Global POV: At the Intersection of Technology and Culture

Intellectual Property

Why politicians ignore tech

CNET makes a good point today--The candidates for US President are being surprisingly quiet on tech issues like Net Neutrality and privacy.

I was CTO for Senator Bayh's AllAmericaPac and fledgling campaign last year and ran into similar lack of political concern. Legislatively, the staffers are all over issues like Net Neutrality, but the political flacks were surprisingly disinterested (the campaign manager aside).

I was not really sure why then and I'm not really sure now. I can offer some possibilities, however.

Tech issues don't resonate with the masses
Supporting things like privacy piss off big companies, hurting contributions
Politicos and their staffers don't understand tech issues

I suspect that the latter is the real reason. So, to all you techies out there, let's keep an eye on these guys, shall we?

Posted on April 27, 2007

Politics

The Sopranos

The Sopranos is finishing up its sixth and final season and it's riveting television. It grabs you because the plot is completely subordinate to character. The web is full of speculation about who gets whacked, but everyone is arguing within the framework of the Soprano's World. It takes some pretty fine writing and directing to get millions of viewers to buy into this setup...like a Godfather or Apocalypse Now movie that keeps going on beyond the first three hours.

Can the Internet ever do this? Well, yes. In theory, the Internet is way better suited for this kind of deep character submersive entertainment than TV ever was. There are three reasons that the Internet is fundamentally superior to television for an immersive experience:

Linking
On the Internet, you can link information, which allows the viewer to choose the "focal depth" of the information, chasing the nitty and gritty as deep or shallow as they wish.

Time-Shifting.
The Internet can also be a time machine, because it does not have to play sequentially from the beginning to the end. For instance, a web-based show (non-streaming), could be restored to a particular "state" of time by the viewer, similar to hitting the pause key on a Tivo.

Collaboration.
One last thing that the Internet could do quite well would be to apply social networking or collaboration to entertainment. I believe that American Idol is a primitive beginning of collaborative entertainment.

I look forward to the first Sopranos on the Web.

Posted on April 25, 2007

Media

Privacy Task Force says "ID theft bad, verry bad"

The long awaited report formt the Federal Identity Theft Prevention Task Force is finally in and their recommendations are earth-shaking. In a nutshell, the task force led by Attorney General Gonzalez have concluded that ID theft is bad and may be caused in part by bad data practices by commercial organizations and by overuse of social security numbers by the government. Duh.

Their recommendations could actually be dangerous from a privacy perspective. For instance, by proposing that a new federal law for data notification supersede existing state law, they are in some cases (like California) replacing a strong state law with a weak federal one. The task force suggests that the new law only require notification in cases where there is significant risk of identity theft. Even more dangerously, the task force goes out of its way to not provide any new right for consumers to sue based on identity theft and possibly limit whatever legal basis they have now.

In short, it sucks. I would rather have no law than to have the government build a weak national framework that purports to be sweeping privacy legislation. I expected no better from the Bush administration, but I have yet to see any candidate truly embrace privacy as a plank in their campaign platform.

Posted on April 24, 2007

Kim Basinger ate my dog

If anyone hasn't heard this yet, you might want to. Alec Baldwin yells at his 11 year old daughter because she doesn't have her phone turned on at the agreed upon time. The audio is pretty harsh and you can hear it here along with his explanation. Apparently the kid's voicemail "mysteriously" showed up on the web.

Baldwin is a well-known actor who has lately been showing a flair for comedy in several movies and tv shows like 30 Rock. His ex-wife is Kim Basinger, a has-been actress. They have been fighting a very public, very contested custody fight for the last year or so. Basinger has repeatedly defied the court, even being charged with contempt for violating judge's orders for visitation.

Okay, I was a single father caught up in custody shenanigans and I understand how rough it can get. On the other hand, he calls her a pig.

So who's to blame?

Easy. Kim Basinger.

People lose their temper in the height of domestic arguing and while not justified or nice or even responsible, it happens. But what occurs inside the family stays in the family. Basinger (for who else would have done it?) putting her daughter's humiliation and shame on display for the world may get some nice smug witchie points with the judge but at what cost to her daughter's eventual emotional well-being? Some day the kid will reconcile with her father and there will always be this between them. I detest people who play this game with kids during custody cases.

My heart goes out to Alec Baldwin who at least deserves the time with his daughter to make his mistakes in person and not have to pour out his anger at his ex-wife on his daughter's answering machine.

Posted on April 20, 2007

Pop Culture

Tragedy vs. Privacy

I live in Northern Virginia and people here are still reeling from the shootings at Virginia Tech this week. The inevitable circus maximus of the media is in full twirl looking for someone to blame. In America these days we always have to have someone to blame.

I have a good friend who is liberal and doesn't like guns. She wanted to know why the licensing people didn't have access to psychiatric records and why the gun owner background check was limited solely to criminal records.

I thought about this and realized that I didn't want anyone to have the kind of data base that would be necessary to do this kind of check. Catching this kind of case would require a fairly comprehensive record of people that have ever been institutionalized and maybe even every taking psychiatric medication or even a list of those who are seeing therapists.

From a privacy perspective, berserker incidents may be unavoidable from a societal viewpoint because the cost of intrusion into our personal lives would be unacceptable. That doesn't excuse the obligation of the individuals to recognize problems and do something about it locally.

Posted on April 20, 2007

Constructing a mnemonic circuit using stone knives and bearskins

Spock is the name of a new web2.0 company that uses technology to solve a problem that's only been partially solved--finding people. What they attempt to do is to disambiguate the multiple person-one name problem. They do this by using what I consider a pretty sound approach--use software to initially populate the database, then enlist the great unwashed, the webtwofer types, to refine the data.

So Google does do this, but it's oriented along the lines of pure content retrieval, it's not looking for people, but stuff. If the stuff is organized along people lines, great, otherwise you get non-standard results. What we want I think, is to search on a person's name and get the most famous or well-known person, not the first one on Google's search list. So Michael Jackson the musician, not Michael Jackson the beer expert.

(Technical note: We actually want neither of those approaches--we really want a context-driven search based on who we, the searcher are. If I'm a beergeek, then I do want the 2nd Michael Jackson. Neither Spock nor Google can do that.)

I haven't actually seen Spock work myself, but I would like to play with the beta. By the way, they're having a moneyed contest to help them with some technical stuff. More info here.

In theory, this should work, although I wonder about the practice. It's like the Wikipedia situation, do we really think that hordes of anonymous people can actually cook an omelet or just break a lot of eggs? I also wonder how difficult it would be for Google to add this capability to their engine, thus killing Spock yet again. Still It will be interesting to see how they do.

Posted on April 19, 2007

Most of us are boring and know it

Reuters reports that Web 2.0 sites are not quite as participatory as the media hype would have us believe. Less than 0.16% of Youtube visitors upload, for instance. 0.2% upload to Flickr.

Yet overall traffic to these kind of sites are up 668%. This number represents 12% of all US traffic, up from 2% two years ago.

Significance? It's like cable access channels...a camera does not make an actor. Most people don't have anything entertaining to say or do and they quickly realize it. Much of the best stuff on Youtube is based on screwups, very little are professionally produced. Although check out this bit on George Washington.

Web 2.0 is, of course, doomed. Maybe not today, but soon. The idea of user-generated content is interesting, but not entertaining and I believe that realization of that is what drives these numbers. American Idol would lead you to believe that anyone is a potential Celine Dion, but the truth is that you would not pay to hear most people sing, or to watch most people dance or to listen to comedy from anyone who has a goofy face.

Posted on April 18, 2007

Double your Google, halve your privacy

If there's any justice in the Justice department, then the pending acquisition of DoubleClick by Google will be blocked, but don't hold your breath. For those too busy reading The Onion (This week's headline: Anna Nicole Smith finally reaches target weight!) to catch up on businessy news, Google has just made a $3.1 billion offer for DoubleClick, besting an offer from Microsoft. Google is a preeminent search engine company that is trying to ooze out over the airwaves and own pay-per-click advertising, DoubleClick is the company that pioneered banner ads and click-through revenue and is a major force causing privacy erosion online. Yeah, let's get THOSE two companies together.

Between the two of them, they will touch over 80% of all online ads. Additionally, they share a common malady--they both leave more cookies lying around then a Keebler elf with Parkinson's.

I understand perfectly why Google wants this and certainly DoubleClick's motives are clear (3.1 billion)...who cares about the consumer anyway? Well, the government should. Perhaps the "Injustice" department will rise to the occasion and at least consider whether this merger/acquisition is anticonsumer.

Posted on April 17, 2007

Business

The Law of Unintended Consequences

I am often accused of being conspiratorial by radio interviewers or at least foolish because I do not automatically support the concept that national security and the needs of the government always trump personal privacy. The naysayers often go on to question the idea that anything monumentally bad will ever happen to innocent folks as a consequence of all that data being collected. To all of them, I offer this story:

In 1993, the government was worried about student loan scofflaws and decided to crack down. They did this by building a massive federal database called the National Student Loan Data System and stuffing it to the gills with tasty bits of bytes on college students. They have continued to build on this database and then, when a kid is behind on their payments--they sic a commercial arm breaker on them and the debt collector uses the aforementioned database to find the former student and get them to pay.

It is now becoming apparent that this huge database, containing personal information including Social Security Numbers, of almost every American student, has been used as the personal well-stocked fishing ground of Direct Marketers. Theresa S. Shaw, COO of the Office of Federal Student Aid, which manages the database, recently admitted at a conference that the data mining is out of control.

This is the law of Unintended Consequences in action--If you build a sufficiently comprehensive database, it will be used in the future for any purpose that makes sense at the time, regardless of the intentions of the originator.

This rule should be part of the discussion on funding for any government-sponsored database project. It is not enough to assure the public that a database will be protected. As long as there are no tangible sanctions in place for abusing personal data, databases will be exploited.

Posted on April 15, 2007

Librarians are heroes

As I've been making the rounds of radio stations (via phone, of course) and talking to hundreds of people about my book Privacy Lost, I've gotten some ideas about how America feels about privacy. So here's a few observations:

Conservatives are quicker to defend privacy than liberals
This surprised me. I've found an almost universal reluctance among liberals to trade away any other issue for privacy because granting privacy rights often takes away weapons that are used by 1st Amendment types, environmentalists and other advocacy groups

Security rules are imposed on others, privacy violations happen to you. Everywhere I've seen a double standard--Most people are willing to take away YOUR privacy rights in a flash for National Security, but they'll guard theirs zealously

The single group who is almost universally aware of privacy issues and protectionist aligned are librarians. Thank God for them! Like George Christian, executive director of Library Connection,who has recently bucked the FBI on turning over computer records a la Patriot Act. Quote Mr. Christian,
Terrorists win when the fear of them induces us to destroy the rights that make us free

Posted on April 13, 2007

Karl Rove--Fantasy man

I am a hopeless romantic. I believe in true love, the purity of little children and the sancity of the family...oh yeah, and that government workers should be ethical.

Call me crazy, but I think that like Caeser's wife, those who want power in the public sector should be straighter than the rest of us. Just like I think that cops should drive the speed limit (are you laughing at me yet?) So, you can imagine that it comes as a shock to me to find out that the Bush White House has been using private 3rd party email addresses to transact official government business in complete violation of the 1978 Presidential Records Act.

The White House has begrudgingly admitted (when forced to by Rep Waxman who asked for official records), that they used email accounts routed through the Republican National Committee (RNC) to do things like, say, talk to convicted felon Jack Abramoff or more recently, to have discussions about firing the 8 disloyal US attorneys.

If a corporate executive from a company under investigation, an Enron say, did something like that, they'd go to jail. Not so the White House.

Oh and the kicker is that they've lost much of the email.

I may be the first person in history to say this but I have lost my virginity to Karl Rove (metaphorically speaking, of course).

Posted on April 12, 2007

Politics

Thinner is a winner

I went shopping for televisions and monitors this week and was stunned at the continually dropping prices for HD-capable thin flatscreens (starting at $350 for a 20 incher at Costco). CPU power is inexpensive, fixed storage prices have dropped and now displays have gotten cheaper. The total package price for a functioning, graphically intense computer system is now well under $1000. At that price, things start to happen. Computers become more directly competitive with game consoles and will accelerate their convergence on a universal media platform.

The first thing that they need to do though is to become transportable or at least omnipresent throughout the house. One of the biggest impediments towards having a computer drive entertainment systems is the need for a dedicated computer in the family room. The form factor isn't right either; computers look out of place almost everywhere in the house.

This is the real power of Apple TV--an attractive, low-key computer that fits well into an AV rack in an entertainment area. They should be able to out-Tivo Tivo eventually.

Posted on April 11, 2007

Imussed up

Sigh. Another talk icon self-immolates. I refer of course, to Don Imus, who referred to the Rutger's women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos" and then refused to back down or apologize for days. I have not seen pictures of the team, but I am guessing from the outcry that the team is composed predominantly of African-American women. MSNBC suspended the talkshow host for two weeks, a penalty that Imus agrees with apparently, now that he's newly contrite.

I wonder at these talk show hosts; on the radio, day in and day out 20 some days a month, 12 months a year. Something has to slip out. How can anyone be glib and spontaneous and not screw up? Although the screwup in question is racial, there is no supporting evidence to suggest that Imus is racist. Just an old talk show host running off at the mouth a little too long and making a public comment that should have been expressed in private, or perhaps not at all.

Is it that we all make these little nonPC cracks and Imus got caught? What he said was hardly on the par with some great blunders of the last few decades where public figures made comments about minority groups that did expose underlying prejudices. In an era of hip-hop with the 'N' word being used as a condiment, is is possible that the very brittle social walls that seperate those who can say certain words and those who cannot, have started to crumble?

Posted on April 10, 2007

Pop Culture

Keeping your head online

The Washington Post has an article this morning about how Mexican drug cartels are using the Internet in a highly sophisticated way. Among other things, they have been posting videos of killed or tortured enemies on Youtube and other video sites as both a deterrence and as bragging rights. Decapitation and autopsy videos are shown with voice overs warning traitors not to trait and presumably kids to not try this at home.

The anonymity of the Internet coupled with the powerful reach of even a simple website, (let alone a leviathan like Youtube) creates this capability--the option to disseminate multimedia of highly charged video that would almost certainly be censored by most governments or their regulated media lapdogs. And this isn't the only case like this--remember the mideast decapitations popping up after the very public killing of reporter Danny Pearl? BTW, I just looked with Google and found that the Pearl video is still out there--I won't publish the link.

What's it mean? It means that the Internet is the greatest source for mass propaganda ever created. Whether said salesjobs are terrorist recruiting or commercial advertising from Disney is simply a matter of degrees and orientation. The only saving grace is that it will always be possible for dissenting messages to also be aired, implying that the future will be some sort of game where we are like ping pong balls, perpetually caroming off opposing messages, flying from one side to the other based on the strength and the spin. I can't wait.

Posted on April 09, 2007

Media

Digitiphobia

The hoary old NY TImes has an op-ed today by a gentleman named Richard Conniff titled The Rich Are More Oblivious Than You and Me. In the article, the author posits that not only are the rich less aware, but they are also risk takers in interesting ways because they do not fear the downside. As examples, he gives the recent story of comedian Eddie Griffin trashing a million-and-a-half dollar Ferrari and the by now notorious Steve Wynn's elbow-through-the-Picasso puncturing. The nonrich drive a 7 figure car differently than the wealthy, because any resulting damage can disproportionately disrupt their (non-rich peoples') lives.

I think that this principle also applies to technology. Those who are willing to take chances with tech gear learn more. Perversely enough, these people tend to be the ones who already understand computers and other gizmos well enough to fix any resulting problems from the experimentation. I can download and install a piece of wacky public domain software, because I can remove it later if it acts up, but everyone is not in that same position. I can experiment with digital cameras and cell phones, computers and camcorders in a way that non-techies cannot, because the downside is a couple of hours of my time rolling back what I did. If the downside was complete and utter destruction of the utility of the expensive product, I might not be so quick to try something new.

I'm constantly being asked by those around me to help them fix their email, configure something on their laptops or explain the birds and bees of USB and firewire to these helpless souls standing there clutching a proud and masculine digital doohickey in their lefthand and a receptive female whatchamacallit in their right.

Perversely enough, the more we experiment, the more we learn. The more afraid we are to play Dr. Moreau and cross-fertilize technology beasts, the more that the nirvana caused by understanding technology passes us by.

Digitophobia: the fear of screwing up a digital gadget by playing with it.

The lesson for parents: encourage your children to screw around with expensive computer stuff. Treat your gadgets like tinkertoys, not like the family jewels. After all, those cameras and computers will be obsolete in 5 years anyway.

Posted on April 06, 2007

Gambling on Second Life

The FBI has been invited to look at the gambling going on in Second Life. Numerous virtual casinos have popped up in the virtual reality world, offering games of chance ranging from blackjack to slot machines.

I'm very interested in the outcome of this investigation, at least philosophically. It's not a simple decision, either. Virtual gambling for real money should probably be regulated, but what about virtual gambling for virtual money? Or for that matter, real (meaning "physical") gambling for virtual money? As the FBI continues to crack down on online casinos, virtual worlds like Second Life are a perfect alternative for the next generation of gambling dens. Why? Because virtual currency will probably turn out to be a way around federal law and virtual currency is worthless without a virtual world to spend it in. This could turn out to be a great future cash cow for the burgeoning world creation business.

Posted on April 05, 2007

General

Some updates...

Keith Richards was kidding when he said he snorted his dad.

The FCC decided to reject the proposal to allow use of cellphones during flight.

Posted on April 05, 2007

General

Start me up

keith richards1.jpg
Keith Richards snorted his father's ashes mixed with cocaine.

There's no social significance to this and certainly no technology hooks...I'm just impressed and appalled.

When asked about his seemingly suicidal, devil-may-care lifestyle, Richards was quoted as saying: "I was No. 1 on the who's likely to die list for 10 years. I mean, I was really disappointed when I fell off the list."

Posted on April 04, 2007

Pop Culture

A bigger piece of Apple's pie

The first crack has appeared in the DRM (Digital Rights Management) armor hastily thrown on by the entertainment industry to fight the unseen dragons of piracy. EMI and Apple announced yesterday that most of their catalog already released digitally will be available on iTunes without DRM protection. This does not include The Beatles.

Granted that this experiment may fail. EMI may not see any measurable gain from it and drop the experiment. Or they mail see billions of copies of their music on piracy sites and rethink their decision. Other music publishers may see this as an aberration and not jump on the bandwagon, rendering the EMI decision a business quirk and not a trend. Apple may decide that they don't like it either. After all, DRM protects them more than the music companies, in some ways. Music purchased from iTunes cannot be played on other players because of the DRM scheme.

Yet, lets look at the big picture; the company and Apple split a bigger pie. DRM-free music will be $1.29, not $.99 per song and I predict that there will be no price resistance from consumers to paying it. Apple continues to establish its industry dominance by showing that they can crack the whip and get everyone to jump. If this works, then they're the ones to break DRM's back. The consumer clearly benefits because Apple will be providing higher quality music for downloading and of course, because there will be no DRM encoding.

If Apple's efforts are successful and that can be judged by watching to see if other music companies join in, then they own the digital music industry for years to come. This also sets the stage for the importance of Apple's iTV box, because they will eventually try to do the same thing in Hollywood.

Posted on April 03, 2007

Intellectual Property

Cell phone gossipers can just go to hell

Having just returned from vacation today, I'm fresh full of bitching and complaining, ranging from poor hotel service to cattle car airplanes. But my biggest hassle when I travel is my loss of privacy--auditory privacy. People just won't shut the hell up.

You can't get peace and quiet anymore when you travel.

Why? Just like everything else these days, blame it on technology.

The way some people use cell phones drive me crazy.

Coordinating something. This is a short and sweet call that sounds like "Meet you at the clock in 15 minutes" or "Half a million by noon or you get another finger in the mail"
Making a business call. This tends to be 10/15 minutes in length and is a bunch of strung-together Q and A punctuated by a lot of self-important throat clearing and if talking to a salesman, seasoned by ghetto business patois. "Yeah, I'm down with it, dog..600 cases of sani-wipes, blue at 10% off list."
Normal people talking normally. Most of us use the cell to call our kids, spouses and friends and give them immediate information, saving the details for later. "I had a good time last night, but I did get a restraining order."
Using the cell phone to extend the range of mindless gossip. This one I don't get, but many people talking on their phone are exchanging no information at all...they are carrying on a conversation that they ought to be having in person. By "ought to have", I don't endorse the idea, just requesting a change of venue. "Then, he said that these shoes matched my eyes and I said, why they're not red...[sound of grande toffee nut latte being snorted out a surgically enhanced nostril]"

I saw one too many people lying on the beach, obviously staying at a very nice hotel and gabbing on their phones about television shoes, manicures and mutual friends. Why do people feel the need to do this? The worst part of it is that the kind of talkers that BS on their phone in pubic don't care if you hear them. In fact, it seems that they want you to listen in as they stroll into your little sound bubble at the beach or the bar or the restaurant or the park or walking along the sidewalk or on airplane.

This last piece is actually newsworthy. The FCC is considering allowing cell phone usage on airplanes. The interference issue was never real anyway, and technically all the airlines need to do is to equip the planes with small cell tower equivalents. The real problem is not technical or safety-related, but privacy. I don't want to hear the blabbers and their treacly, intrusive conversations in the air where I'm captive, can't always put headphones on to drown them out and am usually nervous anyway.

There's something special about being at a park and hearing the birds or getting some peace and quiet in an airplane seat. As a culture, we've devalued this right to be auditorally alone and we will soon lose it in every public place.

Posted on April 02, 2007