Question Technology

Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software

An interesting new book by David Rice. From the book's website:

Geekonomics is about the astonishing lack of consumer protection in the software market and how this impacts economic and national security. Software buyers are literally crash test dummies for an industry that is remarkably insulated against liability, accountability, and responsibility for any harm, damages or loss that should occur because of manufacturing defects or weaknesses that allow cyber attackers to break into and hijack our computer systems. As a matter of good public policy, this is unacceptable and must change.

Geekonomics is also about us and why we behave the way we do when it comes to protecting ourselves in cyber space. As such, Geekonomics is about incentives. Specifically, Geekonomics is about incentives that affect three groups of people: consumers, software manufacturers, and hackers. Each group has incentives for making, buying, and breaking into computer systems that are rife with defects, errors, and weaknesses. This book explains these incentives and how new and different incentives are necessary to address the problem of “bad” software.

Finally, Geekonomics is a book for everyone, not just for geeks or technophiles, because frankly, in modern civilization, how and when software touches us is less our choice every day.

Barbara Walters and April Fool Aubrey de Grey

ABC gives airtime to Aubrey de Grey to talk about his ideas on longevity science and cryogenics for an upcoming Barbara Walters special: Live to 150, Can you do it? 

Ray Kurzweil is featured too, of course.  It airs, appropriately, on April 1st.

(via IEET)

Cellphone health risks

Okay, maybe I'm naive to argue that the wifi-resisters deserve a hearing.  But how about cellphones?  Questioning whether cellphones might cause cancer will also get you ridiculed in many circles, yet studies keep coming out that say there's a risk, particularly for children.  Studies that don't find increased cancer risk also keep coming out, so the issue is far from decided.

The best source I've found for following news of cell phone health risks is textually.org: archive of health risk posts.

The Solitary Vice: Against Reading

The Solitary Vice: Against Reading by Mikita Brottman starts with some provocative questions:  What if reading isn't as important as we're led to believe?   What if reading doesn't make you a better person?   Is it "Cool 2 Read," is reading "Fundamental," is it necessary to "Get Real @ The Library"?  Brottman bristles at slogans like this and questions whether forcing reading on people is a good thing.  She believes reading can in fact be a uniquely valuable activity, but it's all in how you do it: read what excites you, read what helps you grow.  Don't read the classics if they bore you (watch a movie version instead).

The "anti-reading" provocation is only the hook for Brottman's book.  The remainder is a reading memoir.  Brottman shows by example the value she found by reading in genres that are normally looked down upon -- celebrity biography, true crime, comics.  She teaches literature and knows her way around the classics and literary theory, yet she also knows much about the different ways that people learn and think.  Brottman is not so much against reading as against the simplistic rhetoric and elitism that surrounds it.  I liked this book for taking a more subtle stance than most debaters in the perennial "is reading dead?" discussions.

Mikita Brottman has a website with more about the book and her other writing.

Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients Online

Wow. This is disgusting. From Wired:

Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security.

"We are seeing people affected," says Ken Lowenberg, senior director of web and print publishing at the Epilepsy Foundation. "It's fortunately only a handful. It's possible that people are just not reporting yet -- people affected by it may not be coming back to the forum so fast."

The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs.

The attackers turned to a more effective tactic on Sunday, injecting JavaScript into some posts that redirected users' browsers to a page with a more complex image designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epileptics.

[...]

Circumstantial evidence suggests the attack was the work of members of Anonymous, an informal collective of griefers best known for their recent war on the Church of Scientology. The first flurry of posts on the epilepsy forum referenced the site EBaumsWorld, which is much hated by Anonymous. And forum members claim they found a message board thread -- since deleted -- planning the attack at 7chan.org, a group stronghold.

Link: Hackers assault epilepsy patients via computer.

Genetic Dystopia Movie News

A new movie version of Brave New World is planned, with Leonardo DiCaprio starring and Ridley Scott directing: Times (London), LA Times.

Last week Gattaca was rereleased as a special edition DVD.  Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society writes about it at Alternet:

But what about the real-life prospects of the horrors portrayed in Gattaca? In 1997, fertility clinics weren't advertising delivery of a boy or a girl -- you choose -- using the embryo screening technique portrayed in the film. The world didn't yet know about Dolly the cloned sheep. Far fewer genes had been mapped to far fewer traits. Genetic scientists hadn't yet created the monkey or the bunny engineered with a jellyfish gene to glow in the dark, or the goats and sheep that lactate spider silk, or the mice that run mazes faster than their nonengineered counterparts yet also display increased sensitivity to pain.

These technical feats are not the only portents of a future in which genetic engineers take it upon themselves to create designer babies and "enhanced" humans. Perhaps even more troubling is the small but disturbing number of prognosticators who predict this future with eagerness rather than caution; they just can't wait for Gattaca and Brave New World to transcend fiction and become real life.

Who are these promoters of human redesign? A few are researchers for whom the "sweetness" of the science eclipses its social consequences. A few more -- most notably Princeton's former mouse biologist, Lee Silver -- have shifted their careers from the lab to the talk show in order to push scenarios of a "GenRich" ruling class and a hoi polloi composed of "Naturals."

Then there's the coterie of bioethicists who can't say no to anything that any scientist dreams up, and another crew of libertarians who can't say no to anything that the market might wish to offer. And there's the whacky band of futurists who call themselves "transhumanists" and natter about "homo perfectus" and the "Singularity" -- the messianic moment when human technology will suddenly cause superhuman, superintelligent "entities" to appear among us.

Nearly all these crystal-ball gazers acknowledge that Gattaca-like inequalities would be part of their longed-for picture. But this does not seem to dampen their enthusiasm. From their perspective, it seems, self-evident truths about human equality are way outdated, and dreams of social justice and the common good are so 20th century.

Link: Are we headed for a sci-fi dystopia?

Google's Energy Addiction

Harper's has a little piece about Google's energy habits: Keyword: Evil -- Google's addiction to cheap electricity.

Fake Steve Jobs gives us a summary:

I was gratified to see this article in Harper's which describes the obscene amount of energy Google eats up with its data centers ("a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier") and the slick trickery that Google employed in Oregon so it could keep getting us taxpayers to pay part of their electric bills. The Bush administration wanted to privatize a utility. Google and a friendly congressman persuaded Bush not to do it so they could keep getting below-market-rate electricity -- ie, electricity subsidized by us, the taxpayers.

Starting to see the pattern here? We subsidize Google's electric bills so they can run their giant data centers. But those data centers cause global warming. So Google and the VCs create new companies to solve global warming. We subsidize those companies too. Google and the VCs get rich. We get a nice card at Christmas, and a free Gmail account. Right on, dudes. Don't be evil.

Link: Larry Page, friend of the environment.

How to address fear about WiFi health risks?

Dale Dougherty writes at O'Reilly Radar about supposed health hazards of wifi, and how a small number of residents used this fear to force Sebastopol, CA to stop a plan to permit city-wide public wifi.  An excerpt:

One can see the fear spreading. Science should be a way to dispel such fears but it is clear with this group of people that science cannot be trusted. They put forth the idea that science should be able to prove that there is no harm and therefore eliminate any risk, and without such proof, we should not move forward. They use this logic to recommend a "precautionary" approach, which is their keyword for a "know-nothing, do-nothing" approach.

[...]

Now, I don't know that wireless (or electricity) is without harm. I can read the research that does exist and learn more -- if I have the time and reason to do so. However, I do not like the smell of fear, and when people justify actions based on their own fears, I become suspicious that the concern is unwarranted. If it wasn't wifi, it would be flouride. Something is needed to affix to their anxiety. I can only be glad that they weren't alive when the city decided on electrification a century ago.

Link: Hazards of Wifi - O'Reilly Radar.

Like Dougherty, I'm willing to bet that wifi isn't dangerous, but I still have problems with what he says.  For example: "it is clear with this group of people that science cannot be trusted."  Well, we do have examples where scientists has been wrong in similar situations and should not have been trusted as quickly -- think pesticides and radiation fallout from nuclear tests and accidents.  How do scientists earn trust?  By having a good track record and by providing evidence.  Have they provided enough evidence that wifi is harmless?  I don't know, but what I've read seems to suggest that more studies could be done.  The precautionary approach does not (I think) call for absolute proof, but only for strong evidence -- I think Dougherty's characterization of it is simplistic.

Dougherty doesn't like people basing their decisions on emotion, but how different is it when he bases his decision on blind faith in the scientists' word?  It's right to be suspicious when the critics offer nothing but blind fear, but I think it's also right to be suspicious when the advocates offer nothing but blind faith.

Stephen Fry's Tech Column Best When Written by Others

Stephen Fry's technology column in the Guardian is best when someone else writes it for him.  This week Douglas Coupland, having been sent for review some European gadgets that are useless in Canada, muses instead on the relationship between time and gadgets. An excerpt:

Time is measured in tech waves, and not only do these tech waves demarcate eras, they also define them.

I remember in the 80s when cellphones first started to pop. I remember how, if you saw someone using a cellphone on a street, you immediately thought they were an asshole: gee, my phone call is so important I have to make it right here and right now! Twenty years later, we're all assholes. We're assholes at the supermarket's meat counter at 5:30pm, phoning home to ask if we need prosciutto; we're assholes driving in traffic; and we're assholes wandering down the streets. And with cellphones and handhelds, we collapse time and space and our perception of distance and intimacy.

Link: Dork Talk: Douglas Coupland.

Recently Jeannette Winterson tested out some "beauty machines":

What no one needs is a thing called the Hydro Test (£24.99, from iliftuk.com).

This mascara-tube size device claims to measure the moisture content of your skin. You press it against whatever bit of the body you long to reveal its watery secret, and the digital display pops up a number that corresponds to a table that tells you just how desiccated you are.

I tried this all over my poor old bod, and the reading was so dismal that I felt compelled to ring my friend who is a GP. She advised immediate hospitalisation and a saline drip. Crestfallen, but determined to further my experiments for the sake of Guardian readers, I tried the thingy on my cat - I can tell you now that it doesn't work through fur. Luckily, this cat had recently had a little shaved patch at the vet, so I tried it on that. Result? Cat obviously ready for taxidermist.

Taking my dried-out self and my wrung-out cat to the pond, I laid a chamois-leather car sponge (skin, right?) on the surface of the water. The Hydro Test revealed that what I have always called the pond is, in fact, a sandpit. At this point I thought of chucking the thingy straight in the bin where it belongs, but it has a disclaimer on the info that says it mustn't be disposed of via "the waste stream". I expect to see lots of these at Bring & Buy sales quite soon.

Link: Dork Talk: Jeannette Winterson - Beauty Machines, and see also Dork Talk: Jeannette Winterson - Camcorders.

WWGD? (What Would Google Do?)

Jeff Jarvis has announced that he's writing a new book called What Would Google Do?  He says:

I’m reverse-engineering Google, taking the lessons and rules I find in their singular success in the internet economy and applying them to other companies, industries, and institutions. And then I’ll pontificate about the greater importance of Google and links on society and life.

Link: WWGD? - The book

Sounds like Jeff wants to help bring forth the Googlization of Everything and the title is perhaps further evidence that Google is God.

 

Techno Tuesday: Sad e-card

Techno Tuesday is by Andy Rementer.

Joseph Weizenbaum Dies

Weizenbaum wrote one of the seminal books about computers and society: Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.

New York Times obituary: Joseph Weizenbaum, famed programmer, is dead at 85.

Shreddies and Libraries

I love this ad campaign.  I was in Toronto last week and saw it on a billboard.  More at the ad agency's page: Ogilvy Toronto.

I picked up a copy of Alberto Manguel's newest book, The Library At Night, which is due out in the US later this month (Amazon).  From the book's description:

Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. “Libraries,” he says, “have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic.” In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries.

Manguel, a guide of irrepressible enthusiasm, conducts a unique library tour that extends from his childhood bookshelves to the “complete” libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google. He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria as well as the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought—the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral “memory libraries” kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, the library of books never written—Manguel illuminates the mysteries of libraries as no other writer could. With scores of wonderful images throughout, The Library at Night is a fascinating voyage through Manguel’s mind, memory, and vast knowledge of books and civilizations.

Techno Tuesday: All I Have

Techno Tuesday is by Andy Rementer.

The Continuing Rise of the Intermobs

Internet-enabled mass juvenilia is our future.  Some recent signs:

• At SXSW, where the tech hipsterati are gathered, audiences make fun of speakers live in chat rooms and on Twitter (story 1, story 2).
  
• "Digg users revolt" is a bit redundant.  Mob rule is basically Digg's MO.  So it's no surprise Digg users are doing their best to kill an acquisition.
• Forget laser pointers, personal portable projectors are the wave of future "visual pollution" (BBC, Engadget).
• Anonymous is a group of hackers organizing on-line and off to take down The Church of Scientology through various measures, legal, illegal, and juvenile.

Previously: The Power of the Intermobs.