Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Edgy campaign from the Young Greens

Narrow red leaves

The Young Greens of Canada recently launched a new website emblazoned with the slogan “[Y]our parents f*cked up the planet – [I]t’s time to do something about it. [L]ive green, vote green.” Obviously, it is intended to provoke controversy, and it is arguably a tactical mistake. That being said, it is certainly factually true. The ancestors of those now alive helped to expand the fossil-fuel-driven society that is the fundamental cause of climate change. Most of them did so in ignorance of what the consequences would be, but that is no longer a legitimate possibility for those now alive. Faulty arguments from deniers aside, we all now know that climate change is real, dangerous, and caused by us. We have to stop. That being said, it would be more correct to say “our parents” or “all our parents” and to mention that, so far, we are all doing the same thing.

We certainly need a diversity in media campaigns to address climate change and, even if some people object to this one, I think there is some cause for raising the issue of responsibility. We need to move from a mindset where we pat ourselves on the back for walking to the grocery store or using a compact fluorescent light to one where we recognize the harm our emissions will cause to other people and take major steps to reduce them (while also demanding change in the economic and political structures within which we live).

Canada’s political system forces the Greens to engage from the outside. Whether you think this communication strategy will alienate more than it educates or not, that is clearly what the Young Greens are trying to accomplish here.

What does the internet know about you?

Through my friend Antonia, I discovered the Personas project over at MIT. The creators claim that it is “a critique of data mining, revealing the computer’s uncanny insights and inadvertent errors.” Putting in my name yields lots of results, though less information than a simple Google search. Indeed, it is probably what Google turns up when we enter our names that should concern us most. The MIT project is more about nice visuals than about providing a comprehensive precis on someone, based on publicly accessible information.

Even so, it’s a neat little thing to try out, especially if you have a rare or unique name.

Pondering smartphones II

At the end of June, I pondered smartphones for the first time and decided on the Nokia E71 (preliminary review here). Since then, I have witnessed mine sicken and die, getting progressively buggier. Bugs aside, I have also found the phone much less useful than I expected before getting it. The web browsing experience is poor; blogging from it is impossible; the audio quality is lower than with my cheap old phone; and the email capabilities that were my primary motivation for buying it were always finicky, awkward, and temperamental. The media capabilities were never a major concern of mine, but it is fair to note that the media player and camera are both rather poor.

Today, my dead phone was revived by the Fido store in Ottawa’s ByWard Market – eliminating all my saved notes to myself (foolish to save anything in local memory!), settings, and applications. The generic OS they installed lacks some of what my phone came with initially, and it still won’t pair with Bluetooth devices. The people at the shop say that the matter of any further repairs is between me and Nokia, and I should be glad that they didn’t charge me for flashing the phone.

As such, I see myself with three options:

  1. Give the E71 another try, in hopes that the bugs are mostly gone and I will learn to live with its limitations as a device.
  2. Get an iPhone, with the annoyance of a three year contract.
  3. Abandon smartphones altogether and get a basic GSM phone with the capability of making calls and sending text messages only.

The choice is complicated by the apparent defectiveness of the E71. It wouldn’t really be ethical to sell it to someone else in this state. Given that, and my displeasure at the prospect of an exclusive contract and locked phone (or spending $700 on an unlocked iPhone), option two is basically out for now.

In some ways, option three is actually the most appealing right now. Smartphones may simply be more trouble (and expense) than they are worth. Perhaps waiting for a few more generations of devices to pass by makes the most sense. That said, given that I have a phone that I cannot really sell, I will probably continue with option one.

If I could send advice back in time to myself in June, I would probably say: “Wait a few more years before going for a smartphone, and if you must get one now, go with Apple’s offering.”

Now a historical authority

People talk about how the internet and Wikipedia have made the collection and categorization of information more democratic, but the point is really driven home when one of your blog posts gets used as a reference by the Hungarian version of Wikipedia.

I don’t know what the Hungarian text says, but there must surely be a more authoratative source than my blog regarding how George de Hevesy hid the Nobel Prize medals of James Franck and Max von Laue by dissolving them in aqua regia.

This page on the Nobel Prize website discusses the events in question.

Generation of writers

The internet is often accused of dumbing people down, particularly young people. At least one result from the Stanford Study of Writing seems contrary to that, and is discussed in Wired:

Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

It’s hard not to find that rather encouraging, even if electronic forms of communication are sometimes gaining ground at the expense of real-time socializing. I think there is special value in written forms of communication, not least because they put more of an onus on the person expressing themselves to do so in a clear and comprehensible way.

I found this via Metafilter.

CAPTCHAs

Salad at Zen Garden, Ottawa

Like many web users, I am of two minds about Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs). On the one hand, I see their importance in fighting several types of spam. In particular, they are an important defence against the spam blogs that have become so prevalent recently. These sites are set up based on a high-value keyword. They then trawl through real blogs, copy content, and put it up. To Google, this looks like a real blog specializing in that keyword. People find it through Google searches, and sometimes end up clicking the ads that are invariably strewn across these robot-created sites.

When it comes to creating new blogs and email accounts, I find CAPTCHAs entirely reasonable.

Where I object is with more mundane uses, such as vetting comments on blogs. Using a CAPTCHA can seriously annoy readers: especially those who have poor vision, or who are using browser add-ons like NoScript for extra security. To me, when a blog owner chooses CAPTCHAs as a security feature, they are saying that they are happy to waste the time of all of their commenters, rather than invest a bit of their own setting up a spam filtering system and occasionally checking for false positives and false negatives. If your blog gets 5,000 comments a day, you have a good excuse. If it gets less than 20, it really seems like a combination of Akismet and some .htaccess rules should be just fine.

reCAPTCHA (which Google recently purchased) has at least two redeeming features. For one, it does useful work. Unlike most CAPTCHAs, which simply garble text for users to decipher, reCAPTCHA uses text from real documents being scanned. It gives users two words to decipher: one known word to perform the CAPTCHA function, and one unknown word for use in digitizing the book. This leads directly to the second good feature: since these books have already been scanned by the best optical character recognition (OCR) software available, they are fundamentally protected against automated CAPTCHA attacks. Of course, you can always pay real people a small fee for solving the puzzles. reCAPTCHA is thus a relatively robust system, against automated attack, with the additional benefit of adding to the sum of useful digitized information.

Hopefully, future CAPTCHA systems will be less annoying for users and more difficult for computers to game. Experimental forms have included tasks like picking out only kittens from photos showing a number of types of animals. This is apparently a task that is easy for humans, but quite beyond the capability of automatic image recognition software.

Personally, I prefer to think of them as Computer Automated Person Checking Algorithms. It lacks the Turing shout-out, but is more concise and comprehensible.

Cloud computing and consumers

Writing in The Guardian, Cory Doctorow provides a good explanation of why cloud computing might not be so great for individual users. Basically, companies are hoping to use it to wring more money from people, for services that were previously free. As he explains:

[T]he main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes.

That’s not to say there aren’t potential advantages. It may well be worth a montly fee for well implemented and highly secure backup, especially for those who aren’t too computer savvy or don’t have access to Apple’s excellent Time Machine product. (Doctorow talks about using Amazon’s S3 service and the Jungle Disk tool.)

Really, backup seems like the cloud computing application with the most value for users, since encrypted backups elsewhere will probably be safe if you are robbed or have your house burn down. Another application with more limited utility might be buying access to huge amounts of computing power, which could be useful for some researchers.

Incidentally, Time Machine isn’t quite good enough for protecting irreplaceable physical data, since your external hard drive could be destroyed in an accident at the same time as your computer, or stolen. While I use Time Machine for daily backups, I also back up critical files (such as my photos) to a hard drive I keep at work and update every few months. A fairly easy way to do this is to keep all your irreplaceable documents in one place – such as username/documents/original/ – and then copying it over to the third drive every few months. rsync is an ideal way to do this, but it isn’t very user friendly.

“Write for yourself, edit for your readers”

Ductwork on brick

This great bit of advice comes from Copyblogger. When it comes to the proper use of language in online communication, I think the key issue is one of respect. Being respectful of your readers means taking care to express yourself well, as well as avoid spelling and grammatical mistakes. Taking a slapdash approach to editing suggests that you value a few seconds of your own time more than the time of everyone who will subsequently read whatever you are producing. From my perspective, that is rather rude.

Other good resources include George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” This includes concise and excellent advice on how to improve prose (apologies for the inappropriately gendered language):

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

  1. What am I trying to say?
  2. What words will express it?
  3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
  4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

  1. Could I put it more shortly?
  2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

These basic ideas can also be reformulated as six ‘rules:’

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These apply just as much to corporate, government, and academic documents as they do to blog posts or personal letters.

WPA cracked in 60 seconds

WPA is a more secure encryption system for wireless networks than the older WEP system, which was notoriously vulnerable. Now, Japanese researchers have devised an attack that cracks WPA networks using the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm quickly and easily. So far, WPA2 and WPA using AES are not vulnerable to the attack. On past form, it seems likely that those will eventually become vulnerable to rapid compromise, as well.

The broader point this demonstrates is how attacks always get better and never get worse. As such, the longer any particular system has been deployed, the less likely it is to be secure. Threat analysis needs to be ongoing, and accompanied by the patching and replacement of vulnerable systems. Both because of improving computer power and new mathematical developments, this is especially true when it comes to cryptography. As MC Frontalot explains (in a song that references rainbow tables), “you can’t hide secrets from the future with math.”