Adventures in Egotism

I’ve been waiting for the Privacy Lusitania, an event when the infrastructure fails and public opinion galvanizes around solving it. I think it’s a pretty apt metaphor. In WWI people thought everything was OK in the US until the vaguely dangerous power hit the US infrastructure by sinking a commercial transport ship. (Of course that’s all arguable.) 9/11 fits the same logic, but is way more complex in the social psyche.

When I read about the MySpace private photos leak, I thought this could be the I Lusitania was waiting for. But the press has been pretty quiet, by what I’ve seen. Why aren’t people up in arms? Why aren’t they suing MySpace? Does MySpace have any liability at all?

These pictures are on hard drives around the world in a big BitTorrent cloud. They will never go away. Accessible face recognition is here. Riya has been doing it for years and startup Polar Rose is rolling out a web service next quarter. Someone with enough time to make a point could easily run all these photos through face recognition and start putting together some pieces. They could make a wiki or ESP Game app where volunteers name the people in the photos. In fact, since the photos are linked to MySpace account IDs, there’s a whole lot that can be found out with some simple data mining. Those users can delete their accounts, but those pictures will live on in the torrent, undeletable.

Boing Boing recently had a headline, “Database leaks are as immortal and toxic as nuclear spills — let’s start acting like it”. I think now that Chernobyl is a better, albeit slightly ragged, metaphor. When will the public confidence in our privacy infrastructure melt down? It looks like it may be happening in England with those DVDs of private records lost repeatedly in the post. (And the article quoted in BB was from The Guardian.)

The power of IT to destroy privacy been advancing rapidly. Yet over last 7 years while we should have been working to preserve it, we’ve been convinced not to, in order to be safe. Don’t believe it. Security is not at odds with privacy. Security requires privacy.

I have a whole lot of work to do, so to procrastinate clear my mind I’ve started a new blog, Practict. It’s where I’ll share practical knowledge that I’ve found or created. This will help me focus this blog on myself, in accord with its charter.

Wish I had thought of this. And I wish my phone camera recorded better videos.

To see behind the curtain, try passingby-looking-right.

If you ever receive messages with file attachments called "noname", here’s what’s up.

There’s a problem in Gmail in parsing messages sent with Apple’s Mail.app.  It seems it’s mostly Apple’s fault.  But since Gmail still hasn’t solved it, you can work around it with this web utility.

Did Paul Otlet beat Vannevar Bush to HyperText by 50 years? Paul Otlet had both the vision and a rudimentary implementation.

The following is from the blog of the Long Now Foundation, a great organization of which I’m a proud charter member.

Long Views » Blog Archive » Paul Otlet

Long Now seminar speaker Alex Wright brought to all of our attention the truly visionary work of Belgian Paul Otlet and his Mundameum of 1910 (video from a documentary above, and Stewart Brand’s description from the talk below.)

The greatest unknown revolutionary was the Belgian Paul Otlet. In 1895 he set about freeing the information in books from their bindings. He built a universal decimal classification and then figured out how that organized data could be explored, via “links” and a “web.” In 1910 Otlet created a “radiated library” called the Mundameum in Brussels that managed search queries in a massive way until the Nazis destroyed the service. Alex Wright showed an astonishing video of how Otlet’s distributed telephone-plus-screen sysem worked . - Stewart Brand on Alex Wright

I get really tired of e-mails from seemingly reputable organizations that make it difficult to unsubscribe. I’ve repeatedly filled out the unsubscribe form for Alternet.org and yet I keep getting e-mail. Here’s what I just wrote them.
Read the rest of this entry »

Slate writes about GrandCentral, a phone service that wants to simplify your life.

I played with it a couple months ago when the NY Times covered it. I mostly wanted it to get a 412 number so people here in Pittsburgh can call me without paying long distance to my 510 mobile number. fwiw, I can now be reached at (412) ACE-NOMAD.

After toying with it a bit, I abandoned it. I didn’t like it much, mostly for the reasons described in the article. I also was creeped out by the features like “post to blog” for a voicemail you’ve received. That says something scary about the designers.

For listening to voicemails on the computer, I like GotVoice.com. It’s free and doesn’t try to take over your phone patterns. You just set it up to call into your voicemail and it plays the tones to match the button presses you would make if you were calling in. Only it records the audio of the voicemails and makes it available to you over the web. And they recently added a mobile web interface too.

I just wish they had a version for home answering machines so my mom could backup the messages she loves to save from me and my sister. There’s no room for new ones.

A response to The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace (Kollock)

I’ve thought a lot about the economies of online cooperation and I found this paper interesting mostly because it was written by a sociologist in 1999. I took issue with many of its assertions, but was intrigued by what the author did and didn’t consider about the technical issues and how 1999 his examples and reasoning were. In 1999, not even Nupedia (which gave way to Wikipedia) existed yet. How would he revise his analysis for Wikipedia?

The analysis of gifts and motivation suffers from a shallow understanding of the implications of atoms versus bits. Bits are not simply atoms that freely move and replicate. They do, but that makes for a new logic, one that our vocabulary and metaphors haven’t caught up with yet. “Sharing a story” and “sharing a pie” have very different implications. He identifies this as the trait of indivisibility, that “one’s persons consumption of a good does not reduce the amount available to another.” (I can’t find a definition of this term anywhere else, but I’ll go with it.) He brings this up in order to discuss the public goods, but he fails to identify an important implication: when all “goods” are the functionally equal result of activity with the information network, then the appropriate framing is not stuff but action. He analyzes Usenet posts as gifts… would you describe helping an elderly person across the street as a gift? It’s an action.

The “remarkable property of online interaction” he describes is not new in a categorical way; it just takes information exchange to an extreme. We could always share ideas indivisibly and non-excludably (e.g. language itself). As he points out, near-zero costs can change the system in non-linear ways. Today storage costs near zero. What’s “unprecedented in the history of human society” is that the records and byproducts of all our activities create persistent artifacts.

Digital goods then are not created per se, they are the by-product of activity. Activity is the appropriate frame of analysis.

I laughed when I read the rationale for why an operating system would come before a word processor. He’s right on that programmers, when not externally compensated, make the things that they want to use. And that is exactly why the first successful open-source project was Emacs, a programmer’s text editor. In fact, Emacs was the motivation for the GPL license in the first place. Developers had been building free GNU software for years before Linus learned to program. Linux was a new kernel on which all that software could run. Seeing the Linux kernel as the driving force is an easy mistake to make if you’re oriented to goods, because it’s a pretty valuable good. But the volunteer army wanted to do and first made the tools for them to do. Eventually an ideological element emerged, contending that all software should be free because it can be, but most contributors just make what works for them. The magic is that they can share the byproducts of their activity at a trivial cost.

The motivations offered, reciprocity and reputation, seem pretty similar to me, as does “altruism”. It’s all a continuum of scope. As Kollock points out, reciprocity is not expected from the party helped but from the group as a whole. This is contingent on reputation. “Reputation” in an online community can yield other rewards. “Self-image as an efficacious person” is an endogenous reward, but there are other rewards that are exogenous, such as likelihood to be hired. Altruism is a further abstraction, the belief that being good pays off somehow. The larger the scope, the less direct the link between action and reward.

All said, I think the paper does a good job at illustrating “the economies of online cooperation” as it purports to. I focused on my misgivings because I thought they’d make a more interesting post.

If you use Google Transit, you may like this Google Gadget for Google Transit.

I like Bubbles. I was just thinking yesterday about writing such a thing and today I discover some people already have, and pretty well.

I’m writing .bblbox files for the webapps I used, but I’m stopped up by a weird element of their API.

Why not allow elements within the node of the .bblbox? Requiring the creation and hosting of a separate file is a bit of a PITA.

Bubbles people, please make the element in .bblbox work the same as in shortcuts.xml. In the case of profiling a separate shortcuts file, a element could be used.