Media Technology

UPDATE 4/1/04: This was, in fact, all an elaborate April Fool’s hoax perpatrated by the moderators of the board. And I fell for it hook, line and sinker!

The Chainmaille Board is a niche web community for both professional and amateur artisans who make chainmaille jewelry and armor, one of the three big discussion boards for this community (the other two being the Maille Artisans International League and The Ring Lord Chainmail Forum). The board is run by “Lord” Charles DeCordene, who like The Ring Lord also sells his own supplies and jewelry, both to and in competition with other members of the community. The balance between fostering a community and competing with other members in that community is a universal issue from everywhere from niche hobbies to global industries, but that balance was shifted last week when Lord Charles announced that the discussion board was being purchased lock, stock and barrel by Wal-Mart.

Now the site’s new banner sports a “Provided by Wal*Mart, Always Low Prices” logo, and the splash page explains what the purchase will mean to the community:

First, here is what it doesn’t mean:

• We will under no circumstances sell your email addresses to anyone.
• We will under no circumstances send you promotional e-mail (also known as SPAM). On rare occasions we may send members a PM or an email should an urgent matter arise (i.e., if your posts contain inappropriate language or images).
• TCB will continue to have no pop-up ads. We find these annoying, and believe it would drive members away. So quite simply, we’re not going to do it.
• We will not censor your political statements. We believe in free speech. However posts that contain profanity or statements and images that we believe are offensive to the family-nature of the board will be deleted.

And what it does mean:

• Increased tech support: We will soon set up a 24-hour chat forum where members can ask any technical questions.
• Easily accessible archives: Building on previous TCB efforts, we will compile a list of articles and gallery photos to make the board the best resource on Chain Mail available on the Internet.
• Connections to other board members: Because Wal-Mart is sponsoring multiple boards, we will offer members on all boards the option of registering with our General Community Board. This board will provide you the opportunity to find members in your area with similar interests. We are considering hosting monthly shopping days at certain Wal-Mart locations where members can gather together for a day of fun! It is up to you how involved you choose to be.
• Opportunity to sell your chain mail: Our General Community Board will have an online store that has not only Wal-Mart products, but also products of interest to our board members. In the B y Our Members area, members can post items they would like to sell. Think of it as a larger version of the Trading Post currently on TCB. Unlike many other online stores and auction sites, it will be absolutely free to post up to 15 items per month.
• Store Discounts: Beginning in June 2004, Members of Wal-Mart boards will be able to apply online for our new CyberCustomer Discount Card (CCDC). There is no annual membership fee and owners of a CCDC card will save 5% on all Wal-Mart purchases over $20.

We hope that you are as pleased as we are about this exciting venture. We look forward to building a successful relationship with every member here.

On the one hand, Wal-Mart’s sponsorship is adding clear value to this community: Lord Charles was having trouble running the discussion board with his own time and money, and could never offer the kind of technical and developmental support the board will now enjoy. They also will likely expand exposure and thus membership in the community, which in spite of the necessary growing pains will likely help the community in the long run. Wal-Mart, of course, now has the opportunity both to become identified as an insider in a close-knit community and to put their own online auction sites in a premium position. That’s vital for something like auctions, where customers and sellers alike will want to settle on a single marketplace. That marketplace is currently eBay — it’s clear that Wal-Mart hopes to change that default by getting a hold in certain communities and then leveraging that hold through their General Community Board and CyberCustomer Discount Cards.

On the other hand, there have also been concerns expressed in the community, ranging from “Wal-Mart is evil” to “how can a small wholesaler/retailer like myself ever hope to compete against this?” And the latter is a very good question, especially for people who don’t have the volume, Wal-Mart compatible style/branding, or just the desire to sell in the new landscape. These people might be in trouble down the road, forced to change their ways or quietly fade away (to the detriment of the community at large). On the third hand, small sellers who can make the shift to the new model might find the pie getting bigger and whole new marketplaces opened up, just as we’re already seeing with eBay and Amazon Store cottage industries.

For anyone doing research with audio or video recording devices (or just budding voyeurs), the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has a nice practical guide to wiretapping and video recording laws for the 50 states.

I love Joshua Kinberg’s idea for a thesis in multimedia: a chalk-spraying bike that can print protest messages via the Web and SMS during the Republican National Convention in NYC. Perhaps the best part is is proposal for how to evaluate his work:

I will consider this project successful if I can print at least 100 messages in strategic locations during the week of the RNC. The amount of media coverage, unique visits on the project’s website, the website’s Google ranking, and the amount of online participation are other methods by which to gauge the effectiveness of the project.

It reminds me of conversations my officemate and I used to have about teaching an undergrad class in the media and manipulation, with the final exam being to plant a false story in as public a news source as possible.

E Ink just announced the first consumer device to use their Electronic Paper technology: the Sony LIBRIé e-Book reader. Six-inch diagonal display, 170ppi, 4 shades gray reflective screen with an almost 180-degree viewing angle, weighing around 300g with four AAA batteries. Even better than the viewing angle is the battery life: unlike LCDs, electronic paper takes power to modify a screen, but not to maintain a static display. Sony’s tests show you can read around 10,000 pages on four AAA Alkaline batteries.

References

• First-Generation Electronic Paper Display From Philips, Sony And E Ink To Be Used In New Electronic Reading Device (E Ink Press Release, 24 March 2004)
• E Ink’s Electronic Paper Commercialized (E Ink Press Release, 24 March 2004)
• Sony To Launch E Ink-based eBook In April (Timothy Lord, Slashdot, 24 March 2004)

Borrowing a page from Dean, the Bush/Cheney campaign’s webpage provided a create your own poster link to produce a PDF poster, complete with your own campaign slogan like “Negative 2.6 Mill. Jobs Created and Counting.” Oops. A few weeks after Ana Marie Cox at wonkette.com suggested the idea, the B/C campaign staff caught on and crippled their poster-maker (which I note doesn’t work in Safari at all now), but some of the best posters have now been turned into a Bush/Cheney Sloganator slide show.

Given the trend towards underground resampling and “media consumer reuse,” I expect this to be the watershed year for underground campaign hacks. Anyone seen a re-edited TV ad yet, complete with inserted subtitles and footnotes? Where’s the Phantom Editor when you need him?

Doug Adams of Doug’s Scripts for iTunes has just posted about a nice little bit of Applescript he’s coded to make any AAC file bookmarkable on your iPod, just like Audible.com’s audio books. Apparently all it takes is to change the file type (not the extension) to the four-character string “M4B ” (note the space). Apple posted the method in their Knowledge Base (article #93731), but the article was then quickly removed.

I have to wonder why Apple felt the need to pull this info (I also wonder how/if they thought pulling it would stop it from being used now that it’s out, but that’s another question). My best guess is they have some sort of exclusive deal with Audible.com for bookmarking capability, and somebody blew it by revealing the hack they used. I’d love to hear if someone knows more about the politics behind this though.

(Thanks to Rawhide for the link, and of course Doug Adams for the script!)

About a month ago I started downloading audio lectures and listening to them on my iPod. There’s something absolutely wonderful about being able to browse through lectures by statesmen, Nobel laureates and other top minds of our era — here’re a dozen that I’ve especially liked:

• A Conversation with President Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton & Michael Beschloss (JFK Library And Museum Talks, 5/28/03)
• The U.S. Economy: The Last 50 Years and the Next 50 Years, Franco Modigliani, Paul A. Samuelson & Robert M. Solow (MIT World: Distributed Intelligence, 9/18/02)
• Fortune Favors The Bold, Lester Thurow (MIT World: Distributed Intelligence, 10/23/03)
• Rogue States and Weapons of Mass Destruction, Sandy Berger & Ashton Carter (JFK Library And Museum Talks, 3/11/03)
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker (MIT World: Distributed Intelligence, 10/31/02)
• Defining the Boundaries: Homeland Security and Its Impact on Scientific Research, Jerome Friedman & Phillip Sharp (MIT World: Distributed Intelligence, 9/23/03)
• Innovating Information Technologies to Protect Human Rights, Jim Fruchterman & Tom Parks (World Affairs Council, 02/04/04)
• Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America’s Response, John Shattuck & Samantha Power (JFK LIbrary And Museum Talks, 12/9/03)
• Patrick Leahy: U.S. Senator (D-Vt.), Patrick Lehey (National Press Club, 6/25/03)
• The Future of Work, Tom Malone (MIT World: Distributed Intelligence, 7/6/03)
• The Coming Energy Revolution, Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran (World Affairs Council, 01/21/04)
• ME++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell (MIT World: Distributed Intelligence, 11/13/03)

It costs $499 to buy a new 40G iPod.
It costs $10,730 to fill it with songs purchased online at 99 cents each.

I got my first Astroturf political spam comment today on my post on California mental illness legislation. The brief comment links to a press release signed by IPRWire founder and staunch Edwards Supporter Hans Schnauber, better known as The Butterfly Guy. Schnauber made the news in 1996 for registering domain names of big companies and then posting Web pages about how awful those companies have been for butterfly habitat.

The Kerry screed itself takes the well-known story of how Kerry discovered only last year that his grandfather was actually Jewish, and how he had taken his own life in 1921, probably due to financial difficulties. It then goes on to make the completely unfounded assertion that “According to sources, including The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, and Fox News, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts has a family history of severe mental illness” and asks the ominous question “Will the American people vote for a candidate with a family history of mental illness and clinical depression?” Of course, the release doesn’t actually cite the news stories to which it refers, but given a a NetNews post by the author we can guess it refers to the original Boston Globe article and the Sun-Times and Fox News pick-ups, none of which ever mention the possibility of mental illness.

A little web-searching reveals that Hans is hyping the press release on NetNews, posting under the name “Day Bird Loft (loft@pigeons.ws)” (see this post where “Loft” signs his post as “Hans”, and note that pigeons.ws points to the same base scripted website as iprwire.net). But in spite of hyping his story in numerous news groups (sometimes even replying to his own message), I’ve yet to see a response taking him to task for his self-promotion. Given that the NetNews is usually quite aware of spammers, I have to assume he’s gotten away with it for four days (a lifetime on the Net) because his posts are mostly hand-crafted, point to an official-sounding press account (most people don’t know PRWeb is a for-hire press-release wire service), and because he actually defends himself in the threads he posts to. I probably wouldn’t have investigated it either had his comment not been so clearly generated by a spam-bot that got tripped by keywords out of context.

What’s the moral of this story? Just another warning of what we already knew:

1. The Net is a powerful tool for political messages
2. It’s as easy to rumor-monger a lie as it is the truth
3. On the Internet, no one knows you’re not a crowd

Update: Hans comments that he didn’t use a spam-bot, just “plain old fashion tech creativity.” It’s that kind of personal touch that’s missing so often from spam in this day of automation — I’m glad to see some craftsmen still put a little of themselves in their work.

From a purely strategic standpoint though, I have to wonder about the choice of mental illness as the hook for this smear campaign. The best whisper campaigns say out loud what people are already wondering. It doesn’t have to be true: Gore was an honest man but could be painted as dishonest because of his association with Clinton. (Of course, it helps even more if the rumor has truth to it, as was the case with Clinton.) But I haven’t seen anything in Kerry to make me think insanity; it just doesn’t connect emotionally. The story would have stuck much better to Dean I expect — people were much more willing to think he was unhinged, and there were already a lot more forces trying to spin him that way. Perhaps when the nomination is over Hans will explain his reasoning and we’ll be able to do a post-mortum on his one-man campaign.

References

• Mental Illness and Presidential Politics (Hans Schnauber, IPR Newswire, 21 February 2004)
• Butterfly zealot raises Time Warner’s ire (Wired News, 14 January 1997)
• Search For Kerry’s Roots Finds Surprising History (Michael Kranish, Boston Globe, February 2 2003) [archived at RootsWeb.com, scroll down for original English version]
• ‘Irish-American’ Kerry’s Jewish roots revealed (Lynn Sweet, Chicago Sun-Times, February 9 2003)
• Sen. Kerry Learns of Jewish Ancestry (Fox News reprint of Associated Press story, February 3 2003)

Kuro5hin has a brief analysis of the code structure and comments in the recently-leaked Win2K sourcecode.

His conclusions:

The security risks from this code appear to be low. Microsoft do appear to be checking for buffer overruns in the obvious places. The amount of networking code here is small enough for Microsoft to easily check for any vulnerabilities that might be revealed: it’s the big applications that pose more of a risk. This code is also nearly four years old: any obvious problems should be patched by now.

Microsoft’s fears that this code will be pirated by its competitors also seem largely unfounded. With application code this would be a risk, but it’s hard to see Microsoft’s operating system competitors taking advantage of it. Neither Apple nor Linux are in a much of position to steal code and get away with it, even if it was useful to them.

In short, there is nothing really surprising in this leak. Microsoft does not steal open-source code. Their older code is flaky, their modern code excellent. Their programmers are skilled and enthusiastic. Problems are generally due to a trade-off of current quality against vast hardware, software and backward compatibility.

I was also gratified to see this comment, based on a book I loved as a kid:

// TERRIBLE HORRIBLE NO GOOD VERY BAD HACK

Even in Australia…