Back on September 5th
I am away on vacation, and will be returning the day after Labor Day.
Thank you for visiting,
- DHH
Posted on August 29, 2006
August2006
Buy and Cell
Does anyone still use landlines?
I have several kids in college right now, in apartments. It didn't even cross their minds to get phones installed, because they use their cellphones. It's easier with billing and they don't have the sharing problem with roommates. I have a landline, but I don't use it often. More and more, I use my cellphone.
What's this mean in the long run? Well, it's clearly a blow to the gut for the telcos. Even more so, it indicates social change in the offing. Everyone becomes accessible. It's not completely true now, primarily because the directory and filtering systems are disfunctional. How do you publish your number and avoid cell spam? Spam is the unhealthy result of widespread, low-cost communications. For now on, any time that you invent a new digital communication device, spam will pop up, like mold.
A good idea for a startup company would fix this problem early. Some kind of mechanism whereby every cell number was published, but the recipient could screen selectively and easily, without being rude, and only let certain calls go through, rerouting other calls to one of a series of relevant messages or possibly forwarding to someone who is more appropriate to the call.
Posted on August 24, 2006
What is spam?
Spam has been around since the beginning of the 'Net. According to Wikipedia, there is now 55 billion pieces of spam a day.
It used to be that you could stop most spam by being just a little careful. Now, it's not completely clear that you have any real control over it. Even with good junk mail filtering at the server and mail reader levels, I still get 300-500 spammails per day. One email address that I use has existed for almost 15 years though, so presumably it's gotten on a lot of lists.
Spamming is performed by acquiring a large list of email addresses somewhere, attaching a payload (ie; the message) and shotgunning it to millions of names on the lists. In the process, the spammers often use tricks to obfuscate the IP address to avoid retribution.
What's to be done about it? Eventually we will all have mail systems that will not allow mail in unless it's endorsed by someone that we know. That's the only way to be sure. Sure that the mail has a legitimate purpose even if it's still unwanted.
Email has to be completely opt-in. Given this kind of definition, it's easy to see that no matter what the Direct Marketing Association says, most commerical email outreach is spam and should be treated as such.
Posted on August 24, 2006
Goose livers and human hearts
Okay, this is not strictly speaking about technology or even politics; the New York Times has an article today talking about the impending ban of fois gras in Chicago. That's right, the Windy City has decided (for animal rights reasons) to ban sales of the tasty goose liver and have tasked the Health Department to enforce it.
For those in the know, the French make geese fois-grasable by forcefeeding them grain, shoving a food-laden human fist down the birdie's throat. This strange practice causes the goose's liver to expand, often by a factor of 10.
I like fois gras. I also don't like to see animals getting hurt or treated badly, so I could go either way on this kind of thing. However, what I don't like is patronizing legal behavior. Food prohibitions like this one and others such as the ban on unpasteurized cheeses and the old one barring importation of prosciutto are not directly saving anyone's health. The potential problems that result from eating a bad piece of cheese can't be any worse than riding a roller coaster run by shifty-eyed carnies or just eating a couple of dozen raw oysters. And as for the protect-the-animal stuff, I invite anyone to dig just a little bit into how chickens are raised on the DelMarVa peninsula at the Perdue birdie death house and not swear off McNuggets for awhile.
Protectionism is a bad thing. There is a line somewhere and this is not it. Cheap-minded politicians looking to curry favor with crackpot constituents often propose this kind of law. They take advantage of existing enforcement groups created for wholely different purposes, because if they asked for ten million dollars to fund a goose liver enforcement squad, they'd be laughed at the way that they deserve. Hence, the health code inspectors are forced to enforce the fois gras law or police are required to check for illegal immmigrants or the IRS has to punish people who don't pay court-mandated child support. Every occurence of misdirected authority is the result of rodent legislators gnawing at the system long enough to finally draw blood.
This is why I carp and rebel against new surveillance and enforcement groups in government. Imagine all the Homeland Defense apparatus being used for a purpose other than terrorism, maybe to track down illegal movie copiers or pot smokers or maybe take another crack at the prosciutto gluttons.
Sure, today it's a goose's liver. Tomorrow it's your ass.
Posted on August 23, 2006
Upgrade advice (part 2)
Thumbs up or down for upgrading? It gets more complicated when you get into the specifics. Most computer-savvy people get bugged several times a week by friends and family who are foundering on what to buy, when to buy it and the worst of all--upgrade or use the old thing? Unfortunately, unlike lawyers and doctors, computer people are expected to give advice for free (often by doctors and lawyers). Here's what I often say:
- Laptops - Replace them when they break. It's not worth fixing them and if you really use them, they won't survive more than 2-3 years.
- Desktops - These mothers last too long. They will function long past the point where they should be thrown out. That's right, in the garbage. After 3 years, there's no resale value and your nephew doesn't want it, even for free. When the desktop looks like it's too big, it is--get rid of it.
- Networking equipmentThis is trickier. It comes up these days because of the various flavors of 802.11. Basic rule of thumb is that if the new networking gear is faster, don't bother. If it let's you use your laptop somewhere new and that's important to you, do it. If it's for home, don't bother. If what you have works, don't change horses.
- Operating systemsAlways upgrade. You don't have to stand in line all night to be first, but don't be last. Software companies save the real fixes for the paying OS releases and if you don't upgrade to the latest version, you will find that your system gets worse than you're used to, because it's now an orphaned system. It's not fair, but there it is. You can't stand still with OSes. This goes for Apple, too, by the way, although to a lesser extent.
- Cell phonesThese are now fashion statements. If yours works, keep it. If you really, really need a Blackberry, get one. If your phone makes you feel like you stand out for all the reasons, replace it. Trust me on this, by the time that the mandatory phone plan commitment period expires, you'll be ready for a new one.
- PDAsThe first Palms worked. Every subsequent one does not. Not consistently. I use a Treo 650 and I spend far too much time babying it. If you have a PDA that is working , keep it. PDAs are really a peephole into your administrative procedures--change the PDA, and watch Outlook or whatever else you're using, break.
Posted on August 22, 2006
Upgrade advice (part 1)
When do you upgrade a gadget? This is a big problem for gadget freaks and becoming a bigger problem than might be obvious for normal people--aka, those with a life. Here's some examples of what I'm talking about:
- Should you buy a Blu-Ray player even though you own hundreds of DVDs?
- Should you replace your XBox with an XBox 360?
- Do you get rid of your cellphone, palm pilot or Blackberry if a newer model is available?
- Is it time to get rid of your PC?
Many cringe when they hear these questions. These are hard choices. But why?
Firstly, you generally have inadequate information to make an informed decision. Most people do not have the time or the knowledge to process the fine nuances of why USB 2.0 was better than 1.0 or why 802.11n is superior to 'g'. For this reason manufacturers stress quantitative measurements that have very little to do with your subjective experience (often the most important factor in gadget retention and happiness). Since most consumers can't really figure out what will happen if they don't buy the new-new thingie, they listen to peers, read reviews or unfortunately respect the authority of the 18-year old Best Buy salesman.
Secondly, these days you often have an investment in content that's unique to the gadget that may or may not be upwardly compatible. That's the DVD/Blu-Ray question and is always the case with video game consoles. The vendors suck you in because the new device is always a faster processor/better graphics/bigger hard drive or something similar. It's very difficult to weigh the tradeoff of the better whatever against the sunk investment in content.
Thirdly, if you don't upgrade, you will look stupid. Especially to the younger crowd. Clearly there is some point at which you have to get rid of something even if it still works. Think about the old shoebox sized cell phones. I would imagine that they still work, but...jeez! Who would? Advertising often shames us into buying...if not the best and greatest, then certainly the next wave. Blackberry users today follow this philosophy. Not savvy enough or brave enough to have bought the things two years ago when the technology was new, the RIM devices have become the SUV of the suburban cellular set.
Fourthly, you might actually need the new capabilities to do something important. Wi-Fi is significantly different and your laptop really ought to have it if you have any intention of communicating while on the road. It's often difficult for normal (ie; non-gadgethead) people to assess whether and how they will use the new capability unless all of their friends are already using it. It's easy to want Wi-Fi when you see dozens of people every day using them at Starbucks.
Posted on August 21, 2006
Reversal of fortune
Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the US District Court in Detroit ruled President Bush's use of the NSA for domestic wiretapping illegal last week. Judge Taylor used some novel legal arguments to extend the protection of the First and Fourth Amendment to this situation, roundly chastising King Bush in the process.
Hold on to your hats, though. Legal scholars seem almost universal in their lack of enthusiasm for the legal reasoning showed by Judge Taylor. The Bush administration is appealing the decision, of course, and ultimately there will be a showdown.
The consensus among the legalerati is that the decision is likely to be upheld (ie; NSA domestic wiretapping is illegal), but Judge Taylor's reasoning will be attacked.
Still, it's nice to see the slowly grinding wheels of the legal system take off someone else's finger for a change.
Posted on August 18, 2006
Trial by tabloid
JonBenet Ramsey's killer may have been caught this week in Thailand. John Mark Karr, a 41-year old father of three children, confessed to Thai police. He had been a subject of interest in the ten year old police inquiry in recent months because of letters that he had written to a documentary producer who had specialized in the case.
What's most interesting about this case is that Ramsey's parents were virtually tried in the media. The South Park crew came close to outright accusing them and the implications were front and center in tabloids for the better part of the decade. Like OJ, many people believed that the Ramseys killed their own child, regardless of any evidence indicating that this was so.
The Ramseys seemed to be less-than-sterling parents. The beauty pageant shots of their daughter were creepy to the extreme--almost boudoir shots. We wanted to believe that people that pimped their daughter up like that were guilty of darker sins, like murder.
But apparently they weren't. If Karr is convicted, they will be exonerated (Mrs. Ramsey died of cancer earlier this year).
As the Internet and the blogosphere take their rightful place as the village drums in our society, we, as individuals, need to do what the media collectively has proven to be incapable of--exercising restraint in rushing into judgement on the guilt or innocence of tabloid celebrities. It will be so much easier now for this kind of rumor brushfire to start, because now we all have matches. I no more believe newspaper speculation than I trust the President's opinions on WMDs in Iraq.
(Although I still think OJ did it)
Posted on August 17, 2006
Monkey politics
Slashdot points to a blurb advertising an evolution story in this month's issue of Science. The text of the teaser is as follows:
SCIENCE COMMUNICATION: Public Acceptance of Evolution Jon D. Miller,1* Eugenie C. Scott,2 Shinji Okamoto3The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States.
Unfortunately I believe this. One of the particularly evil things foisted upon America by the ill-fated Newt Gingrich orchestrated takeover of the government was the influence of religous fundamentalists in American laws, policy and worse---conceptual ideas.
I'm all for everyone having a vote, even though who are mentally unstable (schizophrenics only get one, though), but having the power to turn fact into conjecture is scary, maybe even Orwellian scary.
Evolution is a fact. There are lots of places to dig out the scientific and logical arguments supporting Darwinism. For an excellent overview, look at the Wikipedia entry. Only in America is this now a national debate. In fact, the argument is about something even more fundamental--those who believe in Creationism have--if you dig deep enough--flawed views of science itself. I have never met someone who believes in logic and the scientific process who also believes in "creationism."
Like other symptoms of the Bush/Rove/Newt/Frist taint, they rename undigestable things in an effort to make them more palatable. "Ism" at the end of "creat" implies some scientific basis for the belief (notice that I didn't say "theory").
How will America adjust to new global business practices and stay competitive in a modern world if we reject science or at least the foundational structure behind it?
Posted on August 16, 2006
You too, you tube
YouTube provides food for thought. At a 50,000 foot level, the idea that there is a site where you post videos and people can look at them, doesn't sound very appealing. But like many other Internet capabilities, the features are in the usage, not in the description. The best technology is often "best" because its users find new ways to employ it--often in a manner not thought of by the designers. Youtube is a good candidate for this model, because it's being used as an angsty sort of zeitgeist, where budding auteurs can post their flicks.
The funniest stuff is now on Youtube. I've seen several hilarious ones, most notably Chad Vader, day shift manager. It's even made instant celebrities, like Peter, a 79-year old British retiree, who makes videos and grumbles about little bits of life.
The future? It seems as if the next wave of the Internet will be almost instantaneous sharing of snippets of our lives. If they're interesting enough, people will watch them. If they're compelling enough, we will become a celebrity, for a little while.
Posted on August 15, 2006
Clueless in Seattle
Amazon is a good company. I use them and so do 59 million other people and we do so because they give us good value for our money, they do so expeditiously and competently and most of all we trust them because they don't give us nasty surprises.
Well, scrap the last one. A Seattle newspaper just published some details of recently public Amazon patent application. The patent protects a process of data gathering that the company apparently plans to do, consolidating personal information on all of their users, not limited to just book purchases, but including ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation.
The patent itself is here.
The patent application talks about "gift clustering" and is obviously intented as a defensive extension of their current wish-list functionality. Still, it's another step down the road towards routine privacy intrusion through profiling. Amazon's dream function would be to place your gift orders for your friends as soon as you think about it, taking all of the work off of your plate to figure out the right present. By using sophisticated analysis routines, fueled by exhaustive and intrusive data bases, Amazon will be able to predict, based on demographics and historical trend analysis, what your friends would like, even if you yourself are clueless.
At that point, are they really that different from intelligence agencies, trying to spot potential terrorists at the first gleam of the subversive idea light bulb over their evil little heads?
Profiling is harmful to our privacy, if for no other reason, than because it forces the creation of disturbingly complete consumer databases, which may be acquired by others, legally or not, and used to our detriment.
Posted on August 14, 2006
No security
It's not hard to make a bomb. You can mix a couple of colorless liquids together or mold a grey pasty clay. You can hide it in a water bottle, or in a shoe or inside a teddy bear. It's not hard to make a bomb.
It's easy to kill a lot of people. You can make a good poison from castor beans or from common cleaners. You can scrape a sheep and create innocent-looking powders like anthrax. Poisons and diseases can be hiding in makeup, candy bars or as powder in an envelope. It's easy to kill a lot of people.
It's simple to make a weapon. All sorts of everyday things can be deadly if in the wrong hands and wielded maliciously. Boxcutters, pieces of broken glass, sharpenened belt buckles, knitting needles and pocket knives can all cut and unlike the song, the first cut isn't necessarily the deepest.
The news that the TSA is banning liquids and gels from airplanes is only surprising in that it has taken this long to enact. Our counterterrorism efforts have often been reactive, not anticipatory, and this prohibition on liquids is no exception to the rule.
Every normal item carried by an airline passenger could be hiding a deadly surprise. Bottles, shaving kits and shoes; chessboards, paperback books and ipods; even a ham sandwich could have a nasty surprise hidden in the Grey Poupon.
The only way to assure airline security is to ban almost all carry-on baggage, search everyone to the skin and exhaustively examine checked luggage. The best way to assure this would be to issue every passenger a disposable jumpsuit, force them to strip and shower and wear the special clothing at the gate. Even then, we'd have to be x-rayed and occasionally cavity searched (and not by dentists, either).
I'm not actually kidding about this. It would be a reasonable way to minimize risk, although of course, not foolproof.
At a minimum, I expect the liquid ban to become permanent and joined by a prohibition on electronic devices like phones, ipods and laptop computers.
There is no security in this world, but it's worth remembering that there never has been. We Westerners are now aware of this truth that people in the mideast have known for many years.
Posted on August 11, 2006
Pride goes before the Fall (Google, it's already August)
Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said in a speech yesterday at the Search Engines Strategy Conference that the real threat to privacy is not corporate screwups, but government interference.
Mr. Schmidt smugly assured the crowd that Google had put in adequate safeguards to protect their data and although they had considered deleting search histories after a few months, decided that they didn't need to because they were safe enough.
Right.
Referring to the AOL screwup last week, Schmidt termed the data release "accidental", I suppose because they got caught.
Schmidt raised the spectre of a government--any government--wresting the search data from Google.
No computer system is secure. The more value in the data, the more effort and resources will be applied to the problem and Google is one of the best targets in cyberspace.
I predict that they will be hacked...bigtime hacked. Not by the government because I suspect that Google already has some kind of relationship with NSA, otherwise they'd be getting beat up by the Justice Department more than they have. No, they will be attacked by some 17 year old French kid. If that's what it takes to break through the entrenched Silicon Valley cyberNarcissistic mind set that nothing can happen to them, then so be it.
Posted on August 10, 2006
Joementum--joemama
Joe Lieberman lost the Democratic primary yesterday. As a third-term incumbent Senatorial candidate and the 2000 vice-presidential choice of the Democratic party, his downfall this week was big and loud. Lieberman is running as an independent in the general elections and polls show that he might win, but even so, the message is clear--the voters, at least the Democrats and at least in Connecticut, may have finally had enough with weak and pandering politicians that have supported George Bush publicly in a war that most of them privately deride.
That last comment may not have been fair to Lieberman. He has been consistent in his wrongheadedness for several years. He has supported Bush in his militant endeavors from a sense of personal conviction. Joe Lieberman is a man of principles, even though I for one, happen to believe that he is wrong.
This is in sharp contrast to the other Democrats in Congress who have simpered and wimped their way through the Iraqi political minefield for the last four years. Their inability to do their job is frustrating and worse, detrimental to our country. Let's tip our hat to Joe Lieberman, who at least has a backbone.
Note: I hope that everyone noticed that Lieberman's website was trashed the night before the primary. Openhanded wideeyed hackers everywhere deny involvement. Stay tuned because there will be many more instances of this. 2008 will be the beginning of cyberpolitics.
Posted on August 09, 2006
AOL screwed up
The Washington Post ran an article today about an unbelievable thing that AOL did this week. They knowingly released the search records of hundreds of thousands of users on a public website for "research purposes." The search information was not equated to actual names but apparently to a unique numeric sequence.
I was quoted in the article as worried about the privacy ramifications because it's not that hard to correlate someone's identity with some search terms. For instance, people often search on themselves or their addresses, their company, etc. These particulars could be matched up to potentially embarassing questions like "what happens if i have sex and my toenails turn blue?" or "how long can my wife hold her breath underground with her hands tied with duct tape?". There is at least one murder case where search terms provided key evidence. A man named Robert Petrick was convicted of killing his wife on evidence including a search history with the words "neck", "snap" and "break."
The really appalling thing here is that AOL didn't have any procedures in place internally to stop this sort of thing from happening. Search data is sensitive and it should have required a very senior executive to authorize disclosure. The fact that a research flunkie, generally not known as the most prestigious job in a tech company, could do this on their own cognizance, speaks volumes about AOL's general disdain for their customers' privacy.
I do not use AOL and never have. Perhaps consumers should start evaluating an online service by the level of respect shown for personal information (including search terms.) If so, judging by this incident, AOL has failed miserably.
Posted on August 08, 2006
Doublethink
As more and more reference material becomes digital, a greater percentage will have never been on paper and it will be too expensive to make a hard copy. Unlike ten years ago, much new digital material created these days lives its entire existence on the computer. It's inevitable, really. The economics are such that it's too expensive to make physical printouts, plus the hard copy has greater utility with backing up, searching, publishing on the web, etc.
Like is Wikipedia even printed out anywhere? It changes so often I can't believe that you could even get a definitive hard copy.
What worries me about this is that disinformation, bad facts or just plain lying might be difficult to check up on. What happens if the government or someone else just changes historical facts to suit the expediency and current need? Several people, including senators and congressmen have been involved in a quiet war to favorably edit their Wikipedia biographies--even to the point of making things up or leaving out key facts.
This concept is part of a concept called Doublethink, and is, of course, an integral part of Orwell's 1984.
I worry about the changing quality and essential verifiability of online reference material and its potential for 3rd party manipulation. As hoary and antiquated as paper is, it's hard to change and once everyone has, say, a dictionary in their house, it's very difficult to change the meaning of a word to suit the political moment. If there was only one dictionary and it was online, it would be child's play.
Posted on August 07, 2006
Customers not Copies
The entertainment industry has been sighting pirates on the horizon for many years. People who work in this industry sincerely believe this is happening. Many other people do not. I believe that there are concerted forces at work to copy material and sell it without paying the creators, but I think that there are a few large cartels doing this in a systematic way, which makes the series of little-guy lawsuits by the studios not only grotesque and unfair, but largely ineffective.
I believe that part of the problem comes from the way that Hollywood looks at their product--they see themselves as selling "copies" of a physical product. They perceive their goods as taking up physical space, competing for shelf space and costing money to duplicate, ship and arrange for returns.
I believe that they should think about customers, not copies. If they can collect $20 from everyone who listens to a new album (is that still a meaningful word?), then they will make money. Trying to get the second $20 if the original buyer wants to copy the music onto an iPod or onto a satellite radio system is what's causing all of this grief. Most consumers intuitively feel that they have the right to do so anyway. The business model should reward music and movie producers for the number of consumers familiar with the work, not the number of units shipped.
How do they make money? They already are. You can't look at a musical album as a shipped piece of plastic in a cardboard sleeve. It's the sum product of road shows, music sales, ringtones, online music, pay-per-view concerts and the like. If normal people are not aware of the album, if there are not enough fans, they won't make any bucks for the music anyway. It's all about customer awareness.
Posted on August 04, 2006
Taking a bite out of Apple
Computerworld reports from the Blackhat conference that a couple of researchers have successfully attacked a MacBook using a wi-fi hack. It's news because Apple has been smugly sniping at Microsoft Windows machines for being less than secure (true) and harder to use (truer) and no fun (truest).
This doesn't surprise me a bit. The underlying point is that No Computer System is Secure. This truism is often swept out with other dirt by the PR brooms, but is one of the underlying truths of the computer age. If there is a sufficient reason, any computer system will eventually go down to a concerted attack. In this case, the motivation was a presentation at an important peer conference. Imagine how much stronger it might have been if there had been a lot of money involved.
Part of the problem is that the lifecycle of computer systems is such that there is simply not enough time for systematic testing of every release, allowing bugs or at least opportunities to creep in.
Apple is no worse than anyone else, probably better. So far, they have been very good about patching security holes when they're pointed out. This is in sharp contrast to companies like Cisco, who sued Michael Lynn last year for demonstrating a significant flaw in Cisco routers, (Lynn was also investigated by the FBI).
Computer security is a function of time and money. The more money that's at stake, the less viable any particular security system will prove to be. The future of data security will not be fortress walls, but hidey holes. If you really want to protect important computer information, hide it.
Posted on August 03, 2006
Wired and wizened
Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster.com, started a new website service called eons.com. The site is targeted at "50+" users and looks like an older version of myspace or facebook, kind of a snoozester for geezers (ed note: I turn 50 myself this year).
The site offers things like a longevity calendar, a "lifemap" where you can store your life memories (in case you get Alzheimers, I guess) and sex tips for older people.
The weirdest thing, IMHO, is a service that you can sigh up for that I can only call social deathworking. You give them some personal information and they try to figure out who you know that's just died and send you a message telling you so.
The take-home point here is that the Internet is no longer just for nerds, nor is it an extended teenage club. Niches for every age group will be discovered and serviced. There's a lot of money mining gold out of the silver-haired. This site is a good example: 50+ people have the bucks and the time to use a tailored service like this.
A site like this catering to the older crowd might be lucrative too: maybe the billing system could be written so that it would prompt them for an annual subscription every couple months hoping they've forgotten that they've already paid.
Posted on August 02, 2006
Adrenaline junkies vs. Risk takers
The NY Times has a thought-provoking article this morning observing that CEOs do not blog. They mention Jonathon Schwartz, the new CEO of Sun, who is apparently the only Fortune 500 CEO who does.
Having been a CEO, albeit a much smaller company than Sun, I can understand and explain by way of my observation, based on many years of experience serving at several levels of executive management: Good CEOs are not risk-takers, they are adrenaline-junkies, and those are not the same things. Bloggers are risk takers.
Risk takers rate every decision on a penalty/reward continuum and go through life calculating the odds of everyday things like a Vegas bookie. They tend to be fearless in the face of adversity and are often accepting of the consequences of unlucky outcomes. Startup jockeys are risk-takers as are many good CTOs. Risk takers like the intellectual rush that comes from in-depth analysis.
Adrenaline junkies like the emotional thrill of gambling. They often show the same propensities for stress in their personal as they do their business life. They drive fast cars, downhill ski on double-diamond slopes that they're not qualified to be on and are often found on weekends bungie-jumping or taking flying lessons or something equally hormonally stimulating. They don't care about the reward and they take risks for the rush, not for the challenge.
Good bloggers speak from the heart and they see the risk/reward tradeoff as being acceptable. They can explain themselves to others and often learn about themselves by writing down their thoughts. There's no adrenaline boosting going on here to interest the CEO.
Posted on August 01, 2006
