Category Archives: information sys

Stross, Google Street Views and Privacy

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Recently, author Charlie Stross posted the transcript of a talk he gave to a tech consultancy titled “Shaping the Future” .  It’s worth reading in it’s entirety; if you click through please remember to come back – I have some thoughts I’d like to share.

A side trip on our way to the meat of the matter… Stross identifies bandwidth – the ability to move information from place to place – as a key variable. It’s one of those things that’s getting faster, faster (think exponential increase). I want to recommend The Victorian Internet – a book that looks at the beginning of the communications revolution. Before the telegraph, information moved at the same rate people did – as fast as a horseback messenger or a clipper ship. The telegraph was an enormous change – one that left fingerprints that we see to this day. Baud – the speed measurement applied to modems (themselves becoming obsolete) – is named for Émile Baudot, a pioneer in the field. There are other examples; I’ll leave the rest to The Victorian Internet.

The focus of Stross talk is the notion of lifeblogging:

Today, I can pick up about 1Gb of FLASH memory in a postage stamp sized card for that much money [ten euros]. fast-forward a decade and that’ll be 100Gb. Two decades and we’ll be up to 10Tb.

10Tb is an interesting number. That’s a megabit for every second in a year — there are roughly 10 million seconds per year. That’s enough to store a live DivX video stream — compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution — of everything I look at for a year, including time I spend sleeping, or in the bathroom. Realistically, with multiplexing, it puts three or four video channels and a sound channel and other telemetry — a heart monitor, say, a running GPS/Galileo location signal, everything I type and every mouse event I send — onto that chip, while I’m awake. All the time. It’s a life log; replay it and you’ve got a journal file for my life. Ten euros a year in 2027, or maybe a thousand euros a year in 2017. (Cheaper if we use those pesky rotating hard disks — it’s actually about five thousand euros if we want to do this right now.)

Why would anyone want to do this?

I can think of several reasons. Initially, it’ll be edge cases. Police officers on duty: it’d be great to record everything they see, as evidence. Folks with early stage neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimers: with voice tagging and some sophisticated searching, it’s a memory prosthesis.

Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it’s all indexed and searchable. “What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?”

Think of it as google for real life. *

We’re seeing the beginnings of something like this today. My blog is not the only way I share information about what I’m up to and what I’m thinking – there’s also my Flickrstream (interesting word that was invented to describe people’s photo repositories, eh?), Twitter (short term, ephemeral stream of consciousness stuff), del.icio.us (public list of my bookmarks), and email (more – presumably – private). Others may add YouTube or other video services to the list and I’m sure there are many other bits of software I’m missing; I have little or no MySpace/Facebook knowledge, for example.

All this is fine as I wander around documenting what I want to document, writing what I feel like writing. But (there’s always a but), here comes Monty! Who is Monty, you ask? He is the cat in the window. A new feature of Google Maps provides street level zooms for select urban areas – the Google folks have vehicles driving around cities taking pictures. When the Google car came by, Monty was sitting in his normal perch. Later, when Google rolled out the new feature, Monty’s owner took a look at her neighborhood, saw her cat in her window, and got a little – understandably in my book – freaked. Ms. Kalin-Casey – one of Monty’s owners – writes,

The question is, where do we draw the line between public and private? Obviously, the picture of Monty isn’t very good, but who’s to say whether tomorrow, Google’s camera’s won’t be a lot better, giving clearer pictures and more detail? I’ve already seen one post online where the poster’s only complaint about Google pics is that the pictures aren’t sharp enough. (He wasn’t commenting on my pic, but on a picture of his own home.)

The opposing argument claims that what’s visible from the street is public. By opening my windows for some much-needed light and air, am I granting permission for my living room to be broadcast worldwide? I don’t think I am. I think if I open my windows, my neighbors and passers by might see the cat in the window. That’s substantially different to me than realizing that everyone in the world can potentially see into my home.

It’s my feeling that we should know what kind of monitoring we’re subject to and when. Stores, airports, intersections, museums —there are security cameras everywhere. We’ve all seen overhead satellite photos for mapping purposes, but when does helpful mapping recon morph into home surveillance? When does it move from a grainy picture of the cat to a high-res image where you can see small details in my apartment? When do I have to choose between sunlight and unseen threats to privacy? *

Think about those sorts of reasonable concerns in a world where everything I see or hear, I record. I think jammer technologies will get hot, but regardless, our notions of privacy will need to be sharpened and thought through a little more thoroughly than they are today. I don’t have answers; I probably am not even seeing the real questions – we ought to start paying some attention though. As William Gibson said, “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.”

The Macro’s Saga

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Every so often, the conditions are right and half the world’s population of internet users decide to go ape over the same silly thing simultaneously. As Prof. Harold Hill would say, “Mass-steria!” The shared memetic obsession this time around? Cat macros, also known as LOLCats or image macros (including the saga of the lolrus and the bukkit). The first rumblings were apparent as early as last Saturday – see the caption to the zombie picture on my AM cleanup post. The big seismic event, as far as I’m concerned, was on Wednesday when the LOLbots site went live. rstevens (the prime mover) on the rollout:

LOLBOTS.COM went up last night and promptly rode such a big wave of meme that we overloaded two servers. My admin Don got us back up and running and helped me optimize some code. The dude’s Bat-Man with a command line.

…

Originally, I was just goofing on the concept of icanhascheezburger-style kitty macros from the perspective of someone prefers machines to animals. I didn’t really think it would catch on, but 40,000 visitors later we have almost 200 robots posted and a backlog of dozens more. In a word: Insane. *

The quotes above are from a post dated Friday, June 1st – 2 days earlier rstevens had an idea and sat down at the keyboard. The fun continues – it will be interesting to watch the meme-seismograph for aftershocks.

Herewith, my faves from the frenzy…

If you know what the Camel Book is, you have – like me – spent too much time in front of a screen.

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You may have noticed that I like Schrödinger’s cat jokes – I love this one:

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And last, one that ties to another post currently floating around the wide-open spaces of my cranium – it will be a mashup of Google Street View and Charlie Stross (that’s a cat in Mary Kalin-Casey’s window).

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Credit where it’s due – the lolcats phenomenon was showing up on my son’s radar even earlier than it did on mine. I think he told me about memecats at about the same time I told him about “I can has brayn?”

Update – didn’t want to leave out creative powerhouse, Mr. Lex10 – he did some LOLPresidents for a fark contest early in the lolnomenon. You should blast over to the Glyphblog to check out the baseball cards; they are (as we say up here) wicked pissah.

Update II – c’est encroyable. The LOLCode version of Hello World:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

Lessons Learned

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It seems to me that a characteristic of a healthy decision making process is that it rewards good predictions and planning and penalizes bad work. In today’s media/policy landscape the entities producing the work can be government institutions, NGOs/thinktanks and/or individuals (either acting alone or working for an institution), but talking heads and the punditocracy – individuals – dominate the national discussion of big issues (though the blogosphere is becoming a bit of a countervailing force to conventional wisdom®). One of the things that’s amazed me, as the disaster in Iraq has played out, is how the folks who were consistently wrong have continued to command attention, while the people whose judgment time has revealed as more accurate are marginalized or ignored. Some recent events that really brought this home:

Via The Washington Note, Jeff Stein’s Congressional Quarterly article on Pat Lang’s encounter with Doug Feith.

In early 2001, his [Lang’s] name was put forward as somebody who would be good at running the Pentagon’s office of special operations and low-intensity warfare, i.e., counterinsurgency. Lang had also been a Green Beret, with three tours in South Vietnam.

One of the people he had to impress was Feith, the Defense Department’s number three official and a leading player in the clique of neoconservatives who had taken over the government’s national security apparatus.

Lang went to see him, he recalled during a May 7 panel discussion at the University of the District of Columbia.

“He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me,” Lang recalled, “ which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers — they always had briefing papers, you know — about me.

“He’s looking at this stuff, and he says, ‘I’ve heard of you. I heard of you.’

“He says, ‘Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?’

“And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s really true.’

‘That’s too bad,” Feith said.

Feith, who Gen. T. Franks famously referred to as “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet” , is now teaching a course on the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policy at Georgetown. Seems like a course that matches well with his intelligence…

Wolfowitz’s latest follies at the World Bank are well known – who could have predicted that he might have trouble there, given his recent brilliant track record (that was sarcasm)?

In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that “stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible,” but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. “I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help. *

The massive underestimation of the size of the occupation and nationbuilding tasks in Iraq – who could have guessed estimates were so far off? Dr. Conrad Crane at the US Army War College in February of 2003 for one. Via This Amercan Life’s excellent Lessons Learned show (here and here) – Crane and others produced Recontructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges and Missions for Military Forces in a Post Conflict Scenario (pdf link). Listen to ‘Act 1: Cassandra’ of the TAL Lessons Learned show – I’m still shaking my head.

If the war is rapid with few civilian casualties, the occupation will probably be characterized by an initial honeymoon period during which the United States will reap the benefits of ridding the population of a brutal dictator. Nevertheless, most Iraqis and most other Arabs will probably assume that the United States intervened in Iraq for its own reasons and not to liberate the population. Long-term gratitude is unlikely and suspicion of U.S. motives will increase as the occupation continues. A force initially viewed as liberators can rapidly be relegated to the status of invaders should an unwelcome occupation continue for a prolonged time. Occupation problems may be especially acute if the United States must implement the bulk of the occupation itself rather than turn these duties over to a postwar international force. Regionally, the occupation will be viewed with great skepticism, which may only be overcome by the population’s rapid progress toward a secure and prosperous way of life.

What are my take-aways (lessons learned, if you will)?

  • Wishful thinking is appropriate if you’ve just bought a lottery ticket. It’s not the thing do do if you are planning for retirement. It is a horrible thing to do when other’s lives are at stake. Transparency – ‘show your work’ – is crucial when big issues are up for debate; standing around maintaining that things will go your way is not sufficient.
  • We need to get this right. I disagree with the “War on Terror” formulation (war on a tactic?), however there are specific state and non-state actors who wish the developed world ill. Figuring out how to neutralize these entities is not optional.

To hand-wave away the botched decision-making process in the run up to the Iraq war is not acceptable – a CF of this magnitude has a lot to teach. Our adversaries are learning from it – will we?

Our enemies are going to make us fight these kind of wars until we get them right. – David Kilcullen, quoted by Conrad Crane (TAL at approx minute 29)

Saturday AM cleanup

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Loose ends…

I’m having some fun with twitter – a microblogging tool (or a social networking tool, or a moblogging tool, or…). There’s it’s ‘as intended’ use, which is pretty darn cool; you can issue 140 character (maximum) status updates from a cell phone, IM client or the web. I love food updates and stray thoughts- good stuff. There are also people thinking about what else they can do with twitter – I’m following Zombie Attack – dispatches from the front line of the zombie wars.

Random synapse fires sympathetically – word of the day: zimboe.

Priority for the day: get this book.

Lastly, and yet again, hurray for Kathy and Red Eye R&B. (Hurray also for three day weekends and sunny Saturdays.)

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Update – A run to the bookstore yielded a copy of The Deep. Wow. Hooray for Beebe and Piccard for getting us started.

On the zombie front – Zombie Mob 2007 attacks the Apple Store in SF.

i can has brayn?

Four quick links:

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  • Private police forces – mall cops with guns and real enforcement responsibilities? Bad idea on so many levels it’s not funny.
  • National Security Letters – abused by the FBI – abuse that was facilitated by the gag order that comes with the letters.
  • DMCA – threat or menace? “Our attempts at copyright control have not been successful” – duh.
  • Folk devils and identity theft. If you don’t correctly identify the cause, good solutions are unlikely.

Systems thinking

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In my post on internet radio I mentioned the adaptation vs. control choice that the media industry is facing. I’m going to eventually post Kauffman’s rules of systems thinking, but since there are 28 of them, I thought I’d soften everyone up with 11 Laws of the Fifth Discipline (from Peter Senge’s book):

  1. today’s problems come from yesterday’s “solutions”
  2. the harder you push, the harder the system pushes back
  3. behavior grows better before it grows worse
  4. the easy way out usually leads back in
  5. the cure can be worse than the disease
  6. faster is slower
  7. cause and effect are not closely related in time and space
  8. small changes can produce big results –but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious
  9. you can have your cake and eat it too –but not at once
  10. dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants
  11. there is no blame

I remain suspicious of folks that lay out characteristics of effective organizations – the descriptive often segues into the prescriptive and as far as ‘just do these things and your organization will flourish’ – if it was that easy I’d think we’d see a lot fewer Dilbert meets Kafka workplaces. I spent many years working for a very large corporation; we had a CEO who was regularly fêted as a managerial genius. Down in the trenches one of my favorite inside jokes was filling in the blanks on a couple bits of management speak: the inside-out view (how do we see ourselves) and the outside-in view (how do our customers and suppliers see us).

  • inside-out = “I wish I worked for the company he’s talking about”
  • outside-in = “I wish I did business with that company”

In fairness to Jack, I think he realized that the company he liked to describe was some kind of idealized construct – that didn’t make the cube farms any more hospitable though… Whining aside, thinking about systems rather than a naive linear cause and effect is a habit all of us need to cultivate (IMHO).

Rule 10 makes me think of another rule from one of the best project management books out there – The Mythical Man Month. To paraphrase a point from Brook’s book in call and response form:

Q: How do you make a late project later?

A: Add more people!

Internet Radio

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It might be the bank teller who won’t cash your check for ten,
the draft board official who wants his job back again,
the rookie cop who will always be a novice,
those little punks down at the Food Stamp office…

Stupid people in positions of power,
stupid people in positions of power,
stupid people in positions of power,
wicked stupid now!

– Bill Morrissey *

A few weeks ago I wrote about Pandora – a webcaster who will take a seed song or artist and play other tunes like it. It’s a good way to discover new stuff and in a rational world, I’d think that the music business would welcome the exposure. Hah! No such luck – seems like everything the mafRIAA touches turns brown and smelly. A friend emailed me to let me know about the internet radio death watch – seems that fees for webcasters are being reset at a level that will put the small to medium sized folks out of business:

Bill Goldsmith of Radio Paradise told Kurt Hanson, “This royalty structure would wipe out an entire class of business: Small independent webcasters such as myself & my wife, who operate Radio Paradise. Our obligation under this rate structure would be equal to over 125% of our total income. There is no practical way for us to increase our income so dramatically as to render that affordable.” Kurt adds, “And Radio Paradise is perhaps the most-successful webcaster in its class! For most operators, this rate looks as if it would be >150-200% of total revenues.” *

Aside – Radio Paradise is successful for good reason. The friend who told me about the death watch also pointed me at Radio Paradise; it’s fantastic.

The market has changed. The record industry seems to think they can legislate the jinni back into the bottle, rather than adapting to new realities. The opportunities are there – provide extremely high bit-rate files for audiophiles, let me buy (non-DRMed) songs with a one-stop click at sites like Pandora and Radio Paradise, open up the long tail (I’d love to get my hands on the two Bottle Hill albums again), etc. Instead of adapting and providing additional value though, it seems like the business plan centers on business as usual via legal control and intimidation (I’ll have more to say about this in another post soon).

This decision has much to offend both free-speech-loving Democrats and free-market-loving Republicans. Especially the latter. You’re not going to find a better example of government interfering with free markets — or preventing them outright — than with this one.

You also won’t find businesses (or organizations, in the case of public radio stations and other nonprofits) that are doing a better job than Internet radio of help recording artists get paid for their work. For proof, go to Radio Paradise and click on any song on its long playlist. You’ll get album cover art, links to the artist’s website, tour info, and much more, including six different ways to buy the song. Go to Soma-FM, click on any playlist and any artist. You’ll get sent to an Amazon page where you can buy the music. Go to NPR’s Music page, and you’ll find Available for Purchase: Featured Music in prominent display.

This is the marketplace at work, today. It is exactly these kinds of market activities — independent businesses, helping make music consumers into music customers — that the RIAA and SoundExchange are working so hard to prevent, and that Judge Simson dismisses as a “nascent industry” that he’d rather see bulldozed to make room for the few Big Boys who can afford to pay. *

Where will this kind of activity go? Maybe offshore? Where the music industry is far less likely to get a cut? Oh, I know – let’s set up our own version of the Great Firewall to protect an entrenched oligopoly. Maybe I’m hypersensitive about the American blind spot ( “Rest of the world? What rest of the world?” ) because I look at my server logs and see hits from lots of other countries, but sheesh – is too much to ask that the folks who run an enormously profitable global industry think globally and realistically?

netvibes

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I’ve been using netvibes for a few weeks now and wanted to take a moment to recommend it. My netvibes page/portal/site is now indispensable – I can keep an eye on my favorite blogs, my Gmail account, Flikrstreams, etc. Clicking on the image above will take you to a Flikr page where I’ve marked the screen capture up a bit. Another great web app I fell over recently was Pandora (I know, I know, I live in a cave) – you give it an artist or song name and it starts streaming music similar to your seed selection. A great way to expand your horizons – in a rational world, the music industry would be showering the Pandora folks with cash. I’ll leave you with a Youtube clip I first saw about 3 weeks ago – it’s getting huge linkage, but one more won’t hurt. Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us:

Cell phone II

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Well, I ended up needing to execute on the cell phone thing earlier than I had originally planned – my current cell started to flake out. My priorities for the new phone were, in order: good phone function (duh!), Bluetooth, decent camera capabilities, and 3G network access. I ended up with a Samsung SGH-A707 – it does what I want it to do. The camera is OK – not great for closeup work (as you can see in the bonus bookshelf blogging shot below), but ok for a quick snap. An excellent extra is that it will record video; I’ve got some footage (can you call it that when it’s a pile of bits?) of my Dendrobates tinctorius that I’m trying to edit so I can post a clip. Unfortunately, iMovie doesn’t seem to want to deal with the camera’s file format – my copy of Final Cut imports it fine, so it looks like I’ve got to get busy climbing the Final Cut learning curve.

The shot at the top of the post is the cell, taken with my junky lo-res digicam. I tried to take it using the cell’s camera, using my cat-like speed (and quantum uncertainty) – unfortunately, I ran into the same problem I experience whenever I try to look at the back of my head by spinning around really quickly. The cell picture is here as a hat tip to Señor Lex10, who posted the graphic goodness I’m using as wallpaper – thanks!

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4th Gen Media, part II

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Incompatibabel
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My last post on the subject was less coherent than I would have liked; I’m going to keep this one short and linky. First, the link from the quote above to Tim O’Reilly’s essay on online distribution is worth following. Tim is a middleman – a publisher – and he gets it (his lesson #5: File sharing networks don’t threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.) What he publishes may have helped him see the light – O’Reilly is responsible for some of the internet’s canonical dead-tree resources. So, for the 4GM II web tour, start at Kung Fu Monkey for a couple quick observations and jump from there (or from here) to Alice’s snippets from a keynote speech given by Chris Anderson. The Long Tail (Mr. Anderson’s phrase for a power-law tail applied to businesses/distribution channels) is another key element in the 4GM puzzle. Be sure to check the comments on Alice’s post – a good reality check. Also – credit where it’s due – I lifted the O’Reilly quote from a recent kfmonkey post.

Cell phone strategies

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As a measure of how much things have changed – I almost left the ‘cell’ off the title of this post. The lowly land line is that invisible/insignificant. My daughter, who is off on her own, has never – as far as I know – had an old style hard wired phone connection. Enough of that – on to the subject I really wanted to discuss…

Curse you, Steve Jobs! I’ve been thinking about upgrading my cell phone – looking at smartphones like the Motorola Q and the Samsung Blackjack. As I read reviews, it became clear that these phones have a fatal flaw – they lock up and crash. It comes with the territory – with more complexity and with a general purpose OS, Murphy has bigger opportunities for fun and chaos. So, after thinking about it a bit (and admitting that really, what I need a cell phone for is making phone calls) I’d settled on what I’m callling the unix approach – loosely coupled devices, each good at the thing they are supposed to do. A cell, with 3G capabilities for data, to make phone calls on; maybe a Nokia N800 for data/web connectivity; a headset; and so on – all tied together with Bluetooth. Sounds like a plan. Then comes the announcement of of Apple’s jPhone and I’m overwhelmed by techno-covetousness. It’s still very early – I’ll be very interested to see the reviews – but mein Gott, what eye-candy. It is, for sure, pricey, but if it performs as advertised reliably it will be a contender and may knock my plan all to hell. Sounds like Apple is trying to ensure reliability – they may be using what I’ll call the PS/2 software model. Developers will have to get software blessed by Cupertino before it’ll be available (through the iTunes store?) – maybe, again, not a lot of details – it’s pretty clear, though, that the iPhone won’t be an open platform. Time will tell and the cell decision delay is for the best – with the boy going off to college in the fall on one of the 2 US coasts (TBD), there are likely to be more important cell plan considerations – like coverage and minutes.

Later – the Colbert Report on the iPhone – I love the fact that he hits the multiple device v. integrated platform thing: