Scientific American has run a pretty aggressive paywall for years. Even so, the SciAm news feed was readable.
Was being the operative word. Lately too many of the posts are incomplete excerpts from articles that are behind their paywall.
Today they pushed me over the edge. They're gone.
Greed has its risks.
(with thanks to Joseph P for the cite).
There were familiar computing names in the 1980s - Apple, IBM and so on. There were also many now lost, such as Atari and Commodore PCs. There were networks and email and decades old sophisticated collaboration technologies now almost lost to memory.
Against that background the Institute for the Future tried to predict the IT landscape of 1998. They were looking 16 years ahead.
You can see how well they did. For reasons I'll explain, the italicized text are word substitutions. Emphases mine ...
STUDY SAYS TECHNOLOGY COULD TRANSFORM SOCIETY (June 13, 1982)
WASHINGTON, June 13— A report ... made public today speculates that by the end of this century electronic information technology will have transformed American home, business, manufacturing, school, family and political life.
The report suggests that one-way and two-way home information systems ... will penetrate deeply into daily life, with an effect on society as profound as those of the automobile and commercial television earlier in this century.
It conjured a vision, at once appealing and threatening, of a style of life defined and controlled by network terminals throughout the house.
As a consequence, the report envisioned this kind of American home by the year 1998: ''Family life is not limited to meals, weekend outings, and once a-year vacations. Instead of being the glue that holds things together so that family members can do all those other things they're expected to do - like work, school, and community gatherings -the family is the unit that does those other things, and the home is the place where they get done. Like the term 'cottage industry,' this view might seem to reflect a previous era when family trades were passed down from generation to generation, and children apprenticed to their parents. In the 'electronic cottage,' however, one electronic 'tool kit' can support many information production trades.''...
... The report warned that the new technology would raise difficult issues of privacy and control that will have to be addressed soon to ''maximize its benefits and minimize its threats to society.''
The study ... was an attempt at the risky business of ''technology assessment,'' peering into the future of an electronic world.
The study focused on the emerging videotex industry, formed by the marriage of two older technologies, communications and computing. It estimated that 40 percent of American households will have internet service by the end of the century. By comparison, it took television 16 years to penetrate 90 percent of households from the time commercial service was begun.
The ''key driving force'' controlling the speed of computer communications penetration, the report said, is the extent to which advertisers can be persuaded to use it, reducing the cost of the service to subscribers.
''Networked systems create opportunities for individuals to exercise much greater choice over the information available to them,'' the researchers wrote. ''Individuals may be able to use network systems to create their own newspapers, design their own curricula, compile their own consumer guides.
''On the other hand, because of the complexity and sophistication of these systems, they create new dangers of manipulation or social engineering, either for political or economic gain. Similarly, at the same time that these systems will bring a greatly increased flow of information and services into the home, they will also carry a stream of information out of the home about the preferences and behavior of its occupants.'' Social Side Effects
The report stressed what it called ''transformative effects'' of the new technology, the largely unintended and unanticipated social side effects. ''Television, for example, was developed to provide entertainment for mass audiences but the extent of its social and psychological side effects on children and adults was never planned for,'' the report said. ''The mass-produced automobile has impacted on city design, allocation of recreation time, environmental policy, and the design of hospital emergency room facilities.''
Such effects, it added, were likely to become apparent in home and family life, in the consumer marketplace, in the business office and in politics.
Widespread penetration of the technology, it said, would mean, among other things, these developments:
- The home will double as a place of employment, with men and women conducting much of their work at the computer terminal. This will affect both the architecture and location of the home. It will also blur the distinction between places of residence and places of business, with uncertain effects on zoning, travel patterns and neighborhoods.
- Home-based shopping will permit consumers to control manufacturing directly, ordering exactly what they need for ''production on demand.''
- There will be a shift away from conventional workplace and school socialization. Friends, peer groups and alliances will be determined electronically, creating classes of people based on interests and skills rather than age and social class.
- A new profession of information ''brokers'' and ''managers'' will emerge, serving as ''gatekeepers,'' monitoring politicians and corporations and selectively releasing information to interested parties.
- The ''extended family'' might be recreated if the elderly can support themselves through electronic homework, making them more desirable to have around.
... The blurring of lines between home and work, the report stated, will raise difficult issues, such as working hours. The new technology, it suggested, may force the development of a new kind of business leader. ''Managing the complicated communication in networks between office and home may require very different styles than current managers exhibit,'' the report concluded.
The study also predicted a much greater diversity in the American political power structure. ''Electronic networks might mean the end of the two party system, as networks of voters band together to support a variety of slates - maybe hundreds of them,'' it said.
Now read this article on using software bots (not robots, contrary to the title) to shape and control social networks and opinions and two recent posts of mine on the state of blogging.
So, did the Institute for the Future get it right - or not?
I would say they did quite well, though they are more right about 2011 than about 1998. I didn't think so at first, because they used words like "videotext" and "teletext". They sound silly because we still do very little with telepresence or videoconferencing -- contrary to the expectations of the last seventy years.
On careful reading though, it was clear what they called "teletext and videotext" was approximately "email and rich media communications". So I substituted the words "computer", "internet" and "networked systems" where appropriate. Otherwise I just bolded a few key phrases.
Rereading it now they got quite a bit right. They weren't even that far off on home penetration. They also got quite a bit wrong. The impact on politics seems to have contributed to polarization rather than diversity. Even now few elders use computer systems to interact with grandchildren, and none did in 1998.
So, overall, they maybe 65% right, but about 10 years premature (on a 16 year timeline!). That's now awful for predicting the near future, but they'd do even better to follow Charle's Stross prediction rules ...
The near-future is comprised of three parts: 90% of it is just like the present, 9% is new but foreseeable developments and innovations, and 1% is utterly bizarre and unexpected.
(Oh, and we're living in 2001's near future, just like 2001 was the near future of 1991. It's a recursive function, in other words.)
However, sometimes bits of the present go away. Ask yourself when you last used a slide rule — or a pocket calculator, as opposed to the calculator app on your phone or laptop, let alone trig tables. That's a technological example. Cultural aspects die off over time, as well. And I'm currently pondering what it is that people aren't afraid of any more. Like witchcraft, or imminent thermonuclear annihilation....
Coverage of Apple's $50 thunderbolt "active cable" focuses on performance advantages ...
The technology inside Apple's $50 Thunderbolt cable
.... Apple didn't respond to our requests for further information about the "firmware in the cable," but an EETimes article from earlier this year noted that in addition to having different electrical characteristics from Mini DisplayPort, Thunderbolt also uses active cabling to achieve full duplex 10Gbps transmission...
Maybe. I'm skeptical though. I suspect it's all about the DRM.
Today one of the quality bloggers I read declared blogging is dying. Two weeks ago, Brent Simmons, an early sub/pub (RSS, Atom) adopter tacked the RSS is dead meme. Today I discovered Google Plus Circles don't have readable feeds.
Perhaps worst of all, Google Reader, one of Google's best apps, is getting no Plus love at all -- and nobody seems upset. The only reference I could find shows in an Amil Dash post...
The Sparks feature, like a topic-based feed reader for keyword search results, is the least developed part of the site so far. Google Reader is so good, this can't possibly stay so bad for too long ...
That's a lot of crepe. It's not new however. I've been reading about the death of blogging for at least five years.
Against that I was so impressed with a recent blog post that I yesterday raved about terrific quality of the blogs I read.
So what's going on? I think Brent Simmons has the best state-of-the-art review. I say that because, of course, he lines up pretty well with my own opinions. (Brent has a bit more credibility I admit).
This is what I think is happening ...
Short version - it's a murky mixed bag. The good news is that pub/sub/notify is not going away, and that compulsive communicators will write even if they have to pay for the privilege. The bad news is that we're probably in for some turbulent transitions towards a world where someone can monetize the infostream.
Sometimes we get stuck with the most awful words. Blog, blogging, blogger, blogosphere. Hate 'em.
I hate the name, but I love the medium. Today's example comes from a Blood & Treasure link to a Granite Studio post on the 90th anniversary of the Chinese communist party as told through the Mad Men TV show. Brilliant, caustic, funny, insightful, educational and all about modern China - writing doesn't get better than this.
All free. These sites don't even have ads.
On the other hand, we have The Atlantic, a magazine fairly recently edited by another superb blogger - James Fallows. I love James writing, and I read the blogs of many of The Atlantic's writers, but the magazine is mostly silly. This month's lead article on how we're ruining children by raising their self-esteem was so excruciatingly idiotic it single-handedly killed my next subscription renewal (still time for a turnaround James).
How can this be? The writers for the The Atlantic are pros -- even the worst of them.
It's volume. There are millions of bloggers producing thousands of posts. I've read a mere 230,000 or so, and shared perhaps 25,000. Even if only one in ten thousand is excellent, my network of readers and bloggers will find and expose it. I don't care than 99.999% are drivel -- because I don't see those. I see the one in 10,000, and of those I read less than 1 in 10.
No magazine can compete.
Update 7/2/11: Corrections in italics and strikeout! My apologies James. I thought you were still editor. A reader informed me that you are a correspondent again. I plain forgot. Maybe that explains the recent 'alternative medicine' and 'spoiled child' articles. Makes it easier for us to donate money to my favorite blogger rather than renew.
Charlie Stross has been heads down writing for a while, but he must have his books in the bag because his blog is aflame again.
Naturally, knowing we crave red raw meat, he started with an attack on geek theology. He beat up on the Singularity.
Go read the essay. Here's my quick digest of his three arguments:
Charlie! What happened? This is your most muddled essay in years.
Not to worry too much though. Charlie followed up with three excellent posts. I think he was just rusty.
See also:
PS. Where am I on all things Skynet? I think we'll create artificial sentience and it will be the end of us. Unlike Charlie, I think there will be great economic advantages to push the limits of AI towards sentience, and we won't resist that. I'm very much hoping that is still 80 years away, but I'm afraid I might see it before I die. I think brain uploading is a hopeless dream. As for us living in a Simulation -- it does explain the Fermi Paradox ...
The good news is that corporations may not be as powerful as I thought they were.
The bad news is that we're reenacting a Cold version of the American Civil War ...
To the Limit - Krugman NYTimes.com
... Last December, after Mr. Obama agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts — a move that many people, myself included, viewed as in effect a concession to Republican blackmail — Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic asked why the deal hadn’t included a rise in the debt limit, so as to forestall another hostage situation (my words, not Mr. Ambinder’s).
The president’s response seemed clueless even then. He asserted that “nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse,” and that he was sure that John Boehner, as speaker of the House, would accept his “responsibilities to govern.”
Well, we’ve seen how that worked out...
... G.O.P. leaders don’t actually care about the level of debt. Instead, they’re using the threat of a debt crisis to impose an ideological agenda. If you had any doubt about that, last week’s tantrum should have convinced you. Democrats engaged in debt negotiations argued that since we’re supposedly in dire fiscal straits, we should talk about limiting tax breaks for corporate jets and hedge-fund managers as well as slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. And Republicans, in response, walked out of the talks.
So what’s really going on is extortion pure and simple. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute puts it, the G.O.P. has, in effect, come around with baseball bats and declared, “Nice economy you have here. A real shame if something happened to it.”
And the reason Republicans are doing this is because they must believe that it will work: Mr. Obama caved in over tax cuts, and they expect him to cave again. They believe that they have the upper hand, because the public will blame the president for the economic crisis they’re threatening to create. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that G.O.P. leaders actually want the economy to perform badly.
Republicans believe, in short, that they’ve got Mr. Obama’s number, that he may still live in the White House but that for practical purposes his presidency is already over. It’s time — indeed, long past time — for him to prove them wrong.
The GOP has the support of about half the US. The Dems have the other half; at the moment, the smarter half.
Obama offered the GOP what, a few months ago, they said they wanted. Now they reject it. They will destroy America to save it.
The last president from Illinois compromised and compromised -- until he couldn't.
This time I'm hoping for a Cold version of a national conflict.
I need to find out how to short US Treasuries.
See also
Talking Points attended a denialist gathering and brought back this poster photo ....
What caught my attention is that the flat earthers no longer deny that the earth is warming. Their new member-mandatory beliefs are:
This is a slightly more interesting flavor of nonsense. Even though these beliefs spring from tribal identity rather than science, they can be evaluated in a scientific framework.
The first thesis is the weakest. If anything, solar output may be transiently declining. The sun certainly does not appear to be increasing its temperature output. If anything natural variation is mitigating human warming.
The second is more interesting. A slow warming of the earth would shift ecosystems. Tropical animals, like low population pre-industrial humans, would probably benefit from a mild, slowish, warming. Rapid warming in a world of 8+ billion post-industrial humans is another matter entirely. I can't see that going well, though some countries (Oh, Canada) may do better than others (China, coal is not your friend).
We may yet envy the polar bears.
See also:
From Google Reader trends: "Since October 7, 2005 you have read a total of 232,935 items."
The iPhone was introduced on January 9th 2007. I was shocked.
It went to consumers in mid-2007. Naturally the share price of RIM (Blackberry) responded ....
Responded,that is, by going up. Way up.
A year later the App Store was online and, with iOS 2, the iPhone was truly useable. Most importantly, Apple licensed Microsoft's ActiveSync. The iPhone could now get corporate calendars and email.
That's when the market finally saw the light and RIMM slid, but, then astoundingly, it mostly recovered!
No wonder RIM's CEOs could delude themselves into thinking they still had a business. The market was a delusional as they were. It wasn't just the market and a couple of overpriced executives. Pundits continued to talk about RIM as though they were a serious contender against Android and iOS.
I thought RIM was finished. It didn't matter how much money they were making. They had a first class horse drawn carriage, but Apple was selling a BMW sedan for a trifle more. It was insane to imagine that RIM, owners of a 1980s PalmOS-style vintage platform, could possibly compete. Now it's obviously over and the big guys will fight for RIM's patents.
It's an interesting story -- because the market lagged reality by so much. Why was it so irrational? I'm sure we can make up post-hoc explanations. Maybe the market assumed Microsoft would buy them, and only gave up when Ballmer "acquired" Nokia (hope that goes better than Skype will go).
Myself, I suspect the market is frequently irrational. Every exec had a BB, and because of the way RIM licensed RIM server access it was a real power symbol. Plebes carried flip phones, executives carried BBs. When plebes started carrying iPhones execs couldn't wrap their heads around the power inversion. To sell RIM was to admit their personal power token had gone the way of the typewriter.
RIMM has one more lesson to teach us. Today a remarkably hopeful but anonymous RIM employee published a roadmap for RIM's recovery. It will be familiar reading to anyone who's ever been a part of a dying software enterprise. It came with 8 recommendations - but four of them caught my attention.
RIM's marketing department responded to the letter. They are so, so dead.
Surly Long Haul Trucker
... A touring bike’s job is to go the distance and then some, in relative comfort, while carrying you and your gear...
... Its low bottom bracket and long chainstays provide comfort and stability, and those long stays increase heel clearance when carrying packed panniers....
... We gave it ample tire clearance for larger tires (larger tires soak up a lot of road static) with room for fenders too. The frame’s tubing is thicker-walled and larger-diameter than standard road and sport-touring frames, and this pre-tunes it for the weight of cargo. And it’s got braze-ons for everything you’re likely to need, from racks to water bottle cages to spare spokes...The owner/retailer had kitted it out with everything. Surly racks front and rear; wide enough to clear the big cantilever brakes. Front rack dual lights. Three or four water bottles. Giant fenders with rubber flaps. Naturally it had a kickstand, the sign of a don't-give-a-damn serious distance rider.
Susanne Lundin is Professor of Ethnology at Lund University, Sweden. This commentary of hers appeared in Daily News Egypt ...
The great organ bazaar by Susan Lundin.
LUND, SWEDEN: The Web site 88DB.com Philippines is an active online portal that allows service providers and consumers to find and interact with each other. Naoval, an Indonesian man with “AB blood type, no drugs and no alcohol,” wants to sell his kidney. Another man says, “I am a Filipino. I am willing to sell my kidney for my wife. She has breast cancer and I can’t afford her medications.” Then there is Enrique, who is “willing to donate my kidney for an exchange. 21 years old and healthy.”
Other offers of this type could, just a few years ago, be found at www.liver4you.org, which promised kidneys for $80,000-$110,000. The costs of the operation, including the fees of the surgeons — licensed in the United States, Great Britain, or the Philippines — would be included in the price.
All of this internet activity is but the tip of the iceberg of a new and growing global human-tissue economy. Indeed, the World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that about 10 percent of organ transplants around the world stem from purely commercial transactions.
Trade in organs follows a clear, geographically linked pattern: people from rich countries buy the organs, and people in poor countries sell them. In my research on organ trafficking, I have entered some of these shadow markets, where body parts from the poor, war victims, and prisoners are commodities, bought or stolen for transplant into affluent ill people.
One woman, originally from Lebanon, told me that a wealthy businessman from Spain paid a huge sum for her kidney. In the end, however, she received no monetary payment. Today, her life is much worse than before, because medical complications following the operation make it difficult for her to work. Similar stories are told by organ vendors I have met from the former Soviet states, the Middle East, and Asia.
Organ trafficking depends on several factors. One is people in distress. They are economically or socially disadvantaged, or live in war-torn societies with prevalent crime and a thriving black market. On the demand side are people who are in danger of dying unless they receive an organ transplant. Additionally, there are organ brokers who arrange the deals between sellers and buyers.
It is also necessary to have access to well-equipped clinics and medical staff. Such clinics can be found in many countries, including Iran, Pakistan, Ukraine, South Africa, and the Philippines.
Indeed, the Philippines is well known as a center of the illegal organ trade and a “hot spot” for transplant tourism. From the 1990s until 2008 (when a new policy was adopted), the number of transplantations involving organ sales by Filipinos to foreign recipients increased steadily. Many organ sellers from Israel, for example, were, together with their buyers, brought to Manila for the transplants.
Hector is one of the several hundred cases of kidney vendors documented by social workers in three impoverished towns in the Philippines’ Quezon province. His brother was trapped in Malaysia with high debts to criminal gangs, so Hector sold his kidney in order to buy his freedom. Another vendor, Michel, became a broker himself; after selling one of his kidneys to pay for his father’s medicines, the surgeon forced him to deliver more organs. The vendors’ organs were transplanted to recipients mainly from the Philippines, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia...
A trade that probably cannot be effectively banned, but can certainly be taxed and regulated.
In the context of a site that claims to check passwords against a published hacker repository [1] Scientific American repeats the NYT's conventional wisdom about passwords and security ...
Observations: How to Know If Hackers Have Stolen Your Password:
... Is your email address listed in any of these databases? The New York Times reports on a easy-to-use web tool that a security professional has created that will check your email address against 13 different databases containing 800,000 email address/password combinations. Called, appropriately, "Should I Change My Password?", the site runs a simple search for your email in the known files. I checked my various emails, and fortunately, the tool didn't turn up anything amiss. But the site also gives some very solid advice: Change critical passwords regularly, and don't reuse the same password across multiple sites... [3]
This is bad advice. The fact that it's repeated ad nauseum doesn't make it any better. Schneier, the doyen of net security, debunked the conventional wisdom about 5-7 years ago [3]. Essentially, these six goals are not mutually compatible ...
Given that most of us want to to get stuff done, and even have a life, what should a regular person do? Schneier hasn't summarized this recently, probably because he's become bored and discouraged, but I think he'd go with this list:
Phew. That's awful, isn't it? Things are bad. There is hope however ...
The above list of security guidelines is pretty bad, but they are doable by regular humans. Meanwhile, what about geeks who, after all, don't have a life to lose?
Here's what this geek does ...
- fn -
[1] If it's legitimate, then the site runs a cryptographic hash function locally and compares the output to hashed versions of the password repository. I gave it an old disposable password, and to my surprise it didn't match anything stolen. I am pretty sure this site is legitimate, but it's a terrible practice to encourage civilians to enter their passwords for testing. At the very least, the site should be run by either the US government (think on that!) or by a corporation with a lot to lose.
[2] Before I went to the "two-channel" flavor of two factor. See below.
[3] For a full set of conventional wisdom, see Schneier on Security: Password Advice (2009): Note, if you don't read it carefully you think this is his advice. It's really the conventional wisdom.
[4] These days, before I sign up for anything, I check their account deletion policies. If they don't give me a clear path to account removal they don't get my business. See Gordon's Notes: Gordon's Laws for software and service use.
[5] Sorry, there's no nice way to put this. XP is finished.
[6] Schneier on Security: Choosing Secure Passwords (against an offline password-guessing attack) (2007): ".... a typical password consists of a root plus an appendage. A root isn't necessarily a dictionary word, but it's something pronounceable. An appendage is either a suffix ... or a prefix ... You should mix upper and lowercase in the middle of your root. You should add numbers and symbols in the middle of your root, not as common substitutions. Or drop your appendage in the middle of your root. Or use two roots with an appendage in the middle.... the seven-character phonetic pattern dictionary -- together with an uncommon appendage, is not going to be guessed. Neither is a password made up of the first letters of a sentence, especially if you throw numbers and symbols in the mix.... Personally, I just use Code Poetry's utility to run OS X Password Assistant and have it make me a memorable password.
[7] With robust Digital Rights Management and many other expected and unexpected side-effects. Unmitigated goodness is rare.
[8] I wrote a custom FileMaker credential management database back in the early 90s. I would prefer to use it on my iPhone, but FM is pretty much dead. Bento doesn't offer encrypted iOS databases.
See also:
The "Foundational Questions Institute" (FQXi, don't ask about the acronym) recently sponsored an essay question about the nature of reality, specifically whether it is fundamentally digital or analog. Is there, for example, a smallest slice of time? Or, if you suspect time is not fundamental but is some epiphenomena of entanglement, is there a way in which the quantum world is less digital than it seems?
Sponsored essays on speculative physics! Neat idea, and seems right up my ally. Of course FQXi's mission statement must attract a wide "variety" of thinkers (emphases mine) ...
... FQXi catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources...
Still, the advisory council includes Guth, Bostrom, Barrow, Rees, and Smolin. So I would have tagged them as potentially eccentric, but most likely interesting.
Would have tagged them I say - but not after I actually tried to read one of the winning essays.
It's a PDF. That's bad enough, but it's a PDF of badly scanned document.
This is pure madness. The FQXi is a sad waste.
It's been a gratifying week for my fellow nimbophobics. Our numbers are growing by leaps and bounds. Consider just four examples ...
These stories range from appalling (Apple) to annoying (excess ads in custom search pages). The Google PHR fail would be the worst, but it's somewhat mitigated by the data exit options they provide and by the two year warning. Those options include CCR XML migration to Microsoft's HealthVault [1].
Friends don't let friends rely on the Cloud. Don't put anything in the Cloud unless you have a way to move your data to an alternative platform. That's as true for your business processes as it is for your family photos.
[1] Any health informatics students looking for a semester project or an easy publishable paper? Create a PHR in Google Health Records. Export as CCR XML. Import into Microsoft HealthVault. Write a paper on the data loss.
