Global POV: At the Intersection of Technology and Culture

Privacy

Bam

Martha Stewart is buying Emeril Lagasse. The Martha business empire is buying most of Emeril, the TV shows, the cookbooks and the cooking equipment. It does not include Emeril's restaurants. The deal is worth at least $45, maybe up to $70 million.

This deal illustrates how valuable well-known intellectual property is today. Emeril or Martha's kissers are instantly recognizable and thus can be used to push pots, pans or towels. Nothing is more valuable than a fake celebrity; whether it's a celebrity chef, a pop singer, an athlete or even a highly-strung upper-class homemaker that's done jail time.

Posted on February 20, 2008

Pop Culture

Gagged by a lawyer

A Caymans Islands financial institution, the Julius Baer bank, has taken some Scientology-like steps to have controversial content taken down from the Net. Wikileaks.org, a whistle-blowing web site published a secret internal bank document which purportedly details how the bank helps their customers hide assets and launder cash.

The bank got Dynadot, the California-based hosting company for Wikileaks, to not only take down the site, but also to "lock" the domain name, keeping Wikileaks from moving the site elsewhere. They then got a Northern California judge to sign off on the agreement between the bank and the hosting company. All of this was done ex parte, without giving Wikileaks a chance to respond. Their site is still down.

I have always been worried about this kind of thing, specifically the usage of domain names as a club to batter small and relatively powerless organizations into submission. Shame on Dynadot (is that a real name?). The ICANN-accredited domain name registrar rolled over far too easily.

I understand why someone who didn't like something that someone said on a website would want it taken down. But shoving a lawyer down someone's throat is an elitist way to gag someone. When the Internet was decentralized, this kind of stunt would have been almost impossible. I blame ICANN for not stomping the registrar.

Posted on February 19, 2008

Security

Fragging a satellite

The United States Navy is going to attempt to shoot down a falling spy satellite. The government announced several weeks ago that a recently launched NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) satellite had failed and communication had been cut off before it could be told to dump its half-ton load of hydrazine fuel. Even though the NSC originally pooh-poohed any danger caused by the falling bird, President Bush announced yesterday that an Aegis Cruiser will launch a non-explosive anti-ballistic missile to try and disintegrate the space craft.

The Internet is buzzing with conspiratorial rumors on the US action. The actual danger from the falling parts seem negligible as 90% of the ground trace is over open water. Many people believe that the US is secretly testing an ABM system or even worse a seaborne satellite-killer. The satellite is apparently an Imaging Radar craft. Aviation Week says that it is no bigger than 15' x 8', much of which is probably a fragile, easily burned-up fold-out radar dish. Of course, there could be another payload on the satellite that would cause an international incident if discovered.

Based on my admittedly 20 year-old experience, I suspect that they just don't want the little pieces to fall over Russia or China, just in case a studyable chunk survives. Plus, the military likes to test stuff and this is a golden opportunity to attempt to shoot a falling object from a Cruiser. (anti-meteors?) Either way, I hope they make the video public; it should be quite a fireworks show.

Posted on February 15, 2008

Security

Human chipping

I have an op-ed in Business Week Online today about human RFID chipping.

Posted on February 13, 2008

Privacy

The sons no one forgets in the British Empire

One of the few saving graces in this era of decreasing American privacy is that it is worse in Britain. Privacy International's annual country privacy ranking has consistently ranked the UK as one of 3 or 4 worst in the world for privacy. America is typically in the tier slightly above; still bad, but at least not the worst.

A new plan to track youngsters' educational achievements beyond school has drawn fire from privacy critics. Every 14 year-old in the country will be given a lifelong "learner number" which will follow them and be updated throughout their life, until they retire. The database will record all of their education throughout their career as well as any disciplinary actions in school such as expulsions. The educational piece of these records only (supposedly) would be made available to future employers who wanted to check up on an employee's academic bona fides.

The problems with this plan are pretty obvious, I would think. Like every other scheme, it optimistically assumes the best possible scenario, ie, that the UK government would carefully protect this information for decades without an incident, let alone abuse the information itself.

This is one of the battles being fought around the world for a universal ID card. The announcement yesterday that Europe may start fingerprinting visitors, the fact that the US already does, the slow chipping away (no pun intended) at the resistance to the US "Real ID" and parallel efforts underway throughout the Western world are all leading to cradle-to-grave databasing of us all. It's sad that the formerly globe spanning powerhouse must be the country to lead the rest of the world into the unknown one more time.

Posted on February 13, 2008

Privacy

Bugged by celebrities

Isabella Rossellini is starring and directing in a series of 8 2-5 minute shorts called Green Porno. Each of these bit videos is designed for small screens such as cell phones. The films themselves are based on insect sex; each one shows Isabella as a male insect mounting a female bug of the same species.

Ms. Rossellini is a veteran film star and the daughter of Ingrid Bergman, the femme fatale from Casablanca.

Not having seen the films, I can't comment on the contents, although I guess that I can imagine it well enough.

But this kind of property along with other highly entertaining, short videos like Will Ferrell's "Landlord" videos are perfect for the exploding world of video-capable mobile gadgetry such as cell phones, iphones, ipods and ultralight laptops.

Expect these celebrity-driven videos to flourish in the next few years. They put money (if any) directly into the pockets of the talent, they're probably satisfying to create and most importantly they begin the ultimate process of disintermediating the terminally ill media distribution companies that have been frantically clutching at legal IVs and technological wonder remedies to self-heal their dying business model.

Posted on February 12, 2008

Media

Barrak Obama.jpg

Obama

After a brief flurry of primary activity, our voting choices are now limited to John McCain as the Republican candidate and Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton as the Democrat. As a Virginian, I am anxiously waiting for tomorrow's primary, especially since Obama and Clinton are neck-and-neck at the moment.

Either Clinton or Obama seem like reasonable choices and hey, at least John McCain is not Bush.

Clinton is now generally viewed as the candidate of experience; Obama is seen as the candidate of change.

I sense that America is on the cusp of change and whoever wins this election might be the catalyst. Do we want a wheeler-dealer like Senator Clinton or an ideologue like Senator Obama? Who can beat McCain and for that matter, do we care?

After a lot of soul searching, I will vote for change. I will vote for Obama.

I would like to see what Obama could do and if he's a bad choice, it's only four years. I am less interested in Senator Obama because of his race, then I am in his enthusiasm and attitude. He could make a difference.

Posted on February 11, 2008

Politics

Microsoft Mash Up

Microsoft is playing around with next-gen advertising techniques, many based on determining on how the viewer thinks, rather than by figuring out his/her demographics or just serving dumb ads tagged to search keywords. This is clearly the purpose of Microsoft Surface, the prototype tabletop touch screen that they've demoed this year.

The Redmond company has shown technology that can evaluate the relative intelligence of the user, tailoring the the ad accordingly as well as convert the spoken words of the video into text, changing the ads to match whatever was being discussed on the video.

I imagine that we will be seeing a whole new kind of advertising in the next wave of Internet technology. There are three trends

Convergence of marketing/advertising companies and technology firms
Sophisticated data mining developed in a post 9/11 world
The renewed interest in applying psychological evaluation methods to Internet browsing

I can imagine lots of creepy outcomes here. (hint: see Minority Report and Bladerunner)

Posted on February 07, 2008

Advertising

The Source of the Amazon

Amazon is quietly hedging its economic bets by selling a product that will probably never appear on most peoples' wish lists--data center services. By productizing their spare computing power and storage, they will be able to convert their spare back office cycles to cash. Even if demand turns down in a depressed economy, Amazon may be able to more smoothly ride through that downturn without having to sell off capital assets in a panic when demand temporarily falls off.

Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is leading the continuing trend towards complete outsourcing of back office computing.

It will be interesting to see if this business factors in Amazon's valuation.

Posted on February 04, 2008

Business

Nerd makes a pass at Geek

For anyone who missed the big tech news this morning, Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo. For money, too, not old copies of Windows Millenium or a talking paperclip or something. In fact, they're offering $44.60 per share, a 60% premium over the current market price.

This is a bold pitch for Microsoft who is rapidly becoming inconsequential and would probably be a good catch for Yahoo, a quasi-media company with a joke name, a mushy business model, inflated customer statistics and no real market differentiator.

For the acquirer? It would mean Microsoft would be visible on the Web in places that they are not today. One interesting thing that they could and probably should do, would be to figure out how to clean up Yahoo's bloated and ghostly customer list, converting them to something paying. This would allow Microsoft to integrate Yahoo functionality with Xbox live, becoming the first company to link console gaming and the social Internet. That would take years for them to screw up and could become the lifeline to pull Microsoft to a fully reengineered business model, where they became less of a product and more of a web services company.

The combined company should own identity management on the Internet, if they wanted. This would provide an effective bulwark to Google. (They should probably buy Verisign, though).

Could this mean the blue screen of death for the Internet?

Posted on February 01, 2008