Global POV: At the Intersection of Technology and Culture

We'll always have Paris

by David Holtzman

For those who haven't heard, the biggest victim of a privacy violation of the year is...PARIS HILTON.

Seriously, it's Paris Hilton. A new website is full of things Paris that were apparently kept at a storage facilty. When Paris was long-term deficient in paying the couple of hundred dollar bill, the company auctioned off the contents. The buyers for $2775, Nabil and Nabila Haniss, realized what they had gotten and had a new auction where they sold off the goodies for $10 million to Bardia Persa, who promptly put up the parisexposed website.

For $39.97 (where did they get that number from?) you get one month access to Paris's things. They apparently include several new sex videos, some featuring her sometime boyfriend, Joe Francis, the brainboy behind the Girls Gone Wild video series (I met him years ago in an elevator in New Orleans where he explained his technique to get amateurs in his videos, including the use of fishing poles, big plush teddy bears and nice looking shills in the crowd). The stash also includes letters, diaries, nudie pictures and what appears to be a prescription in Hilton's name for Valtrex, a drug commonly used to treat herpes. There are also videos where she's clearly smoking pot. Less interesting, but more invasive are copies of her passport and credit card receipts.

Hilton filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that her privacy had been violated and interestingly enough, that she had copyright ownership of the material. Several news stories reported that the site had already been shut down, but as of this morning it's still up.

If privacy is based on expectations, it's hard to imagine how the 25 year old could have any. She's probably the most famous exhibitionist since Lady Godiva. Yet, the financial information could certainly be problematic and although I'm too discerning (and cheap) to spring for the site, something tells me that many other celebrities are mentioned in that box somewhere and they don't deserve to be privacy outed along with Hilton.

After some soul-searching, I believe that I hope that she wins, because legalized public exposure of someone's garbage is an ugly principle to establish.

Posted on January 31, 2007

Squarebobbing for avatars

by David Holtzman

Virtual worlds fascinate me. Creators of these "matrices" seem to be going in two directions right now--horizontally sweeping and vertically targeted. The former case is perhaps best typified by Second Life. Horizontal worlds are a big, digital sandbox in which the inhabitants can do what they might do (or wish they were doing) in the real world, except they'll be thinner and better-looking when they do it.

Vertical worlds can be aimed at a particular demographic or an interest area. The latter would include most of the MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft. It also includes topical entertainment worlds such as the ill-fated Matrix Online, tied in to the movie.

The newest entry in the specialized category is aimed at young kids and is sponsored by Nickelodeon. It's called Nicktropolis. This world allows kids the ability to interact with their favorite Nick characters like Jimmy Neutron and SpongeBob Squarepants. The network claims that it's amied at 6-14 year olds and that they've protected the kids by not requesting personally identifiable information and notifying the parents when their progeny joins up.

They will, however, be showing the kids real advertisements in the virtual world.

Where's it headed?

IMHO, we can't handle too many of these virtual worlds because the identity and financial logistics would get too hairy at some point. If people go through the effort of creating their virtual personas, they're cerrtainly not going to want to do them over again every time a new movie comes out or they pick up a new hobby.

This screams for identity interoperability--where avatars and pseudonymous identities are independent of any one world and certain personal metainformation is owned by YOU, the consumer, not by the company. If I spend hours designing an avatar in Second Life, why can't I use it in Nicktropolis?

By the way, for the record, if some kid created a persona in Nickworld and named it "Squarepants", even without the anatomically suggestive "Spongebob" part, it would almost certainly be censored by the publisher.

Posted on January 30, 2007

Defusing Google bombs

by David Holtzman

Google claims to have eradicated Google bombs by tweaking their algorithms.

For those who don't know, Google bombing is a specific case of a larger set of hacks called "search engine bombing" that attempt to influence the results of search engines through manipulation, usually by a large amount of false entries placed in such a way that the engine's indexer is likely to run across them and interpret them as widespread evidence of popularity.

Fundamentally Google-like search engines are statistical tinker toys. Before Google, the best engines were boolean and used various probabilistic algorithms to increase the "precision" of a search by looking for the presence of each of the terms in the query and then applying mathematical operators to combine the results based on the nature of the Boolean connective (eg AND, OR). Google works very differently, however. They rate a document as more highly relevant if more external websites link to it.

Because of this approach, it's not hard to spoof Google. Implanting links to the victim's website and associating the links with the desired key words on a dozen or so sites should do it. The company terms Google Bombing a "prank", but that's a little arrogant. Google, like candid photography, works best when people forget about their voyeurism. Whenever anyone "apes for the camera", it throws off the legitimacy of the results.

There are several well-known cases of Google bombing, many detailed in the linked Wikipedia article. Probably the most well-known was having the term "miserable failure" link to the official George W. Bush website.

In their announcement, Google says that they will weigh the discussion of google bombing higher than the bomb itself and a search of "miserable failure" seems to confirm this.

So. Although they needed to do something like this to confirm the public's faith in their results, it's futile and arrogant.

Futile because there's always going to be ways to get around Google. What they've done is to throw down the glove and challenge far too many hackers with far too much free time on their hands to work around this latest fix. And make no mistake--someone will hack the system and soon.

Google is arrogant because they seem to think that there's something special about what they're doing. They were the right approach at the right time and everyone involved with the company has been rewarded beyond most of our wildest dreams, but that doesn't make them valuable, immutable or eternal. Okay, valuable maybe. The road to technology hell is littered with the skulls of good company ideas. In many respects, Google is a multi-billion dollar parlor trick and it's getting hokier as they "tweak" their engine for special cases. Eventually they will be a patchwork of special case code that even's whorier than Microsoft's operating systems.

Posted on January 29, 2007

When intelligence agencies go bad

by David Holtzman

There are several court cases pending involving the NSA's extraordinary wiretaping of Americans, but apparently the judges hearing the cases are getting fed up.

For a while now, the Bush administration has invoked extraordinary security measures to keep noncleared people away from the goodies. This includes judges, clerks and of course, opposing lawyers. Civil libertarians have long carped about this situation, complaining that it upsets the very nature of the adverserial American legal system. Some of them are getting close to issuing rulings to cut through the Gordian knot as happened during the Watergate era.

I have two worries; short and long term.

My short term worry is that if not stopped, the Bush/Cheney/Satan approach to government will have permanently upset the checks and balances of our system. It may take a long while to put it right again.

My long term worry is that when we do put it right, in true American fashion, we will overcompensate in the other direction and hamper our intelligence services to the point of futility. We need a robust intelligence function, but we also need one that is monitored--excesses in the heat of need must needs justified later to cooler third party heads.

I wonder if any of the current crop of candidates can effect this sense of balance?

Posted on January 26, 2007

Does Hallmark make a Father's Day card for this?

by David Holtzman

Vice President "Dick" Cheney was on with Wolf Blitzer the other night, selling the same old brand of snake oil. In a sharp contrast to President Bush's new Rodney King "Can't we all just get along" tone, Cheney was unrepentant, arrogant and being as obstinate as ever. It's hard to describe him as anything but as an "angry old white guy."

I find it interesting that Cheney gets angry whenever someone mentions his daughter Mary. Mary Cheney is a lesbian and is currently pregnant, presumably through the means of artificial insemination. The Veep refuses to discuss the issue, in this case telling Wolf that he was "out of line." Why is that out of line? The administration's political base is made up off conservatives who are probably offended at Ms. Cheney's lifestyle. For any other politician I would find this subject out of bounds, also. But not for these guys who have crossed the Potomac river, walking on the backs of evangelicals. I think that bad boy Cheney needs to 'fess up with his religous minions. I hope that if he ever does so, he will truly defend his daughter and her lifestyle choices instead of ducking the issue.

Posted on January 25, 2007

No more beating around the Bush

by David Holtzman

President Bush gave his first beleagured State of the Union message last night to a reasonably hostile, Democratic majority Congress. He was unrepentant and aggressive. He is heading for conflict with the Dems who are only too well aware that this last election was a wakeup call from the voters to the politicos to get serious about winding down the war in Iraq.

Expect Bush to deal with the following things over the next six months:
- House resolutions blunting his 22,000 troop increase
- Investigations into what his administration knew prior to the invasion
- Revelations of high-level Cheney Chicanery from the Scooter Libby trial

I can't wait.

Posted on January 24, 2007

Ayatollahs of the Internet

by David Holtzman

Several media sites are reporting that Microsoft has been requesting that third parties "edit" several Microsoft-related Wikipedia entries to make it more favorable for them. This process, which is a variation of "astroturf", (fake grass roots), seems to be unethical, given the new morality of the Internet. The theory behind these collaborative sites, like Wikipedia, is that each entry is the result of a spontaneous gesture by an uncompromised third party, spurred on by a genuine desire to enighten and share with others.

I think that's crap. Everyone has an axe to grind. Although many people genuinely write reviews of books and movies, products or technology, from a love of sharing, many do not. And all of those who are biased are not necessarily astroturfers working for evil PR firms. Many netizens have hate-hate relationships with people, companies and even operating systems, and will go out of their way to trash their targets every chance they get, regardless of the subject. I've been the target of attacks like these several times over the years as have several other writers that I know. How are these little Ayatollahs of the Internet any different than slick willy PR Geeks? Read Slashdot sometime with a sensitivity towards a priori hate and nastiness and you'll see what I mean.

There was a popular bumper sticker in the '60s labelled "QUESTION AUTHORITY". I encourage people to apply that sentiment to what anyone writes on the Internet, especially on Wikipedia, human naturehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft being what it is. The problem of validating quality on the Internet is poised to become a big one, IMHO.

BTW, if anyone looks up the Microsoft Wikipedia entry as of this morning, they will see this on the right hand sidebar describing the company:

Microsoft Copulation
Type Public (NASDAQ: MSFT)
Founded Albuquerque (April 4, 1975)[1]
Headquarters Redmond, Washington, USA
Key people Salman Mohamed, Co-founder

Posted on January 23, 2007

Porn again

by David Holtzman

There's a scene in the MGM musical, Singing in the Rain, where a silent screen diva tries to make the transition to talkies and with cameras and sound equipment rolling, opens her mouth and out comes a squeaky, Betty-Boopsish voice. Technology often is the harbinger of artistic change as this particular example illustrates.

Now on to Hi-Def TV. The New York Times has an article this morning pointing out how many porn stars are not making the cut to HD, because they have physical imperfections that are illustrated all too clearly in the higher resolution format.

The actresses interviewed for the article discuss the strategies that they are employing to get around this "in-your-face" problem. Many are getting cosmetic surgery to remove or bleach out tiny imperfections. Some are being told to diet and exercise more. Others are using sexual positions that don't show the problems.

Regardless, this issue will eventually make it's way to mainstream Hollywood, triggering another culling of the ranks of the already beautiful people who must soon be blemishless.

As a side note, Sony's just-announced decision to not mass-produce Blu-Ray porn is another terrible decision on their part. Ignoring a $3 and-a-half billion a year industry is bad business when you're fighting a standards war.

Posted on January 22, 2007

Myspace, my kids, my God

by David Holtzman

Myspace is providing a way for parents to check up on what their kids are doing on the popular social networking site. The downloadable software codenamed "Zephyr" lets the adults see what name and age their child is using, while still preserving the privacy of email and profiles.

I understand why they're doing this...they're under attack by pretty much everyone. It's funny really, considering Myspace is owned by News corp, the media megalith owned by none other than Montgomery Burns Murdoch himself. The attacks couldn't happen to a nicer company.

However, blaming Myspace for problems with kids on the Internet is like blaming Hugh Hefner because kids read Playboy. How about the parents? What they need is a better way to do age verification and that's it. Let the poor guys alone, their 15 minutes of fame are ticking by and they should have a chance to make it or not on their own business sense instead of being brought down by the "whataboutthekids" legal jackals.

Posted on January 18, 2007

Spammer in the slammer

by David Holtzman

Bloggers know the prevalence of blog-spam in the last year. I would get a few a week then--now I get 25 or more per day, and the number is going up. It seems as if every new communication mechanism brought about by information technology carries the seeds of its own destruction in it. Because the transmission costs are free, it lowers the barrier of resistance broadcast advertising (spam). We saw it happen with Usenet, then email and now blogs.

Part of the problem is that the regulatory environment is nonexistent because commercial companies also want to spam us and would like to continue to do so. That makes the task of writing legislation that penalizes "bad spammers" while providing a clear legal playing field for the "good spammers" (ie; corporate marketing) a difficult, if not impossible one.

The best way to go about resolving spam is to require mandatory opt-in for all outreach, email or blog. I'd even go so far as to require all senders of bulk communication to register with the FTC and pay a small fee. This has to include non-profit and political fund-raising--two normally protected preserves.

Posted on January 16, 2007

Spying on the locals

by David Holtzman

Cheney has been trying to justify the administration's use of National Security Letters to obtain financial records of Americans.

The story is still loose on details, but apparently the Pentagon has been using the letters to coerce banks and other financial institutions to turn over information on US citizens, presumably because there was some suspicion that they were threatening military bases.

National Security Letters are a government technique to investigate citizens while sidestepping any normal due process or court oversight. Although the ability has existed for years, the Patriot Act gave it teeth. The normal user is the CIA, not the military.

The problem with this story like so many others, is that although it feels reasonable to not stop the government from doing reasonable things to facilitate an ongoing investigation, there's a big element of trust here to not require any checks and balances or oversight on the government throughout the process. IMHO, the best government is one who is being watched, while they watch over us. By that standard, this is a less-than-perfect government.

Posted on January 15, 2007

Yippie-ki-yay, MPAA

by David Holtzman

Slashdot has a bit about the MPAA having been caught uploading fake torrents so that they can collect IP addresses of the downloaders along with ISP information. BitTorrent is a very popular technology for breaking apart files and multicast distributing them for download--in short, the most effective way to illegally download copyrighted material on the Internet today.

There's no attribution so it's difficult to tell if the story's real, but I believe it. The MPAA has been running one of the most creative scams in American business history for years. Publicly, they cry about privacy (in a non-Johnny Depp kind of way) and claim to lose over $2 billion a year from online thiefs. Privately they cut deals as fast as they can to use the technology that they're slamming as a future distribution mechanism to sell their product, ironically safe to do so because the downtrodden hackers have established a culture that knows how to do so. This is similar to Napster, who turned to the dark side as a pimp for the music industry. Warner Brothers has made a deal with BitTorrent, for instance, to sell movies over the service.

I don't buy the $2 billion figure and never have. The people that I know who are willing to watch a movie that they've downloaded onto their computer are not doing it in lieu of going to the theatre. When people decide to go out on a Friday night and see a movie, it's more about the experience anyway. If they've seen one already (say on their PC), then they'll pick another one instead--viva la Multiplex.

The MPAA has scammed and bribed Congress to support them. They've waved those flagrantly offensive Interpol messages in front of our faces everytime we watch "Dude, Where's my car?" I'd like to make these idiots have to watch a mandatory 30 second video warning that corporate espionage and shady accounting practices are illegal every time they opened the door to their office.

The war has started. The armament is encyption and the battlefield is intellectual property.

Posted on January 12, 2007

Loonie opportunity

by David Holtzman

Slashdot mentions a CIBC article that three US defense contracters traveling through Canada have discovered that they were carrying a bugged Canadian coin (a Loonie or one dollar piece). The coins had tiny RFID chips embedded inside them.

This is a little bizarre because RFID has limited range (2-30 feet depending on the antenna). You couldn't track someone across an airport, for instance. These coins would seem to serve one major purpose--fingering the person carrying them for a short period of time as a target. I say "short period of time" because the subject might very well spend the mony. Although as an American who travels extensively in Canada, I've found that most Americans psychologically don't think of coins when they buy things bigger than a pack of gum.

I don't know if the story's true or not, but it's certainly interesting. My suspicion is that it was done by an intelligence agency (probably Canadian) to mark a target for commercial intelligence collection. It's too complicated and sophisticated a ploy for an individual to do and too expensive for most PIs or law enforcement types to even contemplate.

It really makes you wonder about those new RFID-enabled US passports, though.

Posted on January 11, 2007

The Apple of my ear

by David Holtzman

Apple computer has finally launched their long-awaited phone. Oops, as of this week they're now Apple, Inc., not Apple computer. I really liked the AppleTV among the other announcements, but more about that another time.

The phone. It looks sleek, almost museum-quality with the style that we've come to expect from Apple. It appears to have a stripped-down version of OS X built in, which, if so, will make the phone potentially compatible with a great deal of software. It's an iPod. It's from Cingular and right now, only from Cingular. It usees a built-in battery and works on the GSM network with Edge capabilities.

So, the good news is that this will probably be the coolest phone of the year (released: June).
The bad news is that there are some design considerations that might be problematic.

The built-in battery is a bad idea. The bane of the modern Apple has always been their batteries and this will probably prove to be in the same vein.

GSM/Edge makes business sense, but it's slow compared to 3G. For those of us who travel outside the US, it will be problematic. For those who haven't used a Blackberry or something similar, Edge provides fast enough Web access to make you try to download something, but still slow enough to be annoying.

I question whether the phone/MP3 combo is something that consumers really want. Maybe. It would be nice to carry one gadget, but it would be bad if the MP3 player jammed up, locking up your phone.

I'll probably get one this summer and see. If nothing else, kudos to Jobs and Apple for still pushing the edge. Their name change is both timely and appropriate.

Posted on January 10, 2007

Zombies come out and play

by David Holtzman

The John Markoff of the New York Times has written an article warning of the danger of botnets or networks of slaved zombie computers. This has of course, been a problem for a long time, but it's never really a mainstream threat until it's been announced as such in the Times.

The problem comes from numerous viruses and malware that infect susceptible computer systems (read: Windows boxes) and leave a back door open for later usage. Markoff interviews a professor who claims that there are over 65 million infected computers. So you may be wondering why all the digital undead? They are roped together electronically to launch attacks against selected targets by their masters. Sometimes they're scanning for selected financial information (although I think that this threat is overplayed). More likely they're used to launch Denial of Service attacks. The concerted probing of millions of machines can knock any network off the air, commercial or government.

And that's the root of my concern. The existence of such a vast network of botnets is a national security threat of the highest order. Perhaps, even probably, some of these slaved boxes are controlled by groups that we would define as terrorists. They could use them to blackmail companies and perhaps already have, but more threateningly, could be used to shut down, say Wall Street...the Pentagon...perhaps the New York Times itself (again).

Why is our government allowing this threat to exist? A massively parallel cyber attack could easily cripple national infrastructure, possibly cost lives by jamming up the online abilities of hospitals and first responders and certainly cost billions of dollars. As we become more institutionally dependent on the Internet for our daily well-being, the potential harm resulting from its disruption escalates to an equivalent level of crisis as would be another attack on a US airplane, passenger train or cargo ship.

Posted on January 09, 2007

Katrina

by David Holtzman

I toured the worst hit areas in post-Katrina New Orleans this week. I decided to spend New Years day in The Big Easy this year. I've spent a lot of time there over the years and have always loved the city--the culture, the music, the food--but I'd stayed away since Katrina virtually destroyed the city a little over a year ago. I decided that they didn't need another disaster-tourist at that time (although they do now, which is another story).

Grey Line offers a Katrina tour, led by a driver and a guide, both of whom were personally victimized by Katrina. The 3 hour bus tour starts in the Central Business District and quickly drives by the Superdome, where the guides begin the story, even as the winking new dome in front of us belies the horror of watching the refugee-packed arena shredded by the winds.

The bus continues on around the city stopping by the offending culprits--the levies. We see the infamous Ninth ward, the newly constructed Musicians Village and other hard hit areas like Lakeview. The personal narrative helped set the stage, but the visuals spoke for themselves--much of the city is still beat up and used hard--buildings are condemned, huge piles of construction trash can be spotted every few blocks and the condemning house tattoos left by the rescue workers are everywhere , the 'X' hand-painted on the wall telling who checked the house and when and what was found. The bottom wedge of the big 'X' has a number, usually zero, which is the body count discovered inside the residence.

I asked many of the people that I saw there who they blamed-- Nagin the mayor, Blanco the governor, Bush, FEMA. Some blamed Blanco, most blamed the Army Corps of Engineers for doing shoddy work to begin with.

The insight that I got from seeing all of this was the fragility of humans and how vulnerable we are to the failure of complex systems. An entire US city was almost destroyed because a handful of levies were unable to withstand the storm surge. There's a lesson here for those of us who work in technology and are involved in rapidly transforming our world into one controlled by the vast, interconnected systems of digital devices. It makes me wonder what are our levies?

Posted on January 08, 2007

Back on January 5th

by David Holtzman

I am away on vacation, and will be returning on Friday.
Thank you for visiting,
- DHH

Posted on January 02, 2007