Varnished

USAToday today runs an interview with President Bush. It prefaces the transcript with:

Excerpts from USA TODAY's interview Thursday with President Bush, edited for length and clarity.

Edited for CLARITY? Since when is a newspaper supposed to be fixing up a politician's garbled language? That's what we have PR flacks for.

USAToday owes it to us to publish the full, unedited interview on its Web site. I couldn't find it there.

Hotel Factoids and Fictionoids

Note: Still on the road. Back tomorrow.

The speaker before me at the Hospitality Design conference was Peter Yesowitch (spelling?) who reported on trends in the "hospitality industry" — in quotes because the two words just don't go well together.. His company does research, so he was able to give the attendees actual information, unlikely some of us. Among the items that caught my attention: While 40% of hotel decisions are affected by the Internet, only 8% of reservations are made on line. So, I ask myself, what are we doing in the delta between 40 and 8? We're talking. We're complaining about the hotel that forgot to leave a chocolate on the pillow and were gushing about the one where the staff was nice to our kids.

The hotel the conference was at, the Fairmont in Sonoma, was lapfully luxurious. But I felt bad for it. When I checked in, I asked about broadband in the bedroom. Yes, it had just been installed three days earlier. Oy, I wanted to shout. You should have gone wifi! Wifi is going to rock the hotel boat, so to speak, because not only will it make connectivity available everywhere on the grounds, but we'll flock into groups if given half a chance. "Room service is running slow tonight!" "How much should I tip the shoe shine person?" "Anyone going into town tonight and want a ride?" Hotels are conversations, as Doc might say.

Laughing at the Lies

From Mark Dionne comes this Buzzflash "news analysis":

Ari Gets Laughed Out of the White House Briefing Room

BuzzFlash Note: Although we didn't see this occur, we have received three separate reader accounts indicating that the White House press corps finally laughed at the absurdity of Ari Fleischer's lies, at least once. The following is the account from one of our BuzzFlash e-mail reporters about the White House news briefing on Tuesday, February 25:

---

ON CSPAN — WH press conference with Ari ended just now. It's grim. Not much new but a reiteration of the "Saddam must disarm" and some hints that Saddam and other top Iraqi leaders might be assassinated if GW gives the executive decree.

Then one tidbit floated up. A reporter asked about a French report that says Bush is offering a bundle of concessions (and I think she actually said 'buying votes') to Mexico and Colombia, granting worker amnesty and so on. Ari tap-danced. Then she (the reporter) started to press the issue by saying "they (the French) are quoting two US State Dept. Diplomats that Bush intends to give work permits to Colombia and Mexico."

.... Ari just drew himself up with imperious indignation and said something like "you're implying that the President is buying the votes of other nations and that's just not a consideration" or words to that effect. And guess what happened? The whole press corps, normally sheep, broke out in laughter... sweet, derisive laughter. They kept on laughing as Ari turned on his heels and strode out. Sheesh.

Go down to White House Press Briefing (02/25/2003) and click on the video. After it buffers, play from about 28 minutes forward for context, 30 minutes forward to watch Press laugh at Ari's BIG FAT GOP LIE.

Sunny DigitalID

The Theseus Institute in the south of France (swim out of the Mediterranean, towel off in Nice, and go north a few miles) is hosting its annual conference, which this year is on "Digital Personae and Prviacy: the business, technological and social implications":

The 2003 TIMIA conference will be led by Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, and will be joined by a number of other leading experts and business representatives.

This is not just a one day conference but rather a month long opportunity to interact, explore and reflect on this important topic culminating in the face to face exchange on 4th April in Sophia Antipolis.

In contrast to most conferences, and in keeping with Theseus alumni’s entrepreneurial heritage, 2003 TIMIA Conference will commence before the physical meeting of delegates and speakers. Starting in March, using an interactive software tool, developed by the University of Toronto registered delegates will be able to interact with Dr. Derrick de Kerchove, other speakers and each other, by posting questions, comments and related content ahead of the event.

Nope, I'm not going. But I can dream, can't I?

The Theseus Institute is a remarkable business/management school, and not just because it's on the Riviera, although that sure don't hurt. It's quite progressive in its attitude toward the nature of business and success. Here is part of its mission statement:

...Many commentators and most educational institutions still tend to look upon the changes happening as being the result of the acceleration of transactions of various sorts due to computers and the internet. Their basic stand is that once we adjust for the speed of things, the underlying dynamics are pretty much the same, to be treated with pretty much the same tools, and to be understood pretty much with the same mental habits and methods.

We take issue with this stand.

The "information revolution" is bringing about a fundamental change in where and how value is created along the "value web" and, even more critically, who will be able extract and lay claim to the value being so created. This is not a marginal change along the edges of our understanding of management; it requires a fundamental rethink and re-conceptualization...

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that there are no more football scholarships available for the upcoming year.

Kickback free

That last item about the kickbacks was a joke. Really.

Ligh Blogging Ahead

I'm on a road trip, giving a keynote to Hospitality Design on Thursday in Sonoma about "hyperlinked organizations" and leading workshops on "The Web from Your Members' Point of View" for an association of associations (yes, a meta-association) in Orlando on Friday.

Yes, I tell you this not only to explain why my blogging will be lighter than usual but to hint that I'm available as a speaker and consultant. And I'll give you one rock solid reason to prefer me to my colleages and competitors: I give kickbacks.

First You First

Gary Lawrence Murphy actually put a "You First" pledge button on the Teledyn site. "You First" is intended to encourage vendors to respect our right to maximum anonymity when dealing with them, even as the existence of digital IDs tempts them to demand we tell them more about ourselves than we want to.

It's nice to see it on the Teledyn site. And it actually feels pretty good to press the button and read the pledge. Thanks, Gary.

One vendor site down, 5,433,22 to go!

[Note: All numbers in JOHO are guaranteed to have been made up.]

New Issue of JOHO

For reasons we may never fully understand, I published a new issue of my newsletter yesterday, just days after publishing a gigormous one. Much of its contents comes from this blog, but the first article - the one where I make an idiot of myself more thoroughly than usual - is all new.

Is Cheney a Genius?

John Perry Barlow has written a surprisingly even-handed message to Farber's list that says: "With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Dick Cheney is the smartest man I've ever met." So, he asks, what's going through Cheney's head? How can the world's only super-power protect its global interests and stabilize the world? Answer: By acting like "the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to use...By these terrible means, they will create a world where war conducted by any country but the United States will seem simply too risky and the Great American Peace will begin."

Yes, that Cheney is brilliant! And the plan can't fail ... so long as the people we're subjugating can't get their hands on any box cutters.

Taking Nuclear War from Thinkable to Do-able

From Mark Federman comes a link to a press release from the Los Alamos Study Group (a "non-profit, research-oriented, nuclear disarmament organization...") that describes the recently-released minutes of a meeting of "thirty-two senior nuclear weapons managers from U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, the uniformed military, the National Nuclear Stewardship Administration (NNSA), and the Office of the Secretary of Defense." The meeting was set up to plan an August meeting about how to build nuclear weapons that can be used on the battlefield, not merely for deterrence. It seems as if we're about to build a whole new round of nukes.

Feel safer?

Says the press release:

It is impossible to overstate the challenge these plans pose to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the existing nuclear test moratorium, and U.S. compliance with Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1970 and is now binding law in the United States. 

3D Desktop

I loaded the 3DNA demo off a gaming magazine CD just for the heck of it. It replaces your desktop with a 3D environment you can navigate to find your files and applications. This appeals to me because lo these many years ago (i.e., around 1992), for comic relief at a users conference I hacked together a demo of what the Interleaf desktop might look like someday. I replaced Wolfenstein 3D's bitmaps with my own document management ones so you could stroll down a corridor, enter rooms that were the equivalent of file folders, visit the poor saps stuck in the FrameMaker jail cell, and at the end get shot by a Nazi representing the Secure Computing Environment. Hmm, maybe I can sell the idea to Microsoft.

Anyway, 3DNA is just about completely unappealing to me, and since I can't find a lot specifically wrong with itI guess it's the 3D-ness of it that bothers me. There are certainly some nice touches: your Web favorites list becomes a wall of TVs, each showing what's up on the site. But moving through space rather than "teleporting" via mouse seems like a lot of work with no particular pay-off. It's a bad way to traverse lots of information.

There's a free version and one without ads and some additional features for $30.00.

Me, Myself and Someone Else

John Luke, reading my ramblings about selves, recommends Robert Kegan's work: The Evolving Self and In over Our Heads. But I ask: Why read people who have thought deeply about this topic and have developed ideas based on observation and research when I can make up whatever I want? I mean, really!

Something Else to Worry About

From Risk Digest, via a mailing list:

ATM vulnerabilities and citibank's gag attempt

Ross Anderson
Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:58:47 +0000

Citibank is trying to get an order in the High Court today gagging public disclosure of crypto vulnerabilities:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_gag.pdf

I have written to the judge opposing the order:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_response.pdf

The background is that my student Mike Bond has discovered some really horrendous vulnerabilities in the cryptographic equipment commonly used to protect the PINs used to identify customers to cash machines:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/TechReports/UCAM-CL-TR-560.pdf

These vulnerabilities mean that bank insiders can almost trivially find out the PINs of any or all customers. The discoveries happened while Mike and I were working as expert witnesses on a `phantom withdrawal' case.

The vulnerabilities are also scientifically interesting: http://cryptome.org/pacc.htm

Source URL: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/go/risks/22/58/6

The Gift of Salon

Scott Rosenberg, editor of Salon, reports that the 'zine isn't about to fold. It will if it can't come up with any new sources of funds.

One of those sources is you. If you're already a subscriber, you can give a one year gift subscription for a mere $20, 33% off the usual. You can sign up a pal here.

(You can read here Scott's comments about how the Online Journalism Review got the story wrong. One lesson: Don't trust a source who refers to himself as "Bay Aryan" and to Scott as "Rosenkike." The discussion thread is lively. )

Introverted and Proud

Before approaching me in the real world, please certify that you have read Jonathan Rauch's "Caring for Your Introvert." It'll save us both a lot of heartache and misunderstanding.

Ready.goof

David Spector, on a mailing list, points us to some parodies of the inadvertently absurd Homeland of Office Security site, Ready.gov.

Enough

I just spent some pain-in-the-butt time updating my list of recent publications. Conclusion: My ratio of ideas to output is currently running about 1:6. Yes, we're upgrading to an Orange Alert status.

Well, I'd like to chat more about this, but I have a column at Darwin Mag due.

Alpha Halley

Anyone with a grain of sense is at least conflicted by Halley's Alpha Male series. If you hate what it says, I'm not going to argue with you, although I will tell you that Halley isn't writing it because she's anti-feminist. Hah! I know Halley. Something much more interesting is going on.

Read the latest. Two memories vividly recounted, connected by the outwardness of day trips and the inwardness of casual love. Told through details. Personal and specific yet illuminating beyond its subject. Risky in Halley's exposure of herself. Risky even in its style. It's brave writing. If nothing else, give Halley that.

And then read today's entry about how and why she writes.

We Are Not Immune

Too bad Happy Tutor's reappropriation of the Cluetrain Manifesto (see below) didn't take the opportunity to fix #74, the most obviously wrong thesis in the batch:

We are immune to advertising. Just forget it. [original]

We are immune to advertising, whether corporate or political. Just forget it. [Tutor]

If only. Yesterday the guy behind the desk at the auto repair store complained lightly, "People think I'm the Shell Answer Man." It has to be at least 20 years since the Shell Answer Man ads were on TV, but there he is, still stuck in our heads. Marketing shrapnel. And when my wife and I went to buy a new washing machine, I entered the process sure that Maytag is a reliable brand.

No, we're not immune. But the Internet does give us a way to check whether we're thinking clearly or it's just the shrapnel talking.

Cluetrainic Democracy

The Happy Tutor has posted a remix of the Cluetrain Manifesto, applying it to democracy in corporate America. Democracy is a conversation and — just as important — corporations aren't citizens. (And if they were, we'd hate them.)

The Tutor's rendition tends towards the hyperbolic — unlike the staid and measured tones of the original. He doesn't think corporations are capable of reform, and thus he replaces the chiding tone of the original with a call for heads on pikes. And the truth is that the four authors of the original varied on whether "the end of business as usual" (the book's subtitle) meant reform or revolution. (I personally didn't think, and still don't think, that we're going to see the collapse of the large corporation as a form of business life, but I've never been right about anything.) Ultimately, I think the theses ended up calling for corporate change and not corporate dismemberment mainly for rhetorical reasons, although I'm not sure I'm speaking for my co-authors on this: the manifesto tried to express some thoughts latent in the Web body politic about what was going on, and you don't get to explain yourself to someone if you're also screaming "Die, you bastard!" at him.

Anyway, take a look at what the Tutor hath wrought.

World Peace

I find something moving about this collection of photos of peace rallies around the world.

Thanks, David I.

Philanthropy and Links

The Happy Tutor has started a blog focusing on "Philanthropy, Democracy and Weblogs." In it, he's his normal brilliant, incisive and archly funny self. (See, for example, his "Rationale for Extreme Wealth.") The site in fact has an objective, expressed in its subtitle: "Notes towards a Summit of Key Players."

Here's one way blogging maybe could help: I'd love to read blogs by people who are doing the work of helping — someone scooping rice from a sack, someone scratching innoculations into a long queue of people, someone getting a water purification system up and running. You know, the actual heroes.

Anyway, I'm glad the Tutor's new site is around. Thanks.

Two Rules of Truth

Paul Musgrove writes passionately as a writer of history about the limitations of writing history. His lead example of historiography-gone-wrong is a conference where the gender of the Industrial Revolution was discussed:

What I want you to understand is the mindset in which "The Industrial Revolution was a masculine event" is a statement which makes sense. It is a mindset which has lost touch with reality.

I'm in no position to decide about this particular debate. But I do want to defend the utility of abstractions of this and other sorts.

Paul worries that the very act of abstraction — for example, talking about The Industrial Revolution as if it were an actual event rather than a way of referring to a wide range of acts, ideas and feelings — does violence to the very real people who were directly affected by it. For example:

The more I write, and the more I read others' writing, the more I detach myself from the pain and joy of daily life that lies behind "agricultural depression" or "bank failure," or the pettiness and granduer wrapped up in "Congress" or "American hegemony." As I use written language, that is, history becomes a set of arbitrary symbols, rather than a quest to understand the events and choices that confronted people with thoughts and feelings as real as mine.

But he holds out some hope:

Words, when used to communicate well, can push us in the direction of truth. The same attention to detail which serves the best poets and novelists would serve a historian no less well. And our best historians—William Manchester, Robert Caro, and—yes—even Steven Ambrose—comprehend the relationship between the telling detail and understanding. That's why their books are readable and informative, and books exploring the gender of the Industrial Revolution aren't.

I'm a sucker for readable histories. And I also like books, like Manchester's "A World Lit Only by Fire," that abjure trends and theories in favor of descriptions of what daily life was like. I like historical fiction for the same reason. But that doesn't mean that historical accounts that are not about the quotidian are therefore false. One might as well say that the theory of natural selection is untrue because it passes over in a phrase ("nature red in tooth and claw") the very real pain of the short-necked giraffe curled up as it starves on an over-populated plain of Africa, yada yada.

Here's what I think: Truth doesn't apply only to the details, and the details aren't all that's real. Communities are real. Generations are real. Wars are real. Peace is real. Poverty is real. Even fashion trends are real. They are real in different ways, and truth — IMO — consists in (1) revealing each in ways appropriate to it, and (2) remembering that there isn't only one type of revelation. If you do 1 but not 2, you become a narrowly focused partisan who sneers at history's stories as sentimentalism or sneers at history's hypotheses as mere academic flatulence...but either way you end up sneering. If you do 2 but not 1, you end up without beliefs or understanding.

So bring on the abstract theories! But remember that they're doing the work of abstraction, which is not the only work we need done.

As Paul concludes:

The problems of historiography, alas, are not hard to solve; the solutions are simply difficult to implement.

By the way, don't miss the discussion of Paul's ideas following the blog entry itself.

What I've said about truth comes mainly from what I learned from Heidegger. He talks about truth as an uncovering. This in opposition to the standard view of truth as the correspondence of a statement with a state of affairs. Seems real right to me.

The Score: Telcos Infinity, Us Zero

Dan Gillmor explains the latest FCC "compromise" that actually is a near-total victory for the incumbent telcos. Want to guess who the big losers are? Got a mirror handy?

Writes Dan:

Spinning this as a victory for any party but the regional Bell monopolies is a big mistake. Competition for tomorrow's data access just took an enormous hit.

Destroy these Instructions before Reading Them Dept.

I don't like hearing from collection agencies. They scare me because they get to write bad things about you on the permanent record your high school principal warned you about. So, when I received a letter from a collection agency today, it made me nervous. It seems I owe AT&T Worldnet the mighty sum of $16.95.

The nice guy I spoke with at the collection agency cut me off in mid-outrage as I said that I'd never received the original bill. It turns out that the $16.95 was the final charge for a Worldnet account I cancelled a year ago. AT&T had sent the bill to my worldnet email account...yes, to the account that I'd cancelled.

"I get this all day long," the collection guy said.

It looks like AT&T has earned yet one more Golden D'oh.

Coordination vs. Collaboration

Yesterday I heard two presentations that might have been arranged one after another on purpose. The first was an endless walkthrough of all of Microsoft Project's features. "We looked at how teams actually work together," the presenter said, and then apparently they decided to see how much of the humanity well-designed software could squeeze out of the process. Endless grids, timelines, pie charts, warning flags and drill downs that together constituted informational white noise.

The next presenter talked about how the Pentagon rebuilt itself after 9/11. A "slab to ceiling" renovation was already underway, but the team dedicated itself to restoring the hole in their lives within a year of the attack. Contractors and architects worked together, rather than positioning each other to take the blame for overruns in time and budget as is the usual custom. The "ends" were empowered and given incentives to succeed. Spirits were high. And Walker Evey, the ex-NASA guy who headed the project, showed true leadership.

Now, I have every confidence that the Pentagon restoration project used plenty of Gannt charts, timelines, pie charts and grids to coordinate the activities. For all I know, it used Microsoft Project. But it succeeded because of leadership and dedication...and because its managers didn't made the common business mistake of confusing the measurement with the measured.

[Note: Please don't bother writing on the discussion board that you don't like the Pentagon or what it stands for. Neither do I. But if you can't appreciate either the suffering the attack inflicted or the admirable aspects of the restoration project, then, well, you might want to do some yoga to try to get the kink out of your self-righteousness.]

I had my 15 minutes and no one told me until they were over Dept.

In its monthly list of "Wired, Tired and Expired," the new issue of Wired lists "loosely joined" as tired. ("Evolved" is wired and "tightly coupled" is expired.)

I believe that according to the terms of the Geneva Convention on Lost Luggage, I am therefore entitled to claim that "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" must have been at some point implicitly wired. Right?

Woohoo [by implication]!

On the Road

I'm on my way to Kansas City so this concludes the JOHO broadcast day. Cue the grainy images of America and the scratchy rendition of the national anthem...

I'll be back late tonight.

Turning a Blind Irony

Demonstrating a remarkable lack of irony, the Republican Team Leader site that was caught astroturfing letters to the editor (write a letter and get GOPoints redeemable for attractive GOP logo-wear) is now urging members to astroturf the Boston Globe in response to the Globe's editorial against the Team Leader site's astroturfing. (Yes, that sentence does make sense.)

And, quite wonderfully, the pre-composed letter you can click and send is in fact the original letter about President Bush "demonstrating genuine leadership."

Time Theft

From Betsy Devine's blog comes a link to Linda Kim Davies' home page. It's a Flash site and my first reaction was impatience and annoyance. Images and words fade in, leaving me feeling like Bob (or was it Ray?) in the Bob and Ray interview with the president of the Slow Talkers of America Society. Likewise, her essays appear one slow-fading paragraph at a time. "What right does she have to take my time this way?" I thought.

And then I realized how stupid I was being. Or how webby. I'm acting as if I've been made the Lord of Time, that I have an inalienable right to control the pace and editing of what I experience. The sequential, non-random arts demand we trust them with our time, a non-recoverable, non-fungible chunk of our lives. When they squander it, we feel robbed. But when they do more with that time than we could have imagined, not just our ideas and feelings but our lives ourselves have been made more valuable.

On the other hand, I wish Linda Kim Davies would put in a list of links to her photos because I have a lot to do today.

Corporations that Think They're People

From Adina:

There's a discussion on the Well, in the publicly visible Inkwell.vue area, about Thom Hartmann's recent book: Equal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

In our current legal system, corporations are considered persons, with the civil rights due people, like free speech, and freedom from search and seizure. Hartmann argues that these rights contribute to corporate abuses, and argues in favor of restricting corporate personhood.

If you read only one message there, make it #5 from Hartmann. But why stick with just one?

I'm on the Radio Today

I'm doing a commentary on wifi on the syndicated NPR show "Here and Now" today, probably around 12:20. (SPOILER: I'm in favor of wifi.)

Chronicle of Hiya Education on Palladium

Here's a balanced article on the impact of Palladium on colleges and on Fair Use and the enforcement of the UCITA

Thanks to Seth Johnson for the link.

Spam I Couldn't Stop Reading

Dear Sir,

My name is Andy Hudson.

I'm an online marketer, and am currently searching for like minded individuals and web site owners to network with, and to explore potential opportunities that can bring mutual benefit to both of us.

I just visited your site, and would like to congratulate you on a nice clean, crisp site - it's very professional.

Oh yeah, this is a guy who's looked at my site. If ever there were three words to describe it, I think we'd have to go with "clean," "crisp" and "professional." Hah!

So, by the time I got to the line in the spam that said:

"No false promises, but I think this could be the start of an excellent win/win relationship.. "

I was already thinking "Gotta blog this!" But then it got even better. Here are the closing lines from this Seasoned Internet Marketing Professional:

Many thanks.

Your name.

Andy Hudson

Yo, Andy baby: It's ok not to realize that "Your name" is placeholder text in the spam generator you're using, but it is most definitely not ok to spray your spam around without even mailing it to yourself first to test it.

So, when I say "Shove your spam up your integrated marketing portal, Andy Hudson," I hope you understand that I mean this only in the most clear, crisp and professional sense.

Kevin on Clay

Kevin Marks takes a look at the data Clay uses in his application of power laws to blogs, concluding that "Clay's paper is correct as far as it goes, but it makes a couple of classic mistakes."

Kevin's article is all math-like, with graphs and numbers with six digits to the right of the decimal point, so I was disqualified from understanding it well before the lightning round. But both Kevin and Clay are waaaay smart, so if you're in their league, you might want to mosey on over.

Google, Blogger, and the Stupidity Temptation

Now we see what Google is made of.

Google got to be the #1 brand name world-wide, beating Coke and Osama not by out-spending them or by having a catchier jingle. No, they did it the way (frankly) Cluetrain said: by having value and values.

Marketing was invented to solve a distribution problem: How do we let potential buyers know about what we have to offer? The answer was to buy distribution channels that, by their nature, reached a mass audience with a one-way communication, AKA "a message." With thirty seconds to make their case (or, in the print world, with the time it takes to flip a page), companies treated their messages like dumdum bullets: hollowed them of content hoping for maximum impact. Marketing, which should be about communication and conversation, became a cynical numbers game, the apotheosis of which is spam.

But the Internet has solved the distribution problem. Everyone is connected to everyone. We fill the Net with talk about everything we care about, including the products we buy, bought, or will never buy again.

In this environment, a company like Google succeeds by offering something of value and by acting with values that let us trust it. So far — despite some fear-mongering recently — Google seems to have earned our trust. It's one of the best examples of a company adopting the "End-to-End" principles I talked about in the lead article in Friday's issue of my newsletter.

But Blogger offers such a temptation to go wrong. What, after all, is Google's business case for the purchase? For example, the purchase of Deja.com gave Google content that drew more users and, more important, gave them more pages on which to sell ads. Google's ad policy maintains its value and its values: the ads are unobtrusive and are listed in order of their utility to users (based on clicks). But with Blogger, there are two tempting ways Google could violate the trust they've earned: They could start charging for all Blogger accounts, and they could weight searches towards Blogger blogs.

Weighting searches would clearly violate the principle that has built Google's presence: rankings that try to reflect the Web's own preferences. Charging for all Blogger accounts would violate the implicit bond that has made Google not only known and used but loved, for it would make the Web a worse place overall. Google's record so far has been great: Whatever the business reasons for rescuing Deja, the purchase also preserved the UseNet archives, making the Net a better place. And, of course, the superiority of Google's searching ability has made the Web a far better place than it was before.

Many companies get stupid when they get big. So far, Google has bucked the trend. Let's hope it doesn't give into the temptation to get stupid now.

West Wing: Fact, Fiction and Fanaticism

For your West Wing enhanced entertainment experience, here's a site for true junkies.

And this is from Joe Conason's preview of an Esquire article (which should have come out by now) on life in the White House. It quotes John DiIulio, former director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives:

"I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis ... Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera ..."

Mike Muegel points to the Esquire article in question. Thanks, Mike!

The Hardiness of Cluetrain (hardback edition only)

Why has the hardback edition of Cluetrain been ranked in the 600s for weeks on Amazon? The paperback edition, ranked at #18,671, has been out for years. It's available free online here. Don't you people have anything better to do than buy hardback copies of an aging barbaric yawp?

Today's Alert Level

See them all here.

Thanks to Gary Stock for the link.

Support Salon

Salon has reported that it will be out of business in weeks unless something changes.

It has about 47,000 subscribers. HINT: It could use one more.

New Issue of JOHO

A new issue of my free newsletter is out. Here's what's in it

What File Sharing Hasn't Done

Jane Black has an excellent article at BusinessWeek on the real causes of the drop in CD sales. She writes:

The recording industry keeps repeating that file-sharing is ruining CD sales. If it looked for some other reasons, it would find lots of them.

Anonymous Cash

The Lucre Project has released a new version of its code. From the announcement:

A third release is available today along with a new website and, importantly, a graphical client called CashBox.

Lucrative is based on Ben Laurie's Lucre project. Lucre is a system of blinded digital cash. It is unlinkable and untraceable: the bank cannot record the coins it issues to customers, and cannot identify which account is paying which, except by traffic analysis.

This is 'true anonymous digital cash' folks.

Lucrative is building a server anyone can use to build their own digital bearer instrument underwriting business.

First I've heard of it (which puts me at least two releases behind)...

ENUM Alert

Just as I was proofreading the little article about ENUM in the issue of my newsletter I'm trying to get out today, Eric Norlin blogged about ENUM developments and the standard's relationship to digital ID. Important!

New Solution to Car Talk Puzzler

Martin Sutherland has his own, fiendishly clever solution to the Car Talk puzzler. (Mike Booth's solution is here.)

Whatever the solution is, I can't wait to hear Click and/or Clack try to describe it over the radio...

My Pencil Carvings

I don't see what the big deal is about those pencil carvings. Oh, sure, they're flashy in a show-offy sort of way. But I've been doing the same thing for years, and I only use the sharpened nail of my left pinky. For example, here are two of my recent works:

Anatomically precise human skeleton carved into a #2 pencil

Anatomically precise Donald Rumsfeld

Whom We Will Attack

Forwarded by David Isenberg.

Report from Iraq

Submitted to portside by Charlie Clements

I am a public health physician and a human rights advocate. I have just returned from a 10-day emergency mission to Iraq with other public health experts to assess the vulnerability of the civilian population to another war. I'm also a distinguished graduate of the USAF Academy and a Vietnam veteran, so I have some sense of the potential consequences of the air war we are about to unleash on Iraq as a prelude to the introduction of American troops.

The population of Iraq has been reduced to the status of refugees. Nearly 60 percent of Iraqis, or almost 14 million people, depend entirely on a government- provided food ration that, by international standards, represents the minimum for human sustenance. Unemployment is greater than 50 percent, and the majority of those who are employed make between $4 and $8 a month. (The latter figure is the salary of a physician that works in a primary health center.) Most families are without economic resources, having sold off their possessions over the last decade to get by.

Hospital wards are filled with severely malnourished children, and much of the population has a marginal nutritional status. While visiting a children's hospital, we were told about newly emerging diseases that had previously been controlled when pesticides were available. (Current sanctions prohibit their importation.) Later I saw a mother who had traveled 200 km with her young daughter, who suffered from leschmaniais, or "kala azar" as it is known there. She came to the hospital because she heard it had a supply of Pentostam, the medicine needed to treat the disease. The pediatrician told her there was none. Then he turned to me and, in English, said, "It would be kinder to shoot her here rather than let her go home and die the lingering death that awaits her". Our interpreter, by instinct, translated the doctor's comments into Arabic for the mother, whose eyes instantly overflowed with tears.

The food distribution program funded by the U.N., Oil- for-Food, is the world's largest and is heavily dependent upon the transportation system, which will be one of the first targets of the war, as the U.S. will attempt to sever transport routes to prevent Iraqi troop movements and interrupt military supplies. Yet even before the transportation system is hit, U.S. aircraft will spread millions of graphite filaments in wind-dispersed munitions that will cause a complete paralysis of the nation's electrical grids. Already literally held together with bailing wire because the country has been unable to obtain spare parts due to sanctions, the poorly functioning electrical system is essential to the public health infrastructure.

The water treatment system, too, has been a victim of sanctions. Unable to import chlorine and aluminum sulfate (alum) to purify water, Iraq has already seen a 1000% increase in the incidence of some waterborne diseases. Typhoid cases, for instance, have increased from 2,200 in 1990 to more than 27,000 in 1999. In the aftermath of an air assault, Iraqis will not have potable water in their homes, and they will not have water to flush their toilets.

The sanitation system, which frequently backs up sewage ankle deep in Baghdad neighborhoods when the ailing pumps fail, will stop working entirely in the aftermath of the air attack. There will be epidemics as water treatment and water pumping will come to a halt. Even though it is against the Geneva Conventions to target infrastructure elements that primarily serve civilians, this prohibition did not give us pause in Gulf War I — and, based upon current Bush administration threats, will not this time. Pregnant women, malnourished children, and the elderly will be the first to succumb. UNICEF estimates that 500,000 more children died in Iraq in the decade following the Gulf War than died in the previous decade. These children are part of the "collateral damage" from the last war.

How many civilians will die in the next war? That is hard to say. One estimate for the last Gulf War was that 10,000 perished, mostly during the bombing campaign that led up to the invasion. That figure will surely climb because our government has promised that a cruise missile will strike Iraq every five minutes for the first 48 hours the war. These missiles will seek out military, intelligence, and security-force targets around highly populated areas like Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul, Iraq's largest cities, where "collateral damage" is unavoidable. Unable to meet the acute medical needs of the country's population now, the health care system of Iraq will be overwhelmed by such an assault.

This scenario is conservative. I have not taken into account any use of weapons of mass destruction, or the possibility that the war will set loose massive civil disorder and bloodshed, as various groups within the country battle for power or revenge. I have also ignored what would happen if we became bogged down in house-to-house fighting in Baghdad, which could easily become another Mogidishu or Jenin.

There was a lot that made me angry on that trip. I have worked in war zones before and I have been with civilians as they were bombed by U.S.-supplied aircraft, but I don't think I've experienced anything on the magnitude of the catastrophe that awaits our attack in Iraq. Still, as deeply troubling as this looming human disaster is, another issue troubles me far more. If the U.S. pursues this war without the backing of the U.N. Security Council, it will undermine a half-century of efforts by the world community to establish a foundation of humanitarian and human rights law. Such an act on our part would also violate the U.N. Charter and make a mockery of the very institution we have helped to fashion in the hopes it would help prevent crimes against humanity. Many might define the consequences of such an attack on the population of Iraq as just that.

Saddam is a monster, there is no doubt about that. He needs to be contained. Yet many former U.N. weapons inspectors feel he has been "defanged". His neighbors do not fear him any longer. There are many Iraqis who want him removed, but not by a war. Against the short- term gain of removing Saddam, we must take into account that idea that we may well unleash forces of hatred and resentment that will haunt us for decades to come in every corner of the world. I can just hear Osama Bin Laden saying now, "Please President Bush, attack Iraq. There's nothing better you could do to help the cause of Al Qaeda!"

Letter from Charlie Clements

Charlie Clements, a public health physician, has spent much of his professional experience dealing with issues of war, human rights, and the humanitarian needs of refugees. He is the co-founder of the International Medical Relief Fund (IMRF) and was president during the 16 years it functioned (1982-1998). From 1984-1986 he served as the Director of Human Rights Education of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC). He has served on the board of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) from 1987 to the present and is currently its past president. PHR was one of the founders and leaders of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Clements represented PHR at both the signing of the Treaty to Ban Landmines in Ottawa, Canada and the next week at the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway. He is also the founder of the International Commission on Medical Neutrality, which has focused attention on the need to extend the protections afforded military physicians and patients by the Geneva Conventions in times of war, to include both civilian health professionals and patients. Clements is the author of Witness to War published by Bantam in 1984 and subject of a 1985 Academy Award-winning documentary of the same title produced by the American Friends Service Committee. He is a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and a distinguished alumnus of the University of Washington School of Community Medicine and Public Health. He is the director of the Bartos Institute for the Constructive Engagement of Conflict at the United World College in Montezuma, New Mexico.

Lessig Fan Fiction

Alex Golub has written some Lessig fan fiction. The idea is funny enough. The execution actually works. The story begins:

Grand Inquisitor and Supreme Arbiter of Earthling Law Lawrence Lessig leaned back in his ultra-schmancy executive chair and sighed heavily

This is part of Alex's Small Ensembles blog-fiction.

[Thanks to One Pot Meal for the link.]

Coke: The Spiel Thing (or: Coke Is Ick!)

Jonathan Peterson writes to a mailing list:

AdAge is carrying a transcript of Steve Heyer's (Coke's President and COO) keynote speech at Advertising Age's Madison & Vine conference. AdAge talks the speech up as a revolutionary manifesto and it is a good read, clearly designed to rev up the conference goers. But as I got into the speech I realized that the conversational language of the cluetrain was being co opted, and what Steve seems to really be saying is "All these CONSUMERS are becoming deaf to our messages, we need to get Hollywood, Madison Ave and corporate America all on the same page to make sure we can continue to control these people. (In the speech he actually uses the term CUSTOMERS to refer to ad agencies and holly wood, while we are of course CONSUMERS).

I blogged some of the better bits from the speech: I'm pretty hesitant to be telling a company like Coke about marketing (that's pretty much a career decision when you live in Atlanta), but it's amazing that Steve is completely overlooking the value of spending some of the conversational effort he's talking about making with "partners" into talking with some of us "consumers". Perhaps the reason the marketplace is fragmenting is that we don't want to be boxed up and labeled? Instead of convincing ad agencies and media companies to get in bed with Coke to sell *to* us and drive our desires, wouldn't it be interesting to find ways to engage your customers directly by finding out what we want and finding ways to enable those desires instead??

I'm late blogging this. Here's Doc, Brian McGroarty and Doc again.

A Much Easier Trick

The top of the Daypop Top 40 today is a mind-reading trick that is orders of magnitude easier to figure out than the Car Talk puzzler. Nevertheless, I fell for it like Republicans fall for tax cuts. D'oh!

Whitman Re-writ

A Freudian mishearing:

Our 6th grader has been doing a unit on poetry, including having to write poems in the style of Walt Whitman. I find this degrading to Whitman: when they study da Vinci, are they supposed to do oil paintings in the style of da Vinci? No, apparently writing like Whitman is something that any 6th grader can do. Jeez.

Anyway, my son started to tell me about a poem a friend of his wrote as an assignment. My son said: So-and-so's "Song of Myself Poem." I heard: "Song of My Cell Phone."

I telephone myself;
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every ring tone belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

Citizen to Citizen

At the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (about which I know nothing) you can read an open letter from some American citizens to the rest of the world. If you agree with enough of it, you can sign it.

Here is the first paragraph:

It is a troubled time. The drums of war, already loud, are daily being amplified by the megaphones of modern media. The U.S. government is adopting a doctrine of "pre-emptive war." There are large numbers of people in the United States who do not agree. We want to extend our hands to people all over the world to work together for peace, justice, economic equity, and environmental sanity.

(Yeah, we could do without the mixed drums and megaphones metaphor.)

"You First" Back and Forth

Eric has some sharp (incisive and cutting) comments about my idea for trying to get vendors to agree to some restrictions on the sort of digital ID info they'll ask for. Jonathan (whose "Empowered Customer Manifesto" should be read by all) pushes back. Eric pushes back back. Anyone care to push re-back back?

Car Talk Puzzle Solution?

Mike Booth has a brilliant answer to the fiendish Car Talk puzzle. He's allowing me to blog it in the interest of "open source puzzling." But I'd ask you not to enter it into the contest as your own, you slimy bastards. Here goes:

One of the prisoners is chosen to be the Scorekeeper and he gets these special instructions:

"The very first time you enter the switch room, turn switch B off. If switch B is already off, flip switch A (just to waste time). Once this first trip is over you are ready to start keeping score in your head. Your score starts at 1.

From now on, follow these instructions:
If switch B is on, turn it off and add 1 to your score.
If switch B is off, turn it on and subtract 1 from your score.
Eventually your score will reach 23. When it does, tell the warden that everyone has visited the switch room."

Each of the other 22 prisoners gets these instructions:

"You are going to be sending a signal to the Scorekeeper to tell him that you've visited the switch room. But you can't send the signal until you know that the Scorekeeper is listening.

When you first enter the switch room, flip switch A — but look at switch B and see if it is OFF or ON. Remember the position of switch B.

The next few times you enter the switch room, look to see if switch B has changed position. Once switch B changes position, you will know that the Scorekeeper is listening, and you can send the signal at your next opportunity. Until then, keep on flipping switch A every time. To send the signal, turn switch B from OFF to ON. If you can't do that (because switch B is already ON) flip switch A and wait for another opportunity to send the signal. After you've sent the signal, don't touch switch B again — just keep flipping switch A every time.

Remember, you are NEVER allowed to turn switch B off, and you are only allowed to turn it on ONCE."

This strategy works because every player touches switch B exactly once, except for the Scorekeeper who is allowed to move it back and forth (but who keeps an account of how many moves he makes). In this system, Switch A isn't very useful — it's just something to do while waiting for a chance to use Switch B — and that makes me suspect that there's a more elegant answer out there. I'll wait and see.

The "You First" Pledge

Here's an idea obvious so obvious that it's either been done or there's a good reason why it hasn't been done.

My worry about digital ID is that even with the most user-centered technology — the sort that Eric and Doc are pushing — inevitably users will be faced with a Hobson's choice: Although the technology allows us to release only the ID information we choose, in order to do business with them vendors will insist that we give them more information than we want to. Technology that gives us control isn't enough. We also need a marketplace that lets us exercise that control.

So, suppose vendors were encouraged to agree to a set of statements such as these:

If you agree to this, you get to put this button on your site that, of course, links to a web page that explains the details.

What do you think?

Note: This idea came up in the course of an interesting correspondence with Jonathan Peterson, although this doesn't imply that Jonathan agrees with it.

Literary Brookline and Minsky on Rope and Wolfram

I went to the annual Brookline Library Gala on Sunday because they invite local authors in to flog their wares. For an hour the authors get to mingle with readers and with one another. Nice event. I'm awkward in such situations — you know, ones where there are other people — but I ran into Ned Batchelder who is much less so and who is damn interesting. (Ned's excellent blog lists many of the authors in attendance and some of the diverse topics of discussion.)

Marvin Minsky strolled by, and I stood quietly as he and Ned talked. I learned two things:

1. Minsky was wearing a tie made out of climbing rope, a quirk that's been reported before. What I didn't know is that Minsky always carries rope with him because he has twice saved a life by being so prepared. He apparently encounters more quicksand and crevasses than most of us do.

2. Ned and I had been talking about Wolfram, a semi-local author, so Ned asked Minsky if he had read Wolfram's book. "Of course not." Why not? Because Wolfram is merely repeating what has been known for twenty years. Further, said Minsky, the book only finds three types of cellular automata: simple ones, looping ones, and complex ones. For a theory to be interesting, said Minsky, it needs to have at least five categories, not three. Minsky was being cocktail-party witty, but I believe his serious point was that Wolfram needs to present a theory that further analyzes the single class of complex and seemingly random cellular automata.

[Note: Yes I am bothered about blogging a private conversation with someone. But I'm using my judgment. Minsky didn't hesitate to tell two strangers (Ned and me) what I've reported. Neither of these points seems too personal. And let me make clear that I may well have gotten the point about Wolfram wrong since Minsky is a couple primates up the evolutionary tree from me.]

Green, Leafy ID

AKMA has a way to ease into a digital ID infrastructure. (Hint: If we are what we eat, at long last we'll know exactly who we are.)

Bayes vs. Latent Semantics

Just to prove my point about my dysfactia, I recently said that Mac OS X uses bayesian probability to filter spam. I said that because I read it somewhere on the Internet. (Damn Intermenet!) Kevin Marks not only wrote to correct me — the Mac uses Latent Semantics — but also cc'ed Tim Oren who then blogged a brilliant explanation and analysis of the two techniques. Thus has my stupidity made us all a little smarter.

Don't thank me. It's what I do.

How Big Is the Web?

An article in the Boston Globe today on the death of the floppy points to the "information explosion" as a contributory cause. Citing a UC Berkeley study, the article says:

The Web now has more than a half-billion pages, 95 percent of them accessible to the public...and the volume grows by more than 7 million pages daily.

Google has indexed over 3 billion. I thought the common wisdom was that there are over 20 billion pages, although I haven't been able to track that figure down. But a half-billion is clearly wrong.

Given my own dysfactia, I don't report this to make fun of the author for making a mistake. Talk about your kettle talking to a frying pan! But usually you can see how a mistake happens. Maybe the author dropped a zero. Maybe the number actually represents a year's growth, not the total number of pages. Any suggestions? Just curious.

And, more important, any links to recent studies of the size of the Web?

Dreaming Wrong Answers

The weekly Puzzler from Click and Clack, the Car Talk guys, was so hard that they extended it a week and gave some hints. I woke up this morning at 5:30 and knew the answer without having thought about it consciously. Next on my dream agenda: Re-discover benzine's structure!

Unfortunately, when I re-checked the puzzle this morning, I found I'd significantly altered its terms, a case of having the right answer to the wrong question.

Anyway, here's the puzzle:

The warden meets with 23 new prisoners when they arrive. He tells them, "You may meet today and plan a strategy. But after today, you will be in isolated cells and will have no communication with one another.

"In the prison is a switch room, which contains two light switches labeled A and B, each of which can be in either the 'on' or the 'off' position. I am not telling you their present positions. The switches are not connected to anything.

"After today, from time to time whenever I feel so inclined, I will select one prisoner at random and escort him to the switch room. This prisoner will select one of the two switches and reverse its position. He must move one, but only one of the switches. He can't move both but he can't move none either. Then he'll be led back to his cell.

"No one else will enter the switch room until I lead the next prisoner there, and he'll be instructed to do the same thing. I'm going to choose prisoners at random. I may choose the same guy three times in a row, or I may jump around and come back.

"But, given enough time, everyone will eventually visit the switch room as many times as everyone else. At any time anyone of you may declare to me, 'We have all visited the switch room.'

"If it is true, then you will all be set free. If it is false, and somebody has not yet visited the switch room, you will be fed to the alligators."

And then we get three hints:

Hint number 1: A sixth grader could figure this puzzler out.

Hint B: Take a long-term perspective.

And Hint III: Solve the puzzler for three prisoners.

You can submit your answer to Car Talk...but you gotta tell me first.

Marching Forth around March Fourth

Kevin Jones writes to a private list:

Talked with a friend last night who is business manager of chanticleer, an acapella men's singing group, multiple grammy winner, etc. the March 4 event they were scheduled to sing for at the White House; presentation of congressional medals to jessie norman and others, has been cancelled. Their contact at the national endowment of the arts told him that all cultural and social events at the White House "in that window" had been cancelled.

Inference drawn: bush will be in the war room and they don't want to appear to be sipping champagne while .....

(Quoted with permission.)

Patriot II

Identity's Gravity

Eric is applying what we should start calling Norlin's Law (although Norlin's Lawlin is more euphonious) — "The Net moves everything toward the public domain" — to the question of identity. While I've been arguing (if whining counts) that anonymity should stay the default on the Internet, Norlin thinks he's got me in a logical cleft stick from which there is no escape: the Net moves identity towards the public domain, too. To support this he points out that as I post stuff about, say, "how crazy the RIAA is" (hey, Eric, I'm not letting them plead insanity!), I'm "simultaneously losing the very thing he thinks the net provides him with — anonymity." His "bottom line" is: "You can't have it both ways."

Oh yeah?

Since Eric and I and every sane person of stout heart believes that individuals ought to control their own IDs, the "it" I can't have both ways can't be being able to be anonymous and identified. I can have both of those by sometimes identifying myself and sometimes not.

It's a question of defaults. I want anonymity to be not only under my control but also to be the normal, usual, default behavior. That doesn't mean that I always and only want anonymity. My anxiety about the large-scale digital ID systems now under construction is that they'll flip the default because it's in the interest of vendors and governments to have me narrowly identified. They'll apply market and legal pressure to make anonymity look like a choice only for crooks and cowards.

If we're talking about defaults, I can have my cake and eat it, too...and either publicly identify myself as a cake-eater or not.

Questions for Conversations about Iraq

Public Conversations is a remarkable group, enabling and facilitating conversations among people across high and emotional fences. Here are eleven questions they suggest as ways to start a real conversation about Iraq:

1) As you reflect on the state of the world and recent and emerging US policies and actions, what are your biggest concerns?

2) What  troubles  you most about  the course of international events and the role the US has been  playing?  What  do you find reassuring?

3) What are your hopes and fears regarding the outcome of US and/or UN military interventions in Iraq?

4) Can you tell us something about your life experience that will help us understand your views and primary concerns?

5) What is the heart of your concerns related to the situation in the world and possible US responses?

6) Are you aware of any dilemmas, mixed feelings, value conflicts, or uncertainties within your current views?

7) What experience or credible information might shift your current views?

8) What specific events or changes have altered your sense of individual, national, and international "security?" In what way do you feel more "secure?" Less "secure?" What are some specific actions our leaders could take that might increase your sense of security at home and abroad?

9) What actions could the US take that would fit your assessment of risks and your hopes and values?

10) What could the US do regarding Iraq that would make you feel proud to be an American citizen (or to live here)?

11) If you had a half-hour with President Bush, what real (non-rhetorical or loaded) question would you want to ask him?  Why would you pick that question?

You can listen to an NPR piece on Public Conversations here.

Two Live Debates, One Old Link

Larry Lessig's conference on Open Spectrum in Stanford, CA, March 1-2, will feature a moot court case arguing the issues in front of Michael Powell, Chair of the FCC. There will be a live feed.

I wish I could go to the live event. It sounds fantastic.

You can watch a debate over the "broadcast flag" copy-protection proposal. The debate on Feb. 5 featured: Fritz Attaway, Motion Picture Association of America; Jim Burger, Dow, Lohnes & Albertson; Mike Godwin, Public Knowledge; and Andy Setos, Fox Entertainment Group. (I haven't watched it yet.)

(Note: It requires Real video. If you haven't installed Real before, be warned that it is sneakily and persistently opt-out.)

By the way, for background on Open Spectrum here's a paper and a FAQ I wrote a few weeks ago on the basis of information and ideas from Dewayne Hendricks, David Reed, and Jock Gill.

DigitalID World

Lots of intellectual foment goin' on over at DigitalID World. Don't forget to sign up for the newsletter. (Hint: When the registration form requires that you give your real name, don't use Bogus McBogusman. That's mine.)

Waiting for Hydrogen

300,000,000 cars will be built before hydrogen fuel cells are ready. That's today's sound bite from candidate John Kerry.

More from Gore Vidal

Vergil Iliescu points us to two resources for those who want to keep up with what Gore Vidal is saying these days. Here's a resource site. And here's the essay on the subject of the radio interview with Vidal that I still haven't listened to.

I found the essay disappointing. In the course of its explanation of 9/11 and our government's reaction to it, the essay presents just about every conspiracy theory without discriminating among them: pipelines, US sponsorship, previous knowledge, unscrambled jets. It thus comes across as loopy and possibly loony, even though I actually believe in some of the theories he presents. (For example, the Afghan "pipeline is a go-project thanks to the junta's installation of a Unocal employee (John J Maresca) as US envoy to the newly born democracy whose president, Hamid Karzai, is also, according to Le Monde, a former employee of a Unocal subsidiary. Conspiracy? Coincidence!") Not up to his usual snuff. Lots of ideas and uncomfortable facts, though.

Big Bets

Jock Gill at GreaterDemocracy has a good strategic overview of the conservative willingness to place "big bets" that are inherently risky.

Three Worth a Look

Sarah Lai Stirland has started a new blog called Connected: Nodes & Networks over at Corante:

This Weblog is meant to be an accompaniment to my work as a journalist. It?s also meant as a discussion forum between myself and people whom San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor calls the "former audience." As Gillmor puts it, the media world has evolved from Old Media to New Media to ?We Media,? or to Journalism 3.0. The term refers to the fact that ?readers? can now participate in the journalistic process through online publishing and the use of digital devices.

It's off to a promising start. (Here's an interesting article by Sarah on the difficulty of putting things into the public domain.)

William Du Bois has written an article on a possible conservative bias in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I didn't find the article entirely convincing, but it was thought-provoking.

Mark Hurst of Good Experience, an intelligent site about the online experience, is putting on his first ever Live version of his newsletter, May 2, in NYC.

Origins of Evil

Two nights ago, Bush's speechwriter was on The Daily Show, the Jon Stewart fake news program that's funny because it blurts out the truth. The speechwriter explained with glee how he came up with the phrase "Axis of Evil." He originally wrote "Axis of Hatred," but his boss (not Bush) took one look at it and said, "No, it's the 'Axis of Evil,'" repeating it a few times aloud to see how it sounds.

This constituted the debate over whether these countries actually are evil and the effect classifying them as such would have. A couple of lobes short of The West Wing, eh?

Turning 18

Our middle child turned 18 last night. And what has she been looking forward to doing now that she's attained her majority? Getting a tattoo? Buying cigarettes? Checking a pornographic movie out of the video store?

No, she's been looking forward to buying a subscription to Nickelodeon Magazine for Kids without first getting the permission of her parents.

(If you haven't figured it out, she's a delight. Happy birthday, sweetie.)

Kellogg's Popping to Snap Up Crackle Trademark

From Dana Blankenhorn comes a link to an article about Kellogg's application to trademark the phrase "chocolate crackle," a popular recipe in Australia. Kellogg's was granted a trademark for chocolate crackles recipe in 1953 but since then the term has been widely applied to a mix of chocolate and sugar, with or without what we call Rice Krispies in the US. In fact, here's a page from the M&M's site that has a recipe for a Krispie-free chocolate crackle confection.

The Australian patent office is looking into this short-sighted trademark greediness by Kellogg's.

Tripod Goes Bloggy

Tripod is making blogs available to their millions of members. They've announced a deal with Terra Lycos for "Blog Builder" software. Apparently, it's being provided for free with a Tripod subscription.

So, welcome Tripod members, to the blogiverse.

Best of all, think of the multiple millions of popup ad opportunities this means!

The Subtlety of Simple-minded Conservativism

Kevin recommends (which is, of course, not the same thing as endorsing) an interesting essay by Roger Scruton about how a smart guy thought his way into a classically conservative standpoint. AKMA does an excellent job assessing and undermining it. AKMA's main point strikes me as brilliantly right: Scruton poses "a binary choice between banal libertinism and sensible, prudent conservatism" as if shallow liberalism were the only variety on the shelves. And yet there's a further irony here.

The issue for Scruton seems to come down to whether we humans can escape our traditions and culture. If not, says Scruton , then we must embrace who we are instead of thinking — as liberals do — that we can re-invent ourselves. He writes:

Burke brought home to me that our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and that the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss. Replacing them with the abstract rational systems of the philosophers, we may think ourselves more rational and better equipped for life in the modern world. But in fact we are less well equipped, and our new beliefs are far less justified, for the very reason that they are justified by ourselves.

It is certainly the Enlightenment prejudice to believe that "abstract rational systems" should replace older prejudices, but that is not the only liberal alternative. For example: "Moral progress is a matter of wider and wider sympathy," writes Richard Rorty (in Philosophy and Social Hope); sympathy is not an abstract rational system. Further, the very person Scruton goes out of his way to malign rather nastily — Foucault — is in fact one our subtlest thinkers about the way prejudice (pre-judgment, not racial bias, of course) simultaneously enables judgment and undermines it. Rather than saying we are all open to radical self-reinvention — something no one except Sartre and motivational speakers espouse — Foucault provided exactly the sort of nuanced analysis that would help Scruton move past the simplification of naive liberalism vs. coldly-brilliant conservativism.

But, Scruton begins the article by saying that it was conservativism's bold statements that attracted him. So we shouldn't be surprised that his embrace of conservativism is in fact a rejection of nuance. The irony is that Scruton is so smart and subtle in his support of this position.

Trustworthy Everything

Ken Camp, the author of the excellent IP Telephony Demystified, has started a new blog and posts (on my recommendation, I'm happy to say) an email he sent to me about trustworthy computing. Here's a snippet:

If we extrapolate trustworthy computing to it's obvious extensions, don't we move toward an Orwellian society of complete control and observation? Consider "trustworthy transportation" - your automobile, sensing rage at the pressure of your foot on the pedal, shuts off, thereby not allowing you to pass a car and avoid problems. "Trustworthy refrigeration" - Sensing overly high fat content in the inventory within, your net-connected refrigerator notifies your insurance carrier, who then raises your rates based on an unhealthy lifestyle. "Trustworthy photography" could ensure that the bathtub picture of a toddler immediately be reported to those in pursuit of child pornography rings.

Preemptive Dangers

A mailing list I was on was arguing about Iraq, even though that's way off its subject. Sombebody posted a message that said, in part

...it is not only within the right of our government to prevent regimes who have demonstrated BOTH the capability AND willingness to harm America or her allies ... from doing so, it is her responsibility.

I was about to post a reply but the list's owner cut off the thread. So, I'm giving myself the last word here:

Does this mean that Al Qaeda had not only the right but the responsibility to attack the World Trade Center since it rightly perceives the US as capable and willing to do it harm? Or, if you don't like Al Qaeda as an example, how about North Korea, Cuba, or Iran?

The world recognizes the right of a country to defend itself against invasion. Allowing countries to preemptively attack others because another country could attack it — and, frankly, I don't lie awake at night about Iraq attacking us the way I do about Al Qaeda — lowers the bar to war. We have to be able to live in a world with countries that we despise and fear because that's the minimal condition for peace.

If war isn't kept as a nearly unthinkable alternative, it will make peace seem like too much work.

[Did I say "the last word"? Somehow I doubt that. See you in the comments section!]

Gore Vidal on Bush

I've been trying to make time to listen to this broadcast of Gore Vidal on the intelligent radio talk show, On Point. So far, I still haven't heard it. But, what the heck, I'm blogging it anyway in case you're disposed to listen to a smart man made increasingly radical or possibly just crankier by his advancing years.

Here's the show's blurb about the interview:

Gore Vidal (AP) Lucid, insightful and razor-sharp, Gore Vidal has been taking on the American Empire for nearly half a century. As war with Iraq looms, the legendary author and essayist is in high dudgeon. A night with the prolific, ever-engaging, and right now angry, Gore Vidal.

Newsweek Online Reviews Small Pieces

Michael Rogers in Newsweek Online discusses Links by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi , Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs and my book. About mine he writes:

“Small Pieces Loosely Joined” by David Weinberger is subtitled “A Unified Theory of the Web.” Weinberger isn’t quite serious about his subtitle. Rather, he provides a thoughtful explication of the phenomena that any such theory should unify: from the design of e-commerce sites to why the phrase “All your base are belong to us” swept the Web. Of the three authors he’s the most overtly philosophical, with chapter titles like “Space” and “Time.” And he makes an interesting point: the idea of the Web is in some ways more important than the mechanism of the Web. The truly transforming impact of the Internet will occur when the linking and virtual existence that we experience on the Web starts to alter how we understand and manage society itself.

He liked Links and Smart Mobs, too. So do I.

Setback for Spammers

(I missed this news the first time around...) On Jan. 23, MonsterHut lost an important case to the NY Attorney General. MonsterHut was sending spam that told recipients that they had "opted in" to the mailing because the company that supplied the list to MonsterHut claimed that it was an opt-in list. The court held MonsterHut liable for the list provider's lie.

Further, the court said that if, when registering customer names, you present a checkbox that's already checked, that's an opt-out list, not opt-in. In other words, when Real Networks says "Do you want us to send you endless ads in the form of a newsletter?" and presents you with a pre-checked checkbox, they're doing opt-out marketing. And that's not allowed.

For information on this from the point of view of a "direct mail" advocate, read Ken Magill's article. And here's slashdot's take on it.

Michael Jackson Knows Job

Michael Jackson in a recent documentary denies having had any plastic surgery to his face except for two operations on his nose because "it helped me breathe better so I can hit higher notes."

Looks we'll have to go to Hypothesis #2: There is a God and Michael Jackson has really, really pissed Him off.

Humor Unearthed at The Onion

Alice Marshall writes to point out that the new issue of TheOnion gives evidence that it is in fact still a humor rag. She (and I) particularly liked:

Department Of The Interior Sets Aside Two Million Acres For Car Commercials

WASHINGTON, DC—Seeking to "safeguard our precious wildlands for future generations of SUV ads," the Department of the Interior set aside two million acres in Wyoming and Colorado for use in car commercials Monday. "If we do not protect this land," Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton said,

Fantasy Economics

Mark Dionne points us to an article in Slate about the economic models emerging at EverQuest, a massively multiplayer online game.

The article's conclusion:

If EverQuest is any guide, the liberal dream of genuine equality would usher in the conservative vision of truly limited government.

Posted by self at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

AMI Replies on "Trusted Computing"

An extended and reasonable reply from Umbertina E. Vezzani at AMI to the message I sent them:

It must be noted that AMI has not announced support for Microsoft's Palladium. Palladium is an initiative by an OS entity that is slated for the future. To be honest, though we do know about it, AMI has not begun any development related to it. At this point we have not made any decisions on support either. TCPA is completely optional to our customers (OEMs, ODMs, CMs and other system builders). They may choose to make it available or not, depending on the needs of their market. We have had requests from a number of customers for this technology. Depending from the motherboard manufacturer, you will continue to find motherboards enabled by AMIBIOS that do not feature TCPA. I must also add that AMIBIOS is not the first to offer this feature - There are already PCs featuring this technology or other BIOS vendors enabling this technology or other hardware-based security options based on encrypted authentication.

TCPA does not equal Palladium. While certainly there is some future development overlap between the two, TCPA is being introduced by OEM's as a security option to protect systems through hardware and firmware. The purpose of TCPA is to implement a subsystem to protect computer clients from software hackers, not DRM. It is poorly suited, even from a technical point of view, for DRM. DRM applications might use TCPA applications or not, and DRM can be introduced without TCPA. If you are against DRM, your concerns should be expressed to the organizations that promote it.

On TCPA goals and functions

On misconceptions in circulating papers

Another common misconception is that TCPA would not allow people to run Linux. It actually does not limit the ability to run Linux (or any other open source solution). Linux device drivers for TCPA are available as well.

In addition to this, the TCPA FAQ document reports several protections for those users that are concerned with their privacy:

* The system owner has ultimate control and permissions over private information and must opt-in to utilize a TCPA subsystem.(...) A TCPA subsystem can be disabled permanently

* The specification allows the system owner to create multiple and/or anonymous identities to enhance personal security and remove avenues for identity cross-correlation

* Supports multiple certificate authorities to give user choice

* Code, applets or drivers used on a TCPA subsystem do not need to be signed, unless the Operating system used specifically requires it.

Please refer to: TCPA FAQ

As a smaller company itself, AMI has always supported innovation and creativity, as these have been our main tools in competing against much larger companies in our industry. We would not do anything that in our minds would damage our credibility or reputation for world class BIOS solutions and will carefully evaluate this type of feedback when it does come time to examine any future technologies. We would also like to recommend that anyone who is opposed to a Palladium-type solution in the future, please make that known to OEM's and system builders. As they are our customers, we definitely listen to them in terms of what they (and hopefully their customers) will want in future BIOS.

Thank you again for your time in contacting us and we hope that this and some of the links below will shed some light on AMI's plans.

LINKS

Original Articles on theinquirer.net

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7089
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7103

Interview with Slashdot ("real, not laundered")

AMI TCPA module Whitepaper

TCPA FAQ

TPM FAQ

TCPA Website

I don't feel insulted by this, which means it's good boilerplate. Has he changed my mind? Not yet. I'm posting this before I've looked into all the links he provides. But since I want anonymity to remain the Net's default and since I believe that the mere existence of an identity system will lead - because of the tilt in the market's playing field - to abuses, I am unlikely to be brought to think that hardware-enabling such systems is a good idea. But my mind is still open. A bit.

What Happened to The Onion?

I loved The Onion. I love The Onion's book, "Our Dumb Century," a colossal work of funniness. So can someone tell me what the hell is going on over there? Alternatively, can you find one funny line or comment in the current edition? Did it change or have I lost my sense of humor? Or both?

Marlowe Bidforth

Ray Bid writes to alert us to the online diary of a backpacker, Marlowe Bidforth, who is trapped in Borneo and at this point must be assumed to be dead. I also assume that the site is a spoof.

Why aren't we seeing more fictitious weblogs? I don't mean RageBoy's postings about being a babe magnet, but a genuine form of narrative fiction: daily postings from a fictitious character.

On the Radio

I did a 3-4 minute interview for "Here and Now" that will today sometime between noon and one on the 45 NPR stations that carry it. They asked me about slashdot's thread on the shuttle disaster which turned into a discussion of the nature of distributed expertise. (The segments usually air at around 12:20.)

Hijackers Are Worse than Pirates

Seth Johnson has sent around a message alerting us to a page where we can write and send messages to AMI and Transmeta protesting their recent decisions to build into their chips the capabilities required to work with Microsoft Palladium and other "trusted computing" and "digital rights management" systems. Here's what I wrote to AMI:

Notably absent in your recent meetings to decide the fate of the digital marketplace of ideas were the voices of the customer. Had I, as an AMI customer, been allowed to speak, I would have said that I will not buy a computer that has been hardware-enabled for "DRM" since it gives the creators of content the right to control how I use that content, a right we have not allowed in any other medium.

I ask you to have the guts to announce that bullying customers is not what AMI is about. Back away from the one-sided agreement. I would like to be able to buy AMI-based computers in the future, but I will not if by so doing I am enabling Hollywood to hijack my computer.

Here's Richard Stallman on Palladium and "Trusted Computing." Where's Linus Torvalds on the issue? (That's a question, not a poke.) I can't find anything in a quick googling, but since he works for Transmeta and since there's been serious discussion of the effect of DRM on Open Source, I'm surprised links are not leaping off the results page.

Regulah Joe

I'm particularly annoyed by Joe Lieberman because (1) he's sanctimonious and (2) I feel like he's embarrassing us Jews. Chip has found a page that lampoons him. It's a start.

John Adams writes to tell me that MaxSpeak beat me to this link.

Saint Internet

Chip points us to The Quest for the Net's Patron Saint.

Hmmm. Try 'em on for size:

"Hear my fervent plea, St. Berners-Lee"?
"Put our sins behind us, dear St. Linus"?
"The blessed St. Lessig"?
"Put my sins in a cage, boy, oh fearsome St. RageBoy"?
"Sound the heavenly bugle, lovely St. Google"?

Joe Mahoney, feeling "black-minded" about winter, blogs this Wallace Stevens poem:

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Austere advice for poets of war and anti-war.

SourceID

Eric has been working hard on SourceID, "an open source community focused on digital identity infrastructure." Open Source digID has to be better than the alternatives, and now there's The Place to Go for all your Open Source Digital Identity Needs.

Crud Factor Update

My CF has dropped to 4. This means I am upright, slept through the night, and tomorrow expect to be able to face a cup of morning coffee. Woohoo!

Anti-War Poems

Val Stevenson and Todd Swift have put together a book of peace poems, with contributions by "over 100 of the world's leading, mid-career and emerging poets who work in the English language." It's available here as a PDF file that can be printed and folded into a chapbook.

The poems are, of course, pointed. The question for me is: Do I learn from them? Do they open my eyes, either intellectually or emotionally? And do they escape the pitfall of anti-war poetry of over-simplifying in unhelpful ways? For example, "Are there children" by Robert Priest begins:

are there children somewhere
waiting for wounds
eager for the hiss of napalm
in their flesh —

It ends:

does each man in his own way
plot a pogrom for the species
or are we all, always misled
to war

This appeal to the broadest impulses ("species," "all," "always") leaves out the third possibility: Sometimes wars are justified for particular reasons. And since the difficulty of war is always (talk about generalizations!) the disparity between its high aims and the "hiss of napalm" in the flesh of this one child, concluding by escaping into the general is exactly the sort of evasive maneuver the first part of the poem would have us avoid. Or, as Sampurna Chattarjli writes in "Easy"

The death-dealers deserved to die, you say.
Death is easy to pronounce.
It's the smell of burning children that's hard.

But is this just sentimentalism? After all, the inevitable death of children is part of a war that is being fought to prevent much larger evils. Still, the particularities cannot be forgotten, and poetry is one good way to remember them.

Many of the poems dispute the justification of this war, of course. For example, in "Regime change begins at home," Sue Littleton writes about shooting fish in a barrel, except the fish are all stacked up, helpless. The zinger is in the last verse:

The barrel holds no water...
but somewhere in its depths
there is the dark, iridescent sheen
of oil.

Aolfe Mannix allows himself ambiguity in "Taking Sides," which begins:

There will be another war,
many people will be killed,
and I will be expected to have an opinion.
But what can you say about a man
who'd rather let thousands of children die
than give them access to medical vaccines...

and ends:

Talk about a rock and a hard place.
The fundamental difference is questionable.
Neither Jesus nor Mohammed
would have allowed themselves
to be pushed into this kind of choice.

Sounds right. But why would Jesus and Mohammed escape the choice? Because they'd see immediately who to side with? Or because they would have seen the futility of sides? But, the first part of the poem tells us that sides aren't futile, for Saddam is an evil-doer. What is it that Jesus and Mohammed would have done that we have failed to do? I want one more line...or maybe one more poem. Or maybe this is where I'm supposed to do some thinking. (The irony to me is that both Christianity and Islam believe their religions are universal whereas the unmentioned Abraham founded a religion based on a tribal revelation.)

Here is J.R. Carpenter's "A verse to war" in its entirety, a reflection presumably on being asked to contribute an anti-war poem to a chapbook:

I am afraid
(of what will happen
of the rhetoric
of the silence
of not knowing).
I am afraid I don't know what to contribute.

I am afraid
(of destruction
of waiting
of doing nothing
of adding fuel to the flames).
I am afraid I don't have any answers.

I am afraid
(of trivializing
or propagandizing
of margins
of error).
I am afraid it is but a meager thing to add
a verse adverse to war.

I began by asking if these poems opened my eyes. That's what I'm looking for. But anti-war poems can serve another purpose. They can encourage, impassion, give us courage in our opposition. After all, "Blowing in the Wind," the most important anti-war poem of my generation, didn't really teach us anything. But it did let us feel the wind against our back and gave us heart as we sang along. And these poems overall did make me feel encouraged. There are many strong voices making themselves heard.

Now, 100 poems are too many to read, so I admit that I skimmed. But I found only a handful of poems that are the sort of over-written, self-consciously poetic stuff that I personally dislike...the ones that talk about a "sea-cooled face" or stuff that's "taut against the air." Overall, these poems are entertaining and at times moving and thought-provoking. And funny. Hell, it's worth browsing through the anthology just for some of the titles: "Terror on Warism" (Ian Ayres), "Mickey Mouse came, Mickey Mouse saw, Mickey Mouse conquered" (Vincent Tinguely), "God decides to press the mute button on his remote control" (David Siller) and "Talking with the cat about world domination the day George W Bush almost choked on a pretzel" (Kevin Higgins).

Will these poems stop the war? No, but then nothing will.

I'm in Love with a Record Executive

In Salon, John Snyder, president of Artist House Records, says it all and gets it right. The title pretty well sums it up:

This is the dream presentation you've always wanted the recording industry to put under its pillow and play to itself over and over as it sleeps.

Museum of Compilers

Borland offers its antique compilers and development environments — Turbo Pascal and Turbo C in particular — for free at their museum site. I was one of the first customers for Turbo Pascal when it was a $29.00 wonder and hadn't yet been acquired by Borland, so I'm looking forward to the musty rush of nostalgia.

Fragile Military Spectrum

So, the tech industry and the US military have come to a compromise that opens up more spectrum for wireless communications while preserving the slice the military uses for some of its delicate radar. Here's what I don't understand: If the military equipment is so sensitive to "interference" that it requires no other device broadcast at that frequency, why isn't it incredibly vulnerable? Isn't this really a strong argument for moving to an Open Spectrum policy?

Over at GreaterDemocracy.org, Jock Gill blogs on why inteference is a dangerously misleading metaphor.