Month: December 2004

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Resolution

Recent object lessons leading up to my new year’s resolution:

— In one gorgeous, perfectly orchestrated, slow-motion train wreck after another, the show Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy features serialized examples of well-intentioned but ultimately self-righteous individuals moving into other families’ homes with a not-so-hidden agenda to change their world views. The Christian mother wants to “bless the socks off” the Jewish family. The vegan mother wants to convince carniverous bayou-dwellers off meat in a week flat. And so on. In every case, the righteous evangelist encounters not success, but the impenetrability of both their own world-view and that of “the other.” Things seldom end well.

— Red states and blue states (I use this metaphorically; I know we’re all purple). It is still hard for me to understand how a person can have read a daily newspaper for the past four years and still want to reward the actions of Bushco. And yet I know there are lots of sane, loving, and yes, otherwise moral individuals who voted Red this year. What I consider “self-evident” is apparently not self-evident to many. Is my world-view as opaque to them as theirs is to me?

— Forgot where I heard: “The best way to lose an argument is to overstate your case.”

— Through the grapevine: “He doesn’t realize he might actually have a chance of convincing me if he didn’t come off so strident, so convinced that he’s right.”

— From a friend: “You’re just a meatsack like me. We don’t know nothin’.”

My new year’s resolution: I will be less judgmental in 2005. Less sure that “the other” is wrong. Like most new year’s resolutions, this will probably be easier said than done, but I’m going to go for it. I expect that the trick will be to “stay hard” while “going soft.”

Watch me now.

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Doctorow on BitTorrent

Interesting Wired article on Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent — amazed to learn that BitTorrent traffic now accounts for up to 1/3 of all internet traffic, by some estimates(!). Part-way through the piece an interviewee refers to “Microsoft DRM being useful to ‘keep content out of pirate hands…'”, which naturally sets Cory Doctorow into paroxysms of rational response at Boing-Boing:

…there is not a single piece of content in the history of the universe that has been “kept out of pirate hands” (i.e. kept off the Internet, or prevented from being stamped out in pirate CD factories abroad) by DRM. It’s a weird kind of Big Lie strategy by the DRM people to talk about how DRM can prevent “piracy” when there has never, ever been an example of this happening … BitTorrent proves the futility of DRM as surely as DRM turns honest customers into studio-hating downloaders.

Later:

I bought a Sopranos Season Three DVD set for a friend’s Christmas this year. When the friend opened the gift on her Christmas holiday in France, the discs wouldn’t play in her hotel’s French DVD player; nor would they play in the on-site English PowerBook — because the discs had DRM. At that point, the rational thing to do would have been to sell the discs on Amazon and just download Season Three using BitTorrent — the studios have rigged the game so that you get a superior product (e.g., something you can actually watch) when you download bootlegs from BitTorrent, and they actively punish customers who buy their products instead of downloading them.

In a continued public volley, Wired editor Chris Anderson responded to Doctorow’s blog entry, and Doctorow posted an additional rebuttal.

via Weblogsky

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The Oppressed Christian Minority

Reason Online: 4/5 of the country professes allegiance to some denomination of Christianity — hardly an oppressed minority. But every time someone or some organization decides to exchange a religiously specific phrase like “Merry Christmas” with a religiously neutral variant like “Happy Holidays,” the religious right (and even the non-religious radio right) cry foul, as if the curmudgeonly “liberal conspiracy” is now trying to extinguish Christmas itself — an “anti-Christmas Jihad” if you believe the ‘wingers. A ton of great links in this piece by Julian Sanchez.

Happy Holidays, everyone.

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Comment Spam Nihilism

Applying the MovableType 3.14 upgrade made a huge difference in server CPU usage when undergoing comment spam blitzkriegs, which now amount to barely a blip on the resource usage radar. Peace at last. Until…

A few days later we face a new anomaly: Someone out there has created a script that submits fake comments containing randomly generated URLs (all non-active and non-registered), randomly generated fake IPs, and randomly generated fake email addresses — they’re coming in locust clouds of one or two hundred at a time.

Because there are no recurring strings in these comment spams, blackisting them is pointless, and would only fill a blacklist database with garbage. Because the domains advertised are non-existent, I can’t correctly classify them as spam – they don’t advertise anything. Their purpose is purely vandalistic; to annoy blog owners and admins.

Even though Blacklist doesn’t catch them, they’re still held for moderation (so resource usage is nill), but you do have to take the time to batch-delete the suckers.

Posted a query to see if anyone had advice on battling this form of nihilism, but nothing useful so far. I’m quickly coming closer to the last resort: Forced registration for untrusted commenters.

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Yu-Mex

In 1948, Yugoslavia was on the brink of war with the Soviet Union, tanks lined up at the border. Suddenly:

Yu-Mex-1 Yugoslav authorities had to look somewhere else for film entertainment. They found a suitable country in Mexico: it was far away, the chances of Mexican tanks appearing on Yugoslav borders were slight and, best of all, in Mexican films they always talked about revolution in the highest terms. How could an average moviegoer know that it was not the Yugoslav revolution?

With the newfound popularity of Mexican culture, Yugoslavians started donning sombreros, pulling ponchos over their heads, and making faux-Mexican records. “The Mexican influence spread to all of the popular culture: fake Mexican bands were forming and their records still can be found at the flea markets nowadays.”

Great album covers and thrilling lo-fi MP3s.

via Boing-Boing.

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Revert Wars

Reading Technology Review’s piece on Larry Sanger, co-creator of Wikipedia, discovered for the first time that Sanger is “is a professional epistemologist -— a philosopher who explores the very nature and sources of knowledge.” If it seems odd that someone who pursues truth for a living would be so intimately involved with a project that lacks traditional processes of verification, Sanger makes the distinction between “absolute knowledge,” which derives from pure reason, and “received knowledge,” which is the subject of an encyclopedia:

The sort of claims one can make in the form ‘It is generally known that….

The punchline: Sanger no longer contributes to Wikipedia, “in part because of the lingering sting of some particularly nasty revert wars” (where revert wars are epic battles raged by Wiki authors busy undoing one another’s changes, struggling for control over some point or fact).

Thanks Weblogsky

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Evolution of Wind Power

Wind energy often takes a bad rap for its role in bird deaths (though as I’ve posted before, vastly higher numbers of birds are killed yearly by cars, plate glass windows, bridges etc. than by windmills). Neverthless:

SF Chronicle: With 5,000 windmills in a 50-square-mile area, the Altamont Pass is the world’s largest wind farm, producing enough electricity to power 200,000 households annually. But it is also the worst in the country for slaughtering birds.

Environmentalists are not stuck in limbo on wind energy though. Installations like Altamont have become both proving grounds and object lessons for one of the cleanest, most renewable energy technologies we have. Newer towers are much taller, with much larger turbines, both factors that greatly reduce bird deaths by making themselves more visible while spinning, and by spinning above the altitude where predatory birds fly. And, according to the Chronicle piece, we’ve learned that placing the turbines on the leeward side of mountains, we remove them from the paths favored by birds.

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eWeek on Comment Spam

Heard from a reporter at eWeek yesterday who wanted to interview me about Movable Type comment spam overloads and how they affect web hosts. Unfortunately I got the email too late and wasn’t interviewed for the story, which was published today.

Six Apart has released MT 3.14 to address a bug which was triggering rebuild behavior even in settings where it shouldn’t be necessary, such as when moderated comments are added (99% of comment spam is held as moderated by various mechanisms). We’ll be applying the patch to birdhouse blogs throughout the day.

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Blessings, Rinchen

Today my oldest friend Josh, who posts here occasionally as “rinchen,” left the Bay Area for a semi-secret place in the mountains where he will sit and study Dharma with a small group of other Buddhists for the next three and a half years, mostly in total silence. Josh has been a practicing Buddhist for the past 20 years, but this retreat is total immersion.

By tradition, students don’t say much about this retreat. What I do know is that his access to modern amenities will be almost nonexistent, our ability to contact him, or him us, limited to a glimmer here and there (not by hard-core rules, but by general understanding that students are there for a reason, and that contact with the world can only distract).

This retreat is something he has wanted to do for a long time, and circumstances in his life recently provided an opening for him to follow through. I asked Josh the other day whether he felt any kind of trepidation. He responded that he was unconcerned by the prospect of being disconnected from music, news, work and the world, but that he expected to feel the bigness of being alone.

“But I have a job to do,” he said, “a task in front of me.”

“What kind of task?” I asked.

“To pray for all beings.”

Blessings, rinchen. I will miss you, and will be so happy to see you again in 1150 days.

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Religion, Fear, and TV News

AP: Nearly half of all Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans.

The survey conducted by Cornell University also found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims’ civil liberties than Democrats or people who are less religious.

The researchers also found a high correlation between people who consider themselves highly religious, people who believe in curtailing rights of Muslim-Americans, and the amount of TV news consumed.

While researchers said they were not surprised by the overall level of support for curtailing civil liberties, they were startled by the correlation with religion and exposure to television news. “We need to explore why these two very important channels of discourse may nurture fear rather than understanding,” Shanahan said.

Music: Herbie Mann :: Memphis Underground