Blogspam — the latest form of pollution

The News Group system — which was the glory of the early Internet — was undermined by spam and flaming. Blogging seemed to be a way of overcoming that, because Bloggers retained complete control of their space. But then (for the very best of reasons — to encourage conversation and discussion) some Bloggers started to allow readers to comment on their posts. You can guess what’s happened — Blogs are beginning to suffer from comment spamming. See this thoughtful posting on the problem by Simpson Garfinkel — plus some helpful comments from people who’ve been tackling the problem.

Die Broke — a new four-part financial plan

My late and revered colleague Roger Needham gave away a lot of money to our Cambridge College and to the University. When I asked him what motivated him to do this he said, “Well, my wife and I have no children and no relatives, so we figured why should our Executors have all the fun!”. I’ve just discovered (thanks to Kevin Kelly) an interesting book — Die Broke: A Radical Four-Part Financial Plan by Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine — which Roger might have enjoyed. Here’s an excerpt:

“You are not a corporation – you are a human being. Your money shouldn’t outlive you. You should exit life as you came into it: penniless. Your assets are resources to be used, for your own benefit and for the benefit of those you love. Every dollar that’s left in your bank account after you die is a dollar you wasted. Use your resources to help people now when you know they need it, when it will do the most good, rather than hoping they’ll be helped when you’re dead. The last check you write should be to your undertaker … and it should bounce.

* Inheritance is a terribly inefficient way to pass wealth to others.

* You need to shift to a more flexible view of work and career, one that abandons the ultimatum of retirement – a false choice between full-time and no time….Similarly you need to shift to a less rigid approach to earned income. No longer can you look at your earned income as continually increasing up until age sixty-five, at which pint it will stop entirely. From now on you need to approach earned income as you do unearned income. It may grow, it may be stagnant, or it may decrease, all depending on market conditions and your own choices.

* The best metaphor I can think of for today’s pursuit of retirement is of a mass of lemmings busily struggling up a steep cliff and then jumping off the cliff into the abyss.

* Dying broke means living well.”

Camera-controlled games come to the Mac

The gizmo that has most enthused my kids this Xmas is EyeToy, a wonderful game released by Sony for the PlayStation2. Now comes news that someone has developed a similar type of game for the Mac, using the iSight camera. I’ve just downloaded the demo. Wonder if it will persuade the kids to stop lusting after a PS2.

Update:It works, but isn’t as slick as the Sony product, so the pressure from the kids will doubtless continue.

Ralsky swears he’s going straight

There’s a story in today’s NYT in which Adam Ralsky, one of the US’s most notorious spammers, says the new anti-spam law has forced him to rethink his business plans. According to the article, “He stopped sending e-mail offers for everything from debt repayment schemes to time-share vacations even before President Bush, on Dec. 16, signed the new Can Spam Act, a law meant to crack down on marketers like Mr. Ralsky.

He plans to resume in January, he said, after he overcomes some computer problems, and only after he changes his practices to include in his messages a return address and other information required by the law, the title of which stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing.

That is quite a switch for Mr. Ralsky, who has earned a reputation as a master of cyberdisguise. By his own admission, he once produced more than 70 million messages a day from domains registered with fake names, largely by way of foreign countries – or sometimes even by way of hijacked computers – so that the recipients could not trace the mail back to him….”

Post-restante on the Net

What a neat idea — a place where you can drop off files for others to pick up at their leisure (well, within 48 hours actually). It’s called Dropload. Thanks for Larry Lessig for the link.

Jon Johansen finally cleared

The preposterous DMCA-driven prosecution of Jon Johansen has finally collapsed. According to this report, “an Oslo appeals court cleared a 20-year-old Norwegian man of DVD piracy charges on Monday in a new setback for Hollywood studios, which say unauthorized copying costs them billions of dollars a year.

Upholding a verdict by a lower court in January, the court said that Jon Johansen had broken no laws by helping to unlock a code and distribute a computer program on the Internet enabling unauthorized copying of DVD movies.

The U.S. movie industry, which says that piracy costs $3 billion a year in lost sales, had accused Johansen of theft in cracking the copy-protection code when he was 15 and appealed against the January acquittal.

Johansen, called “DVD Jon,” had pleaded not guilty to charges that he broke Norwegian law by helping break the code on commercial DVDs. The original court said that he was free to do what he wanted with DVDs he bought legally.

Prosecutors, who appealed against the original verdict, had urged a suspended 90-day jail term for Johansen.

“The appeal is rejected,” Judge Wenche Skjeggestad told the court.”

Yippee!.

Why Howard Dean is making all the running

Simple: his campaign is MUCH smarter. His team have just released their very own computer game. According to this report, the game simulates the process of getting out the vote in Iowa, including pamphleting, canvasing, placing signs, and moving people to the local precinct to caucus. The game was developed by game designer and theorist Gonzalo Frasca, working with Ian Bogost, as another illustration of news gaming.

Oh and there’s a wonderful NYT column by Frank Rich analysing why the political and media establishments are still blindsided by the Dean campaign. Here’s a chunk:

“The condescending reaction to the Dean insurgency by television’s political correspondents can be reminiscent of that hilarious party scene in the movie “Singin’ in the Rain,” where Hollywood’s silent-era elite greets the advent of talkies with dismissive bafflement. “The Internet has yet to mature as a political tool,” intoned Carl Cameron of Fox News last summer as he reported that the runner-up group to Dean supporters on the meetup.com site was witches. “If you want to be a Deaniac,” ABC News’s Claire Shipman said this fall, “you’ve got to know the lingo,” as she dutifully gave her viewers an uninformed definition of “blogging.”

In Washington, the only place in America where HBO’s now-canceled “K Street” aroused histrionic debate, TV remains all. No one knew what to make of the mixed message sent by Dr. Dean’s performance on “Meet the Press” in June: though the candidate flunked a pop quiz about American troop strength (just as George W. Bush flunked a pop quiz about world leaders in 1999), his Internet site broke its previous Sunday record for contributions by a factor of more than 10. More recently, the dean of capital journalists, David Broder, dyspeptically wrote that “Dean failed to dominate any of the Democratic candidate debates.” True, but those few Americans who watched the debates didn’t exactly rush to the candidate who did effortlessly dominate most of them, Al Sharpton. (Mr. Sharpton’s reward for his performance wasn’t poll numbers or contributions but, appropriately enough, a gig as a guest host on “Saturday Night Live.”)

“People don’t realize what’s happened since 2000,” said Joe Trippi, the Dean campaign manager, when I spoke to him shortly after Al Gore, the Democrats’ would-be technopresident, impulsively crowned Dr. Dean as his heir. “Since 2000, many more millions have bought a book at Amazon and held an auction on e-Bay. John McCain’s Internet campaign was amazing three years ago but looks primitive now.” The Dean campaign, Mr. Trippi explained, is “not just people e-mailing each other and chatting in chat rooms.” His campaign has those and more — all served by countless sites, many of them awash in multi-media, that link the personal (photos included) to the political as tightly as they link to each other.

They are efficient: type in a ZIP code and you meet Dean-inclined neighbors. Search tools instantly locate postings on subjects both practical (a book to give as a present to a Dean supporter?) and ideological. The official bloggers update the news and spin it as obsessively as independent bloggers do. To while away an afternoon, go to the left-hand column of the official blogforamerica.com page and tour the unofficial sites. On one of three Mormon-centric pages, you can find the answer to the question “Can Mormons be Democrats?” (Yes, they can, and yes, they can vote for Howard Dean.) At www.projectdeanlight.com, volunteers compete at their own expense to outdo each other with slick Dean commercials.

But the big Dean innovation is to empower passionate supporters to leave their computer screens entirely to hunt down unwired supporters as well and to gather together in real time at face-to-face meetings they organize on their own with no help from (or cost to) the campaign hierarchy. Meetup.com, the for-profit Web site that the Dean campaign contracted to facilitate these meetings, didn’t even exist until last year. (It is not to be confused with the symbiotic but more conventional liberal advocacy and fund-raising site,MoveOn.org.) Its success is part of the same cultural wave as last summer’s “flash mob” craze (crowds using the Internet to converge at the same public place at the same time as a prank) and, more substantially, the spike in real rather than virtual social networks, for dating and otherwise, through sites like match.com and friendster.com. From Mr. Trippi’s perspective, “The Internet puts back into the campaign what TV took out — people.”

To say that the competing campaigns don’t get it is an understatement. A tough new anti-Dean attack ad has been put up on the campaign’s own site, where it’s a magnet for hundreds of thousands of dollars in new contributions. The twice-divorced Dennis Kucinich’s most effective use of the Web thus far has been to have a public date with the winner of a “Who Wants to Be a First Lady?” Internet contest. Though others have caught up with meetup.com, only the Wesley Clark campaign is racing to mirror Dr. Dean’s in most particulars. The other Democratic Web sites are very 2000, despite all their blogs and other gizmos…”

The truth about the Net

From the latest Pew Foundation report:

“A report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project analyzing the responses of more than 64,000 Americans to phone surveys in the past three years shows that 63 percent of U.S. adults now are online and many of them – especially those with several years of online experience – have built Internet use into their lives in practical ways.

Among our findings about change in the Internet world over time:

– Online activity has consistently grown over the course of our research. Internet users discover more things to do online as they gain experience and as new applications become available. This momentum often fuels increasing reliance on the Internet in everyday life and higher expectations about the things people can do online.

– Despite this growth in activity, the growth of the online population itself has slowed. There was almost no growth over the course of 2002 and there has been only a small uptick in recent months to leave the size of the online U.S. adult population at 63 percent of all those 18 and over.

– Different people use the Internet in different ways. The report is full of examples of how people in different demographic groups use the Internet for different purposes.

– Experience and the quality of online connections matter. Those with more experience online and those who have high-speed connections at home generally do more online more often than those with lower levels of experience and those with dial-up connections. The growth of the cohort of veteran users, those with at least three years of online experience, has been striking. Nearly three-quarters of Internet users have at least three years of experience.

– Online Americans’ experience with the commercial side of the Internet has expanded dramatically in spite of the economic slump. Financial and transaction activities such as online banking and online auctions have grown more than any other genre of activity.

– Email continues to be the “killer app” of the Internet. More people use email than do any other activity online. Many report their email use increases their communication with key family and friends and enhances their connection to them.

– Big news stories drive lasting changes in the news-seeking audience online.”

How to get a sense of perspective

Consult the Astronomy Picture of the Day to see where we fit in the natural order of things.

Dell Inspiron RIP

My ancient Dell laptop which had been turned into something useful by putting Linux on it, seems to have died — from hardware failure, not anything to do with software. I’ll salvage the hard disk and see what can be done about replacing the machine. Wonder if anyone sells Sony Vaios with Linux pre-installed?