Daily Archives: July 19, 2009

Celebrating Mr Tom

Posted on by

Photograph by Tillers1

The only sport I’ve ever really loved is golf, so there was a special poignancy for me in the outcome of the 149th British Open today. I badly wanted Tom Watson to win, not just because of the wonderful way he played over the four days, or because he’s nearly as old as I am, but because he was a hero of my golf-obsessed youth. He came sooooo close to pulling it off, and the way his second shot to the 18th ran off the back of the green and lodged in the half-cut grass was nothing short of tragic. The play-off was cruel because he was understandably disheartened by the fact that he had — literally — thrown away the chance to equal Harry Vardon’s record of six Open wins, and also because he was clearly exhausted — hardly surprising after 72 holes of nerve-wracking competitive golf.

One thing I loved about this year’s event was the way the Turnberry links tamed the world’s finest players. Links — i.e. seaside — courses are wonderful because they are never static: a slight change in the wind can transform a straightforward hole into a nightmare of distance, hollows and cavernous bunkers with precipitious sides. And the rough at Turnberry defied description. I’ve never seen so many first-class players having to hunt for lost balls — a rare reminder for them of what life is like for ordinary mortals.

One good joke emerged from the commentary.

Q: What’s the difference between praying in church and praying on a golf course?
A: On a golf course you really mean it.

Churlishly, I was rather pleased that Tiger Woods failed to make the cut. He’s obviously a great golfer, but somewhat deficient in common humanity. At any rate, his interactions with the public have a clinical air, and he often displays a kind of sulky petulance when his expectations — either of himself or of a particular course — aren’t met. One suspects that the softest part of him is the enamel on his perfect teeth. Tom Watson is, like Jack Nicklaus, a real, accessible, gentlemanly human being. He was very dejected after the play-off, but at the award ceremony his good-humoured courtesy was much in evidence.

And like most Irishmen I’ve loved him ever since he said that his favourite golf course in all the world was Ballybunion in Co. Kerry, which is a course I knew well in my childhood because my father was a member there and I often caddied for him — and later played the course myself.

Orwell, Amazon and the downsides of tethered devices

Posted on by

With my Open University colleagues Martin Weller, Simon Rae and Doug Clow I’ve just finished an experimental online reading group aimed at exploring ways of encouraging ‘deep reading’. It’s aimed at people who are interested in ideas but find it difficult to find time to do anything other than skim-read serious books. The project is based on the idea that “if a book is worth reading then it’s worth reading well”. The first book we chose for the exercise was Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop it, a central theme of which is the dangers to ‘generativity’ (i.e. technology-enabled creativity) posed by tethered devices like the iPhone.

As far as I remember (I can’t locate my copy of the book just now), Zittrain doesn’t mention the Amazon Kindle, but — as we’ve seen in the last week — it provides a rather dramatic case study. I’ve already blogged about this, but the FT’s Richard Waters has posted a striking comment which makes the point well.

Amazon’s woeful decision to delete unauthorised copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from its customers’ Kindles hammers home an uncomfortable lesson.

The idea that you can “own” digital data, in the same sense that you can own a book, was always suspect. But at least some forms of digital media have conveyed many of the attributes of ownership. With local storage, the bits have been delivered onto a device that you can unplug and put in your pocket. The information, at that point, is “yours”.

Unless the device in question is a Kindle. Once connected to Sprint’s Whispernet (now that’s a name George Orwell would have appreciated) Amazon can (and did) reach in and delete it.

New internet media platforms like this raise a dilemna. Their owners have the power to control information on the client. So if they have a legal responsibility to remove data from their systems – say, after receiving a take-down notice under the DMCA – failing to expunge it may expose them to liability.

That seems to be the conclusion Amazon came to. The outcry this has caused has now led it to promise to be less intrusive in future, though it has failed to say how it will act the next time around.

Operating systems designed for the Web, like Chrome OS, take this further. With no local storage, nothing can ever be owned, only rented…

Yep. And that’s why anyone who thinks that the future belongs to eReaders is what Lenin had in mind when he coined the phrase “useful idiot”.

LATER: One of the participants in our online reading group sent us a link to this Bookseller article which draws attention to an interesting point made by the New York Times which reported that

Amazon’s actions were at odds with its published terms of service agreement for the Kindle that does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content”. Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer’s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle, the NYT noted.

The Bookseller reports that Amazon would now be altering its policy so that it could block illegal copies, but not take back copies innocently downloaded by customers. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” a spokesman said.

Anatomy of the Twitter Attack

Posted on by

TechCrunch has a riveting account of how Twitter’s security was compromised. It’s a salutary tale of how an ecosystem of Web 2.0 services contains holes that an astute and tireless attacker can exploit. The Summary reads:

1. HC [Hacker Croll, the culprit] accessed Gmail for a Twitter employee by using the password recovery feature that sends a reset link to a secondary email. In this case the secondary email was an expired Hotmail account, he simply registered it, clicked the link and reset the password. Gmail was then owned.

2. HC then read emails to guess what the original Gmail password was successfully and reset the password so the Twitter employee would not notice the account had changed.

3. HC then used the same password to access the employee’s Twitter email on Google Apps for your domain, getting access to a gold mine of sensitive company information from emails and, particularly, email attachments.

4. HC then used this information along with additional password guesses and resets to take control of other Twitter employee personal and work emails.

5. HC then used the same username/password combinations and password reset features to access AT&T, MobileMe, Amazon and iTunes, among other services. A security hole in iTunes gave HC access to full credit card information in clear text.

6. Even at this point, Twitter had absolutely no idea they had been compromised.

What could have happened next is that Hacker Croll could have used or sold this information for profit. He didn’t do that, and says he never intended to. All he wanted to do, he says, was to highlight the weaknesses in Twitter’s data security policies and get them and other startups to consider more robust security measures.

It’s made me think hard about the approach I take to granting access to Web 2.0 services.

Twitter puzzles

Posted on by

This tweet by Rory Cellan-Jones sent me to Twittercounter, which produced this chart:

Suggests that something strange is going on. Compare, for example, with the chart for my account, which accurately reflects data coming from email notifications from Twitter.

Hmmm… Is a spambot signing up ‘followers’ of Rory?

LATER: Now he’s back to his original track.

Which suggests that there’s something wrong with Twittercounter?

Moral: put not your faith in these statscounting services.

A Tale of Two Stores

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column.

The prospect of Microsoft and Apple stores side by side is rich in comic possibilities. For one thing, what will the Microsoft store sell? It's a software company: its hardware range consists of the Xbox games console, some keyboards and mice, and the Zune music player – which, compared with the iPod, looks like something produced by the Soviet Union in its heyday. But a retail store needs exciting hardware to attract people in off the street and create a buzz.

Stand by, then, for a new range of viral ads from Apple. A Tale of Two Stores, perhaps. One establishment is crowded with teenagers browsing Facebook and trying to get off with one another, watched by benevolently smiling, T-shirted geeks. The other is a deserted cavern, rather like one of those Sony outlets, in which dispirited chaps in ties try to interest passing tramps in the new features of Office 2009. YouTube here we come!