Category Archives: Beyond belief

OJ Simpson’s book creating eBay frenzy?

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From New York Daily News…

While O.J. Simpson’s defunct book has been branded the scourge of publishing, it continued to be a hot collector’s item on eBay yesterday – with people bidding thousands of dollars for a copy.

At least three hardcovers of “If I Did It” – in which the disgraced football legend theoretically expounds on how he would have committed the slayings of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman – were sparking bidding wars.

An attorney for the Brown family accused eBay yesterday of dragging its feet on complying with the publisher’s request to have the books removed from the site.

“We really need to stem the tide and get these books out of circulation because anything that’s out there now is really hurtful to family,” said lawyer Natasha Roit.

A spokesman for eBay, Hani Durzy, insisted his company was trying to accommodate publisher HarperCollins’ request to remove the books from the auction block. But he said with more than 100 million items on the site at any given time, it was difficult to quickly flag them.

The three books up for auction yesterday received more than 100 bids. The highest legitimate offer was $15,300.

Say, where does the plutonium go in this thing?

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That Saddam knew a thing or two. The NYT reports that,

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

The key to votes

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From Ed Felten’s Blog…

The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.

On Wednesday we did a live demo for our Princeton Computer Science colleagues of the vote-stealing software described in our paper and video. Afterward, Chris Tengi, a technical staff member, asked to look at the key that came with the voting machine. He noticed an alphanumeric code printed on the key, and remarked that he had a key at home with the same code on it. The next day he brought in his key and sure enough it opened the voting machine.

This seemed like a freakish coincidence — until we learned how common these keys are.

Chris’s key was left over from a previous job, maybe fifteen years ago. He said the key had opened either a file cabinet or the access panel on an old VAX computer. A little research revealed that the exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and hotel minibars. It’s a standard part, and like most standard parts it’s easily purchased on the Internet. We bought several keys from an office furniture key shop — they open the voting machine too. We ordered another key on eBay from a jukebox supply shop. The keys can be purchased from many online merchants.

Using such a standard key doesn’t provide much security, but it does allow Diebold to assert that their design uses a lock and key. Experts will recognize the same problem in Diebold’s use of encryption — they can say they use encryption, but they use it in a way that neutralizes its security benefits.

The bad guys don’t care whether you use encryption; they care whether they can read and modify your data. They don’t care whether your door has a lock on it; they care whether they can get it open. The checkbox approach to security works in press releases, but it doesn’t work in the field.

Update (Oct. 28): Several people have asked whether this entry is a joke. Unfortunately, it is not a joke.

It turns out that the same key opens the Nedap/Groenendaal e-voting machines that the Dutch government has decided are unsafe for the forthcoming November 22 general election! Truly, you could not make this stuff up.

Nielsen conference on user-generated media bans blogging

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From Greg Verdino’s Blog.

Today, I am off to Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ clients-only CGM Summit 2006.  The agenda is cram packed with sessions covering all aspects of Consumer Generated Media (CGM) including an overview of where we are today, why people do this stuff, where CGM is going in the future, and how exactly marketers can leverage and measure this powerful channel.  Ironically, the confirmation email I received for the event includes this warning:

“Off The Record: the CGM Summit is off the record, so please no blogging, reporting, recording or broadcasting.”

Hmmm…  So how can you host an event about consumer generated media and not let your consumers, um, generate media?

Dib, dib, death to piracy

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Boy Scouts in the L.A. area can now get credit for doing the entertainment industry a good deed. The little troopers can earn a “respecting copyrights” activity patch to sew on their sashes by taking a course designed by the movie industry to impress young minds with the evils of pirating. The patch (different from a merit badge in that it’s not required to advance in rank) shows a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a “C” enclosed in a circle. Course work involves a hike through the swamp of intellectual property law, learning how to identify five types of copyrighted works and three ways copyrighted materials may be stolen. Also required is a project, like making a “just say no” public service announcement, or visiting a movie studio to see how many people would be out of jobs if the pirates win. “Part of being a Scout is being trustworthy and part of being trustworthy is being able to follow the rules in our society,” said Victor Zuniga, a spokesman for the council.

A Textbook Answer to School Violence

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Truly, you couldn’t make this up…

In the wake of recent school shootings, a candidate for Oklahoma state superintendent of education has announced a bold new proposal to keep kids safe without spending more on school security. Republican Bill Crozier suggests that students can defend themselves from school shooters by using textbooks to stop bullets fired at them. “If elected” he promises that thick used textbooks will be placed at the ready under every school desk.

Crozier recently tested his theory by doing what millions of students only wish they could do: fire round after round into a Calculus and science textbook with an assault rifle and handguns. Even better, he made a home video of his experiment and provided an unedited copy to a local Oklahoma City television station…

I always knew my copy of Samuelson would come in useful sometime.

655,000

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From Eric Alterman’s Blog…

This just kind of leaves me speechless and breathless: “A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.” If the number is even half that, well then … I really don’t know to say.

Meanwhile, are these guys trying to protect us? More than five years after 9-11, only 33 out of 12,000 FBI agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in areas that coordinate investigations of international terrorism, here. (And don’t tell me they can’t recruit Arabic speakers. Five years is plenty of time to learn Arabic.) More bad news on that front here.

Meanwhile, speaking of this glorious adminstration’s bravery and competence, what really happened at Haditha? William Langewiesche takes 14,551 words in the current Vanity Fair to tell us, here, and it ain’t pretty. Well, neither is losing three sons, owing to the lies of your president. Our condolences …

And, oh yeah, North Korea.

(McCain’s straight-talking, mavericky solution? Blame Clinton. Brilliant. I sure hope he finds a way to get booked on ABC’s This Week someday.)

Algorithmic ‘integrity’

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From Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog…

Last week, CNET’s Elinor Mills reported on how a web search for “Martin Luther King” returns, as its first result on Google and as its second result on Windows Live Search, a web site (martinlutherking.org) operated by a white supremacist organization named Stormfront. The site, titled “Martin Luther King Jr.: A True Historical Examination,” refers to King as “The Beast” and says he was “just a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own people.” The site also features an essay on “Jews & Civil Rights” by former Ku Klux Klan official David Duke.

What’s remarkable, though, is not that a search algorithm might be gamed by extremists but that the owners of the algorithm might themselves defend the offensive result – and reject any attempt to override it as an assault on the “integrity” of their system….

Carr goes on to quote Google’s response to the CNET story:

At Google, a Web site’s ranking is determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to any given query, a company representative said. The company can’t tweak the results because of that automation and the need to maintain the integrity of the results, she said. “In this particular example, the page is relevant to the query and many people have linked to it, giving it more PageRank than some of the other pages. These two factors contribute to its ranking.”

Microsoft’s response was even more robust:

The results on Microsoft’s search engine are “not an endorsement, in any way, of the viewpoints held by the owners of that content,” said Justin Osmer, senior product manager for Windows Live Search. “The ranking of our results is done in an automated manner through our algorithm which can sometimes lead to unexpected results,” he said. “We always work to maintain the integrity of our results to ensure that they are not editorialized.”

To which Carr tartly responds:

By “editorialized” he seems to mean “subjected to the exercise of human judgment.” And human judgment, it seems, is an unfit substitute for the mindless, automated calculations of an algorithm. We are not worthy to question the machine we have made. It is so pure that even its corruption is a sign of its integrity.

Computerised hostility detection

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Fascinating article in today’s New York Times…

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.

Such a “sentiment analysis” is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said.

Researchers at institutions including Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah intend to test the system on hundreds of articles published in 2001 and 2002 on topics like President Bush’s use of the term “axis of evil,” the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the debate over global warming and the coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

A $2.4 million grant will finance the research over three years.

American officials have long relied on newspapers and other news sources to track events and opinions here and abroad, a goal that has included the routine translation of articles from many foreign publications and news services.

The new software would allow much more rapid and comprehensive monitoring of the global news media, as the Homeland Security Department and, perhaps, intelligence agencies look “to identify common patterns from numerous sources of information which might be indicative of potential threats to the nation,” a statement by the department said.

It could take several years for such a monitoring system to be in place, said Joe Kielman, coordinator of the research effort. The monitoring would not extend to United States news, Mr. Kielman said.

“We want to understand the rhetoric that is being published and how intense it is, such as the difference between dislike and excoriate,” he said.

Even the basic research has raised concern among journalism advocates and privacy groups, as well as representatives of the foreign news media.

“It is just creepy and Orwellian,” said Lucy Dalglish, a lawyer and former editor who is executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Andrei Sitov, Washington bureau chief of the Itar-Tass news agency of Russia, said he hoped that the objective did not go beyond simply identifying threats to efforts to stifle criticism about an American president or administration.

“This is what makes your country great, the open society where people can criticize their own government,” Mr. Sitov said…

BTW: “Sentiment analysis” is what this stuff is called in the comp.sci community.

The CrackBerry habit

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British employers are being warned they could face multi-million-pound legal actions from BlackBerry-addicted staff on a similar scale as class law-suits taken against tobacco companies.

Research by the University of Northampton has revealed that one-third of BlackBerry users showed signs of addictive behaviour similar to an alcoholic being unable to pass a pub without a drink.

The report found that some BlackBerry users displayed textbook addictive symptoms – denial, withdrawal and antisocial behaviour – and that time with their families was being taken up with BlackBerry-checking, even at the dinner table.

Professor Nada Kakabadse, joint author of the study, said that lawsuits were a growing issue for employers who were being sued for failing in their duty of care to staff and in following health and safety guidelines.

In one case in the US, a female business consultant claimed that her marriage fell apart because she was constantly checking messages. She ended up losing custody of her children and sued her employer for damages.

“Enlightened companies that issue BlackBerrys as standard like pen and paper should also have policies on how to use them, so that people can use technology in a way that doesn’t have an addictive side,” said Professor Kakabadse of Northampton Business School.

The BlackBerry backlash has already begun in the US, where firms are settling out of court to avoid negative publicity.

[Source.]

I’ve had a BlackBerry for well over a year. It is by far the most useful gadget I’ve ever owned. But I don’t recognise any of these symptoms. Could it be that most BlackBerry users haven’t figured out how to filter their mail? In my case, the only mail that reaches my phone comes from:

  • a few selected colleagues in the various organisations where I work
  • my kids
  • a few special friends
  • my editors on the Observer.

    Everything else goes to my computer, as usual. The result: really important email reaches me instantly. Everything else has to wait until I’m at a computer.