Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is a Microsoft logo on the side of a JET ENGINE. The jokes practically write themselves:
“Microsoft Flight: Giving new meaning to the term ‘Blue Screen of Death‘”
“The reliability of Microsoft software, now available in jet engines.”
“Well, you can take off fine, but without Genuine Advantage Validation, I’m afraid we can’t let you land.”

I’m not sure what game Microsoft is playing at, advertising on airplane engines, but it doesn’t strike me as a smart move for them. It reminded me of one of those usenet-era computer jokes:

What if Operating Systems Were Airlines?

DOS Airlines
Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again, then they push again jump on again, and so on.

Windows Air
The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Windows NT Air
Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.

Mac Airlines
All the stewards, stewardesses, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look the same, act the same, and talk the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are told you don’t need to know, don’t want to know, and would you please return to your seat and watch the movie.

Unix Airlines
Each passenger brings a piece of the airplane and a box of tools to the airport. They gather on the tarmac, arguing constantly about what kind of plane they want to build and how to put it together. Eventually, they build several different aircraft, but give them all the same name. Some passengers actually reach their destinations. All passengers believe they got there.

Linux Airlines
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”

In any case, Buenos Aires seems like a nice city. It reminds me a bit of Mexico, or maybe downtown Los Angeles. I may have fried the European power cable for my laptop by trying to use it in a South American power outlet that was an almost-but-not-quite fit. Pegs, holes, and so forth. So my mission for today is to find a new cable or an adaptor.

Many people in Europe told me that Buenos Aires is the most European city in South America. South Americans I’ve met refer to BA as “the Paris of Argentina”. This is the first South American city I’ve ever been to, so I can’t really comment on how “European” it feels relative to the rest of the continent, but I will say that it doesn’t remind me very strongly of Paris, and I was in Paris a couple weeks ago. The place Buenos Aires reminds me most strongly of is downtown Los Angeles, which I suppose just demonstrates that if you take a First World city and infuse it with a heavy dose of Latin culture, or take a city with a Latin culture and infuse it with a First World (or near-First World) economy, you wind up in roughly the same place.

From all appearances, there is a great deal of money floating about in Buenos Aires. There are many high-rise buildings, (one of several ways in which BA does not resemble Paris) I’ve walked past several places where significant construction and road repair works seem to be underway (I wrote my initials in wet cement yesterday!). The towering office buildings appear to house local offices for many major multinational firms, including everyone’s favorite Bob developers (P.S. I promise not to rip on Redmond in my next post).

The world's cuddliest evil empire comes to America del Sur

I have been drinking the tap water for a week now, with no apparent ill effects. I have not felt unsafe anywhere yet, although so far I haven’t been in any of the sketchier parts of town. Buenos Aires is also vastly easier to navigate than any of the cities I’ve been in up to this point. After seven months in Europe, it came as quite a shock be in a place where streets that seem to run North-South, East-West actually do! Say what you will about the charm and mystery of Old World cities, but I’m going Nuevo Mundo grid system FTW.

Saturday night, walking back from a bar/club/venue (where I witnessed a neigh-inexplicable kabuki/drum corps/mime/circus acrobatics/dance show) a driver pulled over and asked me for directions. Not only did I know the street he was asking about, but thanks to the rationally laid-out street plan, I was able to give him useful directions (in Spanish!). I was quite impressed with myself.

For the most part, I find Argentinian Spanish easier to understand than Spanish Spanish. This is probably because it’s more similar to Mexican Spanish, which is the dialect almost everyone who studies Spanish in the United States learns.

However, there are some idiosyncrasies to the Argentine argot that continue to throw me. First, ‘y’ is pronounced like a cross between a ‘z’ and a ‘sh’ sound. Think of the sound in the middle of “discussion”, maybe. For example, I’m staying on Avenida de Mayo, and while I would pronounce Mayo as “mai-yo,” the locals here say something closer to “mai-zhoh”. That one takes some getting used to and some back-and-forth to figure out when you’re saying the same word in a different dialect, but it’s not too troublesome.

More problematic is the use of the pronoun vos, which completely replaces tú (informal 2nd person, ‘you’) in Argentinian Spanish. Not only is vos itself a new word to listen for, but it comes with its own set of verb conjugations that are unfamiliar and difficult to find information about. My understanding is that vos is a relic of an earlier form of Spanish, sort of like “thee” or “thou” in English, but still alive and well in Argentina. It’s the coelacanth of the Spanish language!

When I said there’s money in Buenos Aires, I do not mean to suggest that it’s at all evenly distributed. There’s more visible poverty here than any place I’ve been previously (with the possible exception of Croatia). When eating dinner alfresco, I’ve been approached for my leftovers several times. There are homeless people camped out even along major thoroughfares, and plenty of beggars. The children begging are the hardest for me to deal with emotionally, and this is the first place I’ve encountered them. I’ve also been warned that child-beggars can occasionally become knife-wielding child-muggers if rebuffed. In any case, I made a donation to Homeless International to rebuff my own guilty conscience.

To date, I haven’t really felt unsafe anywhere in Buenos Aires. But, unlike in Europe, I’m taking the warnings from locals seriously. I’ve been to sections of Paris and London that were supposedly really sketchy, and found them to be totally unremarkable. I’ve been avoiding the really sketchy sections of Buenos Aires. More than one person has commented that it’s a good idea to carry two wallets: a real one, and one to give to muggers. I bought a new wallet at a street fair yesterday and I’ve transferred my important cards and most of my money over to it.

In other news, the “World’s most annoying financial crisis” continues, although either the situation has improved since Slate’s writer visited in December, or he was exaggerating the severity for dramatic effect. Despite the signs reading NO HAY MONEDAS (literally, this reads as the rather-existential: “There are no coins,” but “We have no coins,” is a more accurate translation), I can report that the monedas do exist, they are simply few and far between. Through careful hoarding, and selectively handing over 5-peso notes for 4-peso bills, I have managed to accumulate around 4 pesos worth of coins, and I did spend $1.25 (the $ sign is used for pesos here, which is rather confusing to an American) on a bus ride.

I’m pretty pleased with the new design, I think it’s very clean and modern-looking without being too gimmicky. It does have some fancyness like transparency, and rounded corners and so forth, so if anyone out there is running into weird glitches (things overlapping, sections disappearing, etc.) I’d appreciate hearing about them. You can leave a comment, or email me. Please include your operating system and browser, too.

It’s actually a brand-new holiday, first celebrated in 2006, intended to commemorate the memory of the victims of that regime, especially los desaparecidos. It seemed to be pretty popular, though. There was a huge parade and street demonstrations. It was an oddly festive atmosphere for such a somber occasion.

There were a ton of people out in the streets

33 years from the genocidal coup

Given the South American reputation for machismo, there were a surprising number of feminist groups marching. This sign reads: We feminists demand, not one more woman victim to prostitution networks.

This puppet of a woman represents negative stereotypes of women, or something like that. The face has slurs written on it; I can't read the sign it's carrying.

Of course, it wouldn't be an Argentinian demonstration without Che Guevara!

This kid's rocking the Che-cape. Guaranteed to attract the chicas

These guys might be taking it a bit too far...

Almost every group of marchers had brought some drummers along.

You can download the tours for free in mp3 format to play on any portable audio player. Alternatively, if for some reason you hate having money, there’s a phone number you can call to listen to any of the audioguides on your mobile phone at the touch of a button. Mobile phone rates here in Argentina are not nearly as obscene as they were in Europe, but a 40 minute call still starts to add up. Plus, if the choice is between “no cost” and “cost”, I’m guessing most people will opt for the former.

However, the BA government has done a rather poor job of promoting their audioguides. If I hadn’t been tipped off to their existence, I probably never would have found them. Google searches (at least on English-language google.com) for Buenos Aires audiotours turn up mostly a variety of commercial sites and blogs, not the governmental site. Consider this post my meager bid to try to improve the Porteños’ PageRank.

1) When walking, take long confident strides. Strive to appear like you both know where you’re going, and have to be there at a certain time. Don’t overdo this, you shouldn’t run like you’re about to miss your train.

2) Read street signs, not maps.

3) Don’t wear a backpack. Somehow, people who live someplace never need to carry things. I haven’t fully figured this one out, but trust me: backpacks are a dead giveaway.

4) Never take out your camera. Don’t stop to look at the impossibly beautiful castle/church/cathedral/bridge/Roman amphitheater. Yawn.

5) Look slightly irritated at all times. This one is pretty clutch. Remember, tourists are excited and happy to be someplace. Everyone else on that bus is kind of pissed off to be going to work.

Hack the Gibson!

However, if you had been reading the tech sections of major media sources in the past few days, you might easily be forgiven for thinking that Conficker was on the verge of ending the internet (or possibly the world) as we know it. A roundup of some of the coverage I’ve seen:

“The Worm That Ate the Web” from Slate, who couldn’t resist the temptation to slap an over-the-top headline on an otherwise fairly good article.

“Worm Infects Millions of Computers Worldwide” from the New York Times, which also features the priceless quote, “If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships steaming toward us on the horizon,” from some guy at a security firm.

“The Conficker Worm: What happens next?” from CBS News, which characterizes it as “one of the most dangerous threats ever,” a phrase that practically cries out for some sort of qualifier—surely the Ebola virus and nuclear war clock in ahead of Conficker on the threat scale, yes?

“Computer experts brace for ‘Conficker’ worm” from Reuters, who’ve since redirected some of their links to the more accurate, but still ominous-sounding “Malicious virus quiet, but attack may be in works”

The short, boring version of this story is that Conficker is not that different from other worms in the past. It’s somewhat more advanced, with peer-to-peer communication and a cryptographically-protected system for phoning home for instructions. However, where it really excels is public relations. By having a clever, funny-sounding name (“Conficker” is pronounced like an accented “configure”, but “ficker” is a noun form of the German verb ficken, which means “to fuck”) and by setting the latest version, Conficker.C, to start listening for instructions on April 1, the worm’s authors tapped into a perfect storm of tech journalists desperate to write an April Fool’s Day story that doesn’t boil down to “Somebody said something funny on teh internets” and antivirus software companies eager to scare people into buying their product (nevermind that the vulnerability Conficker exploits has already been closed by normal Windows updates).

Much of the coverage has focused on the supposedly mysterious intentions of the worm’s creators: as of right now, the worm isn’t actually doing anything to infected computers. It’s taken them over, (pwned, or zombied if you prefer colorful verbiage) but the botnet is still waiting for further instructions from its masters. Many of the articles have this attitude of, “What happens now is ANYONE’S guess! They could do ANYTHING!”

I hate to be the one to kill the mystery, but I can tell you right now that these computers will eventually be used for either a) sending spam, or b) DDoS attacks, or both. The reason I know this is because these are basically the only things anyone ever uses a botnet for. I suppose they might also harvest personal information from infected machines, but there isn’t really any need to create a large, coordinated, remotely-controllable network for that purpose.

It’s really too bad that botnet hackers are so uninventive. When I talk to laypeople about my project, and about hackers, these are the kinds of hackers they typically think of: low-grade criminals who are out to make a buck. But to me, these kinds of botnet spammers are absolutely the least-interesting subspecies of hacker. I have some respect for the technical know-how needed to uncover a vulnerability and exploit it, but the motivation behind it is so pedestrian and petty. As one article put it, “The days of hacker meritocracy earned through digitally destructive acts…have given way to profit schemes in which malware and hacking skills are used to snoop on networks.”

I was brainstorming with a friend of mine, trying to come up with more interesting things to do with a botnet. Some options include:
-> Running SETI@Home on the zombie machines.
-> Using them to brute-force crack cryptography.
-> Find giant prime numbers with them.
-> Conduct sociological research on worm victims. It would be a rare chance to study computer use habits without subjects modifying their behavior.
-> Play Six Degrees of Separation with victims’ email address books. I’d be very curious to find out the average number of nodes separating two people in a botnet.

If any Russian botnet masters are reading this, drop me an encrypted email, we can work something out!

My other idea for a creative, malicious virus or worm wouldn’t necessarily require a botnet. It seems to me that viruses typically target computer resources and data, so it would be novel to see a virus that targeted the human users behind those computers. You could write a virus that sent out emails designed to introduce acute social awkwardness. It would probably be possible to use a heuristic that combined data from a victim’s email contact list with public search results to identify certain types of people, then the virus could send out targeted emails.

Send long, heartfelt declarations of love to email contacts of the opposite sex: “I know you’ve probably never thought of me this way, but I’ve always loved you…”

Identify co-workers who have the emails at the same domain name: “Hey, about that project you asked me to work on: I went on kind of a bender this weekend, so I didn’t really get anything done…”

Extra-credit for .edu domains: “Professor _______, your ideas are laughable and you’re so boring I always sleep through your class.”

For bonus points, spot variations of “Dad” and “Mom” in a contact list: “Dad, I need to tell you, I’m running away to join a corporeal mime troupe. This is what I really want to do with my life.” / “Mom, I’m gay. I thought it was important for you to know.”

For added realism, the virus could be programmed to only send messages late on Friday and Saturday nights, when many suspiciously honest and poorly-typed emails are typically sent.

One person I shared this idea with commented that, “That would be the most evil computer virus ever!” Luckily for the world, my coding skills are nowhere near up to the task of actually writing such a virus. I’m probably not that evil, either.

However, I would like to see the malicious hackers of the world up their game a little bit. If you’re going to be evil anyway, at least be evil and clever! It’s not like they’re handing out extra-long jail sentences for creativity.

Breaking standards-compliance

One guy told me that it’s against the law to sell adapters because they want to force people to buy Argentinian electrical products, rather than bringing in foreign ones. It’s true that high-end electronics are generally cheaper in North America than here, and I’ve talked to Argentinians who make a point of buying digital cameras and computers on their visits to the States. Still, I really doubt there are enough of these people to warrant a law banning the sale of power converters. Plus, wouldn’t those people just buy adapters abroad too?

Another explanation was similar, but with the justification that because Argentina is in the process of changing from an European Type C plug standard, to an Australian/Chinese Type I plug (oh, but they wire them the opposite way!), and they don’t want you using converters to cling to the old standard. Why Argentina feels the need to change their national plug standard, I’m not sure. Today, it’s common to see both types of sockets, as well as weird hybrid sockets that accept either plug. I’m not sure this explanation for scarcity of adapters makes much sense either. Newer buildings and appliances are all Type I, so people would gradually make the shift with or without adapters.

My own theory, for which I have no evidence, is that the adapters simply aren’t worth the trouble for a retail shop. They’re small, dirt-cheap pieces of plastic and metal. The ones I bought cost $5 ARS which is about $1.35 USD. Because they cost almost nothing, but come in a zillion subtly different varieties, the profit margins may be so thin that it’s not worth it to a regular retail shop to organize and stock them.

In any case, I can certainly relate to the frustration of young Skywalker, denied his power converters:

Those of us who pay attention to such things frequently gripe about the failure of standards-compliance in web browsers, especially a certain popular browser that until recently kind of pretended standards didn’t exist. However, it’s worth noting that almost everything in the computer world is fantastically standardized compared to, say, electrical wiring.

According to this site, there are at least 14 different electrical plug “standards” in common use around the world. Adding to the confusion, not all of them are strictly incompatible, either. It’s possible to shove a Type C plug into a Type E or Type F socket. However, just because a plug looks like it should fit, doesn’t mean that it actually will. As noted, “This plug is technically known as the CEE 7/16 (Europlug 2.5 A/250 V unearthed). A plug with an identical appearance with slightly larger pins is technically known as the CEE 7/17 (German/French 16 A/250 V unearthed). This type of plug is very common in most “universal” adaptor sets.”

Can you see the difference?

The prongs on the left plug (a Type G->Type C adapter I have) are just slightly too large to fit in sockets designed for the plug on the right. There’s a nice map here, showing the ridiculous proliferation of different plug types around the world. There was one proposed international standard, but so far Brazil is the only country using it. In this context, IE6’s CSS support looks like a marvel of interoperability.

I really do feel bad for the makers of electrical appliances having to contend with so many different designs. I’m sure it drives up the price of manufacturing to some degree, and it also makes it harder for people to easily move from country to country. Some companies have gotten quite clever at making sockets that accept a variety of different plug types. Now, if the entire world would just switch to sockets that look like this:

(Semi-)Universal Power Strip

P.S. I haven’t even touched on the different voltages/frequencies in use worldwide, and that’s an entirely separate issue.

One of the first things we saw after arriving at the park was a family of coatis. They’re basically like diurnal South American raccoons. However, I think they’re much cuter. One of their nicknames is “snookum bears”. Seriously.

Like raccoons, coatis are experts at stealing your garbage. They also have no fear whatsoever of people.

“Kitty? … Doggie?”

Our first glimpse of the falls.

Rainbow in the spray of some of the smaller falls.

Typical tourist shot: Look, we’re near a waterfall!

Los dos hermanos (the two brothers)

El Obelisco

Here in Buenos Aires, there is a giant obelisk seemingly copied straight from the Washington monument. But, unlike some cities, Buenos Aires doesn’t shy away from the phallic symbolism.

The Obelisk stands in the middle of what is, by some measures, the widest street in the world. The shot I took above is probably the most iconic photo one can take in Buenos Aires. The Obelisk is to BA what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.