Why Germans get their Flickrs in a twist over ‘censorship’

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This morning’s Observer column…

The Flickr firestorm is just the latest refutation of the enduring myth that the internet is uncontrollable. While technologically adept users can usually find anything they’re looking for, the vast majority of the internet’s 1.1 billion users are at the mercy of local laws, ordinances and customs.

Flickr users in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong and Korea are finding themselves at the sharp end of this, because Yahoo needs to conform to local laws if it is to continue to trade in those jurisdictions. The same forces explain why Google provides only a restricted search service to its Chinese users. Libertarianism is all very well when you’re a hacker. But business is business.

Portrait of the Artist aged six and a half

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From the Clongowes class photograph of 1888, the year Joyce entered the college. It’s reproduced in Bruce Bradley’s lovely book, James Joyce’s Schooldays (St Martin’s Press, 1982). Now long out of print (though the wonderful abe.com points to some booksellers who have copies for sale), and a generous gift from my friend, Sean O’ Mordha.

Edward Tufte and the Triumph of Good Design

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I’m a fan of Edward Tufte’s work, not least because he and I see eye-to-eye about the evils of PowerPoint. But I knew very little about him as a person — until I read this piece in New York Magazine…

Edward Tufte is most likely the world’s only graphic designer with roadies. “We own two of everything—amplifiers, digital projectors,” other A/V gear, he says. “One set moves up and down the West Coast, and one stays in the East, to keep the FedEx charges down.” He plays 35 or so dates a year, at $380 per ticket. Today’s is in a raddled old auditorium on 34th Street, over the Hammerstein Ballroom.

Like a musician’s tour to promote an album, this one—which will hit New York again in the fall—exists partly to sell Tufte’s four design books, the newest of which is titled Beautiful Evidence. But Tufte, through his own Graphics Press, is the book’s publisher, and he doesn’t do the usual quick month of hard promotion before heading back to his desk. He keeps going on the road, selling steadily, a few gigs a month, year after year. That may be why there are 1.4 million copies of his titles in print—a staggering figure for self-publishing. (The top seller, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, has been a reliable mover since 1983.) And at these six-and-a-half-hour presentations, the audience starts cheering when he hits the floor, clamors for their books to be signed, buys posters at the table out front. As soon as the applause stops, Tufte bolts backstage, enthusiastically draining a Corona. “There are usually about 500 people who want to talk afterwards, and I’ve exhausted myself,” he says sheepishly. “I have to go hide out. Otherwise it takes hours.” This is all a good deal more lucrative than many author tours. “Thirty-five, forty dollars a book, 1.4 million copies?” he says, with a quizzical smile, when I ask about money. “You can multiply.”

And who are these fans who won’t leave? The majority are male, and wearing expensive rimless eyeglasses. Many are Web designers, creative directors, art directors, editors, architects. They come in knowing Tufte’s obsessions and coinages: Content-light splashy graphics, or “chartjunk,” are bad. Little repeated graphics displaying variations, or “small multiples,” are good. Microsoft’s PowerPoint software is an all-conquering monster of crumminess, a threat to life as we know it. Most of all, if you are making a presentation, you can probably say everything you need to on a single folded sheet of eleven-by-seventeen copy paper, and you ought to. Pretty much anyone who writes or presents can learn from Tufte, and those who have studied his work often speak of him as a kind of prophet. The iPhone is going to be the most talked-about object in America later this month, and the endless praise of Apple’s pared-down aesthetic is, in a way, his triumph…

Lovely piece, well worth a read. Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for finding it.

How not to get eaten by a lion

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Intriguing essay by Bruce Schneier, with extrapolations from his experience on Safari to Homeland Security…

If you encounter an aggressive lion, stare him down. But not a leopard; avoid his gaze at all costs. In both cases, back away slowly; don’t run. If you stumble on a pack of hyenas, run and climb a tree; hyenas can’t climb trees. But don’t do that if you’re being chased by an elephant; he’ll just knock the tree down. Stand still until he forgets about you.

I spent the last few days on safari in a South African game park, and this was just some of the security advice we were all given. What’s interesting about this advice is how well-defined it is. The defenses might not be terribly effective — you still might get eaten, gored or trampled — but they’re your best hope. Doing something else isn’t advised, because animals do the same things over and over again. These are security countermeasures against specific tactics.

Lions and leopards learn tactics that work for them, and I was taught tactics to defend myself. Humans are intelligent, and that means we are more adaptable than animals. But we’re also, generally speaking, lazy and stupid; and, like a lion or hyena, we will repeat tactics that work. Pickpockets use the same tricks over and over again. So do phishers, and school shooters. If improvised explosive devices didn’t work often enough, Iraqi insurgents would do something else.

So security against people generally focuses on tactics as well.

A friend of mine recently asked me where she should hide her jewelry in her apartment, so that burglars wouldn’t find it. Burglars tend to look in the same places all the time — dresser tops, night tables, dresser drawers, bathroom counters — so hiding valuables somewhere else is more likely to be effective, especially against a burglar who is pressed for time. Leave decoy cash and jewelry in an obvious place so a burglar will think he’s found your stash and then leave. Again, there’s no guarantee of success, but it’s your best hope.

The key to these countermeasures is to find the pattern: the common attack tactic that is worth defending against. That takes data. A single instance of an attack that didn’t work — liquid bombs, shoe bombs — or one instance that did — 9/11 — is not a pattern. Implementing defensive tactics against them is the same as my safari guide saying: “We’ve only ever heard of one tourist encountering a lion. He stared it down and survived. Another tourist tried the same thing with a leopard, and he got eaten. So when you see a lion….” The advice I was given was based on thousands of years of collective wisdom from people encountering African animals again and again.

Compare this with the Transportation Security Administration’s approach. With every unique threat, TSA implements a countermeasure with no basis to say that it helps, or that the threat will ever recur.

Furthermore, human attackers can adapt more quickly than lions. A lion won’t learn that he should ignore people who stare him down, and eat them anyway. But people will learn. Burglars now know the common “secret” places people hide their valuables — the toilet, cereal boxes, the refrigerator and freezer, the medicine cabinet, under the bed — and look there. I told my friend to find a different secret place, and to put decoy valuables in a more obvious place…

Why my other car’s not a Porsche

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By mistake, I wandered into an ad for the Porsche Cayenne SUV from a page on the New York Times. Interesting to see that nowhere in the technical ‘specifications’ for this idiotic vehicle on the Porsche USA site — not even in the ‘environment’ section — is there any mention of its CO2 emissions. (They’re 378 g/cm for the Turbo model, in case you’re interested.)

The Magnatune revolution

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Fascinating openDemocracy article by John Buckman about Magnatune.

Four years ago, inspired by the open-source movement, I launched Magnatune – an internet-based record label based on a model I called “open music”. At the time, the major-label music industry was on a self-destructive rampage, destroying companies that attempted new business models and trying to create an all-pervasive “permission society”. Their customers hated them, and “piracy”, far from being seen as anti-social behaviour, was viewed as a strike against injustice: copying music illegally as facilitating the demise of a malevolent system.

Against this backdrop, I use the slogan “we are not evil” for Magnatune, to encompass everything I wanted the music business to be. This is stronger than Google’s “don’t be evil”, which is a recommendation, a goal, but not a rule. “We are not evil” means that we won’t ever do anything evil, but it also insinuates that someone else in the music industry is evil. It also means – and with interesting results – that Magnatune can’t get involved in certain parts of the music business (for example, physical CD distribution) because those areas demand its participants to be evil or they don’t have a chance of surviving…

Read on. It’s a good story of an ingenious idea which is already enjoying modest success.

John Buckman is the founder/owner of the record label Magnatune, and organiser of the peer-to-peer book exchange BookMooch (which is also very ingenious). He is a member of the board of directors at Creative Commons and the advisory board of the Open Rights Group