The Internet allows humans anywhere around the globe to acquire the best available technical education and to use that education to pursue a wide variety of objectives on digital networks. One objective can be to build a great repository of human knowledge. Another objective can be to attack an organization and do great harm. The brain-power economics on the Internet make achieving cybersecurity a much different problem than achieving traditional military security.
Consider, for example, the traditional military security of Norway. Invading Norway by traditional military means requires equipping and training soldiers and securing expensive transport via land, water, or air. A high degree of centralized organization is necessary for traditional military action. Groups of persons that might present a traditional military threat to Norway are particular nation-states. Those possibilities are quite limited.
Cybersecurity of Norway and organizations in Norway depends on a much different configuration of possible threats. The total population of Norway is roughly 850 times smaller than the world population in countries whose average income is less than one-tenth that of Norwegians.[1] Lower income implies a lower opportunity cost of brain time. The upper end of the distribution of natural ability and interest in technical programming among Norwegians surely differs relatively little from that among others. Norwegian technical brain-power could hence easily be overwhelmed by the brain-power of a small share of other persons elsewhere in the world.[2] No cybersecurity technology can protect against greater brain-power, because cybersecurity fundamentally depends on brain-power. Trying to buy cybersecurity tools or expertise is fundamentally futile. With the aggregation of enough brain-power, any cybersecurity Maginot Line can be breached.
A civilized, forward-leading approach to cybersecurity would depend on widely dispersed technical skills and capabilities and open projects that do good. Based on the evidence of the world and faith, doing good seems to be more attractive to most humans than doing harm. Most persons will participate in, support, and defend, in ways feasible for them, projects that do good. For any small subset of brains in the world, seeking to deprive persons of technical skills and capabilities and strictly guarding project boundaries ultimately lessens cybersecurity.
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Notes:
[1] Figures calculated from World Bank’s International Comparison Program data for 2005 (the most recently available year). Average income (equivalent to expenditure in national income accounting) is in purchasing-power-parity terms. Brain-power, scaled by opportunity cost, is overall more than 10,000 times greater outside Norway than within Norway.
[2] The population of Norway was 4.6 million in 2005. The brain-power imbalance problem is orders of magnitude greater for an organization of about 500 persons. Of course, some pooling of expertise is possible. On the other hand, considerable heterogeneity and customization exists in information systems across organizations. Providing cybersecurity requires considerable organization-specific brain-power utilization.
The Internet allows a huge amount of information to be made freely available globally at little cost. Because analyzing information requires time and skill, most persons won’t do it. But the provision of information nonetheless signals credibility. If an authority doesn’t provide publicly, by Internet standards, a reasonable amount of relevant information, then that authority looks like merely a privileged storyteller.
In its purportedly scientific analysis of possible portraits of Shakespeare, the National Portrait Gallery of London looks like a privileged storyteller. In 2005, the National Portrait Gallery told a story about its scientific analysis of a possible portrait of Shakespeare. It made this story public first on a popular television show. A year later it held a related exhibit entitled Searching for Shakespeare. The National Portrait Gallery has not made public detailed descriptions and documentation of its analysis of the portraits. Since the Internet Reformation, everyone should thus question the authority of the National Portrait Gallery’s claims.
Are these details from the same painting?
Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s recent book, And the Flower Portrait of William Shakespeare is Genuine After All, controverts from at least an early modern standpoint the National Portrait Gallery’s claim that the Flower Portrait of Shakespeare is a nineteenth-century painting.[1] Hammerschmidt-Hummel, a Professor at the University of Mainz, has done a large amount of research on Shakespeare’s life and on portraits of Shakespeare.[2] Her book organizes and compares detailed observations on different records of the Flower Portrait. It also presents testimony on common evidence from experts spanning Germany, Austria, England, and the U.S. [3] While effectively recreating a Republic of Letters, the book positions itself, like Shakespeare, in a liminal epistemological-intellectual era. Specifically, attached to the back cover of the book is a CD-ROM that contains 73 images associated with records of the Flower Portrait. Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s conclusions rock the foundations of established beliefs, prompt questions about the credibility of major institutions, and lead into a vortex of confusion about illusion and reality.
Recent exhibitions highlight the National Portrait Gallery’s contrasting medieval intellectual position. The National Portrait Gallery displays in its London museum only portraits of important persons — persons who have made or are making British history or culture. Recently it sponsored at a provincial venue an exhibition of portraits of unimportant or unknown persons. The exhibit, entitled “Imagined Lives: Mystery Portraits, 1520-1640,” makes a claim on scholarly research:
Students undertaking a Masters degree course in Art History at the University of Bristol worked with the National Portrait Gallery curators to research these mysterious portraits in detail and this display presents their findings.
But the exhibition website includes only meager, general information about conserving, restoring, and researching early British portraits. At a different National Gallery in London, one finds a exhibition “Close Examinations: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries” with a significantly different orientation. It presents considerable detailed evidence, including an interesting series of case studies on “how Gallery experts have occasionally been misled – and how their mistakes were discovered.” This exhibition represents the best spirit of science and enlightenment.
The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, in contrast, seems more concerned with high-status storytelling. As part of its exhibition on mystery portraits, the National Portrait Gallery commissioned seven “internationally renowned authors” to compose fictional biographies and character sketches to associate with the mystery portraits. While that makes for good entertainment, it provides a false national portrait, or at least a false national portrait of a nation that will survive through the twenty-first century.
The National Portrait Gallery has offered no substantial public response to Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s work. Perhaps the National Portrait Gallery’s organizational hierarchy has forbid scholars from discussing the matter. Such action would be consistent with the National Portrait Gallery’s policy of not allowing even personal, non-commercial, non-flash photography within the gallery. If ordinary persons were allowed to photograph the portraits it keeps, then those portraits would become much more enmeshed in common communication networks, and ordinary persons would effectively gain greater access to them. The National Portrait Gallery apparently doesn’t want that to happen.[4] Perhaps the National Portrait Gallery can remain a privileged storyteller. But if the National Portrait Gallery ignores or tries to suppress the Internet Reformation, it will lose credibility and respect.
[1] Published by Georg Olms Verlag, 2010, in a dual English-German text. The book will be presented to the public at the University of Mainz on Sept. 28, 2010. Speakers at the event include a vice-president and a dean from the University of Mainz.
[2] See, e.g. Hammerschmidt-Hummel, Hildegard. 2007. The life and times of William Shakespeare 1564-1616. London: Chaucer Press; Hammerschmidt-Hummel, Hildegard. 2006. The true face of William Shakespeare: the poet’s death mask and likenesses from three periods of his life. London: Chaucer Press.
[3] These experts are Reinhart Altmann, former forensic expert at the German Bureau of Criminal Investigation; Professor Wolfgang Speyer, an Austrian expert on Old Masters; Helmut Zitzwitz, a New York-based conservator and art-gallery executive; Dr. Thomas Merriam, a Shakespeare scholar based on Basingstroke, England; Professor Dr. Jost Metz, former Medical Superintendent of Dermatology in Germany; Professor Dr. Volker Menges, former Head Physician for Radiology at a teaching hospital of the University of Heidelberg; Dr. Eberhard Nikitsch, an inscriptions expert based in Mainz; and Dr. Eva Brachert, a picture restorer at the Land Museum, Mainz.
[4] The National Portrait Gallery is a publicly supported institution that keeps important artifacts of common culture. It declares its mission thus:
The National Portrait Gallery aims to be the foremost centre for the study of and research into portraiture, as well as making its work and activities of interest to as wide a range of visitors as possible.
Image credit: To foster public discussion of the unusual issue associated with the Flower Portrait, I created the above image by combining, cropping, resizing, and re-compressing images “015 – A – ill. 4.jpg” and “016 – B – ill. 4.jpg” from Image File I on the CD-ROM provided with Hammerschmidt-Hummel (2010), And the Flower Portrait of William Shakespeare is Genuine After All.
Quality-adjusted average U.S. residential broadband service prices have fallen no more than an estimated 10% from 2004 to 2009.[1] The consumer price index for personal computers and peripheral equipment fell 50% across that period.[2] The price-performance frontier for communications technology is advancing as fast or faster than that for personal computers and peripherals. The difference in realized price trends reflects much different structures of investments, transactions, and business competition.
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Notes:
[1] See Greenstein, Shane M. and McDevitt, Ryan C., Evidence of a Modest Price Decline in US Broadband Services. Center for the Study of Industrial Organization, Northwestern University, Working Paper #0102 (January 2010). The bandwidth figures in this paper are mistakenly labeled “bps” (bits per second). They actually are in “kbps” (kilobits per second). I found that average wholesale local bandwidth prices fell about 20% from 1990 to 1995, and remained roughly constant from 1995 to 2000. See Galbi (2000), “U.S. Bandwidth Price Trends in the 1990s,” Table P4. For related discussion, see Galbi (2000), “Growth in the ‘New Economy’: U.S. Bandwidth Use and Pricing Across the 1990s.” All these reported figures are nominal, i.e. not adjusted for general price inflation.
While independent newspapers and magazines are in deep distress, business-sponsored print publications seem to be flourishing. Costco Connection, for example, is a monthly lifestyle magazine for Costco members. The Sept. 2010 issue offers 72 pages chock-full of advertisements. Its masthead shows a large, traditional print organization (managing editor, associate editors, assistant editors, copy editor, production managers, assistant production manager, etc.). In the column “from the editor’s desk” in the Sept. 2010 issue, the editor describes himself as “trained in the age-old tenets of journalism.” True to that heritage, Costco Connection online looks just like the print product. Costco Connection claims “the largest audience of small-business readers of any magazine in the United States.” While Costco Connection has no subscriber revenue, I would guess that it’s a more valuable magazine than Newsweek.
