James Surowiecki on the Prius phenomenon

James is a New Yorker staff writer and author of The Wisdom of Crowds. He’s just written an interesting article on the Toyota Prius (the Naughton family conveyance). Surowiecki begins by noting that environmental purists are a bit sniffy about hybrids, which they see as a stop-gap pending the really radical development — the fuel-cell powered car. But…

“By keeping our eyes locked on the future, we’re missing the truly radical nature of the present. The hybrid is the most important development in automobile technology since the introduction of the automatic transmission in 1938, or perhaps even the invention of the self-starting motor in 1911. It’s the first successful alternative to the internal combustion engine since the early 20th century, when both steamers and electric cars were popular. And in technological terms, the hybrid represents a qualitative, and not just a quantitative, transformation in the way vehicles work. That’s why Toyota, at least, calls the hybrid a “core” rather than a “bridge” technology. The synergy that propels the Prius will also likely be at the heart of fuel cell cars – if they ever materialize.

What’s especially remarkable about the success of hybrids is that it’s happened from the bottom up. Economists sometimes say there are two routes to innovation: technology push and market pull. In the first case, a cool technology is created and people have to be convinced they want it. In the second, a market exists for a solution to a problem, and it effectively pulls the technology out of the lab and into the real world. Before the recent hybrid boom, many would have said that the cars were a classic example of technology push, with Toyota and Honda trying to force vehicles on an uninterested public. But what has become clear is that the market for “environmentally sensitive” products is large and growing, and that people are willing to pay a premium for these products, as long as they don’t have to compromise on quality.”

He’s right — or at any rate, he has described accurately the thinking that went into my decision to go hybrid.

Thanks to Dave Hill for the link.

How Microsoft plans to exploit spam hysteria

One reason why spam thrives is because the original Internet email protocols do not insist on authenticating senders. So a lot of effort has been focussed by Internet standards bodies on closing this loophole. But now it turns out that any authentication technology that uses the Caller ID system developed by Microsoft will have to pay royalties. This means that open source software will have to avoid that way of doing authentication (not necessarily because people don’t want to pay royalties but because open source licensing terms preclude the inclusion of proprietary products) — which means that open source email systems might come to be perceived as inferior to proprietary products. Which would suit Microsoft nicely. Very good column by Bill Thompson exploring the ramifications of all this.

America at 10mph

A web designer is travelling across America on a Segway. Just one question: why?

The rise and rise of Instant Messaging

According to the latest survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 42% of online Americans use instant messaging, and 24% of instant messagers say they use IM more frequently than email. This translates to 53 million American adults who instant message and over 12 million who IM more than emailing. On a typical day, 29% of instant messengers– or roughly 15 million American adults — use IM.

The new survey also finds that instant messaging is especially popular among younger adults and technology enthusiasts. 62% of Americans aged between 18 and 27 use IM. Within that age group, 46% report using IM more frequently than email.

Hmmm… There are serious security issues here — for example, the risk of an explosion in Spim (Spam over Instant Messaging). The anti-virus industry is concerned because viruses introduced via IM could replicate even faster than those borne by email. One of the companies has produced a scary simulation model of this, but I can’t locate it just now.

The Three Laws of US Robotics

The kids and I have just been to see the movie I, Robot. I went because it was supposed to be based on Isaac Asimov’s book. (It was — loosely.) But the really funny bit was that the Evil Company in the film was called ‘USR’ — which in my day was the abbreviation for US Robotics, a perfectly respectable manufacturer of rather nice analog modems. I’ve just checked, and it is still a respectable manufacturer of same (and it still has USR in its domain name). So how did the movie makers get away with giving the baddies the same handle? Did they pay a hefty ransom?

At last — a useful new HTML tag

Lovely picture which will appeal to HTML coders — from the anti-Bush protests in New York.

Hint for non-techies: it means “End Bush”.

Richard Posner on the 9/11 Commission Report

He’s not impressed. In a very good piece, he writes:

“The tale of how we were surprised by the 9/11 attacks is a product of hindsight; it could not be otherwise. And with the aid of hindsight it is easy to identify missed opportunities (though fewer than had been suspected) to have prevented the attacks, and tempting to leap from that observation to the conclusion that the failure to prevent them was the result not of bad luck, the enemy’s skill and ingenuity or the difficulty of defending against suicide attacks or protecting an almost infinite array of potential targets, but of systemic failures in the nation’s intelligence and security apparatus that can be corrected by changing the apparatus.

That is the leap the commission makes, and it is not sustained by the report’s narrative. The narrative points to something different, banal and deeply disturbing: that it is almost impossible to take effective action to prevent something that hasn’t occurred previously. Once the 9/11 attacks did occur, measures were taken that have reduced the likelihood of a recurrence. But before the attacks, it was psychologically and politically impossible to take those measures. The government knew that Al Qaeda had attacked United States facilities and would do so again. But the idea that it would do so by infiltrating operatives into this country to learn to fly commercial aircraft and then crash such aircraft into buildings was so grotesque that anyone who had proposed that we take costly measures to prevent such an event would have been considered a candidate for commitment. No terrorist had hijacked an American commercial aircraft anywhere in the world since 1986. Just months before the 9/11 attacks the director of the Defense Department’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency wrote: ”We have, in fact, solved a terrorist problem in the last 25 years. We have solved it so successfully that we have forgotten about it; and that is a treat. The problem was aircraft hijacking and bombing. We solved the problem. . . . The system is not perfect, but it is good enough. . . . We have pretty much nailed this thing.” In such a climate of thought, efforts to beef up airline security not only would have seemed gratuitous but would have been greatly resented because of the cost and the increased airport congestion.”

He concludes:

“The report ends on a flat note. But one can sympathize with the commission’s problem. To conclude after a protracted, expensive and much ballyhooed investigation that there is really rather little that can be done to reduce the likelihood of future terrorist attacks beyond what is being done already, at least if the focus is on the sort of terrorist attacks that have occurred in the past rather than on the newer threats of bioterrorism and cyberterrorism, would be a real downer — even a tad un-American. Americans are not fatalists. When a person dies at the age of 95, his family is apt to ascribe his death to a medical failure. When the nation experiences a surprise attack, our instinctive reaction is not that we were surprised by a clever adversary but that we had the wrong strategies or structure and let’s change them and then we’ll be safe. Actually, the strategies and structure weren’t so bad; they’ve been improved; further improvements are likely to have only a marginal effect; and greater dangers may be gathering of which we are unaware and haven’t a clue as to how to prevent.”

Cropping and context

My sunset picture has already puzzled at least one reader. The diagonal line is the top bar of a gate which was wet from the rain. A small pool of rainwater, clinging to the surface of the bar via surface tension, was reflecting the pink cloud. But the picture becomes even more puzzling if it’s cropped to remove the sky — like this. Now it looks as though some strange distorted goldfish is swimming in the pool. The camera may not always lie, but it can be darned enigmatic sometimes.

Why are business books so awful

I thought it was just me. I always get depressed when I pass the ‘business and management’ section in an airport bookshop. How can people write such gibberish? And why would anyone read it? The only explanation I can think of is that most managers spend their entire working lives trying (unsuccessfully) to keep chaos at bay, and delude themselves that if only they could discover The Secret then they will get on top of things. This is a delusion because there is no secret: chaos comes with the territory. But how nice to find the learned Economist weighing in on my side. Quote:

“If you want to profit from your pen, first write a bestselling business book. In few other literary genres are the spin-offs so lucrative. If you speak well enough to make a conference of dozing middle managers sit up, your fortune is made. You can, says Mark French of Leading Authorities, a top speaking agency, make a seven-figure income from speechifying alone.

Given this strong motivation to succeed, it is astonishing how bad most business books are. Many appear to be little more than expanded PowerPoint presentations, with bullet points and sidebars setting out unrelated examples or unconnected thoughts. Some read like an extended paragraph from a consultant’s report (and, indeed, many consultancies encourage their stars to write books around a single idea and lots of examples from the clientele). Few business books are written by a single author; lots require a whole support team of researchers. And all too many have meaningless diagrams.”

The malware problem

The problem of malicious software is the computing world’s equivalent of global warming — except that the timescales are much shorter. The most effective way of doing something about it quickly is to educate computer users so that they become less vulnerable — which is why my colleagues and I have been beavering away on an online course aimed at a non-specialist audience. One of our problems we had was communicating to people how serious the problem is. Here’s a nice opinion piece by Martin Kelly on “The Polluted Internet” which does the job nicely. Here’s a sample:

“If you live in a major metropolitan city where high bandwidth connections are as common as your plain old telephone service, take a look at your firewall and IDS logs. It’s not exciting at all, but you should do it. Compare the results with what you saw even just six months ago. Unwanted packets from worms and trojans are now hitting your network every second. New viruses, old viruses, mutated viruses, you name it. Big worms, fast worms, and worms that have been alive for years, they all reach my firewall and are silently stopped. Nothing new.

The only thing new about this is the magnitude of the problem.

Stare into the light

If you have a cable or DSL modem at home, pause and reflect for a minute as you look into the light. Let me explain.

Take a few short moments to watch the receive light on your modem or unfettered ethernet connection. Here in high bandwidth Canada, that flashing light now flashes almost solid. It’s almost unbelievable. It’s almost all malicious traffic.”