All I want is the world’s simplest email client. It’s for my in-laws who are very bright but completely untutored in computers. I’ve tried teaching them, but when they click off a menu they didn’t want and accidentally click on another window that comes forward obscuring the original window, they get lost. And who’s to blame them.

So, here are my requirements:

It’s got to run on Windows 2000. That’s what they have. And, frankly, the Mac UI isn’t going to be much easier for them.

They need to connect to the SMTP and POP3 servers that comes with their ISP.

It should all be in one window.

It should let them: Compose mail. Show the dozen or so addresses they use repeatedly. Delete. List received mail. Print out. Maybe let them search for old emails.

Have a clear, English, big-font UI.

I’ve done a fair bit of looking and can’t find what I want. I’m thinking of writing one myself. It’ll be crappy for sure, and it’ll be hard-wired and fragile. If you know of something that’ll fit the bill, lemme know. Thanks.

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Massachusetts is going it alone in the suit against Microsoft.

Remember, we were the only state to vote for McGovern in the Nixon landslide of ‘72. Time to break out those vintage “Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts” bumperstickers.

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Eric Norlin is arguing that we need to get more subtle and flexible with our concept of anonymity. I’ms sure he’s right. We’re already working out issues about who we are, who we say we are, who we pretend to be, and who we can prove we are. As the legal requirements become more pressing, we’re going to end up with more formal answers.

My only hope is that the practices that are emerging shape the law, rather than the other way ’round.

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My family is at my sister’s in Connecticut. It’d be just plain rude for me to spend time blogging today…

Enjoy your tofu substitute, with all the trimmings!

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This morning I received a fax from “Arthur Moore” on behalf of “Communication Advisors LLC” telling me that I’ve “been recommended to participate as a member of the advisory Board for a telphone company, which will be fully licensed and oeprating in the U.S.A.” For just 2-3 hours per month of telephone consulting I will be compensated with a “potential income in excess of $100,000.00″

Good one! An appeal to my vanity. An offer of potential riches. But the line at the bottom gave it away: “If you would like to be removed from our database, please call toll free 1-866-446-1905.”

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Tom Matrullo has discovered that ads written in Macromedia Flash 6 have the ability to peer into our rooms via our computers’ microphones and webcams. You have to set your Flash 6 settings to permit this, and it’s probably just part of Macromedia’s attempt to turn Flash into a ubiquitous multimedia platform (best of all: it’s not from Microsoft), but the very capability is scary in a world of highly-motivated corporate and government hackers.

A few days ago, I blogged a note in Linux World about the technical ability to turn speakers into microphones. I find the discovery of surveillance-ware inside of Flash much more disconcerting. As they say on the Macromedia home page: “Over 97.8% of all web users have the Macromedia Flash Player.”

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Halley explains blogs ten ways till Sunday.

At least her link to JOHO is just a mild parody of me and not “that A/V guy who was a putz in 8th grade.” (Good thing. I didn’t graduate to putz until 9th grade. In grade 8 I was just a low-grade schmuck.)

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The Naval Academy has seized computers from 100 midshipmen looking for “illegally” downloaded copyrighted material according to this article. The Navy plunged into action in response to a letter sent from the RIAA to colleges and universities.

[Thanks to Greg Cavanagh for forwarding the link.]

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Doc writes:

The kid spotted the galaxy Andromeda straight overhead. I could barely see it. “It’s not dark enough to see the arms,” he said. I said I had heard that Andromeda and the Milky Way were on a collision course and due to become one galaxy in about three billion years, which was about the same age as most diamonds found on Earth.

In the hands of a good writer, facts can be moving.

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Gary Turner runs a screen capture of an unfortunate line break in a message from Microsoft, thus giving me an excuse to run the following pointless, unjustified ridicule: click here to open the screen capture in a new window.

The fact that Pinnacle Studio version 7 is still so buggy that it can’t compile the videos that you edit is my only excuse for engaging in such pettiness. Yeah, sure.

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Jonathan Peterson reproduces Peter Chernin’s (CEO of Fox) Comdex keynote, interpolating comments disputing not only its accuracy, but its most basic representation of what’s going on. Jonathan summarizes his own reaction:

They still see us as consumers only capable of digesting their offerings and handing over money. They really don’t seem to understand that the reason we are buying PCs, video cameras, digital cameras, broadband connections and the like is that we want to create and share our creations

I found a few places in the speech that made my see the inside of my own retina that Jonathan saw fit not to comment on. In particular, Chernin says:

The trumpeters of the Big Bully Theory may also be startled to learn that we have absolutely no problem with viewers shifting our content from their television to their PC, from their living room to their bedroom and to their bathroom and back again as many times and ways as they’d like.

First, “shifting” does not necessarily include copying. Second — and this is what makes my blood boil — he’s granting us permission to shift “our content” where “our” refers to the entertainment company? It’s not their content. When I buy a DVD, the DVD is mine and I can use it any way I want so long as I’m not reselling it or broadcasting it. The disk is mine. I can make a copy for my upstairs TV. I can mold it into a pretty little ashtray. I can roll it in a tube and sell it to Peter Chernin as a home colonoscopy kit.

Keep your hands of my property, you goddamn burglar!

The speech is long but well worth reading. As are Jonathan’s comments, chockablock with links.

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Whatever you dream, you can be … in your dreams.

Thought while raking leaves: If you place a single leaf in a paper leaf bag, the bag is trash, not a leaf bag. At least that’s what the garbage man told me.

*The extra E is your guarantee of profundity

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The Gartner Group says, according to the Center for Media Research:

More Europeans use short messaging service (SMS) than email… GartnerG2 claims that SMS has therefore become a powerful marketing tool, which can be more important than the web for a range of activities. Around 62 percent of all adults across the major European countries now use a mobile phone, according to the research. Currently, 41 percent of European adults use SMS, compared to 30 percent that use the Internet/email.

Last year, 28 percent of European adults used SMS, as opposed to 29 percent who went online. SMS isparticularly popular in the UK where 49 percent of adults use it, compared to 39 percent who are online.

1. Connectedness will happen. How? The basic answer is: Every way.

2. But it’s not as if email and SMS compete. Read Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs to see how no-location technologies (”no-loco tech”?) are letting us engage in new ways. (There’s a discussion of the book going on now at the Well.Vue. It’s long form and fascinating. Some great stuff, including a recounting by Dave Hughes of what followed from his boast that he could wifi every farm in Wales “by turning every Welsh pub into a wireless ISP.” )

3. I’m looking forward to the day when the announcement of a new type of human connection is not immediately followed by the phrase “powerful marketing tool.” How about something like: “Over 62% of Americans are using ____ to talk with, inform and entertain one another. It therefore promises to provide an antidote to powerful marketing tools.”

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Complexity Digest remains an excellent source, aggregating links to interesting articles. The archive is here. You can subscribe for free by sending mail to subscriptions@comdig.org.

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Steven Johnson’s excellent new blog (he’s the author of Emergence, a book I enjoyed and learned a lot from) has proposed a new Google trick that Rael Dornfest quickly instantiated. You take the number of Google hits on a term, and the number of hits on a second term within that results set, and divide. The result is your “googleshare.” To use Steve’s example, there are 1,450,000 hits on “emergence” and 5,190 of those mention “Steven Johnson,” giving him a .3% googleshare of the term “emergence.”

You can run your own experiments using Rael’s software. (You will first have to get a Google API key, a painless process.) Some top-of-the-head results:

Bush has a 7.93% share of “idiot” and 8.89% share of “moron”

Michael Jackson has a 1.24% googleshare of “freak”

Microsoft has about 3.5% share of “satan,” handily beating Saddam Hussein’s 0.72% share and Osama Bin Laden’s 0.84% share.

Cluetrain has a 0.4% share of “hippy-dippy” and an astonishing 23.19% share of “worst book” (with the search term in quotes), while “small pieces loosely joined” (in quotes) has an astronomical 102.35% share of “worst book”!

Now that’s an achievement worth noting!

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Aha! I just learned how to override the definitions in a CSS style sheet!

Here’s the problem. I use a CSS style sheet to define the properties of the HTML elements on this page. In fact, I load four style sheets with different definitions and let you click on the “Are you color blind?” link at the top of the page to determine which style sheet is in effect. The style sheet defines the <p> element as having brown text. If I want some portion of the text to have a different color — as in the final paragraph of the entry below with the picture of Michael Jackson — the following will not work:

<p><font color=”red”>this should be red</font></p>

The CSS definition overrides the local change. But, if you express the font change in the syntax of a CSS definition, it works:

<p><font style=”color: red”>this should be red </font></p>

This is explained in more detail than I could understand by David Baron. And here I learned how to do a relative size decrease:

<p><font style=”font-size: 80%”>This should be 80% the size of the rest of the text </font></p>

Woohoo! Sure, I should have known this, but then would I have gotten the same kick out of learning it?

(No need to tell me that “<font>” statements are no longer considered acceptable, um, I mean they’re being “deprecated.” I’m not ready to span the gap yet.)

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I was in the video store today and did a doubletake. I mistook the photo of Sandra Bullock on the cover of Murder by Numbers for, well, take a look:

I did just a little editing of the photo on the right, trying to match color/tint - frankly, I had to darken him - and then, what the heck, I cloned in Sandra’s hair (left) and cloth thingy (right).

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The reams of paper your buy in your office supply store often have pictures on their wrappers illustrating Things You Can Put on Paper: color business charts, pictures of a buff guy water-skiing, newsletters, pictures of colorful hot air balloons, more business charts. This is in case you weren’t quite sure what paper is used for. I’m just surprised that they don’t say in small print: “Serving suggestion. Actual pages are blank.”

I felt a bit the same way at a forum at MIT I participated in last night. Panelists and audience members tried to characterize what the Web is used for and how it is used. Are Internet conversations degraded forms? Sure, came the response, just look at the stupidity of the chats at Yahoo. And then I’m tempted to reply: But look at the intelligence of the mailing lists you’re on, yada yada yada. The argument is as pointless as whether most real world conversations are stupid or not.

The Web is what it is. It is what we are.

Yet, I do think there are some types of generalizations one can make based on the nature of the medium itself: Web conversations are almost always mediated by a keyboard. There are no fists that can punch us if we go overboard. There is no immediate feedback in a group conversation equivalent to the antsy shifting in chairs or furrowed brows one sees when talking in the real world. And, of course, the temporality of Web conversations is hugely different from real world ones: I did a chat yesterday on Richard Seltzer’s Samizdat site and in typical fashion, questions and answers overlapped in a jumble of threads that looked like a kitten had been playing with it.

From characteristics such as these we can make some generalizations about Web conversations. For example, the intermittency of many forms of Web conversations means that the replies can be more carefully constructed than in most real world conversations. But does that make Web conversations more accurate or more artificial? And the lack of immediate feedback can lead people to exaggerate their positions just to get people to acknowledge they’ve heard it. But does this mean that people adopt more extreme positions or that they pronounce them with more distance?

In any case, this doesn’t address the issue when someone says, “Internet conversations are like professional wrestling.” The answer to that question can only be: Yes, sometimes, but so what? There are greasy spoons, 5-star restaurants and picnics. What sense does it make to characterize what eating is like? And, by the way, what do people put on paper?

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Prime Minister Chrétien has publicly announced that in his opinion Bush is not a moron.

We will report the results of the poll as other world leaders weigh in.

[Thanks to Gary Laughing Stock for the link.]

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Note about Spam/Scam, added Feb. 25, 2005: Because of the mysterious ways of Google, this blog entry seems to be turning up when people are looking for information about various spam offers involving transferring huge amounts of cash into your bank account. There are lots of comments to this post about that.

Here’s the short version: These are among the oldest and best known scams on the Internet. They are prepetrated by professional criminals who send out millions of these offers every day hoping that you will end up giving them your bank account information. The spammers then transfer all the money from your account. You have no way of getting it back because, after all, you authorized them to make the transfer.

So, when you thought it was too good to be true, you were exactly right.

Do NOT engage with these folks. The scammers got your name off of some list of email addresses and don’t know anything about you. Nevertheless, these are not nice or reasonable people. They are criminals. In fact, The US State Department reports that 25 Americans gullible enough to go abroad to meet with these scammers have been murdered or disappeared. (Don’t be alarmed. To them you’re just an email address on a list of millions. On the other hand, don’t get on a plane to go pick up money from them.)

It does no good to write back to them to tell them they ought to be ashamed or that you’re not going to fall for it. That only tells them that your email address works. They’re mass mailers. They don’t care about what you think. They just want to get your bank account information. Instead, set up your spam filter to trash their messages. (I’ve been getting several of these messages a day for over ten years.)

Here are two Wired articles you might find helpful: One Two.

Now back to the original post…

DarwinMag online just published a column of mine that tries to explain the open spectrum issue to idiots like me. Here’s part of it:

There are three types of benefits from opening the spectrum: short term, long term and deep term.

Short term, we will see a sudden breaking free from wireless gridlock: New bandwidth available everywhere. New local radio stations. Wireless connectivity among appliances in the house. Innovations wherever action at a distance or ubiquitous access makes sense.

Long term, Dewayne Hendricks (founder of The Dandin Group and a member of the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council) says that we’re in the position Marconi was in 100 years ago when wireless communications were first invented. We can’t begin to imagine what’s possible, including — and Hendricks is serious about this — Star Trek-style transporters before this century is out.

Deep term, the unleashing of wireless connectivity will eat away at one of our last remaining social dependencies on broadcast media. Right now, if you want to broadcast you have to get permission from the Feds and you have to have lots of dough. We end up with a society that sits on a couch, facing forward, listening to what people with money have to say. Our freedom is defined by the channel changer nearby. With open spectrum, a bottom-up conversation can begin over the ether, helping to make participatory democracy real.

I also link to David Reed’s page on Open Spectrum and Dan Gillmor’s helpful column on the topic.

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Don’t forget to test your firewall at Steve Gibson’s stalwart site, Gibson Research.

[Thanks to Roch Skelton from a mailing list for the reminder.]

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Beliefnet is back online. Last time I looked, it wasn’t there. Good. It’s the type of experiment I personally want to succeed: a shared space for talk about religion that tries to be respectful of differences. Getting that balance right is difficult — or, put technically, impossible — but there’s room in the world for lots of attempts.

I found out about the rebirth of Beliefnet because Steve Waldman, the editor in chief, has a diary (Remember diaries? They’re like blogs but more tied to daily events) in Slate, recording his group’s comeback from bankruptcy. Informative and charming.

I was on a panel with Steve a couple of years ago and liked him immediately. My respect for him has only grown.

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We have confirmation.

I blogged about the difficulty of learning from history, prompting some people to contribute relevant quotations to the blog discussion:

“History teaches us that man learns nothing from history” (Hegel, contributed by JLaw)

“Large nations do what they wish, while small nations accept what they must.” (Thucydides, contributed by Vergil Iliescu)

And today’s Boston Globe reports that Bush is lecturing our European allies about what we should have learned from the policy of appeasement, leaving out the small disanalogy that Hitler was breaking off bits of Europe one at a time whereas Hussein has been successfully contained ever since the Gulf War. Appeasement doesn’t apply here.

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Greg “LinuxMan” Cavanagh points out this tidbit from the December issue of Linux Journal:

…the PC speaker in post-2.5.31 kernels may now be used as a microphone. This is new and weird. As Jos Hulzink put it on the linux-kernel mailing list, “2.5.32 will go into the history books as the kernel that implemented voice recognition for all AT class computers ..”

Greg comments: “Umm, you mean every machine broken into is now a listening device. Wow.”

If he’s right, this is spooky. Fortunately, our Republican government is fiercely committed to civil liberties so there’s no chance this could be abused.

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While looking for phone cards to call from Greece to the US (my brother-in-law is about to leave for Athens on a business trip), I came upon this page.

I’m reading along, not getting a good feeling about the reliability of this business — is Steve going to be there for me if I have trouble with the card? — when I get to the middle of the page. Do a search on the page for “OH GOD” to see what I mean. Disturbing.

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The new satiric newsletter from Hank Blakely is out. As always, I like his weekly sends announcing the new issue. In this one, for example, he writes:

We have nothing to fear but fear itself, which, it turns out, is more than sufficient…

And from the It’s Not Supposed to Be Funny, It’s Just Easier to Laugh than Shit Your Pants in Fear Dept. comes this quote from W as reported in the new Woodward book:

“I do not need to explain why I say things. — That’s the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

(Thanks to Michael Finley for passing along this link to Xanga.)

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I’m doing an online chat on Thursday and a real-world panel also.

The panel is at MIT at 5pm in Bldg. 2 Room 105. It’s a discussion with Michael Keating about the real world effects of the Web.

The chat is with Richard Seltzer. Here’s the blurb he just sent out to his mailing list:

Our next chat will be this Thursday, Nov. 21, 2002, from noon to 1 PM Eastern Time (GMT -5) when we will be talking with David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Small Pieces emphasizes the human and paradoxical aspects of hte Web — how we behave and interact there and what that says about what it means to be human. He was on two previous chat programs of ours talking about Cluetrain (with Chris Locke and Rick Levine). Those transcripts are available at http://www.samizdat.com/chat124.html (February 3, 2000) and http://www.samizdat.com/chat125.html (Feb. 10, 2000). See my review of The ClueTrain Manifesto and my review of Small Pieces.

To connect to our chat sessions, go to http://www.samizdat.com/chat-intro.html We’re on from noon to 1 PM Eastern Time (GMT -4) on Thursdays.

To view past transcripts and the upcoming schedule, please go to http://www.samizdat.com/chat.html

Hope to see you somewhere!

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Eric Norlin is beginning to think about a taxonomy of trust: 1. You are who you say you are. 2. You do what you say you will do. 3. The combined experience of 1 and 2 builds over time.

As Norlin points out, this applies to one particular type of trust, especially when it comes to transactions and collaboration. But it doesn’t fit so well when applied to squishier relationships. Why did I trust that guy named AKMA — if an AKMA is a guy at all — after reading his first couple of blog entries? In this case I didn’t care much about #1, and #2 doesn’t apply. Different type of trust. Not an objection to Eric’s taxonomy, just a comment on its scope. And implicitly: what’s the relationship of the two types of trust, unless it’st just a trick of language?

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Having discussions attached to my blog entries is new to me. What’s the etiquette about replying?

For example, on the discussion attached to my blog entry about using Movable Type, Miasma posted a thoughtful message about the importance of categories. I learned from it, but I don’t have questions or a comment. Had Miasma sent me an email with the same content, I’d reply with a hearfelt “Thanks!” of some sort. Thank-yous appended to every thoughtful discussion entry would be noise. So, what’s the netiquette? Is it OK not to acknowledge the time and thought someone has spent?

Where’s our aptly-named Emily Post?

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Vergial Iliescu points us to an interactive Flash (i.e., move your damn mouse) that features pointless but amusing morphings and the like:

http://www.foulds2000.freeserve.co.uk/bushv6.htm

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Salon is running — for its subscribers only — an interview with Daniel Ellsberg in which he does something he does not do in his new book: speculate on the motives of the very smart people who made such very bad decisions:

My best guess is that Lyndon Johnson psychologically did not want to be called weak on communism. As he put it to Doris Kearns, he said he would be called if he got out of Vietnam, an “unmanly man,” a weakling, an appeaser.

He preferred to risk office, and to lose office, as a tough guy, than to gain and retain office while facing some strident charges from politicians who were beaten that he was a weakling. And I believe that he was not alone in that. Many Americans have died in the last 50 years, and maybe 10 times as many Asians, because American politicians feared to be called unmanly.

And now we have a president waging a war that he has failed to justify against a foe who defeated his father. Couldn’t possibly be any psychological motives there. Nah.

Furthermore, doesn’t this mean that we can learn surprisingly little from history? The policy of appeasing Hitler turned out to be a deep mistake, yet it wasn’t incontrovertibly wrong at the time, and afterwards we made just as deep a mistake by “learning from it.” Having to know how to apply the lessons of history means they’re not much in the way of lessons at all.

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David Stephenson has an op-ed in Government Computer News about what the Homeland Security web site could learn from Amazon and eBay.

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Dan Bricklin writes up his thoughts about his new Toshiba tablet PC. He’s excited about it, on the whole. Amy Wohl, on the other hand, thinks that the genre won’t take off until they machines are much cheaper and lighter.

Steve MacLaughlin at Saltire sums up his reaction in one word: “Fantastic.” Details follow. He sees a big future for it in hundreds of niche applications: hospitals, sales people, etc.

I personally am not feeling the familiar surges of technolust when contemplating this device in the privacy of my office. If it had a screen with twice the resolution, I’d feel differently.

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AKMA reports that when he asks “Who is AKMA?” of the Magic 8-Ball known as GooglePeople, the top reply is “David Weinberger.” I’m flattered. On the other hand, if you ask the site “Who is the author of the best book on the Internet?”, the answer is Margaret Levine Young who wrote “Internet for Dummies.” My book doesn’t even show up. And I’m pretty sure “The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold isn’t really about the Internet at all.

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The US Senate is going to pass the Homeland Security Bill today unless there is an outpouring of protest. This is a hideous bill that will make civil liberties feel like a thing of the past. CALL YOUR SENATOR THIS MORNING!

(Senator Kennedy’s office says they’re getting lots of calls this morning. Good!)

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I’ve just installed StumbleUpon.com, a tool bar that lets your rate pages and see pages others like you have enjoyed. I gave it some minimal information about the subjects I’m interested in, and the very first page it recommended was Common Dreams, a site Jock Gill (technologist, activist and photographer extraordinaire) had recommended to me last night. Common Dreams’ tagline describes it well:

Breaing News and Views for the Progressive Community

Here are its headlines this morning:

Baghdad Warns That a US Strike Will Lead It To Hit Back at Israel…

Pelosi Vows to Back Bush if War Comes with Iraq…

‘Green Pope’ Warns of Worldwide Catastrophe Over New Gulf War…

Californian Women Strip for Peace…

Jimmy Carter Slams ‘Arrogant’ US Foreign Policy…

Big Write-In Vote for Massachusetts Anti-War Activist…

US May Punish Colombia Air Force…

The commentary looks lively also. So, so far StumbleUpon is one for one. I’ll write a better report on it after I’ve been using it for more than 5 minutes…

By the way, I only installed if after being personally assured by the service’s Garrett Camp that:

The only information we collect is the URL and associated rating when you click bad, good or great. The history of sites you have stumbled upon is also recorded, but only on the client so we don’t show you the same sites twice. Even though you can remain an anonymous user if you wish, you can enter you name and website on the “Your info” page so that you can bring traffic to your homepage. If you wind up the first rater for alot of good sites, a significant number of people will end up looking at your profile and visiting your website. Best of all, they will be people who like what you do, so its one of the best ways to get like-minded people reading your blog.

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Want to see the message box of the future? It’s here today at Rageboy’s blog.

SPOILER: RB bought an online copy of his own article in Harvard Business Review only to find that his computer has been blocked from copying from it.

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With regard to the photo of Bush and the lens caps, Jim Winstead writes:

don’t dismiss it as a fake quite so quickly (snopes certainly didn’t call it a fake — just a possible fake). i contacted contact press images (from the credit at the bottom of the photo) via mail@contactpressimages.com, and a jeffrey there replied that the photo was indeed legit.

but as snopes points out, it’s a pretty trivial thing. (i’ve forwarded the confirmation on to them. hopefully they’ll work their magic to confirm it beyond my simple email to the public contact address.)

(wired also has a related article about the increase of faked photos here.)

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I’m getting msgs from various mail servers that the Klez virus - a worm - has been detected in an attachment I sent. Klez sends mail to people in your contact list. The message was apparently titled “A funny website.”

Sorry! Symantec/Norton antivirus checks all my outgoing email, is always resident, and does a thorough disk scan once a week, so I don’t know how this happened.

Well, here’s part of the answer. This is from the Symantec page about Klez:

Systems Affected: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Me
Systems Not Affected: Macintosh, OS/2, Unix, Linux

In the discussion of this entry, Kevin Marks points out that “Klez is never sent from the address of someone infected. It sends emails from and to people in the infected one’s address book.” So, I am not the source of this particular outbreak. (I do, however, have a nasty groin rash. Photos at 11.)

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Dan Hughes of TheyBlinked points out a “Total Information Awareness” flowchart by John “Felonious” Poindexter up on the DARPA site. It illustrates how the government is going to map your every click and every step. Take a look at the list under “transactional data”: Financial, education, travel, medical, veterinary, transportation, housing, government, communications…

Pornography for information fascists.

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