Global POV: At the Intersection of Technology and Culture

The future of privacy

In my book, Privacy Lost, I devoted a good bit of time discussing why I think that privacy as we know it is doomed. The main argument is that the nature of digital information is such that data never really goes away and even worse, that it becomes consolidated, at least from a search perspective. So, more and more information is available on each of us every year. And it's not just new information, but older stuff that's recently become digitized. Old records (financial, educational, medical, legal) are showing up digitally. You may not think that specialized and "confidential" information will be accessible, but you'd be wrong. Everything is potentially searchable.

So how do you maintain your privacy? Do you just give up?

Never give up. There are 3 things that you can do:

1) Fight back. Stop making it easier on them by giving out your social security number, phone number or anything else that simplifies the data base work.

2) Use pseudonyms online. There's absolutely no reason to use your real information anywhere short of buying something with a credit card. Establish a couple of good identities know and build your reputation. Someday reputation will be the prime currency in online worlds.

3) Let your elected leaders know that you care about your privacy. Privacy support has never been an issue in a political campaign, let alone a litmus test. Perhaps it's time.

Posted on February 27, 2007

Privacy Lost

Machilary

I believe that Senator Obama may very well become the next President of the United States. I believe that because I also believe that Americans are tired of being in Iraq and as the New York Times rightly points out today, Obama has been against the war from the beginning and is the only candidate who could actually win, who can make that claim.

We Americans are tired of hearing the word Iraq, even more than we were tired of hearing about Vietnam 35 years ago. There are very few supporters of Bush's policies because there are no good reasons to be in this war. The presence of WMDs in Iraq were a lie (and I suspect a viciously premeditated one), there is no "domino theory" strategy that's workable in the midEast, we have not brought the Iraqi people peace, we have destabilized the region, we have had over 3,000 American soldiers killed, God knows how many wounded and I would imagine, 50 times that number of Iraqis. Killing Sadam Hussein did nothing for world or Iraqi peace.

Senator Obama has clean hands. Senator Clinton does not. And that makes all of the difference. Hilary Clinton has been asked repeatedly at rallies to apologize for her war vote and she refuses to do so. Senator Edwards and Senator Dodd cleverly do express regrets, but Hilary does not--she is unrepentant and unlike Lady Macbeth, she is not air-cleaning her bloodstained hands in public. Every American politician who supported the war is tainted with that decision and their political prospects must live or die as a consequence.

And we Americans do not like this war. We feel that it's pointless; and other than those Americans who knee-jerkingly support every action done by the President, we believe that it is wasteful of lives and resources and that our presence in that situation does not further the goals of our country.

Senator Obama is aligned with that position and as much as she pirouttes around the pivot point of truth, Senator Clinton is not.

She cannot win.

Posted on February 26, 2007

Old toys creak like old men

My house is littered with bin and piles of dead technology. Milk crates and U-Haul boxes full of cords, transformers, old floppies, manuals and creaky old rollerball mice are under every stair, on top of bookcases and hiding in closets.

I can't throw out a perfectly good SCSI-2 cable or a power cord for a long-dead cell phone or a serial cord. I wonder what this is all about?

Reason 1-They might come in handy some day.
Unlikely. No one will use a SCSI hard drive again until many centuries from now when people stage "Renaissance Fairs" aping the 20th Century, wandering around gnawing on turkey legs and talking on cell phones that look like loaves of bread sprouting licorice whips.

Reason 2-They might be worth something
Not a bloody chance. I have very rarely heard of old tech taking on collector's value. I'm sure that it will happen someday, but I'm not so sure that I'll still be alive then.

Reason 3-Tech people are packrats
Now we're getting to the meat of it. People who have done tech...programmers specifially and former programmers horde everything because they just do. For them, nothing is sweeter than filling up their house with junk for 25 years just for that one golden moment when a visitor looks up thoughtfully from their can of vintage Jolt Cola and ask: "say, this may be silly, but you wouldn't happen to have an external floppy drive for an Atari 800 lying around, would you?"

Posted on February 23, 2007

Technology

Pianist should be behind bars

A new use for the burgeoning MP3 software industry has been identified--detecting fakes. In a case that's rocking and rolling the classical music world, recordings by a prominent pianist, Joyce Hatto, have been found to be fakes--plagiarized from other performers' recorded works.

A British music lover loaded a Hatto CD into their computer and Apple's iTunes product did what it was supposed to do--it identified the music by passing it to Gracenote (an online music catalog), who automatically analyzed the music and determined that it was a performance of Liszt by a musician named Laszlo Simon, and not by Hatto. It does this comparing the track length and other musical externals.

The British music magazine Gramophone investigated and found out that it was true--the sound waves of the Hatto recording and the Simon recording were identical. Once researcher who examined several other Hatto pieces concluded that ""We have yet to investigate a Hatto recording that has not proved to be a hoax."

Wikipedia has a nice table detailing Hatto's "career" recordings juxtaposed with the likely actual performer. In some cases, someone apparently made an effort to hide the deception by slowing a little bit down or something similar.

Hatto is dead, but her husband William Barrington-Coupe, who was also her publisher, denies any wrong-doing.

Obviously he's lying.

There are millions of variables involved in musical performance and a small change in one will affect the resulting recording. Different pianos sound slightly different in different weather and different pianists have a different style which would show up, if not audibally, certainly visually in a recording.

Something similar is being done by schools with student term papers. There are also companies involved in developing picture fingerprinting to spot copyrighted materials that are being illicitly used on the web. It seems as if we're headed to a world where plagiarism is a thing of the past, where everything is recorded, everything attributed and thieves will get smoked out early in the process.

Posted on February 22, 2007

I'm so bored with the election

The First primary is a little under a year away and I'm snoozing already.

Why am I bored? So far, the jockeying and media focus seems to be on character or at least people's perception of same. I want to scream about issues...the war in Iraq...the troop presence in Afghanistan...the possible nuclear arming of Iran...the strange deal made with Korea last week...Fixing things for the victims of Katrina...Building better levies on the Gulf Coast...normalizing relations with Canada and the European Union...inventing a dollar coin that people will use...stopping Nintendo from killing anyone else with their deadly WII controllers...finding out why astronauts are turning into psycho killers(could it be cosmic rays?)...helping Gandalf drag a flaming Ann Coulter off a bridge...dropping a bomb on the grammies so we can take a musical mulligan and start over...rolling Paris Hilton into a ball so that she disappears into her own genitals...feeding Nicole Ritchie some beer nuts with her margaritas so she at least gains some weight...DNA testing everyone in America to see who fathered Ana Nicole Smith's child...

Inquiring minds and troubled souls. How about debating some real issues to occupy us this year?

Posted on February 21, 2007

Watching the watchers watching us

One soon-to-be-recurring theme in this newly cryptographic world is the underlying technical war between institutional technology and citizen technology. It is, of course, the same gadgetry and that's what's different in the digital age--a private citizen can afford world-class spy gear.

The movie studios encrypt and hackers decrypt.

Big money software companies create horrific licensing policies and open source groups create alternative and free products.

It's going on everywhere. One interesting opportunity is citizens holding their public officials accountable. The proliferation of cheap cameras makes a whole new era of neighborhood vigilance possible.

I like this and that's why I find the following story in this morning's Slashdot disturbing: It's about a Georgia couple named Lee and Teresa Sipple. They live on the bottom of a hill in a suburban neighborhood near Rome, Georgia and they got tired of their neighbors ignoring the speed limit and zipping down the hill.

So they did something about it, using technology, of course. They installed a $1200 three-camera rig hooked up to a radar gun, so that they could get the speed of passerbys, take a picture of their plates and then email them to authorities. Leaving the neighboriness of their actions aside, for a second, their problems began when they caught one of their community going 25 mph over the limit and reported him to the police station. The problem is that he is a cop--Richard Perrone.

Rather than reprimanding the officer, the police are helping Perrone press charges against the Sipples--for stalking.

Don't we all get aggravated at people in power flaunting the rules? How many times have you seen a police car going the speed limit, regardless of where they're actually going or what they're doing? I applaud the Sipples for having the courage to report the officer and I'd hate to see them lose their case.

The empowering nature of technology is one of its greatest virtues and one of the few advantages in our surveillance society is to provide a new check and balance to monitor those in positions of power. A negative verdict against the Sipples would be a major setback.

Posted on February 20, 2007

Technology

School for scandal

What would it take to have another juicy scandal in this Age of the Internet? With the exhibitionist celebrities that we read about today, it seems that no event can surprise us, solely based on the event. For evidence, I present the bizarre sage of the self-destruction of Britney Spears, who craves media attention so badly that she's been photographed repeatedly sliding out of cars while wearing miniskirts and no panties and most recently shaved her head bald. How about Mel Gibson ranting about Jews when pulled over in his car or Michael Richards using the 'N' word more than a rap song? Any of these would have destroyed a career before say, 1990.

It's not the event that causes a scandal, IMHO, it's the person. No one was surprised at Mel Gibson's anti-semitic sweet talk because of Passion of the Christ. The richness of the scandal comes from hypocricy.

The more that a person holds themselves morally above others, the more that we want to see them fall...hard. Robert Downey, Jr gets our sympathy for his drug usage, while Rush Limbaugh did not. Bill Clinton was shredded for his sexual proclivities whereas Paris Hilton is celebrated for it.

Now I'm thinking about how this applies to politics. When politicans position themselves as against something, they become vulnerable to an attack at that spot. That's why so many scandals involve politicians. Now that we're moving into an election year, what would be scandal worthy?

Firstly, it must involve a front-runner. The other thing about scandals is that no one cares about an unknown miscreant. If Nicole Ritchie gets pulled over for DUI over the weekend (she did), it's a scandal. If it happens to me, it's a crime.

Secondly, it must be something that if true, derides the target's character and makes them seem at best a hypocrite, at worst a crook.

Thirdly, it must play into our popular perception of their weaknesses. Many people claim that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian, so a scandal with another woman would be the sweet spot. An allegation that she had a male friend would probably not derail her campaign--some might even call it justified.

The Internet has raised the bar for scandals...we now want proof. There are so many video cameras out there, that we expect to see pictures and video or we will not believe it. Therefore the good scandals will have video.

I expect to see some good scandals in this election year...stay tuned.

Posted on February 19, 2007

Pop Culture

Preaching to the online damned

How come there hasn't been a church of the Internet yet? It would seem to be fertile ground for the religously needy. What other medium would give a religion the potential to pump live video and audio into every middle-class house in the world simultaneously, translated realtime into the appropriate language? It doesn't even have to be simple broadcast--the internet allows for interactivity. [Good idea: What about integrating the Nintendo WII system into an interactive religous broadcast so parishoners can sit back and smite animated Satans with the controller as the minister preaches?] And let's not forget the vast potential to solicit donations. Someone could build a site that had a religous preachy video window front and center, a scrolling chat session of realtime hosannas on the left and a click here to donate icon on the right. Once the church got the poor schlub's financial information, it could be set up like Amazon's OneClick (well, not close enough for patent infringement, of course) and spur the parishoner on to click the collection button every time there's an amen or something.

I almost wonder if it's wrong of me to even speculate on this, because someone might do it.

We can laugh about this now, but I have no doubt that the next major religion to come along is going to make Scientology look like Yoga class because it's going to be on the Internet and sticky as hell.

There was one net religion...it was called the Church of the SubGenius and was very tied in a hidden way into pop culture in the 60s and 70s. For more info, here's the Wikipedia article. Their symbol is the picture prefacing this blog entry.

One reason that this may not have happened yet is because the target market--susceptible people who watch evangelist television--are probably just getting on the Internet. So the time is probably right.

Well, if anyone wants to make a lot of money the easy way and get into heaven, drop me a line.

Posted on February 16, 2007

Pop Culture

Narking up the wrong tree

Youtube (Google) has narked on one of its users. Less than a month after receiving a subpoena from Fox, compelling the video company to release the name of one of their registered users (id: ECOTotal), they did. ECOTotal apparently uploaded episodes of 24 that hadn't been released yet as well as several SImpsons episodes that had.

Let's leave aside the question of whether the uploader should have been punished in the first place (probably not) or at a weaker level whether Fox had the right to stop the premature viewing (they do). Where does Youtube (Google) come off rolling over that easily? Granted it's not as bad as Yahoo turning over Chinese dissidents last year, but still...

So the lesson to Generation IM, the spenders of significant amounts of their free time online is "Trust No One." Don't let the cutesy little icons for Internet companies fool you with their cartoon-like appeal and primary color design--these companies are driven by hard core businesspeople and they are no more altruistic than the Disney corporation.

Use pseudonyms. Do not link your pseudonym to a real email account. Always allow a couple of levels of indirection to your actual identity. Even if you aren't doing anything wrong...protect your privacy. Someday you may be glad you did.

Posted on February 15, 2007

Privacy

Cracked and blue

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

The seemingly endless waiting period is over. The much-vaunted AACS scheme of copy protection used by both Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs has finally been cracked a couple of weeks ago by a hacker named arnezami; the result is the string of hexadecimal characters at the top of this post. These high density DVD formats are so new even I don't have one yet and I'm a sucker for new, untested and sometimes dangerous technologies.

There was a lesser crack a couple of months ago that broke a couple of dozen DVDs, but the importance of this one is that it has compromised the whole system because what it reveals is the master processing key for the encryption...that plus the volume ID specific to each disk breaks the AACS protection. This crack enables one to read all of the disks.

Blu-Ray has other untested, probably equally vulnerable protection schemes, of course. There are things that the industry can do to recover from this, but they're not pleasant ones. They can change the key of course, but that will make all existing players unable to play new movies (see, you knew being an early adopter was dangerous). They can, and undoubtedly will, change the scheme used to generate the volume IDs

I have often written about the dim future prospects of DRM. My belief is that the focus in the digital world should be on attribution not retribution. It's a far bigger crime to plagiarize than it is to steal. The proliferation of shared movies (and music) does not necessarily hurt the studios because the kid willing to watch a movie in a 6 inch window on his PC was not likely to watch the movie anyway.

Even the PT Barnum of his generation, Steve Jobs, is shrewdly advocating that music companies stop using DRMs for onine music sales. I expect that this will happen, maybe this year, maybe next. Movies a year or two later.

The unfortunate part of this from a consumer viewpoint is that in an attempt to make up for perceived lost revenue, the studios will almost certainly get more aggressive with compulsory advertising on DVDs, which I hate already. If a couple million people download American Pie X and are force-fed commercials, why is that so financially bad?

Here's the irony--The studios are going to start looking a lot more like broadcast television, providing low-cost entertainment and making their money off of the ads. At the same time, conventional television is morphing in many strange ways, with cable companies like HBO leading the way with business models whereby they make all of their money on the back end of DVD sales.

Posted on February 14, 2007

1 Comment

Hi Gene

Michael Crichton in today's New York Times makes a very convincing case against patenting of genetic patterns. I confess that I'm not very savvy on this issue, but if most of what he claims in this op-ed is true, I'm appalled.

He explains that the genetic markers for some diseases (20 of them so far) like Hepatitis C are patented. Researchers wishing to develop a cure for the disease have to pay royalties to the patent-holder.

Crichton blames the overworked patent office for misreading a Supreme Court ruling and issuing these kinds of patents. Two Congressman, Xavier Becerra, a Democrat of California, and Dave Weldon, a Republican of Florida, have introduced a new bill to make these kind of patents illegal.

I worry about the twisting of the intent of patents. Historically they were granted to innovators and inventors to give them a reasonable period in which they could recover their investment and reward them with some profit for their risk-taking. Fine by me--that makes sense. The point of patents, like certain tax measures like capital gains treatments for long-term investments, reward the person who does the work.

But what about genes? They are discovered, not invented. Not only that, but it seems to me that the whole idea of allowing patents on these patterns has the opposite from the desirable effect--stifling innovation and punishing creativity.

We have lost our way. Just like copyright law has become a wealth creation device for the already wealthy, so has patent law become something that big companies use to squash the little guy. IBM, for instance, has over 40,000 patents. The much venerated Thomas Edison only had 1093 patents in his lifetime.

I hope that this bill passes. It's unfortunate that truly important issues like draconian intellectual property laws or global warming get virtually no press, no debate and no solution.

Posted on February 13, 2007

1 Comment

What I want from 2008

As the election gunshot sounds, the candidates are out of the starting gate even before the smell of smoke dissipated, no wait, that's Joe Biden getting burned. We hear a lot of talk about money and a lot of smuggery about Iraq, but as could have been predicted, no serious issues yet.

One issue that I'd like to see someone take up is privacy. Medical privacy, DNA privacy, rollback of the Patriot Act. Senator Clinton addressed this in a presentation once, but hasn't mentioned it much since.

My biggest fear going into this election is that it's going to be the same old thing warmed over. I'm actually looking to hearing from nuts like Brownback, because at least he's entertaining and different.

Viva la difference.

I've been predicting that this election would be the pivotal one, most memorable for it's use of the Internet. I also have a section in my book, Privacy Lost, where I talk about a "Digital Watergate", where the Net is used to confuse, scare, intimidate and disgust the voters. I will be watching for things that fit that category.

Posted on February 12, 2007

Vampire spam

I think that we are in the calm before the spam storm. It could get a lot worse. Here's how:

Spam is mostly annoying right now because it is the McDonalds of the Internet, clogging the arteries and stopping the good stuff from getting through. Spam is annoying although it can be a little dangerous when it carries a viral payload.

Now imagine that a spambot can harvest your contact list that many of you (not me) give freely to sites like Plaxo or Linkedin. Perhaps it also sucks down some email headers seeing who you talk to. The bot now has an idea of who emails you frequently enough to be of interest along with your inner circle of friends, acquaintances and drug dealers. Now this is a bigger leap, but if the bot can guess who you are in the real world (thanks sig files), it can correlate your online identity (email address) to your relationship web of friends and acquaintances and tie the whole mess to your real world identity. Once that happens, it's trivial to enhance the report by using Google and other pay sites and if cheap enough, add credit bureau, telephone information and DMV (motor vehicle bureau) records including pictures to the rapidly increasing dossier.

You might be thinking that this is paranoid--why would anyone spend the money to come after little old me? The answer is that it's not that much money; the beauty of automated bots is that they're free; more or less; you fire 'em and forget 'em. The computational cost is transferred to some poor yutz's PC that has been zombified by a previous viral spam. If you take over enough computers by rapid proliferation of a virus, you could build dossiers like this on pretty much everyone in the country in a couple of weeks. Of course it would take a huge pervasive security breach to infect a lot of computers at once. Vista upgrades anyone?

So what do we end up with? Absolutely personal spam. Spam sent from our friends and relatives. Maybe from our family and with subject lines and text that appear eerily personal. How do they do the last thing? Easy--you figure out the key words in a body of selected text like your scarfed up emails and pull out the significant nouns and verbs, drop them into a sentence generator and there you go.

Now how the hell do you stop that kind of spam? It's no longer zombies, now the spam is going to come back at us looking like its someone we know. It's vampire spam. And you know what? It will suck.

Posted on February 08, 2007

Whores and fan dancers-the media

I am constantly amazed by the arrogance of the media. As we move into an era where the plunk of every new digital gadget placed on store shelves is another tap, tap, tap cracking the shell of content protection that big media has extruded around their precious. Ipods, Tivos, USB thumb drives, DVD burners--what do they all have in common? Extracting and distributing proprietary content.

Steve Jobs, Apple's erstwhile CEO, yesterday called for the death of DRM, or at least on iTunes. He's like the cadaver procuring body snatching villager who sees the armed crowd heading to the castle, grabs a torch and leaps to the front of the mob, screaming "Death to Dr. Frankenstein!" He knows that content control is doomed and wants to be on record now as leading the charge.

The movie people make a little noise, but don't seem to care too much. The music people are the squeaky wheel that needs to get greased, and hopefully in a highly unpleasant way and in a painful location. They sue housewives, use lawyers the way Homer Simpson uses doughnuts and generally destroys what little credibility remains in their industry.

The print people however, have flamed out in their own unique way. They are so smitten with advertising revenue, that many print periodicals have rendered their online versions unusable.

Take the Washington Post, for instance, my home town newspaper. First they won't let you read past the front page unless you lie creatively on their demographic signup form. And they don't just want to know your name and occupation--they ask for blood type, which side you dress your trousers and your opinion on who made the better captain; Kirk or Picard. Then after you've given them the information (please don't tell them the truth!) they occasionally throw in ads that obscure what you're reading. Yep. Ads that pop up and block the screen, jump pages that you have to look at before the main content and unless I'm greatly mistaken, audio that comes out of nowhere and talks to you when you're trying to read an article.

The Post is hardly the only media whore, but they do stand on a very visible corner and as such set the standard for the others. The music distributers need to get the hell out of the way and let the artists interact with their customer base. Print media needs to come up with a better business model than playing Gypsy Rose Lee with their content, forcing readers to squint for a look at the naughty bits past the fluttering of the advertising fans.

Posted on February 08, 2007

It's my party and I'll cry if I want to

mo bush.jpg
What does it mean to be a Democrat or a Republican? I'm not sure that I understand anymore and now that the 2008 election is beginning in earnest, I'm a little confused.

I am and was anti-Bush because I see him as some sort of atavistic throwback who sees American statemanship as being a global panty raid where you get to wear flight suits. Call it neocon or whatever, but the evangelically fueled grim old white boy approach to diplomacy has always left me cold.

I also hated what's happened to personal privacy and basic Constitutional rights because of Ashcroft, Bush and (ugh) Cheney--the three stooges of the Apocalypse.

But in the course of promoting my new book Privacy Lost, I have discovered an amazing thing--privacy is not a right or left wing issue. It's both and neither at the same time. I used to think that it was left wing, but all too often privacy runs into the First Amendment. Then I thought that it was right wing, but it runs into neocon security problems.

Thinking about this has brought me to the realization that our party system is out of alignment with the voters. The old days where Democrats supported Unions and civil rights and Republicans supported big business and later evangelicals is over. Several of the Republican candidates are pro-choice, for instance.

The war in Iraq is a blip. Sure, it's a disastrous one, but still Iraq itself is not the issue, it's really about what will America's new foreign policy be in the new millenia? What's the new Monroe Doctrine?

The misalignment of the parties magnifies the ambiguous and distorted external image that's currently hurting the U.S. It's like having your Id (Republicans) and Ego (Democrats) perpetually fighting with one another. Where do you go from there?

Issues like privacy, national security, mid-east foreign policy, international intellectual property issues, space exploration and internet governance are all much more important than distasteful noise like the Terry Schiavo case.

These are not Democrat issues. These are not Republican issues. Perhaps it is time to realign our parties with our priorities.

Posted on February 07, 2007

It's alive! Security and Turing Tests.

One of the more interesting issues that have surfacing out of the murky security waters of the Internet is the newly-found relevance of what computer scientists call the Turing Test. This thought experiment, conceived of by noted British mathematician Alan Turing, seeks to determine the moment of sentience of an artificial being. It goes like this: you're in a room communicating by teletype (put new communications technology here). You have a lively conversation with someone somewhere else, using the equipment. At the end of a set period of time you can't tell whether they're a human being or an automaton. They've passed the Turing Test.

As far as I know, nothing has yet passed this quiz. A well-known 40-year old program called Eliza and its desendants often fool people for a few seconds. The Turing test that we might run into the most frequently is the "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" or CAPTCHA. This is the word in a picture that you have to type in to get access to some sites. The belief is that software cannot spot the word in the picture (not completely true) and therefore the reader is human. In fact, spammers are beating this system through the use of cheap or free human labor, coopting others to look at the picture and type the word. I think using the human being as a visual sensor does not break the spirit of the Turing.

I think that Turing tests are going to be big business and so intrinsic to our daily online life that we will shortly become very tired of them. Ultimately they are the only protection against spam. One way to look at the spam/counter-spam wars is that spambots and their enemies are quickly evolving as AI programs. They are getting quite adept at doing their job and may some day be viewed as alive in some sense, since they seem to have the main attributes; they reproduce and they protect themselves.

I believe that the very near future will see a war of semi-intelligent probes and hacking tools, spambots and viruses aht will attempt to punch through the hard shell of our personal computers and suck out our soft data goodness within. This battle moves too fast for humans to get involved. As anyone who runs a blog knows, spam has even worked its way down to blog comments and even spurious log entries.

It's a good time to be studying artificial intelligence. Once a discredited study, I expect it to get much bigger and more interesting as a spam fighting tool.

Posted on February 05, 2007

DNC Winter Meeting (guest post)

(this was from Jim Carr, who attended the DNC meeting. I thought his observations were interesting enough to post here).

DNC WINTER MEETING
Jim Carr
2 February 2007

My wife and I took a day off work to attend the DNC Winter Meeting at the Washington Hilton. We arrived just after 8:00AM to get into the "guests" line. Just like the party, anyone can get in. We had to put up with a long line to get in and a general neglect for punctuality. The GOP would have had web pre-registration, reserved seating, valet parking, and free coffee. I couldn't get my first cup until after lunch and I had a headache all day.

Still feeling fatigued from the 2004 elections cycle, the 2006 midterms were a tonic - especially Jim Webb's victory in VA. I will always remember cutting and pasting the VA State Board of Elections county-by-county results into my spreadsheet to project ahead the vote when 100% of the precincts would be reporting. I projected a Webb victory long before the media caught on to this possibility. Although all I did was donate money, I feel personally responsible for Jim Webb's election. So, you can thank me for the Democratic takeover of the Congress too. The nice thing about a close election:
everyone who helped, even in the least significant way, can take credit. Watch Webb, he hit a homerun with his rebuttal to the State of the Union address. Now it's time to focus on Campaign '08, which begins for me with the DNC Winter Meeting. This is the same forum where Howard Dean kicked off his campaign by famously telling us that he is from "the democratic wing of the Democratic Party." I give you my impressions of the DNC Winter Meeting below.

After much milling about and general disorderliness, Governor Dean calls the meeting to order (late!). We begin with the presentation of the colors by a D.C. high school ROTC color guard. We Democrats aren't quite sure what the proper etiquette is for such a martial ritual. Most of us figure out that standing is necessary and no talking, but do we cover our hearts or just stand respectfully? The pledge of allegiance follows. Thankfully, I know the words from robotically repeating it daily up until high school
when the kids more or less just started ignoring this daily homeroom ritual. We might not do the rituals of patriotism better than the other party, but we sure do the rituals of inclusiveness better than anybody. Our invocation is given by a female rabbi sporting a yarmulke (Reform, one supposes) and our benediction is given by an imam. Each prays for divine intercession on a number of policy fronts. Apparently, contrary to what we have been told, G-d is a progressive.

We are not quite ready for our first speaker Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is still in transit, so Dean has to stall. He is not a bad M.C. Senator Reid arrives and begins his speech. We learn that America is a great place, because only in America could a kid such as Harry Reid, whose mother had to take in the laundry of the prostitutes of Searchlight, Nevada, go to college, become a lawyer, and get elected to the U.S. Senate. We also learn that it is a great thing that the Nevada caucuses will been held earlier in the
nominating calendar because Nevada is such a diverse place - just like the rest of America. To be fair, I have never been to Nevada, but my mental picture of the state is that it is really not at all like the rest of America. Fortunately, Reid is not running for president.

Dodd

Our first speaker is Senator Dodd. Because he is the first candidate to address us, I have not yet caught on to the fact that all of the candidates are going to completely and totally ignore the announced rules: 30 seconds of introductory music, seven minutes speaking, and no more than 100 hand signs to he held aloft by the candidate's rapturous supporters. As Dodd drones on - he is still getting warmed up after ten minutes - I begin to get annoyed. Who does this guy think he is? Doesn't he have any respect for the rules? Why does he think that he has the right to speak for 20 minutes? But, once he gets
started, the speech is really pretty good. He hits hard on the theme that America's moral authority has been diminished by extraordinary renditions, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib. It's personal for him; he tells us that his father was a prosecutor at the Nuremburg war crimes trials.

Let's give this guy some respect. At least, he's got a stride on Joe Biden coming out of the starting gate.
Memorable line: "We won't take fear for an answer anymore."

Obama

This is the guy that I really came to see and most of the audience seems to feel the same way. What is this buzz all about? Kennedyesque is the word to describe Senator Obama. He speaks to us with a measured
cadence, tells us that America is in a sober mood, asks us to stop settling for the world as it is and start imagining the world as it could be. A man in the audience yells: "Barak, we love you." Obama responds "I love you back."

Is America ready to elect its first African-American president? Maybe. Race doesn't seem to factor in the general perception of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, but they never stood for election and occupy positions where they do not have to speak to "black" issues. Up to now, African-American Democratic contenders - Jackson and Sharpton - have crafted their speech to energize their base - African-Americans - just as Bush crafts his speech to energize evangelicals. You can't win an election with only your base; you need to have some appeal in other groups. What Joe Biden probably wished he had said is that Obama has cross-over appeal.

Obama might be just what America needs. Race is still a central fact, if not the central fact, of American life. Obama can speak to matters of race in a way that no white politician can. However, Obama is African and American, not African-American. His father was a willing immigrant from Kenya. His patrimony does not include slavery, lynching, or Jim Crow.
Memorable metaphor: "politcs as a blood sport."
If not 2008, maybe 2012?

Clark

Wes was my man in the last cycle, no regrets there. He is back again with his "National Security" brand testing the waters for 2008. Unfortunately, there was an interlude between Obama's speech and Clark's during which the co-chairs of the Rules Committee read their dreary report. People naturally made their way to the lobby to debate whether or not Obama is JFK in milk chocolate.

General Clark had a moment to seize in the last election cycle. He, alone among the Democratic hopefuls, could lay claim to the national-security brand during a dark period of our history when almost everyone was simply frightened. Instead of contrasting himself with the other hopefuls, General Clark spent a lot time explaining that he really was a Democrat, just like the others. Time will tell if the national-security brand has appeal in 2008. The danger is that the serious contenders have heard this and are talking
like him now.

Edwards

John Edwards had the hall well packed with his "One Corps". They were young, enthusiastic, and well scrubbed, just like the candidate. Most of them looked like students from UNC.

Edwards picks up where he left off, in his best plaintiff's attorney manner, he tells us one hard-luck story after another and then asks if we will "standup" to this or that evil Republican sort of thing.

There is a strain of populism in John Edwards that makes me uncomfortable.

Kucinich

Whoa, what year is it? Is it 1967 or 2007?

The stories he told of traveling through war-torn Lebanon were heart wrenching, except after awhile the telling starting sounding a bit theatrical.

Key question: Who will be the first Secretary of Peace and Nonviolence in the Kucinich Administration?

Fun moment: Audience member's response to what's wrong with America: "capitalism."

Hillary

I am totally prepared not to like Hillary Clinton. For one thing, I do not care for dynastic succession. It's given us George III and George W. But, she is really good. In fact, I think I like her.

Like Obama, Senator Clinton would be another first if elected. Temperamentally, the two are at opposite poles. Obama is about vision and hope; Clinton is about policy and practicality. We are hemorrhaging cash and real blood thanks to the borrow-and-spend Republicans, so at the moment, I am in more of a policy and practicality mood.

Senator Clinton spoke mostly of the middle class. I think she gets it.

There were a few awkward moments during her speech when a group of people dressed head-to-toe in red stood up in the back and started to heckle her over her support of the nonbinding war resolution in the senate. She dealt with it well, raising her voice, and firmly continuing her speech. Her message was that in a body requiring 60 votes to shut down debate, one must sometimes settle for what can pass, not necessarily what one wants. Her closing line of the war issue was that if the war couldn't be ended while she is in the Senate, it would be ended when she is president.

Two things I hate about her campaign: "I'm in to win" bumper sticker. What? Aren't you the front runner? And her telling us that she wants to have a "conversation" with America. Sounds like Oprah.

Memorable factoid: There were more bankruptcies declared last year than people graduating college. This brought gasps of disbelief from the audience. But it's true, I fact checked it.

There was some Exxon-Mobil bashing in more than one of the speeches, as they had announced billions and billions of dollars in quarterly profits the day before. It seems that the words "Exxon-Mobil" conjured up images of oil slicks, greenhouse gases, and greed in most of the minds in the room. But every time I heard "Exxon-Mobil," I thought of my retirement account.

Tomorrow, the remaining hopefuls will address the DNC Winter Meeting. I won't be there. I would have liked to have seen Governor Richardson. Governor Vilsack will speak too. I won't hear him, but I did have some of the popcorn (Iowa, corn, get it?) that his people were passing out in the lobby.

The DNC Winter Meeting sure was fun. I don't know who to support yet. Obama is interesting, Hillary's numbers went way up in my poll, and Wes Clark is still a fine man. I did like that movie about global warming, so drafting Al Gore sounds good too.

Posted on February 05, 2007

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Youtube we barely knew you

YouTube has been asked by Viacomm to remove over 100,000 videos that pertain to copyrighted material owned by the media company.

Viacomm owns such properties as Comedy Central and by extension The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park.

YouTube is complying. It's stated policy is that while it will do no policing of posted material, it will remove videos after received a verified copyright complaint.

Let's look at this cynically...Why would Viacomm want to stop millions of people from watching their television shows and increasing the propertys' popularity? They wouldn't, of course. They are negotiating. Like the revival of Napster as a whorish shadow of what it once was--the Costco of pirated music--the media companies are mad because they're not in control of their property, not because people are watching it. They have not yet come around to the idea that popularity of a video, detached from its original distribution source is potentially okay. I say potentially, because they will have to reinvent their business model since it's too easy to strip ads out of Internet downloadable videos.

Back to Viacomm. One of the biggest video downloads on most video sites are South Park reruns. Presumably they're on the Youtube chopping block, too. Yet, the show owes its existence to Internet distribution. Parker and Stone's careermaking video, the Spirit of Christmas, about Jesus fighting Santa Claus was not only hilarious but so widely distributed around the Net that I made special accomodations for it as a shared file at Network Solutions where I worked at that time, so people wouldn't squirrel away copies of the huge file in their personal area. I say "huge", when of course it was nothing in today's terms.

Viacomm and the other media dinosaurs will come to grips with the new world of digital media distribution, in which you lose the battle (control) and win the war (popularity).

But what about YouTube? My advice is that if they are not to become inconsequential by being exsanguinated by sharp-toothed intellectual property lawyers, they will have to make a stand. I propose something radical--move your servers to some other country and thumb your nose at the Man. For an example, check out www.peekvid.com.

Posted on February 05, 2007

Privacy is for geezers

A Zogby poll released this week shows that 91% of Americans agreed with the statement that our expectations of privacy have changed due to technologies and the Internet.

The most interesting parts of the survey show the clear gap between privacy expectations of baby boomers and the younger generations (I have an entire chapter in Privacy Lost devoted to this idea). For example, only 19.6 percent of 18-24 year-olds consider their dating profile to be an invasion of their privacy, compared to 54.6 percent of other respondents. Another data point is that 45.4% of 18-24 year old says that they or someone they know broke up with someone by text message.

The most telling answers came from the question about which they'd give up first: radio, television or the Internet. 18-24 year olds would hold onto their Internet access until everything else was gone. Older generations would jettison the Net first.

As this generation gets into power over the next 5-10 years, they will bring their lowered expectations of privacy into play in policy formation. The time to make sweeping laws for privacy is now, because it will not happen tomorrow. Perhaps the younger generation has a healthier attitude towards the role of privacy in the Digital Age. I guess we'll find out.

Posted on February 02, 2007

Privacy

Sony's mind trick

Sony reached an agreement with the FTC over their infamous "rootkit" incident last year. Sony had installed a intrusive (and badly written) rootkit on some of their audio CDs, in such a way that when the consumer had bought the music and played it on their PC, the rootkit was surreptitiously installed on their hard drive. Once there, it would do things like stop the music from being copied onto MP3 players, monitor how the tunes were used and occasionally phone home to Sony and tell them what else you have on your computer. (A rootkit is a program that installs itself on your computer and then twiddles the operating system to hide it's presence--sort of like Obi Wan Kenobi using the Jedi mind trick on Imperial Stormtroopers "These aren't the droids you're looking for.")

The settlement worked out to $150 per user to repair damage to their computer. I haven't seen the details yet, but I imagine that the submitting user will have to show that there was in fact, repairable damage to their machine plus proof of purchase of the CD. In other words, although there were millions of CDs sold with the damaging software installed, it's unlikely that Sony will pay off on many of them. In fact, as per usual with this kind of settlement, the biggest beneficiaries will undoubtedly be the lawyers on both sides who probably high-fived each other in the hallways, congratulating each other on collecting another round of high-priced fees.

So, and this is a serious question--why isn't what Sony did an act of terrorism? Wilful attacks on private property, spying on American citizens and potential disruption of computer networks sound like something that the Taliban might have tried.

Why aren't Sony executives being brought up on criminal charges? The recording motion picture industries have been getting away with a lot in this country in the last few decades. This is one of the most outrageous acts, but it's not an isolated incident. If Congress would get the entertainment industries tongues and wallets out of their pants, perhaps they would protect us from these predatory actions on the part of companies like Sony.

I believe that there are worse things going on out there in cyberspace created and released by the Mad Doctors of Hollywood. Viruses and spambots, zombie nets and trojan horse files floating around the Internet plaguing our personal computers may in some part, someday, be traced back to these clowns at companies like Sony.

Posted on February 01, 2007