I did some work a long time ago with Amazon Web Services; I gave them an email address and they periodically send me newsletters about their web services. The most recent one contained a link to an article about a new service: Amazon Mechanical Turk. This service provides ‘Artificial Artificial Intelligence’ and lets developers place tasks in front of humans in a scalable, standardized manner. Amazon, with their infrastructure, makes sure that the task is completed and pays the human who completes the task. Right now, I only saw one set of tasks, sponsored by Amazon, so I’m not sure of the uptake. But this is certainly an fascinating idea–an interesting inverse of the normal computer/human relationship.
Technology and Society - 10. page
Yahoo IM and VOIP
I just installed the latest version of Yahoo Messenger. That and a 20 dollar headset lets me make free phone calls to anyone else on my messenger list (though they have to have the correct version of the software and a headset as well–and Yahoo reserves the right to start charging for the service.)
I may be a bit behind the wagon, since eBay just bought Skype and I have a friend who has been using vonage for over two years, but I was quite impressed witht he ease of install and the sound quality. I’ll be interested to see where Yahoo takes this. They already allow you to make calls to external phone numbers, though you do have to pay 2 cents a minute.
Why is this any different than Skype or Vonage? Because:
1) it leverages the investment most folks have in their IM address books
2) when you’re on IM, you sometimes want to have phone conversations to supplement the quick questions that IM is so good at conveying
3) yahoo is a fairly well known name (as is google, who is also getting into the business of VOIP). I don’t have any numbers on relative bases, but from personal experience, the number of folks who IM is greater than the number of folks who use VOIP.
Remember the days when there was such a business as carrying long distance voice traffic? There are rapidly coming to a close, driven by VOIP and cellular phone usage, I think.
Update: The Economist has an article on Skype and VOIP in general.
Running your company on webapps
Here’s an interesting post on running your company on webapps.
Of course, the issues of security (who’s responsible for it? who do you call when an employee leaves?), data ownership (how can you export your precious data if you want to move to a different provider?), legality (using gmail for business is a violation of their terms of service–didn’t check the other services), and access (if your internet access is disabled, your business is too) are skipped over entirely.
On the plus side, hey, it’s easy to get started, and the ongoing maintenance is minimal! But consider the downsides outlined above before you jump in.
It is interesting to me that that broadband is enough of a utility now, if you can get it, that a business can think of putting something as crucial as their calendar on a remote website.
Article Clipping on the Internet
How many times have you been reading a print magazine and run across an article that would be of intense interest to one of your friends? This happens to me often, and when it does, I either rip out the article or give the magazine to my buddy (if it’s my magazine) or make a copy of the article, if I’m in the public library.
I also subscribe to Salon.com, a liberal online news magazine. On Sunday, I was talking to my mother about health issues and mentioned that today’s kids are the first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. This was from Growing Up Too Fat a recent Salon article. Like most of the articles, it was considered, well written, and entirely inaccessible to non subscribers. I would have loved to shot my mother the link to the article. This would have introduced her to Salon and its excellent journalism. However, I couldn’t do this easily because to view the article she’d either have to be a subscriber or view a commercial, neither of which she’d be willing to do.
Why isn’t the analog of the print article copying that we all have done available? I can think of a technical solution right off the top of my head that would generate a one time link that could only be used for a specific article (preventing someone from handing out subscriptions) and only once (preventing someone from posting the link to slashdot). My mother win, since she gets useful information via a reliable source (me). And Salon wins, because they’ve just gained exposure and also made me a happier subscriber.
There’s no reason why this same technology can’t be applied to any website that has subscription based revenues. Other than the development and the incremental bandwidth cost, it’s free to the website, and it exposes the website in a positive light to people who are, by definition, not subscribers.
Mobile phones as examples of computing in context
Here’s an interesting 20 page paper examining some of the issues surround context and computing.
A few choice quotes:
“…answering the telephone has something of a moral compulsion.”
“…as much of this problem [a phone that understands context] reduces to that of building an intelligent computer.”
“…it is better to have machines which act in predictable ways so users can understand how they work” rather than unpredictable machines that ‘do the right thing.’
“A technology, like mobile phones, with its combination of voice mail, text messaging and the like, is something we dwell with in that it becomes part of the fibre of our practices and lives, even for those without(sic) reject them.” As someone who swore off mobile phones for a long time and now doesn’t know how life continued without them, I can sympathize with that sentiment.
“When people use a technology over time, and get used to seeing other people
using the technology, the actions of the technology come to be seen not as actions of technology but of the user themselves.”
Interesting reading.
Passwords and authentication
Passwords are omnipresent, but just don’t work the way they should. A password should be a private string that only a user could know. It should be easy to remember, but at the same time hard to guess. It should be changed regularly, and only passed over a secure connection (SSL, ssh). At least, that’s what the password policies I’ve seen say. People, however, get in the way.
I have a friend who always has the same password: ‘lemmein’. She is non-technical. Whenever she tries to sign in to a system, she has invariably forgotten her password. She tries different incarnations, and eventually becomes so frustrated, she just types ‘lemmein’ and, voila, she is logged in.
I have another friend who is a computer security professional (or was). He has the same issue with forgotten passwords, but rather than have one insecure password, he keeps all his passwords in a file on a machine that he controls, protected by one master password. In this way, he only has to remember the one password, yet machines aren’t at risk.
I sympathize with both my friends, since, off the top of my head, I can easily think of ten different passwords that I currently use, for various systems and applications. In fact, the growth of the web applications (since the address bar is the new command line) has exploded the number of passwords that I have to remember.
I’m not as blase about security as my first buddy, nor as together as my second friend, so I just rely on my memory. That works, sometimes. Often, if I seldom visit a site that requires a password, I’ll always make use of the ‘mail me my password’ functionality that most such sites have. I won’t even bother to try to remember the password.
Sometimes, password changes are imposed on you. I’ve been at places where your password had to be changed every three weeks, and must be different rom your previous three passwords. I was only there for a short period of time, but I’m sure that there are some folks who are cycling passwords (‘oh, it’s one of these four, I know it’).
On the other hand, I worked at a place for three years; I had access to a number of web servers, often with sudo, yet I changed my passwords two times. It was just such a tremendous hassle to try to bring all my passwords in sync. (Yes, yes, we should have had an LDAP server responsible for all those passwords; that would have made changing it easier. There are some technical solutions that can ease password pain, at least within one organization.)
Passwords are even used in the ‘real world’ now. Leaving aside the obvious example of ATM pins, my bank won’t let me do anything serious to my account over the phone unless I know my password.
Passwords do have tremendous advantages. They let me authenticate myself without being physically present. They’re easy to carry with you. Computers don’t need special hardware or software to authenticate a user via a password. Everyone understands the concept. But passwords are really the least of the evils when it comes to authenticating remote users (/entities). They’re easy to pass around, or steal, since they’re aren’t physical. Passwords are either easy to forget or easy to crack.
I guess my solution has been to break up my passwords into levels. For simple things like logging into web applications, I have one or two very easy to remember passwords, or I use the ‘mail me my password’ functionality mentioned above. For more sensitive accounts that I use regularly, computer logins where I’m an administrator of some kind, my email, or web applications where my credit card details are viewable, I’ll have some more complicated password, which may or may not be shared among similar systems. And for other systems where I need a good password but don’t use it regularly, I’ll write it down and store it in a safe place.
Passwords are certainly better than using SSN, zip code, or some other arbitrary single token that could be stolen. But they certainly aren’t the optimal solution. I actually used a userid/biometric solution at a client’s office (for the office door) and it rejected me a very small percentage of the time. The overhead to add me to the system was apparently fairly substantial, since it took weeks for this to happen. For situations where the hardware is available and deployed, biometric solutions seem like a good fit.
No one, however, is going to add finger/eye/palm scanners to every machine that I want to access, to say nothing of various interesting remote applications (I want my travelocity!). Some scheme where you login to a single computer that then generates a certificate that uniquely identifies you (something like xauth) may be the best type of solution for general purpose non-physical authentication. But, as a software guy, my mind boggles at the infrastructure needed to support such a solution. Looks like passwords are here to stay for a while.
Freecycling, couchsurfing and easy information transfer
One of the most amazing things about the internet is the manner in which it decreases the costs of information exchange. The focus of this decreased cost is often the business world, because that’s where the money is. However, I’m fascinated by the other forums for information exchange that simply wouldn’t exist without extremely cheap publishing and distribution of information. In the past, I’ve taken a look at the web and government budgets, but I recently came across two other activities that I feel are impressive, and exhibit just what the web can provide: freecycling and couchsurfing.
In the past, when I had something (an excess of garden crops, for example) that I didn’t want anymore that was of negligible value, I had a few options for getting rid of it. In decreasing order of personal preference:
1. Foist it on a friend or family member.
2. Put it on the street with a ‘free’ sign.
3. Give it to Goodwill/Salvation Army.
4. Save it and have a garage sale when I had enough items of negligible value.
5. Give it to a thrift store.
6. Throw it away.
Well, now the internet gives me another option: post to a freecycle email list. There are thousands of these groups. I joined the Boulder list, and it has a simple rule: no trading, just giving. 876 people are subscribed to this list. Freecycling is similar in nature to option #2, except many more people will probably find out about your surplus rutabagas via an email than will drive by your house before they turn into a rotting mess (less effort, too–you can send emails from the comfort of your computer chair, as opposed to hauling produce to the curb). In addition to helping you get rid of stuff, these lists also let you accumulate more crap, easily, and without requiring new production. (I don’t know, there may have been freecycle newsletters circulating around yoga studios and health food stores before email took off. Again, the sheer number of people, who by self-selection are interested in giving and getting new stuff, and the ease of posting and receiving the information, means that email freecycling is a better way.)
Speaking of free stuff, a few years I was bumming around down under, and ended up staying with a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. The free place to stay was sweet, but so was the local knowledge and a friendly face in a strange land. Upon returning to the USA, I decided it’d be great to build a website dedicated to these concepts. Friendster and the other social networking sites give you some of the needed functionality (who’s connected to me, where do they live) but not all of it (search by locality, meet random people). I wanted to call the website ‘findalocal’ and even threw together a PHP prototype before I got sucked into other projects. Well, I was browsing Wired a few days ago, and came upon Couchsurfing.com, a site which does almost exactly what I want, has been around for since 1999, and is much more professionally done than what I would have whipped up. The basic premise is, you offer up your local knowledge to anyone who is a member. You can also offer up other services, not least a place to crash for a few nights. For more info, check out the couchsurfing FAQ. Again, this is a service that would have a hard time without the easy dissemination of information provided by the web.
In short, I think that, although a lot of excitement revolves around the portions of the internet where you can make gobs and gobs of money, plenty of interesting stuff is going on with no money involved. In fact, the ease of information transfer is even more important when there is no explicit economic value. Invoices are going to be sent to suppliers, whether via carrier pigeon or extranet, but getting rid of my old bicycle by giving it to someone has to be easier than just trashing it, or, nine times out of ten, I’ll throw it away. And couch surfing is even more dependent on free information exchange, due to the dispersed geographic nature of the activity.
Wireheads and depression
I re-read the first two books of the Ringworld series a few months ago. Great science fiction–cool technology, interesting aliens, cardboard characters, decent plot. In the second one, The Ringworld Engineers, one of the main characters is addicted to electricity. Seriously–he has a device that directly stimulates the pleasure center of the brain. Niven calls this ‘addicted to the wire.’
Recently, however, I ran across this article: Shocking Treatment for Depression. Sure, sure, it will require a prescription, and it only helps “lift [your] mood.” It’s only for folks who are depressed. And Viagra is only for older men with erection problems.
Book Review: Divorce Your Car
Divorce Your Car, by Katie Alvord, is thought provoking. In the United States of America, an automobile is many things to many people: transportation, status symbol, hobby, money pit. Alvord takes apart the place of the car in modern society (the focus of the book is on North America, though she does refer to Europe and the Third World in places) and roundly condemns our dependence.
Her book is split into three parts–the first covers the history of the automobile and other forms of transport. She legitimizes what I’d often heard and dismissed as a myth–the car industry bought up the transit systems of cities in the US early in the 20th century and replaced them with buses. The second is a laundry list of the negative effects of the car (which, I must confess, I didn’t finish–too depressed after the first thirty pages). The final section covers alternatives, including walking, biking, mass transit, non-gasoline cars, and telecommuting.
I found the book to be quite good in outlining the problem and highlighting solutions. The dependence of modern life on the car is a dependence on convenience. But, to some extent, it’s a matter of inertia. Automobiles are so prevalent and easy that many of us never try the alternatives, let alone use them in preference to our car. A strong point is that she realizes that car-free living isn’t for anyone, and makes a point that going car-lite can have a positive effect as well. She also touches on the far reaching implications that technology decisions have had on our society, our cities and our lives–from subsidies to the development of advertising. It would have been interesting to read more about that, but what she did say was definitely thought provoking.
However, I do have three quibbles. Alvord cites sources extensively, but her arguments would be more compelling were the sources less biased (as you can tell by titles like Asphalt Nation) and more first hand. She ignores two factors that would affect my divorce. Giving up your car, or at the very least being aware of alternatives, makes driving after drinking less likely–a good thing! On the other hand, if you don’t have a car, you suddenly have a dearth of available camping and hiking activities. But these concerns aren’t everyone’s, to be sure.
Overall, a book well worth reading, especially if you commute a lot. Too bad they don’t sell it as a book on tape!
Internet Bookmobile
I have to say that the Internet Bookmobile is way cool. (I remember the bookmobile of my youth, and it didn’t carry anywhere near 20,000 books!) I think that the Internet Bookmobile shows two things:
1. The enduring power of the book. I’m definitely not the first person to say this, but the portability, durability, cost and readability of bound books is hard to beat with any electronic format. They’re going to be around for a long time, despite the efforts of e-book software purveyors.
2. Digital, public domain texts are a good thing. (But copyright keeps getting extended.)
(Thanks to Brian D Foy for the link.)
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