Archive for July, 2010
 In the period since the General Election here in the UK I’ve seen a fair number of blog posts and Facebook notes entitled ‘Why I’m rejoining the Labour Party’ – typically by folks who were members of the Labour Party at some point in the past decade and who left when Blair and Brown didn’t live up to expectations. But now, given the Liberal-Conservative coalition Government, these folks are keen to get back in to the Labour Party fold and ‘fight the good fight’ against the ‘auld enemy’ – a Tory Government. (Those of us of a cynical bent and who’ve been around in left wing politics long enough to remember the 1980s can remember when the ‘auld enemy’ was actually people within the Labour Party with whom you didn’t agree…but that’s another story.)
I left the Labour Party around the time that ‘Clause 4′ disappeared from the membership cards – the start of the great re-invention of the Labour Party as New Labour. I’d served time as a Ward Chair, Constituency Vice Chair and been a delegate to the District Labour Party here in Sheffield. I even considered running for election as a City Councillor, and very briefly toyed with the idea of trying for a Parliamentary seat, but eventually stayed as a local party activist and school governor. I was a member of the Party when it was distinctly un-trendy to be so; a time when the Labour Party was in opposition, stood as much chance of getting in to power as England did winning the World Cup.
Despite the fact that I was self-employed, running my own business, the old Labour Party held much appeal for me. Even with Clause 4 – detailed here with the ‘revisions’ - I always felt I had more to gain from a Labour Government than from the Tories. The Labour Party was good on issues that mattered heavily to me - civil liberties, for example – and whilst some of the economic policies would be personally bad for me, I could understand the underlying philosophy. And I always regarded it highly unlikely that Labour would drag us in to wars….
I left the Labour Party after the death of John Smith - nowadays I think there are lots of people who’ve never heard of this man, which is a great shame. I’m pretty sure that Labour would have won the 1997 election with him as leader – without the massive changes from the new Labour experiment being carried out. Whether the party would have had such a big majority – I have no idea – but they would still have been the Labour Party I grew up with and joined. I think reform was inevitable, but New Labour is no longer a party of the people – more a party of the chattering classes. I’ve often considered that left to it’s own devices the New Labour experiment would eventually move the party to either a dilute form of Gramscian Marxism or the political philosophy of the Frankfurt School - neither of which I have much time for.
After leaving the Party I was broadly sympathetic to the activities of the New Labour government in most areas – but there was a certain ‘control freak’ attitude – the ‘Big Nanny’ state – obvious in policy form the very beginning, and that made me concerned for civil liberties from very early on. After 9/11 then it became more obvious; again, I was supportive of certain policies, but not others. Economically, I was concerned that we were seeing a subtle form of old style ‘tax and spend’ taking place, with a bloated and increasingly ineffective public sector being paid for by various ‘one off’ financial wind falls, such as selling off gold (ultimately a £7 billion LOSS) or the 3G Phone licenses (23 billions). Jolly japes like this earned Brown the sobriquet of the ‘Iron Chancellor’ – but it’s pretty easy to balance the books in the short term when you get nice one off payments. Just wait until you have to keep the books balanced when things get tight….
I was also concerned by the increasing levels of surveillance and law changes that worked against our civil liberties. We’re now the most filmed population in the world; this technology exploded under New Labour. Anti-terror laws bought in by New Labour were used to keep people under surveillance to see whether they were using their dustbins correctly, for crying out loud. And let’s not get started on ID cards, vetting to work with children, the Digital Economy Bill, etc. And then there’s the whole business of illegal wars….
I honestly believe that the 2010 election, had New Labour been re-elected, would have been a further blow to civil liberties – combined with the economic crisis I could easily see these Stasi-like powers being expanded to cover all aspects of our lives.
New Labour are no longer in power but the people within the New Labour machine, the officers, the MPs, the leadership candidates, the local members – they’re still there and they are still, in most cases, the same people who have implicitly agreed to all of these assaults on our liberties. I’m not saying that the new Coalition Government have got it right – but I’m happy to give them a try rather than vote in authoritarianism. To the thousands of new members of the Labour Party I say this; do you support reduction of civil liberties and economic mis-management – because by joining the Party today, unless you are joining to get some change of people and policy at the top, you are supporting the people who were in power during one of the most authoritarian decades in the UK’s history.
Think before you join or re-join. I have; and I’m not for joining.
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 Early on in my consulting career – late 1980s, early 1990s – I did a lot of work for a public sector organisation. I worked on a number of projects – this was in the days when IT consultants could still be generalists, applying their skills to whatever was needed – and tended to specialise on development of a few database applications that were centrally based and accessed over a (pre-Internet) wide area network, held together by leased lines, private cabling, etc.
All in all, a fantastic environment in which to hone your skills. Actually, in many respects I was rather spoilt by this client – and by my first job out of university – they both gave me a rather distorted view of working life! For a while we experienced some rather ‘odd’ problems on some of the applications running over the wide area network. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t actually ground the problems – we checked software, hardware, cabling, the works. Eventually, and half jokingly, a colleague and I (both of us radio amateurs) decided that the problems were being some how caused by sun spots….
Unsurprisingly, this caused gales of laughter in the office, but as far as we were concerned there was an element of logic in our proposal. We knew that sun spots and solar activity in general had an effect on the earth’s ionosphere, and that in the past bad solar storms had knocked out telephone and communication systems. Indeed, in the pre-Internet, pre-computer days of 1859 a major solar storm had caused incredible effects, even causing telegraph wires to carry electrical currents when all the batteries were disconnected!
This information did little to convince people around the office, so we simply did what any other self respecting techie would do; turn things off and on, replace a few network cards and bridges, tighten connections and tweak software. And the odd errors stopped, and we stopped worrying about it.
But over teh years I’ve thought about those gremlins on numerous occasions, and it now appears that we may have been right after all. According to this article, solar storms can cause mystery glitches in communication and computer systems.
It may be that the next time we get a big solar storm or Coronal Mass Ejection – when a massive plume of plasma and charged particles is thrown from teh sun out in to space – the impact will be much more than a few gremlins in the works. Some have suggested that a storm similar to that of 1859 might cause massive damage to the electrical and communications systems of the world; indeed, some real pessimists have suggested that a BIG solar event might put us back in to the pre-electronics age for decades.
Let’s hope we don’t get it…
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This blog post was originally an article I had published in an amateur radio magazine some years ago…enjoy! Another example of how it’s often the ‘amateurs’ who deliver the goods.
 How about this for a movie script; an actress flees her homeland after it is taken over by a murderous dictatorship, and settles in the United States. Within a few years she is well known for her films, but has also invented a secret communications method for her adopted homeland.
Far fetched? Well, I thought so too until I learnt about Hedy Lamarr and her invention of Spread Spectrum technology. In this article I’ll tell the story of how the team of this glamorous icon of the 1940s and her musical director came up with a technology that is widely used today in cellular phones and many other communication systems.
Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on September 11, 1913 in the city of Vienna, Austria, at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. She married an industrialist called Fritz Mandl, and from him this highly intelligent young woman picked up a lot of information and gossip about the armaments industry with which he was involved in. Unlike her husband, who became enamoured of the Nazi party, Hedwig, who’d already started doing some acting, left for London and then went on to Hollywood to take up acting. A swift name change soon followed, and Hedy Lamarr was born. She had starred in some rather ‘risqué’ movies, particularly ‘Ecstasy’, by the time that she and her musical arranger, George Antheil, found themselves at a dinner party one evening in 1940 thinking about the unfolding European war.
Guided Weapons
The United States, then neutral, was developing a number of weapons that depended upon radio signals for guidance. Amongst these was a guided torpedo, which could be steered towards it’s target by a radio signal. However, there was a problem; any radio guided missile had a weak link in that given adequate warning that such missiles were in use Nazi scientists could easily produce a radio receiver that could be used by prospective targets to detect the signals used to control the missile or torpedo and then a transmitter could be used to jam the guidance system. Indeed, the jamming signal could be very simple; it might be enough to tune a transmitter to the signal frequency and just turn it on. As the missile approached the target the controlling signal would be weakening with distance from the guiding plane or ship, while the jamming signal on the target would get stronger. Eventually it would overwhelm the guidance signal with the effect that the missile would effectively become a ‘dumb’ weapon and simply carry on in a straight line past the target.
Frequency Hopping
So, what could you do? Hedy was a smart cookie, as they say; she quickly realised that if it were possible for the guidance signal to randomly change frequency it would be difficult for the enemy to actually detect the signal in the first place, and virtually impossible for them to then transmit a jamming signal that would follow the guidance signal. This ‘frequency hopping’ would need to be random and fairly frequent to prevent the enemy predicting which frequency would be used next. Changing the frequency of the transmitted signal on such a basis would be reasonably straight forward to achieve; what was more difficult, Lamarr realised, was making sure that the receiver on the missile or torpedo was able to synchronise itself with the transmitted signal so that as the transmitter changed frequency the receiver would change it’s receive frequency at the same time. Don’t forget, by the way, that this was before the invention of the transistor; all radio communications depended upon valves, and the computer, even in it’s most rudimentary form, would not appear until 3 years later and would then occupy a whole room…not the stuff you could fit in the head of a torpedo no more than two feet in diameter.
Player piano
The composer George Antheil was a friend and colleague of Lamarr’s, and due in part to his background as a composer he imagined that one possible solution to the problem of synchronising transmitter and receiver would be to incorporate some sort of switching mechanism in to the transmitter and receiver that could read a ‘tape’ of instructions, a little like the punched paper strips read by automatic ‘player pianos’. These machines read cards or paper tape similar to what would be later used to program computers, and as the tape was ‘read’ through the machine the holes in the tape caused musical notes to be played. Analogously, thought Antheil, it should be possible for the tape in the transmitter to switch the transmitted frequency as it was slowly unwound through some sort of electronic switch capable of detecting holes in the tape, and similarly an identical tape in the receiver should be able to switch receiver circuits to different frequencies for signal reception. If you had two identical tapes, unwound at the same rate, one in the transmitter and one in the receiver, you could synchronise the transmitter and receiver to stay in step with each other. Of course, any mechanical system is prone to slippage and slight losses of synchronisation, but the principle was there. In December 1940, the concept of a communication system based upon ‘frequency hopping’ was submitted by Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil to the National Inventors Council, a US Government organisation that was co-ordinating technical developments for the war effort. The patent, number 2,292,387 was eventually filed on June 10th 1941 and was granted over a year later in August 1942, when the Britain, the US and the USSR were up to their necks in the series of defeats that would only be halted at El Alamein and Stalingrad. Now would be a very good time for a secret weapon to be developed…..
The Practicalities
Unfortunately, the practicalities of setting this up would prove to be too difficult; the synchronising tapes would have had to be paper tapes, and the whole technical issue of putting fairly complex electronics and mechanics in to the small and rough environment of a bomb or torpedo was too much. Lamarr and Antheil gave their Patent to the US Government as part of the war effort, but their creation would have to wait for almost 20 years until the invention of the transistor and other semiconductor devices allowed the construction of practical, if crude, frequency hopping equipment that was based around digital circuits that created a reproducible, but apparently random, string of random electronic impulses that could switch circuitry with no moving parts.
Practical Uses
The patent lapsed in the early 1960s, at the heart of the cold war, and the US Navy immediately put the system to use using semiconductor technology to create a frequency hopping secure communications system. This was the start of the military use of ‘spread spectrum’ technology, the direct descendant of the Lamarr’s invention. The technology would soon find itself used in a wide range of military communication systems, with frequency switching taking place many times a second making it difficult for an enemy to even detect a signal; a spread spectrum signal heard on a ‘normal’ radio receiver just sounds like a slightly higher than usual level of noise on the channel. The technology was eventually de-classified in the 1980s, just in time for the technology to be used in cellular telephone systems. To see why this technology is useful one has to consider that a lot of cellular phones are in use in the same geographical area. It’s not really feasible for a given phone to be given it’s own frequency, as there just aren’t enough frequencies. Instead, cellular phones can transmit on a number of frequencies and the frequency in use will ‘switch’ as the phone call is made and the user moves from one ‘cell’ on the cellular network to another. The switching from frequency to frequency also reduces the effect of interference on the signal; an interfering signal that is strong on one frequency may be quite weak on another, and so although some of the signal may be lost there is a greater chance for the signal to ‘get through’.
In addition to the cellular phone, low level spread spectrum transmitters are used in ‘wireless’ computer networks, where data is sent from portable computers to other computers by UHF or microwave radio signals. Again, single frequencies would not be feasible in a busy office environment or city centre, so the network adapters that allow the computers to talk to one another use spread spectrum techniques to improve reliability and data security; unless you know a lot about the network it’s quite hard to listen in and detect computer traffic on wireless networks due to the frequency hopping.
The algorithms used to control the frequency hopping in different spread spectrum systems are quite varied, depending upon the job in hand. For example, cellular phones and wireless network cards use chips that generate a pseudo random string of pulses. Two devices in communication will initiate the session by exchanging enough information to set the ‘start’ position for the random pulse chain. Provided the two systems start from the same place, they’ll keep in synchrony. Alternatively, the message to ‘change frequency’ might be actually transmitted to the receiver as part of the transmitted signal. This approach is also used in cellular phones and wireless network cards. Data about when to switch and what frequency to switch to is sent as a data packet. This isn’t terribly secure as anyone with patience and the correct equipment can log the data packets and simulate the receiver. The ultimate in secure spread spectrum probably involves the modern equivalent of the ‘one time pad’; a CD Rom or memory chip is used at each end; these devices contain a string of totally random noise pulses from a natural source, like solar radio noise or noise from noise diodes. A CD ROM might contain enough ‘bits’ for a few dozen messages; a copy would be made and the copy sent to the receiver site, usually under diplomatic protection. The CD ROM would be used for communications, and then after each block of bits is used for a single message it’s never sued again. Combined with a suitable cipher system, this sort of communication is undetectable (don’t forget that the signal sounds like an increase in local noise) and even if it is detected the cipher system ensures that no one else can read the message.
And Finally……
And finally, what did Hedy and George get for all their cleverness? Well, until the late 1990s, not much. Apparently they never even received a formal thank you letter from the US Government. But before she died in 2000, Hedy Lamarr received an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation recognising her contributions to modern computer technology, even though it took place 50 years before. George Antheil died before he could get the award, but at least now the contribution of the composer and the actress to modern communications has finally been recognised.
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‘Chasing Cars’ is the name of a song by the band ‘Snow Patrol’. I quite like it – I’m a sucker for sad songs and this is a fine example of the genre. However, it has a little bit of ‘back story’. According to Wikipedia:
“The phrase “Chasing Cars” came from [singer Gary ] Lightbody’s father, in reference to a girl Lightbody was infatuated with, “You’re like a dog chasing a car. You’ll never catch it and you just wouldn’t know what to do with it if you did.”
That phrase has stuck with me, and I have to say that over recent months I’ve been considering more and more how much time we all spend ‘chasing cars’ in our lives. I’m currently going through one of those times in my life of what can best be described as ‘internal reflection’ (Some unkind folks might call it ‘loafing’ or ‘contemplating my navel’; I’m not listening…  ) and I guess that some of what’s going through my head right now is a product of that.
What cars do I chase? Well, I suppose over the years I’ve been a good starter and not so good finisher; ideas are very cheap – I was saying this to a group of start-up people recently – and what counts is implementing those ideas in a form that makes them usable. If it’s an idea for a business, build a business that’s making money; if for a novel, a written manuscript; if for a cunning invention – a working prototype. I’ve had a few opportunities over the years that have been very close to what most folks would have called ‘big hitting success’ but that didn’t come to fruition. On a few occasions I’ve definitely considered that, rather than being afraid of failing, I’ve previously been much more afraid of success.
For quite a few opportunity-filled years I was, looking back on it, chasing cars; had I managed to get what I was allegedly going for I’m not sure I’d have known what to do with it. Were the same opportunities to present themselves today, I can say two things; I’d give them a rather closer going over to make sure that I really DID want to chase ‘em, and then when I’d made the decision I’d get out there yapping and barking until I caught ‘em.
The trick is to know WHY you’re chasing your ideas and projects; what are you wanting to get from them? Money? Fame? Success with women / men / small dogs? Free food and drink at your local pub? Or do you just want to contribute to society? Grow spiritually? Help out folks less fortunate than yourself? Get your own back on folks who upset you at school?
Don’t let yourself chase cars in your life without being reasonably sure you’ll know what to do if you manage to catch the object of your desire; I’ve been there and it’s a bloody waste of time if you’re not sure!
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