The Internet: A Warning From History…

[Via The Risks Digest Volume 27: Issue 25]

Check out everyfuckingwebsite.com:

[Via Pop Loser]

A lovely tale from tech support:

When I was nearing the end of my tenure, I had a particularly awkward customer. He wasn't being particularly rude, just extremely untrusting and uncooperative. His issue was maddeningly simple – his modem was in standby.

I should probably explain, his modem was an old Motorola model (An SB5100 if I recall correctly). The interesting quirk of this modem is that it has a standby button on it that, as you might guess, puts the modem in standby. What's even MORE interesting is if you put the modem in standby, it'll STAY in standby no matter how often you unplug the thing and plug it back in again. The REALLY REALLY interesting thing is that the modem was completely black and the standby button was also black. Most people didn't know it even existed and it was common for someone to accidentally hit it and suddenly have their connection stop working. Switching it off and on didn't fix it, those lights just wouldn't stay on. Anyway, we see this quite a lot and pushing the button fixes it within seconds – easy. However, this guy wasn't having it.

Despite actually having fixed the problem, he was adamant that his modem was broken. No matter how much I tried to explain that it's REALLY easy to accidentally hit that button ("I've done it myself a few times!"), he was determined. "Oh no, the modem isn't in a position where it could be knocked like that, it's BROKEN!". Bull. Shit. So after batting around for a bit, I had an idea. [...]

A fiendishly clever, utterly hilarious, moderately evil idea.

(I meant to post about this days ago, but because I'm an idiot I've kept putting off writing about it.)

The UK government is running a consultation on the introduction of a system of requiring Internet Service Providers to block 'Adult' content by default. This is a horrible idea for all sorts of reasons:

1. As anyone who was ever used a network with a content filtering system in place knows, they're hopelessly unreliable. They either block far too much, or they block so selectively that they're ineffective. So, in short, they don't achieve their stated aim, and they cause all sorts of collateral damage along the way.
2. If parents want to block their kids' internet access, there's been software available for years to let them do this. It tends not to work very well (see 1 above), or to be hard to install without the help of their tech-savvy kids – hence the request that governments force ISPs to do the job for them. None of which implies that the standards of the most censorious of parents should be applied to everyone: any such system should be offered on an opt-in basis, not as the default.
3. Even if you completely trust the intentions of the current government and of the people who like this idea, putting a system like this in place gives a future government the tools to block whatever content they like. This is a (small) step towards our one day having the Great Firewall of the United Kingdom.

The consultation can be found here. There's a response form you can download and complete, or you could use the online response system produced by the Open Rights Group which copies your response to your MP.¹

The consultation closes on 6 September 2012 (yes, tomorrow), so if you're in the UK and you care about this get thee to one of the links above and let the Department for Education know what you think.

1. As this is a consultation by a government department individual MPs aren't involved in the process yet – their time will come if this all ends in legislation being put forward to implement whatever proposals follow this consultation exercise – but it does no harm for them to know that some of their constituents have views on this topic. ↩

Usenet at 32:

Usenet is 32 years old. You'd be forgiven for thinking that it's a near-dead, cobweb-covered discussion forum platform, but actually it's more popular today than ever before, and it's thriving as an alternative to Bittorrent. [...]

It's interesting to read about some of the clever ways people are using Usenet to distribute other people's content nowadays, but it's a damned shame that Usenet as a discussion forum stagnated.

Web-based discussions are all very well, but as far as I can see even now there's nothing out there that comes close to the flexibility of a good Usenet client that allowed you to follow a series of discussion groups and use scoring and filtering to show you the threads you'd most likely be interested in and block content from known trolls and idiots.

Radio Killed The Podcasting Star, according to Richard McManus:

Podcasters are to radio what bloggers are to newspapers: independent voices taking attention away from mainstream media. At least that was the theory, when professional podcasts and blogs were getting started in the 2000s. But unlike blogs, podcasts by indie voices have not gone on to seriously challenge the mainstream media incumbents. Where is the Ariana Huffington of podcasting? Can you name a political podcaster who's had the same impact as Josh Marshall and his Talking Points Memo blog? Sadly, there are no podcasting stars – and it's all radio's fault. [...]

His thesis is that because so many of the most popular podcasts are derived from public radio shows or semi-celebrities who brought an audience with them to podcasting, this demonstrates that podcasting has somehow failed to break through the way blogging has. I think there's a parallel with blogging, but it's not the one McManus is thinking of.

To my mind, the point of blogging (or of podcasting) was never to displace established media, but to provide a publishing platform that meant that you didn't have to have a wide audience to survive. It's true that a fair chunk of my podcast listening is of BBC radio shows that produce a podcast version, but there are also plenty of shows produced by enthusiastic amateurs¹ that I'd never find on my radio dial.² The point, as Dave Winder notes in the post that led me to the ReadWriteWeb post, "was to get access to the distribution channel for anyone who wanted it, and that certainly has been accomplished." If you want to use podcasts as a way to listen to your favourite BBC radio programs on your schedule then go for it. If you want to hear from people who'll never have a BBC radio show in a million years, that's out there too. The success of the one doesn't deprive me of access to the other, any more that the existence of the Huffington Post prevents me from reading Feeling Listless. They share a distribution medium, but not much else.

[Via Scripting News]

1. I mean that term in the old-fashioned sense of people who are primarily enthusiasts for their chosen subject and who are happy to share their thoughts with anyone who's inclined to listen. ↩
2. OK, that's an outdated metaphor. I think you know what I mean. ↩

From McSweeney's: Prospectus for Silicon Valley's Next Hot Tech IPO, Where Nothing Could Possibly Go Wrong.

RISK FACTORS

An investment in Ponzify involves significant risks.

User metrics

A significant portion of our income is derived from advertisers who still buy this whole "clicks" and "page count" business. Thus, we plan a vigorous defense of our current metrics while making up new ones with impressive-sounding names. For instance, KonBuy (short for "Konfirmation Bias") scores the popularity of apps and websites based on whether their titles are intentionally misspelled portmanteaus.

Age Factor

Our CEO, CFO, COO and a bunch of other acronyms were all born after Nirvana released "Nevermind".

Experience

Did you watch that two-part Frontline special on PBS about the inside story of the global financial crisis? We did. We were like "Dude, that's like what we're doing!"

[Via The Browser]

How much would you like to bet that within the next five years some junior minister – be they Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Labour – will be announcing that they want to explore the possibility of introducing a 'voluntary' system modelled after the one currently being adopted by China's domestic equivalent of Twitter to deal with antisocial behaviour online:

Sina Weibo users each will now receive 80 points to begin with, and this can be boosted to a full 100 points by those who provide their official government-issued identification numbers (like Social Security numbers in the U.S.) and link to a cellphone account.

Spreading falsehoods will lead to deductions in points, among other penalties. Spreading an untruth to 100 other users will result in a deduction of two points. Spreading it to 100-1,000 other users will result in a deduction of five points, as well as a week's suspension of the account. Spreading it to more than 1,000 other users will result in a deduction of 10 points, as well as a 15-day suspension of the account.

Once the point total falls below 60, the user is flagged as "low-credit." A loss of all points will result in an account's closure.

Be sure to read the full linked article, so you can understand how slippery the concept of a 'falsehood' is.¹

[Via The Null Device]

1. For the record, I'm slightly leery of the notion of linking to a 'news source' whose most-read story at the moment is Vampire Skeletons Discovered In Bulgaria With Iron Rods Pierced Through Chests – it's like the Daily Mail's Sidebar of Shame crossed with the Huffington Post! However, the story has been doing the rounds over the last few days and it seems that the basic facts are indeed as related in the article I've linked to. ↩

The case of the 500-mile email:

From trey@sage.org Fri Nov 29 18:00:49 2002
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 21:03:02 -0500 (EST)
From: Trey Harris <trey@sage.org>
To: sage-members@sage.org
Subject: The case of the 500-mile email (was RE: [SAGE] Favorite impossible task?)

Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible… I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. :-) The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained. [...]

[Via kottke.org]

Paul Vixie has posted details of his work in dismantling a network of DNS servers being used to redirect internet traffic from computers infected with the DNS Changer malware. The problem is, even after all that work there are still hundreds of thousands of internet users with infected computers and/or routers, just waiting for someone to pick up where DNS Changer left off:

Internet users are endlessly bombarded with warnings about their security and with offers of services and software (some of it apparently "free") offering to make their computers healthier. The victims of DNS Changer are by this time jaded or overwhelmed or both. The Internet seems to be a very dangerous place, and most Internet users probably feel that they could spend more than half their waking hours just installing patches and responding to warnings – unless they just put their heads down, ignore all that noise, and try instead to get their work (or play) done. I am sympathetic to this mindset. The problem is, the Internet really is that dangerous, and people really do need to pay more attention to the dangers of unpatched or infected computers.

Short of jumping into a TARDIS and going back to 1982 to give various heads of computer companies a stern talking-to about the need to make designing secure systems a top priority I don't see a good way out of this problem beyond passing the problem to ISPs and having them cut off internet access for customers still using infected systems until they clean up their systems. Which isn't going to happen any time soon, and is a terrible idea anyway.

[Via rc3.org]

Tristan Louis has a confession to make:

I killed the internet.

It wasn't some thing I had planned but it was the net result of my actions. And I'm going to explain how it happened. [...]

[Via James Fallows]

Get Your Censor On.



[Via jwz]

Jonathan Zittrain declares that the PC is dead. Which would be fine, if only the smartphones and tablets that are ushering in the post-PC era weren't so locked down:

[...] Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don't merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we're seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other – and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse. [...]

[Via The Brooks Review]

Adam Butcher's Internet Story:

A series of shocking events unfolds when a young man creates a public treasure hunt for his own amusement and a video blogger decides to pursue the riddles across country.

It's only nine minutes long, but well worth a look.

[Via Waxy.org Links/]

Brian S Hall on Microsoft and the foo fighters, wherein Microsoft's Corporate VP of Microsoft Corporate Communications tries to persuade the world that the (Windows) PC has a vibrant future ahead of it:

In the past year, and again in the past few weeks, I've seen a resurgence of the term "post" applied to the PC in a number of stories including The Wall Street Journal, PC World and the Washington Post. Heck, I even mentioned it in my 30th anniversary of the PC post, noting that "PC plus" was a better term.

Translation: Everyone but Microsoft, even staid old media, has come to accept that the PC is dead.

Nothing draws more links and eyeballs than saying something is a foo-"killer" or that foo is "dead." That's human nature and part of the way we like our stories, simple and straightforward, black and white.

Translation: Or beige, as in the case of that PC gathering dust in your house.

A new thing shows up, kills the old thing, end of story. But in the world of technology, it's rarely (but not never) that clear cut. Most of the time, in fact, new objects enhance and complement the things we've already got. They don't replace them.

Translation: Those that do the "enhancing" and "complementing" wind up earing all the money. Microsoft will still be around. Just not making any new money.

I truly don't think the PC is dead, whether it runs Windows or Mac OS X or Linux. There are still times when some of us need a big screen and a hardware keyboard and a lot of mass storage: it'll be a while yet before I can access the sort of quantities of data I have sitting on my Mac Mini's hard disk over a wireless connection at acceptable speeds wherever I go. It's just that relatively few of the niftiest new toys will be designed for the PC any more.

I didn't know you could disable Google Reader's social features with a single line of JavaScript:

1. Go to Google Reader
2. Type this JavaScript code in the address bar: javascript:antisocial('true')
3. Google Reader will reload and you'll see a simplified interface that removes the section "People you follow" and no longer shows shared items from your friends.

[Via Tom Morris]

Quote of the day: Charlie Stross,¹ quoting a character from his forthcoming novel, Rule 34…

"The twenty-first century so far has been a really fucking awful couple of decades for paranoid schizophrenics".

1. Prompted by a demo of NewsTweak. ↩

Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard has been trying to quantify how large a problem linkrot truly is, based on an analysis of bookmarks stored at the site going back as far as 1997:

Along with the pretty graph, I've published the detailed results by year here. Links appear to die at a steady rate (they don't have a half life), and you can expect to lose about a quarter of them every seven years.

I'm actually surprised that the percentage of pages being moved or otherwise disappearing from their original URL is that low. I'm inclined to agree with Ceglowski's suggestion that as these links have been retained by Pinboard's users – going back to the late 1990s in some cases – dead links are likely to have been identified and updated or deleted in users' bookmark collections, thereby biasing the sample in favour of working links.

Part of me thinks that I probably should do something about the no-doubt-large proportion of links I've posted in 11 years or so of blogging that no longer point anywhere useful. Then I contemplate how much work it would be ((Particularly given that I'd be inclined to try to find updated URLs for links wherever possible!) to go through and find them all and then amend or delete the associated posts, and I come to my senses…

Asked to comment on the prospect of one day archiving Facebook, Jason "Archive Team" Scott got his rant on:

Facebook is a living computer nightmare. Just as viruses took the advantages of sharing information on floppies and modems and revealed a devastating undercarriage to the whole process, making every computer transaction suspect… and just as spyware/malware took advantage of beautiful advances in computer strength and horsepower to turn your beloved machine of expression into a gatling gun of misery and assholery… Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship. While I can't really imply that it was going to be any other way, I can not sit by and act like this whole turn of events hasn't resulted in an epidemic of ruin that will have consequences far-reaching from anything related to archiving.

Follow the link – trust me, the full rant is well worth a read.

Translation From MS-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Dean Hachamovitch's "Native HTML5" announcement:

Native HTML5 support in Windows with IE9 makes a huge difference in what sites can do.

We're really, really sorry about IE6. Not sorry enough to disable Windows activation and allow all the software pirates in China to upgrade, but sorry nonetheless.

Web sites and HTML5 run best when they run natively, on a browser optimized for the operating system on your device.

I think we can all agree to hate XUL.