Tag: Internet

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Google is Getting Useless

Google made their name as an efficient search engine delivering streamlined results quickly and effectively. Is it just me or has Google the search engine become mostly useless nowadays. Too many paid results, and even more bad results– pages that might have a word or two of your search string but are otherwise irrelevant. I used to feel confident I would find a few useful results in the first few pages. Lately, I’ve actually– gulp– resorted to Bing, occasionally. And sometimes I just actually give up. I don’t have time to go through a hundred pages to find the one that actually helps me.

As IBM discovered when the Department of Justice was investigating them for monopolistic practices (way back in the 1960’s), too much information is as useless as no information.

In fairness, it’s not just Google’s fault.

Oh yes, it is.  By mastering the competition for profiting by manipulating search results, Google is king of turd island, the exemplar, the model for all that has made the Internet a fucking monstrous garbage heap of  excrement.  Facebook is a close second.

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Canada vs U.S.

It appears that most of the opposition to proposals for national health care reform in the U.S. stem from the belief that government can not do anything right.

Let’s let corporations decide, instead, when I should see a doctor, and how much I should pay.

As a Canadian, let me extend my sympathy. You poor Americans. You are so proud of your flag and your nation and your constitution– but so embarrassed by the idiots you elect to office every two years that you can’t trust them to run an insurance program. You call yourself the greatest country in the world but the citizens of this country appear to be the dumbest voters on the planet.

You see, we Canadians are very lucky. We actually elect reasonably good governments and then give them the power to execute their policies and then we enjoy the benefits— like universal health care coverage. Oh, of course it’s not perfect. You can always find a few Canadians out there who envy you Americans your vastly over-priced system that treats you quickly and then bankrupts you.

But how good is the Canadian system? Not a single politician in Canada will run on a platform of dismantling it. How simple is that? If there were any number of Canadians who were dissatisfied and wanted to move to the U.S. model, surely we’d have a member of parliament or two who would dare to campaign on privatizing health care. But even our conservative parties pledge to leave health care alone, or even to improve it.

That’s not the only thing our government does that strikes most Canadians as reasonably good. Your Social Security is a mess because Republicans won’t cooperate with reforming it and Democrats are terrified of being accused of raising taxes. Our Canadian government simply adjusted the rates of contributions a few years ago. Most Canadians probably barely noticed. But the result is that the Canadian Pension Plan is actuarially sound and all Canadians can count on receiving full benefits when they retire.

Oh and our banks. Did you know that our banks were the only banks in the developed world that did not need a single penny of bail-out funds? Not one cent. Once again, we happened to choose a government (the Liberals) who decided that the credit default swaps, sub-prime mortgages, and derivatives, were too risky. Our banks pleaded to be allowed to make the big money, like their U.S. competitors. The Liberals, under Jean Chretien, said “no”. Our government also wouldn’t let the banks merge so they could take on the big U.S. banks. Crazy, eh?

Do you Americans ever get sick of your two year election cycles? It seemed to take Obama forever to finally get to the inauguration. Well, we might have an election this fall. If it is called soon, the campaigns will start almost immediately and end six weeks later. Yes, six weeks! Isn’t that a gas! Done. Over. And much cheaper too.

No doubt our government could do better. We haven’t done very well in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. We didn’t get sucked into Iraq, but we are stuck in Afghanistan. Our top executives, like yours, get paid too much. The taxpayers bought the Skydome for the Blue Jays but the perception is that no major league sports team will get a tax-payer funded stadium ever again. (That’s why the Expos are gone, probably, and why the NHL doesn’t want to see any U.S. teams moving to Canada. Probably.)

But it’s a nice country. You should come visit sometimes. Our Conservative party would be roughly comparable to your Democrats. Obama probably would have gotten about 75% of the votes up here. Our liberals would probably find Obama a tad too “moderate” for our tastes.

You guys did invent the Internet– good for you!  Yes, your government invented it. And yes, Al Gore took the initiative, in Congress, to fund the proposal.

I personally thank God regularly that we don’t have anything like the Republican Party up here.

Bring your can-do spirit, your generosity, and your exuberance. But don’t bring your guns.

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Televisionization of the World Wide Web

The televisionization of the internet continues. Look at this.

What I think AOL is doing, essentially, is threatening to block business email unless they pay a fee. If they pay a fee, their mail bypasses spam filters. Now there’s a revenue stream I’ll bet you haven’t thought of. Set up a spam filter. Charge people to have their mailbox protected from thousands of annoying spam messages (part of the package of your membership in AOL). Then charge companies to put their mail through anyway.

This idea is even more brilliant than they imagine. In a few years, after you are once again deluged with unwanted e-mail, they can start offering a new service to the user: we will block the unwanted e-mail that we used to filter for an additional monthly fee. But you thought you were paying an additional monthly fee already? That’s like the cable fee you used to pay for commercial-free specialty channels, which are you still paying for, and which now have commercials.

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The Televisionization of the Internet

You probably don’t think of our society as Totalitarian. A Totalitarian society is a society that is rule by a pernicious doctrine to which all societal functions must be subordinated to one exclusive purpose.

By golly, we’re free to live as we choose, in our society. Aren’t we?

Suppose I wanted to come up with a new type of communication network that combined the functionality of the telephone, television, and radio, into one powerful medium, with one small proviso. The proviso is this: no commercial use of the medium is allowed. None whatsoever. No advertising, no selling, no profiteering. The system would be created and run by volunteers only.

There’s a lot of technical obstacles, of course. But probably not as many as you think. But there is one overwhelming obstacle: our society is totalitarian and will not stand for a non-commercial communications network.

Think that analysis is a little extreme? No television network will allow Adbusters to run their advertisements criticizing advertisers and the consumerist lifestyle. They won’t accept the money, they won’t run the ads. You can sell gas-guzzling cars, unproven pharmaceutical products, and booze, and even scantily-clad women, but you can’t challenge the fundamental religion of our society: consumerism.

And now the internet. When it started, it was beautiful, free, clean, and amazing. Have you browsed around the net lately? All you see is advertising, on every single damn site. And if you aren’t seeing advertising on the site itself, you are getting whacked via e-mail, or in the browser frames, or with pop-up windows.

You might think it’s merely a case of a lot of internet users deciding to try to make a few bucks. But that’s not all it is. Why on earth should your browser permit a pop-up ad? Why should it enable such a function? Why should it be difficult or impossible to turn off that function? Microsoft and Netscape design the browsers. They have incorporated features into the browser to guarantee that you will be whacked every time you go on the internet.

And Microsoft has designed the operating system to encourage the user to become a passive drooling idiot, gushing over the little animations and sound effects playing on his computer, while relinquishing control over his eyeballs and ears to the corporate politburos of America.

The internet is the largest single source of pollution. It is so bad, that for the first time since I first went “on-line” way back in the early 1990’s, I am seriously considering getting off.

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Pabulaolum

Have you seen those new AOL ads, the ones about “Chelsea Buns”? This smug but concerned-looking mother talks about how her daughter was looking for a recipe for “Chelsea Buns” when, it is implied, she accidentally hit a porn site. The mom goes, thank god for AOL! She mentions that she also has a son who is deeply into… “X-Men”.

AOL controls your access to the internet. AOL decides which sites are safe for you to see and which ones are not. To add insult to injury, AOL won’t tell you what it’s criteria is, because it believes that it’s criteria is a trade secret. Like the recipe for Captain Crunch, or Barbie’s measurements.

Sometimes an ad tells you a lot more than it thinks it does. And what this ad tells you is that AOL is really not an online information service at all. It is a television network. Television is about corporate control over what you think and do. Entertainment is merely a vehicle for merchandising. The viewer is a passive recipient of logos, celebrity endorsements, lifestyle ads. Yes, even if you are stupid, you can have a fulfilling life if you have a credit card.

And I’ll bet this woman, so concerned about “Chelsea Buns” lets her kids watch gazillions of ads, three hours of television a day, without the slightest concern. Well, for heaven’s sake, her son is fan of the “X-men”. Violence and mayhem are okay. Sex is not.

These ads practically shout, “I want to be told what to think! I want my information to be controlled and doled out like Pabulum by giant soul-less corporations! Please—it hurts to be free!”

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Spam Spam Spam Spam

I am deluged with 10-20 spam a day. I hate spam with a passion. It clutters up my electronic mailbox the way analog spam clutters up my real mail-box– and wastes my time. My first act, when reading my e-mail, is to delete, delete, delete.

The worst thing about spam is that these people are annoying you at your expense. They are quite literally parasites. You pay for your e-mail account, and you pay for the cost of accessing the internet. For some people in Europe, who actually pay by the minute, spam can actually be quite costly.

The solution is real simple– if someone would step in and require it. Every major e-mail program should be required to install a default filter. The filter simply rejects all spam. How will it know what spam is? All companies using email for advertising will be required to clearly mark spam with a couple of bytes in the header of each message.

Now wait a minute– we’re talking about the internet here. The government can’t even stop people from downloading “The Matrix” in DivX;) format from some server in Russia. How is it going to shut down spammers who don’t use the required bytes in their headers?

Well, if they think they can shut down the illegal copying of music files by shutting down Napster, they certainly ought to give it a try.

On the other hand, if they realize that shutting down Napster is a gesture that is utterly devoid of the slightest possible real impact on the downloading of pirated music… they ought to simply admit it and get on with things.

The truth is, they could do it. It would be quite simple. Every ISP in the country would be required to install filters to prevent spam from getting through. Foreign ISPs that allow spam through should be blocked from transmitting to or receiving from North American or European ISPs.

A better solution, a more refined version of this: require all ISP’s to acquire certification from an authoritative body. This body only grants the certification to known, reputable ISP’s who agree to abide by a code of ethics which prohibits, of course, spam.

When a mail is sent by this ISP, it includes code in it’s headers indicating that it is certified: the mail is accepted. It should work like public/private key encryption.

Consumers can be offered the option of signing on with certified ISPs and can then acquire mail programs that filter any mail that does not come from a certified ISP.

If someone really wants to connect to the unfiltered internet, so be it: allow it. But the rest of us can benefit from some controls.

[2011-12-26]

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Lions and Tigers and Hackers– Oh My!

What is it with you people out there? A few years ago, it was Ouija Boards. Then it was Satanic Ritual Abuse. Then it was Backwards Masking. Then it was subliminal messages. Now it’s hackers.

I have a simple solution for the hacker problem. It is very, very simple. It is completely effective and feasible. My solution is this. If you are a big company who wants to do e-commerce over the internet and you are afraid of hackers—get off the internet! That’s it. Couldn’t be much simpler could it?  You’re welcome.

To understand my solution, you have to understand one thing about the internet. To Amazon and eBay and Yahoo and all the other so-called high-tech start-ups: who asked you here? Who invited you? Who wants you? Get out. Go back to television where you belong.

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Clinton Clinton Clinton!

Two events signaled a decisive change in the course of the Clinton Scandal and the impeachment proceedings. Firstly, CNN ran a little piece by a reporter who is actually OUT THERE covering congressional elections. He gently chided people who think that the Clinton scandal matters. He reported that the people are interested in Education, Health Care, and the minimum wage. Nobody is asking candidates where they stand on the impeachment, and Republican candidates are not advertising the fact that they are in favour of it. Could it be they have SOME shame? That CNN aired this report indicates the passing of a fantasy. CNN is not exactly known for their bold, independent analysis of facts. They tried to play up the scandal big time and now appear to have accepted the fact that most Americans just don’t see it as that big a deal, and regard the entire impeachment stuff as nothing more than partisan politics. In the latest poll, less than 11% think Congress should proceed with impeachment. That’s less than the percentage of people who think the Earth is flat.

Newsweek ran an article on the scandal this week that compared it to Watergate. It was a light, irreverent piece, that made it clear that there was no comparison. Watergate was about a lot of very serious criminal acts by the President and his top advisors.

Both magazines are playing to a very subtle thing: the winds of perception. What they are saying is that there is now a widespread consensus that the Lewinsky scandal won’t wash as justification for impeachment.

Something I’ve been saying since January.

* * *

Conservatives like to rant and rave about the Presidency sinking to a new “low”, as if letting tens of thousands of people die in Rwanda or Bosnia wasn’t a “low”.

* * *

Have you bought a magazine lately? Have you ever gone to a really good magazine store, where they stock everything? I walk down the display case, boggled. There are magazines on every conceivable interest, including “Feminist Lesbian Natural Healing Cyber Music Guide” and “Mollusk Interpretations for Franciscan Feminist Social Worker Anthropoid Researchers”. Is there too much information in the world? Is there such a thing as too much information? There is probably a magazine on “Information Overload”. I think there is: “Adbusters”.

You can’t keep up with everything anymore. You just hope that Time or Newsweek picks up the important stuff, and that TV movies give you the basic issue information that you need to make intelligent conversation at parties.

The Internet is like one of these magazine stores, except a hundred times bigger. A million times bigger. I think what will happen is that, after spending hundreds of years making new information, we will spend the next hundred years sorting information into useful categories and subsets.

***

They are everywhere now: cameras. Web-cams. Video-conferencing.

Some day-cares are now installing T-1 connections and “KinderCams”. Parents can check on their little ones through the internet, at any time during the day. Some people find this scary. They’re right. It is scary. We’ll deal with the scary aspects of it. It’s also great. As long as the workers know they’re being watched, I think it’s great. On the one hand, yes, we are being suspicious and cynical about people. On the other hand, we will know more. It is always better to know more than to know less. We may learn that we have been hysterically paranoid for all of our lives for no reason. Or we may learn that life is full of little complexities that are best left alone. Or we may learn that generally day-care workers do a good job. Who knows? We just learn. We have this voracious appetite to know and see and hear everything.

***

Shift Magazine printed a Q&A between some hackers and Senator Fred Thompson. It was pointed out that when the Volkswagen Company found a defect that would affect only three cars out of 8,500, they sent letters to every owner and recalled all of the cars in order to fix it.

Are you still waiting for your letter from Microsoft? Me too. Did you realize that the entire Internet can be brought down by hackers breaking into Windows NT computers? Is that a defect?

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The Anacam

Privacy and Personality

If you check out this website–

http://www.anacam.com/anaframesg.html

[Or maybe not.  More information on Ana Voog.]

you will see real live pictures of Ana Voog, an artist in Minnesota, living her life. This is the Anacam. A camera takes pictures every 240 seconds or so and then feeds it to the Internet.

When I grew up, you would sometimes see a documentary on tv that claimed to show you someone’s real life. They followed him or her around at home, showed them eating, drinking, chatting with friends… and it was all completely phony. Even a child knew that this was all staged. For one thing, you couldn’t pick up these images with a television camera without a huge bank of lights taking up most of the living room. Everybody in the room certainly knew they were on tv. For another thing, you never saw anybody get undressed or go to the bathroom or pick his nose. Of course, that’s what you really wanted to see. More importantly, the program was never live. It was always taped or filmed first and then edited.

Last year, “The Truman Show” claimed to be about a man whose entire life is broadcast on tv, without his knowledge. But this movie didn’t show any of those real, personal activities that you think about when you think about the idea of watching a person live his life without him knowing about it.

The Anacam does. Well, it’s still selective, because you only see what Ana wants to show you, but Ana is far more willing to let you see everything than Truman was. And the Anacam exists in real time: no editing, no condensation, no cheating. I haven’t seen it myself, but I know that she has even taken her webcam into the shower. Is this pornography? I don’t think so. I’m not sure. I don’t think she’s out to titillate the viewer, but, on the other hand, she probably wants to attract as much attention as possible. Ana is an “artist”.

This is something to think about. How valuable is your privacy? We used to think that privacy was extremely valuable. But that was largely because privacy was so hard to violate. People you hardly knew wouldn’t let you come into their bathrooms to watch them go pee and pop a pimple. Well, at least not for the past 100 years. I have a feeling that there was a lot less privacy in the Middle Ages. For one thing, when you went to a hotel in the Middle Ages, everybody slept in the same big bed. I kid you not. You can look it up. And people tossed their garbage right out the window onto the street. People did not have bathrooms or even outhouses. So I don’t think there was very much privacy. Read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Why did this change? Think of the Victorian era in England. Suddenly, everybody wanted to hide anything to do with sexual identity. Women wore big, billowing skirts, with layers of undergarments. Bathing suits were big enough to camp in. Men wore long pants, jackets, and hats. Why did people suddenly become obsessed with keeping their privates private? A wave of piety and religion? No. How about this: privacy was valuable because it was rare.

Then more and more people acquired their own homes, with outhouses. They lived separately, as families, rather than communally with the entire clan. Clothes became cheaper to make. More and more people could afford to wear different clothes on different days. The hardworking bourgeoisie developed habits of thrift and restraint, and one of the things they wanted to restrain was their bodily functions.

Let’s jump into the mid 20th century: everybody’s moving out of apartments (at least, in North America) into private bungalows in the suburbs. At last they’ve got it: privacy. Nobody can even hear you through the walls.

Today, privacy is no longer valuable. What is the value of something that everybody has? Zilch. Why are the social and sexual values of the “third world” so much more conservative than those in Europe and North America? Because their “social economy”, the balance of scarcity and abundance of social values, favours privacy. Privacy hardly exists, so it is very valuable to them.

So why does Ana Voog let the world into her living room, her kitchen, her bathroom? Because privacy is so easy to obtain, that it’s no longer as valuable to her as other things, like, say, her desire to succeed as an artist.

Perhaps that’s also why fashions have changed so much. It’s the economy of sexual relationships. Until the 1950’s, it was in the woman’s best interest to be married to one man, who would provide everything for her until the day she died. A prospective husband would want to make sure that the woman he married would be loyal to him for life. So any indications that she could be available to other men would doom her. She could become a poor spinster, or be forced into prostitution to make a living. Thus, it was not economical for her to appear to be available, even if only for visual ravishment, to a large number of males.

It used to be uneconomical for a woman to be available for visual ravishment by a large number of males. Marriage was different, because social conditions were different. People were less mobile, less prosperous, less flexible. Marriage was for life as much for economic reasons as for moral reasons.

What happened? Why did the mini-skirt appear? Why so many people “shack-up” nowadays, rather than get married first?

What has happened to our society is prosperity. What has happened is that women now are able to earn a living independent of men. What has happened is that our society has adjusted. With the abundance of wealth, privacy, health, and mobility, people are probably actually behaving pretty well the way they’ve always wanted to behave, seeking some kind of emotional fulfillment in relationships, and leaving the relationship if it isn’t there.

We are going to know more and more about ourselves. We are going to watch people live their lives (just wait until the Internet improves to the point where we can have efficient, live streaming video and audio!). It will be a strange knowledge for many of us because we will have never seen these things before. We are going to realize how similar we all are. We all fart, belch, pick our noses, scratch where it itches… we’re just not used to not pretending that we don’t. Once we know that everybody does it, we may have a healthier knowledge of ourselves, and greater acceptance of our own fleshy existences.

Of course, many fundamentalists Christians have a different explanation for all this new behaviour. They call it moral decay. I have never bought that. I have just never believed that we are behaving a whole lot worse than our ancestors behaved, or wanted to behave.

I also have a broader definition of what is “moral”. The fundamentalists, and the American people in general, seem to consider sexual sin to be way, way more important than greed, materialism, or exploitation. What gets you more upset? A man and woman having a consensual sexual relationship outside of marriage, or a society that decides that we are going to turf welfare mothers and their babies so we can all afford a second VCR? Condoms or military aircraft? Swearing or forcing governments in Africa and Central America to close their hospitals before they receive aid from the IMF?

Sorry, James Dobson. I think it’s way more important to save human lives and prevent physical suffering than it is to stop sex between consenting adults. Why don’t you take your $185 million a year and feed the hungry, instead of lobbying against same-sex benefits at the Disney Corporation?