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Borderlines

March 16, 2010 / posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

Borders. The places between. At the edges of everywhere, you will find something interesting. Something akin to what is on either side, but somehow like neither thing.

In the physical world, borders are easy to find. They stand between countries, between cities, and between neighborhoods. Military bases, dive bars, wino hangouts, weird clubs…these are all the stuff of the borderlands.

On the internet, borders are harder to see. They tend to be places where cultures blend, since the physical realm is so meaningless here.

In the old days of the internet, the whole thing was a borderland. BBSs were the wild west of the digital world. You never knew what you mind find when you dialed in to one. Even now, borderlands can be found all over the net.

Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel strikes me as a borderland. Free flowing communication between people of all stripes. The only thing in common being a love for creativity. (Some of the posters there don’t even especially like Warren, which always amuses me.)

Amazing things happen on the borderlands. Cultures clash and mesh, idiotic ideas get bandied about (and sometimes brought to life), grand projects get undertaken, and friendships get made. These things happen elsewhere as well, but I always feel like they happen more often in the places between.

Tilted Forum Project is an old borderland. I hung out there often in the past, and still drop by from time to time now. The talk there is fabulous, and the community is great, but it’s gelled a bit as time goes by.

In some ways, Facebook is a borderland. As everyone uses it, there’s a ton going on there. You can bring together portions of your life that didn’t always co-mingle if you’re not careful.

In a similar way, the new My Outer Space might be a borderland. I only recently signed up, and it’s still getting together, so we’ll see what goes on there.

What borderlands do you hang out in? What magic spot where anything can happen do you point your address bar?

If you don’t have one, you should find one. Perhaps Wayne Coyne and the boys can help show you the way:

2009 Flaming Lips & Stardeath and White Dwarfs – Borderline from George Salisbury on Vimeo.

Where are the strong? Who are the trusted?

March 9, 2010 / posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

The internet’s web of trust is a curious thing.

People receive attacks from odd places all the time. We receive emails with suspicious links, malicious messages on Facebook. Even legitimate webpages we surf to may have been compromised through their javascript, and can do all kinds of bad things to your computer.

When we log in to a site, however, we feel secure, because of TLS.

TLS is part of the “s” (for secure) that appears whenever you see “HTTPS:” in your browser’s address bar. It encrypts your data using an awfully good encryption scheme so no one can see your username or password, or your credit card number, when you do things online.

There are two parts to the whole equation, however. The encryption side of TLS is quite good (There was a small compromise found not long ago, but they’re fixing it now, and the part that caused the flaw was deativated in the meantime). The authentication side, however…

When you send data using TLS, it’s not just important to encrypt the data, but to know who you are sending it to. If you encrypt your credit card number, username, and password, and ship it straight to a hacker (who supplied half of the keypair, probably) all the encryption in the world will do you no good.

To get around this flaw, we use PKI. That’s where we trust a third party to verify who you are sending data to by giving them a certificate. It’s like an ID. The PKI company you have all probably heard of is Verisign.

I’m not here to impugn Verisign’s business. They are a quite well known company, and do an okay job.

If you bought a car on the internet for $10,000.00, and a hacker used a certificate from Verisign to get your information, Verisign would be liable (in certain circumstances, of course). They would refund you up to $100!

Yes, a benjamin. That’s their indemnity in the entire situation, according to their contracts. And they are one of the many certificate authorities out there.I’ve never heard of the vast majority of them. But they say I’m perfectly safe, and should give my info to the nice man behind the counter!

Now, I’m a paranoid in training (I’m going to school for network security), and I’m not trying to freak you out. The internet is a great place, and the vast majority of things on it are enriching, informative, and run by folks on the up-and-up.

But next time you hand over your info, just stop and think for a moment. And make sure your browser is in “HTTPS” mode. It’s the least you can do.

Hopefully someday the internet will lead to some harmony amongst us all, and we won’t have to worry about this crap. I’m not holding my breath, though.

To Believe, or Not to Believe…That is the Question

February 23, 2010 / posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

The Internet allows information to easily and quickly flow from place to place. This means that we are inundated with facts every day.

In the past, information sources were scarce, and tended to police each other. In the 1950′s, if ABC news ran a story that was untrue, NBC news would tell you about how ABC screwed up, so you would watch NBC instead.

This led to an era of complacency in believing what we were told. If it’s on TV, it must be true! They wouldn’t air it otherwise! Information in print had similar watchdogs. Even books were looked over by multiple editors to ensure information was correct before going to print.

Now, speed of information rules. The most correct news story has almost nothing on the first one to hit the broadcast medium. News venues will print almost anything they think might have the slightest air of credibility.

My favorite story regarding this was the recent iPad debacle with Jason Calacanis. The night before the iPad was announced, Jason went on twitter and began posting the most ludicrous information regarding the iPad as an obvious joke. He stated things such as solar power, wireless recharging over the air, a special Farmville app interface, multiple cameras, and facial recognition as included features. It might have been more believable if he’d stated it was delivered to him by a Unicorn.

The Wall Street journal, CNN Money, and Wired all picked up the story, among others.

The more quickly and easily we communicate, the more crap we spew. Some of it is simply things no one cares about. Some of it is malicious. Some of it is just misunderstood. (Sarcasm symbol, where are you? And not the SarcMark, either. The fact that it costs money is like a sarcasm tax. And the Temherte Slaqi always just makes people think I’m a retarded spanish speaker.)

This is why Curation is the way of the future. Curators will sort through the massive data sea, looking for the tasty krill we all want. Curators are all over the place, and the need for curation does not appear to be slowing down.

Next time you read a fact or figure, will you believe it? After all, 86% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Including that one, of course.

My mommy says I’m special…

February 16, 2010 / posted in Broadcast Domain / 1 Comment

The internet brings knowledge to us in a way that’s almost unfathomable. When I need to do something, a step by step webpage, if not a video, is just a Google away. The giant knowledge net that is Wikipedia is a few mouse clicks from my desktop. With a smartphone, these resources can be accessed nearly anywhere.

This is making every one of us a potential generalist in every subject.

In the past age being a generalist was something to brag about. Knowing a lot about a variety of subjects made you useful. You would know enough to discourse on a variety of subjects, and fix potential problems in most areas, whatever they might be. If deeper knowledge was required, further research could be done, or a specialist hired. Specialists were scarce because so few were needed.

In the past, I have had people refer to me as “The Fount of Useless Knowledge”. If you wanted to know obscure facts about Heinlein novels, Celtic legends, the musical instruments of Asia, or common physical greetings used among Roman Legionnaires, I was the man to ask. Still am, in fact, but no longer because I have everything packed in my head. (Well, all the above knowledge is still packed in my head. Along with lots more useless stuff.)

John Graham-Cumming wrote about TF-IDF here, and summed it up nicely. I used to sum this up by telling people I can “think the way the search engine thinks”. It makes being a generalist entirely too easy. With it, and my basic knowledge of regular expressions, I can find things on the internet rather quickly. My built in habit of voracious reading (and thus assimilation of fantastically obtuse data points) still makes me a mildly interesting conversationalist (and in my opinion enhances my worldview, but that’s another article) but is no longer a selling point of me as an employee.

Much of the younger generation will have a fundamental grasp of TF-IDF, and it is therefore my belief that specialist are going to be the hottest commodity in the workforce in the coming years. People who know how to do very particular things, do them well, and have practiced them so they can do them in their sleep. We have numerous specialist we call upon already, but the number is going to go up.

In some ways, I believe a change to our education system is in order. A general knowledge is delivered of many topics by our K-12 system, but our higher learning system is entirely out of whack. Two year colleges, which offer specialized learning in a focused area, are considered inferior to a Bachelor’s degree, which offers general learning in a field. We’ve seen this trend reversing already. I would be unsurprised if apprenticeship had made a resounding comeback within 50 years.

Just something to ponder. When you’re looking to learn, remember to be special. I’m going to go rewire the house. Don’t worry, I looked it up on eHow.

Caught a bolt of lightning, cursed the day he let it go…

February 9, 2010 / posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

You can’t unmake an idea.

Humans have tried. Ideas have been forgotten, destroyed by destroying everyone who knows about their existence, and locked away for years, but once you know something, you can’t unknow it. Even if you do away with whomever had the idea in the first place, you know what the idea was to want to get rid of it, and there’s no way around that.

I was speaking with someone a few days ago who stated they’re afraid that digital media will do away with so much face to face human interaction that it will be bad for humanity in general. I’ve actually thought about this in the past, and dismissed the idea.

Human interaction is a generally positive process in which ideas are exchanged. A negative outcome might be reached based on the information exchanged, but the overall interaction itself is one of information building.

For instance, we’ll look at two children on a playground. Tommy tells Billy that his mommy is a ‘fat ho-bag’, which makes Billy cry. Obviously a negative outcome, but Billy still received information he didn’t have before. Receiving information we didn’t have before is a positive process. It always opens up new options for us. In the previous example, Billy might pay a little more attention to what’s going on in his household, decide not to let his life turn out like mommy’s, and go on to be a wicked cool guy. Of course, he might decide to make Tommy eat the mud from under the swingset. If we’re lucky, both might occur.

All the technology we have allows us to interact on levels we didn’t previously interact on. I talk to people on a daily basis, through Facebook and Twitter, that I used to talk to only a few times a year. I’m part of their daily community, and they’re part of mine. We support each other with little messages every day, and let each other know what’s going on.

In the past, this was always done based on geographic boundaries. Your neighbors live close to you, so you can easily interact with them on a daily basis. If you were surrounded by people you didn’t mesh with well, you either moved or got used to being “the weird guy who lives on the corner”.

Now, communities are limited only by the technology present and who we want to interact with. I could be part of a community in Japan, and interact with those people on a daily basis. Video chat such as Skype could allow me to hang out in their living room if we wanted.The hardest part would be the time difference.

However, I believe humans will always choose face to face interaction for things. Even now, if you wish to communicate something important, you do it in person. Our average day to day face to face interactions may be dropping, but I believe it’s because we save those meetings for important things. If we just want to shoot the shit, we send an email, or a text, or a Tweet. As it should be.

Humans have rarely mishandled technology so poorly in the long term that we’ve suffered for it as a race. We’re very good at handling technology poorly in the short term, and causing irreparable harm to portions of our race all at once, but we tend to learn that’s a bad plan. If social media were going to be detrimental to us as a species, I think we’d realize, and stop using it, or at least begin using it in a different way.

Wouldn’t we?

After all, ideas spread far and fast in the Information Age. And you can’t unmake an idea.

Perspective

February 2, 2010 / posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” – Nietzsche

Everyone has a perspective. We all know what’s said about opinions, and an opinion is really a perspective. Every day changes how we look at life, and every time we open our mouths, tap something out on our keyboards, or place brush to canvas, we are sharing our perspective with the world.

One of the amazing things about perspectives is how memetic they can be. When you pass on you opinion on something, that colors the opinion of the people who heard you. They pass it on to others, and the idea spreads. Others come up with their own opinions, and spread them as well. So it is that our ideas about the world, how to interact with it, and how to interact with each other spread.

The internet, of course, is a fantastic communication tool. It allows perspective to be shared faster than any other medium humans have ever had access to. Twitter is fascinating for this purpose, as the messages are so compact, and you can receive them from so many people at once. Firing up a Twitter feed is like taking what’s inside the heads of a bunch of people and quickly riffling through them and seeing what catches your eye.

Nothing has more quickly conveyed the differences in culture and opinion to large groups of people on a daily basis. Perspectives are being shared, and therefore folded into each other, more than ever. Globalization is taking place on a fantastic scale. Some fear this, stating that it will remove cultures from all of us, leaving one giant melting pot.

I disagree. I think this will lead to a better understanding of foreign cultures and perspectives without sacrificing our own. This may lead to more global cooperation, and hopefully less war overall. Meanwhile we will stay true to our cultural heritage through ritual and story. When people see us celebrating those rituals and hear us telling those stories, they’ll seem familiar to them as well. An understanding will be reached.

Of course, that’s just my perspective.

Fetch the Pig Bladders!

January 26, 2010 / posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

First, I thank you all for bearing with my horribleness since my return from the Yule break. Homework and life issues are slapping me about on the weekends, so I’m moving Broadcast Domain to Tuesdays for the foreseeable future. If you don’t like it, feel free to send me an email. Feedback could even prompt me to change it back. Maybe.

So, how is it that Hugo Chavez knows that we have an earthquake machine and I don’t?

I refer, of course, to this.

Now, it’s not that I don’t think a weapon that could cause an earthquake could not exist. After all, Nikolai Tesla imagined it could, and that was before we even had computers.  We may very well have such a device. China might have such a device. For all we know, all the world powers have them, and only a tense agreement not to fuck each other up big time keeps us from shaking the entire earth’s crust apart.

Why would we use it on Haiti?

I’m not saying Haiti has no interest for us as a country. It would not surprise me at all to find that we basically occupy the country in an effort to assist in rebuilding, and end up making Haiti a close economic ally. But I cannot imagine we would be so crass as to test a weapon on a country filled with innocent bystanders.

Still, one person thinks that of us, and the internet delivers that knowledge unto us. It allows us to pull it apart, research it, discuss it, brainstorm on it, and (eventually) determine its validity (or lack thereof, in this case).

That’s the power of the internet. Even the silliest stories can get talked about as if they were actual valid news. I love this thing.

The Great Internet Divide

January 19, 2010 / posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

Net Neutrality. Many have heard the term, but few agree on what it means. The term has been bandied about by lawmakers all over, and bent to do whatever they want.

What Net Neutrality really comes down to is freedom of internet traffic. The FCC is (apparently) looking at setting up rules making all internet traffic have to be handled equally by every American ISP. That’s basically how the internet is now, and this would seek to keep things that way.

Many people never stop to think about the fact that the internet is really a giant network wholly owned by telecom companies, and they can do whatever they like with it. Net neutrality seeks to regulate what they can do to restrict access to their giant networks, and they do not like the idea.

The internet is an important part of what almost all of us do every day. We send emails, surf to web pages, and check our online bank accounts. What would you do if that traffic were unable to get where you wanted it to go?

Although we have not heard of plans to do so yet, the telecom companies have the ability to set up exclusivity contracts with network end providers to make extra money. It’s tough to imagine, but roll with me here for a moment.

Let’s say I’m a mythical telecom company called All Internet Traffic (AIT) and I want to make enough money to swim in. I look at where everyone on the internet goes all the time, and decide to call the world’s largest search company, Biggle. I get Biggle to sign an exclusivity contract with me, where they will connect only to my network. Anyone connecting to Biggle has to go through me. In return, Biggle doesn’t have to pay a dime for their internet hookups.

In the real world, this isn’t done exclusively (yet) and is done by a method called Peering. Peering is where big telecom companies connect their networks together and just let traffic pass from one network to another freely. They work together to make the internet happen, and don’t charge each other for it. However, let’s go back to my example.

Now, AIT (that’s me) has all traffic to Biggle passing over its network. It’s a lot of traffic! I decide it’s so much traffic that my network can’t easily handle it, and I need to do some upgrades. That’s going to cost millions of dollars and take months, so for now, I decide to go with what I have and implement QoS instead. However, I’m a giant evil telecom and don’t want to piss off my customers, so I decide to do selective QoS. QoS means Quality of Service, and is a method whereby a network acts as a traffic cop. It speeds up some traffic by slowing down other traffic. In selective QoS, it does it by looking at certain kinds of traffic. In this case, I’ll slow down traffic heading to Biggle from other telecoms, and let my own customers go there at full speed. If the other telecoms don’t like it, they can pay me extra money to have me speed up their traffic. If the other telecoms get belligerent about it, I might even just stop all traffic from them headed to Biggle. Because I can.

This scenario can easily go the other way. If two retailers are connected to the same ISP, and one is a super mega mart, and the other is a hometown mom and pop place, the super mega mart could pay extra to the ISPs to have traffic flow to them faster.

Please note this is not the same as bandwidth. The “speed” you’re thinking of there is actually the amount of data that can be sent at one time over you connection to your ISP. QoS actually deals with how fast information traverses the network…and in some cases, if it will ever even arrive.

The telecoms say that Net Neutrality isn’t needed because they’re never going to implement schemes such as the one I laid out above. They’re asking you to trust them.

I ask you to remember how well that has worked in the past. Every time a large corporation has asked us to trust them, we’ve gotten the shaft so they can make more money.

Really think it won’t happen? Comcast has already enabled deep packet inspection and used it to slow Peer to Peer bittorrent traffic. Yes, they looked at every packet of information that crossed their network to see what it was, and slow it if it was something they didn’t like.

Also, don’t be fooled by things like the Internet Freedom Act. The clever title hides the fact that this would actually place the power directly in the hands of the telecoms by making it so the FCC can’t mandate anything regarding the internet.

This is a big issue, impacting how we use the internet on a daily basis. No matter what side of things you come down on, you need to keep an eye on it.

See you next Monday. Hopefully you can still get to BKI across a nice, open internet.

What has it got in its pocketses?

January 11, 2010 / posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

I return! I’m sure you all enjoyed your winter break. I know I enjoyed mine.

I got some great things for Solstice, and that got me to thinking about where our entertainment comes from, and how that’s changed. The changes have a large effect on our culture.

Not that long ago, things could be hard to find. I remember a story about a young Bob Dylan traveling 30 miles to someone’s house (a ‘friend of a friend’) to hear a Robert Johnson album. The music was hard to find.

Now, if you want to hear the newest, hottest, local band someone from a far away place mentions, you hit their web page. Even if they don’t have EP’s for sale on their website, I’ve never contacted one by email with an offer of 10 bucks and some shipping cash and had them deny my request for a mail order.

Scarcity is a crazy thing, and one that doesn’t exist as much in the digital realm as it does in the real world. You can always make more bits. With a printing press and a load of ink, I could possibly get the words I am writing now to a few hundred people, and it would be a lot of work. With the internet, they can be served up to millions of people (as long as they don’t all arrive at the exact same moment. Moving bits from place to place in the internet is the only real scarcity it has to deal with.) with very little relative work.

As much entertainment is no longer done in person, almost anything you want can be found. When I tell someone about the new ifihadahifi EP, they can go to their website and find out how to get it. The same applies to movies, books, stand up comedy…the list is incredible.

Therefore, cultural movements are no longer strictly geographic. You can’t be interested in something you’ve never heard of, of course, but now you can find anything you’ve heard of at the touch of a few buttons. I think that’s a pretty damned cool thing. I believe it may finally allow talent, and not marketing, to play a larger role in what new media we devour.

So, who should we be paying attention to?

The only journey is the one within. – Rainer Maria Rilke

December 21, 2009 / posted in Broadcast Domain / No Comments

People often say that the journey is more important than the destination, and I generally agree. I’m not one to flip to the back of the book to see how it all turns out, or pay no attention to the drive out of a simple desire to ‘be where I’m going, already!’

However, how much of the journey of a story lies in taking the time to get to know the story as it progresses? What if we could simply KNOW the story, immediately, without having sat and read the book over a dozen sunny afternoons? How much would that change our experience of the story itself?

Our experience of the story itself has changed miraculously over the past century. The ready availability of books and the education of the world’s young to a common point of literacy changed stories from an oral pursuit shared by large groups, to one of the solitary reader and their book. We then switched back with the advent of radio drama, with families sitting around the radio to find what happened to The Shadow or Fibber McGee and Molly. From there, we moved to the silver screen, and then the small screen, and have wavered between the two ever since.

How much does how we are told the story matter in the long run? I don’t mean in the sense that things are often removed from the story to transpose it to another medium. This is often done for movie adaptations, and is the reason many prefer the book, even if they saw the movie first. Movies (and to a much lesser extent, radio) shape concepts of the story for us in our minds, rather than allowing us the freedom to imagine it ourselves. Does this truly detract from the story itself?

Alan Moore certainly feels that the changes made to his work to move it to another medium is a horrid thing. Although I’ve enjoyed most of the adaptations of his work for what they are, I feel they never quite live up to the original source. Something about the layout of a comic book, and the way your eye tracks across the images and dialog, simply cannot be recaptured, no matter what medium it is moved to.

So, what will this mean when new mediums are made available for the telling of stories? We already know from the reaction of traditional media outlets that they become incredibly afraid whenever a new medium for telling stories becomes available. Publishers are still claiming they will be ruined by Ebooks, despite the fact that people with Ebook readers buy almost ten times as many books as those without. More importantly, what will this mean for those of us who consume the stories? How will changing the journey affect the audience?

Science has slowly come to know more and more about the functioning of the human brain as time passes. At some point in the future, I can only imagine that nanomachines of some type will be able to change things in our brain so that we simply know things. Direct manipulation of human physiology will alow stories to be downloaded directly into your consciousness. No interaction with the medium will be required. At that point in time, the journey of consuming the story will itself be gone. Only the story will remain.

Will that be a good thing, or a bad one, in the overall telling of our tales?

I’d love to find out.

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