Joi on the hostages...

Joi has a fascinating blog entry trying to interpret to us non-Japanese the reception the released hostages received. An excerpt:

I think one of the things that made many Japanese I know upset were the parents of the hostages making public statements about how the government should help get the hostages back without apologizing first about causing trouble for the government. Even if they didn't believe it, it would be proper Japanese etiquette to say this first...

In the comments is a link to this long and moving account by Marine Lieutenant Colonel M.R. Strobl of his experience escourting the body of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps back to his home town.

Auto-mesh

Glenn Fleischman writes:

The CUWiN [Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network ] project wants to allow self-forming, noncentralized, mesh-based Wi-Fi networks using standard, old PCs with no configuration. Slightly more advanced units could be ruggedized boxes using Compact Flash, but the basic unit would be a 486 or later PC with a bootable CD-ROM or bootable floppy that bootstraps a CD-ROM. Once booted, a unit finds other similar units without any other configuration or control and forms a mesh.

Clay comments over at Corante Many2Many:

As with straight Wifi, the obvious uses of a simple meshing tool are to replace wireline networks where they would be too expensive, but the second-order benefits that will come out will all be novel and often social uses for temporary creation of self-configuring high-bandwidth LANs — internet cafes without the cafe, temporary autonomous file trading zones, video re-mix culture throwdowns in real time.

The old paradigm of top-down network provisioning is so fragile that just one garage-based genius - surrounded by an open source community - could implode it. Exciting.

Edge-based about-ness

What something is about often is so implicit that it's precisely the thing that's not stated. And sometimes a page can't even know what it's about: the manual about O-ring maintenance couldn't know that it would actually be about the Challenger disaster.

So, I wonder how a search engine like Google would do if, when assessing the relevance of a page, it counted the content of pages directly linking to it much higher than the content of the page itself. Aren't those linking pages more likely to state explicitly what's on the target page that warrants a link?

Maybe Google's PageRank algorithm(s) already does that. Anyway, I bet a bunch of people have already studied this extensively and have pre-figured out why I'm wrong.

Balldroppings

Balldroppings: Game, Artwork or Sport? Whatever, it's elegant, free and makes nice boopy sounds. [Thanks to Lockergnome for the link.]

Google's modest heuristics

Google's filing its IPO shows up as #4 in Google News' list of top business stories today. Ahead of it are "Nortel's chief on a dozen boards," "Time Warner sprints ahead, AOL crawls" and "MergerTalk: Though tarnished, Roberts' image retains shine." And since it's #4, it doesn't show up on Google News' home page.

How Jay ticks

Jay Rosen writes thoughtfully and entertainingly about the hows and whys of his most excellent blog:

Questions and Answers About PressThink

Hi. If you're the kind of person who loves to complain about "meta" posts and make fun of blogging about blogging for being too self-referential, which is a fine and amusing thing to do... please. Don't read this post. You'll hate it. It's the echo chamber again. Q & A about how I do my blog, PressThink. Very self-referential, okay? Meta meta, yadda yadda, blog, blog, blog for pages on pages. The only people who might be interested are...

...well, most of us. Me for sure.

Making the new reality

From Chris Nelson's blog:

The following is what one of the Bush administration's representatives told journalist Ron Suskind, regarding their philosophy behind the administration's actions and their relationship with journalists.

I'm quoting from an Air America Radio interview with Suskind:

Suskind: He says, you know, "You, Suskind, you're in what we call the 'reality-based community'" — that's actually the term he used.

I said, "The WHAT?"

He says, "The 'reality-based community'.". He said, "you all believe" — now let me see if I can get this right — "You all believe that answers to solutions will emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality."

I said, "Yeah... YEAH, OF COURSE..."

He says, "Well, let me tell you how we really see it. You see, we're an empire now. And when we act, we kinda create a reality. Events flow from our actions. And because of that, what we do is... essentially... we act, and every time we act we create a whole new set of laws of physics, which you then judiciously study for your solutions, and while you're doing that we'll act again, promulgate a whole other set."

Janine Garofolo: "So you throw a rock in the pond, and the ripples go out..."

Suskind: And this guy said, "and that's where we'll stand ultimately; you'll study us, and we'll act. We'll be the actors, and you will study what we do. And if you're really good — on good behavior — maybe thirty years from now one of us will visit that graduate seminar you'll be teaching at Dartmouth in your tweed blazer." That's the thinking.

Cynical, yet dead-on accurate. It's not just history that's written by the victors. Now it's also journalism, politics, and talk radio.

It's scary that the Bushies recognize this. It is the nuclear bomb of politics. And it's what terrorists have always known: 19 guys can create a new normal in a single morning.

[Thanks to Joe Copperas for the pointer.]

Big snails

Those are some big-ass snails.

Bricklin takes license...

Dan Bricklin is thinking about how small software development houses can license their products in ways that provide the benefits of open source but that also build in reasonable compensation for the original creator. Dan is looking for feedback from software developers and others, so take a look and let him know what you think.

Direct link to C-SPAN talk

FWIW, here's a direct link to the talk I gave that C-SPAN broadcast. My piece is 55 minutes in, but the RealPlayer lets you skip ahead.

Jewgle, Part 3

Shel points out that now when you search for "jew," Google at the top of the page points you to a quite reasonable explanation of why you're getting anti-Semitic pages. This seems like to me like an excellent resolution.

Ironically, the first site on the list is no longer Jew Watch. It's the entry "Jew" in the wikipedia, undoubtedly the result of the benevolent "google bombing" by concerned anti-anti-semites.

Democratic Party party

Quite an action-packed day yesterday. I did two keynotes, at two separate events. After the second one, I went back to the first event, a gathering of about 125 people who run libraries and museums, because I'm trying to write some stuff about metadata and taxonomies. I learned, for example, that one well-known art museum has had to create over 300 new Dewey Decimal categories for illustrated manuscripts ... and one for astrology.

Afterwards, I went to a cocktail party put on by the hosts of the second event. It was quite the power party. I got to chat for five minutes with Terry McAuliffe, the chair of the Democratic National Committee. I tried to say that the Net can be do things for campaigns other than raise money ... for example, bring in a portion of the population that is feeling a tad alienated in part because of the relentless money 'n' marketing focus of the campaign. MacAuliffe agreed, and then went on to re-express my point in terms of using the Net to raise money. But, what the heck, it was 5 minutes at a cocktail party where everyone was elbowing for a chance to talk with The Chairman, so I'm grateful for the opportunity to make a ding if not a dent.

I then got to say about two sentences to Tom Daschle. after he spoke to the assembled group, thanking the people there who have done real work for the progressive movement. Sen. Daschle had just made a heartfelt thank-you statement, yet I found myself impressed that I was listening to a person who could express himself in untortured English. Yikes. FWIW, he seemed more sincere in person than on TV, but, then, if the reverse were true, you'd have some type of personality disorder, wouldn't you? Look, I liked him in person, ok? That's all I'm trying to say.

I spent a little more time (i.e., a minute or two) with Senator Patty Murray from Washington. We talked about the possibility of using the Internet for more than fund raising. It felt like an actual conversation. She put on no airs and seemed to lack the protective, hey-how-are-ya bubble that surround so many professional politicans.

And then I talked with Senator Stabenow from Michigan. Like Senator Murray, she seemed like an actual person, humbled by sitting in the Senate. I liked her a lot. A real lot. Because we had a little more time, I also urged her not to legislate the Internet without understanding what it is. No Senatorial preachiness to her at all. Just Net preachiness on my part. What an ass I am. But what a treat to get to talk with her.

Here's the photographic evidence that I'm not a total liar, at least in this particular entry:

Sens. Tom Daschle and Patty Murray

Sen. Patty Murray

Sen. Debbie Stabenow

Me responding to one of Sen. Daschle's
many sharp-edged japes

Me on C-SPAN

Unbeknownst to me, my presentation at the TechnologyPolitics Summit was broadcast live on C-SPAN this afternoon. You can see it on the Web by going to C-SPAN and clicking on the link to the conference. I don't know how long they'll keep the link up, though. (I'm on after Tom Athans from Democracy Radio and Mark Walsh of Air America Radio, about a half hour 55 minutes in.)

I haven't seen it. All I remember is yelling a lot. Ulp.

[In the comments, Greg has posted this direct link to the video: rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/c04/c04042604_tech.rm. Thanks, Greg.]

Half an hour in front of DC politicians

It's been a week of light blogging because of my 2-day trip to Portugal and then a set of, um, computing setbacks that involved technical support groups on several continents and the reinstalling of anti-virus software. Then, for the past couple of days, I've been working on two presentations I'm giving on Monday in DC. Both are new and both are important to me.

In the morning, I'm keynoting a conference of research librarians and am doing a mainly-new presentation about how we managed to "informationalize" the world so that it consists of thin gruel, and how it is (I hope) now being re-thickened and double-good ambiguated again.

While that presentation has new material and a ton of new slides (I tend to eschew text in favor of over-animated graphical slides), I'm more concerned about the lunchtime keynote I'm doing for the FieldWorks Technology Politics Summit. I have half an hour. Here's an outline of what I think I'm going to say:

1. I want to address two questions in a roundabout way. A. Why is it that when Dean supporters met, we'd frequently talk about what we didn't like about Dean, even while remaining fully licensed Deaniacs? B. WRT the Dean slogan, we have the power to take our country back from whom exactly? Why did that slogan work?

2. These questions are obscured by the rapid consolidation of inappropriate lessons we've taken from the Dean campaign, including that the Net is only good for raising money and all that social networking stuff was for naive girly-men.

3. So, let's accept (for the nonce) the view that politics is naught but a specialized form of marketing in which the only successful market share is 50% + 1. So, what's happening with marketing? Marketing is war waged against customers, but we're in revolt. Marketers no longer have control over corporate information. Networked markets are smarter than the companies they're talking about. [Yes, this is overtly Cluetrain-y.]

4. At the heart of the revolt is the human voice. We get to sound like ourselves in the new public world known as the Internet, rather than having to listen to the monotonous, inhuman, too-perfect voice of marketing.

5. Taking blogging as an example. It looks individualistic, but it's really about conversation and links. To see how unusual it is, look at the Dean blog: We've never before had someone who speaks for the campaign but in his/her own voice. This isn't good marketing. It's anti-marketing: It succeeds insofar as it stays off message.

6. To see the importance of comments (i.e., the blog wasn't simply a new type of broadcasting), you have to understand the Net's architecture. It is not a broadcast or publishing architecture. It's end-to-end. It succeeded by removing the controlling center, and by keeping the center as empty as possible so that innovation would happpen at the edges. The Net is the opposite of marketing. It is profoundly democratic. And it explicitly provided the model for the Net portion of the Dean campaign. (Meanwhile, Washington and Hollywood seem hell-bent on destroying the Net by misunderstanding it.) [I'm sneaking in World of Ends stuff because there will be people in the room — including Tom Daschle — who I want to yell this at.]

7. No wonder we're so eager to go wrong about the role of the Net in the Dean campaign. Campaigns are about top-down control of message. Kerry said ten words off mike and there was a firestorm. But blogs are always off mike. (We forgive ourselves preemptively.)

8. Back to the two questions. We talked about why we disliked Dean because it affirmed that this campaign wasn't about top-down marketing. It was about us. We were encouraged to go off message — that is, to appropriate the message in our own way — because the campaign is about us, not only about Howard Dean. That is, we are taking the country back not just from the lobbyists, corporations and Republicans. We're taking it back from the campaign marketers. We're taking it back from our own alienation. And that's a good thing.

Too many files

Symantec Anti-Virus just scanned my computer and found over 700,000 files to look at. Woohoo! I have too many files!

I'm guessing not more than 30% of them are blog entries...

Joogle, Part 2

Seth Finkelstein writes up his investigation of why a Google search on "jew" returns an anti-Semitic site in the #1 spot. He concludes: "Google ranks popularity, not authority. And popularity is a measure which is vulnerable to many games."

An interesting finding: Seth reports that the offending site has been removed from the French and German versions of Google.

I'm a Republican chairman!

Great news! Congressman Tom Reynolds of the National Republican Congressional Committee has personally invited me, via a tape recording played over the phone, to become an honorary chairman.

Of course I said yes, proudly and humbly...

More at Loose Democracy...

Portugal photos

I've posted about a dozen photos from Portugal...

Second day in Lisbon

[Posting a message written Wednesday evening]

Last night, my delightful hosts — a media/public relations company that yesterday changed its name from Bates to Red Cell, possibly because their new corporate ambition is to become the bad guys in a Tom Clancy novel — took to me out to a delicious dinner at Bica de Sabato (literally, "Bite the Shoe" — now there's some marketing!), one-quarter owned by John Malkovitz; Catherine Deneuve was among the celebrities not in attendance that particular evening. It's difficult to find Portuguese vegetarian food, but this place had goat cheese in filo dough and a vegetarian risotto. That and some excellent Portuguese wine, along with an animated, non-stop conversation about marketing and politics — hint: George Bush is not widely hailed here as the savior of the West — made for a lovely evening. A sincere thank you to the evil minions of Red Cell.

This morning, I gave my presentation to about fifty of Red Cell's clients. This was their first "Cream Talk" (nata fala), supposedly presentations by fresh-thinking marketing folks; they chose me to inaugurate the series, undoubtedly due to a bad translation. I got to yell at the audience for 70 minutes about why most marketing sucks and why Internetworked markets are smarter than the companies they talk about. Plus I got to throw in the lessons business should draw from the Dean campaign. Lots of fun. And good, hard questions afterwards, beginning with: Will John Kerry defeat George Bush? (Maybe I should say seriously that the session seemed to go very well, and I admire Red Cell's willingness to put before its customers views that don't entirely coincide with its own.)

On the way out, I said to the helpful and gracious Christina that I usually manage to leave something behind. Five minutes later, I called her from the cab to let her know that I'd left my converter there. Sigh.

From the session, I went to Sintra, an ancient city in the hills that's one vowel short of being Old Blue Eyes. It was raining healthily, which cut down on the view, but the little streets were still twisty and the palaces were still sumptuous. I ate too much lunch — quiche and a wheel of cheese that weighed as much as my foot, along with an I-got-what-I-paid-for house wine — and weaved from sight to sight.

We drove back along the surging ocean. It's hard to imagine looking out at that expanse and deciding to sail over the horizon just to see what's there. The Portuguese have not forgotten that that's just what their forebears did.

I came back and went to the Old City, the Bairro Alto. (Yes, I thought I knew how to pronounce it also.) For 1.10 euros, I rode up the funicular, a varnished wood and brass carriage that ascends several blocks that make San Francisco look like a girly-man. The guide book describes the Old City as bohemian, but the part I saw sure was upscale. I found a cafe with soccer on the the TV and paper tablecloths on long, shared tables. After I reassured the waiter repeatedly that, no, insanely, I really didn't want shrimp or pork in my omelette, I got a plate of fries and eggs and a cold beer.

I'm beat. But I've had a great two days. I fell immediately and easily into interesting conversations with just about everyone I met. The parts of the country I saw were beautiful and complex. As always for an American in Europe, the presence of the past is overwhelming.

I love travel. I love the differences.

On my way back from Portugal

I am in the airport in Lisbon, on my way back to Boston via Newark. (Cannot find the apostrophe key on this Portuguese keyboard, hence the lack of contractions. Pray for no possessives.)

It was a rich couple of days here in Lisbon. I will post details when I am back. I am using a public access machine and cannot now post what I have written.

I have been unable to pick up email for 36 hours. The horror! When I checked yesterday morning, I had 970 messages. Ulp. (By the way, if you are spamming me, please stop. Thank you.)

In Portugal

After flying all night, I arrived at the York Hotel at 10:30 this morning. The hotel is beautiful: a thoroughly modern, elegant room in an old structure gained by climbing foliage-covered steps. I slept for a couple of hours and then went out to see a bit of the city before the taxi my hosts have arranged — thank you very much! — was scheduled to pick me up. I spent 1.25 hours stumbling onto banks, trying to find one that changes US dollars, and finally did. Then I steeled myself to try to find a cheese sandwich in a town that's apparently been certified 100% Atkins compliant. Mission accomplished. You know changing money and finding cheese aren't such bad ways of seeing a city.

I spent the next four hours visiting highlights on the tourist menu. This took me across the expanse of the city, but of course in four hours, I'm willing to admit that I haven't exhausted the riches of Lisbon. Nevertheless, I cling to the foolish belief that in a few hours of walking around, you can learn a lot about a city. You can, so to speak, hear some of its music, the rhythms and sounds and smells that the inhabitants take for granted. (Someday remind me to tell you why the Harmony of the Spheres is the most beautiful idea in Western history.) Of course, if you live longer in a city, you end up unlearning a lot of what you learned at first.

In terms of defined locales, I saw the Castelo de Sao Jorge, the outside of the Torre de Belem aand the Monisteiro dos Jeronimos, and the inside of the Museum of Archaeology. (I only saw the outsides because the insides were closed when I got there.) And I walked a lot. I learned that the bends in the streets are older than the streets.

I'm liking it here a lot. But now I have to run to dinner with my hosts. More later.

Name of the Week

According to the Associated Press, a man in Unity, NH, is suing a police officer for allegedly molesting him ten years ago. The officer's name? Sergeant Barrit Bodkins. Bare Bodkins' parents must have been both literate and cruel.

And to make matters worse, a "bodkin" is defined as a prick.

Portugal in Three Hours

I'm off in a couple of hours for Portugal. I arrive Tuesday morning after taking a red-eye, have dinner with the conference hosts that night, talk on Wednesday morning, and leave Thursday morning. That leaves me about three hours to see the entire country, plumb its depths, and come to grips with the Portuguese soul. That would be impossible for most people. Thankfully, I am a shallow American.

BTW, here's a travel tip: I've spent the past couple of weeks convincing my children that Portugal's leading export is hotel soap. That's going to save me loads of shopping time!

Iran's VP on Iraq and US politics

This comes from the blog of Iran's vice president:

The convulsions in Iraq are of benefits for America

I believe that America, close to the presidential elections, needs Iraq situation to be convulsed more than ever. It is because the best reason for America’s stability is these convulsions. Bush needs to announce the public in America that there is an unfinished project in Iraq that no one else other than him can make it to the last point and if doesn’t finish, the Middle East will be in war and fire and America will be injured and damaged more than any other country.

If my analysis be the right one, Moghtadi Sadr attitudes and actions in Convulsion making in Iraq and unifying Shiite and Sunnis together against America, is just exactly what America needs in such a situation.

The out of tradition attitude by America which is being shown against the convulsions in Iraq, like the blockade of Falluja or killing the innocent Iraqi citizens who are extremely tired of killings and wars, or closing some newspapers in Iraq by America, which are all opposite of the principles that America used to talk about. These are all in concern with how much do the Americans need a convincing reason for their stability in these days close to their elections and also how much would these manners be effective for Bush’s stabilization.

I hope that those who are influential in political areas of Iraq, including Shiite and Sunni parties, pay attention to this reality and do not prepare grounds for the longer stability of occupational regime and let Iraqis to be able to decide on their destiny as soon as possible.

First, need I point out how remarkable it is that a vice president is blogging so frankly and so personally?

I can certainly see why the upheaval in Iraq from outside the US looks like it should be helpful to the incumbent president. And we do hear the Republicans talking about not changing horses in midstream (or, as someone put it recently, not changing horses in mid-Apocalypse:). But surely the Republicans would be happier if Iraq were stable, democratic and quiet, for they get the bulk of the blame for the war not going well.

Another attack on the US homeland, however, would (IMO) greatly favor the Republicans because they are more capable of the sort of intemperate response that we would emotionally want. It'd be the sort of classic id vs. superego battle that the superego always loses.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that. And, in my book, hope is something you work for.

By the way, don't miss VP Abtahi's description of the social role of coffee.

[bc] BloggerCon

I'm at the second BloggerCon, Dave Winer's do at Harvard.

Dave begins by sketching the shape of the conference. Then he leads us in a sing-along of Take Me Out to the Ballgame and the US national anthem. Really.

Now it's on to Jay Rosen's session on blogging and journalism. He's running it like a 100-person seminar, which is the format of sessions here. Why is blogging moving towards journalism, Jay begins by asking. There is, of course, a spread of opinion. Are blogs moving towards journalism? Are they more like op-eds? Are they muckrakers? Could blogs move towards journalism if they didn't have real journalists to rely on? Is there a sharp distinction in that journalists have a set of practices and ethics they follow? How does blogging change journalists? Does it alter their attempt to be objective? Does blogging hurt the relationship with sources?

I did a session on blogs in business. "Did a session" means that I facilitated a group discussion. There are no panels here, which is turning out to be a great choice. The moderators actively facilitated, in the mode of Jeff Jarvis' stellar session last year, keeping the discussions moving and focused. I highly recommend this format to other conference organizers: The audience is the panel.

I've spent most of the day taking notes for the IRC, so I don't have notes for you. Here are some links, though, many from the last session I was able to attend, the one on blogging and religion:

Velveteen Rabbi

NeoPaganism

Iranian VP's blog

GhanaWeb

Hoder's comments

Hoder on making a blogosphere

Islamicate

Religion for the non-religious

The Revealer on Bush's religious language

The Daily Ablution

Catholic RageMonkey

Iranian VP blog

Hoder on the BloggerCon IRC points to a blog by the VP of Iran. Quick look: Wow!

[bc] Rebecca MacKinnon

I'm at BloggerCon. I'm blogging this out of order, but at the moment I'm at Rebecca MacKinnon's session on international blogging. She points us to her aggregation of international blogs. Looks useful.

Ordinary Language Digital ID

I've just published a new issue of my newsletter, JOHO. It consists of a single article that tries to apply the ordinary language sense of ID to the Net:

The term "identity" was confusing enough in the real world. Its meaning in the digital world is even more ambiguous. Since momentous decisions about the nature of online life hang on this verbal ambiguity, we need to be extra-special careful about the real-world assumptions that are guiding our expectations about digital identity.

So, here's my program. Let's start with the real world meaning of identity. Then let's see if we can use that to clarify identity's digital meaning.

Now, here are my hidden aims:...

More...

Non-Digital ID

Yesterday I was at an all-day meeting of group looking into privacy issues around medical records. The number of people in a typical database of medical records who have the same social security number is astoundingly high. And, apparently there are 12 William Smiths born every day in the US.

So, it's occurred to me that we could solve lots of our problems if we required people to give unique names to their children. For example, "William Smith1087b" or perhaps "Jeff ButterBurp12 Michaels" and "Rashid SneekerBang Jones."

ICANN could set up name servers and authorize ... Oh, to hell with it.

Blair's case

Tony Blair on why we're in Iraq...and Terry Jones' grading of his essay.

National ID

Bruce Schneier responds to the Kristof column that recommmends national ID cards. Bruce replies that they would make us less secure.

Yesterday's outage

My host's server died yesterday and didn't come back until this morning. Sorry for the interruption.

I don't know yet what will happen to email you sent me yesterday. Apparently it's all going to arrive soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Who do you trust?

Kevin Salwen points to Starbucks' report on how corporately responsible it is. And, while I certainly would rather work for a company that cares enough to issue such a report than the egregiously selfish ad agency Kevin points to, the Starbucks report does raise a question: Who do you trust any more?

So, Starbucks does up a lovely color brochure explaining just how good a world citizen it is. Kudos for at least pretending to care. But how much of the report is BS? ...

Continued at Worthwhile...

Technorati BlogThreads

Technorati has made it easy to see which other blogs are commenting on one of your blog entries. Click on "BlogThread" at the end of one of my entries to see how it works. (For purposes of example, pick one that has some TrackBacks.) Dave Sifry explains how to do it here. [Later that same day: I'm adopting Esther Dyson's suggestion of "Threadorati" instead of BlogThreads.]

This is a lot like TrackBacks, which were introduced by MovableType, except the aggregation of referring sites is done by Technorati as part of its continuous polling of the blogosphere. With TrackBacks, your blogging software automatically pings aggregation sites whenever you post anything. Technorati's feature — which I'm calling "BlogThreads" in honor of the comatose ThreadsML, an attempt to make discussion threads interchangeable — works with any blogging software. (This blog uses MT, by the way. I'm very happy with it.)

Technorati continues to be very, very cool.

The murderer is .... The murderer is .... Aaaaaarrrrggghhh...

So, when Symantec's Anti-Virus program — which has been around for, what, 75 years? — lists the viruses it's found, it gives you the three key pieces of information: The name of the infected file, the virus, and the action Symantec took to fix the problem.

Click on this image to see the full screen capture.

Unfortunately, there's not enough room in the window to list everything. And it's an un-resizable window with no horizontal scroll bar. And, no, hovering doesn't work.

Another couple of decades and maybe Symantec will get this right.

Search crashes IE. Try it here!

I thought it was just an oddity of my particular set up, but I've heard from a reader that he's having the same problem:

If you do the ^F search thing on this very page as viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Explorer will terminally hang and you'll have to Ctl-Alt-Del your way out of it.

But, wait, it's weirder than that! Search for a word that's visible and near the top, and it'll work. For example, if you're reading this in the main blog, not in an archive, try searching for "LCD". Should be fine. Now try searching for "Scotty," which is toward the bottom. Hang city.

Happening to you, too? Is IE a total piece of shite or what? (Yes, I do use FirePlace or FireMe or FireStone, or whatever the hell the new Mozilla build is called these days.)

The best LCD for games?

I'm thinking about switching to an LCD since I've been having problems with my 22" Viewsonic CRT. Just about any LCD will be good enough for text work, I figure, but I'd also like it to work acceptably for fast-paced (= shoot everything) games.

Any thoughts?

And, care to tell me if the following assumption is true? Since 19" and 17" LCDs run at the same resolution, there's not much point in paying the extra couple of hundred bucks for the larger one: It's just making the pixels bigger.

And the truth is that I'm thinking about getting two LCDs since I use up a lot of real estate in the course of a workday; I typically have 30+ windows open at a time.

Comments, criticisms, instructions to get a Mac?

Damn you, Spyware!

Ah, what a perfect morning. Crispy matzoh for breakfast, a cup of delicious coffee, and then a couple of hours trying to clean my PC of adware and spyware, some of it fiendishly clever and as tough to pry out as a hermit crab that's grown into its shell.

Adaware works pretty well - extremely well since it's free - but there are some objects that it can't delete because they are in use. And neither can I, even doing a safe mode start-up. Die 3avxfmcodec.cpy.dll, die!

Some of the little wankers get loaded via my Hosts file, and then reload themselves after I manually delete them. WinPatrol - also free - has been doing a good job of monitoring the various soft startup bellies of XP, notifying me when a program is trying to add itself to auto-start, hijacking my home page or is juist hanging around the schoolyard asking kids leading questions. Their persistence is almost admirable.

Get a Mac? And miss the thrill of editing the Registry? Not on your life!

Thanks to Jason Lefkowitz's comment, I got a copy of SpyBot. It's good, but not good enough to get rid of two of the vermin on my system: Something continued to overwrite my HOSTS file, putting in redirects, and something was causing IE to spin up an unwanted page. Even running it while in Safe mode didn't work.

I'm crossing my fingers that I've got it licked. I saved a fixed version of the HOSTS file and locked it against alteration, and I hand edited the Registry, especially some of the funky entries in HKey_USERS/S-1-5-21...etc/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer. (The middle set of numerals is too long to write out.) Check entries like SearchUrl and Toolbar. And good luck to you.

PS: Remember to set a savepoint and to save your Registry before mucking about with it.

Fraught Phrases #445

An entire generation, plus 30 years of psychoanalysis, all in a five-word phrase:

His [David Carradine's] costar, Barbara Hershey, later gave birth to their son Free, who now calls himself Tom.

Two questions about what we knew when

Over at Loose Democracy, I've blogged about two questions I hope the Commission gets around to: Why did we help 140 Saudis leave the US in the first couple of days after 9/11? And why was Ashcroft warned not to fly commercial airlines 6 weeks before 9/11? I'm trying not to be paranoid...

An identity question

I've been trying to work through some issues about digital identity by thinking about ordinary language uses of "identity," and this morning I came up with a question:

Talk amongst yourselves.

Clay on NYC

Berkman Audio on Social Software

Harvard's Berkman Center's Mary Bridges and friends have put together an 8 minute audio report, from the SXSW conference, on social software.

The PowerPoint Mythology

I spent yesterday consulting with a company whose salesforce is having trouble explaining exactly what its software does, a common problem with enterprise applications since software tends towards functionality sprawl in ways that, say, refrigerators and asphalt don't. Not to mention that this company's software is genuinely innovative.

The company's impulse is to address this need in the usual way: Build a PowerPoint "deck" (sorry, "deck" instead of "slide set" still sounds unnatural to me) with the sort of corporate overview appropriate for an industry analyst. But, the deck a salesperson needs is, of course, quite different. The rep isn't there to explain what the company is. She's there because

...Continued over at Worthwhile Magazine's blog

Zack goes to Kerry

Over at Loose Democracy I have some comments on the Kerry campaign's hiring of Zack Exley of MoveOn.org to direct their online organizing...

Digital Lock-Down (NPR)

This is a near-transcript of a commentary of mine that ran on NPR's All Things Considered on April 5. You can listen to it via Real or Windows Media Player. (And please forgive my over-simplifications and overstatements.; I only had 3 minutes, which makes it tough to be subtle.)

From the begining the Web has seemed like the Wild West. But now we're being told that it's actually a looting spree, with people smashing-and-grabbing all the music and movies and copyrighted text they can, for free. The irony is that thanks to Big Content companies such as the recording industry and movie industry, big computer companies and big government, three technologies are being pulled together that may make control over ideas stricter on the Web than it ever was in the real world.

Right now, once you've loaded a song or an article onto your computer, you can do what you want with it. But digital rights management technology, the first of our trio, would change that. If, for example, Metallica's recording company will let you pay to download a song of theirs and listen to it just once, DRM would make sure that it's erased after that one play. Or maybe DRM will let you read an online book but not print more than two pages from it or copy any paragraphs out of it. That gives content companies stricter enforcement rights on line than in the real world — after you've bought a physical book, the publisher can't physically stop you from reading it a second time or lending it to a friend. DRM can. Adobe and Microsoft are beginning to build DRM into their software, and so are hardware companies, such as Hewlett- Packard.

But for DRM to enforce the content company's rights against you, it has to know who you are. That's where the second piece comes in: digital ID. It's good for online merchants and has an obvious role in homeland security, but again, it goes further than ID in the real world: In the real world to buy stuff all I need is a credit card; in the digital world, I'll also need to present the equivalent of a valid passport. I'll be less anonymous on line than I am in the real world.

But how will anyone know that the ID I'm using in fact belongs to me? That's where the third leg, "trusted computing" comes in. A trusted computer - a term I find Orwellian - has cooked into its hardware and software the ability to authenticate itself to other computers, and to keep you from running software in any unauthorized way - including that Metallica song you want to listen to a second time, you pirate you! Trusted computing gives content companies more control over your machine than you have. Microsoft has announced it's building trusted computing into the next version of Windows, called Longhorn, due in a couple of years, and major chip manufacturers such as Intel have agreed to redesign their chips to work with it. This is real, and it's on its way.

Put 'em together - DRM, Digital ID and so-called trusted computing - and you have a world that's far more locked down than the real world ever could be. No leeway, no judgment calls, our computers will decide for us. Content companies will be happy, at least short term, because every note, word, image, phrase, every idea can be owned and tracked and accounted for. But the free market of ideas needs to let us play with works, incorporate the images and phrases and ideas into new works of our own. That's how culture grows. And if the Internet - the greatest force in history for growing the public domain - if the Internet ends up bringing on a regime of control that locks us out of our own culture, it won't be ironic...it'll be tragic.

The digital data lockdown

Last night NPR's "All Things Considered" ran a commentary of mine on the danger that the convergence of three technologies - Digital Restrictions Management, Digital ID and "Trusted" Computing - threatens to make content on the Net far more owned and restrictive than in the real world. Here are links to the RealPlayer and Windows Media Player versions of it. (Please keep in mind that I had three minutes to cover a lot of territory, so, yes, what I say is waaay over-simplified.)

Gary and AKMA resolve BLX spat

It appears that Gary and AKMA have settled their dispute over Gary's proposed BLX standard (pronounced "bollocks"). (Begin the thread here and then follow it in the main page of Gary's blog.)

Trouble ahead, though: Now that BLX has incontestably become an important part of the Web standards toolkit, Microsoft has announced that all future versions of Office will embed key summarization information in "islands of BLX" that will be accessible only via Microsoft's own parser.

Clay on Situated Software

Clay's being brilliant again (damn him!), this time on the rise of software that works because it isn't intended to scale. This is not only a trend, it's a clarifying meme.

New blog for a mag too new to read

Worthwhile Magazine doesn't exist yet, but that hasn't stopped it from starting up its blog, under Halley's editorial eye. It's an interesting model for a print magazine aiming at the big time market: Blog first!

Worthwhile is about what makes work worthwhile. Its editors - Anita Sharpe and Kevin Salwen - each with serious editorial experience and credentials, are prepping the first issue. I'm proud to be a contributor to the Worthwhile blog, along with Tom Peters, Halley, David Batsone, Rebecca Ryan, Kate Yandoh, and Anita and Kevin.

My first three entries are on why massages are like bad jobs, why I don't want to travel on America West again, and what should come before "create shareholder value" in a mission statement.

Saving the Net

A bunch of Net Heavyweights tried to explain to the US government this week how its lack of understanding of the Internet is going to kill it.

Stupid network, yes! Stupid government, no!

World of Ends, yes! End of the e-World, no!

Karen Hughes, off the hook

It was disappointing to hear Terry Gross let Karen Hughes off the hook in her Fresh Air interview. Hughes said something like, "When people talk about this administration being secretive, I think they actually mean that there aren't many leaks." Then Hughes gave an example of a leak that did damage. "No," Terry didn't say, "That's not what we mean. We mean that Cheney won't release the names of the people he consulted with about energy policy..." and then she didn't go on from there.

Cheese Weasel Day

Apparently, April 3 has been Cheese Weasel Day since at least 1992. According to Big Wide Logic, the custom is to leave a piece of cheese under the keyboard of techies.

Ironically, because Cheese Weasel Day this year occurred on the first Saturday in April, it coincided with Vermin Attraction Day .

[Thanks to Mike O'Dell for the link.]

Beam me up, Scotty

CNN/Money reports that Microsoft and Sun have dropped their lawsuits, although the terms make it sound more like they settled out of court and Sun won: Microsoft has agreed to pay Sun a total of $1.950 billion, while Sun agreed to pay Microsoft royalties for any technology it incorporates into its products. (The Times of India has a franker and more helpful article.)

Yes, Scott McNealy apparently wore
a Trekkie outfit to the press conference

In addition, CEO's Bill Gates and Scott McNealy announced that they are producing the feature film "Star Trek: Unholy Alliance" in which Captain McNealy of the Starship USS Solaris teams up with The Chairman of the Borg to defeat their common enemy, the Torvaldians from Planet Linooks.

Passover blog

You want to see what Jews are like when we're not dominating Hollywood, cheering crucifixions, and plotting the takeover of the global economy? Take a look Mark Federman's Passover blog where he thinks out loud about his annual wrestling with the holiday's story and traditions. (Mark is more familiar to most of us as the author of a McLuhan-themed blog.)

Keep Voting Ponderous (NPR commentary)

Here's the next-to-final draft of a commentary that ran on NPR's All Things Considered on Monday. You can listen to it here.

I'm double worried about electronic voting machines. First there's the problem that lots of people have noted with the new machines. Instead of marking a box with a pen, you touch the screen to put an electronic mark in an electronic box. Very convenient and results are tabulated instantly, but suppose there's a bug in the computer, or suppose someone hacks into them. How would we even know that the software is miscounting the votes?

The most talked-about solution is to have the electronic voting machines also produce a paper copy of your vote so you can compare it with what you touched on screen. The paper copies would be kept secure so they can be counted manually to verify the electronic results...which makes sense to me.

But even if all the technical issues are resolved, I'm not going to like voting with the new digital machines. I'm voting because I want to make a difference. A little difference, exactly one person's worth. So I want my vote to make a mark in the world. I want to make a thick X in smelly magic marker ink where there wasn't one before. I want to feel a lever click into place. I want to punch some chads. That's what making your mind up feels like. Touching a computer screen is a little too literally doing my "bit."

Of course I don't want Florida to happen again. No one does. And I'm enough of a combination news and computer junkie to want election results within 4 seconds of the polls closing. But I'd be willing to give that up if it meant I could savor my role as a citizen longer.

You know, I not only want to make a mark on paper, I want to wait in line at the polls. The line should be long, and not only because that means lots of us are voting. The inconvenience reminds us that voting is worth waiting for. Besides, the line puts in front of me and behind me people who disagree with me. Yet right or wrong, we all get to stand in the same line. No matter how much we disagree about the future direction of our country, everyone in line agrees on this: People who cut in line stink! That's the basis of civil society.

And it should be drizzling on election day. And a little cold. Hands in pockets cold, not glove cold. We should be dusting the outside off our coats and stamping it off our feet as we enter the polling place because, although voting is an indoor activity, we should be reminded of the reality of the world outside, especially as voting goes digital.

So, yes, I bow before the inevitable. I'll probably be poking my finger at a touch screen and, I hope, checking the results against a paper print out. I may even glance sideways at the screen to see which names have the most accumulated fingerprints next to them. That's how badly I want to know the outcome. But I'm afraid I'm going to feel more like I'm recording information about my vote than actually voting. Casting a ballot is the fundamental, irrevocable act of democracy. I'm voting to have an effect. It'd be nice to be able to feel the effect.

I love Canada

As you've undoubtedly heard, a Canadian judge has made, in a nutshell, all the right decisions about file sharing and copyright, and then added in a defense of customer privacy as well. David Akin of the Canada's Globe and Mail blogs about this here, but you should check his overall blog for updates.

I was so happy that in a fit of completely irrational exuberance, I was on the verge of paying Prince $9.99 to download his new CD, but the DRM restrictions are too high - you can't copy it onto a second computer even if it's your own.

Recorded chapter 14 of Lessig's book

I just posted a recording of Chapter 14 of Larry Lessig's Free Culture, as per AKMA's publishing-changing idea. Chapter 14 is 17MB, and it's filled with explosive P's (damn amateurs!), but it's up and it's free.

I started reading Steve Johnson's amazing new book, Mind Wide Open, to our son the other day. Reading to a kid flips reading - our paradigm of what you do when alone - into a social act. And it opens the book up in a new way. But reading into a microphone for public consumption is something else again. It's like taking the book out for a spin: You're always looking ahead for dangerous curves.

Fun to do. Let's do another!