If you are a spammer who likes to use any of my domains as spoofed addresses for your nasty little missives, causing me to have to pick my real email out of thousands of your horrid little bounce messages, I had better not ever find out where you live, because if I do I will come right over. And I will then cheerfully disembowel you with my left thumb and a salad fork.
Grr.
(The alt text was “You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback”)
Lately some of the more pretentious online folks have started calling those pretty pictures of how your Facebook profile (del.icio.us profile, LinkedIn profile, etc.) relates to other profiles a “social graph” instead of the previously-used “social network”.
No, no, no. Graphs have variables. Networks have connections. What we have here are connections, not variables. There’s no y axis on those pretty pictures, just lines depicting individual connections between data points. Therefore, there is no graph, even if you do make your data into a pretty picture. It could perhaps be a map or a diagram or a web, but it is not a graph.
Sensible commentary and a bunch of comments at (among other places) Rough Type.
edit: the original post on this was Dave Winer’s How to avoid sounding like an monkey . That post also has a bunch of background.
I’m not much of a gamer. I’ve played various versions of Civ since about 1994, but not much else… the gunfire sounds in first-person shooters make me tense, and when I’m playing it’s not my desire to end up more tense.
Still, seems to me it’s as good a way of spending time as any other. I’ve noticed there are more and more positive stories about gaming and about online pursuits generally, and (with the exception of pedophilia-related scare stories) fewer “D&D killed my dog!” stories. I liked this piece by Clive Thompson today:
Yet, just like a crossword addict, when the game is over, we’re left with — what? A sense of completion? Sure, except what we’ve completed could be regarded as a supremely arbitrary, nonproductive task. The elation I feel when I finish is always slightly tinged with a worrisome sense of hollowness. Wouldn’t I have been better off doing something that was difficult and challenging and productive?
Except, wait a minute. That’s just stupid, Puritan thinking. Videogames, like crosswords, are a form of play — and play is a key element of a healthy adult existence. As game theorist Raph Koster has always pointed out, our playful brains love to seek out patterns, to solve problems — and there’s something existentially joyful about doing this in an environment that doesn’t have any stakes if you screw it up.
Or here’s a more radical way of putting it: Wasting time is one of the central reasons we play. If play were productive, it wouldn’t be … play. Monday Night Football doesn’t achieve anything either.
The BBC talks positively about gaming as a way of assessing the character of potential offline relationships:
You can easily gauge some of the slipperiest aspects of human nature by observing someone’s tactics. Are they a risk-taker? Do they panic under pressure? Do they respond to failure with frustration or creativity? Are they a gracious winner or a griping loser? A loner or a team-player? Perfectionist or bodger? Is winning all that matters, or will they risk death to pull a prank or tell a joke?
And Doonesbury made me snort (click for the full-size version — originally here):
HAI
I HAS A VAR ITZ 1
IM IN YR LOOP
VISIBLE VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 39 O RLY?
YA RLY
GTFO
NO WAI
UP VAR!!1
KTHX
KTHX
KTHXBYE
(From here. Lolcode specs here.)
Hmm, the code tag is malfunctioning. If it’s all left-justified to you, please pretend it’s properly indented.
A nice passage from the middle of a long (and recommended) Boxes and Arrows post:
A good password is one that cannot be guessed. And there within lies the problem. What is difficult to guess is most likely difficult to remember. This problem is multiplied when you have many applications that require authentication, each with its own password policy that dictates password complexity and mandatory resetting. So while a hacker may not be able to guess your passwords, you most likely will not be able to remember them either. So what do you do? Do what everyone else does (but knows they shouldn’t) – write your passwords down on the small piece of paper in your desk drawer. Not exactly the most secure practice.
The problem here is that the security folks design their password policies in a theoretical world where they only consider computers and hackers. Make the passwords very strong. But the primary end users, the people who actually log in appropriately, are not considered. The ultimate result is systems that are less secure. People are people. Defining password policies without considering the complete human context in which they are applied results in lower security.
At work, I have to come up with a new strong password every month. Until they put in that system, I had an excellent, very strong password that had never been written down or told to anyone. Now, because I have to remember a new password and change it again every 30 days, I have a very simple formula for each password. It meets the rules for strength but only by the letter of the law and not its spirit: it’s pretty weak. If it wasn’t simple, I’d have to write it down.
Boxes and Arrows proposes that IT departments promote the use of password management programs, which is a sensible enough solution and one I’d support in a workplace setting. (I’d support it within IT departments too. How many firewall/router/wireless etc installs have you seen with admin settings that haven’t even been changed from the defaults?)
I think many us can get away with a much simpler solution: not changing passwords*. The stuff on my servers and websites is pretty tame stuff — no nuclear secrets there, no plans for world domination**, nothing that might reveal Bourne’s true identity. If someone hacks my stuff, it’ll be a plain old vandal, not someone who’ll snoop in time and time again to read and steal things with Top Secret stamps on them. If I’m hacked they’ll be the boring kind of hackers, the kind that are just out to break stuff and make a mess, and it’ll be obvious. Given that, what’s the point in preemptively changing passwords? If I don’t write it down and I don’t tell anyone, my strong password remains just as strong as it was when I created it.
Odds are low anyone will bother to get past a decently-administered firewall. A good firewall is like a good bike lock: it won’t keep out someone determined to get you (edit: or someone who really likes a challenge), but if they’re not after you personally, they’ll probably move on to an easier target.
This stuff makes me crazy. More complication is not always better.
–
* This assumes there are proper backups. Leaving passwords unchanged is a level of potential foolishness I can accept. Failing to back up adequately is foolishness on a totally different scale.
** Those stay safely in my head 
Wide-eyed children of the eighties watched in astonishment as Michael J. Fox (a.k.a. Marty McFly) shredded pavement on a hovering skateboard in Back to the Future Part II. The hoverboard was just like a skateboard, but with one crucial difference: no wheels. His pink and teal board had “magnetic” pads on the bottom and with a quick push-off could silently cruise over grass, pavement, and even water. While this highly desirable piece of movie technology seems very plausible, it crushingly remains fiction. I think I speak for all of us when I say, “Thank you for breaking my heart, Michael J. Fox.”
Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived
by Daniel H. Wilson
Ah, how often I’ve shouted that exact phrase. It’s the 21st century, for heaven’s sake, now WHERE IS MY JETPACK, why does my house lack a transporter room, and when do I get my robot maid? Good grief — Firefox is even flagging “jetpack” as an unknown word. This isn’t the 21st century I signed up for!
Daniel Wilson understands this frustration. (So does my husband, who saw this book and bought it for me, and who now must put up with me reading the funny bits out loud.) The book examines, with decent science and great humour, just what’s up with all this great stuff they promised us: whether it exists; if not, why not; and if so, where and how you can get your hands on it.
Though fiery explosions brought on the demise of commercial airships, a simple fact remains: Someday, the fate of the free world may rest solely upon your ability to pilot a stolen Nazi zeppelin.
Yes, Daniel Wilson understands what this is all about.
Wherever a dangerous new technology exists, there is a guy with cool goggles and streaky blond hair waiting to shatter his fibula. Totally.
(All quotes from the book.)
(A found poem, comprising titles from my spam)
I.
A certain tenseness could be sensed in the atmosphere of the household
I have read your treatise–a very useful work, but stupid
The man from the centre realised that he couldn’t draw blood there either, so he went back to the subject of the tung
So I stood upright, protecting my head and neck with my arms and hands as well as with the cloak
It is for the promise of the solution
Load bearing fruit cake
II.
You have new mail from Natalia, 25, Russia, dating
The woman’s face changed before his eyes
Thoughts of reprisals fill her mind.
Why be an average guy any longer
But maybe it could never be the same, I told myself
Sorry, man. I have to go
I’m at DrupalCamp, surrounded by a sea of (other) MacBook-toting geeks.
There’s a conference of Marxists using the same space. A while ago they came in and carried off a couple of our tables, which was a tricky moment for the DrupalCamp organizers: “Oh yeah. I’m going to go tell the guy who doesn’t believe in private property that those are MY TABLES.” Eventually a common understanding emerged — Drupal being Open Source, code free as in speech and free as in beer and all that — and I think the tables came back.
Nonetheless, I put on my dorky conference t-shirt. There are hardly any women at DrupalCamp and I didn’t want to be mistaken for one of the Marxists.
A tech summary:
I’ve developed a long list of Drupal modules to look at and a much better understanding of how presentation elements function, so I may have to bug our poor db guy less often with silly questions and he won’t have to bug me to upgrade versions. Good.
Drupal supports OpenID. I’m still unconvinced that OpenID is a good idea. Technically, yeah. Makes things a lot easier. But practically speaking I do not think most users have a deep enough understanding of what information is where and how it’s used and how to control it for OpenID to be an acceptable risk. An example: how many people actually give Facebook their Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo! password, which would be a hugely insecure thing to do, so they can auto-import their contacts? 99%, I bet. And suddenly these folks are going to be able to make appropriate decisions about their OpenID information?
Issues surrounding the value of anonymity and the value of maintaining multiple personas aren’t a part of the OpenID discussion at all. Admittedly the technical forum is not the place for those discussions, but they aren’t happening anywhere else either from what I can tell. Those things will be key factors in how OpenID should be presented to non-geeks, especially female non-geeks. I suspect that goes back to the lack of women in Open Source generally. Talk to women for a very short time and you’ll hear just how highly anonymity is valued.
Anyway, the technical stuff is great, and the Marxists have entertainingly wild outfits that balance out our dorky t-shirts, so there’s visual as well as technical entertainment.
I love seeing academic stuff tossed at online phenomena — like this sort of sociological/linguistic analysis of lolcats via I Can Has Cheezburger?
Check out this chart:
Ha! Harbls in a chart!
The great thing about all of this is how we can see new languages forming out of a new medium, and since the pace is abnormally fast, we can watch it evolve over weeks instead of decades.
It also demonstrates how the Internet changes the way we connect and communicate. These words and macros depend on the users manipulating not only the information being passed back and forth, but the format of the codes we agree on to represent the information. Strunk and White would probably be appalled, but then again, maybe not.
Heh. Nice to see a bit of work that manages to analyze something goofy without mocking it.
(The post title refers to this image)
From User Friendly:
Reminds me of this:
which is spoofing this ad:
Why should we pay to watch ads in already-expensive products? Or be forced to sit through nasty warnings about piracy on DVDs that, since we’re seeing the warning, clearly aren’t pirated? Unskippable ads in children’s DVDs drive me crazy too. Why go to such trouble to make your customers hate you? Phhtthththththhtbt.
Lately I’ve noticed a bunch of spam has come in with delete-receipt requests attached. Since most people’s email programs auto-process such requests, it’s an efficient and invisible way of marking live addresses for further spamming and/or sale. Sneaky!
An old friend’s “death by spoon” concept could be applied to spammers with great public support, I think.
This is a really cool bit of technology.
Flickr recently added — or perhaps it’s always been there and I haven’t noticed — the ability to geotag photos. Being Flickr, they’re friendy and non-jargony about it. When you’re looking at one of your own photos, “place this photo on a map” appears on the right, along with the camera type and the date the picture was taken and all the other metadata. Click it, then up pops a map and you drag a little thumbnail of your photo to the right spot. That’s all.
Once you’ve mapped your photo, “place this photo on a map” becomes “taken in Toronto, Ontario (map)”. Click the link, and you can see all your geotagged photos on the map(1).
But that’s not the cool bit.
Looking at that same map, you can choose to see everyone’s(2) geotagged photos from that area. Click my screenshot at the top of this post for a (nonfunctional, since it’s just a screenshot) example. It provides a whole new approach and an element of serendipity to exploring an area via images (from a passive perspective), somewhat like the [murmur] project does via cellphone messages. More interesting, however, is that it adds the ability to collaboratively — even with total strangers(3) — visualize and document an area (from a more active perspective).
Very interesting possibilities there.
(1) The one thing that seems to be missing is the ability to correct or delete geotags. I hope that’s in the works.
(2) There are other options, such as viewing based on date or group filters, which are pretty neat too. The group filter would enable this to be used for things like class projects or other deliberate collaborative efforts.
(3) You can see whose photos you’re looking at, of course, and can click through to the rest of the author’s photostream… which brings us back to issues of identity and privacy. You can edit the privacy settings to control who can view a photo’s location on the same page that you use to decide who can see the photo itself. So, good: you can set a photo to be viewable by all, but its location might only be viewable by friends and family.
(Update: Ivor Tossell responded to my rather ill-mannered rant with a very gracious note, thus disproving the hypothesis that the Internet exists solely so we can all call each other asshats, and adding strength to the hypothesis that at this point Google runs the world. The conversation will continue.)
This article in the Globe: Who do you want to be? irritates me, not least because the author (Ivor Tossell) seems spectacularly shallow-thinking and whiny for a technology writer.
One of the Internet’s basic weaknesses is that there’s no central way of keeping track of who you are.
Well, no. That’s a strength, if it’s anything. It means I control my own information, which is enormously important. Would we really want to put the locus of identity control elsewhere? Who would you trust in that central role — the machines?
But what if you actually want to identify yourself as the same person from one website to the next? Then you’re in trouble, because none of these websites talks to one another. For instance, there’s no easy way of seeing the Wikipedia entries made by a person who uploaded a given YouTube video, or vice versa.
If that bugs you, buy a domain and fill it with RSS feeds from all your various online exploits, or use Pipes to work out a clever mashup, or pull a Steve Mann and record your whole life, or deploy any number of other solutions — and refer to that whenever you post something somewhere. As a technical problem under one’s individual control, it’s not hard.
…every time you sign up for a new website, you’re not just creating an account, you’re starting a new identity.
This is the crux of the problem, I think.
You are not creating a new identity in such cases, you are merely expressing facets of your identity. We express certain facets of ourselves at work, other facets at home, and yet others when we’re down the pub — this isn’t considered a problem, but merely normal compartmentalization and appropriate socialization. That distinction should not vanish, and should not be turned into a problem, simply because the venues in which the behaviour is taking place move online.
That kind of thinking also seems to presume that everyone’s online just for fun. What about those of us who work online AND play online? Would conflating the personal and professional facets of my life accomplish anything, other than boring my friends and irritating my clients? No. The compartmentalization serves a purpose — it helps my clients get at my work and my friends get at my not-work, thus keeping the signal-to-noise ratio high and keeping everyone happy.
Do you really want to push all your online actions into one box where your boss, your mom, and your dog can have at it?
I thought not.
Sitting next to me on the table, her power light breathing quietly in the way that Macs do, is my shiny new black MacBook — my present from D, who obviously knows very, very well how to make me happy.
She is a thing of beauty, this MacBook, and a few light-years ahead of the slightly-ailing 2001 Dell laptop I’m using at the moment. Tomorrow I’ll have time to get her all set up properly (I’ve only got the wireless configured at the moment)[1] and perhaps then she’ll reveal her name.
There are four computers on our dining room table at the moment (plus a stray tiara, a strange little screwdriver, and some Kleenex because we are all still sick). More computers than people — geek.family.
[1]: …which really means, buy and install Civilization IV
The BBC reports that the top Google search terms this year were
…which is kind of peculiar, if you think about it a moment. Both Bebo and Myspace have blindingly obvious URLs, so instead of typing into a Google search box you could type into the address bar directly (you could even leave off the .com, since modern browsers will generally add it for you) and save both time and clicks. Wikipedia also made the top 10.
I bet that this is because a lot of folks Google everything now. From what I’ve observed, many people aren’t even bookmarking things, let alone using the address bar to type URLs. You want Hotmail? Google “hotmail” then click through. The browser’s become irrelevant to these people — what do browser features matter when Google can always get you where you need to go?
While this says good things about the reliability of Google, I think it also speaks to the profoundly disempowering experience that Internet Explorer creates for the inexperienced user. (And let’s be real: these people are using IE.) It has warnings! All kinds of warnings and security notices and popups asking intrusive questions! And mystery: IE hides the underlying processes, so you’re forever guessing what’s really going on. It’s scary. It doesn’t lead anyone to want to play with it or explore settings that would make it better. No, many people find it better to rely on Google, which is reassuringly straightforward despite (and because of) its lack of features.
People who are used to almost entirely disregarding their browser find it hard to understand what geeky folks like me find so great about Firefox. I can run myself out of breath talking about features! extensions! customizability! open source! and by the way people’s eyes glaze over I may as well be reciting machine language poetry or pi to n-hundred decimal places (not that I can do that. I’m not that geeky). There’s nothing in their experience on which my words can build.
The Internet lets us manipulate and contribute to the enormous flow of content and connect with each other in wonderful new ways — and here we have people who are so disempowered by the technology that they passively rely on a search engine to tell them where to go instead of taking the nominal but active step of going there directly.
It’s a shame, really.
Why online should be off limits in the bedroom
And on and on it goes. Wherever you find a household with wireless technology, you will more than likely find a man who is trying to bring a laptop into bed and a woman who is trying to prevent him from doing it. One girlfriend of mine confided that she got wireless so her boyfriend wouldn’t retreat to his study all night. Now, the computer in bed is threatening their sex life.
If Leah McLaren was in my bed, I’d cling to my laptop, too. But she misses the whole purpose of the laptop/wireless setup. The point of having wireless is so two people (or more, I suppose) can sit companionably in bed, each with his/her own laptop, and email each other about cool stuff.
