Quotulatiousness

November 23, 2009

Digital Economy Bill should be called Digital Disenfranchisement Bill

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:16

The proposed British legislation called the “Digital Economy Bill” is going to be very bad news, says Charles Stross:

I’m a self-employed media professional working in the entertainment industry, who earns his living by creating intellectual property and licensing it to publishers. You might think I’d be one of the beneficiaries of this proposed law: but you’d be dead wrong. This is going to cripple the long tail of the creative sector — it plays entirely to the interests of large corporate media organizations and shits on the plate of us ordinary working artists.

Want to write a casual game for the iPhone and sell it for 99 pence? Good luck with that — first you’ll have to cough up £50,000 to get it certified as child-friendly by the BBFC. (It’s not clear whether this applies to Open Source games projects, but I’m not optimistic that it doesn’t.)

Want to publish a piece of shareware over BitTorrent? You’re fucked, mate: all it takes is a malicious accusation and your ISP (who are required to snitch on p2p users on pain of heavy fines) will be ordered to cut off the internet connection to you and everyone else in your household. (A really draconian punishment in an age where it’s increasingly normal to conduct business correspondence via email and to manage bank accounts and gas or electricity bills or tax returns via the web.) Oh, you don’t get the right to confront your accuser in court, either: this is merely an administrative process, no lawyers involved. It’s unlikely that p2p access will survive this bill in any form — even for innocent purposes (distributing Linux .iso images, for example).

As I’ve said before, we’re rapidly moving to a world where it will be difficult to have a normal life without network access . . . this bill will create a new underclass of non-persons, all to benefit the dinosaurs of the media conglomerates. And introduced by a _Labour_ government, no less.

We are already at the point where it is a reasonable and sensible thing to say that access to the internet is a human right (at least in the west). Mandelson’s three strikes provision will deny innocent people access to the internet (for all it will take is accusations that do not need to have proof), which for more and more people will be the practical equivalent of being exiled from the country. No internet access would mean children can’t get access to school work, parents can’t get access to their bank accounts, and everyone will be cut off from large parts of their social circle (more and more people depend on email, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to stay in touch).

Due process? That seems to have been lost in the rush. Proportionality? That’s been gone for years.

November 17, 2009

Is your avatar racist?

Filed under: Africa, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

For some reason racism is a hot topic at the moment. And not just ordinary racism, online racism seems to be the particularly irritating bee in a lot of bonnets. First, there’s the Twitter matter:

What happened? Last June a thread with the hashtag #thatsafrican became a trending topic. Here are some tweets that appeared with the hashtag, cited by the blog Afrolicious:

#thatsafrican when your last name when your lst name is OD too hard for teachers to pronounce
#thatsafrican if your son is the leader of the free world
#thatsafrican when your mum negotiates the prices of sneakers at footlocker. 99 dollars. come oooon!
#thatsafrican when your ringtone is african queen by 2face. haha!

A journalist from the Huffington Post, David Weiner, published a piece “#Thatsafrican — when Twitter went racist?” shortly after the topic was removed from the Twitter stream. He said:

The debate is already raging over the appropriateness of the trend. Is it self-deprecating humour? A cover for racists? Something only Africans and African-Americans can joke about? Something no one should be talking about?

What’s more, it brings into question the role of free speech on Twitter and the company’s role as moderator, or lack thereof. If a popular trend on Twitter is deemed racist, what action is required on the part of the company.

Twitter is not — and cannot be — responsible for what its millions of users post every day on the service. Any hopes that it could do so are technologically unreasonable. Anyone can join Twitter, and there are no particularly difficult hurdles to clear in order to get an account. So Twitter posts can’t be policed in real time, and they can’t be pre-screened through restrictive membership requirements . . . they can only be removed after the fact.

Racism is a particularly difficult topic for Americans, in spite of the last 50 years of improving racial equality. Any conversation that veers toward race-based topics becomes potentially volatile and divisive. In the real world, visual identifiers like skin colour can still cause trouble between individuals. You’d think this wouldn’t be an issue online . . .

On one of my hobby-oriented mailing lists, someone posted a message about a new list covering basically the same topic of interest, but this new list “serves to highlight modeling achievements either personal or hobby-wide amongst minorities and/or people of color”. Ideally, the invitation would be ignored by those to whom it didn’t apply, and followed-up by those to whom it did. But we don’t live in an ideal world:

“This kind of thing is highly inappropriate. We have more than enough politically-inspired, politically-correct nonsense already. I suggest you post your comments elsewhere – perhaps on liberal blogs. Not appropriate here.”

“Weak man. who dies and made you god?”

“Wow. Just wow. Yours is the post that is inappropriate. Bone-headed, really. And completely off-topic for this list. There was nothing political or inappropriate about the original post.”

Okay, so perhaps the discussion dies down now, right? No . . . now the real trolls come out to play

“I hate to break this to you, but the Nam generation may not exactly of had your best interests at heart educational wise. Only the finer dept. stores frequented by northern tourist would have black and white water fountains while the Woolworths down the street did not.

Did they teach you that the “Montgomery Bus company” and one other interstate travel company were the only 2 that ever had Jim Crow.

It was a few rednecks and societal snobs, nothing more.

Your living a lie while empowering a political base that feeds on unrest.”

From that point on, Godwin’s Law is almost certainly going to go into effect quickly.

November 12, 2009

“Mafia Wars” developer got too much into the spirit of the game

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:34

I hate to say it, but I’ve worked for folks with nearly this little class, so I readily believe him:

From the beginning, the profitability and viability of popular Facebook social networking games Mafia Wars and Farmville were predicated on the backs of scams, boasts Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in this video. “I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues,” he crows in the clip to a gathered bunch of fellow scumbag app developers.

In games like Mafia Wars, Farmville, YoVille and Vampires Live, you know, some of the major sources of all those garbage announcements cluttering up your Facebook, players compete to complete missions and level up. By leveling up, you can complete more difficult missions and fight off weaker opponents. You can wait for your various energies to regenerate naturally over time, or you can purchase with real money in-game boosts. Or, you can complete various lead generation offers, many of which are of the “answer page after page of questions and opt in and out of receiving various kinds of spam” variety. Some of them install malware and adware that is impossible to remove. And some of them secretly subscribe you to monthly recurring $9.99 credit card charges.

Couple this reckless profiteering with in-game incentives for recruiting more players into your network and a constant blast (if you let it) of promotional messages to your friends, and it’s like Amway discovered Facebook and threw a gangster-themed house party.

November 11, 2009

Murdoch’s brilliant, evil master plan

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

Lore Sjoberg has cracked the secret plan that Rupert Murdoch appears to be following:

The audiences for traditional newspapers are getting older, more crotchety and increasingly dead. Most people don’t want their news to come with such hassles as a cover price, ads or dissenting opinions. How to bring in a younger, hipper audience that’s willing to spend money just to prove that they have money?

Murdoch, that crazy mad genius, realizes that the only way to attract this lucrative demographic is to establish street cred. He’s going underground, reinventing news as an exclusive club that you can’t find just by entering a search term.

Presumably, Murdoch’s New York Post, for example, will be renamed to something hip and enigmatic, like Velocity or Unk. The new URL won’t be publicized. To get it, you’ll have to know somebody, or know somebody who knows somebody, or know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, or show a lot of cleavage. There will be a long line outside the website, just like an exclusive club or World of Warcraft right after an expansion release. A moderator will check out your online presence and won’t let you in unless you’re a mover, a shaker, a player, a spender or showing a lot of cleavage.

Once inside, the website will be dark, noisy and disorienting, just like an exclusive club or a MySpace page. There will be a two-drink minimum. I’m not sure how that will work, actually, but if anyone can force people to buy $10 beers while browsing the web, it’s my man Rupert. People will pretend to be reading stories about police standoffs and Knicks games, but they’ll actually be looking around to see who else made it in. And all that affectation and posing is like unto money in Murdoch’s pocket.

November 3, 2009

“Like Soylent Green, medicine is made of people”

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:04

Colby Cosh on the paradoxical nature of the public’s view of medicine:

We’re conditioned to think of “medicine” as a single, coherent planned enterprise, if not a conspiracy, and we often fear and despise it — until we decide we need it. At which point it cannot possibly move fast enough to please us. Like the state or the church, medicine is an impersonal abstraction, but one that seems to have common priorities and intentions, significant powers and one voice. Rationalists and believers in progress invoke it; nutcases and conspiracists resist it.

In a way, both are paying tribute to a fiction, much like Christians and Satanists. In real life, there is no pope or president of medicine, no temple where it can be consulted, no medical mandate of heaven. The emerging vaccine debacle, though mercifully likely to have fairly limited public-health consequences, reveals the terrible truth. Like Soylent Green, medicine is made of people. Not just doctors, but administrators, industrialists, economists and politicians — none of them angels, and none with an angel’s ability to predict mass behaviour, perceive and weigh risk, or foresee the judgment of future history.

[. . .]

People have always been prone to weird beliefs, but now there is a medium that compounds those beliefs, allows them to coalesce into a historical counter-narrative and unites their holders like never before. For the first time, there are people who seem not just weird, but positively, thoroughgoingly “weird-ist.” Try spelunking amidst the Internet detritus of the anti-vaccine movement. There is no philosophical reason that strange beliefs about vaccination should correlate with fringe beliefs about UFOs, reptilian elites, 9/11 “truth,” JFK, the world ending in 2012 you name it. Yet the correlation is real, and not hard to confirm.

October 31, 2009

Twitter evolution

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:12

When I first heard of Twitter, I didn’t get it. The benefits were not clear, and the drawbacks — following everyone else’s dinner menus, lunch dates, appointments, and daily routine — seemed like a minor purgatory for me.

At the last company I was working for as a full-time employee, it was mandated that managers join Twitter and (at a minimum) follow the other managers/team leads. After a few weeks, I branched out from the mandate and started following other, non-work related, Twitterers. It’s been a great source of potential blogging material, providing me with useful and interesting links. 140 characters doesn’t seem so limiting, now that I’ve discovered how useful even that short a string can be.

What Wired characterizes as “mob rule” is actually a very useful service. I now wonder how I managed to find blogworthy material without it.

Last August, the people who putatively run Twitter — the small crew that three years ago launched the world’s fastest-growing communications medium — announced a relatively minor change in the way the site functions. The tweak would have a small effect on retweeting, the convention by which Twitter users repost someone else’s informative or amusing message to their own Twitter followers. Retweets start with RT, for “retweet,” and usually cite the first author by user ID. And, importantly, retweeters often add a word or two of commentary about the repeated content.

But there was a problem: Twitter itself didn’t invent retweeting; it was created by Twitter users. In a blog post explaining the changes to retweets, the company’s second-in-command, Biz Stone, called them “a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be.” The good news, he said, was that Twitter was building retweets right into the site’s architecture. The bad news was that Project Retweet didn’t make any provision for the commentary that users might like to add.

It didn’t take long for Twitter users to respond: How dare Twitter mess with . . . Twitter. A self-described “social, search, and viral marketing scientist” named Dan Zarrella posted a passionate cri de coeur, writing that Twitter was about to “completely eviscerate most of the value out of retweets.” That night, Zarrella created a Twitter hashtag — another grassroots Twitter convention, which lets users group their conversations — called #saveretweets. A few tweeters liked the plan, but the general consensus was summed up by one user skilled in Twitter’s uncompromising brevity: “Very bad plan we hates it.”

October 30, 2009

Cory Doctorow on Britain’s ill-advised ‘3 strikes’ move

Filed under: Britain, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

Cory Doctorow would have the British government do something other than their idiotic ill-advised move to enforce the “three strikes” rule:

Peter Mandelson’s proposal to disconnect the families of internet users who have been accused of file sharing will do great violence to British justice without delivering any reduction in copyright infringement. We’ve had 15 years of dotty entertainment industry proposals designed to make computers worse at copying. It’s time that we stopped listening to big content and started listening to reason.

Since 1995 — the year of the WIPO copyright treaties — the entertainment industry has won extrajudicial powers to enforce its rights without the need to prove a case in court. “Notice and takedown”, as the system was called, was supposed to stop copyright infringement on the web. It gave rights holders the power to compel internet service providers to take down material simply by stating that it infringed their rights, and obliged those providers to act or face liability.

A decade and a half later there is no indication that this has reduced copyright infringement online (certainly there is more today than there was in 1995). And, predictably, a system that allows for legalised censorship without penalties for abuse has itself been abused.

We are already at the point where it is a reasonable and sensible thing to say that access to the internet is a human right (at least in the west). Mandelson’s three strikes provision will deny innocent people access to the internet (for all it will take is accusations that do not need to have proof), which for more and more people will be the practical equivalent of being exiled from the country. No internet access would mean children can’t get access to school work, parents can’t get access to their bank accounts, and everyone will be cut off from large parts of their social circle (more and more people depend on email, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to stay in touch).

Due process? That seems to have been lost in the rush. Proportionality? That’s been gone for years.

October 24, 2009

The oddity of PJTV, Bloggingheads, etc.

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

Chris Taylor asks a question that has bothered me too:

Why would you duplicate the worst aspects of the medium?

I need somebody to explain the appeal of PJTV and Bloggingheads.tv. I thought this whole “citizen journalism” thing was about bringing greater depth, detail and context to the news the major media cranks out into the airwaves. Taking the time to write from a specialist’s perspective, to fill in the background that a beat reporter would not even realise they are missing. And all of that married to the ability to receive and remark upon news stories and opinion, anywhere there is a wired or wireless net connection.

The move to try and push this discourse into video from text is ridiculously misguided. The most compelling video isn’t watching two talking heads debate the issues of the day; if it were, the local candidates debates during elections would rival strip clubs for popularity and revenue-generating possibilities. Compelling video is watching the events occur, unfiltered; not having a vacuous talking head try to interpret the events long after they have actually occurred.

Exactly. I rarely watch online videos of the PJTV/Bloggingheads type, partly because I find them generally boring and partly because they take up too much of my time. If I’m web surfing on my lunch break, I don’t want to devote ten or twenty minutes to watching talking heads . . . I’ve got limited time, and the spoken word is far slower than reading the same information in text form.

Worse, sometimes the talking head is someone whose writing I appreciate . . . but their onscreen personality detracts from the message they’re trying to communicate. There’s a reason the mainstream media have tended to feature certain kinds of presenters for their news and opinion programs: they’re able to communicate in pleasant well-modulated voices, they appear dignified on camera, and dress well. They don’t fidget, they don’t twitch or scratch their noses . . . they’re performers in a specific kind of professional performance. Bloggers generally do not fit this profile at all: they’re writers and thinkers, not performers. And it shows.

October 17, 2009

Blogger, know thyself

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 20:29

Gerard van der Leun knows blogging well. Perhaps a bit too well:

“THE 27 DAILY AFFIRMATIONS FOR BLOGGERS”

  1. When I post under an assumed name, I can get in closer touch with my Inner Sociopath.
  2. Through block-quotes and fisking I have the power to transform even the most harmless statements of my enemies into concrete evidence of their evil plans to enslave mankind and rule the world.
  3. In all humility I do not seek to rule the world. I seek only complete agreement and total capitulation.
  4. I assume full responsibility for my posts, especially the good ones that are just links to someone else’s posts.
  5. If, after publication, one of my posts should appear irresponsible, I will be responsible enough to make it disappear, along with the Google cache of it.
  6. Being more confused about the First Amendment than I am about copyright, I am free to reveal the obscene number of hours I blog at work, and the URL of my secret blog where I post the truth about my coworkers’ hygiene, bodily functions, porn-surfing habits, and gender reassignment surgeries without being fired. I know my rights.

October 10, 2009

Passwords and the average user

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:22

In this day of widely publicized panic about online security, it’s time we revisited the basics of password security. I’m sure that none of you reading this would ever have a less-than-ironclad routine for all your online activities:

  1. Never ever use the same password on multiple sites. Once they’ve grabbed for login for the MyLittlePony site, they’re into your bank account . . . or worse, your MyLittlePonyDoesDallas account.
  2. Always use the maximum number of characters allowed . . . I know it’s a pain when a site allows 1024 characters, but your online security is paramount. I believe most health insurance now covers carpal tunnel treatment, so you’re golden.
  3. Never include any word — in any human language — embedded within your password: this includes all the words in the Scrabble® dictionary for every known language. Can’t assume that the black hats speak English, y’know.
  4. Always use both capital and lower-case letters and include at least a single digit and a non-letter character in every password.

    5. Note: Don’t try to be clever and use 1337speak. The folks trying to crack your password all post on 4chan: you’re giving them a head-start. They dream in 1337.

  5. Change your password regularly. Daily, if necessary. Even hourly if you share a computer with others.
  6. Never, ever write your password down. That’s the first thing they’ll look for when they break down your door and trash your crib.
  7. Never, ever re-use a password. Don’t pretend you haven’t done this one. We all used to do it, until site admins started checking that you hadn’t re-used an old password.

Of course, even the professionals don’t do all of this. Some of ’em don’t do any of it. Do like the pros do: set all your passwords to “passw0rd”. Nobody ever guesses that.

For actual password advice that might be helpful, you can try this post on the Gmail Blog.

October 8, 2009

Google’s neglect of its USENET archive

Filed under: Economics, History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:05

Maybe giving Google a monopoly over all those millions of out of date books won’t work out as well as we might hope. They’ve (kinda) been here before, and the results weren’t what you would expect. For those who remember the “good old days” when USENET was the place to be (before the Web, it was the best thing online), Kevin Poulsen looks at what happened after Google took over the effective ownership of the archive:

Salon hailed the accomplishment in an article headlined “The geeks who saved Usenet.” “Google gets the credit for making these relics of the early net accessible to anyone on the web, bringing the early history of Usenet to all.”

Flash forward nearly eight years, and visiting Google Groups is like touring ancient ruins.

On the surface, it looks as clean and shiny as every other Google service, which makes its rotting interior all the more jarring — like visiting Disneyland and finding broken windows and graffiti on Main Street USA.

Searching within a newsgroup, even one with thousands of posts, produces no results at all. Confining a search to a range of dates also fails silently, bulldozing the most obvious path to exploring an archive.

Want to find Marc Andreessen’s historic March 14, 1993 announcement in alt.hypertext of the Mosaic web browser? “Your search — mosaic — did not match any documents.”

October 5, 2009

Anonymous and the Church of Scientology

Filed under: Liberty, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:41

Julian Dibbell looks at the beginnings of the “Anonymous” campaign against the Scientologists:

In the evening of January 15, 2008, a 31-year-old tech consultant named Gregg Housh sat down at the computer and paid a visit to one of his favorite Web sites, the message board known as 4chan. Like most of the 5.9 million people who visit the site every month, Housh was looking for a few cheap laughs. Filled with hundreds of thousands of brief, anonymous messages and crude graphics uploaded by the site’s mostly male, mostly twentysomething users, 4chan is a fountainhead of twisted, scatological, absurd, and sometimes brilliant low-brow humor. It was the source of the lolcat craze (affixing captions like “I Can Has Cheezburger?” to photos of felines), the rickrolling phenomenon (tricking people into clicking on links to Rick Astley’s ghastly “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video), and other classic time-wasting Internet memes. In short, while there are many online places where you can educate yourself, seek the truth, and contemplate the world’s injustices and strive to right them, 4chan is not one of them.

Yet today, Housh found 4chan grappling with an injustice no Internet-humor fan could ignore. Days earlier, a nine-minute video excerpt of an interview with Tom Cruise had appeared unauthorized on YouTube and other Web sites. Produced by the Church of Scientology, the clip showed Cruise declaring himself and his co-religionists to be, among other remarkable things, the “only ones who can help” at an accident site. For the online wiseasses of the world, the clip was a heaven-sent extra helping of the weirdness Tom Cruise famously showed on Oprah. But then, suddenly, it was gone: Scientologists had sent takedown notices to sites hosting the video, effectively wiping it from the Web.

Housh and other channers knew that Scientology had a long history of using copyright law to silence Internet-based critics. But this time, maybe because the church was stifling not just unflattering content but potential comedy gold, the tactic seemed to inflame the chortling masses. That evening, Housh logged in to an IRC channel frequented by like-minded chuckleheads and started talking with five others about the Cruise video. There was a sense that something must be done, but what? One of them logged out and posted a call to action on 4chan and some similar sites. By the middle of the night, 30 people had joined the chat. Within a couple of days, a consensus emerged: They would take down the main Scientology Web site with a massive distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS.

October 1, 2009

Twitter lists

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:12

I’ve been using Twitter for the last few months, and I’ve actually found it rather useful. Useful, in the sense of providing me with a wider range of information, which often leads to something blog-worthy. But the down-side is that for every new Twitter account I follow, I increase the ‘noise’ in my Twitter feed, making those gems sometimes harder to spot.

John C Abell looks at a new feature under trial for Twitter to allow grouping feeds together into lists which can be shared with other users:

Twitter is trialing a method to sub-categorize the people you follow into “lists,” making it possible for the first time to systematically organize — and recommend — feeds you follow.

Once rolled out to everyone Twitter lists will make allow you to create dynamically-updated timelines of your favorite news sites or opinion makers, celebrity administrative assistants, congressional Republicans and all those guilty-pleasure spoof accounts. If you’re already a somebody, you may be able to bestow upon some unknown a bit of Oprah-like fame.

The lists will be public by default — the better to increase viral discovery of an account you might like because your friend likes it — and can be made private. This is the nearly best of both worlds, but we always think that services which convey one’s thoughts and leanings and predilections and intentions ought to be opt-in, since failure to drop the curtain can cause inadvertent embarrassment or eliminate what would have been a competitive advantage.

I like the idea of lists, but I’ll have to wait to see how they’ve implemented this (it’s not available to my account yet).

September 29, 2009

The Guild, Season 3 Episode 5

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

<br /><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-US&#038;vid=d492d422-9f08-481f-a6c7-e0f096cf614e" target="_new" title="Season 3 - Episode 5: Application&#39;d">Video: Season 3 &#8211; Episode 5: Application&#39;d</a>

September 22, 2009

The Guild, Season 3 Episode 4

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:36

<br /><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-US&#038;vid=2db36212-baaf-4fe6-9cc5-cdefe4b27f40" target="_new" title="Season 3 - Episode 4: Get it back!">Video: Season 3 &#8211; Episode 4: Get it back!</a>

And try to imagine the horror . . . or just go to http://finnsmulders.com/.

If you can’t get enough, here are some bloopers.

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