Terminally Incoherent

Back to my BSG complaints. Once again, I wanted to preface this post by saying that I’m bashing this show ONLY because I love it to death. I am a big BSG fan and as such I am allowed to nitpick and complain about silly shit. That said, on with the rant.

Some of you may or may not remember my recent grumbling session titled Cylons Don’t Use Backups. I complained at length about the silliness of having an emergency resurrection system that has no failsafe and no backup. Some of you actually came up with really interesting explanations on why the system works the way it does. I especially liked Tino’s bit about consciousness being a set of quantum states that can be transmitted but not stored. In my mind, that actually makes sense so I’m sold on that theory.

I just watched the latest BSG episode “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner” and I want to cry. If you haven’t seen that episode, I will warn you that the rest of this post will be a bit spoilish, so you probably should stop reading now.

Let me tell you why do I feel like crying though. It’s because in this latest episode Cylons just revealed that their whole resurrection network is a SPOF system. Just after I came to terms with their rather irresponsible (in my mind) no-backup, no-failsafe scheme, they go and do something that is a 100 times less responsible. They build their whole system (which BTW is of the utmost importance for every living Cylon) with almost a criminal design flaw that would get most engineers fired on the spot.

Oh, yes. I should probably explain what a SPOF is to those of you who do not thing in acronyms. SPOF is short for Single Point of Failure. In engineering it can be defined as:

A component that, if it fails, will cause the entire system to go down.

In the episode “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner” the rebelling Cylons offer a mutually beneficial bargain to the Colonials. They will reveal the location of their “Central Resurrection Hub” in exchange for help in identifying the final 5 Cylon models. Here it is, in it’s full glory:

image @copy; galacticabbs.com

The hub is the previously discussed “boxing functionality” where the Xena Warrior Princes er… Diana model is held in stasis. It is also central nexus of the Cylon resurrection network. We are told that once it is destroyed, all Cylons will lose their ability to resurrect. Yep, the whole seemingly distributed resurrection network with a dedicated R-ship attached to each fleet, has a single point of failure. This single space vessel coordinates resurrections for all Cylons in the universe - both the planet dwelling, as well as space borne. Yep, there is only ONE of these. How is it defended? Well, there are couple of base stars that seem to be floating around it, but a single Raptor patrol was able to jump in, take some pictures and jump away without anyone noticing. So their security seems to be rather lax at this point. Other than that, they just jump it from one location to another every once in a while to avoid detection.

My reaction:

You’d think that there would be a local hub on Caprica for example. Or on some other planets. You would think there would be many of those all over the place - for example, one per occupied planet, and then few others for each major fleet. But no. There is one, and if it is destroyed, then the whole Cylon race instantly loses their immortality. I’m sorry, but WHAT THE FUCK IN HELL?

Let’s assume that the station is virtually indestructible. It is very well defended, and it jumps every few hours using complex patterns that make it almost impossible to track. Cylons may be confident that Colonials do not have the resources to take down this station. But what if it malfunctions? What if there is a fire on board? What if there is a problem with their communication equipment? In a station that size there is half a million things that may go wrong - and any of them can put the whole facility offline for anywhere from minutes, hours to even days. Are Cylon’s really this stupid? Do they actually enjoy gambling with their lives?

Did anyone actually read this script critically, or is everyone just to wrapped up in the BSG mysticism to actually worry about stuff like, I don’t know, logic, common sense and basic engineering principles? To me the Resurrection Hub is nothing more than a huge plot device. It is the ultimate prize. They had tho have something huge at stake, otherwise it would be out of character for Adm. Adama to agree to this uneasy truce between humans and rebel Clons. Too bad it is also laughably stupid.

No one builds mission critical systems this way. No one! Even if there is some strange reason (ie the quantum thing) that would require only a single hub of this type to be in operation, there is no reason why there should be only a single one in existence. They could easily build many hubs like this one - all of them identical in every aspect. But only one would be online at all times - others would act as backups, and/or decoys. In case of an attack or a malfunction the active hub would shut down and transfer control to one of it’s copies.

Then again, perhaps Cylon’s do not actually understand the resurrection technology at all. Perhaps there is only one Hub in existence because they do not know how to build another one. Perhaps they were created with an intentional design flaw, and they simply never were able to improve upon it. Perhaps they sort of know how to maintain the Hub and the R-ships but they are unable re-create this technology and lack knowledge to even reverse-engineer it. This would sort of fit pretty well with their religious zealotry.

If reverse engineering certain “sacred” technologies was forbidden by their religion then they wouldn’t do it for the same reason why some models refuse to search for the final 5 models. Maybe this is all part of a big plan set forth by their creators, or perhaps their god who may not actually be a divine being at all.

What do you think? Is the hub a plot device, or an arcane artifact that Cylons depend on, but do not understand?

Let me preface this post by saying that I nitpick because I love. It seems that what started as a random nitpick will turn into a whole series of posts wot the “Cylons don’t use” in the title. This one is about encryption. Yes, I have another bone to pick with the writers. This time it is about this:

screencap © galacticabbs.com

This is the super-secret note that Colonel Tigh (a very senior military officer, and the former leader of the New Caprica resistance movement) passed to Chief Tyrol (who also had experience in NC resistance movement) about an incredibly secretive meeting which was accidentally intercepted by Tyrol’s wife Cally. This sort of thing happened to me too - back in grade school. Since then, I have learned to use encryption.

Let’s review - both Tigh and Tyrol are Cylons (if I just spoiled you, then go back and watch S3 finale already and stop complaining) and they must keep this secret. If anyone would find out about who or what they really are, their lives vrypotwould be in danger. Therefore keeping their true identity secret should be their paramount concern - and no effort should be spared to cover their own tracks. But here we have an experienced leader who had tons and tons of experience operating behind enemy lines make a colossal, bone headed mistake that might have exposed them. It is just stupid!

I do think about encryption all the time because of my education and my job - I’m conditioned to notice these things. A lot of people never even consider it. For example a housewife cheating on her husband may not have been exposed to concepts such as cryptography and information security so she may never even think about using anything but unsecured notes like this one. But these folks, for one have a military training. I have never been in the military so I might be wrong about this but I would think that security and simple cryptography would be part of basic training at least for officers. I’d think that they ought to know about cryptography in case they find themselves behind enemy lines, or in a position where all their communications are intercepted. If I’m wrong, please correct me.

Even if they didn’t get this knowledge in basic training, you can’t tell me they haven’t developed strong, low tech methods of encryption during the New Caprica occupation. Let’s face it - if a silly note like that ended up in the hands of the occupying forces it could mean many deaths, or loss of valuable resources. They simply could not afford to openly communicate their attack plans or resistance movement secrets in plaintext.

What should they have used? There are many low-fi methods to obfuscate or encrypt hand written notes. A simple Caesar Cipher would probably be good enough for plausible deniability in front of Cally. Would she be curious enough to try to crack it? Perhaps, but it is likely that Tyrol could easily play the gibberish note as some sort of an entry code he needed on a routine repair job or simply shrug and act as if it was just that - gibberish.

For real security they should probably use One Time Pad encryption. The pad is a long random sequence of symbols that is used as a key to encrypt and decrypt your message. This method was used successfully by CIA and KGB in the past. How does a pad look? It can be something like this:

image © ranum.com

It is really a relatively secure method as long as you destroy the pads after each use, and you have a foolproof method of securely exchanging them. Our protagonists do have one, since they meet regularly. On each meeting they could exchange pads, which they would then use for written communication until the next meeting. The pads can be small and easy to conceal. A very nice disguise for a pad is a stack of papers with random stream of characters printed on one side, and unrelated hand written notes on the back. Plausible deniability - it’s just scrap paper - some gibberish spit out by some malfunctioning printer and you are just using it for personal notes.

When handled properly, it’s virtually unbreakable and in my honest opinion would be near prefect for this setup. But it seems that the BSG writers have never took a cryptology class. I’d say they ought to hire a consultant who could advise them on blunders like this one, but the difficult part is that an average person wouldn’t even think that this part of the screenplay would need to be looked at by a technologically clueful person.

So this is my BSG nitpick for today. I love that show, and this is why I hold it to a high standard and will ruthlessly pick on the little annoying little bits like this one. They simply destroy my enjoyment and prevent me from buying into the drama. I should be freaked out that Cally found the note and she will expose the final 5 but all I can think of is that C. Thigh is an idiot for leaving that note in plaintext.

Sigh… Sometimes I think I would enjoy TV and movies much more if I was just absolutely, technologically inept and clueless.

There are two storytelling crutches that often come into play to “hand wave” over some plot inconsistencies or explain something odd and unusual. One of them is called magic, and the other one is called technology. They are both used as explanations of improbable and impossible events which are supposed to help the viewers suspend their disbelief.

It is usually very easy to make viewers accept magical events. All you have to do is to make up some magical system and say “this is just how magic works in this mystical world”. After all, we don’t have magic in the real world, so we might as well go with it. As long as the rules governing this magical system seem logical, consistent within the story, and do not contradict themselves it is easy for us to accept it.

Technology tends to be used the same way. Unfortunately, unlike magic we are pretty good at science. A lot of viewers have scientific degrees and at the very lest, most people took a science class or two in school. So if you start bending and contradicting laws of physics, we can easily call you on it. When you introduce a futuristic technology it must not only be consistent, but also plausible. Of course if you are blatant enough about it, and make it obvious you don’t even pretend to be using “real science” you end up in the same realm as magic. For example Lightsabers are so far fetched that we just accept them even though it would be impossible to construct them. Same goes for various methods that allow spaceships to travel faster than light. We all know it’s impossible, but we agree on this convention because it makes the story more interesting. These devices have no scientific basis for them so they are really nothing more but techno-magic. But closer you show us something that looks and acts just like existing real world technology, we will sort-of expect it continue working within the same limitations and in the same way.

Having a degree in Computer Science and working in IT for a long time doesn’t help me suspend my disbelief when writers try to include technology in their stories without actually bothering to understand how it works in the real world. Usually any movie or show that features “hackers” or computer security experts and etc.. makes me roll my eyes so hard, and so often that it actually hurts. Science Fiction often doesn’t cause as much eye strain for me - often because it’s usually pretty good about portraying science and technology in plausible way. Still, every once in a while even hard SF or Space Operas manage to drop the ball and annoy me with inane or poorly researched and thought out “future tech”.

For example, let’s take one of my all time favorites - Battlestar Galactica. The Cylon resurrection system that is an important part of the story has been pissing me off for a while now. I don’t have a problem with the system itself but it is portrayed as having an inherent flaw that more than once was used as a plot device. It’s just that the flaw is ridiculous, and it is almost inconceivable that no one ever worked out a countermeasure for it. Any engineer or sysadmin would ask two questions during his first visit to a Cylon resurrection shop - “how do you do backups?” and “What is the emergency restore procedure to the when a unit fails away from the ship without having a chance to transmit the latest state?”. Sad part is that it seems that no one ever thought about that.

For those of you who haven’t watched the series let me explain.

In the BSG universe, when an individual Cylon dies his or her consciousness is instantaneously transferred into a vat grown spare body which is kept on a specialized, well protected Resurrection Ship. The transmission seems to be instant, and happens at the exact moment of death but this process seems to have a limited range. This is why every Cylon fleet takes at least one Resurrection Ship with them wherever it goes. So far, so good - I don’t have a problem with that - in fact it is a pretty good system. Personally, I’d have a resurrection chamber on each Base Star and turn it into a distributed system, but I guess growing new bodies requires space and resources so centralizing this function is not such a bad idea.

The show however came up with an interesting idea. Want to truly kill your Cylon enemies in a way that prevents them from ever coming back? It’s easy as pie. All you have to do is to destroy the local Resurrection Ship and then simply do your thing. Yep, it’s that easy. Imagine being a Cylon and having to deal with that. If you accidentally die 10 feed beyond the range of the closest R-ship then BOOM! Permadeath! Your near immortality is over.

The sysadmin part of me reels in horror after hearing this. Who designs systems like this? What we have here is a permanent, irrecoverable data loss happening every time an expendable and temporary shell for your AI expires beyond the range of your wireless network. Thats is a criminally stupid design flaw - and one which could be easily fixed! Didn’t these people hear about backups?

Let’s think about it - the transmission of consciousness is almost instant. We have seen it on the show many times. Old body dies, and the Cylon wakes up in a vat of goo almost instantly. This tells me that it takes only a split second to send given Cylon’s memories and personality back to the resurrection ship, and few more seconds to actually upload it to a spare body. Since they are able to do this at all I think it is indisputable that heir consciousness can be fully digitized. There is this notion out there that digitizing human consciousness will never be possible because there is actually more to it than a mapping of neural connections and distribution of electric charges. I don’t know whether or not this is true, but obviously Cylon psyche can be transmitted digitally without any problems. If you can digitize something, you can back it up to permanent storage.

In other words, if Cylons have technology to upload the transmitted consciousness to a vat grown body, then they absolutely must have a technology to temporarily or permanently store this data on some sort of media. I mean it is a prerequisite - before you can put the consciousness in a body, you have to be able to store it somewhere. In fact, I imagine that the Resurrection Ships must be buffering these transmissions in some way before they do the body uploads.

For example, what happens if a Base Star is destroyed? Now you have instantaneous transmission from hundreds if not thousand Cylons streaming down from the wreckage, probably on the same frequency. What happens if the vats are not ready? What if there is a temporary power outage in the vat room? What if the prepared bodies turn out to be defective and need to be discarded? What if the transmission comes in with potential errors caused by outside interference? It’s just simple engineering concerns - you need to have a buffer which will hold the upload until the body is ready. Otherwise you would often miss the window of opportunity and consciousness transfers would simply get lost in space for silly reasons. Not to mention the need to check for transmission errors. It would be a pity to see a Cylon emerge from a vat half-retarded because the post-death transmission included static noise that could have been easily removed in some pre-processing CRC check.

So, if they are processing and buffering the signal there is no reason why they couldn’t just dump it into storage for safe keeping. What is the difference between storing it in memory for 20 seconds and saving it in storage for 3 days? Well, main difference is that the latter is cheaper than the former on all counts - at least by current technology standards.

So why not do a daily backup? Or even hourly incremental backup for that matter? Or even a continuous rolling sync to the R-Ship storage since it seems the consciousness transfer is almost instant? If the Resurrection Ship kept the “last good copy” of each Cylons consciousness then instead of permanent death, a stranded Cylon would simply loose last few hours or days of his/her life. If you would make Resurrection Ships sync up their backup data on regular basis, you now have a highly efficient distributed system that offers you virtual immortality. Permadeath would only be possible if someone would manage to track down all the Resurrection Ships with the copy of your consciousness.

I’ll go even further - why not allow Cylons to make emergency backups to personal storage they could then stow away in a safe place. Drop a thumb drive in a safe deposit box on Caprica before going on an important mission and you can be restored even if your whole fleet was wiped out.

So yeah, I don’t buy the whole “Oh noes, where is the R-ship? If we die now we die FOR REALS!” I just refuse to believe that a race of sophisticated intelligent machines would neglect something as important and basic as backups. It is a small thing, but it bugs the hell out of me.

In the past if you missed an episode of your favorite show you had very limited choices. If you had Tivo or a similar service you could just pray and hope it was smart enough to record it. You could also hope it was available on some sort of on-demand service provided by your cable. Failing that, you could either wait for a re-run, or go online and download the episode from your favorite P2P network. Added bonus was that the friendly folks who were uploading the shows usually grabbed them from HD feed, and were kind enough to remove commercial breaks. I did this myself several times for this or that show. There is just no way to prevent it.

At the time I used to wonder why the networks didn’t simply put the episodes online, complete with commercial interruptions. Since they already circulate in the wild, why not turn around and profit from it. This rejection of adopting a viable stream of revenue out of fear that it will make it easier for pirates to “steal it” seemed silly to me. I mean, some groups out there are able to start seeding an episode 15-20 minutes after it was aired - all they need to do is to grab the file from their VDR, and cut out the commercials. Not releasing a digital copy of your show didn’t necessarily impede their work.

Conversely, if you stream the episodes from the official website, surround them with one or two advertising banners and include commercial spots embedded in your stream, you are capitalizing on several of the 8 generatives Kevin Kelly talked about in his essay Better than Free. Since this is an official release the fans of the show know immediately where to find it (they can bookmark the page, instead of searching P2P networks), and furthermore they know the content is authentic and trustworthy which is not always the case with the less than legal sources.

Well, lo and behold - this idea is starting to take ground. This Friday I missed the new Battlestar Galactica episode and to my surprise I noticed that all 3 episodes of the new season are available via SciFi Channels Rewind service. Yes, the quality is low, and the commercial breaks are a tad annoying but you know what - I don’t really care. I just want to catch up with so that I can participate in online discussions and the obligatory Monday lunch hour BSG discussion at work. And for that the grainy, slightly above Youtube quality compressed FLV is just fine. Hell, it’s in fact more convenient since all I need to do is to click a button and watch. I don’t need to wait for the download to finish, and I don’t need to worry that part 5 of 6 will be taken down before I am able to watch it as it is often the case on the TV-Links like link services.

I wanted to commend Scifi and all the other networks which choose to follow this route. I’m glad people are slowly begging to see the light. When you put episodes online like this we all win! You get an extra stream of revenue and I get to watch my show whenever I want. This is exactly how you should combat piracy - compete with them on terms they cannot match. The streaming show on your website is official, safe, permanent and readily available when needed - it is better than free.

Is this an indicative of change? I don’t think it’s just Scifi that is doing this. I think ABC was doing something very similar for Lost episodes, although I’m not sure if they just offer the last episode, or all of them. So there are networks out there that are beginning to understand how to make a buck in the digital world, and that is filling me with hope. Perhaps future is not as bleak as we all suspected.

I’m usually skeptical of total conversion mods. Most of them set very ambitious goals for themselves but never quite reach them. What you usually end up with is a half-assed, buggy mod with sub-par graphics and degraded game play. On the other hand, some turn out great. Beyond The Red Line is a total conversion of Freespace 2 set in the universe based on Battlestar Galactica series. I never played Freespace but I do like to play space sims from time to time, and I do love BSG so I decided to give it a whirl.

This is not a full review because I didn’t really get to play a lot. But I wanted to put a blurb about it here anyway. Besides, it is hard to review a product that is still in an early development stage. Right now only a demo is available on the website and it is a tad rough around the edges. The briefing UI and option panels are positively dreadful and unintuitive. Ship and weapon descriptions are read by the Microsoft text-to-speech engine and it sounds horrible. But I’m guessing these are little details that they can iron out later.

Fortunately the mission briefings and in-game chatter is all voice acted. This was the bit of the game that impressed me. The acting is really decent, and the voices are surprisingly clear. They follow BSG cannon closely using the familiar jargon - they even do that voice distortion thing when you are in the cockpit. I did notice a slight issue with volume though - sometimes it was really hard to hear the dialog over the effects, but I think that’s something I could just tweak myself via the options menu. The default volume settings are not prefect apparently. But it’s a demo.

The game puts you in the role of a rookie viper pilot on Batlestar Pegasus. The first mission is a tutorial where a slightly annoyed instructor puts you through the basic navigation and combat training. I think they did fudge around with Freespace controls a bit I can’t say for sure. What I can tell you though is that this game is more on the sim than the arcade side. You do have a pretty fine control over your ships acceleration, and thruster systems and the keyboard controls are all over the place. Initially I was a bit confused by the complexity but I guess it grows on you eventually.

I didn’t really get much past the tutorial mission so I can’t write much more. It does have a potential though and it looks like the crew is active and committed. I will be watching this one closely to see where it goes from here. I think that if anyone has a chance to become one of the few successful and worthwhile total conversions it is these guys. If you love BSG I recommend you grab the demo and check it out. You don’t actually need Freespace 2 to play - it is distributed as a standalone product.

Oh, and as most total conversions this one is free.