Mr T's rants and ravings

I’ve been in a couple of airports which a certain company sponsors free wi-fi. When you sign in there is a nice welcome page letting you know this. So far so good. But then you have two options. One, with a really big clear button, says accept conditions and connect to the Internet. Pressing this button changes your home page to this company’s home page. If you don’t want this you can still get on but you have to click a different, much smaller link that doesn’t look at all like the other button. Who knows how many people get this new home page even though they really don’t want this. I think this is mildly evil.

Of course a lot of software does similar things by having such things as defaults. It aggravates me but this case is particularly bothersome because of how unobvious the change is. Not that I am a fan of the other software either.

Recently a friend of mine, Vicki Davis, received a pre-publication copy of the new book by Kevin Mitnick the famous cracker. Vicki wrote here review of the book at Ghost in the Wires: Kevin Mitnick’s memoir. She found the book disturbing.  BTW I refuse to call him a hacker because that is in many ways a term of respect. I don’t have any respect for the things Mitnick did to gain access to computers. What he did was to lie often and effectively to gain access to computers (find out here for repair services) that did not belong to him. He’s a great liar – not something that engenders respect in my opinion. Most of what you hear and read about Mitnick comes from his own words. Someone who is both a convicted and admitted liar. There is a word for people who believe Mitnick and it is not a compliment. What you seldom hear are the stories of people whose computers he broke into. Well that changes now.

Are crackers harmless? Not really. I was a software developer some years ago working on a system called The Ark that was broken into. Unfortunately it was accessed during a time when the disk that held the source code for the operating system we were working on had read/write access. Now the hacker claimed that they didn’t change anything. So harmless right? Someone lies repeatedly to gain access to a computer. Time after time they tell falsehood after falsehood and now, after they are caught we should believe what they say? Does that sound as foolish to you as it does to me? Fans of Mitnich and others like him find that reasonable. On the other hand for the development team I was on this seemed a bit risky. After all this system would be used by hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions of people, all over the world. Major banks would be trusting it to be secure and safe. So we should just trust a serious liar that he left things alone? That was something that seemed unreasonable to us. So what did we do?

For a month approximately 70 people scoured the source code line by line. It was compared to developer notes, personal backups, old listings, read line by line and verified by every means we could think of. Seventy man months shot. The release of the software was delayed meaning lost opportunity costs. The lost productivity was measured, conservatively at hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is real harm. But there is more.

Have you ever had your home or car broken into? Know any one who has? It takes an emotional toll. It makes one feel violated. Having your development computer broken into leaves one much the same way. Thirty years later it still upsets me to remember that feeling of violation. People who break into other people’s computers are violating people’s personal spaces. They are taking an emotional toll beyond and different from ay financial toll. And then there are the people who were tricked, people who just wanted to be helpful and fell for the lies of someone out to prove how smart they are. How must those people feel knowing that they inadvertently let the wolf into the henhouse? Reportedly Mitnick names those people in his book. How can anyone see that as anything but twisting the knife that these people have been living with in their backs for years. “Changed people” don’t do that so if you think Mitnick is somehow changed for the better clearly you don’t base that on his book.

I know that a lot of people respect Mitnick – I don’t understand them but perhaps it is because they don’t really understand what Mitnick and others like him did. And what they continue to do today.

I can’t sleep. My mind is racing with questions. Perhaps if I write them down they will leave me alone.

First one. Childhood obesity is a problem right? Have you ever been in a school cafeteria and seen the people who work there? An awful lot of them seem to be over weight and even a lot morbidly obese. And these are the people we trust to help students eat right and keep their weight under control? Does that strike anyone else as disconcerting? Oh and what is the percentage of teachers who are overweight or obese?

Speaking of schools – why is no one talking about parental or student responsibility in the matter of education? Does no one think they have a role?

Legislatures want to pay teachers based on performance right? How about we pay legislatures based on performance? No pay without a balanced budget for example. Or we pay them based on the percentage they vote with the majority. Obviously if they are doing a good job solving problems there will be a lot of bi partisan agreement.

While I’m at it, does is strike anyone else that being an attorney and being a member of a legislature is an inherent conflict of interest and should be banned?

If the people of Afghanistan and Iraq are benefiting from democracy why are US military doing most of the fighting? Shouldn’t the Iraqi and Afghan people doing most of it? If there are not enough Afghans willing to fight and defeat the Taliban why should we be doing it? Let’s let them rebuild the county. It should take them a while before they are done with that enough to bother us again. Likewise let the Iraqi people spend all their energy fighting each other and trying to fix their country? If they want a democracy wonderful! If they want a dictatorship shouldn’t that be their choice? After all we let the Saudis have one. As long as they leave us alone who cares.

Does anyone really believe that either the Israelis or the Palestinians want a peaceful solution? After all this time they should have been able to work one out. But no they each make totally unacceptable demands of the other. I see no sign that they are tired of fighting. Sure some people are but there do not seen to be enough of them to change anything. And why is it the US’s job to bring them together? Do we somehow have more of in interest in Middle East peace than people who actually live there?

Is anyone else starting to think of Walmart as China’s retail outlet in the US? Is this a good thing?

Now I am married to a school librarian so a) I have a bias toward them and b) I have a bit of an idea of how they think and how libraries operate. OK not all libraries or all librarians but at least one really good one. So I had to read this post by Seth Godin (The future of the library)

In that post he describes a future librarian that sounds a lot like my wife and a library that sounds a lot like the library she is always working towards. But what Seth misses is the reason librarians still need to fight for sharing and borrowing on eBook readers. In a word – access.

It’s all nice and fuzzy to say you can get everything you need on the Internet if you have a nice set of Internet connected devices and good access to the Internet everywhere you go. And Seth probably has that. Many of the patrons of most libraries, especially the libraries that serve poor and rural areas do not have those things. For these patrons even inexpensive books are outside their price range and 24/7 Internet access is still the realm of science fiction. For these readers the loan of an eBook reader is a door into future possibilities. If librarians do not fight to get them access to this technology and to the information on them they may never get to see it.

Also librarians have for the most part redefined themselves away from guardians of books to sharers of information. (well the good ones anyway)They have embraced media of all types from eBook readers to videos (online and on hard media), online databases to Internet searches. They are all about helping people find information and entertainment (yes people do read for entertainment). There are lots of computers in most libraries. It’s still hard to take those computers home though and if someone doesn’t have a computer at home (or Internet) than eBook readers are yet one more tool in the librarian’s toolbox.

Seth says:

Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.

Librarians are not missing the point. Seth is missing the point. Librarians do see themselves as “producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario” and have for years. Seth misses the point that librarians are about access and sharing by almost any means or media possible. They are not defending the library as warehouse but the library as a source for information sharing. And that is something  you would think Seth would be onboard with.

Mark Cuban has an interesting post that asks if ESPN.com has a Twitter problem. It seems, to him and he may well be right, that ESPN is not getting as much traffic from Twitter and Facebook as they would like.  Their reporters have too few followers and ESPN doesn’t seem to be able to correct that. Cuban suggests that online sports properties who hire people with effective Twitter accounts could win traffic that ESPN would like to have.

He’s probably right. This suggests the question of what is the value of an online presence? Twitter for one. Blogs for another. Facebook perhaps as well. I think it is pretty clear that they have some value but how is it determined.

I went looking for sites that set values for Twitter accounts. http://whatsmytwitteraccountworth.com/ says my Twitter is worth $1,102. Yawn. http://tweetworth.com/alfredtwo says $4,984 and that is with very stale data – I have 50% more followers then they show. I’m not sure how they calculate these numbers but clearly they use different formulas and I have no way of accessing the validity of them. Worse still I think that formulas like this can’t possibly have enough context to affix a real value. Of course this could be because I assign a much higher value to my Twitter account. The people I follow are invaluable to me!

In the marketplace an item’s value is usually determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. Lots of things go in to determining what someone will pay of course. We’re really still early in valuing social media exposure. In times that this it is tempting to use formulas that only look at raw numbers. I don’t think that tells the whole story or even close to it though.

Lady Gaga has over 9 million followers. I have no doubt that her account has a lot of value to her. It lets her promote herself, her brand, her concerts, and what ever else is part of her business. But would her account, or more correctly the set of people her tweets reach, have the same value to someone else? Probably not.

If you are just trying to reach a lot of people with something most people are interested in knowing about her account would have some value. If you are looking to promote an ESPN.com article about the NBA it probably isn’t as valuable. Mark Cuban, with “only” 386,000 followers, may be more valuable. If you wanted to reach tech geeks Robert Scoble, with “only” 173,000 followers may be worth a lot more to you.

In the latter two cases you are getting a higher percentage of people who are actively interested in the topic. Better yet, those are people who are retweeted, there messages are passed along, to still more people who are interested in what you are promoting. That sort of things adds up quickly. But how do you measure it and how to you assign a value to it? I think the jury is still out on that.

Still I think it is clear that having an online presence in social networking is valuable. As time goes on companies are going to place more and more value on that sort of thing. I know people who have gotten jobs based in part on their blogs. I as sure that there are companies who look at Twitter accounts and other online presences. Smart companies look beyond raw numbers and try to see what the target audience is and how well messages spread though a person’s online activities.

Are we at the point where companies shop for people with specific online audiences? Probably in a few niches like tech news we are probably already there. Will it grow? I think so.  But only time will tell if companies are going to be willing to count online presence in the same ways they count more traditional forms of goodwill that a potential employee brings to the table.

Cross out what you’ve done.

graduated high school.
smoked a cigarette.
kissed someone.
gotten so drunk you passed out.
ridden every ride at an amusement park.
collected something really stupid.
gone fishing.
watched four movies in one night.
gone long periods of time without sleep.
lied to someone.
snorted cocaine.
failed a class.
been in a car accident.
been in a tornado.
done hard drugs.
watched someone die.
been to a funeral.
burned yourself.
run a marathon.
cried yourself to sleep.
spent over $200 in one day.
flown on a plane.
written a 10 page letter.
gone skiing.
been sailing.
had a best friend.
lost someone you loved.
shoplifted something.
been to jail.
dangerously close to being in jail.
had detention.
skipped school.
got in trouble for something you didn’t do.
stolen books from the library.
gone to a different country.
dropped out of school.
been in a mental hospital.
watched the “harry potter” movies.
had an online diary.
fired a gun.
gambled in a casino.
had a yard sale.
had a lemonade stand.
actually made money at the lemonade stand.
been in a school play.
taken a lie detector test.
swam with dolphins.
gone to sea world.
voted for someone on a reality tv show.
written poetry.
read more than 20 books a year.
gone to europe.
used a coloring book over age 12.
had surgery.
had stitches.
taken a taxi.
seen the Washington monument.
had more than 5 im’s/online conversations going at once.
overdosed.
had a drug or alcohol problem.
been in a fist fight.
suffered any form of abuse.
had a hamster.
pet a wild animal.
used a credit card.
gone surfing in California.
done “spirit day” at school.
dyed your hair.
gotten a tattoo.
had something pierced.
gotten straight a’s.
been on the honor roll.
known someone with HIV or AIDS.
taken pictures with a webcam.
started a fire.
gotten caught having/going to a party while parents were gone.

Like a lot of people I have alerts set so that I am notified when my name comes up on the Internet. (Please tell me I am not alone.) I think it is good practice because I know that a lot of people look me up because of my job. While I don’t have a very common first name my last name is common enough that people with the same first and last name do show up on the Internet besides me. Several of them, sadly to say, for criminal activity. I suspect that almost everyone has someone with the same name who gets into trouble. I keep hoping that someone with my name will make the news for something good. And today it happened.

In the UK a man named Alfred Thompson stopped an armed (with a knife) robbery and held the criminal for police. (Story here) Mr. Thompson I salute you. Not sure I’d have the courage to do the same but I do appreciate you bringing honour to our name. Thanks.

This started as a comment I wanted to leave on a blog post by Robert Scoble but after I started writing it it felt too long for a comment and too far off the main focus of his post.

When I see a list of most influential anything the first thing I wonder about is context. There are some 300+ twitter users with over a million followers. Most of them have no influence in *my* life. I think I follow, technically, a couple of them but really don’t pay that much attention to them. A number of people with hundreds (or fewer) followers have more day to day influence with me.

In my case I follow several lines in Twitter. Tech of course. Friends as well. The big group though is education which in some cases overlaps friends and tech. Who is influential in that context is not influential in the context of the sort of tech Scoble writes about but may be very influential in educational technology.

Now I like making lists as much as the next guy (more than some) but I have to realize that the people who make lists have their own context and their own idea of influence and I might very well be influential in the areas I want/need to be without making those lists. I think that judging influence only makes sense when looking at one person in the context where they are trying to make a difference.

My friend Doug Peterson (@DougPete) and I frequently share “another list we didn’t make.” It’s a bit of a joke and we both (I think) see these lists as interesting but not important enough to get upset over not being included. We share ideas, thoughts, conversations, and quips. We try to be interesting, helpful and useful. If we have influence fine. If not, well, if we are helpful to someone that is good enough.

I think I worry a lot more than Doug about “influence.” Call it insecurity on my part. Or ego. It’s most definitely a weakness on my part – a vanity. At the end of the day though I know I will never have the influence of many many other people on Twitter and I am ok with that.

And besides, those lists are not to be taken seriously. Entertainment value only. Even, or perhaps especially, the ones that list me.

We’ve (US government and businesses) not really been good in the sense of being principled with regards to our relations with kings, dictators and tyrants in my opinion. What we have long been is practical. That is to say that stability is good for us so we have tolerated and supported anyone who kept a country stable – at least outwardly. Maintaining any sort of stability in a totalitarian society requires a lot of energy. And it requires keeping opponents from getting organized. So the stability is more in appearance than in actuality. What has happened is that communication has gotten less centralized and so harder to infiltrate and control. Instability has followed.

I think the reason the religious was involved in some of the early revolts, Iran kicking out the Shah for example, is that the only organization was the religious organization. These days communication and organization is more widespread and driven more by economic than religious or purely political reasons. My hope, and to some extent my belief, is that once tasting popular control people in many of these countries will be unwilling to surrender it to new tyrants. This seems especially likely in Tunisia. How stable Egypt becomes depends on the army keeping the elections clean and fair.

People are worried about Saudi Arabia and I think they should be. The royal family has the support of the Bedouin and their own favorites but not of the small middle and upper classes. The old trading families, who we hear very little about but some of whose children I have had as students, are also fans of stability and they will support the royals only as long as that stability is maintained. The king there has opened his check book and that may keep the peace for a while. How long is any ones guess.

I’m not seeing anyone in the US government making friends with the people who will likely take over in the event the royals get tossed out. In my opinion that would more likely be the wealthy trading families who would be more likely to support a democratic meritocracy than the religious radicals there. That good be good for the US and the business of those families is business and they have more in common with the US than not.

The key will be who the masses support if they no longer support the royals. Complex situation. And it could go either way. The edge I give to the trading families is that they know their resource is the minds of their people and they are educated as well as money can buy.

Oil prices are as stable as the political landscape so we are going to see some uncertainty for a while. When it gets stable it will stabilize lower than it currently is but probably not back to anything like a historic low. This is the message the Republican right does not seem to want to recognize. I am not global warming nut but even I can see that relying on overseas oil, or oil in general, is not sustainable. China sees it and they are doing more than we are about it. We are falling behind. Will this current situation teach us anything? I have my doubts.