On the disappearance of...

... the (often difficult to understand and appreciate) Chinese commentors.

They might be peddling unwanted wares. That was not difficult to detect. They might have been incomprehensible.

The question is, WHERE HAVE THEY GONE?

Is this a policy being imposed by Google, on their own behalf? Or at the persistent request of their clientele?

Or is the result of their acquiescence to pressure from the Chinese authorities who desire that their community be sheltered from the excesses of Capitalism; or whatever the current bugbear might be.

A loud BOOOOOO!! from the probligo if the latter is the case.

Two (minor) cautionary tales...

First comes this story about Facebook, and the next step in their development of the system -

FACEBOOK is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150 million members by creating one of the world's largest market research databases.

In an attempt to finally cash in on the social networking site, once valued at $US15 billion ($23.6 billion), it will soon allow multinational companies to selectively target its members in order to research the appeal of new products. Companies will be able to pose questions to specially selected members based on such intimate details as whether they are single or married and even whether they are gay or straight.

The company, which has struggled to make money from advertising, has been demonstrating the benefits of its new instant polling tool to business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Following from that is the latest Aussie panic about Google -

YOUR local phone exchange is down and your landline and mobile are not working. You need to make an urgent business call but you have no way of communicating with the outside world. What do you do?

A similar scenario hit the internet yesterday when Google, the dominant search engine, suffered a malfunction and marked all websites as dangerous, blocking them from use.

Millions of users were unable to access the sites they were looking for, and instead received the warning: "This site may harm your computer".

While the problem lasted only about 40 minutes, experts estimate millions of dollars were lost from online transactions dependent on the company's search functions. Users reported failures on other Google applications such as Gmail, which has 1.3 million accounts with the Department of Education.

"What happened? Very simply, human error," was Google's response. It said its list of sites containing malware - set up to protect users from potentially harmful sites - was wrongly updated and all sites were automatically blocked.

"Unfortunately, the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs," Google's vice-president of search products, Marissa Mayer, wrote on the company's blog.

But the failure of the search engine giant - believed to capture about 70 per cent of its market - raised questions about how widespread the financial impact would be of a longer or permanent failure of Google's products.

"It's critical infrastructure because people have it so interwoven and so ingrained into their existence that they can't live without it," said tech enthusiast Dave Gray from podcastersemporium.com.

"It scares me to think 'What if something would happen to Google today?'. Businesses would go under, massive amounts of money would be lost, core businesses would fail because they base their business models on using Google services.

"You've only got to look at the biggest-selling phone for the last quarter of last year, which was the iPhone. It's integrated with Google. It's got Gmail built into it, it's got Google Maps built into it, it has YouTube, which Google owns," said Gray.

Google's global range extends beyond internet searches on google.com. When the outage occurred yesterday, users reported failures on other Google applications like Gmail - which is now has 1.3 million email accounts with the NSW Department of Education - and iCalendar, used by businesses to organise and manage events for clients. A longer outage could have impacted the archiving of sites, thus rendering organisations dependent on an online presence for profit or profile virtually invisible to the public.

I remain, yours truly,
probligo the luddite

The Morning News -

To all those who might be interested, the heading links to (what I consider) NZ's premiere news programme (from any medium).

For the next week, one of the presenters (Geoff Robinson) is based in Washington DC and through the technology of Skype, VOIP, and Internet you too will be able to listen to the same news as the probligo gets from 6 a.m. every weekday morning (NZ time).

Very highly recommended.

Take a listen or three... oh, and an occasional report back of reactions would be appreciated.

A retro(per)spective -

The good people at ALdaily really tweaked the curiosity with this one -

Every new gadget is, wrote T.S. Eliot, “Filled with fancies and empty of meaning / Tumid apathy with no concentration.” T.S. Eliot? Who’s he?...

Well, Eliot is one of my favourite writers, not just for his poetry (which can be very dense and somewhat depressing) but his prose as well. So the combination of the quote from "Burnt Norton" with "every new gadget" did not quite ring true and I had to go looking.

From the third stanza of "Burnt Norton -

...Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

It reads almost like he was describing an accountant... quelle horreur!! The actual article that pinged the quotation was this from timesonlne

I was – the irony! – trying to read a book called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. Crushed in my train, I had become the embodiment of T S Eliot’s great summary of the modern predicament: “Distracted from distraction by distraction”. This is, you might think, a pretty standard, vaguely comic vignette of modern life – man harassed by self-inflicted technology. And so it is. We’re all distracted, we’re all interrupted. How foolish we are! But, listen carefully, it’s killing me and it’s killing you.

David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.

The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

I read on and a separate line of thought started with this -

Meyer tells me that he sees part of his job as warning as many people as possible of the dangers of the distracted world we are creating. Other voices, particularly in America, have joined the chorus of dismay. Jackson’s book warns of a new Dark Age: “As our attentional skills are squandered, we are plunging into a culture of mistrust, skimming and a dehumanising merger between man and machine.”

Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, has just written The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardises Our Future. He portrays a bibliophobic generation of teens, incapable of sustaining concentration long enough to read a book. And learning a poem by heart just strikes them as dumb.

In an influential essay in The Atlantic magazine, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is Google making us stupid?” Carr, a chronic distractee like the rest of us, noticed that he was finding it increasingly difficult to immerse himself in a book or a long article – “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Instead he now Googles his way though life, scanning and skimming, not pausing to think, to absorb. He feels himself being hollowed out by “the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’”.

And at that point the thread of the idea - Meyer through Bauerlein to Carr - began to get scary. I work with two other accountants in a small office of a medium sized manufacturing firm. I am nominally "Cost Accountant" but despite that I spend a good 80% of my time on financial accounting (yes, there is a difference). The others, and my boss, are all under 35; all are "very technically savvy"; all are looking for the latest in "gadgets" - skype phones are almost passe, and the latest rage is just a bit more expensive than can be hidden inside of "General Expenses".

That is the background, so far not scary. Where it does get scary is the approach to problems - the reconciliation that doesn't work or the cost centre that has blown out over the past three months, or the sudden decline in margin on a product. The boss is a great fan (and reputed "expert") in a dbase access system called "Hyperion". To me it has its uses, for my boss it is the only way to "find things out". So he spends several hours fine-tuning his analysis, preparing summaries; I sit down with a listing and (interruptions aside - I have a real difficulty concentrating!) work my way through the data.

That difference in approach is the scary bit. The thought of applying concentration and logic to form understanding is quite foreign. The idea that one misplaced transaction may not be human error but indicative of a deeper systemic failing is an incomprehensible heresy!

Bauerlein is 49. As a child, he says, he learnt about the Vietnam war from Walter Cronkite, the great television news anchor of the time. Now teenagers just go to their laptops on coming home from school and sink into their online cocoon. But this isn’t the informational paradise dreamt of by Bill Gates and Google: 90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks. They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”.

“They don’t,” says Bauerlein, “grow up.” They are “living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are now”.

The hyper-connectivity of the young is bewildering. Jackson tells me that one study looked at five years of e-mail activity of a 24-year-old. He was found to have connections with 11.7m people. Most of these connections would be pretty threadbare. But that, in a way, is the point. All internet connections are threadbare. They lack the complexity and depth of real-world interactions. This is concealed by the language.

Think too, of the "Personal life support systems" that are de rigeur in today's world. Who can walk the streets without personally selected musical accompaniament? Who can be seen in public without at least once demonstrating their social importance - or business importance - by receiving a cell-phone call?

TF might remember when I drew his attention to Wordsworth - "we have no time to stop and stare" - TF, here is another to put in the mind...

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

and -

...Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

Face(less)book...

Our Sunday paper has a feature (Section 3 Page 1 and 2) headed "Why Facebook is Evil" attributed to Guardian News and Media. Neither the SST, nor the Guardian, lists that title in their websites or search engines - which is a little strange.

In the normal course I might not read an article with a headline like that, but the teaser made it ever so much more "attractive".

Facebook is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be as long as you don't mind being bombarded by adverts for the world's biggest brands.

Neoconservative liberalism? Who has this guy been reading? Paul? Mise? Rand?

But suddenly it did start getting interesting. Not for the politics, which might surprise as they fringe, rather than form, the main thread of the article.

The author tracks from the origins of Facebook, to the three people who consitute the Board of Directors of the holding company.

Mark Zuckerberg - "media cover star".

Peter Thiel - "Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher..."

Jim Breyer - partner in Accel Partners, board member of Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment and former Chair of NVCA (National Venture Capital Association). So what? Little that is wrong there.

The most recent round of funding Facebook comes from Greylock Venture Capital, who contributed some USD27.5 million - some investment. One of the senior partners in Greylock is Hpward Cox, another former Chair of NVCA. So what? Little that is wrong there either.

Howard Cox is also on the Board of In-Q-Tel.

Say what?

Our Aim
In-Q-Tel identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions.

Launched by the CIA in 1999 as a private, independent, not-for-profit organization, IQT was created to bridge the gap between the technology needs of the Intelligence Community and new advances in commercial technology. With limited insight into fast-moving private sector innovation, the IC needed a way to find emerging companies, and, more importantly, to work with them. IQT, as a private company with deep ties to the commercial world, is able to attract and build relationships with technology entrepreneurs outside the reach of the IC. In fact, more than 75 percent of the companies that IQT works with had never done business with the government before partnering with IQT.

Similar to a corporate strategic fund like those found at Intel Corporation, Motorola and Disney, IQT operates for the strategic – rather than financial – benefits to its customers in the IC. IQT targets its technology engagements based on a deep understanding of the challenges of our Intelligence customers to deliver solutions that will provide strategic advantage to the mission of intelligence.

To best serve its customers, In-Q-Tel plays multiple roles:

A technology accelerator, fostering development and introduction of technologies needed by the Intelligence Community


A capabilities builder, helping nascent commercial technologies mature into commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products the government can buy


An idea lab and forum for innovation, providing the Intelligence Community with insight and access to both new technologies and leading innovators and thinkers


A strategic investment firm, investing in companies and helping build businesses into reliable providers for the Intelligence Community

Life sure is stranger than fiction...

Hello, Big Brother!

i-things...

WHY??


TF asks "Why not?"

Well I guess that the answer to that runs something like this -

Our (15 year old) tv is developing an intermittent fault. The cause is most likely a small capacitor in the colour decode sections somewhere. The part would probably be worth $2, maybe at the outside $10. IF I could find someone reliable to do the repair, it would be worth the bother to get it fixed.

I could spend anywhere from $800 to $8,000 replacing it.

The rebuttal to TF's question is this -

If I spend $8,000 on a new tv, does the extra expense improve the quality of the programmes any?

So it is with i-things. If I spend USD1,000 to have the latest means of accessing the 'net, does that improve the crap (including what I write) any? Does it make a better telephone than what I already got? Judging by the frustrations experienced by the executives at work with their Bluetooths, Sharktooths, Elephanttusks, eyepods or whatever the flavour of the month is, does it make communication any more effective or efficient?

Anyone getting the feeling that the ol' probligo is a Luddite?

The new look -

Hmm, well it was worth the try I guess.

For the technically minded the header banner was taken from two of mine own photos, ably shopped by my now rather ancient MicrographiX 6 which came as a freebie on an earlier system. How much longer I can keep that going is a worry. I have an old beastie (16-bit) in reserve so that I can go back to it if I need to. I also had to load up the .gif via a dummy posting. If there is another route please tell me because the posting way sets the image size at 420px wide and I want the full 820px. Any suggestions for a work-around?

Has anyone tried animated .gifs on blogger headings? Gotta couple ideas which could be fun. Yeah, I know, do it in Flash because it is easier. It may well be if you spend the USD2000 or whatever Flash costs these days.

Some assistance required with dynamic lists. The post index is not working right. If I click on (say) 2006, I get the last posts in 2006 but the index seems to disappear or it stays stuck at 2007. I might spend some time on that over the next few weeks but my immediate suspicion is that it is widget driven and consequently not accessible unless I write my own. So, to those who might know - help?!.

UPDATE -
Yeah, well it is red-face time. I missed the "Y'click on the little triangle thingies.." bit in the 'structions. So that problem is solved.

:o

IT (MS variety) is madness...

I have been trying (with only marginal success) to wrestle my way through Peter Gutmann’s lengthy review of some of the technicalities of MS Vista. It is not an easy read, especially for the technically incompetent such as I. HD-DVD is a very long way down on my list of desires. But I have my present computer set up with the intention that it will form a part of my "home entertainment" system. For that reason, the commentary coming from news and interviews about Vista was of some interest.

I have on board a thing called "Windows Media Centre" which at the time of purchase seemed like a good idea, a reasonable start on the kind of centralised television / radio / DVD / video system that would be cheaper in the long run than having to match and buy individual components or (as with the last two stereo systems I have owned) buy matched systems of plastic switches and frequency displays that crap out two or three days after the warranty expires.

Because MCE is now discontinued, replaced with Vista, Gutman’s article has increased interest for me.

But I want to stick with MCE for the moment because it has a very interesting feature that I was unaware of until just this past three days or so.

I was given (thanks Kath and D) two DVD’s for Christmas; for those wanting the detail they are "Hoodwinked" and a Special Edition of "World’s Fastest Indian".
Simpleton that I am I put them into a back cupboard until "the right moment" which turned out to be Saturday evening and "Hoodwinked" was piquing my interest. Simpleton that I am, I put the DVD into the right slot and pressed all the right buttons (I have played a number of music DVD’s on the system without problem).
What’s this? Cannot play the DVD? "Region 4" protected? WTF? To cut a long story short one of MS’s little updates is a precursor to some of the features in Vista.

Among the communications from MCE as I worked my way carefully through the processes to get to play my DVD were –
"Region 2 capable only"
"To change Region select from the following"
"You are permitted to change Region only four times. Select your Region with care for this reason..."

There was also a fairly dire warning that the system could (under some given circumstances) –
"Prevent further use of the DVD player"
"Cripple the DVD and CD write features"
"Attempts to clear the disabling of these features by re-installing the system will be unsuccessful".

I am NOT going to find out just how accurate that last warning might be.
What it does point out though is another feature of the "protection rackets" that are developing in response to the piracy of the few – or am I in the minority here?

If a good friend of mine in the US or Japan or Britain were to send me a DVD unavailable in NZ it very likely that the gift would be totally useless. Why? Because the "protection features" would prevent me from playing the DVD.

How F***ing STUPID!!
_______________________________________________________________________________

Mr Johnson, that fuzzy region on your X-ray indicates one of two things. Either you have multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, or the copy-protection system on our computer thinks that part of your left lung looks like Mickey Mouse.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Oh, and if you are wondering why the ol' probligo is now part of the NEW google empire there was not much choice. It was change format or not sign in.

Period.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Strikes me that there is a common point there -

Yeah!! That's right!

Intended Product Redundancy