Chaos Program

I had a slightly weird encounter yesterday with Google Social Search. This is a beta product (which in Google-land doesn’t really mean anything) that shows you results from your search that are found via your “social circle.” I ran a search and noticed this new and unusual thing at the bottom of the first page of results.

At first, I thought it was amusing. Then I thought it was creepy. Then I decided it was just annoying. Let’s examine the meaning of this service by going through each of these points in turn.

Amusing: My search was a catch all for material on an academic subject. It doesn’t matter which one. School’s out but I’ve been gong to school so long, sometimes my brain just gets in that mode. I had already tried searching Google Scholar and found some interesting stuff, and a lot of other stuff that I could not afford to buy. The ridiculous price of so many scholarly and scientific publications is a pet peeve of mine (I don’t mind them making a buck. I just mind that they jack up the prices so high that published research is effectively hidden from most of the world, especially me). So since I didn’t have hundreds of dollars to shell out for a very few articles that might or might not be relevant, I decided to broaden the search and see what regular Google would bring up.

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The big tech story of the week is the one about Google making people mad with it’s new “Buzz” service. The most interesting aspect of this story is that everyone seems to have gotten it wrong.

Here’s the short version of the story: Google has some new social media application that makes all your email contacts into “friends” in the social networking sense and a lot of people objected to that, claiming that email contacts should be kept private, not advertised to the world as a friends list. This is stupid on so many levels – Google, their users, all the “analysts” – it’s hard to know where to start. So I’ll start at the beginning as far as I knew it.

The other morning, as I do most mornings, I brought up my gmail account and glanced to see if there was anything new. There was some kind of banner or thing about something called “Buzz.” I immediately thought “Hmm. Could this be a whack at Yahoo’s boring Buzz bookmarking service?” But no. I saw that my boss had already been there and made a comment. I also saw that to reply to his comment I had to create a “profile” that would make all of my email contacts into friends who I could then get Buzzy with, or some such thing.

I decided not to create the profile because I don’t use my gmail account for general email purposes. I have a yahoo account for that. My gmail account is mostly for poetry and other writing. I use it to communicate with the members of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, a lot of editors and a few close friends and family. It’s the kind of account – intentionally – receives the kind of joke emails that people forward all the time. In other words, while it’s a public address, I tend to use it for more private purposes.

Weirdly, Buzz shows that I have 6 followers, including 4 who do not have public profiles – which I also do not have. How do you follow someone who does not have a profile to follow? And if you don’t have a profile, how is it possible to follow someone else without a profile? What the hell is going on here? read more »

Two unrelated things clicked in my head today as actually being related on a theoretical level. Thing one I spent some time the other day looking over the websites of some potential vendors. I’ve done this sort of thing lots of times before. As per usual, I was unimpressed by the websites themselves (which may or may not say much about the company itself). Thing two: Someone cracked the algorithm for cell phone signal encryption (really a sort of hiding) to the internet. Both these things show the conflict between the old industrial era way of doing things (let’s call it web 0.5) and the newer Twitter-ified way of doing things (web X.0). It tells us a lot about the changing generations and the growing struggles of the information age.

After that slightly pompous lead in, it’s tempting to just stop but I’ll add some detail, starting with the cell phone encryption code, which is a pretty big deal news-wise. The biggest weakness of cell phone security – and it’s a very big weakness – is that, in order to work, cells broadcast their signal in all directions at once. It’s not like the old fashioned landline phones that send their signal down a wire. In order to intercept the signal of one of those old phones, you have to tap the physical wire. In order to intercept a broadcast signal, on the other hand, you just need to be within range with the right equipment.

For a couple decades now, most cell phones have attempted to evade broadcast interception by (somewhat) randomly changing frequency multiple times during every transmission. That way it’s very hard to intercept more than a single tiny portion of the signal, hopefully too tiny a portion to make sense out of the message. The flaw in this scheme is that for the message to be received, the other end (the cell tower) must be able to follow all the frequency hops and put the complete transmission back together. So both ends need to be synchronized. True randomness is impossible.
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A few years ago when I took a course in web development, I had an assignment to survey a number of different websites all from the same industry. Since I worked for a newspaper at the time, I chose the newspaper industry. After spending many hours on this assignment, my conclusion was that the newspaper industry was completely devoid of creativity or any thought, whatsoever, about the needs of the consumer. I found the web pages for all the different papers to be essentially the same, offering the same news in the same format, with the same crappy navigation system using the same old web 1.0 (or maybe 0.8) technology.

Since then, we have had a few years for web technology to develop and for companies to learn the ropes of the new system. For the most part, though, newspaper web sites haven’t improved beyond adding some video and maybe a search function. Circulations are down, advertising is way down but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of creativity going toward finding solutions.

Or does there?

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Not long ago when there was a rumor that IBM might by Sun Microsystems (see All the Failure Money Can Buy) I gave the opinion that this was a bad thing that IBM should not pursue. IBM didn’t pursue it and life went on.

Now today we have the news that a deal has been reached for Oracle to buy Sun instead (Oracle To Buy Sun For Approximately $7.4 Billion – Hold On To Your Hats). So the question is, is this as bad for Oracle as it would have been for IBM? Short answer: Not as bad, though still not great. Most of my reasons for thinking Sun was a bad buy for IBM apply to anyone who would buy Sun. I just don’t believe Sun has much of a future.

Weirdly, Sun claims that Java is an incredibly important part of the purchase. If I had any stock in Oracle, I’d sell it on the strength of that pronouncement alone (but I’m poor. I don’t own stock in anything, thank God). There is another aspect of the purchase that has to be taken into consideration, however. It’s called Mysql.

Mysql is a (mostly) free database package that comes included with most Linux installs and runs a ridiculously large percentage of Internet websites and applications. Sun bought Mysql a little over a year ago for $1 billion (Sun to Acquire Mysql). That’s right: They paid a billion dollars for a (mostly) free product. Shortly thereafter they started looking for somebody to buy the whole company because they were losing ground fast. Can we say, “Oops?”

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A random roundup is what happens when I’m so busy (or lazy, or disorganized) that I start a number of blog posts over a period of several days, but never seem to finish or post any of them. So instead, I slam them together into one big one and pretend like I’m being conscientious. The latest crop includes some notes about Twitter, Facebook, Roadrunner and my old employer the Democrat & Chronicle.

Twitter is bad for you

In other news – if you can call it that – Twitter makes us less moral. Really. Scientists said so (Can Twitter Make You Amoral? Rapid-fire Media May Confuse Your Moral Compass). Apparently, someone thinks that the stream of consciousness that characterizes much Twitter content is too fast to allow people to reflect on other people’s feelings. Do we need to use more smileys? Can you do smileys on Twitter? Having never used a smiley anywhere, I wouldn’t know. But surely those will make us more moral by putting our feelings out there for others to see, right?

Actually, the research seems to imply that Twitter is not good for teaching morality and that someone brought up on 140 character or less communication may have some deficiencies. So when raising children, remember to talk to them sometimes, not just Tweet at them.
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So there’s a story going around that Time Warner Roadrunner is proposing instituting tiered service in Rochester, NY. The levels would start at $29.95/month for up to 5 GB of data transfer and go up to $54.90/month for 40GB of data. There would also be fees for going over your monthly allotment. More details here and here.

This would directly affect me, so I’m not exactly an unbiased observer. But in an unbiased way, my first thought on seeing this structure was, “Between YouTube, Facebook and online Mah Jong or what have you, who on Earth actually uses a lousy 5 gig?” It may sound like a lot to people who don’t know any better but take it from an old – professional – Computer geek. That one is a red herring. They don’t even mean it seriously.  Ignore it (except possibly to be offended by the mendacity of a company that pretends to be offering a low price option that, in effect, no one can use).

My second thought was that there is no need for tiered service. The infrastructure is there, in place. When a particular user downloads some huge file, there is no one in a control center yelling, “Scotty! We need more power! Hurry or she’s gonna blow!” There is no danger that the pipes are going to burst because there are too many electrons going through them. The system works just as well at a user’s first gigabyte downloaded as their hundredth. Tiered usage is a bookkeeping device, completely unrelated to the stresses and strains on the system.

As I said, this will directly affect me and I’m not happy about it. I work from home more often than not. And I take online classes. I can use a half gig (500 mb, 0.5 gb) in a day without even trying. I can do that without downloading any Linux ISOs or software, or using Internet phone (skype – I’ve thought about it but haven’t tried it yet) or viewing YouTube videos or other streaming media, believe it or not. I know this because I have a bandwidth meter installed on my main computer. I’m just that kind of guy. People who use streaming media are likely to use much more.  And pay more. This is starting to sound like a bad thing, especially in a recession.

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I usually stay away from the popular news of the day but this one was so funny I had to say something about it: IBM in Talks to Buy Sun in Bid to Add to Web Heft (Note: This link keeps coming up with an excerpt and a “subscribe” link, but when I opened it from Google search results it gave me the whole article. Interesting, huh?). The short version of this is that the two companies are in talks and there’s a possible price tag of $6.5 billion.  As of this writing, no actual deal has been announced. They’re just talking. Interestingly, according to the WSJ article, Sun has been looking for a buyer for some months. This makes sense to me since I’ve considered Sun to be doomed for several years.

I’ve worked with Sun’s Solaris operating system quite a bit. I like it. It’s terrifically stable. In fact, the times when it seemed to fail there was always an underlying hardware problem. Sun hardware is pretty good, too. Some of their Sparc stations run practically forever. That said, I don’t see Solaris to be all that much better than Linux and it costs MUCH more (On any hardware. Linux has been ported to everything except my mailbox but it’s not much of a mailbox). The extra cost for Sun just isn’t worth it.

When I worked at the newspaper the editorial software we put in during my first year ran on Solaris 8 on a pair of V880s the size of one of those mini office refrigerators. At the time, that editorial system depended on Oracle for the db and was not available on Linux. It was a powerful, very stable and fabulously expensive system. That editorial software is now available on Linux. It’s still fabulously expensive but the cost of the hardware and the operating system are a fraction of what they used to be.
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Does anybody know if scientific journals are making money lately?

I don’t have any idea. A lot of commercial print information sources are having serious troubles. There are reports, for example, that the San Francisco Chronicle is in deep trouble [http://sfist.com/2009/02/24/sf_chronicle_for_sale.php] and even venerable (if you can imagine that word in this context) Playboy may be up for sale. [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100906383&ft=1&f=1020] I’ve discussed before some of the troubles in journalism in general. But what I’m asking about today concerns the plethora of scientific and technical journals out there that seem to make up a huge industry.

The question came up because I came across a report that the International Journal of Technology Transfer and Commercialisation has a paper in an upcoming issue about how social networking could be used to discover prior art related to patent applications and thereby speed up the review process [http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/02/23/social.patents]. It seems there’s an enormous backlog of patent applications and there isn’t much hope of reducing it with current procedures.
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I was going to do an update to the previous post about schizophrenia today. There have been several interesting findings just since I wrote that post (here). But instead, I found an interesting thread about something else schizophrenic: A story at Techcrunch that has the text of emails about why people left Google  (Why Google Employees Quit).

Google carefully cultivates a reputation for being the best and for hiring the best. On the other hand, they just had a layoff (story here) so, best or not, they still have to function in the same economy as the rest of the world. And apparently with the same lame practices. Full disclosure: I’ve been laid off several times and this has probably contributed to my general lack of respect for business “leaders.” read more »