Spreading confusion over the internet since 1994
Defunct Tweets
Umm, yay?
Hmm “Now you can embed a Tweet right on your WordPress blog, Posterous Space, or any website. Read more:” dev.twitter.com/blog/tweets-an…
— Seth Anderson (@swanksalot) January 5, 2012
Let’s try the short code version:
Dan Savage fact-checks @nytimes "Not-So-Confidential to Noam Cohen at the New York Times" http://t.co/2x2VGwbN
— Seth Anderson (@swanksalot) January 5, 2012
Computer Consultants
The Hollywood-funded SOPA1 debate has been tabled for now, to be taken up again next year. Maybe by then Congress can figure out what exactly they are proposing to do.
Or not:
It’s of course perfectly standard for members of Congress to not be exceptionally proficient in technological matters. But for some committee members, the issue did not stop at mere ignorance. Rather, it seemed there was in many cases an outright refusal to understand what is undoubtedly a complex issue dealing with highly-sensitive technologies.
When the security issue was brought up, Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina seemed particularly comfortable about his own lack of understanding. Grinningly admitting “I’m not a nerd” before the committee, he nevertheless went on to dismiss without facts or justification the very evidence he didn’t understand and then downplay the need for a panel of experts. Rep. Maxine Waters of California followed up by saying that any discussion of security concerns is “wasting time” and that the bill should move forward without question, busted internets be damned.
The fact that there was any debate over whether to call in experts on such a matter should tell you something about the integrity of Congress. It’d be one thing if legitimate technical questions directed at the bill’s supporters weren’t met with either silence or veiled accusations that the other side was sympathetic to piracy. Yet here we are with a group of elected officials openly supporting a bill they can’t explain, and having the temerity to suggest there’s no need to “bring in the nerds” to suss out what’s actually on it.
“No legislation is perfect,” Rep. Watt said at one point, continuing the insane notion that the goal of the House should be to pass anything, despite what consequences it may bring. Later, Iowa Representative Steve King tweeted, somewhat ironically, about surfing the internet on his phone because he was bored listening to his colleague Shiela Jackson speak about the bill. Then, even more ironically, another representative’s comments calling him out for it were asked to be stricken from the record.
…
This used to be funny, but now it’s really just terrifying. We’re dealing with legislation that will completely change the face of the internet and free speech for years to come. Yet here we are, still at the mercy of underachieving Congressional know-nothings that have more in common with the slacker students sitting in the back of math class than elected representatives. The fact that some of the people charged with representing us must be dragged kicking and screaming out of their complacency on such matters is no longer endearing — it’s just pathetic and sad.
(click here to continue reading Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works | Motherboard.)
Footnotes:
Is the tech industry bubbling again? I have a Tumblr account, and like it well enough to keep using it, but there’s not anything compelling enough that I would pay a subscription for a Tumblr blog, and how else exactly is Tumblr going to make money?
Blogging service Tumblr said it has raised $85 million, although the New York-based company has scant revenue and has yet to develop a solid business model.
The lack of revenue kept some major Silicon Valley venture firms from signing onto the deal. But at least two prominent firms—Greylock Partners, an investor in Facebook Inc. and Groupon Inc., and Twitter-investor Insight Venture Partners have joined the investment round.
Other new investors include The Chernin Group, Sir Richard Branson and returning investor partners Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, and Sequoia Capital.
Tumblr didn’t comment on the valuation that the investment conferred on the company but in recent money-raising discussions investors valued the company at around $800 million
(click here to continue reading Tumblr Raises $85 Million – WSJ.com.)
and even Tumblr execs don’t have a clue as to where the revenue will be coming from…
“Questions around monetization still exist,” he said. “But the company has absolute scale, massive traction, and huge growth and money-making potential.”
So far, Tumblr’s efforts to generate revenue have been mostly experimental.
Mayor Emanuel
Interesting, at first glance, but we’ll see what effective policies come out of the office first. Just saying Chicago is going to focus on social media and transformative technologies is a sound bite, issued daily by hundreds of corporations and entities big and small. I am pleased the Mayor Emanuel is a modern man who at least knows what technology can do, in contrast to1 Mayor Daley. Maybe EveryBlock will get data from City Hall more quickly in the near future…
But this is City Hall and the diagram-filled windows belong to Brett Goldstein, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s chief digital officer. After a single encounter, I’d only partly question his sanity, since he left a nice San Francisco job with OpenTable, an online restaurant reservation service, to become a police officer on the West Side.
But Mr. Goldstein, a Boston native who has degrees in criminal justice and computer science, wound up as a head of the Chicago Police Department’s Predictive Analytics Group. And now the new mayor has teamed him with John Tolva, an I.B.M. refugee and the city’s chief technology officer, and Kevin Hauswirth, its director of social media, to harness technology to make a typically calcified big-city government more transparent, more efficient and a catalyst for economic development.
In a world of Groupon, Foursquare, Facebook, Livestream, Tumblr, Twitter and Shazam, a few municipalities with similar goals, including London, New York and Washington, are exploiting relatively new strategies like social media. But no mayor appears to have created all three such positions, or to be quite so focused, as Mr. Emanuel, the vacationing heat-seeking missile with a bloodlessly pragmatic streak and prodigious Rolodex.
The early results include nearly 200 online “data sets,” like breakdowns of crime, calls to 311, vendors banned from city business, restaurants’ rodent-baiting requests, processing time for building permits and removal of fallen trees after bad weather, response rates to graffiti-removal calls and installation of 96-gallon plastic garbage cans at single-family residences.
My personal favorite is wasmycartowed.com. Is your Honda Civic not where you left it last night? This Web site will tell you if it’s in a city pound, quelling fears of its winding up in a South Side chop shop. Mr. Tolva offers a challenging historical corollary: As a pioneer in meat packing, Chicago prodded innovation in related areas like transportation and cold storage. Why not use “data, knowledge and ideas” as transformative agents. The two coasts need not be the only pacesetters in this regard.
(click here to continue reading 3 of Mayor’s Men Join Forces. Their Goal – Harness Technology to Help the City. – NYTimes.com.)
Footnotes:
Of course shady banks are involved in the worldwide spam scourge, otherwise there wouldn’t be any money generated for the spam-meisters sending their poorly crafted herbal viagra emails. What’s interesting is that there are so few banks involved.
For years, a team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, the billions of unwanted e-mail messages generated by networks of zombie computers controlled by the rogue programs called botnets. They even coined a term, “spamalytics,” to describe their work. Now they have concluded an experiment that is not for the faint of heart: for three months they set out to receive all the spam they could (no quarantines or filters need apply), then systematically made purchases from the Web sites advertised in the messages.
The hope, the scientists said, was to find a “choke point” that could greatly reduce the flow of spam. And in a paper to be presented on Tuesday at the annual IEEE Symposium (PDF) on Security and Privacy in Oakland, Calif., they will report that they think they have found it.
It turned out that 95 percent of the credit card transactions for the spam-advertised drugs and herbal remedies they bought were handled by just three financial companies — one based in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in Nevis, in the West Indies.
The researchers looked at nearly a billion messages and spent several thousand dollars on about 120 purchases. No single purchase was more than $277.
If a handful of companies like these refused to authorize online credit card payments to the merchants, “you’d cut off the money that supports the entire spam enterprise,” said one of the scientists, Stefan Savage of the University of California, San Diego, who worked with colleagues at San Diego and Berkeley and at the International Computer Science Institute.
(click here to continue reading Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions – NYTimes.com.)
And you probably already realized this, but there is a lot of spam sent out, cluttering our email boxes with come-ons for boner pills and Cialis rip-offs…
Spam has proved notoriously difficult to defeat over the years, despite sophisticated filtering technologies and legal investigations and convictions. Seven years after the famous prediction by Bill Gates, then chairman of Microsoft, that spam would be eradicated in just two years, about 90 percent of all e-mail is spam.
An earlier study undertaken by the scientists showed that a single commercial spam e-mail campaign generated three messages for every person on the planet. That same study revealed that to sell $100 worth of Viagra, a spam provider needed to send 12.5 million messages.
Some additional reading August 3rd from 07:56 to 07:56:
Wonder if this:
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Enter the URL for the feed you would like to have auto-submit your content
Does what I think it does?
Digg key
e2ca61311dd24d5284deda96daf33763
Oh well, ignore this post either way.
Mixed feelings about this: the Federal Government probably should have some sort of cyber patrol to protect the nation’s infrastructure against attack, but am always skeptical that this isn’t just an excuse to legalize the spying upon citizens that has become the norm.
The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed “Perfect Citizen” to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program.
The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government’s chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn’t persistently monitor the whole system, these people said.
Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. recently won a classified contract for the initial phase of the surveillance effort valued at up to $100 million
(click to continue reading U.S. Program to Detect Cyber Attacks on Infrastructure – WSJ.com.)1
Footnotes:
Speaking of product launches, the Microsoft Kin has been discontinued after a whopping two months in the marketplace. Yikes. Sales must have been freaking horrible. Microsoft spent a lot of money developing Kin, and a lot of money advertising it. Who is getting fired tomorrow? Ballmer?
Amid anemic sales, Microsoft has decided to halt work on its Kin phone less than two months after the product hit the market. The social media-oriented phone will not make its planned European debut and Microsoft is shifting the entire Kin team to work on Windows Phone 7, the Microsoft smartphone operating system due out later this year. Andy Lees, who heads up the company’s cell phone efforts announced the move to Microsoft workers earlier on Wednesday, according to a source close to the company.
Microsoft confirmed the move in a statement to CNET.
“We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned,” the company said. “Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones.” The Kin, which made its debut just two months ago at an event in San Francisco, was the result of several years of work by Microsoft and stemmed from its 2008 acquisition of Sidekick maker Danger. However, despite a few innovative features including streaming music and a Web-based companion site, the Kin phones were criticized for missing key features, such as a calendar, as well as because the monthly fees for the phone were as high as more capable smartphones, such as the iPhone and Android-based devices.
(click to continue reading Microsoft pulls the plug on Kin | Beyond Binary – CNET News.)
I’ve been a long time fan of EveryBlock, from its earlier incarnation called Chicago Crime.org, through its purchase by MSNBC. I had noticed this police report information shortfall as well.
In Chicago, the police department declines to make any details available online to us or to EveryBlock, a five-member operation based here. EveryBlock was bought last year by MSNBC.com and cranks out daily updates for neighborhoods in 15 other cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Dallas.
The site’s frustration with Chicago underscores how scant our access is to public records at most levels of government.
Take the city’s Department of Public Health. It stopped updating its Web site last year. That means that for months, citizens haven’t been able to find out about, say, what restaurants have been hit with violations. In part, the department blames technological problems.
EveryBlock is the brainchild of soft-spoken, angular Adrian Holovaty, 29, well-known in the online world for innovations in computer code. He retains oversight and, with two colleagues, operates out of an airy but bare Ravenswood loft about a mile north of Wrigley Field.
Mr. Holovaty is asking his audience here to sign a petition, to prod the Chicago Police Department to change its ways. He links to the petition from each crime. ‘Would you like to see more information about this crime? So would we!’ he asks.”
(click to continue reading Chicago News Cooperative – In the Age of Information, the Police Department Lags Behind – NYTimes.com.)
What is strange is that the local paper The Chicago Journal has a page of police reports written in English. I guess these are hand-crafted by Chicago Journal reporters? They are not as extensive, of course.
If you have a second, take the time to sign the EveryBlock petition.
Chicago Police Bomb Squad
As I hinted, I love Everyblock – I receive a daily email about my 8 block area, and another email1 that contains all news in a hand-crafted area of my own choosing, plus I subscribe to an RSS feed that covers similar ground, and have the EveryBlock iPhone app installed.
Neighborhood demarcations are like country borders, they are useful sometimes, but in real life, are less meaningful. When I walk around taking photos, there is an area that I usually stick to – about a mile in some directions, but it is not a geometrically perfect circle. I walk west to Ashland, but usually not beyond, walk south to maybe Jackson, or occasionally Van Buren, but not beyond, walk north to Chicago Avenue, along the Chicago River, but not west of Halsted, walk into the Loop proper, but not too far. In other words2 my personal stomping ground includes portions of 4 or 5 different neighborhoods, but to me, it feels like one. EveryBlock allows me to mark a map and then pulls information from this marked “personal” neighborhood3.
Anyway, I strongly agree with Mr. Holovaty that the Chicago Police should open up their data for EveryBlock, I don’t see the downside for CPD.
Footnotes:It’s one thing to know there was a $300 theft down the street; it’s another to read the police officer’s description. “Clearly, there’s a huge difference between a random break-in and, say, an ex-boyfriend breaking into an apartment to get his stuff,” Mr. Holovaty says.
We can get those details if we go to the police station. But the department won’t make descriptions available online. The end result is ignorance, possibly about the real dangers in a neighborhood. Lack of context can breed fear and needless anxiety.
Chicago is not alone in arguing that there are privacy concerns, notably names of victims, and what can be raw descriptions replete with misspellings. But Mr. Holovaty underscores that EveryBlock, as a matter of policy, does not run people’s names on any of its listings, be they crimes, real estate transactions or granting of business licenses.
Further, he says he could devise algorithmic solutions to dealing with privacy issues like bad spelling and raw language. But he meets resistance.
“The trend in the law is fairly robust when it comes to access for the public,” said Eve Burton, vice president and general counsel for the Hearst Corporation. “But the practice among those implementing the laws is less good, and media companies are no longer putting the time, energy and resources into being the watchdog of government.”
If government wanted to live up to its obligations, technology could make everything from crime reports to restaurant inspections available. But instead, the cat-and-mouse game will continue, with government preferring secrecy and the likes of Mr. Holovaty banging on doors, or at least their data servers.
Cloud Computing: buzz word of 2009, and apparently going to be the buzz word of 2010 too.
This year, Netflix made what looked like a peculiar choice: the DVD-by-mail company decided that over the next two years, it would move most of its Web technology — customer movie queues, search tools and the like — over to the computer servers of one of its chief rivals, Amazon.com.
Amazon, like Netflix, wants to deliver movies to people’s homes over the Internet. But the online retailer, based in Seattle, has lately gained traction with a considerably more ambitious effort: the business of renting other companies the remote use of its technology infrastructure so they can run their computer operations. In the parlance of technophiles, they would operate “in the cloud.”
Ah, the cloud — these days, Silicon Valley can’t seem to get its head out of it. The idea, though typically expressed in ways larded with jargon, is actually rather simple.
Cloud providers, large ones like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and AT&T, and smaller ones like Rackspace and Terremark, aim to convince other companies to give up building and managing their own data centers and to use their computer capacity instead.
[Click to continue reading Companies Slowly Join Cloud-Computing – NYTimes.com]
I actually do see the usefulness of cautiously outsourcing the creation and maintenance of data centers, as long as certain privacy oversights are part of the process.
Almost every big company is cautiously testing the waters these days. 3M, the St. Paul, Minn., conglomerate, is using Microsoft’s new Azure cloud service to allow advertisers and marketers to tap into a service that mathematically analyzes promotional images and evaluates how visually effective they are likely to be. “It took a lot of the risk out of whether to commercialize it or not,” said Jim Graham, a technical manager at 3M.
But most big organizations say they are wary of placing more critical software and business operations on another company’s computers.
…
Government agencies are looking at it too. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab currently runs various experiments on the computers of Amazon, Microsoft and Google — to avoid committing to a single company, said Tomas Soderstrom, the I.T. chief technology officer there. Among other experiments, the agency is using Amazon’s servers to process vast amounts of telemetry data coming from the rovers on Mars.
But NASA executives also tell of the seven months it took to reach its licensing agreement with Amazon. NASA wanted, among other things, to be able to inspect the hardware it was using; Amazon declined.
NPR covered the sins of modern musical over-compression, a topic we’ve discussed a few times before.
Robert Siegel talked to Bob Ludwig, a record mastering engineer. For more than 40 years, he’s been the final ear in the audio chain for albums running from Jimi Hendrix to Radiohead, from Tony Bennett to Kronos Quartet.
…
“The ‘Loudness Wars’ have gone back to the days of 45s,” Ludwig says. “When I first got into the business and was doing a lot of vinyl disc cutting, one producer after another just wanted to have his 45 sound louder than the next guy’s so that when the program director at the Top 40 radio station was going through his stack of 45s to decide which two or three he was going to add that week, that the record would kind of jump out to the program director, aurally at least.”
That’s still a motivation for some producers. If their record jumps out of your iPod compared with the song that preceded it, then they’ve accomplished their goal.
Bob Ludwig thinks that’s an unfortunate development.
“People talk about downloads hurting record sales,” Ludwig says. “I and some other people would submit that another thing that is hurting record sales these days is the fact that they are so compressed that the ear just gets tired of it. When you’re through listening to a whole album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued. You may have enjoyed the music but you don’t really feel like going back and listening to it again.”
[Click to continue reading The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse : NPR]
Don’t get me wrong, I love the convenience of digital music, but something has been sacrificed, namely nuance. For CDs I rip myself, I use higher settings1 than the default 128 kbps – which to my ears sounds like a shitty little AM transistor radio.
Matt Mayfield created a little YouTube explanation, check it out…
Big-name CD manufacturers are distorting sounds to make them seem louder. Sound quality suffers.
This video was made with image editing software and a screen capture program for the visuals, and a DAW (Digital Performer 4.5) to process the audio
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
Footnotes:A delightful merging of analog and digital technology
A photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) made glass negatives in the early 1900’s that could be used to create color images. He did this by inventing a camera that would take three different frames of the same scene, with different color filters (red, green blue) for each. He displayed the pictures via projection, using the same filters. Even though the negatives were only grayscale images, the result was comparable to that obtained using a color slide film, such as Kodachrome. As a result, we are able to see full-color images of an historical period that otherwise would be seen only in black-and-white.
…
The whole process is described on the Library of [the USA] Congress, here: The Empire That Was Russia: the Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated.
The original images are on hand-made 3-inch x 9 inch glass negatives. Each negative has three 3×3 images. Archive workers made digital scans of the negatives, cropped the three frames, and used computers to colorize each frame. Then, they superimposed the three color images using layers.
[Click to continue reading Digital Reconstruction: Color Images of Russian Empire : The Corpus Callosum]
The Library of Congress website has several galleries of the images1, some of which are also found at the Wikipedia entry
Footnotes:part the nine-gazillionith
The federal government has committed more than $50 million to build a sophisticated highway traffic monitoring system that has produced unreliable data and cannot freely share live reports on highway bottlenecks with the public, an audit by the Transportation Department’s inspector general has found.
Thousands of tiny traffic-monitoring sensors are being installed along highways in 27 cities nationwide under the program. The monitors collect information on lane occupancy and traffic speed, and the data then is supposed to be transmitted live to electronic message boards and other devices.[quote]
But the decade-old agreement that the department signed with Traffic.com, the contractor hired to install the system, included a provision that granted the contractor exclusive control of the data, says the report, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times in advance of its public release.
That means Traffic.com, a subsidiary of Navteq of Chicago1 can sell the data to commercial providers like The Weather Channel or post it on its own Internet site. But state and local governments that are partners in the project have been told they are not allowed to share the information with the public unless they pay a fee, the report says.
In San Francisco, for example, the state collects and distributes its own traffic data, offering traffic updates for the metropolitan area. But it cannot do the same with the detailed information gathered by Traffic.com through the federally subsidized system.
The Massachusetts Highway Department, the report says, was formally prohibited from using the data to offer highway message board estimates to Boston-area commuters on traffic delays. Local and state governments were also prohibited from posting the traffic information on government Internet sites or traffic information telephone hotlines, unless they paid Traffic.com a fee for the data.
State and local governments are allowed to use the data to study trends in highway use. But for the most part, Traffic.com is the only entity that stands to profit from the equipment installed in the public right of way and paid for with federal money, the report concluded.
[Click to continue reading U.S. System for Tracking Traffic Flow Is Faulted – NYTimes.com]
What lobbyist wrote this bill anyway? Was Bill Cat Killer Frist involved in some way? Really, why is this even a valid use of public tax dollars? Navteq doesn’t need federal money to underwrite its own infrastructure improvements. If it does, Navteq should rent the space on public highways, not be given the data for free, especially if its plan was all along to sell the data for profit.
Footnotes:A few interesting links collected December 9th through December 10th:
As for the names in your Contacts: they’re sent to Nuance so that the app will recognize the names when you dictate them. No other information (phone numbers, e-mail, addresses, etc.) is transmitted.
What I don’t understand is: Why don’t these same people worry that Verizon or AT&T is listening in to their cellphone calls every single day? Why don’t they worry that MasterCard is peeking into their buying habits? How do they know Microsoft and Apple aren’t slurping down private documents off the hard drive and laughing their heads off?
I mean, if you’re gonna be paranoid, at least be rational about it.
That option has disappeared, and now apps can get all of your “publicly available information” whenever a friend of yours adds an app.
Facebook defends this change by arguing that very few users actually ever selected that option — in the same breath that they talk about how complicated and hard to find the previous privacy settings were. Rather than eliminating the option, Facebook should have made it more prominent and done a better job of publicizing it. Instead, the company has sent a clear message: if you don’t want to share your personal data with hundreds or even thousands of nameless, faceless Facebook app developers — some of whom are obviously far from honest — then you shouldn’t use Facebook.
