Is "cold fusion" back?

Italian scientists claim to have demonstrated cold fusion (w/ Video)

Interesting, if true. Which it probably is not.

This, in particular, rings an alarm bell:

Further, the scientists say that the reactor is well beyond the research phase; they plan to start shipping commercial devices within the next three months and start mass production by the end of 2011.

It sounds like an elaborate investment hoax to me. Earthshattering discoveries like this just don't come out of nowhere in investment-ready state. It could also turn out that it's not actually fusion which is occurring. The authors of the study admit that they don't know what is happening, so this seems likely. A third-party research team needs to get their hands on one of these devices, study it thoroughly and see what is really going on.

Of course, in the unlikely event that this is the real deal, it may well save our collective asses. For now.

Show me the magic of your crystal ball, oh great prognosticator of the future! I swoon before your omniscience! I gibber in amazement before your...

Whoops--turns out Blogger actually does have a limit on the length of subject lines. How lame.

Anyway, getting to the point at hand:

It amazes me that people get paid to write stuff like this. Behold:

Things Babies Born in 2011 Will Never Know
[...]

Video tape: Starting this year, the news stories we produce here at Money Talks have all been shot, edited, and distributed to TV stations without ever being on any kind of tape. Not only that, the tape-less broadcast camera we use today offers much higher quality than anything that could have been imagined 10 years ago -- and cost less than the lens on the camera we were using previously.

One of the few "good riddance" items on the list. I can't see videotape being missed by very many, especially considering how poorly the tapes held up over time.

Travel agents: While not dead today, this profession is one of many that's been decimated by the Internet. When it's time for their honeymoon, will those born in 2011 be able to find one?

Amazingly, there are still travel agents in business today. I don't know why. Maybe they're a luxury item, for people who prefer not to spend hours poring over listings on Orbitz.com or wherever. My own guess is that this is how it will stay: The few travel agents still in business will be a luxury service, offering convenience and what-have-you above and beyond what can be found online with automated services. Saving money won't necessarily be the primary goal anymore.

The separation of work and home: When you're carrying an email-equipped computer in your pocket, it's not just your friends who can find you -- so can your boss. For kids born this year, the wall between office and home will be blurry indeed.

Now we start venturing into more dystopian territory. It's entirely possible that the sheeplike masses will submit to this bullshit, but I sincerely hope not.

Books, magazines, and newspapers: Like video tape, words written on dead trees are on their way out. Sure, there may be books -- but for those born today, stores that exist solely to sell them will be as numerous as record stores are now.

There was a time when this would have bothered me, but then the internet killed my attention span, so I am no longer particularly concerned about the demise of books. As for magazines, I've realized that they are perhaps the most worthless form of printed literature ever. They're worse than useless, actually, since the sole reason for their existence is to convince you that you absolutely need whatever it was that their advertisers are selling. Like, for instance, a brand new, $10,000 home theater system, to replace the $9,000 home theater system you already have.

Movie rental stores: You actually got in your car and drove someplace just to rent a movie?

This one is in the "already dead" category. I am aware of one brick-and-mortar video store left in my community, and, oddly enough, they are the one that was erected most recently (in the late 1990's). The last mom-and-pop video store went out of business about five years ago, and I only think they stayed in business so long because they were a tax write-off for mom-and-pop, who also owned a profitable marina or something like that. Netflix finally killed them, though. That left the chain stores. Hollywood Video's two outlets are now gone, and I'm pretty sure the last remaining Blockbuster is now gone, too. For the one store that's left, I'd be surprised if they're still in business at the end of 2011.

Watches: Maybe as quaint jewelry, but the correct time is on your smartphone, which is pretty much always in your hand.

Another one I'm not looking forward to. Not just because I don't own a "smart"phone, but because I honestly think a watch is just a better way of telling what time it is.

Paper maps: At one time these were available free at every gas station. They're practically obsolete today, and the next generation will probably have to visit a museum to find one.

This one is really going to suck. Paper maps are just superior to this GPS crap. Why? Because with paper maps, it's easier for morons to get lost, and that's something I'm in favor of. ;) Seriously, there is no way that all of this GPS shit will ever compare to the sheer beauty of a well-made paper map. The demise of paper maps, if it happens, and I damn well hope it doesn't, will be a great loss for mankind.

Wired phones: Why would you pay $35 every month to have a phone that plugs into a wall? For those born today, this will be a silly concept.

Yeah, this is increasingly getting to be a useless ripoff. The amount of snailmail spam I get from AT&T is ridiculous, too--they must really be getting desperate. I actually got one envelope from them with the words, "Please don't discard!" printed on the outside. It almost worked. For one thing, I respond much better to an honest, human entreaty like that than to typical corporate advertising hype. And, for a moment, I actually felt kind of sorry for them. But ultimately it boiled down to the fact that I already have pretty much what I want, and although I would consider changing things up if I thought it would save me some money, there's nothing out there that is likely to do that. Which is part of the problem.

Long distance: Thanks to the Internet, the days of paying more to talk to somebody in the next city, state, or even country are limited.

Good riddance. ;)

Newspaper classifieds: The days are gone when you have to buy a bunch of newsprint just to see what's for sale.

Craigslist baby! Craigslist! (Only problem is, you can't find listings for hookers anymore because those chickenshits caved in to a bunch of grandstanding whores attorneys-general.)

Dial-up Internet: While not everyone is on broadband, it won't be long before dial-up Internet goes the way of the plug-in phone.

I find it hard to understand how anyone can even function on dialup these days, with everything online being as bloated as it is. How do they manage their software updates, for example? What happens when they need to download a 50 megabyte update? That would take forever on dialup.

Encyclopedias: Imagine a time when you had to buy expensive books that were outdated before the ink was dry. This will be a nonsense term for babies born today.

This one is kind of sad, really. One of my favorite things as a kid, when visiting Grandma's house, was poring over her World Book encyclopedia set. I especially loved the transparent pages devoted to human anatomy, those were just plain cool. I've seen a lot of cool stuff online, but computers really do fail in one particular area, and that is the lack of "realness" that you get with real stuff. My parents didn't buy encyclopedias, but they did have a lot of other cool books. Several different Time Life series, for instance. I loved those.

Forgotten friends: Remember when an old friend would bring up someone you went to high school with, and you'd say, "Oh yeah, I forgot about them!" The next generation will automatically be in touch with everyone they've ever known even slightly via Facebook.

Sounds a bit nightmarish, to me.

Forgotten anything else: Kids born this year will never know what it was like to stand in a bar and incessantly argue the unknowable. Today the world's collective knowledge is on the computer in your pocket or purse. And since you have it with you at all times, why bother remembering anything?

Hmmm. What was I going to say? Unfortunately, I am unable to Google my short-term memory, although I'm sure the Google tech crew is working on that even as we speak...

The evening news: The news is on 24/7. And if you're not home to watch it, that's OK -- it's on the smartphone in your pocket.

Good riddance. "TV journalism" is an oxymoron anyway--worse than useless.

CDs: First records, then 8-track, then cassette, then CDs -- replacing your music collection used to be an expensive pastime. Now it's cheap(er) and as close as the nearest Internet connection.

I'm sincerely looking forward to getting rid of all optical media, which have proven to be a grossly unreliable pain in the ass. Compact discs, the original, non-burnable kind, were the only optical media that I ever thought was really decent, but even they haven't proven to be as durable as everyone originally thought. I have one disc, for instance, which has somehow developed a tendency to emit loud bursts of static, in time with and over the top of the music, as it plays. Since the music in question is classical piano, this represents a serious problem! (I suspect what's happening is the high-order bits have somehow become destroyed and/or obscured, and the noise is due to clipping resulting from the normally-16-bit signal getting unceremoniously truncated to 13 or 14 bits. Weird, and I would really be interested to know how something like that could happen. The disc exhibits no visible scratches or pinholes. It's a mystery.) Luckily, I was able to buy a duplicate copy of the CD, which is now ripped into my iTunes library. ;)

Film cameras: For the purist, perhaps, but for kids born today, the word "film" will mean nothing. In fact, even digital cameras -- both video and still -- are in danger of extinction as our pocket computers take over that function too.

Film cameras are now an "artist" item, much sought after by aspiring young photographers, many of whom are curious about this older way of doing things. As for digital cameras, I can certainly see a reduction in the avalanche of point-and-shoot models thanks to "smart"phones, although I don't think they'll ever completely go away. There are also DSLR cameras and mirrorless large-sensor cameras, which may yet experience some kind of major transformation, but haven't so far (the recent addition of video capability to DSLRs hasn't proven to be particularly transformative, although many do find it to be a useful feature addition). One advantage of a DSLR over a "smart"phone is the way it feels to operate. I own a Nikon DSLR, and I admit, sometimes there's a certain amount of pleasure to be had just from fondling the damn thing. :D

Yellow and White Pages: Why in the world would you need a 10-pound book just to find someone?

I've heard white pages are already on the way out. Yellow pages? Not sure, I have very little info on that one. I know that my brother, who is a portrait/wedding photographer, is not going to renew his AT&T yellow pages ad because it's just too expensive relative to the amount of business it brings him. The other thing about the yellow pages is that they are often a serious bother to use. You want to find something, so you look it up, but it turns out that whatever-it-is is not under the heading that you expect. You can easily waste five minutes struggling to find where whatever-it-is is. This is a pretty common problem, and the answer turns out to be fairly easy: Just Google It. ;)

Catalogs: There's no need to send me a book in the mail when I can see everything you have for sale anywhere, anytime. If you want to remind me to look at it, send me an email.

No complaints on this one. Just today, in fact, my stupid health insurance carrier clogged up my snailmail box with their phonebook-sized hardcopy edition of their preferred provider catalog. Most of these doctors aren't even local to here, so why the hell do I want this, exactly? I suppose this does depend on one other thing, though: How well their website works. Show me a shitty website interface, and I'll take the hard copy version, any day.

Fax machines: Can you say "scan," ".pdf" and "email?"

Yup. Dead. In fact it was just the other day that we got rid of our fax machine at work. It was in perfect working order, never had a problem with it, but when our old copier died and we replaced it with one that faxes and does everything else short of oral sex, our trusty little fax machine was instantly converted into a doorstop. :(

One picture to a frame: Such a waste of wall/counter/desk space to have a separate frame around each picture. Eight gigabytes of pictures and/or video in a digital frame encompassing every person you've ever met and everything you've ever done -- now, that's efficient. Especially compared to what we used to do: put our friends and relatives together in a room and force them to watch what we called a "slide show" or "home movies."

Whatever. All I know is that when I was a kid, I loved the slideshows whenever the relatives got together. They were fun! I never understood how other people thought slideshows were cheesy or boring. (Maybe other people just took more boring pictures than we did.) The other nice thing about them was that the quality was simply far superior to anything that has come since, including digital. Yes, the sheer resolution of modern DSLR and medium-format digital cameras will outstrip that of Kodachrome, but how many of us have computer monitors that are eight feet wide for viewing? Don't assume you know what I'm talking about just because you have a 100 inch hi-def TV, either. A Kodachrome 25 slide blown up to that size absolutely blows away any form of hi-definition TV currently available to consumers. The only thing comparable is what you see in movie theaters. (And, actually, a 35mm slide has double the resolution of a normal 35mm film frame anyway, plus there is a slight additional loss of resolution created by movie cameras that use anamorphic lenses to achieve a "wide screen" effect. So the real comparison might be to super-35 or 70mm film. IMAX would be superior, but nothing else that I am aware of.)

Wires: Wires connecting phones to walls? Wires connecting computers, TVs, stereos, and other electronics to each other? Wires connecting computers to the Internet? To kids born in 2011, that will make as much sense as an electric car trailing an extension cord.

Wires make it harder for the government to corrupt my precious bodily fluids. ;)

Seriously, I was looking for a replacement mouse the other day and was surprised by how few of them are corded now. That is unfortunate, because 1) a corded mouse is never going to get lost, 2) it's highly unlikely it will ever get broken from being dropped, and 3) it will never have to have batteries replaced. I can't see us running everything on batteries, can you? At the very least, we'll need somewhere to plug in the battery chargers.

Hand-written letters: For that matter, hand-written anything. When was the last time you wrote cursive? In fact, do you even know what the word "cursive" means? Kids born in 2011 won't -- but they'll put you to shame on a tiny keyboard.

What I want to know is, is it now possible to get through college without having to be able to write on paper? I'd love to go back to school, but my hands have changed so much since the first time around thanks to all the time spent on the computer. I get writer's cramp in less than a minute now. I have no idea how I would get through a 60 minute essay exam, for instance.

Talking to one person at a time: Remember when it was rude to be with one person while talking to another on the phone? Kids born today will just assume that you're supposed to use texting to maintain contact with five or six other people while pretending to pay attention to the person you happen to be physically next to.

[puke puke puke]

This one NEEDS TO BE STOPPED.

Seriously, I fail to see the point of talking to someone if they're not even going to pay attention.

Retirement plans: Yes, Johnny, there was a time when all you had to do was work at the same place for 20 years and they'd send you a check every month for as long as you lived. In fact, some companies would even pay your medical bills, too!

One mistake here was giving out pensions too easily. My dad retired at 55 for example. Admittedly, he had already put in almost 30 years by then, but still, 55 is pretty young to be retired, for anyone who's been employed in a normal type of job. However, it's not entirely that simple, because retiring at that age probably saved his life, too, which suggests that maybe more people should retire early...except that would clearly not work from an economic standpoint. I guess this one is too complex and far-reaching to make one quick little comment about, so I'm just going to blow it off.

Mail: What's left when you take the mail you receive today, then subtract the bills you could be paying online, the checks you could be having direct-deposited, and the junk mail you could be receiving as junk email? Answer: A bloated bureaucracy that loses billions of taxpayer dollars annually.

Netflix has turned me into a die-hard Postal Service supporter, since I have so far been uninterested in their streaming service. (That, incidentally, is almost certainly not going to be able to continue going the way it's going for too much longer--it's sucking up too much bandwidth and somebody is going to have to pay. I also heard that Netflix streaming movies aren't as good as a Blu-Ray disc to begin with, except for the fact that they're streaming, rather than being stuck on a scratch-prone, breakable optical disc...this one is no-win, I guess. Whatever happens is going to have some serious drawbacks.)

There seems to be less junk mail now than there used to be, too. I've noticed in the past couple of months that the amount of it I get every week has gone down. A lot. Enough to have an impact on the amount of garbage/recycling I have to do. The main snailmail spammers for me now are my phone company and my ISP, both of whom are totally desperate to upsell me to one of their ridiculous all-in-one plans. Purely random advertisements seem to have virtually disappeared.

One final thing on this: In my work, I often deal with postal service staff and I have to say, they have really improved in the past 15 years. That means I have to object to calling the Post Office a "bloated bureaucracy". It's true, the Domestic Mail Manual (aka "postal regulations") are probably just as bad as any other federal regulations, but the difference is that with the Post Office, you have easily accessible postal staff who are able to help you understand all of it. Just in the last few months I've had postal employees bend over backwards to help me out, saving me a lot of time, money and embarrassment. So please, spare me the "government bureaucrat" criticism. It's just not accurate for all too many of them.

Commercials on TV: They're terrifically expensive, easily avoided with DVRs, and inefficiently target mass audiences. Unless somebody comes up with a way to force you to watch them -- as with video on the Internet -- who's going to pay for them?

More to the point, how is entertainment going to be paid for in the absence of advertising support? Will it just be HBO and Showtime, the last two standing? Somehow, I doubt it, because, from what I understand, a lot of the production money for a channel like HBO doesn't just come from HBO subscriptions, but from subscription fees for basic cable as well. So how does that work if basic cable goes away?

Alternatively, if TV ends up staying with the "free" model, will it begin to rely more and more on product placements? Some of these have been getting pretty obnoxious. If you watch "Chuck" for instance, you have surely seen how sometimes they will interrupt the story for what is little more than a Subway commercial, starring the characters of the show. Yes, it was necessary to do that in order to save the show, and I don't mean to pick on Subway (or "Chuck") in particular, but if this is the wave of the future, I'll have to find something else to do with my time.

What they really ought to do is figure out a way to make automatic commercial skipping not work. But the problem there is that there are now enough alternatives to regular TV shows that making commercials harder to skip could easily backfire and drive a critical mass of people away. How many people will realize that their lives are simply too short to spend 20 minutes of every hour watching advertisements? It's not a tough concept to grasp.

Commercial music radio: Smartphones with music-streaming programs like Pandora are a better solution that doesn't include ads screaming between every song.

I stopped listening to commercial radio a long time ago. I don't even remember when it was anymore. There were just too many endlessly annoying ads, so I turned it off, forever. Student radio and public radio filled in the void for quite a while, but eventually Wisconsin Public Radio became Disney-fied, thanks to the never-ending necessity to pander to potential donors, so I decided to give up on that too. Student radio was simply too inconsistent to rely upon as my sole listening medium. So that was the end of that. My next car will have an iPod hookup. Or something.

Hiding: Not long ago, if you didn't answer your home phone, that was that -- nobody knew if you were alive or dead, much less where you might be. Now your phone is not only in your pocket, it can potentially tell everyone -- including advertisers -- exactly where you are.

Here's another one that can be filed under "Hell on Earth." Pop culture already seems to be catching on to this problem, though, at least a little. :P

I did want to add one item to the list, which children born in 2011 will hopefully be ignorant of: "Journalists" who have nothing better to write than utterly depressing articles about how much the world is going to suck 20 years from now, written in a tone suggesting that it's already a foregone conclusion, because, you know, "progress" is inexorable, and nobody has any control over any of this.

Of course, we will probably still have know-it-all bloggers. ;)

The Gawker case - is the FBI really needed?

More interesting news relating to the Gawker hack:

FBI Investigating Gawker.com Hack

NEW YORK – Investigators from the FBI were expected to meet with Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton Monday following the massive weekend hack by a group called Gnosis that paralyzed the media company’s website and temporarily forced it to stop publishing.

Unfortunately that's kind of vague, and there's no further indication of what the FBI is up to in this case. Maybe they're going to actually try to catch somebody. Or maybe they're just meeting with Denton as part of standard procedure and have little interest in protecting a site which so obviously failed to secure itself properly. Who knows.

What's interesting about this case is that, while I certainly am not going to advocate the sort of hacker break-in that happened here, there is also a definite element of "they had it coming" in this case. In other words, if the FBI decided to not take this case very seriously, it would hardly be a tragedy.

A somewhat flawed password-generation scheme

As suggested by this article, it is possible to dream up a way to have a unique password for every site you use, and not have it be a total nightmare.

How it works is that you come up with a base password, then devise a way to modify it based on which site you're using. So, for instance, if your base password is "34cheese!", and you are logging in to Gawker, you would add a letter "g" to the beginning, giving you "g34cheese!". The article suggests using three different base passwords, and separating them based on what sort of site they pertain to.

There are a couple of problems with the idea, though.

One is that it's going to eliminate quick logins, due to the need to think through the modification each time you log in. However, if you're really concerned about this, most sites have "keep me logged on" or "remember my password" options. In most cases they actually work, too. (Personally, I rarely use "remember my password" because if I do, it's much easier for me to forget it, which leads to a significant headache on the day when I find myself at a strange computer needing to access the site.)

More troublesome is that the idea isn't going to work in cases where your account is spread over a variety of sites. Gravatar accounts (anyone who uses Wordpress.com, for instance), OpenID, and others where you have the same username and login for a bunch of different, unrelated sites (such as Blogger and Google), are going to mess this idea up.

The troublesome implications of the Gawker hack

Some details from the group who pulled it off (article here)--they aren't willing to disclose exactly how they were able to hack the site, only that they have access to lots of passwords. They also commented at length on the poor security of the site. For instance:

We have had access to all of their emails for a long time as well as most of their infrastructure powering the site. Gawkmedia has possibly the worst security I have ever seen. It is scary how poor it is. Their servers run horribly outdated kernel versions, their site is filled with numerous exploitable code and their database is publicly accessible.

We will be releasing the full source code to their site as well as the full database dump later today or tomorrow, when we get enough press to stir up the release. We will also be releasing a text file describing Gawkers numerous security failings.

The reason this is troubling isn't so much that the Gawker commenter database, with passwords, was compromised. The problem is this: Everywhere you go online, you have to create a new account (with some exceptions, like OpenID or Gravatar-enabled sites). There are so many of these that people naturally tend to reuse passwords at multiple sites. The assumption when doing this is that none of these sites will be compromised. But if one of them is, and you have a password in there which you use multiple times, then you're in trouble, aren't you?

Furthermore, there is no way to know in advance whether a site is going to have problems or not. Gawker apparently was very lax in terms of security, but how was anyone supposed to know that? Furthermore, what other sites have similar problems? There is simply no way to know. (I hope, for example, that Blogger is secure. So far, I've had accounts here for six years and have never had a problem, not even when Google took over. But you never know.)

This fundamental insecurity means better password management is needed, and that is fundamentally a pain in the ass. Avoiding password repetition is virtually impossible.

Theoretically, there should be a point where a reasonable level of safety is reached just by using a manageable number of passwords for all purposes. However, there is still the possibility of making mistakes such as using a password for your Gmail account, then using your Gmail address and the same password as username and password for another site. If someone cracks that other site, they're able to immediately break into your Gmail account. You can have the best password in the world and still be vulnerable to this sort of mistake.

What a pain.

In any case, I just decided to change my Blogger password. ;)

More on the attempt to squelch Wikileaks

Just noticed something in the tail end of the article I linked in the previous post:

MasterCard Worldwide is also choking payments to the site.

I had mentioned depeering as an effective method of control, well, here's another method. The fact that there is no practical way to pay cash online is a significant advantage for authoritarians, possibly even more significant than depeering. Not being able to utilize cash online means you can only pay for something with the aid of a third party. There are only a few third parties with enough market presence to actually be useful, and those have proven many times that they are perfectly willing to bend over when the government asks them to.

Years and years ago, I read at least one article (possibly in Wired magazine) pertaining to the possibility of "e-cash", that is, a method of making payments online that could allow the same degree of anonymity as a real-life cash payment. Presumably it would involve a third-party intermediary, but both sides of the transaction would be anonymized, meaning the intermediary wouldn't know who was paying who. I forget how it worked, but I recall that strong encryption was involved somehow in the anonymization process (I really ought to look this up sometime, because it was a very cool idea). The idea never caught on, mainly because nobody cared, but I suppose also because there were vested interests who didn't want it to happen. It didn't occur to anyone that, someday, the de facto cartel that controls credit card payments would also be able to control the online world, simply by virtue of controlling the flow of money.

That, really, is the center of the problem: the flow of money is subject to centralized control. That should not be the case. It should not be possible to financially choke someone just because the government is pissed off.

The article also says,

In all cases, the companies have insisted their decisions are not politically motivated.

That is bullshit. "The companies" would be Amazon.com, Paypal, Mastercard, EveryDNS, and PostFinance. There isn't a single one of them who would have done what they did without government pressure, and we all know it.

There is one exception, so far--one company with enough balls to say "no", and that is Wikileaks' French ISP, OVH:

French internet service provider OVH said it had no plans to end the service it provides to Wikileaks.

"OVH is neither for nor against this site. We neither asked to host this site nor not to host it. Now it's with us, we will fulfil the contract," said OVH managing director Octave Klaba.

"It's neither for the political world nor for OVH to call for or to decide on a site's closure," he added.

This, in spite of pressure from the French government to shut the site down. Bravo to them.

Anon rules.. or do they?

Anon takes up the Wikileaks battle:

Wikileaks defended by Anonymous hacktivists

A group called Anonymous has hit sites that have refused to do business with the controversial whistle-blowing site with a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks.

It mirrors similar attacks aimed at the Wikileaks site.

Targets include the Swiss bank that froze founder Julian Assange's assets and PayPal which has stopped processing donations to Wikileaks.

Yay for anon, but in the long run, I fear the authoritarians will not only win this battle, but will win the war as well. People have been saying shit like "the internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it" since the early 1990's (that I know of), and you know what? With the possible exception of the chaos of the late 1990's, when you could literally order videos of people having sex with animals on popular auction sites, each year that has gone by has resulted in more and more restrictions on what people can put online.

I am not sure why this is the case. In fact, theoretically, it shouldn't be. Authoritarianism is inherently an organized, orderly thing, which means it requires effort to maintain. Without that effort, entropy will wear it away--or at least, that seems like the way things ought to work. Anon is actually working on the same side as entropy in this battle, so how is it that they can be losing ground each year?

Just some food for thought.

I suppose the ultimate problem is that "the internet" is really just a bunch of computers, and if someone gets too pissed off at the contents of a particular computer, it's not that hard to pull the plug. Especially when you can do it remotely, simply by depeering it. So I suppose the problem isn't the inherent vulnerability of the internet, but the seemingly inherent tendency of people to march in lock-step when the jack-booted thugs come around.

(Also, for the record, I think the term "hacktivist" is really, really stupid. ;)

"Don't Track Me!" & Concern over new web tracking methods

Some interesting details are coming out on the "Do Not Track" idea:

Q: How would the proposed "Do Not Track" feature work?

A: As envisioned by the FTC, it would be a universal setting. Instead of having to seek out the websites or individual marketing companies to ask them not to track you, you would be able to turn on a setting in your browser that would broadcast that message to any and all marketers you encounter in your Web travels.

[...]

Unlike the Do Not Call Registry, in which the government maintains a list of phone numbers, the "Do Not Track" information would be stored as something akin to a cookie in each individual browser. [emphasis added]

So, a person could essentially flip a switch on their computer that says, "Do not track me!" and, presumably, merchants would be required to comply.

This is vastly preferable, and substantially different to a central database that would identify every surfer as they moved around various websites, which I expressed serious concern about two days ago. In fact, news reports characterizing the idea as a "Do Not Track List" were incorrect, since there would apparently be no list at all.

Of course, even if a browser cookie method would be used, there would still be a risk of non-compliant merchants, as well as foreign sites who would not be subject to the rule. However, this is a much smaller problem than the potential of having someone keep track of people's identities as they surf the web.

I am undecided about whether, given this development, I now support the idea or not, although I admit I am now leaning towards support. A big question that still needs to be answered is whether it is actually necessary for the government to mandate such technology.

It occurs to me, however, that while they are dealing with this question, they should also deal with the question of what methods are used to track people. It is already known, for instance, that Flash cookies can be used to track people, including those who intentionally clear their regular cookies after each browser session. You need a special Firefox plugin to void the Flash cookies. Furthermore, when HTML 5 is finally implemented, one "feature" of it will be the ability to utilize more and "better" ways of collecting information from web surfers. There is also the problem of device fingerprinting, which is already here. Will a "do not track" list put a damper on this sort of horseshit? Because, if it doesn't, then it is obviously useless.

There is also the question of whether the upcoming Republican Congress will even be willing to consider any of this.

Netflix, Wikileaks

Netflix is a bandwidth hog. Who will pay? (Hint: You.)

The traffic that Netflix is creating at this point is only the beginning--as a Netflix member myself, I can confidently state that they are doing everything they can to push their membership away from DVD-only usage and towards the "view instantly" option, which means their overall bandwidth usage is likely to continue to increase above and beyond its current astronomical level. That's going to require some infrastructure adjustment going forward, and that is going to cost money.

Who should pay for it? Accepting the truth that any company is going to pass along whatever costs it can to end users (meaning us), there are basically two options. 1) Netflix users themselves, or 2) Internet users in general. Which is more fair? Right now, "watch instantly" carries no limitation at all, so a person can conceivably spend every waking minute downloading movies if they want to...up until their ISP complains to them about the endless gigabytes of downloads and tells them to back off. I'm thinking the best approach here would be to force Netflix to back off on their unlimited usage idea, putting a limit on how much individual subscribers can access. Those who want more could pay for it, and Netflix could pass that money along to other companies. The alternative would be for Netflix to just keep on doing what it's doing, which would force the costs onto other companies, who would pass it along to their customers. The problem with this approach is that they don't know who uses Netflix and who doesn't, so they would probably just increase rates for everyone, or, worse, start implementing metered billing structures. I'd rather avoid any of that crap, myself. So, this whole question puts me in the surprising position of taking the side of Comcast. I guess Hell must be freezing over today, as well. ;)

Did Amazon Just Pull the Plug on the WikiLeaks Website?

Yes they did. Not much to say on this one, other than that they will no doubt find another place to host the site. I suggest Russia. Apparently, some of the leaked material was quite flattering to Vladimir Putin, so the Wikileaks people are not likely to run into any problem finding a new home there, right? Except Russia may not want to annoy the United States government, which is seriously pissed off about recent Wikileaks leaks. :P

In fact, as I typed the last couple of paragraphs, there is already a new development on this: "WikiLeaks moves URL to Swedish hosting firm after Amazon 'ousted' the controversial site." Bravo Sweden. I wonder how long that is going to last?

Of peripheral interest to the Wikileaks story:

WikiLeaks Founder's Mom: 'Don't Hunt My Son'

My general feeling on Julian Assange is that someone should give the guy a medal. Problem is, all the people who would be likely to do that are exactly the people he insists on pissing off. Coming soon, damaging information on a large bank. Which one? Who knows. He's going to end up wishing he was Salman Rushdie, at this rate.

More on "Do not track"

A detail I failed to notice the first time, on the "do not track" list idea covered in the previous post:

The FTC is not yet calling for do-not-track legislation in Congress, but Web browser makers and other Internet companies should act quickly to implement a universal do-not-track list, Leibowitz said. [emphasis added]

So it looks, perhaps, like identification of the person who doesn't want to be tracked would be handled at the browser level, and based on that, there would need to be a way for merchants to identify which browser/user is which. That means some kind of unique identifier. In other words, if you want this to work, you have to set up an online ID system for web users. This, coming from a government whose record with respect to the privacy of its citizens is pretty damn spotty.

Does a "Do Not Track" list make sense?

The FTC is proposing a "do not track" list for web users, which would prohibit ad networks and websites from tracking people's movements as they browse the web:

The do-not-track list, modeled after a national do-not-call list targeting telemarketers, would help consumers better protect their privacy because a uniform mechanism for opting out of online tracking does not yet exist, the FTC said in an online privacy report released Wednesday. The do-not-track list could be implemented by the Internet industry or by the U.S. Congress, the FTC said.

While I applaud a move towards protecting individual privacy online, I question whether this is actually a good idea. How would it work, exactly? Would a person register by name, or by IP address, or what? If I decided I didn't want to be tracked at home, would that also apply to work? Could my employer require me to allow myself to be tracked at work? If it's based on IP address, then what happens when my IP address changes? If registration is by name (or some other non-IP method such as ISP subscription account), how are they going to know it's me that's online at any given moment? That last question is actually the one that bothers me the most. It's entirely possible that this move, in order to work, would require implementation of technology even more fundamentally intrusive than tracking cookies, which, quite frankly, are not all that bad.

It seems like a whole can of worms might be cracked open if this goes forward. Furthermore, there are ways right now that people can guard themselves against this stuff. One step I take myself is to disable third-party cookies in my web browser. That doesn't take care of everything, obviously, but it's a start. Of course, there are always trade-offs. Disabling third-party cookies has the side effect of making both my Blogger and Wordpress logins not "stick" between browser sessions, due to both of these sites utilizing third-party cookies to track logins. This is the exception, not the rule, however. My feeling is, the vast majority of third-party cookie usage is not something that benefits the rank-and-file web user.

A person can also utilize browser plugins like Adblock Plus or NoScript, or even FlashBlock, to help foil online trackers. Those who are really hardcore can set their browsers to delete all cookies on exit. I believe most browsers even have a setting allowing outright refusal of all cookies (although I suspect a lot of sites would "break" if that was activated).

There is also at least one browser plugin available that takes care of Flash cookies, which aren't affected by normal cookie settings. (Offhand I can't recall the name of it, I'll have to look it up and report back later.)

The point is, I am sitting here wondering why in the world this is even needed.

Chunks, Eggs en Phoenix

I've decided I'm going to take a stab at this blog again. Recent events relating to one of my other blogs somehow managed to spur my interest in this. I've been noodling along on Wordpress.com for a couple years now, but in general I find that platform to be rather frustrating, for various reasons, not least of which is that I can't even choose the damn font on the layout that I like. Also, the user interface is just too cluttered, in my opinion.

It's been a while since I've been active here, and a lot has happened in the meantime. I find that many of my political views have evolved, so much so that I may have to go back through old posts to see if what I wrote is even consistent with what I believe anymore. I assume I will find many such posts, and that then raises the question of what to do about them. There are various possibilities. 1) Delete them. I tend to be loathe to do this, however. 2) Add some kind of notation at the beginning, indicating that the post is no longer reflective of my views. A more reasonable approach, to be sure. 3) Same as #2, except also adding a new post indicating my current views on the subject, and crosslinking the two posts. This is an ideal, one which I can easily see myself sliding away from. So I'm not going to do it every time.

I also need to look at some potential layout changes, mostly to sidebar links and such. I had an idea of trying to organize third-party links according to how they fit in with this blog, i.e. science, technology, politics. A lot of the links there may also be defunct or out of date now, too.

Of course, all of this is predicated on whether or not I can manage to find time to actually do all of this stuff. ;)

Electric cars, people! Electric cars!

Let's start with an interesting article in the NYT:

High Rice Cost Creating Fears of Asia Unrest

What's really interesting is how they carefully manage to avoid mentioning the word "ethanol" anywhere in that article. The closest they come is this, pretty much:

Many rice farmers are turning to more lucrative cash crops, reducing the amount of land devoted to the grain.

The "lucrative cash crops" are those which can be converted into ethanol. They don't say that. But I read another article today which does, in Time magazine, of all places. It's the cover story. Worth reading, or at least looking at (I only read about 3/4 of it).

In short, biofuels need so much vegetable matter to produce that their use is driving up food prices worldwide, as agribusiness shifts towards those crops instead of food-only crops. One unpleasant side effect of this is that it raises the value of food crops, which leads to clearcutting of rainforests, draining of wetlands, etc. There are also some countries which take a more direct route and simply burn down their rain forests to grow palm trees instead. Palm oil is apparently big money these days, in that it's used in a lot of different food products, and can be converted to ethanol. It's estimated that fully 20% of total carbon emissions now are a direct result of ethanol production. In other words, what was supposed to help reduce the level of greenhouse gases in the atmostphere is actually making the problem a lot worse, and it's causing people to starve to boot. From that standpoint, we'd be better off burning pure gasoline.

As for the other big side effect: Formerly, world hunger was being slowly but surely reduced. No more.

By the way, all the major presidential candidates in the United Staes are totally gung-ho about ethanol. Part of the problem there is Iowa, which is not only home to the first big primary race in the country, but which has also developed such a substantial ethanol production infrastructure that it is now a net importer of corn. Iowa, importing corn. Unbelievable. Needless to say, ethanol is the new god in Iowa, and heaven forbid that any presidential hopeful should fail to toe the line on that issue. Something like over 50,000 jobs in the state depend on its production, which means Iowa would be screwed if the ethanol idea went away.

I shouldn't pick solely on Iowa, though. It's not like they're the only corn-producing, ethanol-producing state in the nation. They're just the best at it.

Electric cars, people. Electric cars.

</rant>

[Props to Wily at DWS forums for the NYT link.]