Posts by Shannon Jacobs

Mass media? Journalism? Who needs free publicity?

Notice how the neo-GOP has taken their hatred of the mass media and REAL journalism to new extremes? They've realized they don't need the free publicity. They have enough money to absolute saturate the voters during the last week before the election. You're about to see an infinite flood of ads showing puppy-eating Democrats!

Watch my ads! Look at Paul Ryan's abs!

Vote Nixon/Goldwater 2012 so that government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% of Americans, shall rule the earth!

Crating monopoly

Interesting article, but I think it completely ignores the impact of de facto standardization. Except for Apple, no one is claiming that they have a perfect user interface, but Samsung or ANY other company entering an existing market has to respond to customers' expectations. The customers mostly want to do it the SAME way, and it's really hard to convince them that ANYTHING else is better than the way they have been doing things.

Yes, a company does deserve compensation for innovation and also for creating the market in the first place, but Apple is trying to destroy freedom by eliminating meaningful choice. In addition I think that Apple stole most of the innovative ideas of apps from the PDA makes who were in their earlier turn destroyed by Microsoft. Yeah, things do get better on the long-term average, but we don't get to live on the average.

You can't get no respect, even if you're the FBI?

Judging by all the "FBI" spam these days, I'm kind of amazed they can do anything. Maybe it's just a trap? By pretending the spammers have no respect, they're trying to lure the suckers without getting accused of entrapment?

Anyway, I still wish there were some effective anti-spam tools available. Among other features, the FBI could get monthly reports on the trends in spam that claims to be from the FBI. Maybe there'll be a slump next month as an indirect response to these arrests?

Is there actually a market for the truth?

Looking at the American election you have to wonder if anyone does value the truth these days. Every time I think Romney/Ryan have reached a limit, they surprise me with some bigger lie, and their campaign hasn't imploded yet...

However, assuming that the truth has value and that people want to know it, then I think the strategy of targeting Assange so aggressively may not be a good idea. Yes, they are cowing almost all of the professional journalists, but most of them started as cowards and went downhill from there. Unfortunately, the truth is still out there, and if the professional journalists won't pursue it, that just creates more opportunities for the amateur journalists. The problem for the liars and truth-concealers is that the motivations of the amateurs are much more mixed. If you have a small number of professionals working for money, you can also focus your countermeasures.

In contrast, if you have a LARGE number of amateurs flying off on many dimensions, it's going to make things much messier. One guy might be motivated by fame, another by notoriety, another by his personal position on the issue, another by something that happened to a family member, and on and on. The truth is still there, but the amateurs aren't going to have the same kinds of patterns in how they look for it or even stumble across it...

Insofar as I'm an optimist who thinks that things get better on the long-term average, maybe this prosecution of Assange will work out well enough.

I meant Ustream there...

And still over 100,000 watching the feed.

Loyal opposition? Not possible in America.

One of the special things about America is proud ignorance and refusal to learn from anyone else. The British have an understanding that it is possible to disagree on many issues while still being patriotic and loving the nation. Therefore you can usually manage to have rational discussions of the national problems and look for the best solution for everyone.

That sort of thing is no longer possible in America. The teabagging extremists think they are the only "true patriots" who actually love the nation. Anyone who disagrees with them is not merely wrong, but should be compared to socialists, nationalists, Nazis (National socialists, remember), Arab terrorists, or whatever other pejorative terms they can think of.

I'm not saying that all the voters are idiots and that all of the Americans deserve the disaster that the political dysfunction is leading to--but there are enough voters who are idiots that their votes are swinging elections. Actually, "swinging" is not the right verb. More like "flushing" as in down the toilet. This week's amazing example involves a guy in Tennessee who attacked his wife for looking at a picture of Romney. I guess she was stupid enough to like Romney and is probably getting ready to vote for Rmoney--but he is so stupid and ignorant that he decided Willard "the Mitt" Romney was her lover, so he destroyed her computer and beat her up. At least if he's in jail he might be unable to vote, eh?

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=757&sid=21511688

God save the queen? Save America first?

Name claiming, but... Here comes da' spam!

I confess that I did sign up. Partly to claim my "own" handle, partly just to see what looked new, but mostly in hopes of an effective anti-spam system. Right now my impression is that I will not be using it. Perhaps quarterly visits to keep my handle?

The #1 problem of email remains spam, and I could not find ANY evidence of new anti-spam capabilities within outlook.com. I had some hopes. As part of their "Let's be less evil" campaign, Microsoft has been doing some good work upstream against the spammers, so it was possible they were ready to take some action on the downstream end. If so, I could not find it. Sorry, but I don't need another email address for the spammers to abuse.

There are lots of possibilities, but here is what I think would most satisfy me. It would be an integrated spam-fighting system something like SpamCop, but on steroids. Rather than one round of analysis with a confirmation of complaints to the spammer's ISP and webhost, I want a multi-round system that would gradually refine the analysis and targeting to go after ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, to pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and help and protect ALL of the spammers' victims. You don't have to use it, but I sure would. I really hate spam and I want to have the tools to be a spam fighter first class.

6,000 rounds is not the question

Actually, I think the number of rounds has become a misleading question. He only needed a few hundred rounds for the killing he actually did. That was plenty, thank you to the morons who think more well-regulated militias are just what America needs these days. My fuzzy recollection is that I bought rounds in boxes of 50. Three or four boxes would have been enough.

Actually, when you start talking about thousands of rounds, then it doesn't make any sense to think that you are going to use them on innocent victims. You have to be planning on a major shootout against an army of policemen. Perhaps that was going through his crazy mind, though I wouldn't have minded if a few bullets had gone through instead. Alternatively, someone who really loves target shooting could go through thousands of rounds--but everyone knows the targets are guilty and deserve to be shot. I'd even argue it's a better waste of money than whiskey or cigarettes.

Now the 100-round magazine and the complete body armor... Those raise more interesting questions. The presumption of innocence is a good thing, but the presumption of sanity in this case?

Moore's Law in action?

The way I interpreted the ad, it seemed a trivial upgrade if the old system was more than a few years old... As long as Moore's Law holds out, we sort of expect every new system to have a hardware advantage.

Having said that, I better ad the disclaimers that I'm in the IBM food chain and I think all ads are extremely dubious these years. What I'd like to see is a progressive tax on idle cash that the corporations are sitting on.

Obvious solution: Possession is 9 points of the law

Anyone who stores your personal data should be obliged to allow you to download your own copy. The format should be an international standard, probably XML, but something open.

However, going beyond that, the normal default should be for you to possess YOUR own personal data, and the exception should be permitting someone else (such as Facebook) to use it. Open-ended, unlimited copies for sale to any third party should be downright illegal.

This can be extended beyond Facebook all the way to such personal information as bank records. Why not store the physical copies on your own computers as long as you can satisfy the bank's legitimate concerns for robust storage (or are willing to accept the potential loss)? The bank can include checksums in the data to prevent you from modifying it, and it should be YOUR decision when and with whom you share such data.

It's not freedom, it's greedom

Innovation and creativity lose again. No, I'm not in favor of rampant piracy and I absolutely think that creators deserve recognition and PROFITS for their creative work. The problem is that innovation and creativity have essentially nothing to do with profit maximization as the publishers see things. Their main concerns are with creating monopolies, minimizing the actual payments to the actual creators, and preventing any form of derivation reduces their profits. If they could only get an agreement with the other publishers, they would probably stop producing ANY new or innovative content.

What we really need are innovative new financial models. Don't look at the existing publishers to create them.

Live and let spam is NOT a solution

I still have some trouble understanding how the so-called safe havens exist. The Internet is predicated upon cooperation. You refuse to cooperate in shutting down your spammers, why should I cooperate with you in such little things as accepting ANY of your email or allowing anyone to access any websites hosted in your network? It doesn't really matter if "you" is a nation, a corporation, or even a real person running a minor Web server. If you aren't willing to cooperate, you should be frozen out. Start with a few cold toes, but the other side should keep Mr Freeze's phone number handy...

Anyway, the current new annoying spam-scam of the day involves Yahoo's calendar, apparently via the German subsidiary of Yahoo. This one really screws with the filters, but that's fine with the spammers. After all, live and let spam has become part of the spammers' business model. When you think your marginal cost is effectively zero, there's no problem with another million spam messages. One more sucker? Divide by zero and the RoI still looks like infinity, and the marginal cost to all the other suckers is certainly not bothering the spammer's nap time.

I'll bounce a possible answer at you on the theory that you might have some personal friends and influence at Yahoo, possibly even including this Marissa Mayer person. I really would like to see Yahoo survive. Nothing personal about Yahoo, but just as a matter of giving us more meaningful freedom and for the sake of increasing the value of the Internet for all of us.

In the case of Yahoo, I think their focal point and the locus of any recovery has to be their email system. What is the #1 problem with email? SPAM. The spammers divide-by-zero economic models must be thoroughly broken. That's not to suggest that the spammers can ever become decent human beings. You don't have to be a sociopath to be a major businessman in America, but it is an absolute requirement to be a spammer. I'm just saying that we can and should push the spammers under less visible rocks, and the best way to do that is to make spamming much less profitable.

What I suggest is that Yahoo should integrate a REAL anti-spam system into their email system. Something like SpamCop, but on steroids. If you're familiar with SpamCop, you know that it does an automatic parse of the spam and asks for confirmation before sending complaints to the spammers' ISPs and webhosts. What I'm suggesting is several rounds of analysis and increasingly refined confirmations and targeting that would route complaints to ALL parts of the spammers' infrastructure, pursue and harass ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and help and protect ALL of the spammers' victims. Of course the webforms should always have "other" options for the spammers' new attempts, like this new calendar scam. The email system can give recognition for effective spam fighting--I just want to be a spam fighter first class. (I don't want to criticize SpamCop, but the truth is that they lost their fire after Cisco acquired them... I feel like they are no longer improving, but barely surviving.)

Let's remember that there are a LOT of people who hate spam and only a tiny number of idiots that send money to the spammers. If it is made easier for the large number of people to fight spam, then a few of them will join in, and that will immediately make it MUCH harder for the spammers to reach their suckers. Also remember that the spammers cannot obfuscate the parts of the spam that have to be understood by human beings.

Good luck, Mr. Phelps. If you fail to save Yahoo, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. If you succeed, the secretary would appreciate a tip of the hat in hopes of getting some leverage on other projects...

Sony wasn't interested

Actually I suggested this at a Sony shareholders' meeting a couple of years ago, along with some data conversion utilities. For Sony, it would have been partial atonement for orphaning my Clie, but it might have gotten me to consider buying a Sony smartphone. (Already two potential sales went to Sony's competitors, plus recommendations against Sony.) Suffice it say that Sony didn't appear to be listening--and that was before this year's angry circus of restless natives. (I was actually seated about 5 meters from where they stopped a guy who was trying to rush the stage.)

Pretty sure I wouldn't have paid $50 for the old data, but at this point it's moot. It's possible that my Palm data is still lurking around somewhere, but not worth looking for now. Might as well assume it's gone to that great bit bucket in the sky.

(However I still mostly blame Microsoft. Not for offering a superior alternative. Microsoft is still desperately fishing for that. I blame Microsoft for inducing Palm to commit suicide. Palm was NOT a full-scale computer and they never should have allowed Microsoft's marketing fluff to draw them into that black hole fighting against Microsoft's infinitely deep pockets.)

Mindless crap alert

I wasn't absolutely certain from the title, had to check the byline.

Mindless crap warning.

No need to read farther.

Hey, constructive suggestion time. The headings should include the authors and a direct thumbs-down link. It would save time.

Crossing the line, anyone

I like the contrarian attitude when it is part of a reasoned challenge to conventional wisdom. However, I just smelled this one was going to be a troll and seeing the author, I didn't bother to read farther.

There are two assets of a journalist: credibility and Integrity. They have to be nurtured, but at this point I don't believe in the truth value of anything this guy says and wouldn't believe his personal testimony that the sun will rise tomorrow.

We aren't sure, so how about we don't take the risk?

To me the tragedy of this politicization of science is that the political solution got shot in the head. There was a negotiated political agreement for everyone to share the risk. It was called the Kyoto Protocol. It wasn't perfect, but the basic principles were sound, and if Dubya hadn't nuked it, then we could have focused on fixing it. Yes, there would have been costs, but the whole point of the cap-and-trade idea was that the costs of the externalities would have been shared in a way that didn't confer competitive advantage. Or perhaps you could argue that any competitive advantage would come from innovation, but even the neo-GOP extremists haven't (yet) gotten around to denouncing innovation.

Cap-and-trade was a pretty good idea, mostly created by the OLD Republicans, Now it is politically inconvenient because the other side agrees it's a good idea.

In conclusion, he who dies with the most toys is still dead.

Recommendation of Freefall by Stiglitz

However, I think it can be summed up as "Accountants know the cost of everything and the value of nothing."

Didn't read it

Only clicked to see if Lewis the one-eyed narrow-minded moron was the author. That was all I needed to know about it.

No risk of learning anything useful or interesting in the actual article. After all, we know that those morons have taken a mighty oath not to reveal who is paying them.

Is there ANYONE out there who believes ANYTHING this moron writes?

But obviously the spammers business models are still working...

Actually, I still monitor my spam on two accounts, and identity theft spam has become the clear leader these days, but most of it is pretty naive. The author was right that the current trend involves more social engineering and fewer technical exploits, but I think that is because today's spam is increasingly coming from low-class low-competence criminals. The high-competence criminals are mostly working for the banks these days. You just can't beat the combination of "too big to fail" and "private profits with public losses". The dregs of the scum are just fantasizing about writing the perfect 419 sob story that suddenly gets a hit rate of 1% of suckers providing sufficient information for identity theft...

These days most of the spambait seems to be originating on throwaway accounts. For example, pocomail was a very popular source until recently, but it was pretty clear that they just created a pocomail account and used it to send as much spam as possible with no expectation of the account surviving the day. The actual hooks of such spam are pointing at email accounts on other systems, mostly Gmail and Yahoo.com.hk, along with some of the minor players like globomail. The spammers only concern is to throw out as much bait as possible, and then they sit back to wait for nibbles on the other systems that are most reliable for delivering suckers to their fate.

I think it is noteworthy that Microsoft (AKA Hotmail and live.com) is clearly NOT favored these days by the spammers (except for fake headers From: lines, where Microsoft apparently has some extra delivery cred). Can't prove it, but I'd wager it is because Microsoft has become fastest at identifying and nuking those accounts before the scammer can reach the suckers. All of which shows that it is possible to fight the spammers more effectively, but Yahoo is too feeble, and either Gmail doesn't care or is too evil. I really hate to give kudos to Microsoft, but they have been leading the upstream war against the spammers, and now it looks like they are leading downstream, too.

Pie in the sky, but what I want is a REAL spam fighting tool that would let me join in making the miserable spammers' lives even more miserable. Something like SpamCop, but on steroids. If you are familiar with SpamCop, you know that it is one round of analysis looking for the spammers' ISP and webhost, followed by confirmation before sending complaints. What I want would involve several rounds of increasingly refined analysis and targeting, going after ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, pursuing ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and even trying to help or protect ALL of the spammers' victims.

Perhaps a few examples would help. One of the targets of such an integrated spam-fighting system could be the unsubscribe mechanisms to identify the legitimate ones from the address harvesters. At a minimum, that would involve some testing with honeypot addresses. Such a powerful spam-fighting system could collect statistics to notify the owners of valuable brands that their reputations are being excessively abused and even give them an opportunity for legitimate counter-marketing to prove they are on our side against the spammers. The human being in the loop could categorize the spam and help prioritize the serious spam for the rudest responses. Of course there should also be "Other" options to trap the spammers latest wiggles. I really want the tools to be a first-class spam fighter.

Case for DISLIKE option

People probably LIKE the idea of revealing the privacy policies and have no way to say they DISLIKE what those policies actually are--and Facebook doesn't care. Just came across a very relevant quote:

"Givers have to set limits because takers rarely do." -- Irma Kurtz

Don't know who she is, but she certainly hit the nail on the head. In this particular example, Facebook will take as much data as they can get, and you can bet their ToS says that nothing bad is their fault. After all, that's what lawyers are for. In America, this situation is that the richest 1% is the takers, and they obviously have no limits on what they want to take--and after this election in November, I predict they will have none.

"Elect me so that government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1% of Americans, shall rule the earth." -- attributed to Mitt Romney

Credibility, credibility, who's got the credibility? NOT Lewis whaz-his name!

Might be true. Probably even has a grain of truth somewhere in it.

Too bad whaz-his-name has blown his credibility account to smithereens.

Unfortunately, a media source only has two real assets. No, snide contrarianism is NOT one of them. That's just a mood thing and can even be a plus if it comes from an underlying skepticism and willingness to challenge assumptions. I actually like the mood, but that has nothing to do with little Lewis here.

The two assets are integrity and credibility. Do you speak the truth and does anyone believe anything you say, whether or not it's true. Lewis the crybaby has blown both of them, and by extension and persistence he has progressed to the point where he is destroying the residual value of the Register. Obviously he doesn't have any stake in it's survival, but if someone is paying him for his tripe, he's getting paid too much.

I used to think the Reg was an interesting and thought-provoking source of information. Now I mostly think of it as little Lew's propaganda puff organ. Less of my interest, less of my time, less of my exposure to ads, less value to everyone.

How widespread was the effect?

I didn't see anything in the article about where it was detected. For the entire earth, or primarily in the northern hemisphere. Could they possibly even detect a flash event that affected just one side of the planet for a few hours?

What's new? Or did I get bored out too quickly?

Everything the author described as supposedly new has been in the Firefox I've been using for quite a while. I'm vaguely confused about the apparent cluelessness, but mostly I think it doesn't matter. Actually, the main point of the article to me is the increasing evidence of the desperation at Firefox as they realize that their economic model is failing.

Here's a clue: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Here's a suggestion: "Don't change it until someone actually wants to pay for the changes."

Random change for the sake of nothing is NOT helping. So in closing, here's a suggestion for an alternative funding model (of reverse auction charity shares):

http://eco-epistemology.blogspot.jp/2009/11/economics-of-small-donors-reverse.html

It's kind of like Kickstarter, but with more focus on project management and software testing (though that particular description was actually tilted more towards Web publishing).

As regards Firefox, I'm still using it as my primary browser, but with less and less enthusiasm and mostly because of inertia and the lack of non-evil options. Microsoft (IE) and Apple (Safari) are already established leaders against freedom, and Google (Chrome) is becoming an increasingly strong challenger for the evil crown. Facebook (dying Opera?) will NOT be a solution, at least not in this universe...

Report from Japan

My own conclusion is that the government was more worried about panic than almost anything else. There could have been a massive radiative event, and they would have just dealt with it, but they were most concerned about not scaring too many people with those possibilities.

As regards the disaster itself, every time I learn more about it, the more amazed I am by the incompetence of the proximate response--but I still blame the Americans for pushing that particular style of nuclear reactor. Short-term profits, military applications, and worst of all, the actual desire for MORE plutonium at a time when we were concerned about a possible shortage of nuclear weapons.

Insincerity of the google

If the google were sincere about opposing the criminalization of the Internet, they would obviously focus on better community-based tools. My own peeve is email spam, but have you looked at the gawdawful webform that eventually "handles" a spammer's use of the google? Pitiful.

I don't understand exactly why the google has become so tolerant of the criminals. It obviously has something to do with their determination to make profits, and I think it's also related to their increasing evolution to evil.

It used to be that I didn't blame the google for becoming evil, since that's essentially how it works in America. The least ethical businessmen bribe the cheapest politicians to rig the game in their favor. I think a good business should be in business to stay in business, though you can make a morally neutral argument that a good business is in business to make a sustainable profit. However, the rules of American business is that every business must grow like a cancer or be destroyed--and the game riggers are ignoring the little question of what eventually happens to cancers and their hosts. Too big to fail? Yeah, the dinosaurs thought so, too.

However, in recent news, it turns out that the google has become the leading lobbyist among tech companies, beating out such other contenders as Apple and Microsoft. Kind of hard to absolve them now, eh?

Deja vu all over again

Not news, but if the Register insists on doing an article about it, they should try for something a bit more substantive. Not the first time I've noticed this kind of thing, and it's not limited to .NET stuff, and there was a bunch of this going on around the time of Patch Tuesday--though I'm already unsure if it was this month or last.

I'm always interested in hearing more about Microsoft's incompetence. Never liked that company. However, this article was NOT more. The headline actually managed to tell more of the story than the article, which is something of an accomplishment.

Neo-GOP economics: Destroying the jobs to save the jobs!

Why am I not surprised this is the best idea she can come up with? How many jobs will she destroy to save jobs? That kind of strategy just worked so well with the villages in Viet Nam, right?

Isn't she already the poster child for neo-GOP economic incompetence? How much money did she spend NOT becoming governor of California?

Let me guess. It was just building up her personal brand so she could get the HP job, right?

Okay, she was lucky to get a lot of money. ONCE. Mostly I think her luck was good timing, NOT hard work, because the Internet moves in waves and she managed to catch a big one. ONCE.

The interesting aspect to me is that good ideas are almost worthless. I've had LOTS of them--at the WRONG time. My track record is generally from 5 to 10 years out of sync--but it might be larger. I'm still convinced that some of my older good ideas will also come to pass, though the technology and economics aren't quite ripe yet. To make a good idea valuable, you have to have it at the right place and time, and I obviously have NO idea about those parts of it. Seeing the obvious future improvements and solutions to problems avails naught.

Oh well. At least I'm lucky enough not to be working at HP. I certainly think that would be a distinctly unpleasant roller-coaster to be riding...