Global POV: At the Intersection of Technology and Culture

The fire inside Amazon's Kindle

by David Holtzman

I just got my Kindle, Amazon's new book reader. I got it because this was a technology that I thought that I needed to understand and for some reason, the descriptions sounded compelling; more so than the half dozen or so failed book readers that preceded this one.

There are three things about the Kindle that are markedly different:

1. It uses the new "electronic ink" technology providing a crystal clear display, even in direct sunlight
   
2. It has built-in wireless (Sprint EVDO) that is preconfigured and transparent to the user
   
3. You can buy content from Amazon amazingly easy and a book downloads in less than a minute
   

The books are amazingly readable. In the case of Colbert's book, the illustrations are rendered and crisply, (in monochrome, of course). The device is light enough, that you don't get tired holding it up, the way you do sometimes with big hardbacks.

There are also things that you can do with a Kindle that you can't do with a book--looking up definitions (there's a built-in dictionary), playing background music, accessing Wikipedia, highlighting text (surrounding it with a box, anyway).

The battery seems better than I would have thought. 3 or 4 hours didn't hurt it too badly, whereas it would have killed my laptop.

The device is a bit clunky; it's not as elegant as say, an iPod.

But the big thing here is that it works. You can buy books and newspapers, quickly download them into a gadget and quite legibly read them when you're on the go. That's pretty cool. And by the way, many people have criticized Amazon for missing features from the Kindle, but there is an experimental web browser, via which I was able to manipulate to do most other things that I wanted to do.

I believe that this gadget will be quite successful. A reader is not a phone nor a music player. Some gadgets won't converge for awhile and unlike GPS's which will almost certainly be subsumed into phones, this reader might survive as a standalone thingie for quite awhile. I am looking forward to traveling and having a bunch of books in the Kindle and out of my suitcase for once.

Posted on November 30, 2007

The mystery of spam

by David Holtzman

Wave after wave of meaty spam drips down my computers screen. I am spending some time this morning tweaking my email filters. For the last ten years, the junk mail problem has plagued power email users, originally a few emails a week, usually from real companies trying to mass-market sell junk and eventually evolving into today's deluge of odd sales pitches. Today's spam is odd-looking, almost Daliesque, with their deliberate misspellings, use of spacing and symbols and what can only be called crazy products.

Who buys these things? Really, someone must be buying these right?

How about this note from "Betsy Fink":

Hello! I am tired tonight. I am nice girl that would like to chat with you. Email me at wnnllc@TheGlowPuppy.info only, because I am writing not from my personal email. To see my pics

or Rico Sanderson's financial missive:

Look at

Company T ride n Telecom New

T._R_(T)_M_

T./R/(T)[M] (tri.de,n Telecom) just added Permanent Technologies with its
Tine-Lok Fastening Technology for high vibration environments.
This amazing addition should supply a hearty boost to the value of (T).R..T./M/

Succuss for sure

Many of these spammail point to normal looking websites selling slightly off products. Like this one which points to a site called Canadian Pharmacies. They purport to sell Canadian drugs including "Penis Growth Patch" and "Penis Growth Oil"

The FAQ explains the mechanics of the online drug industry and is oddly compelling, like this explanation to the question of "why are your drugs so cheap?"

A: There is a number of reasons for that. We do not spend anything on marketing, there are no taxes to be paid as the product comes into the country unregistered, the manufacturer is located in an offshore zone and the production costs are way lower. No child labor is used.

I understand that the misspellings in the spammail are an attempt to circumvent filtering software. I assume the horrible grammar at the websites is because the people writing the website are Nigerian and speak English as a tenth language. What I don't understand is which idiot consumers ignore the choppy email, click through, get to the equally disturbing drug websites and type in their credit card number. (For a good explanation of the economics of Viagra spam, see here.)

Posted on November 29, 2007

DMC-eh?

by David Holtzman

Cory Doctorow at Boing-Boing has an opinion piece today talking about a pending Canadian bill in Canada that's structured similarly to the US DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). The DMCA is not well-loved by American consumers although it has been quite supportive of the rights of copyright holders. The DMCA was used to shut down Napster and has frequently been used by TV networks like NBC to force YouTube to remove videos.

Canada's proposed law is probably worse the existing US one. The gist of the Canadian bill seems to be that if a device has functionality to prevent copying of the content, it will be illegal for anyone to circumvent that protection for any reason, even say, the perfectly legitimate one of backing up your owned content.

If the Conservatives pass this bill, then Canada will be transformed overnight from one of the friendliest countries for consumers to one of the least friendly. Plus the Canadian cult of independence almost guarantees widespread flaunting of this rule.

Posted on November 28, 2007

The bell tolls for Classmates.com

by David Holtzman

Classmates.com has filed for an IPO. The company is valued by the underwriters at $600-700 million. Tech Crunch gives a nice overview of the terms:

-Revenues the first nine months of 2007 weer $140 million. (Full-year 2006 revenues weer $139 million; 2005 revenues were $85 million).
-Net income the first nine months was $1.6 million. ($1.9 million loss in 2006; $8.2 million loss in 2005).
-50 million registered users as of September, 2007. Only 12.8 million of which are active and 3 million of which pay on average $3.33 a month to email and connect with old friends directly.
-Monthly churn of 4.6 percent

These numbers would not normally have justified an IPO, but they are obviously trying to cash in on the Facebook lollapalooza. Classmates is not really a social networking company, well maybe they are. They are, however antiquated and have been or soon will be replaced by Facebook. Unfortunately for Classmates, niche businesses like theirs often lead the way for broader, more pervasive plays. It took companies like Classmates to make Myspace acceptable and ultimately pave the way for the wheeled juggernaut that used to be Facebook.

I am afraid that in the long run, companies like Classmates are not actually businesses, they are products; perhaps one of a long line of offerings in a larger company. Regardless of how the stock performs at the IPO, I question the long-term viability of one-trick pony social networking companies.

Posted on November 27, 2007

The ultimate nerd gadget

by David Holtzman

Wired has an article about the adoption of 3D printers, giving the example of a man who designed his fiance's platinum wedding ring on Autocad, then extruded a plastic prototype which was then cast into the real thing.

3D printers are driven by a computer to apply successive layers of polymers and build up a three-dimensional shape as a prototype. There are many possible future applications of this technology as the price comes down; medical one-off prosthetics, military parts, etc.

In many ways, this is the ultimate geek gadget. I look forward to getting one myself. Computing will go to the next level when you can leave the world of the virtual and build a real artifact from digital data. Imagine needing a spare part for a coffee pot, logging on to the manufacturer's website, downloading an xml-like file and building the part, right there.

Posted on November 23, 2007

Britain gets cheeky with privacy

by David Holtzman

The British government has lost data on 25,000,000 citizens. The data includes personal information such as national insurance numbers (like our social security numbers) for every family in the UK that receives a government financial benefit for having children.

The data was sent on 2 CDs via a commercial delivery service and lost.

How stupid is that? They could easily have encrypted the data (they just used a password) and why did they feel the need to ship a physical CD anyway? Don't they have network connections.

This kind of incident, like the much larger Veteran's Administration case in the US a few years ago, highlights a key problem: government people have too much valuable personal information on their citizenry and too little responsibility and accountability.

I believe that when this kind of thing happens, there should be a witch hunt and everyone up and down the chain of command should be crisply toasted. Resignations are the minimum; how about criminal charges and financial sanctions? Until mass market identity screwups are punished in a grown up way, they will continue to occur.

Posted on November 21, 2007

I'm turned in by Japanese--oh

by David Holtzman

Starting today, Japan will be photographing and fingerprinting all foreigners that enter the country. Their ostensible reason is that they are afraid of terrorism and want to compare the photographs and fingerprints to international databases.

Unfortunately they refuse to specify how long they will keep the information, meaning they will store it indefinitely.

It's going to be very difficult for anyone in the world to have privacy if countries keep doing these kind of things. If every country does this, than any well-traveled individual has too many copies of their fingerprints floating around.

Why is this a problem? Because fingerprints are often used for identification in biometric systems. Easy access to someone's fingerprints is a great way to steal someone's identity. If Japan only checked the prints and erased them after the visitor left the country, it would be less of an issue.

Of course it's hypocritical for an American to complain about this seeing as how all non-Canadian and Mexican visitors have been experiencing the same treatment for the last few years.

This is why the US needs to be careful with which way it decides to go on controversial security/privacy issues. Even if the measure seems to be reasonable from an US safety perspective, it invites other countries to do the same thing to Americans traveling abroad.

And the same argument applies to torture.

Posted on November 19, 2007

Globalization by gear

by David Holtzman

I've been traveling a lot this month. I've been in Canada, Korea, Hong Kong and am just leaving Sweden right now, where I was speaking at SIME 07, the big Scandinavian multimedia event; which was absolutely wonderful, by the way. Something that I've been reading loud and clear is how the Internet is quickly breaking down cultural barriers. In most relatively urban places in the world, people (read: young people), use advanced communication technology in every part of their daily life. Chat, Facebook, SMS, you name it.

The lexicon of this technology is not linked to any one country but is becoming a mish-mash of international abbreviations, mostly in English. Memory cards have been easily available in every place that I've been in the last few years, more apparent than Starbucks. The pictograms of technology like USB plugs, wi-fi hotspots and ethernet jacks are a sneaky new international symbology.

As new abbreviations and dialects come into existence from the ground up, this will serve to tie the world's youth together in a new and interesting way and incidentally pushing pop culture instantly out to the edge of the circle with imperceptible delay.

When I was a kid I could tell who was from urban hot spots and who wasn't by what they wore, what music they thought was hot and even by what kind of slang they used. No more.

I realize that these aren't new thoughts but call it another data point. I wonder what the world will be like in ten years and what the new generation, Gen Z(?) will think is important, given that they will be the first generation almost literally wired from the cradle.

Posted on November 16, 2007

Board of Congress

by David Holtzman

Waterboarding sounds like an innocent sport that you might take up in Cancun one vacation week. It is not. It is the practice of strapping a subject to a board, covering their head with a hood and slowly pouring water onto their head, into their mouth, up their nose and soon into their lungs. People who have experienced waterboarding compare it to drowning.

Malcolm Nance, a Navy terrorism specialist told Congress yesterday that it was clearly and unequivocally torture. Mr. Nance had experienced it himself as part of SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training.

He also felt that it was an ineffective interrogation technique because the questionee will say anything to make it stop. Several Republican members of Congress took exception to this and claimed that it had elicited good information from terrorist suspects already.

I am ashamed that the United States of America has gotten to the place where this kind of hairsplitting goes on. It makes a mockery of those who attacked Bill Clinton for his "it wasn't really sex" position. As a Democratic country we should be edging well away from the precipice of torture rather than lightly walking along the very brink.

I propose (and I mean this) that any Congressperson wishing to support the continued use of waterboarding volunteer to undergo 60 seconds of it under controlled conditions, such as the aviators' SERE school.

Posted on November 13, 2007

Spearphishing in the treacherous waters of the Internet

by David Holtzman

A Mr. Drew Biondi had an unfortunate problem recently with his Yahoo email account. Someone broke into his account and generated a mass email to all 600 of his contacts in his account. The Email was a variation of the infamous "NIgerian" spam scam where some quasi-officious Nigerian (usually a government minister) hits people up for money, sometimes as a prelude to collecting a large fortune. The latter is a variant of the 150 year old "Spanish Prisoner" scam.

Spearphishing is a personalized variant of phishing, in which an email appears to come from someone known to the recipient.

I expect to see the next big wave of phishing based on this technique. Enough personal information on all of us has been accumulated by now and correlated to email address to generate this kind of wave of personal attacks. I suspect that many people are going to be taken in when companies like Plaxo and Myspace get hacked or turn rogue and social networking info is all turned against us.

Posted on November 11, 2007

Banged in Iowa

by David Holtzman

I have long predicted that this presidential election would be typified by internet dirty tricks. It has already started, albeit with a whimper so far; the bang presumably coming in Iowa.

Wired has a couple of interesting articles this week. One analyzes the recent curious spate of emails coming from the Ron Paul campaign that apparently initiate from Korean spambots. This junk mail, replete with random string headers to circumvent spam filters, have actually accomplished their job, increasing media awareness of Paul, who did not have a ghost of a chance a few months ago.

There have also been several fake political websites springing up, purporting to be for a candidate, but actually lambasting him/her.

The interesting thing about these deceptive sites and to some extent, the email, is who is affected by this. The theory is that the dumb ol' electorate is getting swayed by these deceptions.

I'm afraid that the truth is that it is the media are the ones mostly affected by this trickery. In their ever-increasing attempt to scoop the other channels, conventional news outlets have taken to scouring the Internet for real-time stuff and they sadly do not do a lot of fact-checking. We, the electorate, do not have the time or the inclination to scour the Internet looking for a new political website and maybe we don't care so much anyway. It's the media's reporting that becomes newsworthy--they are the targets for this manipulation.

Wait until we get close to the primaries. I predict a three-ring circus with crazy websites, some satirical, some nasty, some pornographic. It's so easy to copy the pictures and other stuff from the official website and therefore easy and quick to create a fake one.

Posted on November 06, 2007

Do not track registry is a bad idea

by David Holtzman

Several privacy groups made a proposal to the FTC yesterday that they create a "Do not Track" registry, similar to the successful FTC "Do not Call" registry started 4 years ago. The idea would be that consumers would register with some database and that advertisers would have to check that list and not track someone if they were on it.

I can see why people would think that this is a good idea.

I think that it's a really bad idea. For three reasons:

1. The technology really isn't there to do this. It would require browser mods which would be one more thing that might break
   
2. It leads to backward-thinking design. We are starting to deemphasize the browser now, in favor of tightly integrated software. Cell phones use mini browsers as do XBox3s. They would all have to support the mod or the scheme would break.
   
3. Most importantly, it is actually anti-privacy. The only way that this would work would be for everyone to use a fixed number of registered pseudonyms, or IP addresses or both. I don't want a central repository with that information available to advertisers, the government or indeed anyone.

   This is a bad, bad idea. A much better one would be to levy a serious fine on each case of privacy abuse by a marketing company. Sure let Double Click collect the info, but if they screw up, fine their ass. With an average screwup affecting maybe 10-30 million people, hit them with $10 per violation and the accumulated money might teach them a better lesson.

   Why has the world gotten so screwed up that consumers have to enter their information into "Donot" lists to avoid having bad things happen to them?

   How about a "Do not Rob me" list? if you're not on it, then you can be mugged.

Posted on November 01, 2007