I like to think it's this guy's extended o-face

Probably the best article ever

Oh man.

Favorite line: "...I even caught a hacker or two." It's like: wut

Via Sullivan.

A Captain and Tenille flame war for the ages

Of course, I fully realize that by the time you're reading a YouTube comments flame war, you really ought to have gone to sleep. But: in this one the stakes are so high:

Bag0fRats (2 months ago)

Toni Tenille now wears a calostmy bag, being a druggie is never smart

vicnored (3 weeks ago)

@Bag0fRats y do u know this

Bag0fRats (2 weeks ago)

@vicnored it's well known. Didn't ever hear of the concert she gave in the late 80s in LA when she dropped her colostomy bag on stage ?

InformingChristians (1 week ago)

That is not nice of you to spread falsehoods. Toni Tennille and her husband did not do drugs. And she looks very health to me.

They have a website. Google Captian and Tennille.

Shame on you...

Debra J.M. Smith
of
Informing Christians

Bag0fRats (1 week ago)

@InformingChristians Falsehoods ? I suppose you could tell the thousands that saw her perform in LA in the late 1980s that saw her drop her colostomy bag on stage are all lying and coincidentally made up the same lie. Oh, and all the morning radio shows must have lied too as well as all the callers who were joking about it.

InformingChristians (4 days ago)

@Bag0fRats

I never heard anything about it. And even if a situation happened that she had such a health issue, that would not mean that it was from drug use.

I never heard of her doing anything mean to anyone. Why go after her in such a hurtful way? It makes no sense. She has feelings too.

Debra...

Bag0fRats (3 days ago)

@InformingChristians how is pointing out a fact hateful ? She did drop her colostomy bag on stage in LA back in '89. Maybe you didn't hear because you live in the east or whatever. If you did live here you would have known about it because it was the joke of every morning radio show in the morning. so again, how is that hateful ? Please explain.

InformingChristians (3 days ago)

@Bag0fRats,

If that did happen, then it is very cruel that people would have joked about it. And it does not mean that she was on drugs.

Debra...

Bag0fRats (3 days ago)

@InformingChristians Cruel maybe, juvenile yes.

It seems that poor Debra--who I'm sure is a very nice, ordinary person--hasn't learned not to get lured into YouTube comments flame wars with people named "BagofRats".

"Under Construction"

A bit of internet history.

Yahoo, Verizon, and others profit by handing over your information to the government

Yahoo and Verizon are trying to block a Freedom of Information Act request as to how much they charge the government for wiretaps and such.

Web 2.0's Moore's law: every two years, the smarminess of the latest communication platform doubles

I used to think that Twitter was pretty damn smarmy and pleased with itself--until I used Google Wave. Ho-ly Christ. Bold prediction: Google Wave will fail to take hold in any significant way, because it is way too over-designed and way too concerned with finding solutions to problems that don't necessarily exist.

Here's the thing: Twitter was smart in that it kept things extraordinarily simple for so long. They let actual user behavior lead feature creation, rather than the other way around. For example, users would come up with hashtags on their own, and then Twitter would develop features and widgets around that. With Google Wave, though, it seems just the opposite: there's this preening tone to the whole endeaver that just seems to say, "We Google geniuses are so genius that we know what you want before you do. We're envious of you that you are just starting out on your journey, and have not yet had your mind blown by the sheer elegance and revolutionary user experience that awaits you."

(PS: Key indication of an application's smarminess? "Cute" error messages. Fail whale???!?!?! Why, these aren't some boring old programmers--what a sense of humor! Everything will be "shiny"??!?!?! Hey--that's from Firefly! These guys have some serious cred!)

Some day, one big wall?

This sort of thing is always interesting. Apparently Rupert Murdoch has plans to 1) erect a pay wall around all online Fox Corp content, and 2) block Google from indexing Fox sites. Not sure what there is to gain from (2)--maybe because he doesn't want Google caching the content of the sites?

In any case, it'll be interesting to see if the Great Fox Wall business model pans out. Conventional wisdom on the web says it is doomed to fail--that it will simply be undercut by comparable sites that offer their content for free. I tend to agree with this conventional wisdom.

On the other hand, though, it seems that at some point, newspapers and other content providers are going to have to start making money on the web in order to survive. A pay wall might work for some cases of specialized content--for example, the Wall Street Journal (which is behind a pay wall, and has been doing quite well). But I don't think it would work for general news and entertainment content--unless, maybe, you made the wall big enough?

The world can definitely learn to live without Fox, but could it learn to live without, say, Fox plus the major movie studios, major newspapapers, and big TV networks? If there were a critical mass of sought-after content behind one big universal pay wall, I could see a subscription model working--you buy one key that opens many doors. The companies behind the pay wall could then share the subscription revenue using some equitable sharing formula (based on, say, traffic numbers).

Hmm..

The internet hits a walk-off homerun

This is it. It's over. INTERNET WINS:



From a cool blog that filters 4Chan for you.

If Iraqis could Tweet, would we be so cavalier about bombing them? We might, if they Tweeted all the time, for no good reason.

Although I disagree with some of the phrasing that he uses--clearly, even those who favor bombing Iran do not do so because they "want to slaughter" innocents, as he seems to imply at one point--I think Glenn Greenwald makes a very, very good observation:

Hopefully, one of the principal benefits of the turmoil in Iran is that it humanizes whoever the latest Enemy is. Advocating a so-called "attack on Iran" or "bombing Iran" in fact means slaughtering huge numbers of the very same people who are on the streets of Tehran inspiring so many -- obliterating their homes and workplaces, destroying their communities, shattering the infrastructure of their society and their lives. The same is true every time we start mulling the prospect of attacking and bombing another country as though it's some abstract decision in a video game.

Humanizing is right. Although it's a bit of a cliche at this point to refer people to the #iranelection tag on Twitter, I think it actually shows pretty well how these social networking sites enable Americans to become exposed to--and emotionally invested in--whole groups of people who would otherwise remain foreign and abstract.

It makes me wonder, a bit, how things would have been different if Iraqis had been able to communicate this effectively in the run-up to the war in 2003. Suppose that when their homes and neighborhoods were bombed, they emitted a steady stream of horrifying pictures and videos? Suppose that they directly entreated us to stop raining death down upon them from above with Facebook groups and hashtags? Even as I write that it seems kind of dumb, but, still: isn't there something very powerful about one person saying to another, in whatever medium: please don't kill me and my family?

The post title is a paraphrase of a great Jack Handy line, that questions whether we would be so quick to cut down trees, if they could scream. Unfortuneately, I have a feeling that the same principle applies to people. Before the internets, it would have been nearly impossible to have any kind of meaningful, personal, and affecting interaction with someone on the other side of the world--and, as a consequence, the snuffing out of tens, even hundreds of thousands of lives would enter into our brains as bare factual information. Psychologically, we wouldn't "hear the screams".

So maybe this is the "Kantian turn" in the ongoing discussion about what, if anything, the role of sites like Twitter are playing in the Iranian civil unrest. The change isn't taking place within Iran; it's taking place within our brains.

(Photo by natachaqs)

When political junky-ism reduces to a Jay Walking segment

I never much cared for Jay Leno, but I always had to grudgingly admire his "Jaywalking" bit, where he would take a camera out somewhere and quiz people on questions they ought to know (like, who is Joe Biden). Of course, if you ask enough people an easy question, eventually you'll find one poor sap who doesn't know the answer. And after enough filming you can edit together just the saps, and then--voila--you've made the general population of Los Angeles look far more uninformed than it actually is. It's a simple trick, but it makes for pretty good TV.

Something I've been starting to notice, though, is that this same mechanism will often be at work on the internets. What happens is, you end up regularly reading blogs that more or less reinforce your worldview. And these blogs take it upon themselves to hold the other side accountable for their words and actions--as they should--and so they call out offensive and ignorant quotes from the other side and scathingly tear them apart.

And all this is fine, as far as it goes. But what happens is that, after a while, you start getting a very skewed picture of what the other side is all about. The mess-ups, the poorly phrased statements, the idiots--that's what you get exposed to, just like a Jaywalking segment. And, you know, it's entertaining.

But over time this sort of thing just stifles any kind of meaningful exchange of ideas across the ideological divide. I mean, is it really intellectually honest or useful in any way for Andrew Sullivan--who has the most popular political blog in the universe--to call out a whackjob comment in some arbitrary right wing blog somewhere?

(Photo by Xurble)

It's time to call bullshit on: keyboard cat

Look: I enjoy an internet meme as much as the next guy. But I feel like the internet phoned in keyboard cat. It seems contrived to me--basically just a combination of LOLcats and FailBlog.

This is America. We can do better.

Arrrrgg!

I've been saying this for years--but I never thought to put it on Twitter!

I'm ordering an immediate investigation of all jokes I've ever made to see if they can be put on the record.

Twitter, #googlefail, and the viral misinterpretation of data

Some hay has already been made about this, but basically today for a couple of hours Google and all of its attendant services--search, Gmail, etc.--went down. And so on Twitter there were a flurry of messages tagged #googlefail that said something to the effect of, "Google's down!"

But a lot of the messages were re-Tweets of this:

@chr1sa : Graph of Internet traffic showing impact of this morning's #googlefail. Google practically IS the Internet: http://bit.ly/nICxj

However, these people totally misinterpreted the graph: it does not show all internet activity, but rather, it "shows average traffic from ten top North American ISPs sending data to Google’s network". So of course it's going to go down to virtually zero when Google's network is down.

And, really, wouldn't it be strange if all internet activity declined so drastically because Google went down? Why would people stop using the internet simply because they couldn't use their favorite search engine? Silliness.

(PS: Even though this post is about the internet, I'm not going to deploy the "internet icon", because of how incredibly stupid it is.)

Apologies in advance

But I thought this "chain comment" (is that what they're called?) on a YouTube video was kind of funny:

1. copy and paste
2. send this to 2 other videos.
3. hold your breath for 10 seconds
4. press refresh twice
3. LOOK AT YOUR HANDS

Yeah, I'm gonna start saying that.

Lay off Hook

I'm not sure why, but I think this is quietly one of the best comments I've ever seen on the internet, by one Kyle at the Onion AV Club:

Hook is okay. I don't know why that movie is such a punchline. It's an average kids flick and it moves along breezily enough

Lay off Hook, everybody

It's like the opposite of a horrible YouTube comment.

Incidentally, there's definitely an art to not using a period. It really changes the feel of a sentence. Sometimes it can be just the thing.

The internet is watching

One thing about this brave new world of communications technology that we don't hear much about is the almost ubiquitous, distributed surveillance that results from the fact that everyone carries around a handheld video recorder. So when Condoleezza Rice has a rather testy exchange with a Stanford student after some event:



...it can eventually find its way into an editorial of the nation's paper of record:

Consider a recent chat at a college reception between a student and Condoleezza Rice, who as White House national security adviser was deeply involved in the development of the authorization of brutality and torture.

Among the many absurd things Ms. Rice did was to offer this argument that waterboarding is legal: “By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.”

Pretty neat. And incidentally, I've always thought of this "distributed Big Brother" phenomenon as a good thing, giving us the benefits of surveillance (people get punished for doing bad things) without the accompanying specter of government abuse. Be good: society is watching you!

On a separate note, Rice's behavior in the video made me rise an eyebrow or two. When you accuse someone of stealing bread, and that person starts talking about how hungry they were at the time of the theft, that person starts to sound pretty guilty. Likewise, if you accuse someone of authorizing torture, and that person starts talking about how dreadful 9/11 was, it sounds like this is a person who, as a matter of fact, has authorized torture, and who is basically pleading for mercy given the circumstances.

Anybody else would have done the same thing! You don't know what it's like to go hungry! I had children to feed--I had to steal it!

And I'll tell you something. Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after September 11^th, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans....If you were there in a position of authority, and watched Americans jump out of 80-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people, then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again.

Google's critique of humanity

When you enter "why won't" into a Google search bar, you get the following suggestions, in this order:

why won't--

• limewire connect
• god heal amputees
• my iphone sync
• my car start
• my ipod turn on
• he marry me
• itunes open
• he propose
• my dog eat
• he call

These are the deep philosophical questions we all face.

Nom d'internet

The utility of having a consistent and unique nom d'internet is becoming increasingly clear to me. Before when I posted comments anywhere I would enter as my name "david morris", in a gesture of gutsy earnestness ("I stake my very reputation on this blogge post comment, goode sir", it seemed to say), but now I see that I should be signing them "thedavidmo", since this is a) pretty much unique and therefore Google-able, and b) consistent across many different bullshit internet venues (Twitter, any forums, etc.). Also, for some reason signing blog comments with your real name makes you look like kind of a boner.

Okay I'm gonna go to Germany now bye

Takadanobaba = YouTube!!!

Ok--this is really fucking cool. Basically this research firm evaluates the most trafficked domains on the internet and, to put it in perspective, maps the results onto the Tokyo subway system!

Mapping information metaphorically onto a totally different, familiar system like this seems to me like a very legit way to represent information in a way that humans can easily digest. It'd be great to see this method used more often.

You can see a good image of the map here.

Yes, good friend, I did mean that

Sometimes, the internet is damn good:


Those of you familiar with my Twitter feed are undoubtedly slightly sickened at how much you've been able to glean about the last half hour of my life or so. Or if you're Eric, sickened again.