The Compulsive Explainer

You Gotta Subscribe to Ribbon Farm

You gotta do this for no other reason than to learn how to do a subscription on the Internet. If you already know how to do this, you can ignore the rest of this posting - but I still think you will enjoy his site. It's something else. Even the comments are worth reading, he has some interesting friends. If you are really high-tech, you can look at his code to get some ideas for yourself.

To subscribe to an Internet site, such as a blog, you use the RSS feed published by that site. You don't have to know anything about how this works, which is rather complicated, just consider it a piece of Internet magic. Doing this used to complicated, but now it is super easy - especially with Firefox. I now have seven subscriptions lined up along the top of Firefox. For example, I just now looked at Robert Reich's blog Too Big to Fail: Why The Big Banks Should Be Broken Up, But Why The White House and Congress Don't Want To .

When you are on a site you want to subscribe to, to get more of their good stuff automatically, just go to the bookmarks menu at the top of Firefox, or whatever browser you are using. If this site has an RSS feed, the selection subscribe to this page will be active. 

In Internet Explorer, click the RSS logo, select the feed, and subscribe to it. It's help facility can also help you with this. Windows does have excellent help, the best in the business. 

Venkatesh Rao, the guru of Ribbon Farm makes this ever easier: just click on Subscribe on the upper-right corner of one of his blog postings, for example, here is his latest.

Enjoy!

When fast and slow time meet, fast time wins

A previous posting We know more and more, and therefore we know less and less was from the book The Tyranny of the Moment by Thomas Hylland Eriksen. This posting is also taken from that book. The sub-title of the book is Fast and slow time in the information age. He has a lot to say about this, including the following:

This is why one never gets the important things done because there is always something else one has to do first. Naturally, we will always tend to do the most urgent tasks first. In this way, the slow and long-term activities lose out. In an age when the distinctions between work and leisure are being erased, and efficiency seems to be the only value in economics, politics and research, this is really bad news for things like thorough, far-sighted work, play and long-term love relationships.

Here is another main point:

The main scarce resource for suppliers of any commodity in the information society is the attention of others. Whether it is advertisements, talks, scientific articles, knowledge or simply physical commodities that we offer the outside world, there is an intensified competition for the vacant slots in the time budgets of the target groups. These vacant moments become fewer and shorter, since the people in question are subjected to powerful expectations that they should squeeze ever more impressions, commodities, experiences and pieces of information into their lives. The next impression kills the previous one at an accelerating speed. 

He is not the first one to notice this. Providers of every kind on the Internet are well aware of it. They are fighting like hell to get their brief moment in the awareness of the viewer.

A friend of mine down here in Costa Rica was complaining to me that he had spent 1000 dollars on his Web site, which hadn't done a bit of good. I was shocked, 1000 dollars down here is a lot of money. I told him he had been cheated, but I was thinking something else: that he was helpless and stupid - which he is.

i-name

I got roped into this i-name thing early on. It sounded like a good idea, as Wikipedia explains:

I-names are one form of an XRI — an OASIS open standard for digital identifiers designed for sharing resources and data across domains and applications. I-names are human readable XRIs intended to be as easy as possible for people to remember and use. For example, a personal i-name could be =Mary or =Mary.Jones. An organizational i-name could be @Acme or @Acme.Corporation.

One problem XRIs are designed to solve is persistent addressing — how to maintain an address that does not need to change no matter how often the contact details of a person or organization change. XRIs accomplish this by adding a new layer of abstraction over the existing IP numbering and DNS naming layers used on the Internet today (as well as over other type of addresses, such as phone numbers or instant messaging addresses).

For example, before I moved down here, I got the domain halsmith.org and gave that to all my friends in Silicon Valley. But due to some screw-ups committed by others, I lost that Web address.

Check my i-name contact page. Getting this was a struggle. One i-name vendor roped me in, and then went out of business, selling my name to another vendor, who made my contact page nonoperational. It did not respond to my requests for technical support.

Fortunately, I found Marcos Sabadello at fullXRI, who has been most helpful. His email address is [email protected].

The World-Wide Computer

I am not talking about the World-Wide Web (WWW) - but the World-Wide Computer, which has for one of its components the WWW. This will reshape the world.

It is the result of two technologies: mega-computer centers and vast numbers of fiber-optics cables, which were laid during the high-tech boom. The companies responsible for them have since gone to their rewards (bankruptcy) but the cables are still there, forming a glut in the global high-bandwidth communications market. The mega-computer centers have also formed a glut: computing power so cheap it is practically free.

Nicholas Carr in his book The Big Switch compares this situation to the advent of massive power generating stations and the network of power distribution networks. This replaced local power generating stations owned mainly by manufacturers and trolley companies. At first, they didn't trust the power companies, but cheap power eventually won them over.

The government also got involved. After WWII most farms had no electricity. So the Feds set up the Rural Electrification Authority, and sent electricity to them - over the violent objections of the power companies. The farmers thought they were in heaven. The government also got into the power generation business: the Tennessee Valley Authority that revitalized a whole area - and whose abundant power helped make the Atomic Bomb.

Here is the main blurb for The Big Switch:

The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr's best-selling look at the new computer revolution makes a simple and profound statement: Computing is turning into a utility, and the effects of this transition will ultimately change society as completely as the advent of cheap electricity did. From the software business to the newspaper business, from job creation to community formation, from national defense to personal identity, The Big Switch provides a panoramic view of the new world being conjured from the circuits of he "World Wide Computer." 

Mary Eisenhart, of the San Francisco Chronicle says this:

"While technological innovation is largely the creation of idealistic geniuses spurred on by utopian visions, Carr points out, it is rapidly co-opted by the incumbent in power and turned to other purposes .... Technology may be the ultimate tool or even the ultimate psychedelic, but do we really want to become utterly dependent on something about which we have essentially no say? And as for those utopian visions, do we really share them?"

Computer Taiwan is on the Move

MaximumPC Exclusive: Thermaltake's Jaw-Dropping Level 10 Chassis Unboxed!

America's lead in computer technology didn't last very long. This design is brand-new and well thought-out.

Dig the photographs and the comments at the bottom of the article. This super-PC will cost $700 and be available next month!

While you are at it, check this new kind of memory from a South Korean company. It's enough to make American companies piss in their pants. It's also about Dynamic Specialization. All kinds of people, all over the world, were involved in making this device. Samsung just pulled them all together. 

The Internet Promotes Social Polarization

This is not what we expected at all. I can remember Marshall McLuhan, who I respected immensely, when he was proclaiming the coming of the global village. The Internet would bring everyone together.

Once again, this shows that the social effects of technological innovations are impossible to predict, and are often worse than anyone could imagine. The reason for this is simple: people like to hear things that reinforce what they already believe. We have a bounded rationality, to use a technical term.

Once again, I quote from the book The Big Switch, pages 162-167:

In "Global Village or Cyber-Balkans?," an article that appeared in the journal Management Science in 2005, Eric Brynjolfsson, of MIT; and Marshall Van Alstyne, of Boston University, describe the results of a mathematical model they constructed to measure how individuals' choices influence the makeup of online communities. "Although the conventional wisdom has stressed the integrating effects of [Internet] technology," they write, in introducing their research, "we examine critically the claim that a global village is the inexorable· result of increased connectivity." 

"Our analysis," they write, "suggests that automatic search tools and filters that route communications among people based on their views, reputations, past statements or personal characteristics are not necessarily benign in their effects." Shaped by such tools, online communities could actually end up being less diverse than communities defined by physical proximity.

More and more people are only being shown the things that fit in with their world outlook - either liberal or conservative. This is being done automatically by software tools that work in the background, finding out what we like - and therefore what we would like to buy. Several other studies are cited.

As University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein explains in his book Infotopia, "When like-minded people cluster, they often aggravate their biases, spreading falsehoods." They "end up in a more extreme position in line with their tendencies before deliberation began." This phenomenon, which Sunstein reports has been documented "in hundreds of studies in over a dozen countries," may in the worst cases plant "the roots of extremism and even fanaticism and terrorism." 

Given how easy it is to find like-minded people and sympathetic ideas on the Internet and given our innate tendency to form homogeneous groups, we can see that ideological amplification is likely to be pervasive online. The effect is not merely a tendency for members to conform to the group average but a radicalization in which this average moves toward extremes."

Although they stress that it's too early to know exactly how all of these forces will play out, they warn that "balkanization and the loss of shared experiences and values may be harmful to the structure of democratic societies."

It's clear that two of the hopes most dear to the Internet optimists: that the Web will create a more bountiful culture and that it will promote greater harmony and understanding: should be treated with skepticism. Cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation seem equally likely outcomes.

The Failure of Anonymization

From the Social Science Research Network

Why should you be interested in this strange subject? Because your personal data is being used without your knowledge. For example, every email I send and receive on Yahoo Mail is saved, anonymized, and sold to marketing companies - who want to know everything about Americans there is to know. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security gets this data directly, without any filtering, for their huge data banks. They are looking over your shoulder, whether you realize it or not. But that is another topic I will not go into here. 

This whole business is not regulated at all, there is just a gentleman's agreement that personal information will be filtered out - and since these gentlemen are business men, they are not too interested in protecting anyone's privacy - except their own, of course.

The abstract of this article, by Paul Ohm at the Colorado Law School:

Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques for protecting the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated they can often 'reidentify' or 'deanonymize' individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease. By understanding this research, we will realize we have made a mistake, labored beneath a fundamental misunderstanding, which has assured us much less privacy than we have assumed. This mistake pervades nearly every information privacy law, regulation, and debate, yet regulators and legal scholars have paid it scant attention. We must respond to the surprising failure of anonymization, and this Article provides the tools to do so.

Americans, however, could care less. If someone has the money to buy their information, they are welcome to it.

Unethical Behavior in the Web - Big Time

From Mobil Crunch via Slashdot.
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When it comes to winning in the App Store, one PR firm has discovered a dynamite strategy: throw ethics out the window. Reverb Communications, a PR firm that represents dozens of game publishers and developers, has managed to find astounding success on Apple’s App Store for its clients. Among its various tactics? It hires a team of interns to trawl iTunes and other community forums posing as real users, and has them write positive reviews for their client’s applications. Yeah, that 5-star iTunes app review you saw for the once top-5 paid app Enigmo? It might not be written by a real user, but rather by Pangea Software’s PR firm. Reverb isn’t the first to try and game the user review process, but they are definitely one of the most blatant cases.

Reverb Communications is an extremely successful PR firm that claims to have “first party” and “personal” relationships with Apple. Aside from representing Pangea Software, one of the more successful App developers for the iPhone (they made Enigmo, which was featured during the Apple WWDC Keynote 2008), they also represent Harmonix (the Guitar Hero and Rock Band guys), MTV Games, and a host of iPhone game developers. Additionally, they’ve managed to do an impressive job at courting the press: clients have had iPhone apps featured in just about every major media outlet known to man, including Forbes, MTV, G4TV, NBC (in fact, all the examples were for one developer: Publisher X, which Reverb happens to own). Reverb claims that their clients have sold over $2 Billion of product under their watch.
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This is a long article, but well-worth reading - by anyone who wants to know what is really going on - which is evidently not many people, because my last posting about Facebook's shenanigans was ignored.

Any idea that takes more than three seconds to absorb, doesn't get absorbed at all.

More Thoughts About Facebook Privacy

The basics here are simple: Facebook is a free Internet application. How on earth can it be free? Because its main objective is the mining of data.

The day of gold and silver mining is mostly over. Even back then, the source being mined was mostly eager new minors and investors. "Pikes Peak or bust" usually ended with with a bust. 

The mother lode now, in the information era, is data: personal data. Every company wants to know that is going on in everybody's head: what everybody wants. Once they know that, they have a head start on the competition. 

But they will never come right out and say that - they want you think of them as a mystery benefactor, acting out of the goodness of their warm and lovable hearts. And people believe this: they think all these Internet services are some kind of divine right, given them because they are so wonderful. 

Recently, I had a posting about Facebook privacy. The ACLU made it clear that Facebook does a poor job of protecting your data from unscrupulous Internet operators. But they said nothing about protecting your data from Facebook itself - because there is no such protection. Facebook owns all your data - and all your friends data. Anything on Facebook they own. Facebook is their property. Clear enough?

Since I suggested others ought to increase their Facebook security, I decided I would give it a try myself. I headed for Settings/Privacy/Applications/Settings. Under Learn More I got this:

All applications must respect existing privacy settings. For example, if an application creates a slideshow of your photo albums, and a certain album is set to "Only My Friends", it may only display that slideshow to your friends.

If you believe an application is violating Facebook's privacy policies, please report it immediately. You can report an application by going to the application's About page and clicking "Report Application" at the bottom of the page, or by clicking "Report" at the bottom of any canvas page within the application.

Evidently, Facebook is not checking to see if foreign applications are violating your privacy settings! This is easy enough to do: it should simply make it impossible for them to do it. If there were any mandatory Internet privacy requirements, this would certainly be one of them. People should be able to control access to their data.

There was another interesting setting: Do not share any information about me through the Facebook API, followed by this link:

You are unable to fully opt out of sharing information through Facebook Platform because you are currently using applications built on Platform. To enable this option, you need to remove any applications you have added, and remove your permissions to all external applications that you may have used.

I cannot imagine what they mean. All I did was get a Facebook account, how did I get all this other stuff? What is this Platform thing?

However, under the Applications Authorized to Access Your Information heading it does have a link to the applications I have authorized: Events, Gifts, Groups, Links, Notes, Photos, and Video. Each of these has an Edit Settings and Profile link. I was surprised to learn that six of my friends also use the Events application. Facebook links multiply profusely! And I see no way to stop using any of these applications, you are stuck with them, whether you like it or not.

There are also Facebook Connect and Beacon applications - which you can block if you want to. Otherwise, they are allowed. There are also Blocked Applications and Ignored Application Providers sections. More stuff for you to understand.

In summary, Facebook makes to hard for you to understand what is going on, so most users don't even try, they just accept the defaults - and Facebook remains in control.

Facebook's Lousy Privacy

From the ACLU . I got the original link from Slashdot.

I have a Facebook account, but never use it. But I get different Facebook requests all the time. It is extremely popular. From what little work I have done on it, it appears to be overloaded: it tried to grow too fast. It probably has money problems too and is trying to solve that by selling member data - a common strategy in the industry.

The ACLU Blog of Rights, because freedom can't blog itself is excellent. If you are into Facebook, you owe it to yourself to look at it.

Internet privacy is a whole bag of worms that is unlikely to improve, because that suits business interests, who can do whatever they please with your data.