Why did it take 32 years* for me to realize that Gnip Gnop was Ping Pong spelled backwards? What a racket that game made…
* I got this game for my 10th birthday and played it heavily through much of that year.
As consumers, we’re conflicted. We want the products we purchase to be pristine, untouched by human hands. But the very thing that keeps products perfect on the long trip from Asia is the thing that drives us nuts when we get the product home — the “ubiquitous plastic clamshell, resistant to scissors, razor blades and loud swearing.” Washington Post says consumer frustration with plastic clamshells has reached an all-time high, and that alternatives are finally on the way. This may be the last year we have to fish our items out of the dreaded translucent sarchophagi.
This year, Consumer Reports magazine gave an award for the worst plastic clamshell packaging to a warehouse-store version of a Uniden cordless phone set: It took 9 minutes 22 seconds to unwrap completely and nearly caused injury to the person opening it. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, injuries from plastic packaging resulted in 6,400 visits to emergency rooms in 2004.
The article barely touches the larger issue of the environmental impact of all that plastic, but hints that future packaging may be some kind of cardboard/plastic hybrid. But for me, that begs the question: What percentage of products could be successfully shipped and stocked with no packaging at all? Obviously not everything, but what’s wrong with sticking 100 widgets in a cardboard box with some kind of low-impact filler for padding, and letting us select items au naturelle from a crate, as is common with low-cost items found in your local Chinatown, or like virtually everything at Crate and Barrel?
Yes, theft prevention is also part of the equation, but let’s be creative here. We don’t just need different packaging - we need less packaging. A lot less.
The Packaging hall of shame is a nice idea but a small project. Someone could spin that idea off into a great little dedicated web site, collecting images and descriptions of heinous packaging from around the world.
ComputerWorld reports that spam security firm Postini “spotted 7 billion spam e-mails in November, up from 2.5 billion in June.” And 80% of it is apparently being generated by 200 criminal gangs worldwide. But that’s not the part I found most interesting. Despite common wisdom that anti-spam legislation can’t work, evidence to the contrary:
She pointed to the Netherlands as an example of how the current legal regime can be used to cut spam. Holland’s spam-busting unit, known by the initials OPTA, has just five full-time staff and $747,000 worth of equipment, but it has succeeded in cutting spam by 85 percent … Finland was also singled out for praise. A filtering system there has cut the amount of spam to 30 percent of all e-mail, from 80 percent two years ago.
Of course there’s more to this than mere laws, which have no teeth against untrackable crime rings. To make that kind of dent, you basically need to firewall a country — to encircle it with spam filtering hardware. And that kind of government intervention in the “free” internet sounds spookily similar to the Great Firewall of China. Kind of the difference between a benevolent dictator and fascism, I suppose. I might be inclined to go with the benevolent dictator in this case.
Technorati Tags: spam
Posted last year about the re-launch of UbuWeb, a 100% free repository of avant-garde and conceptual audio and video — concrete poetry, experimental sound works, obscure video. Now the site has “converted all of its rare and out-of-print film & video holdings to on-demand streaming formats a la YouTube … We offer over 300 films & videos from artists such as Vito Acconci, Pipilotti Rist, Jean Genet, The Cinema of Transgression, Richard Foreman, Shuji Terayama, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneeman, John Lennon and hundreds more.”
Unfortunately they don’t offer an “embed this video” option like YouTube does, but no matter - UbuWeb is performing an incredible service by presenting the content. Not all of it is great, but all of it is appreciated.
Thanks Jan Fex
Russel Davies has created a mini-primer called How To Be Interesting — a list based on two assumptions: 1) The way to be interesting is to be interested, and 2) Interesting people are good at sharing. The title is tongue-in-cheek of course, but some of the suggestions are good — carry a camera with you at all times and post one photo per day, try things you’ve never tried before (often), pay attention to art, interview one person per month, make things (”Making’s the new thinking.”)
4. Every week, read a magazine you’ve never read before. Interesting people are interested in all sorts of things. That means they explore all kinds of worlds, they go places they wouldn’t expect to like and work out what’s good and interesting there. An easy way to do this is with magazines. Specialist magazines let you explore the solar system of human activities from your armchair. Try it, it’s fantastic.
I think the sharing recommendations are great - sharing is the open source of human endeavor. And the more you take in, the more interesting what you have to share will be. I personally feel this tension — like I’ve become less interesting over the past few years as my available time to consume information about things not directly related to my work has slipped toward a vanishing point.
Back when I worked at Ziff-Davis in Boston, a multimedia developer named David Drucker provided my first introduction to the Macintosh (an introduction I resisted, though his predictions that I would someday become a Mac-head ultimately proved true).
When Bush won re-election in 2004, Drucker and his wife did something many liberals talked about doing, but that few actually followed through on - they up and moved to Canada. Today, the LA Times has published a brief piece by Drucker on whether their commitment to Canada has changed now that Democrats are back: Dems in control? We’re still staying in Canada, wherein he marvels at the fact that Canada’s “conservative” prime minister Steven Harper recently referred to a new “holistic” approach to environmental policy. Imagine anyone from the Bush administration using the term “holistic” with anything but sarcasm.
We’ve come to the conclusion that the United States has drifted so far to the right that any self-respecting Canadian Conservative would be considered a raving liberal in Washington.
If graffiti is a crime, what about cleaning? What if you clean selectively, removing only the bits that don’t make art? placeboKatz:
Alexandre Orion is cleaning São Paulo’s tunnels by scraping the deposited vehicle exhaust soot from the walls to make hundreds of sculls. Even so police turned up several times they couldn’t do much as cleaning is no crime. After some time the São Paulo municipal started their own cleaning mission, consequently only cleaning the parts already cleaned by Alexandre. Again the skulls appeared on the remaining soot canvas and this time the city decided to clean all tunnels.
More images, and an interesting bit on our glib acceptance of living amidst our own pollution, at the artists’ site.
Just had what I thought was going to be a miserable experience: Had typed a lengthy response to a blog posting but was not quite finished. In the background, the Microsoft Office updater popped up, so I accepted its recommendation to update. Entered my password and it responded with “Looking for programs to update.” Spinning pinwheel of death. But not just for the updater — the entire system was locked. Could not force quit anything, could not even ssh in to kill the process. 10th Avenue Freeze-Out.
Finally accepted that my response-in-progress was lost for good and hard-booted the machine. When it came back up, Firefox asked whether I wanted to restore the previous session. Said yes, and up came all previously open tabs, including the site I had been typing the lengthy comment into, with — yow! — all of my unsaved words totally intact in the comment field, ready to resume. After a hard boot. Auto-save comes to the read/write web.
So here’s my Thanksgiving geek shout-out to everyone who has ever contributed to the Firefox codebase. You guys rock.
Seems like you can’t shake a stick lately without stumbling on a discussion about “the new atheism.” Kids’ birthday parties, water cooler conversations at work, barbershop, discussion lists. Sparked by the release of new books by Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett, all of a sudden it’s OK to talk about atheism. We’ve had some great conversations here recently on the subject, but it seems like the topic is bottomless.
In a recent Wired cover story, the state of modern atheism was compared to that of homosexuality slowly emerging from the closet a few decades ago. When pressed, many people who publicly claim agnosticism turn out actually to be atheists afraid of offending the present company. Because to declare yourself an atheist is to say “All that stuff that means more to you than anything, that belief system you hinge your life upon? I reject it entirely.” In other words, it’s not polite to declare yourself an atheist. That’s what the “new atheists” want us to move beyond.
Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, does an amazing job in this BBC interview of summarizing the views of contemporary atheism in ten minutes. Dawkins is extraordinarily well-spoken and charming, though some theists will no doubt find him strident.
Dawkins also has a great essay up on Yahoo: Why There Almost Certainly Is No God. Also worth listening to him describe the stunning predictive capacity of quantum theory to a Christian. If you’ve got an hour to spare, catch NPR’s interview with Dawkins. I found it fascinating and illuminating; a friend found it annoying.
iSquub is struggling with the paradox of feeling agnostic but agreeing with Dawkins’ line of reason:
Still, to me the most gripping part of this discussion keeps boiling down to that one thing: why is he an atheist, and I an agnostic? Why do I care? The god I’m agnostic about makes no perceivable difference in my life, yet I get frustrated when Dawkins uses what is pretty much an identical chain of reasoning to the one I use but suddenly leaps to an entirely different conclusion.
My take is that, for many of us, this is not a matter of being committed to agnosticism, but rather of not being prepared to make a positive statement that it’s insensible to base our personal or political lives on what amounts to myths. When quantuum theory can make predictions about our world with breath-taking accuracy while the story of the Trinity can make none, what are we waiting for? As Harris says, in no other field of human endeavor are we so willing to accept with indifference the possibility that an outrageous claim might have merit (as agnostics are). We’ve accepted agnosticism as safe and non-committal. It’s not impolite to be an agnostic, and agnosticism allows us to walk on the razor’s edge. Why not stand up and say “Fairies aren’t real?”
Perhaps agnosticism is just a “well, maybe” sort of allowance that we give. An allowance we would not allow in any other field of discourse when evidence is shaky.
Lighter side: Dawkins on Colbert. And Salon.com recently called Dawkins one of the sexiest men alive. On the other side, Francis Collins’ The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief promises to present equally convincing reason in the opposite direction. I’m interested.
I was going to link to Dawkins’ interview with fallen angel Ted Haggert, but YouTube has “Removed the content at the copyright holder’s request.”
Oh, and Daniel Dennett recently had a brush with death (to which he says “Thank goodness!”)
Posted back in 2004 about the almost inconceivably large earth muncher, Bagger 288 (technically a “bucket wheel excavator”). Here’s what happens when a stray bulldozer wanders into Bagger’s path:
No info there on whether a driver might have been in the bulldozer at the time. More pix at thrillingwonder.
Information Architects Japan: The Interface of a Cheeseburger, on how Interface = Brand. On how you can have a bad, ugly product and still be successful if you have a great UI. On why the iPod’s logo is on the back of the device, not the front.
The cheeseburger has the easiest food interface one could think of. No forks, no knives, no spoons, no plates, no chopsticks. Like a sandwich, but softer and sweeter and above all: Standardized. No alarms and no surprises when eating a cheeseburger. Almost as simple as “the only intuitive interface” - the nipple. Sandwiches can be complicated at times.
Miles and I lucked out today and discovered that the Cal Outdoor Club at the Berkeley Marina had public kayak rentals for the last day of the season. Absolutely perfect weather. Thought he’d get bored, but he was way into it. Spent an hour paddling around the Marina and ventured into SF Bay, then went under a long pier where we got to watch a 3-ft. leopard shark get pulled out of the water right in front of us by a fisherman up on the pier above. Wonderful vantage point to witness nature struggling with man.
After an hour, I asked, “Miles, should we go back to the dock or should I keep paddling?” Miles answered “I’m going to lay down on my back [and he did, gazing up at the sky]. Everything I see in the whole world is blue! You keep paddling, daddy.”
Afterwards we went to the Adventure Playground, across the street - a park that the kids themselves get to build and paint - all scrap wood and old pianos and boats and bicycle parts, etc. If you’ve never seen a two year old wielding a hacksaw, you ain’t lived. More on adventure playgrounds.
Check Miles throwing down some way out skronk jazz, doing the Cecil Taylor thing on an abandoned piano. The sign reads “Do not hammer, stand, or paint on the piano!” (other pianos there are hammerable and paintable). Forgot to set the white balance on the camera so these came out all blue. Did my best to correct them, but they’re a bit noisy now. At home he was gazing out the living room window as the sun went down. “Already? I don’t want this day to end!”
“There has been a 67 percent increase in overall spam volume and a 500 percent increase in image spam since Aug. 2006.”
Illuminating (but seriously depressing) series of articles at eWEEK on botnets — arrays of 0wnz0r3d Windows computers assembled under the control of sophisticated “bot herders,” silently pumping every orifice of the interweb full of spam in all its forms. The virus that makes a machine part of a botnet does not cause harm to its host - like all successful viruses, it wants to assure its own survival. Amazingly, the latest generation of botnet software even installs antivirus software (a pirated copy of Kaspersky Anti-Virus, to be specific) to eradicate competing malware, so it can have the full resources of the infected host to itself.
For a while, it looked like botnet activity was shrinking, but lately it’s seen a huge uptick. vnunet reports that a million-bot botnet is quietly being assembled around the world, and that we’ll soon see an even more massive onslaught of phishing and spam attacks.
The sophistication of these systems is amazing — the botnets even come with their own self-contained DNS system. “This allows a bot herder to dynamically change IP addresses without changing a DNS record or the hosting—and constant moving around—of phishing Web sites on bot computers.”
So can’t botnet hunters just focus on nailing the central command and control machines? Nope - that’s the “beauty” of using a peer-to-peer model:
Control is still maintained by a central server, but in case the control server is shut down, the spammer can update the rest of the peers with the location of a new control server, as long as he/she controls at least one peer.
One of the many factors that makes fighting back so hard is that infected bots expect incoming commands to be digitally signed. Commands from the bot herders to members of the botnet are securely encrypted, and virtually impossible to decipher or reverse-engineer.
The sophistication of modern spammers is impressive on so many levels. Image spam (e.g. Viagra ads that appear as graphics rather than text) has been especially vexing lately, as it seems to elude all filters. Since almost all anti-spam mechanisms — even collaborative ones like Akismet — rely to some extent on the ability to deduce unique “signatures” from a message, every single image sent by machines on a botnet has slightly different dimensions and characteristics, making it nearly impossible to nail down. I’ve even noticed random graphical noise splattered in the background of image spam lately - which prevents any two images from producing identical signatures.
I think I was wrong when I said recently that my IP firewalling script was becoming less effective because spammers had learned to spoof IPs. I believe now that the problem is that the botnets are so widely distributed that the same IPs don’t come up with enough repetition to be useful. Rather than spam spewing from a volcano somewhere in the Ukraine for a few days, it’s now more like a steady mist that suffuses the atmosphere - an endless acid rain emanating from everywhere at once.
What amazes me is that articles like this never seem to point out the obvious: The botnets are comprised entirely of Windows machines. There are currently approximately 5.7 million infected Windows computers out there, ready and able to join a botnet at any time. If I were the sysadmin of a Windows network, this would be significant information to me. It’s not that OS X or Linux are theoretically incapable of this kind of takeover, but the plain reality is that it doesn’t happen. And yet, articles like this never make a recommendation that admins consider a platform shift. Why?
Sadly, experts are starting to feel hopeless about their prospects of staying in front of the game.
We’ve known about [the threat from] botnets for a few years, but we’re only now figuring out how they really work, and I’m afraid we might be two to three years behind in terms of response mechanisms,” said Marcus Sachs, a deputy director in the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International, in Arlington, Va.
Amazon is having serious issues with spam, as is del.icio.us. Of course one would expect large services to be constantly hammered with spam, but if the largest and best-funded commercial entities on the web can’t keep spam off their public doorsteps, you know things are getting serious out there.
It’s becoming increasingly popular for admins to block entire nations, either at the apache or at the firewall level. I’ve been tempted to do the same myself, but haven’t. Yet.
All of this applies to the interactive aspect of the web as much as it does to email. I deal with it on wikis, discussion boards, blogs, and apache logs (referrer spam). In recent months, I’ve seen them stuffing personal contact forms, and even the public jobs database at the j-school (which is absurd, since no job ever gets published without human review, but that doesn’t stop them from trying). Amidst all the Web 2.0 talk of participatory journalism, the wisdom of crowds, the read/write web, and two-way communication, it’s those very features that are being exploited by spammers and the massive botnets.
I worry that the openness that made the internet possible will ultimately become the sword upon which it impales itself. I see a future where everything is so locked down that all of the fun participatory stuff becomes impossibly difficult. I worry that someday email will only be feasible with whitelisting, that registration with identity verification will be required for all participatory web features, and that the concept of anonymity will ultimately become untenable.
Compare the atmosphere of the internet to the ecology of the earth. It took us millions of years to get to industrial civilization, then just a few decades to pollute our environment to the brink of sustainability. I worry that the internet is following a similar course - 30 years to become mainstream and five years to become so polluted it’s unusable.
Thanks Mal
Back in 2001, I had some fun with Leonard Nimoy’s monologue Visit To a Sad Planet by shooting a series of overly literal scenes illustrating the piece, and editing them in Adamation’s personalStudio for BeOS. Decided tonight to put it up on YouTube, just because I could, and to see if gets any traction.
A higher-resolution version is at the original Sad Planet page, which describes a bit of the shooting process.
The process of getting images out of your camera and onto Flickr is completely different from the process of getting your videos onto YouTube. How do you decide what to store at MySpace or Friendster and what to store on the personal web space provided by your ISP? For many users, these are difficult decisions and even harder tasks - huge barriers to entry for big chunks of the population. David Kushner for Spectrum: “The mess of the Web, in other words, leaves you trapped in one big tangle of actions, service providers, and applications.”
IEEE Spectrum profiles Firefox creator Blake Ross, and describes his latest project, an open source, web-based, personal and/or shared desktop called Parakey, which aims to provide a unified desktop on the web — one that other people can visit, and one that lets you decide what content to share and what to keep private. Parakey will communicate with your home computer, keeping all the right stuff in sync. One step closer to that holy grail of an entire Web-based OS.
Right now, the Parakey front door is devoid of content or clues. But if Parakey take-up turns out to be anything like Firefox adoption (”People are switching to Firefox at the rate of 7 million per month”) things are going to get interesting.
Came home to one of Miles’ excellent “projects” tonight. His description:
“The ghost took the princess’ hat and then she waked up in the morning and she was going to feed her cat but she had no cat because the ghost took it and he took it to a blue mountain and then all the knights hurried to the mountain and then they climbed up it and this knight stabbed the ghost and then one of the ghosts put the kitty in his hat and the kitty had arrived in his hat to the princess’ home and then they all had a celebration for saving her cat.”
Flash back to the cassette tax of the 80s, when labels assumed that the vast majority of blank cassettes would be purchased to pirate music, and were able to push legislation forcing cassette manufacturers to share proceeds with the labels. Now flash forward to the present:
Universal Music Group refused to license its music to the Zune unless it could receive a percentage of each device sold, in addition to standard music licensing fees for downloads and subscriptions. “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it,” UMG chairman/CEO Doug Morris says. “So it’s time to get paid for it.”
In practical or percentage terms, UMG is not entirely wrong - of course most iPods carry pirated content. It’s the presumption of guilt that galls me. In addition to pirated content, iPods/Zunes etc. also carry a huge honkin’ ton of A) Music ripped from people’s own CD collections, B) Music purchased from services like eMusic, iTMS, Rhapsody, etc., C) Podcasts, D) Music provided for free download by bands on MySpace etc. In fact, I’d wager that a much higher percentage of content on the average iPod is legitimate than was on the average cassette tape.
Taken as a whole, that’s a helluva lot of legitimate content, and a whole lot of people being tarred/taxed unfairly with the “pirate” flag.
The night the Amiga was introduced to the world, Andy Warhol used one to paint a portrait of Debbie Harry, like only Warhol could. In the months that followed, Warhol acquired a bunch of Amigas, and used them to create what is/was probably the first digital art film. Never released, You Are The One had been, until recently, only rumored to exist. Artdaily:
Long believed lost, this short masterpiece (20 painted frames) was reconstructed by Arnie Friedhoff and his team at ITN on a retro-fitted Mac G5 and reunited with what is believed to be its original soundtrack (also discovered on another floppy disk marked in Warhol’s familiar scrawl “soundtracks for imaginary movies, i.e., you are the one”. Now, after five years of painstaking archival reconstruction, YOU ARE THE ONE is being debuted for the first time anywhere at the Museum of New Art (MONA).
“However, due to threatened legal action tied to estate disputes and to its pending seizure, the museum will only be allowed a one day screening of the film.”
Thanks Mal
Just finished watching the 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, which has left me feeling both limp and elated. Johnson is a manic depressive singer/songwriter with delusions of grandeur, who has grappled with downward spirals and dangerous encounters throughout his life. His songs are simple and raw, but emotionally complex, sometimes naive, sometimes overflowing with religious fervor, the purest of love (mostly for a girl he was obsessed with 20 years ago). Every song in his catalog of 20+ cassettes is absolutely raw. His drawings and cartoons are as strange and amazing as his music.
In the mid-80s, Johnston became a favorite of the alt-rock scene, and he worked (loosely) with Sonic Youth, Half Japanese’s Jad Fair, Yo La Tengo, Mike Watt, and others. His involvement with the Butthole Surfers ended strangely after the already tottering Johnston ingested LSD at a Surfers show and met the devil head-on. It’s implied that the trip sparked his religious obsessiveness, and that he never quite recovered (Gibby Haynes is interviewed for the film while having his teeth drilled by a dentist). Later in the film, Johnston refuses a bountiful recording contract with Atlantic Records because Metallica is also on the label, and Johnston is convinced the band will beat him up.
In an interview with his parents, Johnston’s father describes how his reading of a Casper the Friendly Ghost comic book led to him taking over their self-piloted airplane and crashing them into the woods. They barely escaped with their lives, but in Daniel’s mind, they became heroes in the Lord’s service. It’s all so fragile and frightening and weird.
Johnston has filmed and taped obsessively since he was very young, and the documentary milks the resulting library of self-recorded material in such a way that you feel incredibly close to his life - and his life’s work.
All of Johnston’s self-released cassettes are available on eMusic.
The Daniel Johnson mural on Guadalupe in Austin, TX. Click for larger version.
I wannabe like Paris Hilton! No, wait - I wannabe like Tom Cruise. No, wait… I wannabe a wannabe. A new site called like.com (not linking because I don’t feel like lending them the Google juice) features pictures of celebrities with their shoes, watches, handbags, etc. highlighted. Click the highlighted region and the site instantly shows you where to buy the items your heroes are wearing. So you can be like them. Because that’s all it takes, right? If only I had the right watch, I’d be more like Diddy.
This whole thing just reeks to me. As if the whole culture of celebrity isn’t odious enough all by itself, now we need help from sophisticated image recognition technology to sell it back to us a second time. Ewww.
Yahoo! news correspondent and backpack journalist Kevin Sites will be speaking at the J-School Thursday night, and I’ll be webcasting the event. Watch it here, 7pm pacific time.
Sites has spent the past five years covering global war and disaster for several national networks. Sites helped pioneer solo journalism, working completely alone, traveling, and reporting without a crew. As a solo journalist (”SoJo”), Sites carries a backpack of portable digital technology to shoot, write, edit, and transmit multimedia reports.
Check out his reflections on his first year in the “hot zone,” covering every major global conflict. The talk should be fascinating.
Miles:
If King Kong was as big as a crystal, he would use an ant for a telephone and his best friend would be a banana slug and a beetle and a ant and he would use a banana slug for a car and he would be able to carry a ant and he would read a banana slug.
Fun fact, from the Wikipedia entry for Gerrymander:
The word “gerrymander” is named for the American politician Elbridge Gerry (July 17, 1744 – November 23, 1814), and is a combination of his name and the word “salamander,” which was used to describe the appearance of a tortuous electoral district Gerry created in order to disadvantage his electoral opponents.
So… when is redistricting going to be put into the hands of an independent body, rather than incumbent legislators? Why is it even legal?
J-School students are reporting on local and national contests, with full Election Day coverage planned for today and tonight. “Currently featuring advance election stories and Special Projects examining the strange life and colorful times of Bonds and Propositions, and the changing look of California’s voters.”
It’s going to be another late night — I’ll be here long after the polls close, helping to get emerging coverage onto the web. I remember going home at midnight two years ago after our coverage ran down. Bush had just been re-elected, and I was so depressed I got drunk and bought Emerson Lake and Palmer albums at iTMS to drown the sorrow. No idea what compelled me to do that, since I don’t really like ELP much. Probably just punishing myself. Happy to say I don’t expect tonight to end the same way.
