Global POV: At the Intersection of Technology and Culture

Vigilante justice

by David Holtzman

I don't understand why spam is still commercially viable. Looking at what I have for spammail today, I have several sTr0nG bUy recommendations for the Equal Gold Trading company, similar touting for Goldmark industries, a diet product called Anatrim from a company named unafento, spam service called Zenith-net and several thinly veiled Viagra ads from a place called iorrestuly (which doesn't resolve to anything in a browser).

So at some point, these are "real" companies, right? Someone is paying the spammers money to drive people somewhere. I assume that these are not people who get their kicks out of misspelling words and vaguely annoying everyone.

So why don't vigilante's blow the "real" companies out of the water? If you can be sure that the advertising business is actually paying for the spam (and not being set up), then surely there are people out there who can make their servers go away for awhile?
In the medium-term view, vigilanteism is the most likely method for successful spam pushback. If the rewards were huge DOS (Denial of Service) attacks, then companies would think twice about seeing spam as an alternative form of advertising.

Now phishing is another problem...

Posted on July 30, 2006

The attack on online currencies

by David Holtzman

Via Slashdot, articles in Gamespot and in Eurogamer mentions that some popular games (Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft respectively) have cancelled many player accounts because of usage of third party software in the games. Such software can be used to mine online game currency and this, coupled with external sales of game currency is against many online games' rules. Blizzard (World of Warcraft) cancelled 59,000 accounts last month alone and stripped 22 million of game gold out of the accounts.

Expect to see more of this kind of thing....alternative currencies are spring up in may places on the Internet and games are just the easiest to use and most visible of the variations. It gets most interesting when, like these examples, there is a way to cash these virtual moneys in for coin of the realm.

Reading over this, I notice that I used the word "virtual" to describe these currencies, but really what is any country's currency based on these days? They're all virtual and Internet-based ones are just as legitimate if enough people believe in them. Of course, wide-spread adoption would play holy hell with any nation's economy.

Posted on July 28, 2006

Hogan takes on the fascists

by David Holtzman

Wired has an article about software developer, Shawn Hogan (CEO Digital Point), who received one of those calls from an MPAA lawyer claiming that he had downloaded an illegal copy of "Meet the Fockers" from BitTorrent, and demanded that Hogan pay $2500 for a settlement. Hogan refused and is planning on contesting and taking it to trial to challenge the legality of the MPAA strategy.

Good.

The heavy-handed tactics of both the motion picture and the recording industries have made intellectual property theft ethically acceptable, which was not the case before. Even if people are a little worried about lawsuits, they will wait until they're sure that the technology of fileswapping is untraceable again and then they'll be back in business in a big way.

I can't wait to see the discovery process uncover the methodology of how the MPAA is linking IP addresses to individuals, so that they can nail the individual "beyond a reasonable doubt."

There's plenty of ways that someone can hide their identity well enough to avoid being positively identified in a lawsuit--I think that the MPAA is bluffing and they're suing based on a "good enough" standard, figuring it will never go to court.

Posted on July 27, 2006

Paying with porn

by David Holtzman

There is a growing need for a currency that is useful on the Internet for micro and anonymous transactions. Both cases are ones where credit cards won't work. Micropayments with credit cards take away all of the profit for the seller because of the transactional fees. Anonymous exchanges, by their very nature, won't use fully authenticated systems like Visa or Mastercard. Yet there are multitudes of examples of small services or digital products that are screaming for a payment system, mostly dealing with content consumption. These range from reading an online newspaper to downloading a cartoon. For an indepth discussion, see the Wikipedia entry.

Most of the schemes that have been tried for micropayments involve token aggregation; the consumer pays, say, $20 in advance, for the right to make 10 $2 transactions. This way the vendor only hits the credit company once in a while, for a twenty dollar hit. This still doesn't solve the anonymity problem, though, because entering financial information leaves an absolute audit trail back to the buyer.

So I have a suggestion: If DRMs (Digital Rights Management) ever really become workable, consumption tokens issued by a DRM system would make an excellent currency. In other words, you could read the New York Times online and pay with porn. Or you could pay with a song, of course. Although porn seems more melodramatic somehow.

The idea is that DRMS could easily issue an encrypted token which would allow a one-time use of the specified content. These tokens could allow a single Amazon.com book download or a song from itunes or some porn. If these were transportable tokens, if I could hand one off to someone else, for instance, and they had a decent expiration time (say a year), then I could barter off that token to someone to make a micropayment.

It's going to have to be something like this because the alternative is to create an online currency that would spit out cash from an ATM. The stakes for that kind of system would be too high, because the availability of ready cash would make it too tempting a target. It makes more sense to have a micropayment currency of "units" where say, one "unit" would buy a song or a newspaper.

Posted on July 26, 2006

The Private Parts of Privacy Policies

by David Holtzman

I have an op-ed running in Business Week Online today complaining about privacy policies.

I urge anyone that is curious about what will happen to their privacy to start reading the policies of the companies that they deal with. I think that like software shrinkwrap licenses, the public has gotten inured to forcefed legal pap, having become resigned to the idea that they can't do anything about it anyway.

Posted on July 25, 2006

Hotel towel scam

by Melody

One of the things that I really hate about hotels are the little "green" cards saying that if you care about the planet, you'll use dirty towels for a couple of days. You signify this by dropping the towels on the floor or something as opposed to putting them on the rack. The "save-the-planet" messages are written like they were written by a Jewish mother toting a Greenpeace bag and are straightforward in their guilt-provoking prose.

Hotels around North America have unsurprisingly sprung up to the challenge and put the little cards in all their bathrooms. Many of them have gone one better and making the default action "no-towel" unless you do something bizarre, like put a special card on the bed or in one case, actually being forced to call the desk and say that you want fresh towels every day (Earth-Killer!).

The Internet is littered with websites telling hotels how much money that they'll save by doing this, typicall $1 - $1.50 per day, per guest. That's why they're doing it. If hotels could save money by protecting wildlife, you'd have rabbits in your shower. They are not doing it to be good citizens, they are doing it to save $1.50 per guest, per day.

Hotels will spit filthy smoke into the air from a heating system, sponsor seal-clubbing expeditions for their guests or invite the oil industry to have an Exxon Valdez reunion with no shame at all. The towel scam is a cynical attempt to increase their profit margin.

I like clean towels every day. When I spend $200 for a hotel room, I expect them, regardless of what I'm doing to the planet. Can't they just raise the price of the cans of peanuts in the minibar or tack another couple of bucks on inroom porn or something?

Posted on July 24, 2006

Emily of the State

by David Holtzman

A Canadian comedy troupe has posted a very funny video called "Emily of the State", playing off on the recent announcement that Bell Sympatico will cooperate with the Canadian goverment in monitoring content, like most of the American telcos have. (via Canadian Privacy Law blog)

Emily of the State

Posted on July 21, 2006

Bloggers!

by David Holtzman

The Pew Foundation released a new report on the Internet yesterday titled "Bloggers." The nonprofit organization did the analysis by conducting two telephone surveys last year.

Some of the conclusions were:

• Bloggers are not journalists. Most have not been published elsewhere. They are new voices.
  
• 12 million Americans write blogs. 57 million people read them.
  
• Blogs are about life experiences. Politics is not as important as the media would have us believe.
  
• Most bloggers are under 30, half are women
  
• Bloggers are power users of the internet
  
• More than half of bloggers use a pseudonym
  

The next generation of movers and shakers are writing blogs today. Clever business people will figure out a way to listen to them.

Posted on July 20, 2006

Myspace--nothing to laugh about

by David Holtzman

Myspace is shifting their marketing emphasis into a new area--comedy. MySpace's original "big push" came from emphasizing music. The site provided a forum for little-known or regional bands to showcase their music to a wider audience, driving traffic to the new website. In the parlance of tech companies, music promotion was the "killer app" driving Myspace.

I think that comedy is a shrewd step for them. The comedy market is underserved by comedy clubs and it's interesting to note how influential the Comedy Channel has become with today's youth. There's never been a good way to push comedy and this might very well be it. I expect big things to come out of this. At the very least, it'll be a good way for the next Dane Cook to turn up.

Besides, when the political, international and business news start looking bleak, comedy will be a nice distraction.

Posted on July 19, 2006

Catching infringers for cash

by David Holtzman

I have a suggestion for harnassing the power of the web to do good. What about offering a bounty empowering citizen do-gooders to keep an eye out for copyright infringement? A prominent brand like Coke or McDonalds could have a reward page where they pay off for each righteous catch. They wouldn't even have to pay cash--many people would be more than happy to get free promotional stuff. Some rules would have to be figured out to stop people from doing their own infringing just to get a free Ronald McDonald skeet shoot set.

The power of this is one of the fundamental Internet lessons--any business that create a financial flow that causes large groups of people to do something can move mountains. Imagine tens of thousands of people scanning the web every morning looking for infringers.

Posted on July 18, 2006

Scrambled Marketing

by David Holtzman

Today's New York Times has an article talking about CBS's unusual new advertising media--eggs. They plan on laser-etching slogans and ads for their upcoming fall schedule directly onto the surface of eggshells.

The technology was made possible by a company called EggFusion, who developed the procedure to mark eggs with expiration dates. CBS is so sunny side up on the technology that they've worked out an exclusive period to use the method.

I appreciate the desire of a company to find new and novel ways to catch consumers' eyes, especially in these times of mass mindshare and eye space confusion. It's also creative because it's different.

The problem is that what's creative and topical quickly palls and becomes intrusive. Paris Hilton was interesting once, too. The very nature of a cliche is that of overworked creativity and I suspect that the idea of advertising eggshells will quickly lose its novelty value and become boring, eventually tedious, ultimately annoying.

Where will this end? It should be easy to advertise on almost every imaginable food stuff and notice that I'm not talking about the packaging, but the thing itself. How about logos printed right on apples with edible dyes? Printed bacon. Laser-etched breadcrusts. The list goes on.

I would hate to see legislation stopping this because it would be hard to get it right. Much better would be to see consumer groups pounding advertisers holding them accountable for every stupid stunt and forcing the marketers to keep these commercials fresh, letting them know that we consumers are annoyed before these stunts get boring and possibly boycotting the products as a penalty for over-zealous intrusiveness.

Posted on July 17, 2006

DoD monkeys around with college students

by David Holtzman

EPIC has some documents obtained using FOIO that confirms that the Defense Department is monitoring the email of college students protesting the military on campus. The military used the TALON system, supposedly designed to track terrorists by databasing unsubstantiated rumours, to follow the students after receipt of several emails revealing the protest plans. The students were protesting military oncampus recruitment as well as the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy in which the military will process avowed homosexuals for discharge.

This is pretty scary for a couple of reasons. One is that I thought that we as a nation were past this "spy on the college kids" stuff in the 60s and 70s. Apparently not. The second reason is worse and one that I've been worried about for five years--that the massive monitoring capablities given to the Bush administration and their flying monkeys will be used for other purposes than just following terrorists. It's a very small stretch to direct a domestic espionage monitoring and/or tracking program against anyone, after all, who is a preterrorist, anyway? If antiwar, antimilitary or even antibush protests are now falling within the confines of antiterrorism, then it's time for some scrutiny on how these tools are being used.

Posted on July 14, 2006

Pay me, protect my privacy

by David Holtzman

I just finished up editing my book, Privacy Lost, coming out by Wiley in October and after being soaked to my elbows with privacy, I am convinced that a definition that I use in my book is reasonable--Privacy is the right to control information about yourself.

If this is so, then how is privacy (control information about self) different than trade secrets (control information about a company) or classified information (control information about a government)?

The latter two types of information are protected a lot better, the latter punitively, the former civilly. Fines or jail time. What sanctions does the violater get for intruding on your privacy? Nothing. Then perhaps the right model is to give you something.

It seems that in this rapidly digitizing world, that nothing is more important than information, potentially nothing more valuable either. Routine information like news, is commoditized and valueless. Uniqueness of information creates value, as does timeliness. A 30 minute-delayed stock feed is free, up-to-the-minute is $50 a month, 30 minutes into the future is absolutely priceless.

Our privacy is worth something. If companies want to take our data, we should be reimbursed and not with crummy coupons, either. How about some laws giving us money everytime the phone company sells our records or mail us $100 every time a marketer violates the Don't-Call registry? Even a free Big Mac for every violation would slow the worst offenders down.

Posted on July 13, 2006

United we stand

by David Holtzman

There are two electronic consumer needs headed on a crash course at the crossroads--unification and segregation. Unification refers to the idea of an all-in-one gadget, like the Treo that's a phone, a PDA and a camera. Many people, especially gadget freaks such as myself, run out and buy the new electronic Swiss army knife because it holds out the promise of multifunctionality in a small package. Almost every new phone seems to have a camera these days, for instance.

There's even a software equivalent: integrated software applications. Microsoft Office is sold as a package for a good technical reason, the various components share common elements, making the whole installed beast only grossly fat, which is a big change from the alternative configuration that would have to be labeled "morbidly obese."

So what's wrong with it?

The weakest link in a chain breaks the whole chain or something like that. What do you do with your Treo if the camera breaks? There's a hidden proposition in multifunction gadgets--disposability. They are betting that you won't keep one for more than two years anyway.

On the software front it's even worse. Consolidated software packages do weird and unexpected things to users. For instance, MS Office on the Mac checks for concurrent license usage across a LAN and stops the second instance from running. But it will you stop you from using Word if I'm using Excel, which somehow doesn't seem quite right.

The solution? Case by case. As a consumer, you need to think about these weird side effects and also question whether you really need a watch with a built-in universal remote control. Think about what happens if something breaks. As far as software goes, you probably don't have legitimate alternatives, certainly not in the case of Adobe and Microsoft.

Posted on July 12, 2006

Lays--Betcha can't beat just one

by David Holtzman

Kenneth Lay is dead. He is the ex-CEO of ex-Enron, George Bush's top fundraiser and "Kenny boy" to the president. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, caught the death pretty quickly. The article flailed around within minutes of the announcement of his death, some listing the causes as heart attack, some as suicide. One even said that "the guilt of ruining so many lives finaly led him to his suicide." The Washington Post trashed the encyclopedia for this flailing.

There's often a smug analysis of new, online entities because they don't measure up to the standards of the venerable media, even though there's people alive who were older than television and radio and trees older than newspapers.

Wikipedia is a new kind of entity; it's not just an online encyclopedia, it's a collaborative encyclopedia. It functions differently, because it doesn't have an editorial staff, or rather it has an ad hoc one. I think that it's amazing that they had an entry up that quickly at all.

The real issue is going to be whether Wikipedia's entries become shaded by political opinions to an unacceptable amount. So far, there's not a huge amount of evidence saying that is, and after all, conventional reference books are also a product of their times, even if academics don't like to admit it. I'm sure that if I looked up "negro" in a 19th century reference book, I wouldn't like the answer.

And as for Lay, well, he died peacefully vacationing in Snowmass, Colorado instead of going to prison for 30 years as was likely. Perhaps he can lead the charge for fundraising in Hell in advance of the next wave of energy executives and arrogant politicans.

Posted on July 11, 2006

Street smart technology

by David Holtzman

The New York Times has an article talking about how gangs are using the Internet. Law enforcment professionals now watch known gathering places on the Internet for information on crimes, members and to soak up some of the cultural references. Sometimes the sites are used for recruiting, some to memorialize dead members, some as a community noteboard.

The Internet is a non-discriminatory social experiment. It's come a long way from its roots as a playtoy for atomic energy scientists.

Anyone can use the Internet for any purpose. Future innovations will ooze out of their business shell and be adopted by whomever needs to use it, because they're either useful or not.

Sure gang members use the Internet the way that they use a spray can or a telephone. Now that they know that they're being watched, they'll probably adopt encryption soon, too.

Technology, if useful, will be employed by many people for many purposes, some of which will be unintended, unanticipated and even dangerous to the society that birthed the creation.

Posted on July 10, 2006

What dates movie technology?

by David Holtzman

I was watching the all-time worst movie ever made Plan 9 from Outer Space the other night and it got me to thinking, why does media representation of technology look oldfashioned so fast?

It's not the clothing really. Barbarella's wardrobe, specifically the stuff on Jane Fonda, still looks hip and vaguely futuristic.

It's not weapons. Star Trek's phasers look a little cheesy, but not bad enough to make you groan.

Sometimes it's the monsters/aliens, but there are plenty of movies that either don't have them or don't show them.

I think that it's the monitors. When you see the blipping of an oscilloscope or an old red LED panel, it immediately dates the movie. Movies like Minority Report were done more cleverly by inventing brand new kinds of computer interfaces (remember the hand-waving search system?)

If you are visually showing the future, don't tip your hand by displaying your past.

Posted on July 07, 2006

Burgle the Boss

by David Holtzman

The FBI sensitive computer systems have been cracked. According to a Washington Post article, a contractor for BAE hacked a highly classified database in 2004. Four times. He got the passwords of 38,000 FBI employees using some shareware programs, which sound suspiciously like crack, a password-guessing program that's been used for at least 15 years.

Among the information contained in the database were details of counterespionage programs and get this--the Witness Protection Program.

What's wrong here? The FBI has undoubtedly spent hundreds of millions of dollars on their systems. Hell, I even worked on one once. Is it dumb computer programmers? Nope. Do they need more high tech systems to protect their computers? Nope. Do they need to understand Computer Security? Yep.

Stupid users are often blamed for security problems. "A junior technician made a mistake in the data center and exposed 14 million credit reports" or "one of our analysts took home a laptop with the personal information of every single American ever to serve in the military." We are then relieved to hear that the political appointee has fired the offending employee/contractor. That's a relief...for a second I thought that we had a security problem.

Fire the manager who let FBI agents use passwords that could be broken using crack, a program that every 15 year old script kiddy knows how to use. Fire the designer who made it that easy to get to multiple sensitive databases from a single system. Fire the security manager who wasn't actively looking for intruders.

The less-than-completely-computer-aware walking among us have a fatal, almost a religous belief that computers protect information like a locked safe. Because they can't imagine how to break into one, they can't conceive of anyone else doing it. Managers should know better. How do you fix computer security problems? Burn the boss.

Posted on July 06, 2006

Mice Pays

by David Holtzman

Myspace is an enigma. They don't have a business model, they appeal to people who don't buy anything from them and worse, they've been bought by Rupert Murdoch, the living embodiment of the Simpson's Mr. Burns.

Yet, they're hot. So hot, in fact, that they've made boring old Silicon Valley hot again, too. Venture Capitalists have opened their maws and disgorged the money that they've been hoarding for just such a day. Social networking. Web 2.0. These terms come up often when talking about Myspace, and in just 3 years, they've already spawned imitators and related sites like Facebook and Youtube.

Is the success of Myspace due to their appeal to schoolchildren?
Are they successful because of some pentup desire for pushing content?
Is it the fact they're pushing bands like the Arctic Monkeys?

I suspect that it's none of these things. As much as marketing mavens would have you believe otherwise, viral marketing is a description of a phenomenon, not a premeditated action. Myspace has found pent-up demand for something and like a mosquito that bites down on a carotid artery, it has struck the motherlode.

This newer generation knows computers and grew up with the Internet. They don't want wow, they want something that works for what they want, and that's communication. Myspace is a digital shopping mall, just like IM is a computerized telephone and facebook is this millenium's version of a yearbook. I don't mean literally, of course, but they satisfy the same need.

There is fertile business territory here, catering to the needs of all age groups by providing technologically equivalent versions of what they're already used to, like televisions, phones and yearbooks.

This is the first generation that doesn't believe that anything computerized is high-tech, they discriminate new and old, hip and square, by what the applications do for them, not because they can play pong with it.

Posted on July 05, 2006

Sick of computers

by David Holtzman

It's been 20+ years now that consumer computing really took off. And by computer, I don't mean PC, I mean calculators, televisions, cell phones and every other device that has a digital brain inside. 20 years and in my case, literally hundreds of gadgets later and I've come to the conclusion that I'm...sick...and...tired...of...computers.

I like what they do for me and I wouldn't go back. I appreciate the convenience and the portablity and the low cost. I like watching blockbuster movies and playing videogames and keeping in touch with my kids as I travel all over the world; I'm not a luddite. I just don't like thinking of these things as separate devices anymore. I don't want to configure things that I buy and be aware of battery life and having to reset the blinking red "12:00"s when the power goes out. I don't want to remember which charger cord goes with which device and tracking down esoteric gizmo parts in Europe has gotten old.

Why can't computers disappear into clothing or the walls or something? What would it take to have a seamless digital world?

For one thing it needs a commitment by vendors or maybe even one. One stylish, consumer-sensitive business, almost certainly European, could make a commitment to releasing digital products that were fashionable and had the guts as neatly tucked away as a split, broiled lobster in a nice American restaurant.

We are, as a consuming people, as primitive in our objectification of digital artifacts as the South Pacific Cargo Cult.

Computerized devices should be invisible. They should have style. They should work out of the box and for at least two years thereafter. The company that gets the model right will win and win big and with the decline in influence of Microsoft, you couldn't find a better time.

Posted on July 04, 2006

Anonymous now and forever

by David Holtzman

EFF is continuing its good work in defending Internet anonymity. A Tulsa, Oklahoma school superintendent doesn't like being anonymously criticized on the Internet and has sued the site operator to force revelation of the users making the posts. EFF has filed to block the school official's subpoena. I don't agree with EFF on every issue, but this is a noble cause and the Oklahoma case is not the first anonymity case in which they've filed something.

Anonymity is not privacy, but it is the "penumbra" of privacy (apologies to the departed Justice Douglas). Free Speech is, as a practical matter, easiest to protect when there is not retribution for what's said. Given the permanent nature of what's written on the Internet, there is no sense of latency; when you read something on a website, it often reads like it was written today. When the veil of anonymity is lifted, then whatever the author said will be around forever and fully attributed. Could anyone with an opinion survive having that opinion recrammed down his throat for the rest of digital eterntity?

The penalties of endless attribution and possible retribution far outweigh the benefits of allowing a subppoena for an angsty lawsuit.

Posted on July 03, 2006