My sister is home safe from England, and my mother–budding NewsBruiser hacker–is using the import feature to document her own trip from last July.
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Sly
Post-sweeps, Arrested Development reappears tonight, and it’s on the front page of Wikipedia today.
As seen camwise, we have a really awesome Advent calendar, of which a couple friends and relatives have copies. Maria found it at a German Yahoo! store, along with several other varieties, all of which she bought and gave away. Last night we glued and folded the little houses by twinkly lights while we watched Rudolph and Veronica Mars. This afternoon I opened the first house and ate the chocolate inside it.
Sometimes I talk about technology and copyright too much, and not enough about how happy I am. I am very happy.
BellSouth–among many other providers of broadband pipe–wants to be allowed to charge for discrimination. That’s not how they’re selling it, of course; they make reasonable-sounding analogies like “If I go to the airport” and “I can get two-day air [shipping] or six-day ground.” It almost works.
But bandwidth isn’t a service–it’s a resource, closer in application to electricity or water. Can you charge more money for people who use more of those? Sure. Can you charge more to guarantee that when other people lose access to electricity or water, you’ll still have it? Nope. Telcos build over and under public and private land to run their wires, which means they’re doing it under public license. That in turn means they must provide equal priority to all uses, public and private alike.
Google is on the right side of this fight, predictably, as are Amazon, eBay, et cetera. Seeing Google’s name attached to this discussion makes me think, though: how long until search is a resource rather than a service? Until they stop being good at it, is my guess, or until it stops being a top-layer application (ie shipping uses roads; roads are a bottom-layer resource, shipping is a top-layer service; roads are regulated and shipping isn’t).
I’ve said before that I think Google will end up under government control, but their diversification over the last couple of years (and their reputation, at least, for business ethics) might forestall that. Then again, Microsoft almost got split into Ops and Apps. I wonder if Google will end up facing a choice between Search and Labs.
Ian has been and gone, leaving giggles and makeouts in his wake. Thank you very, very much to Deb Core, Sumana Harihareswara, Joan Wood, Sharon Calhoun, Lisa Brown, Scott Stauble, Kyle Neumann, Angel Brooks, Ken Moore, Monica Willett, Sean Hoban, and especially Maria, whose idea this was in the first place. You guys are the champions of friendship!
Okay, let’s be men for a minute. 101 words isn’t much of a challenge anymore. I’ve been cramming stuff into that space for almost two and a half years and, like a man who plays Tetris every day, I pretty much know what is going to fit where.
I don’t want to change that constraint on Anacrusis because, while challenge is an important part of a constraint, it’s not the only part. It’s an easy selling point; it’s a convenient finish line on days when I’ve got very little material. Besides, I like the form and I’m not done playing with it. But the fact remains that as a device, the word limit has lost much of its ability to stir up ideas.
So. Something new, with occasional interruptions, starting today.
Actually, the whistling is optional.
Man, today’s new virus email was pretty cool! The subject line was “You visit illegal websites,” and it was spoofed to appear like it came from “Department@fbi.gov.” Attachment: the standard ZIP file. Little do they know that all the illegal websites I visit are based outside the US, and would fall under the purview of the CIA! AH HA!
Seriously, if you get that or a similar email, don’t open the attachment, don’t open the email, don’t even preview it. Just hit the Junk button in Thunderbird and whistle a merry tune. (You are using Thunderbird, right?)
I think the killer app for Mechanical Turk is already out there. Think about it: what’s very simple for a human, very hard for a computer, shows up everywhere and acts as a gatekeeper from potentially greater value?
That’s right: those little “verify you’re a human” image boxes that make you transcribe a series of bendy, obscured letters and numbers in order to leave a Blogger comment, or get an LJ account or a GMail address. (Less awkwardly, more annoyingly, they’re called CAPTCHAs.) Yoz Grahame pointed out like a year ago that these are a solved problem: you just go to a CAPTCHA page, grab the image, and put it in front of porn on one of your other sites. Step three: profit!
The only problem with that scenario is that, well, there are ways to get porn without all that tiresome thinking, and most porn-seekers will take them over your time-consuming verification step. It’s easier to type BRITTNAY SPEER NUDE into Google Image Search than it is to decipher Ty$23YiD.
But if MT’s model works (and I’m not saying it does; right now only Amazon uses it, and you’d have to work hard and boringly to make five bucks an hour), and if it gets sufficiently popular that the site’s admins won’t notice spammers slipping CAPTCHAS in, this could be a viable crack. Sign up for an account, pay Random Human two cents to verify it, and spam, spam away. It’s okay, say the servers you’re using to link your herbal V1agra incest mortgage. I know that’s not a bot!
CAPTCHAs are the least bad solution to bot-signups out there right now, but I hope the tech startups that are built around providing that kind of authentication don’t get comfortable. They’ve never been more than a stopgap.