Entertaining and informative reading, Ethan Zuckerman’s notes on his talk at ETech, “The Cute Cat Theory”.
A couple of excerpts to draw you in, but you should go read it for yourself.
Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.
and
Based on my Tripod experience, I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media - it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test - if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.
When I was working in the online dating space, I assumed the deluge of porn was a function of our being the intersection of people who were single/horny and willing to use their credit card to buy things online. Now I’ll have to re-think that assumption, something I probably should have done long ago based on the presence of porn comments in my spam filter.
I don’t recall any activism in the dating business, but maybe it just never made its way over to me since I was focused on security and fraud.
But I digress…
The real point of the talk is about activism, not porn, and more specifically about how activists effectively use social networking tools to align the interests of people who share pictures of cats, drawing in the cat sharers of the world (who far outnumber the activists) as collateral damage.
That’s not to say this approach is perfect–he explains how the Chinese government has engaged in a game of measure and countermeasure censorship, but in general, it provides an interesting example of how activist signal benefits from cute cat noise and the unintended conseqences of both.
Posted in The Electronic Frontiers Foundation (of which I’m a member) has a new Surveillance Self-Defense Guide which includes a Risk Management Primer. They define Risk Management as:
Security Means Making Trade-Offs to Manage Risks
Security isn’t having the strongest lock or the best anti-virus software — security is about making trade-offs to manage risk, something we do in many contexts throughout the day. When you consider crossing the street in the middle of the block rather than at a cross-walk, you are making a security trade-off: you consider the threat of getting run over versus the trouble of walking to the corner, and assess the risk of that threat happening by looking for oncoming cars. Your bodily safety is the asset you’re trying to protect. How high is the risk of getting run over and are you in such a rush that you’re willing to tolerate it, even though the threat is to your most valuable asset?
That’s a security decision. Not so hard, is it? It’s just the language that takes getting used to. Security professionals use four distinct but interrelated concepts when considering security decisions: assets, threats, risks and adversaries.
They go on to explain the rest of the relevant concepts as well as how to put them all together effectively and appropriately. I might have a few quibbles with a bit here or there, but I still highly recommend this as an accessible overview of Information Risk Management.
While I’m sure that the process for manufacturing “Fogbank,” the code name for a component in Trident Missile warhreads as supposed to be a top secret, I don’t think they meant this secret:
PLANS TO refurbish Trident nuclear weapons had to be put on hold because US scientists forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead, a US congressional investigation has revealed.
The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “lost knowledge” of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extra $69 million.
This seems to be a process-level analog to a friend’s comment that, “encryption equals data loss.”
Bob sent me the link to this Daring Fireball post about Copying the Wrong Thing
A common knock against 37signals’s products is that they work perfectly — if you happen to think exactly like Jason Fried. And so of course none of the knock-off products are very good, because they’re aping the 37signals style without Jason Fried’s direct input. (And by “Jason Fried” I mean “Jason Fried and everyone else at 37signals who helps design their products”.)
What’s worth copying isn’t the final product but the attitude. It really is the case that Basecamp is a project management tool that looks and works exactly how 37signals thinks a project management tool should look and work. It is very much unlike any project management software that came before it. They didn’t start with what customers wanted, or with what existing project management software looked like, or by trying to guess what some group of faceless others would want. They designed and built what they themselves wanted, under the assumption that there were some number of other people who would want the same thing.
It’s like the bar that opens to try and copy the cool bar, but only poseurs and cheezy guys go there and the owners can never figure out why their bar never has any hot chicks in it.
From an article on Nokia’s withdrawl of their new smartphone due to quality problems:
Meanwhile, news that defects have surfaced in the 5800 XpressMusic phone seems to be just one of many problems surfacing about flawed mobiles these days. In the past week, we’ve had news of Blackberry handsets overheating in Japan, and the LG Spyder 830 being recalled for being unable to handle 911 calls. Perhaps then RIM CEO Jim Balsillie was right when he said after the Blackberry Storm launched with a number of issues that buggy phones were the “new reality” as companies tried to crank out large volumes of complex smartphones in tighter and tighter time frames.
I’m sure that plenty of folks will feel free to disagree, but I worry that cell phone complexity problems have exceeded the quality of the engineering talent which will work for companies big enough to make phones.
Throw in all the weird breaking of functionality that each carrier demands to support their own business models and it’s no wonder that we have these problems. Phones are now little tiny computers that also do voice but the risk thinking among people who buy and deploy them is still .
From Virgil Griffith, the guy at CalTech who did the incitefully-named “Books that make you dumb” comes “Music that makes you dumb.”
He used the same methodology of taking facebook+university+avg university SAT scores and comes up with some interesting data points. He also talks a little about how he massaged the data, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal:
Griffith came up with the idea as a way to show how to take two separate sets of data that were pretty straightforward on their own–in this case, the average SAT score and the favorite books among students at various universities–and combine them to become more interesting. Griffith says, “Their unity is hilarity incarnate. This is to inspire people to think creatively about the data sets that are on the Internet.”
“Of course there is the whole correlation is not causation thing, but, I mean, duh,” he added.
He found the highest average SAT went to people who claimed Beethoven, which strikes me as a bit pretentious on the fans’ part. Bach is actually much more interesting from a mathematical perspective.
I think that the question of what correlations or commonalities exist between similar points along the scale, e.g. what identifies or differentiates bands that had similar intelligence appeal, would be more interesting (==fun), even if the data quality isn’t there to actually draw those conclusions.
Personally, of my few favorites that actually made the list, I’m a big fan of outliers at both ends of the spectrum, such as Ben Folds and Blink 182. Does that make me an idiot savant?
This is the view from my window today, March 1st.
The forecast was for “a.m. flurries” but not only am I reminded that March is still a long way from spring, but also that weather is one of the few forms of forecasting or uncertainty that most people make any effort to understand, and even then their understanding is frequently incorrect.
Pop quiz: what does a 40% chance of rain mean?
Someone should explain to the fine folks at Central Command that after the documents are on wikileaks is not the most effective time to turn off the server. http://oneteam.centcom.mil is down as I write this. It seems they shut the whole box down, not just the Web server off-line.
February 27, 2009
WIKILEAKS EDITORIAL
Wikileaks has cracked the encryption to a key document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The document, titled “NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative”, details the “story” NATO representatives are to give to, and to avoid giving to, journalists.
An unrelated leaked photo from the war: a US soldier poses with a dead Afghani man, in the hills of Afghanistan The encrypted document, which is dated October 6, and believed to be current, can be found on the Pentagon Central Command website “oneteam.centcom.mil”: [UPDATE Fri Feb 27 15:18:38 GMT 2009: the entire Pentagon site is now down–probably in response to this editorial]
http://oneteam.centcom.mil/isc/Shared%20Documents/NATO%20Master%20Narrative.doc
The encryption password is progress, which perhaps reflects the Pentagon’s desire to stay on-message, even to itself.
I fight this same fight every day in my job and we have no better luck than CentCom. We just don’t get to shut down the servers when people screw up.
John Robb theorizes that the current global depression is a stress test for nation states:
Nation-states are now caught between two irresistible and strengthening forces:
1. A dominant, turbulent, and uncontrollable global super-network, that is pressuring/weakening/buffeting nation-states from above.
2. Super-empowered individuals/groups rising up from below that are ready to pounce on or exploit any demonstration of nation-state weakness.So far, the vast majority of thinking re: the response to the stress test has been a revival of early 20th Century methods/theories of activist government. I’m fairly sure that this is a sterile response to the challenge.
From an Information Risk perspective, corporations are like nation states here. The overall economic situation is pushing companies down and driving budget cuts and weakening the companies’ ability to act from above. Meanwhile, poor morale and accumulated/earned disloyalty is pushing up in the form of ignorant/unconcerned, negligent and malicious employees.
Lest it be said that I’m nothing but doom and gloom, here’s Red vs. Blue’s take on the financial crisis.
So remember, it could always be worse. At least you’re not having to share your guns and base with the other team (yet).