Internet matters – Page 31 – a sibilant intake of breath

New campus blogger

My friend Evey is now blogging for the Macleans magazine ‘On Campus’ site. Her first post is on growing up slowly.

One of the biggest problems with the way information is now distributed is the increasing limitations on how you can use it. With physical media like books and CDs, you had quite a few rights and a lot of security. You could lend the media to friends, use it in any number of ways, and be confident that it would still work decades later. There is much less confidence to be found with new media like music and movies with DRM, games that require a connection to the server to work, mobile phone applications, Kindle books, etc. Companies have shown a disappointing willingness to cripple functionality, or even eliminate it outright, for instance with Amazon deleting books off Kindles. Steven Metalitz, a lawyer representing the RIAA, has stated explicitly that people buying digital media should not expect it to work indefinitely: “We reject the view that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works.” Of course, the same people argue that they should be able to maintain their copyrights forever.

The solution to this, I think, is to make it legal for people to break whatever forms of copy protection companies put on their products, as long as the purpose for which they are being broken is fair use. It also wouldn’t hurt to clarify the ownership of such materials in favour of users. A Kindle book should be like a physical book – property of the person that bought it, and not subject to arbitrary modification or revocation by the seller.

Of course, politicians are under more effective pressure from media companies than from ordinary consumers. Perhaps a strong Canadian Pirate Party, asserting the rights of content users over content owners, would be a good thing. Of course, stronger support from mainstream parties that actually hold power would be of much more practical use.

Arguments with climate change deniers

For the sake of organization, here is a list of some of the disagreements that have arisen on this blog between those that accept the scientific consensus that climate change is real, caused by human activity, and dangerous and those who do not. Given that a lot of the deniers seem to flit from blog to blog, leaving misleading comments, cataloging some rebuttals to them seems worthwhile.

This list includes people who believe that climate change is real and a serious problem, but believe for one reason or another that nothing should be done about it.

They are listed here in the order in which they first appeared:

Jack Carradice – September 2008
Vaclav Klaus – December 2008
Antonio Sosa – January 2009
Betula – May 2009
Dan Pangburn – July 2009
Mike Goad – December 2009
Ashley Baker – January 2010
Brad Cocomile – June 2010
Robert Laughlin – July 2010
Dave Graham – February 2011

I will add more as they crop up.

Scan this with your camera phone

The above is an example of QR Code: a kind of two-dimensional barcode that can be used to encode any sort of textual data. As cameraphones and smartphones become more common in North America, you may see more and more of these. They are already common in Japan. Nokia has a website that lets you make your own mobile codes. You can make a simple business card like this:

URLs, phone numbers, and other sorts of information can be similarly encoded.

CRTC public submissions and privacy

Quite conveniently, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission allows citizens to comment on ongoing matters through their website. Unfortunately, the privacy protections employed in relation to the submissions are lacking. Their website says the following:

The information you provide to the Commission as part of a public process (i.e. comments, interventions or observations) is entered into an unsearchable database dedicated to that specific public process. This database is accessible only from the webpage of that particular public process. As a result, a general search of our website with the help of either our own search engine or a third-party search engine will not provide access to the information which was provided as part of a public process.

This doesn’t seem to be true. Searching for my own name in Google brings up the submissions I made to them opposing Bell’s efforts to introduce Usage Based Billing (UBB). The submission includes my full name, personal email address, and phone number.

I complained electronically to the CRTC about this, but got no response. I then sent a letter to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, with a carbon copy to them. At the very least, the CRTC should obscure email addresses and phone numbers in a way that prevents robots from harvesting them. For instance, obfuscated email addresses can be made to look normal for standard browsers, but like gibberish for most robots. Alternatively, the CRTC could provide a web contact form that lets people contact submitters, without learning their email address. I have no problem with submissions being made public, in the interest of transparency. If it is going to happen, however, people should be clearly informed about it on the page where they submit the information (not some separate privacy information page) and reasonable efforts should be taken to prevent the inappropriate collection of personal information by either people or automated systems.

[Update: 7 August 2009] The CRTC responded to my complaint, and it seems they have come into compliance with their privacy policy.

Insight into Google

For someone who produces a site which covers a broad variety of topics, Google is an especially critical source of traffic (because people interested in one topic are unlikely to follow a site with a bunch of other random topics included). In my case, more than 60% of the traffic I received in the last year came as the result of Google searches. No other search engine produces more than 3.5%, and only 12% of visitors actually type in the URL, rather than clicking a link from a page of search results or another site.

Given the importance of Google, it is worth knowing a bit about how the organization operates. Over at All Things Digital, there are three interesting articles. The first covers the human evaluators Google uses to evaluate the effectiveness of their various search algoriths. The second discusses the attempts people make to game the system (inevitable, given the sheer amount of money that can be gained or lost by rising or falling in Google rankings). The third describes how Google intends to improve future search results.

One interesting fact mentioned in the first piece is that the option Google offers for users to hide results in their searches is used to refine their search algorithms. For instance, I am personally annoyed by websites that try to scrape together an identity page on someone, by grabbing snippets from here and there that seem related to them. Sites that do this include pipl.com, 123people.co.uk, zoominfo.com, and others. It is a bit encouraging that if enough people hide their unsolicited and error-prone amalgamations, their overall page rankings may eventually suffer.

Diet for nerds and computer programmers

John Walker, the founder of Autodesk, has written an interesting guide on health and weight loss, which is available for free online: The Hacker’s Diet.

Basically, the book focuses on the fundamental mathematical issues associated with weight loss and gain, and describes some useful techniques for transitioning to a lower weight. In particular, the moving average approach to measurement described seems quite valuable, insofar as it helps to separate the ‘signal’ of actual weight from the ‘noise’ of variation in things like water retention. The moving average generates a trend line that seems like it should provide more meaningful guidance than a scatterplot of individual data points, or even a simple curve fit to them.

The book also describes a 15-minute health regimen that ramps up in difficulty and is intended to serve as a minimum level of exercise for life.

The book is quite an unusual one, as health books go. For instance, it endorses frozen microwave dinners as a convenient way to get a predetermined number of calories. It also insists that exercise is not a critical weight loss strategy, and that some degree of suffering inevitably accompanies efforts to move closer to one’s ideal healthy weight. While I am sure people could take exception to this approach, it is good to have variety out there, and encouraging that tools are being created for the ever-larger number of people worldwide that are overweight or obese, and likely to suffer significant health risks as a consequence. Those who don’t want to mess around with Walker’s custom Excel files can use a web-based version of Walker’s approach at PhysicsDiet.com

Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air

David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air is a remarkably engaging book; it has certainly kicked off and contributed to some very energetic discussions here. The book, which was written by a physics professor at Cambridge and is available for free online, is essentially a detailed numerical consideration of renewable forms of power generation, as well as technologies to support it, and to reduce total power demand. MacKay concludes that the effort required to produce sustainable energy systems is enormous, and that one of the most viable options is to build huge solar facilities in the world’s deserts, and use that to provide an acceptable amount of energy to everyone.

The book has a physics and engineering perspective, rather than one focused on politics or business. MacKay considers the limits of what is physically possible, given the character of the world and the physical laws that govern it. Given that he does not take economics into consideration much, his conclusions demonstrate the high water mark of what is possible, with unlimited funds. In the real world, renewable deployment will be even more challenging than it is in his physics-only model.

Here are some of the posts in which the book has already been discussed:

I have added relevant information from the book to the comment sections of a great many other posts, on everything from wind power to biofuels.

Even if you don’t agree with MacKay’s analysis, reading his book will provide some useful figures, graphs, and equations, as well as prompt a lot of thought. It is certainly one of the books that I would recommend most forcefully to policy makers, analysts, politicians, and those interested in deepening their understanding of what a sustainable energy future would involve.

Improving voicemail

While useful, voicemail is a flawed technology that can be improved in many ways. Three recent examples come to mind:

First, there is Apple’s visual voicemail. The improvement here is like the improvement between cassette tapes and compact discs: each message is an independent ‘track’ that can be treated as a unit. That is nicer than just having a single audio string to deal with, since you can see right away who called and jump to any message.

Secondly, there is the voicemail system of my VoIP provider. The nicest thing they do is provide an option to email you MP3s of your messages, which include caller ID to let you know who they are from. Now, I only call the actual voicemail number to periodically delete all the messages accumulating there.

Third, and neatest of all, is the transcription feature in Google’s forthcoming ‘voice’ product. Not only do you get to see who called, but you get an automated transcript. I am sure the voice recognition is far from perfect, but people seem to find it good enough to evaluate which messages need to be listened to, and which ones are just ‘call me back’ requests. To some extent, this even makes voicemail searchable, which is a neat trick.

While sound has character and authenticity to it, it is really a degraded form of communication, when it comes to simple searching and management. It is nice to see innovative ways to overcome the limitations of sound-based messages, while still retaining the original format, for those situations where you actually want to hear the message.

Pondering smartphones

Soon, I will probably be switching cell phone plans, and possibly phones and providers as well. I am considering getting an internet-enabled phone, and pondering the various associated options. The most appealing phones are the iPhone and the HTC Android phone, followed by the Nokia smartphones. Using the first two would mean switching to Rogers.

In terms of the phone itself, I definitely prefer a physical keyboard to Apple’s error-prone on-screen version. That said, it would be nice to have a phone that was also an iTunes compatible iPod replacement… Does anybody have an HTC Dream or direct experience with a working one? I am curious how they compare with the iPhone for web browsing, email, and instant messaging.

I definitely don’t want to get locked into a three-year contract, so I am considering buying an unlocked phone as inexpensively as possible, then getting a one-year smartphone contract from Rogers. That way, if I move outside Canada, or get into a financial circumstance incompatible with expensive data plans, I won’t have to pay a massive fee to get out of the contract.

Category: Internet matters