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Ever wonder how they draw that yellow line on the field in televised football games these days, showing where the first-down marker is? This video explains it nicely. (The part about encoding the camera orientation as an audio signal is just because there is a built-in audio line from the camera to the truck where the processing happens. In other words, it’s adaptive re-use of a technology that is there for another purpose, but isn’t needed — they don’t actually collect the field audio from the cameras.)

You might think the tricky part would be getting the line to go under the players, rather than on top of them, but that’s actually a digital version of an old television technology, the same one that TV meteorologists use. The image they seem to be standing in front of isn’t really there — they are standing in front of a solid blue background. The technology puts the weather map everywhere that’s blue, so it misses the meteorologist (who never wears blue — if one had a blue scarf on, you’d see the weather map right “through” it). In the case of the football field, it’s a uniformly green color, or maybe blue — either way, not a color in the uniforms. If the field gets muddy, this may not work so well, and the yellow line may show gaps.

I am quoted in Men’s Health magazine on how men can buff up their social networking profiles to become more successful at picking up women.

As Hal pointed out to me privately, this makes me an heir to the tradition of George Antheil, for reasons explained in Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits.

A local high school football coach seems to have gotten more than a bit carried away with his relationship to a fifteen-year-old student at the school. He is now up on statutory rape charges, his wife is divorcing him, etc.

The “bits” angle here is that he sent the girl more than 500 text messages in a single month. Now that’s less than 20 per day, which between 15-year-olds wouldn’t necessarily be a huge number. But from a 44 year old man who must have known at some level that what he was doing was inappropriate, it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t realize that he was leaving tracks every time.

I suppose that once he got started, he may have figured that a few more messages wouldn’t make matters any worse.

Apparently her father just picked up her cell phone and saw the messages.

The Governor of Oregon says his state needs to wake up to the downside of high-efficiency automobile engines. With cars getting more MPG, they won’t use as much gas. You thought that was a good thing? Not if you rely on gas taxes to pay the bills.

So instead the idea is to go to a mileage tax. As explained in a Corvallis newspaper, the system would work like this. Cars would have global positioning systems, which would be used not to track their locations but to log their mileage. At the gas station, the mileage would get uploaded and (during the transition period) you’d get a rebate on the gas tax.¬†Eventually the system would become universal, and automakers would build the GPS into the car.

Supposedly this kludge protects privacy, but of course it doesn’t — the state would know the exact dates, times, and locations of every fill-up. And how long do you think it would take before law enforcement, the insurance industry, or Homeland Security would find it “essential” to collect and upload just a bit more information about vehicular movements?

In any case, why not just have motor vehicle inspection stations report the odometer reading when cars are inspected? In Massachusetts that happens annually, and the odometer reading is one of the data that is taken down. This plan sounds very fishy to me.

First, the Chinese Internet censors are back to work following a bit of a break to buff the country’s image during the Olympic games. As of a few days ago, the New York Times web site became inaccessible from inside China. The press couldn’t get a comment from the government, but in the past, it has said that other countries regulate the Internet too. (Thus equating child pornography with the New York Times. Oh well, that’s what totalitarianism is about.)

And second, Gatehouse media, which publishes some suburban newspapers, has sued the New York Times because boston.com (the site of the Boston Globe, which is owned by the Times) was linking to some local stories in the Gatehouse publications. Just listing the headlines, with live link to the Gatehouse publications’ original stories. The legal issues are several — see this good analysis from the Citizen Media Law Project. It’s hard to think that what the Globe is doing is not well within “fair use” from a copyright standpoint. But either way, strategically it’s a head-scratcher. The Globe is steering traffic to the sites of obscure suburban newspapers almost no one reads. As the eloquent David Weinberger asks, why would those papers want that stopped?

It’s a little hard to tell, since I have to rely on Google Translate to render the Dutch reviews into English. Like all mechanical translation efforts over the past fifty years, Google Translate occasionally produces comic results, but it’s generally pretty easy to understand what was intended. That Google offers this wonderful service free, as an adjunct to its advertising-enhanced search engine, is itself a marvel of the digital explosion. (Apparently the Dutch word for “members” — of some kind — is “Ledeen”!)

Review #1, as rendered from the geencommentaar.nl web site into English by Google Translate:

On September 19, 2007 Tanya Rider rode in a ravine near Seattle. Eight days they hung upside down in the wreck of her car before rescue workers had the right to her mobile phone to call for information and to find her.

Hal Abelson, Ken Members and Harry Lewis begin their book “Blown to bits’ with this example to the opportunities and complexities of the digital life in general. Tanya had a mobile phone with them, making the phone company would be able to trace at the time that the device was destroyed in the crash. When Tanya’s husband Tom moved to the police to report her disappearance, but police could not trace the cell phone. Since she has the right not only because of Tanya’s privacy. Only after a week when Tom began to suspect a crime, they could and there were so Tanya, who was seriously injured, but ultimately survived.

In the era before everything was digital this dilemma would not have existed. The information from the mobile phone was simply not there, so there is no need to be invented manners. But now contain numerous computers worldwide personal data of the bank to the flickr account (that of yourself, but also that of others where you maybe in the background is a portrait of someone else, perhaps in the company of someone with whom you are not in the public want to be seen).

Abelson, members and Lewis have each more than forty years of experience in the ICT, in universities and industry. They have the whole process to see happen. In eight chapters analyze them as many phenomena, with the impact these have on the way society works.

Of course, there is the inevitable chapter on privacy, but the chapter about data which you thought he was gone, so is instructive. While it seems easy to erase information, that is not in practice. If you nude ten seconds on the Internet has been, you can be sure that there are already so many copies of it that you do not get out more. Passages in Erased Word documents remain in reality it is only invisible, as the U.S. army to his disgrace had in a research report which appeared sensitive passages removed. And formatting is not really enough to all information from a hard disk to retrieve.

A full chapter is also on Google and other information brokers. Where information used by sheer size was inscrutable, there is now little more of a hindrance. Everything can be found – or not, if you see Google in China, for example. It is not only substantive information, but also meta-information: who has consulted at any moment?

All this information is food become lawyers. Previously copied teenagers plates on straps and nobody could control. But now the way is to become illegal music to come, the record companies suddenly a detection tool. They have succeeded if the law into their hands to set up even if you’re innocent, it is better for the companies to pay as they knock on your door – what they do with enthusiasm. Information is a powerful weapon in the hands of the powerful.

The chapters can be read in any order and there is certainly necessary overlap between. The authors do not lift finger on the digital threat, but try as sober as possible the finger on the sore spots to explain rather surprised than alarmed. People are rescued by the explosion bit, and they killed it. Freedoms are won and lost. Which way the balance eventually will spread, it is not to say.

And Review #2, from ZB Digitaal:

Now it is not my habit to whether to refer to a book that I have not even voted for the half but the book paints a clear picture of such complex Internet issues that I can not wait to gain share with others, especially because the book in its entirety and can be downloaded free-even per individual chapter.

Chapters 2 and 3, I have already read: they influenced my views about online privacy and security aspects of proper documents. I like to do. Blown to Bits highlights not only the dangers of the digital era, the book teaches you a lot about the opportunities and potential. It is a book that the spirit strengthened.

No comment on a discussion in English can be found on Slashdot to find one in English. When the book is obviously also a blog.

And if you intend the book immediately to buy or borrow: watch or even that you not that other orders or applied ….

That last sentence is a warning not to buy the other book by the same name!

Opinions differ about whether digital technologies transformed the Obama campaign into something inclusive and empowering that had never been seen before, or whether it was really an old-style, top-down campaign that made masterful use of the new technologies to get its message out and to coordinate the troops, while making them feel included.

Either way, no one seems to be disputing that the McCain-Palin campaign was much less clued in on how to use the technologies. And the evidence continues to accumulate after the campaign is over. The campaign auctioned its Blackberry phones without wiping the memory clean — so those who bought them bought phone numbers of donors, lobbyists, and journalists too. Apparently they were not amused when the purchaser called them up.

As we explain in Chapter 3 of Blown to Bits, it’s not hard to reset a phone by pressing a few buttons — though even following the vendor’s instructions may not really wipe the memory clean enough to keep the information out of the hands of a determined snoop.

A Wall Street Journal story about a proposed agreement between Google and Internet Service Providers suggests that Google is pulling a double-cross, given its prior commitment to Net Neutrality. Unfortunately the details of the proposal haven’t been made public. But the consensus of the knowledgeable is that the WSJ misunderstands what is going on and that Net Neutrality is not threatened by Google’s proposal. A greater worry is perhaps about the implications of Google’s increasingly monopoly power over bits, but that wouldn’t mean that its packets got delivered faster than those of some minor player.) Thanks to Steve Schultze for pointing me to this collection of comments.

Blown to Bits is now available for free download, under a Creative Commons license. You’ll notice that the tab above that used to say “Excerpts” has been relabeled “Download,” and the Download page has links not just to excerpts but to PDFs of the individual chapters.

Don Knuth, the father of modern computer science, has for forty years been paying people to discover errors in his books. Catching the master in some minor oversight or typographical inconsistency was a grand game, at which everyone won: the lowliest sophomore could become a local hero, while adding to the sum of knowledge embodied in Knuth’s great encyclopedia of the field. It became such an honor to receive a small check from Knuth that almost no one ever cashed them (most people, as Knuth wryly observed, cached them instead). The proud display of a Knuthian check has apparently caused his bank account numbers to leak into the public domain, and his bank accounts have been broken into. Here is Knuth’s explanation of how this happens, and the larger lesson:

Leading banks and investment funds have been foundering, because of bad debts and lack of trust; and other, less well-known kinds of fiscal chaos are also on the horizon. For example, due to an unfixable security flaw in the way funds are now transferred electronically, worldwide,¬†it is no longer safe to write personal checks. A criminal who sees the numbers that are printed at the bottom of any check that you write can use that information to withdraw all the money from your account. He or she can do this in various ways, without even knowing your name — for example by creating an ATM card, or by impersonating a bank in some country of the world where safeguards are minimal, or by printing a document that looks like a check. The account number and routing information are all that international financial institutions look at before deciding to transfer funds from one account to another.

The end of personal checks may not be a big deal–we can certainly see it happening de facto. I used to write dozens every month, but with online banking and electronic fund transfers, I am down to two or three per month, and even that number is decreasing rapidly. I hadn’t thought about this being a real loss to anyone. But for those of us who know the enormous symbolic value of a $2.56 check from Don Knuth, his new plan doesn’t feel quite the same:

After painful deliberation I’ve come up with a new plan, which I hope will be acceptable to all concerned, and perhaps even welcomed as an improvement. Instead of rewarding heroic bug-finders with dollars, I shall henceforth award brownie points, otherwise known as hexadecimal dollars (0x$). From now on it will be kudos, not escudos.

Instead of writing personal checks,¬†I’ll write personal certificates of deposit to each awardee’s account at the Bank of San Serriffe, which is an offshore institution that has branches in Blefuscu and Elbonia on the planet Pincus.

Times change. Checks were always a way of transferring information, so turning them into bits makes all kinds of sense, but sometimes even those monetary informational chits carry a lot of emotional clout.