Prescient – “The End of Practical Obscurity” (dated 21/05/2003)
Further evidence supporting the idea that Apple is planning to cut the legs out from underneath Google.
Discussion: Students and professional developers take on the “skill shortage” in the IT sector (Boards.ie). Mark Dennehy’s take.
Somewhat prescient, somewhat wacky – What the future looked like in 1993 (video)
Novel usage of Twitter data – http://sleepingtime.org – find out Twitter users’ sleeping patterns.
In the same minute that I pressed “publish” on this blog entry, it was downloaded by search engines, chopped up into keywords and indexed for the world to find. It was downloaded into RSS readers. If it were something significant or vaguely interesting to someone, it might be copied to another blog, a forum, linked to or printed out. A wandering spambot will likely download it, scan it, and attempt to insert a comment promoting some sort of pharmaceuticals. It might also be used by that spambot in an attempt to stuff another fraudulent website with “real content” in order to boost that websites search engine ranking.
Knowing all this, I still pressed that button. But how many others would hesitate doing the same if they knew this? When it comes to self-published blogs, it’s quite likely many authors do know this – at least on some level. They may not understand the full ramifications, but they likely have a reasonable grasp of the situation. If you’re a professional web developer or work in the online industry you are likely aware of all of this. What of the majority of Internet users though? What of the Facebook or Bebo users?
The title of this post is inspired by a phrase from the world of security engineering, “security by obscurity,” which describes a system secured by an outsiders lack of knowledge/understanding of the design or implementation of the security system. Privacy by obscurity then, could be defined as the belief that information is under control where it is in fact, not.
Security through “obscurity” is effectively a social deterrant to crime; a locked door or closed window won’t stop a determined thief. Online privacy would be the same – if the house had no doors, windows, or walls.
People have a fuzzy, stratified concept of privacy. There are things that you will tell one friend that you wouldn’t tell another, or things you might share with your siblings that you might not with your parents, etc. The stratification is broad, multidimensional and different for each person. It changes between each data point in a particular block of information, per person, over time.
For example – Bob goes out to a nightclub on Wednesday and meets Sally. He has a few drinks and smokes a couple of cigarettes. A friend takes a polaroid photo of Bob and Sally dancing; Bob goes home at 2am feeling a bit ill due to some dodgey pints.
Bob’s friends want to know what he was up to on Wednesday, and as it was perfectly innocuous, he’s probably happy to tell most of them; however, some considerations:
This is only a short example, but hopefully it illustrates that this block of information does not fit what most people would like broadcast about them on the nine o’clock news (if in the imaginary situation that Bob suddenly received a lot of attention), nor is it exactly deeply personal.
However, it is also technically possible that one of Bob’s friends will inadvertently tell Bob’s mother that he smokes, or that the polaroid will be shown to Joe at some point. The idea that “unencrypted” information can be confined to the specific target audience of the person involved is flawed. In real life, we’re used to judging the probability of this bleeding of information because the number of data points (the polaroid, the fact Bob smoked) and nodes (Bob’s friends) are small enough for us to naturally calculate the risk.
The problem occurs with the Internet because the data points are infinitely replicable at zero cost (copying a photo to your hard drive, or to your Facebook profile is trivial and takes virtually no time at all – in many cases even this is automated). The network effect of Internet technologies also means that each node is massively more connected than before (everyone you know is probably listed as a “friend” on your social networking profiles regardless of your relationship to them).
The low cost of replication and the network effect quickly eradicate this flimsy stratification, treating it as an error, and reduces our personal stratification of information control to its simple, boolean reality – private, or public. Like heat increases the rate of chemical interactions by increasing the rate at which molecules collide, the Internet increases the rate at which data points collide with nodes.
This is not an entirely new concept, however. From the emergence of language to the invention of the printing press, ways of disseminating information faster and more easily have paved the way for light to be shone into the dark recesses of ignorance and secrecy. Sharing of information is literally the cornerstone of civilization – it’s one of the major behavioural traits that set us apart from the animal kingdom.
Much like the printing press, the Internet has catapulted us into a new and ever changing revolution in the way we see ourselves, each other and the world around us.
With this understanding, comes the inevitable realization that information can really only be reliably defined in one of two fundamental ways:
Public is where the majority a person’s online information falls into (intentionally or not). There are a lot of people for whom what they consider private information actually falls very much into the public sphere, through simple lack of understanding of the Internet.
Whoever falls within your circle of trust now may not do so in future – relationships of all kinds can change over time. Conversely, due to the persistent and transferrable nature of bits, a copy of a given piece information is just as good as the original, just as transferrable, and importantly, eternally subject to the whims of whomever has access to that copy.
If you’re not routinely conscious of your personal information, this proposition should, to put it mildly, alarm you. Never in the history of humanity has so much information about people been willingly offered up. This information is being regularly scoured by farms of automated bots owned by criminals looking for information on how best to scam you. It’s also being regularly scoured by “legitimate” marketing agencies who want to find ways to make you buy their tat, as well as find ways to prevent you from talking about poor experiences with them or their clients. The more online services you use, the less anonymous you are.
There is an argument that people should stand over what they say and do online. Maybe they should think before going on a wild rant against a company they had a poor experience with. Maybe they shouldn’t publicize how they’re giving work the runaround by taking sick days and going on holiday. Maybe they shouldn’t fill out personality tests or give their email login details to “help” them find more “friends”. I agree, to an extent. People need to think before they share, but to do so they need to understand what they’re doing in the first place.
This tearing down of percieved walls may be something we’re going to have to come to terms with if we wish to live in a more connected society. We may be able to prolong the illusion of information siloing, but the longer it continues, the higher the risk to each of us and the higher the reward for those who exploit it.
Maybe we will decide the illusion is worth it, as each of us operating online as though we were a celebrity, endlessly pruning our public image, may have conseuqences we’re not prepared to accept. However, the concept of the Internet as an Orwellian monitoring device, powered by the gossip-hungry schadenfreude of the people who use it may not be far from the truth in the near future.
Just a thought that came out of a café conversation with Conor; the increasing effort from Apple to eradicate Adobe’s Flash platform from their devices could be a subversive attack on the advertising revenue of both Google and Microsoft.
We know that Apple owns the high end of consumer laptop purchases and holds a significant chunk of the smartphone market. We also know that a savvy, well-to-do audience commands the best per-click advertising rates. It wouldn’t be strange then for one speculate that in the demographic of “higher income earners” there is not insignificant crossover between high-end targeted online advertising and consumers of Apple mobile products.
Flash is popular because of video sites like YouTube, Vimeo, etc, and for various gaming applications (Farmville on Facebook being an obvious current example). Flash-based advertising has been a side effect of this widespread popularity, cleverly piggybacking on consumer desire for video/gaming content in order to deliver more effective campaigns. Flash advertising is the price we pay for video and gaming content.
Moves by Apple to explicitly ditch Flash coupled with the W3 Consortium’s inexorable march towards the implementation of HTML5 are converging to remove the reward for having Flash available as a content delivery mechanism. If the only thing Flash delivers is advertising, why would anyone wish to have it?
Advertisers rely heavily on Flash to deliver rich media advertising to Internet users. It’s hard to imagine an industry, one which has had great difficulty in embracing the Internet in the first place, mobilizing to change their entire infrastructure from one based almost exclusively around Adobe’s proprietary Flash product to something unknown, overnight.
Clearly, this is not something that is actually going to occur overnight, though Apple, by jettisoning Flash from the devices of a high-yield demographic, could reap huge rewards relatively quickly. It doesn’t even need to come up with it’s own advertising solution to replace the hole it leaves – simply destroying that chunk of revenue for Google and Microsoft may be enough to begin destabilizing the incumbent online advertising market.
I don’t believe that Facebook could possibly be clueless; they’re one of the few companies that gets to take their pick of what talent is available to the industry.
This is a slip into the unethical, at the very least it’s a slip into the grey area – every web company that survives on advertising revenue (ie, nearly every social media company) is under constant pressure from their own advertising, marketing and public relations teams (or whatever fulfills the tasks of such traditional elements in their business) for better, deeper information and bigger numbers for that information. At the end of the day, it boils down to targeted advertising, and must do for a company like Facebook, judging by their popular D.I.Y. advertising model.
I don’t for a moment believe that their motives are *evil*, but I do think they are misguided. I think they have probably “dogfooded” themselves into believing that it’s a harmless way to increase the value of their product (and their product is the users of Facebook, their customers are the people who buy the ad space).
There are stirrings of regulation on this side of the pond (though still only rumbles) and one has to suspect that eventually the problem of regulating Internet companies activities online is going to get attention – but I’m not sure this particular event will be the final straw. I think it’s likely that companies will keep pushing the boundaries until one finally does something that creates a scandal and brings the whole privacy house of cards tumbling down.
I was initially wary of them for their “enterprising” (and now widely adopted) strategy of scraping address books and email inboxes for contact details to “helpfully” invite others to the service. I think the value they bring to the table is limited, and that their success is based, in large part, on the ferociousness and tenacity of their contact harvesting spampaign and gimmicky features that result in email notifications.
So no, I don’t trust Facebook to not exploit what information I give them; I’m waiting to see just how far that exploitation goes.
An opinion piece about the effect of “new forms” of communication appeared in the Irish Times on Friday last, written by John Waters.
While the piece makes some succinct and witty observations, I believe that it fails to comprehend the breadth of application of what is collectively referred to as “new media” (with scope as varied as the authors describing it).
There are many levels of discourse on the Internet, much as there are many levels of discourse in print and speech. I think it is a mistake to allow anonymous, unmoderated comments to be added to newspaper articles, even blogs – depending on the context.
I believe John is correct in assessing that the particular method currently employed by the newspaper adds no value to the article whatsoever. However, it is unfair to generalize all forms of new communication as subject to the same problems or that even those “abusive” and “posturing” comments are objectively useless.
In fact, “the mob” needs a place to harmlessly churn and rage and eventually either blow out or become coherent and constructive. At the bottom of a news article is not the place for that. It’s easy to mock, but as long as someone is communicating at all they can be engaged and even educated. It isn’t necessarily the place of the newspaper itself to do so, however it is the place of every person to educate and help their fellow countrymen in whatever small way they can. That’s what the Internet can facilitate like no other medium before; places like Boards.ie present a method for people to discuss and educate themselves and others with little material cost, but perhaps a large personal gain.
However, as much as it allows for that, the greater the reach something has, the higher the value becomes for some people to become those that John pithily describes thusly:
“Most contributors appear mostly to want to draw attention to themselves, seeking to convey strength, cleverness, cynicism or aggression, while pre-empting the possibility of hostility or ridicule by pushing these responses in front like swords.”
This is not a problem confined to the new media. This is something that has been with humanity since man realized he had an audience for whatever he was doing. It’s less mob mentality than it is stage mentality; the same as the wino who starts a mocking dance in front of a street musician playing to the crowd, or the manic street preacher perched upon his box, eulogizing at anyone in range.
It’s easy to lay the blame for problems upon the technology itself, despite the inherent blamelessness of technology. Technology needs to be applied correctly. Though, to be fair to John, he does postulate towards the end of the piece that the problem may be representative of a change in society.
Blogs and Twitter and Facebook and forums and comments are not interchangeable terms and they are not the same thing packaged up differently. It would be akin to sweeping broadsheets, tabloids, celebrity magazines, paper pamphlets and sticky notes all up into one big amorphous glob, calling it “old media,” and then going on to say that broadsheets and sticky notes are inherently worthless because celeb magazines are mindless trash.
Allowing anonymous, unmoderated comments on newspaper articles is comparable to leaving your front door wide open while throwing a party. You will inevitably have gate crashers, whether malevolent or simply “friend of friends”, and these people are ultimately unaffected by the condition your house may be in after the party.
John is right when he describes these people as attention seeking, but they are not stupid, nor are they even unusual. In newspaper comments they are simply being given, on a platter, a platform they have not proved themselves capable of contributing to, while being respectful of other readers and contributors.
What we now consider “newspapers” are what some blogs will undoubtedly eventually become and in fact have already become (the likes of The Huffington Post, for example.) Even now, the lines are blurring; Rupert Murdoch is planning on introducing a “pay wall”, but that horse has already bolted. Journalists should, need to, embrace the new technology that is being made available to them. Absolutely, there is a need to understand this technology rather than simply shoehorn it into current processes, or apply it lazily, but there is also a need to be careful not to scorn or attempt to decry these new channels that will almost certainly become the news outlets of tomorrow.
Kevin Smith announced a one day presale of tickets to his show in Vicar Street, Dublin, An Evening With Kevin Smith, on his Twitter account last night.
Tickets are on sale starting today from 9am.
I found myself needing to write a URL-shortening system recently, nothing particularly fancy, just something that would result in URLs similar to those of tinyURL and bit.ly. PHP’s own base64 function is purely for encoding string data to make it “URL safe” and actually results in a longer string. PHP also has a base_convert function, but this only goes up to base-36, and it seemed like a waste to only go as far as base-36 when more can be fit in.
I found a couple of functions written in Python on StackOverflow for base-62 conversion that solved the problem perfectly. The author of the solution, Baishampayan Ghose, also suggested a shorter alphabet (removing similar characters for ease of readability) which would whittle it down to base-56. I’ve ported the functions to PHP and employed a base-56 alphabet in the example below, but it would be trivial to swap it out for a longer one if required.
$alphabet_raw = "23456789abcdefghijkmnpqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ"; $alphabet = str_split($alphabet_raw); function base56_encode($num, $alphabet){ /* Encode a number in Base X `num`: The number to encode `alphabet`: The alphabet to use for encoding */ if ($num == 0){ return 0; } $n = str_split($num); $arr = array(); $base = sizeof($alphabet); while($num){ $rem = $num % $base; $num = (int)($num / $base); $arr[]=$alphabet[$rem]; } $arr = array_reverse($arr); return implode($arr); } function base56_decode($string, $alphabet){ /* Decode a Base X encoded string into the number Arguments: - `string`: The encoded string - `alphabet`: The alphabet to use for encoding */ $base = sizeof($alphabet); $strlen = strlen($string); $num = 0; $idx = 0; $s = str_split($string); $tebahpla = array_flip($alphabet); foreach($s as $char){ $power = ($strlen - ($idx + 1)); $num += $tebahpla[$char] * (pow($base,$power)); $idx += 1; } return $num; }
Usual code-usage caveats apply.
Test your exposure to newly fashionable socialism!
Does it make a difference whether or not one uses an Irish URL shortening service?
I find myself using bit.ly (not Irish) more and more due to how much better integrated it seems to be with services from Twitter to WordPress. It appears to be inching ahead of myriad other potential services, though I think there’s opportunity for the .ie brand to be made use of, as well as potentially tailoring the service to Irish Internet user idiosyncrasies somehow.
The three shorteners that I’m aware of are:
Short.ie – Collaborative effort by Webstrong and echolibre, this would be the strongest contender to bit.ly in my book, I have it set as the default shortener for several of the @boards_ie twitter streams.
URL.ie – Around as long as I’ve been using URL shortening services, used to be quite flakey with complex URL strings (or anything with a ? in it) but those problems seem to be sorted these days. Shorter URL than short.ie too, which is a bonus if you wish to eke out an extra couple of chars.
Min.ie – Doesn’t appear to be online at the time I’m writing this post, so possibly not a top recommendation, although another with a nice, short URL that makes sense.
Are there other (.ie) shortening services that I’m leaving out?
Links for 7th April, 2010
Leslie Jensen-Inman via A List Apart, examines the use of colour. Worth a read, especially for the tools she highlights:
Clay Shirky – “The Collapse of Complex Business Models”
Microsoft’s TERMINATOR project – solving the halting problem… for a finite number of “real” systems.
Damien Katz gives up on git for managing CouchDB. He’s a smart dude, hope he elaborates.
Bruce Schneier – Privacy and Control