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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At the beginning of the movie The Longest Day, the Germans have broken an important code the Allies use to communicate with the French Resistance. At least they think they have. They believe that when a line from a particular poem is read on the radio, it will be the signal that the invasion of France (D-Day) is imminent. They don’t know what the French resistance fighters are supposed to do about it, where it will happen or much of anything else, but they will at least know the time with possibly as much as several hours of warning.

It’s possible that the message carries information about specific assignments or even where to find further instructions. The movie (one of those rare masterpieces, by the way, that may be more interesting just to listen to, than to watch) does not go into detail about the communications network that put these codes in place, or the people who were imprisoned, tortured or murdered by the Gestapo to find ways to weld the scattered cells into a guerilla army that could be set in motion so well at the required time.

That brief scene, though, and others, such as the one where resistance members hear the coded signal, should help teach us something that’s been missing from the commentary about the really interesting role of Twitter in the protests in Iran this week. That lesson is that spontaneous revolutions are not just uncommon, they are almost impossible in a modern police state.
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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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We commonly refer to computer programs that spread and cause trouble in terms of diseases; we call them viruses and we say that a computer that has one is infected. Lots of things spread, though. Butter. Ideas. Economic downturns. Clouds of nerve gas. But there are a more limited number of things that spread between people.

Twitter had a problem today. Not just today but that’s when it seemed to come to a head. (If you don’t know Twitter, all you need to know is that

Twitter without Don't Click

people send very short messages that will be seen by their friends who “follow” their posts, or by anyone who looks at the stream of all posts. More on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter). This was both hilarious and disturbing. Hopefully that’s not a comment on life, the Internet, or Twitter itself.

What happened was that Twitter was hit by a piece of program code that used a simple social engineering trick to fool people into activating it, so it could reproduce. It showed a link that said “Don’t click this link.” Of course people did click the link, allowing the code to insert itself into their feed, where all their followers would see it – and passive-aggressively do what they knew they shouldn’t and replicate the link still farther.
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