Monthly Archives: July 2009

Amazon and the memory hole

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This morning’s Observer column.

Up to now, the debate about eBooks has been dominated by technical issues: ergonomics, portability, storage capacity, the readability of display screens, the quality of the user interface and so on. These are important matters, but ignore the biggest issue of all, namely the ways in which the technology enables content owners to assert a level of control over the reader that would be deemed unconscionable – and unacceptable – in the world of print.

Our societies have spent 400 years developing legal traditions which strike a reasonable balance between the needs of authors and publishers on the one hand and those of users on the other.

Compromises like the doctrine of ‘fair use’ are examples of that balancing act. One of the reasons the publishing industry is salivating over the potential of electronic texts is that they could radically tilt the balance in favour of content-owners in a single decade. We’re sleepwalking into a nightmare of perfect remote control. If nothing else, the tale of Amazon, Orwell and the memory hole ought to serve as a wake-up call.

Update: Bobbie Johnson had a good piece about this in the Technology section of Thursday’s Guardian and the following day reported the reaction of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, to the debacle. Bezos wrote:

“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle… Our ‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted and we deserve the criticism we’ve received.”

Provence!

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Flickr version here.

“The man who is tired of London”, said Samuel Johnson, “is tired of life”. The same applies to Provence. We’ve been coming here every summer for years, and yet over the English winter the memory of its magic fades, with watercolours exposed to sunlight. And then we step out of the plane and are struck by the wall of scented heat, the chorus of cicadas, the azure sky, the amazing umbrella pines and palm trees and — whoosh! — it’s back.

Yesterday we decided to eschew motorways and big roads and lit out for the hills, picking our way along smooth, virtually-deserted country roads that snaked through valleys and woods and ochre-tinted villages baking in the afternoon sun to St Maximin-la-Ste Baume where we stayed in a converted Dominican monastery next to the basilica of Sainte Marie Madelaine.

This is a vast church, as big as some English cathedrals, built in the 14th century to house the skull of the woman who is supposed to have been one of Christ’s followers. According to the legend, she was the sister of Lazarus (he of the great comeback), was driven from Jerusalem by persecution and wound up in Provence, where she retired to a grotto in the Sainte Baume mountains we had driven through. She died, it seems, in the arms of St Maximin — the Bishop of Aix — in the town to which he gave his name and where we had found lodgings for the night.

Flickr version here.

The relic is a blackened skull encased in a hideous gilt enclosure on a sedan-chair apparatus — which suggests that it is paraded around the streets from time to time, no doubt accompanied by clerics in elaborate frocks. The size and magnificence of the basilica reminds one that possession of a high-class relic with provenance linking it back to Christ must have been the basis for a great business model in the Middle Ages. Just imagine it: all those pilgrims; all those indulgences to be sold. And just think of the spin-off merchandising opportunities.

Not that the merchandising opportunities were confined to the Middle Ages. In recent times, Mary has become a staple of bestselling fiction: think of the role she plays in, for example, The Da Vinci Code.

Onwards and downwards?

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The report of Alan Milburn’s inquiry into social mobility in contemporary Britain is deeply depressing. It charts the extent to which this is an unequal society. As Ian Jack observes.:

Many of its statistics are shocking. Only 7% of the population attended private schools, but 75% of judges, 70% of finance directors, and one in every three MPs went to one. And unto those that hath, etc: among nine out of 12 professions examined, particularly medicine and the law, the proportion of entrants coming from well-off families has been increasing; doctors born in 1970, for example, typically grew up in families with an income nearly two thirds higher than the average. Connection matters. ‘Soft skills’ in interviews matter: how to be confident, how to please. Unpaid internships and work experience schemes, particularly in glamorous professions such as the media, tend to be monopolies of the well-connected. Milburn describes it as “the closed shop society”, with a geographic bias towards London and the south-east.

Jack is as astonished as I am by one finding of the report relating to the mainstream media:

Figures 1F and 1G in the report. The first shows that more than half of “top journalists” were privately educated. The second shows how this proportion has actually increased since the 1980s – alone among eight professional categories, including barristers, judges and vice-chancellors.

As far as this phenomenon is concerned, the decline of the print media looks like a consummation devoutly to be wished. Once the stranglehold of the print and journalistic unions was broken by Murdoch & Co, the closed world of British national newspapers was transformed into an environment tailor-made for shoehorning well-connected Oxbridge kids into cushy roles. With a bit of luck this agreeable system of outdoor relief will wither on the vine: these brats won’t find the online world quite so accommodating to folks whose main qualification is an assumption of entitlement and superiority.

But the wider problem laid bare with scarifying clarity by the Milburn report remains. And nobody — and this includes Milburn — has any real idea what to do about it.

Armchair farming

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Well, I’ve heard of ‘set-aside’, i.e. getting subsidies from the EU for not growing anything on your land, but this is ridiculous. Sit-aside, perhaps?

Spotted today on my drive home. Flickr version here.

Celebrating Mr Tom

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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

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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

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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.