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This post is mostly a ripoff from Wikipedia because who ever wrote about the topic did a pretty good job of summarizing the main ideas behind Barry Schwartz’s work.The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less is a 2004 book by Mr. Schwartz. In the book, Schwartz argues the controversial thesis that eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers. Kind of communism in a way but wait! There is more…

How we choose

Schwartz describes that a consumer’s strategy for most good decisions will involve these steps:

1. Figure out your goal or goals. The process of goal-setting and decision making begins with the question: “What do I want?” When faced with the choice to pick a restaurant, a CD, or a movie, one makes their choice based upon how one would expect the experience to make them feel, expected utility. Once they have experienced that particular restaurant, CD or movie, their choice will be based upon a remembered utility. To say that you know what you want, therefore, means that these utilities align. Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended.
2. Evaluate the importance of each goal. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have researched how people make decisions and found a variety of rules of thumb that often lead us astray. Most people give substantial weight to anecdotal evidence, perhaps so much so that it cancels out expert evidence. The researchers called it the availability heuristic describing how we assume that the more available some piece of information is to memory, the more frequently we must have encountered it in the past. Salience will influence the weight we give any particular piece of information.
3. Array the options. Kahneman and Tversky found that personal “psychological accounts” will produce the effect of framing the choice and determining what options are considered as subjects to factor. For example, an evening at a concert could be just one entry in a much larger account, of say a “meeting a potential mate” account. Or it could be part of a more general account such as “ways to spend a Friday night”. Just how much an evening at a concert is worth will depend on which account it is a part of.
4. Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals. People often talk about how “creative accountants can make a corporate balance sheet look as good or bad as they want it to look.” In many ways Schwartz views most people as creative accountants when it comes to keeping their own psychological balance sheet.
5. Pick the winning option. Schwartz argues that options are already attached to choices being considered. When the options are not already attached, they are not part of the endowment and choosing them is perceived as a gain. Economist Richard Thaler provides a helpful term sunk costs.
6. Modify goals. Schwartz points out that later one uses the consequences of their choice to modify their goals, the importance assigned to them, and the way future possibilities are evaluated.

Why we suffer

Schwartz integrates various psychological models for happiness showing how the problem of choice can be addressed by different strategies. What is important to note is that each of these strategies comes with its own bundle of psychological complication.

• Choice and Happiness. Schwartz discusses the significance of common research methods that utilize a Happiness Scale. He sides with the opinion of psychologists David Myers and Robert Lane. who independently conclude that the current abundance of choice often leads to depression and feelings of loneliness. Schwartz draws particular attention to Lane’s assertion that Americans are paying for increased affluence and freedom with a substantial decrease in the quality and quantity of community. What was once given by family, neighborhood and workplace now must be achieved and actively cultivated on an individual basis. The social fabric is no longer a birthright but has become a series of deliberated and demanding choices.
• Freedom or Commitment. Schwartz connects this issue to economist Albert Hirschman’s research into how populations respond to unhappiness: they can exit the situation, or they can protest and voice their concerns. While free-market governments give citizens the right to express their displeasure by exit, as in switching brands, Schwarts maintains that social relations are different. Instead, we usually give voice to displeasure, hoping to project influence on the situation.
• Second-Order Decisions. Law professor Cass Sunstein uses the term “second-order decisions” for decisions that follow a rule. Having the discipline to live “by the rules” eliminates countless troublesome choices in one’s daily life. Schwartz shows that these second-order decisions can be divided into general categories of effectiveness for different situations: presumptions, standards, and cultural codes. Each of these methods are useful ways people use to parse the vast array of choices they confront.
• Missed Opportunities. Schwartz finds that when people are faced with having to choose one option out of many desirable choices, they will begin to consider hypothetical trade-offs. Their options are evaluated in terms of missed opportunities instead of the opportunity’s potential. Schwartz maintains that one of the downsides of making trade-offs is it alters how we feel about the decisions we face; afterwards, it affects the level of satisfaction we experience from our decision. While psychologists have known for years about the harmful effects of negative emotion on decision making, Schwartz points to recent evidence showing how positive emotion has the opposite effect: in general, subjects are inclined to consider more possibilities when they are feeling happy.

Or summarized in a different way, we have the following factors:

• Regret and anticipated regret
• Opportunity costs
• Escalation of expectations
• Self-blame

You can extract this information from the videos located at the beginning of the post, which I highly recommend to preview.

Conclusions

I started this post by saying that the concepts behind The Paradox of Choice are similar to those found within the communist doctrines. I cannot remember much of the time when my home country was under communist regime but I’ve heard a lot of stories about what was back then. Although people had less choice and very often they had been forced to do things against their will, in general, they were a lot happier. This fits quite nicely with what Schwartz said at some point in his lecture: people usually find themselves being happier in the past, perhaps because of the lack of choice (paraphrased). I believe it is a personal thing but that idea is something I find true in many different ways.

Another example, I guess, of the The Paradox of Choice is mirrored by the folks at 37signals, which work I find quite fascinating and interesting to follow. Here follows a few snippets from their book Getting Real which refer to the concepts why less is usually more:

Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five (or 15, or 25). If they’re spending x, you need to spend xx. If they have 20, you need 30…

…The answer is less. Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to everyone else. Instead of oneupping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing…

We’ll cover the concept of less throughout this book, but for starters, less means:

• Less features
• Less options/preferences
• Less people and corporate structure
• Less meetings and abstractions
• Less promises

(Getting Real: Build Less)

Follow the videos and the research and make up your own mind about what makes you happier: Less or More.

To hack does not necessarily means to break into something illegally. Hacking is mostly related to creativity, culture, and the way the extraordinary human mind works. The following video is a proof of a hack, which sounds.

If you haven’t yet experience a life performance, I highly recommend to do so. There are plenty of places around London you can hear some nice tunes, played by extraordinary gifted people.

Lat week I have been relatively busy with all sorts of projects and things to do. Nevertheless, I’ve managed to collect all kinds of interesting things which I hope I will have time to publish them all on Hakiri. The following post is most about creative advertising. I am quite bored of traditional adverts so all of the currently displayed ads come very fresh, indeed.

If you are an RSS reader and you cannot see the pictures above, click on the following link.

WarGames is a 1983 suspense film written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes and directed by John Badham. The film starred Matthew Broderick in his second major film role, and featured Ally Sheedy, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, and Barry Corbin. The movie was a box office success, costing US$12 million but grossing over $74 million after five months in the United States. With a cost of $1 million, the NORAD set was the most expensive single movie set ever built up to that time. But most importantly WarGames was one of the movies to inspire a whole generation of hackers.

The above movie clip is the original trailer. It does look a bit lame but keep in mind that the move was made in 1983. I saw it much later and even then was quite cool. However, it seems like Hollywood producers are preparing for a the WarGames sequel. I didn’t see that one coming. You can watch the trailer from over here. Of course :) it could as well be an April 1st joke. Bare that in mind. However, if it is true, the movie would mostly likely disappoint.

Interesting speech from Tim O’Reilly on this year’s ETech event. Why does he love hackers? Check it out!

Although I agree with what he is saying, I need to add a few more things. First and foremost, hacking is a state of mind. It is not something that you can learn but it is definitely something that you can cultivate until you start understanding it. Second, hacking is not all about solving complicated problems. I don’t agree. Hacking is about solving problems (any kind) in a creative way. It is the art of being innovative in its most simplistic form. Innovation is also the act of finding new solutions on an old problems so don’t be fooled by the so-called new factor.

Basically, hacking is everything that you can change or use in undesired or unintended, interesting and rather innovative ways in which you are solving a problem.

Poison! This is exactly what The Prodigy are for many old-school boys like myself. It is needless to say that their music has developed an entire generation of open-minded individuals. Don’t make em like this anymore!

As far as I remember the concert on the right was the one that took place on the Red Square in Moscow.

We live in a monoculture. What does that mean? Well, go out to your street corner. You’ll probably see a Long Pig stand, SPKF on a screen somewhere, an Angry Boy Dylan’s Gun Store. You’ll go into a record store and see new recordings by the usual suspects, maybe a special Space Culture display rack.

Go out onto a streetcorner in London and you’ll see the same thing. Same in Prague. Same in Sao Paulo. Same in Osaka, and Grozny, and Tehran, and Jo’burg, and Hobart. That’s what a monoculture is. It’s everywhere, and it’s all the same. And it takes up alien cultures and digests them and shits them out in a homogeneous building-block shape that fits seamlessly into the vast blank wall of the monoculture.

This is the future. This is what we built. This is what we wanted. It must have been. Because we all had a fucking choice, didn’t we? It is only our money that allows commercial culture to flower. If we didn’t want to live like this, we could have changed it any time, by not fucking paying for it.

So let’s celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger.

I bet that you remember the the Mentor’s last words: You may stop me, but you can’t stop us all. Bullshit or not, this is the essence of the hacker community.

His words will forever be remembered and immortalized through the movie Hackers, a cultural tripping point for me and many others.

The 24th Chaos Communication Congress (24C3) is the annual four-day conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). It takes place at the bcc Berliner Congress Center in Berlin, Germany. The Congress offers lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics and attracts a diverse audience of thousands of hackers, scientists, artists, and utopians from all around the world. The 24C3s slogan is Volldampf voraus! the German equivalent of full steam ahead a particular request for talks and projects featuring forward looking hands-on topics. Chaos Communication Congress

The video above shows some highlights from last years event. If you have some spare days between XMas and New Year, you must check it out. CCC is considered as one of the best hacker events in Europe.

Alexander Sotirov, a.k.a Solar Eclipse, is a well known security researcher who specializes in buffer overflow exploit development and binary reverse engineering. In the following video, Solar gives a couple of simple advices which may come as a breakthrough for the readers who are new to the fields of binary software hacking.

To summarize his word, buffer overflow exploitation starts and finishes with a crash. The crash occurs due to the fact that the input supplied to the program hasn’t been correctly sanitized. In most cases, this results into overwriting a memory segment behind a buffer. This segment often contains data which is crucial to the program execution. If the corrupted buffer is in fact a local variable relative to a function (could be C/C++ main as well), then we are dealing with a stack-based buffer overflow which traditionally is very simple to exploit. In case the buffer is dynamically allocated at runtime (malloc and the rest of the family), we are dealing with heap-based buffer overflow which often is very hard to work with. There are other conditions we have to keep in mind although stack and heap overflows compose the majority of all bin software vulnerabilities.

No matter whether it is stack or heap based exploitable condition, the simple fact is that buffer overflow vulnerabilities are often very easy to locate, although they may require a bit of time to exploit. As long as you can supply data, which influences the EIP register at runtime, you are on the right path. The next step is to identify the type of vulnerability by tracking the execution path a couple of instructions back. From that you should be able to see whether the execution is caused by RET or some function pointer. And all in all, this is all what buffer overflows are. Of course, based on the circumstances, you might make use of several other techniques (nops, return to libc, exception handler overwrites, bla, bla), which help to bypass certain restrictions. However, the first step is always to find the crash.