Category: observations

taking stock of the uncounted

Listening to Marketplace Morning Report on NPR this morning, they once again cited the 400,000 unemployed who are not counted in the news stories. If, like me, you’re not eligible for unemployment benefits, you drop off the list, no matter if you’re in the hunt or not.

It occurred to me that documenting a representative sample of the uncounted unemployed might make a potent statement about the economy. And what easier way to do this on a website?

It wouldn’t be that hard to do: I just need to figure out what information to collect from everyone who “registers” to ensure they’re legitimate without intruding on their privacy.

Suggestions welcome.

falling on one’s sword

Freedom to Tinker:

Senate staffer Miguel Miranda will resign in the wake of the recent scandal over unauthorized accesses to the opposition’s computer files, according to Alexander Bolton’s story in The Hill.

Is having a staffer fall on his sword the appropriate consequence? What about the people who used the information in those documents? Since this was a repeated occurrence, someone else had to be involved.

weblog metrics

There are a couple of theories about makes a good weblog, good being open to interpretation. For my purposes, I’ll defined good as shorthand for something readers regularly visit and find useful enough to interact with, either by leaving a comment there, by sending around URLs to their friends, commenting on their own site, etc.

Traffic numbers are not all that useful, with all the robots and spambots roaming about: if we all get the same amount of that, low-traffic sites will have a disproportionately high ratio of bots to readers.

Likewise, blogrolls and technorati fail my test: they can be a whim of the moment and are not an indicator of how much a site is valued by its readers.

I think the best measure is a comments:entries ratio. Values of 1 or greater equate to a high level of interaction . For sites that aren’t open to comments, something like feeds.scripting.com will have to do. My C:E ratio right now is .644: there was a time when it was greater than 1 but the whole Voodoo Magick Box meme died down.

So by this yardstick, Instapundit, for all its creator’s prolixity, garners very little status, while Crooked Timber and Freedom To Tinker do rather better.

taking responsibility

Geeks Put the Unsavvy on Alert: Learn or Log Off:

Some in the technocamp imagine requiring a license to operate a computer, just like the one required to drive a car. Others are calling for a punishment that fits a careless crime. People who click on virus attachments, for instance, could be cut off by their Internet service providers until they proved that their machines had been disinfected.

This was how the UW handled infected systems during the worm attacks of 2003: exploited systems were off the network until they could be certified as virus-free.
[ . . . ]

“Responsibility is shared,” said Scott Charney, Microsoft’s chief security strategist. “With some of these viruses that require user action, people have a responsibility to be careful and protect themselves.”

A little bit of blame the victim there: how is it so easy for people to send these around? How often is Outlook’s address book part of the infection vector?

network problems?

For some reason, I can’t reach many places on the Interweb, including CNN.com, Google, mail servers at Apple or Comcast, etc.

I did have some kind of fluke on my Comcast network (was it just a day or so ago that I said I have no complaints about them?) causing my public network interface to lose it DHCP lease, and nothing I did could get it back. I suspect something has gone south in their network. Not that I can go anywhere to find out . . . . .

Inbound traffic seems to be unaffected, but any pages that load content from places like Google or Amazon (that means all of them) are slow to load.

the spam arms race: do we need a new system or can we leverage what we have?

Gates Backs E-Mail Stamp in War on Spam:

“Every proposed scheme will break parts of the way e-mail works today,” said Hans Peter Brondmo, a senior vice president of Digital Impact who has represented big e-mailers in the spam technology negotiations. The challenge, he said, is to find a system that will require as little retrofitting as possible to e-mail systems.

I think any system that requires you to pay to send or receive email is a bad idea or at least breaks part of what makes email work so well.

Re-reading this article, Tim also proposes a “stamp” of sorts, though of smaller denomination, but I think his ideas about whitelisting authorized relayers, instead of individual senders, is the best part of it. Right now, whitelists are at the individual level: you have to look at and approve everyone who wants to send you mail. It would be far simpler to add authoritative relayers (USPS.gov, etc. as Tim suggests) and let them handle the security and authentication.

Add to this the notion of signed email, either PGP/gpg or S/MIME, and the chances of getting something you didn’t want should go way down.

what browser war?

Mirror on the wall

This is exactly the reason why Mozilla appears to be steaming up recently: a couple of years the move was made to radically redesign its renderer to keep an eye open on the emerging W3 standards (CSS was still under discussion). The same happened with the Opera and Konqueror engine. Now, open up the Explorer’s “About Box”: Look for the Mosaic hint. See? Since day and night Explorer has been built around Mosaic. Remember Spyglass? If you’re using Explorer, you’re using ‘second-hand’ technology. Where do you start fixing ‘second-hand’ bugs?

I start to wonder if this is the reason why Microsoft is so reluctant of updating their browser: it isn’t possible to support the new standards without redesigning the internal renderer of Explorer. So while Microsoft seems to have won the “browser war”, looking from a developer’s point of view it looks like Mozilla and Konqueror, Safari and Opera are actually the real front runners, practically stealing the show.

It was a similar revelation to me that the two main flavors of IE (forgetting the shortlived Solaris version) used two different and incompatible rendering engines. I thought the Mosaic/Spyglass code was just to bootstrap things and that by version 3 or so, it was gone.

More innovation, it appears.

[Related link]

domestic terrorism?

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: February 01, 2004 – February 07, 2004 Archives

Why didn’t this get reported more widely? And is it related to what happened yesterday on the Hill?

From a January 9th report from CBS and the AP …

The FBI on Thursday offered a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to an arrest of anyone responsible for leaving a package containing the deadly poison ricin at a post office in October.

A letter inside the package said the author could make much more ricin and will “start dumping” large quantities of the poison if new federal trucking rules went in effect, according to information released by the FBI and other federal agencies Thursday.

The letter, which was found at a post office in South Carolina, was signed “fallen angel” and the sender identified himself as “a fleet owner of a tanker company.”