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?

The most promising technical attack on spam…

… still seems to be SpamBayes which implements and develops Paul Graham’s ideas for using Bayesian inference to filter messages. More info here.

Old and new ways of combatting spam — both from Microsoft

First, the old-fashioned way. Earlier this month Microsoft and the New York attorney general went after a sprawling e-mail spam ring, saying they hoped to drive it into bankruptcy by exposing what they called its schemes of deception. The company and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer filed joint lawsuits in Manhattan against members of the ring, which they said has sent billions of unwanted and illegal e-mail messages.

Beyond simply being annoying and jamming e-mail inboxes, Spitzer and Microsoft officials said the spammers have repeatedly broken the law by deceiving consumers. “Deceptive and illegal spam, like the kind we’re attacking today, is overwhelming legitimate e-mail and threatening the promise and potential of the Internet for all of us,” Microsoft lawyer Brad Smith said.

Now comes an interesting idea — this time from Microsoft Research (a formidable outfit IMHO), which seeks to make the spammer pay for email in a way that doesn’t cripple legit users. According to this BBC report, “The basic idea is that we are trying to shift the equation to make it possible and necessary for a sender to ‘pay’ for e-mail,” explained Ted Wobber of the Microsoft Research group (MSR).

The payment is not made in the currency of money, but in the memory and the computer power required to work out cryptographic puzzles. “For any piece of e-mail I send, it will take a small amount computing power of about 10 to 20 seconds.”

It would work like this: Before an email program accepts a piece of email from an unknown sender, it sends the dispatching machine a small cryptographic puzzle to solve. If it solves it, then the recipient accepts the message.

“If I don’t know you, I have to prove to you that I have spent a little bit of time in resources to send you that e-mail. “When you see that proof, you treat that message with more priority.” Once senders have proved they have solved the required “puzzle”, they can be added to a “safe list” of senders. It means the spammer’s machine is slowed down, but legitimate e-mailers do not notice any delays.

Mr Wobber and his group calculated that if there are 80,000 seconds in a day, a computational “price” of a 10-second levy would mean spammers would only be able to send about 8,000 messages a day, at most.

In a nice touch, the Microsoft research project which led to these ideas is called The Penny Black Project — after the 1830s idea of making the sender rather than the recipient pay for mail that led to the formation of the British postal system.

Full marks for ingenuity, less for practicality, alas. For this to work, it would have to become a universal email standard — and one that was not owned by, er, Microsoft. Shame.

How to get more from your iPod

The iPod is wonderful, but the user model built into it by Apple is a bit restrictive. Thanks to the Net, there is wonderful software out there for liberating it — like iPod Access.

Happy Christmas!

I know this is corny, but I love it. Think of it as the Santa perspective. Click on the image if you have a broadband link.

US gets mad cow disease

US consumers have traditionally been much more relaxed and trusting than Europeans (and especially Brits) about their food industry. That may be about to change. According to today’s NYT, “Agriculture officials pored through cattle sales records at two Washington State companies on Wednesday in hope of finding where a cow with mad cow disease was born so they could trace the extent of the outbreak.

Officials hope to be able to determine where, when and how the Holstein became infected with the disease as a clue to whether other animals were also infected. But they have faced slow going because of a lack of centralized records on the animal’s history, officials said.

Beef importers abroad were not waiting for the results. By early Wednesday, about two-thirds of the export market for beef had already dried up, with Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Russia and South Africa all banning imports of American beef, agriculture officials said. About 10 percent of American beef, worth about $2.6 billion a year, is exported.”

Hmmm… given the importance of the US farming lobby, this could be interesting….

The SCO lawsuit…

… gets curiouser and curiouser. Initially, I thought that while the SCO guys were unscrupulous at least they were smart. Now it’s beginning to look as though they are just clueless. In their latest attempt to shake down some Fortune 100 companies, they demand that they stop using Linux, or reach an agreement with SCO over what it claims are copyrighted “binary interfaces”.

“Any part of any Linux file that includes the copyrighted binary interface code must be removed,” says the demand. SCO identifies a number of files which, once machine-specific versions are discounted, boil down to simply four header files. The claim is that the files signal.h, ioctl.h, errno.h,stat.h and ctype.h contain copyright infringing code.

These files, according to SCO, “must carry USL / SCO copyright notices and may not be used in any GPL distribution, inasmuch as the affirmative consent of the copyright holder has not been obtained, and will not be obtained, for such a distribution under the GPL.”

This is interesting, because it’s not that long ago since SCO spokesman Blake Stowell denied that these binary interfaces contain allegedly infringing code.

“This code is under the GPL and it re-implements publicly documented interfaces”, he said. We do not have an issue with the Linux ABI modules.”

So what’s going on? Do these guys know what they’re doing? Linux/UNIX techies are falling about laughing over these particular claims. And Linus Torvalds has now weighed in. He writes:

“For example, SCO lists the files “include/linux/ctype.h” and “lib/ctype.h”, and some trivial digging shows that those files are actually there in the original 0.01 distribution of Linux (ie September of 1991). And I can state

– I wrote them (and looking at the original ones, I’m a bit ashamed: the “toupper()” and “tolower()” macros are so horribly ugly that I wouldn’t admit to writing them if it wasn’t because somebody else claimed to have done so ;)

– writing them is no more than five minutes of work (you can verify that with any C programmer, so you don’t have to take my word for it)

– the details in them aren’t even the same as in the BSD/UNIX files (the approach is the same, but if you look at actual implementation details you will notice that it’s not just that my original “tolower/toupper” were embarrassingly ugly, a number of other details differ too).

In short: for the files where I personally checked the history, I can definitely say that those files are trivially written by me personally, with no copying from any UNIX code _ever_.

So it’s definitely not a question of “all derivative branches”. It’s a question of the fact that I can show (and SCO should have been able to see) that the list they show clearly shows original work, not “copied”.”

So back to my question. Could it be that the SCO guys are really just clowns who are chancing their arms and hoping that FUD will persuade some companies to pay up just in case…? So far, the SCO lawsuit has proved a pretty expensive gamble. According to The Register, “SCO’s legal costs continue to wipe out its hard earned profit. SCOX reported a loss of $1.6 million for the quarter on sales of $24.3 million, after excluding a $9 million charge for legal fees. It would have posted a $7.4 million profit otherwise.”

Later:: Just noticed that the NYT also covers Linus’s response.

Still later:Novell has entered the fray. According to the NYT of 24 December, “Novell Inc. has quietly registered for the copyrights on many versions of the Unix computer operating system that the SCO Group already says it owns, further muddying the water surrounding a dispute that has embroiled the Linux open source world for almost a year.

[…]

SCO reacted on Monday to Novell’s decision to register for the Unix copyrights by calling the move a backdoor act to claim code that is rightfully SCO’s. “We see this as a fraudulent attempt by Novell to get something they don’t have,” said Darl C. McBride, president and chief executive of SCO. “It’s fraudulent to now go and say they have these” copyright registrations.

Mr. McBride contended that Novell was acting as a stalking horse for I.B.M., the biggest seller of Linux to corporations. “It’s not just Novell,” Mr. McBride said. “It’s an attack by I.B.M.””