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Some Gibson, then a break

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We’re leaving tomorrow on a brief mid-winter getaway, so I may be absent from these precincts for a handful of days. Before I go, two passages worth savoring from Andrew Leonard’s recent interview with William Gibson in Rolling Stone:

How does it break down for you? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

I find myself less pessimistic than I sometimes imagine I should be. When I started to write science fiction, the intelligent and informed position on humanity’s future was that it wasn’t going to have one at all. We’ve forgotten that a whole lot of smart people used to wake up every day thinking that that day could well be the day the world ended. So when I started writing what people saw as this grisly dystopian, punky science fiction, I actually felt that I was being wildly optimistic: “Hey, look — you do have a future. It’s kind of harsh, but here it is.” I wasn’t going the post-apocalyptic route, which, as a regular civilian walking around the world, was pretty much what I expected to happen myself.

Also:

The very first time I picked up a Sony Walkman, I knew it was a killer thing, that the world was changing right then and there. A year later, no one could imagine what it was like when you couldn’t move around surrounded by a cloud of stereophonic music of your own choosing. That was huge! That was as big as the Internet!

Around the economic world in four headlines

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Many years ago, thanks to some mutual friends, I had the privilege of meeting the late George W.S. Trow, and of sitting in on a class he was giving as part of a journalism workshop at Bard College. Each morning Trow would sit down with the day’s New York Times front page and begin to find links between the stories — not hypertext (this was way pre-Web), but causal connections, cross-currents and submerged conflicts, relationships that the newspaper couldn’t or wouldn’t overtly illuminate but that you could make out if you just let the stories rub against one another in your mind.

The author of In the Context of No Context (which I wrote about in Salon a decade ago) was giving us a lesson in how to place the loose atoms of conventional news reporting into molecular structures of context. Once the lesson took, the methodology was impossible to shake.

I got those old Trowvian vibrations again this morning as I scanned the front-page of the Wall Street Journal — crammed as it is these days with four or five headlines where there used to be three, an immediate result of the new Murdoch regime.

The lead story, “Trader Made Billions on Subprime,” tells of hedge fund operator John Paulson, who has made $3 to $4 billion, personally, by “betting against the housing and mortgage markets.” Since those markets, you may have heard, have been going through a rough patch, Paulson’s “bets” paid off.

Paulson himself sounds almost contrite about his success: he’s “reluctant to celebrate while housing causes others pain,” intends to increase his charitable giving, and thinks that “a lot of homeowners have been victimized.”

This stands in contrast to Los Angeles real estate investor Jeff Greene, the subject of the Journal’s second lead, a friend of Paulson’s. Paulson invited Greene into his housing-crash fund, but Greene went off and implemented the investment strategy on his own. Paulson is irked, but Greene protests, “He never told me, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”

The “bet” paid off for Greene, too. He now has three jets. (What does one do with three jets?) He believes that he is “pretty conservative in the way I spend money”; after all, his newest jet is an “older model” Gulfstream that he got for only $2 million — a steal!

We understand that the financial engineers of Wall Street have always been handsomely rewarded. Lots of people and institutions in the financial industry lost the gambles that Paulson and company won. But I can’t help thinking there is something broken with a system in which Olympian financiers place their bets on incomprehensible financial instruments and risk winning or losing bonuses and jets — while these same transactions bear real consequences that are very comprehensible and tangible for the people whose lives they affect. When the roulette wheel of the derivatives market stops, some people get to buy jet number three; other people lose their homes.

Which leads us to headline number three: “States to Tighten Belts as Weakness of Economy Cuts Into Tax Receipts.” Here we move down from the rarefied air of Wall Street back into the thicker atmosphere of everyday reality, where, it seems, the mistakes made in the mortgage market — all the stuff that Paulson “bet” against — are now dragging down the economy, dampening consumer spending, slowing economic growth, reducing employment and cutting into government coffers. Which means less money for schools and police and children’s healthcare and other stuff that people without three jets — or even two jets! — might care about.

Finally, if your eyes scan down the page, you hit headline number four, “Toxic Factories Take Toll on China’s Labor Force” — an account of the cadmium battery industry. Making the batteries requires toxic chemicals, and when the U.S. started regulating their manufacture, the industry simply moved to a lower-cost, no-hassle home in China, and took its poisonous impact with it.

The story pulls our gaze out from the national to the global scale, reminding us that the U.S. economy now rests, even more completely than in the past, on foreign foundations. James Fallows explains how in painfully clear terms in the new Atlantic:

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China.

There you have it: the story of the economic world today, from prosperous financial buccaneers to worried middle-class America to the developing-world workforce that can only dream of someday upgrading its problems to the sort we in the United States contend with. It’s all on the Journal’s front page today, but the newspaper won’t connect the dots for you — that work is left to each of us.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
— John Muir

[tags]george trow, wall street journal, subprime crisis[/tags]

When Nintendo cartridge meets spin cycle

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I am accustomed to, and accommodated to, the fragility of our electronic gadgets. At best, they are built to have a fighting chance of surviving a few knocks. I have used Thinkpads until their plastic cases began to disintegrate, and I have an unusually durable cellphone — an antediluvian model with a black-and-white screen. But in general, our PDAs, Ipods, cameras and all other manner of digital gewgaw are prone to failure given the slightest abuse. And we accept this as the nature of contemporary stuff: cheap to make, quick to fail, cheap to replace — and your replacement will be faster, cooler, more capacious.

So when my son Jack reported, with a downcast face, that he had failed to remove three Nintendo DS cartridges from the pocket of a pair of pants that had just passed through the washing machine, I figured, oops — there goes $100 worth of ROM chips. I knew Nintendo does a great job of protecting its hardware from the depredations of its puerile customer base; how many times had I seen Game Boys survive impacts that would have totaled any laptop? Yet I had no hope for the laundered cartridges.

“Maybe they still work!” my son proposed, with the look of a gambler willing to bet on a long shot, knowing full well he faced brutal odds. I just pursed my lips and thought, “Dream on.”

I fished the pants out of the washer and located the cartridges — turned out to be two, not three. They seemed remarkably dry, yet I had no hope of their survival. This micro-finery of silicon and contacts, marinated in Tide and then roughed up by wash, rinse and spin? No way, Mario and Luigi.

I handed the cartridges to Jack and left the room, torn between urges to console my son and to chastise him.

A moment later, I heard: “YESSS! It works!” Sonic Rush had survived. So, we learned a moment later, had Pokemon.

Somehow, Nintendo had managed to manufacture a game cartridge that could take a licking from an eight-year-old boy — and his family’s household appliances — and keep on clicking.

To such engineering prowess, one can only bow.
[tags]nintendo ds[/tags]

My next book: the story of blogs

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I left Salon last summer with the idea of working on a new book. I’m happy to report that the book now has a deal and a publisher — Crown, with whom I had such a happy experience on DREAMING IN CODE — and I’ll be spending the next year or so researching and writing it.

I am, I think the word is, stoked.

The topic will seem obvious to any of you who’ve been reading my stuff over the years: It’s going to be a book about bloggers and blogging. The working title is SAY EVERYTHING, and we’re describing it as the story of how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and what it means for our culture.

Upon delivering this news I typically hear two wildly divergent responses from two different groups of listeners. People in the tech world tend to react like this: “Blogging? Oh, that’s so 2000!” They think blogging is something that happened way back in the early part of this decade, about which everything has already been said. Meanwhile, people outside the tech-industry bubble — who’ve never heard of Techcrunch or Techmeme — respond with variations on “I’d love to read that.”

I should probably point out here that the population of potential readers in the second group outnumbers those in the former. Yet I belong to the first group myself. So I also hope to show the insiders that there is more to be learned and understood about blogging than they perhaps realize.

In other words, I’ll continue to do the sort of writing on technology I’ve always done, since I started back at the old S.F. Examiner: trying to be accurate enough to keep the respect of those immersed in the field, and insightful enough to hold their interest, while doing my best to make sure that everything I’ve written appeals to smart people who know nothing about the subject. It’s a bit of a straddle; some readers thought I pulled it off with DREAMING IN CODE, some thought I fell to one side or the other. I’m going to try it again.

Why blogging? I think I harbor a secret wish to spend the next couple of years explaining that writing a, you know, book about blogging is really okay — and that, no, I don’t think it should have been a blog instead.

Seriously, there’s a great tale that has still not been fully told of how the practice actually evolved — from technical invention to media craze to cultural phenomenon. As the haphazard efforts to mark some sort of 10th-anniversary-of-blogging this year proved, people are still a little fuzzy on the basics of the story. (Rebecca Blood’s account from 2000 remains invaluable, but it’s incomplete and now far out of date.)

When Mike Arrington asked, last summer, “Will Someone Who Actually Cares About Blogging Please Write the History Of It?,” I just smiled. But I wasn’t ready to talk about my plans yet; I remain uncharacteristically superstitious about announcing big projects until their financing is in place. I realize this is terrible un-Web-2.0ish of me, but there it is.

So there’s a story, one about how innovations emerge, how they bubble up from the creativity of geeks and pass into the wider culture. There’s also an argument, one that I’ve been making for ages, in different forms, from my very first column on blogging eight years ago: that blogging is not, despite what you hear from so many different quarters, a trivial phenomenon. And that, despite all the dismissals (most recently by Doris Lessing), blogging — far from contributing to the demise of culture and the end of civilization — actually offers a lifeline in the sea of information overload.

There’s much further to say but that’s enough for now. More as the work progresses!
[tags]books, blogging, say everything[/tags]

Remembering Bob Watts

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I was deeply saddened to hear from my former colleagues at Salon that Bob Watts, who served as Salon’s art director for many years, passed away early this morning after a long fight with cancer. (Joan Walsh’s remembrance is here. And here are other remembrances from Salon people.)

I knew Bob from his start at Salon as a photo intern in 1998, but worked closest with him during the dark years after the dotcom bubble burst, when Salon’s prospects were dim and budgets were slim. Some of Salon’s editors fought their own guerrilla battles against our financial woes by spending money they didn’t really have, and it was my job as managing editor to try to reel them back toward reality. I never had to do that with Bob: at the end of each month he’d calmly deposit the art department’s report on my desk, and it was so reliably in order and under budget that, I confess, I took to reviewing it less and less closely over the years. It could simply be counted on, as could he.

Stereotypes paint the artist as undisciplined and indulgent. Bob wasn’t a stereotype; he was the real thing, and so he approached his work with care and consideration, balancing his own abundant inspiration with the needs of the people around him, working fast on ridiculously tight deadlines to create consistently delightful images.

He must have produced, literally, thousands of Salon cover images over the years, each one a witty or moving or beautiful little time capsule. I will miss them, as I will miss him.

A year of Code

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It really has been a great year for Dreaming in Code — many thanks to all of you who helped make it so. The book started off with a rush of interest sparked by Joel Spolsky; I got to present the book to interested crowds at Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, and talk about it on a bunch of radio shows; and sales of the book held steady all year.

Now it’s the season of year-end lists, and my book has turned up on the Chicago Tribune’s list of “Our Favorite Books of 2007”. Some kind bloggers have also put it on their year-end lists — I’m grateful.

I’m also happy to have received a detailed and thoughtful write-up by Michael Schrage, the longtime technology columnist and commentator, who selected Dreaming for his list of favorite books of 2007 in Strategy and Business.

The paperback is due out in February, with a new epilogue, taking the Chandler story further down its still open road.

And, yes, there’s another book in the works where that one came from. I should be posting more about it pretty soon now…

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]