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Pile ‘o links #1

March 8, 2016 in Links | 1 comment

I use OneTab to move all my open tabs into a single list on a Web page. But then that gets unwieldy too. So now I’m moving a bunch over here. Although it’s a sloooow process inside WordPress’ composition window (or whatever this is called). So I’ll stop trying to edit this page and start working on the next one.

You Didn’t Notice It, But Google Fiber Just Began the Golden Age of High Speed Internet Access, by Susan Crawford in @Medium’s Backchannel. The optimistic view on Googles deal with Huntsville Alabama to do Google Fiber on the city’s own glass.
What Money Can Buy – The New Yorker
What is blockchain? – Business Insider. Has some useful visuals.
How the Blockchain Can Change the Music Industry (Part 2) — Cuepoint — Medium
From shoe repair to digital identity — putting online on the High Street — The Internet of Me — Medium
A New Manifesto for the Tech Industry — Medium
Is Google Fiber (Finally) Changing the Broadband Game ? | diffraction analysis
The growth rate of FTTH/B subscriptions should continue to increase at an annual average rate of 10% until 2019
Shoshana Zuboff: Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism. A learned, deep and depressing take on Where We Are Now. Fortunately we’re on the case.
Why Trump? by George Lakoff. George has studied the shit out of where each of our political preferences come from, and he puts it to work here.
The rise of American authoritarianism – Vox. Also about Trump.
Flyover Country on the App Store. A fabulous app I can’t wait to try on my next trip studying geology at 500 mph at 38,000 feet.
FCC Just Making A Bad Thing Worse | Doc Searls in Radio Ink. A comment they liked so much that they turned it into a stand-alone post. It’s about how all attempts to “revitalize” AM radio are worse than wasted in an age when digital live streams, on-demand and podcasts are the obvious future. Bonus link.
Adblock Plus and (a little) more: Acceptable Ads explained: monetization
The New York Times Might Ban Visitors Who Use Ad Blockers | Adweek
NY Times recommends ad blockers after CEO mulls ad-block ban | Ars Technica
The Ad Blocking Wars – The New York Times
Why People Block Ads
Discussion of a user/publisher optimized web advertising system – Google Docs
Data is a toxic asset, so why not throw it out? – CNN.com
The Trichordist | Artists For An Ethical and Sustainable Internet #StopArtistExploitation
Personal data empowerment: Time for a fairer data deal – Citizens Advice
First, design for data sharing : Nature Biotechnology : Nature Publishing Group
Big Data, Trust and ‘You as The Product’ | A Customer & Brand Strategy Blog
Is Digital The Answer To AM Radio Interference? | Radio Ink
Publishers Asked to Pay Up for Distributed Platform Tracking | Digital – AdAge
The Trumping Of Adblock Plus 03/03/2016
The Onlife Manifesto – Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era | Luciano Floridi – Academia.edu
How Tech is Killing Off Independent Pizzerias | Aaron D. Allen | LinkedIn
Introducing the Futurist Hall of Fame | Thomas Frey | LinkedIn
Louis C.K.’s Warning About Donald Trump – The Atlantic
Giving Silos Their Due | Linux Journal
The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) | Hacker News
Louis C.K. on Trump: "The guy is Hitler. And by that I mean we are being Germany in the 30s." – Vox
From shoe repair to digital identity — putting online on the High Street — The Internet of Me — Medium
Is technology making the world indecipherable? — Aeo…
Our Economy Is Obsessed with Efficiency and Terrible at Everything Else
The Forthcoming–Behavioral–Economics of Abundance
UK consumes far less than a decade ago – ‘peak stuff’ or something else? | Business | The Guardian
Is technology making the world indecipherable — Aeo…
The car century was a mistake. It’s time to move on. – The Washington Post
March 2016’s shocking global warming temperature record.
Republican Party in suicidal tailspin over Donald Trump’s unstoppable rise
Half of the Earth must be preserved for nature conse…
GBG: world leaders in identity data intelligence – GBG UK
When Fallacies Collide – The New York Times
The Case of the Woman With the Severed Child’s Head – The New York Times
IAB Creates Guide For Publishers To Combat Ad Blocking | Digital – AdAge

Bag ‘o tabs

February 14, 2016 in Links | 3 comments

I have accumulated a ridiculous sum of open tabs and closed ones collected in OneTab pages. Here’s a selection from just the latest collection, for your reading pleasure.

Stuff I’ve said

Giving silos their due, in Linux Journal. Phil Windley responds with Decentralization is hard, maybe too hard.
Part I of an interview by Simon Carroll in Medium on The Internet of Me (#IoM).
The Adblock War Series, now with its own page and 41 entries long.

Science

The chips are down for Moore’s Law, by @MitchWaldrop in Nature. Bonus link: The quantum source of space-time, by Ron Cowen in Nature. But he was right long enough.
Gravitational Waves at Last, by Sean Carroll. “What I want to do here is to make sure, in case there was any danger, that nobody loses sight of the extraordinary magnitude of what has been accomplished here.” Watch the video there too.
DIY autostereograms. Fun.
Acoustic Space by Light through McLuhan. Pull-thought: “The concept of ‘efficient causality’ (i.e. the singular ’cause’ that produces the ‘effect’) only makes sense to the eye.” I can see that. Also, Living in an Acoustic World, by Marshall McLuhan.

Tech, especially Internet

The Internet is a Global Public Resource, by Mark Surman in The Mozilla Blog. “We’re working to bolster the open Internet movement and take it mainstream.”
It’s not cyberspace any more, by danah boyd in Medium. Pushback against John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “We all imagined that the Internet would be the great equalizer, but it hasn’t panned out that way… There is a power shift underway and much of the tech sector is ill-equipped to understand its own actions and practices as part of the elite, the powerful. Worse, a collection of unicorns who see themselves as underdogs in a world where instability and inequality are rampant fail to realize that they have a moral responsibility. They fight as though they are insurgents while they operate as though they are kings.”
The Open Web and its Enemies, by Bill Thompson in Medium. “…we can use the tools of Web science to design and build a better and more resilient Web — but that we must move quickly or there will be nothing left to save.”
Beyond Mobile: Life After Smartphones ToC, by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble in Medium. “We spotlight four game-changing product categories that will come into play in 2016 and change the world as we know it over the next decade–faster in any case. They are: Augmented and Virtual Reality, Robots, Digital Genies and Autonomous Cars.”
When your heroes disappoint you. The disappointing hero in this case is Wolfgang Puck.
From platforms to protocols, by John Light. Important. Example: “Within the past decade or so, many open protocols have been invented that can be used to assemble platforms that can replace the corporate Death Stars.”
Ida — a Community Empowerment Platform, which “seeks to leverage technology to create new political and economic space for communities.”
The economics of the Internet, by the World Bank. Not bad as far as it goes, which is transactions. But the Net is about more than transactions. So is economics.
Scoble goes apeshit over Magic Leap. “I can’t talk about what I saw… is absolutely the biggest product introduction demo, the most interesting product demo, that I’ve ever had in my life.”
The Waze Effect: AI and the Public Commons, by John Battelle in Medium. “Should we just throw up our hands and “trust the tech?” No.

Politics

American Democracy is Doomed, by Matthew Yglasias in Vox. “The story here, like so much in American politics, is race.”
Strategy Trumps Confusion, by Mark D. Stahlman and Jeffery A. Martineau in The Thinker. Makes good sense of the election so far. Good set-up for the next one…
This is what a Donald Trump Presidency Would Actually Look Like, by Gwynn Guilford in Quartz. In a word, bad. In a worse word, possible.
Dear Bernie Sanders: Don’t follow in Obama’s footsteps on campaign finance reform, by Larry Lessig in The Washington Post. “…like Obama before him, Sanders has failed to make central the one change that could make his revolution credible: changing the way congressional campaigns are funded.” On the other head, The Super PAC minuet, by George Will. “…understand the wisdom of choosing what the Constitution, properly construed, actually requires: unregulated politics.”
Podcasting: Legacy media’s new platform, or its antidote? by Lorraine Young in Fold. “For podcasting, there is no more remarkable finding than this: if you are a daily listener of podcasts, you listen to more podcast audio than any other form of audio.”
American politics just changed, media and money in crisis by Dave Winer. “I predicted that money would not be the determining factor in politics, people laughed, said it’ll never happen. Now we’re there. Neither of the leading candidates have taken contributions from the established sources of political money.”

The People vs/+ Marketing and Advertising

60% of all Mobile Banner Ad Clicks are Accidents. Wasting 60% of the $18 billion expected to be spent on mobile advertising this year. Not to mention (the business never does) the wasted time, energy and bandwidth costs to human beings, most of which would rather not have ads on their phones at all.
Buy More Pointless Stuff, says street-art-edited adverts at the Ealing tube stop.
Non-Marketing, by Andrew McLuhan in Medium, explains a bit about that last point above: “Fashion magazines and Superbowl Sunday aside, no one wants to see the ads. But in spaces like Snapchat, the users don’t just dislike ads and marketing, they really, really, dislike it. They resent it.”
MyData: A Nordic Model for human-centered personal data management and processing. “The core idea is that individuals should be in control of their own data. The MyData approach aims at strengthening digital human rights while opening new opportunities for businesses to develop innovative personal data based services built on mutual trust.” A long manifesto at the heart of what might become a movement or part of one. Bonus link: MyData 2016. In Helsinki, August 31-September 1. I’ll be there.
Wired Is Launching an Ad-Free Website to Appease Ad Blockers. “‘Wired plans to charge $3.99 for four weeks of ad-free access to its website. In many places where ads appear, the site will simply feature more articles,’ said Mark McClusky, the magazine’s head of product and business development. The portion of his readership that uses ad blockers are likely to be receptive to a discussion about their responsibility to support the businesses they rely on for information online… There are legitimate reasons that people use ad blockers, according to McClusky, like a desire to speed up web browsing or not wanting to be tracked online. But Wired has bills to pay. “’I think people are ready to have that conversation in a straightforward way,’” McClusky added. But there is no conversation. If there were, it would look like this.
Samsung wants customers not to discuss personal information in front of smart TVs, in The Week. Headline says it all.
Smart, Connected Devices Open More Doors To Personal Networks, by Chuck Martin in MediaPost‘s IoT Daily. My response: “The only ‘transformative consumer experience’ that matters is one of personal independence and control of one’s own data and one’s own stuff. Approximately 0% of the jive around the Internet of Things today is about that, however. Mostly it’s about surveillance and marketing guesswork further intruding themselves into our lives, on vectors of connected stuff controlled by remote corporate and government intelligence agencies with zero interest in our privacy and absolute interest in spying on us. On our side there is no market demand for that. Until we get the true Internet of Things — http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/true… — we’ll just have more delusional BS.” Chuck’s gracious response: “Agree. Doc, that will have to be part of the “value” exchange. Great piece at the link, thanks for sharing. Still a ways to go to reach The Internet of Everything.”
Facebook and the new colonialism, by Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic.
India Doesn’t Need Facebook’s Free Mobile Internet Access. It Needs Nationwide Broadband, by Hasit Shah in Slate. “India has a can-do mentality that enables it to keep functioning and thriving, despite disparaging remarks from places like Silicon Valley. It’s not dissimilar to the spirit that has made the Internet itself a realm of possibility. Splendidly, the 2015 TRAI report ends with a quote from Machiavelli: “The one who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise that the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not.” India paid attention, Facebook did not.”
Is Adblock good for consumers? — asked in Quora. I just added an answer.
Samsung rolled out ad blocking on Android, Google said no, and then said “Yeah, okay.“

Humanities, culture or something

I never went looking for a mentor, by Ethan Zuckerman. Good one. Bonus link #1: Why is Verizon letting rural broadband decay? Because they can, and they don’t care. Bonus link #2: Heroin and hope. “…in our corner of New England, we’re starting to see a sane, rational, humane approach by law enforcement to drug addiction.”
Passages: Put a fork in me, media. I’m done, by Terry Heaton. The good doctor leaves the dying patient who long since stopped listening. No point in staying.
The Christian Science Monitor has a new project to provide more positive takes on global news, by Laura Hazard Owen in NiemanLab. “an antidote approach to news.”
Sleeping on subways and elsewhere, by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. Also there: In search of forty winks, by Patricia Marx.
The Funniest And Most Melodic History Of Japan You Will Ever Watch. By Bill Wurtz.
The Fallen of WW II. By Neil Halloran. Fucking amazing data visualizations. And history lesssons.
What Paul Graham is missing about inequality, by Tim O’Reilly in Medium.
Photoblogger, because it’s all interesting.
What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foudation set out to conquer inequality, by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker.

Fintech

The state of P2P lending. By Sonny Singh in TechCrunch

Oldies but Goodies

Steven Levy interviews Jeff Bezos in Wired. From November 2011.
Our Town, by Jill Lapore, in The New Yorker in 2007. About two famous failures: John Smith and Jamestown.
Organization and Markets, by Herbert A. Simon. Not sure how old, but it’s old.

How #adblocking matures from #NoAds to #SafeAds

October 22, 2015 in adtech, Architecture, Business, Cluetrain, Internet, Links, problems, publishing, Social, Technology, VRM | 20 comments

Take a look at any ad, for anything, online.

Do you know whether or not it’s meant for you personally — meaning that you’ve been tracked somehow, and that tracking has been used to aim the ad at you? Chances are you don’t, and that’s a problem.

Sometimes the tracking is obvious, especially with retargeted ads. (Those are the shoes or hats or fishing poles that follow you to sites B, C and D after you looked at something like them at site A.) But most of the time it’s not.

Being followed around the Web is not among the things most of us want when we visit a website. Nor is it what we expect from most advertising.

Yet much of today’s advertising online comes with privacy-invading tracking files that slows page loads, drives up data use on our mobile devices and sometimes carries a bonus payload of malware.

So we block ads — in droves so large that ad blocking now comprises the largest boycott of anything in human history.

Reduced to a hashtag, what we say with our ad blockers is #NoAds. But even AdBlock Plus (the top ad blocker and the most popular* add-on overall), whitelists what its community calls “acceptable ads” by default.

So there is some market acceptance, if not demand, for some advertising. Specifically, Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads Manifesto whitelists ads that:

are not annoying.
do not disrupt or distort the page content we’re trying to read.
are transparent with us about being an ad.
are effective without shouting at us.
are appropriate to the site that we are on.

Those are all fine, but none of them yet draws a line between what you, or anybody, knows is safe, and what isn’t.

In Separating advertising’s wheat and chaff, I draw that line between ads aimed at populations and ads aimed at you (because you’re being tracked). Here’s one way of illustrating the difference:

As Don Marti puts it in Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful, #SafeAds carry a signal that personally targeted ads do not. For one thing, they don’t carry the burden of requiring that every ad perform in some way, preferably with an action by you. He explains,

Richard E. Kihlstrom and Michael H. Riordan explained the signaling logic behind advertising in a 1984 paper.

When a firm signals by advertising, it demonstrates to consumers that its production costs and the demand for its product are such that advertising costs can be recovered. In order for advertising to be an effective signal, high-quality firms must be able to recover advertising costs while low-quality firms cannot.

Kevin Simler writes, in Ads Don’t Work that Way,

Knowing (or sensing) how much money a company has thrown down for an ad campaign helps consumers distinguish between big, stable companies and smaller, struggling ones, or between products with a lot of internal support (from their parent companies) and products without such support. And this, in turn, gives the consumer confidence that the product is likely to be around for a while and to be well-supported. This is critical for complex products like software, electronics, and cars, which require ongoing support and maintenance, as well as for anything that requires a big ecosystem (e.g. Xbox).

In my wheat & chaff post, I said,

Let’s fix the problem ourselves, by working with the browser and ad and tracking blockers to create simple means for labeling the wheat and restricting our advertising diet to it.

So this is my concrete suggestion: label every ad not aimed by tracking with the hashtag “#SafeAd.”

It shouldn’t be hard. The adtech industry has AdChoices, a complicated program that supposedly puts you “in control of your Internet experience with interest-based advertising—ads that are intended for you, based on what you do online.”

Credit where due: at least it shows that advertisers are willing to label their ads. A #SafeAd hashtag (and/or some simple code that speaks to ad and tracking blockers) would do the same thing, with less overhead, with a nice clear signal that users can appreciate.

#SafeAds is the only trail I know beyond the pure-prophylaxis #NoAds signal that ad blocking sends to publishers and advertisers today. So let’s blaze it.

* That’s for Firefox. I can’t find an equivalent list for other browsers. Help with that is welcome.

Valley Fire losses

September 13, 2015 in Friends, Geography, infrastructure, Journalism, Life, Links, News, Personal, Photography, Places, problems | 6 comments

Here is the current perimeter of the Valley Fire, according to the USGS’ GEOMAC viewer:

ValleyFire 2015-09-13 at 3.10.24 PM_a

As you see, no places are identified there. One in particular, however, is of extremely special interest to me: Harbin Hot Springs. That’s where I met my wife and made more friends than I can count. It is, or was, one of the most lovely places on Earth, inhabited and lovingly maintained by wonderful people.

I just matched up a section of the map above with Google Maps’ Earth view, and see that Harbin and its neighborhood are in the perimeter:

Screen Shot 2015-09-13 at 3.12.19 PM

After seeing this picture here, which looks northwest from downtown Middletown…

COyGRRHVAAEwC4w … I suspected the worse.

And now comes news that Harbin is “pretty much destroyed.” Damn.

Other places in the perimeter — or so it appears to me (please don’t take this as gospel):

Outer edges of Middletown and Hidden Valley Lake communities
Parts of Whispering Pines, Cobb, Holbergs and Glenbrook
Areas adjacent to McCreary Lake and Detert Reservoir

Watch here for official information about the fire.

We can all make TV. Now what?

May 31, 2015 in Broadcasting, Business, Culture, Fun, Future, Gear, history, Ideas, infrastructure, Internet, IoT, Law, Life, Links, Live Web, music, News, Photography, Politics, privacy, problems, Technology | 9 comments

meerkat Look where Meerkat and periscopeapp Periscope point. I mean, historically. They vector toward a future where anybody anywhere can send live video out to the glowing rectangles of the world.

If you’ve looked at the output of either, several things become clear about their inevitable evolutionary path:

Mobile phone/data systems will get their gears stripped, in both directions. And it will get worse before it gets better.
Stereo sound recording is coming. Binaural recording too. Next…
3D. Mobile devices in a generation or two will include two microphones and two cameras pointed toward the subject being broadcast. Next…
VR, or virtual reality.

Since walking around like a dork holding a mobile in front of you shouldn’t be the only way to produce these videos, glasses like these are inevitable:

(That’s a placeholder design in the public domain, so it has no IP drag, other than whatever submarine patents already exist, and I am sure there are some.)

Now pause to dig Facebook’s 10-year plan to build The Matrix. How long before Facebook buys Meerkat and builds it into Occulus Rift? Or buys Twitter, just to get Periscope and do the same?

Whatever else happens, the rights clearing question gets very personal. Do you want to be recorded by others and broadcast to the world or not? What are the social and device protocols for that? (Some are designed into the glasses above. Hope they help.)

We should start zero-basing some answers today, while the inevitable is in sight but isn’t here yet.

It should help to remember that all copyright laws were created in times when digital life was unimaginable (e.g. Stature of Anne, ASCAP), barely known (Act of 1976), or highly feared (WIPO, CTEA, DMCA).

How would we write new laws for the new video age that has barely started? Or why start with laws at all? (Remember that nearly all regulation protects yesterday from last Thursday — and are often written by know-nothings.)

We’ve only been living the networked life since graphical browsers and ISPs arrived in the mid-90’s. Meanwhile we’ve had thousands of years to develop civilization in the physical world.

Relatively speaking, digital networked life is Eden, which also didn’t come with privacy. That’s why we made clothing and shelter, and eventually put both on hooves and wheels.

How will we create the digital equivalents of the privacy technologies we call clothing, shelter, buttons, zippers, doors, windows, shades, blinds and curtains? Are the first answers technical or policy ones? Or both? (I favor the technical, fwiw. Code is Law and all that.)

Protecting the need for artists to make money is part of the picture. But it’s not the only part. And laws are only one way to protect artists, or anybody.

Manners come first, and we don’t have those yet. Meaning we also lack civilization, which is built on, and with, manners of many kinds. Think about much manners are lacking in the digital world. So far.

None of the big companies that dominate our digital lives have fully thought out how to protect anybody’s privacy. Those that come closest are ones we pay directly, and are therefore accountable to us (to a degree). Apple and Microsoft, for example, are doing more and more to isolate personal data to spaces the individual controls and the company can’t see — and to keep personal data away from the advertising business that sustains Google and Facebook, which both seem to regard personal privacy as a bug in civilization, rather than a feature of it. Note that we also pay those two companies nothing for their services. (We are mere consumers, whose lives are sold to the company’s actual customers, which are advertisers.)

Bottom line: the legal slate is covered in chalk, but the technical one is close to clean. What do we want to write there?

Start here: privacy is personal. We need to be able to signal our intentions about privacy — both as people doing the shooting, and the people being shot. A red light on a phone indicating recording status (as we have on video cameras) is one good step for video producers. On the other side of the camera, we need to signal what’s okay and what’s not. Clothing does that to some degree. So do doors, and shades and shutters on windows. We need the equivalent in our shared networked space. The faster and better we do that, the better we’ll be able to make good TV.

Live blogging

May 22, 2015 in Blogging, Links | Permalink

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve been quiet here for a bit. One reason is that I’ve been traveling almost constantly, and not always in the best position to blog (or even tweet). Another is that I’ve been liveblogging instead. So here, latest first, is a list of liveblog postings since my last post here:

Most are lists of links: tabs I’m closing. Many contain bloggy additional notes. Some are more extensive, such as my liveblog notes on @janelgw‘s talk in New York on May 6.

I’ll get back to more regular blogging here, while still liveblogging, after I get back in the States from Australia, where I am now. I fly tomorrow (Saturday in Oz, Friday in the Americas).