Stray

 Cats, Computer Games  No Responses »
Jul 282022
 

So I’ve been playing this cyberpunk cat game (how could I possibly resist? The protagonist is a cat. I am quite fond of cats. And the game is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, my favorite genre, so to speak.)

But first…

* * * Spoiler alert! * * *

As I said, I was playing Stray. Beautiful game. The visuals are stunning, the story is engaging (reminds me of the quality of writing that went into the classic Infocom text adventure games in the early 1980s) and the cat is an orange tabby that looks and behaves just like our Freddy. What more can I ask for?

But then I realized that the story of Stray is incredibly sad. Even the ending can at best be described as bittersweet.

Because… because for starters, in Stray there are no humans. Only robots, which look very obviously robots, with display screens as faces showing cute emoticons.

The reason why there are only robots has to do with humans, and something unspeakably evil that these humans must have done in the distant past. The result: A walled city (“safest walled city on Earth!”) devoid of human inhabitants, infested with evolved trash-eating bacteria that now eat cats and robots both, and inhabited by kind, naive, incredibly gentle, almost innocent robots, former Companions, cleaning and maintenance staff who have become somewhat self-aware, mimicking the behavior of their former masters.

A few of these robots dream of the Outside, which is where the cat protagonist comes from, after falling off a broken pipe. His drone buddy, who turns out to carry the consciousness of a human (quite possibly the very last human), helps him navigate the dangers and eventually open up the city. He does so at the cost of his own life.

When the game ends, the cat is free, again walking under a blue sky chasing a butterfly. And this cat may very well be the last representative of our once great civilization. Because the robots do not form a functioning society. They go through the motions, sure, even running, rather pointlessly, barbershops and bars with robots for customers. They are so innocent, they are almost completely free of malice (apart from a few security robots and their drones) and they are incredibly polite: “What will it be today, little sir?” asks the robot bartender of the aforementioned bar, “Our world must seem gigantic from your little eyes. Wish I could be as tiny as you, so I could explore new hidden places.”

Yet their society is non-functional. They don’t make things, they just make use of the leftover remnants of a collapsed civilization.

The world of Stray, then, is more depressing than the various Wastelands of the Fallout game franchise. At least in the Wastelands, humans survive. Sure, the societies that emerge are often evil (the Enclave, the Institute) yet they present a path towards a better future. But the world of Stray, as far as humans are concerned, is irreversibly dead (unless a sequel introduces us to surviving enclaves of humans, but I sure hope that won’t happen, as it would ruin a great, if depressing, story.)

Hence my sense of melancholy when I was ultimately successful opening up the city, at the cost of losing my last NPC companion, the drone B-12. While it was hidden behind its impenetrable walls, the city of Stray preserved at least an echo, an image of the civilization that created it. Now that the city is open, what is going to happen as the robots disperse? What remains (other than lovely colonies of feral cats) after the last robot’s power supply runs out or the robot suffers some irreparable damage?

Not much, I think. The little eyes of Stray, the cat, may very well end up as the final witness to that echo of our existence.

 Posted by at 9:41 pm

Network forensics

 Internet, Personal  No Responses »
Jul 092022
 

When the Rogers outage hit us, especially seeing that equipment remained physically connected but became unreachable for the outside world, I was immediately drawn to the conclusion that this was a cascading configuration error, invalid routes advertised through BGP, not some physical equipment problem or a cyberattack.

I guess I was not wrong (though I should stress that making such a general assessment after the fact from the comfort of my own chair is easy; finding the specific causes and resolving the problem, now that’s the hard part and I’m sure there are more than a few Rogers network engineers whose hair got a bit grayer in the past 48 hours). Cloudflare offered their own analysis, in which they pointed out that indeed, the outage was preceded by a sudden, unexpected burst of BGP advertisements. Here are two plots from Cloudflare’s blog post, montaged together so that the timestamps match:

Whatever the specific action was that resulted in this, it is truly spectacular how it killed all of Rogers’s network traffic at around 4:45 AM Friday morning.

Today, things were slowly coming back to normal. But just to add to the fun, earlier this afternoon first my workstation and later, two other pieces of hardware lost all connectivity here on my home office network. What the… Well, it turned out that the router responsible for providing DHCP services needed a kick in the proverbial hind part, in the form of a reboot. Still… Grumble.

 Posted by at 10:32 pm

Someone broke the Internet!

 Canada, Internet, Personal  No Responses »
Jul 082022
 

Well, someone broke the Internet this morning.

To be more precise, someone broke a large part of the Internet in Canada. The network of Rogers has been down since about 4:30 this morning. When I woke up, I saw several e-mails from my own server complaining about its failure to connect to remote hosts; I also saw an e-mail from our family doctor’s office informing us that their phone lines are down and what to do in case of a medical emergency.

The fact that a major provider can have such a nationwide outage in 2022 is clearly unacceptable. Many are calling for the appropriate regulatory agencies to take action, and I fully approve.

In my case, there are backups and backups of backups. I am affected (we have no mobile data, and my highest-bandwidth network connection is down) but the outage also offered an opportunity to sort out an issue with network failover.

But I find it mind-boggling that more than 9 hours into the outage, Rogers still has no explanation and no ETA.

And now I accidentally hit Ctrl-Alt-Del while the KVM was connected to my main server instead of the device that I was trying to reboot. Oh well, no real harm down, the server rebooted cleanly, I just feel stupid.

All in all, this Friday is shaping up to be a rather unpleasant one. And here I thought I was looking forward to a nice, quiet, productive day.

 Posted by at 2:02 pm

Pro-life

 Health, Politics  No Responses »
Jul 032022
 

So let me get this straight. You are pro-life. You stand strong. No exceptions. Once a woman is pregnant, she must be compelled by the full force of the law to bring that pregnancy to term. If she tries to assert bodily autonomy by essentially withholding her support from the fetus, you call it murder.

Very well, I understand that viewpoint. I might even be sympathetic to a certain degree: human life is precious, and even an unborn infant can often survive with medical help, and grow up to be a wonderful person.

But let me offer a strong analogy. Suppose you are the driver of a vehicle that causes an accident. Not necessarily your fault. Perhaps you did everything right: you obeyed the rules of the road, you paid attention, you were not impaired. Yet… shit happens. You hit someone. That person is now on the side of the road, bleeding to death when the paramedics arrive.

“What’s your blood type?” asks one of them. You dutifully answer, “O, RH-negative.” – “Excellent,” says the paramedic. “Now lie down here while I hook you up.”

“Wha…?” you ask in shocked surprise. “Oh, you will be donating your blood to keep the victim alive.”

“But… I don’t want to?” – “Doesn’t matter. The law says that you have no choice,” they reply.

“But,” you continue, “I am anemic. I cannot give blood without serious risk to my own health.” – “Doesn’t matter,” says the paramedic. “The law permits no exceptions.”

“But,” you interject again, sounding like a broken record, “look at the victim! His skull is split open! Half his brain is smashed! He will never recover!” – “That may be true,” says the paramedic, “but so long as there’s a heartbeat, we must act according to the law or we risk criminal prosecution.”

At this point, you take a tentative step to leave, but the paramedic warns you that this would qualify as fleeing the scene of an accident, and your refusal to give blood will automatically result in a second degree murder charge.

A week later, at your funeral, your deeply religious relatives remark what a good person you were, willingly risking, in the end sacrificing your life to save that of a stranger, a shining light for the pro-life movement. The irony is completely lost on them.

Lest we forget, many abortions (pretty much all later-term abortions) happen for similar reasons: because the fetus is not viable, because the mother’s life is at risk, or both. Not because of some imaginary pro-choice callousness when it comes to the meaning and value of human life.

 Posted by at 5:45 pm