Blown To Bits

Archive for the ‘The explosion’ Category

Bits and the Presidential Campaign

Monday, September 15th, 2008 by Harry Lewis
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Hal, Ken, and I wrote an opinion piece called Campaigning for Our Digital Future, raising some “bits” issues that the next president should think about. It was published recently in the Providence Journal.

Was the LA Metrolink Engineer Text-Messaging?

Sunday, September 14th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

A teenage train enthusiast reports that he was exchanging text messages with the engineer of the train that crashed Friday, killing 25 people. The teenager, Nick Williams, responded to the engineer, Robert Sanchez, at 4:22 PM and received no response, about a minute before the train drove through a red light and crashed into a freight train.

A similar speculation, about cell phone use while driving, arose about the driver of a Boston MBTA train that crashed last summer, killing the conductor. But that theory was laid to rest by the evidence.

Evidence there will be in this case as well. A timestamped record of the engineer’s texting exists and has doubtless already been acquired by forensic investigators.

Everything Is Bits Today

Saturday, September 13th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

Saturday is usually the weak newspaper day. Embarrassing news that must be revealed some time generally gets announced on Friday afternoon. Large parts of the newspaper staff are sidetracked to getting the Sunday paper ready.

But for some reason, to bits-oriented readers today’s New York Times is full of interesting stuff:

In Digital Age, Federal Files Blip Into Oblivion. A good report on the entirely unsurprising fact that digital files tend to get purged, either because people don’t realize they are important to preserve, or because new administrations tend to want to make a clean sweep and start afresh. It’s hard to put a high priority on archiving when the money could be used in some politically more expedient way. This all relates to our observations at the end of Chapter 2 about how digital information can last forever, but that’s no guarantee that it will even when you want it to.

Stuck in Google’s Doghouse. A great Joe Nocera piece on the mysteries of Google’s quality metrics and the plight of those trying to make a living through Google ads. Lots here that will make sense to readers of our Chapter 4.

Virginia: Spam Law Struck Down on Grounds of Free Speech. A great example of how hard it is to get Internet law right, as we discuss in Chapter 7. Virginia tried to control spam. A fine idea; spam is not only full of swindles, it uses enormous amounts of network bandwidth and processing locally at the machines receiving it. Unfortunately, according to the Virginia Supreme Court, the law is

unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The conviction of a big-time spammer was overturned and he is free to prey on us all — in Virginia at least. I am sure that anti-spam laws in other states, and the federal statute, are being examined today in light of this decision.

Three big-time bits stories in one Saturday. And that’s not even counting the claim in the sexy front-page story that the Internet is contributing to the total collapse of the morality of Chilean 14-year-olds.

Too Much Information?

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

The Washington Post reports that there are competing web sites for women who want to track their menstrual cycles online: mymonthlycycles.com and mon.thly.info. Also Bedpost for tracking your sex life, and many other tools for recording and analyzing the ordinary moments and extraordinary moments of your daily life.

Personally, no matter what the sites’ privacy policies say, there are some data I wouldn’t put in “the cloud”!

Bits Change the Campaign

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 by Harry Lewis

In important ways, this is really the first digital presidential campaign, and the news about Sarah Palin provides some thought-provoking examples.

First, the McCain campaign explains that the disclosure of her daughter’s pregnancy was required to dispel the wild rumors being circulated by liberal Internet bloggers about who was the mother of her own four-month-old. Someone needs to trace back who started this on the Internet. I quickly looked at the Daily Kos and both the rumor and skepticism about the rumor are discussed there. (By the way, wouldn’t a birth certificate have sufficed to put that rumor to rest? But I digress.)

The official reaction of the McCain campaign is that this is the sort of thing that happens to families. Some conservative columnists are turning this news into another way in which the Republicans can identify with ordinary Americans. That is post-Internet Republicanism. At another time, they surely would have done there best to hide it.

But you can’t hide stuff any more, as we repeatedly explain in Blown to Bits. Not your silly college-dorm photos (that’s Sarah Palin looking like the college student she was, with a T shirt that reads “I may be broke but I’m not flat busted”). Not the Facebook silliness of the boy who got your daughter pregnant (from the NY Post; thanks to Richard Bradley for point this out). We are all silly when we are young, but having all the silliness permanently recorded and universally accessible is something new.

The spread of this kind of stuff can be childish and mean. It raises the question of whether McCain’s staff was aware of the Internet materials like these that turned up very quickly after the announcement of his VP pick.

But the exposure of these personal details does seem to be making politics less distant. This campaign has so much else going on with it that it’s going to be hard to separate out the effect of the Internet from other factors. But it seems certain that politicians are going to be unable to be quite so pretentious in the future. Too much will be known about them too quickly — especially if they, like Sarah Palin, were born after 1960.

And the public is going to have to decide what it thinks about the disclosure of things it rarely used to find out about. As we say in the book, we really don’t know what we think about privacy any more.

Connected but Hermetically Sealed

Monday, August 25th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

Ben Stein, writing in the Sunday New York Times, bemoans the loss of contact with the “real world” that accompanies our greatly expanded capacity for digital communication.

What he is really saying is that too many bits are reaching us. In the old days (that is, five years ago or so), the paucity of sensors and the weakness of communications technologies meant that we had to think harder about the limited data we received. And sometimes even process non-digital data, such as the sunlight reaching our eyes.

Now we have digital sensors galore and the technology to funnel megabytes per second to us from all over the world. Our processing capability is now consumed with just keeping up with the inputs and outputs. Not enough time is left over to think deeply about what is going on, the way we used to do when we read books.

The line of reasoning is not wholly original, but it’s not wholly wrong either. Look back at my August 18 post about the paradoxes of improved communications technologies.

Automation Risks

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

We talk a lot about how digital technologies are improving, and in particular making it possible to do automated language-processing tasks that used to require human intervention. A couple of nice examples that the technologies are not perfect yet. First, a reminder that automated language translation still requires human checking, especially if the output is going to be publicly deployed:

Chinese Restaurant Sign

Or this attempt at automated cake decoration, which triggered an error message in the decorating software:

Birthday Cake

Thanks to Adweek for the restaurant sign and to Livejournal for the cake.

Wireless in the Sky

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

Delta Airlines will offer wireless Internet access on its airplanes, the Wall Street Journal reports. It will cost about what hotels charge, $10 or so. The motivation is customer demand only secondarily; primarily Delta, which is pretty much broke like most airlines, hopes it will be a money-maker.

It will be interesting to see how this works out — will the cabin attendants help passengers get their software settings right? Will the bandwidth be good enough for streaming video?

I think it’s great, though I’m finding that the seat rows are packed so close together these days that it’s hard even to open a laptop. And no Skype, please. I don’t want to listen to my neighbor’s VoIP telephone calls while I am trapped in midair.

Cloud Computing

Monday, August 4th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

We have a short piece on the Business Week web site today about things to consider before storing corporate data in “the cloud,” that is, using a service such as Google or Amazon to hold your files for you. The piece got edited in a way that is a bit disappointing, since it left out one of the crucial points we wanted to make:

Who would fight a subpoena? With your data in the cloud, the cloud’s lawyers, not yours, will decide whether to resist a court order to turn over your data.

It actually seems that they ran the version they gave us for review, without incorporating any of the suggestions we made in response — for example, we pointed out that the sentences identifying the authors are ungrammatical.

When Technological Luxuries Become Everyday Necessities

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

The Los Angeles Times has a lovely example today of the law changing at a slower pace than technology, a phenomenon familiar to readers of Blown to Bits. It turns out (who knew?) that if your business provides you a cell phone, you’re supposed to keep track of personal calls so the tax man can hit you for the value of the personal expense you are avoiding by using the business’s equipment. If you don’t do that, the business is liable. The University of California at Los Angeles had to pay the IRS $239,196 in penalties this year for exactly that reason.

This law was passed in 1989, when cell phones were an expensive rarity and Congress decided they should be treated like company cars. (I became dean of the College in 1995, and even then I was about the only kid on the Harvard block who had one.) The world has changed a bit in the intervening 19 years. The government doesn’t actually make much money this way, but it could if its enforcers got geared up. (And with the declining take on gas taxes as people drive less, who knows what other revenue sources they’ll be looking to?)

Happily, there are bills in Congress to repeal this provision of the tax code. In the meantime, though, what’s an employer supposed to do? Tell all the employees to log cell phone calls to their spouses, or hope the IRS doesn’t come knocking?

The progress of Moore’s law vs. the legislative speed of the U.S. Congress. There’s no match!