Category Archives: Internet

Legislature.com

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In 1996 (maybe 1997) I was involved in the first effort to stream audio of floor debate from the Missouri legislature. It was early days for streaming and the audio sounded pretty shitty. We had very limited bandwidth and the first RealAudio encoders were primitive. But it was the first time anyone could listen to live debate without being in the Capitol building (where they had audio lines to each rep’s office).

That first year I think we only streamed live but the following year we started archiving the audio as well. That, however, was nearly useless if you were trying to find a particular piece of debate in audio files that could run five or ten hours.

Not sure I can explain this but what we did was insert links to specific points in the debate (not unlike how we now create YouTube links that jump you X minutes into the video). I spent hours doing this before I dumped it on an assistant. But it allowed someone that wanted to hear debate on House Bill 123 to click a link and get pretty close. Unbelievably tedious.

We provided this service at no charge for a year or two and then started charging $500 per session. Lots of takers, mostly lobbyists and lawyers. We bumped it to $750 the next session and lost a few subscribers. It wasn’t long after that that the House and Senate Information Offices took this service over and we were out of business. It wasn’t a good “business” business but it offered a hint of what would be coming down the road in terms of streaming.

If you’ve never listened to floor debate of a state legislature, it’s hard to describe how boring this shit was. As streaming tech got better, someone would suggest they stream video and they’d take a shot at that, usually on the final day of the session. On one such attempt they had to pull the plug quickly because the cameras were showing members dozing at their desks.

Once people saw that we could actually do this, we started hearing grumblings about the audio archives. It was explained to me this way: Since the dawn of time, the House and Senate journals were the official record of what happened in the respective chambers. But those records could be amended. So if one member called another member “a lying motherfucker,” that got stricken from the official journal. But but not from our audio archives. This made lots of folks very uncomfortable and — ultimately — led to the legislature taking over. I always assumed some poor schmuck got stuck with editing those monster audio files.

UPDATE: I failed to mention the important role Phil Atkinson and Charlie Peters (and the people that worked with them) played in this (and other) digital project. I’d ask, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could…” and in a few days (or hours!) they found a way to do it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: This was our first web page for this project. Really ugly, and really long.

You are being tracked

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“This list, instead, tallies the kind of tracking an average person might encounter on an ordinary day in the United States. Each example has been sourced officially or from a major publication.” [The 24 ways we’re tracked on a regular basis.]

  • Car movements — Every car since 2006 contains a chip that records your speed, braking, turns, mileage, accidents whenever you start your car.
  • Highway traffic — Cameras on poles and sensors buried in highway record the location of cars by license plates and fast-track badges. Sev enty million plates are recorded each month.
  • Ride-share taxis — Uber, Lyft, and other decentralized rides record your trips.
  • Long-distance travel — Your travel itinerary for air flights and trains is recorded.
  • Drone surveillance — Along U.S. borders, Predator drones monitor and record outdoor activities.
  • Postal mail — The exterior of every piece of paper mail you send or receive is scanned and digitized.
  • Utilities — Your power and water usage patterns are kept by utilities. (Garbage is not cataloged, yet.)
  • Cell phone location and call logs — Where, when, and who you call (meta- data) is stored for months. Some phone carriers routinely store the contents of calls and messages for days to years.
  • Civic cameras — Cameras record your activities 24/7 in most city down towns in the U.S.
  • Commercial and private spaces — Today 68 percent of public employers, 59 percent of private employers, 98 percent of banks, 64 percent of public schools, and 16 percent of homeowners live or work under cameras.
  • Smart home — Smart thermostats (like Nest) detect your presence and behavior patterns and transmit these to the cloud. Smart electrical outlets (like Belkin) monitor power consumption and usage times shared to the cloud.
  • Home surveillance — Installed video cameras document your activity inside and outside the home, stored on cloud servers.
  • Interactive devices — Your voice commands and messages from phones (Siri, Now, Cortana), consoles (Kinect), smart TVs, and ambient micro phones (Amazon Echo) are recorded and processed on the cloud.
  • Grocery loyalty cards — Supermarkets track which items you purchase and when.
    E- retailers — Retailers like Amazon track not only what you purchase, but what you look at and even think about buying.
  • IRS — Tracks your financial situation all your life.
  • Credit cards — Of course, every purchase is tracked. Also mined deeply with sophisticated AI for patterns that reveal your personality, ethnic ity, idiosyncrasies, politics, and preferences.
  • E-wallets and e-banks — Aggregators like Mint track your entire financial situation from loans, mortgages, and investments. Wallets like Square and PayPal track all purchases.
  • Photo face recognition — Facebook and Google can identify (tag) you in pictures taken by others posted on the web. The location of pictures can identify your location history.
  • Web activities — Web advertising cookies track your movements across the web. More than 80% of the top thousand sites employ web cookies that follow you wherever you go on the web. Through agree ments with ad networks, even sites you did not visit can get informa tion about your viewing history.
  • Social media — Can identify family members, friends, and friends of friends. Can identify and track your former employers and your cur rent work mates. And how you spend your free time.
  • Search browsers — By default Google saves every question you’ve ever asked forever.
  • Streaming services — What movies (Netflix), music (Spotify), video (You Tube) you consume and when, and what you rate them. This includes cable companies; your watching history is recorded.
  • Book reading — Public libraries record your borrowings for about a month. Amazon records book purchases forever. Kindle monitors your reading patterns on ebooks — where you are in the book, how long you take to read each page, where you stop.

“It is shockingly easy to imagine what power would accrue to any agency that could integrate all these streams. The fear of Big Brother stems directly from how technically easy it would be to stitch these together. At the moment, however, most of these streams are independent. Their bits are not integrated and correlated.”

The Inevitable (Kevin Kelly) (PDF)

Paying for news

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Yesterday I subscribed to the digital edition of the New York Times. I think this is the first time I have paid for news online. I’ll pay $3.75 per week, less than the cost of a double-espresso at The Coffee Zone.

Recall? What recall?

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google-search
While getting my car serviced (at the MINI dealership in St. Louis) earlier this week I mentioned the Takata airbag recall and the young man at the part window got puzzled look on his face.

“You’ve heard about the exploding airbag canisters and the big recall, right?

Nope, he insisted. He hadn’t heard about any airbag recall. About that time another young man came up to the next part window so I asked him. Same response. Had no idea what I was referring to.

I’m certain they weren’t fucking with me. Somehow they had missed seeing/hearing/reading _anything_ about this long-running story. I find that amazing.

Unless I’m missing something here, this means these two men could not have watched a network or cable newscast, read a newspaper, or spent 2 minutes on an online news site for the past 6 months (longer?).

How is that possible? And what else is going on in the world about which these young men are oblivious? I assume they’re on Facebook and would have seem some reference to this story there. No?

The end of capitalism has begun

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The provocative headline of this article (by Paul Mason in The Guardian) is enough to make some dismiss it out of hand. I hope you’ll give these excerpts a quick scan and, if you see something interesting, click through to the article.

  • Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet. As a result, large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites. Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms: the banking system, the planning system and late neoliberal culture reward above all the creator of low-value, long-hours jobs.
  • We’re surrounded not just by intelligent machines but by a new layer of reality centred on information. Consider an airliner: a computer flies it; it has been designed, stress-tested and “virtually manufactured” millions of times; it is firing back real-time information to its manufacturers. On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet. Seen from the ground it is the same white metal bird as in the James Bond era. But it is now both an intelligent machine and a node on a network. It has an information content and is adding “information value” as well as physical value to the world. On a packed business flight, when everyone’s peering at Excel or Powerpoint, the passenger cabin is best understood as an information factory.
  • The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them.
  • Today the whole of society is a factory. We all participate in the creation and recreation of the brands, norms and institutions that surround us. At the same time the communication grids vital for everyday work and profit are buzzing with shared knowledge and discontent. Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they “cannot silence or disperse.”
  • By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.
  • The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted – whether conceived in a tent camp, prison cell or the table football space of a startup company.
  • The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago.

We are data: the future of machine intelligence (2015)

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“Artificial Intuition happens when a computer and its software look at data and analyze it using computation that mimics human intuition at the deepest levels: language, hierarchical thinking — even spiritual and religious thinking. The machines doing the thinking are deliberately designed to replicate human neural networks, and connected together form even larger artificial neural networks.”

This is from an article by Douglas Coupland. Maybe one of the more frightening things I’ve read about data collection. Let’s start with a few of one-liners:

“Amazon can tell if you’re straight or gay within seven purchases.”
“Doug’s Law: An app is only successful if it puts a lot of people out of work.”
“The amount of internet freedom we have right now is the most we’re ever going to get.”

He starts his piece with a description of an imaginary app called Wonkr. I had to read this a few times to decide if he was serious or not.

“You put Wonkr on your phone and it asks you a quick set of questions about your beliefs. Then, the moment there are more than a few people around you (who also have Wonkr), it tells you about the people you’re sharing the room with. You’ll be in a crowded restaurant in Nashville and you can tell that 73 per cent of the room is Republican. Go into the kitchen and you’ll see that it’s 84 per cent Democrat. You’ll be in an elevator in Manhattan and the higher you go, the percentage of Democrats shrinks. Go to Germany — or France or anywhere, really — and Wonkr adapts to local politics. The thing to remember is: Wonkr only activates in crowds. If you’re at home alone, with the apps switched off, nobody can tell anything about you.”

“Wonkr’s job is to tell you the political temperature of a busy space. “Am I among friends or enemies?” But then you can easily change the radius of testability. Instead of just the room you’re standing in, make it of the block or the whole city — or your country. Wonkr is a de facto polling app. Pollsters are suddenly out of a job: Wonkr tells you — with astonishing accuracy — who believes what, and where they do it.”

“Wonkr is a free app but why not help it by paying say, 99 cents, to allow it to link you with people who think just like you. Remember, to sign on to Wonkr you have to take a relatively deep quiz. Maybe 155 questions, like the astonishingly successful eHarmony.com.”

If you’re busy, put this aside until you have 10 minutes. It’s packed tighter than cocaine mule’s carry-on.

The AI we confront will be us

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From an article by Tim O’Reilly

“When news of import spreads around the world in moments, is this not the awareness in some kind of global brain? When an idea takes hold in millions of individual minds, and is reinforced by repetition across our silicon networks, is it not a persistent thought?”

It’s a rare day I don’t “ask Google” a question. Usually several. Increasingly, Google provides a useful answer. As this bit of magic becomes commonplace, the line between Me and the Net becomes thinner and thinner and will soon disappear. (Already, perhaps?) My mind (whatever that is) feels like it’s escaping the cramped confines of my head and it feels wonderful.

“AI that we will confront is not going to be a mind in an individual machine. It will not be something we look at as other. It may well be us.”

As our Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal ancestors slowly became what we are today?

The SMAYS Award

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smays-award

The company I worked for holds an annual meeting of their sales reps that includes an awards ceremony. The awards are called the Clydes in honor of the company founder (Clyde Lear). Sort of like the Oscars but, well, the Clydes. One of the categories — Digital Sales — is named after me. I was pretty annoying in the late 90’s and early 00’s on the subject of the Internet. Lots of eye rolling back then, big part of the company’s revenue today. This is, I’m convinced, a short-lived vanity. It already seems odd to refer to something as digital when everything is, and has been, digital for a long time.