Greatest – Richard Bennett

Symmetry, Control, and Progress

A friend asked me what I thought about Doc Searls’ latest essay on the evolution of the Internet and as I happened to be reading it already, I’ve written a few disjointed notes. The short version of my reaction is that it’s sad that everybody with an axe to grind about technology, politics, or business these days seems to think that the Internet has an immutable, Platonic form that’s somehow mystically responsible for all that’s good in the technology business for the past twenty years, and any alteration of this form will screw it up. According to this way of thinking, stuff like Napster that exists solely for the purpose of illegal activity is good (even though new), but DRM (which isn’t really a Net deal anyhow) would be inscrutably bad.

This is sort of a “natural law” argument that’s supposed to persuade business and government to turn a blind eye to abuses of the Net, leaving its regulation to self-appointed do-gooders free of commercial interest. It’s a flawed argument that ignores the fact that the Internet is actually a tool and not a spiritual essence from a higher reality, which like all tools adapts to human needs or is discarded. The strongest proponent of this view is Larry Lessig, whose book “The Future of Ideas” I’ve just read, and the others who argue this line (Searls, Weinberger, Gillmor) take their lead from him. I’ll write a review of Lessig’s book in the next few days, and it’s not going to be pretty. But back to Searls, and the theory of immaculate conception:

The Internet is not simply a network, it’s a means of interconnecting networks. It won out over competing technologies because it was heavily subsidized by the government and more simple than the alternative, the ISO/OSI protocol suite. OSI was a complicated set of international standards devised by committees with membership as diverse as the UN but in some ways even less rational. It contains a myriad of options, many non-usable, and is hard to understand, let alone to implement. In the heyday of OSI, we had a series of “OSI Implementors’ Workshops” to hash out subsets of the protocols to implement for purposes of demonstration, and even that was very painful. Internet protocols weren’t designed by committees, but by individuals paid by ARPA to keep things simple. OSI was intended to take the place of proprietary protocols from IBM, Xerox, and DEC, providing end-to-end applications, whereas the Internet was simply intended to interconnect diverse networks with a basic level of end-to-end capability.

Make a side-by-side comparison of any early Internet protocol with the competing ISO candidate and you see that the Internet offering can be implemented in tinier memory and fewer CPU cycles and with less man-hours of programming effort than the alternative. As if that weren’t enough to ensure victory, the government paid contractors to write reference implementations of Internet protocols and then gave them away for free.
Continue reading “Symmetry, Control, and Progress”

Misunderstanding the Internet

The mistaken idea that Internet architecture is “End-to-End” has cropped up again, this time on the Doc Searls blog, with a reference to some orders to the FCC from Larry Lessig, who’s not especially empowered to make them. While there are many problems with using the FCC to impose this view (like, um, the fact … Continue reading “Misunderstanding the Internet”

While there are many problems with using the FCC to impose this view (like, um, the fact that they can’t), and with Searls’ desire to make a political litmus test out of it, the most important is that it’s simply not true. While it may be argued that the Internet has an “end-and-end” architecture that concentrates as much intelligence as possible in the endpoints and has precious little in the middle, a truly “end-to-end” architecture would allow the ends to control the flow of messages through the middle, and the current architecture can’t do that.

An end-to-end architecture, in other words, would allow a voice application to tell the network “I need a narrow stream of bandwidth connecting me to this other end, but I need that stream to be free of jitter. I don’t need retransmission of packets dropped to relieve congestion, but I do need to know I’m getting through, and I’m willing to pay 25 cents a minute for the that.” Or it would allow a caching media application to say “I need lots of bandwidth for a 4 gigabyte transfer, but I don’t want to pay a lot for it and you can work it around other applications that need small chunks because I don’t care about jitter.” Or it would allow an email application to say “Send this the cheapest way, period.” And it would allow a teleconferencing application to say “send this to my group of these 14 end points without jitter and with moderately high bandwidth and we’ll pay you a reasonable fee.”

The network would then deal with congestion by dropping the spam and the e-mail until conditions improve, and by delaying the honking media files, but it would endeavor to deliver as many of the voice and real-time media packets as possible. It therefore wouldn’t allow spam to step on VoIP, as it does now. Most of us are able to see that this would be progress, but we see the Internet as a tool, and not as a socio-political metaphor.

There are a number of kludges that have been adopted in TCP to approximate a truly end-to-end capability, but none of them really make it a reality because there’s not enough smarts in IP and its various kludgy cousins (ICMP, IGMP) to make this work. So freezing the architecture at this stage would be a serious mistake, which is why you never see network architects arguing for the things that Searls (a Public Relations man), Lessig (a law professor) or Dave Weinberger (a philosophy professor) want.

The story of how the Internet came by its odd architecture, which it doesn’t share with the much better-designed ARPANET, coherent architectures like SNA and DECNet, and extant PDNs, is a story of ambitious professors, government grants, and turf wars among contractors that’s not at all a tale of the best design winning out, but more on that later. This “end-to-end” fantasy is simply historical revisionism, and we need to nip it in the bud before it does any more damage.

UPDATE: Weinberger gets defensive about his creds at the wanky Supernova conference:

Up now, David Weinberger brings the Cluetrain ethos to the new areas of digital identity and DRM, professing his end-user ignorance as his unique qualification for speaking for normal users and articulating the rights they would want to protect.

Heh heh heh.

What we wish the Internet were

Doc Searls and David Weinberger have apparently written a Cluetrainish hallucination about the Internet called the World of Ends. I haven’t read it [ed: now I have, see updates below] because their server’s down, so I’ll critique it without the unnecessary distraction of actually knowing what they have to say. They’ve got it all wrong … Continue reading “What we wish the Internet were”

They’ve got it all wrong because they confuse what the net is – an extremely complex network of computers, routers, and links that barely works most of the time and falls far short of what it needs to be – with what they wish it were – a magic wand for bringing about a Utopian paradise in which everything is free, toil and trouble are abolished, men are all smart and women are all good-looking. We see this kind of rubbish over and over, etc, etc, etc.

Seriously though, it’s No. 1 on Blogdex so it’s worth a read when the net can serve it up, most likely. And I hope to be able to read it someday.

UPDATE: Their server stayed up long enough for me to read it, and it’s pretty much as I expected, a rehash of Weinberger’s previous claims that we’ve already dealt with.

The reactions to the article are interesting, and fall into two categories: most are laudatory and quite brief, statements like “brilliant explanation of how the Internet works”, although some quote the entire page. The others, written by people who really do understand how the Internet works, tend to go point-by-point showing how the authors have got it dead wrong. See Soundbitten, or Brett Glass on Seppuku, or Empty Bottle or Way.Nu or Marc Canter or Russell Beattie (my favorite) for a proper analysis.

Bottom line: Searls and Weinberger are hippies, and they see a Free and Open Internet as a key building block of a free and open world, in much the way that Timothy Leary saw LSD in a previous generation. They’re concerned that commercial interests will spoil their metaphor through misunderstanding, and somehow pervert it into a tool of control, oppression, and Big Brother. But they fall into the trap that they warn about, by romanticizing the ‘Net and making it more metaphor than reality.

Probably their most egregious error is the failure to understand that the Internet itself – the plumbing – is, like most technical things, dynamic. When it was deployed in the early 80s (as an improvement on ARPANet), it was intended to support three rudimentary applications (ftp, telnet, and e-mail), none of which was real-time, and its own maintenance needs, which in the early days were simply routing table updates. As the applications of that day were simple, the plumbing to carry them was also simple, and as the community of hosts was small and trusted, there was no need for security and no worries about viruses and attacks. So it was as simple as it needed to be, and no simpler.

Things have changed. DNS has been created (in the old days name-to-address mapping was accomplished by local files), the routing table update protocols have become more sophisticated, the application set has grown to encompass media, real-time, commerce, and web surfing, and we’ve had to cobble together a host of retrofits to deal with Denial of Service attacks, spam, and viruses. Needless to say, the basic transfer engine – the IP protocol – has gone through several enhancements, and in its latest form (IPv6) is in fact quite complicated. The trend over time is clearly toward greater complexity, but still no more complexity than the applications themselves require. One could say the same of cars, telephones, toasters, or any other technical thing.

One specific area where the boys are soaking wet is the matter of traffic priorities. From the beginning, the Internet has recognized that some streams are more time-sensitive than others, and from the beginning it’s had mechanisms to assign higher priority to them. In the early days, this was the “Urgent Data” flag in the IP header, and in IPv6 it’s four levels of priority. Higher priority streams are network maintenance streams updating routing tables and applications like digitized voice (VoIP or Real Audio), while lower-priority streams are things like e-mail and Usenet. Priority isn’t a judgment about value or importance, its a fact of life in the application domain. And while it’s true that giving priority to voice makes e-mail move slower, it’s nothing to get upset about. In the fullness of time, users of high-priority streams will pay for the load they put on the net, and others will get cheaper service as a side-effect, essentially drawing a subsidy. Think Priority Mail vs. bulk mail: the Postal Service collects money from Priority Mail users, which it uses to enhance its infrastructure; this enables all forms to mail to actually move faster.

As to the three crazy rules (nobody owns it, everybody can use it, anybody can improve it) there’s one more they’ve left out: everybody who uses it has to pay for it. Nothing’s free, guys, and when you crank economics into your metaphor, the whole thing changes.

Let’s get a clue here, OK? The Internet will continue to evolve, and it must evolve in order to support video streaming and the Semantic Web. That doesn’t mean there’s going to be an All Controlling Intelligence at the center of it, but it does mean that the pipes are going to get smoother and faster. Today, you push bits into the Internet and they come out the other end bearing little resemblence in terms of sequence to the way you put them in. This kind of behavior would be completely unacceptable for the phone nework, so it’s got some relatively simple mechanisms to ensure that delivery sequence matches up with transmit sequence. That’s all we need from the ‘Net to support video and voice – for it to act as if every endpoint-to-endpoint connection is a wire. It’s not so much a matter of network intelligence as network transparency. The ‘Net, in other words, needs to stop reminding us that it’s there and just carry the data faithfully. Is that too much to ask? I didn’t think so.

So let’s discard the hippie dogma and treat the ‘Net for what it is: a technical creation supporting a certain range of applications, not a politico-religious symbol that wants to keep us locked into Woodstock.

Another update: Weinberger links some of the pushback here. While most people are trying real hard to be polite, there’s no ignoring the fact that the World of Ends is based on outdated dogma.

ANOTHER UPDATE: See further commentary here.

Fortney’s Complaint

The Mercury News ran some of Fortney “Pete” Stark’s comments from the House floor on the Iraq resolution, omitting his reading of the Molly Ivins column blasting the President for the sin of being an “upper class white boy”; I’m guessing Fortney was told he resembles that remark himself. Here’s what they did run, with … Continue reading “Fortney’s Complaint”

I am deeply troubled that lives may be lost without a meaningful attempt to bring Iraq into compliance with U.N. resolutions through careful and cautious diplomacy. The bottom line is I don’t trust this president and his advisers.

We — that’s the US and the UN — have already tried 11 years of careful and cautious diplomacy, embargoes, pressure, and conversation, Fortney, and it hasn’t accomplished a thing. Repeating an act while hoping for different results, is, well, nuts. So let’s not jump to the bottom line that our President is wrong for simply enforcing the measures that should have been enforced in 1998 when Congress last authorized force against Iraq.

Make no mistake, we are voting on a resolution that grants total authority to the president who wants to invade a sovereign nation without any specific act of provocation.

You yourself say, just a little further down, that Iraq attempted to assassinate an American President. While you don’t like that President’s party affiliation, most of us take this kind of aggression as seriously as you would take an attempt on the life of your president, Martin Sheen. Iraq has also attacked, 60 times, American and British jets lawfully policing the No-Fly Zones, and that’s aggression in anybody’s book because it subverts “careful and cautious diplomacy”. Iraq pays the families of suicide bombers, encouraging the murder of innocent people in Israel, more aggression, and it’s gassed, bombed and tortured its own people, the Kurds. What more do you need, little fellow?

This would authorize the United States to act as the aggressor for the first time in our history. It sets a precedent for our nation — or any nation — to exercise brute force anywhere in the world without regard to international law or international consensus.

You need to go back to school and study some history, Congressbubba; we were the aggressor in our Revolution, in the our Civil War, in the Spanish-American War, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even in World War II where we attacked Germany even though they didn’t attack us first. You can look it up. And our action to enforce the International Consensus embodied in the sixteen UN Resolutions Iraq has already violated isn’t chopped liver, dear one.

Congress must not walk in lockstep behind a president who has been so callous to proceed without reservation, as if war was of no real consequence.

The President perceives, rightly, that failing to act against Iraq is the option that has the most real consequences, and I doubt he cares whether you walk in lockstep or you dance a jig, as long as you do the right and honorable and intelligent thing.

Let us not forget that our president — our commander in chief — has no experience with, or knowledge of, war. He admits that he was at best ambivalent about the Vietnam War. He skirted his own military service and then failed to serve out his time in the National Guard. And, he reported years later that at the height of that conflict in 1968 he didn’t notice “any heavy stuff going on.”

So now you’re trying to tell us that Vietnam was a just war, and the President should have been on the front lines, where you weren’t? You need to make up your mind about that.

So we have a president who thinks foreign territory is the opponent’s dugout and Kashmir is a sweater.

So now we have to automatically shut out any President who happens to love baseball? While it may not be as refined as your avocations — macrame and character assassination — it’s a fine sport and one that most Americans enjoy. And I’m willing to wager that the President hasn’t worn a cashmere sweater in his life, while your closet is no doubt full of them.

What is most unconscionable is that there is not a shred of evidence to justify the certain loss of life. Do the generalized threats and half-truths of this administration give any one of us in Congress the confidence to tell a mother or father or family that the loss of their child or loved one was in the name of a just cause?

Not a shred of evidence, well, except for the stuff the UN weapons inspectors found before they were locked out, and what the defectors told us about, and what the satellite pictures have shown, and the cell phone and fax intercepts, and the invoices, etc, etc, etc. That’s about a truckload of shreds.

Is the president’s need for revenge for the threat once posed to his father enough to justify the death of any American? I submit the answer to these questions is no.

See note above about aggression against an American President. You shouldn’t have brought this up, dim one.

The questions before the members of this House and to all Americans are immense, but there are clear answers. America is not currently confronted by a genuine, proven, imminent threat from Iraq. The call for war is wrong.

Your answers show contempt for the truth, as well as for our nation’s security.

And what greatly saddens me at this point in our history is my fear that this entire spectacle has not been planned for the well-being of the world, but for the short-term political interest of our president.

What disturbs me is that your tantrum isn’t calculated for political effect, but that you sincerely believe this stuff. For that alone, you should be hospitalized.

Now, I am also greatly disturbed that many Democratic leaders have also put political calculation ahead of the president’s accountability to truth and reason by supporting this resolution.

When the majority of Congress says the evidence supports the President, and a minority that includes KKK recruiter Bobby Byrd, Cuba lover Barbara Lee, and yourself says otherwise, I submit the majority is right.

But I conclude that the only answer is to vote no on the resolution before us.

This isn’t a conclusion, Fortney, because it doesn’t flow from the evidence — it’s more like an impetuous whim, and we don’t govern on that basis in this democracy. Sorry, but you don’t win the free pie.

Pete Stark is a Democratic congressman from Fremont

…which is a sad commentary on the voters in that part of the Frisco Bay area.

UPDATE: Cato the Youngest takes the Flying Iron Fisk to the full remarks Stark made on the floor, including the Molly Ivins (gee, does anybody take her seriously?) reference. Comments by readers point out that the US was also the aggressor in WW I, Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya (twice) and arguably in Southeast Asia.

Decoding the High-Tech press release

In the interest of restoring investor confidence in the market, we at Omphalos would like to offer a lesson in decoding the high-tech press release. We start with an actual press release from an actual company whose name is redacted for obvious reasons, and explain in layman’s terms what the company is trying to convey. … Continue reading “Decoding the High-Tech press release”

Original in plain text, translation in italic.

XXX Networks, Inc., formerly known as YYY Networks, Inc., develops breakthrough technology and Wireless LAN products that enable mainstream adoption and new applications by vastly improving the quality and convenience of the Wireless LAN consumer experience.

We’re jumping on the Wireless LAN bandwagon.

XXX’s networking solutions, based on the IEEE 802.11 standard (also known as Wi-Fi), dramatically improve the quality of experience for WLAN users and solve issues that limit usability of today?s WLAN products.

There’s no real difference between our company’s network gear and anybody else’s, except price.

XXX?s technology gives users secure, easyto-use, standards-compliant WLAN capability that works in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. The breakthrough wireless technology provides performance for even the most bandwidth-intensive applications ? truly eliminating the need for wires at home, at work, and in public places.

Our wireless network doesn’t require wires – cool, eh?

The core team at XXX comprises a world-renowned group of wireless product and technology entrepreneurs from Cisco, Agere, Bell Labs, Nortel, Intel, Philips, and other companies.

We can’t hold a job.

XXX?s founders include the founders of ZZZ, a company that revolutionized OFDM wireless technology and was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1998.

We got lucky when Cisco was buying everything in sight.

XXX?s founders also include key technologists from Agere who invented the latest generation of Wireless LAN standards technology.

Agere (now Proxim) is a better company.

The company’s main office is in Palo Alto, California, USA, and it has development centers located in Fort Collins, Colorado and Breukelen, The Netherlands.

Our engineers don’t want to deal with the people on the company’s marquee; neither do you.

This public service presented by the Omphalos for your reading pleasure.

Where’s the beef?

— The Mercury News jumps on the latest trend in eating, the return of grass-fed beef to the United States: In the United States, grass feeding was the norm until the end of World War II, when gunpowder plants were converted into nitrogen fertilizer plants. The fertilizer was then applied to cornfields in the Midwest, … Continue reading “Where’s the beef?”

— The Mercury News jumps on the latest trend in eating, the return of grass-fed beef to the United States:

In the United States, grass feeding was the norm until the end of World War II, when gunpowder plants were converted into nitrogen fertilizer plants. The fertilizer was then applied to cornfields in the Midwest, tripling production and sending commodities markets into a tailspin, says Ernest Phinney, general manager of Western Grasslands Beef, a cooperative of six Northern California family ranchers.

After grain prices crashed, fertilizer companies began to offer farmers subsidies to use their fertilizers to grow corn. Eventually, corn replaced grass as the feed of choice for steers in their last months before slaughter because it was cheaper and it bulked up the animals more quickly — adding as much as three pounds a day, compared to grass’ one pound.

In the past few years, there has been a resurgence in grass feeding among some California ranchers who are trying to preserve their way of life by producing a more artisanal product, one that they argue is also more sustainable because cattle are eating what is natural to them, unlike corn, which is more difficult to digest and often leads to ailments that require antibiotics. Even so, less than 1 percent of the 30 million cattle raised for meat annually in the United States is primarily grass-fed, says the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

The story’s also been covered in the Chronicle and in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. The appeal is pretty easy to see: beef that’s lower in cholesterol than chicken or fish, and high in healthy stuff like omega 3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA, both of which are thought to help fight cancer. And the animals aren’t over-dosed with antibiotics in feed lots, or subjected to months of diarrhea from eating a grain diet that their digestive systems can’t really handle. So order some grass-fed beef, from Marin Sun Farms like we do, or another local producer, and invite some vegetarians over for a barbecue. When they turn down the offer of juicy steaks, tell them it’s healthier than tofu, because it is. And watch them squirm.

Seriously, we just got our second annual order of artisan beef, this one a quarter of a grass-fed Angus/Hereford cross from Marin, after last year’s quarter of a Longhorn from Minnasoooda. Longhorns are too lean naturally to feed exclusively on grass, so we went for the local beef this year to get the higher Omega-3 and such. The fat from a grass-fed steer is yellow from all the beta carotene in their diet, and the meat has a more intense beefy flavor. Cooking requires some adjustment, unless you’re used to dry-aged prime beef, but properly-done steaks, stews, and chili are tender enough to eat with no hardship. And the beefs are trained to come when they’re called. My gratitude to the beef god for the steer who gave up his young life that we and three others may eat great curry for another year.

Silicon Valley Politics

— Computer people in Silicon Valley are mainly very clever, but they’re weird about politics. Demographics say that upper-middle class people with college degrees who live in the suburbs should be moderate Republicans, but Republicans of any stripe are rare here, mainly confined to the venture capitalists and some corporate management, like John Chambers at … Continue reading “Silicon Valley Politics”

While engineers in other parts of the country conform to their demographic, Silicon Valley’s rank-and-file tend to be split between Chomskyites, libertarians, and feminist Democrats. Chomsky appeals to people like hardware engineers who believe that human society has to look like the systems they design, where predictability comes out of complexity when big feedback loops govern the operation of many small circuits. Chomskyites, like all paranoid schizophrenics, are fundamentally lazy and want an all-embracing explanation without doing the work it takes to get literate on subjects as complicated as politics, culture, and media.

Libertarians understand at some level that there need to be rules for the masses of dumb people who predominate numerically, but they don’t feel that these rules should apply to them, and besides they don’t like keeping their rooms clean, so they’re caught in a sophomoric political philosophy. While I have some sympathy for that point of view, at the end of the day I realize that November votes for third parties are throw-aways, so I reject it. Libertarianism isn’t so much a philosophy as it is a non-philosophy that basically says “I’m too clever for this debate, so screw you, I’m going fishing.” Fishing is good, but it’s not politics.

Feminist democrats are the easiest to understand, because they’re just lonely boys trying hard to get laid in a sub-culture where males outnumber females about 20 to 1.

The one thing all these folks seem to agree on is that complicated human problems should have solutions simpler than your average hunk of application code, and when this thought takes hold in concrete form, the results are pathetic. They elect people like Mike Honda, a former schoolteacher with a 2-digit IQ, to Congress over much smarter Reeps like Jim Cuneen simply because Honda’s a Democrat, and they support people like Boxer, Barbara Lee, and Pete Stark, even though you’d be embarrassed to bring any of them home for Thanksgiving dinner.

A particularly sharp example of Silicon Valley political naivete is the essay on Dave Winer’s blog titled “Sharon Must Go.” Winer is the king of the Elf Clan that others have called the San Francisco web kids and I used to call the “Font Kiddiez.” He’s a common phenomenon in this valley, the accidental millionaire who made it big selling Mac applications in the 80s when nobody really quite knew what, if anything, the Mac was good for. He amuses himself now, while living off his interest, by building blogging tools. Here’s the essence of his argument:

I try to see both sides. Sharon went out of his way to press Palestinian buttons. He’s as responsible for the terrorist bombings, imho, as Arafat is.

The effort to see “both sides” doesn’t include any attempt to understand why Israel might like to avoid being wiped off the map, and the beef with Sharon seems to be a lurking suspicion that the Prime Minister is a troll who “punches buttons.” Winer also doesn’t quite seem to realize that the only possible successor to Sharon in the wings right now is Netanyahu, a more hawkish man than Sharon himself. And that moral equivalency thing is simply pathetic.

I find all of this disturbing because I realize that this Winer character, for all of his obvious flaws, is way smarter than the average human, so if he’s dead wrong about the war in the Middle East, how can the average man get it? Probably, because the average man doesn’t have as many mechanisms of defense going on as Winer, he’s better able to grasp the obvious. Whether you think the establishment of the state of Israel was a good thing or a bad thing in 1948, sensible people realize that that’s a done deal, and in 2002 the Israeli people have a right to live in peace and security, by whatever means are necessary. And Sharon’s personality isn’t really a factor.

I don’t see this piece going into Blog Nation, frankly.

Update: Dave comments on today’s J. D. Lasica piece on media East and West, and misses the point entirely, in a predictably navel-gazing rant confined to the Tech press. Sigh. Real soon now, I’m going to write about why the Tech press failed to warn us about the real nature of the Dot Com Swindle, a scam so vast it makes Enron look like small potatoes.

The Fall of Singapore —

From Sister Moira’s Blog, this commemorative piece: Veterans recall “living hell” of Singapore’s wartime fall More than 100,000 mainly Indian, British and Australian troops were taken prisoner on the evening of February 15, 1942, when General Arthur Percival unconditionally surrendered the British island fortress that had been believed impregnable. The fortress was believed impregnable because … Continue reading “The Fall of Singapore —”

From Sister Moira’s Blog, this commemorative piece: Veterans recall “living hell” of Singapore’s wartime fall

More than 100,000 mainly Indian, British and Australian troops were taken prisoner on the evening of February 15, 1942, when General Arthur Percival unconditionally surrendered the British island fortress that had been believed impregnable.

The fortress was believed impregnable because it was ringed with walls and armaments facing out to sea. But the Brits left open and unprotected the Causeway to the Malay Peninsula. Japan landed soldiers on the unprotected East Coast of Malaya, and they literally rode bicycles down to the Causeway and invaded with no resitance. The bicycles were Japanese-made, and sold to the Malays for ten years before the war.

Historians of colonialism often say that the Fall of Singapore, more than any other single event, erased the illusion of the White Man’s invulnerabilty and fueled Asian Independence Movements.