Post Peeves

Friends don’t let friends click spam

Thursday, September 7th, 2006

Doc Searls unfortunately decided the other day that offering his blog under a relatively restrictive Creative Commons NonCommercial license instead of placing its contents in the public domain is chemo for splogs (spam blogs). I doubt that, strongly. Spam bloggers don’t care about copyright. They’ll take “all rights reserved” material, that which only limits commercial use, and stuff in the public domain equally. Often they combine tiny snippets from many sources, probably triggering copyright for none of them.

A couple examples found while looking at people who had mentioned Searls’ post: all rights reserved material splogged, commenter here says “My blog has been licensed with the CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 for a while now, and sploggers repost my content all the time.” A couple anecdotes prove nothing, but I’d be surprised to find that sploggers are, for example, using CC-enabled search to find content they can legally re-splog. I hope someone tries to figure out what characteristics make blog content more likely to be used in splogs and whether licensing is one of them. I’d get some satisfaction from either answer.

Though Searls’ license change was motived by a desire “to come up with new forms of treatment. Ones that don’t just come from Google and Yahoo. Ones that come from us” I do think blog spam is primarily the search engines’ problem to solve. Search results that don’t contain splogs are more valuable to searchers than spam-ridden results. Sites that cannot be found through search effectively don’t exist. That’s almost all there is to it.

Google in particular may have mixed incentives (they want people to click on their syndicated ads wherever the ads appear), but others don’t (Technorati, Microsoft, Ask, etc. — Yahoo! wishes it had Google’s mixed incentives). At least once where spam content seriously impacted the quality of search results Google seems to have solved the problem — at some point in the last year or so I stopped seeing Wikipedia content reposted with ads (an entirely legal practice) in Google search results.

What can people outside the search engines do to fight blog and other spam? Don’t click on it. It seems crazy, but clickfraud aside, real live idiots clicking on and even buying stuff via spam is what keeps spammers in business. Your uncle is probably buying pills from a spammer right now. Educate him.

On a broader scale, why isn’t the , or the blogger equivalent, running an educational campaign teaching people to avoid spam and malware? Some public figure should throw in “dag gammit, don’t click on spam” along with “don’t do drugs.” Ministers too.

Finally, if spam is so easy for (aware) humans to detect (I certainly have a second sense about it), why isn’t human-augmented computation being leveraged? Opportunities abound…

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Economics, Peeves, Public Domain, Wikipedia | 3 Comments »

Experts agree to bark like dogs

Saturday, September 2nd, 2006

One of the more annoying things political pundits do is to consistently make the case that their candidate or cause is a likely winner, or if too obvious a loser, at least will beat expectations. Surely there is demand for pundits as critical about their favored outcome’s chances as they are about their ufavored outcomes? Perhaps if I watched lots of television I would know of such a chimera.

Fortunately there are again (see Historical Presidential Betting Markets) markets to give anyone who wants one a reality check. However, it is rare (in the U.S.) for a “third party” candidate to be significant enough for an election market to cast any light on their chances. Often “field” will be available (for example, Intrade currently lists the following spreads for 2008 Presidential Election Winner (Political Party): Democrat 49.1/49.2, Republican 47.6/48.4, Field 2.9/3.2) but chance accorded by traders to “the field” has to be based on the expectation that a viable independent will come out of the woodwork (e.g., Ross Perot in 1992) rather than the expectation that a Green, Libertarian, or other minor party candidate has a non-negligible chance of victory. This is too bad in a way, as my casual observation says that minor party backers are more delusional than most when it comes to their candidate’s chances.

It appears that in the there is a possibility that “the field” may map strongly to a minor party candidate’s chances — Libertarian Party nominee . Democrat is the only major party candidate on the ballot. Republican is running a write-in campaign.

A Smither press release proclaims that “The Experts Agree” that Smither has the best chance of defeating Lampson, and quotes four sources that say something along those lines. These “experts” aren’t putting anything on the line though — the Intrade CD22 market has the following current bid/ask/last values: Democrat 70.0/90.0/76.0, Republican 12.0/19.9/12.0, Field 2.0/9.9 /0.1.

Traders seem to think a Smither victory is about as likely as Lampson and Sekula-Gibbs photographed together in bed, with a dog. Maybe that isn’t too unlikely. Put your money where your delusions are!

Regarding expert political judgement, I’m planning to read that book soon.

Posted in Peeves, Politics, Prediction Markets | 8 Comments »

How to end the Jewish jurisdiction in a generation or less

Sunday, August 27th, 2006

Or demographics of the :

: 6.4m

: 4.9m Jewish (of which half are “secular” and one quarter non-believers), 1m Muslim, the rest Christian, Druze, or unclassified.

: 3.5m

Muslim birthrates are considerably higher than those for other groups.

There appears to be lots of debate about all of these numbers, take them as approximations. With that caveat, consider that in the territory the jurisdiction of Israel controls or has military dominion over (Israel proper, the West Bank and Gaza) there are about 5m Jews and 4.5m Muslims with the latter number increasing faster and more solidly religious than the former.

Clearly the strategies of war, riots, terrorism and demanding a separate state pursued for approximately three generations by politicians of surrounding Arab jurisdictions and Palestinians are incredibly stupid.

All Arabs need to do to end their hated “Jewish state” in relatively short order is to renounce violence and a separate state and demand full citizenship and voting rights in Israel. The best or worst outcomes of such a strategy (which may be flipped if one is crazy) within a generation would be a secular jurisdiction (not Jewish nor Muslim) or civil war, like Lebanon at its best or worst.

Someone who follows the politics of the Insane Land (Christianity and Islam consider it holy, which marks a strong correlation with insanity in my book) could doubtless name many reasons Palestinians and their putative friends do not pursue this strategy. Surely some do. It seems just too obious a winner (but then I have another draft post entitled something like “why is nationalist policy always stupid?”)

Those who wish to maintain a separate Jewish jurisdiction and preempt this strategy would be advised to support the creation of a “legitimate” Palestinian jurisdiction immediately, preferably one that offers citizenship and residence to Muslim citizens of Israel.

If I were a resident of the Insane Land, regardless of religion, I would do no such thing as advocate any of the above. I would concentrate on getting the hell out of the Insane Land. The West offers prosperity and safety, and parts of it offer desert and religious fanaticism, if I really wanted to be reminded of home.

Posted in Peeves, Politics | 1 Comment »

Just false

Sunday, August 27th, 2006

If is what does that make Christianity and other faith-based religions? Just pseudo.

I’ve been wanting to use that throwaway comment for awhile, but not having any desire to discuss ID (I’m glad there are people out there dedicated to debunking obvious crackpot pseudoscientific claims, though for some reason the targets don’t particularly provoke in me amusement, interest, or outrage, unlike purveyors of economic-political-religious-social crackpot ideas — odd peronality quirk I suppose), I haven’t until now, occasioned by the Technology Liberation Front group blog’s (I’ve cited several times) incredibly stupid decision to add a employee to their roster.

My ignorant comment on ID: Overall, a positive development. Theists feel compelled to justify their faith on scientific-sounding grounds and are eager to debate real scientists. Even if the theists’ reasons for wanting to debate are completely disingenuous clearly they are on a slippery slope away from faith, which requires no evidence.

Update 20060901: Tim Lee’s TLF post addressing the Discovery Instituteis an utmost example of decency.

Posted in Blogs, Peeves | 5 Comments »

No ultimate outcomes

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

Tim Lee responds to my AOLternative history. I agree with the gist of almost everything he says with a few quibbles, for example:

Likely, something akin to a robots.txt file would have been invented that would provide electronic evidence of permission to link, and it would have been bundled by default into Apache. Sure, some commercial web sites would have refused to allow linking, but that would have simply lowered their profile within the web community, the same way the NYT’s columnists have become less prominent post-paywall.

In a fairly bad scenario it doesn’t matter what Apache does, as the web is a backwater, or Apache never happens. And in a fairly bad scenario lower profile in the web community hardly matters — all the exciting stuff would be behind AOL and similar subscription network walls. But I agree that workarounds and an eventually thriving web would probably have occurred. Perhaps lawyers did not really notice search engines and linking until after the web had already reached critical mass. Clearly they’re trying to avoid making that mistake again.

Lee’s closing:

So I stand by the words “relentless” and “inevitable” to describe the triumph of open over closed systems. I’ll add the concession that the process sometimes takes a while (and obviously, this makes my claim non-falsifiable, since I can always say it hasn’t happened yet), but I think legal restrictions just slow down the growth of open platforms, they don’t change the ultimate outcome.

Slowing down progress is pretty important, in a bad way. Furthermore, I’d make a wild guess that the future is highly dependent on initial conditions, no outcomes are inevitable by a long shot, and there is no such thing as an ultimate outcome, only a new set of initial conditions.

That’s my peeve for the day.

Grandiose example: did Communism just delay the relentless march of Russian society toward freedom and wealth?

Posted in Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, Peeves | 4 Comments »

Pig assembler

Friday, July 21st, 2006

The story of The Pig and the Box touches on many near and dear themes:

  • The children’s fable is about DRM and digital copying, without mentioning either.
  • The author is raising money through Fundable, pledging to release the work under a more liberal license if $2000 is raised.
  • The author was dissuaded from using the sampling licnese (a very narrow peeve of mine, please ignore).
  • I don’t know if the author intended, but anyone inclined to science fiction or nanotech will see a cartoon .
  • The last page of the story is Hansonian.

Read it.

This was dugg and Boing Boing’d though I’m slow and only noticed on Crosbie Fitch‘s low-volume blog. None of the many commentators noted the sf/nano/upload angle as far as I can tell.

Posted in Blogs, Books, Creative Commons, DRM, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Public Goods | 1 Comment »

Constitutionally open services

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

Luis Villa provokes, in a good way:

Someone who I respect a lot told me at GUADEC ‘open source is doomed’. He believed that the small-ish apps we tend to do pretty well will migrate to the web, increasing the capital costs of delivering good software and giving next-gen proprietary companies like Google even greater advantages than current-gen proprietary companies like MS.

Furthermore:

Seeing so many of us using proprietary software for some of our most treasured possessions (our pictures, in flickr) has bugged me deeply this week.

These things have long bugged me, too.

I think Villa has even understated the advantage of web applications — no mention of security — and overstated the advantage of desktop applications, which amounts to low latency, high bandwidth data transfer — let’s see, , including video editing, is the hottest thing on the web. Low quality video, but still. The two things client applications still excel at are very high bandwidth, very low latency data input and output, such as rendering web pages as pixels. :)

There are many things that can be done to make client development and deployment easier, more secure, more web-like and client applications more collaboration-enabled. Fortunately they’ve all been tried before (e.g., , , , others of varying relevance), so there’s much to learn from, yet the field is wide open. Somehow it seems I’d be remiss to not mention , so there it is. Web applications on the client are also a possibility, though typical only address ease of development and not manageability at all.

The ascendancy of web applications does not make the desktop unimportant any more than GUIs made filesystems unimportant. Another layer has been added to the stack, but I am still very happy to see any move of lower layers in the direction of freedom.

My ideal application would be available locally and over the network (usually that means on the web), but I’ll prefer the latter if I have to choose, and I can’t think of many applications that don’t require this choice (fortunately is one of them, or close enough).

So what can be done to make the web application dominated future open source in spirit, for lack of a better term?

First, web applications should be super easy to manage (install, upgrade, customize, secure, backup) so that running your own is a real option. Applications like and have made large strides, especially in the installation department, but still require a lot of work and knowledge to run effectively.

There are some applications that centralizaton makes tractable or at least easier and better, e.g., web scale search, social aggregation — which basically come down to high bandwidth, low latency data transfer. Various P2P technologies (much to learn from, field wide open) can help somewhat, but the pull of centralization is very strong.

In cases were one accepts a centralized web application, should one demand that application be somehow constitutionally open? Some possible criteria:

  • All source code for the running service should be published under an open source license and developer source control available for public viewing.
  • All private data available for on-demand export in standard formats.
  • All collaboratively created data available under an open license (e.g., one from Creative Commons), again in standard formats.
  • In some cases, I am not sure how rare, the final mission of the organization running the service should be to provide the service rather than to make a financial profit, i.e., beholden to users and volunteers, not investors and employees. Maybe. Would I be less sanguine about the long term prospects of Wikipedia if it were for-profit? I don’t know of evidence for or against this feeling.

Consider all of this ignorant speculation. Yes, I’m just angling for more freedom lunches.

Posted in Computers, Creative Commons, Open Services, Open Source, Open Standards, P2P, Peeves, Programming | 15 Comments »

Digital Rent-a-Center Management

Tuesday, June 20th, 2006

I make a brief appearance in a DRM protest video noted by Boing Boing today.

Kent Bye did a good job turning his footage into two minutes of watchable video. At least I don’t look or sound as stupid as I could or should have and his choice of backing music is good and appropriate.

One of the opposing comments on Bye’s blog:

As a consumer you have a choice of who to purchase from; and you must abide by the rules set by who you buy from. If you don’t like those rules don’t buy.

In my view the protest was about informing consumers of reasons they may want to exercise their choice to not purchase DRM content. I don’t think anyone was calling for making DRM illegal.

A brief quote about the inability to transfer rights to DRM content was also misunderstood by come commenters. The point I wanted to make is that consumers are getting a substantially different deal with DRM media than they have gotten in the past, indeed a substantially worse deal.

Only desperate or stupid consumers would lease a home theater from Rent-a-Center. DRM media should be seen in the same light.

Valleywag weighs in (flyweight!) with a sarcastic comment:

With all the hoopla in the tech world over trivia like censorship or the turning of political dissidents over to oppressive foreign governments, it’s good to know that this weekend, brave protesters picketed the San Francisco Apple store for that most basic of human rights — the right to play all kinds of music on the iPod.

Yes, plenty of room to talk with recent posts entitled ‘Google bachelor watch: Larry and Lucy “kissy-faced” in Maui’ and ‘Girl sues MySpace because boys are too hot’ … regardless, Valleywag critically misses the point that DRM and more generally copyright are free speech issues. I find the U.S. policy of encouraging intellectual protectionism abroad appalling. If you don’t think such will be used to further censorship in oppressive states (and supposedly non-oppressive ones) you are sorely lacking in the cynicism department. Go read the recent Bruce Perens essay Is DRM Just a Consumer Rights Issue?. I’ll also repeat two of my favorite sentences in the history of this blog under the subheading What Would Brezhnev Do?:

The Soviet Union took information control to extremes, including prohibiting use of photocopiers by scientists. I suspect that had the USSR survived to this day, the KGB would now be furiously trying to make Digital Restrictions Management work so as to gain access to a few of the wonders of computing without permitting open communication.

I could go on for awhile about why DRM is a bad thing, but in addition to the above I must briefly mention that DRM is deadly for long term data preservation, stifles innovation, is a security threat and doesn’t even prevent copying, the fantasy that it could with just the right legal backing leading to regulatory ratchet.

On the specifics of the Apple protest, see Seth Schoen’s writeup.

In closing, another zinger from Tim Lee:

I think the fundamental disagreement here is one about technology, not philosophy. Attaway believes that the flaws and restrictions imposed by DRM are temporary—kinks that will be worked out as more sophisticated technology is developed. If that were true, Attaway’s argument would have some merit. But the reality is just the opposite: as the media world becomes more complex, the flaws of DRM will only become more glaring. DRM is technological central planning. Centrally planned economies become less efficient as they grow more complex. For precisely the same reasons, centrally planned technologies perform worse as they become more complex.

Posted in DRM, Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Politics | 3 Comments »

Apple for dummies

Thursday, June 15th, 2006

Apple’s penetration of the geek market over the last five years or so has bugged me … for that long. It has been far longer than that since I’ve read a comp.*.advocacy threadflamewar, so stumbling upon Mark Pilgrim’s post on dumping Apple and its heated responses made me feel good and nostalgic.

Tim Bray (who does not b.s.) answers Time to Switch? affirmatively.

I hope this is the visible beginning of a trend and that in a few years most people who ought to know better will have replaced laptops sporting an annoying glowing corporate logo with ones sporting Ubuntu stickers.

Posted in Computers, Open Source, Peeves | 11 Comments »

Peer production economy

Wednesday, May 31st, 2006

Tim Lee points out a couple more cases where critics of open source use fallacious broken windows arguments.

Open source skeptics, particularly those otherwise economically literate, need to be beat over the head about this for awhile.

Meanwhile, I hope economists begin attempting to quantify the value of peer production output.

Posted in Economics, Open Source, Peeves | 1 Comment »

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