Global POV: At the Intersection of Technology and Culture

Yesterday Rush Limbaugh accused Michael J. Fox of faking Parkinson's symptoms during political endorsement television ads in order to drum up sympathy for his pro-stem cell research candidates.

Fox has an advanced case of Parkinsons and has been actively supporting stem cell research. When confronted with evidence that Fox was not faking, Limbaugh said:

"Now people are telling me they have seen Michael J. Fox in interviews and he does appear the same way in the interviews as he does in this commercial," Limbaugh said, according to a transcript on his Web site. "All right then, I stand corrected. . . . So I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong, and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox, if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act.

Aren't we done with attack politics yet? No matter who wins the election next month, I hope that a new day of civility will dawn in America where we don't make fun of ill people. When the leaders of our government lie about a reason to go to war, shelter a possible pedophile in the name of politics and spy on our reading material, our moral compass is spinning out of control.

Posted on October 25, 2006

Masking Beijing bloggers

China is contemplating requiring bloggers to register with their real name before they blog under a pseudonym. I understand why they want that--they (the Chinese government) doesn't tolerate unfettered dissent and when they have their inevitable "attitude adjustments" they want to know where to find the gadflies. I'm not condoning it, mind you, but I understand. Relative to their culture and government, it is a reasonable thing to do.

I hope that this idea doesn't catch on here. This is exactly the kind of thing that some idiot Congressman would think was a good idea and he/she would be completely supported by litigators who always want to know who to sue.

The power of pseudonymity is one of the great gifts of the Internet and is one of the great self-corrective mechanisms of a Democracy. Lose it and free speech on the Internet will be dialed down to a barely audible mumble.

Posted on October 24, 2006

Privacy

I fought the law and Google won.

The venerable New York Times has a thoughtful piece today discussing how Google deals with litigation. It makes for interesting reading as they go over the various cases that the Mountain View company is currently embroiled in. They are being sued for leaving a company out of search results, they are being sued for selling ad words triggered by a company's name to its competitor, they are being sued for publishing thumbnail portraits from a porn company and they are being sued for deep-scanning published books. They have increased their legal staff from a single lawyer a few years ago to over a hundred today.

This story is understandable on two fronts. First, of course Google is being sued. In a sense, it's more than just the company, it's really the leading edge of Internet business that's under attack. Google is an innovative firm, pushing the edge and they're going to attract attention both from get-rich-quickie artists and people that want to make the world spin faster so they sue God. Because right now, on the Internet, Google is the supreme deity. No other company comes close to their influence and in fact, historical (?) Internet companies have been mostly marginalized, other than cash ([cough]--Yahoo).

The story is also understandable from the sense that they'd aggressively defend themselves. They can't afford to lose a single case, because discovery (the legal process of crawling up your bodily orifices with a flashlight in case you forgot some paperwork up there) would hurt them a lot by exposing their "trade secrets." BTW, when Google talks about trade secrets, they imply that there's some magic formula, like Coca-Cola's, that if made public, would hurt the company. I suspect that it's the opposite--that if people knew how simple their algorithmic approach was and how often they diddle it manually, they'd be upset.

EIther way, Google is out there, hacking through litigious jungle with a legal machete. I wish them well because I agree with their sentiments. Their goals and many of ours coincide--we both want a laissez-faire, open Internet, where any VC can make a buck and it's reasonable for 22 year olds to become billionaires.

Posted on October 23, 2006

Kill Hill, then Bill?

It's interesting to speculate who might be the next President of the United States. It's even more interesting when you think about who might be Vice-President. The Washington Post has a neat blurb musing about a Hllary-Bill ticket with Bill as Veep. There's a lot of back-and-forth about whether that's even Constitutional. The problem lies in language that says that the Veep needs to be as eligible to be President as the President himself. Since the 22nd Amendment bars anyone from being elected to the Presidency more than twice, that would seem to prohibit a Hll-Bill ticket. Ah, but the key word is elected. Since he wouldn't be elected as President, perhaps he could be elected as VP and then inherit the office.

Bill Clinton and Al Gore's stars have risen substantially during the dark years of the Bushies. Gore, who was essentially disgraced within the party because he lost to George W. Gump and Clinton because of his predilection for women who smoke cigars.

How about Al Gore?

(btw, the picture at the top is Bill & Hillary at Yale in the 70s)

Posted on October 20, 2006

Hot soup, hot damn

There's a new opinion site in town this week. It's called Hotsoup and it was started by several political consultants as a way of getting well-known consultants like Donna Brazile or Ed Gillespie even more out in the open, huckstering their worn and comfortable opinions in the context of a debate.

Other than the excessive use of flash, the biggest problem that I have with this site is their mistaken belief that opinion leaders on the Internet will be the same boring talking heads that we've had to watch on television. Why is this wrong? Because these type of politicos and pundits are....boring. Yes. They are not entertaining, with the possible exception of James Carville, whose accent and bald head are a universally appealing combination.

The future opinion leaders of the new media are the pseuds, the pseudonymous trend-setters who develop their own constituencies by being entertaining. We see this on television with reality shows and on the net with people like Drudge and the founders of the Daily Koz and Wonkette. They're not right and they're not prescient. They're entertaining and that can make all the difference.

I highly encourage the hotsoup hierophants to encourage new opinion leaders and eschew the treadworn. Ask me how...I have opinions:)

Posted on October 19, 2006

Pop Culture

J'accuse

The New York Times had an article yesterday pointing out that it's impossible to expunge a criminal record these days. The situation: Many people who commit minor crimes are offered expungement by the judge if they behave--complete erasure of their record. The problem: Database companies like Choicepoint and Acxiom hoover up the information as soon as it hits the computer, retaining the data regardless of whether or not it stays in the public computers.

It's actually worse than the article indicates. Often people who have been accused of a crime and later acquitted are also in the databases and are unable to clean it up.

It's impossible to clean these records because they're too widely distributed. Unlike credit reports, where there's essentially three major bureaus, there are many American database companies. Additionally once their customers have bought data, it's out of their hands. One of the biggest customers these days is of course, the federal government. This puts the government in the unique position of being able to circuituously read back in data that they generated in the first place and retain it in a way that they couldn't legally do if they had just kept it.

Posted on October 18, 2006

2 Comments

Privacy

Chertoff condemns the Web

Homeland Defense secretary Michael Chertoff lambasted the Web yesterday while giving a speech at the International Association of the Chiefs of Police.

He said that the Web could become a Terrorist training camp because the technology enables the individual to learn new skills without traveling to a camp. He also said that spies and satellites were going to be less useful in tracking these new online terrorists.

Well, duh.

Where has Chernoff been? The potential to use the web for nefarious purposes has always been there. All technology is agnostic; if it can be used for good, then it can be used for...less than good.

Certainly the government needs to develop abilities to monitor what's going on on the Net, but it won't help much. The nature of the Net unfortunately, makes it all too easy to facilitate groups of people talking and planning things in secret. That's actually one of its attractive qualities, IMHO.

Posted on October 17, 2006

Security

On the Ballmer

The New York Times has an interview with Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. He waxes poetical about his youth in Belgium and why it's so hard to make Windows work. He says that Windows is different because it manages the hardware. Responding to the growing threat to Redmond from the open source movement and Internet software distribution in general, he acknowledged that it's the future, but downplayed the significance of the Internet to the company's well-being.

The article all but says that Vista will be the last significant Microsoft operating sytem.

I agree with this conclusion. MIcrosoft, as we know it, is really three companies today. It is an operating system developer, forcing hardware manufacturers to conform to a universal spec. It is an application developer, building the definitive versions of word processors, spread sheets and presentation management. It is recently a consumer entertainment company, selling the XBox line along with associated content and controllers. It's soon-to-be released Zune MP3 player shows where they're going .
The first Microsoft is the one being hammered by Open Source. The second company only succeeds because of the monopolistic tricks practiced by the first. The consumer company is and has always been, in a highly competititve environment.

The Microsoft of the future must empathize the 2nd and 3rd corporate incarnations. They are losing their grip on the first part, the Operating System division, that's been so lucrative for them in the last two decades.

It seems to me that for them to be successful in recasting their company they will need a new culture and new management. Mr. Ballmer may be too attached to the old world order and ultimately may not prove hungry enough to discover a new world for Microsoft to conquer.

Posted on October 16, 2006

Technology

HP names ethics officer

HP today announced the appointment of an Ethics Officer, Jon Hoak, former GC of NCR.

I don't know Mr. Hoak and know nothing about him except for his record at NCR which was apparently very good and the fact that he is a lawyer.

I'm disappointed that he is an attorney because it's a continuation of the national delusion where we confuse good behavior with legal behavior. Ethical officers shouldn't even be needed, right? Everyone should be an ethical officer. But if you have to have one, IMHO, they should be anything but a lawyer. Same as the Chief Privacy Officer. There should be tension with the General Counsel, not collegial legal back-slapping.

Ethics is an everyman's sport. Privacy is a universal right. The law is a game that everyone has to play and ony some of us are allowed to know the rules.

Posted on October 13, 2006

Bully for you

Take Two Interactive gaming company, best known for the uber-brutal Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series has been in the gunsight of conservative gunsights ever since the infamous "Hot Coffee" mod to GTA3 appalled many nongamers with its simulated (I think) sex scenes. (writer's caveat: GTA3 is my favorite Xbox game)

The new and highly anticipated Rockstar (a subsidiary of TakeTwo) game due to come out next month is called "Bully" and is the story of a young man at a prep school that has to defend himself against bullies. Not, apparently, with guns and flamethrowers, but with household stuff. Conservative lawyer Floridian Jack Thompson has successfully persuaded Judge Friedman to injoin Rockstar from releasing the game while the content is "evaluated" based on Florida's public nuisance law. Starting tomorrow at 3Pm, the Judge and Jack will watch the game being played (or maybe play it?) until they can evaluate whether it is truly a "Columbine simulater", the way Mr. THompson has been alleging.

Wow. I can't believe that this is happening. If God loves a lunatic, he must visit Florida every summer. Lucky for TakeTwo it's this game and not the last one, for reporters who have seen advance copies of the game have all said that it's nonviolent and does not glorify bullies. Still, it's chilling that guys like this get to somehow "rule" on the content of entertainment prior to release. I would imagine that the same argument could be applied to music and videos. Even if the game is socially unredeemable, I would support the company's right to sell it, although I'm sure that there's a line somewhere, some sort of video-Skokie where I would have a problem with its release.

Posted on October 12, 2006

Pop Culture

Business week op-ed

I have an op-ed running in Business Week today in which I lambaste HP and specifically their chairperson, Patricia Dunn for unethical behavior. I notice the comments are piling up, some of which seem to be taking the position that it's unethical to leak information to the press the way Keyworth did and therefore Dunn's actions were justified.

This is an old argument in which the rightness of the means of a given action is subordinated to accomplishing a justifiable end. This is the same stupid reasoning that got us into Iraq and Vietnam before it. I do think that there are cases in which spying on a reporter or a Director is justified; I just don't think this was one.

There's an old military principle which says that sometime you have to do something that's illegal, unethical or just wrong. You do it for reasons which to you are sufficient. The principle is that in this case, you do what you must, but take responsiblity later and if necessary, punishment. People who perform the dubious action, deny responsiblity later when caught and blame subordinates are acting cowardly and I address that accusation at a broader audience than Hewlett-Packard.

Posted on October 11, 2006

1 Comment

Viagra for El Jefe

Five years ago, in a saner, safer United States, President Bush introduced the concept of the "Axis of Evil." The Axis was the club for evil countries, sort of a bizarro Justice League. Their members were: North Korea, Iran and Iraq. Now the President is embroiled in a situation with all three Axis countries. Iran is quickly building a nuclear program, N. Korea has detonated an atomic weapon and Iraq is poised on the brink of civil war.

Mr. Bush has failed to deal with his own fantasy problem--the Axis stands. Rather than removing any of these threats, he has incited them, threatening two of the countries and invading the third, but not being able to finish the job; the job being a peaceful situation with the likelihood of conflict reduced. No, he has not done that.

Additionally, Mr. Bush has succeeded in infuriating an entire religion and one of the largest ones, at that. His own NIE last month was quite clear on the point that the War on Iraq has created a new generation of terrorists, who will grow up hating the US for the Iraqi occupation.

So, where goes the Axis of Evil now? Will we invade Korea or bomb them to get them to stop, assuming that economic sanctions fail? After all, we've used that tactic on Cuba for, let's see...43 years? What about Iran? How do we stop them from continuing their enrichment program? Will Iraq calm down and become the 51st American state and a red one at that, now that the "Mission" is "Accomplished"

A logistical point--America couldn't fight another war right now unless it was critical. We have bled our Reservists and National Guardsmen for several years, recruitment into the active military is at an all-time low and we're mostly out of ammunition and missiles. Additionally, we as a people, do not have the will to flght. We no longer believe Mr. Bush, Mr. Rumsfield, Mr. Cheney and the other old white men who have lied to us since 9/11.

The Axis of Evil is looming as one of the biggest problems facing the new President in 2008. North Korea's bomb test has changed the political debate.

But the real truth here is that Mr. Bush has spectacularly failed as President . After a lifetime of being the 2nd string son in a political dynasty, approaching life by getting by; he has finally excelled at something. He is the worst President in my lifetime, worse than RIchard Nixon.

He is the most politically impotent man in history.

Posted on October 10, 2006

Sock it to me, puppet

I confess that I hadn't heard the terms "sock puppet" and "meat puppet" used to refer to fake Internet identities before I had read about a recent snafu on Facebook, the popular college alumni online watering hole. A local company named "Ruckus Networks" created a fake Facebook account for "Brody Ruckus." Brody, according to his Facebook entry, was trying to get 300,000 fans to sign up to be his friend, because if he did, his girlfriend would have a menage a trois with him and another young lady. True to form, Mr. Ruckus got half a million signups in short order. Unfortunately he wasn't real. He was a "sock puppet", a virtual personna created solely for marketing purposes. Ruckus successfully harvested 500,000 names from this stunt and generated some valuable, fake grassroots buzz (called "Astroturf").

I am not sure that I have a problem with this. It's kind of clever, certainly funny. I guess it depends on what Ruckus does with the names.

Get used to this. I've been anticipating this kind of thing for many years. The line between fake identities and real identities is blurring. This is a brain-dead case because it's a static profile. Imagine a fully interactive personna in a chat session and being unable to tell if it's real or not. Not possible, you say? Check out Eliza. For those who remember, Eliza was one of the earliest AI (Artificial Intelligence) programs that would appear to carry on meaningful conversation by using psycho babble, picking up key words from the user's sentences and throwing them back as questions. Eliza was the mother of early computer games like Adventure and it's commercial follow-on Zork.

Kudos to Ruckus. Today it's amusing. Soon it will be obnoxious. I predict a new kind of "Elizaspam" in which social networking sites are brought to their knees by fake personnas created by advertisers.

Posted on October 09, 2006

Advertising

The dynamics of the Future

An article in the Washington Post today makes the interesting observation that because of the Internet, ticket prices to events have quietly shifted into a dynamic pricing model.

The Internet is very good at creating efficient markets--EBay is the most visible manifestation of that. Tickets are a natural for market adjustment and that's happened in a number of ways. First off, scalpers have moved online and become respectable. I'd noticed that since I occasionally buy tickets that way myself, but hadn't generalized from the experience. However, for the last few years, I could always get a ticket to a Broadway show, no matter how sold out it was, if I was willing to pay a premium.

The Post article points out that the promoters of sporting events and rock concerts are starting to auction off the best tickets on the Internet. That would seem to be an inevitable outcome, although it's usually not possible for the same company to run a primary and a secondary market for any commodity, because the price isn't allowed to freely fluctuate in the secondary market the way it ought to, usually because of hidden consideration seeking to prop up the primary.

I imagine that there'll be more of these dynamic pricing models popping up, as people get more used to the superficially unfair aspect of it.

How about:

Charging more for the pre-Christmas purchase of the hottest toys?
Decreasing the screens for movie releases and adjusting the pricing--Charge more when the film is popular and gradually drop the ticket price as sales drop off
Allowing students with lesser academic records to attend prestigious schools, but pay more?

Posted on October 06, 2006

Selling a book

I received a couple of boxes in the mail yesterday--early copies of Privacy Lost, How Technology is Endangering Your Privacy, my new (and first) book. Amazon will be shipping in a few days and the books will be available in bookstores next week.

Non-fiction books are a lot harder than I thought to sell, write and market. Actually of the three, writing it was the easiest.

For anyone considering it, the first step is to get an agent. That's difficult if you're unknown, because agents only make money when you do and they might have to put in years of work for free before you sell anything. It helps if a mutual acquaintance introduces you, but I know several people that have cold-called agents and been successful over time. I was very lucky to be introduced to Grace Freedson, who worked diligently at selling my book and in fact, did so.

Then you need a proposal. This is a 10-30 page marketing document in which you explain the book from the perspective of why someone would spend $25 or so for it. Expect to do a little competitive research. I did. It's the writer's job to convince the publisher that the product will move out the door. At this stage, you are discussing a commodity and using the language of sales. Your book's content is less important than its financial prospects.

Then the fun begins. Your agent ships the proposal out and schmoozes perspective buyers. It took about a year and a half to sell Privacy Lost. Part of it was the political climate. Some publishers were nervous about being openly critical of the Bush Administration for awhile (that's changed, of course).

Someone in the publishing house needs to believe in what you're writing or it has to be a cold-bloodedly obvious well-selling entry. I was lucky enough to have my book championed by Dorothy Hearst at Josey-Bass (Wiley & Sons).

The contract negotiation was simple because as a first-time writer you have no clout at all. I argued about the amount of the advance for a few minutes, but only because I thought that it was what I had to pay them.

Tomorrow -- writing.

Posted on October 05, 2006

Privacy Lost

Spearphishing for spam

CNET has an article talking about how social networking sites are getting hit by malware attacks that appear to be personalized because of the information inherent in the site.

I expect a much worse problem in the next few years. I anticipate the growth of "spear-phishing" or targeted, personalized spam using personal information gleaned from bots and updated mailing lists, cross-indexed with public records and google searchs. For instance, it wouldn't be that hard to monitor email traffic, figure out who people talk to and deliver email, ostensibly from those "friends" that would be effectively impossible to filter. How about subject lines taken from websites browsed by the victim or even copying subject lines received on an earlier email?

This idea requires some email theft, which isn't so hard. But it could also be done by using spyware on a PC, malware at a social networking site or even a massive hack against a poorly-defended "viral" site like Plaxo.

Every spam filtering system out there today that I know of will collapse under the weight of this kind of mailings.

Posted on October 04, 2006

Technology

Planes still fly

An interesting article in the New York Times today written by a freelance reporter that happened to be on board the small private jet that hit the 737 in Brazil the other day. Amazingly enough, the small Embraer made it safely down to a nearby runway, even though a big piece was chunked from the wing. Everyone on board the Embraer was fine. Not so the passengers in the larger plane. The 737 went into an immediate death spiral, hitting the Amazonian jungle and killing all 155 people aboard.

The description by Joe Sharkey is amazing. He is one of the few people who have ever survived a mid-air collision.

I don't like to fly yet I do it all the time. The main reason that I'm nervous about flying is because I am a technologist and thus shocked that these things even work. Think about it: how many engineers, computer programmers and project managers worked on that plane? How many millions of lines of code are required to keep it operational? All it takes is one bad day for one worker and a rivet might be put in wrong, right enough to pass safety checks, but still flawed. Maybe the navigational software is glitched, but only when you cross zero degrees latitude (don't laugh--it happens). My God, WHAT IF THE PLANE IS RUNNING WINDOWS XP?

It's amazing that planes fly. Thinking about this accident and realizing that this is about as bad as it ever gets--a screwup causes a collision--makes me proud of technology. It's great to realize that even with all of the human frailities of the many people involved in getting that jet into the air, somehow we've created enough quality control to compensate. Not only could that jet fly, but it got clipped and landed safely--and in the rain forest no less.

There's hope for technology yet.

Posted on October 03, 2006

Technology

Hastert the pimp

The FBI has now decided to examine Foley's emails.

An interesting lesson about the efficacy of intelligence collection can be found in the sordid, soap-opera drama of Rep Mark Foley, a Republican Representative from of all places, the nation's political freak zoo--Florida. Foley as you may remember, is the apparent stalker, possibly would-be pedophile who sent mashing and explicit notes to a Congressional Page, asking for, among other things, a picture of the young man. Foley resigned when some of the emails became public. The lesson here is that knowing something is not as important as doing something about it.

In the case of Foley, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was notified of Foley's contacts with pages as early as a year ago and did nothing but warn Foley to "leave the pages alone." Hastert's defense is that they hadn't seen the raunchier emails yet.

The hypocrisy of these guys never ceases to amaze me. When you look at some of their bizarre "principle" stands like trying to upend the Constitution to keep poor, brain-dead Terry Schiavo alive and yet leaving a Humbert Humbert wannabe in Congress and get this, also serving as co-chair of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus; it's mind-boggling.

So the lesson here is that increasing intelligence collection is not sufficient in of itself. Protection of our shores and apparently our children is not guaranteed by having prior knowledge of attacks or scouring email looking for intent--it requires the will to act and the absence of overarching political concerns. Information is useless unless it is actionable.

Posted on October 02, 2006