Not so with Yahoo! Answers because it allows the person who asked the question to essentially shut down further answers on the question by designating it as answered satisfactorily. Even this wouldn’t be so much of a problem if Yahoo! Answers pages didn’t inherit Yahoo!’s page rank in Google, so they occasionally turn up on the first page of search results in Google even though they contain wild inaccuracies.

For example, the other day I blanked on the name of Leon Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics during the Bush administration. Among other things, people have highlighted Kass’s bizarre view that eating an ice cream cone in public is a disgusting, animalistic behavior that civilized people would never engage in.

My Google search, however, turned up this Yahoo! Answers page as the very first result, even though it is filled with inaccuracies.

Karl Zinsmeister, G. Bush’s ‘Morals and Ethics’ advisor (hey, don’t laugh Demos — you’ve got Ted Kennedy and Jore Biden on the Semate Ethics Committee!) — published a White Paper naming his chief concerns about US morality.

Near the top of the list was Mr. Z.’s florid statements about a lewd practice he sees as “descended from cats and dogs”, and which should be “confined, if necessary at all, to private places so as not to offend the general public”. What is the awful degenerate behavior so threatening to decorum and even Our Way of Life?

Hold onto your hats — it’s EATING ICE CREAM CONES!!!
Hundreds of words spewed out about this by a man with the President’s ear — chosen by him in fact to gauge moral sensibilty. Just when you thing the Bush administration has reached its limit for abject insanity, another summit comes into sight.

Of course, it wasn’t Karl Zinsmeister but rather Leon Kass. Zinsmeister was Director of the Domestic Policy Council  beginning in 2006.

Moreover the claim this appeared in a white paper strongly suggests — and in fact commenters to the page pick up and amplify this — that the ice cream quote appeared in a document Kass prepared as part of his role in government. In fact, it appeared in his 1999 book The Hungry Soul which specifically examines the paradoxes and problems with eating.

But there’s almost no way to point that out because the person who wrote all that closed the page after receiving a satisfactory answer to his or her question.  Yes, you can still post a comment, but the comments are effectively hidden so it is very unlikely anyone will notice them, much less read them.

So this inaccurate information just sits out there, potentially deceiving folks and getting relatively high page rank due to its association with the Yahoo! brand.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

Yahoo! Answers’ Irresponsible Behavior

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The victims, aged 25 to 35, were forced to pay large sums of money to the gang members, who told the women they would go mad or have their souls destroyed if they disobeyed orders given during Voodoo rituals that were held in Nigeria involving pieces of their fingernails or hair.

How utterly bizarre.

Source:

Spanish police arrest Voodoo extortion gang. Associated Press, May 23, 2009.

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Human Trafficking Women Threatened Nigerian Women with ‘Voodoo Curses’

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Blackest Night Earth-2 Superman

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Lego Star Wars Minifigs

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U.S. organizations squander $2.8 billion a year to power unused machines, emitting about 20 million tons of carbon dioxide — roughly the equivalent of 4 million cars — according to a report to be released Wednesday.

About half of 108 million office PCs in the USA are not properly shut down at night, says the 2009 PC Energy Report, produced by 1E, an energy-management software company, and the non-profit Alliance to Save Energy. The report analyzed workplace PC power consumption in the USA, United Kingdom and Germany.

That makes sense. I have a low power server at home that I leave on at all times (because it’s actually working on automated tasks 24/7), but for the most part I put the rest of the computers I use into a sleep mode at night. Partly that’s to save energy, partly it is so the entire house isn’t lit up like a Christmas tree from a bajillion LED lights.

But here’s Null’s take on this,

Of course, it’s also a fact that your PC will function better if you restart it regularly, and nightly shutdowns can help you avoid having to suddenly reboot in the middle of the day when you’d otherwise be productive. So even though this little laptop, by my math, eats up only about a quarter’s worth of power overnight, maybe it’s a smart idea — and ultimately a time-saver, too — to shut it down after hours after all.

Okay, that’s retarded. The fact that we’re most of a decade through the first part of the 21st century and users of the major computer OS have to regularly restart is a bug not a feature. It would be interesting to calculate the energy and time lost just in rebooting Windows — I’d wager it is significantly higher than the total cost of leaving machines on all night.

Besides, not all of us use OSes that need to be constantly restarted. I use several machines that regularly go months and even years without needing to be restarted (if I had more redundant power, I could go even longer than that) and with no measurable decline in performance.

What really needs to happen is improvements in the way sleep modes work coupled with the already burgeoning focus on lower power machines.

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Should You Leave Your Computer On Overnight?

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The most obvious feature is the steady decline of Internet Explorer’s market share from 90 percent in 2004, to just around 66 percent today. Firefox and Safari are the two browsers that have gained most from Microsoft’s losses.

One way to look at this is the glass is 2/3rds empty — the vast majority of Internet users still use crappy Internet Explorer despite all of its problems, security issues, etc. On the other hand, the 1/3 glass full view is that this is a phenomenal achievement. As one of the commenters to Dotzler’s post notes,

It is [a bit depressing that IE' share is still so high], but then you have to remember these are percentages of the whole web-using population. A few percent a year equates to millions of users switched. When you consider that it has happened without OS-bundling, without huge paid marketing campaigns, and without major web sites mandating particular browsers, then it’s actually an incredibly impressive rate of adoption. Even as it stands, the market share of non-IE browsers is enough to keep Microsoft honest, and force them into a more proactive and standards-friendly approach. IE8 may still be way behind the competition in many areas, but at least it pays far more attention to web standards than any previous IE release, and we have Firefox and Safari to thank for that.

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Long Term Browser Usage Trends

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The idea is simple: whenever you are on an editable website (usually a wiki), your borwser should display an icon just like it does when you’re on a website with an RSS feed.

Gohr stepped in and took the existing FF addon for this and fixed some bugs and other issues and it is now in the experimental repository. Gohr is hoping enough people will check it out and review it to have it moved to the regular Firefox Extension area.

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Universal Edit Button Extension to Firefox

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So JJ Abrams’ take on Star Trek is an enormous hit and garnered relatively good reviews. It is not a bad summer movie in the same way that, say, Armageddon was not a bad summer movie. If all you want from a movie is to watch some cool effects and an occasional explosion or fifty, both of those films will deliver, and without any fealty to any internal consistency on the science. Fine, I could live with that. But what Star Trek combines is a complete lack of a meaningful story in conjunction with the  worst aspects of the Star Trek franchise.

For all of the media commentary about how Star Trek films (of all things) were too cerebral and Abrams’ movie represented a break with that, Abrams draws on the most overused hackneyed plot device that pretty much ruined Trek in general — time travel. And here we’re talking about time travel that supposedly results in a supposedly new timeline so Abrams can presumably discard the long history of Trek. Abrams should have called his movie Star Trek: Crisis on Infinite Worlds — given his history on Lost and Alias, the next movie will almost certainly feature retcons galore and soon the continuity will be orders of magnitude more complex than it already was.

Oddly, though, Abrams proceeds to simply fill in the details of his new film by borrowing liberally from the previous films and series, so it is difficult to understand what the point of the time travel reboot plot was in the first place (in fact there are brief but interesting homages to Star Trek II and Star Trek IV — both of which were much better films than this). Perhaps Abrams thinks time travel is the alpha and omega of science fiction; one can almost imagine script meetings these days…oh its a sci-fi film, don’t forget the time travel subplot!

Once you get past the pretty explosions and the incoherent time travel plot, there’s not much else to Star Trek. There’s very little of the humor or the character interactions that made Star Trek sometimes interesting. The characters wear familiar outfits, but they’re cookie cutter depictions that could be applied to any generic space opera film. Whereas Gene Roddenbery once called Star Trek “Wagon train to the stars”, Abrams model is more like “Friday Night Lights with spaceships and phasers.”

Leonard Nimoy’s in there, but his presence just reminds the audience of just how poor the new replacements are — ultimately they’re little more than placeholders for the original actors and the entire movie is a pale shadow of what it could have been.

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A Contrary Opinion on JJ Abrams’ Star Trek

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But wait … where’s the Spider-Man bluetooth headset? Come on, guys, lets get with the program here.

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The S On the Chest

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Penguicon

John “Maddog” Hall

Sustainable Computing

40th year in commercial computing. Using unix for 32 years. Using Linux since 1994.

Linux is inevitable. Manager said “what do you mean by that?”

Programmer, systems engineer, product manager, QA, technical marketing, educator, consultant

My C code looks a lot like Fortran I and talks with a Russian accent.

One Laptop Per Child – XO
$100 computer

Nicholas Negroponte showed me this.
I said ‘where’s the Internet’?
That was my problem with the project. Not the goal.

The goal was actually to bring the Internet to the kids. If you could have done that with tin cans and string, then for god’s sake do it.

$100 laptop — ooh, that’s great.

What do you think of when I say the word “Brazil”?
Maddog does a little dance.

Sao PAOLO BRAZIL — second largest city on planet. 19-29 million people.
The Internet is not 500 miles away in Brazil.

80 percent of people in Brazil/South America live in urban areas.

Internet is 50 feet away..but if you can’t reach it.

My African savanna…the Brazilian favela…
If we could bring Internet to poor slums, that would be great.
But you have to bring the Internet to that.

Goals:

sustainable business model — not proprietary software

Digital inclusion – easy to use, affordable

Environmentally friendly — low electric power; small effect on earth; long life

Sustainable business model — creates jobs

*sustainable business model* is most important thing

Maddog–I can’t use free software because there’s no big company behind it; no one I can sue if something goes wrong.

Ever tried to sue Microsoft? License/warranty gives meaningful away rights to sue

Software is no longer a luxury.
If software were to disappear, planes would fall from sky, elevators would stop working.

Mergers — products disappear and software you’ve been using disappears.

Cuba — cannot use any of our software legally due to embargo.
Even if we don’t’ have an embargo, those countries say ‘what if we do’

Brain drain–countries want to have software economy in their country. Right now, students in these countries go elsewhere.

Scale of support — very, very bad problem. When I started in computing and had a question, it was very easy to find someone who knew the answer. Person next door or downstairs would know the answer.

These days when you have a problem, where do you get the support. You call tech support. Phone menu systems.

If you’ve written a explanation for closed source software, how often do you get a detailed workaround in return. It’s not because they don’t want to help you but because they can’t help you.

How many have had a bug in proprietary software? How much did that cost?
* lost time
* lost effort

How many have had to change the way they did business? How much did that cost?
* retraining
* loss of sales
* customer dissatisfaction
software freedom allows business decisions

Use free software–they say, we already use free software, we just pirate it from Microsoft.

Used to be China pirated 96% of software. Now they only pirate 8x%.

U.S. pirates 34% of its software

Inverse relationship between GDP and how much software piracy

The Beginning of the End

Economies of scale made “shrink wrap” software possible.

Companies started up — 100 engineers / 1000 customers / 2000 reporters / 20 engineers

Maddog called up company to report bug and talked to the president…who was also QA/shipping/etc

Volume of bug reporting was acceptable.

Time goes on…

150 engineers, 4.5 million customers

If each one puts in 1 bug report and 1 request for new functionality, 9 million pieces of paper and 60,000/engineer

The person who absolutely needs that bug fix/enhancement cannot get it.

Only going to get worse.

40 years ago software was less complex — support was closer and training was greater.

Now: software and networking are re more complex; training is less; support is further away

Binary-only shrink wrap is child of the 1980s

Ease of use: the real problem of desktops — my mother and father

Why are they a problem?

* they do not want to spend hours installing their software

*they do not want to spend hours fixing viruses

* they do not want to have to upgrade their system every three years

* they don’t want to have to worry about any networking issues

*they just want to email and surf the web*

Loss of Productivity

5 USD lost per day/person — viruses/crashes/worms/spam/software not doing what we want it to do.

*Times 900,000,000 systems – $4.5 billion/day

BC: that’s almost certainly a vast underestimate.

Digital Inclusions — easy to use client/server

*LClient inexpensive — low power — fixed for most customers; no fan or movable disk; local storage through USB thumb-drive or disk

Very expensive system burns up due to failure of $5 fan.

Could stick in thumb drive and do local storage, or attach local devices.

Very, very low power device. These thin clients would be attached to a very powerful local server system.

Regional/Local Server

Why easy to use?

Software installation by systems administer / software updates by SA / viruses treated by SA / SPAM filtering by SA /  Backups by SA / Reliability monitored by SA

Users just *use* system

What else does SA do?

Trains users to better use systems.

Creates web sites

does simply programing/consulting

sells computer supplies and peripherals

Attracts additional clients

SA is an Entrepreneur

Leases hardware/software/services

Rotates old equipment out over time

Keeps servers responsive

I keep running into people all the time who say they want to do a job with free software. Great, but lets do something sustainable with that job and make it something that’s your own business.

It took us 60 years to create e the first billion computers — that’s how many there are now…a few hundred million servers.

and we think it will only take 5-6 years for the next billion computers!

Cost of computers dropping like a rock, and utility of the Internet is driving sales of computers.

Not necessarily desktops — smart phones, etc.

Going to be something that’s fairly complex.

But we will still have another 4.3 billion more computers to deliver. People who do not have computers yet.

Without paying attention to power issues….if we try to deliver 200-300watt desktop systems to all those people, @200w each…for next 70million computers .. a hydroelectric plant at 14gw…just to run those…and another hydroelectric plant like that to cool them…and that’s only 70million.

We have to get the power requirements down.

What will drive this — 9 petabytes of data

Computers everyplace
*not just the office/kitchen/bedrooms/tv room

Doing everything — dsl modem/routers

Omnipresent computing

BC: ooh…I need that.

We want computing available all the time. Compute returned off is worse than a boat anchor.

If you do have electricity…it may be expensive.

Off vs. on grid…most of us are on the grid…get electricity from power system.

Off grid, electricity becomes much more expensive.

IRaqw…downtown Baghdad only had 3 hours of electric power for three hours a day…run computers a few hours a day, then power goes off.

If you had a computer that only used 10w, you’d be charging cart battery when electricity was on and then run computer rest of the day on charged batteries.

Inveno and Africa — asterisk in Africa…on very low power computer…solar power and bicycle power. Inveno would ask tribal leaders which they’d prefer, and they’d say bicycle…repairing solar cell expensive and takes a long time.

Small Footprints

Bad chemicals — RoHS compliance

Large boxes and landfills — pay to buy; pay to dispose

Computers that are easy to recycle so we don’t end up with mountains of computer hardware.

Client in detail — less than 10wats –12 volt

always on; multi-function with virtualization; wireless mesh router and backhaul capable – 802.11 wimax

No noise; no fan; no moving disk

long life

Science fiction stories where computer is actually helpful — i Ono for that day

Job is just to display data to you.

Average lifetime of a fan in a boat is about 1 and a half years.

You’re going to have several thin clients.

One or Many

May be only one or many thin clients per household — low wattage/cost makes multiple clients possible

Using the right power in the right place

Digital Inclusion — people want sex

Maddog — even though the people want to have digital inclusion, they want to have sex. THEY WAnt to have something that’s sexy — like rich people have.

smart phone-style smart client — GSM/802.11/bluetooth/USB 1.x/GPS/Accelerometer/8gb flash store

Servers in Detail

Industry standard — lower power

Three sizes — all has with redundant disks
Reutilize parts as serve needs grows

Free software

debian based / virtualization ;/ encrypted file systems / virtual private networks

Networking

“Free” WiFi throughout Brazil

“Fon” or “Beijing” model
Limited “free” bandwidth per user client
Internet everywhere, all the time

Internal network protected by virtualization

I want to make every computer system in effect a wireless router.

Backhauls provided through wired Internet to servers
*reduced latency / increases throughput to fixed clients

Inexpensive

Pay for equipment on a lease basis.

*allows investment in long-service equipment
*start small and expand server as needed

Sustainability: People become dependent

I’ve seen lots of these projects, and they try to do it by using government money

Government money is a way to fail

I do believe that software people should be paid for the software they write.
Way for sustainability is to create a system where people can make money and people value the job that they have.

Show people how they can offer these service to other people, and then facilitating them doing that. That is how it is going to be sustainable.

Not just for emerging nations.

New JErsey — nation’s most populous state / highest density of living

Appalachia / American Indian Reservations / Inner City Chicago

A lot of our SA make so much money right now, it’s difficult to make this model work very well.

Co-operatives

Single person — what can you do

BBest way is to form a cooperative — one of the problems that companies have is dealing with a single person. They want to deal with a company that has longevity. A lot can happen to a single person, but a company tends to go on.

Cooperative — like minded people all working with free software all with different skills who then go out and engage with different customers. These people share legal resources and sales resources. This is the type of thing that gives longevity to a company.

Summary

The Internet should be omnipresent

Computers should be on all the time (but using such a small amount of energy we don’t care)

Information accessibility should be a right , not a privilege.

Emerging economies may be center city — Chicago or wall street or Detroit

Who knows where the next Albert [Einstein] will be?

Why did I present this talk at Penguicon?

With free software, you get to see the people who write the software…they are visible.

Why did I present this talk at Penguicon?

You folks deal with science fiction. Science fiction has an odd way of becoming science fact. You’ve been working toward moving ideas forward.

We should be working to get good software out there so people can lower the cost of computing.

Koolu — www.koolu.com

Linux New Media

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John “Maddog” Hall – Sustainable Computing

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Drudge has had all the personal publicity anyone could ever want and more. He has no interest in becoming just another bold-faced name in the gossip columns like Donald Trump or Lindsay Lohan. His resistance of the temptations offered by the celebrity culture is quite admirable, even if it is unfathomable to the shallow hacks at The New Republic.

Okay, this is the same Matt Drudge who in 1997 went public claiming Sidney Blumenthal beat his wife, only to later have to apologize saying he had been given bad information. Oops, sorry about those lies about your private life!

Although I like his site for the links he turns up, Drudge is a scumbag pseudo-journalist who is the last person in the world who should expect that he will get any sort of pass on his private life.

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… is free for 7 days after it is posted. The article …  requires a subscription. If you are a subscriber, please login below. Otherwise, subscribe now.

The kicker is that the subscription is completely free, except you have to enter all sorts of demographic information including name, address, type of business you work at, job function, etc.

Riiight. Sorry, there’s never going to be anything captivating at your site to make me waste my time going through that process.

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Even if you’ve never seen it, the title probably gives it away. The Professor manages to build a spaceship (of course — why didn’t he think of that before!) to get off the island, but of course things go awry and the castaways end up marooned on another planet.

Except for Tina Louise (who obviously had issues with the whole Gilligan gig), all the original cast provided the voices.

So my only question is how come its 2009 and this still isn’t on DVD?

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So sometimes I’m tempted to pick up a copy of Warman’s Lunch Boxes Field Guide, but I know the next step is bidding wars on eBay for that 1974 Planet of the Apes metal lunchbox that I sincerely believed made me the coolest kid evar in school. But $110 or so for a nostalgic lunch box? That way, my friend, lies madness.

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In fact, I think the reality is that while there are surely battles ahead, the culture war itself is already over and traditionalist conservatives lost big time. Consider Young’s analysis,

There is no question that religion has often been used to promote virulent hatred and contempt toward gays. Yet traditionalist objections to same-sex marriage include not only religious scruples but concerns about the consequences of sexual liberation that are shared by many people on secular grounds — concerns about a cultural environment in which 40 percent of children are born out of wedlock and half of all marraiges end in divorce. Is it bigoted to believe that it is ideal for children is [sic] to have a mother and a father, or to worry that same-sex marriage will further uncouple marriage from childbearing and thus make it harder to answer the questions, “Why wait for marriage before having children?”

Don’t get me wrong — these are indeed serious issues. But from a purely descriptive point of view, hardly anything is being done about this. Everyone decries the out-of-wedlock and divorce figures, but it isn’t like there is a mass movement to stigmatize low-performing heterosexuals.

Few people on the right, for example, see Newt Gingrich’s multiple divorces and apparent acts of adultery as in any way deligitimizing his criticism of gay marriage. In fact it is all but unthinkable that anyone today would propose any sort of sanctions on “illicit” heterosexual relationships that used to be common in this country.

The reality is we might strongly dislike the divorce and out-of-wedlock birth rate, but we place a much higher value on our own personal sexual freedom. And that completely undermines all of the traditional arguments about gay and lesbian sexuality which is why the last 30 years have seen barrier after barrier restricting homosexuals fall. Barring the last minute rise of some anti-sexual freedom mass movement, the culture war is already over and it is just a matter of time before gay marriage becomes legalized throughout the U.S. despite the objections of its opponents.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

The War Over Gay Marriage Is Already Won

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Part of the reason is the Xbox. On the one hand, I have never found playing games on a console nearly as captivating or engaging as games on the PC. With PC games, you feel like you’re playing the game; on the Xbox it often feels like the games are playing you, since they tend to be far more linear and have fewer options.

But that’s not a bad thing in that it is a lot easier to hop on the Xbox and play for an hour or two, and then actually stop and go back to what I was doing. I could rarely do that with a good PC game.

The second thing that’s nice about the Xbox is precisely that it isn’t my PC. So laptop=writing/web browsing/productivity. Xbox=blowing off steam for an hour. And ne’er the twain shall meet.

Still, I can’t bring myself to actually cancel my WoW account — feels a bit like permanently putting my toon out to pasture. Maybe in a few more months I can reach some sort of closure there.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

How I Finally Quit Playing WoW

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Fortunately, there are scripts and add-ons to deal with most of the defects, such as the Folders4Gmail Greasemonkey script which lets the user organize labels into a hierarchical structure. Google says nobody needs this, but I beg to differ. This is extremely helpful. For example, each of my web sites sends out numerous administrative e-mails which I assign labels to. It’s extremely helpful to have a Web Sites –> websiteX hiearchy, so it’s easy to quickly drill down to these particular set of e-mails without cluttering up the labels list.

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Folders4Gmail Greasemonkey Script

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Zombie Miniatures

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Self-trackers like  [Chris] Messina and [Brynn] Evans could spend hours online, charting, analyzing, tracking. Life as a series of pure, distilled data points, up for interpretation.

I’m not sure if that’s reporter Monica Hesse’s take on self-surveillance or Messina and Evans really do enjoy spending that much time, but here’s my take — if you’re spending more than a few minutes a day capturing and tracking data, you’re doing it wrong. I’d say on most days I spend about at most 10 minutes doing the charting/analyzing/tracking routine (and I’m currently tracking 16 different variables). This is the computer/Internet age — automate, automate, automate and get back to living your life.

The other thing I find a bit odd in this article and others by proponents of self-surveillance is the extent to which you can make decisions based upon such data. There seem to be people, for example, who track their daily/hourly/whatever moods and then attempt to correlate that with other events.

Tracking can “zoom out over my entire life,” he [Messina] says. It could, for example, help him better understand the aforementioned breakup. “When you’ve self-documented the course of an entire relationship, trivia that doesn’t seem like much could, over time,” help him understand exactly what went wrong, and when.

Maybe, but I doubt it. I suspect that such data would either be obvious — wow, my mood is terrible the day before my dentist appointments as I have a childhood fear of dentists — or it will be specious correlations that are confused for causation.

So what exactly is self-surveillance good for beyond the obsessive need to do it? For me, it is primarily a) a tool for meeting personal goals, and b) a way to objectively look at the progress I’m making on those goals.

For example, I really want to lose about 50 pounds. But losing weight is difficult, and as my daughter’s endocrinologist told me, we have a psychological tendency to overestimate the amount of exercise we’re doing. So if I take the dog for a walk a couple months a day, there’s a strong part of  me thinking “okay, I took the dog for a couple walks, I can skip the treadmill.” Tracking weight, dog walks, treadmill, and other workouts does two things. First, it forces me every day to record objectively just what I did the previous day. Did I get on the treadmill? If not, a big 0 goes in there and I’m reminded I really should have done so. Moreover, I can see pretty much what effect that and other decisions have on my weight.

That’s a fairly traditional method of self-surveillance, but I use the same principle to keep me on target for my reading goal this year. Not only do I track when I start and finish a book, but I go so far as to track and record daily how many pages I read the previous day. Again, when I have to put in 0-15 pages, I realize there’s no way in hell I’m going to meet my goal with too many days like that. On the other hand, when I can stuff 172 in that particular chart, it is a very nice positive reinforcement that says “see, you can really do this.”

I don’t want to turn all Norman Vincent Peale here, but IMO a good portion of life is tricking/persuading ourselves to stay on task to achieve difficult goals. Self-surveillance can play a major role in personal achievement without becoming an obsessive substitute for it.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

Washington Post Article on Self-Surveillance

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Of course, it has always been a pain to store pornography — and so we have the cultural trope of a stash of magazines “under the mattress” or in a box hidden in the closet. But as the sex industry shifts toward digital publication at every level, we might imagine that mere storage will become a problem of the past, or, at least, a problem related to legacy materials (books, magazines, videos, comic books, photographs, etc.). Cheap, massive storage media means no more problem, right?

Well, reviewers of porn find that they quickly amass more material than they will ever have time to peruse; librarians who need to provide access to controversial and poorly cataloged material end up overwhelmed; even casual collectors of pornography still need some way to keep track of what they have.

Toward that end, I am doing preliminary research on how people store and access their digital pornography collections. In my early interviews, I have already encountered a fascinating mix of responses; one person has said they store their porn “in the cloud,” while another explained his detailed system for hiding digital porn files from his partner.

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How Will We Store (and Find) All That Porn?

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Futurama Captain Yesterday Action Figure

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Hasbro to Release 9 ‘New’ Iron Man Action Figures

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Yardley is co-founder of Pinch Media which makes spyware that is then baked into iPhone apps. When you use the iPhone app, the app gathers and transmits information about you back to Pinch Media. Johnson highlighted this, but Yardley responded that what company does is no different than what Boing! Boing! does,

Here’s what Boing Boing is running right now, right when I loaded this page:

Google Analytics
Quantcast
Federated Media
HitTail
Doubleclick
Google Custom Search Engine
Tribal Fusion
Six Apart Advertising
Adify
Chitika
AWStats

That’s no fewer than eleven different services that started tracking information about me without my consent. Most (not all) of these services track users across every domain where their code is placed, constructing a profile that’s then used for ad targeting. Some of these services go out of their way to circumvent user attempts to safeguard their privacy. A couple, for instance, store information in the much lesser-known – and rarely deleted – Local Shared Objects that come along with Flash, and have been known to use this information to ‘recreate’ user cookies after they’ve specifically been deleted. A couple more combine the information they’ve gathered about you here with information they’ve pulled in from social networks (where you’re also tracked) to work up a complete demographic profile for targeting. Some of these probably don’t even have a direct relationship with Boing Boing, but are served by other ad networks doing backfill – you could get a different set of trackers, potentially even more invasive, the next time you reload the page.

I didn’t consent to any of the tracking Boing Boing does – there’s no terms of service or privacy policy that pops up on first entry. Even if there *was*, by the time I got here, it’d be too late. If we went by the first commenter’s standards, Boing Boing’s running eleven different pieces of spyware.

The weird thing is that Johnson’s response is extremely weak (emphasis added),

And as far as Boing Boing’s tracking and analytics goes, I can’t really argue against his general point. It’s useful for me as a writer and small businessman to have some basic stats (tracking pageviews to understand what sort of articles readers find compelling, for instance), and I think most people understand that a baseline of metrics is par for the course on commercial sites, but I hate the amount of tracking the comes out of the ad networks, too, and it only seems to be getting worse. There’s rarely more perfidious Javascript than that coded by an ad network programmer.

First, I think he’s totally wrong about the bolded part. Most people don’t have a clue just how much data the typical website is gathering about them. If you started talking to them about “baseline metrics” as Johnson does their eyes would glaze over.

But even assume that is true, so what? Saying it is useful and most people have come to expect it seem like the sort of weasel words we’d see from any industry trying to cover its ass.

Johnson continues and here’s where he really goes off the rails,

But there’s one difference between web-based tracking and the sort of analytics that Pinch Media gathers on the iPhone: it’s pretty simple to figure out what stats tracking occurs between a web site and a browser on a computer, as Yardley shows; it’s much more difficult to discern—or even be aware of—tracking that occurs in a closed system like the iPhone. And it’s not FUD to point it out so users can make their own decision.

That is a complete crock of shit. It is, in fact, extremely difficult for most people to figure out what is going on when they visit a website. I know pretty much what Boing! Boing! is doing in the background because I run Adblock and NoScript and can quickly look at all of the stuff Yardley points out.

The secretary down the hall has no clue. Moreover, my experience has been that once you show people and they understand, rather than being empowered they are resigned to going along with the system because they have little choice to do otherwise.

I can quickly right click on the NoScript button and enable the Flash movie that I want to see but that it blocked. The secretary has better things to do than spend all of her time trying to guess which script on the page is serving up necessary content and which is going to rat her out to some other server.

And before anyone beats me to it, I do run two services here — Google Ads and WordPress.com stats. Google Ads because I’m a greedy bastard, and WordPress.com stats because I wanted a basic stat tracking without the overkill that is Google Analytics. I’m not prepared to defend either one as motivated by anything other than crass self-interest.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

Why Do Websites like Boing! Boing! Collect So Much Data?

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The obvious sort of tracking that goes on is that which even normal people tend to do — people tracking weight or calorie intake while on a diet, for example. Or weekend athletes tracking their efforts toward that next marathon or bike race.

But self-surveillance takes that as a starting point and then moves into often bizarre territory. For example, on a daily basis I track,

• weight
• blood pressure
• steps taken on the pedometer (Omron ftw)
• hours of sleep the previous night
• # of pages read in the book I’m currently working on
• bandwidth usage on my primary laptop
• bandwidth usage on my G1
• # of emails sent/received
• various exercise routines
• mood on a 5 point scale
• and about a dozen more different things that can be quantified

For anything that can actually be pinned down to a numerical value, Zealog is in my opinion the best tool out there.

First, it is extremely customizable, so you can track whatever you want instead of having a few pre-populated measures to choose from. Want to track # of hour spent web browsing daily (I should really add that to my list), it takes just a few clicks and you’ve got a chart in Zealog ready to start entering data.

Second, Zealog offers a number of different ways of accessing the data. You can view it in chart form on the site, and then make that chart public or private. Each chart also has an RSS feed which I particularly like as I feed all of the information into my lifestream application.

The only thing I really wish Zealog had at the moment was the ability to look at multiple variables on a chart. I’d love to be able to overlay my weight, calories and steps charts, for example.

Not everyone wants or needs to obsessively track the minutae of their daily lives, but if that’s your thing definitely give Zealog a try.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

Zealog

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There’s also a mode to make all tags private by default, and then require the administrator to designate specific tags as public as needed.

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Private Tags WordPress Plugin

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To oversimplify it a bit, the extended mind thesis claims that technology literally extends our minds outside of our bodies such as, for example, when we’re using a smart phone. Quoting Fodor quoting David Chalmers’ foreword to Supersizing the Mind,

I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain  . . . The iPhone is part of my mind alrady . . . [Clark's] marvellous book . . . defends the thesis that, in at least some of these cases the world is not serving as a mere instrument for the mind. Rather, the relevant parts of the world may have become parts of my mind. My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me . . .  When parts of the environment are coupled to the brain in the right way, they become parts of the mind.

I won’t go into more detail as Fodor does an excellent job of explaining the thesis and some criticisms of it, except to note that along with technology other people would seem to also be part of the extended mind imagined by Clark and Chalmers.

For example, there is a whole class of things that rather than my smart phone I consult my wife about. Restaurant food, for example. My wife can remember exactly what I want to eat at many food establishments, whereas I don’t consider it worth my time to commit this to memory and so will interrogate the waiters about this and that food choice.

Frequently, it is just easier for me to turn to my wife and ask her what I should order since she is able to much more quickly access what it is I would like at a given place than I would. Under Clark and Chalmers formulation it would seem my wife is part of my extended mind. I haven’t read enough to know what their view on other people as part of the extended mind is, but it certainly would be an odd result if they affirm this.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

Are We Out Of Our Minds (Or Our Minds Out of Us?)

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Hollywood Collector’s Gallery’s Giant Godzilla Statue

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Of the three pieces, Jennifer Stilles’s look at the National Archives’ efforts to preserve/recover data stored in obsolete formats was the most interesting. It seems clear from Stilles piece that the crux of the problem is the constant drive for technological innovation which produces products that are ever better but also, too often, ever more incompatible with previous formats. Moreover, this is a problem that started long before the current digital computer age,

On the wall are the internal organs of a film projector from the 1930s; the old heads have been mounted to play together with modern reels. “Twenty-eight different kinds of movie sound-tracking systems were devised during the 1930s and 1940s, trying to improve the quality of sound tracks,” Mayn explained. “Most of them are unique and incompatible.” This particular one used something called “push-pull” technology, in which the sound signal was split onto two different tracks. The technology was meant to cancel out noise distortion, but the two tracks must play in near-perfect synchrony. “If it is played back properly, it is better than a standard optical track, but if it is played back even a little bit improperly, it is far, far worse,” Mayn said. In the mid-1980s at a theater in downtown Washington, he was able to actually use this reconfigured projector to show several reels of push-pull film containing the trials of top Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. And the lab has transferred some 1800 reels of push-pull tape onto new negatives.

Wow. That fits nicely with one of the main problems with data storage today once you get past the physical media — the plethora of file formats and an odd lack of recognition that this is even a problem.

Microsoft rolls out yet another proprietary format for Office? Everybody simply upgrades without a second thought, because if you don’t all of a sudden you’re receiving file attachments you can’t open. Much of this is driven, I suspect, by the view that most data production is largely ephermal. Are we really going to be want to be able to open this report in Word 2003 format 10 years from now? Of course, I’ve also seen the fallout from that where people run around trying to find some way to open that 10 year old file which is suddenly extremely important due to issues with a specific vendor or contract, etc.

The current state of data preservation efforts remind me of the documentary “The Chances of the World Changing.” The documentary follows turtle enthusiasts who, given the lack of any coordinated effort to preserve endangered turtles, create their own ad hoc network of mini-Arks. They  buy up individual turtles from overseas, and store them in warehouses, basements, garages, etc., moving the turtles around when one or another enthuisast burns out or runs out of cash. And they hope they’ll be able to keep the turtles going and around until they’re able to get others to see the need for a permanent, formal preservation effort.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

Long Now Post on Digital Data Preservation

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Given how convoluted the admin area of WordPress still is (especially once you throw in the inconsistent admin functions of plugins), this is a huge timesaver.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

Admin Links WordPress Plugin

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I2P is an anonymous peer-to-peer distributed communication layer designed to run any traditional internet service (e.g. Usenet, E-mail, IRC, file sharing, Web hosting and HTTP, Telnet), as well as more traditional distributed applications (e.g. a distributed data store, a web proxy network using Squid cache, and DNS.

According to I2P itself,

The I2P project was formed in 2003 to support the efforts of those trying to build a more free society by offering them an uncensorable, anonymous, and secure communication system. I2P is a development effort producing a low latency, fully distributed, autonomous, scalable, anonymous, resilient, and secure network. The goal is to operate successfully in hostile environments. even when an organization with substantial financial or political resources attacks it. All aspects of the network are open source and available without cost, as this should both assure the people using it that the software does what it claims, as well as enable others to contribute and improve upon it to defeat aggressive attempts to stifle free speech.

I rarely want to do much completely anonymous activities on the Internet, but it’s good to know there are folks like I2P working 0ut the systems necessary to allow this for when/if it is necessary.

This is a post from Brian.Carnell.Com.

I2P Anonymous Network

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