The Internet, Phonebooks, and Privacy

A really interesting statement from Xfinity/Comcast:

We will no longer make available any directory listing information about our Xfinity Voice customers through ecolisting.com, directory assistance, or print publications. This includes names, phone numbers, and addresses. We also will not share any of this information with third-party publishers.
We're making this change as part of our ongoing commitment to enhance customer privacy. 

Why is this so interesting? It speaks directly to the issue of unforeseen social consequences and new technology.

Early in the days of pushing the information revolution, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a lot of idea about information and change were bandied about. Two of them, relevant here, were easier access to information generally with phone numbers and addresses as an example, and the other was the end of the paper phone book (saving lots of trees, it was said, more marketing and less fact).

Starting with the paper phone book, well there are giant paper phone books from who knows what advertising-driven company delivered to my door every year. When I lived in NYC, trucks would roll around the city and low-paid workers would deposit phone books on everyone's stoops. I've received them here in Massachusetts as well in the last year. So, no, the phone book did not go away, although the companies, its specific name, and its economic model are very different from AT&T's yellow pages of the 1970s and 1980s that were completely necessary back then.

But free access to information online didn't work out either: when you try to look someone up online, unless they have put their contact information up themselves, it's often paywalled and the Google results usually look pretty dodgy. If you get an unknown phone call (my recent ones are "from" Chicago and Michigan [they almost always fake the source phone number] and feature a recorded message in Chinese with music in the background, which says something about the economics of the phone-spam industry reaching out to non-English speakers in the US) and you Google the number to do a reverse lookup (a simple database operation), it is often very hard to get any information at all, although this could be because the number that shows up on your caller ID isn't actually in service. The point is, you can't actually look people up easily unless they are fairly digitally oriented.

So, we still have paper phone books, but they are not exactly the paper phone books from 40 years ago, and we still can't look people or phone numbers up online (I am tempted to mention the "where's my flying car?" trope, but we have flying cars, it's just that we call them helicopters and they are incredibly more complex than today's regular cars), and, to come back to Xfinity, maybe we don't even want this information available--when it was merely in a paper phonebook, restricted to who had access to those phonebooks, that was one thing, but in today's digital world where Macedonian teenagers can make websites devoted to fake news stories (which are shared to Facebook or via Twitter and then can make their way up the news hierarchy to actual televised news shows), maybe having easy access to everything is not the best idea. (I'll avoid a tangent to how newspapers, despite being driven by advertising revenue, still mostly cared about the advertisements they ran in their pages, but Facebook and Twitter don't see it that way.)

UK Tabloids and Royalty

Really interesting and depressing comparison of headlines of the Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle (as an American, we have no royal titles, so I'll just label them princesses as in "married to princes" but they have titles and such) and the racism and perhaps classism of the British tabloid press (perhaps it's even intersectional). The point is to show this happens at all, and hey, here it is. Shameful. But what is to be done about it?

"Here Are 20 Headlines Comparing Meghan Markle To Kate Middleton That Might Show Why She And Prince Harry Are Cutting Off Royal Reporters"
Subtitled, Over the years, Meghan has been shamed for the same things for which her sister-in-law, Kate, has been praised.

Pedantic and Accurate Tyepsetting

For years I have wondered how to italicize and capitalize newspaper titles such as, and I will do it correctly here, the New York Times. I always wondered, should the initial "the" be capitalized, because it seems like part of the title? (No.) How much should be italicized, since isn't all of it the title, or not? (Not the location.)

I figured the exceedingly pedantic (but in the good way) New Yorker would, one day, give me guidance on that. They have! I thank them.

Facebook, Paris, Beruit

A lot has been written about how Facebook activated its "Safety Check" feature for the recent Paris terrorist attack, but not for one the previous day in Beirut. There is some good commentary, from less well known sites to the bigger news sites to personal blogs.

So what are we left with?

Facebook is a part of the global media fabric as much as any other site, they not only act as gatekeepers for news but act within the news environment and ideas about what constitutes news. Facebook is based in California, and so most of the employees who make up the organization we call Facebook are American: they grew up within a specific media environment which had clear but subtle ideas about what news is. (As an aside, I wonder how many employees at Facebook who are involved in the curation of people's feed have any background in actual journalism.) To understand this framing of what is news and what isn't, we need to understand global history and the flow of information, a flow which often parallels economic flows. So yes, we need to understand words that some framings have determined should make us uneasy, such as imperialism and colonialism. (Think about it this way: in the Babar series of children's books, when Africans wear European clothes they are portrayed as good, but when there are Africans who wear non-European, "traditional", or "pre-contact" clothes [I am not sure what the best term is], they are portrayed as backwards -- yes, they are elephants and rhinoceroses, but they are being used as humans in the stories. This has not gone unnoticed.) Because often parts of the world that were used for colonialism and imperialism, empire building, and the extraction of goods through forced labor and violence, are now the parts that are not worthy of news coverage, although it isn't quite so easy and straightforward.

But what we do have is highly problematic, besides the sadly common lack of coverage in some parts of the world -- the Western news media didn't cover the Beirut attacks very much, neither did Facebook, and both of these non-reactions are for exactly the same reasons which can be couched in economic terms but have deeper cultural and historical roots. Facebook doesn't have as many users, most likely, who are directly connected to Beirut, but it has many more with connections to France. The same is true for their employees. But they are also reacting to what they see in the media and perhaps to trends they are continually monitoring, live, in the overall Facebook environment.

Like the media, Facebook is essentially bestowing the idea of newsworthiness on some issues and also deciding that some other things are not newsworthy at all. That really is a big problem, as it's clear no one there is qualified to do so. This is also a well-known issue more broadly and is not at all new. This is not to say it's good, it's not at all good, nor is it to say Facebook shouldn't have activated the "Safety Check" feature. I appreciated it, as I have friends in Paris.

There are also some technical issues, beyond deciding which events qualify.

For example, for an earthquake, what if I check in as "safe" after the initial earthquake, and then am killed shortly thereafter by an aftershock? (The same issue holds for other kinds of events, such as terrorist attacks.)

Facebook's page about the Safety Check says it's for natural disasters (as of November 15th, 2015), and does not mention other events such as terrorist attacks, nor how any of these will be selected. Yet it was used for an event that was not a natural disaster.

More broadly, it could be argued that being black, female, or GLBT,  in America is to live under constant threat (there are many other examples but I am not qualified to discuss them much, nor can I make an exhaustive list, this is just an example). But, like the framework that silently suggests that Beirut is less coverage worthy than Paris, these issues should be kept quiet.

Facebook has taken action in a very contentious area, one where ideology and hegemony are heavily invested in outcomes and how we think about what is worth thinking about. Yes, as we should expect from most gigantic global companies, they did a bad job. As we know, people have been discussing these issues for a long time. These issues are still issues. Now, more people are talking. That's an important step. Steps are how we move forward.

Addendum: There is also the profile picture change to overlay the French flag on your profile photo, which again is not a bad idea, the problem is still which events are worthy of this level of attention, who is deciding, and how are these decisions made. It's the same problem as that with big data algorithms, except here it's with people's decision making.

Addendum, part 2: Here is an article from The Verge about why the people at Facebook who make these decisions did so, but I personally don't find the official explanation very satisfying about the criteria for their selection of events because the official response avoids all of the difficult issues that most people are talking about. If you're a company like Facebook, you can address these issues in a much better, direct, and clear manner. 

Straits Times Mention

Some work I did with Dr. Marko Skoric got mentioned in Singapore's paper of record, the Straits Times. The work looks at media use by students who were organizing a protest. One important take away was how the students navigated the media environment, using both the "new" media and the "traditional" media. If researchers and analysts only consider the new media environment, they aren't going to get an accurate picture of human behavior.

The Battle Over Language

So, Fox is still in a kurfuffle over the money they might have lost with those Wolverine downloads. 

From The Hollywood Reporter: 

"Piracy is a serious issue for us. We now estimate that there are above 4 million downloads of that stolen 'Wolverine' movie that was up there," News Corp. COO Peter Chernin told Wall Street analysts on Wednesday.

Notice he says "stolen". This is inaccurate, as Fox still has the movie, it was not stolen from them. It was copied. Fox still has as much of the movie as it had before, all of it. Nothing is missing. Although Chernin makes a financial assessment, it is not at all like theft from a bank where actual physical goods ($) are taken from the bank and the bank no longer has those goods in its possession. 

This... is hegemony! What a great word. It is the battle over ideas, if you accept that intellectual property is exactly the same as physical property, then you are thinking what they want you to think.

Old Media + New Tech = Disruption!

Newspapers are all after Google for including snippets of their news, or something. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The Author's Guild is all over Amazon for text-to-speech in the Kindle. 

Reminds me of, well, everything. The radio powers (initially AM) suppressing FM technology (which was better) so as to protect their AM investments. The TV establishment fighting cable TV and the VCR until they could profit from them (I cannot resist the "Boston Strangler!" comment, who can, it is perfect). Newspapers hating the internet. Oh wait that's where we still are!

Established powers like the status quo, it's what sustains them, even if they draw on a formerly disruptive technology. They always seek to stop challenges in any way possible, and when consumers make it very clear they would use something new, the established powers seek to destroy it, often legally. Eventually if they can they co-opt the new technology, but that doesn't always happen. 

Challenge is opportunity. Embrace it (but not like an anaconda would).

Fox Misses Opportunity With Wolverine Leak

Piracy Puts Film Online One Month Before Open from the NYT.

The short version is that the Fox lawyers are all freaking over the fact that they still can't control human behavior through technology (DRM, anyone?) and law (DMCA anyone?) because someone leaked a pre-final version of the movie Wolverine onto the internet.

So, their response is to freak out and worry that the "untold thousands of people" who watched it won't like it since it wasn't the final version. If someone is going to watch an unpolished version on a small screen, don't you think they will want to watch the real thing? (Unless it is really horrible, that is, but whose fault is that?)

This is a missed opportunity for Fox. (Idiots.)

Run an ad. Lawyers (white guys in suits) running around, throwing paper into the air, yelling in panicked tones, "It leaked! It leaked! The internet!" Then have a calm person with all of that in the background, face the camera (like Alec Baldwin in the Hulu ads), and say "Thousands of people wanted to see Wolverine so much, they grabbed an unfinished version from the internet. Unfinished! Missing special effects! Can you imagine what the final cut must be like?" (Or something like that, I don't usually write advertising.)

Media Misattribution

Two things in the media have been rather horribly wrong, although the second one was only today but two things was one too many.

The NY Post, which is very trashy and revels in being so, had the big front page splash (pun intended) about the airplane landing safely in the Hudson. The call it the "Miracle on the Hudson." Sorry, no, that assumes that the pilots didn't know what they were doing, and that they were doomed to crash and many people were going to die, except that some unknown, invisible force (which had just moments before thrown some birds in the engines, so nice!), intervened. ("Engines Missing" is the headline, well yes, they do tend to get ripped off the plane in the event of a water landing, so, no surprise that they're not attached -- but they're not missing, they're just at the bottom of the river.)



The pilots on American commercial jetliners are heavily trained in dealing with emergencies and are highly qualified to do so. No miracle, just good training, and the good foresight to train pilots in case of emergency. Luckily there was enough open space on the Hudson, which is fairly large, but it is also full of boats. Hitting a boat is probably worse than hitting a bird.

But, the Post is trash. It's like the Boston Herald. Waste of paper.

The second, also annoying, is how in the many Bush reviews now that he is finally leaving, too many commentators are unproblematically saying that Bush has had, over his eight years, both record high and low approval ratings, with the low being current (and for a while), and the high being right after 9/11.

Except, his high approval rating after 9/11 wasn't an approval rating for him at all.

That's why we have training (like pilots!) in survey methodology. Just because you ask a question that looks simple and straightforward doesn't mean that it is. Human psychology is way too complex for it to be that easy. Of course, Bush didn't do anything after 9/11 except make some speeches, so there wasn't much to approve of. What people were responding to was showing faith in their country and patriotism. The President is, among other things, a figurehead, a human representation of the country. Expressing faith in the president is, in some cases, equivalent to expressing faith in the nation. Given that Al Qaeda had just shown us that we shouldn't have had much faith in our nation's ability to defend itself from terrorism (did you forget the first time they tried to destroy the WTC in 1993? You did? Shame on you! Didn't think they'd try again, huh? Complacency!), many people felt it was an important time to express faith in their nation. (The horribly sad story of the complete failure of the communications on that day is so depressing -- given how good the republicans are on security, you think they would have done something about that ahead of time -- oh, they didn't did they? They didn't defend us from the worst (so far) terrorist attack on US soil -- how good at security are they, you have to wonder. If they were any good, 9/11 wouldn't have happened.)

Here it is right here in the NYT today.

In surveys that began with Gallup polling in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mr. Bush has the distinction of being the president with both the highest and lowest approval ratings. The highest, 90 percent, was recorded shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

So, it is disturbing to see media talking-heads repeat this statistic which is completely incorrect. They don't understand surveys, and not even the survey people are apparently pointing this out. Lies, damned lies, and statistics indeed.

DRM - Dummies Rule Media

DRM is a horrible, horrible thing, and even though it's been pointed out again and again, companies still use it (are the DRM peddlers FUDsters?).

Penny Arcade has a nice three-parter on DRM, although part three is best (part one, part two). Of course there are the accompanying comics (one, two, three). 

You should of course read Cory Doctorow's Microsoft talk about DRM (or maybe watch the video).

The Machinist at Salon has a nice write-up of the dust-up over the Spore DRM. Omg it installed SecuROM on my Mac?!?! Not acceptable! Well I guess I have to find out how to remove it now...

Don't forget the Sony rootkit fiasco either. Wikipedia's external links for the article may be better, there is one for BoingBoing and one for Groklaw.

Oh and, a late add, XKCD's recent take on it. Pretty accurate and concise.

The Daily Show

Good writeup of The Daily Show in the SNYT. I won't explain it (spoiler), just go read it.

The Yankees

If you missed it, a Boston Red Sox fan, who lives in the Bronx and is a construction worker, buried a Red Sox jersey in the cement of the new Yankees stadium. The Yankees ownership found out about it, much brouhaha ensued, and they dug it out to the tune of $50,000 (and about five hours of drilling).

Seriously.

Apparently, some people take these things seriously. Yankees President Randy Levine is one of them, who said the worker "was trying to do a really bad thing" and that it was "a very, very bad act." A shirt? I had no idea a shirt could be so powerful! Billions of people wear them every day! This is incredible! And people wear them to baseball games! Scary!

According to the worker, the shirt did not cause any structural problems (it was in a floor), yet the Yankees front office were discussing possible criminal charges. I do not believe our legal system recognizes jinxes, since they don't exist except in people's heads (and no, that does not make them real).

Also amusing is the copywrong notice on the AP story ("This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed."), which is wrong, and of course I could comment on how the New York Post is taking this seriously, but if that surprises you then you don't know the Post (so I hope it surprises you).

The Middleman

The Penny Arcade guys, who, as far as I can tell, have built up to a convention, an annual fund raiser, massive street cred, and now a game, all from a mere cartoon (wow it looked totally different back then), were discussing the forthcoming On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness and the Greenhouse distribution app, and they linked to an interview they have over at Wired (with their actual pictures). 

Wired: Oh, so this goes back to the earlier experiences you guys had, where you let other people take too much control of your content and it didn't work out.

Gabe: Yeah. We were essentially in the business of being screwed, professionally, for years. If we can avoid being screwed, we're gonna do it.

This should bring to mind, dear reader, all the material you read about musicians, Napster, the RIAA (vile people), and how the Internet was going to erase the middleman and connect consumers (citizens?) directly to non-middleman businesses (all of this was heady pre-dot-con hype). Eventually the hype machine realized that middlemen can be good at times (a realization that generated even more column inches and advertising revenue), such as with news filtering, but not all the time (possibly with musicians, and I hope you've read about alternate revenue models for musicians that the Internet is allowing us to imagine and realize, and as you see above, with cartoonists).

It was striking to see the same issue being played out ten years on in the case of some really smart, capable guys. I thought we'd figured that one out, but I admit running your own web server is not an easy thing. 

Tee Shirts

Bought the nephew a tee shirt from this guy who makes cool designs. So cool I'm linking to his site, increasing his visibility. See what making good products and being nice to your customers does? Free advertising!

In an ASCII Far, Far Away

Wow! This takes dedication. To make, I mean, but to watch as well. Old school. (C/o GS.)

telnet: towel.blinkenlights.nl

South Park Free

Wow. Every South Park episode is free. No no, not just bittorrent, but from the rights holders. Amazing. They get it. What a great day. Sure, there are some ads in the episode, but somebody has got to pay for it (apparently not the current revenue streams, though). Granted I am used to turning on the TV and finding all my content in one place (on the TV), and although that model is not the only one anymore, maybe it won't be too hard to find content in a number of locations. (iTunes does make that easy.) I see they are also available on XBox Live (or whatever it is called, everything is "Live" with them, which is odd if you are really live -- only zombies would stress "Live" like Microsoft does, it's creepy), but did not check pricing (which should be zero). Oh I checked XBL pricing, they are not free. I believe the XBL ones are higher resolution, but still, that's not very competitive, although versioning is a traditional market strategy.

NYT and the Internets

Annoying and amusing, the New York Times still suffers from an inconsistent web presentation with articles that are (most likely) automatically moved from the newspaper's paper channel. Here is an article that has an example, shown in the image below.

The Northwest link is to Marketwatch.com, but it is so inconsistent to have only one airline with a link (to the airline? to NYT stories about the airline? no). Items in a list should be the same type, and they are here, but they are not treated the same and it is a jarring read and inconsistent use of the power of connectivity. If they can link one, why not the others? (To be fair Continental is linked earlier in the article, but still.) To be more fair, their bloggers do a much better job with links.

Update 4/4/08: Aha! I am not the only one to feel this way. Jack Shafer at Slate does too.

Fútbol

I was watching UEFA League yesterday, and the irony of the Fox Soccer Network was too much. Soccer, the beautiful game, the international event, loved by many including the French. And Fox has a station devoted to it here in the US? Fox, the republican feaux-newshound, isolationist, French-hating ignorant lying scum? Yes. That is too weird. I guess money is more important to them than principles, but I'm not too surprised by that.