… And now my Twitter account got suspended, probably because I have a link to tiara.org on my Twitter page. It’s under review, but Twitter doesn’t have the greatest appeals process for suspected spammers. I must have really pissed off some patron saint of technology out there.
We’ll see how long it takes for my iPhone to stop working or my laptops to explode.
Somebody hacked my site yesterday and added iFrame code to two pages, start.html and lj_bib.html, which redirected users to some shady-ass spam/malware site. So the entirety of tiara.org has been blocked. I’ve fixed the problem, changed my password, and submitted the site to Google Webmaster tools for re-analysis, so everything should be back to normal in a day or two.
I’ve traced the hack to a major Dreamhost security breach, where 3,500 account passwords were “compromised,” mine probably among them.
I was impressed that Google Safe Browsing identified the exact pages that had been hacked and the links I should look for, which made it (relatively) easy to fix.
I’m working on a project w/ Alix Rabin about Identity 2.0. Behind the cut is our proposal and bibliography. If anyone has any comments, let me know! Thanks!
I apologize for my quietitude. I have been out of town for two weekends, caught a cold, and have been battling my endless battle with Time Warner over our internet service.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a whole lot lately is the Blade Runner effect, where we see into the (speculated) future and it looks shockingly different than today. This is obviously because we don’t see the increments of change. For example, if, ten years ago, you made a film filled with trek-like Bluetooth earpieces, pho places on every street, MySpace microcelebrities, YouTube video memes, and people trolling used book sales with Treos & bar code readers (to check up-to-the-minute alibris prices), it would have seemed like science fiction. We get the gee-whiz factor with early technology, and by the time it trickles down the long tail, we are used to it and have moved on to the next point.
***
I’ve been reading a lot on modernism and media lately which I guess has me re-evaluating a lot of my presuppositions. We tend to see the world in a very black-and-white way, and we tend to place overarching narratives over events. The Story of Modernity goes like this: A bunch of authentic, local cultures (local = making things with your hands and being outside a lot and having strong family ties and a sense of identity) have been replaced by with the ravacious consumerism of late modernity (actor here is Western capitalism). Our identities are fragmented and no longer fixed, so we turn to stuff like TV, fundamentalism, dogma, religion, and patriotism to give our lives meaning.
That’s a compelling story. It has a narrative arc, it explains things, and it has Good Guys and Bad Guys. And I think most of us believe it in some way or another. Which leaves many people feeling vaguely guilty about being on the wrong side of globalization, that they consume too much, and that they don’t really have a sense of who they should be, and buying things doesn’t make up for that.
But it’s a little too simplistic to see the world like that. First, it assumes that “late capitalism” is a Western invention entirely, whereas “globalization” as it exists today has had contributions from many other countries, cultures, and entities (example A: China. Example B: Pho, manga, Nintendo. Cultural flow is not one way). Second, it assumes that our current culture is deficient in comparison to what came before it. Third, it assumes that media (insert your favorite globalization symbol here) automatically corrupts cultures that were somehow “pure”, and that people in those cultures don’t incorporate media consuming/making into their lives in different and interesting ways.
Obviously there are things that I do feel are very problematic in this world (and I am not trying to celebrate Western consumerism one bit). But feeling the guilt of modernity does nothing to change that and it just feeds into post-modern identity nihilism which basically says “Give up, it’s all been done, it’s all over”. But I don’t think that’s true at all. I think most people are very active consumers and producers, and I think that modernity guilt is leading to this mythologization of the “authentic”, leading to stuff like the wedding/baby hysteria of the last decade in an attempt to harken back to some mythical 50’s “family traditions” which, for most people, didn’t exist in the first place.
Back to my point: globalization is a two-way street. America is no longer the top of the heap. I think worrying about the Westernization of the world is a little passe. We definitely need to continue checking multinational corporations, particularly with regard to egregious human rights abuses and environmental degredation, but I want to see people complicating these models. I especially would like for people to actually study what social practices people are DOING when they consume media, rather than talking about TV zombies and force-fed commercials and blah blah.
***
Recommended essay: Daniel Miller, “Anthropology, modernity, and consumption.” Worlds Apart: Modernity Through the Prism of the Local, Routledge 1995, (1-22). (Can’t find PDF, sorry!)
Official Google Blog responds to their critics re: China.
This is actually quite a good response. Harry posted a comment in my last delicious dump about my use of the word “reprehensible” w/r/t Google, which was a bit harsh, I guess. I did sit there for about a minute and hem and haw over whether I should critique Google when describing their policy in China, and I decided to err on the side of being critical (they’re a huge company, they can take it). Was I wrong?
The rationale for launching a domestic version of Google in China – a website subject to China’s local content restrictions – is that our service in China has not been very good, due in large measure to the extensive filtering performed by Chinese Internet service providers (ISPs). Google’s users in China struggle with a service that is often unavailable, or painfully slow. According to our measurements, Google.com appears to be unavailable around 10% of the time. Even when users can reach Google.com, the website is slow, and sometimes produces results that, when clicked on, stall out the user’s browser. The Google News service is almost never available; Google Images is available only half the time.
These problems can only be solved by creating a local presence inside China. By launching Google.cn and making a major ongoing investment in people, infrastructure, and innovation within China, we intend to provide the greatest access to the greatest amount of information to the greatest number of Chinese Internet users. At the same time, the launch of Google.cn did not in any way alter the availability of the uncensored Chinese-language version of Google.com, which Google provides globally to all Internet users without restriction.
(The last argument is a straw man, since I don’t think anyone was really arguing that the Google.cn and the Chinese language version of Google were the same thing).
A few points:
1. The original story I posted was about a bug (that Google has since fixed) that filtered out search results for Google.cn, including sites about pregnancy, homosexuality, jokes, and beer, without informing the users that the sites were being omitted from the search results. Google has corrected that problem, which is good.
In order to operate Google.cn as a website in China, Google is required to remove some sensitive information from our search results. These restrictions are imposed by Chinese laws, regulations, and policies. However, when we remove content from Google.cn, we disclose that fact to our users. This approach is similar in principle to the disclosures we provide when we have altered our search results to comply with local laws in France, Germany, and the United States. When a Chinese user gets search results from which one or more results has been filtered, the Google webpage includes an explicit notification – an indication that the search results are missing something that might otherwise be relevant. This is not, to be sure, a tremendous advance in transparency to users, but it is at least a meaningful step in the right direction.
2. An example of some of the local laws that have affected search results:
- The US’s DMCA allows people to send Cease and Desist notices or takedown demands to Google. The vast majority of these involve alleged copyright infringement, business practices, and search rankings. Google makes these public on the Chilling Effects web site, and usually doesn’t seem to comply with the requests. One exception is kazaa (scroll down to see the notice that the DMCA complaint omits one search result, which is probably the current KazaaLiteK++ homepage.)
(One famous example is the litigation-happy “Church” of Scientology, which files dozens of complaints and takedown requests with Google. They did manage to get the Scientology critique site xenu.net removed from Google’s search results for a while; Google replaced it with an explanatory link to Chilling Effects. This is no longer the case.)
- German law “considers the publication of Holocaust denials and similar material as an incitement of racial and ethnic hatred, and therefore illegal.” France has similar laws (which have been upheld effectively against Yahoo! auctions). Google complies with these laws w/r/t Google.de and Google.fr [source]
A lengthy and well-worth reading editorial by Danny Sullivan about these issues points out that at least the Chinese search results inform users of omitted results, while the French and German results do not.
3. This is part of a much-larger discourse around “Should US companies abide by restrictive laws in order to sell products in foreign markets?” Google claims that by having a presence inside China, they will do more good than if they did not have a presence there, which makes the obvious response “Just pull out of China” more problematic. These issues also came up during the 1970’s/80’s with Apartheid-era South Africa, and the Sullivan Principles [wikipedia] were created to govern US company investment there. I know very little about this, but the Wikipedia entry is very well-worth reading as it points out what can be done when a large US company takes a principled stance against a foreign government.
A WSJ article (which I can’t read and don’t have a citation for) claims that technology companies may be formulating a similar set of principles, which I would call more of a manifesto than anything else.
I’m going to come down on here on the side of pragmatism vs. idealism, something that I very rarely do. I’m going to gingerly agree with Google that their self-censorship is probably better than the Chinese government’s censorship of Google, which is heavy-handed and more likely to block random things (like internet filters do in American libraries), with a few caveats. I think that Google could be a bit more proactive in its statements of user notification (like maybe using the term “government censorship”). I think that American companies (MICROSOFT, I’M LOOKING IN YOUR DIRECTION) are generally chasing the Chinese dollar and not considering their citizens. (Yahoo! should be similarly ashamed of themselves if the allegations are true that they provided emails and revealed “confidential” user account information to the Chinese government, resulting in a 10-year jail sentence for one journalist). And I must ask: Google assumes that staying in China and creating a presence, even a watered-down, censored presence, is better for the people of China than not being there. But if their presence complies completely with the status quo laws and does not question them, how exactly is it better?
This is the tip of the iceberg so far as these types of conflicts go. Welcome to the late modern global society.
Penny Arcade on Infinium, part 300.
It was in a hurricane, in Sarasota, Florida, to a roomful of rich Republicans. I was the demo monkey and was flown in, first class, specifically for the one night. Everyone in the company got drunk afterwards in a bar next to a Harley-Davidson dealership. Very classy exprerience.
I actually really loved working at Infinium, and there were some truly amazing people there. I KNOW we have a terrible reputation, OK? But working with best-of-breed dev teams is always awesome, and I still believe we had the foundations of a truly spectacular project.
In our times people are often willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accommodate technological innovation while at the same time resisting similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds.
eBay full of fakes
[NYT, registration required]
I’ve long heard of Chanel, Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton and other luxury brands keeping track of how fakes are selling on eBay. I figured that this was a practice that eBay was fairly strict about, as they frame the site as a great place to buy high-end goods for cheap and are always flashing around brand-names in their ads. But apparently not. This article starts out talking about some jewelry dealers who’re trying vigilante-style to smoke out a group of fakers, but Tiffany and Co. are also apparently angry about the amount of ugly fake heart toggle necklaces being sold on the site.
What I think is interesting here isn’t that eBay isn’t doing anything. I’m never surprised when a corporation won’t take responsibility for something within its own borders. No, what’s interesting is that it’s the features of the system itself that makes this possible. No oversite from eBay and very few mechanisms for user-user policing.
I’ve written before about how the reputation system doesn’t work. the harm of retaliation for leaving negative feedback is greater for buyers than for sellers, so people generally don’t do it. But eBay can’t police all the thousands of transactions that happen each day either. So this means you have a marketplace full of faked or misrepresented items, and few options for users who are aware of these practices. They can’t leave messages for other users, they can’t request the items be removed unless they themselves have bought them and found them to be fake, and the sellers usually won’t bother responding to emails.
Obviously the danger is that rival sellers will sabotage each other’s stores. But in practice I haven’t really seen anything like that, whereas I’ve seen a great deal of people puffing up their positive feedback and driving up their bids by using multiple accounts or friends and family. The high-volume pirates from Hong Kong and China who sell low-quality Marc Jacobs jackets for $25 are organized and professional. If the site actually does care about keeping down piracy, they need to look at alternate models of policing, perhaps organized around community moderation rather than a top-down authoritarian approach.
Meet Britney Gallivan.
(img c/o Pomona Historical Society)
Ms. Gallivan was a high school student in Pomona, California, when she was given an extra-credit math diassignment to fold a piece of paper in half more than 8 times. Conventional wisdom has generally held that a piece of paper can’t be folded in half more than 7 or 8 times, and even that’s very difficult.
First, Britney managed to fold a piece of gold foil 12 times, breaking the record. Then, contemplating folding non-foil paper, she derived “the folding limit equation”:
(img c/o wikipedia)
This is for single-direction folding. L = minimum length of the material, t = material thickness, and n = number of folds possible in one direction. (L and t need to be expressed using the same units.) Britney wrote a number of strict rules and definitions for the folding process, and then derived an equation for alternate direction folding as well.
I’m a big fan of the (mostly apocryphal) “kid solves unsolvable extra-credit problem” genre and I’m always happy to see young women involved in math, science, and technology. A++ to Britney.
(Doing my best to contribute to the War on Christmas)
I’m heading to Seattle for two weeks to commune with my people. Expect updates, but they might be sporadic for a day or two. Enjoy the holidays and, my fellow New Yorks, keep on keepin’ on WRT the transit strike.
