BookBlog

Delicious acquisition anxiety

Phil Edwards writes about the discontent felt by del.icio.us users when the big bad Yahoo buys out a social software web service. It's tied into a critique of web 2.0 as an exploitative phenomenon.

I suspect this pattern arises from client-server architecture and server cost, regardless of malice. Successful client-server apps like google and del and flickr wind up costing someone a truckload of money. They need to do something to pay for the servers. There's hardware and backup and patches and air conditioning and so on.

Even if you factored out venture money and outsourced r&d and the other artifacts of high-tech commercial culture, you'd still need someone to pay for the servers. Thus the classic phenomenon of a successful, idealistic web app provider doing a begathon when the server goes down.

The governance issues posed by server ownership get particularly strange when it comes to online games and communities. Eventually it could lead to political governance, where costs are paid via taxes to a democratically chosen government.

Some applications (aggregated comments) might be done decentralized. e.g. a shared bookmarking service that aggregates the bookmarks in each of our browsers, and allows browsing and querying of the virtual db, or a decentralized aggregated comment tracker.

When these apps are conceived after there's an installed base of tools, it requires painful standards work to make this sort of thing happen, and then the installed base turn adoption process can take years. Data standards are political; the user base needs to have enough power and organization to create and demand the standard; this can take a long time. In many cases it's easier to throw up a server, which gets us into the economic bind.

More data mining skepticism

Matt Yglesias, John Cole, and Ezra Klein have picked up the question about data mining math. If you're looking for a small enough needle in a large enough haystack, will the noise outweigh the signal?

Ezra Klein asks the question nicely:

I’m not necessarily against a program of this sort if properly executed, but why is it such high priority? Bush keeps mentioning how we needed to “connect the dots.” Only problem is, he doesn’t seem to understand the phrase. Pre 9/11, the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, the FAA, and a variety of other groups had collected isolated bits of information and surveillance that, if laid out on the same desk, would’ve laid out the 9/11 plot in considerable detail. We had FBI officials noticing the Al-Qaeda members in flight school, NSA intercepts calling 9/11 “zero day,” agents theorizing that hijacked planes would be turned to missiles, and so forth. But none of that mattered. Because while we had the dots, we lacked the ability to connect them.

At best, this NSA program collects tons more dots, but are we connecting them? Do we have the ability to process this much information? Or are we dangerously decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio? In short, why is this program necessary? We had the intelligence under the old protocols, we just didn’t process it. Why is the answer more data and why should we be confident that the government has the resources to sift through it?

Geoblogging

Excio is doing a geoblogging service. You can look up a zip code, see who's blogging in the same place, and contribute posts.

The catch is that it's a standalone blogging tool. "Excio offers all great features of other blogging tools, plus the ability to Geo-Code individual posts."

Maybe this is a demo to show makers of other blogging tools how it works? But if they wanted to get integrated into TypePad and Blogger and WordPress -- and logal blog portals like Austin Bloggers they ought to have a public api. As it is, they're starting from zero users instead of millions.

Smart textile remote control

Maggie Orth's International Fashion Machines is marketing a fuzzy light switch. Touching the pompom completes the circuit and turns on/off the light.

A fuzzy switch is kind of nifty if you don't have little kids with sticky fingers. But it's not that different from a regular switch that you need to get up to flip.

What would be really nifty is a fabric household remote control. Touch bits of fuzz or parts of a colorful pattern to could turn on/off lights, heating/air conditioning, stereo, run the bath. The trigger could be a soft press, or a bounce for the playful. It could be a fuzzy desk toy, a mousepad like desk accessory, or a watch band.

It will be especially fun when these are available as kits, and 8-12 year old kids will be able to make them as crafts projects.

Wired Magazine

The December Wired had an interesting-looking cover story, and a few article referrals in the queue, so I took it on the plane. Summary: despite some good articles, a reminder of why I don't read Wired anymore.

Wired had one superb piece by Gary Wolf about an emergency warning system in Portland, Oregon, where 911 alerts are fed back to schools, hospitals, and building managers, and community members can feed back into the system. This is a working model of decentralization and openness, ready to be adopted around the country.

There were a few other good bits sprinkled around the magazine, including a graphical one page summary of government spending to keep data secret.

But the bulk of the magazine was written on autopilot. The cover story about alternatives to oil was euphoric and shallow. The claims of providers, from ethanol to oil shale to hydrogen, were repeated uncritically, summarized in a table showing the plentiful riches that await slightly higher energy prices. No mention of the critique that ethanol requires more energy to produce than it generates, and hydrogen is interesting as an energy storage medium, not a fuel.

The alternative energy story in the Economist (the other bit of airplane reading) was much better in the level of detail and critical thinking. A regular diet of blogs like The Oil Drum and the Ergosphere provide an infinitely richer picture about the opportunities and risks of post-oil energy technologies.

One effusive story about homeland security vendors was downright creepy. An ex-athlete with government connections raises venture financing with the purpose of buying out a homeland security vendor -- any vendor - and selling the product to the government. Reminds me a bit about this story that broke last week in the Washington Post. It would be a fine idea to take down the names in the article and watch to see if any of the players are bankrupt or indicted in the next few years.

And the articles about media -- movies, games, video, music read like product placement. It's Entertainment Tonight with a focus on special effects. The esthetic is anti-O'Reillly -- the audience is a consumer not a producer. The section on personal DVR knocks Linux versions as being "too hard" -- true, linux dvrs aren't consumer products yet, but the Wired editors are making that decision for the readers, assuming assuming their readers don't include hackers anymore. There's not so much critical thinking about the role of broadband and copyright policy on creative innovation, except for Xeni Jardin's interview of Steven Soderberg, where the movie director fantasizes about mashups he can't legally make.

I can't remember when I stopped reading Wired Magazine. At its best, it was a heady brew of technoeuphoria, exploration of new ideas sparked by new technology, tasty tech and media tips, and gizmo ad porn.

Wired does publish some excellent work. These days, the good articles already make their way to the link inbox via blogging. External links are a better way to find those good articles than separating the glossy ad pages. The tips about gadgets and games and tech stuff can all be found sooner by blog.

This isn't about the net killing magazines. It's about the need to have a better product. If the issue had five or ten strong articles instead of two or three, Wired would have a regular reader.

Mass surveillance and bad math #2

This Ars Technica piece makes the argument about the ineffectiveness of mass surveillance at catching terrorists.

Just imagine, for a moment, that 0.1% of all the calls that go through this system score hits. Now let's suppose the system processes 2 million calls a day. That's still 2,000 calls a day that the feds will want to eavesdrop on—a very high number, and still much higher than any courts could possibly oversee. Furthermore, only a miniscule fraction of the overall total of 2 million calls per day on only a few days of each month will contain any information of genuine interest to the feds, and the odds that some of those calls will be among those that catch the governments interest are passing slim.

Targeted human intelligence has always been and will always be the best way to sort the sharks from the guppies (to change fish metaphors). Government money invested in much less intrusive and much less defense contractor-friendly programs like training more Arabists and developing more "human assets" in the field will be orders of magnitude more effective than mass surveillance could ever be. Blunt instruments like airport facial recognition software and random subway bag searches produce much more noise than they do signal, and any engineer or computer scientist worth his or her salt will tell you that an intelligent, targeted, low-tech approach beats a brute-force high-tech approach every time."

When you're looking for a needle in a haystack, the number of false positives is going to be enormous. Sifting through these low-quality false positives can overwhelm legitimate law enforcement resources to pursue high quality leads.

Get a warrant

Investigate by all means, but before investigating the homes of US citizens, get a warrant.

Data mining and bad math

There's a lot of speculation that the warrantless spying authorized by the Bush administration is using some kind of TIA-like, Echelon-like massive data gathering and data mining operation.

That's why the administration couldn't get FISA warrants. If that's what they're doing, it's arguably a bad idea even if it was legal (which right now it pretty clearly isn't).

You can get warrants if you are spying on one, or five, or twenty people. You can't get warrants if you are spying on 100,000 people, or 1 million people.

It's also why they couldn't use the "after the fact" exemption in FISA. Under FISA, the government can start spying immediately, and ask for the warrant up to 72 hours later. But if you've amassed petabytes of data on millions of people, the analysts haven't analyzed it all in 72 hours. Maybe they go back and look for a pattern months after the fact.

Even if it was legal, though, it would arguably be a bad idea. Bruce Schneier makes the best argument that data mining is in many cases less effective than traditional, lead-based investigative work.

When you're looking for a needle in a haystack, data mining is bad math. It's very different from the use of data mining to detect credit risk patterns. In the US, there are probably tens of millions of people who are iffy credit risks, and there are different probabilities of default. It's reasonable to use math to assign a credit rating based on probability. And there's a competitive market for credit. If an individual gets turned down by one provider, they might get credit from another. It's not a binary thing.

But what about looking for terrorist sympathizers. Islamist terrorists in the US are rare. How many potential terrorists in the US are willing to kill innocent civilians -- maybe 100, 200? Not that many. How big is their network of sympathizers and supports? Maybe a few thousand? By contrast, how many people are there who are news buffs, ordinary muslims, and ordinary, never-violent political activists? Many millions.

So a data mining operation that looked for keywords would find many many more innocent people than potential terrorists. The government would waste their time reading this blog post and menus for mosque community dinners.

When you are looking to assess a credit rating, being about right is OK. If someone pays a rate of 15% instead of 14%, not that much harm is done. But when you are looking for a terrorist, you want to be 100% right. It doesn't help if you miss a killer and abduct uncle abdul the hardware store owner.

The government would be much better off doing the traditional job of finding leads, getting warrants, trailing those people, and finding their contacts. That sort of hard work actually has a higher probability of success than the data mining approach.

Cheney says 9/11 attacks could have been prevented by wiretaps

as reported in Forbes. Of course. Nobody is arguing against the needed surveillance of suspected criminals.

And if law enforcement wants to eavesdrop on a US citizen or a resident, they need to be authorized by a judicial warrant. The missing word in Cheney's remarks is "warrant".

The terms of FISA are quite liberal -- the government can start eavesdropping immediately, and ask for judicial review up to three days later. If for some reason, the terms of FISA hampered legitimate investigation of terrorists, the administration should propose a change to the law.

Our constitution does not allow the president to disregard the law, or to make law by fiat. That's called monarchy or dictatorship.

The joke's less funny this year

Over the years, I've argued in favor of calling the office Christmas Party a Christmas Party, since that's what it is. If generic christians really and truly wanted to be ecumenical, they'd also hold Purim parties and Diwali parties -- they'd really celebrate when other ethicities party, instead of condescendingly including Hannuka with Christmas.

Last season, the war on Christmas seemed like a joke - a joke on the humorless, paranoid ultra-Christian scrooges who managed to sustain a persecution complex when they're part of the majority culture.

This year, it's not so funny anymore.

I'm not offended when someone untentionally wishes me a Merry Christmas. But I do appreciate it when people who know I'm Jewish say Happy Hannukah. The point isn't about people in the minority being offended. It's about people in the majority being considerate. So the "war on Christmas" folks are waging a war on politeness. But I'm getting the sneaking suspicion that it's worse than that.

Wishing a "Merry Christmas" becomes a test of club membership. If a non-Christian doesn't eagerly welcome the greeting, we're "them", not "us". What the "war-on-Christmas" people are trying to do is to subtly and insidiously create the impression that people who aren't Christian and aren't faking it are somehow less American.

It's good to see that ACLU Texas is prosecuting the war on Christmas with the vigor it deserves.

How important is HD anyway?

Mark Cuban thinks it's very important. Of course, he has invested heavily in high definition video content and distribution.

There's a huge audience of people who like sports, and movies about things that explode dramatically. Presumably those are the people for whom "quality" means more pixels.

For me, long tail access and convenience are many times more important than better pictures. I could get by with crappy little pictures for a long time, if I could find the niche content that I care about.

I wonder about the size of the respective markets for mass market content with really pretty pictures, and niche content with ordinary pictures. Probably both very big. Probably the important business insight is to forget that there were once one-size-fits-all tv and movie markets.

Will the American people buy the explanation of secret spying?

After Congress returned from recess to vote for the Terry Schiavo bill, I followed the news obsessively, looking for signs about whether the American people would embrace the creepy, intrusive conservative nanny state trend. Thankfully they didn't; the Schiavo law was the beginning of the Bush administration's loss of mainstream, independent American voters.

The NSA wiretapping story feels to me like a similar moment. Will the American people buy the John Yoo theory that anything the president does with a national security justification is by definition legal? Or will they agree with Russ Feingold that "The President does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow. He is a president, not a king."

Update:
* this reading of FISA indicates that the surveillance should have required FISA warrants.
* comments here raise questions about whether the surveillance should have been covered
* more facts are needed. This needs to be investigated immediately.
* the "Bush Doctrine" that the president can use national security justification to disregard the law was and is unamerican

Lovely and Amazing

Lovely and Amazing is loathesome and hateful. The characters are narcissistic and vapid and masochistic, and dull while they're at it.

In Mostly Martha, the chef tells off her philistine customers, which puts her on thin ice with her boss who has to weigh aggravation and respect. Martha can be a jerk, but a complicated jerk with redeeming qualities.

In Lovely and Amazing, a wannabe artist shops her overpriced crafts to LA boutiques and tells each of the proprietors to fuck off when they turn her down. She has an early school-age daughter, and the most interesting story she has to tell in any social situation is her natural childbirth, followed by her story about being homecoming queen. Her actress sister asks her boyfriend to critique her body, and then berates him for not taking seriously her anxieties about flabby upper arms. She needs to get a pair of dumbbells and stop whining.

The matriarch of the family has a crush on her incompetent plastic surgeon. Her one redeeming feature is her close relationship with an adopted daughter. The movie manages to undermine that by exploiting the various possible stereotypes about an upper-middle-class Jewish woman adopting a black girl; from awkward moments about sunscreen, to hair-straightening, to a taste for fast food. The grownups, black and white, are too busy being awkward about the situation to actually be parents and mentors.

The adult women characters are all linked with cold, disapproving, deceitful men. The attempt at romantic redemption is the wannabe artist's fling with a 17-year old. At least they share a level of maturity.

I didn't get the feeling that the film-makers had a distance on their material. The movie is an exaggerated version of real life, with more socially clueless and floridly insecure characters facing the same traps.

Why did this movie just make me mad, when I thought that Sideways was darkly funny? The self-destructive characters in Sideways were more self-destructive -- one was an alcoholic, and one was a philanderer headed toward marriage. They were further along in unsuccessful artistic careers; one was a several-time unpublished novelist, the other a soap opera romantic lead past his prime.

Maybe because the movie was more literate, in structure and dialog and pictures. Maybe because the characters showed some passion along with their self-destruction. Maybe because the characters didn't have kids, so their idiocies did not seem as cruel. Maybe because the movie took the characters' deceptions -- of women, of themselves -- more seriously.

Mostly Martha

My favorite scenes in Mostly Martha the "take your neice to work" scenes. A driven head chef at a Hamburg restaurant inherits the care of her eight-year-old neice after her sister dies in a car accident. When a babysitter finds the bereaved and hostile little girl impossible, Martha brings her to the restaurant in the evenings. The girl experiences rosemary and truffles, watches the complex choreography of dozens of gourmet dishes in progress, is charmed into eating by her aunt's boisterous culinary rival, and learns to help out in little ways.

Other excellent restaurant scenes:
* the new Italian sous chef comes in and charms his all of his new co-workers with music and a playful style that contrasts with Martha's high seriousness.
* Martha's ubergeek hostility to restaurant customers - when a customer complains that the foie gras is raw, Martha replies that it is "perfekt", cooked at 140 degrees Celsius for 3 minutes.
* Watching Martha's boss, a tall, blond, imperious fifty-something restaurater, tolerate her prima donna employee
* The showdown: when Martha is unwilling to overtly accept Mario's presence, he offers his resignation with the restaurant crew watching tensely; when his boss says she wants him to stay, he replies: "It's your restaurant, but her kitchen".

Of lesser excellence, the "opposites-attract" romance between the extraverted Italian and the chilly German; fortunately the movie ends before the battles over toothpaste tube hygiene and music volume; they win the "movie couple most likely to be divorced" award.

Interesting contrast between the adoption love story in Mostly Martha and King of Masks. Both movies have a gruff artist conveying their art to an adoptive child; in the Chinese movie, the older and younger characters take on bonds of obligation, and the love between the characters cements the obligation; in the German movie, the older and younger characters make a choice, and the love between the characters cements the choice.

Yi Yi, King of Masks, Shower

King of Masks is a heartwarming fable set in 1930s China about an aging street performer searching for a male heir to learn the family art. Shower is a heartwarming modern fable set in 90s Beijing, where the elderly proprietor of a traditional bathouse has a retarded son who helps with the business, and a non-disabled son who's busy making money with a high-tech, low-touch version of the family business in south China.

Yi Yi is a bittersweet novelistic film in late 90s Taipei, where the grandmother is in a coma following a stroke. The doctors advice the family to speaking to her in the hope of stimulating a recovery. Her children and grandchildren confide in their mute elder; the confidences reveal crises in the lives of the various family members.

All three movies are about breaks in the passing of tradition across generations. The distance is greatest in the movie set in modern Taiwan, where the grandmother is mute for most of the film, and her descendents are forced to make their own way through the dilemmas of faith, purpose and love.

The themes are kin to the "generation gap" that affected modernizing US culture, with more affection and nostalgia for the changing old ways.

For Peterme who wants recommendations, I thought Masks and Shower were well-crafted and affecting; and Yi Yi was fantastic.

Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien

Loved Amores Perros. It gets compared to Pulp Fiction for superficial reasons (interwoven stories; black comedy; violence; first scene is a suspenseful car ride with a a bloody victim in the back seat), but has little in common. Where Pulp Fiction is ice cold, Amores Perros is passionate; it's dark humor comes from nuances of heartbreak. Pulp Fiction is post-modern nihilist; the outcome is defined by genre. Amores Perros is more post-Catholic; the outcome for each of various characters is one part accident; and one part the fatal outcome of decisions.

Didn't like Y Tu Mama Tambien so much, for much the reasons as the various Amazon reviewers who didn't like the movie. The teenage boys were doofuses. The famed sex scenes didn't do much for me. The bleak background scenes of Mexican countryside with occasional pompous voiceovers attempted to instill social relevance to a movie which would be better off honestly shallow. The final plot twist with the female character isn't believable, and gets the storyteller out of the need to forsee the the consequences of the story.

I wish I had more film vocabulary to describe visual styles. A film class someday? Maybe some books or DVDs.

Realtor standard time

When a real estate agent calls and wants to show your house "at 3", he means some time starting at 2:30 or so. To make sure the house is ready to be shown, get the agent to agree explicitly on the time. Otherwise a coffee cup is on the dining room table, and socks are on the floor by the bathtub.

On a related note, one of the annoying things about having a house for sale is needing to break down perfectly functional household organization. The media laptop lives in the bedroom; the comfortable office chair lives by the dining table; the telephone and headset live on a movable side table. But for house-showing purposes, the media laptop and the office chair go in the office, and the phone set up gets tucked away in the bedroom, and the headphones are hidden away in the backpack.