Disney plans on renting self-destructing DVDs.
From article:
The discs stop working when a process similar to rusting makes them unreadable. The discs start off red, but when they are taken out of the package, exposure to oxygen turns the coating black and makes it impenetrable by a DVD laser.
Don't fall for this:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 06:51:58 -0500
From: Visa Service <security@visa-security.com>
To: [my gender-specific email address]
Subject: Visa Security Update
Dear Sir/Madam,We were informed that your card is used by another person or
stolen. It could happen if you have been shopping on-line, and
someone got your "Billing information" including your card number.
To avoid and prevent any billing mistakes and to refund your credit
card, it is strongly recommended to proceed filling in the secure
form on our site and applying for our Zero Liability program. This
program is free and it will help us to investigate this accident.[FORM]
Sincerely yours, Visa Support Assistant, Alwin Desagun.
Gosh. Visa must really be hurting these days, what with them being unable to find anyone to compose their important emails in grammatical English. All that fraud must be taking its toll - I'll get right on filling out that form...
The Pew Internet and American Life Project just released a study on Internet usage patterns. This is a subject of longstanding interest to me.
CNN characterized the results somewhat negatively, I feel:
"Despite the potential of turning every Internet user into a publisher, relatively few have created Web journals called blogs and even fewer do so with regularity, a new study finds."
The article goes on to say that only about 10 percent of the bloggers out there update them daily, with the majority doing so only once a week or less often.
Goshdarnit, it seems I'm only average. I better get busy posting more often.
I went by a post office today to get a change of address form. They appeared to be out of them, but there was a sign saying I could change it online at usps.gov. So I went home and just tried that. I plugged in all the informtaion and verified it, then submitted it.
Up pops a notice:
I agree that I will be charged a $1.00 credit card processing fee upon successful completion of my change of address request. I also will be able to print coupons for moving-related offers in my neighborhood.
WHAT???? Had they not been out of the paper form, I could have done this for free. I could have even had the coupons delivered for free. Instead, I save THEM the data entry costs, and they charge me for the privilege? Amazing, such a counter-productive customer- (citizen-) unfriendly policy.
I refuse to part with my money so pointlessly, so now I'm annoyed that I have to shlep to the post office again to get the paper to do this for free. Boy, that whole privatization of the U.S. Postal Service has really paid off. Things are run so much better now...
Lately when I've been watching TV I've been doing it with the closed captioning turned on. I started doing it to be able to follow a show while listening to something else. But it's interesting to see how the tv watching experience is different for those who depend on the captions. It's interesting how incidental sounds are described, and how sometimes what is said is not actually what appears in the captioning. Some shows clearly have the luxury of time to turn an actual transcript into captions, and some are clearly typed out on the fly.
I was watching a Meet the Press where Tim Russert was interviewing an Iraqi diplomat. He asked a question, something about why the Iraqi people have not greeted us as liberators as we were told we would be. To this the diplomat tried to make an excuse of the population having been beaten down by 45 years of autocratic rule. But the response was typed out as 45 years under an "attorney regime."
Hmmm? Tort reform, anyone?
Written, and therefore backdated, to 12/5, though posted on 12/6.
Edit 12/6: I was watching the tribute concert to George Harrison last night. With the captioning on. It was incredibly specific, indicating when the final chord of the song was played, when Clapton's solo had melted back in with the rest of the ensemble? it even spelled out all the vocal fills. It was clear that the captions had been written to really create that sense of immediacy, of being "at" the concert like a hearing person would feel from watching the performance. It was very impressive.
At the Volokh Conspiracy are several posts on errors that have become entrenched in our documented history most likely by virtue of the Word autocorrect feature. Which isn't nearly as handy as it purports to be when it doesn't get things right.
An additional example I've noticed is that Word will change "tortious," a handy word for lawyers to use when suing for a tort, to "tortuous," which may also be applicable to the matter at hand but certainly doesn't express quite the same thought.
Lawyers should probably turn off that particular recommendation. Unfortunately not all of them have...
This is not convenient, but not entirely unexpected.
My laptop broke. It was starting to break near the end of last semester, with screen problems that sometimes resulted in complete freezes. I nursed it through the end of finals with the expectation that I would need to send it back for repair now anyway. But it seems I now have no choice. Within the last week or so it has degenerated: the suspend stopped working, the wireless stopped working, and yesterday it started freezing somewhat randomly. Today it no longer boots.
Fortunately I was able to get nearly everything backed up, and in its last act of benevolence it let me sync my palm one more time (which itself is starting to suffer from wear - though it is nearly 6 years old). Unfortunately not *quite* everything got backed up, and I now have email strewn about hither and yon, some local, some not, some recoverable, some not... Same deal with address books and other digital pieces of my life.
IBM will send for it tomorrow and hopefully repair it quickly. But in the meantime I need to remember what life was like before the wonder of laptops. I'll have to take notes by hand and use lab computers for papers and such. How very 20th century...
Edit 1/15: The moral of the story is that you should always blog about your needs, because you never know when some reader will be able to offer you a solution to your problem, like, oh, say, the loan of a laptop. You should also always go to Huey Lewis and the News concerts, even ones far away, because they provide good opportunities for meeing people who might someday be able to solve your problems, like, oh, say, by loaning you a laptop. I'm very astute, so I suspect I will demonstrate how well I've internalized these lessons at some point in the near future.
At De Novo there's a discussion about whether or not Boalt should put wireless Internet in the classrooms. I'm for it, but Armen (who goes there) is not so sure. This is what I mentioned in the comments:
I vote for wireless everywhere. My school (BU) has it. Granted it's only recently that it's worked reliably, but we missed it when it didn't. For one, rooms are used for multiple purposes (not just lectures). For another, there are legitimate educational reasons for having Internet accessibility during class (the construction of our school means that wireless is the only way to get it): e.g., checking documents on the course website when the professor mentions them, or during OCI having ready access to email for the last minute interviews that could get scheduled, or getting clarifications on what the professor just said via IM (yes, it's happened), etc.Personal judgment and discretion determine whether wireless access might negatively affect one's academic performance. It doesn't do so automatically.
Now I say all this as someone whose entire laptop has recently gone kaput and has been taking notes by hand all this semester. Clearly I can live without technology, Internet-connected or standalone. But I don't think that evidence of my survival necessitates the conclusion that others should be deliberately deprived of the option.
(And my lack of connectivity is just forcing my classmates to IM me by passing notes on scraps of paper. Clearly the Internet is more discrete, and saves more trees...)
but you should follow the link for the rest of the discussion.
However, it should also be noted that since Boalt = Berkeley, I have a lot to say about its diffusion of Internet technology...
My relative silence is due in no small part to the collusion of every piece of technology I use to inconvenience me as much as possible.
- My broken laptop was returned to me, "fixed," where "fixed" is defined as "not nearly as stable as it used to be before the hardware broke." Even with a new hard drive, which of course necessitated reinstalling all my software.
- The first piece of software I installed was Mozilla. The first piece of software I SHOULD have installed was my antivirus software. (Apparently just being connected to the school network for an hour yesterday managed to result in 6 viruses establishing residence on my computer, and a nastygram from BU IT threatening to keep me off the network unless I cleaned up my machine.)
- I did manage to sync my palm onto the laptop, but somehow all the times of all the events ended up 3 hours later than they were supposed to be. That was lots of fun to fix.
- The mouse is flaky, I can't shutdown the machine reliably, and the networking is unstable. Of course, I can't easily troubleshoot the networking because my router has apparently joined my laptop in its uprising against me and decided that now would be a good time to start failing too.
- Meanwhile, all my email has been backing up while I try to get everything reorganized. This has resulted in still more nastygrams from BU IT threatening to bounce my email unless I cleaned that up too. The complication: I DID clean up my email. Many, many times but for some reason it kept thinking I was still over quota. I somehow managed to magically fix this yesterday, but not without further disorganizing myself by dragging and dropping all my email into local folders on a computer, which, unbeknownst to me, was infected with a virus...
- I am now typing this post on a machine in the journal office, but not the machine in the journal office where my 1L memo has taken up permanent residence on the desktop. It's been deleted numerous times, but it keeps coming back. I'm baffled. Cuneaform has less permanence than this file does.
- And nearly daily MoveableType finds more and more show-stopping bugs that require me to upgrade the blogging software ASAP.
So here I was, all excited that I could take a break from writing my note to catch up on everything else in my life... Ha.
I'm seriously considering becoming a luddite again.
At first things seemed to improve: the laptop was finally fixed; a new router and printer and scanner were acquired; all seemed well.
But then with spring I decided it was time to turn my attentions to my car. Especially what with me needing to drive it about 6000 miles starting in the next few weeks.
First I decided to finally get the chip in my windshield fixed. I'd actually called my insurance company about it in August. But then I got busy with school, and then there was three feet of snow on it, so I never got around to getting it repaired. Until now.
About a week ago I called the first people on the list of people the insurance company recommended, and they said they could come out on Wednesday. That was several days off, which seemed like a while to wait, but I was free then, so ok. But then on Wednesday it was raining, and they can't replace the windshield when it's raining because the glue won't dry. ("It would be like holding the windshield in using scotch tape," a technician told me.) So they couldn't come that day, and the next available appointment was on Monday.
Alarmed that this was now threatening to drag on even longer than I'd already forced it to drag on, and concerned that the company wasn't trying very hard, I left it (I thought) that they would come by again Monday, but in the meantime, I hedged my bets and called another company that said it could come today. BUT THEN! The first company actually turned up on yesterday! Huzzah! Such customer service! But alas, he only had a windshield with tinting, and I didn't want that. So he promised to come back next Tuesday with a clear one.
Of course, I still had the appointment for today with the other company. Who came. Also with a window with tinting. So he too left, and promised to call to reschedule next week.
I feel kind of bad about two-timing the glass repairers, but at this point, the first company to show up with the right windshield is going to get the business.
To be sure, I could have avoided the delay entirely if on Wednesday I'd just driven the car into the shop. However, that would have required ALL the wheels of my car to spin. Sadly, only 75% of them do. Thus rendering the car pretty much useless. They may have built the ancient pyramids in Egypt without the help of the wheel, but without four functioning ones my car isn't going anywhere.
So add "making car go" to the list of things that need attending to.
Meanwhile, my VCR is making frightening noises and threatening to eat my Huey Lewis and the News videotapes, which is extremely unsporting of it.
I suspect it's in cahoots with the car.
In the Great Saga of getting Cathy's windshield fixed, the glass guy came back out today. He didn't have room to open both doors, so we needed to move my mom's car parked next to me. Then I could wiggle over, dragging the frozen wheel (the RIGHT rear wheel, not the left rear wheel as my mom had earlier told me - "It was the left wheel as you're looking at the car from the front...") and give him the room he needed.
Except her car wouldn't start because the battery is dead.
Edit: UPDATE!! Cars may suck, but AAA rocks. When the guy came out to jump my mom's car, he whipped out a socket wrench and a mallet and after some whacking freed my wheel. Meaning my car goes now! Forward AND backward! Yay!
Edit 5/5/05: I am now the proud owner of a snazzy new windshield.
Today I took this survey: http://blogsurvey.media.mit.edu, "a general social survey of weblog authors being conducted at the MIT Media Laboratory." Other people should consider taking it too.
I'm a big fan of Internet sociology, having done some of my own myself. I emailed the survey's author afterwards and asked to see the results when they're ready. I said that I myself had been torn between doing a grad degree in sociology or going to law school. Obviously, I chose the latter. But my interests have remained the same. Instead of measuring how people used the Internet I decided to do advocacy to protect people's abilities to use it as they see fit. But to do that effectively the law needs to be better informed by the sociology, and more of these kinds of projects should be referenced in legal literature.
In emailing back and forth I also shared my undergrad thesis from 1996, and had cause to reflect on what it was like to prepare it. It was quite the technical ordeal - I was running SPSS to compile the data on my tiny little underpowered 386, and had to go out and buy an extra FOUR megs of RAM in order to have the minimum *EIGHT* to run the program...
It's 30 minutes since the Supreme Court handed down the Grokster decision. And it's still not up on Lexis.
I wonder what the turnaround time normally is?
Edit: It's now four hours after the decision, and sometime between my initial posting and now Lexis posted a temporary version of it, subject to edits and repagination. I'm sort of curious as to when it got posted, but I didn't feel like obsessively reloading Lexis during the past few hours to find out.
When I was still living in Boston, I started having problems with my network bandwidth being sucked up. Although I couldn't be sure, I decided it was probably because I left my WiFi network open.
I got really annoyed at the people swallowing enough of my bandwidth to make my network unusable, and sometimes unplugged my router for long periods just to dump them off. Normally it doesn't bother me in the least that people can hop on – I'll never use all that bandwidth myself – but it bothered me when people chewed it all up and left me with nothing. It sort of seemed like a breach in etiquette.
But it didn't seem like a crime. And really, I think what was actually annoying me was that I couldn't control my network as finely as I wanted - to be able to leave my network open without suffering for the decision. However, that was my problem, one that I needed to find a technical – not legal – solution for.
So I regard with concern the actions taken in Florida, of arresting someone who used someone else's WiFi. This is not behavior that requires criminalization. For those who do not want their network bandwidth borrowed, there are ways to secure it. The onus should be on the network operators to keep unauthorized people off; it shouldn't be up to the police. And it shouldn't be a crime to do what many people are perfectly happy to have done – or do themselves: use open WiFi bandwidth.
What most concerns me about the Florida article, however, is the language associating WiFi usage with "tapping." I feel quite strongly that wiretapping – of phone or computer communications – is an extremely bad thing, and the sanctity of those communications deserves the utmost privacy protections the law (civil and criminal) can provide.
But I don't believe that prohibitive paradigm is appropriate here. Your basic, run-of-the-mill WiFi usage does not involve the interception of any communications. It merely puts its own communications into the available communications stream. Now if people watched that stream and filtered out the messages contained within them, that would be an interception that the wiretap laws should prohibit. But without that interception of communications, referring to WiFi usage as a tap invokes an inapplicable legal framework that stands to penalize those who don't deserve it.
I don't tend to have good experiences purchasing cell phones. Hamburg has been no exception...
The apartment where we live has two phone lines. Great. But the one in my room has no voicemail. So it wasn't quite the set-up that I would need. Thinking that in Europe prepaid cell phones would be cheap, we went shopping. Whereupon we found out that they were not.
The best plan we could find was at the O2 store. If you prepaid 30 euros, for the next 4 weeks your calls would cost only 19 cents – whether or not it was to a landline or a cell phone on another carrier. But the phone selection was pretty grim. And expensive. So we decided it wasn't worth it, and I decided instead to get an answering machine for my room.
But then my roommate reported that because our phone is ISDN and not analog (huh?), a new phone with an answering machine, which I thought might be about $20, would be more like $80. Not a good plan. So what to do?
All that was last week. Then Saturday at 9pm I saw my roommate and she had a cell phone. "I thought you weren't getting one?" I queried. "Didn't I tell you?" she responded. "Saturn [an electronics superstore] has O2 phones for 40 euros." She showed me her phone. It was worth 40 euros to me. "But that special rate plan expired tonight at 8pm." Damn! Damn damn! I was too late!
Or was I? On Monday I got up early to go to school to get my passport. They had collected passports the week before to send out for our residency permits. Word had it though that they weren't going out until Monday, so maybe I could get mine real quick, run out to the store, and then bring it right back. Why? Because word also had it that you needed to show a passport to buy a cell phone. The gossip chain was a little uncertain about how strict this requirement was, but just in case, I thought I'd go get my passport before going to Saturn. Except I was too late, and when I got there to school the passports had already gone out.
I rushed to Saturn anyway, though, to see if I could still get the deal. I found a clerk who spoke English. "Where are your 40 euro phones?" "We don't have any 40 euro phones." "But my friend just bought one here!" "No, we don't have any 40 euro phones."
Of course, it turned out he was wrong, and he just hadn't noticed the 100 or so of the 40 euro phones piled behind him... But he assured me that the promotion continued. "Great, I'll take one then."
But without my passport, he wouldn't give me one. It was never fully explained why the passport was required and how hard and fast this rule was, but he did seem to mumble that only German residents could buy the phone. Of course, my passport wouldn't say I was a German resident. Still, maybe I could give them the next best thing and so the next day when I went back I brought with me a copy of my passport, a copy of my lease (residency in Germany!), and a letter from the school saying I was a student there. But they still wouldn't sell me the phone.
Fortunately my German friend had come with me, and so we used his passport to buy the phone. Which is dumb, because now my phone is registered to him. But if that's how Germany wants to do it... The sad thing is, I would suspect this nonsense is probably due to 9/11 and the terrorist cells hanging out in Harburg, coordinating their plots with disposable cell phones. I suppose this registration requirement is designed to keep that from happening again. But like many other anti-terrorist measures, it has its greatest effect on innocent behaviors.
So I bought the phone, after some discussion about which rate plan to get. I thought about a different one, but in the end I opted for the 19 cents/minute one. But even with the phone in hand there was nothing I could do to set it up because the battery was dead. So they sent me away to charge it overnight, and I could come back the next day to set it up.
The next day I did. The clerk turned on the phone, helped me put the SIM chip in, and set the interface for English. This I needed him to do, because the manual was all in German. But that was all he would do. For voicemail set-up he sent me to one of the O2 shops. So across downtown I went, back to the O2 shop. (This was now the second time I'd been there, and the third I'd been to Saturn for this so far.) The clerk there helped me set up my voicemail, which unfortunately is also all in German, and load in my prepaid cards. There was some concern that Saturn had sold me three 10 euro cards and not one 30 euro card, but it turned out to be fine. What was not fine is that I realized I was not on the 19 cent plan - I was on a different plan. And it was going to cost 5 euros to change it, despite the Saturn guy having said that the first call to change it would be free.
So once again I had to enlist the help of my German friend to go back to Saturn to have them fix this. Fortunately my friend, speaking German, was easily able to get them to agree to do it. Unfortunately, it couldn't be done that day. It would happen overnight, the clerk said, and I would get an SMS message in the morning when it was fixed. More delay... but ok. Only the next day my friend wouldn't be there. What if I didn't get the SMS? Still, they were willing to fix the problem so my friend said "Great! But please put that in writing." Only the clerk refused, saying that his telling us this should be enough. However my friend – a lawyer in training – dug his heels in and insisted. And a short time later the clerk acquiesced and hand-wrote a letter for me. I think his change of heart was in part because of my friend's fine lawyering skills. And in part because at that point the clerk would probably have done whatever he needed to make sure he never saw me again...
This morning the SMS did arrive, and I now am properly cell phone endowed. I've since used it to make and receive a call or two, but I've mostly been playing with SMS. We don't use SMS much in the US, but because in Europe it costs money to check your own voicemail, people use SMS instead.
In retrospect, however, I'm not entirely thrilled with the phone. My first cell phone ever was a kludgy Nokia, and I was excited to upgrade to my current US-based Audiovox. Unfortunately, though it improves on a few of the Nokia features, it's also worse on others. So despite it being a newer model with a few more features, I feel like I traded down. But now I got to get a snazzy, evolved European phone, a Siemens model. And it's even worse! Even with the menu in English I can't understand what's going on. This is so aggravating – cell phone technology has made great strides in advancement, yet all the cell phones I get keep getting more stupid.
Oh well. All I really ask from my portable telephony is that it be easily portable, and this phone does fit into my pocket. And makes and receives calls. And SMS. So it will work for me for the next few months. I hope.
Cedric Manara has a few posts (one in English, and one in French) about domain names that don't quite hold up so well either when pronounced or in other languages.
In the latter he refers to me, because I recounted to him the sad tale of a friend of mine who chose for his professional domain name a combination of his last name and the name of his craft. Which works perfectly well in English, but... um... potentially undermines the positive impression he would like to make in another prominent language...
(Domain name withheld because I really like my friend and I don't want to expose him to teasing. However, if he wants the publicity, I'd be happy to link to him. He really is very good at his profession, and a nice guy to boot...)
Of course, it's not just my friend who has this kind of problem. All sorts of enterprises, large and small, that wish to do business across borders need to be sensitive to these linguistic and cultural nuances. The Internet exacerbates the situation because it makes it so easy to have an international presence, but these problems have arisen before. I remember hearing once the potentially apocryphal tale about how Chevrolet couldn't figure out why sales for the Chevy Nova were so poor in Mexico - until someone pointed out that few people would want a car that was called "It Doesn't Go."
The Wall Street Journal has an article, written from an American perspective, lamenting the difficulty American enterprises have when dealing with China and the apparent cultural reluctance of the Chinese to use voicemail (either to leave it or to return it). This can drive Americans batty, as we use voicemail all the time and rely on it to get business done.
I showed the article to a Chinese classmate here and she confirmed the Chinese predisposition not to use it. But it didn't seem like an oversight to her - there was simply no perceived need. Everyone sends text messages, she said. She herself sends about 15-20* of them a day, and thinks that she might be below average in that tally.
Rather, she found the American predilection for it to be surprising, thus suggesting that Chinese people may be driven just as batty as Americans by their western counterparts not using text messaging more.
* Edited downwards 12/2 based on her clarification. But that's still a lot more than Americans send messages...
From Cedric Manara, the man who brought us the French equivalent of "blawg," comes information that the French have decided to call "pop-ups" "fenêtres intruses." ("Intrusive windows")
Edit 1/23: I just checked. There seems to be no special German term for them. They use "pop-ups" to describe them too.
It appears I am going to need to acquire some new gadgets in the next several months.
An MP3 player. I admit it, I am an embarrassingly late adopter to the whole MP3 thing. I've not really had the need to rip any music before now though. I either have my laptop with me, on which I could play my CDs, or I can play them on the CD player I got for my car. That pretty much has satisfied my music-playing needs up till now. There are a couple of downsides to this arrangement, however: one, I have to shlep around all my CDs around with me, with occasionally unfortunate results, and two, that the laptop isn't a really portable electronic device. I can listen to music while I'm sitting down, but not while I'm walking around.
And that's what I really want to do. Not listen to music while walking, but listen to it while running. As I've mentioned before, I hate running. But I discovered last summer that I was able to get through it when I replayed a Huey Lewis and the News concert from the night before in my head. I'm beginning to drool over future triathlon opportunities and think I need to get off my butt and start training. I suspect that's much more likely to happen if I have an MP3 player to keep me company.
But what to get? I did a little research and it appears I'll need to get a flash MP3 player. Downside: they're smaller in storage volume and proportionately more expensive. Upside: they are also smaller in terms of dimension, and they're solid state so they can endure jostling.
Yet beyond that, I'm not sure how to make a good decision. I figured I should get one with at least a gig of memory so that I can put on most(?) of my collection. But then what? I'm intrigued by the ones that allow for easy ripping of input, since I've got a ton of records and tapes I've never gotten around to ripping, but that might be a gratuitous feature. And other than that, what should I look for? What brands? What models? So far, these look intriguing: Creative Lab's Zen Nano Plus, or the iRiver iFP-799. What mostly attracts me about the latter is the really cool waterproof case you can get for it. Not only could I run with my MP3 player, but I could also SWIM!
Are there other brands/models I should be looking at?
A PDA. I have a Palm Vx from 1999 that I'm quite satisfied with, except for the fact that it's no longer working reliably. It's not a huge problem right now because I have my laptop with me all the time, so I just use the computer version of the software to keep organized. But it would be nice to not have to shlep my laptop everywhere, and I think this aspiration might require getting a new PDA.
Again, what to get? I'm pretty happy with Palm and not keen to give Microsoft more business, but I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the feature bundles on Palms. Then again, I'm not sure which features I want. To replace the functionality of my Vx wouldn't require very much money and I could get a nice, tiny device. But maybe it would be good to add some features, especially if it meant that I could stop shlepping my laptop everywhere. Lots of people at Bucerius, for instance, used to take all their notes with keyboard attachments connected to their PDAs. Since my laptop is getting old and I might not want to replace it until I get an income again, it might be worth offloading some of its functionality to another, cheaper device I could carry around instead of it.
If I do that, though, then I need to confront the feature-set question. Since I have a T-Mobile wireless subscription it might be nice to have one that could handle wireless internet connectivity, especially if I could run Skype on it. Then I could save my cell minutes. However, the Palm devices don't (last time I checked) seem to be able to accept a microphone input. Perhaps when I'm ready to buy that will have changed, but it currently changes the what-to-purchase equation.
The other possibility is to get some sort of PDA/cell phone combination. There is some appeal in getting a cellphone compatible with world-wide networks that I could just swap out sim cards for. Right now I have an American cell phone and a German cell phone, and I think everything is sim-locked so that I can't swap sim cards in and out. It might be nice to have only one device that not only works everywhere but that I can put a German card inside when I'm in Germany, a French card in when I'm in France, etc. Under the current set-up if I go to France I'll have to either get a new phone that can handle a French carrier, or pay an arm and a leg to O2 for out-of-Germany roaming.
Anyway, the cell phone telephony is also a gadgetery problem to solve, and perhaps when I solve the PDA one.
A Digital Camera. I've been a hold-out mostly because I like the tangibility of picture prints. But I'm getting tired of film, and now that it's not too hard to get hard copies of pictures, maybe it's time to make the switch. Given the way I take pictures, I think it would be good for me to be able to be less uptight about worrying about which ones to snap, since it would be costless to keep snapping and so I could end up with some better ones.
The problem with my gadget wishlist is that it's an expensive list to satisfy. I suppose the digital camera is lowest on the list because it's the least-needed. I'm not that avid a photographer, and my current camera is still ok. I think the PDA will need to be acquired in the somewhat near future, but I can probably wait a few months until I'm done with school before dealing with it. The MP3 player, though, I think I'll want to add to my life sooner though. I need to start running…
Web design has been in the news a lot lately. Target has been sued because its website is inaccessible to blind people, and now there's news that grants.gov, the government website designed to streamline federal grant applications, doesn't work with Macs. Nor does the FEMA site where Katrina victims can apply for aid.
There's really no excuse for any of these problems. Not in this day and age, given the ubiquity of free, standards-compliant web browsers.
In the "old days" of web design, designers always had to make trade-offs between desired functionality and incompatibility with various browsers. Both Microsoft and Netscape had taken the original HTML specification and "embraced and extended" it far beyond what the standards authority, the W3C, could sanction. But eventually the W3C caught up, and the browser wars mostly settled down. Yes, Microsoft still likes doing certain things its way, but now that there are viable alternatives to its Internet Explorer browser (like Mozilla's Firefox, along with Opera and Safari for the Mac) becoming used by more and more of the public, programming in Microsoft's Internet Explorer-only code is becoming increasingly ill-advised and unnecessary.
In addition, starting a few years ago there has been an initiative to make websites accessible for people with disabilities. In fact, in 1998 Congress required all Federal agencies to make their sites accessible to people with disabilities. Now, even though Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act doesn't apply to private entities like Target, there's no good reason not to make the websites compliant with the law. The effort it takes to build a website that works in all browsers is for the most part the effort it takes to make them 508 compliant. (Which means it's strange that the grants.gov and FEMA sites won't work on certain platforms. It would make me wonder if these sites themselves are in compliance with the law.)
The bottom line - the bottom line for any web development endeavor - is that it does not make sense to build sites any other way and shut out a large portion of the audience. Now, occasionally it can make sense to decide in favor of some certain functionality that can only work for a limited audience. But those occasions are usually limited to situations where the desired audience is itself a limited one. That can't be said for government sites - every citizen needs to be able to interact with them - and it doesn't seem like it should be said about a major retailer like Target. It wants to be able to sell to the largest market possible. So why on earth would it limit itself to selling only able-bodied people? Especially since it's fairly trivial to make the site work for everyone. In fact, if the site is going to work effectively for anyone it should be constructed in a way that happens to work for everyone. The fact that it boxes out handicapped people suggests that it shuts out many able-bodied ones as well.
When HTML was originally developed it was intended to be a simple mark-up language that would simply permit information to be conveyed over the Internet. The browser could decide however it wanted how to display it - the content wouldn't care. But it turns out that publishers of content did care. They wanted more control over how a page displayed, and so they found ways to manipulate HTML code to force pages to display the way they wanted. This only worked to a point, however, as different browsers still did things their own ways. The point of standards, therefore, was to try to give some consistency, so that a web developer could predict that a page would display the way it was intended on any browser. Ultimately the standards developed so that this result could be best achieved if content was separated from display. Only the basic, textual information would be coded, and then stylesheets would be used to affect how the page would look.
The benefit of splitting page development in this way is that it allows browsers to render consistent content in whatever way is appropriate for it. This means that both Internet Explorer and Firefox on computers can render it, mobile phones can render it, and specialized browsers for the disabled can handle it because they can all have their own stylesheets appropriate for them. If the site is standards compliant, it's well on its way to being 508 compliant as well.
In any case, it is not obvious what Target hoped to gain by using a web technology that wasn't so compliant. The goal of its site is to sell things. To do that it needs to list its goods in a promotional context and provide a mechanism for their purchase. Yes, the page also needs to look nice to make the store look appealing, but there's no aesthetic requirement so severe that could possibly require using an esoteric technology that provides an aesthetic at the expense of its information. It just needs to look nice; it doesn't need to win an art award.
Therefore, at minimum Target's choice is a bad business decision. The question is whether it might also be illegal. It's not subject to the Section 508 requirements, but it is generally subject - at least in the physical world - to the ADA. I'm not an expert on that law, but I would guess it does not speak directly to website requirements. The question then would be whether such a requirement could be construed to apply to its website. Offhand I think there's a plausible argument for it: the policy values behind requiring a store to be wheelchair accessible, so that the disabled aren't shut out from society, are just as applicable in the web context. An accessible website itself can help create the same inclusive effect as physical in-store accommodations -- perhaps even more so because it affords another, potentially more convenient avenue for the disabled to participate in the retail world. Plus it's likely easier to make an accessible site than make an accessible store. In fact, you almost have to go out of your way to build an inaccessible website, in defiance of any sort of best practices. A well-designed website is one that enables its intended audience to interact with it in the intended way. If that result doesn't ensue, the web developer has done something wrong no matter what the law has to say.
I just got another spam attempting to get me to divulge financial data to someone other than my financial institution. My email client did not render the prettily-designed HTML of their missive, however. Rather it just displayed the source code that the phisher used to construct it. What's interesting is that it includes lines like this:
<link href="https://chaseonline.chase.com/echaseweb/common/css/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
and
<img border="0" src="https://chaseonline.chase.com/content/ecpweb/sso/image/chaseNew.gif">
No wonder people are fooled - the phishers are making it look like an email from the financial institution because they are using the exact same building blocks to make their email that the institution uses in their own.
Which got me wondering - cannot banks like these change the construction of their websites so that they are not comprised of publicly-available materials (like images and stylesheets)? I'm not exactly sure how this could be done, but then I wasn't really a backend programmer. Nevertheless, I do think this is likely a solveable problem, perhaps by having these materials reside in a publicly-inaccessible database and served dynamically from a session-specific URL. That way there would not be a static library of these building blocks for phishers to help themselves to when constructing their deceptive emails.
I mean, even *I* should not be able to do this:
But at least I'm not out to steal your money…
I was thinking about how often people, when hyperlinking something, simply attach the hyperlink to the word "here." (As opposed to a more descriptive phrase.)
That got me thinking about how Google works. Google generates its results in part through the words used in reference to a subsequent page. So, for instance, if lots of pages include links like, "See this page for more information about this term," Google will rank that page more highly when people do a search for "this term."
So then I started wondering which page Google found most authoritative for the specific term "here," since so many people make links say things like "for more, click here." To find out, I did a search.
The search yielded a lot of results. "About 10,700,000,000" of them, in fact, but what I thought was interesting were which pages appeared at the top of the results:
A link to the Adobe reader, a link to real.com, a link to the Flash player, a link to mapquest, a link to the Quicktime player, a link to browser.netscape.com, a link to download ie and then a link to the Microsoft download center.
The next page's links pointed to:
WinZip, Bittorrent, The American Red Cross, XE.com (the "universal currency converter"), WinAmp, AIM, Java.com, Disney, and Netscape.com.
I guess that's what most people think is there when they point to "here."
The perennial debate has reared its ugly head again with reports of a professor having banned them from her class. I'm with the commenters here who have criticized the policy. It's paternalistic, over-reaching, and counter-productive. The professor is basing her ban on a series of assumptions about how she believes students learn, with little data to support her view and a blind eye turned to the data that doesn't.
One argument she made is that laptop typing inhibits eye-contact. More so than hand-writing? If I don't look at what I'm scrawling on the page, I end up scrawling it all over the page. Whereas with a laptop, I can touch type.
She also asserted that there was a pedagogical harm in students transcribing the lecture. Man, I would LOVE it if I could really transcribe a lecture. My best notes, the ones that are the most helpful when I study, are the ones that most thoroughly recreate the lecture. The more word-for-word they are, the more useful they are as a learning tool.
She also talked about how the diversions afforded by a laptop are somehow dishonest. "Dishonest?" Perhaps there's a tenable argument for "rude," but not dishonest. And even so, more rude than doodling or passing notes? Students have found ways to not pay attention long before the advent of laptops.
But to the extent that students do take care of other things while they are in lectures, so what? Law school is incredibly demanding, and there's just not enough hours in the day to take care of all the things that need taking care of. Multitasking is a necessary survival tool. If this is a problem because our attention may be split, the remedy is to address the systemic demands on us, not further incapacitate our ability to take care of everything we need to.
Now, I did spend a semester taking notes by hand. It is possible that I may have even done a smidgen better, since, yes, it did force me to pay a little more attention so that I could get everything down. (It's a lot easier to catch up on something I missed when typing, I think.) But I think a lot of that was just due to the novelty factor of taking notes differently than I had been. And it was not without negative consequences, like my inability to share my notes with classmates. Not only did my notes have to be manually xeroxed, but my handwriting also had to be translated. Thus as a study tool, handwritten notes were vastly less helpful than typed ones.
Also, there have been several occasions where I have indeed used the Internet connection to research relevant material pertaining to the class discussion. Even in small seminar classes this has happened several times. But a pre-emptive "I know better than you" policy like this would obviously preclude that benefit.
The professor also fails to recognize that people use technology differently. For people who grew up during the days of handwriting, typing may seem like something optional, something apart from the study experience. But for people who have grown up with laptops, they seamlessly integrate with their lives. In fact, depriving them of the tool they've come to depend on is much like what it would have been to force a notetaker to use pen-and-ink for their notes rather than a ballpoint, just because for older people that's how it's always been done. For people who have pre-existing work patterns adopting new technology may in some way seem like a burdensome switch. But for those younger people who have never known it any other way, the burden is to be forced to live without it.
There is certainly more to be said on the subject, but here are a few thoughts. On Prawfsblawg Gaia Bernstein wrote:
[T]echnologists [...] often put their faith in the power of legal solutions, while legal academics frequently demonstrate a strong preference for technological answers.
She went on to give a theory for why the legal side reacted as such, but I commented in demurral about her initial observation:
In my experience I've found the opposite to be true, at least as far as technologists are concerned. While I think several years ago technologists may have more been of the belief that, the law being just, it would get out of the way, so to speak, and let technology develop. But I think many technologists are becoming increasingly scared of the law, having seen it too often be wielded as a club against technological development (see, e.g. the DMCA), and now doubt that it will be able to provide good solutions.Or, if they do still believe in the law's ability to provide solutions, what they actually believe is simply that the good law will win out over the bad. Which is a different thing than believing that the law will somehow provide overall solutions that technology can't.
(And with regard to the lawyers, I run into many legal thinkers with minimal faith in the ability of technology to solve problems. On the contrary, there are many with an inherent distrust of technology, who feel they must use the law as a means to control it.)
A call to Verizon today revealed that my crappy little tri-mode Audiovox phone (the 8600, which I hate), will work in China. It will also work in some other countries as well. It's not dirt cheap, but it's not hideously expensive either. 49 cents/minute, or 1.18 if there's roaming. And no cost for other people to reach me, I think.
Of course, maybe I'm wrong on some of these details, because it sounds too good to be true. And it doesn't really work in Europe. But otherwise it sounds really cool.
In re: the discussion of blogging and career, Cedric Manara sent me an article that mentioned how an otherwise qualified law student lost a judicial clerkship because of something on the Internet a background search turned up. There's nothing from the article that said it was a blog; rather the article suggests it might have been some other injudicious piece of writing by him that just happened to show up in Internet archives.
It's this kind of thing that's probably a greater danger to reputation than a blog (at least a blog like this one). Here I'm fully aware of how what I say now will be captured "on the Internet" and consequently can maintain finer control over what that never-forgetting brain can see. Where people are getting bitten is in all the innocuous things they posted in 1994 without realizing how permanent they were going to be in this publicly available memory.
For me, the first page of results in Google for my name pulls up my blog at the top (as it should be...), my old homepage second, posts that I did for De Novo (interesting), a post I made in 1998 to a mailing list (this is exactly the kind of thing that can come back to haunt you, since when you write to lists like these you don't expect the posts to last forever - or at least back then you didn't - but fortunately the worst thing it reflects for me is slightly poor grammar), and a page referencing me about a project hosted on the website of the project leader.
What's of greater potential concern, however, is the result that's tucked in between all that: a website result for a completely different Cathy Gellis. Now, I'm sure this kind of thing happens all the time for the John Smith's of the world. But Cathy Gellis is a unique enough name that you wouldn't expect there to be more than one. Plus, when you look further into it, you won't readily notice clues that we're more than one person: she lived in California, she's around my age, she's on record as having attended Star Wars premiers (as a geek in Silicon Valley I did go opening night once...), she hangs around colleges, and she likes football. Plus she has the same middle initial.
As it happens, I know there has been at least one person who, when googling, thought she was me. Which raises an interesting problem: for all the talk about not ruining your own reputation on the Internet, what happens if someone else ruins it for you? Now, this hasn't happened to me. None of her results indicate anything remotely unsavory on her part. (On the contrary, she sounds exactly like me...). And given that most of the results for "Cathy Gellis" on the web do actually refer to me, if anyone is likely to be affecting anyone else, it's probably me affecting her.
Still, I do find myself hoping that she gets married and changes her name so that I can have mine all to myself...
If you use Thunderbird, which is a generally nice (and well-documented) mail client, be sure to make back-ups, especially of your prefs.js file. There may come a day when you'll appreciate it...
Not thrilled that I had the occasion to find this out...
If you've been emailing people from an AOL account, it very likely hasn't reached anyone whose email service employs SpamCop:
(From BU IT)
It appears that, beginning on Tuesday evening, a number of AOL's mail servers managed to get themselves on to one of the black lists we (and many others) consult to determine whether a mail server connecting to us is widely known for sending spam. It is ultimately AOL's responsibility to block use of their servers by spammers and to get themselves off this black list. However, to minimize the inconvenience to our community, at approximately 2:30 on Tuesday afternoon we took steps which should work around AOL's current situation and allow AOL senders to send mail to Boston University.We regret the inconvenience you and other AOL users have experienced
because of this situation.
There are larger issues raised here than just this particular email blockage. For one, it means Internet service providers are making decisions on whether or not to deliver certain pieces of mail. Imagine if the post office did that. Moreover, they're making these decisions wrong. Yes, it's true users don't want spam. But they do want the mail they want to get, and they aren't getting it because ISPs are choosing on their own whether or not to let it arrive.
Worse, they are making these decisions by delegating their judgment to an unaccountable third party, those who keep the blacklists. "It is ultimately AOL's responsibility ... to get themselves off this black list." AOL as a gigantic ISP may have the clout and capability to be able to pull this off. But a smaller ISP? Or an individual mail sender? Or even an individual who runs his own mail server? According to BU (and I suspect other ISPs like it) these people have an affirmative duty to make sure they don't get on blacklists - meaning that they at all time must monitor whether whether they are added to them, and then on their own seek redress if they are.
If that's even possible, because chances are the blacklist exists to pressure people to run their email servers in certain ways, ways they may have good reason not to want to run them like, or else these third parties - not even parties to the delivery of the mail themselves - will not let their mail arrive. An example of this: no open relays. Now, on the surface such a rule might seem beneficial because spammers like to use open relays to send their mail (in other words, they don't need to have email accounts with a service that will allow them to send unsolicited commercial email, which admittedly is getting hard to find. However, while blocking open relays might seem to solve that problem, it prevents open relays from solving other problems - particularly for people who must rely on them to send their email. If open relays are prohibited, some people will not be able to email at all.
Meanwhile there is an irony to what happened last week. Although perhaps it might not be an irony as much as it may be a direct connection. In recent weeks, several ISPs, including AOL, have tried to propose a tiered email system. In other words, pay us money if you want to make sure your mail will be delivered. Many people are aghast at this proposal, as it seriously diminishes the populist accessibility of the Internet as a communications medium. To say nothing of interfering with the delivery of legitimate and wanted email. As a result, there are campaigns afoot to protest this plan - campaigns conducted in large part by email. But then came word that AOL was refusing to deliver those emails. It looked like a realization of every suspected fear connected this plan: censorship of message by an intermediary party. Eventually AOL did correct this particular blockage problem, but it is possible that someone managed to get AOL added to the blacklist as some sort of retaliation. A little taste of their own medicine, perhaps, of seeing how frustrating it is to not have your email go through because of arbitrary intervention by deliverers.
Not that I advocate these tactics, of course, but I would hope that from this experience AOL might get the message nonetheless.
Edited so substantially 4/21 that I changed the date.
Two ideas here: one, that it's really interesting the timing of Skype's new promotion of free nationwide phone calls given the NSA tracking brouhaha. Skype, for people who don't use it, is an Internet-based (VoIP) phone client, which, from a piece of client software on your computer, will let you call the regular phone of (nearly) anyone in the world (as well as people with the piece of client software running on their computer). They used to charge about 2-3 cents per minute to make calls to these phones (it was free to call computer-to-computer) but now, though the end of the year, it will only cost to call abroad.
Talk about a good way to build up clientele. Not just because it's now a free way to make phone calls, but because it positions Skype as an alternative to the regular Bell Companies. You know, the ones that gave your call records to the NSA without a court order (except Qwest, which held out). So that if that behavior alarms you as much as it should, suddenly you have a choice about whom you can do your telephony business with. A pretty cheap choice right now. (The promotion isn't permanent, but I think the idea is to get you so used to using Skype that you won't be able to go back to a Bell once they do start charging again.)
Which brings me to my grumble about Palm. I think Palm has eroded its base by not coming out with the right devices with the right features soon enough. I'm very happy with my Palm Desktop software. To the extent that anything keeps me organized, it does, and I have no love for the Windows solution. So I would like to get a new PalmOS PDA that can keep me similarly organized. But I also want one that supports Wi-Fi, since I already have a Wi-Fi subscription, yet few do. And of those that do, they don't have a microphone, thus rendering Skype calls impossible. But then, that's ok, because Skype hasn't bothered to develop a client for PalmOS since no one with a Palm device would be able to use it anyway. (Skype has, however, developed one for the Pocket PC, so there are PDAs out there perfectly capable of making Skype calls.) Now, in theory I may have bet on the wrong horse going with Skype for my VoIP needs because it is a closed-source system - whereas with an open source system some geek might be sitting around somewhere porting a PalmOS version of a VoIP client. But then again, Mozilla's Firefox web browser, which is also open source, doesn't seem to have a PalmOS version - and if any open source software going to be available for Palm, you'd think it'd be that one. But I guess no one sees it as being worth the effort, as Palm devices are now riddled with inconvenient feature sets and/or proprietary services (I don't want to pay EvDO for Internet connectivity when I'm already paying T-Mobile for it. And I don't want to cancel T-Mobile because I still need it for my laptop, which EvDO is not useful for.)
So I'm in a position where I can either get a standalone device that will keep me organized but do nothing else (and force me to keep shlepping the laptop with me everywhere for Internet), or migrate to a PocketPC-based PDA that supports Wi-Fi and has a microphone, but not the organization software. It's really pretty sad, because Palm shouldn't have had to make me choose like that, but they did. And thus they will likely lose a customer.
(There is, however, one more possibility: the Treo. But I'm having trouble getting answers about it. The Treo 650 won't do Wi-Fi, ever, so that's out. But the 700w apparently has an expansion slot so for $100 (grumble…) I could get Wi-Fi capability (it seems). The technical question then would be whether the phone microphone would work as input for Skype calls. Assuming yes, however, then there's still the tradeoff between running Skype and running the Palm Desktop. Especially since it appears that there will soon be a Palm 700p, which supposedly is the same device but with the PalmOS instead of Windows PocketPC. So better organizing software, but no Skype. At this point, though, I'm thinking that it's getting time to say good-bye to the Palm organizing system. It just seems to come with too many tradeoffs.)
I just saw a job posting inviting interested candidates with questions to contact the administrator in charge "telephonically." ("Interested applicants can contact [person] telephonically with questions at...")
It's an interesting choice of words...
Poor Mike. He has terrible luck with laptops. When he started law school he had an old laptop. It needed replacing, so he bought an IBM. It immediately died, so he bought an HP instead. It has continually and repeatedly died throughout law school, leaving him to scrounge for altnerate technological sources like an ancient Apple (so ancient it is pre-Powerbook), his girlfriend's laptop, and probably some other laptop I'm forgetting about. As it is his HP is dead again, and it is currently out with them for repair (or ideally replacement under lemon laws), so he is once again laptopless.
But my sympathy may have suddenly lessened. See, last week during bar review I'd left the room for a moment, and when I came back I found that Mike had pulled up some sort of "Yankees suck" web page on my laptop. Ha ha, very funny. But the full effect of his mischief was not felt until today when my laptop fully and completely died. About an hour ago. There I was, innocently typing email, when the computer froze. And when I cycled the power, nothing happened. I suspect nothing ever will happen. The thing is utterly and completely dead.
So part of me thinks this was somehow Mike's fault. He touched the laptop, and the laptop died. Is that not exactly why the res ipsa loquitor doctrine was developed? Of course there's causation - the thing speaks for itself!
Well, maybe. The theory I'm working with actually is that the parts IBM replaced last year were bad. They had replaced the harddrive, the system boards, and a few other parts. But they didn't last. Of course, they "conveniently" managed to last until a %$&#ing week after the warranty expired. So tonight I was on the phone with IBM, telling them that they need to fix this anyway since the "new" parts they gave me apparently weren't good. They said they'll decide whether they'll deign to in a few days.
But either way, I'm back to being a luddite. EVERY TIME my life gets complicated, the technical underpinnings collapse. But I guess it could be worse. The computer is not necessary to study for the bar, first of all. Now, I was in the middle of typing up nice outlines to study from, and those seem lost(!), but I can get a few of them back and anyway there's always the Conviser book. I did lose my datebook information, but as was discussed earlier, I already lost a lot of my datebook information and it wasn't the end of the world. I will feel silly having to call those doctors for my appointment information again, but in the meantime I suppose I can reconstitute much of what was gone, although if you gave me your contact information any time within the last year, please send it to me again since my backups are really, really outdated. And that's what's really annoying. I started to get ready to back things up, but did I? No. Not yet. Dammit!
On the upside, I don't have to re-rip my music because I've got the iPod. And in a way it's sort of freeing to lose a lot of old clutter that I never had the bandwidth to go through and organize. I'm at a place of newness in my life, so maybe a fresh start will be nice. But there are a few things I'm really pissed about losing - mostly projects I was currently working on - and it will be disruptive to not have the technical infrastructure I've come to rely on there to be relied on. Plus either way I slice it, it's going to cost me money I don't have to replace it somehow.
Anyway, tomorrow I'll go see if there's any way to suck data off the harddrive, and then in a couple of days I'll figure out if IBM will do right by me or decide what to do next. (e.g., pay IBM to fix the old thing, replace it completely, or go laptopless for a while - maybe getting that Treo to get by with instead.)
I would, however, prefer to be studying...
BU offers lifetime email forwarding. So does Cal, and earlier this year I'd started updating my contact information with the Cal forwarding alias. Bad idea. Unbeknownst to me the vendor providing this service had put a spam filter on it. And it wasn't a very good one. I don't know the full extent of its wrongful blocking, but as I was planning my China trip it became clear that it was blocking every single email that originated in Asia. And it wasn't just filtering them into a box I could review; it just bounced them all back to the sender.
Thanks but no thanks. This isn't even slightly useful. And it completely negates any purpose of lifetime forwarding. The idea is that with the single address you won't lose touch with your correspondents. But if it blocks the email of those very correspondents you most certainly will lose touch with them.
So I complained, and they fixed it. But there was an interesting tangent to all this. At the bottom of the tech support person's email was a stock disclaimer:
This Email is covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. Sections 2510-2521 and is legally privileged. The information contained in this Email is intended only for .[sic] If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distributions or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us by telephone [at this number], and destroy the original message.
There are a couple of things to note about this disclaimer. One, the error ("is intended for .") Secondly, privileged??? The signature of the sender said they were an account director, not an attorney. And I don't remember, in all the work I did studying privileges, that there was an "account director" privilege.
But the thing that really caught my eye was the citation to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. It's basically a 1986 addition to the 1968 Wiretap Act, which makes intercepting electronic communications illegal. (In fact, the citation seems inaccurate. ECPA amended sections of code (18 U.S.C. §§ 2510-2521) that had been created by the Wiretap Act, but ECPA is not the code sections itself. A more accurate way to have written the citation would have been with the language "as codified by" the code sections.) But I've never seen an email disclaimer that cites it as the authority for protecting mis-directed emails. Probably because it has absolutely no authority over it. At best, to the extent that the Wiretap Act protects emails, it protects them from interception. Having them delivered to your inbox would not likely count as "interception," and without that the Wiretap Act has no bearing on what happened to the email. (The Wiretap Act also has nothing to do with the concept of privilege.)
However, blocking and not delivering my email, that could very well constitute interception, impermissibly so under the Wiretap Act. For all intents and purposes, the Wiretap Act bars any interceptions of electronic communications except under a few enumerated circumstances. One of these circumstances, however, is maintenance. According to the vendor, it appears the reason the filter was used was because an influx of viruses had led to the vendor ending up on blacklists. It raises an interesting question of whether the maintenance exception would cover filtering for this purpose. But even if it were to, it seems to be a situation of killing a fly with a bazooka, to impose a filter that over-blocks with unnuanced rules, with no chance for review. And the fact that it is happening untransparently, with no user knowledge, does not help its case.
In any case, it's a complex and open issue as to how the Wiretap Act (as amended by ECPA) operates with respect to Internet communications. Way too complex and open to have been inserted into a disclaimer with any authority.
Craigslist is a wonderful thing. It's how I found my place in Marin, and it's how I just sublet a parking space. Because it's (essentially) free you can find anyone selling anything on almost any terms.
But having just gone through the experience of posting my listing, a few suggestions for future Craigslist respondents come to mind:
In general, when you respond to the ad, do something to further the dialog.
* At least include a phone number. Without a phone number the exchange will be doomed to the delay inherent in playing email tag. A phone call can cut right through that. But don't make the original poster send the number first. He has the benefit of anonymity. Don't induce him to break it without at least demonstrating that it will be worth his while. With that in mind:
* Even better, include something of your personality so that if the poster got several responses they have some reason to choose yours to respond to first. "Hi, is it still available?" is not a very useful response, unless it was the only one the poster got. Mentioning that you are local and/or why you want the item offered makes a world of difference as to whether the poster will want to take the time to follow-up with you. It's a big pain to juggle multiple inquiries, so making the poster want to focus on trying to close the deal with you will be in your best interests. You want to give some clue that it will be logistically reasonable to do so, and by including something of yourself the poster may be more likely to trust dealing with you.
I suspect this advice is applicable for things other than Craigslist as well.
Accidentally not posted until 9/4.
Well, I finally broke down and bought a new gadget: the Treo 700p. I needed it, and it was the right decision given the prevailing options, but it's too imperfect to be too pleased with the purchase.
I needed a device that was 1) PalmOS compatible so I could keep my organizational rhythm, 2) Internet-capable and Word capable so I could start leaving my laptop home more often (yes, I have a nice, new shiny 2-year warranty for it, but the thing will probably be better off if it gets shlepped around less - as will my poor back…), and 3) a phone that actually answers phone calls (the last one was not so good at that).
It is PalmOS capable, although there are some things about this version that make it worse than the old Vx version I was using. For one, it doesn't appear you can search within Tasks, which I've found an obstacle. For another, it is button-driven, not stylus-driven, and I find the stylus much more efficient. I was able to put GrafittiAnywhere on it, which helped, but unfortunately it supports Grafitti 2, whereas my previously-wired brain supports Grafitti 1, so I keep getting slowed down by stupid typos. Also, the stylus can't seem to switch applications. For that you seem to need the Home button, inconveniently located on the right-hand side of the phone, the hand which is busy holding the stylus. In theory you are supposed to be able to do everything on this phone using this 5-way joystick thing, but the learning curve on it is pretty severe (I keep accidentally deleting stuff, for which there is no "undo.").
The phone *is* Internet capable, and I'm finding that really cool. For instance, I was at a football game last weekend and saw a billboard for a firm name. Thinking it might be a law firm I could apply to, I was immediately able to look it up. It wasn't - it was a construction supply firm, but it was nice to be able to sate my curiosity immediately. However, there's still no WiFi on the phone, which is kind of weird since the WindowsCE-based Treo 700w apparently takes the Palm WiFi card. A third-party vendor may eventually make an attachment, since one makes one for the PalmOS-based Treo 650, but there doesn't appear to be one now.
The absence of WiFi is particularly onerous given that the Verizon data plan seems disproportionately expensive. I ended up with a plan that gives me unlimited data and 1350 anytime minutes for $110. There is a cheaper data plan that gives 10MB in data transfers for $20 less, but I don't know how much I'll use, and it's easier to budget a fixed amount every month for the ability not to worry about it. Also, I needed vastly more minutes than I had since I no longer have a landline, and this package hit a sweetspot in Verizon's current pricing model. The problem is that it starts to become particularly cost-ineffective given the redundancy. I already pay for home broadband. Not a lot, because it's shared, but it's covered. In theory I could save the cost (if I were living alone) and simply tether my Treo to my laptop, but I have to pay $15 a month more to do that, which makes it really expensive. I suppose I could have saved money if I'd not felt like such a slave to Verizon, and I briefly considered going with Cingular, but then I remembered the horror that was having AT&T Wireless in Boston and realized I couldn't in good conscience make that jump.
I also find it expensively aggravating that I can't figure out how to put a library of files (pdfs, docs, etc.) on the device without getting an expansion card (more money! whee!), although I did figure out a work-around (email them to my gmail account, for which there is a great mobile-readable version). I need to generally do more research on applications available for the Treo that will support my computing habits. For instance, I'm currently trying out Bloglines as an RSS reader because it has a mobile version, and then I can be in sync wherever I am. Unfortunately, I don't really like the Treo's Blazer web browser (though it seems to be the best one out there), and I'm not sure I really like Bloglines either…
But, on the upside, the Treo does make phone calls! Answers them, too, I think… (Few have called, so it's hard to tell…) It's also nice that it integrates with my general contacts information, so I don't have to maintain two data sources.
So it's not perfect, and it's expensive, but it will support my current needs and better than anything else I was able to find. And it nicely complements my general geeky image.
Last week a panel presentation was held at Stanford Law School on the topic of click fraud. Presenting on it were Eric Goldman, law professor at Santa Clara University, Shuman Ghosmajumder, a non-lawyer representative from Google, Daralyn Durie, a lawyer for Keker & Van Nest who is counsel for Google in click-fraud class actions, and Laura Sullivan of the FTC.
Although the panel was originally billed as a panel on the legal issues inherent to click fraud, there seemed to be a consensus that click fraud is really a business issue, assuming that it is any issue at all. The point was raised that certain interests, such as plaintiff's lawyers or advertisers' associations, have an incentive in making click fraud look like a serious problem caused by inherently adversarial interests: advertisers, and the search engines that profit from their ads. In reality, the panel suggested, the problem is a) much smaller than many might claim (several people took issue with the metrics used to formulate the conclusions that click fraud was such a massive problem in the first place), and b) one where there is greatest profit potential for either party when the profit potential for both is best preserved. Arguably this kind of win-win is best brought about through effective pricing models and technical solutions designed to weed out the "click fraud," or the kinds of clicks that would never, ever lead to revenue for the advertiser.
Of course, for any of these tactics to be successful there needs to be some sort of definition for what "click fraud" is. Professor Goldman cited Wikipedia for a definition as a place to begin:
Click fraud occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating an improper charge per click.
This definition is still quite vague, so he followed it up with some potential scenarios:
Relatedly, Goldman raised other tangential problems associated with Internet advertising, including "impression fraud," where someone causes an ad to look like it's not generating revenue and thus gets kicked out of the service, and "syndication fraud," where ads appear on low-quality sites (such as when a domain name is parked and simply aggregates other content published around the Internet, along with search engine-provided ads). And then there is the general gaming that can happen where parties try to raise or lower the profile of ads within a service.
No one in attendance doubted that these scenarios were problems on some scale. But there was skepticism that the search engine's profit motive was such that they would be inclined to tolerate it simply because the extra clicks would turn into extra revenue for them. Indeed, Goldman speculated that if advertisers had to continually pay for inflated click counts, they would simply put pressure on the search engines to pay less per click.
(A complicating factor, however, is that advertisers ultimately care more about return on investment than the specific cost of the ad. The problem with diluting click counts with un-valuable ("fraudulent") clicks is that it becomes harder for the advertisers to track the return on each investment and assess its true effectiveness.)
The representative from Google also asserted that it was in Google's interests to keep advertisers happy, and outlined a 5-stage model the company used to weed out the un-valuable clicks so that advertisers ultimately would not have to pay for them.
Still, concern was raised (particularly by some people in the audience) that while there might not be an obvious legal wrong with the current behavior of the search engines, there was a lack of transparency that made it very easy for advertisers to naturally distrust the search engines. Not only might they question their bills, but they also might question how the ads were ranked and displayed. There also was the concern that any party that might be banned by Google for suspicion of wrongful behavior might not have any redress. The term "black box" was raised along these lines, with the concern that even as a company like Google promises to "not be evil," by allowing Google to be the sole arbitrator of these kinds of disputes where it is also an interested party inherently engenders distrust and causes the more vulnerable parties to look for legal solutions beyond the search engine's direct control. Whether or not such solutions are available, however, is subject to some debate. Ms. Durie, for instance, a defense counsel for Google, posited that few were available, outlining how breach of contract causes of action or class action claims for fraud in the inducement could not stand. There is the possibility that the FTC could play a role, since it "has broad authority to ensure practices are fair and not deceptive" and not injurious to the consumer. However it is not clear under what statutory authority it could actually prosecute, and thus far the FTC's prosecutions in the Internet advertising space have mostly resulted in settlements (not full adjudications) involving spyware and spam.
Is it just me, or is there something wrong with Gmail? It feels like I'm ending up with enormous lag times in incoming emails, although it's hard to completely substantiate and it may be complicated by the fact that I'm using a lot of aliases that forward to it. Some things seem to show up pretty quick - like emails sent to this domain - but my two school forwarding ones have taken anywhere from 10-20* minutes to 12+ hours! Which would be plenty annoying on its own, but also makes me wonder if there are some emails I'm not getting at all? (Actually, I know the answer is currently "yes," because any emails sent to my older berkeley email seem held up by the fact that the entire system seems to be down.)
Anyway, I'm nervous, because I'm trying to coordinate things with people and apply to jobs and being unreachable by email is not a good thing...
* Also, looking at the headers for emails sent to my berkeley forwarding email makes me think that this is happening again. Grrr...
Edit 11/28: I'm bumping this post because I'm still having a ton of problems with my email. I just gave out a bunch of business cards to people who need to email me before I can email them back, and I'm not sure email sent to that address is reaching me, though I have no idea why (despite lots of testing). This is quite upsetting...
Edit 11/30: While it appears that there may still be some problem with Gmail (and a downside to using it as a primary mail service is that there's no one to call when things seem amiss) I did some diagnostics involving the email forwards I send to it from addresses on another ISP and they came back fine. So at this point it may be reasonable to presume that my email is not generally broken, I'm just unpopular...
One of the other sessions I attended at CES was a 1-on-1 interview of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin by Gary Shapiro. As I'm writing this considerably after the event my memory of some of the details is a bit foggy, but there was one aspect in particular that came up that I noted and wanted to at least call attention to for further scrutiny.
It had to do with network neutrality, which I've blogged a bit about before. At first the conversation focused on the issues involved with rolling out broadband Internet to all Americans. Per Martin - and this sounded reasonable to me - the goal should be for 100% of Americans have access to an affordable broadband connection. The problem, however, is that it's very expensive to deploy any sort of telecommunications network, such as broadband, to all Americans. Telecommunications companies usually don't mind making the investment in urban areas because there are lots of customers per mile of infrastructure, essentially guaranteeing a decent rate of return, but the US is an enormous country, and the people who live spread out in it need access to these networks too. Historically telecom companies have been regulated in such a way as to insure that they did, in fact, wire the hinterlands by making it economically viable for them to do so, as well as mandatory. However over time the industry and technology have changed to such an extent that the old regulatory models may now interfere with further telecommunications investment, rather than facilitate it. If we're going to ensure that everyone gets an affordable broadband connection, something may have to change. Of course, the devil is in the details, because how this regulatory structure will directly affect whether and how (and how expensively) consumers get access to these technologies.
But at the presentation these details weren't specifically delved into, and Martin merely "blue-skyed" what the ideal should be. Every American having broadband? Sounds good, let's shoot for that. Still, the dialog always focused around the investment terrain telecom companies are entitled to, and Martin's administration feels that it should be one where the they are able to discriminate among the content that they deliver. Not that they should be able to block content, necessarily, but that they should be able to prioritize certain content's delivery.
Tremendous problems will result if this happens, especially while telecom companies are also content providers. Of course they would want to prioritize their content above that of a content competitor, yet there would be a significant anti-competitive impact if a telecom company could get away with that. But what Martin's comments really reflect is the vision where content providers would pay the telecommunications carriers to have their content prioritized. Naturally that, too, would have anti-competitive effects, but the most glaring problem with this vision is that it ignores the consumer-driven nature of the Internet that gives it its value in the first place.
Martin made the comment that since a company like Yahoo can charge its customers a premium for prioritizing certain email content, so should telecommunications companies be able to. My jaw dropped at hearing this, because it is such a flawed analogy. For one, Yahoo's prioritization is itself consumer-driven. The consumer is basically paying to outsource some of its labor. Rather than having to prioritize his own email, he pays Yahoo to do it for him automatically. It is not similarly consumer-driven to have the telecom provider step in and elect how the consumer's chosen content should be prioritized. The consumer has already made that decision by choosing what to download. The telecom company has no business unilaterally second-guessing that decision.
Furthermore, the analogy ignores the essential utility of the telecom connection, an importance which underlies why we would be having this discussion about providing broadband in the first place. Yahoo as an email service doesn't have this utility value. If someone didn't like Yahoo, or didn't want to pay for its prioritization, the consumer has many other choices for its email service, including handling it entirely on their own systems. As long that email data reaches them in some form, consumers can make their own choices for what to do with it. But the only way for that data to reach them is through their broadband connection. Without this connection, the consumer gets no data (or gets data very slowly with a non-broadband connection, and ultimately misses out on all the content that requires more speed to be effectively delivered). So an email service is a choice, but a broadband connection is essential. Indeed, even Martin understands this. Look at how important he acknowledges a broadband connection to be, that we would even endeavor to ensure that everyone have one. Why is it so important? Because it's an essential link connecting the consumer to every bit of information anyone has ever connected to this vast network called the Internet. But if a telecom company can step in and fray that link by discriminating against content, it undermines the whole philosophy of why we think that link was worth having in the first place.
Furthermore, given the expense and difficulty in providing that link, it's not likely that consumers will have much choice if their broadband provider interferes with the content they choose to consume. Few people, even if their local market could provide it, would have more than one broadband connection, and in many markets - as it was noted in the presentation - people will be lucky to have even one provider, meaning there will be no one to take their business to when that provider starts telling them what they may or may not access. True, we're not (necessarily) talking about outright censorship, but when Internet data can be scrutinized as to its content and then delivered either more or less expeditiously depending on what it is, consumers' content choices are meddled with in a way that debilitates their ability to enjoy the content that they choose, which is roughly the same effect that actual censorship would have.
Interestingly, there is some tension between the FCC and the FTC on the issue of network neutrality. In another panel I attended a representative of the FTC indicated that it would be ready, willing, and able to use its clout to ensure that there not be the anticompetitive effects that would come in the absence of network neutrality. Whether this is an effective regulatory framework is a discussion for another day, but there's reason to believe that the horse would be out of the barn by the time the FTC can get to the issue because what gives companies their potentially disproportionate market clout is the rules the FCC enforces. If the FCC lets broadband providers act as a market gatekeeper by permitting their discrimination, then there will be something for the FTC to later handle. The better approach, however, is to not put telcos in the regulatory position where they can take these discriminatory measures at all, and to recognize the unique need they fulfill simply by offering their connection. Few are arguing that they can't offer price discrimination based on the size of the link they offer - a consumer can pay more for a larger "pipe" - but offering different pipe sizes is not the same as deciding what can be put down that pipe, which is what Chairman Martin thinks they should be allowed to do.
The following entries are posted a bit late, but it took me a bit to write up the third part and I wanted to post them all together.
With the exception of Gary Shapiro, the head of the Consumer Electronics Association who opened the event with some important comments that I'll discuss subsequently, the keynote "speeches" were pretty disappointing. Mostly because they weren't really speeches. "Dog and pony show" was the term I later heard used to describe them. Company bigwigs got a stage and captive audience to show off the latest and greatest of their company's products. Granted when Robert Iger of Disney presented it was marginally interesting. At least if you were a fan of Lost. I'm not - never watch it - so having two of its stars show up and make banal comments wasn't so interesting to me. I did laugh (appropriately) at the little Lost spoof they showed, though. I gather that there's a big underlying mystery to the show, so at some point in this clip they pin one guy down who says, "You want to know what it is? OK, I'll tell you--" and then the screen filled with static. A caption immediately appeared that said something along the lines of, "CES is currently having AV difficulties." Then there was another caption, "Which, as you can imagine, is very embarrassing for us." ("CES" stands for "Consumer Electronics Show.") But otherwise the presentation made it seem like *but for* Monday Night Football, Lost, and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Disney is but an empty shell of a company.
And the earlier keynote we'd seen by Motorola was even more boring, as they trotted out every single new phone model and showed what its firmware could do. Given the phenomenal amount of broadband-capable phones that were in attendance at CES (I have never seen so many Treos assembled in one place in my life...), explaining the wonders of phone-based Internet surfing was probably a waste of everyone's attention.
On the other hand, as I commented to my friend, it was sort of interesting from a technological evolutionary standpoint. Hearing Motorola describe the increasingly complex function of their phones made me realize that what was really happening was the reinvention of the PC, but this time starting small. As each tiny device becomes more and more capable of replacing the functionality of a computer, conventional computers become more and more oversize, redundant artifacts. So the process of reinventing their capabilities, with different operating systems and different hardware, is actually quite fascinating.
Written 1/26, posted 2/5.
I recognize that some of my worst blog posts have been in the housecleaning category when I've gone twelve rounds with trying to upgrade my blogging software. There you've seen full-blown temper tantrums in response to the immense frustration such undertakings have necessarily caused. In the end I've always succeeded, but not without insignificant suffering.
The thing to realize in reading them, however, is that they don't reflect a lack of composure on my part nearly as much as they reflect a surfeit of defects on the software's part. In other words, yes, maybe it would have been better not to flail about so publicly, but such flailing was certainly not unwarranted. In fact, it may say numerous positive things about my composure that I only flailed about this much...
Nonetheless, criticism is always more weighty when given in a cool, calm, and collected manner, so I will endeavor to restrain myself before launching into the following complaint: MovableType is a complete pain in the ass to deal with.
I started using it nearly half a decade ago in large part because it was the only blogging software I'd ever heard of that could be installed on your own domain. Back then it was at version 2.something. Since then it has worked its way to version 4.01, via a major jump to version 3, lesser incremental jumps to version 3.3 or 3.4, and another major jump to version 4. I suppose the major jumps are a necessary evil; whenever you design a major software product you always want it to scale to new uses, but it's sometimes hard to anticipate them so far in the future. After a while it gets to the point where you can't continue to improve on what you've got - you have to start over from scratch.
As a MovableType user it's kind of distressing when this happens because it means you'll have to start over as well in order to upgrade. Hence my previous frustrations, as the upgrades often killed all my customizations and styling, and at times my posts themselves. Many people have chosen to avoid the frustrations by not upgrading at all - I know quite a few quality blogs that are still at version 2.x. But upgrading may be a necessary evil, as the newer versions close security holes while also promising new, exciting, and even useful capabilities the older versions were without.
It's this promise which is at the root of my discontent, because I so often find it so often undelivered. To be fair, eventually I came to like version 3. I could see how its general design offered some significant improvements over version 2, mostly by separating more effectively the content of the page from the design of the page. Of course, this separation meant that large parts of my site broke during the upgrade, but eventually things settled down and third-party developers started providing other tools and plugins to make using the MovableType product a relatively easy proposition.
Not content to rest on their laurels - which I suppose is reasonable - MovableType's developers decided to provide even more functionality. Which sounds good, but unfortunately doing so apparently required yet another complete reconceptualization of the product. This time, instead of better separating the look-and-feel elements of the blog from the content elements like they did in the last major upgrade, this time it was going to further split out the rendering logic from the page content as well.
Generally speaking, this approach seems to make sense. The power of the web in general is best realized when all its aspects (display, content, logic) are separately provided. A database holds the content, which middleware logic accesses and compiles into a page of output that a stylesheet then controls the display of. The less discrete each aspect is, the less flexible (and therefore the less powerful) each will be.
But after taking a look under the hood of the MT 4.01 version I recently installed I'm perturbed: I can't figure out what's going on. I see in general what it's trying to achieve, but exactly how it tries to go about it is a mystery. Which is extremely unfortunate now that I'm trying to work with it.
My needs themselves are modest. Initially all I'm looking to do is set up a site similar to the site I've already got. I have a second project lined up that might need to push the envelope a bit, but at first all I need is something simple: a nice website with blogging capability and a simple yet somewhat customized appearance. And I can't do it.
Well, let me rephrase: I'm sure I could do it, given enough time. But the fact that I need to employ skills I haven't honed since the peak of my previous technical career strikes me as something very wrong. If you need to have professional-caliber web development skills to be able to set up your own blog, all the promise of a world where people can truly self-publish through their own presses is lost. Yes, people can still blog, using the various services out there (e.g., Blogspot, TypePad, etc.). But there are definite advantages to owning your own autonomous outlet, and it really shouldn't be this hard to do so.
My criticism of MovableType is based in part on the sense that when revamping the product for version 4, the developers made some poor decisions when it came to designing its architecture. Various PR statements I keep seeing with respect to how wonderful the 4.1 version- still in beta - will be make me think the developers might themselves agree that it missed the mark. Of course, the touting of the upcoming beta just adds to my feeling of having been an idiot for upgrading to a product, MT 4.01, when it clearly was not ready for primetime. In fact, so unprepared was it that few there's a dearth of third-party applications that might make using it easier. All these developers seem to be waiting for the 4.1 version themselves before they waste their time on work that will likely break as soon as it comes out.
But these problems would be much less significant if, for once, there was actually good documentation. Over the years the MovableType developers have bragged about new MT versions having better and better documentation, but in my experience it's actually ended up worse and worse. And not just worse, but often objectively and unforgivably bad. For example, there's documentation on their website that apparently only applies to the 3.x version but bears no indication of such fact. The only way one would know is because all the 4.x documentation bears the notation that it's all still in draft form!!!
The other day I went to see what would be involved with trying to set up the new website I wanted to make. I'd gotten the hang of version 3.x and figured it would only take a few hours to set things up under version 4. But I was wrong. It won't take hours: it will take days, maybe even weeks if I wait for the 4.1 beta to get finally released, which will hopefully (although the way things have gone in the past, probably won't) address the things about it that are currently cumbersome and cryptic with version 4.01. The administration screens' user interface provides few clues about how it's all to work, and there's no supporting documentation to help guide me through figuring it out either. It's a terrible state of affairs, and if I'd paid money for this I'd be demanding a refund.
But that's the thing: I'm using MovableType for free. In fact, the company that develops it is further encouraging warm, fuzzy feelings with its recent announcement that MovableType will be open source. Huzzah! This is great news, as it's always good to see powerful software be offered to the public (both as users and further developers) on financially-accessible terms. In the long run this move will make MovableType a much better product and its developers much richer...
In the meantime, however, the current version is crap. And it's got me boxed into a corner. I really want to make those sites and I want make them now. But I can't. I certainly can't make them both expediently and also the way I'd like them to be, and I'm not even sure at the moment I could either achieve expediency or make the way I'd like them to be. As it is I think the best I could hope to do is to set something up with a basic stock template and style and then change it over time as further upgrades make it feasible. Unfortunately that means I'd have to commit a cardinal sin of web development by launching a website that's not actually done. While it's always fair game to improve and tweak a site, wholesale changes to a user interface should really be done before a site is launched and users become acclimated to it. Just as major software products should not be released before they are done and users (try to) become acclimated to it...
So frustrated have I been by all this that I even looked into chucking MT altogether and instead switching over to WordPress. I generally hear much less bitching and moaning about WordPress, and at first glance the administration of it does seem much less cryptic than MT ever was.
But the only viable solution I've ever seen for comment spam is a MovableType solution, and I don't think I could live without it. Plus, in the long run I wish to maintain several blogs on my website and take advantage of some of that promised functionality, so with MovableType I think I am stuck.
How that will affect anything you'll see here will eventually become apparent. In the meantime, however, I just needed to complain...
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