DocBug

France's digital library: A race to the top? 

Sounds like President Jacques Chirac has bought into the French National Library president Jean-Noël Jeanneney's call to make huge swaths of European literature available online. A big nudge came from Google's plans to put some 15M English-language books online, leading Jeanneny to write an editorial in the French paper Le Monde warning that such a service would naturally view the knowledge of the world through an Anglo-American lens. If it became the dominant source of knowledge, that perspective would become equally dominant. (You can see the full editorial in this blogger-cached copy or the Google translation).

He is, of course, quite right in assessing the threat. It's nice to see the French respond with a call to counter-attack rather than protectionism — such a contest can only result in a race to the top, delivering the best each of us has to offer to the betterment of all. It's also nice to see yet another example of culture as something to spread rather than something to protect — that sometimes gets lost with all the copyright wars going on.

Jeanneney also hits on something that's not coming out much in the English press: he's not just afraid English-language texts will be over-represented, but also that the organization of the texts will be seen only through that lens. From a March 4th Le Monde Q&A (auto-translated by Google):

Why are you hostile with the Google project?

Hostile? It is not the word right. When Google announced, December 14, its project of digitalization of 15 million volumes drawn from the funds of several large Anglo-Saxon libraries, we did not doubt that among these works would appear a great number of European titles. But their selection, their hierarchisation in the lists will be defined inevitably starting from a singular glance: that of America. The Anglo-Saxon scientific production will be inevitably overestimated. The American mirror will be the single prism. My remark does not raise of any chauvinism, I do not intend to inform any lawsuit with the opening of Google, I restrict itself to note an obviousness. I would like simply that one can have in the future another point of view, marked by another sensitivity - European - of a glance on the world undoubtedly quite as partial and even partial, but different. What I defend, it is a multipolar vision.

It's not clear to me how Google plans to categorize the vast library they're helping put online, or indeed if they plan to do more than add existing (no doubt US/British-centric) library classifications, offer full-text search and then let the emergent organization of the Web take its course. But the problem is a tricky one, and search-engine bias is both subtle and, honestly, inevitable. We would all benefit from multiple experiments, multiple methods and multiple points of view, and at least for a while that's worth a little duplication of work. However, I do hope that all the sides involved come together at least enough to establish some common data formats and, more importantly, agree to share data with each other. No one would be served by multiple little fiefdoms, each hoarding their little corner of culture out of fear the other side would gain an advantage. Let's keep this a race to the top.

AIM, your right to privacy and trust 

It looks like Ben Stanfield started a blogstorm this weekend by pointing out a new(?) clause in AOL's AIM terms-of-service that states "In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy." AOL has been trying to stamp out the fire, and say the terms aren't meant to apply to person-to-person instant messenger, only to posting in public chat rooms, message boards and other public forums.

I think AOL is telling the truth here, but the more I think about it the less I think that matters. In the end my privacy over AIM relies on my trusting AOL; trusting them not to change their privacy policy without my noticing, trusting them to stand up for my rights if they receive an overly-broad subpoena and trusting them to secure their networks from snoopy employees. Over the past 10 years I've learned to be sparing in my trust of Internet companies. Luckily, there are alternatives that don't require that kind of trust. Time to get off my butt and finally start using that Jabber server I set up a while back, and to see how well Skype's encrypted IM and voice-messaging really works.

Update 3/18/05: I had thought only the Enterprise version of AIM supported encryption (and that may be AOL's intent), but apparently you can just create your own certificate and that'll work too. Thanks to Aleatha for the comment (and also for pointing out that the TOS has, in fact, been around for a year or so in this form).

On a related note, I also notice that iChat 3.0 (shipping with Mac OSX Tiger) will support Jabber as a standard protocol. Yay!

Mitch Kapor on Groove 

Mitch Kapor has two posts about Microsoft's purchase of Groove Networks. Mitch was founder of Lotus and more recently the Open Source Foundation and was also the first outside investor in Groove, so he has several good insights into the software and how / whether Groove would be as Open Source if it were done today. The quote that got my attention the most was this one though:

With the prospect of open source-based server capabilities of all kinds becoming more like the electrical power and distribution system, universally available on demand in whatever amount is needed, a whole class of objections to client-server architectures such as dependence on non-local, unreliable and inconvenient infrastructure diminishes. Groove's peer-to-peer architecture performs uniquely well in areas where the telecom infrastructure is weak, such as conflict-ridden areas of the Middle East and Asia where both military and humanitarian aid groups have deployed it successfully, but this alone is a niche application.

I like peer-to-peer technology for a whole host of reasons, but I think he's right that the infrastructure arguments for P2P are (and always have been, IMO) weak except in niche applications (bandwidth saving via BitTorrent being the notable exception). But the driver for P2P technology hasn't been about limiting the effects of technical infrastructure failure — it's been about limiting active efforts by an adversary to stop communications. The adversary might be an opposing army, an oppressive government or the RIAA, but the goal is the same — and that's a need hasn't changed in the past 10 years.

Better Bad News on Google Autolink 

The folks at Better Bad News have done a wonderful remixed video mash-up of a bunch of blogsphere commentary on the Google Autolink feature. These guys are great:

Unbalanced and Half-true News Opinion and Commentary What would people be talking about if you controlled the newsroom teleprompters? Choose a professional talking head to speak for you on a freewheeling moderated panel discussion by accessing our dedicated web connected teleprompters.

I love this sort of remixing art. I wonder if I could make a toolbar that could make their talking heads read all my blognews?

Google Auto-link 

Google's Auto-Link feature is generating all sorts of commentary, most of it the perennial "have they crossed the line into scary all-your-base-are-belong-to-us mode yet" type.

I've not seen the interface yet (it's Windows-only, and I'm, well, not). But assuming (a) it's easy to turn on or off and (b) users can tell what's an auto-link and what's original to the webpage I see the application itself as just one more shift in power from the author to the audience, just like TiVo, ad blocking, style-sheet overrides, those DVD-reediting kits for people who don't like the dirty bits, the remote control and the highlighter pen. I'm in favor of all of them.

There is one thing that does concern me though, and it's not the application itself, but the bundling of the information source with the Google Desktop app itself. There's not much they could do about that (and I trust Google a lot more than I trusted Microsoft when they tried this same trick), but I would feel much better if this were a generic open API in my Firefox, where I could pick and choose who handles each of my rewrite rules. Even a benevolent hegemony is dangerous, both in case it stops being benevolent and because it lacks genetic diversity.

So, who's up for writing an auto-link Firefox plug-in?

Spectrum Wars 

National Journal has a great historical look at the National Association of Broadcasters' battle to keep the "beachfront property frequencies" they've enjoyed for free for over 80 years. Well worth the read.

Mitsubishi Pocket Projector 

Mitsubishi just announced its Pocket Projector, which is about the size of your hand and can project a 20" image from just over a foot away. The press release doesn't say how bright it is or whether you'll need lights out to see it well — it uses three colored Lumileds LEDs. SRP $699.

Google Maps 

Google released their Google Maps service today — one look shows yet again that interface design is one of their serious strengths. The maps are just plain pretty, the drop-shadows keep you from confusing map & overlay and they've even managed to glide to new positions rather than blank the screen and reload when you recenter. The link to directions even includes the zoom level and where you were centered on the screen. It's also fast, and apparently the client-side stuff is all done in Javascript — I'm impressed.

If I were any of the other mapping services I'd be scrambling to catch up right about now...

Treemap diskspace visualizers 

I just started playing with Disk Inventory X, a nice treemap diskspace visualizer for Mac OSX. (Windows users can use the older and more complete WinDirStat to do something similar.)

Disk size has nothing to do with importance, but I still get a weird feeling seeing my music collection as a big blue block some 50 times bigger than the project I've been working for almost two years. Now I wish I had a treemap for how I spend my time during the day...

Update: and for Linux there's KDirStat, which is apparently older than either of the other two...

Tech Review waves the terrorism flag 

Technology Review recently declared they are trying to get back to being more science & analysis, less breathless hype. Let's hope David Talbot's Terror's Server in the February '05 issue was just still in the pipeline before they made that decision. Here's the letter to the editor I just sent:

David Talbot's "Terror's Server" was the kind of rambling, analysis-free hand-wringing we came to expect from the mainstream press in the mid 90s, not from Technology Review in 2005. Talbot's main point that terrorists are (gasp) using the Internet is obvious and trivial. Terrorists are also using telephones, SUVs, credit cards, textbooks and mail-order catalogs to plan their attacks. Why is there no call for the automobile industry to "fix" their terrorist SUV problem?

The Net amplifies individual voices, be they the voices of civil rights activists, cancer survivors or terrorists. The real issue is not whether terrorists use the Net (just like everyone else does these days), but whether society is better off allowing individual voices to be so easily heard. This is an important debate with historic undertones; Gutenberg's press amplified Luther's 95 theses and led to hundreds of years of war and bloodshed — and to the Protestant Reformation and Renaissance. Please, next time address the issue directly instead of simply hiding behind the terrorism flag.

Bradley Rhodes
PhD, MIT Media Lab (2000)

Posted by bug to Media Technology at 10:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Makyoh (Japanese magic mirror) 

The Makyoh (Japanese for "magic mirror") is an ancient art that can be traced back to the Chinese Han Dynasty (206 BC — 24 AD). They were made of metal, usually with an intricate pattern carved or cast on the back and the front polished to a mirror finish. The front looks like a smooth reflecting surface, but when sunlight or other bright light is reflected onto a wall a glowing pattern emerges. Usually the image seen would be the same as the image on the back of the mirror, often an image of the Budah or other focus for meditation. The art later moved to Japan (especially Kyoto), and after missionaries brought Christianity into Japan in the mid 1500s many mirrors were made with secret images of the Holy Cross or of Christ. Because Christianity was punished at the time, many Christians wore such magic mirror as a secret sign of their faith.

I just received a modern makyoh from the Grand Illusions toy shop, a wonderful site for exotic, clever and scientific toys (and they now accept PayPal). One thing I love about Grand Illusions is that they include videos and articles about how their toys work, including the magic mirror. Much as I respect the secrecy magicians have for their tricks, I much prefer the magic scientists perform — real magic isn't spoiled when you know the secret, it's even more amazing.

I've posted a few other pictures on my pictures page.

House-wide VOIP 

I just finished hooking up voice over IP so it services all my house phone ports, with the Motorola Voice Terminal hiding in the closet along with the house's patch panel, DSL modem and firewall router where it belongs. I can't say it was totally painless, but most of the effort was just gathering the right tools, connectors & knowledge. Useful resources included this general phone wiring primer and this one specifically on how to distribute VoIP throughout a home. Since I was starting kinda from scratch, I also found this basic page on how the heck to use a punch-down tool useful.

Google gears up for inter-galactic advertising 

DocBug Exclusive — Google revolutionized the internet. Now it is hoping to do the same with inter-galactic communication.

The company behind the US-based internet search engine looks set to launch a service that turns unused bandwidth into a powerful signal generator capable of sending advertisements to the far reaches of space. Thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable laid during the boom of the late 90s now lies dormant, and this so-called dark fiber capacity is available at a price that industry experts say is ripe for being turned into a giant planet-sized billboard.

Some believe this is the future for Google

Jules Hewlett, senior analyst at a company that talks to reporters about technology, said: "From an intergalactic advertising perspective there is a big appeal in the fact that Google is a search operation — and of course the Google brand is a huge draw." We're not sure what he means by this, but he's very smart so we've quoted him anyway.

Though the project is hush-hush, Google spilled the beans about their new project by posting a job advertisement on their website that calls for a "strategic negotiator" to help the company to provide a "global backbone network" — in other words, an Earth-sized Light Bright.

By investing in capacity, Google could reroute packets to certain parts of the world, lighting up the dark fiber to spell out words or even full phrases that would be visible against the darkness of space for light-years.

Although Google is reluctant to talk about its plans, off the record people close to the company have called reports of the plan "mere speculation," "baseless rumor" and in one case "the biggest load of malarky I've heard since The Times reported we were coming out with telephone service."

Media Lab Europe closing its doors 

Media Lab Europe is closing its doors after just 5 years (here's the NYT article, subscription required). I know folks who were there, but I don't have any deep knowledge of what went down (besides the obvious problem of opening just before the tech crash in 2000), so I'll just raise a Guinness wish them all a happy landing wherever their next gig lies.

Satellite podcasting 

I still think the MP3 player could become a satellite-radio killer, but in the meantime Trax Technologies is coming out with a satellite-radio-to-iPod dock...

Update on Art & Optics 

Some time ago I posted about the ongoing debate between David Hockney and our Cheif Scientist, David Stork, about whether the great painters of the 15th century "cheated" by secretly using optical devices like the camera obscura. Hockney thinks the realism one suddenly sees in paintings around 1430 proves that such devices were used, even though no record of them can be found (they were secret, remember?). Stork thinks it's hogwash, and has both proposed numerous ways the realism could have been acheived using technology known to exist at the time and pointed out reasons the optical techniques Hockney proposes wouldn't have worked anyway.

Now the New Scientist is reporting that evidence of one alternative technology Stork suggested has been found:

Separate findings will be published in March by Thomas Ketelsen, a curator at the Museum of Prints, Drawings and Manuscripts in Dresden, Germany. Hockney has argued that the similarity between Jan van Eyck's drawing Portrait of Niccolò Albergati and a larger oil painting of the same name could only have been achieved using optical projections. But using a microscope, Ketelsen has found evidence of previously unseen pinpricks in the drawing - suggesting the copying method was mechanical, not optical. He suggests that a type of reducing compass called a "reductionzirkel" might have been used.

Falco points out that the pinpricks could have been made 50 years after van Eyck's death by someone wishing to copy it, or even 500 years after. "Holes can't be carbon dated," he says. But Stork thinks the mounting evidence can't be ignored. "The evidence doesn't support Hockney," he says.

"The debate is fascinating," Hockney says. "But it cannot end just because someone found pinpricks."

Hockney's argument was never strong to begin with, but it's starting to sound like he's join the ranks of creationists, alien abduction followers and conspiracy nuts. If so, he may as well have ended his last sentence after the fourth word...

Mac mini & iPod Shuffle 

To quote a coworker of mine, "Apple's going to make unspeakable amounts of money on these." I'm especially glad to see the Mac mini, since it's exactly what I've been searching around for as the media hub of a new entertainment center I'm putting together now that I'm no longer in a one-bedroom apartment. Cheap ($499 starting, a little over $600 for the bluetooth & 80G version I want), small (6.5" x 6.5" x 2"), and quiet — it'll be my combination CD jukebox, DVD player and MIDI munger for my keyboard.

As for the iPod Shuffle, I could really see this becoming the satellite-radio killer. If the iPod is your music collection in your pocket and the iPod mini is your jogging music / music wherever you want, the iPod Shuffle is going to be the daily download. Mix it with iMix, Wiretap Pro and/or a Radio Shark and you've got a personalized commercial-free radio with a "next song" feature. You miss out on realtime info like traffic reports (which really should go to your GPS/nav system anyway) and breaking news, but how much news breaks between the time I leave for my commute and arrive at my destination? I'd also miss out on Howard Stern if I don't go with satellite radio, but for me that's a feature, not a bug.

As is traditional, Apple's stock is down almost %6 as of this writing. Me? I just put in a buy order...

Times-for-fee (IWTBF!) 

BusinessWeek and Reuters mention that the New York Times is "considering" moving to a pay-for-content model for their web-based news, though they've no immediate plans to do so. Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly comments :

For all the big talk in the blogosphere, if this happened it would pretty much spell the end of political blogging. Without a copious supply of online newspapers and magazines providing the raw material, there are very few bloggers who would have anything left to say.

I doubt that, though honestly I'm not sure it would be a bad thing if it happened. Riffing off my basic belief that the trend towards decentralized communication are too powerful for one company (or even one cartel) to reverse, I see one of two things happening should the NYT make such a move:

1. Bloggers keep going just as before without the NYT, linking to other news sources that are still free or to AP or local paper stories that talk about the NYT articles rather than linking to the NYT directly. In the end this could damage the Times' status as the paper of record for US online news-junkies, but they'd probably keep their reputation among the pros.
2. Other news sources follow suit, and people start caching the pages directly and putting them online as "context for this quote." Then people get fed up with how it takes 10 seconds to cut-and-paste a copy, and all new blogging software settles on extensions and interface paradigms that automatically make a local cache of anything you link to (ala the Cache plug-in for MovableType). Newspapers realize that people are still reading their content but now they've lost control of the frame, presentation and banner ads. They briefly consider pulling an RIAA and going all lawsuit crazy, but then realize that (a) unlike the recording industry their value is so time-critical that there are plenty of other ways to monetize their content, and (b) it's generally bad to follow in the footsteps of a someone currently sinking in quicksand anyway.

Personally, my money's on #2 happening regardless of what the Times does.

How do they know? 

Found at the bottom of a PDF online form on the IRS website:

One-click disaster-relief donation 

Amazon.com has set up a one-click donation site for the American Red Cross Disaster Relief fund. All proceeds will go to the fund, and they've already collected over $2M. (Get your donation in before the 31st for tax savings this year...)

Before the Net, I would have thought about giving a donation but not gotten around to it — as it is, I just sent $100. I love seeing things like one-click and PayPal making it easy to do good...

Transclusion 

Ted Nelson and Andrew Pam have come out with The Little TransQuoter, a simple (and currently fairly rudimentary) system for doing transclusion of text blocks on top of HTML (see sample).

The concept of transclusion — the quotation of documents by linking directly to embedded text instead of making a copy — has a lot of interesting possibilities, but in the end it feels to me like it's going in the exact wrong direction for the digital age. Nelson's whole design seems to be based around the idea of ownership: I own the bits I've written, I control the content and modifications, and when you quote from me you owe me a micropayment. That was the shape of publication in the last century, but it's not how 21st-century publication is shaping up. In so far as ownership means control, information in the 21st century has no owner. Information can have hosts, pedigrees, histories, and even generally-accepted custodians, but in the future that's being built "my bits" means not what I've written but what I'm carrying in my hard drive. Like a new joke or a bad cold that travels around the office, mutating as it goes, each copy of information is controlled by the host that holds it in his possession. I can't see any technology that tries to buck that trend winning out in the long run, especially not as we ride the technology trends towards the day when I can store the entire Web in my pocket.

Yahoo Video Search beta 

Yahoo unveiled their video search engine a couple days ago — CNET News has the story and talk of similar projects by Google, Microsoft and AOL.

I'm pleased to say I was able to find my old favorite Powers of Ten pretty easilly...

Spies like us... 

The latest for that James-Bond or Peeping-Tom wannabee:

• The Nokia Spyphone, which looks like a normal cellphone but will silently turn on and act as a wireless bug whenever called from a particular phone number. In another mode it can seem to be turned off but silently take calls and listen in (say, when you take a break during a business meeting).
• The Nokia Observation Camera, which will send pictures to any MMS-capable mobile phone or email address at a certain time, when triggered by a motion sensor or when the temperature goes out of a set range.
• The Nokia Remote Camera, which includes capabilities of the Observation Camera plus the ability to capture video clips with sound, ability to call and listen in on the microphone, remote control with compatible mobile phone and night-picture mode using its own infrared light source. (No word on whether the night-picture mode has the side-effect of giving you a see-through-clothing mode like with the Sony Nightshot...)

(Thanks to Thad Starner and Ellis Weinberger on the Wearables list for the links...)

Wikipedia's defense 

(By way of SlashDot) The Wikipedia entry on Sollog is an interesting example of how a community can protect a shared collaborative space. Sollog is a self-proclaimed seer/prophet, who a little over a week ago was the subject of a new anonymously-written Wikipedia entry touting his books and otherwise proclaiming his powers. Since then the entry has been edited, vandalized & blanked back and forth 194 times (several of the vandalizations from the same IP address that wrote the original article), put to a vote on deletion by community members (who decided to keep the article, though in edited form) and finally protected from further edits to keep it from being vandalized.

The part that impresses me most is the amount of work and calm rational discussion that's gotten done over at the discussion thread on the topic (and even pre-refactored version). I wish I had a metric for how much the success of an online community owes to the communication tools at its disposal (protection, easy version-handling, IP-blocking, etc.), a clear mission statement / rules of engagement and smart dedicated people, but I'm betting the breakdown is something like 20% / 30% / 50%...

Google Print 

Google just announced a new partnership with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, and The New York Public Library to digitally scan library books and make them searchable online. In one sense they're playing catch-up with Amazon, who started putting text online some time ago and is in a stronger position to turn that into more book sales. I'm speculating a bit here, but I expect Amazon is also in a better position to negotiate for the right to make more copyrighted text available than Google, given the easier read-it-to-buy-it pipeline.

One thing that really strikes me about Google's project is this bit:

Users searching with Google will see links in their search results page when there are books relevant to their query. Clicking on a title delivers a Google Print page where users can browse the full text of public domain works and brief excerpts and/or bibliographic data of copyrighted material. Library content will be displayed in keeping with copyright law. For more information and examples, please visit http://print.google.com/ [URL corrected — 'Bug].

I'm a little biased since my PhD Thesis was about this kind of application, but I can easily see this sort of show me information related to what I'm doing now app being the next big thing interface advancement. (At least once it's integrated with good search, the right data, and most importantly a company that doesn't try to integrate it with an all-too-helpful cartoon character.)

Google Suggest 

It's a small feature, but just one more thing from the "those guys at Google really get it" port: Google Suggest. Autocomplete of common search terms as you type into the Google bar, along with the number of terms listed.

New Palm OS built on Linux 

PalmSource just announced that their next version of Palm OS will be built with Linux at its core. To this end, they're purchasing China MobileSoft (CMS), which has a phone platform already built on top of their own Linux variant. As the Register puts it:

Like Apple with Mac OS X, PalmSource will keep all the top-layer code proprietary, but it will release any changes it makes to the underlying Linux code — for faster boot times and battery life preservation systems, for example — available to the open source community.

RFID for patients in hospitals 

Via the SJ Mercury News (sub. req.), the FDA has approved an RFID chip that you place on (not in) a body part that's to be operated on to identify the proceedure and other info:

The system works like this: At an initial visit, the information on the operation is placed in the computer. The patient sees it on a monitor and verifies that it's correct. The data is then printed out on the chip and then re-read by the computer. Again, the patient verifies the data.

On the day of the procedure, the patient once again verifies the chip is correct, and it is then placed on the area to be operated.

At the suggestion of the FDA, the chip will have a notice on it that it should be removed before the procedure.

This would presumably replace the current technique of using a sharpie and writing stuff on the patient like "no, the other leg!" I'm curious but a bit sceptical — on the one hand the RFID tag can hold a lot more info than you can fit on a body part (allergies, etc.), but I don't see that making up for the immediacy of reading what's written on the body part you're about to operate on. Why would an RFID tag be any more likely to be read than the patient's chart?

Major TWiki Security Hole 

A major security hole has been found in TWiki which allows anyone with access to the search function to execute arbitrary shell commands with the privilages of the web-server process. Anyone running TWiki should read here and upgrade and/or take countermeasures immediately.

Google Scholar 

Google's got a new service for searching journals, conference proceedings and other scholarly writings called (appropriately enough) Google Scholar. Nice clean interface, and like Citeseer they're pointing not just to the official pay-for-download sites like the ACM and IEEE portal sites but also the free-for-download versions that authors usually put on their own sites (often in violation of copyright, but the last thing professional orgs want to do is piss of their own community).

Very Slow Scan Television 

Seen at the DEAF'04 festival: Very Slow-Scan Television. Gebhard Sengmüller builds on Slow-Scan TV, a video-transmission system developed to send TV over Ham Radio at around 8 frames per second. Then he hooks it up to a large robotic ink-jet printer that injects cyan, yellow and magenta ink into bubblewrap, producing one frame in about 10 hours.

Slide shows in pure XHTML, CSS & JavaScript 

the Simple Standards-based Slide Show System (S⁵) gives you PowerPoint-like presentations in pure XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. See it in action here. Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0 license, and backwards-compatible with OperaShow Format 1.0 — Neat!

I'm not giving up using Keynote, but it sounds perfect for retro-folk who still like writing your slides in Emacs or Vi...

Fog Screen 

OK, I don't know where I'd put it or exactly what I'd do with it yet, but I want one of these. FogScreen is a large wall of fog kept in a thin sheet using laminar flow, then used as a projector screen. That part has been around for a while, but they've recently added the ability to "write" on the screen like some wizard writing runes in the air, using the same ultrasound-tracked pens used in virtual-whiteboard systems. Check out their video.

Paper or Plastic? 

For many Californians there will be something of a reforendum in tomorrow's election that isn't on the ballot: paper or plastic. As you've probably heard, there have been serious and significant security issues with electronic voting machines. That's an implementation problem which is shameful, but not a fundamental limitation of the technology. A more fundamental issue with the smart-card system most of our touchscreen-voting counties are using is that the system lacks any kind of voter-verified paper-trail — meaning there's nothing to fall back on if you suspect electronic fraud. The argument I sometimes hear is that getting rid of paper eliminates the problem of hanging chads and the recount problems from Florida 2000. This is true, in the same way eliminating all financial accounting records would reduce fraud convictions.

Here in California, our Secretary of State has insisted that all voters be given the option to vote via a paper ballot... but many counties feel that's an extra burden so they won't inform you of that right, and some counties even plan to further inconvinience paper-ballot voters. My advice to those who are voting in touchscreen counties: ask for paper anyway. My hope is that Wednesday's headlines (under the one that says "Kerry Wins," of course) all report record numbers of voters requesting paper ballots and giving a resounding no-confidence vote in the shoddy technology we have this time around.

MyPollingPlace.com 

I mailed my ballot earlier today, but for all you folks doing meat-to-meat voting on November 2nd, People for the American Way has a website to find your polling place: MyPollingPlace.com. Nice, simple. (Props to Political Animal for the link.)

Touchscreen interface problems 

There's been a lot of talk about how touchscreen voting is a better interface than paper ballots, but that we should not (and should not have to) sacrifice the security, understandability and reliability of having a paper audit trail as well. Now it seems we're seeing interface problems with touchscreen voting.

I expect the voting officials are right that this is a case of "user error" — that's what we call it in our industry when the interface designer didn't do enough of a good job and now wants to blame someone else. Having watched technologically-minded researchers get confused when they accidentally trigger our giant presentation touchscreen at work, it doesn't surprise me much either. Unfortunately, with all the cases of actual voter-registration fraud, invalid and highly-suspicious selctive purging of voters from the rolls, back doors secretly coded into official vote-counting software, and laughable "security" protocols in voting machines these voters (Democrat and Republican) are right to be skeptical. We need to do better.

Handheld photoalbum with face-rec 

FujiFilm recently showed off the F-next Image Viewer, a cute prototype hand-held digital photo album that includes a search-by-face function. Select a face in any picture, the device will show you all the other pictures where that face shows up.

(via enGadget, TechJapan and DCWatch, thanks to DC Watch for the picture.)

PODcasting, academia and XM Radio 

There's a recent buzz around what's being called PODcasting, wrapping web audio with whatever wrappers are necessary to make them convinient to link in a blog and download to your MP3 player of choice for later listening. (See Doc Searls' explanation for a nice intro.)

It's a nice meme, and having gotten a lot out of my own browsing through audio links I hope it catches on. I find it interesting and not that surprising that the PODcasting meme seems seems to mostly involve pointing to educational and intellectual audio rather than the music that drove the P2P music-sharing revolution. Music briefly had its day on the Web, but was rapidly driven off by commercial interests worried overtly about piracy and covertly about both piracy and competition. Education has both a different culture and economic structure, and while educators and lecturers like to make money somehow there's a much deeper understanding that giving away our best ideas is often in our own best interests.

Unfortunately, even in the academic and public-radio world it looks like we're in a meta-stable state, with many sites offering only streaming audio due to either legacy licensing issues or presumably to maintain some control on distribution. Once the technology to record off a stream becomes ubiquitous (as it surely will), will the remaining barriers to recording and rebroadcasting the audio be enough to placate people who want to distribute their content for free but not let it run wild?

Regardless, this whole thing just reconfirms my original skepticism at the long-term viability of XM Radio as a basic technology. Here we are in the age of personalized, on-demand, time-shifted and place-shifted content... and XM Radio is offering a capital-intensive satellite-based broadcast solution. Maybe I'm underestimating the value of live, up-to-the-minute news and information, and maybe I'm underestimating the long-term value of a big company that can afford to make deals with the RIAA, but I just don't get it...

The next question? 

I was on a panel on wearable computing a couple days ago, and an interesting question came up:

Ten years ago, when you picked up the phone you asked Who is it?

Today, with cell phones and Caller ID, you pick up the phone and ask Where are you?

What question will be asked ten years from now?

My guess is that even when you meet someone face-to-face you'll ask Who are you with?, with the assumption that your friend might have invisible cyberspace tagalongs with her and that it might not be polite to butt in on the middle of their conversation.

Other condenders?

Time to change the locks? 

Ed Felton has been blogging on the partial "cracks" (collisions) found in the MD5 and SHA-1 hash functions that are being reported at Crypto 2004.

Felton's brief analysis:

Where does this leave us? MD5 is fatally wounded; its use will be phased out. SHA-1 is still alive but the vultures are circling. A gradual transition away from SHA-1 will now start. The first stage will be a debate about alternatives, leading (I hope) to a consensus among practicing cryptographers about what the substitute will be.

Note to self: design my systems so it's possible to update crypto algorithms in all my legacy data, should the need arise.

NPUC 2004 trip report 

Every year Dan Russell at IBM Almaden hosts a small one-day workshop for HCI and related researchers to schmooze and talk a particular subject. This year's topic was near & dear to my heart: what do we do with WAAAY too much information? The first half of the day featured talks from what Dan jokingly described as "people making the problem worse," the second half dealt with specific methods for trying to understand huge amounts of information.

My trip report is now online for anyone who's interested. Dan also promised that the conference video will be posted online — I'll post a link when it's up.

Comments on Apple v. Real 

My friend Nick 'Rawhide' Matsakis had some insightful comments on my question about Apple v. Real, and since I've somehow broken my comments form (grumblings on MovableType to come later) and he's a grad-student-with-no-time-for-his-own-blog™ I'm posting them here.

The way I see it, there are three parts to Apple music triumvirate: The iPod, the iTunes Content Store, and the Fairplay format (AAC+DRM). Each of these support the other two in a devilish lock-in scheme. Customers don't appear to mind this lockin so much since the Apple solutions are all in the top of their class and arguably best of breed.

Despite many competitors, no one else has this kind of seamless experience and there is still no one who can. Sony has crashed and burned (see here) and Microsoft will no doubt have an excellent music store, but the only player they have announced is a $400+ media center thingy that plays movies and shows pictures. Meanwhile, Apple will sell millions of iPods this Christmas, with the $250 Mini leading the charge.

Also, despite claims of being proprietary, Apple has opened up this triumvirate. HP will begin selling iPods in a few weeks, Motorola will begin selling Fairplay-enabled cell phones next year, and Audible.com has been selling spoken-word content on iTunes for 9 months. So, what is the problem with Real making its content play on the iPod? The iPod is clearly the big moneymaker for Apple, so making it be able to play more content should only be a good thing, right?

On its face, yes, but I think there are two issues here. The first is one of control. Apple has 'opened' up its triumvirate, but only a tiny crack and only in ways that 1) are strategic for Apple and 2) maintain the quality of the experience for users (at least Steve Jobs' vision of a quality experience). Having Real have access to the iPod doesn't appear to offer either of these.

More iPod content is good, but the engineering effort required to maintain interoperability is better spent working with the likes of HP and Motorola, which will each bring the Apple solution to millions of customers (perpetuating the lock-in, etc.) Likewise, the deals with HP and Audible have maintained Apple's control over the experience. I'd be surprised if the Motorola phones didn't have an Apple-designed media player that enforced the Apple brand in its appearance and operation.

Also, more importantly, Real is a real competitor to Quicktime in the online streaming media domain. Apple would probably be very happy if Real disappeared completely, offering them a bigger slice of the cross-platform content-creation platform.

In short, I think this is all about Real, and the results might have been much different if another company had approached Apple trying to license fairplay. Personally, I want to think Apple is being foolish in not trying to get a broader base form MPEG-4/AAC over WMA. However, I think they are adopting the Microsoft battle plan: grab as much land as possible in the beginning then rent it to the rest of the world at a profit. This plan hurts consumers, but I think it is the only way that Apple will be able to hold off the onslaught of Microsoft.

Why is Apple upset about Harmony on iPods? 

This whole Real-Networks v. Apple flap over the iPod has me scratching my head. On the surface it's the age-old fight we always see when one company makes money by giving away the razors and selling the blades and another company tries to "free load" and sell their own blades. What confuses me here is that Apple makes most of its profit from selling the razors (iPods), and very little from selling the blades (songs on their iMusic site). (Their Q3 revenue on iPods was 3-4 times their revenue from the iTunes Music Store, and my unfounded guess is that the profit margin is also a lot higher than the estimated ten-cents-on-the-dollar they make on each $0.99 iTunes sale.) That's one of the things I've always liked about Apple's digital-hub strategy — unlike Sony, they don't have to be all schitzo about whether they're an electronics company or a content provider.

So assuming they expect to remain the portable-player market leader based on the merits of the iPod's design rather than format lock-in (bad assumption?) then why get bent out of shape that someone else is trying to make their product better?

Netscape Calendar discontinued without warning 

Users of the Netscape Calendar service had an unpleasant surprise this morning: a note informing them that the service was no longer available and that Netscape apologizes "for any inconvenience this may cause." Small consolation for my coworker who lost access to all his appointments, upcoming talks and meetings for the coming year. A call to Netscape was equally helpful — they were sorry, but quickly pointed out that this had been a free service and that their Terms of Service agreement clearly stats they can discontinue it at any time without warning. When asked why they didn't warn customers in advance, the support person made some comment about how when they warned people in advance about changes to their email service they got lots of complaints, so this time they didn't want to warn anyone. And no, there isn't any way for him to recover his data. Eit.

I'll leave speculation as to why Netscape took this action and what it means about the health & direction of the company to others — for me there are two lessons to be learned here. One is that even a trustworthy good-guy company like Netscape can be bought up or go bankrupt without warning. In the end our valuable data is our own responsibility, and we need to insist on the ability to keep and store local copies of our data in non-proprietary formats. This is exactly why a friend of mine refused to use her Gmail account until she installed PGtGM, a program that lets her keep local backups of her Gmail archive.

The second lesson is for companies who provide Web services: even if you think of yourself as a good guy company and always have the customer's interests at heart, you won't be trusted — and shouldn't be trusted — without real safeguards in place to insure us in the event that you go belly up or turn to the dark side. Even the nicest Web-service company takes collateral damage when someone in the industry does wrong. You need to assure us that our data is safe and is owned by us, not just through words, but by enacting strong legally-binding assurances in your Terms of Service & Privacy Statement, by giving us the ability to export our data, by embracing open standards, and in many cases by making your software open source so we can still use and modify it if you go away. If you do these things and play right by us, we'll gladly use your service and often either subscribe to your premium service or click on your banner ads. If you don't, we'll equally gladly shift over to your competitors who do.

Article on PR People and blogs 

Micro Persuasion has re-posted an interesting article from a public-relations industry newsletter: It's Time to Take Blogs Seriously — and Maybe to Develop One of Your Own.

Some highlights:

"To those people who still think that blogs are 'loose cannons,' I'd say that they should embrace the revolution, or become cannon fodder," says [Shift Communications principal Todd] Defren.
...

Some of the rules [Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble] suggests in his manifesto should be followed by anyone who wants to run a corporate weblog:

• Tell the truth
• Post fast on good news or bad
• Use a human voice
• Have a thick skin
• If you screw up, acknowledge it
• If you don't have the answers, say so
• Never lie
• Never hide information
• Link to your competitors and be nice to them

...

"The empowering nature of the Internet will allow users to blog with or without corporate permission," Defren says. "The blogger who is encouraged with tools, freedom, and a few simple rules-of-the-road becomes a valuable advocate for the company. The blogger whose ambitions are repudiated simply sets up shop at home and spends their free time gossiping about the company's embarrassing hiccups."

All sounds like good advice — and much nicer for those of us on the receiving end of their messages than the alternative "always be sincere, whether you mean it or not" line we sometimes get.

Verizon Treo 600 finally official 

After interminable waiting, Verizon has finally officially announced they're going to start carrying the Treo 600.

How to Make a Guerrilla Documentary 

The New York Times Magazine's How to Make a Guerrilla Documentary article about the production of Outfoxed has everything you could ask for in a story about Internet-era guerrilla media: footage gathered by recording Fox News 24/7 for six months straight, volunteer watchdogs identifying and categorizing clips via email, simultaneous editing by five different editors coordinated over a secure Web site, even the risk of being sued for Copyright infringement as a way of silencing the work. Throw in Web distribution, coast-to-coast kick-off house parties organized by MoveOn.org, and commentary clips available for download over BitTorrent and what do you get? A hard-hitting political documentary, produced in only four and a half months for only $300,000.

Eat your children 

HP's Multi-user 411 Desktop computer is a cute idea: one Linux box with four monitors and four keyboards, sold to cash-strapped schools. It's a perfect match really — the typical school computer lab is lots of seats close together, with low CPU needs but a tight budget. Currently they're only selling them in South Africa, though there's certainly interest elsewhere.

The strange part is all the nay-saying industry analysts in the Reuters article, with quotes like "As interest in the machine grows, the limited supply has turned a well-intentioned product into a source of confusion among educators and a point of debate among industry analysts, who question whether a major computer maker has an interest in bringing a low-cost alternative to a wider mass market." Out here in Silicon Valley, that's the kind of quote we like to put on the gravestones of large companies who refuse to eat their young.

The hardware is nothing special — it's just a regular Intel box running Mandrake, with 4 NVIDIA Qdro4 100NVS 64MB DH cards (one AGP, three PCI), one PS/2 keyboard and three US keyboards, one audio card and three Telex P-500 USB Digital Audio Converters. Sounds like they've done a little bit of software coding to make it all smooth and there's clearly value in buying from a brand-name company like HP, but if they decide it's too risky I bet someone else could be producing near-identical machines within a week. Heck, make it a school project and kill two birds with one stone!

GPS Camera for monitoring graffiti 

Crime Mapping News has a nice two-page writup on how the Santa Monica Police are using a GPS-enabled camera to keep track of graffiti abatement (see pages 2 & 3). The cameras (made by the company I work for, Ricoh) include a drop-down menu to tag images with meta-data, including things like gang affiliation associated with a particular graffiti tag. The images can then be downloaded wirelessly from any city Wi-Fi station and be viewed in aggregate along with other GIS information.

G.W. Bush Public Domain Audio Archive 

The Bots have put up a public-domain database of full MP3s from G.W. Bush's speeches, debates and other statement. It's mostly laid out for cutting up into remixes (like their latest song, Fuzzy Math) but they're also providing the full linear speeches for whatever people want to do with them. In a couple months they'll be sponsoring a contest for best use of the database — I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with.

(Props to Lawrence Lessig for the link.)

Random Factoid of the Day 

• Number pages that can be stored on a Sony Librié with a 512M memory stick: 261,000
• Reading speed required to finish that many pages, reading 24-hours a day, before the 60-day eBook "rental" time expires: 600 wpm.

Real live link vulnerability for Mac OSX 

I don't think this has appeared in the wild yet, but no doubt it will soon. It's an exploit that allows someone to execute arbitrary code on OSX just by visiting a website, regardless of browser, by using Javascript to download a disk image and then using Javascript to open help://Volumes/Rootkit/Rootkit.script. The browser passes the request on to the Help Viewer, which will gladly execute code. The exploit is being discussed on the MacNN Forums and has been summarized on TidBITS.

No solution from Apple yet (though apparently they've known about it for two months already — sheesh), but a stop-gap solution is to install MonkeyFood Software's free MoreInternet and then set the helper app for type "help" to some innocuous program like "chess."

On the minus side, it's sad to see OSX suffering the same pain I've teased Windows users about all these years. On the plus side, I'd been meaning to play more chess anyway...

UPDATE: In flaming about the above exploit, the MacNN folk found a variation that doesn't have a full work-around, though you can make it harder for an attacker to get the payload to your machine. See the top of the thread for details.

Statistical Debugging 

This is cute — download a special version of open-source software like Evolution, Gaim, The Gimp, Nautilus, or Rhythmbox from The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project and they'll randomly sample usage paterns to try to automatically detect bugs that make software crash. Unlike the usual "this application has unexpectedly quit, shall I email a crash log to the developer" kind of thing, this one collects sparse data from both crashes and normal use, enabling an automated classifier to tease out what the differences were.

Sony LIBRIé review 

This review of the Sony LIBRIé e-Book reader sounds typical of what I've heard — thumbs up the new E Ink screen, interface could be improved but isn't bad, and as usual the content side of the Sony house is willing to make the whole package next-to-useless by throwing enough DRM on the device to insure no one will want it. I can see the advertisements now:

Read for hundreds of hours without changing batteries — just like paperbacks!
Great resolution — just like paperbacks!
Magically disappears after 60 days — just like paperbacks!

Didn't they learn anything from minidisc?

Of course, this time their system is Linux-based, and Sony is making at least some of their software available online, so people might be able to write their own content for what sounds like decent and certainly interesting hardware technology. Wonder if that'll happen fast enough for the LIBRIé to get its legs before Phillips & others make a version that will actually play eBooks already out there?

It takes two to email 

Declan McCullagh echos something I've heard several places about Google's Gmail service:

The objections lodged against Gmail are telling, because they illuminate two different views about how to respond to new technologies. The protechnology view says customers of a company should be allowed to make up their own mind and that government regulation should be a last resort. Privacy fundamentalists, on the other hand, insist that new services they believe to be harmful should be banned, even if consumers are clamoring for them.

I'm not one of the people clamoring to ban Gmail (see previous post for my own take) but the above argument does miss the important point that email is a two-way street. Maybe you're happy to sign away your privacy to a third-party company, but I've signed no such agreement. When I send email to you or to a closed mailing list you're on I have the expectation that, at the very least, you will first read the email before deciding to share it with a third party. I trust Google, but I want that expectation of privacy to continue after all the other email-providers follow suit with their own arrangements.

The flavor of Redmond Kool-aid 

Chris Pratley has an interesting Microsoft Perspective on the history of Word, in particular talking about how Microsoft beat out WordPerfect as the wordprocessor of choice when platforms shifted from DOS to Windows. Pratley joined Microsoft in 1995, but what interests me most is his version of the Microsoft story prior to his arrival — it gives a great insight into the Redmond Kool-Aid served to new Microsoft employees:

In case you're too young to remember, Windows development started back in 1983, and it was a joke in the industry. Windows 1.0 (released in 1984 I think) was sort of a demo. Windows 2.0 (1987 or so) was much better, but it was limited in memory (286 processor had a max of 1MB addressable RAM), and ran too slowly for practical usage. It is also hard to believe now, but all the pundits in the industry thought GUI interfaces with windows and dialog boxes and menus and mice (the Mac, Windows 2.0, etc.) were for novices and were basically toys, since they lacked the power of a command line interface. Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect ruled the desktop, with arcane command sequences that a professional user could work magic with, but which new users found impenetrable. Especially interesting was the discussion that came up around the impending release of Windows 3.0 around 1990. In 1989, all the editorials talked about whether application makers should bother with a Windows-version of their DOS apps. WordPerfect was pretty clear - they saw Microsoft as a competitor, Windows as a lame horse, and they felt pretty strongly that they would best serve their customers by sticking with DOS. Their customers knew the WP-DOS interface, it was faster and more professional than the goofy toy-like Windows interface. It became a point of pride that WP would not do a Windows version.

PC-Word, on the other hand, tired of losing reviews and not being able to shake the stranglehold that WP had on the DOS word processor market, had nothing to lose by making a Windows version. Fortunately, that also coincided with the direction that Microsoft was taking: bet the company on Windows. In retrospect, this seems like a no-brainer, but remember that at the time Windows was still considered a joke. Betting the company on it was a big, big bet.

Now I love a "techie bets the company on a radical idea" fable as much as the next geek, but this version leaves out the most important part of the story: WordPerfect wasn't sticking with DOS — just like the other category-leaders Lotus 1-2-3, dBase and Harvard Graphics, they were spending their resources developing for OS/2, the new windowing OS being developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft. And the reason they bet on OS/2 is that both IBM and Microsoft were endorsing OS/2 as the platform for the 1990s: check out this quote from Bill Gates at the Fall 1989 Comdex. At the time, Windows was seen as essentially an extension of DOS, and was touted as being for low-end computers (a 386 with 4MB of RAM, also known as next-year's trash). Which is to say, Windows was touted as being "for novices and... basically toys," but the GUI and OS/2 were taken quite seriously. Now cut to Spring 1992, when Microsoft ships Windows 3.1 and signs a "divorce" document from the deal with IBM to develop OS/2 (much of the technology was later licensed for Windows-NT). Betting the company on Windows wasn't just a big, big bet, it was also arguably the biggest bait-and-switch of the decade.

Oddly enough, Pratley doesn't mention OS/2 even in his follow-up post, though he does make the claim that Microsoft built the first office suite:

Some of the posters noted that Word was helped to success by the Office bundle. That is certainly true - that move was a truly inspired marketing decision to use our strength of having enough apps to build a "suite" - something which hadn't existed up to that point. At first it was just a bundle of three apps for the price of 1.5 apps or so. People said it was crazy - too much of a giveaway.

That's another impressive claim, considering when Microsoft Works came out in August 1986 (for Mac, the DOS version was 1987) there was already Innovative Software's SmartWare Suite (1983), Electric Company's Electric Desk (1984 or earlier, later reborn as AlphaWorks and LotusWorks), Ashton-Tate's Framework (1984), Migent's Agility (1985) and Lotus Symphony (1985).

Pratley mentions a few suspect his blog is just a "marketing ploy," but I figure his admiration for Microsoft's history is genuine and his posts are from the heart — he just needs to get out of Redmond a little more. Perhaps his blog will be just the thing to cure the memory gaps that are so often caused by years of Kool-aid abuse...

Edit: changed typoed August 1996 to August 1986.

• Let's talk about Word (Chris Pratley, 27 April 2004)
• Word Myths and Feedback (Chris Pratley, 28 April 2004)
• "We believe OS/2 is the platform for the 90s" [WAV file] (Bill Gates, Fall 1989 Comdex)
• Computer History (1980-1990
• DOS Abandonware: Integrated Suites
• 30 years of Windows: a retrospective (Matt Lake, CNET Special Report, 22 June 1998)
• Timeline of Microcomputers

CD-Boot Linux Audio Studio 

The AGNULA Project (A GNU Linux Audio distribution, originally funded by the European Commission) has just released DeMuDi 1.1.1 Live, a full music-recording, editing and playback suite all on a bootable CD-ROM. It's all made from existing Open Source components, built on top of a Linux low-latency kernel, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, and the JACK audio-connection kit, with applications ranging from soundfile editors & MIDI sequencers to sound-synthesis software, sheet-music preperation software and media players. Pop it into your Intel box, regardless of native OS, boot from the CD-ROM and you've got your editing suite! (A Mac-G4 version is in the works.)

• Overview
• ISO Disk Image

(Thanks to Steve for the pointer...)

iMix 

I've wanted something like iMix ever since I burned my first Lindy-Hop CD mix. Absolutely brilliant.

Now if we could just shift from $0.99 / track to something that suits better for radio-style "let's see what's on" kind of play we could give ClearChannel the heave-to once and for all.

(Some of the other new iTunes features look nice too)

Beepcard 

Cute security technology from Beepcard:

The Comdot™ solution is easy and convenient: Users simply hold the card in front of their PC, phone or other networked microphone and squeezes the Comdot™ — a flat button on the card — the card uses sound, carrying a one time 3DES encrypted code, to identify the user to the destination server.

Bruce Schneier's comments:

This is perhaps the coolest security idea I've seen in a long time. They have a demo application where you go to a website and purchase something with a credit card. To authenticate the transaction, you have to put the card up to your computer's microphone and press the button. The sound is captured using a Java or ActiveX control — no plug-in required — and acts as an authenticator. It proves that the person making the transaction has the card in his hands, and doesn't just know the number. In credit-card language, it changes the transaction from "card not present" to "card present."

Even cooler, they are making an enhancement to the system that also includes a microphone on the card. This system will require the user to speak a password into the card before pressing the button.

Why do I like this? It's a physical authentication system that doesn't require any special reader hardware. You can use it on a random computer at an Internet cafe. You can use it on a telephone. I can think of all sorts of really easy, really cool applications. If the price is cheap enough, BeepCard has a winner here.

Sony & TOPPAN announce 25GB Paper Disc 

Sony and TOPPAN have just announced a 25Gig Blu-ray Disc made out of 51% paper:

Hideaki Kawai, Managing Director, Head of Corporate R&D Division, TOPPAN CO., LTD commented: "Using printing technology on paper allows a high level of artistic label printing on the optical disc. Since a paper disc can be cut by scissors easily, it is simple to preserve data security when disposing of the disc".

Masanobu Yamamoto, Senior General Manager of Optical System Development Gp., Optical Disc Development Div., Sony Corporation said: "Since the Blu-ray Disc does not require laser light to travel through the substrate, we were able to develop this paper disc. By increasing the capacity of the disc we can decrease the amount of raw material used per unit of information."

Details will be announced at the SPIE Optical Data Storage 2004 Conference next week.

TOPPAN is also working with E Ink to produce their paper displays.

Gmail, privacy and centralization 

There's been a lot of hubbub over Gmail, Google's new free (advertising-based) Not An April Fool's Joke email service with 1Gig of disk space. The biggest issue is that Google hasn't properly communicated where they stand on protecting email privacy, especially in relation to their plan to automatically scan email and present relevant advertisements as a sidebar. In response, a host of privacy organizations have written an open letter demanding that the service be suspended until privacy issues are addressed. The EFF has also been asking some important questions, and Google says they're "batting about a number of options".

On the surface, Gmail isn't that different than existing online email services. It's a free email account run on company-owned-and-operated servers, just like MSN Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. It automatically scans and annotate email, just like spam-filters do already. And in spite of criticism about Gmail's privacy policy, it's not that different (and in fact more explicit) than the ones you find at MSN or Yahoo!. But look just a little down the road and Gmail isn't an email service at all, it's a personal information archival service. This is the real service Google is looking to provide. As they put it: "Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the message you want."

My first reaction is "it's about damn time someone's doing this." Since 1995 I've kept every email I've received or sent (yes, even spam), for a total of over 1.6 Gig and almost 200,000 non-spam email messages. I index it all with the Remembrance Agent (my PhD thesis project) so whenever I get email on, say, some hot new technology I also get links to what other friends, colleagues and mailing lists have said on the subject. (On a different note, when I write love letters I see what I've written to previous girlfriends, which is sometimes quite educational.) I'd love to have this kind of thing hooked up not only to my own email but also, say, my favorite 1000 RSS feeds that I'd like to read but don't have time for. That's clearly the direction Google is heading (they even cite me — I love it when that happens!)

Systems like Gmail face two problems, both of which are also strengths. The first is that my personal and work email archives contains some of the most sensitive information there is in my life. They include email confirmation of purchases, trips I've taken and investments I've made. They include love letters I've sent and later regretted, discussions of medical issues, and drunken emails complaining about people with whom I've lived and worked. They include research ideas not yet patented and drafts of papers not yet published. Often these emails are sensitive precisely because they are powerful and useful, but more often than not information that empowers me can also empower my enemies, competitors and parasites.

The second problem is Google's centralized architecture, which is easier to maintain and deploy but requires me to trust them with my most sensitive assets. This is a general problem with indexing the Deep Web of proprietary data, and I suspect it was the main failure point for Autonomy's short-lived Kenjin system and the main reason they moved to an inside-the-firewall search system. This is not to say a centralized approach is untenable; we already have institutions that are trusted with sensitive data, namely doctors, lawyers, and financial institutions. But what these three have in common are a combination of legal and institutional guarantees of privacy, security and longevity of the data they keep. By improving on the usual web-mail model Google plans to join these institutions in terms of trust required, but so far they haven't improved on the old and inadequate web-mail privacy guarantee. It may not even be possible for Google to make the necessary guarantees without Congressional support, an unlikely prospect given the Justice Department's current lust for total information awareness.

If Google manages to innovate new trust models as well they do technology, I suspect Gmail will be a good stop-gap technology, though it will never be as trustable as a combination of my personal local data cache, an encrypted backup service, and trusted friends or services who keep backup keys. Call me picky, but I'm still holding out for my personal server. How much longer before I can have the Web in my pocket?

References

• About Gmail (Google, 1 April 2004)
• Google's Web mail no joke (Stefanie Olsen, CNET News, 2 April 2004)
• Twenty Eight Privacy and Civil Liberties Organizations Urge Google to Suspend Gmail (World Privacy Forum and 27 others, 6 April 2004)
• Google's Gmail and Your Privacy - What's the Deal? (EFF, EFFector 17(12), 9 April 2004)
• Google to consider Gmail changes (Evan Hansen, CNET News, 13 April 2004)
• Why I Wouldn't Consider Google's E-Mail (Dan Gillmor, eJournal, 3 April 2004)
• Gmail Privacy Policy
• MSN Privacy Policy
• Yahoo! Privacy Policy
• Remembrance Agent Page (your faithful correspondent)
• Query-Free News Search (Henzinger et al, WWW2003, 20 May 2003)
• Autonomy claims the search is over (BBC News, 29 March 2000)
• Autonomy Active Knowledge Page
• What can you do with a Web in your Pocket? (Brin et al, Data Engineering Bulletin 21(2): 37-47, 1998)

Connections 

I am now connected to 198,199 people through Orkut, 21,660 through Tribe, and about 80,000 through the local White Pages. I wonder which links are the most meaningful?

Fully Retractable 

I hate getting my chords tangled, so I just picked up some retractables:

• Retractable iPod Earbuds
• Retractable Nokia Cellphone Headset (Treo-600 compatible, unlike the "universal" version)
• Treo 600 sync/charger USB cable
• ...and much much more!!!

Your house on the cover of Reason 

Reason Magazine is personalizing some 40,000 covers for their June print version, according to a write-up in the NY Times. Subscribers will get a satellite photo of their own neighborhood with their house circled and the cover story: Bradley Rhodes... They Know Where You Are!

Cute stunt — the times article talks both about the privacy and personalized-marketing issues.

There's no fool like an April Fool... 

...and I'm one of them. Turns out the Wal*Mart purchase of online communities was an elaborate April fool's hoax (dang it, these things are happening earlier every year!). From the owner of the board:

...And after reading thru the discussions the past week and all the frustration, concern, heated discussion and heartfelt conversation I came to realize one important thing.

THIS WAS THE BEST APRIL FOOL'S GAG YET!!!!! (Well it *could* have been)

Yeah, you got it. It was a scam, April Fool's all completely bogus.

This was a carefully thought out and orchestrated prank from a group of truly demented geniuses, your moderators. Probably would have played out better had not a few people taken it as some declaration of war. We really had no idea some would be as hateful as to treat it that way.

Makes me wonder what else is a gag. Anyone taking bets on whether Richard Clark is going to jump up and yell April Fools?

Wal-Mart.com purchasing online communities 

UPDATE 4/1/04: This was, in fact, all an elaborate April Fool's hoax perpatrated by the moderators of the board. And I fell for it hook, line and sinker!

The Chainmaille Board is a niche web community for both professional and amateur artisans who make chainmaille jewelry and armor, one of the three big discussion boards for this community (the other two being the Maille Artisans International League and The Ring Lord Chainmail Forum). The board is run by "Lord" Charles DeCordene, who like The Ring Lord also sells his own supplies and jewelry, both to and in competition with other members of the community. The balance between fostering a community and competing with other members in that community is a universal issue from everywhere from niche hobbies to global industries, but that balance was shifted last week when Lord Charles announced that the discussion board was being purchased lock, stock and barrel by Wal-Mart.

Now the site's new banner sports a "Provided by Wal*Mart, Always Low Prices" logo, and the splash page explains what the purchase will mean to the community:

First, here is what it doesn't mean:

• We will under no circumstances sell your email addresses to anyone.
• We will under no circumstances send you promotional e-mail (also known as SPAM). On rare occasions we may send members a PM or an email should an urgent matter arise (i.e., if your posts contain inappropriate language or images).
• TCB will continue to have no pop-up ads. We find these annoying, and believe it would drive members away. So quite simply, we're not going to do it.
• We will not censor your political statements. We believe in free speech. However posts that contain profanity or statements and images that we believe are offensive to the family-nature of the board will be deleted.

And what it does mean:

• Increased tech support: We will soon set up a 24-hour chat forum where members can ask any technical questions.
• Easily accessible archives: Building on previous TCB efforts, we will compile a list of articles and gallery photos to make the board the best resource on Chain Mail available on the Internet.
• Connections to other board members: Because Wal-Mart is sponsoring multiple boards, we will offer members on all boards the option of registering with our General Community Board. This board will provide you the opportunity to find members in your area with similar interests. We are considering hosting monthly shopping days at certain Wal-Mart locations where members can gather together for a day of fun! It is up to you how involved you choose to be.
• Opportunity to sell your chain mail: Our General Community Board will have an online store that has not only Wal-Mart products, but also products of interest to our board members. In the B y Our Members area, members can post items they would like to sell. Think of it as a larger version of the Trading Post currently on TCB. Unlike many other online stores and auction sites, it will be absolutely free to post up to 15 items per month.
• Store Discounts: Beginning in June 2004, Members of Wal-Mart boards will be able to apply online for our new CyberCustomer Discount Card (CCDC). There is no annual membership fee and owners of a CCDC card will save 5% on all Wal-Mart purchases over $20.

We hope that you are as pleased as we are about this exciting venture. We look forward to building a successful relationship with every member here.

On the one hand, Wal-Mart's sponsorship is adding clear value to this community: Lord Charles was having trouble running the discussion board with his own time and money, and could never offer the kind of technical and developmental support the board will now enjoy. They also will likely expand exposure and thus membership in the community, which in spite of the necessary growing pains will likely help the community in the long run. Wal-Mart, of course, now has the opportunity both to become identified as an insider in a close-knit community and to put their own online auction sites in a premium position. That's vital for something like auctions, where customers and sellers alike will want to settle on a single marketplace. That marketplace is currently eBay — it's clear that Wal-Mart hopes to change that default by getting a hold in certain communities and then leveraging that hold through their General Community Board and CyberCustomer Discount Cards.

On the other hand, there have also been concerns expressed in the community, ranging from "Wal-Mart is evil" to "how can a small wholesaler/retailer like myself ever hope to compete against this?" And the latter is a very good question, especially for people who don't have the volume, Wal-Mart compatible style/branding, or just the desire to sell in the new landscape. These people might be in trouble down the road, forced to change their ways or quietly fade away (to the detriment of the community at large). On the third hand, small sellers who can make the shift to the new model might find the pie getting bigger and whole new marketplaces opened up, just as we're already seeing with eBay and Amazon Store cottage industries.

Can we tape? 

For anyone doing research with audio or video recording devices (or just budding voyeurs), the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has a nice practical guide to wiretapping and video recording laws for the 50 states.

Crashing The Party 

I love Joshua Kinberg's idea for a thesis in multimedia: a chalk-spraying bike that can print protest messages via the Web and SMS during the Republican National Convention in NYC. Perhaps the best part is is proposal for how to evaluate his work:

I will consider this project successful if I can print at least 100 messages in strategic locations during the week of the RNC. The amount of media coverage, unique visits on the project's website, the website's Google ranking, and the amount of online participation are other methods by which to gauge the effectiveness of the project.

It reminds me of conversations my officemate and I used to have about teaching an undergrad class in the media and manipulation, with the final exam being to plant a false story in as public a news source as possible.

E Ink launching book reader w/Sony & Philips 

E Ink just announced the first consumer device to use their Electronic Paper technology: the Sony LIBRIé e-Book reader. Six-inch diagonal display, 170ppi, 4 shades gray reflective screen with an almost 180-degree viewing angle, weighing around 300g with four AAA batteries. Even better than the viewing angle is the battery life: unlike LCDs, electronic paper takes power to modify a screen, but not to maintain a static display. Sony's tests show you can read around 10,000 pages on four AAA Alkaline batteries.

References

• First-Generation Electronic Paper Display From Philips, Sony And E Ink To Be Used In New Electronic Reading Device (E Ink Press Release, 24 March 2004)
• E Ink's Electronic Paper Commercialized (E Ink Press Release, 24 March 2004)
• Sony To Launch E Ink-based eBook In April (Timothy Lord, Slashdot, 24 March 2004)

All your spin... 

Borrowing a page from Dean, the Bush/Cheney campaign's webpage provided a create your own poster link to produce a PDF poster, complete with your own campaign slogan like "Negative 2.6 Mill. Jobs Created and Counting." Oops. A few weeks after Ana Marie Cox at wonkette.com suggested the idea, the B/C campaign staff caught on and crippled their poster-maker (which I note doesn't work in Safari at all now), but some of the best posters have now been turned into a Bush/Cheney Sloganator slide show.

Given the trend towards underground resampling and "media consumer reuse," I expect this to be the watershed year for underground campaign hacks. Anyone seen a re-edited TV ad yet, complete with inserted subtitles and footnotes? Where's the Phantom Editor when you need him?

Making your own AAC files bookmarkable on iPod 

Doug Adams of Doug's Scripts for iTunes has just posted about a nice little bit of Applescript he's coded to make any AAC file bookmarkable on your iPod, just like Audible.com's audio books. Apparently all it takes is to change the file type (not the extension) to the four-character string "M4B " (note the space). Apple posted the method in their Knowledge Base (article #93731), but the article was then quickly removed.

I have to wonder why Apple felt the need to pull this info (I also wonder how/if they thought pulling it would stop it from being used now that it's out, but that's another question). My best guess is they have some sort of exclusive deal with Audible.com for bookmarking capability, and somebody blew it by revealing the hack they used. I'd love to hear if someone knows more about the politics behind this though.

(Thanks to Rawhide for the link, and of course Doug Adams for the script!)

Audio Lectures 

About a month ago I started downloading audio lectures and listening to them on my iPod. There's something absolutely wonderful about being able to browse through lectures by statesmen, Nobel laureates and other top minds of our era — here're a dozen that I've especially liked:

• A Conversation with President Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton & Michael Beschloss (JFK Library And Museum Talks, 5/28/03)
• The U.S. Economy: The Last 50 Years and the Next 50 Years, Franco Modigliani, Paul A. Samuelson & Robert M. Solow (MIT World: Distributed Intelligence, 9/18/02)
• Fortune Favors The Bold, Lester Thurow (MIT World: Distributed Intelligence, 10/23/03)
• Rogue States and Weapons of Mass Destruction, Sandy Berger & Ashton Carter (JFK Library And Museum Talks, 3/11/03)
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker (MIT World: Distributed Intelligence, 10/31/02)
• Defining the Boundaries: Homeland Security and Its Impact on Scientific Research, Jerome Friedman & Phillip Sharp (MIT World: Distributed Intelligence, 9/23/03)
• Innovating Information Technologies to Protect Human Rights, Jim Fruchterman & Tom Parks (World Affairs Council, 02/04/04)
• Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America's Response, John Shattuck & Samantha Power (JFK LIbrary And Museum Talks, 12/9/03)
• Patrick Leahy: U.S. Senator (D-Vt.), Patrick Lehey (National Press Club, 6/25/03)
• The Future of Work, Tom Malone (MIT World: Distributed Intelligence, 7/6/03)
• The Coming Energy Revolution, Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran (World Affairs Council, 01/21/04)
• ME++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell (MIT World: Distributed Intelligence, 11/13/03)

Random Factoid of the Day 

It costs $499 to buy a new 40G iPod.
It costs $10,730 to fill it with songs purchased online at 99 cents each.

A one-man anti-Kerry smear campaign 

I got my first Astroturf political spam comment today on my post on California mental illness legislation. The brief comment links to a press release signed by IPRWire founder and staunch Edwards Supporter Hans Schnauber, better known as The Butterfly Guy. Schnauber made the news in 1996 for registering domain names of big companies and then posting Web pages about how awful those companies have been for butterfly habitat.

The Kerry screed itself takes the well-known story of how Kerry discovered only last year that his grandfather was actually Jewish, and how he had taken his own life in 1921, probably due to financial difficulties. It then goes on to make the completely unfounded assertion that "According to sources, including The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, and Fox News, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts has a family history of severe mental illness" and asks the ominous question "Will the American people vote for a candidate with a family history of mental illness and clinical depression?" Of course, the release doesn't actually cite the news stories to which it refers, but given a a NetNews post by the author we can guess it refers to the original Boston Globe article and the Sun-Times and Fox News pick-ups, none of which ever mention the possibility of mental illness.

A little web-searching reveals that Hans is hyping the press release on NetNews, posting under the name "Day Bird Loft (loft@pigeons.ws)" (see this post where "Loft" signs his post as "Hans", and note that pigeons.ws points to the same base scripted website as iprwire.net). But in spite of hyping his story in numerous news groups (sometimes even replying to his own message), I've yet to see a response taking him to task for his self-promotion. Given that the NetNews is usually quite aware of spammers, I have to assume he's gotten away with it for four days (a lifetime on the Net) because his posts are mostly hand-crafted, point to an official-sounding press account (most people don't know PRWeb is a for-hire press-release wire service), and because he actually defends himself in the threads he posts to. I probably wouldn't have investigated it either had his comment not been so clearly generated by a spam-bot that got tripped by keywords out of context.

What's the moral of this story? Just another warning of what we already knew:

1. The Net is a powerful tool for political messages
2. It's as easy to rumor-monger a lie as it is the truth
3. On the Internet, no one knows you're not a crowd

Update: Hans comments that he didn't use a spam-bot, just "plain old fashion tech creativity." It's that kind of personal touch that's missing so often from spam in this day of automation — I'm glad to see some craftsmen still put a little of themselves in their work.

From a purely strategic standpoint though, I have to wonder about the choice of mental illness as the hook for this smear campaign. The best whisper campaigns say out loud what people are already wondering. It doesn't have to be true: Gore was an honest man but could be painted as dishonest because of his association with Clinton. (Of course, it helps even more if the rumor has truth to it, as was the case with Clinton.) But I haven't seen anything in Kerry to make me think insanity; it just doesn't connect emotionally. The story would have stuck much better to Dean I expect — people were much more willing to think he was unhinged, and there were already a lot more forces trying to spin him that way. Perhaps when the nomination is over Hans will explain his reasoning and we'll be able to do a post-mortum on his one-man campaign.

References

• Mental Illness and Presidential Politics (Hans Schnauber, IPR Newswire, 21 February 2004)
• Butterfly zealot raises Time Warner's ire (Wired News, 14 January 1997)
• Search For Kerry's Roots Finds Surprising History (Michael Kranish, Boston Globe, February 2 2003) [archived at RootsWeb.com, scroll down for original English version]
• 'Irish-American' Kerry's Jewish roots revealed (Lynn Sweet, Chicago Sun-Times, February 9 2003)
• Sen. Kerry Learns of Jewish Ancestry (Fox News reprint of Associated Press story, February 3 2003)

A quick look at the Win2K sourcecode 

Kuro5hin has a brief analysis of the code structure and comments in the recently-leaked Win2K sourcecode.

His conclusions:

The security risks from this code appear to be low. Microsoft do appear to be checking for buffer overruns in the obvious places. The amount of networking code here is small enough for Microsoft to easily check for any vulnerabilities that might be revealed: it's the big applications that pose more of a risk. This code is also nearly four years old: any obvious problems should be patched by now.

Microsoft's fears that this code will be pirated by its competitors also seem largely unfounded. With application code this would be a risk, but it's hard to see Microsoft's operating system competitors taking advantage of it. Neither Apple nor Linux are in a much of position to steal code and get away with it, even if it was useful to them.

In short, there is nothing really surprising in this leak. Microsoft does not steal open-source code. Their older code is flaky, their modern code excellent. Their programmers are skilled and enthusiastic. Problems are generally due to a trade-off of current quality against vast hardware, software and backward compatibility.

I was also gratified to see this comment, based on a book I loved as a kid:

// TERRIBLE HORRIBLE NO GOOD VERY BAD HACK

Even in Australia...

Virtual sheep-shearing! 

Seen at the PalmSource Develper Conference: A "virtual sheep" to teach sheep-shearing (from New Zealand, natch). Run the Palm-based barcode-scanner "shears" in the right order and you gain points. Run it wrong and blood graphics splash on the screen. I want one!

Putting the Djinni back 

When I was a young MIT grad student back in 1994, I attended a big Media Lab symposium on the new Digital Information Superhighway. Mosaic had been out a little over a year, Netscape had been founded six months ago, and I was listening to Mickey Schulhof, President & CEO of Sony America, give us his vision of the future. The world he described was the standard pre-Web story: every home in America would have a set-top box (made by Sony) that decoded content for all us consumers. At the other end of the wire was a Sony office that handled billing and content delivery. The content was, of course, also produced by Sony, though they'd happily broker for non-Sony customers as well. He also made a strong point that they had no interest in managing the wires themselves, kindly ceding this part of the vision to competition.

Being a young grad student and having religiously read Wired Magazine for over a year, when it came time for Q&A I asked the obvious question: "In this world you describe, how will people get access to non-professionally produced content that can't afford the pricing structure Sony will require?" His answer: "I don't think people care about non-professional content."

As we all know, he was soon proven horribly wrong, but every time there's a new seismic shift in technology all the current monopolies scurry to try to put the Djini back in the bottle. The latest shifts for content is with portable and home-entertainment boxes, and it's in this context that I read the announcement that Disney has finally agreed to license Microsoft's Digital Rights Management software to "bring about a vibrant market for legitimate, high-quality entertainment delivered to new categories of end-user devices, such as personal media players and home media center PCs." In other words, the game is shifting again, and this time the Content Cartel isn't going to be caught with their pants down.

Now things get bloody, as if they weren't before. I suspect the only thing that frightens Disney more than P2P-traded Mickey Mouse fan-art is the idea of Microsoft stepping into the Sony role of Mickey Schulhof's vision. Microsoft, along with Apple and RealNetworks, have to walk the fine line between appeasing the Content Cartel and offering consumers enough control that they don't blow off DRM and proprietary standards entirely for systems with simple embedded Linux & MPEG. (See Jeffrey O'Brien's recent Wired article for a nice discussion.) I'm not sure who's gonna win this one, but as one of those people producing non-professional content, I sure hope Schulhof vision wasn't just late in coming.

References

• Microsoft and Disney Announce Multiyear Agreement to Cooperate On Digital Media Initiatives and for Disney to License Windows Media Digital Rights Management Software (PRNewswire, 9 February 2004)
• Disney and Microsoft strike Internet deal (Mark Tran, The Guardian, 9 February 2004)
• Microsoft, Disney In Digital Pact; Wake-up Call To Apple? (Brad Gibson, The Mac Observer, 9 February 2004)

Audio Lectures for download 

The past few days I've been downloading streaming audio of lectures and talks given by interesting and intelligent people™, converting them to MP3 format and putting them on my iPod. The process is still a little slow — usually I stream the audio using RealPlayer and use Applescript and Wiretap to automatically capture to disk, then trim using Quicktime Pro and convert to MP3 using iTunes. However, I'm pleased with the end result.

I'm still looking for good sources of audio talks, and welcome suggestions & links. Here are the three I've most enjoyed so far:

• WGBH Forum Network: A large archive of free public lectures (some audio only, some audio + video), hosted by Boston's public TV/Radio network. I'm especially enjoying the MIT series of talks by Nobel Prize winners.
• World Affairs Council of Northern California: Interesting talks on a wide variety of global topics. I often listen to this on my local public radio (KQED).
• National Press Club: The NPC holds luncheon talks by people ranging from Donald Rumsfeld to Wynton Marsalis. Archives hosted by National Public Radio.

Tech in Public Space contest 

FusedSpace is hosting a design contest for "innovative ideas that, by means of existing technology, can change or improve our current relationship with physical public space or that can otherwise bring about innovations in the public domain." (Where by public domain they mean in the sense of common space, not in the intellectual property sense.) Props to Corante and Eric Nehrlich for the link.

Commercial Wearable Camera 

Years ago, Steve Mann made Cool Site of the Day with his Wearable Wireless Webcam. Now, almost a decade later, you can order the DejaView CamWear Model 100 hat or glasses-mounted camera, which continually records a 30-second buffer of video so you can push a button and start recording from before you even know you wanted to. Price will be $399, available "in January" (so they'd better hurry!)

I don't expect this first-generation product to make a big splash, but I do believe in the vision of always-ready wearable cameras and microphones with this sort of record-30-seconds-into-the-past kind of feature. The story is somewhat compelling for consumers ("when your baby makes that great smile, you can capture it and grab the best frame as a picture") but even more so for industry and inspection, where you're more concerned with documenting an event than with the artistry of the video.

National Geographic's first digital shoot 

Rob Galbraith's Digital Photography Insights has a great article about National Geographic's first cover story shot entirely in digital. (Props to Haberlach for the link.)

Digital had many of the advantages I'd expect: less equipment to get lost, easy backups, ability to review pictures on-site, and easier remote collaborative editing. The disadvantages were more surprising to me, and included having to deal with brightness differences on different screens, inability to edit on a large horizontal surface like a light-table, and poor contrast compared to slides when showing photos to a large group.

Bridging the gap between email/IM and Web 

I recently came across two programs for helping transfer large files via instant messenger or email. I see both these systems as gap-bridgers — they bridge between the spontaneity of email/IM and the robust and recipient-controlled download you get with Web browsers. Since the Internet abhors a gap, I've no doubt this difference in functionality will go away in the near future, especially as Web-based protocols are further integrated into the OS and file systems.

• DropLoad (http://dropload.com/) is a donation-ware website where you can upload a file (using the web-browser upload) and indicate an email address you want the file "sent" to. That recipient then gets sent a random-hash URL to the uploaded file. Files are deleted after 48 hours or once they are downloaded, whichever comes first.
• HFS (http://www.rejetto.com/hfs/guide/) is a webserver where you can drag & drop files onto the server and get a new URL for the file automatically put in your clipboard. You can also create "virtual folders" that are essentially directories on the webpage. I've not tried this one, but it feels like a more lightweight (and potentially temporary) approach to what WebDav or shared file systems do.

Number mobility: 26 days and still holding 

I got a new cellphone back on December 5th, swapping out my T-Mobile Sidekick for an AT&T Treo 600 (both good phones, but AT&T has much better coverage in my area). I also signed up to transfer my T-mobile number over to my new phone.

Twenty-six days and about 8 hours on hold with technical support later and I'm still waiting for my number to be transferred. The problem is a classic multi-system gridlock. AT&T sent a request for number transfer to T-mobile through Telcordia, an intermediary that handles number portability communication between the various telcos. They then sent a follow-up with more information, but the follow-up arrived at T-mobile before the main request arrived. This wedged T-mobile's system and caused both requests to be dropped. Now T-mobile is asking AT&T to cancel and resubmit the request, because they can't get their side unwedged. Unfortunately, AT&T's system can't cancel requests that are awaiting a response. Gridlock.

There's no one person to blame here. T-mobile's system clearly shouldn't have gotten wedged so easily, Telcordia shouldn't have delivered messages out of order, and AT&T shouldn't have sat on the request for three weeks when they thought the ball wasn't in their court. Most importantly, both telcos need more staff to cut through the hour+ hold times.

At long last I've gotten the problem escalated at AT&T, thanks to a dedicated number mobility group member named Andrea who was willing to wait through T-mobile's hold time and patch me into the call. They now say it'll be another 48-72 hours, which will bring them just under the 30-day return policy on my new phone. Here's hoping...

Update: And 29 days after purchase, my new phone finally takes calls! (And there was much rejoicing.) FYI, you can cut to the head of AT&T's customer support queue by dialing 1-888-799-1305 and selecting 3G and English. This is the priority queue used by AT&T stores, though customers can also use it. (Thanks to Nelson and Vyruz Reaper for the number.)

Microsoft looking into just-in-time information retrieval 

Last night I finally got around to watching Microsoft's Comdex presentation, specifically the section where Susan Dumais shows off her new search technology "Stuff I've Seen." (Search for "switch gears" at the bottom of the transcript or go to 1:07:50 on the video.)

Most of Stuff I've Seen is concentrating on the problem of quickly indexing and searching your entire hard drive, regardless of media format. (I sometimes jokingly refer to projects like this as YAPIM, or Yet Another Project Invoking Memex, my own thesis work fitting that description as well.) However, the part that interests me most is what they're calling implicit query. As CNET describes the Comdex demo:

In demonstrating Implicit Query, Dumais began to type an e-mail asking a colleague about a set of slides for an upcoming conference. Before the message was complete, the program — which appears in a window on the side of the screen — pulled up e-mails, slide decks and Word documents containing the name of the conference and the future recipient. Each hit came with a brief summary of the internal content, date, the type of software the file was written in, and its potential relevance, among other information.

This is the same functionality that in my PhD I call Just-In-Time Information Retrieval, and is the main focus of the Remembrance Agent software I developed. It can be incredibly powerful (I use it regularly to suggest email discussions related to my blog entries, for example) and I hope Dumais pursues it. It looks like she's still in early stages with the concept though, and and more importantly the current interface is still designed for explicit query — far too intrusive for something that runs all the time in the background. By contrast, Autonomy has had an actual product in this area for over three years, though I'd say the interface is still the real trickiness for this kind of application. Still, as is often the case one of the more interesting aspects of Microsoft doing something is that it's Microsoft doing it. If implicit query makes it into a future version of the OS (and if MS doesn't screw it up they way they did with that annoying paperclip) that'll be quite interesting.

References

• Remarks by Bill Gates, COMDEX Las Vegas 2003 (Bill Gates, Microsoft, 16 November 2003) [Video available in Windows Media Format, OSX users need to install WMP 9, Linux users are as usual shut out]
• Microsoft aims for search on its own terms (Michael Kanellos, CNET, 24 November 2003)
• Stuff I've Seen: A System for Personal Information Retrieval and Re-Use (Susan Dumais et. al., ACM SIGIR'03 Conference, 28 July 2003)
• Autonomy's Active Knowledge Page
• The Remembrance Agent (code and papers from my thesis work — runs as a plug-in for Emacs)

I got the horse right here, reloaded 

Back in July there was a big scandal over DARPA's funding of a futures market where people bet on things like whether Arafat will be assassinated or when the US will pull out of Iraq. The project was canceled, and also became the straw that forced John Poindexter's resignation. Now the Guardian reports that San Diego-based Net Exchange, the company that was implementing the project, is going ahead and launching it without government support or involvement. Given the previous uproar, Net Exchange is being understandably quiet about the whole thing.

Personally I'd be happy to see them try this out. As I said before, the U.S. Government shouldn't be involved in something as shady as gallows gambling, but as a private experiment the whole thing intrigues me and I don't have a problem with seeing where it goes. My guess is it will wind up being an interesting past-time for armchair analysts, but like most markets will fluctuate far too much to provide any real security data. The only real danger I see is if the stakes get high (unlikely) and attract corruption — unlike sports gambling or its Wall-Street counterpart, Middle-East politics has neither conflict-of-interest nor insider-trading laws. The more likely danger is simple lack of interest, the risk all seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time Internet projects face.

References

• Future's bright for terror betting (Gary Younge, The Guardian, 18 November 2003)

New iPod Accessories 

Just in case anyone was still in doubt that Apple's iPod is going to slowly grow into a universal portable media server, Apple has just announced several new iPod accessories, including a voice recorder (microphone to turn the iPod into a dictaphone) and media reader (accepts various media cards and slurps the data onto the hard drive for later retrieval). The iPod isn't the first hard-drive based MP3 player to offer these extras (Archos has had one for a while), but Apple goes one step further with automatic synchronization of recorded audio and stored pictures with iTunes and iPhoto respectively. Now if they can just add Bluetooth the iPod will be well on its way to becoming the personal server it's destined to become.

It was just a matter of time... 

I just got my first automated blog-comment spam, attached to my post about artificial diamonds (I've since deleted it). Interestingly enough, the spam wasn't meant for me or my readers but for Google — it was just random snatches of English peppered with the word "jewelry" and links to http://jewelry.lstor.com/, which produces more random phrases. No doubt the idea is to raise the pagerank of some real page that will go there later.

Wonder if this is what they mean when all those spammers keep telling me they can raise my Google ranking?

Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War 

The Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland and Knowledge Networks have just released a report that sheds a lot of light on the much-reported polls that show Americans have serious misconceptions about the facts surrounding the Iraq War. (PIPA's press release and questionnaire are also available).

At the heart of the PIPA study are three questions:

• Is it your impression that the US has or has not found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al Qaeda terrorist organization?
• Since the war with Iraq ended, is it your impression that the US has or has not found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?
• Thinking about how all the people in the world feel about the US having gone to war with Iraq, do you think the majority of people favor the US having gone to war?

The answers, by the way, are "no clear evidence has been found," "no weapons of mass destruction have been found," and "the majority of people in the world do not favor the US having gone to war." If you got at least one wrong don't feel too bad: only 30% of people surveyed in three polls (June, July, and August-September) got all three correct.

The report is well worth reading, but here's a brief summary of their findings:

• Misperceptions are widely-held. To quote a few numbers, 48% believe the US has found clear evidence that Saddam was working with al Qaeda, 22% believe Iraq was directly involved in carrying out the September 11th attacks, 22% believe the US has found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, 20% think Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons in the war that just ended, and 25% believe the majority of world opinion is in favor of the US having gone to war.
• Misperceptions are strongly correlated with support for the war. Both pre- and post-war, support for the war is much higher among those who are wrong about the facts. For example, 86% of those who incorrectly answered all three questions listed above were in favor of the war, compared to 23% of those who had no misperceptions. Of course, we can't know for certain whether people are basing their support for the war on incorrect information, or if they are instead making up their minds and then choosing to believe rumors and insinuations that support their already-formed opinions. However, this is still a good indication that these misperceptions had a real effect on public support for the war.

• Misperceptions correlate strongly with media source. People who watch Fox News as their primary news source were much more likely to be incorrect on the questions of links to al Qaeda, WMD and world opinion than those who watched any other source. People who got their primary news from television were more likely to have misperceptions than people who got their news from print media, and NPR/PBS viewers were the best informed on these subjects.

  Number of misperceptions per respondent	Fox	CBS	ABC	CNN	NBC	Print media	NPR/PBS
  None of the 3	20%	30%	38%	45%	45%	53%	77%
  1 or more misperceptions	80	71	61	55	55	47	23
  2 or more misperceptions	69	51	41	38	34	26	13
  3 or more misperceptions	45	15	16	13	12	9	4

  The data also show that these differences aren't explained by different viewer demographics. For example, the average incorrect answer rate was 54% for Republican Fox viewers, but only 32% for Republicans who get their news from PBS-NPR. Viewer education levels also don't account for the differences between the media sources. The amount of attention people pay to the news has little effect on the results, except in the case of print media and to some extent CNN, where more attention results in being better informed, and Fox News, where paying more attention to the news actually increases the likelihood of being misinformed.

I don't have high hopes that this report will directly change public opinion or make people better informed: the people who think we've already found WMD aren't going to be reading scientific reports. What I do hope is that this report, along with the poll data that led up to it, will be a wake-up call to the mainstream press to do their job. (Fox News, of course, is a lost cause and no doubt sees this report as evidence they are doing their job.) Paul Waldman recently wrote a column in the Washington Post that calls for exactly that:

Once misconceptions are known, journalists have an obligation to highlight the facts in a prominent way, writing stories specifically about where people have misunderstood or been misled, and correcting the misimpressions. The average citizen can't be expected to wade through the euphemisms and competing claims, research the evidence, and come to a conclusion about who's telling the truth and who isn't.

That's what reporters are for.

Let's hope the press wakes up soon — we need our fourth estate more than ever.

References

• Misperceptions, The Media, And The Iraq War (The American Public on International Issues, 2 October 2003)
• Study Finds Widespread Misperceptions on Iraq Highly Related to Support for War (Program on International Policy, 2 October 2003)
• PIPA Questionnaire
• Follow the bouncing White House ball (Molly Ivins, 5 October 2003)
• Bush: Saddam not involved in 9/11 (Terence Hunt, Associated Press, 17 September 2003)
• Why the Media Don't Call It as They See It (Paul Waldman, 28 September 2003)

NeoMedia coming out with portable price-checker 

NeoMedia has just announced a service where you can take a picture of an ISBN code (the barcode printed on every book jacket) with a cellphone camera and be automatically brought the the Amazon.com page for that book. From their press release:

"Now, shoppers can take out their Nokia(R) 3650 camera phone at Barnes & Noble, Border's, or just about any other book store, and just take a picture of the ISBN on the book to comparison shop at Amazon.com right on the screen of their wireless Web browser," Jensen said. "It's kind of a high-tech version of the Santa Claus at Macy's(R) sending Christmas shoppers to Gimbels in the classic movie, 'Miracle on 34th Street'," he mused.

Gizmodo suggests this is Barnes & Noble's worst nightmare, but I expect it won't hurt the large chains, as their volume keeps prices fairly close to Amazon's as it is. It'll be harder on independent bookstores, but even then there's a premium that people are willing to pay for a book that's already in their hot little hands. That premium will be even larger than the usual amount people will pay for bricks-and-mortar convenience because the customer is already in the store — I expect a lot more.

The biggest question for me is whether "now is the time." I first saw this kind of technology about 6 years ago, both in a class project at MIT and in Anderson Consulting's (now Accenture's) Shopper's Eye project, and even briefly looked at doing a startup in this area just before the crash. It never quite felt like the time was right for this to go mainstream because the technology wasn't in the hands of enough consumers. Clearly NeoMedia thinks we're getting close.

References

• Direct Link to Amazon.com for Book Price Shoppers is Newest Application for 'PaperClick for Nokia Camera Cell Phones' from NeoMedia Technologies(NeoMedia press release, 30 September 2003)
• PaperClick and IDOCS Technology (NeoMedia)
• Bad news for bookstores: instantly check Amazon prices with a cameraphone (Gizmodo, 2 October 2003)
• Shopper's Eye: Using Location-based Filtering for a Shopping Agent in the Physical World (Andrew E. Fano, May 1998)

CIA and ICT developing anti-terrorism training "game" 

The CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) is working to develop training simulations with the help of the Institute for Creative Technologies, a center within the University of Southern California that specializes in combining artificial intelligence, virtual reality and techniques from the videogame and movie industries to create interactive training simulations. The company recently received accolades for their "Full Spectrum Warrior" project, which was designed as a training aid for the US Army but has also lead to a commercial videogame for the X-Box. The Army project uses material developed with the Army Infantry School at Fort Benning and a rich AI engine to run trainees through both military and peacekeeping scenarios. For example, in one scenario the trainee plays an officer in charge of a unit that has just been involved in a traffic accident between a tank and a non-English-speaking civilian. If approved, the CIA's simulation would allow analyst trainees to play themselves or the part of terrorist cell leaders, cell members, money-movers and facilitators.

The Washington Times, who broke the story, is highly critical of the project, comparing it to Vice Adm. John Poindexter's ill-received Idea Futures project and quoting unnamed military officials and other critics who call it "a ridiculous and absurd scheme that makes Poindexter's project look good in comparison" and suggest that "the key issue here is the CTC misspending funds on silly, low-priority projects, exactly the kind of thing that forced Admiral Poindexter to resign." A follow-up article, also in the Washington Times, quotes former Georgia congressman Bob Barr (R-GA) as saying "Perhaps this is the reason we were surprised by September 11. If it weren't so serious, it would be comical... What we ought to be doing is focusing our money and attention in identifying terrorists and their associates so we can be on the watch for these characters, not playing video games." The Sydney Morning Herald was slightly less critical, but also linked the project with Poindexter's projects.

It's entirely possible that this project is too expensive (the CIA has not revealed the price tag) or that the simulation is in some way teaching the wrong lessons. However, the main criticism seems to be of the form "the CIA is wasting time playing video games," which is patently absurd. Simulation role-playing has been an effective training tool in both the military and business for decades, and in fact much of the technology now seen in video games was originally developed for training U.S. Army officers. To suggest that the CIA should be out catching terrorists instead of playing video games is like suggesting the U.S. Army should be out fighting wars instead of wasting their time doing training exercises consisting of "running around with toy guns playing capture the flag."

It's pretty clear that there's a thicket of political wrangling going on behind the scenes, and the Times story is a salvo fired by people who want this CIA project canceled. I've no idea whether this is a case of fighting over scarce funding, vengeance against the CTC, or an honest attempt to scuttle a project that won't provide good training, and I won't even begin to speculate. Hopefully someone with a better understanding of the ins and outs of intelligence and military politics (like Phil Carter at Intel Dump) will weigh in on this before long.

• DCI Counterterrorist Center (CTC)
• Institute for Creative Technologies
• Full Spectrum Warrior (Institute for Creative Technologies)
• CIA pursues video game (Bill Gertz, Washington Times, 29 September 2003)
• CIA criticized for video game (Audrey Hudson, Washington Times, 29 September 2003)
• CIA to combat terrorism with Bin Laden video game (Sydney Morning Herald, 30 September 2003)
• CIA agents 'to play bin Laden' (ITV.com, 29 September 2003)

Breaking the brick 

Intel's Personal Server project, lead by Ubiquitous Computing long-timer Roy Want, got some press this past week after it was shown at the Intel Developer Forum. The prototype is a 400MHz computer with Bluetooth, battery and storage, all about the size of a deck of cards. No screen and no keyboard — I/O is handled by whatever devices happen to be around, be they the display and keyboard on your desk, the large-screen projector in the conference room or your portable touch-screen. This concept isn't new; it's something that researchers in Ubiquitous Computing and Wearable Computing (including Roy) have been talking about for over a decade. But it is the right concept, and Moore's Law is finally bringing it to almost within reach.

There are three main reasons why this is the Right Thing(tm):

• Your hands aren't getting smaller. Handheld computers are now small enough that the limiting factor is screen and button size. Since our hands aren't getting any smaller, we're pretty much at the limit for everything-in-a-single-brick handhelds, at least for current applications. One of the ways out of that box is the wearable computing approach, where interfaces are spread around the body like clothing or jewelry. Displays are shrunk by embedding them directly into the glasses, tiny microphones are used for speech recognition, micro cameras and accelerometers are used for for gesture and context recognition, and specialty input devices such as medical monitors get used instead of more generic input devices. One of the big difficulties with wearables is all the wires leading from the CPU/Disk/Battery unit to the I/O devices, and in fact this problem was a big motivating force behind the IEEE 802.15 short-range wireless standards, which include Bluetooth. Wireless isn't a complete solution (you still have to worry about powering your I/O devices) but it's a start.

  The other way to break the hand-size limit is the UbiComp approach: use whatever interfaces are in your surrounding area. When I'm at my desk I want to use my nice flat-panel display and ergonomic keyboard, not my black-and-white cellphone LCD. When I give a presentation I want to use the conference hall's projector. I don't need a keyboard at all, just enough to launch my Keynote presentation and change slides. Roy naturally leans towards this second approach, but as I've argued before the Ubicomp and Wearables approaches work well together; there's no need to choose.

• Always the right tool for the job. Another advantage to breaking the CPU from the I/O is it gets around an inherent conflict in interface design. On the one hand, designers will tell you that you always want the interface to fit the task. Use a hammer to drive nails and a screwdriver to turn screws, and all that. But in the mobile world you don't want to carry around your cellphone, PDA, MP3 player, two-way pager, camera and laptop everywhere you go. When it comes to mobility, most people choose to carry a Swiss Army knife instead of a full toolchest, even though the one-size-fits-all interface won't ever be quite right for the task. (That's why I still carry my Danger Hiptop, which is great for text messaging but feels like I'm holding a bar of soap to my ear when I use it for voice.) When you break the brick, as it were, you can use one CPU, main battery, network connection and storage for all your devices. Then just bring whatever interfaces you need for whatever you tasks you expect that day, and use interfaces in your environment when they're available.

• Thin clients don't grow with Moore's Law. An alternative to having your personal CPU with you at all times is to run a thin client that has just enough smarts to talk to a server over wireless. The server then does all the heavy lifting. The trouble with this approach is that thin clients rely mainly on two resources: wireless bandwidth and the rather significant battery power needed to get to the nearest cell tower. The trouble is, these are the two resources that are growing most slowly. Since 1990, the RAM in mobile computers has improved a hundred-fold, CPUs 400-fold, and disk-space a whopping 1200-fold. In that same time, long-haul wireless speed has improved only 20-fold and battery efficiency only three-fold. (Thanks to Thad Starner for those numbers.) And, of course, thin clients don't work when you're in a wireless deadzone.

It's not clear when Intel (or Apple or Sony for that matter) will finally come out with a successful Personal Server style product. The hardware is just one necessary piece to the puzzle, with resource discovery, communication standards, good interface design and of course the all-important "killer app" to bring it all together. But in spite of the hurdles yet to come, this is the right approach. I'm glad to see Intel is giving it the support it deserves.

• The Personal Server (Intel Research)
• Intel Personal Server Research: Mobile Computing in the Palm of Your Hand (Roy Want, Intel Research, 5 September 2003)
• Intel Foretells "Personal Server" (Mark Hachman, eWeek, 16 September 2003)
• Intel Developer Forum (Intel, 16-18 September 2003)
• IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC 2003)

ISWC registration deadline this Friday 

As a reminder for those who are interested in wearable computers, the early registration deadline for the 7th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers is this Friday, September 26th. You can check out the advance program here.

I'll be co-teaching the Introduction to Wearable Computers tutorial with Thad Starner, and am also tutorials chair and on the program committee.

Privacy and soft walls 

I've been reading up on IBM's recently announced WebFountain project. The system, which has been dubbed Google on steroids, spiders the Net and other databases and applies various data-mining, natural-language processing and pattern recognition techniques to the data. The current system uses 500 parallel-processing Linux boxes, all accessing about half a terabyte of storage in the basement of the IBM Almaden Research Center. IBM's infrastructure allows clients to customize their searches and standing queries using a library that will "tokenize the data to identify people and companies, and discover patterns, trends and relationships in the data." The technology is being offered as a service, and is already being sold through a partnership with Factiva. It is being marketed mainly for trend identification and for "reputation management," where a company watches chat rooms, bulletin boards, newspapers and other sources to see what people are saying about it.

I'm quite interested in the technology, and even have a friend from grad school who has been working on it (Hi Dan!). But the thing that got me thinking was a comment about privacy by Robert Morris, the director of IBM Almaden. As reported in the San Jose Mercury News:

The technology could potentially raise privacy concerns if companies turned its power on analyzing individuals. But Hart and Morris said both companies would protect user privacy.

"Anything we mine is public data on the Web," Morris said.

But it isn't yet clear how the company would restrict users trying to use the tool to invade someone's privacy.

The quote is in line with the comment by The Economist: "No doubt some people will say it sounds a little intrusive. But all WebFountain does is reveal information that is hidden in plain sight."

Unfortunately, the idea that anything findable on the Net is "public" is a dodge — "public data" is a simplification of what is a much more complex set of social rules. Counter-intuitive as it may sound, privacy rules are not primarily about restricting information access to particular people. The primary purpose of privacy rules is to keep people from using the information in ways that would harm the person who is keeping it secret. This is why companies wink at sharing trade secrets with your wife or husband but are adamant about not revealing them to potential competitors, unless they've first signed a non-disclosure agreement. The NDA explicitly restricts harmful uses of the data, making the privacy rules unnecessary.

The idea that privacy is a restriction on power was brought home to me a few years ago by an old fraternity brother of mine. Back when he was still finishing his PhD at MIT he got a call from an MIT campus policeman, who somewhat sheepishly explained that he was calling on behalf of an irate member of the Massachusetts Maritime Police Department. Apparently this maritime policeman had been surfing the Web and had come across a picture from my friend's undergraduate fraternity days, showing him firing water balloons from a giant funnelator. The campus policeman said he was calling to inform my friend that slingshots are illegal in Massachusetts, and that he wanted to make sure that the device had been destroyed.

So here was a picture that was clearly "public" in that it had been published for anyone to see. The intended audience was anyone who was interested in our fraternity's annual Water War, plus anyone else who might get a chuckle out of it. You could even say the intended audience was everyone in the world except for particularly humor-impaired members of the Massachusetts Maritime Police Department. If webservers had provided such vaguely-defined access rules, we certainly would have used them.

A more realistic idea of public vs. private spaces is one of intended use, with restrictions on access as a proxy for limiting that use. When I write an article for an academic journal or even a blog entry I expect to be called upon to defend my position. When I write a LiveJournal post I expect much less criticism, and I expect that people who read my postings will be the sort of people who generally agree with me and will be accepting of whatever personal thoughts I write. Both are published on the Web, both are "public," but different social rules are implied by the relative ease of access, ease of discovery, and the different communities that are most likely to come across my posts. Difficult access provides a kind of "soft wall" that restricts access to certain communities, and the social rules of those communities provide a soft wall that limit how my information will be used. I expect most LiveJournal users would feel violated if information from their posts wound up being used in targeted marketing literature, even though most posts aren't password protected.

I don't intend to slam WebFountain with this argument — WebFountain is just the latest technology that is moving soft walls around by changing the ground rules. It was also only a matter of time before such a service was be offered. As a coworker of mine has pointed out, it is almost a certainty that the NSA has already developed such technology. (The argument goes: (a) The NSA would have to be really incompetent not to have done this, and (b) the NSA is not incompetent.) Given this is likely, it seems better for society that such technology be out in the open so people can adjust their expectations about how soft those soft walls really are.

• WebFountain (IBM Venture Development)
• WebFountain Overview (IBM Almaden Research Center)
• IBM to market Web data tool (Dean Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News, 18 September 2003)
• Fountain of truth? (The Economist, 4 September 2003)

Move over Zuccarini 

For those who don't know, John Zuccarini is the most notorious of the so-called "typo-squatters," people who register domain names that are common typos of popular websites and then flood the poor fat-fingering visitor with advertisements. Zuccarini had at least 5,500 copycat Web addresses, and the FTC estimated he was earning between $800,000 and $1 million annually from the mostly porn-based banner ads he displayed, in spite of numerous lawsuits against him for trademark violations. Zuccarini was arrested last week under the new Truth in Domain Names provision in the PROTECT Act of 2003, which makes it illegal to use misleading domain names to lure children to sexually explicit material.

But to add insult to injury, no sooner has Zuccarini been arrested than he has been toppled as the typo-squatting king by a new upstart: the domain-name register VeriSign. Trumping Zuccarini's 5,500 copycat domain names, VeriSign has used their position as keeper of the keys to redirect ALL unregistered typos to their site. Try going to http://whattheheckisverisignsmoking.com/ and see for yourself. VeriSign has posted a white paper on their new move, which creates a top-level "wildcard" registry for every domain-name request in the .com or .net domains. The change redirects any entry without DNS service to VeriSign's own SiteFinder search engine, including reserved domain names such as a.com and domain names that are registered to other people but don't have an active name server.

The main problem is that VeriSign is abusing their position as gatekeeper of the com and net domains, which are a public trust and not VeriSign's commercial property. Network types have also been quick to point out other ways this move breaks things on the Net. Most important to everyday users, Web browsers are no longer able to gracefully handle bad links or mistyped URLs. Most browsers pop up a small dialog box for a bad URL, leaving the user on the old page. With the new changes, browsers cannot give this functionality. (Of course, for people who use versions of IE that redirect to Microsoft's search-page, the only difference will be a change of masters.) Furthermore, debugging scripts often use domain-not-found errors to check for routing problems; these are no longer returned. And finally, anti-spam software also often uses domain-not-found errors to detect mail from invalid email addresses. (There was also concern that email sent to a typoed domain name would not bounce properly, but it seems this was either not the case or has been fixed.)

As one might expect, the flameage has been fast and furious on this one. Of particular note is the discussion on the North American Network Operators Group mailing list, where members have already contributed several patches to routing software that would essentially ignore VeriSign's wildcard lookup, restoring the Internet (or at least the portions that apply the patch) to the old way things operated. Many are also simply dropping the IP address for sitefinder.verison.com (64.94.110.11) on the floor. If widely adopted such actions would essentially neutralize VeriSign's change, but I expect the adoption levels will only be enough to be a statement of protest, not an actual revolution. However, Computer Business Review notes that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages aspects of the DNS for the US government, has yet to weigh in on whether VeriSign's changes are actually valid according to agreed-upon specs.

UPDATE: It seems VeriSign is only half-handling email correctly. What they've done is hooked up their own special mail-handler (which they call the Snubby Mail Rejector Daemon v1.3) that returns a fixed set of responses to SMTP transactions. Currently, VeriSign reads the From and To headers and then returns an error code. This means all misaddressed email relies on VeriSign's server to bounce mail, and should the server not be available bounces might be delayed by several days. It also means that all addresses of typoed email are actually sent to VeriSign before being bounced, rather than stopped locally. Of course, I'm sure no VeriSign employee would be so criminal as to actually use this information for industrial espionage, nor would he change the Snubby Mail Daemon to actually collect the contents of said messages.

Friends of mine have also pointed out that ISPs and businesses "cache" DNS addresses on their local DNS servers. By claiming that all DNS requests are legitimate, VeriSign is clogging these caches with bad requests.

References

• Notorious Cyberscamer John Zuccarini Targeted by FTC (KEYTLaw, 1 October 2001)
• Feds arrest Florida man in `mousetrapping' online porn scheme (Erin McClam, Associated Press, 3 September 2003)
• Truth in Domain Names Act (26 February 2003)
• Protect Act Fact Sheet (Department of Justice, 30 April 2003)
• VeriSign's Site Finder Implementation (VeriSign, 27 August 2003)
• Re: What *are* they smoking? (Marius Strom, email to NANOG mailing list, 16 September 2003)
• VeriSign Eyes Valuable 'Junk' Traffic (David McGuire, Washington Post, 16 September 2003)
• Re: blocking AS30060 (Will Yardley, email to NANOG mailing list, 16 September 2003)
• VeriSign Countermeasures (ImperialViolet.org, 16 September 2003)
• VeriSign Mulls Way to Make Money from Typo (Kevin Murphy, Computer Business Review, 9 September 2003)

Flash Voids 

Science fiction author Larry Niven once described a world where people would instantly teleport to places where something interesting was happening, causing what he called "Flash Crowds." Now the LA Times reports that movie makers are seeing the opposite problem: instant communication means that if the audience doesn't like your movie on opening-night Friday, by Saturday you'll have yourself a flash void:

"Today, there is just no hope of recovering your marketing costs if the film doesn't connect with the audience, because the reaction is so quick — you are dead immediately," said Bob Berney, head of Newmarket Films, which distributed "Whale Rider," a well-received, low-budget New Zealand picture that grossed $12.8 million and has endured through the summer. "Conversely, if the film is there, then the business is there."

Two things are going on here. The first is just that word-of-mouth is getting faster, which we already knew. That means that the old strategy of hyping a bad movie so everyone sees it before the reviews come out won't work much longer. The more important point, though, is that movie companies are seeing their carefully crafted ad campaigns overwhelmed by the buzz created by everyone's texting, emailing and blogging. The shift in power cuts both ways: audience-pleasers like Bend It Like Beckham thrive on almost buzz alone, while The Hulk was killed by buzz based partially on pirated pre-release copies, in spite of a huge marketing campaign.

Studios (and producers in general) will learn one of two lessons from this trend. Either they'll decide they need to manipulate buzz by wooing mavens and carefully controlling how information is released, or, just possibly, they'll follow the advice of Oren Aviv, Disney's marketing chief: "Make a good movie and you win. Make a crappy movie and you lose."

References

• High-Tech Word of Mouth Maims Movies in a Flash (Lorenza Muñoz, LA Times, 17 August 2003)
• 'Bend It,' like 'Greek Wedding,' is starting off strong (Andy Seiler, USA Today, 14 April 2003)
• Texting blamed for summer movie flops (Andrew Gumbel, The Independent, 18 August 2003)
• Flight of the Horse (Larry Niven, collection of stories where Flash Crowds is described, 1971)

The ESP Game 

What do ESP and Artificial Intelligence have in common? The ESP Game, a new game (and AI research project) recently discussed at IJCAI by CMU researcher Luis von Ahn.

Many AI researchers believe that the biggest barrier to creating human-like intelligence is that humans know millions of simple everyday facts. This ordinary knowledge ranges from knowing what a horse looks like to a simple fact like "people buy food in restaurants." In the past, AI researchers would spend years painstakingly entering such information into huge databases, but now a new crop of researchers are leveraging the millions of Netizens who have nothing better to do than answer stupid questions all day to build these databases quickly and for free. One such site is the OpenMind Initiative (hosted by my own Ricoh Innovations), which is primarily being used by the MIT Media Lab to collect Common Sense Knowledge.

The latest foray into this space is the ESP Game. When you log into the game you are paired randomly with another player on the Net. Both you and your partner are shown the same 15 random images from the Web, one at a time. Your job is to type in as many words to describe the image as possible, with the goal of matching a word your partner has entered. When you agree on a word, you both get points and move on to the next image. Usually I don't care for Web-based games, but I have to admit the game is compelling.

The real goal of the system is to generate a huge database of human-quality keywords for all the images on the Net. The task is huge: Google's Image Search has already indexed over 425 Million images by using the text that surrounds the image's hyperlink. But numbers are on Ahn's side: if only 5000 people were to play the game throughout the day, all 425 Million images would receive at least one label in a single month. Given that many game sites get over 10,000 players in a day, a few months is probably all Ahn needs to fill out the whole database.

Micropayments finally here? 

I'm probably the last on the block to have heard about this, but Scott McCloud, the author of Understanding Comics, has finally come out with an online comic available for a micropayment of 25 cents. Or rather, he came out with it over a month ago, but I just found out about it today. As you might expect from Scott, he's put the new medium (Macromedia Flash in this case) to good use without losing the fundamental comic-book feel. It was a quarter well-spent, especially since I could download the content to my computer and feel like I actually got something I can call "my copy."

Payments are made through BitPass, a new startup out of Stanford that allows you to open an account with as little as three dollars and a credit card or PayPal account. The whole process was quick and painless, as is the payment process itself. There's not too much content you can purchase through BitPass yet, but it looks like they're building up a solid content base as they go through their beta-testing. Content providers seem to still be figuring out how the market will play out for different kinds of media: models range from the donation cups that are already common with PayPal, to purchase-and-download, to a "30 reads in 90 days" pay-per-view kind of model.

And now just in case I wasn't quite the last person on the Internet to have heard about this, you know too.

And the DMCA be damned... 

Here are a few free Mac programs I've recently come across that make it easy to exercise your rights to fair use. Which is to say, these are programs that allow you to backup, timeshift, spaceshift, or quote digital media that you have bought and paid for but that the Content Cartel would rather you not be able to manipulate. Windows users will have to find their own equivalents (they're bound to be out there) or just break down and buy a Mac.

• DVDbackup: A program that copies a DVD to disk. It can also change or remove region codes, remove the Macrovision Analog Protection System that prevents copying DVD movies to video tapes, and decrypt the Content Scrambling System (CSS) that prevents copying of commercial DVD content to another digital storage media. Simple drag-and-drop interface. Freeware. Note that some uses of this program may be illegal in the U.S. or any other country that has granted legal protection to any business model that can be encoded in digital rights management technology.
• OpenShiva: Convert a VOB (DVD video) file to MPEG-4 with AAC audio codecs. This will reduce the size of a full-length feature film from about 4.7 Gigabytes to only 1 Gigabyte without substantial loss in quality. Simple interface, and lots of options including cropping and scaling of the final output. Open source (GPL). Note that for commercial DVDs you will need to use something like DVDbackup to decode the CSS encryption first.
• WireTap 1.0.0: This program goes right to the sound drivers and records any audio playing on your Mac. This includes sound snippets from DVD movies, games, iChatAV conversations, or Internet radio. Free product provided by Ambrosia Software, the people who make the SnapzProX video/screen capture software.

Kaltix and personalized search 

There are some interesting rumors floating around about Kaltix, a stealth start-up out of the Stanford WebBase Project. This is the same group that created the PageRank algorithm that was later spun out as a little start-up called Google. As you might expect with a company in stealth mode we're still long on speculation and short on facts, but it looks like their main technology is a faster way to compute PageRank, the algorithm used by Google to rank hits from a search based on the Web's link structure.

This is interesting because it would allow Google (or any other search engine) to quickly recalculate personalized indexes for each and every user. After seeding a personal index with my bookmarks file, Google would know that when I for "Jaguar" I'm probably interested in the latest version of Apple's OS, not the car or the cat. The CNET article has a good overview, but Jeffrey Heer's blog has a nice perspective as a researcher who happens to be housemates with one of the Kaltix founders.

There are a lot of question-marks still, and I'm not yet convinced that Kaltix's technology is the crown jewels that Heer or the CNET article claim it is. Speedy indexing is necessary for large-scale personalized search, but you still need to create a profile from something. The real question will be whether a search engine can generate a personal profile that helps disambiguate the searches people make in actual use. Add to this the need to keep personal information like browser history from being transmitted to outside companies and you have a tall order. I'm not saying these problems can't be solved, but as far as I know they haven't been solved yet. I expect Kaltix will get bought by one of the big search companies, but it will still be several years before we see personalized search running on any large (non-intranet) scale.

References

• Searching for the personal touch (Stefanie Olsen, CNET, 11 August 2003)
• Search (and destroy) (Jeffrey Heer, Heerforceone, 15 July 2003)
• The Stanford WebBase Project

Identity Theft and the Need for a New Common Sense 

A couple stories have come up the last two days that highlight how the way the law and business determines identity isn't keeping up with technology. One story is about identity theft and the other about computer security violations, but both have a common thread: technology has made it so our common-sense assumptions about how to tell someone's identity no longer work.

The first is a lengthy Washington Post article about identity theft. The driving story is about Michael Berry, whose identity was stolen by an ex-con who proceeded to rack up debt and eventually commit murder all while living under Berry's name. Around this driving story the article gives a good analysis of just how incredibly easy and common this kind of identity theft is today.

It used to be that identifying someone was a long-term and high-touch operation. You'd get paychecks from a local business, deposit checks at the local bank branch, and write checks to the local grocery store. Over time all these entities would get to know you and your identity would become firmly entrenched in the system. Now that society is more mobile that system doesn't work, and we're finding that the replacement system of asking for social security numbers or mother's maiden name doesn't work too well either. Currently banks have to eat any monetary losses that come from identity-theft fraud, but do not currently have to take responsibility for damage caused to a person's credit rating or reputation (as a recently upheld by the South Carolina Supreme Court). That means that, as the law stands now, the economic incentives encourage more convenience and less security than would be the case if banks had to take the total cost of identity theft into account.

The second story is from yesterday's New York Times, who reported that a British man was exonerated of child pornography charges after his computer was found to have been infected by nearly a dozen Trojan-horse programs. Mr. Green, who has lost custody of his daughter and spent nine days in prison and three months in a "bail hostel" due to charges, has all along claimed that his computer was infected and that it even dialed into the Internet when no one was home.

In this case the question is whether Green is responsible for the material on his own computer. Not long ago if a crime was committed in a particular house then the perpetrator could only be one of a handful of people. For these data crimes, the person actually downloading porn onto Green's computer could have been literally anyone in the world. Similar arguments have been made about open Wi-Fi access points and "zombie" computers that are used as launching pads for attacks on other sites on the Net. As the Times article points out, there are two issues here. One is that bad guys could use such security problems as a defense, the other is that it really is a valid defense:

"The scary thing is not that the defense might work," said Mark Rasch, a former federal computer crime prosecutor. "The scary thing is that the defense might be right," and that hijacked computers could be turned to an evil purpose without an owner's knowledge or consent.

The general problem is that our old common sense ideas of identity no longer hold, or can't be applied in our hyper-convenient and mobile society. I'm not necessarily in control of my own networked computer. I'm not the only person who knows the last four digits of my SSN. And the person handling my application has almost certainly never seen me before, and that's no cause for alarm. Perhaps technology will come to the rescue in the form of biometrics that can prevent identity theft while still preventing governmental abuses. Perhaps regulation will come to the rescue in terms of systems to challenge faulty information, and by insuring that those who are responsible for security have the incentive to maintain it. Probably a combination of these will be required, but in the mean time I expect the problem to get worse before it gets better.

References

• Identity Crisis (Robert O'Harrow Jr., The Washington Post Magazine, 10 August 2003)
• Acquitted Man Says Virus Put Pornography on Computer (John Schwartz, New York Times, 11 August 2003)
• South Carolina High Court Hands Down Major Identity Theft Decision (Shannon P. Duffy, The Legal Intelligencer, 12 August 2003)
• Of 'Zombie' Computers and DDoS Attacks: The Security Liability (Dorsey Morrow, SC Infosec, 3 April 2002)

Guided Voting 

Eugene Volokh has an interesting post about guided voting over at the Volokh Conspiracy (also discussed at Edward Felten's Freedom to Tinker).

Guided voting already exists in basic form. I'm knowledgeable about a few political issues, but when it comes to local candidates or ballot initiatives outside my area of expertise I rely on party affiliation or endorsements from friends or organizations I trust to "tell" me how to vote.

Prof. Volokh's point is that, like it or not, Internet voting will lead to a much greater role for guided voting. Today's ballots have a candidate's party affiliation printed on the ballot, but if I want to know how, say, the National Organization of Women feels about a candidate I need to do my homework in advance and bring a cheat sheet. Volokh paints a future where I could go to a trusted third-party site, say suggestedvote.com, and check off the organizations I would like to guide my vote. The website would then produce a suggested ballot that aggregates all the recommendations of the organizations I picked, possibly weighing organizations differently in case they conflict on a particular issue. Then with a single keystroke my suggested ballot could be filed. The advantage of such a system, so the argument goes, is that the influence currently held by our two main political parties would be diluted and the political process would become more diverse.

While I like the idea in principle, I think there are two improvements that could be made to Prof. Volokh's scenario:

First, there is no reason to have a third-party gatekeeper such as suggestedvote.com. More general and egalitarian would be for election boards to publish a standard XML ballot and then any interested party could publish their own itemized recommendations. I would be able to subscribe to recommendations from now.org, aclu.org, or even volokh.com just like I currently subscribe to RSS feeds to read several blogs at once. Of course, a site like suggestedvote.com could still offer to host RSS or similar recommendation feeds for anyone who doesn't have their own website.

Second, I am quite frightened by the concept of one-click voting. Behavioral psychologists have repeatedly shown that people will tend to do what an interface makes easy to do (see The Adaptive Decision Maker for a nice analysis). This is why there are heated debates about things like motor-voter registration and whether voting booths should allow a single lever to cast all votes for a single party, policies that would be no-brainers if changing the convenience of voting didn't also change who votes and for what. Given that any change we make will affect how people act, I want the system to encourage thoughtful individual contributions to our democracy, not a constituency of sheep.

This is not to say there should be no voting guides at all, but rather that people should still be forced to actually see and touch every ballot measure, even if it is only to find and check the their favorite party nominee. Each ballot measure and candidate would be accompanied by labels representing endorsements by each guide the voter has chosen, possibly with links from the endorsement to a short argument explaining the group's reasoning. Rather than follow an automatically aggregated recommendation, voters would judge for themselves who to follow on each individual issue. Voters might even choose guides from organizations with whom they explicitly disagree, either to vote against their measures or to see opposing viewpoints. This system would not be that much more inconvenient than the one-click voting Prof. Volokh suggests, but would insure individual voter involvement while still giving the main advantages of voting guides.

References

• Guided Voting (Eugene Volokh, The Volokh Conspiracy, 5 August 2003)
• Guided Voting (Edward Felten, Freedom to Tinker, 7 August 2003)
• The Adaptive Decision Maker (Payne, Bettman & Johnson, Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Howard Dean, Blogs, and the Fireside Chat 

Mark Glaser at Online Journalism Review has an interesting look at Howard Dean's Blog For America campaign blog. Glaser's main point: Dean's blog is building support and a sense of connection to his campaign, even though almost all the entries are from his campaign staff rather than Dean himself. As Dan Gillmor puts it, the official Dean blog is a campaign document, not a candidate document.

The article raises the question of how blogs (and by extension, the Web) is best used in political campaign. For Dean, blogforamerica.com is a tool for organizing grassroots support. It lets supporters know what they can do to help, and more importantly it keeps them informed about the bigger picture of how the campaign is moving. Dick Morris even goes so far as to declare grass-roots Internet organization as the new replacement for television ads. But as Glaser points out, you don't get the feeling of being in Dean's head like you would if he were writing his own daily entries. In fact, you get a better sense of Dean's thought process from the posts he made as a guest blogger at Lawrence Lessig's site than from his own blog.

Certainly there's nothing wrong with how Dean is using his blog, and his success so far has shown (yet again) just how powerful the Net can be for grass-roots organization. But I can also see why people would wish for more personal contact through his blog as well. Like email, blogs are an informal and even intimate medium, better suited to throwing out ideas that are from the heart, or at least from the hip, than to well-rehearsed campaign speeches. It gives everyday voters a seat on the campaign bus, where they can discuss the issues in detail and watch as positions become fully formed. One of the problems with politics, especially around campaign season, is that everything is so well crafted that you can never hear the doubts and alternatives that had to be considered in crafting the final message. This was brought home to me after 9/11 when, for a period of about three months, it seemed like the curtains had been lifted and politicians were all thinking out loud.

The next question in my mind is how this sort of medium can be used once a candidate is elected. Dean has commented that he might have a White House blog if he's elected, and of course already the White House publishes Press Secretary briefings on the Net. Perhaps the White House blog could become the 21st century's fireside chat?

References

• Dean's Blog Builds Support Despite a Lack of Personal Input (Mark Glaser, Online Journalism Review, 6 August 2003)
• Blog for America
• Dean Campaign Blog Isn't Candidate Blog (Dan Gillmor, 6 August 2003)
• Dean's Internet Revolution (Dick Morris, FrontPageMagazine.com, 6 August 2003)
• From Burlington (Dean's comment on a White House blog) (Howard Dean, Blog For America, 16 July 2003)
• White House Press Briefings

Art history, optics and scientific debate 

Our Chief Scientist, David Stork, has been doing some side research the past few years in art history. In particular he's been assessing a theory that artist David Hockney presents in his book "Secret Knowledge": that artists as early as 1430 have secretly used optical devices such as mirrors and lenses to help them create their almost photo-realistic paintings.

The theory is fascinating. Art historians know that some master's used optical devices in the 1600's, but Hockney and his collaborator Physicist Charles Falco claim that as early as 1430 the masters of the day used concave mirrors to project the image of a subject onto their canvas. The artist would then trace the inverted image. This alone, Hockney and his supporters claim, can account for the perfect perspective and "opticality" of paintings that suddenly appear at in this time period.

If the theory itself is fascinating, I find Stork's refutation even more interesting. Stork's argument is based on several points. First, he argues, there is no textual evidence that artists ever used such devices. Hockney and his supporters counter that the information was of course kept as a closely guarded trade secret, and that is why there was no description of it. It isn't clear how these masters also kept the powerful patrons whose portraits they were painting from discussing their secret. Stork's second argument is that, quite simply, the paintings aren't all that perfect perspective after all. They look quite good, obviously, but if you actually do the geometry on the paintings Hockney presents as perfect you see that supposedly parallel lines don't meet at a vanishing point as they would in a photograph. And third, Stork points out that the methods Hockney suggests would require huge mirrors to get the focal lengths seen in the suspected paintings: mirrors far far larger than the technology could create at the time.

My analysis is a little unfair to Hockney as I've only seen Stork's presentation, but I must say I'm impressed with his argument. Hockney's argument is quite media-pathic. It's a mystery story that wraps history, secrecy, geniuses, modern science and great visuals all in one -- no wonder it's captured people's attention! Unfortunately, I expect Stork's right about one of the less fun aspects of the theory. It's also probably dead wrong.

For those interested, a CBS documentary on Hockney's theory will be rebroadcast this Sunday, August 3rd, on 60 Minutes.

References:

• Was It Done With Mirrors? (CBS 60 Minutes, 16 January 2003)
• Art & Optics (Conference Web Site, 1 December 2001)
• Further Reflections (Stork's objections from the Art & Optics conference)
• Optical Projection in Renaissance Art: Did the Great Masters Cheat? (Interview with David Stork, Advanced Imaging, June 2003)
• FAQs about claims by David Hockney and Charles Falco on the purported use of optical devices by early Renaissance painters (David Stork's page on the subject)

NPUC 2003 Trip Report 

A couple weeks ago I attended the New Paradigms in Using Computers workshop at IBM Almaden. It's always a small, friendly one-day gathering of Human-Computer Interaction researchers and practitioners, with invited talks from both academia and industry. This year's focus was on the state of knowledge in our field: what we know about users, how we know it and how we learn it.

The CHI community has a good camaraderie, especially among the industry researchers. I suspect that's because we're all used to being the one designer, artist or sociologist surrounded by a company of computer scientists and engineers. Nothing brings together a professional community like commiseration, especially when it's mixed with techniques for how to convince your management that what you do really is valuable to the company.

One of the interesting questions of the workshop was how to share knowledge within the interface-design community. Certainly we all benefit by sharing knowledge, standards and techniques, but for the industry researchers much of that information is a potential competitive advantage and therefore kept confidential. Especially here in Silicon Valley, that kind of institutional knowledge gets out into the community as a whole through employment churn, as researchers change labs throughout their careers.

Here are my notes from several of the talks. Standard disclaimers in place: these are just my notes of the event and subjected to my own filters and memory lapses. If you want the real story, get it from the respective horses' mouths.

Mike Kuniavsky (Adaptive Path): Reverse the polarity

Kuniavsky's first point was that the dot-com era brought new awareness of the need for usability testing and design. What was once an after-thought is now recognized as a primary driver for getting and keeping customers. He describes it as a crisis of purpose that has brought many new players together, including people involved in design, information science, HCI, ethnography and marketing. Techniques have also shifted from those that study single users (psychology, cognitive science) to those that study groups (marketing).

He then described the methodology used at his usability consulting company, which starts with an analysis of all stake-holder needs. These stake-holders include users of the system or Web site, as well as management, tech support, system maintainers, etc. Through this more holistic approach their solutions are more likely to have long-term benefit for their client because they can be more confident the right problem is being solved.

Colin Johnson (EyeTools): Understanding Users Through Their Eyes

EyeTools is a spin-off company from Stanford that provides user-testing of websites and software using their eye-tracking equipment. Their final reports show exactly where visitors are looking when they read a site, displayed either as they paths their eyes travel or as heat-map displays overlayed on top of the main page. They've shown some clients that not only are users not seeing the important marketing blurb on a page, but that they don't even notice when the blurb is changed to complete gibberish.

One preliminary but interesting effect they've seen is that people have very different viewing patterns when asked to "say out loud what you're looking at" than when they simply read naturally. If confirmed in a full study, that would imply the typical stream-of-consciousness commentary method of evaluating an interface may not get at natural usage patterns.

Bonnie John (HCI Institute, CMU): Data collection in support of US: Moving HCI to Level 5

Many Engineering fields have at least flirted with the Capability Maturity Model, which describes a process as being in one of five stages of maturity: Initial (chaotic), Repeatable, Defined, Managed, and Optimizing. The idea is to standardize the entire process such that methods are repeatable and testable, and the results of any change are predictable. Dr. John's argument was that we, as a field, should strive towards levels 4 and 5.

Arguments against this idea came fast and furious. The first was that our work would become controlled by the "tyranny of the quantifiable." Some research can not be easily quantified, but this does not make the research any less important. It was also pointed out that in HCI it's very hard to tell what to measure, and doubly hard for politically-charged applications such as education. The compromise position was that especially critical niches might still benefit, such as usability of interfaces for NASA's Martian lander. It was also pointed out that the field knows a great deal of rules about ergonomics, but such information has not yet been collected into a single volume.

Genevieve Bell (Intel): Lessons from the field: or, how not to do ethnography in 5 easy lessons

Dr. Bell had just gotten back from six months in Asia, studying daily interactions with technology in urban centers in India, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, China and South Korea. The talk had lots of interesting insights about both Asian and Intel culture; here are a few tidbits:

• Asia is huge and extremely varied. This should come as a surprise to no one, but...
• ...did come as a surprise to some at Intel.
• Religion is hugely important in some parts of Asia. For example, mobile phones in Malaysia and all around the Middle East have a much-loved feature: push a button and they point towards Mecca.
• In South Korea mobile phones are used to manage complex social networks to set up blind dates.
• Technology in Asia is used as a way to show your identity more than here in the US. Phones often are attached to stuffed animals or toys with which the owner identifies. She also showed cellphone covers from Malaysia with pictures of airplanes flying into the World Trade Center, and covers with Bin Laden's picture and a quote from the Koran encouraging martyrdom. All hung out for sale in a normal retail store, wrapped in a Hello-Kitty plastic bag.
• In the US, mobile technology is still more predominantly information, with communication secondary. It is the reverse in Asia.
• Intel culture is such that people really want a big take-away message on a single PowerPoint slide. That's how ideas have an impact there (and many other modern businesses I might add): have it on a slide that others can steal and put in their own talks. These days ideas are traded around like currency, three bullet-points per thought.

Merissa Mayer (Google): The science behind Google's UI

Google has six basic steps to designing and testing their interfaces:

1. Use existing bodies of research. For example, they mined all the psychology literature about what kind of fonts and color combinations were most readable.
2. User-test existing products. Initial tests look at around 15 users to get feedback. Testing in early 2000, for example, revealed that users kept waiting "for the page to finish loading" because the layout is so sparse. This led to Google adding the copyright notice at the bottom, as an indicator that the page was complete.
3. Internally test products in development. Ms. Mayer kept talking about feedback from "googlers," clearly an extremely valuable internal testing resource. Eventually I asked what exactly googlers was, and whether it was some specific Q&A group. She laughed and said no, it was just the company-wide mailing list. Whenever they have a new interface or feature to test, they just send the URL to the entire company, and the next day find some 100+ emails with feedback. Google clearly has a fun and open company culture; it shows in everything they do. One nice quote: "Delightfulness has a value. People like to know the personality of the people behind a service."
4. Experiment on live site. Google will sign up sets of users (e.g. broadband users in a specific area) to try out a beta site. They used this technique to try out displaying thumbnails of resulting web pages. The feature wasn't well-received: the thumbnails forced text down, so you could only fit four results above the fold instead of 5-7. Also, thumbnails were generally not useful unless you had seen the page before. However, they are trying the thumbnail experiment in Japan now, where usage is different. Due to differences in the keyboard, the Japanese use Google much more often to go to simple URLs like Yahoo!, rather than type the URL in directly.
5. Analyze the logs. Google is constantly checking their logs to check things like how often the spell-checker feature is used.
6. Lather, rinse, repeat. Iterate after each step. Google does a site-wide test once a month, and also tests other products like advertising products or the Google Toolbar.

As an interesting side-note, she says the purchase of Blogger wasn't as strategic as it is seen to be outside of Google. They were purchased mainly because they were good engineers who needed resources, and it seemed to be a good match. There might be a move in the future to have them help with a service where blog owners can resell targeted ads on their site, should they want to monetize their publications.

Electronic Voting Gets Burned 

Electronic voting is getting slammed this week. First, Dan Gillmor's Sunday Column took election officials to task for not insisting on providing physical paper trails that can be followed should the results of an election be in doubt. Then on Wednesday several computer security experts at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University published a scathing analysis of the design of the Diebold AccuVote-TS, one of the more commonly used electronic voting systems, based on source code that the company accidentally leaked to the Internet back in January. Exploits include the ability to make home-grown smart-cards to allow multiple voting, the ability to tamper with ballot texts, denial of service attacks, the potential to connect an individual voter to how he voted, and potentially the ability to modify votes after they have been cast. The New York Times and Gillmor's own blog have since picked up the report. Diebold has since responded to the analysis, but at least so far they haven't addressed the most damning criticisms.

There are several lessons to be learned from all this:

1. Paper-ballot voting systems can fail and can be rigged, as anyone who was awake in November 2000 can attest. However, they have two advantages over electronic systems. First, they are easily understandable. Every voter and poll worker understands that ballots should be kept in a locked box to keep them from being stolen or modified. Far fewer people know how to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks on protocols that don't encrypt their passwords. Second, paper ballots are localized. If I want to rig a paper-ballot election I need to do a lot of leg-work to get all those physical artifacts changed. With some of these electronic security exploits I just need access to a single voting booth and I can silently change every vote it registers for the rest of the day.

   The solution lauded by both the Johns Hopkins team and Gillmor is to have a "voter-verifiable audit trail" as a backup for the electronic system. Whenever a vote is cast, a paper ballot is printed and checked by the voter for accuracy. If the print-out reads correctly, the ballot is stored as a record of the vote. If it is incorrect, the vote is invalidated and the paper ballot destroyed. Should the electronic record be questioned, the paper audit can be counted to confirm the results.

2. To be secure a system needs openness, not secrecy. Security is hard to get right, and there are a lot more bad guys in the world than there are good guys working on a single programming team. The best way to secure a system is to publish the full specs and source code and let the world's experts look for loopholes. Diebold claimed their system was secure, and even had outside certification by "independent testing authorities." But once the code was shown in the light of day the warts became visible. Vendors who sell "secure" software without publishing their source code are like used-car salesmen who won't let you do a test-drive first.

   Diebold is in an interesting situation now. The Johns Hopkins analysis found security holes big enough to fly a starship through, but they had to make a lot of assumptions due to not having the complete specification. Diebold is defending their software in part because of those holes in the team's knowledge, but unless the whole system is brought out into the light for a full and informed debate to occur there's no way it can be trusted.

3. The Johns Hopkins analysis notes that there was a large amount of additional source code they could have used to analyze the security of the system, but did not. The problem was that the extra source was protected by a PKZip password. PKZip doesn't provide any real security (there are plenty of password-breaker programs online) but the team didn't crack the minimal encryption because they were worried about being arrested under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Yet again, the DMCA has a chilling effect and leaves our Nation worse off and less secure in the process.

Luckilly, if you live in California there's something you can do. Secretary of State Kevin Shelley is soliciting public comments on a recent task force report on touch-screen voting machines, until Aug. 1. Comments can be sent to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, attn: Touch Screen Report, 1500 11th St., Sacramento, CA 95814. E-mail comments to taskforcecomments@ss.ca.gov or fax at 916-653-9675.

References:

• Technical Response To The Johns Hopkins Study On Voting Systems (Diebold, 25 July 2003, updated 29 July 2003)
• Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say (NYT, 24 July 2003)
• Security Experts: Electronic Voting Machines Threaten Democracy (Dan Gillmor's Blog, 23 July 2003)
• Analysis of an Electronic Voting System (Kohno, Stubblefield, Rubin and Wallach, 23 July 2003)
• Electronic Voting Machines Need More Safeguards (Dan Gillmor in Silicon Valley, 20 July 2003)
• Ad Hoc Touch Screen Task Force Report (California Secretary of State, 2 July 2003)

US to add RF-ID to passports by October 2004 

Frank Moss, US deputy assistant secretary for Passport Services, announced at the recent Smart Card Alliance meeting that production of new smart-card enabled passports will begin by October 26, 2004. Current plans call for a contactless smart chip based on the ISO 14443 standard, which was originally designed for the payments industry. The 14443 standard supports a data exchange rate of about 106 kilobytes per second, much higher than that of the widely-deployed Speedpass system.

The Enhanced Border Security Act and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002 requires that countries in the US visa waiver program include machine-readable biometric data. This new passport project would update US passports to meet that standard as well. Moss says the goal is global interoperability, and plans to adopt standards from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The EU recently made a similar announcement.

The new passports would encode cryptographically signed copies of the passport photo and passport information, making such information more difficult to forge. Moss did not mention the use of biometric data not currently included on US passports, such as fingerprints or retinal scans, though The Register suggests that the EU is looking into these systems as well. Given that the ICAO has not yet ruled out such additional biometrics it is probably too soon to tell, though the current ICAO blueprint does favor face images over fingerprint or retinal-scan technology.

References:

• Government Cites Policies and Standards Behind Broader Use of Smart Cards (Smart Card Alliance, 22 July 2003)
• Passports to get facial biometrics (Washington Technology, 22 July 2003)
• TI Embraces Prox Card Standard (Texas Instruments RFiD Journal, 6 March 2003)
• Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002 -- ALDAC No. 1 (US State Department, 15 May 2002)
• MRTD - Biometric Technology Identity Confirmation (ICAO Tech Report Exec Summary, March 2003)
• Other ICAO Technical Reports
• Biometric Identification To Provide Enhanced Security And Speedier Border Clearance For Traveling Public (ICAO Press Release, 28 May 2003)
• EU backs biometric passports (The Register, 23 June 2003)

IEEE deciding short-range wireless standard this week 

Nearly six years to the day after the process was started, it looks like the IEEE is honing in on a single standard for a fast (around 100 Mbit/s), short-range (< 10m), low-power, low-cost wireless communication. The standard, which will be IEEE 802.15.3a, comes out of the IEEE Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) working group. Unlike cellular or Wi-Fi networks, the point of a personal area network is to communicate with other devices that are there in the room with you. For example, a high-speed WPAN would allow your PDA to stream video directly to a large-screen TV. Alternatively, your core CPU could wirelessly communicate with medical sensors, control buttons, displays and ear-pieces, all distributed around the body. The standard fills much the same niche as Bluetooth (the first standard adopted by the working group, also known as 802.15.1), but the new technology is significantly faster than Bluetooth (up to 100 times faster, according to champions of the technology).

Trade news columnists who know more than I do about this are picking Texas Instruments' proposal for OFDM UWB (that's Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Ultra Wide Band, thank you for asking) as the likely technology to be picked. Assuming it does, TI's UWB business development manager says we can expect to see the first UWB products hitting the marketplace in 2005.

Update: The standard did not receive enough votes to pass, and will be voted on again in mid-September.

References:

• IEEE 802.15 Website
• Wireless raises the final standard (ZDNet, 22nd July 2003)
• Basis of UWB Spec Could Be Decided This Week (Electronic News, 21st July 2003)
• Military's 'sneaky wave' out of hiding (C|net, 11 March 2003)
• Texas Instruments' UWB page