Fables of the reconstruction

Ain't Technology Wonderful

I just installed Typepad Mobile on my new Palm 700p, and am trying it out. It's okay. Makes it easy to enter text and pics, but not links. (Not that it would be easy to do so on a phone, but still.) There's no spellcheck.

Bottom line: A toy I'll play with occasionally, but unless I get a cameraphone pic of an airliner crash, not very useful.

Timothy Noah, Wikiwanker

Dear Mr. Noah:
I know your column was intended to be kind of cutesy and self-promoting ("Hey, look everyone, I have a Wikipedia entry, for now!"), but your effort to indict Wikipedia for having notability standards is just lame.

1. "Wikipedia commands what is, for all practical purposes, infinite space and infinite manpower." You do work for an online publication, right? Because I would expect this sort of thing from a total newbie. Wikipedia has editorial administration, oversight and management, because it does have standards for completeness and style, and there will always be disputes over editing. Someone needs to have final say. Adding untold millions of articles on any subject or person, no matter how minor, is guaranteed to break the system.
2. "If Wikipedia publishes a bio of my cleaning lady, that won't make it any harder to field experts to write and edit Wikipedia's bio of Albert Einstein. So why not let her in?" The internet is wonderful, but it's not magic. A huge database is difficult to manage, and expensive to host. A database run amok with useless entries is the shortest distance to bankruptcy. And yes, Mr. Noah, it costs money  to run a site like Wikipedia.
3. "Another limit is accuracy. The bio's assertions about my cleaning lady would have to be independently verifiable from trustworthy sources made available to readers. Otherwise Wikipedia's vast army of volunteer fact-checkers would be unable to find out whether the bio was truthful." The vast army of volunteer fact-checkers also has to care enough about a topic to check it. Having a notability requirement helps to ensure this.
4. "We know why other encyclopedias need to limit the topics they cover." Here's the basic problem: You don't understand why an encyclopedia is useful. You don't need to create an article when the information is readily available elsewhere. Googling your name tells one all they need to know about you because there isn't that much which needs explanation, unlike - for example, using "random article" - coronal loops.
5. "We limit entry to the club not because we need to, but because we want to." This ending is just wacky. You're protesting being removed from Wikipedia, not because your cleaning lady never got an entry in the first place. You are pissed because you want to be in the club, not because entry is limited. And using an internet resource - especially one like Wikipedia - as an example of an exclusionary social structure is ludicrous. Google exists, okay? If you feel the need to be known, put up a vanity page. Get a free blog and autobio yourself until you can't autobio anymore.

Update: I had forgotten I had written this about Noah three years ago. He makes as little sense now as he did then.

Motorola Q versus Treo 700p

This is not a full-blown review, just a summary of my personal experience as a long-time user of Palm devices in comparing Verizon Wireless's Motorola Q and the Treo 700p.  My conclusion is that - for someone like me - there is ample reason to get the Treo over the Q. Even if you haven't used Palm devices before, you may find some factors - the battery life, especially - important.

I've used Palm devices since about 2000. First I owned a Kyocera 6035 Smartphone (and I think its bulky corpse still haunts my repository of discarded electronics). Dissatisfied, I replaced the flawed convergence device with a combination of a regular cell phone and a PDA - first, a Handspring, and when that broke, a Sony Clie SJ-20. Finally, in mid-2004 I got a Treo 600 from Verizon Wireless. Having overcome my resistance to using a headset to talk on, I finally was able to simultaneously talk on the phone and use the Calendar and Contacts. From my perspective, that's the only way a convergence device is useful - if it does different things at the same time. As a major bonus, there was a wonderful array of free applications created by Palm enthusiasts available online. 

When it came time to replace my old Treo, because of what I read about it in magazines like Wired and testimonials like Albert's, I first got the Motorola Q. I have been using Windows PCs since 1987, so I figured my learning curve for  Windows would be trivial. I fully expected to be blown away, but long story short, I took advantage of Verizon Wireless's policy that you can return any new device within two weeks. I then got the Treo 700p, and was thrilled with it from the moment I turned it on.

First, here's a (very bad) picture I grabbed off the web of the Q next to the 700, just for size comparison:

And here are my old Treo 600 and new Treo 700p:

Here are the factors that went into my comparison of the Treo and the Motorola, in descending order of importance:

• The Treo's battery life is significantly longer.  When I charge the Treo overnight, under normal usage conditions, it lasts me all day and all evening. If I neglect to charge it the next night, it will still have juice through the next morning. Doing the same thing with the Q gave it enough power to get through the day and part of the evening, and then it crapped out. That alone was very close to being a deciding factor for me. Worse, when you plug in a Q with a very low battery, the phone does not come on again for several minutes. If I push the Treo to its battery limit and then plug it in, it works.
• Treo's ergonomics are superior to the Motorola's. Long story short, the Palm is designed to fit in your palm, and the Q is not. This one completely caught me by surprise.  One of the reasons I wanted the Q was it was much thinner and lighter than the Treo. But it turns out the thicker, heavier Treo is much easier to hold and use one-handed, a key advantage. The difference is the result of a basic design decision: the edges of the Treo are curved, while the Q is a thin, rectangular box. When you hold the Treo, your hand and fingers are  actually touching the curved portions, resulting in you having a good quarter-inch of skin gripping each side of the device. This allows your thumb to reach all the buttons on the phone without worrying it will slip out of your hand. When you hold the Q, by contrast, your hand and fingers are trying to grip it on the sharp bottom edges. That means you have to grip it harder to make it feel secure in your hand, but a tighter grip makes your thumb unable to reach all the buttons.
  
• Programs run faster on the Treo. When I open an application or perform an operation inside an application on the Treo, it almost always happens instantly. (Occasionally, there will be some lag when scrolling through menus, but if that happens the worst that results is you overshoot the menu you wanted to get to.) The Q lagged a lot while opening new applications and, significantly, lagged while performing operations within an application. That second kind of lag is really undesirable, because if you're not sure if you just missed the right button, you end up hitting it twice, and when the Q finally catches up, you may have done something you didn't want.
• SMS conversations are in IM format on the Treo. This is a feature of the Treo I have always liked, and it mystifies me that Microsoft didn't steal it. If you're like me, you text with the same people all the time. When I open the SMS folder, all those conversations are grouped by the person's name, just like an IM chat log. You can't do that on the Q.
• You can search all the data on your Treo, but not the Q. The Treo has a search function that allows you to search all the application data on the phone. Since my phone holds a lot of data in different ways - contacts, appointments, SMS - it's helpful. You can't do that on the Q. In fact, I couldn't figure out how to search Contacts at all, which is really a drawback when you want to find a person based on some detail you entered in their profile.
• The Treo has a touch screen, the Q does not. Even if you don't enter data using the stylus, having push buttons in applications just makes life easier.
• One advantage for the Q: screen resolution.  The one thing I found more desirable about the Q was that its screen was sharper. That was the only thing I liked better about it.

Google Maps Adds Subway Stops And Building Outlines

Via Lifehacker, I see Google Maps has added subway stops (although not routes) and the outlines (with shading to indicate height) of prominent buildings:

The building outlines are a huge improvement. When Google added the Satellite view, it was really fun to play with:

Hey look! I can see my roofdeck! Which is cool, but there was an obvious flaw: You couldn't print it, preventing you from using the topography made visible as a navigation aid. On the other hand, you might not actually want to print the full-photo view, both because it would use an enormous amount of ink and because often cluttered landscapes were confusing to interpert.  The new building outlines provide the useful details of the satellite view while avoiding its problems.

Send Cellphone Pics to 911

From Boing Boing, a good idea whose time has come:

New York City will be upgrading their 911 and 311 systems to accept digital photos and video from callers.

In philly, we're just happy if they answer 911.

National Security Spam Email

I don't know why. I don't know who. I am not sure at all what, except that a) it's spam and b) has the subject line "WMDs sponsoring":

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(Emphasis mine.)

Yahoo! Mail Leaves the Stone Age

Yahoo! Mail rolled out a beta with three innovations - tabbed views, drag and drop, and using Ctrl or Shift to select multiple messages.  These are things they should have done the moment Gmail was announced, but hey.

The ACLU Has a Blog. Who Knew?

Guess what? The American Civil Liberties Union - the leading civil liberties organization in the country, which makes headlines every day, is often controversial, and has over 500,000 members - has a blog.

I have been hoping they would start a blog for years.  So I should be overjoyed.

Yet, I am not. I am disgusted. Because they so do not get the concept:

• The blog is not listed in the Technorati directory, on the TTLB ecosystem, or any other blog directory that I can find.   
• As of right this second, there are 12,930 blog links to the front page of aclu.org. But just 46 links to the blog. Why? Maybe one reason is there is no link to the blog from the front page of the site.  In contrast, stoptheaclu.com has 25,939 links. (These are raw numbers of links, not uniques, and obviously by the time you click on them, the figures will have changed.  But I bet the proportions remain the same.)  I mean, come on, I have 284 links.
• There is no freaking blogroll.  There are nearly no links to any other blogs at all.
• They launched the blog in September, 2005, and I only stumbled upon it tonight by accident.  Was there an announcement made at all?  The first post wasn't even "Hey, We Have a Blog."
• In almost 13 months of operation, a grand total of 63 posts. Some months, no posts at all.  Unsurprisingly, almost all of the recent posts have no comments. 
• The most recent post is from September 8 and the title is - I kid you not - "Report from the September 7 Senate Judiciary Committee Mark-Up." 

This is horrible, in a word.  They clearly have no one in the shop who understands the basics of blogging, and the leadership clearly don't care, if they know it exists at all.  It's a magnificent opportunity squandered. 

The blog format is perfect for the ACLU given its membership size, the amazing talent that it has on staff and in volunteer lawyers, the importance of the issues involved, and the vitriol launched at the organization on a hourly basis. Imagine a crew of really good staff bloggers engaging the ACLU's supporters and critics as events occur instead of leaving the online debate to alleged friends ("I do feel that they've become overly partisan in recent years ...."), dishonest hacks, nutjobs, dimwits, and their sworn enemies.  Imagine guest posts by clients with heart-wrenching stories of having their civil liberties violated, by the lawyer who led the latest high-profile case to victory, by the lobbyist who sounds the alarm on yet another bill in Congress that threatens our constitutional rights.  It would be devastating. Imagine how many passionate, intelligent, informed bloggers - lawyers or not, ACLU members or not - who would link to such discussions.  Using blogs to spread the word and rally people to action would give the ACLU ten-fold more leverage than they get from just emailing their half a million members now.  And that's not even to mention how effective a membership recruitment and a fundraising tool it would be.

I am disgusted because I really wished they got it.  I have been a lifelong ACLU member and it pains me to see them not use this powerful tool that is lying right in front of them. 

Bloglines Freedbacking

Freedback they want, freedback they get:

1. Searches from the bloglines screen do not produce good results.  Specifically, they miss posts I know exist in the database.  This happens all the time. It makes search basically useless.
2. I have lots of posts from my favorite blogs checked as "keep new".  I can no longer access any that are more than a few weeks old.  Why? The count clearly shows I have them checked. (I know this may not be a great filing system, but it worked up until recently.)
3. I need to be able to edit my feed names and move them into folders from the main screen, not an "edit" one.

I used to recommend bloglines to people without hesitating.  I can't do that anymore.

Ask the Laziest Blogger in the World

You know what they need? They need to make my sporadic, half-assed writing easier:

1. Suggested Links. It takes too much goddamn effort to go out and find links to news articles and other blog posts that pertain to whatever subject I am writing about.  When I draft a post, it ought to come up with a list of such links (with an RSS feed so I can find out when new shit appears).

2. Predictions Tracker.  For a political blogger, predictions of future events are pretty common and more commonly forgotten.  If some asshole like me says, "Within 2 Friedmans, Iraqi troops will have Anbar pacified", then that prediction should be tracked automatically - either by the blogging software or by some technorati-type web app or both - so that when time is up, said asshole is publicly embarrassed.

3. Text Boxes. You know those chunks of text that appear in large bold font in the middle of a newspaper story? They're there to keep the reader's attention on a long, potentially boring story.  The parallel to blogging should be obvious. The virtue of this format is ease of reading, and even for someone like me whose average post is very short in length, you want to make it as simple as possible for the reader to determine if she is interested in reading the whole thing.  Making those boxes should be automated. As far as I can tell, right now it's impossible for me to do it at all in typepad.

4. Footnotes. Come on, I'm a geek who thinks historical references, cultural allusions and wacky connections are fun. It's better for everyone if I can drop a footnote automatically so as to get the tangents out of the main flow.

Of course, there may be ways to do all of those things automatically already, but of course, I am too lazy to even go check first. If I had that kind of energy, then I wouldn't be on typepad, now would I?  I would have just completed the latest update of wordpress on a server in my basement, whatever that means. And I think you know what it means. It means please dumb it down for me.

Sock Puppets for Republican U.S. Senate Candidate from N.J.!

Oops. Better get a new spokesperson.

Best Site for Finding Cheapest Gas Near You

Gina Trapani of Lifehacker reports that different gas-price sites were compared and the best is MSN Autos Gas Prices.

Wikipedia in the New Yorker

The July 31, 2006 issue of The New Yorker has a Stacy Schiff article on Wikipedia:

According to a page on the site, an avid interest in Wikipedia has been known to afflict “computer programmers, academics, graduate students, game-show contestants, news junkies, the unemployed, the soon-to-be unemployed and, in general, people with multiple interests and good memories.” You may travel in more exalted circles, but this covers pretty much everyone I know.

Clever. The rest of the article is a mess, however, best suited to someone "in more exalted circles" who has heard of Wikipedia but has never been to it, and who uses the internet rarely, if ever. It presents the topic as a conflict between stereotypical young, creepily enthusiastic internet nerds and stodgy greybearded print encyclopedia editors, between a million web monkeys typing at a million keyboards spewing out trash and treasure trying to overwhelm a fortress in which dusty old scholars are nodding off over dusty old books, between revolution and reaction.  Given that frame, of course the reader will side with the revolutionary, and the article ends on that note:

[Wikipedia Founder] Jimmy Wales may or may not be the new Henry Ford, yet he has sent us tooling down the interstate, with but a squint back at the railroad. We’re on the open road now, without conductors and timetables. We’re free to chart our own course, also free to get gloriously, recklessly lost. Your truth or mine?

This frame is shit. It's a lost opportunity to consider the subject seriously, instead of a contest of new versus old.  Whether the Model T was more reliable than a horse and buggy is not a very interesting question.  More interesting is to ask what the advent of the automobile heralded. It took less than 40 years to go from a 20 horsepower 4 cylinder engine to the jet fighter.  If Wikipedia is the Model T, how long before the moon landing, metaphorically speaking?  And actually, the Henry Ford analogy works better for the traditional encyclopedia: Top down control, a hierarchy of authority dedicated to ensuring sameness of output, and disregard for customer desires epitomized by the saying, "You can have it in any color you want, as long as it's black."  What Wikipedia does is totally different.  What is it about knowledge today that makes the wiki so appealing to people? Is it just that Wikipedia's free and online and the Encyclopedia Brittanica isn't?  Or is it that the fact that the users are also the authors mean that wiki content always automatically molds itself to the users' needs in a way a traditional encyclopedias cannot? It would have been nice to read an article about that.

Lifehacker's Weird Post About How Bush is Not Violating Your Rights

Lifehacker is the only Gawker blog I still read, and while I usually love it, today it has a bizarre post by some third-year law student named Stewart Rutledge entitled  "How the government (doesn't) read your email: or How Conspiracy Theorists Were Reborn as 'Privacy Advocates''".

The post begins sanely enough with the statement that Google's data collection practices don't make the government's job of invading your privacy any easier.  If the post had just laid out the evidence surrounding this issue - which is complex enough - and taken a view, it would have been fine. But then it goes on to raise questions it fails to answer, insult the very sane, very smart people working to preserve 4th Amendment rights in our personal information, and make the completely unsupported assertion that any privacy rights you haven't already contracted away are certainly being respected by the government.  What the fuck?

I won't waste a lot of time disassembling the post because it has the feel of a crank letter to the editor published just to get people angry enough to write in.  So rather than allowing myself to be manipulated further, let me just say: I am a lawyer. I have read the USA PATRIOT Act.  I have followed the news of the Bush Administration's surveillance programs.  And between PATRIOT's permanent, global gag orders surrounding the execution of searches, on one hand, and Bush's apparent conviction that he can do whatever he wants to whomever he wants in total secrecy, on the other, all that can be said for sure is that none of us has the slightest fucking clue whether and to what extent our rights have been violated.  Which is intolerable in a democracy, no matter what some law student who is trying to suck up to Google says.

Improvements to Google Maps

It looks like Google Maps rolled out a couple of improvements in the past day or so.  I haven't been reading the tech blogs (or any blogs) during that time, so maybe you already know about this.

Zoom - it used to be when you zoomed in or out, Google Maps erased the entire map you had been looking at and then redrew the map from the start.  This meant a good period of time waiting while looking at a blank page, sometimes exacerbated if you got impatient and started hitting the zoom button repeatedly.  When the new map finally did appear, you wasted further  time re-orienting yourself.

Now, when you zoom in, it actually zooms in on the image you are already looking at, then re-draws. No blank screen.  No re-orienting. The effect is to produce a serviceable map initially blurred by artifacts and pixilization, which then sharpens, similar to how some photoeditors load a recognizable thumbnail as a preview which sharpens in a couple of seconds (i.e., if you don't move on to the next image).  This saves significant time.

Printing - Google Maps always looked great on the monitor but sucked when you printed it.  It still sucks, mainly.  If I map an address, when I click print on the screen, what emerges shows almost no street names.  But I just noticed if I do directions, then the detail shows up WYSIWYG. Did I just miss this before? Could it be my completely whitebread configuration - XP service pack 2, Firefox 1.5.0.4 and a Dell A940 - actually produces this bizarre bug? Whatever. If it happens to you, that's how to fix it.

Typepad Spellchek Broken?

If my spelling seems worse, it's not; I am making mistakes at the same rate, but Typepad's spellcheck function lately began missing errors and declaring some posts free of misspellings when they weren't. On other posts it seems to work fine, with no obvious pattern.  Any other Typepad people experiencing this?

Bus Goes Airborne; We Are Big Brother

Here's video with sound from two cameras showing front view and driver's reaction when a minibus' steering linkage breaks, and the bus flies off an embankment over parked cars and lands in a parking lot.   Pretty funny stuff.

The video is from DriveCam, a San-Diego based company that installs camera systems in fleet vehicles.  About the video, DriveCam says, " It’s important to reinforce the positive aspects of the DriveCam program to gain driver acceptance. In this instance, the evidence is indisputable and the camera protects the driver of Vehicle #1 as well as ABC Parking from any legal responsibility. Culpability could be more challenging without this video."  In other words, people don't like to be taped, so tell them it's for their own good.

Constant surveillance by private companies and individuals is just a fact of life as this technology gets cheaper.  Naturally, people want to keep an eye on their stuff.  Companies want to watch employees; parents want to watch children; everyone wants to watch their homes and cars.  If DriveCam is profitable now, in a few years everyone will be able to install cameras that upload video to the web full time.  Who sideswiped my car? Is Junior going straight home from school? Who knocked over my garbage cans? Log in and find out.  Or companies might offer real-time aerial video surveillance featuring high-resolution cameras on stationary blimps for traffic reporting, mapping, agricultural or ship navigation purposes.  Go outside and wave to the nice Google maps camera, dear.

We rightly fear the government as Big Brother, but like with other technology, video monitoring is primarily privately done.  The United States needs a comprehensive privacy law like Europe's, so we can constrain the most intrusive corporate monitoring systems that  may be coming down the pike. 

Get Rid of Your Car Lease or Take Over a Car Lease

I was reminded by lifehacker of leasetrader.com, a site which allows people who have car leases to find people who want to take them over.  I've never done it, but it's always struck me as a great idea.  Economically, it makes no sense for me to lease a car long-term, but the thought of a 6- or 12-month lease of some cool ride sounds really appealing.  I found 6-month leases on a MR2 Spyder and a RX-8, each for about $350 a month. 

Two seaters? Gah!  I am having a midlife crisis. 

Windows Attacks Craigslist With Expo

Microsoft Live Expo.  It's only beta, and nothing's up yet, so we'll see. Unless they can bring something to it that's actually better than CL, I don't see a bunch of people switching to the evil Microsquish.

(Via Lifehacker.)

Voicemail Must Die

I loathe voicemail with a passion some people reserve for child rapist/murderers.  I hate getting it, I hate leaving it, I hate listening to it, I hate the whole thing.  I need to steel myself to listen to it, which means I end up engaging in one of two dodges: (1) Pretend it doesn't exist and then listen to several days' worth all at once.  Not an effective strategy;  important information is missed.  Callers are either perplexed or enraged at you.  (2) Call the caller back and tell them you see they called but didn't get a chance to listen to their message yet.  This has the benefit of being true (if you stretch the definition of "didn't get a chance" to include "are too neurotic") and tells them you'd rather listen to their lovely voice live.  The downside of this tactic, of course, is if you get their voicemail, you are in the somewhat absurd spot of telling their VM you haven't listened to their VM. 

Text messaging, on the other hand, rules - at least it does until I decide I hate it and another bright shiny object gets my attention.  It's text, which I love for lots of reasons, it's instant but time-shiftable, it requires brevity, and it tells you when the person's phone got it.  Email is a distant second.  If you want me to get your message now and respond in a timely manner, text me.  Unfortunately, there are still some people who can't text, so I have to leave the voicemail on - for now.

How did we get into this mess? Once upon a time, computers were not consumer goods, video entertainment required a movie projector, and a phone message was when someone answered and wrote it down.  Then the Rockford Files invented tape answering machines and people spent the 70s enjoying the novelty of speaking after the beep.  The 70s were full of boring shit that people found novel, no one knows why. 

Deep inside the lower intestines of the CIA during the Reagan years, some lab monkey decided it would be a good idea for everyone to have voicemail, so the Agency could leverage its electronic interception intelligence capacities, or some shit.  Basically, they can eavesdrop on everybody's messages by breaking into the computers your voicemail is on, an idea both creepy and clever at the same time.  Like good little sheep, Americans obediently adopted voicemail as the way to leave rambling, incoherent, barely audible messages for each other, in lieu of actual work.  I am ashamed to admit I participated in the charade. Baaaa.

In the last decade of the 20th century, voicemail grew out of control and mutated into monsters like automated attendant systems, which the CIA has no use for and therefore you're allowed to make fun of, sheep.  Cooler, even more surveillable communication forms like email and IM (which go through the government's own computers) were developed at the same time, making voicemail seem quaint.  The final insult was the voice-navigated automated attendant, which is lampooned openly on commercial television and requires you to enunciate all your personal information in a clear, loud voice on a crowded commuter train and goes back to the start if you inhale at the wrong moment or call the whole thing a bleeding pustule.

Here's my solution:

First, you should be able to charge people for leaving you a voicemail.  The user should be able to modify it for each caller - the more boring and irritating the caller is on VM, the more they must pay.  You could exempt some people from the charge, ban some people from leaving VM at all, and limit the length and frequency of messages for each person. You can only collect the cash if you can prove you listened to the whole message, say by pushing a button when prompted.  If you liked pain and needed money, you could take yourself off the do-not-call list and allow telemarketers to voicemail spam you.  They should love it, given they would know you listened.

Second, automated attendant systems must be shunned.  If a company doesn't have a great website that has everything you need already, they go to the wall.  Retain automated attendants until poor people all have computer access too, but voice navigation must be optional, live customer service easily available and any menu system with more than 5 choices should be punished with a stint in Gitmo. This is war, people.

Lifehacker: The Single Most Useful Blog Out There

If you are the kind of person who benefits from hints and tips on how to get things done or get them done more efficiently, lifehacker is an absolute wealth of information you can use.

That is all.

Google Blog Search

Google has launched Blog Search.  I guess it will be useful, although the utility is escaping me at the moment.  I assume that this won't affect blogs' rankings in regular google searches.

(Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.)

Get Your Credit Report For Free

You can get a free copy of your credit report once a year from each of the three main credit reporting agencies.  A good idea would be to order one from a different company every four months, so you don't have to wait a year to see if there is anything untoward on it.

Follow That Car

The other day on NPR they did a brief piece on how the Brits are implementing a system which will require all cars to have active RFID tags.  It's the same kind of technology as is in Easypass systems in the States - it transmits a unique identifier for your car which can be picked up by a roadside receiver. 

What the Brits want to do ostensibly is charge tolls automatically, but the program gave the real reason as preventing the use of false license plates, which is apparently a big problem in Britain.   See, the Brits have these speed cameras that take a picture of your plate and they mail you the ticket.  So, people make fake plates to avoid getting tickets. 

Enter the RFID solution.  All auto tags must have a chip in it.  The chip, we are assured, cannot be fiddled, finagled or fudged - it is foolproof.  Okay, that's the first red flag.  I can just imagine some 14 year old computer genius sitting in her bedroom, listening to this broadcast about the foolproof RFID chip, and giggling as she posts instructions to the web on how to dupe, spoof and alter the RFID transmitters. 

That's how it works - you invent a technological solution (speed cameras) to a problem involving people (speeders), people invent a low-cost work-around (duped plates), you invent a new technology to block the work-around (RFID), and people then invent a low-cost work-around for that.  Any technology designed to constrain the general public from doing something they commonly want to do never survives long in contact with the public. 

But the gotcha at the end of the NPR piece was when the host of the show raised the privacy issue with the guest, who I think is an editor with the Economist.  And the editor, in his rich, plummy English voice, chuckled and said something like, "Well, Britain has the largest number of closed-circuit cameras per capita in the world.  They can't rightly claim their privacy is being invaded when they don't have any privacy left to give up." 

Exactly.  Freedom - use it or lose it.

Update: Iocaste clearly explains the point that I was trying to make:

It's important to understand that this is exactly how the Fourth Amendment works in this country.  The Fourth Amendment forbids unreasonable searches and seizures -- that means that courts examine whether a search was "unreasonable." This inquiry is typically based on prevailing expectations of privacy.

The problem, however, is that the more routine a search practice becomes, the more our expectations of privacy are deemed to change. Once upon a time, for instance, you could make a serious argument that you have an expectation of privacy even when boarding an airplane. [She then rehearses the history of how crude magnetometers led to today's strip-searches.] ...

These types of decisions have eroded Fourth Amendment protections to the point that you are deemed to have virtually no expectation of privacy when you travel at all -- be it by airplane, car, bus, boat, or train. In each of these contexts, a series of court decisions that build upon each other have held that because people have lessened expectations of privacy when they travel, various types of searches are deemed to be "reasonable."

This is why, for example, it is so important to challenge New York's new policy of randomly searching subway passengers. ...  Once we have diminished expectations of privacy on the subway, we will soon have diminished expectations of privacy outside the subway -- starting with subway entrances, then moving on to the sidewalks, etc.

She's exactly right, and I wish I had unpacked all that and raised the random subway bag search issue.  In my view, though, it's the technological surveillance that poses the biggest risk.  As a culture, we think technology is almost always a positive thing, and we value openness, so a camera system or electronic tags doesn't trigger a visceral negative reaction.  Also, technology of this kind is virtually invisible, unlike a cop rifling through your bag or following you down the street.  And it almost is self-evident that Americans since 9/11 are willing to do almost anything the government says is necessary to keep them safe.  At the same time, law enforcement and other government agencies see technological solutions as a very efficient and cost-effective tool to do their jobs.  (The ability to let technology purchasing contracts doesn't hurt, either.)  The net result is that there is a high demand for more and more sophisticated technological surveillance, and resistance is low. 

Because technological surveillance grows so quickly, we have to challenge its use whenever a new practice of it is begun, and challenge the ongoing use of old techniques.  By challenge, I do not mean unalterably oppose.  I mean that we must interrogate our law enforcement officials about the efficacy and necessity of their practices.  General electronic surveillance, from a cop's point of view, is desirable because it might lead to one additional arrest.  It is natural that the police officer or other official does not put the priorities of citizen's civil rights first.  It's not a matter of them being evil, although evil government officials do happen, it's a matter of priorities and motivations of someone who has a certain job to do.  I  am not arguing for vigilance because I have a deep-seated hostility to the police.  It's just that we can't rely on the government to police itself.  It's our job as citizens to demand there be a very good reason why surveillance is necessary, given the intrusion into all of our lives. 

I don't want to live in a country with a creeping vine of further and further intrusion by the government into my life, or your life, or anyone's.  I don't believe it's necessary or warranted by the threats we face today, and that includes bombings and terrorism.  I don't want a camera on every lightpost, recording our every move.  I don't want chips or transmitters that can be read from a distance on my person or in my car. I don't want these things even if in some rare cases they would lead to an arrest that wouldn't otherwise happen.  That's what being for liberty means, that some people are able to get away with bad things sometimes so that the rest of us don't have to live in fear of our government.  (Anyway, I think just as that teen computer whiz can defeat RFID, a determined criminal or terrorist can defeat high-tech defenses, so I have serious doubts about the efficacy of such measures.)  A terrorist can only kill me, but my government can do far worse - it can take away my freedom unjustly, and unthinkingly, and the freedom of everyone I know.  I live in a major city with quite a few tempting terror targets, so if there is any place in which the argument for cameras on every block is strongest, it's here.  I would be safer if we had them, in the short run, but I would not be freer, and in the long run, not safer, either. 

It's freedom which, paradoxically, keeps us safe.  It's not the cop or the camera or the RFID chip or the database in the back of your neck.  Those are all just tools.  What keeps us all safest is a vibrant culture in which we all value our lives and our property, and the lives and property of our neighbors.  Giving in to demands that we surrender our privacy voluntarily is a sign of the degradation of those values in a freedom-loving culture.  The basis for such a culture is the absence of government control over what we do on a day to day basis.  And no matter what you are told, surveillance is control.  As Franklin wrote, "He who can surrender essential freedom for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety."  I think Franklin means, such a person deserves neither, and so he will get neither.  He's right.

Never Let Blogger Lose Your Post Again

If you use Blogger, you have lost a post.  Never again!  Download Blogger for Word and post from Word.

(Via LifeHacker.)

Need a Job?

If you're looking for work, let me suggest using indeed.com.  I get no kickback from them; I just think they're a great service.  It's  the best job-search tool I have found, because it pulls listings from hundred of job sites and corporate employment pages, it's simple to use and because you can create an RSS feed for any search you perform.  Also, they have a blog.

Planet X

Washingtonpost.com: Astronomers Say They Have Found a 10th Planet.

A name for the planet has been submitted for approval; why not sell naming rights, like to stadiums?  "Planet Cisco Systems."  "Microsoft World."  The only problem - cold, barren and distant are not the qualities you want to associate with your corporation.  Unless you're Verizon. 

I think it's interesting that scientists are debating whether Pluto is really a planet or not.  What are the criteria for planethood - size, rotation, a regular orbit?

This also makes me wonder whether that astrologer who sued NASA for impacting the probe on a comet (and thus disturbing the cosmic forces) is upset about this - a whole new planet to make shit up about account for.

Google Now Offers Hybrid Street Map/Satellite View

Wow. Wow:

Google Bets on Broadband Over Power Lines

Google, Goldman Sachs and Hearst have put $100 million in a startup that will provide broadband over power lines.  Very cool. 

Comcast and Verizon lobbyists are joining forces to warn against this dire threat to continued human existence.

(Via Ryan Block at Engadget.)

Skydiving

This is hypnotic and disturbing. (Smaller version here.)

(Via planetdan and David Pescovitz at BoingBoing.)

Google Earth

So cool.

On The Subject of Stupid Exercises of Power ...

Dumbassery from the porn police slipped through Congress and is now law:

Any site affected by 2257 must also publish a physical address that serves as its "place of business." Someone must be available at that address 20 hours a week just in case a law enforcement officer wants to gain access to those 2257 records. This doesn't seem too onerous if you imagine a Penthouse.com or Vivid Video type of operation. But consider all the mom-and-pop adult Web sites run out of private residences, or Webcam girls who don't turn the cam off when they take someone to bed. These rules mean that your local Webcam girl and our friends over at sex blog Fleshbot.com must publish their physical addresses online, thus leaving performers and writers vulnerable to stalking and harassment. But hey, it's a great full-access wank pass for cops who can't afford to pay for really primo porn sites every month.

Washingtonpost.com Accidentally Releases Rehnquist Obituary

Anyone else notice this in their feedreaders from yesterday?

A Rehnquist retrospective by Charles Lane titled "Chief Justice Rehnquist Dies/Retires" showed up, along with a bio piece with a general byline titled "A Justice's Journey". Unfortunately, they only syndicate what you see there, and the full articles are 404, of course.

Oops.  I guess there is a new intern.  Editor: "Don't *smack" press "smack" the "smack* 'publish' "smack* button *smack* until *smack* I "smack* tell *smack* you!"

Update: They're protecting the intern's identity:

A headline and article summary that appeared to indicate that Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist had either retired or died was inadvertently published on washingtonpost.com and through a washingtonpost.com RSS feed on June 23. The headline and summary have been retracted and no longer appear on the site.

Yes, we know.

Run Your Antispyware Program in Safe Mode

If you're running Windows of some flavor and have antispyware software installed, it pays to update the spyware definitions, then reboot the computer in safe mode and then run the antispyware program.  I did so and found 22 pieces of spyware that was otherwise hiding from me.  Here are instructions on how to boot in safe mode.  If you're curious, I use Microsoft Antispyware, Ad-Aware, Spybot and A2.

Phones and Wi-Fi on Airplanes

Regarding this issue, I have to agree with Engadget: no phones on planes!  It's bad enough that people want to bring their children with them or hold extended conversations about nothing with other passengers while I'm trying to sleep.  And as much as I would love to use the web while traveling, I can imagine the first time the person next to me goes to fatgrannysluts.com.  Sartre was wrong: Hell is other people's porn.

Real Gone Phishin'

I have received more scam emails in the past week from Paypal ("confirm your account now or be suspended!") than ever before.  Online porn industry must be in trouble.

Verizon DSL Goes Does Not Go Naked

On Monday, according to Slashdot, Verizon announced that DSL customers in the old Bell Atlantic/NYNEX area of the Northeast can drop their phone service and just subscribe to DSL, if they wish, called "naked DSL".  This move tacitly acknowledges that cable high-speed internet and VOIP are putting pressure on them, especially, I would bet, Comcast's announced speed increase.  I can't wait for Philly to push Wi-Fi or Wi-Max out to everyone, so we can smack both Verizon and Comcast upside the head.

If you have no idea what I'm babbling about, ignore me. As usual.

Update: I just called them to drop my telephone service.  Hilariously, despite the fact that corporate announced it yesterday and it's all over the news, they had neglected to tell anyone in customer service.  So, you know, the people who have to implement this have no idea how to drop my telephone service without dropping the DSL, too.  But they have stopped billing me for it while they figure it out.  Is this just typical for the management of Verizon , or is the fact that they didn't have a communication plan proof that competitors stampeded them into it?

Update 4/20/2005:  Um, turns out they're not offering naked DSL, according to these guys.  There's nothing on the Verizon website at all, so who knows.  I guess I'll switch to cable modem after all.

Big Brother Is A Delaware LLC

Go ahead.  Enter your name.  See what people can find out about you.

Free As In You Get What You Pay For

Wired News:

Lately, it seems like almost every time you tune into your favorite Blogger-hosted blog ..., you find that the site is frozen in time. Or, there are multiple posts with identical content. Since Blogger, which is owned and operated by that sleek geek machine, Google, is a lot like a public utility, when it goes down, so do the lights on a large swatch of the blogosphere.

The result: a lot of irate netizens.

Well, yes.  If you've ever heard the word "bloggered", then you don't need to read the article.  Hint to tech execs: If the name of your product ever becomes a slang term for "broken", revisit your business plan.

So, what's the direction of the free blogging software world? 

Recently Yahoo! came out with Yahoo! 360, an invitation-only social-network thing with a blog utility.  Here's my Yahoo! 360 blog: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-wMFAlLA8crLtKqOG2IQXcSNi.  See that url?  My, that'll be easy to tell my friends about.  See the plain ol' blog design?  You can't change it - all Y!360 blogs look the same.  And it doesn't allow trackbacks.  Okay, it's in beta and it hasn't ever, ever gone down in the whole 2 days I have been using it.  But still. 

I also read at Lifehacker about Blogsome, which is based on the popular software Wordpress.  Sounds like a good service - fully customizable design, easy to remember urls (http://mithras.blogsome.com/), and although no trackbacks yet, I'm sure they'll come.  The problem?  Well, I signed up for it this morning.  They have to email you the password to post to the site you create.  Waited a couple hours.  No email.  I again requested the password be sent to me.  Waited a couple hours.  No email.

Great.

My suggestion?  A basic typepad account is a measly $4.95 a month. 
 

Google Maps Adds Satellite Imagery

You can now view the satellite image of whatever map you're using in Google Maps. (There is a map/satellite toggle in the upper-right corner of the page.)

I've joked for a while that the logical next step is that when you zoom in on a map, you get real-time satellite video imagery.  You know, it's not that much of a joke anymore. 

As a tech user, what I want to see happen with maps next is:

1. Integration of street-level photographs, like the A9 service.  When I go someplace, I want to be able to print out pictures of landmarks along with my driving directions.
2. Information on traffic and parking.  Yahoo! Maps already has a primitive system of alerting you to traffic problems.  That needs to be made more robust (by letting the driving directions function give different results based on current and predictable future traffic flows.)  Also, there should be at least some way to see where the parking lots are and how much street parking is available.  Ideally, some way to know in real time where a space is available.  Impossible?  Not if the municipalities will cooperate. There are a number of ways I can think of - sensors in the roads, pole-mounted cameras that can "see" when a space is empty - of keeping parking information current. 
3. Real-time overhead video.  Blimps and other unmanned aerial vehicles are getting cheaper and more useful (especially as innovation on wireless high-speed data and voice traffic continues).  Cameras can be hung on aircraft and the imagery can be integrated with mapping software.

As a citizen, I worry about the privacy implications of all this, of course.  But the technology exists already, the applications are obvious, and the revenue-producing potential vast. It's coming (someday), so we better think of how we're going to deal with it.

(Via /.)

The Downside of Biometric Security Devices

Malaysia:

But having stripped the car [a $75,000 Mercedes], the thieves became frustrated when they wanted to restart it. They found they again could not bypass the immobiliser, which needs the owner's fingerprint to disarm it.

They stripped Mr Kumaran naked and left him by the side of the road - but not before cutting off the end of his index finger with a machete.

From the first time I heard of biometric security devices, I always thought of scenes like that for movies.  The secret lab requires an iris scan for entry.  One of the scientists who works there is kidnapped by terrorists, and in the next scene you see them sneak up to the door - and then pull the scientist's eyeball out and press it up to the scanner to get in.

In real life, I don't know if the iris gag would work, because I don't know how removing the eye from its blood supply would alter the iris's characteristics.  (Also, some iris scanners look for pupil dilation.)  But obviously, chopping off a digit works.  And fingerprints are the least secure technology that I can think of to ward off determined, tech-capable thieves. 

Already, ordinary inkjet printers can be modified to produce 3-D materials.  Specialized printers can produce a copy of almost any object you can think of.  It would be simple to print out plastic material with someone else's fingerprint on it - hell, if you could get an image of the whole hand, you could create a glove that makes your hand look like theirs.  No scanner could stop you.

And if you could make the material thin enough and porous enough that your skin oil came through, or even if you just coated it in a reasonable substitute, then voila! Instant fingerprints.  Think of the possibilities of framing people and faking evidence - everybody assumes fingerprints are conclusive proof, like an eyewitness - and we know how reliable they are.

Isn't technology wonderful?

(Via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.)

Blog Milestones

Atrios had his 50 millionth visitor last night. 

It'll be good to look back on these Model-T days.  "Remember when we thought 50 million hits was a big deal?  And bread was only a nickel!"

Fight Parking Tickets On-Line

Here's a neat idea: At parkingticket.com, you can fight your parking ticket (in certain cities) by signing up. If it's dismissed or reduced, you pay the company half of what you save. If you lose, you pay them nothing (although, of course, you have to pay the ticket.) This is a great application of technology to everyday legal/regulatory problems.

Here's What's Crap At The Moment

1. I woke up, blearily, to 69 spam comments.  Maybe the number was supposed to be a joke; I don't know.
2. The 69 spam comments were from 45 different IP addresses.  Typepad gives you the ability to delete comments en masse, so no problem there.  It also gives you the ability to ban IP addresses, which is nice, except you can't ban IP addresses en masse.  So I had to manually ban all 45 IP addresses.  If I am deleting a comment, it seems obvious to me that I might want to ban the IP address, too.  It's not like comment spam is a new thing, guys.  Do I have to think of everything around here?
   
   (What I don't understand about technology could fill volumes.  One of the many things I don't understand about IP addresses is the prediction that I've heard many times that in the future almost everything - my car, my home HVAC system, my stereo, my toaster, my fridge - that has a power source will have its own IP address.  If I understand correctly, the format of IP addresses is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.  Twelve digits, so just under one trillion possible combinations.  That seems like an awfully low number of unique addresses to tag everything in the world with.  Especially if a spammer can hijack 45 of them on one spamming rampage.)
   
   If I inadvertently blocked your IP, email me.
3. Google no longer indexes each of my posts.  I suspect it has something to do with this and the nofollow attribute.  Having my posts moved down the list of results is bad enough.  No longer being able to even search my own site sucks.
4. I am now old enough that two glasses of red wine can give me a hangover.  Great.

Like Drinking From a Firehose

I always wondered what getting a link from one of the top blogs would be like.  Atrios linked to the Armanious post on Saturday morning, and I got 7,300 hits that day, about a quarter of that the next day, and about half that the next.  The link fell off his front page today.  It was fun to watch the SiteMeter spin and it provoked a good discussion. 

Hey, Where'd Ya Go?

This is pretty cool: MyBlogLog is a free service tells you which links people click when they're leaving your blog.  You can upgrade to Pro version for $3/month if you're an A or B-level blogger (1,500+ hits per day) who needs to find out how your traffic is flowing.   For me, the free version is fine. 

(Via 43 Folders.)

As Computers Get More Complicated, They Also Get Less Useful

Computers are like any other tool.  A simple tool is good because it's easy to use.  You don't usually need a lot of instruction to use a hammer.  But the hammer is only good for one or two things.  If you want a tool that does more things, you have to add complexity.  The more complexity you add, the more learning you need to use the tool's features. 

As computer software gets more powerful and complex, it becomes harder and harder to learn how to use properly.  For example, this morning I caught this post at LifeHacker about ClearType, which is a property you can turn on in Windows.  (Try it right now - click Settings->Control Panel->Display->Appearance->Effects-> then tick the "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts" and select "ClearType"->then click Apply.  If you don't like it, you can immediately go back and change it, but if your setup is like mine, you will love it.)  The question is, why is this not something that everyone already knows about?

Another example of software that's getting too complex to be useful are image manipulation programs like Photoshop.  I don't own a copy - instead I use Paintnet - but the problem is the same: virtually everyone I know who uses Photoshop says they barely know the features it has, and it takes them a long time to learn how to do anything.

All of this may just be complaining from someone who doesn't appreciate that the software available at least is available.  And it may be that the existing problems will disappear, to be replaced by new problems, but the set of intuitive, easily-mastered tools will continually expand.  But it's frustrating to know that I just spent two years squinting at unnecessarily blurry fonts for no good reason. 

Think. Different. Or Whatever.

The original.

The update. (Caution: Contains humor.)

Google Movie Listings Via Text Message

Get movie listings on your cell phone or on your computer from Google.  (From Google Weblog.)

Podcasting and Intermediate Forms

Ann Althouse has a good post up about the deficiencies of podcasting.  Basically, the problem is that you don't how long a commitment you're making when you start listening to a podcast (and this is true of videoblogging, too).  With text, you can see roughly how long the post is and decide if you want to invest the time.  Also, I would add, with text you can skim and see if there is any part that interests you enough to justify re-reading the whole thing.   With video or audio, if it starts out badly you have the choice of sticking around to see if it gets better or cutting bait.  Either way, it's less optimal than the text route.

Althouse comes to the conclusion that text is just better.  "I note that I'm essentially making an argument for why reading is the best way to receive communication (unless you're having a personal relationship)."  I think that, obviously, text has a lot of advantages.  But I think we'll see a continuing trend toward more webcasting, as high-speed access spreads and tools for webcasting are improved. (I realize that the future of the web is not what Althouse was addressing, necessarily, but I want to jump off from her conclusion.)  I think that's so because of (non-financial) market forces.

The fact is that people are largely not big readers.  There is a reason that every home in America has a TV but not a library card.  As I have said before, I think there are probably only 500,000 people or so who read political or current-events blogs on a regular basis. (I may be disclosing some bias in that I think that audience is the relevant one.)  Someone who puts together a slick, easily-navigable video version of a blog has the potential to get a lot more visits than someone typing alone.  My vision here is of a page with a two-column layout with headlines scrolling on the left hand side in a list.  Click one, and it brings up a summary of the videocast, with playing time.  Click again, the video plays on the right hand side.  Text permalinks or other material can be featured in frames in the viewing window.   Viewer tools will allow you to select a snippet of video and permalink it.  Obviously this setup is not possible now, especially due to bandwidth and connection speed issues.  But someday, it will.    And when someone puts that together, people will go watch, instead of reading. 

Essentially, I am arguing that the web will become millions of little TV stations.  And it may seem scary or weird to think that ordinary people will be pulling slick video presentations together, but if you told me five years ago I would have set up and designed (sort of) a website and was updating it daily, and that people read it every day, I would have thought you were off your head.