On The Internet, Nobody Knows You Are A Personality Management Software
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 19, 2011 by admin in Technology
The US government is actively soliciting online persona management software to manipulate consensus.
 What if all your friends were really chatbots and spies? |
If you bother following tech news at all, it’s really no wonder that tinfoil hats are so fashionable these days. We recently talked about the takedown of security firm HBGary by the internet activist group Anonymous, but I didn’t bother mentioning one amusing thought that kept occurring to me, and frankly should occur to anyone who applies any thought to whistleblowing, reputation management, and disinformation strategies. Which is: what if HBGary was just a sort of honey trap for hacktivists? What better way to infiltrate your opponent than allowing them to think they’d infiltrated you, and made off with 4GB of sensitive internal e-mails? Four gigabytes of e-mails loaded with discussions about security exploits, with file attachments that were themselves exploits? What a great Trojan Horse to deliver to your enemy! And while perhaps I’m being a bit flip suggesting such a thing, you should find the reality of what has been revealed by perusing the HBGary e-mails even more disturbing. I personally have a lot of friends that I rarely see but often banter with online, and often joke that I’m just a sophisticated chatbot. Which for now of course is an absurd notion; in spite of supercomputers beating humans at Jeopardy, the average chatbot is still in the “conversation with a dullard” phase of development. But ponder this: so are most humans who spend their time commenting all over the internet. So here’s the disturbing bit. By now you should be familiar with things like political astroturfing and internet sockpuppets, but this DailyKos piece discusses what may be an even more disturbing concept that HBGary was working on – “persona management” software that allows the user of the software to appear online as an army of commenters to manipulate opinion and erode online trust, much like Digg Patriots. It’s questionable how effective the tool would be at this point in terms of creating credible personas, but what is actually more worrying about this kind of tool is the latter notion. We’re already bombarded daily by various forms of phishing attempts, but what if all our social network interactions, blog commenting, and Twitter/RSS feeds were partially tainted by an intelligently-crafted stream of consensus manipulation, as that DailyKos piece suggests? Oh, and by the way. The US government is an interested customer. I look forward to your comments, even if you ARE just a piece of sentiment-manipulating software.
The “Wet House” Concept: Bunks For Drunks? Or Harm Reduction?
[ 5 Comments ]Posted on February 18, 2011 by admin in Health & Wellness
How would you feel about your tax dollars paying for housing for drunks where they’re allowed to drink all they want?
 Who knows. Maybe a “wet house” is preferable to the Romanian “Please don’t run over the drunks” approach. |
There was a time in my life when – if you told me there was a place I could go live for free and drink my brains out as I saw fit – I would have camped out overnight so I could be the first first in line on registration day. I spent much of my adult life proving how well I could maintain an orderly existence while ingesting mind-boggling amounts of intoxicants selected from the veritable smorgasbord of both socially acceptable and not-so-socially acceptable recreational drugs available to the modern party monster, and I guess I was pretty good at it for a while. My views have changed a bit though, after slowly calling it quits over the years, finally ending my personal war on drugs a few years ago when I surrendered to the most resilient of my challengers, alcohol. Which is why I have to say I have some mixed feelings about the idea of something I’d never heard of before today: a concept called a “wet house”. The idea is that trying to rehabilitate “chronic inebriates” (i.e.: hopeless drunks) is such a financial burden on society that giving them a place to live for free and just letting them drink their brains out is a better solution. They’re trying it in St. Paul, Minnesota, and San Francisco was considering the idea last fall, after seeing the results of a wet house program in Seattle that started in 2006. As you can imagine, the responses to the idea tend to be rather polarized, ranging from those who deride the program as “bunks for drunks” to those who argue in favor of the idea based on the concept of harm reduction. I’m still trying to process the realities of this scenario; although my gut reaction is that it’s an awful, awful idea, reason urges me to consider the possibility that if managed well, it may actually present an “end of the line” alcoholic with one last chance to get sober, when it’s obvious that the existing system has failed to help them.
Australian Film Collective Blue Tongue Films
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 17, 2011 by admin in Popular Media
My love of short film is partly due to my short attention span, and the remarkably talented filmmakers of Blue Tongue Films provide a OH! LOOK! A BUNNY!
Nash Edgerton, an Australian fellow who was at one time an aspiring stuntman, has pulled off an even greater stunt by creating a collective of exceptionally talented filmmakers called Blue Tongue Films. I’ve mentioned before how – thanks to my goldfish-like attention span – I’m a bit of short film addict, so while discovering the treasure trove of quality shorts that Blue Tongue has made available via their YouTube channel has given me a huge fix, the sheer volume and quality of their output may unfortunately require checking into film junky rehab when I’m done booting up. I hadn’t heard of Blue Tongue until today, but this NYT piece from last spring outlines how the collaborative formed over the last few years, eventually evolving into a full blown production company that develops its various members’ work in a cooperative fashion perhaps reminiscent of filmmaker friends like Scorsese, De Palma, and Schrader, or Tarantino and Rodriguez. So far I’ve only watched the shorts Netherland Dwarf and Spider (featured below), but both of these films embody mature conception, execution, and production values that make it evident these filmmakers aren’t just talented dabblers. And their feature film Animal Kingdom – although I personally haven’t seen it – adds weight to that assessment; it won a World Cinema Jury Prize at Sundance last year. They have a number of other feature length films in production, and, as I said, plenty of shorts to whet your appetite. Which is why I’m going to just shut up now, and get back to perusing some of the highest quality shorts I’ve seen in a while. Read the rest of this entry »
If Deficits Don’t Matter, Why Does The Government Keep Taxing Us?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 16, 2011 by admin in Politics
I’m taking the same approach to federal budget discussions that I took with the health care bill. I’m hiding ’til they’re over, so I can smugly observe later that nothing has changed.
 This image really has little to do with the article, but we spent a lot of time on it so we like to use it whenever we can. |
I wish I were the US government, or a bank. Then, whenever I’m broke or actually running at a deficit, I could just say “that’s okay, Deficits don’t matter” or “people of America, if you don’t give me exactly the amount of money I need, life as you know it will cease to exist” and everyone in America (and their grandchildren) would give me billions of dollars, which I could share with my other friends who had been frivolous about finances or made some insanely bad investments. Unfortunately, I’m not a bank or the government, so it is mostly with a detached amusement that I sit and read about the shirtless flirts in Washington that we pay so much to sit around arguing about the annual budget. I mean, we shouldn’t be surprised that congressmen spend all their time looking for dates on Craigslist, when the alternative is actually trying to understand monstrously incomprehensible legislation like the health care bill, net neutrality issues, or for the near future, the federal budget. I mean, have you actually ever looked at the thing? Even when the New York Times creates a clever and relatively simple interactive graphic, it’s mind boggling. But definitely preferable to buying the darn thing, I mean, The basic overview is 216 pages and costs 38 bucks, and the Appendix is 6 times longer than that (1368 pages) and costs 75 bucks. If you bought all the available related publications, you’d have 2448 pages to sift through, at a cost of $214.00. And that doesn’t include the CD-ROM, which thankfully is not an audio book read by Timothy Geithner. If you want to learn more about how the budget is put together without spending 200 bucks, the Wikipedia page goes in-depth. Over 13,000 words in depth in fact. Remarkably, the words “billion” and “trillion” are only used 81 and 59 times respectively. Me? While everyone else sits around arguing about taxes, spending, sacrifice, and responsibility, I’ll be kickin’ back, ignoring the doorbell and the phone as creditors continue harassing me. Why? Because deficits don’t matter. And besides, I oddly find myself agreeing with Fox/WSJ writer Paul B. Farrell’s rant Fed dictator Bernanke needs to be toppled – Forget Mubarak, it’s Fed reign of terror that must end. To distract myself while I sit here broke with it not really mattering, I think I’ll play a few rounds of the poverty survival game Spent. Because virtual homelessness is a lot more fun than real homelessness.
Astrology 101
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 15, 2011 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Why I have at least as much faith in astrology as I do in say, economics, with a brief introduction to how it works.
 One of history’s better known astrologers, Galileo Galilei |
People have on occasion asked me if I believe in astrology. I always have to chuckle a bit, because to me it’s sort of like asking if I “believe in” history, theoretical physics, archaeology, or economics. I’m referencing those four fields of study in particular, because I used to hang out with a group of doctorate students that included a person from each, and my favorite conversational goad was to ask them how their fiction writing was going. Using the historian as a wedge, it was pretty easy – especially after a few drinks – to get them all to admit that in the end, they were all really just fiction writers at heart, even if in the beginning they hard started with some reasonably solid facts. So do I “believe in” Astrology? Probably more than economics; I always considered the term Voodoo Economics to be redundant. But the simple answer is “no”. However, I find it to be a fascinating field of study. A field of study that – unfortunately – attracts a lot of loonies. And it seems that the looniest of the loonies are the ones who seek the most attention for their work, while the folks who do all the rigorous computation and statistical studies remain almost entirely unknown. The result of this is that the familiar face of astrology is the “daily horoscope”. Even the most uninformed student of the “serious” study of astrology will side up with the pragmatist who says that a daily horoscope is bunk, and at best a form of entertainment. This form of astrology supposes that somehow, all the people born in a given month (i.e., people with the same “sun sign”) will somehow have a similar theme playing out in their lives on a given day. We’re talking about more than 580 million people. I’d feel confident saying that about the only thing that ALL of these people would have in common is that they all benefit from breathing oxygen. I recently offered up a less-than-vigorous defense of the serious study of astrology, but just what is the “serious” study of astrology? I would say that it’s an attempt to explore the human psyche and its interconnectedness with the universe in which it dwells. And just how does it do this? Well, much like psychology, sociology, philosophy, and religion, it relies on a lot of symbols and analogies to describe the human experience, but astrology attempts to connect this human experience with observable planetary cycles. I know. Still probably sounds fishy. But I’m not trying to convince you of anything, other than to understand a little more about the topic before you dismiss it in relative ignorance. I mean, we’d all agree that alchemy was probably a frivolous pursuit, but modern chemistry and medicine would probably not exist if alchemy hadn’t. And according to that Wikipedia item just linked, Isaac Newton devoted more of his writing to it than his other studies combined. So let’s not throw out the proverbial baby with the proverbial bath water. If you’re still reading, below is my version of Astrology 101. Although I’ll be doing an Astrology 102, we probably won’t have a 200 series level; not only do I not have enough knowledge to pull it off, I don’t have enough interest either! Read the rest of this entry »