Leonid Mamchenkov

Debunking “If you have nothing to hide …” argument

I am quite a publicly open person. There are very few things about me, which are not published online or which I am not open to discuss with strangers. So one could say that I am not much concerned about my privacy. Given that, and the recent advance in technology – photo and video cameras, storage space, centralized database, and search – I do often say that the privacy is dead. Some people hate it, some people like it, yet others are neutral. But I see it more as a fact, rather than a distant future possibility. And that often gets me into discussions about privacy with people who fill different.

Since I don’t really care much about it, I might have used the “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” argument. Not because I strongly believe it, but because I think this is the case most of the time. Today I came across an article that provides a few reasons for why that is a dangerous argument to use. And I have to say that it made me think and agree with a few points that it raises.

It’s not you who determine if you have something to fear: You may consider yourself law-abidingly white as snow, and it won’t matter a bit. What does matter is whether you set off the red flags in the mostly-automated surveillance, where bureaucrats look at your life in microscopic detail through a long paper tube to search for patterns. When you stop your car at the main prostitution street for two hours every Friday night, the Social Services Authority will draw certain conclusions from that data point, and won’t care about the fact that you help your elderly grandmother – who lives there – with her weekly groceries. When you frequently stop at a certain bar on your way driving home from work, the Department of Driving Licenses will draw certain conclusions as to your eligibility for future driving licenses – regardless of the fact that you think they serve the world’s best reindeer meatballs in that bar, and never had had a single beer there. People will stop thinking in terms of what is legal, and start acting in self-censorship to avoid being red-flagged, out of pure self-preservation.

I still think that the privacy is dead. And it’s still not a big issue for me. But I do understand people who worry about it a bit better now.

Software emulates a living organism

The New York Times covers the story of the first ever living organism simulation in software.

Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute have developed the first software simulation of an entire organism, a humble single-cell bacterium that lives in the human genital and respiratory tracts.

The scientists and other experts said the work was a giant step toward developing computerized laboratories that could carry out many thousands of experiments much faster than is possible now, helping scientists penetrate the mysteries of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.

[…]

The simulation of the complete life cycle of the pathogen, Mycoplasma genitalium, was presented on Friday in the journal Cell. The scientists called it a “first draft” but added that the effort was the first time an entire organism had been modeled in such detail — in this case, all of its 525 genes.

The simulation, which runs on a cluster of 128 computers, models the complete life span of the cell at the molecular level, charting the interactions of 28 categories of molecules — including DNA, RNA, proteins and small molecules known as metabolites, which are generated by cell processes.

Super super cool!

Racing in slow motion

This is beautiful, almost breathtaking. When watching racing in real-time, a lot of tiny moments fly by without being noticed. In this video, they are brought back to us – everything from small things like sparks and flying dirt, to crashes and people’s reactions.

This video is the fourth installment in the series, and it’s the most awesome. If you want to check the other ones, here they are: part 3, part 2, and the original. Subscribe to the RacingInSlowMotion YouTube channel to be notified of the new uploads.

goosefraba

wp-config.php and standalone scripts

WordPress plugin architecture is great and it provides developers with a lot of flexibility. But once in a while one needs to write a standalone script that should use some of WordPress settings. For example, a script that would have the same database credentials as a WordPress instance. This sounds simple unless you look at the bottom of the wp-config.php file. There’s that:

/** Sets up WordPress vars and included files. */
require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php');

That means if you are to include wp-config.php in your standalone script, you’ll get the whole WordPress thing loaded and fired up. On one hand, that’s cool because now you can use WordPress functions and objects. But on the other, it’s not. Sometimes you just need the configuration only.

The work around is trivial. Modify wp-config.php file like so:

if (!defined('WP_CONFIG_ONLY')) {
    /** Sets up WordPress vars and included files. */
    require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php');
}

Now, in your standalone scripts, you can do the following:

define('WP_CONFIG_ONLY', true);
require 'wp-config.php';

And you’ll only get WordPress configuration without any extras. If you don’t define the WP_CONFIG_ONLY constant before loading the wp-config.php, then all will work as before.