Formal Methods

Posted on Sunday, May 24, 2009 - 0 comments - , ,

Drew Conway, who authors one of my favorite blogs Zero Intelligence Agents. Posted an interesting entry on fractal network growths. Its worth a read. In the comments, I asked him how his research in networks applies to political science and he responded:
If you are asking about network research specifically, the application is in understanding how the the structure of human relationships contribute to their collective decision making. In political science, our primary concern is studying these collective decision, such as legislation, war, trade, etc; therefore, the network component is critical. Developing models of how these structures form can help inform our understanding of how structure contributes to collective action.
My personal interest is in how adversarial structures, such as terrorist networks, form and act. For this subject, I recommend subject is “Leaderless Jihad” by Marc Sageman.
More generally, my focus at ZIA is to explore how formal methods can be applied to questions of national security, for which there is a lengthy literature.
I would highly recommend following his work as he's a lot better at this stuff than I am. Reading this, I am inspired to read up on networks after I return from my research position in El Paso this summer.

Political Science's role in society.

Posted on Friday, May 22, 2009 - 0 comments - , ,


This is a discussion of the future of the profession of political science. Maybe I'll expand the focus of this blog to make it slightly more scholarly and try to eliminate the pomp. We will see as the blog matures what directions we want to go in, until then I highly recommed watching this discussion by two academics.

Kylin

Posted on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 - 0 comments -

So I was reading Scott Henderson's post at The Dark Visitor concerning reports of China's super secret hardened OS Kylin and I have to say I agree with his conclusion.

So it seems that this operating system is not really what is was presented as. The Washington Times article references Kevin G. Coleman, an advisor to the government, as the primary source for the Kylin information. I doubt that it was an intentional misrepresentation but it is difficult to imagine presenting Kylin as anything to be concerned about when it didn’t take very much effort to figure out that it isn’t worthy of anyone’s attention. Not only is it not widely deployed, it isn’t new, unique or in any way innovative in terms of security.



Cyber conflict is growing more and more popular, but at the same time its getting more hype than it deserves. I swear every time you see the words "Chinese Hackers" they are usually attached to some larger conspiracy, I just don't see this as the case. Yes, they are patriotic to a fault. Yes, they can potentially be dangerous. Yes, they've been pushing the limits of our security for years. But no, they are not coordinated and in all honesty I believe they aren't very centralized. More on this as I do more research.

Welcome!!

Posted on Friday, May 15, 2009 - 0 comments - , ,

Welcome to Chinese Arithmetic, my blog lying in the crevasse between cyber-conflict, digital activism, social science, and infosec. I started this blog as a way to voice my opinions on emerging threats to cyber and national security issues that are the result of terrorism, activism etc. I will admit, I'm no expert- I will be-, but I want a place to start off to find my voice and eventually become an expert. Chinese Arithmetic is that place where I can fine tune my opinions and eventually learn to give the expert reviews that many people can read.

Why Chinese Arithmetic?

I named this blog Chinese Arithmetic, no not because of the Chinese hackers getting media attention lately (though that would be a smart guess!), but because in this field is complicated. Ask any of the experts who have been involved in the hard intelligence gathering projects, such as Jeffrey Carr of GreyLogic or Scott Henderson the Dark Visitor himself, and they will probably tell you that trying to disseminate fact from fiction and signal from noise is a complicated mess. Its harder than (gasp!) Chinese arithmetic. That's where I decided to take this name.

So what exactly will you talk about here?

To put it simply, Cyber Conflict in all of its forms. There will also be some political science thrown in there (I am a college student after all). This is something I became interested in about a year ago, and it is only now that I feel I have attained enough background knowledge to comment seriously on and be taken seriously. As time goes on, the content of this blog may change; as I've stated before I'm still trying to find my voice and a unifying theme not just for this site, but my research as well. Well that's it, thank you for visiting and I hope you comment above.
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