Internet matters – Page 36 – a sibilant intake of breath

Location data and photography

Before long, I expect that many cameras will have built-in GPS receivers and the option to automatically tag every photo with the geographic coordinates of the place where it was taken. That will allow for some neat new kinds of displays: from personal photo maps that show the results of a single person’s travels to composites of the photos a great many people have taken of the same place.

For those who would be interested in such things, but don’t yet have equipment that can locate itself, it seems like there could be a simple workaround. These days, low-cost GPS tracking devices are very affordable. All you need is a camera and a tracker with coordinated clocks. Then, you carry the tracker with you when you take photos. After you upload them to a computer, you can run software to automatically attach location data from the tracking system to the photos. Given the increasing number of cell phones with GPS capability, they might be the ideal devices to provide such locational data. You could even configure one to automatically upload a track of your movements to a web service which would then match up that information with photos you upload later.

One snag would be photos taken in areas where GPS doesn’t work, such as on the subway. To deal with that, users could be presented with a few choices. The coordinates from the closest point in time where data is available could be used, a very general coordinate for the city or region in question could be substituted, or such photos could simply be left untagged.

No doubt, people could dream up some very clever ways of using this kind of data, especially once a lot of it was online. You could, for instance, produce collages of how a particular area looked over time. A mountain valley could be presented from the perspectives of everyone from those hosting afternoon picnics to those undertaking technical climbs of the peaks, with spring and summer photos contrasted against snowy winter shots. Groups of friends could also watch their trails of photos diverge and overlap, as they move around the world.

All told, it could be a very interesting experiment in communal memory.

Sorting digital music

When it comes to the organization of music, I am probably one of the most obsessive people out there. I would actually rather delete a song I cannot properly categorize than retain it as ‘Track 1’ by ‘Unknown Artist.’ Also, once I start categorizing something such as music or photos, I cannot rest easy until the task is done. It’s a tendency I need to be aware of and careful about. The decision to tag all my iPhoto images for which friends are in them, for example, produced about three days worth of intense work.

Of course, iTunes is the ultimate enabler for music organization obsessives. It puts everything into a big database: song ratings (all my songs are rated), artists, titles, play counts, last played dates, etc. It lets you set up smart playlists that, for example, consist only of songs rated four or five stars and haven’t been played in the last two weeks. You can also tag your songs as Canadian, too obscene to be included in a random party playlist, or whatever other designations are useful to you. I have most of my good music sorted into mood-based categories, including angry, brazen, demure, dramatic, energetic, rebellious, sombre, and upbeat.

One annoying element of the age of digital music is the enduring character of mix CDs consisting of CD-style music tracks, rather than data files. Almost invariably, this means that someone somewhere converted the uncompressed music on a CD into an MP3, AAC, or WMA file. Then, someone took that compressed file and stretched it back into CD format. If you then try to re-compressed the previously compressed and de-compressed file, you encounter a notable loss of quality. It would be far better if people made mix CDs consisting of data files (those in a lossless format would be especially appreciated, and still significantly smaller than uncompressed music files).

One final annoyance I will mention is the fact that my iPod is no longer large enough to store my music collection. Since I am now about 500 megabytes beyond its capacity, I need to manually ‘uncheck’ songs so that it can synchronize properly. Beyond being a pain, this somewhat undermines the iPod concept, which is really to have all your music available at a touch. My iPod is an old 4th generation 20GB model. It was replaced four times under an extended warranty that has since expired, and it probably doesn’t have enormously more time left in the world of working gear. When it bites the bullet, I will buy something large enough to store many years worth of future musical acquisitions.

Most visited posts of 2008

As the year comes to a close, it seems worthwhile to link back to the posts that got the most attention over the past twelve months:

1) By far the most popular was this post on Greyhound bus security, arguing that incorporating airport-style security into the bus system doesn’t make sense. Largely because it got linked by Bruce Schneier, the post was viewed over 2,000 times – more than 1,000 of them on the first day when it was linked.

2) Second post popular was this post on Health Canada’s climate change report. It’s not much of a post, really, when it comes to new content from me. What it does do is make the PDF files of the report available for easy download: something Health Canada itself opted not to do.

3) The third most popular post came very early in 2008, and was about how high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission could be a major enabler for renewable electricity generation.

4) The fourth post once again demonstrates the power of getting linked on a popular site. Zoom directed a lot of people towards my odds guessing experiment, the results of which were posted subsequently.

5) Finally, the fifth most popular post of 2008 was my flowchart for voting in Canadian elections. Strategic voting was a big issue in Canada this year, as was the difficulty of interpreting any electoral result. Voters are simply trying to express so many different preferences through such a narrow channel that knowing precisely what any vote means is impossible.

Taken together, these posts demonstrate a few basic realities of the blogosphere: (a) the small fry get a lot of attention when they can catch the eye of bigger fish, (b) failing that, it pays to be Google-bait, (c) it pays to be the one providing access to something popular, and (d) posts with the most substantive content won’t necessarily get the most traffic.

My thanks to the 36,418 absolute unique visitors who stopped by this year, viewing 117,400 pages. Hopefully, next year will be even better, both in terms of the quality of writing, photography, and discussion and in terms of how many people participate.

Video on copyright in Canada

Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law is a 50 minute film about copyright in Canada, produced by Michael Geist and Daniel Albahary. It is largely a response to the Conservative government’s deeply problematic proposed copyright legislation.

Equitable copyright laws are an important issue. In the first instance, that is due to the overwhelming importance of information, who controls it, and who can do what with it. Secondly, it has to do with societal decisions about what kind of conduct is acceptable, who enforces the rules, and what the consequences for violating them can legitimately be. Rules on when technical means of copyright enforcement can be legitimately circumvented are especially important, since that is a new sort of right potentially being extended to content owners. As such, the balance between the societal interest of fair use and the content owner’s claim to protection needs to be evaluated in a more profound way than has occurred so far.

As with many of the new developments on this issue, I found out about it through BoingBoing.

Legit Monty Python becoming available online

In another victory for the internet at large, Monty Python has launched a YouTube channel – providing free access to an increasing number of their videos at reasonably high quality.

For the uninitiated, and those seeking to rekindle their appreciation for all things Python – I offer a few viewing suggestions:

They will be using the channel to try and sell DVDs of their films and television episodes, but that seems very fair.

I look forward to when some of my other favourite sketches become available, such as the Cheese Shop sketch, the ROMANES EUNT DOMUS segment from The Life of Brian, the Crunchy Frog sketch, ‘I Wish to Report a Burglary,’ and the ‘I’d Like to Get Married’ sketch.

The virtues of digital photography

While there are certainly benefits to film, there are also many excellent reasons for which people are switching to digital. The sensors in even the low-end digital SLRs have rather good low-light performance. They are less grainy at 1600 ISO than the sensors in point and shoot cameras are at 400 or even 200 ISO. The dSLR systems also include features like depth of field preview, mirror lock-up, and bracketing for both exposure and white balance. Also very useful are dedicated controls for things like white balance, ISO, and exposure compensation. Sure, you can set all those things through menus in most good point and shoot cameras. It is a lot more pleasant to be able to do so on the fly, while still looking through the viewfinder.

As a fan of wide angle lenses, I do find the 1.6X multiplication from small sensors annoying. That being said, dSLRs these days do come with decent kit lenses that include an appropriately altered range. And, of course, there is always the enormous value of being able to take unlimited photos without marginal cost and get immediate feedback on the results of what you are doing. Being able to consult luminosity and RGB histograms half a second after taking the photo certainly beats having to wait for processing and printing.

In short, there are many virtues to digital photography: especially to those of us who are uncertain about there we will be living in the next few years. Just like one’s personal library, shipping around binders of archive-quality negatives is an expense and a pain. Ones and zeros can be zipped around the world at a much lower price, and with less risk to the originals.

New developments in spam

Remarkably, it seems that 70% of the world’s spam emails were originating from an American firm called McColo. On November 11th, two American internet service providers cut them off from the web, leading to the huge drop in the global volume of spam. It is estimated that 90% of spam messages are actually sent by computers that have been compromised by viruses, which makes it a bit surprising that such a drop could be generated by disconnecting one firm. Clearly, it is a network that needed central direction to operate. Those that emerge as successors will probably be more robust, located in more unpoliced jurisdictions, or both.

While the respite is likely to be temporary, the situation may reveal some useful information on the practice and economics of spam. This unrelated paper (PDF) examines the latter. The researchers infiltrated a segment of the Storm Botnet and monitored its activity and performance. On the basis of what they observed and estimates of the rest, they concluded that the botnet earned about 3.5 million dollars a year by selling pharmaceuticals. While that isn’t an inconsiderable sum, I suspect it is less than is being spent by companies combatting the flood of spam messages themselves.

Recyclable packaging from Amazon

A recent decision by Amazon.com deserves to be applauded. They are collaborating with manufacturers to reduce the use of bulky and hard-to-open plastic packaging. In place, they are making products available in streamlined packaging made from recyclable cardboard.

It’s a small step, but a sensible one. It also demonstrates the degree to which big retailers can play a role in setting standards. A similar push from someone like Wal-Mart could have a pronounced effect.

Loggers and tree-huggers

HSBC has released the strangest environmentally related ad I have ever seen. Usually, environmental advertising is absurd because filthy companies like Exxon pretend to be clean, or because they horribly distort environmental science. This one is strange both because it doesn’t make much sense internally and because there is no sense in which it constitutes a genuine endorsement of HSBC. The ad is bewildering if you take the logger to be the protester’s father; it becomes a bit more disturbing if you take them to be romantically involved. Either way, the best shot in the piece is the older male protester putting away his glasses while the police approach.

John Swansburg has produced some fairly extensive analysis.

NIST hash competition

Several times, the American government has held open competitions to create new cryptographic standards. Important examples include the Data Encryption Standard (DES) selected in 1976 and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) chosen in 2001. As mentioned before, the hunt is now on for a new hash function. These are one-way forms of encryption that play a number of vital roles, such as making it possible to save only encrypted versions of passwords in password databases that might be compromised.

Bruce Schneier, who made an unsuccessful bid for his TwoFish cipher to be accepted as the AES, is now part of the team that has created the Skein Hash Function for the ongoing National Institute of Standards and Technology competition. The function is based around a successor to TwoFish called, unsurprisingly, Threefish. All entries must be submitted by tomorrow and will be publicly scrutinized over the next four years or so. The result should be a more secure successor to the SHA hash functions.