Category Archives: Technology

Ruling Backs Internet-Phone Wiretapping

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From this morning’s New York Times…

WASHINGTON, June 9 (Bloomberg News) — Comcast, Vonage and other companies that provide telecommunications services over the Internet must allow wiretapping of phone calls by law enforcement officials, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

In a 2-to-1 decision, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a Federal Communications Commission directive treating such companies the same as conventional phone companies for law enforcement purposes. Comcast and other cable companies offer Internet service over their networks, and Vonage is the biggest provider of Web-based phone service…

Yes, but what will they do about Skype, which is a P2P system?

The long tail in action

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From today’s New York Times…

a nice illustration of a brainteaser I have been giving my friends since I visited Netflix in Silicon Valley last month. Out of the 60,000 titles in Netflix’s inventory, I ask, how many do you think are rented at least once on a typical day? The most common answers have been around 1,000, which sounds reasonable enough. Americans tend to flock to the same small group of movies, just as they flock to the same candy bars and cars, right?

Well, the actual answer is 35,000 to 40,000. That’s right: every day, almost two of every three movies ever put onto DVD are rented by a Netflix customer. “Americans’ tastes are really broad,” says Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive. So, while the studios spend their energy promoting bland blockbusters aimed at everyone, Netflix has been catering to what people really want — and helping to keep Hollywood profitable in the process…

The wisdom of cr… er, lynch mobs

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Here’s an interesting echo of Jason Lanier’s rant about the stupidity of crowds — an intriguing NYT story about online vigilantism in China.

SHANGHAI, June 2 — It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of the country’s most popular Internet bulletin boards from a husband denouncing a college student he suspected of having an affair with his wife. Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack.

“Let’s use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons,” one person wrote, “to chop off the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband.”

Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams that hunted down the student, hounded him out of his university and caused his family to barricade themselves inside their home. It was just the latest example of a growing phenomenon the Chinese call Internet hunting, in which morality lessons are administered by online throngs and where anonymous Web users come together to investigate others and mete out punishment for offenses real and imagined.

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Problems of the “hive mind”

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Interesting essay by Jason Lanier challenging the “wisdom of crowds” hypothesis.

The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. It’s been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. At the very least it’s a success at revealing what the online people with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and that’s actually interesting information.

No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous…

Open Source XP

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This is an illustration from today’s New York Times showing how Chris diBona, Google’s Manager of Open Source Programs, uses a fancy little micro-PC when he’s on the road. Er, just one problem: the cool little gizmo — according to the picture caption — runs Windows XP. What kind of Open Source advocacy is that?

Finally, a real use for the Segway

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From Technology Review…

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Thieves used to break into as many as five cars a week in the parking garage at Los Angeles’ Union Station. Then the Metropolitan Transportation Authority came up with a simple solution: They put a security officer on a Segway Human Transporter. ”The first day that one of the security officers was on the device was pretty much the last day there was a break-in,” said Robin Blair, a transportation planning manager for the MTA, which owns about 19 Segways.

Although the electric, self-balancing Segway scooter never quite caught on with commuters the way its backers had predicted five years ago, the gizmo has found a growing market among law-enforcement agencies, with more than 100 departments around the world now signed on as customers and many others testing the device. The niche market, coupled with a burst of interest from Europeans struggling with gas prices much higher than in the U.S., have breathed new life into the Segway…

Get the bad news early

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From Technology Review…

An ultrasensitive DNA and protein detector, expected to be widely available later this year, could save lives by detecting genetic and infectious diseases early, before they turn deadly or spread. Its relatively low cost and simplicity will make diagnostic tests that today can be done only in specialized labs available at local hospitals.

Furthermore, because it’s extremely sensitive, it could detect signs of disease invisible to current tools.The device, which has been developed by Nanosphere, Northbrook, IL, based on research by Chad Mirkin, professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, is already being in used in several research labs and is awaiting Food and Drug Administration approval before it enters general use.

In its first application, the gold nanoparticle-based detector will tell doctors whether patients have a genetic trait that makes them likely to develop blood clots during surgery, helping doctors prevent strokes. Soon after, pending the results of ongoing clinical trials, it could diagnose previously undetected heart disease and help researchers diagnose and develop treatments for Alzheimer’s disease by detecting levels of telltale proteins in the blood at concentrations “undetectable by any other technology,” says Bill Moffitt, CEO of Nanosphere.

Each year 100,000 patients complaining of heart attack-like symptoms are sent home without treatment because current methods cannot diagnose some heart attacks, Moffitt says. Of these people, 20 percent die within a month, he says. And the rest have a much greater risk of dying from a heart attack in the coming year. Moffitt says that by detecting concentrations a thousand times lower that current methods of a protein released in the body during a heart attack, the Nanosphere technology may help doctors diagnose and treat these attacks.

Pshaw! I developed a simple test for Alzheimer’s decades ago. You just ask someone to spell it. If they can’t, then the chances are they’ve got it!

Serendipity and the Web

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Thoughtful essay by Bill Thompson. It was prompted by a column by William McKeen arguing that online reading precluded the serendipity that one experiences in reading offline newspapers.

Perhaps the best argument in favour of the argument that today’s richly interlinked web is as much a promoter of serendipity as the library, the bookstore or the radio is simply that the discussion is happening at all.

I came across Steven Johnson’s first post, a response to McKeen’s article, because I subscribe to the feed from Johnson’s blog through the Bloglines service. I can see whenever he writes something new, and because I like his style I generally read his stuff.

He linked to the original article so I read that, but there were also a range of comments already posted on Johnson’s website, so I followed them up too.

My serendipitous discovery of McKeen’s piece demonstrates clearly not only that he is wrong but that the potential for accidental discovery is greatly enhanced by the net and the web. The chance of me stumbling across the St Petersburg Times in my local library is rather small, since it doesn’t actually keep copies of it.

Once I came across the argument about serendipity I focused on it, searched specifically for people engaged in the debate, and ignored many interesting sidelines – like an old post from Jason Kottke about why Macs used to be rubbish – as a result….

Travel-time maps

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Terrific piece of ingenuity by Chris Lightfoot and Tom Steinberg of mySociety — travel-time maps showing journey times via public transport and shortish taxi rides. Using colours and contour lines they show how long it takes to travel between one particular place and every other place in the area, using public transport. They also show the areas from which no such journey is possible, because the services are not good enough.

The detailed map of Cambridge is very interesting because it shows how some destinations in the neighbourhood are easy to reach by public transport, whereas others (e.g. outlying villages) are effectively cut off.

Link via BoingBoing.

Amazon.com’s architecture

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Lorcan Dempsey, whose Blog is a thing of wonder, pointed me to this riveting Conversation with Werner Vogels – Amazon’s CTO on the thinking which led to the company’s transformation from online bookstore to e-commerce juggernaut. The conversation is with Jim Gray, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and should be required reading for anyone responsible for scaling up online services.

Lorcan also spotted an important aspect of the Amazon S3 storage service that I’d missed when I blogged it.

One interesting feature was the absence of a feature – the user interface. It did not have its own user interface: it is available only through machine interfaces. One of these is BitTorrent. So it is built from the start as a network service, a service that other applications communicate with.