Slashdot Mirror

Anti-Globalism sends us to Ars Technica for Jon Stokes's musing on the falling value of Web advertising. Stokes put forward the outlying possibility — not a prediction — that ad rates could fall by 40% before turning up again, if they ever do. "A web page, in contrast, is typically festooned with hyperlinked visual objects that fall all over themselves in competing to take you elsewhere immediately once you're done consuming whatever it is that you came to that page for. So the page itself is just one very small slice of an unbounded media experience in which a nearly infinite number of media objects are scrambling for a vanishingly small sliver of your attention. ... We've had a few hundred years to learn to monetize print, over 75 years to monetize TV, and, most importantly, millennia to build business models based on scarcity. In contrast, our collective effort to monetize post-scarcity digital media have only just begun."

Anti-Globalism passes along a review in Ars of some recent speculation on the role of interconnected computer models in the global economic crash. "If Ritholtz, Taleb, Mandelbrot, and the rest of the computer modeling and financial engineering naysayers are correct about the big picture, then we really are arguably in the midst a bona fide computer crash. Not an individual computer crash, of course, but a computer crash in the sense of Sun Microsystems' erstwhile marketing slogan, 'the network is the computer.' That is, we have all of these machines in different sectors of the economy, and we've networked all of them together either directly (via an actual network) or indirectly (by using the collective 'output' of machines in one sector as input for the machines in another sector), and like any other computer system the whole thing hums along nicely... up until the point when it doesn't."

Anti-Globalism sends in this quote from Scientific American about attempts to synthesize molecules that function as well or better than the natural building blocks of life: "A molecule that some researchers study in pursuit of this vision is peptide nucleic acid (PNA), which mimics the information-storing features of DNA and RNA but is built on a proteinlike backbone that is simpler and sturdier than their sugar-phosphate backbones. ... Many studies have demonstrated PNA's suitability for modifying gene expression, mostly in molecular test-tube experiments and in cell cultures. Studies in animals have begun, as has research on ways to transform PNA into drugs that can readily enter a person's cells from the bloodstream. ... Some scientists have suggested that PNAs or a very similar molecule may have formed the basis of an early kind of life at a time before proteins, DNA and RNA had evolved. Perhaps rather than creating novel life, artificial-life researchers will be re-creating our earliest ancestors."

Anti-Globalism writes with this excerpt from PCWorld: "Last year, consumers spent $733 million on Cyber Monday, and it's expected to be even bigger this year. According to a survey by online shopping site Shopzilla for the National Retail Federation's Shop.org, nearly 84 percent of online retailers plan to have a Cyber Monday promotion on December 1. That's up from just 72 percent last year and zero percent in 2005, says Shop.org executive director Scott Silverman."

Anti-Globalism writes with this excerpt from the Guardian: "China is stealing sensitive information from American computer networks and stepping up its online espionage, according to a US congressional panel. Beijing's investment in rocket technology is also accelerating the militarization of outer space and lifting it into the 'commanding heights' of modern warfare, the advisory group claims. ... A summary of the study, released in advance, alleges that networks and databases used by the US government and American defense contractors are regularly targeted by Chinese hackers. 'China is stealing vast amounts of sensitive information from US computer networks,' says Larry Wortzel, chairman of the commission set up by Congress in 2000 to investigate US-China issues." The full study addresses these issues and others relating to the US-China relationship (PDF).

Anti-Globalism notes a large study out of the UK indicating that computer-aided detection can be as effective at spotting breast cancer as two experts reading the x-rays. Mammograms in Britain are routinely checked by two radiologists or technicians, which is thought to be better than a single review (in the US only a single radiologist reads each mammogram). In a randomized study of 31,000 women, researchers found that a single expert aided by a computer does as well as two pairs of eyes. CAD spotted nearly the same number of cancers, 198 out of 227, compared to 199 for the two readers. "In places like the United States, 'Where single reading is standard practice, computer-aided detection has the potential to improve cancer-detection rates to the level achieved by double reading,' the researchers said."

Anti-Globalism writes with this excerpt from AFP via Yahoo! News: "Seoul-based 'free-to-play' computer game titan Nexon on Wednesday blasted into the US videogame arena with a 'Combat Arms' online first-person shooter title that makes its cash from optional 'micro-transactions' by players. The game makes its money from players that buy animated helmets, outfits, emblems or other virtual items to customize in-game characters. To keep the battlefield even, players earn experience or advanced weaponry by skill so people essentially can't pay for power. ... Startups and established game makers including Japanese goliath Sony are venturing into the free computer game market, according to DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole. 'It looks like it could be very big,' Cole told AFP. 'It's one of the things everybody seems to be looking at. The challenge is it is a very new model and it remains to be seen whether customers used to a free model will be tight when it comes to actually spending money on it.'"

Anti-Globalism writes with this excerpt from CNet: "Google's vision of tomorrow's wireless network is in stark contrast to how wireless operators do business today, setting the two sides on a possible collision course. Earlier this week, the search giant filed a patent application with the US Patent Office describing its vision of an open wireless network where smartphones aren't tied to any single cell phone network. In Google's open wireless world, phones and other wireless devices would search for the strongest, fastest connection at the most competitive price. Essentially, wireless operators' networks would be reduced to 'dumb pipes.'" The full patent application is available as well. Google founder Larry Page recently asked the FCC to free up portions of the broadcast spectrum for this purpose.

Anti-Globalism sends word that MySpace flipped the switch on its online, ad-supported, DRM-free music service that will "... give its roughly 120 million users free access to hundreds of thousands of songs from the world's largest recording labels. Unlike much of the material at Apple's iTunes store, the music sold through MySpace's new service won't contain the protections that limit how many times a track can be copied. MySpace is hoping to set itself apart from iTunes even further by allowing its users to create an unlimited number of playlists containing up to 100 songs apiece, a sharing concept similar to music services already offered by Imeem and Last.fm."

Anti-Globalism writes "We like to think that people will be well informed before making important decisions, such as who to vote for, but the truth is that's not always the case. Being uninformed is one thing, but having a population that's actively misinformed presents problems when it comes to participating in the national debate, or the democratic process. If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief."

Anti-Globalism brings news that New York City has set up a system to accept pictures and videos for their 911 and non-emergency hotlines. The files can come from cell phones, computers, and PDAs. Quoting: "Tipsters in New York City can now send photos and video ... to report crimes and quality-of-life issues such as potholes, officials announced Tuesday. Depending on the case, the images may be shared widely with the public, with police officers on patrol, individual detectives or other law enforcement agencies, according to city officials. The images may also be used to help in assessing and responding to emergencies."

Anti-Globalism writes "The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth, sometimes more, during peak hours. While these 'power users' are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load."

Anti-Globalism writes with an excerpt from a story at Ars Technica, according to which "a preliminary study from a group of researchers in Quebec suggest that working on a computer may have an additional impact on our waistlines: taxing mental effort appears to cause people to eat significantly more food, even though it doesn't burn many more calories than sitting around and relaxing. The publication, published in a journal called Psychosomatic Medicine, arose from a pilot study that the researchers were performing in order to determine whether a potential connection between mental effort and eating was worth following up on."

Anti-Globalism sends us to a Wall Street Journal for a report that Dell plans to sell its factories in an effort to revamp its production model. Quoting: "Dell's plants are still regarded as efficient at churning out desktop PCs. But within the industry, company-owned factories aren't considered the least expensive way to produce laptops, which have been the main driver of growth lately and are complex and labor-intensive to assemble. Rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. years ago shifted to contract manufacturers -- companies that provide production services to others -- to build their portable computers. H-P builds "less than half" of its PCs in facilities it owns, wrote Tony Prophet, H-P's senior vice president for PC supply chain, in an e-mail. Contract manufacturers can generally produce computers more cheaply because their entire operations are narrowly focused on finding efficiencies in manufacturing, as opposed to large firms like Dell, which must also balance marketing and other considerations."

Anti-Globalism writes "Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it."

During the Olympics we discussed the international monitoring effort as China shut down factories and curtailed automobile travel in an attempt to reduce pollution. Now reader Anti-Globalism sends in a story that reveals that monitoring effort to be ongoing, with a bigger mandate: assessing the impact of China's pollution on the US. In fact the problem is bigger still because, as one researcher put it, "It's one atmosphere." Scientists are finding that pollution from, for example, Europe can travel right around the globe in three weeks. "By some estimates more than 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach the US annually. The problem is only expected to worsen: Some Chinese officials have warned that pollution in their country could quadruple in the next 15 years. While some scientists are less certain, others say the Asian pollution could destabilize weather patterns across the North Pacific, mask the effects of global warming, reduce rainfall in the American West and compromise efforts to meet air-pollution standards."

Anti-Globalism writes to tell us that in a new book titled The Numerati, author Stephen Baker introduces us to some of the math wizardry that is used to label or track our movements through purchases, phone calls, internet usage and other habits. "One of the most promising laboratories for the Numerati is the workplace, where every keystroke, click, and e-mail can be studied. In a chapter called "The Worker," Baker travels to IBM, where mathematicians are building predictive models of their own colleagues. An excerpt: 'Samer Takriti, a Syrian-born mathematician. He heads up a team that's piecing together mathematical models of 50,000 of IBM's tech consultants. The idea is to pile up inventories of all of their skills and then to calculate, mathematically, how best to deploy them. I'm here to find out how Takriti and his colleagues go about turning IBM's workers into numbers. If this works, his team plans to apply these models to other companies and to automate much of what we now call management.'"

Anti-Globalism sends in a Reuters account of an appeals court hearing in which an unnamed ISP is challenging the Patriot Act "National Security Letter" provision that allows the FBI to issue secret letters to ISPs and telecoms, demanding customer records. "A panel of federal appeals court judges pushed a US government lawyer on Wednesday to answer why FBI letters sent out to Internet service providers seeking information should remain secret. ... Between 2003 and 2006 nearly 200,000 national security letters were sent out. Of those about 97 percent received gag orders."

Anti-Globalism points out a story at the German magazine Spiegel profiling two small US companies that monitor terrorist networks online — IntelCenter and SITE Intelgroup. "[Founders of the two companies] Venzke and Devon are two of the most prominent 'terror trackers' worldwide. In the United States, and increasingly in other countries, the term refers to a community of people who spend their days analyzing traces that al-Qaida and affiliated organizations leave behind, especially on the Internet. The two Americans are essentially digital trackers in the age of globalized terrorism. IntelCenter and SITE Intelgroup are the companies that Venzke and Devon, respectively, have founded. They enjoy a strong reputation within the relatively small community of terrorism experts. Beyond that, though, they are virtually unknown ..."

Anti-Globalism suggests an article at Science News on the passing of Henri Cartan, one of the founding members of a strange and influential group of French mathematicians in the twentieth century. "In the 1930s, a group of young French mathematicians led an uprising that revolutionized mathematics. France had lost most of a generation in the First World War, so the emerging hotshots in mathematics had few elders to look up to. And when these radicals did look up, they didn't like what they saw. The practice of mathematics at the time was dry, scattered and muddled, they believed, in need of reinvention and invigoration... Using the nom de plume Nicolas Bourbaki (after a dead Napoleonic general), they wrote a series of textbooks laying out mathematics the right way. Though the young mathematicians started out only intending to write a good textbook for analysis..., they ended up creating dozens of volumes which formed a manifesto for a new philosophy of mathematics. The last of the founders of Bourbaki, Henri Cartan, died August 13 at age 104... Two of his students won the Fields medal..., one won the Nobel Prize in physics and another won the economics Nobel."

Anti-Globalism points out an analysis of India's CAPTCHA-solving industry posted at ZDNet. It begins: "No CAPTCHA can survive a human that's receiving financial incentives for solving it, and with an army of low-waged human CAPTCHA solvers officially in the business of data processing while earning a mere $2 for solving a thousand CAPTCHAs, I'm already starting to see evidence of consolidation between India's major CAPTCHA solving companies. The consolidation, logically leading to increased bargaining power, is resulting in an international franchising model recruiting data processing workers empowered with do-it-yourself CAPTCHA syndication web based kits, API keys, and thousands of proxies to make their work easier and the process more efficient."

Anti-Globalism sends along a piece on how a consumer-friendly service is not so good for PC manufacturers. "Before they ship PCs to retailers like Best Buy, computer makers load them up with lots of free software. For $30, Best Buy will get rid of it for you. That simple cleanup service is threatening the precarious economics of the personal computer industry. Software companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars to PC makers like Hewlett-Packard to install their photo tools, financial programs, and other products, usually with some tie-in to a paid service or upgrade. With margins growing thinner than most laptops, this critical revenue can make the difference between profit and loss for the computer makers, industry analysts say."

Anti-Globalism points out this AP story, which notes: "As cable and phone companies race to upgrade services or offer video for the first time, they're doing it by installing equipment in boxes on lawns, easements and curbs all over American neighborhoods. Telecommunications rollouts have always been messy, but several towns and residents are fighting back with cries of 'Not in my front yard!' AT&T Inc.'s nearly fridge-sized units, which route its new U-verse video product to customers, are drawing particular ire. A few caught fire or even exploded. AT&T said it has fixed that by replacing the units' backup batteries."

Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O'Reilly's ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from Perl. "[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to Perl-based systems as 'legacy' and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in Perl. Business users, of course, don't want nasty old, broken Perl code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in Perl. Its because the Perl code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company's first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don't interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain."

Anti-Globalism sends in Ars coverage of a speech by Jim Griffin, who is a consultant for Warner, one of the big four music labels. Griffin is encouraging dialog on the idea of blanket licensing of music — a topic heretofore more likely to be heard from the EFF or the Barenaked Ladies. "Taking music without paying for it may not be 'morally voluntary,' Griffin says, but he admits it has become 'functionally voluntary.' No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture.' So Griffin's job is to help Warner monetize digital music, and he's convinced that the issue of payment for music is nothing less than 'our generation's nuclear power.' Griffin's most intriguing idea, and one he's been pitching for some time now, is a voluntary, blanket music license; essentially, bringing the collection society model to end users. In this model, consumers would pay royalties into a pot (by paying an extra monthly fee to their ISPs, for instance) and would then have access to all the music from all the labels that participate in the scheme."

Anti-Globalism sends along a PCWorld article outlining two technologies from Intel and Dell that do an end run around Windows. "Dell, Intel and their partners announced last week new technologies that represent major leaps forward for mobility. The companies seem to have discovered the secret to making such bold leaps: Cut Microsoft out of the deal. One technology involves enabling users to gain instant access to a laptop's e-mail, browser and other basic functionality — without booting Windows at all. The second technology enables an Internet-based message to wake a Windows PC from sleep mode. These new technologies are perfect metaphors for what's happening in the industry... Windows is asleep while Microsoft's own partners give users what they really want."

Anti-Globalism writes "In an age of digital manipulation, many people believe that snapshots and family photos need no longer stand as a definitive record of what was, but instead, of what they wish it was. It used to be that photographs provided documentary evidence, and there was something sacrosanct about that, said Chris Johnson, a photography professor at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area. If you wanted to remove an ex from an old snapshot, you had to use a Bic pen or pinking shears. But in the digital age, people treat photos like mash-ups in music, combining various elements to form a more pleasing whole. What were doing, Mr. Johnson said, is fulfilling the wish that all of us have to make reality to our liking. And he is no exception. When he photographed a wedding for his girlfriends family in upstate New York a few years ago, he left a space at the end of a big group shot for one member who was unable to attend. They caught up with him months later, snapped a head shot, and Mr. Johnson used Photoshop to paste him into the wedding photo. Now, he said, everyone knows it is phony, but this faked photograph actually created the assumption people kind of remember him as there."

Anti-Globalism takes us to The Observer for an article by Vint Cerf on how far the internet has come, and how much can still be accomplished through its development. Cerf says, "We're nearing the tipping point for mobile computing to deliver timely, geographically and socially relevant information. Researchers in Japan recently proposed using data from vehicles' windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers to track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible. It may seem academic, but understanding the way severe weather, such as a typhoon, moves through a city could save lives. Further exploration can shed light on demographic, intellectual and epidemiological phenomena, to name just a few areas."

Anti-Globalism sends this except from the Guardian: "In a report commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, leading scientists were asked to examine how a greater understanding of the brain over the next 20 years is likely to drive the development of new medicines and technologies. They found several areas in which progress could have a profound impact, including behaviour-altering drugs, scanners that can interpret a person's state of mind and devices capable of boosting senses such as hearing and vision. ...The report highlights one electronic technique, called transcranial direct current stimulation, which involves using electrical pulses to interfere with the firing of neurons in the brain and has been shown to delay a person's ability to tell a lie."

Naturalist writes "For decades, educators and employers have worried that too few Americans are preparing for careers in science. But there's evidence to support a new, broader concern in this election year: Ordinary Americans may not know enough about science to make informed decisions on key questions."

Naturalist writes with an excerpt from a New York Times story about the need for a more secure method for identification than the password-based system almost everyone currently uses. The article also discusses the weaknesses of the OpenID initiative to simplify the process. "The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords -- and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on. Instead, machines have a cryptographically encoded conversation to establish both parties' authenticity, using digital keys that we, as users, have no need to see. ...OpenID offers, at best, a little convenience, and ignores the security vulnerability inherent in the process of typing a password into someone else's Web site. Nevertheless, every few months another brand-name company announces that it has become the newest OpenID signatory."

jfruhlinger writes "In the upcoming Olympics, competitors will take part in the 'modern' pentathlon, designed in 1912 to simulate the skills a cavalry officer would need when trapped behind enemy lines. ITworld.com has developed a new set of competitions — untangling cables! code obfuscation! — that are a bit more relevant to the modern geek." Don't be too smug, though: Naturalist points out a story indicating that "Exercisers learn faster, remember more, think clearer and bounce back more easily from brain injuries such as a stroke."

Naturalist recommends a piece up at Ars about a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the EFF, CDT, Public Citizen, and a group of 14 law professors in the case of Lori Drew, who posed as a teenage boy to harass another teen online, eventually driving her to suicide. (We've discussed the case a few times.) "[The amicus brief argues] that violating MySpace's Terms of Service agreement shouldn't be considered criminal offense under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The groups believe that if the mother, Lori Drew, is prosecuted using CFAA charges, the case could have significant ramifications for the free speech rights of US citizens using the Internet."

Naturalist writes "Exact data on (the Linux-powered) Kindle sales figures have been hard to come by. Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped about it, and although CEO Jeff Bezos did give some Kindle-related information back in July, the company has yet to break out how many readers it has sold to date. Now TechCrunch claims to have spoken to a source close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the company's sales figures. According to this unnamed source, Amazon has sold 240,000 Kindles to date, for an estimated hardware revenue between $86 million and $96 million; media sales would push the total above $100M." We've been following the Kindle since its launch nine months ago.

Antiglobalism writes to tell us that an Alameda County Judge has ruled against Sprint Nextel in a class-action lawsuit, awarding customers $18.2 million in restitution for early termination fees. "Though the decision could be appealed, it's the first in the country to declare the fees illegal in a state and could affect other similar lawsuits, with broad implications for the nation's fast-growing legions of cell phone users. The judge - who is overseeing several other suits against telecommunications companies that involve similar fees - also told the company to stop trying to collect $54.7 million from other customers who haven't yet paid the charges they were assessed. The suit said about 2 million Californians were assessed the fee."

Postglobalism writes "A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organizations. Many researchers want to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, saying a 'clean-slate' approach is the only way to truly address security and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet's birth in 1969."

Antiglobalism writes "Scientists say they have found a workable way of reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere by adding lime to seawater. And they think it has the potential to dramatically reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, reports Cath O'Driscoll in SCI's Chemistry & Industry magazine published today."

Corrupt brings us a ZDNet column by Jeremy Allison, who says Linux could benefit from more "tough love" in order to improve its functionality and popularity. Excerpting: "As Elie Wiesel said, 'the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.' LinuxHater really doesn't hate Linux, despite the name. No one takes that much time to point out flaws in a product that they completely loathe and despise. The complaints are really cries of frustration with a system that just doesn't quite do what is desired (albeit well disguised). A friend pointed out to me that the best way to parse LinuxHaters blog is to treat it as a series of bug reports. A perl script could probably parse out the useful information from them and log them as technical bug reports to the projects LinuxHater is writing about. Deep down, I believe LinuxHater really loves Linux, and wants it to succeed."

Corrupt writes "As Viacom is granted access to YouTube user records, a bigger threat to user-generated sites emerges: The law is increasingly siding with rights owners."

Corrupt writes "I've admired Obama, but I never confused him with a genuine progressive leader. Today I don't admire him at all. His collapse on FISA is unforgivable. The only thing Obama has going for him this week is that McCain is matching him misstep for misstep."

Corrupt notes an Ars analysis of the FISA bill of which the telecom immunity provision has been getting all the attention. Timothy B. Lee enumerates the ways in which the bill loosens current protections on domestic wiretapping and opens up whole new areas to government eavesdropping. "The legislation eliminates meaningful judicial oversight of eavesdropping between American citizens and foreigners located overseas, and effectively legalizes dragnet surveillance of domestic-to-foreign traffic. It stretches out the judicial review process so much that the government will in many cases be able to complete its surveillance activities before the courts finish deciding on its legality."

Corrupt writes "Just ask 11-year-old Jemella Chambers. She is one of 650 students who receive an Apple Inc laptop each day at a state-funded school in Boston. From the second row of her classroom, she taps out math assignments on animated education software that she likens to a video game."

Corrupt writes "Microsoft on Monday released a letter that supports investor activist Carl Icahn's efforts to unseat Yahoo's board, as well as confirming its interest to explore a bid to buy the entire company, or just its search assets, with a new board."

Corrupt writes "A Japanese firm has produced a 38 cm- (15 inch-) tall robotic girlfriend that kisses on command, to go on sale in September for around $175, with a target market of lonely adult men. Using her infrared sensors and battery power, the diminutive damsel named "EMA" puckers up for nearby human heads, entering what designers call its 'love mode.'" These are closed-mouth kisses, by the way.

Corrupt links to a Sydney Morning Herald article which begins "The French state and internet service providers have struck a deal to block sites carrying child pornography or content linked to terrorism or racial hatred, Interior Minister Michel Alliot-Marie announced on Tuesday." The article is thin on details, but what it does say is bad enough: "Under the French plan, internet users, via a platform, will be able to signal inappropriate sites and the state, receiving the complaints in real time, will then decide whether the sites are to go on a so-called black list to be passed on to internet service providers to enforce site blocks." It sounds like the perfect way to organize an especially malicious DDoS attack. The French government has never been shy about wanting to "protect" French people by censoring Internet content, though.

jihadist writes "Hoping to make it even easier to turn its online maps into collages of local information, Google Inc. is introducing tools that will stitch together applications from a hodgepodge of Web sites."