Chaos Program

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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I read a few articles this week about the 60th anniversary of the George Orwell novel 1984 (including this interesting one at National Review Online) and one thing that struck me is that very few literary works get reviewed 60 years after their publication. Even fewer good ones get reviewed/taught/discussed 60 years later. Everybody knows at least a little about 1984, even those of us who have not yet read it (In school, I was in the class that was assigned Animal Farm instead. Interesting book. Hated the pigs).

But this is not a review of 1984. That would be silly since I just admitted I haven’t read it! But it seems I should. Traditionally, reading has been seen as a way of passing on culture – not the kind of culture that causes people to donate money to the opera or spend time at museums but the kind that shapes the way people think. That’s why an old fashioned Classical Education valued Socrates and Thomas Aquinas among others. Agree with them or not, these were smart people and excellent teachers.

Well, that’s the official story, anyway.
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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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I ran across an interesting internet hoax yesterday. Apparently, a number of people believed the announcement that Twitter was going to start offering special accounts – for a fee – that would allow both more than the usual 140 character limit on posts and would, apparently, randomly force people to follow these special pay accounts. (For the record, no, I’m not one of the people who fell for it. Really. You believe me don’t you?). See Twitterville Falls For Premium Accounts Hoax for more information.

Poor Twitter. People are making fun of their business model just because they don’t have one!

Let’s just take it as stipulated that Twitter is cool. That’s one of the reasons it gets targeted for silly jokes like that. If you don’t even know what Twitter is, you’re not cool. Sorry. That’s life. Look at The Infection Meme and Twitter to broaden your education. More importantly, it sometimes has value, though not always where you think. And I don’t just mean this: Ohio Cops Use Twitter to Talk to Residents.

One feature of Twitter (apparently not entirely planned by the creators) is the ability to tag posts for subject matter and search on those tags, so that you see what the whole world is saying about a subject, not just the people you personally follow. During the final episode of Battlestar Galactica I posted several items with the tag #BSG, to show that I was talking about BSG. See how it works?
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Where I make snide – I mean informative – comments about stuff that caught my attention, instead of the usual long-winded ranting. I’ve been thinking about this for a while because often I see something, think of a paragraph or two, then get bored and wander away. But maybe sometimes a paragraph or two is enough! First up:

New Test For Detecting Fake Organic Milk

I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this one. You mean there’s a problem with knock-offs of organic milk? Of course there is! Damn that supply and demand! People are willing to pay extra for a product they can’t identify, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when there are distortions in the market. That’s what art fraud is all about, after all. Tell a collector you’ve discovered a brand new Vermeer, then sit back and watch the bucks roll in because even the experts can’t tell the difference! (It happened during World War 2. See The Forger’s Spell)

Here’s a thought: If you can’t tell the difference, then maybe it’s not worth the extra money.  (The milk, anyway. The fake Vermeer’s in the book I referenced were terrible. The experts were idiots, which is a lesson we’ll go into at great length some other time)
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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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