by Jason on January 29, 2010
I’ve had this in my reader’s open tabs for over a month now – totally old news, but they found out that people were able to tap into the video feed from U.S. Predator drones using software that costs around $25.
And yes, it’s in my browser because there’s a part of me that wants to check out this software. Maybe it has a free demo period so I can try it out. Because hey, wouldn’t it be cool to see what the local Predator drones are seeing?
I just never got around to it. Which is probably just as well – I mean, what are the odds I’d find a live feed of a Predator in downtown Toronto, and what exactly would my reaction be if I found one?
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by Jason on January 24, 2010
I picked up Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City
(affiliate link) at the local library both because it was listed as a top ten business book of 2009 on some list somewhere and because the premise seemed so bizarre: Henry Ford once owned a chunk of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of Delaware and attempted to build a rubber plantation there!
As it turned out, the plantation story was fascinating enough on its own, but I was blown away even further by what was basically the background material for the story, which talked about the sheer impact that Ford had on the way things worked in the beginning of the 20th century.
The industrial revolution on its own was pretty huge, but most of what I knew about it was from the brief talk Clay Shirky gave about the use of gin as a universal coping mechanism to handle the sudden influx of free time that city workers found themselves with.
Ford not only brought a new means of production to the world, but he seemed to recognize that workers were as much a part of the factory as the thousands of tools he’d built to fashion the cars, and he took extraordinary steps to make sure the workers were in, well, good working order as well.
This not only included higher than usual wages ($5 a day!) but he also had a whole department that visited employees and their families in their homes to make sure they were spending their money wisely and learning basic life skills like keeping flies off the food.
There’s an incredibly fine line between fascism and Ford’s style of capitalism, but some of his experiments and theories were unbelievably audacious. Forget factories; he’d build whole towns in the most extreme cases of vertically integrated manufacturing I’ve heard of to date. For example, cars had wooden floors, so Ford harvested and milled lumber. Cars were metal? Ford had foundries. Oh, and this was all done in the same factory at River Rouge.
I can’t express the degree of change that Ford tried to and in many cases managed to implement on society that go far beyond the assembly line – not due to length or time restrictions, but simply because I don’t understand them fully and the book’s been retured – but I’m left with this impression:
For all the hype and talk about the degree that the internet has changed modern society over the past 15 years, it’s a mild incremental process compared to the upheaval that must have happened between, say, 1879 and 1929, a span which would encompass Edison’s light bulb, Ford’s work, and, to a lesser extent, the airplane (I chose that 50 year span to go against the, oh, now 63 years that have passed since the transistor was invented in 1947.)
For example, there’s a clip at the 52:34 mark of the Code Rush documentary (available here) where someone (analyst David Readerman?) stands at a town’s main intersection and points to the banks and stores and claims they might be all gone in 2 years, replaced by the internet: “I don’t know why [The Gap]’s even renovating this store. Why aren’t they investing the money in their website?” That didn’t happen, but if the change was “Ford big” it might’ve.
Maybe that change is still coming, awaiting only one more big (or even small) thing to bring the stars into alignment, but it’s left me wondering:
What Big Change could result in a remoulding of the world on the level that happened not even a hundred years ago? And if it’s coming from the tech community, are those Two Guys in a Garage that we kept hearing about working on the prototype as I write this?
Tags:
Change,
Ford,
history
by Jason on January 20, 2010
OK, if your character is making a 911 call, then yes, show the network logo on the phone:
However, if your character is arming an explosive device via his cell phone, then no, do not show any branding:
Lastly, if a mobile phone is being used to detonate explosives, take the whole faceplate off just to be sure we don’t imply that mobile phones can do anything bad:
(Why oh why can’t I just enjoy some television like normal people do?)
Tags:
24,
mobile,
product placement
by Jason on December 22, 2009
The Lettera 32 would be an awesome netbook if you could type silently
Lots of saved browser tabs accumulating (and some old mental bookmarks as well) surrounding Cormac McCarthy, who apparently wrote the book No Country for Old Men and The Road, both of which were movies as of late, though he’s been published since 1965, so it seems shallow to just highlight the stuff he’s written in the past 10 years. I mean, they guy’s typewriter sold for a quarter million, and it helped build way more than two books.
But hey, it’s not like I’ve read anything by him. I just accumulate the links and tabs and bookmarks until they spill over.
So.
Item the first, which is the most recent, is from this week by Hugh MacLeod, in which he retells the story of a young aspiring writer asking McCarthy for advice on starting writing. The response was “Don’t do it unless you have to.”
That reminded me of a post from way way back on MemeMachineGo, which retold comics writer Alan Moore’s (Watchmen, V For Vendetta, lots of other good stuff) 5 tips for would-be comics writers. The first, almost not surprisingly “don’t,” with tips 2 and 3 mirroring tip 1 in Fight Club style, but the one that always stuck in my head was item 5, paraphrased thusly: “if you’re going to be any good, you have to commit yourself to it like an ancient Greek or Egyptian commits himself to a god.”
That always stuck with me, but before we drill into that, we’re going back to McCarthy, who John Gruber quoted from a WSJ profile: “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”
I liked that bit, but that same interview yielded this gem, which was a little less bleak until you think of the ramifications: “If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it.”
You know, writing good code isn’t that much different than writing great works of literature, at least from a mindset perspective. I think the biggest thing the blog and Twitter world has exposed is the (not altogether new) talent of making it look like you’re not working very hard on an all-consuming passion.
Tags:
coding,
mindset,
writing
by Jason on November 2, 2009
It’s been a while, so I bring you this: the multi-step process to amusing yourself when you’re tired and burnt out and don’t really like computers but can’t think of anything else to do and your brain is buzzing too much to sleep.
1) Go to the Toronto Library website. They’ve got a lot of books.
2) Do a keyword search for the internet.
3) Marvel at how the number one search result is not found in any library.
4) Try to figure out what that means.
No tag for this post.
by Jason on July 28, 2009
In lieu of something significant (has it been a month already? I swear, between blogging and bathing, I don’t know how anyone gets anything done,) I found the Google ads around the feed around this story about being sued by the RIAA somewhat amusing (bear in mind I’m in Canada):
No, these aren't clickable.
It’s been about a month since I read Appetite for Self Destruction, and I was almost feeling optimistic about the music industry, but something’s been holding me back from posting about it. Probably the fact that they still make a business around suing their customers. And how the music retailers (what’s left of them, anyway) think downloaders should be sued but then are shocked when they’re asked to pay fees for playing music in their music stores.
The fact of the matter is, there’s basically an infinite amount of music out there. Check these poorly-researched stats: as of April 2007, Myspace had 25 million songs. Hosted. I have no idea how many of these were duplicates, but that was over two years ago, so cut me some slack and assume a lot more indie bands have uploaded their songs to the service since then.
This means that if I lived to be 100 and listened to Myspace tracks nonstop, I still wouldn’t hear them all.
Once there’s more than you can use in a lifetime, I reckon that’s infinite.
Sure, if we crowdsourced the problem, the population of Canada alone could listen to the whole inventory in about 3 minutes.
But we wouldn’t have any shared stories.
Music gains power when more people listen to it, and that’s the blessing and the curse for the industry: they don’t have the same issues of scarcity-based pricing that other companies have. In a certain sense, the more people that listen to a track, the more valuable it becomes, while at the same time the cost of distribution stays relatively static on a per-listen basis. The margin against this hypothetical value grows with every listen.
While some companies have experimented with the Dutch auction style of pricing, like how Amie Street prices songs progressively higher as they get more popular, encouraging early music discovery and adoption, you’ll have a hard time finding a consumer who’s willing to pay $1000 because they’re the 70th million person to “discover” a track. Indeed, in today’s market, people who are late to the party usually get a discount on items that aren’t hot anymore.
I don’t know the legal term for the argument (it’s probably in Latin,) but people being sued by the RIAA need to figure out how to explain how while they might have 60,000 tracks on their hard drive, the number they would have downloaded if they were worth even a penny each (to the downloader) would be about 6.
In the meantime, I’m considering taking Google’s advice and downloading as much as I can before declaring bankruptcy. You know, as long as I can still enter the USA. I hear they have vegan doughnuts.
No tag for this post.
by Jason on June 29, 2009
Suppose it’s the early 1730s, just after the discovery of electrical conduction. Installation of power lines won’t take place until the 1880s, and the first long distance telephone line won’t be installed until 1877 (which puts it in the wrong order, chronilogically, but that surprised me so much I won’t edit this paragraph.)
In this context, suppose further that you’re approaching some entity with lots of money (a King, a church, some merchant consortium, what have you) with a crazy plan: you’re going to string wire all over the country on wooden poles. What will it be for? You answer honestly: I have no idea, but I’m sure the users will find an application.
I think about this kind of thing when I read the umpteenth article questioning how Twitter’s going to make money. The thing of it is, lots of companies are founded on this basis – there’s something there, and we don’t know what it is, but it’s worth a try just for the sake of finding out.
I have no idea how much it would have cost, in today’s dollars, to wire up even a portion of the United States in the 1730s. What’s interesting to me is that today’s investments in social infrastructure aren’t necessarily a bargain in comparison (millions of dollars are still millions of dollars,) but I wonder how speculative some investments of centuries past were according to the wisdom of the time.
No tag for this post.
by Jason on June 20, 2009
I got a Twitter follow notification in my inbox for this profile:
Marge is looking for love in all the wrong places
Like Tyler Durden in Fight Club who never answers his own phone, I never click on links on the internet (it saves so much time!) so hey, maybe it’s a legitimately lonely person on the interweb and not some kind of scam or spam or spacam.
Except this follow wasn’t for me. It was for my cat.
That’s what’s wrong with spammers. They don’t even try anymore. No work ethic. When I was a boy, you had to copy addresses by hand out of the phone book and put them on envelopes. And you had to lick the stamp! None of these peel off stamps for us, nosir.
(And yes, my cat has a Twitter account. It gives my family no end of amusement, for we are easily amused. I’m sure someone has made a Twitter account for the hummous they made a week ago, so this really isn’t as lame as it seems in the grand scheme of things.)
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by Jason on June 4, 2009
Back when I developed ticketing software for events, the clients would complain that I made the ticket ID too long. I feel vindicated today.
Via a post to the Torcamp mailing list (from Stephen, last name left out to give some semblence of after-the-fact privacy,) I found out about an email campaign being run for Primus Canada. It’s got all those slick bits that marketers love: you get a personalized link that shows a video WITH YOUR NAME IN IT! Wow! And better still, you get to send customized videos to your friends! Viral wow!
The only real problem here is that instead of using, say, a GUID or some other really big identifier in the personalized URLs, the company used an integer. A few quick tests confirm that it’s a sequential integer.
Let’s spell this out: Primus has provided their customer list of names and emails to anyone who can edit a URL.
So what’s the exposure? In about 3 minutes of entering higher and lower IDs in the URL, I found a consecutive range of about 144, 657 IDs. I didn’t try every number in that range (you can be sure some scrapers are doing that right now, somewhere on the internet) but given the overall naivete of the URL scheme I’m guessing the range is unbroken.
What’s more, it’s highly possible that there are other ranges in there from other database loads.
Picking an arbitrary starting number for your consecutive number range is not a realistic security measure. In my ticketing days mentioned above, the exposure would have been counterfeit tickets which might or might not have been caught at the gate (there were secondary measures like the customer’s name on the ticket matching the scan.) Here, I can pretty much guarantee that a lot of Primus customers just got added to a bunch of spam lists.
So, for developers out there (or marketers with half a brain that want to test their dev team), what’s a better way to do this? As I suggested, a GUID would work better – it’s a really big number that’s harder to guess, but not impossible, and the more names in your database, the more hits, so I’d add the customer’s actual email address (or a tokenized version of it) to the URL as well – this is an email campaign, and it’s not like people will be typing these URLs in anyway, so there’s not much harm in making them bigger. The email token’s probably overkill, but this way the only way an attacker is going to see the email address is to know it in the first place.
Oh, and added bonus: if you view the source of the landing page there’s a link to the privacy policy and the terms and conditions. They’re commented out.
Update: Andrew Loius has even more gory details over here.
Update 2: The site’s been pulled (like, hard down, 404 not found, Gordon Ramsey style “shut it down.”) Hopefully they’ll resolve this properly and recover somehow; it’s not a bad campaign, just an unfortunate deployment.
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by Jason on April 14, 2009
I’m not sure if I’ll have the time tonight to write what I want to write about, so here’s a link to the review I posted about Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America by Julia Angwin. Oh wait, the title of the book’s the link.
That’s not Amazon affiliate bait either, just a regular link. BUT it’s to the .ca version of Amazon so 80% of you will have to look the book up yourself on the .com. And I don’t get paid. So we’re even. Nyah.
I need more practice writing book reviews. Amazon’s like a practice blog where I can put stuff that I’m not sure I’ll like in a few months as my writing gets back up to speed. If I posted it here, I’d end up leaking mental energy over the mild urge to edit or delete it, but once it’s on Amazon (and no, I’m not going to check this,) I can’t delete it.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t mean what I said, I just figure I need work before I can turn “I really liked this book” into a full page feature in some literary review magazine.
If you like business stories, check it out, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed, except about the having to look it up on Amazon.com thing.
Oh fine, here.
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