Author: rob

Want to Spread an Idea Fast? Describe it with Software.

I’ve been thinking about ideas recently. What it takes to move from neurons in one person’s head to changing the lives of many.

The essence of an idea can be documented in a software’s backend system. Hidden behind the buttons you click on and input boxes you type into is a backend describes complex “business rules” or logic that describe the idea.

The focus of my work very recently is expression of an idea in software at its various user interface (UI) endpoints. A goal of this work is to build interfaces that communicate the fundamental idea to people while solving specific existing problems.

Even unknowingly, users are influenced by core concepts that drive a software system’s behavior. When people engage with a system via a software UI, it can establish new social norms and behavior.

For example, if you have used Wikipedia, you are immediately learning that it is possible for anyone to share important information using writing and pictures and that this can be reviewed by and edited by peers for free.

The idea that people could collaborate in such a way was not widely accepted as a good one to understand until a backend system and desktop web interface was created to express the idea.

In Facebook’s S-1 filing, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was created “to accomplish a social mission–to make the world open and more connected.” To express such an idea in software at the time meant reliving past ideas like MySpace’s wall and bringing new taste to the expression of the idea. Interestingly, part of Facebook’s success was in limiting the idea’s early availability to students.

Compared to reading a white paper or listening to a lecture, average folks will probably understand the meaning of an idea more quickly by interacting with it via software. That is, if the software is fun to use.

Software can now spread to individuals extremely fast.  This is exciting because when a sufficiently advanced new idea is described for the first time in software, the idea may be spread nearly as fast.

This suggests that if you have a big new idea and want the idea to influence how people think and behave, perhaps you should consider how it would be described using software.

Mobile Automated Fluid Dispenser that Accepts Bitcoin as Payment Mechanism

Farmer, thermal dynamics researcher, and DIY pro, Andy Schroder created a “mobile, automated fluid dispenser that accepts Bitcoin as a payment mechanism.”

This is an amazing look at the future of P2P service delivery. I’m particularly impressed with depth of thought Andy gave to the capabilities of his demonstration. If you want to skip the explanation, the action really starts about 8 minutes into the video:

This is so futuristic and awesome that it could only be improved only by the presence of a node to a mesh network with an uplink to the Bitcoin network, rather than reliance on commercial telecom. Bravo, Andy.

Swartz vs Snowden OR Resist Restrictions that Seem Arbitrary or Capricious

MIT released its report on Aaron Swartz (.pdf) this morning. It is interesting to read about the amount of energy and concerted effort around Swartz, in contrast to Edward Snowden. Swartz’ prosecution and MIT’s “neutrality” to that effort seem sad when taken in the context of President Obama’s comment on June 27th where he said “No, I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.”

In the report the authors pose questions to the MIT community, including: “How can MIT draw lessons for its hacker culture from this experience?” The answer includes:

MIT celebrates hacker culture. Our admissions tours and first-year orientation salute a culture of creative disobedience where students are encouraged to explore secret corners of the campus, commit good-spirited acts of vandalism within informal but broadly— although not fully—understood rules, and resist restrictions that seem arbitrary or capricious. We attract students who are driven not just to be creative, but also to explore in ways that test boundaries and challenge positions of power.
…
This raises the question of whether the MIT community is sufficiently aware of what the hacker culture is meant to be about, of the risks inherent in crossing lines as part of hacking, and the roles of faculty, staff and administration in responding to what might or might not be a hack.
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Yet in the computer context, unlike as in the physical world, “unauthorized access”—ill defined as it may be—can be grounds for a major federal felony prosecution. For Swartz the end result was calamitous. The entire episode may create a chilling effect for those students contemplating exploits that may push the bounds of their and society’s knowledge, but will also take them to places where conventional rules say they are not supposed to be—“coloring outside the lines” so to speak, punishable by criminal records rather than mere forfeiture of crayons. [emphasis added]

I can’t help but think of the recently exposed removal of President Obama’s promise to “Protect Whistleblowers” from Change.gov. Which read:

Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance.

Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process. [emphasis added]

Later, in the answer to the above question, the MIT report asks “Are we misleading students and community members by advertising one kind of community and enforcing rules more appropriate to a different kind of community?”

This seems to be the question not just for the MIT community, but for all Americans.

Steve Jobs on Loyalty

This isn’t exactly Steve Jobs on loyalty, but rather comments from Joshua Michael Stern, director of the new Steve Jobs film JOBS:

“… I think that he was loyal to his vision and he was loyal to the one thing he wanted to bring to the world … I think he was loyal to what he was trying to achieve. If you were loyal to that too then he loved you and if you didn’t then you didn’t understand him.”

I think this comes from feeling that Steve Jobs’ execution toward his vision for how things could and should be was the greatest single contribution he can make to society. If you are following a vision of similar grandeur, you can not see another way to behave that would make the world a better place.

When you see only one vision for how you can help the world, you must have people around you who support this. Otherwise, those people are blocking a better world. When the vision is big enough, there is no room for half-hearted allegiance or simple cooperation. It is ride or die.

Rockonomics

I’ve greatly enjoyed Alan Krueger’s “Land of Hope and Dreams: Rock and Roll, Economics and Rebuilding the Middle Class” speech given at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this past June.

In the speech, Krueger compares the economics of the music industry to what is happening in the U.S. economy as a whole. It puts the major shift in the average cost of concert tickets right next to changes in the US income distribution.

It features details from a clever study (.pdf) that measured the impact of luck in combination with merit on the success of artists in a system for downloading music. It also puts forth proposals from President Obama’s economic agenda for addressing the dangerous consequences of a winner-take-all economy.

I’m an avid concert-goer and watched ticket prices climb in the late 90s and 2000s. Later I ran a Dave Matthews Band fan website where we were so regularly bombarded by requests to run advertisements from scalpers we had to take a stand.

Not surprisingly, my favorite portion of the speech focuses on the concept of fairness:

If artists charge too much for their tickets, they risk losing their appeal. In this sense, the market for rock ‘n roll music is different from the market for commodities, or stocks and bonds.

Considerations of fair treatment exert pressure on how much musicians can charge, even superstars.

Along these lines, one of my favorite performers, Tom Petty, once said, “I don’t see how carving out the best seats and charging a lot more for them has anything to do with rock & roll.”

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This is a major reason why there is a market for scalped tickets.
But many artists have been reluctant to raise prices to what the market will bear for fear of garnering a reputation of gouging their fans.

They also protest when tickets sell for a higher price on the secondary market, and often try to prevent the secondary market entirely. And it is considered scandalous when performers sell tickets on the secondary market themselves.

This behavior can only be explained in light of fairness considerations. Singers want to be viewed as treating their fans fairly, rather than charging them what supply and demand dictate.

Indeed, you can think of market demand as depending on the perception of fairness.

Read The Economist’s digest of the speech or Download the text of the speech (.pdf)

 

I’m on Your Roadz, Scanning Your License Plates

For a long time, I’ve imagined what it would be like if you could see information about other drivers around you in real-time. For example, if you are driving down the freeway you would see a red arrow over cars that are known to have been involved in bad driving practices.

This information would be presented in a heads-up-display. You could dive into information on any car to see what its previous behavior had been, such as cutting off other drivers, reckless speeding or other stuff that would cause any reasonable person to be upset on the road.

The data would be sourced from normal people.  If someone dangerously cut you off and flipped you the finger for good measure, you could simply type in the license plate, the make of the car and this would be added to a public database. The location and time of the incident would be stored, along with your own reputation of identity. This would make the “colored arrows” over the cars more valuable to other drivers, and hopefully reduce the risk of getting in an accident or otherwise entangled with a Ne’er-do-well.

There are a lot of problems to sort out, such as how do you ensure people are not trolling each other, mis-reporting driver behavior? What if a car is shared, and one driver “ruins” the license plate of a car for all users. What if the system is used to screen for other things, such as entry into a gated community? How can the license plate and car make and model be collected safely by someone who is driving a vehicle and witnesses something wrong. And most importantly, what are the privacy implications of creating such a vast database?

Some of these questions have easier answers than others. Two things seem clear to me now:

  1. It is simply a matter of time before such a public database and the accompanying software to populate it exist.
  2. We are quickly entering a time where if you own and regularly use the same car, you are giving up the privacy of your real-time location and possibly that of your family.

The reason I write this now, is because the ACLU recently published a study (pdf) (overview) on the growing use of police cameras and how the information is being collected and used by government authorities to circumvent the need to get warrants on GPS trackers.

If law enforcement is using automatic license plate readers, and we have russian drivers almost universally using dashboard cams, we are very close to civilian use of automated readers. And the use case I describe above will become a reality.

The user experience probably won’t jump directly to HUD, however a push notification to your smartphone that a car ahead is dangerous seems a fairly trivial feature. All that’s missing is the software.

How do you protect the privacy of your movement when you commonly need to travel the intermediary and custom pathway that automobiles provide? It would be great if you could travel by car and avoid revealing your location to mass surveillance by getting getting rides with strangers you can trust. Such a system does not exist today, but it could be created to counter concerns described above.

If you wanted to start today, you might have some success with ride share services like Zipcar. But those require registration and some level of identity validation. It seems like Lyft, the citizen cab company might be a better value and deliver more privacy. But even that requires Facebook connect, and thus full real name and photo exposure to the driver and company itself.

Update 3/20/14: Los Angelas police argue “All [license plate] data is investigatory.” See EFF’s “Los Angeles cops Argue All Cars in LA are Under Investigation.”

Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do.

“Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years.”

-Steve Jobs

Obama on PRISM

I very much respect our President, Barack Obama. I watch his speeches and press conferences with great interest. I am impressed by his thoughtfulness around issues and ability to craft language and sentiment that offers digestible feedback for the public on complex civic issues. I’ve voted for him twice and hope to meet him one day.

So watching and reading his reaction to questions about PRISM, a program which may shape public sentiment toward government oversight of private communications for the next decade or longer, is of great interest to me.

The Wall Street Journal published a copy of the transcript from Obama’s first comments on PRISM, and I wanted to call attention to two particular passages bolded below:

“So — so we have a system in which some information is classified, and we have a system of checks and balances to make sure that it’s not abused. And if, in fact, this information ends up just being dumped out willy-nilly without regard to risks to the program, risks to the people involved, in some cases on other leaks, risks to personnel in very dangerous situations, then it’s very hard for us to be as effective in — in protecting the American people.

That’s not to suggest that, you know, you just say, trust me, we’re doing the right thing, we know who the bad guys are. And the reason that’s not how it works is because we’ve got congressional oversight and judicial oversight. And if people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.

…But I know that the people who are involved in these programs — they operate like professionals. And these things are very narrowly circumscribed. They’re very focused. And in the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential, you know — you know, program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then I think we’ve struck the right balance.“

The exposure of PRISM (and the Verizon meta-data tap) shook people into realizing their conversations (textual and otherwise) data are part of a dataset being monitored for suspicious activity. The NSA and Executive Branch may have tangible, real-world examples that, in their minds, justify PRISM. However, it doesn’t change the fact that many people are surprised, shocked and alarmed at its exposure.

Absent specific proof about how PRISM has enhanced security, all people can do is trust the systems that Obama describes are in place. And further, that neither he, nor his successors will allow PRISM to be abused.

In the first bolded passage, Obama seems to almost make light of the idea that Americans might have an active distrust of the Executive Branch, Congress and Federal Judges. To contrast the idea of trust at this level, let’s take it to extremes: these are the same folks trusted to authorize a nuclear attack. Surely, if you can trust them with the bomb, you can also trust them not to abuse PRISM.

Americans are ok with the President carrying the nuclear football to his daily basketball games. The implication being that Obama might need to call a timeout, take a phone call and authorize a nuclear launch courtside. At least everyone would know it happened.

Having your email read by the federal government seems to be a bigger cause for concern.  It is easier for normal people to see how the responsibility to collect, retain and analyze private communications would be abused and directly affect them. With PRISM the American people must trust a rather large and hard to properly identify security apparatus. They also are unlikely to find out if a mistake is made using PRISM and a misguided follow-up information request ends up violating their privacy.

Clapper’s Cuteness

A major, major problem in my mind with regard to establishing trust with the American people over PRISM is the March testimony of the Director of National Intelligence before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

My home state’s Senator, Ron Wyden, (who I have personally discussed electronic privacy with here in Portland), asked Clapper point break about PRISM. Clapper gave what he described as an answer that was “too cute by half.”

SEN. RON WYDEN (D-Ore.): “This is for you, Director Clapper, again on the surveillance front. And I hope we can do this in just a yes or no answer because I know Senator Feinstein wants to move on. Last summer, the NSA director was at a conference, and he was asked a question about the NSA surveillance of Americans. He replied, and I quote here, ‘The story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is completely false.’
“The reason I’m asking the question is, having served on the committee now for a dozen years, I don’t really know what a dossier is in this context. So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
Director of National Intelligence JAMES CLAPPER: “No, sir.”
SEN. WYDEN: “It does not?”
DIR. CLAPPER: “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.”
SEN. WYDEN: “Thank you. I’ll have additional questions to give you in writing on that point, but I thank you for the answer.”

It is unfair for Obama to make light of Americans’ potential distrust of congress when there is recent evidence, that even our duly elected government officials can not pry even a semblance of truth, under oath (which indicates rule of law) from the Director of National Security.

I believe a reasonable person would assume that Ron Wyden was asking his question on behalf of the American people. Presumably, Wyden was well-briefed on PRISM at that point and knew the answer to his question was yes.

So allowing the false verbal testimony to stand seems to have done more harm than good: the exchange was misleading to the public, It was supposed to appear as truthful testimony and a matter cleanly resolved. In fact it was neither.

Yeezus Comes. Into and Out of Kanye West

Kanye's Barking Dog Background from Black Skinhead on SNL
Kanye’s Barking Dog Background from Black Skinhead on SNL

I first got into Kanye West in 2005 with the release of Late Registration. There is a Grammy winning track on that album called Diamonds from Sierra Leone. It was originally a solo recording for Kanye but Jay-Z extended the track with his own verse and it was included as the final track as a “remix” of the original. I thought the remix was great and Jay-Z crushed it. I became a fan of Kanye West.

I had been really into Bonnaroo at that time of my life. I was running a Dave Matthews Band fan site at the time and used it to get press credentials for the festival. I shared some amazing memories and built relationships at Bonnaroo. I wrote reviews of the festival and set up interviews with the likes of Grace Potter and Sharon Jones.

In 2008, Kanye was scheduled to perform the main stage at Bonnaroo and I defended him to my pals, insisting he was worth listening to. Then he rescheduled his performance and arrived late to that. Ultimately he really blew the performance, only to later condemn Bonnaroo.

I contrasted Kanye’s performance with then rising Lupe Fiasco’s set in The Other Tent as a difference of appreciation for the festival. As a long-time attendee, I had never witnessed such a lack of professionalism from an artist at Bonnaroo. Kanye has had a lot of problems in public, yet I had given him a pass. But this was too much, I stopped listening.

And then he dropped My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The demonstration of artistry on that album re-wired my senses, allowing his music to cover for his public mistakes. I still listen to that album.

Rumors have been swirling about a June release titled Yeezus and what guests might appear. Naturally, I’m pretty interested. Here’s what I’m seeing:

Last week he did a surprise appearance at the Adult Swim Upfront event last week that included a rant. This past weekend projected a video debuting “New Slave” in 66 locations worldwide and performed New Slave and Black Skinhead as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live.

Both tracks have interpretations posted on RapGenius, which are worth a look.

I’m watching and waiting for the release. Kanye may be the most talented and complicated artists I’ve followed to-date. I’m watching this album closely, and will try to update this post as it develops.

Update 1: Def Jam Records, Kanye’s label has confirmed album art for Yeezus:

Update 2:  Kanye does interview with New York Times:

“I think you got to make your case. Seventh grade, I wanted to be on the basketball team. I didn’t get on the team, so that summer I practiced. I was on the summer league. My team won the championship; I was the point guard. And then when I went for eighth grade, I practiced and I hit every free throw, every layup, and the next day I looked on this chart, and my name wasn’t on it. I asked the coach what’s up, and they were like, “You’re just not on it.” I was like, “But I hit every shot.” The next year — I was on the junior team when I was a freshman, that’s how good I was. But I wasn’t on my eighth-grade team, because some coach — some Grammy, some reviewer, some fashion person, some blah blah blah — they’re all the same as that coach. Where I didn’t feel that I had a position in eighth grade to scream and say, “Because I hit every one of my shots, I deserve to be on this team!” I’m letting it out on everybody who doesn’t want to give me my credit.”

Terrorists Make Mistakes and Bitcoin as a Technological Tour De Force

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have a new book coming out called The New Digital Age.

They did an interview with CNBC on the book and at one point it focused on Illicit networks. In the book it reads, “The real challenge will be a combination of virtual currency with anonymous networks that hide the physical location of services.”

Jared Cohen’s comment in the interview is that illicit networks are two trillion dollar industry, and adds that a new virtual currency complicates the global challenge.  He argues that although it could serve to empower criminals that leverage new technology, there is also new potential for mistakes that foil crime.

Eric Schmidt is asked directly, will big businesses decide to accept Bitcoin or other forms of virtual currencies. Schmidt’s response is: “Bitcoin is a technological tour de force. What I don’t know is ultimately whether it is going to be legal.”

Fascinating.