Monthly Archives: January 2006

Those Iraqi ‘security’ forces

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From an interesting piece by Paul Rogers in openDemocracy.net

In the second week of December 2005 one of Saddam Hussein’s largest palace compounds – in the former dictator’s home town of Tikrit – was handed over by US forces to their Iraqi counterparts. The elaborate ceremony of this richly symbolic event included the arrival by helicopter of the American ambassador and the commander of US forces in Iraq, in order to demonstrate the success of Iraqi forces in taking on more and more security functions. Within days, however, the very Iraqi security forces that had taken charge had systematically looted the 2,000-hectare compound; truckloads of its furnishings later were found on sale up at local markets (see Ellen Knickmeyer, “After Handover, Hussein Palaces Looted”, Washington Post, 13 January 2006)

Rules for Internet boors

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David Pogue writes the excellent ‘Circuits’ column about digital technology in the New York Times. I find him to be a perceptive and reliable observer. But he gets some really foul email from trolls who disagree violently with his views. This week he’s published a nicely ironic response…

RULES FOR TROLLS AND PILLS

WHEREAS, 95 percent of all the e-mail received by critics and columnists is civil, friendly or respectfully constructive;

but WHEREAS, this is the Internet age, and we’re all anonymous and can avoid making eye contact forever;

and WHEREAS, there’s so much information overload, a little heat and drama on your part may be necessary just to be heard above the din;

and WHEREAS, many of those who fire off potshots are missing out on some of the best techniques for effective snippiness;

THEREFORE let us now post the rules for membership in the Pills of the American Internet Neighborhood Society.

1. Use the strongest language possible. Calling names is always effective, and four-letter words show that you mean business.

2. Having a violent opinion of something doesn’t require you to actually try it yourself. After all, plenty of people heatedly object to books they haven’t read or movies they haven’t seen. Heck, you can imagine perfectly well if something is any good.

3. If it’s a positive review that you didn’t like, call the reviewer a “fanboy.” Do not entertain the notion that the product, service, show, movie, book or restaurant might, in fact, be good. Instead, assume that the reviewer has received payment from the reviewee. Work in the word “shill” if possible.

4. If it’s a negative review, call the reviewer a “basher” and describe the review as a “hatchet job.” Accuse him of being paid off by the reviewee’s *rival*.

5. If it’s a mixed review, ignore the passages that balance the argument. Pretend that the entire review is all positive or all negative. Refer to it either as a “rave” or a “slam.”

6. If you find a sentence early in the article that rubs you the wrong way, you are by no means obligated to finish reading. Stop right where you are–express your anger while it’s still good and hot! What are the odds that the writer is going to say anything else relevant to your point later in the piece, anyway?

7. If the writer responds to your e-mail with evidence that you’re wrong (for example, by citing a paragraph that you overlooked), disappear without responding. This is the anonymous Internet; slipping away without consequence or civility is your privilege.

8. Trolling is making a deliberately inflammatory remark, one that you know perfectly well is baloney, just to get a rise out of other people. Trolling is an art. Trolling works just fine for an audience of one (say, a journalist), but of course the real fun is trolling on public bulletin boards where you can get dozens of people screaming at you simultaneously. Comments on religion, politics or Mac-vs.-Windows are always good bets. The talented troll sits back to enjoy the fireworks with a smirk, and never, ever responds to the responses.

9. Don’t let generalities slip by. Don’t tolerate simplifications for the sake of a non-technical audience. Ignore conditional words like “generally,” “usually” and “most.” If you read a sentence that says, for example, “The VisionPhone is among the first consumer videophones,” cite the reviewer’s ignorance and laziness for failing to mention the prototype developed by AT&T for the 1964 World’s Fair. Send copies of your note to the publication’s publisher and, if possible, its advertisers.

And there you have it: the nine habits of highly effective pills. After all: if you’re going to be a miserable curmudgeon, you may as well do it up right!

Google’s Shadow Payroll

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Interesting NYT snippet on Google AdSense…

The trickle-down effect from Google does not stop at fledgling entrepreneurs. A growing number of rank-and-file contributors to Web sites are also profiting.

Consider Digital Point Solutions, a software company in San Diego, which publishes an online forum (http://forums.digitalpoint.com) frequented by about 15,000 users. Any one of them who starts a new forum discussion topic receives half of the advertising revenue paid to the site by Google for ads on the front page of that topic section. (The discussion’s creator then splits his share with others who post messages.)

Google does not actually advertise on the Digital Point site. Rather, through Google’s AdSense program, it places ads on the forum, similar to the ads that appear next to search results on Google.com. Google scans the information on the forum’s pages, then posts related ads. If the discussion is about computer hardware, for instance, ads for DVD drives might appear.

Google pays Digital Point about $10,000 a month, depending on how many people view or click on those ads, said Shawn D. Hogan, the owner and chief technology officer of Digital Point.

Hmmm… My total income to date from AdSense is, let me see… (counts pennies), er, $15.06!

Michael Dell to eat his hat

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Well, well. Nice story in the New York Times…

In 1997, shortly after [Steve] Jobs returned to Apple, the company he helped start in 1976, Dell’s founder and chairman, Michael S. Dell, was asked at a technology conference what might be done to fix Apple, then deeply troubled financially.

“What would I do?” Mr. Dell said to an audience of several thousand information technology managers. “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

On Friday, apparently savoring the moment, Mr. Jobs sent a brief e-mail message to Apple employees, which read: “Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.”

More: According to Slashdot, the actual numbers were: $72,132,428,843 compared to Dell’s $71,970,702,760

Why you’d be mad to use Internet Explorer

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Bruce Schneier drew my attention to a fascinating piece of research on the relative insecurity of different web browsers. He summarises the findings thus:

The researchers tracked three browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were “known unsafe.” Their definition of “known unsafe”: a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been publicly announced and no patch was yet available.

MSIE was 98% unsafe. There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole.

Firefox was 15% unsafe. There were 56 days with an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. 30 of those days were a Mac hole that only affected Mac users. Windows Firefox was 7% unsafe.

Opera was 17% unsafe: 65 days. That number is accidentally a little better than it should be, as two of the unpatched periods happened to overlap.

This underestimates the risk, because it doesn’t count vulnerabilities known to the bad guys but not publicly disclosed (and it’s foolish to think that such things don’t exist). So the “98% unsafe” figure for MSIE is generous, and the situation might be even worse.

Still using IE? Think about it.

The end of Nikonography

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This morning’s Observer column about Nikon’s plans to stop making film cameras.

Nikon’s decision is as profound as the switch from vinyl LPs to CDs in the early 1980s. And the arguments which rage about the merits of analogue and digital photography have echoes of the debates about vinyl versus CD. Digital music is created by sampling the audio signal 44,000 times a second, and hi-fi buffs argued that this degrades sound quality. As someone who could never afford high-end analogue hi-fi systems, however, CDs seemed immeasurably better to me. 

But then, I’m no hi-fi buff. I do, however, know something about photography, and there’s no question that digital images are currently inferior to analogue ones. At even moderate levels of enlargement, the differences are obvious. Areas of sharp contrast between light and dark are problematic for digital imagery (try a digital photograph of a leafless tree silhouetted against a bright sky); and colour rendition in low-light conditions can be wacky and ‘noisy’ (flecked with what looks like digital dust).

But to average snappers, the images coming from a digital camera are as good as anything they ever got from film. In fact, they’re better, because more of the duds will have been snuffed out in the camera. They come in a much more convenient form – as files that can be emailed to friends and family or posted on Flickr. And although the camera may cost more to buy, subsequent savings on processing may compensate.

So, for the average punter, film lost the argument with digital ages ago…

Explaining free software to lay people

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I’m very interested in finding way of communicating the essence of important technological issues to lay audiences. The advantages of open source software are readily obvious to techies, but opaque to anyone who has never written a computer program.

So when I talk about open source software nowadays I find it helpful to talk about cooking recipes without mentioning computers at all. To communicate the importance of the ‘freedom to tinker’ that free software bestows on its users, for example, I invite people to ponder the absurdity of not being allowed to modify other people’s recipes for, say, Boeuf Bourgignon or fruit scones. I often make BB without using shallots, for example, and just chop standard onions into largish chunks. (It saves time and IMHO doesn’t materially affect the ultimate taste. And if a purist objects, I can always christen my modified recipe “Beef in red wine” and tell him to go to hell!)

Similarly, to illustrate the difference between open source software and compiled binaries I compare Hovis bread-mix (“just add water”)

with a recipe for baking bread.

Most people grasp intuitively that the ‘open-source’ recipe gives you certain important freedoms that the ‘compiled’ bread-mix doesn’t.

Now comes an equally homely way of communicating to a lay audience what a news aggregator does.

A blogger compiled her own table of contents for several fashion magazines, mashing them up to make the one magazine she wanted (instead of the half-dozen ad-filled craptacular glossy anorexia advertisements that she had). If you’re struggling to explain the value of aggregators to offline people, this is a good place to start: magazines are often only 10% relevant to you, so what if you could extract the few good articles from a lot of mediocre magazines to get one really good magazine?

Why the steam media still don’t ‘get’ Wikipedia

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Insightful essay by David Weinberger. Excerpt:

The media literally can’t hear that humility, which reflects accurately the fluid and uneven quality of Wikipedia. The media — amplifying our general cultural assumptions — have come to expect knowledge to be coupled with arrogance : If you claim to know X, then you’ve also been claiming that you’re right and those who disagree are wrong. A leather-bound, published encyclopedia trades on this aura of utter rightness (as does a freebie e-newsletter, albeit it to a lesser degree). The media have a cognitive problem with a publisher of knowledge that modestly does not claim perfect reliability, does not back up that claim through a chain of credentialed individuals, and that does not believe the best way to assure the quality of knowledge is by disciplining individuals for their failures.