Blogs and the US Presidential election

Transcript of Larry’s interesting interview with Joe Trippi, Governor Dean’s campaign manager, about the role of Blogging in the campaign.

If at first you don’t succeed… — ask Google

Lovely story by Larry Lessig about how he solved the problem of threading optical fibre through the cable conduit in his new house.

Why the Hutton Inquiry is a smokescreen

Michael Heseltine (former Deputy Prime Minister), writing in today’s Guardian:

“In Iraq the military victory was swift, which in itself raised questions about the reality of the threat. But at least the sceptics could be silenced. Where the inspectors had failed it would now be possible to succeed. But that needed evidence and there was none. The government was faced with a growing demand to follow the precedent that, as an opposition, it had so loudly demanded. Not an inch did it give.

I vividly remember listening to the news of David Kelly’s death. I also remember the coincidental announcement of a judicial inquiry and my reaction to it. The squeamish will not like what I now say but the squeamish do not last long in politics or understand the ruthless survival instinct of politicians under pressure. Dr Kelly’s death gave a new urgency to the demand for an inquiry but it also provided a lifeline. The government could concede the case for an inquiry, but one with narrow terms of reference that precluded any investigation of the major matters now of growing concern. Of all modern governments this was the one pre-eminent in steering the news and controlling the agenda. Of course there were downsides. There could be uncomfortable revelations. But all this would be as nothing to the dangers that could arise from the alternative and far-reaching inquiry that the government was so determined to avoid. ”

Catastrophe Theory

Every time there’s a newsworthy virus attack, someone asks me where will it all end. The answer is in catastrophe. We are building a networked society on incredibly insecure foundations, and it is only a matter of time before someone figures out how to bring the entire system down. Actually, someone has already figured it out. Nicholas Weaver at Berkeley has written a fascinating paper on the possibility of what he calls a ‘Warhol worm’, so called because it could overwhelm the Internet in 15 minutes. The First Law of Technology applies here: if it can be done, it will.

Exit Spinmeister, stage left

So Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s personal combination of Machiavelli and Savaronola, has finally decided to depart. The Hutton Inquiry into the suicide of Dr. David Kelly was his final achievement. How come? Well, when it became clear that there were no WMD in Iraq — and never had been any ‘imminent’ threat from Saddam Hussein — and that, therefore, Blair had taken Britain to war under false pretences, Campbell saw that this could fatally damage New Labour’s main electoral asset: the public perception of Blair as a man of honesty and integrity. So he did what great tacticians always do — launch a diversionary attack, in this case on the BBC and the flawed reporting of one of its reporters, Andrew Gilligan. This had two effects. The first was to drag Dr. Kelly into the limelight; the second was to divert media attention from the substantive issue. The ploy was spectacularly successful — not surprisingly since Britain’s right-wing tabloids loathe the BBC and are always searching for ways of attacking it. In Campbell’s mental universe, this was business as usual — just another round in the game he played so brilliantly. But, as it happened, Dr. Kelly was psychologically unsuited to the role of pawn in a media game, and killed himself — thereby triggering the Hutton Inquiry. But the Inquiry, by focussing almost exclusively on the ‘game’ between Downing Street and the BBC, has effectively buried the vital issue, namely that Blair misled Parliament and the British people, with the result that British troops are now dying and Iraq is on its way to becoming a fundamentalist Islamic state.

I met Campbell only once — in Downing Street at the launch of the Prime Minister’s website in late 1999 or early 2000. He was exactly as the profiles describe — handsome, hawklike, brooding, dangerous. He told a lovely story about his boss’s problems with IT. Blair once tried to order flowers for Cherie on the Net and failed spectacularly. The news leaked out. Then it was decided that the PM would take an ‘IT for beginners’ course — with full media coverage. (Classic New Labour gesture.) The course was held in Blair’s Sedgefield constituency, and the PM was not noticeably adept at handling a PC. At the end, he was hesitatingly answering a multiple-choice questionnaire when he noticed that the chap next to him was also having trouble with the questions. “I’m sorry if all this [pointing to media crews] has put you off”, he apologised. “Naw”, replied his neighbour, “that’s not what’s bothering me. What’s bothering me is that I’m having trouble with this stuff, but I’ve been unemployed for years. But you’re having trouble — and you’re the bloody Prime Minister”.

I’ve no idea whether the story was true, but it made us laugh. And it had the subtle effect of, somehow, making Blair’s technological incompetence seem endearing.

The BBC Gets It — and how

Just when I had come to the gloomy conclusion that the intellectual property frenzy was unstoppable — even by Creative Commons — the Director General of the BBC, Greg Dyke, makes a truly extraordinary commitment: to make huge amounts of BBC archive content available on the Net, under reasonable fair-use licensing terms. I know — it’s unbelievable. But here is the relevant excerpt from his Edinburgh Festival interview.

“Looking ahead, let me give you one example of the kind of thing the BBC will be able to do in the future.

The BBC probably has the best television library in the world.

For many years we have had an obligation to make our archive available to the public, it was even in the terms of the last charter.

But what have we done about it?

Well, you all know the problem.

Up until now, this huge resource has remained locked up, inaccessible to the public because there hasn’t been an effective mechanism for distribution.

But the digital revolution and broadband are changing all that.

For the first time, there is an easy and affordable way of making this treasure trove of BBC content available to all.

Let me explain with an easy example.

Just imagine your child comes home from school with homework to make a presentation to the class on lions, or dinosaurs, or Argentina or on the industrial revolution.

He or she goes to the nearest broadband connection – in the library, the school or even at home – and logs onto the BBC library.

They search for real moving pictures which would turn their project into an exciting multi-media presentation.

They download them and, hey presto, they are able to use the BBC material in their presentation for free.

Now that is a dream which we will soon be able to turn into reality.

We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don’t use them for commercial purposes.

Under a simple licensing system, we will allow users to adapt BBC content for their own use.

We are calling this the BBC Creative Archive.

When complete, the BBC will have taken a massive step forward in opening our content to all – be they young or old, rich or poor.

But then it’s not really our content – the people of Britain have paid for it and our role should be to help them use it.

This is just one example of the kind of public value which I believe will come with the second phase of the digital revolution, but there will be many others.”

The consolations of poetry

This day last year, my beloved Sue died. At 15.05, when she was very close to death, I had an eerie feeling that she somehow needed our permission to depart. I said this to our young children, and they both told her, through their tears, that it was OK to go. Three minutes later, she slipped away. I guess some people will think that that was a terrible request to make of any child, and yet I am sure it was the right decision. The fact that they participated in this final moment of their mother’s life mitigates the sense that she was stolen from them. They faced up the ultimate horror that can confront a child and did not flinch. And I think that, in the end, they will be stronger for it.

One of the things I noticed first was how my perception of time had changed. In the 18 months while Sue was ill and I cared for her, I had the feeling of living in a universe where the hands of the clock whizzed round like they do in cartoons. I would look up from something I was doing, thinking that it must be getting on for 10 o’clock and then find that it was 2.30 in the morning. But the moment she died, time slowed to a crawl. I would look up from my keyboard thinking that it must be midnight and find that it was only 9 pm.

So it has been a very slow year. And a bleak one, lightened only by the kindness of friends. Grief is such a strange and complex thing. People who have not experienced it really have no idea what it is like. They have a model of it rather like the graph of a heavily-damped first-order differential equation — where the effect is greatest at the beginning and then exponentially decays. But it’s not like that at all. I remember, for example, an eerie peace and serenity in early September, brought about by relief that Sue was no longer suffering. My daughter said to me at one point in those early days: “Dad, we should advertise in the paper for a sick person to look after because we’re so good at it now”. But this serenity gave way to waves of anguish which would strike without warning — often at times when one least expected them. I had anticipated, for example, that our first Christmas without Sue would be terrible. It fact, it was unexpectedly calm and enjoyable. But New Year’s Eve turned out to be the most anguished day I have ever spent.

And so it went on. Sue’s birthday in May was agonising — filled with lacerating memories of earlier days. Similarly for the children’s birthdays — also in May. By the time the summer break arrived, all three of us were exhibiting signs of acute stress — just at the time when the simplistic first-order model would be predicting a return to stability. So we went on a long Summer break — first to a wonderful house in Provence where our hosts gave us space and tranquillity, and then to Ireland, where my sisters looked after us with the same kindness and generosity they had shown towards Sue when she was dying.

And now we’re back, and a year has passed. Sue’s gone, and yet in a way she is as real a presence in my life as she was when she lived. I still find myself talking to her sometimes — about the children, or about something that’s happened at work, or about our friends. It’s as if I haven’t — cannot perhaps — let her go. People who have lost loved ones tell me that there will come a moment when I will suddenly feel that, somehow, it is all right to let her go. This has nothing to do with forgetting, but with acceptance. And it doesn’t run to any timetable over which one has control. So I guess I just have to wait.

Like all intellectuals, I looked for sustenance, illumination or consolation in books. And found very little, save in two sources. One was C.S. Lewis’s beautiful little book, A Grief Observed, in which he meditated about the loss of his wife (also to cancer). The other was the poetry of Peter Porter, and particularly his collection The Cost of Seriousness. Peter (whom I know slightly because he and used to work on Radio Three’s Critics’ Forum) also lost a beloved wife, and expressed his anguish in some wonderful poems, particularly one entitled ‘An Exequy’ which is a conversation with her. It reads, in part:

The words and faces proper to
My misery are private–you
Would never share your heart with those
Whose only talent’s to suppose,
Nor from your final childish bed
Raise a remote confessing head —
The channels of our lives are blocked,
The hand is stopped upon the clock,
No one can say why hearts will break
And marriages are all opaque:
A map of loss, some posted cards,
The living house reduced to shards,
The abstract hell of memory,
The pointlessness of poetry–
These are the instances which tell
Of something which I know full well,
I owe a death to you–one day
The time will come for me to pay
When your slim shape from photographs
Stands at my door and gently asks
If I have any work to do
Or will I come to bed with you.

Why Spam will be hard to stop — it’s fantastically profitable

Like everyone else, I receive email invitations every day to purchase pills which will enhance some aspect of my sexual performance. As I delete these I’m thinking “Who would be daft enough to fall for this?”. Actually, it seems that an astonishing number of people are. This riveting Wired article outlines what was revealed when a spam-marketing firm left its customer log inadvertently exposed on the Web.

Amazing Internet Products’ websites revealed that, over a four-week period, some 6,000 people responded to e-mail ads and placed orders for the company’s Pinacle herbal ‘penis-enlarging’ supplement. Most customers ordered two bottles of the pills at a price of $50 per bottle. That’s $600,000 for selling hot air.

Eh? And who’s buying this crap? “Among the people who responded in July to Amazing’s spam, which bore the subject line, “Make your penis HUGE,” was the manager of a $6 billion mutual fund, who ordered two bottles of Pinacle to be shipped to his Park Avenue office in New York City. A restaurateur in Boulder, Colorado, requested four bottles. The president of a California firm that sells airplane parts and is active in the local Rotary Club gave out his American Express card number to pay for six bottles, or $300 worth, of Pinacle. The coach of an elementary school lacrosse club in Pennsylvania ordered four bottles of the pills.

Other customers included the head of a credit-repair firm, a chiropractor, a veterinarian, a landscaper and several people from the military. Numerous women also were evidently among Amazing Internet’s customers.”

The naivete of the customers is also astonishing. As Wired puts it, “All were evidently undaunted by the fact that Amazing’s order site contained no phone number, mailing address or e-mail address for contacting the company. Nor were they seemingly concerned that their order data, including their credit card info, addresses and phone numbers, were transmitted to the site without the encryption used by most legitimate online stores. ”

The Naked Chef hoax — and its implications

From Slashdot:

“The speed with which the 4MB e-mail hoax purporting to be the new cookbook from the Naked Chef streaked across the Internet suggests to Slate that a new, disquieting era for the publishing world may be in sight. Indeed, the latest Harry Potter tale made the rounds on the Web just hours after the book went on sale, its 870 pages apparently scanned in and distributed by rabid fans. The old argument that no one likes reading on a computer has pretty much eroded. Just because publishing people can’t conceive of book piracy doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”

Vacation Ontology

The BBC’s Tech Guru (and my colleague on the iSociety Advisory Board), Bill Thompson, has been on holiday in Venice and has been musing on the experience of being (largely) disconnected from the Net. He seems to find it untraumatic. “I use my mobile connection to send some e-mail”, he writes, “and I go into a cyber cafe to download the torrent of spam and occasional useful message. But apart from a brief glance at a couple of news sites to check that no major disasters have befallen the world – and the hottest day on record in London doesn’t count – I have hardly used the web at all.”

Bill goes on to mount one of his hobby horses — the pointlessness of Blogging. “In fact, I had stopped paying careful attention to the lists and the blogs even before I left the country. It seemed to me that the number of useless postings and blog entries was starting to increase and there was less and less there that was really of interest. This could be the sign of a worrying phenomenon. Perhaps the blogs, after a brief time when they were seen by some as a wholly new wave of internet development, are losing their appeal.

The earliest bloggers have been at it for two years now – how many days can someone keep on posting to their LiveJournal site, or visiting Blogger to add more details about their cat’s mysterious illness? “

Bill’s little rant is a good example of a venerable genre which I call ‘vacation ontology’. Hack goes on holiday, is temporarily disconnected from his frenetic life and is shocked into pondering The Meaning Of It All. (I know, because I’ve done it myself.) But it would be unwise to take these holiday musings too seriously.

For the record, my kids and I have had — courtesy of some generous friends — an idyllic week in Provence, in a villa with a wonderful view, a pool and no phone connection. My Bluetooth mobile worked up to a point (9600 bps), but basically we were cut off from the Net for a week. This deprivation, however, did not induce in me the same reaction as it did in Bill. Rather it made me realise how essential an always-on connection is for a civilised life. I missed the regular email traffic with friends, and — more intensely — being able to access the resources of the Web. Our hosts and I had lots of conversations which would have been enriched if we’d been able to access Google. Who wrote that? What year did Popper die? What’s the weather forecast for Provence for tomorrow? What was the title of that essay by…? Do you remember that review of X that was in the New Republic? Or was it Salon? How do you add music soundtracks in iMovie? And so on.

Before we went to Provence, I had asked our host if the house had an Internet connection. “No”, he replied. “If it had, why would I ever go home?” (He lives and works in Amsterdam).