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LotR and Potter: some notes

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As I said above, I came reluctantly and very late to the Harry Potter saga, as a Tolkien fan prepared to be dismissive. And I was thoroughly won over. Rowling’s work may fall short of Tolkien’s in sheer mythological scope, grandeur and sublimity; yet it also exceeds its predecessor in other areas –Rowling, for instance, is far better at building, and managing, suspense.

Here are some of the many parallels and echoes — and some central differences — between the two works that I noticed as I raced through the Potter books these past weeks. These notes are offered as a comparison between two masterworks, with no particular agenda and no desire to rank them. (Spoiler alert: if you’re in the dwindling portion of the populace that has not yet read the Potter cycle, you’ll probably want to skip the rest.)

In Tolkien’s work, as in its mythic models, good and evil are pre-existing poles to which characters, and whole races, simply align. There are complex characters in Lord of the Rings whose nature is ambiguous — Boromir, in his way, or Gollum, in his — but they are rarities. We do not particularly know or care how or why Sauron became the Dark Lord; that is simply what he is. Rowling’s Dark Lord has a personal history that explains, though hardly excuses, his evildoing: indeed, Harry’s gradual discovery of that history — and how it in part parallels his own — forms one of the central arcs of Rowling’s books.

Frodo and Harry are both “little” people who have greatness thrust upon them, but Frodo is more truly a nobody; Harry, though Rowling makes a little fun of his status as “the Chosen One,” is born to specialness — it’s just that he’s still a kid when we meet him, and he needs to grow into his power.

Both Frodo and Harry are orphans raised by uncles — but for Harry, this fact is formative, where for Frodo it seems almost incidental. The Potter books are all about families and Family: the bad guys believe in an aristocracy based on bloodline; the good folks understand family as a bond of love. The evil regimes of both worlds bear resemblance to the Third Reich, but in Rowling’s books the racial-purity parallel is explicit. The Potter series makes a case for tolerance, diversity, and the cherishing of misfits that is more thoroughly modern than Tolkien’s. The redemption of house elves like Dobby and Kreacher recalls the partial redemption of Gollum, but Tolkien would never frame this as a matter of “liberation.” (Of course, when Rowling does so, it’s with a healthy dose of humorous irony.)

The tale of The Lord of the Rings unfolds across the long majestic arc of a single quest, where the Potter books are more episodic: each new book brings a whole new set of Maguffin-like objects and new information. On the other hand, Rowling’s work proceeds across its own grand trajectory — that of Harry’s bildungsroman, his coming of age, worked out year by Hogwarts year, mystery by solved mystery.

The similarity of the Ring and the Horcruxes is obvious — objects that each Dark Lord has endowed with a portion of his power and that must be destroyed. As Frodo’s quest nears its conclusion, the Ring grows heavy and painful and begins to have a mind of its own; the Horcrux that Harry and his companions haul around through much of their final book is particularly Ring-like in this way. Frodo gradually spends more and more time in the darkness of Sauron’s dimension; Harry, similarly, finds his scar aching and his mind tracking Voldemort’s. The long passages in The Deathly Hallows in which Harry, Ron and Hermione hole up in a tent on the run from Voldemort’s Ministry share the narrative shape and emotional desolation of the chapters in The Two Towers and The Return of the King that follow Frodo and Sam on their lonely journey into Mordor.

There’s probably a zillion other interesting points of overlap or contrast. That Potter provides fodder for this sort of comparison is, I think, a tribute to Rowling’s achievement. Now I’d better go back and re-read His Dark Materials — I’m afraid that I read Pullman’s books on such thin sleep (we had babies then) that I remember little of them, other than my delight.

[tags]Harry Potter, Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, J.K. Rowling[/tags]

Fool for a CTO

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This past summer I paid a happy visit to the Motley Fool — in downtown Alexandria, just across the river from D.C. proper — to meet the technical team there and give a talk on Dreaming in Code.

I was pretty impressed with the people I met and the lively atmosphere at the company — unpretentious but serious about the important stuff. Anyway, the Fool is now looking for a new CTO. I know from experience that that’s a tough position to fill, but maybe one of you reading this is interested — or knows someone who’d be. More info here.

Clash of the titanic business-press cliches

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My eight-year-old sons don’t pay much attention to the business pages, but yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Business cover — featuring three cartoon characters in a boxing ring — caught their eyes over breakfast.

“Who’s the big fat guy?”

That, I told them, was supposed to be Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO. “The one in glasses?” Bill Gates. They’ve heard of him. The third figure, I said, was a poor likeness of Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

As their interest dwindled, I explained the illustration. And it occurred to me what about the cover bugged me. The headline, no joke, was “Clash of the Titans” (omitted from the Web edition, for some reason). And the whole tired frame for the story had been constructed with an eye to the sensibility of eight-year-olds.

It’s the oldest cliche in the business-journalism book: Corporations are led by warriors and market conflicts are military campaigns — “clashes of the titans.” The trouble is, it’s not only infantile, it distorts our understanding of reality.

Are Microsoft and Google in conflict? Of course. They have fundamentally different visions of where computing’s headed — visions that the Times article, by Steve Lohr and Miguel Helft, ably lays out. But it’s not as if they are feudal fiefdoms fighting over some fixed patch of ground. Their conflict will play out as each company builds its next generation of software and services, and the next one after that, and people make choices about what to buy and what to use.

Those choices are the key to the outcome. In a battle, civilians are mostly bystanders or casualties. In the software business, civilians — users — determine who wins.

Remember that the next time you see a business publication trot out the old corporate-battlefield cliches to talk about the software industry. And if you want to know where the software world is headed, watch your nearest eight- or ten- or twelve-year old — they’ll be making decisions over the next couple of decades that, far more than any punches thrown by Ballmer or Gates or Schmidt, will determine which titans prosper.
[tags]software business, business press[/tags]

No obligation to be famous

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My exposure to the strange music and story of Jandek, the reclusive Texan singer-songwriter, has been limited to occasional enthusiastic mentions by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. But NPR did a story about Jandek last night that concluded with this observation by critic Douglas Wolk. It bears repetition:

“There’s not an obligation to be famous,” Wolk says. “We live in a culture that has impressed on us the idea that everybody not only can be famous, but should or must be famous, and if you’re not famous, you’ve failed, and if you’re making art and the world doesn’t cheer you, then it’s a failure, and that’s just a lie. And it’s a lie that Jandek realizes is a lie, and he’s gotten around it his own way.”

[tags]jandek, fame, celebrity[/tags]

Deep packet inspection and the new ad targeting

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It’s not hard to understand why people got upset with Facebook over “Beacon,” the company’s effort to track what its users do on the Web and auto-transform those actions — like buying products or tickets to a movie — into messages broadcast over a personal network. Who wouldn’t be creeped out, at least sometimes, by this transmutation of private transactions into public statements?

But Facebook is just facing the same pressures all tech companies encounter when they find they have to deliver on sky-high valuations for investors and markets. Facebook, and the people pouring money into it, now claim the company is worth $15 billion. Expect plenty more “monetization” gambits.

I’ll remain wary, but I won’t be surprised. Instead, I’m keeping my eyes on a different, and far more troubling, violation of Web norms: it’s called “deep packet inspection.” That geeky phrase hides a world of potential ill.

All Internet messages travel as packets of data. Packets have headers; they’re like the addresses on envelopes, and service providers’ routing equipment uses the headers to make sure messages get where they’re going. Deep packet inspection (DPI) involves looking at the content of the packet as well — it’s the equivalent of the post office opening your envelope, or the phone company listening to your call. Internet service providers use DPI for security purposes. It’s usually been discussed in the past as a tool that enables ISPs to limit Bittorrent use or other peer-to-peer filesharing activities; it is also what would enable various schemes being bandied about for creating “fast lanes” of privileged types of Internet communication. The debate over such schemes is well-advanced.

But now, it seems, hardware companies have begun producing devices that enable service providers to use DPI to target ads. The Wall Street Journal covered this topic last week here. And that, to me, is just way over the line.

I don’t want my ISP looking at how I use the Internet to target ads to me, period, any more than I want the phone company listening in on my conversations in order to sell me stuff.

I’m sure we’ll hear that the DPI-based targeting schemes are a Big! New! Benefit! in providing us with more relevant ads. But I’d rather be the steward of my own personal information than let a service provider make decisions for me. We’ll also hear that privacy-minded users should just find a service provider that suits them. But how can we make an informed choice about service providers unless they are forthright about telling us exactly what they’re doing with DPI, in words everyone can understand? In many communities, high-speed Net service is a monopoly, anyway.

Then we’ll hear that this is no different from the way Google’s Gmail scans your messages to target text ads to you. But Gmail has tons of competition. And Google’s accumulation of personal data has begun to raise privacy concerns as well — so saying “Google does it too” doesn’t exactly provide full ethical cover.

This issue sits at the heart of the Net neutrality debate, and it comes at us in a form that is more easily understandable to the everyday user than its previous manifestations. “Packet inspection” may be unintelligible to non-geeks, but anyone can understand why you don’t want the post office opening your mail.
[tags]deep packet inspection, net neutrality, ISPs, targeted advertising[/tags]

Becoming a cranky geek

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Back in the dotcom era I used to appear occasionally on ZDTV’s “Silicon Spin” and chew on the tech headlines with John Dvorak and other guests. Dvorak is doing pretty much the same thing once more, in somewhat less lavish circumstances but with a somewhat more honest name for the show — Cranky Geeks.

I joined the panel today for a lively discussion about Facebook’s Beacon ad-policy brouhaha; the mysterious firing of a GameSpot editor, apparently for panning an advertiser’s game; Google’s entry into the wireless spectrum auction; AMD’s CEO bad-mouthing Intel (which really doesn’t qualify as news, does it?); and more.

You can stream or download the Cranky Geeks episode from this page.
[tags]john dvorak, cranky geeks[/tags]

There and back again

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If you tried to visit this blog over the last 48 hours or so, you may have experienced some, ah, bumps. (See previous post.)

I believe I’m back in business now, though I still have to put together some of the more far-flung pieces of the site.

Normal blogging will resume in a bit! Apologies for the brief mess.

WordPress footer follies

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I was all prepared to post a backlog of interesting stuff today when it came to my attention, thanks to alerts from Reinhard Handwerker and Vikram Thakur of Symantec, that some strange spammy stuff was happening on this site. I ended up spending the day rooting out bot droppings from my WordPress installation.

Yes, it’s true, I’d been lax about upgrading to the latest version. I was only a little behind, but perhaps that was enough. In any case, here are some details, which might be useful to others who find themselves victim to what I think of as the “wordpress footer exploit.” (I’ve already gotten email from a couple of other users who are battling the same problem. Al Gore, apparently, went through something similar.)

Skip the rest of this unless you’re a WordPress user in trouble looking for help!

Here were the gory details in my case. No doubt others will differ. I don’t have a clear sense of the starting point for the exploit — no doubt some little chink in the WordPress armor that I can only hope is no longer open in the current version.

My HTML source revealed a long list of spammy links in the WordPress footer — hidden from view but presumably accessible to the Googlebot. The first step in defeating them was to remove the php call to the wp_footer function from the footer template. (If you need that function for other plugins or users, you can add it back in once your code is cleaned up.)

That alone isn’t enough, alas. I also found 2-3 lines of code inserted into the main index.php file at the top level of the blog. The code that kept reinserting the spammy links into the footer even after they’d been deleted was located in a few lines added to the default-filters file in the wp-includes directory. Then I found two more completely new files had been added to wp-includes: one called “class-mail” and the other, deceptively simply named “apache.php,” which was a motherlode of mischief. (Thank you, though, oh hackers, for labeling your crud with ASCII art of a spider — it’s really helpful when one is scanning dozens of files to know that when you stumble on the malicious code, it comes with its very own Dark Mark.) “Classes.php” looked like it had been touched, too, based on the mod date; I replaced it with a clean version.

I killed all this crud and succeeded in removing the spammy links, but I still had a problem: there were a bunch of files that seemed to be being served from my domain that were just pages advertising, you know, those drugs that spammers like to advertise. They weren’t my content, of course, but they’d somehow made their way into my WordPress — and they were being linked to from other compromised WordPress sites. The ways of the botnets are devious indeed! I couldn’t figure out exactly where this infection’s root lay, but — having removed all the malicious code I could find and then changed all my passwords — I overwrote my WordPress installation with a clean download of the WordPress code, and that appeared to do the trick.

If you suspect your site is compromised, I recommend proceeding in the following order: First, root out the bad code; then change your passwords. If you change your passwords while your site is still compromised, you risk having your new passwords exposed via exactly the same route your old ones were, if in fact they were (I don’t know if mine were or not, but hey, when you start finding bad code in your directories, it’s time to change your passwords).

May you never need this information! But if you do need it, may this be of some use to you.
[tags]wordpress, spam, bots, exploits[/tags]

Returning, Pensievely

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Apologies for the extended bout of blog hooky. My excuses are not all that profound. Mostly, I’ve been finishing up the new book proposal. Also, riding herd on a long-drawn-out basement remodeling project which should allow us, belatedly, to provide each of our now-eight-year-old boys with their own bedroom turf. (I think the term defensible turf is relevant here.)

And also, finally, I have been catching up with the rest of the known universe and plowing my way through the Harry Potter cycle. As a Tolkien cultist from youth, I’d long resisted, but the time finally came, and — while I remain a Tolkien man through-and-through — I freely admit to the addictive nature of J.K. Rowling’s books: she has created a worthier world than I’d expected from the Oxbridgian mimicry and the iconic images (impossibly cute round-spectacled kid face with robes and wand, etc.) that represent it on and beyond the covers of the books themselves.

This passage (from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) describing Dumbledore’s Pensieve caught my blog-enchanted eye. (Of course many others had previously noticed the same parallel.)

“What is it?” Harry asked shakily.

“This? It is called a Pensieve,” said Dumbledore. “I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”

“Er,” said Harry, who couldn’t truthfully say that he had ever felt anything of the sort.

“At these times,” said Dumbledore, indicating the stone basin, “I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.”

Easier to spot patterns and links, indeed!

[tags]harry potter, pensieve[/tags]

Kapor’s early bet on the Net

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This season, Mitch Kapor is delivering a trilogy of lectures on “Disruptive Innovations I Have Known and Loved” at the UC Berkeley School of Information. I missed number one, which covered Kapor’s role in the early years of the PC (podcast audio is here). Wednesday evening I made it to the second lecture, which focused on the rise of the Internet, and particularly the early, pre-Web Net era — the time when the Internet was considered a hopelessly geeky backwater for Unix heads and the golden road to the future lay with outfits like Prodigy and Compuserve and AOL. (The third lecture, on virtual worlds, is on Nov. 28.)

I first heard Kapor speak on this topic in the summer of 1993, at the Digital World conference in Beverly Hills, where, amid a throng of cable executives and Hollywood honchos and telco bureaucrats, he was the only speaker to make the then-fringe-y claim that the Internet offered a better model for the networked future than the “Information Highway” then being touted as an inevitability. His concern — one that resonated with me at the time — was that we try to create something better than “500 channels with the same crap that’s now on 50,” some system that would not only be open to corporate entertainment and commerce but would offer “a migration path for the weirdos and the outsiders to get into the system, mature and blossom.”

Kapor’s espousal of the Internet in those days was part of a wider activist portfolio; he’d cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation only a few years before. But it also stands as one of the more accurate acts of long-shot prophecy in technology history. At his talk Wednesday, Kapor looked back on that time and filled in some of the details of his own role.

He’d joined The Well early on, in the late ’80s (a year or two before I did), and “lost the next two weeks of my life” absorbed in the online conversation. A bit later the Well gave its members Internet access, making it one of the only ways that members of the general public could connect to that network. Around then the National Science Foundation began an aggressive project to open the Internet out to the public and to private businesses. In 1992 Kapor was spending a lot of time in Washington doing EFF work and got to know the founders of UUNet, which was one of the first firms to resell Internet connections to other companies.

“Why,” Kapor asked, “wasn’t this an obvious investment?” He tried to interest John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins, but Doerr “wouldn’t take the meeting.” Kapor himself ended up putting some of his own money into the company. He provided no details, but it must have been a lucrative move: UUNet went public in 1995, shortly before Netscape, and was gobbled up in an accelerating series of acquisitions that made it part of Worldcom, in the days when people thought Worldcom was taking over the known universe. (Today what’s left of Worldcom — after a storied detour through the courts and various name changes — is part of Verizon. Full timeline here.)

My recollection of those days — when I was a recent immigrant to technology journalism from the arts — was that, much as I rooted for the Internet-style future as a healthier one for our culture, it was awfully hard to see how anyone was likely to make money via such a system. Kapor said he looked at the open network’s advantage in generating innovation and encouraging participation and concluded, “I think this is the one that’s going to win.” He was right.

It’s incredibly useful to keep that era in mind today, I think, because it provides not just a heartening saga of the triumph of free expression and open participation, but also a clear case in which those ideals were more practical, too.

The Internet’s victory over the services we now derisively dismiss as “walled gardens” was an instance, within recent memory, when the idealists weren’t hopelessly outgunned by the cynics — when, in fact, the idealists turned out to be the realists, and the cynics took a bath. That’s worth keeping in mind as today’s tech industry — powered by Google’s success and enthralled by innovators like Facebook — races through yet another cycle of debate over what “open” really means.
[tags]mitch kapor, uunet, lectures, berkeley school of information, internet history[/tags]