Category: Deep Thoughts

Lambda lambda lambda

It can help ya help ya help ya.

It’s Python’s lambda function1! Pesky urllib2 not allowing you to construct a DELETE request? Environment Overlords not letting you install a sane http module like Requests2? Don’t like what a module you have no control over is doing for you?

Lambda the damn thing!

For example urllib2 has a method called .get_method(). It returns the type of HTML request being made. In their infinite wisdom, the writers of urllib2 thought there were only two useful types of request anyone would ever want to make using their module, GET and PUT. The method looks at the URL and if it sees post data it returns “POST”. Otherwise it returns “GET”.

But it’s a modern Web we live in and we want to do modern things like make calls against a RESTful api provided by a vendor. Sometimes that vendor uses the kind of request being sent to determine the kind of action to take. Makes sense, no? But urllib2 spits on us and makes us write bad checks. What shall we do?

In this case we just hack the bejesus out of the .get_method() method and force it to return “DELETE” every time.


import urllib2
req = urllib2.Request( "http://www.example.com" )
req.get_method = lambda: "DELETE"

Now we can run DELETE requests against the RESTful API all damn day long. And then, later, when we want to do a “GET” all we have to do is lambda the damn thing again and make it return “GET”. Yay for us!

Yay for lambdas!

This is my rose for the day.

1http://www.secnetix.de/olli/Python/lambda_functions.hawk
2http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/

The binary scale

My manager type person just asked me if I though a proposed story was something I could bang out. To which I replied thought it was bangable. Which makes is a “1” on the binary scale. Which, if you get right down to it, is the scale that matters way more than the traditional 1 – 10 scale.

Metadata and social network analysis

Remember the furor a month or two ago when it came to the national attention that the United States government was conducting analysis of phone records? How the claim was that they weren’t using the contents of our phone conversations and SMS messaging, merely looking at the metadata these records could provide? One of the prevailing questions at the time was what could be done with this information? Why was this important?

And that is a difficult question to answer. What kinds of information can be derived from records of who calls or texts whom? This is a question that I was informally asked if I could shed some light on in a public venue. At the time I had to decline as my experience and training with metadata has more to do with preservation and authentication of documents.

This article1, on the other hand, does a reasonably good job of demonstrating what can be deduced from something as simple as the membership roles of a few colonial societies that are suspected of revolutionary tendencies.

For those of you who are tl;dr, the short of it is, by looking at membership in just seven societies, it becomes clear based solely on this information that Paul Revere is a central player in revolutionary communications.

Now to look the implications of this fact.

If you were Tory-oriented, you would definitely be wanting to keep an eye on his comings and goings. If the British had been doing that, the Ride of Paul Revere would have been more dark limerick and less epic poem…and the Battle of Concord may have not gone so swimmingly. Lacking the buoyancy of this success, the Massachusetts push for revolution may have sputtered. Etc.

It doesn’t take a lot of extrapolation to see how “persons of interest” can be identified just by looking at the amalgamation of our social graphs (as represented by our phone records). Persons of interest need not be doing anything in order to be interesting to watch. Their movements and behaviors are markers for the groups they connect. By closely watching these individuals, various security apparatus can keep their finger on the pulse of the general population without the resource expenditure required to monitor every single person.

Getting darker, this perfunctory analysis sheds some light on how the federal government identifies targets for drone strikes. The target (person or location) can be “interesting” without knowing a single thing about what the target is actually doing. By virtue of being identified as playing a central role in a social graph, the target demonstrates the value of its elimination–the disruption of a communication network that has been identified as “problematic.”

Not to fear monger–it’s really not my thing–but I came across this article and wanted to share since it does a decent job of translating the math into concepts graspable by regular old folks. The example and POV of the writing help demonstrate the gravity of what this kind of analysis can illuminate.

1 http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/

The new phonebooks are here!

To say I’ve enjoyed the Wool1 saga by Hugh Howey is an understatement. It’s probably the best long-arc dystopian fiction I’ve ever read. For a kid coming of age in Reagan’s America, I had nightmares of how living in fallout shelters might work. The numbers of generations needed to outlive the half life of nuclear fallout was incomprehensible. At some point the math just doesn’t hold and everything has to collapse.

In the Wool saga, Howey puts a story and framework around these childhood fears and lets his characters play out in this world. It is gripping stuff and I devoured everything published. I came to the party relatively late so having most of the series already available was great. Waiting for these last few books to drop have been interminable.

Dust2 is the very last book in the series and it was made available this last weekend. If you’re short of reading material, like dystopian fiction, and have a little coin to throw around, you could do a lot worse than pick these up.

I should also add, Hugh Howey is a model for self publishing. It doesn’t work for everyone, but he managed to turnkey Amazon direct-to-Kindle printing into a multi-six-figure payout.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wool_%28series%29
2 http://www.amazon.com/Dust-Silo-Saga-ebook/dp/B00CYNGPTG