The NYT reports that the US arm of Toyota has come up with an engagingly daft idea for marketing their Scion model (only available in the US): owners can go online to design their own coats of arms. Somehow, I can’t see Prius owners falling for this.
Douglas Coupland has been writing elegantly about the relationship between time and gadgets,
because there is a relationship between the two, and it’s not just about the 18-month tech cycle or the decomposition-proof materials that will allow my swaggy new Casio Module 3070 wristwatch to be around when the sun goes supernova. Any gadget we use invariably morphs our perception of time’s passing.
These shifting perceptions of time are what give eras in human history their specific textures. I was in Austin, Texas last spring and bumped into a friend from my stint at Wired magazine in the mid-90s. The encounter went along the lines of, “John – I haven’t seen you since… eBay! I haven’t seen you since… Google! I haven’t seen you since… BlackBerrys!” The point was that the use of decades and calendar years to mark eras is over. Time is measured in tech waves, and not only do these tech waves demarcate eras, they also define them.
I remember in the 80s when cellphones first started to pop. I remember how, if you saw someone using a cellphone on a street, you immediately thought they were an asshole: gee, my phone call is so important I have to make it right here and right now! Twenty years later, we’re all assholes. We’re assholes at the supermarket’s meat counter at 5:30pm, phoning home to ask if we need prosciutto; we’re assholes driving in traffic; and we’re assholes wandering down the streets. And with cellphones and handhelds, we collapse time and space and our perception of distance and intimacy…
Steve Lohr has an interesting piece about the survival of the mainframe.
IN 1991, Stewart Alsop, the editor of InfoWorld and a thoughtful observer of industry trends, predicted that the last mainframe computer would be unplugged by 1996. Last month, I.B.M. introduced the latest version of its mainframe, the aged yet remarkably resilient warhorse of computing.
Today, mainframe sales are a tiny fraction of the personal computer market. But with the mainframe facing extinction, I.B.M. retooled the technology, cut prices and revamped its strategy. A result is that mainframe technology — hardware, software and services — remains a large and lucrative business for I.B.M., and mainframes are still the back-office engines behind the world’s financial markets and much of global commerce.
The mainframe stands as a telling case in the larger story of survivor technologies and markets…
This morning’s Observer column (about voting machines)…
It’s not just the accuracy of the machines that is questionable, it’s also their security. Several projects have demonstrated how voting machines from all the major makers can be hacked into with comparative ease. This is not an argument for not using machines: who would want to replicate the ‘hanging chads’ fiasco of the 2000 election? But before a society entrusts its central democratic process to machines, it ought to take reasonable steps to instil public confidence in the technology.
This requires only two very basic provisions…
Songwriter Bill Bragg was struck by the news that Bebo co-founder Michael Birch has walked away with $600 million after the site was bought by AOL. Bragg has some ideas about what Birch should do with the money:
I heard the news with a particular piquancy, as Mr. Birch has cited me as an influence in Bebo’s attitude toward artists. He got in touch two years ago after I took MySpace to task over its proprietary rights clause. I was concerned that the site was harvesting residual rights from original songs posted there by unsigned musicians. As a result of my complaints, MySpace changed its terms and conditions to state clearly that all rights to material appearing on the site remain with the originator.
A few weeks later, Mr. Birch came to see me at my home. He was hoping to expand his business by hosting music and wanted my advice on how to construct an artist-centered environment where musicians could post original songs without fear of losing control over their work. Following our talks, Mr. Birch told the press that he wanted Bebo to be a site that worked for artists and held their interests first and foremost.
In our discussions, we largely ignored the elephant in the room: the issue of whether he ought to consider paying some kind of royalties to the artists. After all, wasn’t he using their music to draw members — and advertising — to his business? Social-networking sites like Bebo argue that they have no money to distribute — their value is their membership. Well, last week Michael Birch realized the value of his membership. I’m sure he’ll be rewarding those technicians and accountants who helped him achieve this success. Perhaps he should also consider the contribution of his artists.
The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend…
“Having assembled his folk melodies, Stravinsky proceeded to pulverize them into motivic bits, pile them up in layers, and reassemble them in cubistic collages and montages.”
Alex Ross on Stravinsky, in his book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Quoted by Steven Poole in his excellent review.
Er, in case you’re wondering (as I was) what ‘motivic’ means, Wikipedia says that it’s “using a distinct musical figure that is subsequently altered, repeated, or sequenced throughout a piece or section of a piece of music”, and that it “has its roots in the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and the sonata form of Haydn and Mozart’s age.”
If you’re puzzled by what happened to HBOS shares last week, then this sobering Telegraph column by Jeff Randall may help.
Put simply: I know that you want to buy 100 shares in Jayar Junk. The shares are trading at £10 each. We strike a deal at that price, and I promise to deliver them in one week’s time. At this point, I still don’t own any Jayar Junk. No matter, my buddies at the Rumour Mill are about to go to work.
Through a series of postings on dodgy websites, anonymous emails and loose talk in dealers’ watering holes, we spread the story that Jayar Junk is running out of readies. Very soon the shares start falling, to £9, £8, £7. In angst-ridden markets, there is no bottom. When they hit £5, we buy 100.
Bingo! You are contracted to take them from me for a total of £1,000. My cost is just £500. I double my money and you are ripped off. It’s no more complicated than that. Like a spiritualist medium, the Rumour Mill relies on its victims believing an illusion: stock market ectoplasm.
It’s not illegal “to short” a stock, ie, sell shares that you do not have. Several reputable hedge funds made millions by “shorting” both Northern Rock and Bear Stearns. The law is broken, however, when the Rumour Mill creates malicious falsehoods with the aim of driving down prices.
For ordinary folk, whose pensions are jeopardised every time the Rumour Mill starts turning, these are troubling times. They tuck away a few quid each month in the belief that they are investing for retirement. They accept that there is risk, but don’t (yet) regard this form of saving as a day at the races.
But in his book, The Truth About Markets, Oxford economist Professor John Kay writes: “Most transactions in securities markets are not about sharing or spreading risks; they are like transactions in a betting shop. The people who engage in them believe they are deploying their superior knowledge, but this can never be true of more than a small minority of players.” The trick for regulators is to make sure that this small minority has gained its advantage openly and honestly, without recourse to chicanery. Experience tells us, however, that this is extremely difficult, if not impossible…
From the Register…
Selling “installs” is a common practice in the cyber-underworld, the most notable example being in 2005 when Jeanson Ancheta was arrested for building a 400,000-strong botnet and installing adware from 180 solutions for a fee of $60,000. Cybercriminals have since moved on to installing spyware onto compromised machines.
Zombie machines infected with Trojan horse malware can be used to relay spam or launch denial of service attacks. Compromised machines can be also be pointed to websites from which additional items of malware can be downloaded. The practice is normally used to update Trojan code, but it also creates a means for cybercrooks to make a “nice little earner”.
The income that can be earned grows with the numbers of installs, and varies based on the geographical location of an installation. For example, installing spyware on 1,000 machines in Australia earns $100 but only $50 in the US, and a measly $3 in Asia. A sample price list obtained by net security services firm sheds fresh light on the phenomenon.
MeesageLabs culled its figures from a malware distribution site in Russia, the existence of which we’ve verified. The site is loaded with malware and for that reason we’ll refer to it by a shortened version of its name, installscash.org.
From the Guardian‘s Letters and blogs…
The online Sydney Morning Herald of March 14 took the advert targeting issue, as discussed recently in Technology, to another level altogether. A report of a gruesome assault in a Sydney park was headed “Woman’s nose bitten off”. A link was provided – “Ads by Google” – to “Safe Cosmetic Surgery” from London. “Request a free brochure online now!” it urged, sensing there wasn’t a moment to lose.
Harold Lewis, Cobham
Thanks to Kevin Cryan for spotting it.
The Adsense logic engine produces weird results. When I’ve blogged about the quagmire in Iraq, for example, it often comes up with recruiting ads for the US Army. And whenever I write about the iniquities of the copyright thugs of the RIAA and the MPAA, Google invariably produces ads from legal firms offering their help in “protecting your intellectual property”.
From Rory Cellan-Jones…
Facebook has unveiled what it says is a new policy on privacy. The press release says the aim is to give users more control over the information they choose to share. It goes on to explain that the two main features are “a standardized privacy interface across the site and new privacy options.”
Is that perfectly clear? Well, not entirely. What is a “standardized privacy interface” when it’s at home? The 75% of users who never bother to change their default privacy settings probably won’t care. But read on, and it seems the main change is the ability to differentiate between different groups of friends – and give them different levels of access to your information….