Liminal states

Other than the title, which doesn’t do it for me, Caroline McCarthy’s Social networking gets its geek on is an excellent short roundup of the activity in 2007 in the social networking space, with great links both in the story and the “2007 highlights” sidebar.

One thing that popped out at me: legal and political issues crop up in five of the ten paragraphs (the lawsuit related to Facebook’s origins, Digg and the DMCA takedown notice, the state attorneys general pressuring MySpace on sex offenders, MySpace and MTV’s “presidential dialogs”, and of course the Beacon brouhaha).  OK, the first one is fairly standard startup stuff, but the others clearly illustrate social networks’ increasingly important role in society.  So I though Caroline’s closing paragraph was particularly insightful, and applies much more broadly than the specific sites and issue:

Not surprisingly, privacy and safety issues remained on the horizon. Both Facebook and MySpace grappled with demands from state attorneys general who were concerned that young people could be exposing themselves to online threats through social networks. Their efforts didn’t do much to stall either site, but served as a continual reminder that even though Silicon Valley might tout a company as the future of communication, legal authorities might beg to differ.

Indeed.  With the McCain bill still lurking out there (it didn’t make it out of committee in 2007, but 2008’s an election year) and the Mcarthyesque “Violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention act of 2007” having already passed the House, it’s clear that at least in the US,  the potential democratizing and empowering effects of social networks are leading to predictable backlash from entrenched interests.  The good news is that people are rapidly learning how to use social networks for activism, so any crackdown is likely to meet with a lot more resistance than expected.  I hope.

The two months since I left Microsoft have been low-key recharge-and-relax time: catching up on sleep, visiting my mom, reconnecting with friends, doing some writing (blogging, poetry, the fictional The anomaly and the goddesses), and hanging out with Deborah. It’s been great. My friends consistently tell me how relaxed I look and sound (my Facebook status messages apparently give the same impression), and that’s exactly how I feel.

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Who da’ Punk’s got a new post up on MiniMSFT with a great, and somewhat out-of-character, topic.  Most of the commenters thus far appear to have missed the request “I’d like to know what you honestly think is going well, too”, but it’s early days yet.  The areas Mini lists as going well in his/her/their opinion include competition, a surprisingly good experience with Zune, translucency (as opposed to transparency), the potential for a solid VS2008, signs of edging away from the dead weight of DRM, and getting past the “evil empire” reputation.

A fine topic indeed.  Worth thinking about … so please, jump in!

With a cover story in by Paul Clarke in Imbibe magazine (not available online, alas) following Jacob Sullum’s The Green Fairy gets a Green Card in reason online last month, it’s absinthe-mania! The legal issues are complex and relate to the levels of thujone, the ingredient that may or may not be psychoactive.

To me drinking absinthe feels roughly like being hit on the side of a head with a sledgehammer (60% alcohol content will do that to you) and a steel wire brush scouring my brain from the inside. I remember saying “wow, I can really see why the whole fin-de-siecle crowd went nuts drinking this”. There is a very distinctive warm and langourous feel along with it which is quite interesting; hard to know how much is the set and setting — morphogenic fields in the cultural sense. People have told me that drinking three or four sometimes leads to hallucinations, but as a notorious lightweight I suspect I’d be passed out from the alcohol long before that, so I’ll have to take their word for it.

Still, even though it’s not my drug of choice, it’s got lots of adherents, and a rich tradition; so it’s great to see this semi-legalization. Kudos to the Ted Breaux for the historical and chemical research, and to Swiss distillery Kubler which supported the legal battle.

With a two-part series on TPM Cafe’s Table for One, an article in the Mercury News on Christmas Day, and the recent settlement of a suit on text messaging, Facebook continues to become a focus for discussion of privacy issues. To some extent this is a consequence of their size and success: they’re a high-profile target. Behind this, though, lurks a pattern of Facebook unilaterally making decisions that compromise user privacy, apologizing, addressing the most egregious aspects while leaving the rest in place — and then repeating.

The TPM Cafe piece is by Ari Melber of The Nation, and starts out

When one of America’s largest electronic surveillance systems was launched in Palo Alto a year ago, it sparked an immediate national uproar. The new system tracked roughly 9 million Americans, broadcasting their photographs and personal information on the Internet; 700,000 web-savvy young people organized online protests in just days. Time declared it “Gen Y’s first official revolution,” while a Nation blogger lauded students for taking privacy activism to “a mass scale.” Yet today, the activism has waned, and the surveillance continues largely unabated.

He goes on to discuss the Beacon fiasco in terms of Facebook’s past behavior, quotes some of my faves (danah boyd and a CMU study that I believe is by Alessandro Acquisti), and in his follow-on post ties Facebook — and web services more generally — to a national surveillance state. People familiar with the privacy space won’t see anything new here; what’s significant is that this is another example of Facebook privacy making the jump out of the tech ghetto to the national political scene: TPMCafe’s the extension of Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, a DC-based progressive political blog that sees itself as a muckraker in the positive sense of the word and has been very active in helping uncover and publicize recent political scandals.

The lawsuit settlement specifically relates to Facebook continuing to send text messages to cellphone numbers after they had been recycled. Facebook didn’t admit any wrongdoing, but did agree to “make it easier for recipients of text messages to block future messages originating from the social network” and “work more closely with mobile phone carriers to monitor the lists of recycled numbers and reduce the frequency of unwanted text messages.” The fact that people had to resort to a lawsuit to get action on these basic business practices paints a rather unflattering picture of the company’s arrogant attitude towards its users — and to the non-users who got the recycled numbers and then were billed for the messages.

Elise Ackerman’s Facebook alarms privacy advocates again talks about a Facebook signup icon showing up on smartphones without the owners permission. This is privacy in the classic sense of “the right to be left alone”, not being tracked; and of course this is something that phone companies do routinely, viewing phones’ “screen real estate” as a spot for advertising and product placement … so “alarm” seems somewhat overstated. Still, given the pattern above, Jeffrey Chester (of the Center for Digital Democracy) sounds on-target to me when he says “It illustrates a basic problem over at Facebook, which is their need to fatten their bank account is confounding their need to protect the privacy of their members.”

And not to sound like a broken record or anything: this kind of attention augurs well for proposals like the national “do-not-track” mechanism — and increases the probabilities that populist-oriented politicians in any party will seize on privacy as a chance to differentiate themselves this upcoming election year.

Sometimes truth is just as strange as fiction. I’m working on a sequel to my story Eris and the anomaly which kicks off with the law firm of the Gods of Olympus sending me a takedown notice, claiming copyright on both the image of a golden apple and the term “kallisti”. I was pretty pleased with my inventiveness coming up with such a wacky start to a farce; and then I read today in the Guardian…

Egypt is planning to pass a law that would exact royalty payments from anyone found making copies of the country’s ancient monuments or museum pieces, including the pyramids.

Mercy.

Queen Elizabeth’s annual Christmas broadcast, along with about 20 other clips, are up on YouTube as the inital offerings of The Royal Channel.  George V started the tradition with a radio broadcast in 1932, and the queen took it to television in her 1957 broadcast, hoping that the new medium would give a more personal and direct connection.   Fifty years later, she’s making the jump to social networks.

The New York Times reports that the 1957 video’s the most popular so far, with 400,000 downloads; the current rating’s 4 1/2 stars.  Prince Charles visiting a school trails with 3,000 downloads (3 1/2 stars).   Sam Wollaston in the Guardian has some good advice for the royals:

You need to make it more fun, for the internet generation. Less stuffy guff from Palace press office, more jokes. Get Philip on there, going off about something that irritates him. And Harry killing something. And the dogs. That’s what the Royal Channel needs. Corgis. Making love.

Indeed.

… at least according to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was responding to Chinese criticism for meeting the Dalai Lama in his office as opposed to a hotel.

Just thought you’d want to know.

Heading out soon to Geomagnetic.tv’s Geo Solstice 2007 at the Gingerbread House in SF tonight. Geomagnetic’s Dr. Spook, who did the pscychedelic Ad Astra visuals and rotating globe, is on at midnight; string art by Andres!

The psytrance, dark psytrance, and darkwave scenes are feast-or-famine in SF: sometimes there’s a ton of good stuff going on, sometimes nothin’. Between this, Death Guild’s XMas, a legal absinthe party, and the usual great stuff on New Year’s Eve/Day, Holiday season 2007/8 is shaping up as an abundance of riches!

w00t w00t!

I usually love my Mac, but right now is a big exception.  When I got a new MacBook Pro earlier this year running Tiger (10.4), the migration over from my previous (two-ish year old, running 10.1 or 10.2 I think) machine went incredibly smoothly with the minor exception of no longer being able to print from the HP printer in SF.  I could still print on the Oki in Bellevue; and Deborah (who had been running a later version of the OS than me) didn’t have any problems.  So I assumed it was a pretty minor compatibility problem and that I’d just have to do something like reinstall drivers.  Irritating, but no big deal.

Last night, six months later, I finally needed to print something in SF.  So I googled the warning message and got a nice  page in Apple’s forum which in turn pointed me to the HP issue page describing the incompatibility between 10.4 and my printer.  I followed the 50+ step manual uninstallation process on the page, rebooted as instructed, found the download page (not linked to from the issue page), downloaded the 27MB installation file that matched the one on my CD, and installed, rebooted, went through the HP Setup Assistant’s configuration of the phone line I never use [if you leave it out, the printer doesn’t work] and was rewarded by a different error message.   I tracked it down, and discovered I had overlooked one step in the uninstall (resetting the disk protections); oops, my bad.  I uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled, rebooted, configured, and got to a new and worse state.  Hmm.  So I once again uninstalled again, this time more meticulously; downloaded the newer 56MB “all-in-one executable” or whatever it’s called … no change noted.  Since by this point it was 1 a.m. I gave up and mailed the link to Deborah who was kind enough to print it out.

And then when I opened up the computer this morning I was greated with the popup from the HP Setup Assistant.  AAAARGH!

Sometimes all you can say is “feels a heck of a lot like Windows to me”.

Slashdot’s linked to a bunch of good stories on computer security recently. Squirrelmail repository poisoned has the catchiest title, and plus it’s about squirrels, so it goes first.

What happened was that an intruder got into the site where you download Squirrelmail, and introduced a very subtle change in the code that would allow somebody who know about it (the intruder or anybody he/she told or sold the secret to) to “an arbitrary code execution risk” aka “pwning” both of which are security speak for “doing whatever you want to on the system”.

YOW! Dreamhost, my ISP, provides a nice one-click install for Squirrelmail (“webmail for nuts!”) and I use it on a couple of my domains. Maybe somebody’s used this to hack in — and that’s why my colors keep intermittently changing from pink to blue! Hmm, well, probably not … although other than the unsatisfyingly generic “intermittent software bug” it’s the best explanation so far.

Imagine, though, that this was a political candidate’s blog; and that the hack gets exploited to delete a random 10% of mail from potential supporters and voters. This might not get noticed for a while … and if it went on long enough, it could easily lead to enough impact to swing a close election. Or suppose there’s a mass-mailing from the account to everybody in the district the day before the election: “This account has been hacked, can you really trust this bozo?” Hmm. Talk about your social engineering attacks.

It’s also another interesting example of the “security as a social science ” theme — and more specifically, the process issues for web services that came up in How’d that get through QA? Something that’s really encouraging here is that in both cases the software providers did exactly the right thing here, including being transparent about what had happened — Squirrelmail’s blog shows how quickly they reacted, announcing immediately and getting the fix out within a day.

Recently somebody who’s interviewing around Microsoft told me that they had brought up Ad Astra in an interview context as a way of demonstrating that they understood viral marketing: “Remember all those hot pink Mashup posters around campus? Well, here’s how we approached it; this was my role; this is what I learned.” And it worked out well!

It’s a great way of framing it, because even though we didn’t do a great job of marketing Ad Astra in general, Mashups were something we got a lot of people to notice and talk about. And best of all, it had measurable results: attendance at Mashups steadily increased by 50% monthly, using techniques like this, emailing, leafletting, … classic viral marketing.

For those of you who haven’t spent time on the Microsoft campus, there are posters everywhere, mostly in blue brown and gold, occasionally in other colors — but never any pink. So these stud out And we put up a lot of posters; in March, the guy who runs the internal postering service told me that we had already put up more posters than Windows or Office had in the previous 12 months. [I pointed out that they had better existing name recognition.] So (at least in the Redmond area) the reasonable odds that the person either heard about it, or knows somebody who has, are pretty reasonable.

Thinking about it afterwards, I realized that there are probably 50 to 100 people who were involved in various aspects of marketing Mashups. Most of them have no previous marketing background; all of them now have at least one anecdote that they can use to show their awareness and understanding of this kind of marketing. That’s kinda cool.

Yay us!