Daily Archives: May 31, 2006

Recipe for disaster

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As an experiment, Steve Knopper bought a Dell computer and left it unprotected — and clicked on every dubious link he could find. He kept a diary. Here are the last few days.

Day 10: I download Kazaa, search for .xxx, .gif, .rar, .pif, and .exe files, and open everything. My desktop is soon stuffed with pornography, MP3s in Arabic, and pirated copies of Tomb Raider. Within minutes, Explorer has a grand mal seizure – 95 pop-ups and innumerable error messages. Hah!

Day 11: Incredibly, the Dell boots up. I’ve gotten some strange attachments that Yahoo, Outlook, and Eudora won’t let me open. I try copying some from my regular computer to the Dell using an external drive. Nothing.

Day 12: Upon firing up the computer, I get six Internet Explorer pop-ups, one WhenUWin Sweepstakes, and one “The Best Offers.” McAfee VirusScan says I have 25 potentially unwanted files, including W32/Netsky.q@MM!zip and two other viruses. SaferScan finds 1,002 porn files on my hard drive, and my Yahoo Mail inbox has 200 brand-new messages with subject lines like “Tired of dating games?”

Day 18: I take the Dell to Best Buy’s Geek Squad and tell a technician that I’m having a bit of trouble with it. Less than four hours later I get a call back from Carla. She declares it a total loss and advises wiping the hard drive and restoring it with system disks. “The tech ran a couple of virus scans,” she says. “One kept beeping so much that he had to just turn it off.” Ah, that’s the stuff.

It was a Windows machine, you understand.

Neocon mistakes

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Andrew Sullivan writing in TIME Magazine…

Fukuyama’s sharpest insight here is how the miraculously peaceful end of the cold war lulled many of us into overconfidence about the inevitability of democratic change, and its ease. We got cocky. We should have known better.

The second error was narcissism. America’s power blinded many of us to the resentments that hegemony always provokes. Those resentments are often as deep among our global friends as among our enemies–and make alliances as hard as they are important. That is not to say we should never act unilaterally. Sometimes the right thing to do will spawn backlash, and we should do it anyway. But that makes it all the more imperative that when we do go out on a limb, we get things right. In those instances, we need to make our margin of error as small as humanly possible. Too many in the Bush Administration, alas, did the opposite. They sent far too few troops, were reckless in postinvasion planning and turned a deaf ear to constructive criticism, even from within their own ranks. Their abdication of the moral high ground, by allowing the abuse and torture of military detainees, is repellent. Their incompetence and misjudgments might be forgiven. Their arrogance and obstinacy remain inexcusable.

The final error was not taking culture seriously enough. There is a large discrepancy between neoconservatism’s skepticism of government’s ability to change culture at home and its naiveté when it comes to complex, tribal, sectarian cultures abroad…

Yep to all three.

Prescott gives up Dorneywood

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From BBC Online…

Deputy Prime Minster John Prescott has announced he is to give up his grace-and-favour home, Dorneywood.

Mr Prescott lost his department but kept his £133,000-a-year Cabinet salary and two grace-and-favour homes after he admitted an affair with a secretary.

He said he had now taken a “personal decision” to give up Dorneywood because the public controversy over it was “getting in the way of doing my job”…

He’s doomed. Now for the really interesting question: who will get Dorneywood now? It used to be the country house allocated to the Foreign Secretary, but Margaret Beckett prefers to stay in her caravan when she goes to the country. So the hot money is on Jack Straw. He deserves a consolation prize, if only for saying that the idea of invading Iran was barmy.

The dark underbelly of the World Cup

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Julie Bindel had an interesting piece about an aspect of the World Cup not usually dwelt upon in the football pages.

With just 10 days to go until the first matches kick off, shops across Britain are heaving with World Cup merchandise: football shirts, whistles and scarves. And then there are the condoms. At 500 branches of Superdrug, there is a range of condoms tailored for England supporters. They are emblazoned with the slogan “Lie Back and Think of England” and decorated with the cross of St George.

It may seem reassuring that football supporters travelling to Germany are being encouraged to be sensible, but there is a pernicious side to the connection between the 2006 World Cup and sex. Alongside the beer tents and burger bars catering for a massive influx of fans to Germany, entrepreneurs are preparing to sell a product already openly on sale throughout Germany: women.

Germany has legalised its sex industry – Cologne opened the world’s first drive-in brothel in 2001. But with three million foreign football fans about to descend on the 12 cities hosting the tournament, entrepreneurs are laying on special facilities. In Berlin, for example, a 3,000sqm mega-brothel has been built next to the main World Cup venue. It is designed to take as many as 650 customers at any one time. Wooden “performance boxes” resembling toilets have been built, with condoms, showers and parking all laid on…

The really scary question is: where will these women come from? Answer: people trafficking.

After Blair

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Max Hastings, gushing about Dave ‘Vote Blue get Green’ Cameron in the Guardian.

Whatever happens in the months ahead, the circumstances of Blair’s departure will be at best undignified, at worst humiliating. Whatever Gordon Brown does on inheriting the mantle, he will find himself in the position of an aged Broadway star summoned to London to revive the fortunes of a flagging musical – deprived even of its custard-pie turn with the announcement that John Prescott is “resting”, as he surely soon will be.

The highlights of Brown’s early premiership will be supervision of a more or less ignominious retreat from Iraq, further increases in taxation, pressures on public spending and – if Brown is foolish – a lurch back to “old Labour values”. Leave morality out of this. As Blair always understood and the left never does, there are not enough poor people in Britain to elect a government. The majority of “haves” will always care more about what happens to them than about compassion for the less fortunate…

As I was saying…

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… about user-generated content. This article about YouTube continues the theme. Excerpt:

YouTube and other video-sharing Web sites signal a shift in the way entertainment will be made and consumed in the future. They’re creating a new form of television that’s at once personal, grass-roots and unfettered.

With the emergence of technology for easily sharing video over the Internet, viewers are gaining the autonomy to choose what, when and where they watch — be it on an iPod, laptop or desktop computer. And the masses are getting an opportunity to create and experiment with video while bypassing the central filter of a TV network.

No company epitomizes these rapid changes more than YouTube. In the past six months, YouTube, a 27-employee company housed above a pizzeria in San Mateo, has become a new global stage.

Visitors to the site view more than 50 million videos a day, mostly made by amateurs. Its audience has mushroomed to 12.5 million a month, making it the chief place people go online to watch video. It has become one of the 50 most visited Web sites overall….

Hmmm…. Wonder what their monthly bandwidth charges are like.

On the other hand…

Web sites such as YouTube, whose motto is “Broadcast Yourself,” have a long way to go before killing off the boob tube. In a recent survey for the Online Publishers Association, 24 percent of Internet users said they watched online video at least once a week and only 5 percent watched it daily. The average person watches 4 hours and 52 minutes of TV a day, according to Nielsen Media Research. On average, each YouTube visitor spends nearly 16 minutes on the site, according to Hitwise, an online measurement firm in New York.

For now, YouTube is a pastime mostly for the young. Thirty-one percent of its visitors are 18 to 24, according to Hitwise. And that is probably the age range of most of YouTube’s budding video makers.

But that only emphasises the point I was trying to make in my lecture. Nobody is saying that YouTube means the end of broadcast TV, any more than blogging means the end of journalism. It’s just that user-generated content brings new organisms into the media ecosystem, and changes the relationships between its components. The only things we can say for sure at the moment are that: (a) the old, near-total dominance of push-media and publication gatekeepers is eroding; and (b) the media ecosystem is rapidly becoming much more complex. For a fuller argument, see Yochai Benkler’s new book.

So who are the really creative people around here?

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I’ve been lecturing for years (e.g. here) about the coming transformation from the ‘push’ world of broadcast TV (in which small numbers of content creators push multimedia content at passive consumers — aka couch potatoes) to a world dominated by ‘pull’ media like the Web. The dominance of the broadcast model led people to assume that audiences were essentially passive and stupid — which is why, to broadcasters, the notion of “user-generated content” is an oxymoron.

I’ve also been putting forward the (to me, obvious) proposition that the current surge of user-generated content (e.g. in Blogging, Flickr, YouTube, Google Video, etc.) is a very good pointer to the way the world is going to be. Now comes some really interesting empirical evidence in support of that from the Pew Internet Survey whose latest report says, in part

Overall, 35% of all internet users have posted content to the internet. Specifically, we asked about four types of online content: having one’s own blog; having one’s own webpage; working on a blog or webpage for work or a group; or sharing self-created content such as a story, artwork, or video.

  • An even higher percentage of home broadband users – 42% or about 31 million people – have posted content to the internet. They account for 73% of home internet users who were the source of online content. A majority of them are home broadband users.
  • Having a fast, always-on internet connection at home is associated with users’ posting content to the internet and thereby shaping the environment of cyberspace.
  • Although home dial-up internet users get involved in putting content online, they do not do so at the same rate as broadband users.
  • Just 27% of dial-up users, or about 13 million adults, have placed some sort content online.
  • Sharing a variety of creations online is among the most popular kinds of user-generated content.
  • Overall, 36 million internet users have shared their own artwork, photos, stories, or videos on the internet. That comes to 26% of internet users. Home
    broadband users account for about two-thirds of this number.
  • Home is not the only place from which people upload content. Among the 11% of online Americans with access only at work or some place other than work or home (such as a library), 21% have posted some content to the internet. That comes to 5 million people.

    • 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!

    So what happens now?

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    This doesn’t affect me, because I’m boycotting the US until they elect a new president, but the European Court’s decision is going to cause some interesting problems. Here’s the NYT report…

    PARIS, May 30 — The European Union’s highest court ruled Tuesday that the Union had overstepped its authority by agreeing to give the United States personal details about airline passengers on flights to America in an effort to fight terrorism.

    The decision will force the two sides to renegotiate the deal at a time of heightened concerns about possible infringements of civil liberties by the Bush administration in its campaign against terrorism, and the extent to which European governments have cooperated. The ruling gave both sides four months to approve a new agreement, and American officials expressed optimism that one could be reached. But without an agreement, the United States could take punitive action, in theory even denying landing rights to airlines that withhold the information. That could cause major disruptions in trans-Atlantic air travel, which accounts for nearly half of all foreign air travel to the United States….