Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing and Search Engine Watch have more on Google and COPA: it seems that several other search engines, including Yahoo and MSN, complied with the government’s demand for log files. Only Google is putting up a fight.
Ben and Josh
My friend Josh Kornbluth, in Philadelphia to perform his great Ben Franklin solo show as part of the city’s celebration of the Franklin birthday tercentenary, got robbed — but that didn’t stop him from posting this moving little story and tribute to Franklin, the power of song, and more. Go read it.
COPA’s latest collateral damage — Google users’ privacy
Salon — along with the ACLU and a diverse group of plaintiffs — has been in the thick of the fight against the misguided and, we believe, unconstitutional Child Online Protection Act since 1998. The argument went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2004. Having lost the five-year-long preliminary round, the Bush Administration is taking the matter to full trial. And guess who’s getting dragged into the argument? Google, and all its users for an entire week — among whom, most likely, are you and me.
The Mercury News reports today on this strange turn of events. It appears that the Bush Justice Department believes that, somehow, a gigantic, indiscriminate data dump of a week’s worth of search engine activity logs will help it demonstrate that the 1998 law is not a censorship measure at all but rather an effective measure limiting minors’ access to online porn.
It’s a peculiar idea, given the vast volume of Net smut that originates outside of U.S. jurisdiction, the reasonable effectiveness of search engines’ own decency filters and the likely use of the law by prosecutors to go after uppity publishers. But it’s of a piece with the rest of the new Imperial Presidency’s tactics: When in doubt, seize as much private citizens’ information as you can and see what kind of a case you can patch together!
Just as we are supposed to let the Bush Administration decide in secret when and how to break the wiretap laws, we are supposed to trust it to use discretion in applying this broadly-worded statute — which punishes all publishers of material considered “harmful to minors” with fines of up to $50,000 and imprisonment of up to six months for each day of publishing such material, unless the publisher puts it behind a wall of credit-card verification.
Relax, says the administration lawyers — we’ll only go after the real bad guys. If you’re a legitimate publisher, you’ll be okay. Why am I not reassured? I’d be wary of any government receiving that power; this particular administration long ago squandered any trust it might have possessed.
Note the error in the Mercury copy, which reads, “The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content inaccessible to minors.” I assume the paper meant, “accessible.” Actually, who knows what the law was meant to do? All that’s certain is that, if it is ever enforced, it will give the government a potent new weapon to use against any online publisher it doesn’t like, if said publisher dares to post non-PG-rated material.
Hitsville Yahoo
I know I’ve already lit into Lloyd Braun, Yahoo’s Hollywood guy, but it’s irresistible.
Today’s Journal carried news of his latest plot to bring TV-style hit shows to the Web — a revival of the long-forgotten, ill-starred reality show “The Runner.”
Braun’s aim, the Journal reports, is “For Yahoo to create the first mass-market Internet hit, which would do for the medium what ‘The Sopranos’ did for pay cable or Milton Berle did in the early days of broadcast TV.”
Now, this is not a direct quote from Braun. Maybe he’s not as dumb as the Journal summary implies.
That aside, well, Braun needs to be brought up to speed about the Web. And wait, he’s in luck! All he needs to do is hop on his private plane and fly up to Sunnyvale and sit down with two guys named Jerry Yang and Dave Filo. They can tell him a lot about what a “mass-market Internet hit” really is. Yang and Filo created the very first one; it was even a reality show of a sort — just a little directory of Web sites that evolved into the juggernaut we now know as Yahoo.
Some other Internet hits Braun could study: Amazon. EBay. Napster. Linux, Apache and open source. You fill in the rest.
Sure, these are not “shows” at all — they’re complex hybrids of businesses, services and communities in which people connect and, in a sense, perform for one another.
That is what a “hit” on the Web looks like. Few of us could see that a decade ago. To not see it today is just plain blind. Braun’s quest for a mass-market “hit show” on the Web displays a complete misapprehension of its nature.
I get this picture of a TV executive in the early ’50s. Someone who worked in the movies until this new thing came along. He sits, fretting, in his office. He knows exactly what he’s looking for — that first breakthrough TV show, one so compelling, so overwhelmingly great that people would want to see it in a movie theater!
Hack your socks
I have returned to work at Salon — more on that, and what I’m up to, anon. But first, a meditation on “life hacks.”
I attended the original “Life Hacks” talk that Danny O’Brien gave at the Emerging Technology Conference in 2004 and was intrigued to learn how leading geeks organized their lives and files. (For instance, store everything in plain text files — they’ll never become obsolete or unusable, like fancier file formats.) When Merlin Mann started up his personal-productivity blog I was further hooked. There’s something irresistible about observing how software engineers apply the inhumanly rigorous logic of their calling to the mess of daily life: Sometimes it’s like a train wreck, but often the rest of us can learn something.
Life hacks now appears to be something of a minimovement, with its own Gawker Media blog called Lifehacker and an O’Reilly book apparently in the works. This page on Mann’s site offers a fine overview of the sort of “Hints from Heloise” meets “The Wisdom of Crowds” stuff we’re talking about here. Suggestions range from the violently ingenious (“Keyboard improvement — For those with a PC keyboard who don’t have perfect typing skills: rip out the ‘insert’ and ‘caps lock’ keys…”) — to the sneakily devious (“Messy house? Always keep several get well cards on the mantel….. so if unexpected guests arrive, they will think you’ve been sick and unable to clean”).
So here is my little contribution to the great parade of Life Hacks.
I have long felt that time spent matching socks is time lost forever. There is no edification, no lesson to be mastered, no pleasure to be wrung from the ordeal. Music can alleviate the boredom but not fully redeem the experience. I have achieved the zen of washing dishes, and even the tao of sorting laundry. But socks — nah.
So here is my method allowing you to Never Ever Sort Socks Again (patent pending):
(1) Throw out all your old socks (or donate them, if they’re presentable).
(2) Decide what color socks you need. The fewer colors the better. I’ve gone minimalist-retro: there’s the black socks, and there’s the white socks, and that’s it.
(3) Purchase large quantities of socks in those colors. You can get different brands/makes for each color, as long as all socks of the same color are exactly the same.
(4) Just dump the socks in your dresser drawer as is from the clean wash — don’t sort or pair them. When you need a pair, grab any two of the same color — they’re guaranteed to match!
Your socks will all be of the same vintage, and as long as you mix them up periodically and don’t let some languish at the bottom of the drawer, they will wear evenly. When they become grimy or sprout holes — go back to step (1).
This method comes to you fully tested. I have eaten my own dogfood. It works, I promise you.
But wait, you say you want color and variety and style and pizazz in your life?
I say: buy some sweaters!
Viiv easy pieces
Intel has a big new consumer technology initiative. The company is reaching beyond the corporate and engineering worlds that it calls home and trying to make further inroads into the home. So why does its new platform have a name that defies pronunciation and looks like a typographical error?
Viiv. When I first saw a reference to it, I thought, gee, those crazy geeks, playing games with Roman numerals again! (OK, I studied Latin for too long.)
Rhymes with “peeve”? Apparently not. According to this morning’s Wall Street Journal, it is supposed to be pronounced “five.” Gee, that’s obvious! And even if Intel’s gajillions of ads pound it into the heads of consumers everywhere that when they see “Viiv” they should think “Five,” still, why? Five what?
Doesn’t Intel have enough money to pay someone to do this stuff right? Or perhaps they paid someone too much. Considering how successful the company was with “Intel Inside,” which it has now decided to ditch, this move strikes me as vwacky.
Again dangerous visions
I don’t have as low an opinion of Edge in general as Dave Pollard does, and I found the site’s annual Q&A intriguing as always: this year, John Brockman asked his assembled literati, digerati and cognoscenti to answer the question, “What is Your Dangerous Idea?” I enjoyed skimming the answers, but also enjoyed Pollard’s rejoinder of his own list. Two of my favorites from the latter:
| The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred [George Bernard Shaw]. If you really think that anybody really understands what another person has said, do an experiment after the next presentation you attend and ask attendees one-on-one immediately afterwards what they got out of it. You’ll be astonished. You never change things by fighting the existing reality [Bucky Fuller]. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. |
Off the petroleum reserve
It seems there’s an extra dose of right-wing perspectives and conservative punditry on the New York Times op-ed page these days.
Yesterday it was a Heritage Foundation fellow lecturing the Democrats on proper and improper ways to mix religion and politics; today it was conservative legal scholar Charles Fried going to bat for Samuel Alito. But the capper, also today, was a strange essay by a pair of Cato Institute fellows arguing that the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve should be liquidated.
Now, this is something that Big Oil has always dreamed of. From a strict free-market economics perspective, there’s even something to be said for it. The reserve certainly holds the potential for distorting the oil market, and if you live in a dream-world in which that market exists outside of the international political system, with all its unpredictable non-economic dynamics, then you will find this a laudable goal. Certainly, in an ideal world — one in which, say, we had a government that understood how important it was to move us away from an oil economy — who’d want the public sector to waste its resources stockpiling oil?
But the piece, by Cato’s Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren, is full of fallacies. It seems that, on the one hand, the reserve is so insignificant in size that it can’t really help the nation in a pinch; yet, on the other hand, the reserve is so vast that it distorts the fundamental economics of the oil industry.
If we just do away with the government reserve, they tell us, private industry will do the job for us. “Economists agree that every barrel of oil we put in the public reserve displaces oil that might otherwise have gone into private inventories,” they tell us, then add: “How much displacement occurs is unclear, but there is little doubt that it’s significant.” But wait, they just said that unnamed “economists” agree that every barrel of oil in the public reserve displaces private inventory. That’s not “unclear” at all. Are they even reading their own words?
What the Cato guys completely miss is the first word in the reserve’s name: strategic. The reserve was created in 1975, and anyone who was of news-consuming age then (as I was, and as I must assume these “senior fellows” were as well) will know why. The reserve was created to help the U.S. avoid being blackmailed by foreign oil suppliers. It should have been accompanied by long-term conservation programs and other measures. But its primary rationale was national security, not good economics.
In the wake of 9/11 you’d think such concerns would be at the forefront of conservative thinkers’ arguments. But corporate free-marketry trumps national defense every time when the likes of Cato and Olin are paying your rent. So Taylor and Van Doren tell us (a) oil embargoes can’t hurt us any more because the market’s so globalized; (b) a real catastrophe, like al-Qaida taking over Saudi Arabia, might be “worrisome,” but the reserve wouldn’t be big enough to help us in such a case (this is really an argument for a bigger reserve, but never mind!); (c) we really shouldn’t worry because even anti-American regimes wouldn’t be stupid enough to bankrupt themselves by refusing to sell their oil.
These writers evidently believe that they have explained all possible futures, and yet every one of their scenarios imagines rational economic actors in every role. Before 9/11, you could write that off as amusing folly; today it constitutes tragic stupidity.
There must be an argument going through someone’s head at the Times that goes like this: Their newspaper is under assault from the right, most recently because of its exposure of the Bush administration’s illegal-wiretap power grab; so it must achieve the impression of “balance” by presenting these op-ed voices from the right. But really, to balance the Cato people you’d have to find some wild-eyed leftist arguing that, say, all oil companies should be nationalized tomorrow.
The greatest achievement of the right over the past decade — oh, setting aside the seizure of “all three branches of government” in the wake of a disputed election, the plundering of the Treasury, and the derailing of the war on al-Qaida — is this: By a wide swath of American opinion-makers, “balance” is understood to mean that the usual welter of mainstream American voices needs to be weighed down by a gang of beady-eyed ideologues on right-wing think-tank payrolls who can barely construct a sensible argument.
Quicken little
Over the weekend the New York Times business section published a slightly damp kiss for Intuit, the maker of Quicken. I wouldn’t have paid the piece much mind except for two things, one trivial and the other less so.
The photo for the piece showed Intuit execs who were, according to the caption, “working out problems in software.” But if you looked at the picture you actually saw two guys moving Post-it notes around a whiteboard. In previous posts I’ve noted the unexpected value that software developers have found in this low-tech information-management and project-planning tool; I even found my own use for them in outlining my book. More evidence: Stickies rule!
More importantly, I have to say that this paean to Quicken left out one huge problem with the product. I’ve used Quicken for something like 12 years now to manage my finances, carrying my data from an early Quicken for Windows over to Quicken for Mac (in the mid 90s) and then back the Windows in the late 90s. I’ve found that the Windows version has steadily, if slowly, improved since I finally settled on it. I tend to upgrade about once every four years. When I recently upgraded from the 2002 edition to the 2005 version I was thrilled to discover that the helpful but slow-moving wizards at Intuit had finally, after all these years, made it possible for you to merge transaction categories without requiring you to go back and manually reassign each transaction (something no sane person with years of records would ever undertake, making merges effectively impossible). Progress!
My Mac-based wife wants to get her Quicken into better shape and reorganize some of those barnacled categories, so we upgraded her version from 2003 to 2006. Intuit charges twice as much for the Mac version — and, for your extra dough, throws in only half the features. Now there’s a business model. Among other things, the category-merging feature that Windows users enjoy, and that was the whole point of our upgrade, is not available on the Mac. (Macintouch offers a host of other gripes from Mac hands.)
The whole experience has left me disgruntled and eager to explore the variety of Quicken alternatives on the Mac platform. And the Times piece, by praising the company’s revitalization of the Quicken product line without noting how poorly it treats its Mac customers, did a small disservice to this small but passionate and legendarily vocal population of users.
Kung Pao-er
Since my last post on the elusive perfect home-cooked Kung Pao chicken, I have pursued this grail a half-dozen more times, and I believe I have achieved my goal, or as close as I expect to get in this lifetime.
I started working from a recipe I found here — the photo looked somewhat right, and the ingredient set was close to my preference for a simple chicken, scallion and peanut dish.
I tried out a variety of modifications, including the use of hoisin sauce instead of sugar for the sweetening, but in the end found the simpler white-sugar approach, combined with a switch from light to dark soy sauce, did the trick. I added scallions, eliminated some extra salt, brought the cornstarch level way down (I’ve never been able to put a whole tablespoon of cornstarch into any dish without ending up with muck), and tinkered with the sauce ingredients — adding rice wine and black vinegar. The result is just what I was after. Here’s the full recipe.