General
Money for nothing and beer for free
I didn't do it, but if I did I'd be admitting it. Paul Croucher, the owner of the Croucher Brewing company in New Zealand came up with an unusual way of getting his stolen laptop back--free beer for life. Apparently a vandal broke a lock, got into the office and nabbed the computer which had some of the company's financial information on it.
I realize that this story has absolutely nothing to do with privacy and is only marginally connected to technology, but is kind of interesting.
Posted on October 23, 2007
Viddy well, little brother
BoingBoing has a very interesting article on how to tell why an airplane is REALLY late. You do it by checking the disposition of the cargo instead of the passengers. Presumably the airlines lie less about the cargo.
The airline service this year is the worst that I've ever seen. I cringe every time I have to do anything different or unusual. I know that any given flight will be delayed (for the "weather", right?). I know that my luggage will be lost. I know that the flight attendants will be people that were too ugly and mean-spirited to get cast as extras for Shaun of the Dead. I know that the pilot has a pistol and is waiting to use it. I know that every airline employee is newly empowered to be a Clockwork Orange-like thug and vent years of petty grievances on the first protesting passenger's head.
Airlines suck. If any business sector were ever to be nationalized, fixed and spit out for competitive bid, it would be this one.
Posted on October 19, 2007
Osamiam
I'm Osam
I'm Osam
Osam I am
That Osam-I-am!
Than Osam-I-am!
I cannot find that Osam-I-am!
Do you like my sham Islam?
I do not like them,
Osam-I-am.
I do not like your
sham Islam.
Would you like a
terrorist scare?
I would not like it
here or there.
I would not like terrorism
anywhere.
I do not like your sham islam.
I do not like them
Osam-I-am.
Would you like it in a plane?
Do you think I"m quite insane?
I do not like it in a plane.
I definitely think that you're insane.
I do not like it here or there,
I hate your terrorism
anywhere.
I do not like your sham Islam.
I do not like them
Osam-I-am.
Can you find me in a tree?
Where I am's a mystery.
Hint: try searching every flier
rectally.
You will not find me in a tree
Where I am's a mystery
You will not find me in a plane
I am, you know, quite insane.
You will not find me
here or there.
You'll find my terrorism
everywhere.
You will like my true Islam
You won't find me, Osam-I-am.
Posted on October 09, 2007
Espresso exorcism
Girl overdoses on espresson. Yes, it's true. 17 year old British teenager, Jasmine Willis was taken to the hospital after drinking seven (7) double espressos at her family's sandwich shop, mistakenly believing that they were single servings. She hyperventilated, got the shakes and ran a fever.
I do that.
Posted on August 14, 2007
Globalpov is looking for bloggers
As of this summer, globalpov will be getting a slight facelift and become a multi-author blog. Anyone wishing to become a regular contributor should submit a note and explain what they'd like to write about. Experience isn't necessary, but passion helps. The overarching theme is how technology affects society with specific areas in politics, technology in general, the media and pop culture.
Posted on June 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
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
Wikipedia's bad reputation
Wikipedia is shocked and appalled to discover that one of their highly credentialed amateurs is not, in fact, the expert theology professor that he claims to be. They are so shocked that they are planning on putting into place a system to check editors' credentials for cases in which they cite same credentials.
So why such a surprise? People misidentify themselves on the Internet, which after all is part of the game.
Wikipedia is trying to have the best of both worlds--the coolness of the anonymity along with the authoritativeness of professionalism.
IMHO, the future is going to be some kind of reputation-based pseudonymity. Wikipedia is right on the cusp of needing it, although other sites will soon find themselves in the same position. Think about how many web-based business models are reputation based...Ebay and feedback scores? Amazon's reviews? Faceless bloggers everywhere.
Someone will make a lot of money developing reputational technology.
Posted on March 08, 2007
Spammer in the slammer
Bloggers know the prevalence of blog-spam in the last year. I would get a few a week then--now I get 25 or more per day, and the number is going up. It seems as if every new communication mechanism brought about by information technology carries the seeds of its own destruction in it. Because the transmission costs are free, it lowers the barrier of resistance broadcast advertising (spam). We saw it happen with Usenet, then email and now blogs.
Part of the problem is that the regulatory environment is nonexistent because commercial companies also want to spam us and would like to continue to do so. That makes the task of writing legislation that penalizes "bad spammers" while providing a clear legal playing field for the "good spammers" (ie; corporate marketing) a difficult, if not impossible one.
The best way to go about resolving spam is to require mandatory opt-in for all outreach, email or blog. I'd even go so far as to require all senders of bulk communication to register with the FTC and pay a small fee. This has to include non-profit and political fund-raising--two normally protected preserves.
Posted on January 16, 2007
Katrina
I toured the worst hit areas in post-Katrina New Orleans this week. I decided to spend New Years day in The Big Easy this year. I've spent a lot of time there over the years and have always loved the city--the culture, the music, the food--but I'd stayed away since Katrina virtually destroyed the city a little over a year ago. I decided that they didn't need another disaster-tourist at that time (although they do now, which is another story).
Grey Line offers a Katrina tour, led by a driver and a guide, both of whom were personally victimized by Katrina. The 3 hour bus tour starts in the Central Business District and quickly drives by the Superdome, where the guides begin the story, even as the winking new dome in front of us belies the horror of watching the refugee-packed arena shredded by the winds.
The bus continues on around the city stopping by the offending culprits--the levies. We see the infamous Ninth ward, the newly constructed Musicians Village and other hard hit areas like Lakeview. The personal narrative helped set the stage, but the visuals spoke for themselves--much of the city is still beat up and used hard--buildings are condemned, huge piles of construction trash can be spotted every few blocks and the condemning house tattoos left by the rescue workers are everywhere , the 'X' hand-painted on the wall telling who checked the house and when and what was found. The bottom wedge of the big 'X' has a number, usually zero, which is the body count discovered inside the residence.
I asked many of the people that I saw there who they blamed-- Nagin the mayor, Blanco the governor, Bush, FEMA. Some blamed Blanco, most blamed the Army Corps of Engineers for doing shoddy work to begin with.
The insight that I got from seeing all of this was the fragility of humans and how vulnerable we are to the failure of complex systems. An entire US city was almost destroyed because a handful of levies were unable to withstand the storm surge. There's a lesson here for those of us who work in technology and are involved in rapidly transforming our world into one controlled by the vast, interconnected systems of digital devices. It makes me wonder what are our levies?
Posted on January 08, 2007
Back on January 5th
I am away on vacation, and will be returning on Friday.
Thank you for visiting,
- DHH
Posted on January 02, 2007
Doublethink
As more and more reference material becomes digital, a greater percentage will have never been on paper and it will be too expensive to make a hard copy. Unlike ten years ago, much new digital material created these days lives its entire existence on the computer. It's inevitable, really. The economics are such that it's too expensive to make physical printouts, plus the hard copy has greater utility with backing up, searching, publishing on the web, etc.
Like is Wikipedia even printed out anywhere? It changes so often I can't believe that you could even get a definitive hard copy.
What worries me about this is that disinformation, bad facts or just plain lying might be difficult to check up on. What happens if the government or someone else just changes historical facts to suit the expediency and current need? Several people, including senators and congressmen have been involved in a quiet war to favorably edit their Wikipedia biographies--even to the point of making things up or leaving out key facts.
This concept is part of a concept called Doublethink, and is, of course, an integral part of Orwell's 1984.
I worry about the changing quality and essential verifiability of online reference material and its potential for 3rd party manipulation. As hoary and antiquated as paper is, it's hard to change and once everyone has, say, a dictionary in their house, it's very difficult to change the meaning of a word to suit the political moment. If there was only one dictionary and it was online, it would be child's play.
Posted on August 07, 2006
Paying with porn
There is a growing need for a currency that is useful on the Internet for micro and anonymous transactions. Both cases are ones where credit cards won't work. Micropayments with credit cards take away all of the profit for the seller because of the transactional fees. Anonymous exchanges, by their very nature, won't use fully authenticated systems like Visa or Mastercard. Yet there are multitudes of examples of small services or digital products that are screaming for a payment system, mostly dealing with content consumption. These range from reading an online newspaper to downloading a cartoon. For an indepth discussion, see the Wikipedia entry.
Most of the schemes that have been tried for micropayments involve token aggregation; the consumer pays, say, $20 in advance, for the right to make 10 $2 transactions. This way the vendor only hits the credit company once in a while, for a twenty dollar hit. This still doesn't solve the anonymity problem, though, because entering financial information leaves an absolute audit trail back to the buyer.
So I have a suggestion: If DRMs (Digital Rights Management) ever really become workable, consumption tokens issued by a DRM system would make an excellent currency. In other words, you could read the New York Times online and pay with porn. Or you could pay with a song, of course. Although porn seems more melodramatic somehow.
The idea is that DRMS could easily issue an encrypted token which would allow a one-time use of the specified content. These tokens could allow a single Amazon.com book download or a song from itunes or some porn. If these were transportable tokens, if I could hand one off to someone else, for instance, and they had a decent expiration time (say a year), then I could barter off that token to someone to make a micropayment.
It's going to have to be something like this because the alternative is to create an online currency that would spit out cash from an ATM. The stakes for that kind of system would be too high, because the availability of ready cash would make it too tempting a target. It makes more sense to have a micropayment currency of "units" where say, one "unit" would buy a song or a newspaper.
Posted on July 26, 2006
Lays--Betcha can't beat just one
Kenneth Lay is dead. He is the ex-CEO of ex-Enron, George Bush's top fundraiser and "Kenny boy" to the president. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, caught the death pretty quickly. The article flailed around within minutes of the announcement of his death, some listing the causes as heart attack, some as suicide. One even said that "the guilt of ruining so many lives finaly led him to his suicide." The Washington Post trashed the encyclopedia for this flailing.
There's often a smug analysis of new, online entities because they don't measure up to the standards of the venerable media, even though there's people alive who were older than television and radio and trees older than newspapers.
Wikipedia is a new kind of entity; it's not just an online encyclopedia, it's a collaborative encyclopedia. It functions differently, because it doesn't have an editorial staff, or rather it has an ad hoc one. I think that it's amazing that they had an entry up that quickly at all.
The real issue is going to be whether Wikipedia's entries become shaded by political opinions to an unacceptable amount. So far, there's not a huge amount of evidence saying that is, and after all, conventional reference books are also a product of their times, even if academics don't like to admit it. I'm sure that if I looked up "negro" in a 19th century reference book, I wouldn't like the answer.
And as for Lay, well, he died peacefully vacationing in Snowmass, Colorado instead of going to prison for 30 years as was likely. Perhaps he can lead the charge for fundraising in Hell in advance of the next wave of energy executives and arrogant politicans.
Posted on July 11, 2006
Create, not educate
When I talk to college kids today, I try to discourage them from studying computers.
It's not because i don't think that computers are important now and in the future, because I do. It's because I don't think that the world needs a couple of million more computer majors. Business doesn't require hard core computer expertise in every department the way that it did ten years ago.
What matters the most now is creativity. Marketing is way more important than engineering. It's all about applied technology, figuring out what the next killer app or service is, than inventing the underlying technology. Sure, someone needs to innovate the tech, but not that many people are needed and can do that kind of research. That job is best for the uber computer geeks.
Being able to write and speak, having the creative spark necessary to come up with a new kind of commercial or ad--the liberal arts--that's what's important. That's what business needs more of. And those are going to be the people who get the best jobs in applied technology.
Posted on June 21, 2006
Blogger: Unabomber?
The whole world is a blog and all the people merely bloggers.
What/why is a blog?
I read a lot of blogs now. I used to think that they were silly, now it's how I filter the news. The first couple that I ran into seemed like the Unabomber's Manifesto; a rambling, semi-disjoint discourse on whatever.
If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later...Ted Kaczynski
But the system hasn't broken down....Blogs are a good example of how the system is growing in a healthy way, by adding original human content to cold, hard data.
I wonder where blogs are going, say 5 years from now? It seems unlikely that they will look the same way.
I suspect that we'll see video podcasting turning into the new blog with thousands of roaming reporters, interpreting and even making the news the way that they see fit. Conventional American network news is now so bad, so poorly made and pandering to the worst possible element of public taste, that their depowering would be a welcome relief.
Posted on June 07, 2006
Books and crooks
Books.
I was thinking about them this morning as i continue to edit mine. Several articles have been flying around the press lately making much of Google's deep indexing of books, both those in the public domain and those that are not.
This never bothered me and I think that I know why. Reading a book is an experience. Those of us who truly enjoy reading find it to be one of the most pleasant parts of the day. We all have our little habits, our routines on how we read a book. Some people curl up in an armchair, I like lo lie back on a couch. Book reading is so tactile. The feel of the cover and the creak of the binding on a new book, the way virginal pages act when first touched.
Reading is immersive. It's like subtitled films. People that don't make a habit of watching them are usually surprised at how quickly they slip into a trance whereby the reading is just another form of sensory input blending into the visual and auditory stimulus.
Now what about non-physical books? I hate reading books on a computer. EVERYONE hates reading books on a computer. The usual reason given is the lack of a tactile experience as described above. But I think that it's more than that. Computers are about finding information quickly. Our brain works in concert with our mouse-clicking hand and our darting eye to quickly find the fact that we need. This is rotten frame of mind to be in when you're reading something for enjoyment.
The idea of indexing the world's books doesn't bother me at all. It will be used for research, for reference, maybe to win a bar bet. The idea that someone will download a book, say hacked from Google, for instance, then print the book on a laser printer, bind it somehow, sit down and read it, and then that they'll enjoy it as much as they would reading a fine leather-bound book is simply ludicrious. For one thing, it'll cost $5-$10 bucks anyway to print it. For another, you won't get look and feel of the original book or even the fonting, you'll get flat, boring text. For another, people who read, read. They wouldn't want to do this. The people who will steal and read a book and be satisfied with the laser printout will be the once-a-year book reader and they will undoubtedly be stealing the Da Vinci code anyway.
The experience of reading is special, pleasant and comforting for many of us. Substituting a digital equivalent is like drinking cognac from a jelly jar. Sure you can do it and it will intellectually taste the same as being drunk from a fine heaviy leaded-crystal snifter, but it leaves something lacking.
Posted on May 18, 2006
Back of the computer bus
EFF has been watching AOL/Time Warner's new email shakedown service, "Goodmail', like a hawk. For those who don't know, the service allows mass mailers (ie; spammers) to bypass mail filters--for a fee. There are two problems with this is, of course: First, that people who don't or can't afford to pay blood money to Time Warner won't be able to reach their mailing list. Second, they're clearly confused...we don't want any spam at all. There ought to be no goodmail, and if it was, it should be user configurable.
Going back to the first reason for a minute. If you think about the dual trends of pay-as-you-go spam filters and the current Net Neutrality debate, a disquieting future reveals itself...a two-tiered Internet. Net Neutrality is the codeword for changing some customers more than other customers, because they're more popular. Now they only charge more for OUTGOING traffic, if the telcos have their way and Congress lets them, then they will start charging more for INCOMING traffic.
Both of these plans and I'm sure many others like it are opportunistic. These companies have been characterizing their problems as a result of their early investment in the Internet, but that's bull. The early infrastructure providers for the Net were subsidized by the National Science Foundation. These companies are trying to use their seriously heavy lobbying power to blow apart the free market that is at the heart of Internet E Commerce.
In the next few years, you'll see more of these ideas. Sure, they'll all have consumer-friendly names, but that's the way they do things today. "Goodmail", "Patriot Act", "Defense Department." They're all oxymorons and the names are contradictory, too.
Watch for benignly named ideas that seem to incense Netizens. If they coincidentally are favorable for large companies, watch them closer. Bonus points if the company has executives under indictment.
Posted on May 10, 2006
Psycho killer, Qu'est-ce que c'est?
EBay recently stopped a Wisconsin land auction owned by a gentleman named MIke Fisher. The asking price for the 40 acre property was $250,000 but Fisher had only received one small bid. The reason EBay stopped the auction? It used to belong to Ed Gein, the infamous serial killer who has been featured in several movies including "Psycho" and "Silence of the Lambs." You see, Gein skinned people and made suits out of them. The property for sale was where police discovered all sorts of body parts and people-clothing. Why did EBay stop the auction? Because it violated their policy of not selling items associated with murder.
EBay actually restricts quite a few things. They stop the obviously illegal like drugs and alcohol, yet also stop things such as screen savers with multiple celebrity images, movie prints, police badges, teacher's editions of textbooks. The most interesting category of blocked items are ones which are deemed offensive.
To whom ? Presumably EBay.
I understand why they have some rules. No one wants to go to court and I'm sure that they experience their share of lawsuits anyway. I am sure that they are being reasonable in their application of their rules. I have never, for instance, heard of EBay using their product sale policies solely to benefit themselves in some advantageous way.
It bothers me though that a company can make these determinations. EBay is not an American company, it is a global one. When Internet companies make subjective determinations, whether they're about offensive material or verboten domain names, they're making a statement about right and wrong, proper and improper, and then extending that moral blanket across the Western World. That worries me a little, although I have not the slightest suggestion for an improvement.
Posted on April 11, 2006
Blogging by bobos
I'm confused about blogging, specifically how newspapers and tv shows can blog. Web logging was always intended as an alternative media source, a way for non-journalists to share with others what they were experiencing. Clearly we were all interested, because that's what broadcast journalists covered anyway ("Mrs Smith, how did you feel when your sleeping son Timmy was eaten alive by rats?").
So why now, do big papers like the Washington Post and television news shows have blogs? I assume that from their perspective there is less editorial control than there is over a print article. But none? I doubt that.
Is a blog a news article that happens to be online and told in a casual manner?
Wikipedia defines blogs as
...A blog (or weblog) is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed with the newest at the top. Like other media, blogs often focus on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news. Some blogs function as online diaries.
That may be true, but there is a social expectation for a blog. A blog is the reality television of journalism. We expect it to be more revealing, more honest than a conventional news story and more importantly, there is an expectation, IMHO, for it to be amateur, not amateurish, which is a different thing entirely.
The big media players writing blogs are silly. It's an attempt to use a fashionable word and a slight change of editorial policy to do what they were doing all along, anyway.
It feels to me like it would if Frank Sinatra were alive today and I had to watch him singing duets with Eminem.
Blogs are alternative media.
Blogs are erosive, not institutionally accretive.
Blogs are subversive.
Posted on March 23, 2006
A thought on censorship
Censorship has been in the news a lot lately from an unlikely source--Internet companies. Both as participants and targets. Some companies, like Google, have cooperated with the Chinese government in blocking certain searches. Some, like Wikipedia, are being completely bocked.
I'd like to point that censorship on the Internet started long before this. Network Solutions, my alma mater, refused to sell 7 domain names based on George Carlin's 7 dirty words that you can't say on television bit (actually there were 2 other racial words that we quietly held onto, also). Auction and merchandising sites like Ebay and Yahoo have long cooperated with the governments of France and Germany in blocking sales of Nazi war memorabailia (illegal in those countries).
I begrudgingly accept that there may be limited justifications for blocking things on the Internet, although as a purist, I would prefer complete free speech, as tough as that might be to personally stomach.
But it's the massive censorship efforts put on by China that really noogies my goat.
So, it occurred to me that they're not blocking it by domain name (Right? I hope that's true), but by IP address.
So what would happen if a group of well-intentioned Internet people provided caching and multiple IP address setups that changed on a random basis? Sort of like the old WWII movies where the Resistance would get new frequencies to listen to Allied Radio, avoiding the old jammed ones.
Posted on February 20, 2006
Cartoon violence
The recent furor over European cartoons satirizing Mohammed is a good example of how the media has become political, regardless of protestations to the contrary. Not there's anything wrong with political representations by newspapers, as long is it's identified as such, say by labeling it an editorial cartoon or something similar.
There's a line, though. A divider where it's no longer about politics but becomes a hate crime. From what I know of these cartoons, that doesn't seem to be the case. The point is satire. One cartoon supposedly portrayed Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban. If the point is that a lot of violence is being perpetrated by Muslims for supposedly religous reasons, who really wants to disagree with that? It's rare that you hear about Jehovah's Witnesses even carrying a gun, let alone using one for ideological purposes.
No, it doesn't disturb me that these cartoons were published. I haven't seen them, though, so I reserve judgement.
What does annoy me is not that they were published, it's that I can't see them. American newspapers appear to be deliberately not showing them. That bothers me, because they're worried about retribution, which means that violent protests to control the media does, in fact, work.
I'd like to believe that our media is made of sterner stuff than that. Yes sir, I'd like to believe that.
Posted on February 06, 2006
Microsoft makes a lousy father
Technology is only as good as its next task. We don't want it do any more or any less than we wish--at that moment. It's tough, maybe, but hey, that's why WE get to throw THEM out...for now, anyway. When products do less than we think that they should, they're underpowered and we get wistful; we look around, our eyes caught by each pretty, shiny gadget that catches our wandering eye.
Worse technology offers more than we want. Like VCRs or graphic equalizers. Don't tempt us with idiotic choices, it's confusing and makes us restless. It'd be like going to McDonalds and ordering a happy meal and having them ask to do your taxes or give you a bikini wax. Kind of creepy.
The very baddest, most evil technology doesn't ask, it does. Like a weekend warrior dad, it tries to be parental, in a most inappropriate way. It pops up windows that you don't want, replaces text that you just typed or checks your music licenses, to "help you". In short, Microsoft tries to be the ineffectual digital dad that sometimes embarasses you, sometimes pisses you off, but that you haven't showed off to your friends since you were a little kid.
Macs on the other hand are like the coolest father that you never had. Mac apps wait for you to tell them what you want, then they try really hard to do it for you, even if it's not completely legal. Like itunes DRM doesn't REALLY stop you from copying music (burn a cd, then import it back as mp3s). Mac apps slip you a beer when mommy isn't looking.
Posted on November 03, 2005
This blog
Welcome to the new Globalpov, dedicated to that twilight zone where technology meets society. Specific topics will include Privacy, Intellectual Property, Security, Pop Culture, Politics and anything else that looks interesting.
I will be following some national issues very closely like the Patriot Act confirmation hearings.
I'm especially interested in stories about how technology is driving change. Look at the Apple Ipod. It certainly wasn't the first MP3 player, nor the best. Why the fad? Look at the original Palm Pilot or the Tivo. What all three of these gadgets have in common is, first and foremost, they work. They do what they say they do, not much more, nothing less. That's the promise of technology, a hammer that works on nails, a screwdriver designed for screws. As many times as I buy 6-in-1 ratchets at K-Mart; you know, the kind with the bits in the handle? Anyway, I never use them. A hammer is a hammer and an MP3 player is an MP3 player. A good tool is a fiercesome thing, capable of knocking down forests or music companies.
Posted on October 31, 2005