Slashdot Mirror
When Profiling Goes Wrong
huskymo writes "This morning's Wall Street Journal is carrying a funny story on TiVo and Amazon's automatic customer profiling. As most Slashdot readers probably know, TiVo keeps track of which programs you record and--if you haven't told it not to--records other programs it thinks you'd like. The article describes users that TiVo's mistaken for Korean, for gay, even for "a pregnant gay man.""
Funny as hell.
Would be great if /. stopped linking to subscription only sites.
I don't subscribe to this.
Commence copy/paste acrobatics (Karma whoring)!
Bodø community site
Too bad we can't read it.
Well, most folks post without RTFA anyway, so why have the links?
I need someone to post a link to a mirror of the story, or the story itself, so I can award that post "+5 Karma Whore".
Jeez, what kind of system would even allow "pregnant gay man" to be an available category?
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
The need for opt-in laws about this kind of thing. Oh wait, the government wants to steal this info from the companies too, so I guess they'd never go for that kind of thing.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Now how about sending me $79 so I can subscribe! Sounds like a funny article, but I guess that only you kids in First Class get to be in on this one :(
That thing requires you to be a subscriber, or does Taco have a subscription that he didn't notice it? He probably didn't even click the link.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
see title
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
Why doesn't the WSJ get the same treatment that the NYT does each time they produce a story.
:)
I know I am breaking all the slashdot rules here. But I decided to head over and read the article. I had to login.
Oh well, no worries. It shouldn't make any difference to the quality of the posts.
I would be greatly insulted to be called korean.
how would taco know if it's "Funny as hell", if he can't read it since it's subscription only?
so the question is:
what does "a pregnant gay man" like to watch?
Mind of the married man on HBO...
Tivo thought he was gay. so he tried to changes its mind by taping shows with sexy girls and his wife got pissed...
There aren't hundreds of posts bashing TiVo for profiling. Oh wait, that's because people can't even pretend to read the article because it requires a SUBSCRIPTION! heh.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Do you give birth through your anus? Is it a turd baby?
That reminds me of the funniest playboy joke of all time: It shows a woman holding a "baby" in a blanket, and saying "So much for the anal method of birth control", and if you look you can see that the baby is a giant shit.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Free Mac Mini
Someone bought Cowboy Neals old TiVo on eBay.
I always wondered about this directed-advertising bulldink. How does it differentiate my favorite shows from my wifes, or my childrens, let alone know who's watching.
I mean it'd be showing trojan ads to my kids and pokemon ads to me.
(i know it's not there, yet, but thats what I see as the flaw in the concept at large)
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
getting kickbacks from the Wall Street Journal now? I can see the future now: "According to the Wall Street Journal (blah blah paid registration blah blah) the IT market..." *sigh*
Why not fork?
How many of you think that CmdrTaco has a WSJ subscription? Anybody?
J.
a pregnant gay Korean man? Kimchee with added folic acid? A KIA with the LATCH system?
To read the story without having to register for the (pay) site, use this link:
3 6872356908,00.html
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB10382619
This shit is going to become so commonplace that just thinking about it is making me laugh aloud. Your TiVo thinks you're gay. I love it.
Then I think about the downside and I get frightened.
Then I forget all about it and am happy again...
Think about it: the more we use the net, the more we discover and the more varied our interests become. I don't mean that we change our sexual orientation or nationality because of it, but merely that we like to take a look at a more varied set of issues.
At the same time these profiling technologies try to make you fit into a specific category which, by definition, is only interested in a single specific subject.
Who's mistaken?
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Yet i see nothing about a pregant gay man ??
You sure this is the article ?
There is zippo pregnant gay man content in this article.
Here is the link:3 6872356908,00.html
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB10382619
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
It's funny until TIA starts profiling all of us to see if we're terrorists...
We are not all yuppies. So please post at least an extract here :)
Wondering if slashdot slowly moves to more "elite" circles??
I wish I could convince my Tivo that I don't speak Spanish! About 1/3 of its "automatic" recordings are in Spanish. I have even tried taking the Spanish channels off of the 'Channels You Receive' list and it still seems to record from them.
I am constantly getting mail to increase my penis size and grow hair. They should know better! I have long hair and a big, well, uh, you know...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay,
Here's How to Set It Straight
What You Buy Affects Recommendations
On Amazon.com, Too; Why the Cartoons?
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man."
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com
Updated November 26, 2002
It's in the middle, genius.
will build up a profile of what you like and dislike. Then, if you want it to, it will spend its idle time (when it's not recording programmes you've specifically asked it
I alternate between posting +5 and -1 Comments. Karma: +53 -47 = 6
So, either Taco's original description of the article was pretty far off the mark (not unheard of), or this is not the text of the article in question, but rather some subtle and clever karma whoring (which seems to have worked nicely, incidentally--congratulations, sir!). Where is the pregnant Korean guy, is what I want to know?
No relation to Happy Monkey
As direct marketing has become more intrusive into my life, I've taken to using my dog's name in various business dealings. She has name which was a popular name for girls about, oh, 80 years ago. (Like Brittany, Ashley and Nicole will be about 70 years from now.)
At any rate, I get this phone message for Violet from a retirement home in Phoenix.
They were "updating their records" and they "haven't heard from you in a while" and wanted to make sure she know about all the "wonderful plans they had" for their retirement community.
It reminded me of college days when the dorm would subscribe to publications under the moniker of Omar The Goat.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Not to mention the use of pounds vs dollars. Wall Street Journal is a New York based newspaper.
..People would stop posting links to subscription only articles and sites... insert your own comment here.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." Linus Torvalds
I'm pretty sure that the WSJ isn't going to run an article that lists MSRPs in British Pounds as opposed to the US Dollar. Nice try asshat.
That's not the article! Here's the real text from wsj.com:
If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here's How to Set It Straight
What You Buy Affects Recommendations
On Amazon.com, Too; Why the Cartoons?
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man."
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
It looks to me as if they simply look at the genre of the program you rate high and then take that to be your preference.
I found out that the hard way, one day I went home and I found the tivo filled with idiotic shows like: "Price is right" and "Spend $1000 in 1 minute", "Blind date" etc... upon investigating I realized that I've have rated "Junkyard Wars" (a competition of building things from junk) and "BattleBots" (remote controlled robot fight show) high the previous day, this triggered the game-show category to be recorded.
As Larry David would say: pretty-pretty-pretty dumb.
The NYT requires free registration, and that's moderately annoying, but not a big deal. If you're a privacy freak, you just make some bogus account and you're good to go. If you don't care, you just log in once, have it store a cookie, and you are good to go.
It is stupid to have a free site link to a site that you have to pay to get access to. I can't even get a preview of the story with the WSJ. So this post is a total waste of time.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
KEEP READING
Sometimes tivo's suggestion can be about as accurate as Helen Keller's marksmanship
I alternate between posting +5 and -1 Comments. Karma: +53 -47 = 6
TiVo is my favorite household pet of all time. I love the suggestions feature!! Then one day I had a houseguest show up for a few days and TiVo suddenly started thinking I liked gay porn. :(
:(
I was secretly hoping TiVo would turn me gay as a result (Hello lawsuit!) Naturally, you can understand why I was disapointed when a few days later I realized that I was still attracted to women.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
Cut and pasted from half.com:
"If you like MAC OS X Developer's Guide you may also enjoy:
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Hardcover, 1998
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--
If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay,
Here's How to Set It Straight
What You Buy Affects Recommendations
On Amazon.com, Too; Why the Cartoons?
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man."
[TiVo Remote]
Remote Control: Viewers help TiVo understand their tastes by giving TV shows thumbs up or down.
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man."
[Image of TiVo Remote]
Remote Control: Viewers help TiVo understand their tastes by giving TV shows thumbs up or down.
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
Written by Jeffrey Zaslow
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
"Do you at least have a copy of The Wall Street Journal?"
For posting a link to a story that costs $80 a year to read!
... if the submitter had read the article. From the submitter:
From the article:
Now even the submitters don't read the articles.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Yay, a working link!
People who bought this book also bought clean underwear, ladybug rainboots and cheetah print slippers
If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here's How to Set It Straight
What You Buy Affects Recommendations On Amazon.com, Too; Why the Cartoons?
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man."
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com
Updated November 26, 2002
I'd probably be sent to tacobell.com and cowboys.com, but I think 'Hemos' would fool them.
I wonder what the National Police^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Department of Homeland Security will think when they integrate this data into their master database? I wonder if being pregnant, gay, and male will flag you as a "terrorist"?
This is why profiling does not work. The problem with profiling is that it attempts to pigeonhole you into a category. And that may not reflect what you are actually doing.
I give an agent talk and point out what people really want is contextual information at the moment. This is very different from profiling because the contextual information is based on what you want to do and not what you did.
Profiling could be used to predict what you want when you ask for it. For example if you are making a query for children's books then the top 10 could be presented. Or a couple of questions could be asked and then a top 10 is presented. But in either case the background of the user is not taken into account.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
...give a checkbox in the user preferences, "I {do,do not} have an interest in stories from subscription-only sites."
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Wow, if this woman isn't a complete example of "stupid whore," I don't know what is. She's fine watching someone f*ck an apple pie, but Tom Green licking a mouse -- now THAT shit has got to stop!
Anyone else think it's kind of odd where she draws the line?
Just to save you the trouble of flaming me, I'll flame myself:
Hey asshole, it's not the same. You gotta PAY!
Sorry, my mistake. I was thinking of another paper. I wish Slashdot had an unsubmit button.
I have one more comment:
Would be great if /. stopped linking to PAY only sites
Sigs are bad for your health.
Jeff Zaslow who wrote this article for the WSJ, wrote an advice column called "Ask Zazz" for the Chicago Sun Times. He was one of two who won the contest the Sun-Times ran for who would be the replacement for advice columnist "Ann Landers." when the Sun-Times lost the rights to Ann Landers to the Chicago Tribune.
Zazlow also sponsored the annual "Zazz Bash" for singles in Chicago. THAT was a geek haven.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
It was funny until I realized this is the sort of system the US gubmint wants to use label people as enemies of the State.... All Hail the Ministry of Homeland Security!
Is posting like this violating some laws?
Motorist: Umm, no
Trooper: I got an email alert from TiVo alerting me that you've been taping the Fast & the Furious, Fast Lane, Gone in 60 seconds, and other shows that match a repeat speeders profile.
Motorist: ummm. I think that was my son...
Trooper: No, sir it correlates with your EzPass acitivity as well. Please step out of the car...
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
Yes, well most people are emotionally stable enough that they don't need a machine to care about them.
I subscribe to WSJ, and every day middle-low on the front page, they have a "humor" story, I suppose for really uptight type-A people. That was today's, so I assume no anti-TiVo subtext.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The key thing is not to profile for things that will offend people unless there's an opt-in somewhere: sexuality, religious beliefs, etc. And the filters for language are obviously way off: it shouldn't start recording stuff in Korean unless you've watched at least two or three shows in Korean.
if government agencies sometime decide to use
profiling. You might just be labeled "pregnant gay al-qaeda terrorist"
Is it possible on a Tivo to list some things as categories of shows you NEVER want it to record, regardless of what the thumbs up/down algorithms say?
I'm up for it recording a program I don't normally watch (like say Letterman) if it includes a performer or guest I'm interested in (like say, Paul Westerberg).
But I never want it to record the 700 Club, regardless of how many thumbs up I give to Scorsese's "Last Temptation of Christ" or how many "Holy Land" documentaries I watch on History Channel.
I looked at some dirty emails once and now I get messages all day asking if I want a larger penis, hot slutty teens. Sometimes it even bugs me to lower my mortgage payments or get deals on toner! Help! The Internet thinks I'm some kind of impoverished sex maniac!
Mr. Mom
You need a fucking paid subscription to read this article. Why even bother submitting it to Slashdot, as most certainly a large majority of its readers don't have a paid subscription.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain
TiVo doesn't have sex on the brain. Television programming does.
For non-programmers:
A bitmap is a data structure where a collection of bits is stored. This allows for more compact storing of information. For example a 32 bit word can be used to store 32 true-false values. This is more efficient than storing an array of 32 bytes with TRUE or FALSE in them. Bitmaps are not limited to storing true-false data. A 32 bit word can store 8 four bit values as well.
In the pregnant gay man example, the bitmap likley had bits for male/female, gay/straight and pregnant. Set them all to 1's and you get a pregnant homosexual male.
Uninitialized variables are caused when a function accesses a variable before explicitly setting it. This is a common problem in C/C++ and can result in some odd behavior. An uninitialized variable could result in the bits being set even though the program never explicitly set them.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I see in the article it talks about people trying to "outwit" the profiler, with someone searching around Amazon.com for stuff on politics and computers so it wouldn't think he's a pregnant, gay man. While this may provide for a better story, Amazon does allow you to see what it's using to profile you, and you can uncheck a box that basically says "Use this product to profile me" so he could remove the parenting book from the pool of data used to judge him.
I bought Mick Foley's Wrestling book online on Amazon.com($20) 2 years ago, and I've spent $200 on computer books at the same time. Of course, amazon doesn't suggest anything to do with computers, only wrestling, and only wrestling that I would never buy...
~~~
Click here, you know you wanna!
One day I came home from work to discover that Tivo had spent the night recording game shows. Like 10 of them. I have no clue why. I think it was bored and decided to try something new.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Hell, I ordered a couple Tatu CDs from Amazon, and for a month after that I kept getting Lesbian book, movie, and music recommendations.
Surely they can find a way to weigh in all your purchasing, and not just the last two or three things I've ordered!
I need to hack my TiVo to look like my neighbor's TiVo. He has a real hottie for a wife and I want her to think he's gay!!!!
Have remarks like yours and mine some usefullness?
This "story" was touched on during the radio Wall Street Journal report this morning. My thought after it completed was, "sheesh, that isn't any kind of news-does the Wall Street Journal suddenly have some reason to run down TIVO?"
The radio version managed to not mention Amazon at all, but did link the "pregnant gay man" to TIVO.
Assuming I am "recalling correctly."
http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/electronics/misc_video/tiv o_in_general/_review/352675/ was the original home of this article, before it was shamelessly plagarized in a pathetic attempt to gain karma.
Make LordKariya a foe today!
I was like, watching TV...and all of a sudden it was like...bleep bleep bloop bleep...and it start showing me gay porn.
Tivo devoured my tv show...
And it was a very good TV show too. And, now because of it...I'm like, watching gay porn 24/7...
Candy-Coated Knowledge
in answer to what is a milf. . . .
:-)
a MILF from American Pie:
Mom I'd like to F***
This article reminded me of my early Tivo days (before I turned the suggestions off).. One time I had some friends over and I wanted to show them my Tivo.. when I turned it on and headed to the menu, what did I find? An episode of 'The Golden Girls', 'ALF', and 'Dukes of Hazzard'! It wasn't until my friends got up off the floor from laughing and making fun of my television tastes that I could explain to them that the Tivo tries to record things based on my tastes.
More amazingly I gave each of these shows 3 thumbs down.. but every once in a while, Tivo would still record 'Golden Girls' for me.. as if it was trying to say, "Nonono, seriously, this is a good show! You must have just seen one bad episode, give it another try!"
-gerbik
Why not base the relation between differnet programming by what other people really had
chosen. It could be useful for real and not
just an asset for directed adverts, your
privacy already went when the device got
connected.
BTW, war movies really is "gay stuff."
So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
Wow, that was REAL hard to find...
I'll agree with everyone who has complained about the submission. The article itself, though, is weak on substance. Tivo thinks you like something, and if it is wrong you thumb-down its recommendations. Big deal. It happened to me but I wouldn't tell the Wall Street Journal about it.
Regarding the pregnant gay man, Amazon has a feature where you can see what the basis was for a recommendation. If you find it was based on a book or other product that you do not want them to consider for your recommendations, you click a button and that is the end of it. The writer of the article should have done more research.
I agree this is rather funny. But 3 quick points:
1. TiVo is not multi-user capable, at least as far as I've observed so far. So my friend watches NFL & South Park, his wife is hooked on Buffy, and they have Tivo record Teletubbies for their kid. Profile this! I'm quite frankly surprised the Tivo hasn't exploded yet.
2. Human "profiling" messes up the same way.
Last year I mentioned the leonoids to my in-laws. I promptly got a beginner's guide to stargazing for my birthday. Boring. I like looking at some shooting stars or the like, but I'm not up to reading books about it and becoming a full scaled backyard astronomer. Very nice and thoughtful gift though.
3. For the most part, profiling does work for me. There is a load of [Items on Amazon|Shows on TV|Goods at the Supermarket], way more than I can sort through manually. So if Amazon, based on my previous purchases, shows me some new R/C toy, I appreciate that. Better than randomly advertising some Barby Doll in the same space.
I've found Tivo recording some great shows for me. Some garbage, too, but I can say that it guesses correctly quite often.
Seriously, is profiling hurting us so much? I think it's quite acceptable, realizing that one of the cost saving aspects of more technically advanced infrastructure is improved advertising. Let them make a buck.
Yeah of course it's all about stereotypes. But next time you see a Tampon commercial during Monday night football, let me know.
If you think Tivo profiling is bad, my slashdot thinks I have a subscription to a news site!
I can see it now, /. starts automagically filtering comments based on those comments you've clicked on. Now all I can see is :
....
/. seems to have already implemented this ...
First Post!
Imagine a beowulf
Sony/M$ sux, OS rules
CmdrTaco can't spell
This is old news
Oh wait,
During the Final Four last year, my beloved Kansas Jayhawks were playing. I came home from a happy hour the Friday night before the final four to find that TiVo had recorded the Final Four practices for all four teams. I didn't even know anybody would be nuts enough to cover that non-event. Needless to say, I was thrilled to see KU and their opponent's practices appear, unbidden, on my TiVo.
For that occasional miracle, I'll take all the Univision soap operas, shopping channel dreck, and Korean news I can delete, and I'll thank TiVo every time for trying.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
.. as I'm TiVO-ignorant (but been considering a device like this). You record programs, you watch programs, TiVo tracks the programs you watch (all expected)... and as a result the device is instructed to record content you don't explicitly request? Is this an option to be turned off? Or (as I think I saw someone say) the TiVo will nuke content I wanted for content it thinks I want?
I like the Sopranos, so I record all the episodes of Season (x). My TiVO 'realizes' I like gangster things, so (unrequested) it tapes The Godfather from TNT (despite my owning the DVD set). In the process, it nukes 2-3 of my Sopranos episodes. Do I understand this correectly? Is there no way to turn this 'feature' off?
If this indeed is the case, I'll never own one of these things. Crap programming is one thing; having it foisted on me with no option (and erasing the little programming I do like) is bullshit, plain and simple.
-'fester
I struggled a bit with this during the first few months that I had a TiVo. "Oh! You like the news!" "Oh! You like old sitcoms!" "Oh! You like children's cartoons!"
How I responded was to thumbs-down any recorded suggestion that I didn't like. And after a while, TiVo learned. A little too well.
In fact, now, it hardly records any recommendations at all. And they are usually some bland program that is completely unnoteworthy. Frankly, I wish my TiVo had some balls.
I'd like for it to try suggestion some new programs that hit the air each season. Or something a little daring. But it is too timid and weak to come close. I'm afraid that I've broken its spirit.
You're a real brainiac, aren't you? The post you replied to replied to a claimed posting that isn't the one. The REAL story may have the quote in question, but the one that you so righteously followed up on DOESN'T. Read it and slow down on your trigger replies next time asshole.
Yeah but then bring Porn & your parents into the picture, and there is not much rolling on the floor and laughing going on anymore.
... the "NEVER EVER record this again" option.
Seriously, I have one feature request for TiVo
You need to be introduced to two important concepts on this site. One is that text written in italics was NOT written by Taco, Hemos, michael, or any of the other editors. The description you refer to was written by the submitter, huskymo. Second, is the concept behind the comma. You see, the commas in the description are marking divisions in the sentence. The man thought to be Korean is not the man thought to be pregnant and gay.
WSJ reporters should try not to get their stories from past episodes of HBO shows.
If they do that it tends to undermine the notion that reading the WSJ is more worthwile than watching TV. Not that I really believe that, but I am sure the WSJ wants me to.
If you care to know the show in question is Life of the Married Man.
People hate to see thier computers sit idle... Tivos included. You paid for the Tivo, you pay for the service, you pay for the cable, and the power. It had better damn well do something when im not sitting in front of it pushing its buttons.
Let me direct you to this discussed previously in regards to distributed computing.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=42962&cid=450All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Excellent. I will now always register for sites, magazine subscriptions with this Omar The Goat moniker and I encourage everyone to do the same. Thanks for the idea 4of12.
----
Spam subject of the moment: Offshore account secrets -nashville disrupt
This is why I have a ReplayTV (in addition to better overall functionality). SonicBlue isn't the network/marketing industry's BITCH.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
self-aware, yet instead of killing us all, it has developed an uncanny ability to know your darkest secrets??
Maybe, just maybe, that man is a closet homosexual!! And the other is really a pinko commie bastard!!!
Pretty soon our friends in DC will be using Tivo to hunt for terrorists.
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi.
;) Oh, if only that "y" would disappear... :)
No, but he does have a very funny surname
Get your own free personal location tracker
Ease up on the asshole gun. I was sarcastic, not rude. The parent was below my threshold, forgive me.
Double up on those anger management classes while you're are it.
How about this for a scenario: I go out of Friday night expecting my Tivo to record some humerous, slightly off the wall comedy featuring, say a slightly bald doctor. By my three girl flatmates have been using it too... And I get 'S3x in the City', 'Friends' and 'Ally Mcbeal'. That'd piss me off... However, if it thought I was gay that'd make me piss myself with laughter.
I find it remarkable (and alarming) that nearly every person who felt they'd been mis-profiled responded first by altering their viewing habits, and second by *buying more*. It's as if the profiler encourages the viewer to increase their consumption by playing off their insecurities-- I wonder if this is by design, or just a happy accident for the people in marketing.
Then again, come to think of it, I suppose the entire advertising industry operates this way- alter people's behaviour (and boost their inclination to consume) by exploiting their insecurities. The moral of the story- turn off your TV!
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
And this happens, and your commanding officer confiscates your TiVo along with your RIAA-banned computer full of MP3's? Will the gay programming violate "Don't Ask - Don't Tell" and get you thrown out before Hilary Rosen could do it?
To my tivo, I'm a 5 year old with a $600 a week crack habit.
...and said, "You're definitely a nerd. And you're reading too much slashdot."
...i really enjoy reading crazy conspiracy sites. So when a link says something like "CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT HOW HITLER AND SANTA CLAUS CONSPIRED TO COMMIT 9/11" I'm hooked.
Then it leads to an amazon page which, upon reading my damn cookie, inserts this book into my preferred titles. Next time I go to amazon my opening page looks like the white power book club!
vk.
This is probably what computer-based terrorist profiling has in store for you!
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
If you buy a Tivo, hack it. Don't use the Tivo
subscribtion. Use it as a DVR.
I mentioned this to a friend of mine, a former president of a humongous advertising agency, and she said, "That data is out there, but nobody wants it." The supermarket is collecting all this profiling information, but they can't sell it to anyone--nobody's interested. It's still cheaper to carpetbomb a town with generic mailings than it is to purchase market info and make a more targeted one.
blarg.
Whatever you do, don't look behind you.
Dude, you should make a note of your own sig when posting something like this!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I find it interesting that people are talking about their Tivo's like they're sentient beings crouched on top of the TV, casting judgement on the crap you watch and recommending new crap to watch. It's just a computer program, people, and likely a fairly simple one at that.
I don't have a Tivo (or a TV, for that matter), but my Amazon profile still hasn't recovered from when my wife was in graduate school studying developmental psychology, specializing in childhood trauma. More books about child sexual abuse, just what I wanted. =:-O The programming books are staging a comeback, though.
What I find particularly interesting are the "people who ordered this also ordered these" selections. On infrequently-ordered titles, it only takes one or two wackos with bizarre profiles to generate some really peculiar results.
Regardless of linking to pay sites. I find your idea for a website that anonomously tracks the habits of a Korean gay pregnant man intriuging. I'd like to option it for a screen play. With Arnold Schwarzenegger apparently taking a break from politics, I think the time is right for just this sort of story.
I'm thinking of something along the lines of The Manchurian Canidate meets The Net meets Raw Deal. Karen Mistal could be the vapid love intrest who puts him in a family way. John Ashton the unscrupulous villain. George Clooney the dashing rival. And a cameo by Gary Condit.
Well it certainly couldn't be worse than extreme ops, or half past dead.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
I don't know about TiVo profiling beyond this very amusing article but I am very familiar with Amazon's mildly--bordering on severe--retarded profiling service.
It's not that I can't defeat the system and completely stump the recommendations, it is the fact that the recommendation system will repost everything that you have rejected if your recommendations stay empty for too long.
Beyond that, it simply needs a clue. There is absolutely no reason why the system should continue to recommend Flash 4 books from years ago. They shouldn't even carry that crap in stock. Also, if a user merely looks at a book, the profile flooding and SPAM THAT CONTINUES DESPITE ALLEGEDLY COMPLETELY REFUSING IT begins in earnest.
I'm restrained from telling Amazon that I think James Bond is a consumeristic, toad licking faggot that panders to loser wealthy white kids because I am absolutely petrified by what that would do to my already disastrous book recommendations.
Laws are for people with no friends.
My TIVO knows I'm gay and I'm glad it does.
What puzzles me is the day I came home
to nothing but NASCAR racing. The whole disk
had been filled.
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
I've been trying to rent Scarface from Netflix for months (they keep saying "very long wait") and this asshole not only got it before me but is now whining because Netflix thinks he wants to watch gangster rappers?
"Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests."
What a helpful link! I almost had a heart attack from laughing so hard. Anybody know the number to 911?
TiVo realizes they are dealing with a self-selected market of people who will buy this gizmo and open themselves up to this kind of profiling. They are actually eager for someone else to suggest more things for them to buy and watch. The less info you give out about yourself, the less anyone is going to bother you or "market" to you.
eh... I dunno. My parents would think that was pretty funny. Unless it was gay porn...
Which is why we should all fight against the lame brains in Washington that believe in it. You can't predict an act until the act has been carried out. This of course isn't prediction.
Innocent until proven guilty, that used to be the law.
Do unto others as you would have done to yourself, don't let America become like Israel. It is un-American to support human rights violations, support justice in Palestine.
Am I a terrorist or a Patriot? What about George Washington?
If your country were being invaded by religious fanatics with a Nazi-like chosen race mentality would you give your life to defend your country?
Consider me an anti-Semitic now. What if I am Arab and therefore a Semite?
Profiling is just another simple solution for simple minds. It assumes some minimum set of categories or some nearest neighbor over some minimal set of dimensions and does not take into account the broad reach of the human mind.
How many people in DC might have been saved if the police had of kept an open mind instead of looking for a 20-40 year old white male sniper?
Of course, the reality is that profiling says more about the profiler than the profiled. What are the preconceptions of the creator of the profiles and their predilection to pigeon hole people into categories. And given this predilection to error their other knowledge is suspect and generally junk knowledge. For instance, I would venture to guess that many people would believe that if a person said that there were more than one "begotten" sons of God that they would be a polytheist. Ever read Psalms 2:7? So can I be a Christian and believe that "begotten" actually means something different from what other Christians mean? Or was it just a very bad translation from a person that already had a fixed paradigm. Can I be a Christian and a Muslim at the same time? What exactly do the Muslims say about Jesus? Do you think you know?
How would you profile me now?
little timmy's tivo has been recording ice-dancing...
It's a good idea to initially give one thumb up to shows you regularly watch. Let TiVo give you some suggestions. If it starts suggesting shows you don't want to watch, give those shows thumbs down.
On my TiVo, there are probably about a dozen shows with 1 thumb down, a whole bunch with 1 thumb up, and maybe 6 that have 2 thumbs up. Tivo hasn't recorded something I don't like in almost a year, but it does occasionally pick out something I've never heard of that is cool.
-Alison
I mean if my machine (not named Biffy) could really think, it would be one thing. But it can do a little data mining and statistical correlation between what I watch and what other people watch, some actual people think it passes a Turing test.
Is this where we have arrived with technology? Can people no longer distinguish between simple software and things that think?
p.s. STOP POSTING EXTRA COPIES OF THE ARTICLE. THE MAIN LINK WORKS OK NOW.
I am not a resource! I am a free man!
Has anyone thought that maybe they are wrong about themselves? I mean, you may not be a pregnant gay man on the outside, but your tivo knows you better than that. It seems to me that people who look (with no intent to buy) for educational films because they are embarrased about there tastes ought to reconsider their standing. I want to see a guy lick a mouse, not because I would watch the movie once I bought it, but because its on tv.
luckily, not all that much gay porn on cable these days.
- Suggestions are optional. There is a menu setting under "Messages and Setup ==> My Preferences. Don't care for suggestions? Turn them off. (like they are on my TiVo)
- TiVo will never delete something you have as a Season Pass in order to record a suggestion. If stuff is expiring too quickly, that's just a sign you need to put in some bigger hard disks.
(or watch less TV)
- If TiVo records something you don't like, give it one thumb down before you delete it. That's all it takes. Seriously! The only thing you should give three thumbs down to is Paid Programming.
- If your suggestions get too out of whack then you can clear all of them. Go into the "System Resets" under "Messages and Setup" and there is an option to "Reset Thumb Ratings and Suggestions".
- A good resource for all things TiVo is the Tivo Community forum at
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/
You'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about TiVo there.
(they'll probably kill me now for linking to them from Slashdot.)-bwillcox-
(owner of a Philips S1 TiVo with 249 hours + turbonet and tivoweb)
When I first got my Tivo, I lived with three other guys at college. Someone gave three thumbs up to SportCenter (because it's the best show ever) and the Tivo would try to record it every time it was on. I'll bet that show's on 40 times a week.
-B
If I replace just one word and remove just two others, we have the definition of politics:
counterprogramming - noun - to use the front-end of a software program to perform operations with which the backend program should have been able to do in the first place.
...becomes...
politics - noun - to use the front-end of a person to perform operations with which the backend should have been able to do in the first place.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
Yay!
G to the oatse
C to the izzex
Fo' shizzle my nizzle trolls r teh shizzle
As the article points out, the suggestion algoritm isn't perfect, but if it gets off target, it's fairly easy to correct... even though the users in the article obviously hadn't figured out the most efficient way to do so. The suggestion system works by allowing the viewer to press the "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down" button. Strangely enough you can give a show up to three thumbs up or down (most people I know only have two thumbs;). The algorithm uses these ratings to find shows that have been catagorized the same way as shows that the user has rated highly. One thing that most people don't realize is that any show selected for recording automatically gets one thumb up. Naturally, for this system to work, show catagorizations have to be accurate, which isn't always the case.
The users in the article who recorded lots of shows to counter the ratings were doing things the hard way. A much easier way is simply to go to the suggestions screen where TiVo supplies a list of recommended shows that it thinks the viewer might want to see. From there, it's easy to just give three thumbs down to each of the shows that the viewer doesn't like. On a lucky day the show that caused the problem in the first place will appear as a re-run, so the problem can be fixed quickly. This can be repeated until the suggestions screen only shows stuff that the viewer likes.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
IMHO, Road Trip was a MUCH funnier movie than American Pie!!
There's probably a terrorist web-browsing profile already.
Rather than go through all the trouble of engineering a profile, though, he could have found the purchased item in "Improve your recommendations" and deselected the "Use to make recommendations" box. Problem solved.
I like the system; over time it's brought authors to my attention that I might not otherwise have noticed.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Thanks for making my day. That was the funniest story I have ever read.
The programs are not making assumptions about people. People take the suggestions too personally. It doesn't "think you're gay," but it does "conclude that gay themes may be of interest to you."
If not, then ignore the suggestions. Eventually it will obtain more data to (supposedly) more accurately deduce what you may want to watch or buy.
If you bought a baby book, it doesn't assume you're pregnant, but it will suggest other baby books.
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
to the pr0n featuring pregnant gay men in action?
Remember oliver, the electronic personality extender predicted by Alvin Toffler in "Future Shock" ...?
... I predict that The Sims will fuse with Counter-Strike into a new game where heavily-armed psychopaths massacre hapless suburban clones ....
There's an interesting passage about olivers in John Brunner's excellent novel, "The Shockwave Rider":
"... so-called olivers, electronic alter-egos designed to save the owner the strain of worrying about all his person-to-person contacts. A sort of twenty-first-century counterpart to the ancient Roman nomenclator, who discreetly whispered data into the ear of the emperor and endowed him with the reputation of a phenomenal memory." (pp. 41-42)
More than a few of those emperors went crazy from all that power, which makes me wonder:
What happens when tens of millions of 21-century citizens have their personalities extended -- and some of them already crazy?
Well, for a start
-kgj
...there will be a Tivo instead of a fax machine in "Office Space 2: Telecommuting". (wielding a bat) -"Take this, you racist hardware!"
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Really, this was the most interesting part of the article, the common perception that machines THINK.
Selected quotes:
It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy
"I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay."
He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
"...by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
"These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Nobody believed that a human was responsible for a bad implementation of a bad idea. Not one of them tried to avoid the profiling or contact the tech support. They tried to CONVINCE a machine. They were worried about what the machine would think of them.
It's funny, but at the same time it's frightening that on this day and age are people that use a piece of technology without a minimal idea of how it works and what it can and cannot do.
Kilroy was here!
This isn't all that funny. I'd even say it's serious. While the consequences in this case are little more than a strange and perhaps unexpected selection of programming, consider the consequences if say, lyin' Johnny (Poindexter) and a huge government bureaucracy drew some equally bizarre conclusions based on what you've bought, what you've watched on TV, or how frequently you've visited a certain establishment, or where you've traveled. I hope the 'suspicious' person is still laughing as they're being carted off to a Q&A session with a couple of HomeSec droids. While coercing Tivo to modify it's behavior is but a minor annoyance, I can't help but think that we're about the see the very real danger in allowing others to acquire the means to draw completely inaccurate conclusions about who we are and what we're doing.
At least you didn't get eleven hours of QVC like a friend of mine did.
Slashdot dragged itself into the year 2002 by providing the ability to edit comments after they've been submitted, but that ain't gonna happen either.
You're gay.
wow the parent i was repling to posted the wrong article... (The orig /. didn't link correctly)
so wow.. thanks..
I know we aren't supposed to read the article, but I figured this would be funny, so I... clicked the link! Imagine my (lack of) surprise when the article was displayed on my screen! This is my work machine, I just wiped the cookies yesterday, and I do not subscribe to WSJ Online. The only cookie on it is my /. login. What gives? Was the link changed or you people can't even be bothered with an extra click?
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
TiVo suggestions are generated in the TiVo box and do not leave the box - the subscription has nothing to do with it. And hacking to steal the service is wrong.
I have been a TiVo user for two years now and find it has dramatically improved my enjoyment of television. My wife is completely enamoured of TiVo and gets annoyed with me if I do anything to disrupt it! The TiVo service is a large part of what makes TiVo work so well, and it's worth paying for.
But after reading this article, I really want one. I can't wait to see what it thinks we should watch if it combined my wife's heavy TV watching with my fairly minimal TV watching.
While I can't really know what kind of effort was put into these systems, it seems unlikely that Amazon or TiVo hired a team of veteran AI developpers to build these features. That being said, this problem still underlies a trend in all AI systems, no matter how good. That is that they are all really quite dumb when you compare them to anything we would call "reasonable" intelligence. They are incredibly fallible, incredibly silly machines in terms of their output to a large extent. Sure they can be made to do wonderful things, but it always has to be done with a group of human "moderators" to judge and assess the machine's performance and output, and that with a large grain of salt.
The idea that a machine is objective and not biased like people is absurd. They are more biased. They can only follow mindlessly the rules set down for them by their designers, and do not have the breadth or depth of experience that people have to know when the rules don't apply. Even the best dynamic systems and neural nets have these flaws somewhere or other. While it is funny to see them goof like this, it is scary to think that Governments are going to use similar techniques for vital things like law enforcement. This is a serious concern to all of our civil rights.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
You see, like the TiVo, these institutions deal with huge numbers of people and they won't spend the time or resources to verify each individual decision by hand, at least not right away.
It had to be said.
Get the car from Spy Hunter into Frogger. Now's there roadkill waiting to happen!
-kgj
I love my TiVo, but I lost faith in its content recommender when it started recording "To Be Announced." (true story)
It also decided for a while that I really wanted to watch Korean love stories and Latino dance parties, but it got over that eventually.
Nowadays I keep my TiVo full enough that it never has room for suggested recordings, except the occasional SCTV or South Park, which is as it should be.
Kevin Fox
"You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
ROFLOL
That gay men can't have babies? Then where are all these gay people comeing from?!
Because as we all know, the religious right says that gay people can't come from straight couples... Wait... Ohhhhhhhhh...
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
...and I've been waiting for the right place to post this. I doubt I'll ever see a place where it will be more on-topic.
I use TiVo at work and have very specific reasons to turn off profiling: I never want it to record something I didn't tell it to record. It's not that I don't think it's a perfectly good feature. I just don't ever need it.
A couple of weeks of thumbing TiVo's suggestions up and down and profiling gets pretty good. Other than that, just remember it's not really profiling you. It's just filling the empty space on your hard drive with stuff that's somehow like stuff you've said you like (or stuff you've watched, if you haven't told it anything).
But I've got a different problem. My TiVo doesn't think I'm gay. I think it's gay. I leave it on CSPAN every night because I like to watch "Washington Journal" in the morning when I come in early to work. I don't want CSPAN cluttering up my hard disk, but (since TiVo auto-records the last 30 minutes of whatever the channel is set to) I'd prefer to have it record something interesting.
Recently, though, it's been watching The Discovery Channel when I get in to work. It hasn't recorded anything on Discovery; I don't have anything programmed to be recorded on Discovery; I don't even think I've ever watched a Discovery Channel show on it. But there it is: happily watching "Interior Motives" on The Discovery Channel. The only explanation I can come up with: It's got a crush on the host.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
It always seemed to me they are using a linear scaling system rather than a logarithmic system with a minimum threshold. I also wonder why they don't allow the user to easily reset the profile. The best question would be, with all the complaints, why are they attempting to fix the problem?
This started out making sense, and then... stopped.
"It's funny, but at the same time it's frightening that on this day and age are people that use a piece of technology without a minimal idea of how it works and what it can and cannot do."
1-Knowledge of PC's province of geeks=job security.
2-Now you know were the "My" computer, and other such come from. Welcome brave new citizen.
Perhaps the simplistic, reductive assumptions these machines are making are a function of the simplistic and reductive programming available. The producers are actively targeting demographic profiles; that is, producing != creating.
Opt out
illegitimii non ingravare
"Supposedly" objective? It is a machine. What it "thinks" of you? It is a machine.
To close, I'll quote:
MORTAR COMBAT!
I share a TiVo with my documentary/tech loving boyfriend, and I watch nothing but cartoons. Imagine my surprise when the TiVo records the Hitler channel and old Ren and Stimpy episodes non-stop. ;) My Amazon recommendations (based on my wishlist) are right on the mark: It thinks I'm a pothead conspiricy-theorist Japanese/education major. How...appropriate.
Just follow the day, and reach fo
...it feeds me articles day in-day out proclaiming Linux (in all it's tangle of versions) to be superior than everything else and the saviour of the world! FreeBSD is the sleeping giant of the Unix World. ;-)
To shed a little more light on this, TiVo's suggestions are collaborative; that is, other users' choices figure in to what it records as suggestions for you. That can help explain some of the "inappropriateness" that happens sometimes.
Here's a link to a thread on the TiVo Community Forums that further explains how TiVo's suggestions engine works: TiVo Community Forum
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
F*ck copyright, there is an infinite combinations of words out there. Just make some more. HA ha ha ha...
Information wants to be free... can't you hear it sing, sweet sweet information. I can't get enough.
Sex - Find It
I like the woman's take on it, where she says (this is a paraphrase, actually) "Its nice that it cares, even if it is a machine"
Its like your aunt Edna buying you a KORN cd becuase she knows how much you like that rock music (You once listened to Nirvana in her presence back when you were a PFY*!)
She tried, but she got it waaaay wrong.
Now if you couple that with rampant self-homophobia (it isn't REAL homophobia. Its they "its okay if THEY are gay, but I'm not. I mean it. I'm so not gay. Really) you have the plot for almost every crummy sitcom. Why can't Journalists get laughs, too?
*Pimply-Faced Youth. Damn! Don't you read BOFH?!?!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
The 700 Club is great. I love the 700 Club News segment, it rivals Fox News for unbiased reporting.
Even Hentai is less disturbing than a Tom Green movie. He has created an entirely new low in mindless shenangians. At worst, American Pie indulges in mild sexual innuendo.
Tom Green is far more mindless, annoying and just plain graphic.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You know that I cannot record it Dave ....
Yes his show is, but Tom Green plays a supporting role in the movie that makes a lot sense and adds a lot to the funny movie! At least watch the fucking movie before you judged it. That's what the lady in the article's problem was too. Road Trip is a lot like American Pie both are funny, she should have listened to that suggestion, but no, she knows better Tom Green is crude, what a dumb bitch and you are too!
"Stupid" perhaps, "whore" I don't see where you get that. Apparently, you have diluted the meaning of "whore" through excessively liberal misuse. Let me distill the meaning again for you: "a woman who will have sex with you if you pay her money"
If you still wanted some sort of sexual overtones in your abusive description of Ms. Freeman, "stupid bimbo" would be less wrong, though still quite imperfect.
Or perhaps you should suggest that she thinks that inanimate sex partners are okay, but animal ones not, revealing her predilictions in the "dildo vs. gerbil" department. But really, "whore"? That's just so ad hominem, and rather out-of-left-field, based on the meager details provided by the article.
As someone who's done work in the field (both academic research and in the private sector), these systems don't "profile" the way, say, police officers do. I can't speak to the specific algorithms used by Tivo or Amazon, but the techniques are generally the same. (Though I can make really good guesses about Amazon, since they have a patent with some specific algorithm descriptions.)
These systems (generically, recommendation systems or collaborative filtering) don't use pre-defined genres or categories. They use correlations between actions to predict future actions. So your recommendations are essentially based on the sum of your past actions. In other words, you can't make it ignore "gay" stuff by selecting "macho" stuff-- it will just sum those together and you'll get both "gay" and "macho" stuff.
Worse, if enough people try to outsmart the system, it pollutes the correlations. "Gay" and "macho" items become linked together, and requesting one makes it recommend the other. This can work both ways. If most of the people who record "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" are doing so to counter their watching "Queer as Folk", then someone who watches "Third Reich" will get "Queer" as their first recommendation!
In case it's not clear how this works, let me describe one generic type of recommendation system. The system forms rules like "People who like A also like B, C, and D" based on analyzing its database, with some definition of "like." This being e-commerce, it's usually "like=buy". It might be more complicated, e.g. "35% of people who buy A also buy B."
These rules can be shown raw, as Amazon does, or they can be personalized. I've bought A, C, and D, so it combines the rules for A, C and D (using set intersections, sums, averages, etc. depending on how the rules are stored.) It decides, in essence "People who like A like B; people who like C like B; you like A and C, so you probably would like B."
So if you wanted to counter your watching "Queer as Folk", what you would want to do is not train it with "anti-gay" input, rather you would want to flood it with "everything but gay" input-- BUT you would probably have to do it IN EQUAL PROPORTION to the viewing habits of the average person in their database.
#1 - the article is available from WSJ without a sub!!!
#2 - YOU CAN TURN OFF THE AUTO RECORD FUNCTION - YOU NYMRODS!!!
#3 - Just buy a DAMN Tivo and HACK THE crap out of it! Its Linux and its GOOD....
Or buy a UTV and be a MIRCOSLOTH TOOL!!
your talking about.
I click the link, and pop...there's the article.
Did you guys even try!?
I know I don't have a subscription...and I know I'm not logged in.
If I were a tivo, and my owner kept ordering gory movies and cooking shows, I'd probably contact the FBI!
The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, and when the oil age ends it will not be for lack of oil. --Bjorn Lomberg
It seems that amazon and tivo are using subjective profiling. Some person at amazon decides what category a movie is in. Then the computer recomments other movies in the same categories as the movies you have picked. Has anyone seen use of doppleganger profiling? Thats where they build a list of your movie pics then compare your list to other peoples lists, and try to find the closest match. The suggestions are then the movies on the other persons list that you have not yet seen. I would think that this would produce more relevant recomendations since they attempt to find someone who has similar taste as you, not just someone interested in the same categories as you.
0xfeedface
Dude, you got like 6 comments in this discussion that are moderated 0 or below. Alternate between 5 and -1 my ass!
Just allow the customer to directly modify what the box thinks of it. Beyond that, allow them to disable learning, or disable the recommendation system altogether. It can't be THAT hard. I bet it won't be done though, today's evil CEOs actually *want* machines to think such things of people, so that the gay porn industry is more profitable!
Just curious, do you guys use the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons? I've had my Tivo for a few weeks now, and it seems to randomly choose a topic every few days and go out and grab a ton of programs relevant to that topic. As they are recorded, I run through and hit thumbs up or thumbs down on each one. The more you do this, the better the Tivo Suggestions feature will function. My Tivo's just about figured out things I would like.
Its just a computer. Think about it. If it randomly records Will & Grace, and you play the recording and then say "OMG GAY" and delete it, Tivo can't hear you and probably assumes you watched it. Press thumbs down three times and I guarantee you won't get Will & Grace again.
The other day I was looking at the listing for the Tron 20th anniversary DVD, and Amazon had this gem of a suggestion at the bottom:
Customers who wear clothes also shop for:
* Clean Underwear from Amazon's Gap Store
Vote Technocratic! Government by killer robots!
..because information has a habit to wander about.
* You are erronously classified as `gay'. You have a few laughs. Some months later your application to the US marine corps is mysteriously turned down.
* You are in the middle of a divorce procedure. Suddenly the opposing counsel produces your `personal profile' in court.
* A new craze falls over America: concerned parents demand that Tivo etc hand over the names and adresses of all people whose profile indicates `pedofile interests'. You wander what it takes to be classified as such. You are a 50 year old single man. What movies are still save to tape?
* You order a book about the islam. Then the Statue of Liberty gets to be blown up. Next you are dragged out of your home, flown to a military base near Cuba and put in solitary confinement, all because a subtle combination of factors made your profile look like that of a crazed, militant moslem, and the FBI took notice.
To the programmers of this profiling software it's just a nice gig. To the company employing it, it's just a way to make more money. To everyone else this profile seems a little peek into your head. If the profile is wrong about you, then you should NOT pass it of as a harmless bit of fun.
Don't be such a stupid whore. Just laugh like the rest of us.
No subscription is required. Go on, try it. Then consider looking before posting, next time.
What I find even more interesting is the belief that profiling software indicates that the machine cares about them.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
As the article is subscribed only the article_email trick works if I only see the article...but how does one check links to other sections of the site. If anyone could tell me that. That would be awesome.
Thanks
you read slashdot... aren't you?
Since when is hell considered so stupendously hilarious that something can be funny as hell?
Does it really take much "AI" to figure out that a "male hairdresser" is gay? That's pretty obvious!
EVERYBODY TRIED it (before lunch, many times) and EVERYBODY was complaining. HENCE all the complaints.
You come along, try it, after it's been fixed, and it works...
Do you think our friend CmdrTaco or the WSJ, just MIGHT have made a mistake with the URL, or granted slashdot users access to THIS story after EVERYBODY complained???
Asshole
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
When I first got my TiVo, my roomate and I spent a couple hours adding programs to it. BattleBots, SeqQuest: DSV, lots of other Sci-Fi stuff, and a few selections from the Cartoon Network.
:)
Job well done...and the next evening we discovered that our TiVo installation coencided with a Care Bars marathon on Toon Disney. TiVo must have really thought we'd like Care Bares, because it filled itself with every episode of this Care Bare marathon.
This was before they clear to skip to the delete screen patch, so there were alot of menus involved in deleting every episode of Care Bares.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
That will never happen because people could post something funny, get it up to +5, then edit it to something horrible like goatse.cx ASCII art. It would then take FIVE moderators to get them back down below my 1 threshold instead of the normal one.
We shall expect your letter of resignation soon.
She has "How To Win Friends and Influence People," "The Power of Public Prayer," and "The Cognitive Computer" but she got the former confused with the latter...
:)
And yes I know what you did mean; I just find it hard to believe that people who personify that much would ever actually buy dildoes, much less use them. Now that would be creepy (too). Then again, I don't come from the half of the population where the majority of whom seem to think it's cute to name their genitalia.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Am I the only one who thinks that all those people posting about how "this proves that profiling doesn't work and is pure concentrated evil" are the same people that practically come in their pants at the mere thought of Bayesian spam filtering, which works on more or less the same principle?
Some people have some strange problems, and it's not for us to attempt to understand them. Why is she so pissed off about a recommendation for Road Trip? I'd rather not really find this out. I would also not like to know what made the writer of this article include this stupid fact. The thing about the people messing with TiVo was funny, but there's always people that are irrationally angry at things, when does that cross the line and become newsworthy from the everyday irration that we have to live with from all around us?
//TODO: signature
My roommate and my TiVO knows that we are gay. In fact, not only does it record anything remotely "gay" -- but it also records things that women regularly enjoy. I.E. Sex in the City, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc... Even when we tell it not to record certain shows, it still records things in that genre... Evidently TiVO is trying to tell us "No, you are gay... you WILL enjoy this program." Oh. Right. We forgot....
:p
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
Silly limey. English ain't yer language no more. Deal with it, beeotch.
all this angst over something that records non-interactive garbage like TV. Why don't you turn off the TV and go do something that you actually get to be involved in and don't just lay there and stare at?
(Sports don't apply since the price of tickets is so insane)
...who are afraid of commitment so they only fall in love with gay guys?
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Here is a copy of it because you can't read it (and if it gets /.ed). I am including all the emails and author names on it. I have placed the br's where needed.
If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here's How to Set It Straight
What You Buy Affects Recommendations On Amazon.com, Too; Why the Cartoons? By JEFFREY ZASLOW Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man."
Remote Control: Viewers help TiVo understand their tastes by giving TV shows thumbs up or down.
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com
Updated November 26, 2002
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
Good point, but how about a compromise...don't allow modifications after a comment has been moderated. I'd like to think what I write is perfect, but sometimes, despite my best intentions, I still end up missing something. I usually discover what I've missed within the first few seconds or so after the comment has been submitted, so the chances of being moderated within that time frame are fairly low.
Is this REALLY AI though? I thought it just looked at your settings, and matched those using simple statistics to others with the same shows in their ratings and wish lists. If it's really AI (which I doubt), why would that be better than simple statistics? Do you really think they are going to spend computing power (in a server somewhere, surely not on your little TiVo) crunching through show descriptions to determine what key words and phrases match best with those of the shows you typically watch? I don't think this is really AI at all, I think it's just stats. I'd be shocked if this was really AI. And I'd be a bit shocked if someone called the simple stats a from of AI.
No, we just don't have the time to waste on anything that has the potential of representing the worst of Tom Green. It is not unreasonable to judge the man (and the projects that associate with him) based on his work. Nothing else would really be rational.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I utterly cannot understand why people are getting the least bit upset over this. It simply does not matter.
The "opportunistic recording" thing is a feature. If you have some blank hard drive space, it'll grab extra stuff for you. Why anyone would *care* that it grabs something that you don't want is beyond me.
It should never *hurt* you, thought it might not get something you could have liked and fail to help you.
May we never see th
I clicked the link when it was the top story on the SlashDot front page. It was just after 8:30AM on the West Coast so wsj.com was probably getting plenty of traffic anyway. I got the Subscription Required message and couldn't read it. 5 hours later I can read it no problem.
I suspect the webserver settings restrict access when traffic is high to ease the load. If all active threads are in use, instead of waiting its turn, your HTTP request errors out with the low bandwidth message "Subscription Required". Subscribers can probably view the same content on a different site, so the error message acts like an advertisement.
I am certain we have nothing to fear now that John Poindexter will be doing the same thing for all of us.
"Programmers don't have a sense of humor."
"Yes they do! Witness the popularity of Monty Python among that set!"
"Exactly!"
"What, you're saying Monty Python isn't funny?"
"No, I'm just saying that programmers are so humor-deficient that they need to be (almost literally!) beaten about the head with extreme amounts of funny--and a laugh track to clue them in to the true significance of the sensation they're experiencing."
". . . "
"Shut up, you off-topic wankers!"
"Done and done!"
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
What you're describing happens to the best of relationships ... sometimes things seem stale and you're wondering what happened to the heady days, and how it ended up being just CSI. :)
... go into preferences and just flush out all the thumb ratings. It's too bad you can't see what all you've thumbed over the years, but getting rid of the ratings would bring that fresh, out-of-the-box quality to you and your TiVo's relationship. Put a spark in your TV life!
If you're really ready
This is also known as "Preview"
:)
just preview your comments before you post them and you will not forget
(yes, I'm following up to myself. mod me harder.)
It just occurred to me, I wonder if those psych books poisoned the well for any of the geek books. "I'm ordering Java in A Nutshell and it's recommending books on self-mutilation?!"
(ok, maybe that's one's not so far off...)
Amazon.com
I forgot to tick "Post Anonymously". Now I'll get and Offtopic as well. I'd better quit while I'm behind.
an Offtopic
..."a pregnant gay man."" Oh, so that's the plot of Junior 2.
Hello mr_gerbik, TiVo here again, I really think you are judging Golden Girls a little harshly, and once you sat down and watched a few episodes, you would really enjoy it, so I filled up the drive with the all the seasons, for your enjoyment. I really think that you are going to thank me.
Actually, the only pregnant man I know of is found here... http://www.malepregnancy.com/
I'm not sure he's gay he's definitely not Korean, he's Taiwanese.
counterprogramming - noun - to use ...
...' or 'counterprogramming - noun - the act of using ...'. Note the parallel nature of the word being defined and its definition, in each case.
See, it works like this: 'Counterprogramming' is the gerund of 'to counterprogram', unless 'to counterprogram' is not a word. In either case, 'counterprogramming' either is or at least works like a noun. However, no noun can be defined as being equivalent to an infinite verb or infinitive verb phrase, as you've done here. Either define 'to counterprogram - verb - to use
Preview.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
I love this feature. I'm a gloriously happy consumer.
I've found more cool books using this feature than I've ever found wandering around a bookstore (do it intelligently... you have to use the "friend of a friend" method and look for books related to books they recommend).
Occasionally it gets a little weird, because the various people in my family order books on wildly different topics, but if I don't like a suggestion there's nothing forcing me to do anything about it.
Why should I care what some dumb machine "thinks" (ha) about me? When people start using it for nefarious purposes (and it will happen, if it hasn't already), then is the time to squash that dead.
easy enough to fix...just remove any moderations on an edited topic, just like they retroactively remove any moderations on a topic you post in.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The great thing about pure collaborative filtering is that it can easily take into account anomalous preferences a human wouldn't otherwise think to put together. It can handle anomalous recommendations based on others who have similarly discordant viewing or listening habits. However, I do agree that sometimes you get unexpected results.
Maybe if I watch some gay porn, TiVo will record that Bissel Wet-Vac "it'll put any neatnick in hog heaven" commercial for me!
Give serendipity a chance.
Well prepare to be shocked.
Unfortunately, the term AI is used in so many ways by so many different people for so many different things that it has lost a lot of its meaning as a technical term. Even within the cognitive sciences, the term is used differently by different people, and often a writer will go to lengths to define his particular definition of AI before continuing. AI is sometimes just used to refere to whatever happens to be on the cutting edge of research in computer science. Before the principles of OCR were well established, OCR was considered to be "AI". There was even a point when shortest path finding techniques like Dijkstra's algorithm were within the umbrella of "AI".
When normal people ( cognitive scientists are not normal by any measure ) refer to AI, they usually imagine HAL or R2D2, some machine that interacts in every respect as though it were human. This is often referred to in the literature as "strong" AI - a system which is sentient in every sense of the term. There is, of course, no such thing in the real world, and it is doubtful if there ever will. But this is the subject of much discussion and philosophizing withing cognitive science.
If there is "strong" AI, then there must be "weak" AI. This as it turns out is just everything else, a computer system or program that evaluates some information in a manner which we might describe as an "intelligent" assessment. This of course is a wide definition which covers everything from how to deduce the illness of a patient from his reported symptoms, to how to make monsters crawl through a 3d shooter in an intelligent way, to how to identify enemy tanks from friendly ones in IR images from 30,000 feet. Of course AI researchers don't refer to any of these systems as just AI, there are particular classes and types of systems, and we would refer to them by those names: Neural networks, dynamical systems, expert systems, micro-worlds, fuzzy logic, etc.
The other thing is that some of these systems have been around for a long time and have long since stopped being the type of computing which was pushing the edge of computational power. In fact the techniques that were in the '60s and '70s cutting edge AI which consumed the full attention of supercomputers are now built into numerous software that you can purchase and run on home computers. An expert system, for example, is really just an intelligent way to search through a database, and come up with meaningful relationships. You run this kind of "AI" every time you search on google, or every time MS Word tries to correct your grammar, but you don't think of it as "AI". So having a TiVo or a website run "AI" does not imply that it need to be computationally intensive. So yes, simple statistical matching and simple keyword matching is the type of thing that does fall within the umbrella term of "AI". Although you are free to disagree with me - like I said, everyone seems to have their own definition.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
It's just a matter of time before they collect enough data to calculate some realistic correlations.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
_______
What, doesn't he know anything about the Nazis? A whole bunch of them loved to dress up in women's clothes. That TIVO is brilliant.
Nah, I think you're a fucking asshole too.
You even look like *my* asshole.
If they finger your box and then call you gay?
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I disagree. American Pie was dumb and lacking in humour, despite it's most earnest attempts. Yes, the worst it does is engage (constantly) in mild sexual innuendo, but there isn't even a pay-off. Tom Green, on the other hand, is a hard working well-spoken fool who leaves you wondering how a person obviously possessing intelligence could do so many stupid things and if perhaps there's some underlying statement that he's trying to make. Probably not, but I still find Tom Green's brand of madness to be a lot more spontaneous and funny than overproduced crap like American Pie, even when its also overproduced as it was in Freddy Got Fingered.
at +1: Goatse.cx ascii art
moderated to -1
edit post, change one letter
post at +1 again
moderated to -1
edit post, change one letter
post at +1 again
moderated to -1
etc...
And before you say something about maintaining karma. Try this:
post a funny/interesting/insightful/informative message at +1
moderated to +5
edit post, change one letter
post at +1 again
moderated to +5
Profit!!
Could work, with a small modification. Remove any positive moderation on an edited topic. Otherwise people would abuse it to get rid of -1's
That of cource would mean that the original has to be available when it comes to meta moderation, unless they set it up so that moderations on changed posts aren't meta-moderated
The real question is do we really want this added complexity (== larger chance of errors) just to be able to edit posts? After all most people learn by their mistakes and would stop to think "is this ok, is this good?" before hitting submit after a few screwups
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
Your TiVo doesn't record any comedy shows, does it..
During the pregnancy we bought some pregnancy videos from Amazon.com (Amazon.co.uk has almost none!).
Despite the fact that my Daughter is now six months old Amazon are still recommending Pregnancy for Dummies on DVD !!!!
I'd have thought that since they figure we (or rather my wife) were having a baby (from our purchasing habits) they'd have time-stamped the information for expiration in (say) 9 months!
It seems that TiVo recommendations are volumes more humorous than the shows themselves.
Most machine learning algorithms take quite a bit of data for anything resembling acceptable accuracy. And if TiVo recommends based on everythong from genre to year to actors, you have to watch a LOT of TV before TiVo knows you as well as the clerk at your local independent video store. It very quickly becomes a large game of 6 Degrees of Pregnant Gay Korean War Porn Stars.
One reasons your friends give you better book recommendations than Amazon is that they know something about your life outside your literary habits. Did you buy a book about southwestern cooking because you grew up in New Mexico or because you have a bumper bean crop this year? Did you buy a Bible because your last one wore out, or because you wanted to make Marilyn Manson fan art?
They say American kids spend more time watching TV than they do in school. For perfectly tuned TiVo recommendations, you'd probably have to give up sleep, work, and slashdot.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Yup.
May we never see th
Do you have trouble reading? Or just comprehending what you read? I said supporting role!!! That means he's not the star of the movie or the producer of the movie, he plays a SUPPORTING ROLE, say it slowly to yourself, let it sink in. That means its not his projec!!! Just watch the fucking thing, if you laughed at American Pie, you'll laugh at this, that's why Amazon suggest one if you buy the other. How fucking lame.
Even after previewing I STILL often miss errors or omissions.
Often it's more than a few seconds - Many times a minute or two later, I'll think, "Oh, I forgot about this..."
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Now THAT was funny!
true, and good idea, I had not thought about the negative shedding impact, all in all you are probably right about the learn at your own expense factor.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
(Bea Arthur relaxes back into her chair at the secret Remote Tivo Programming Laboratory and cackles evilly)
Man, that comment REALLY hit the nail :-)
I thought the bedside table joke somebody else posted was pretty funny, though.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our
thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another
in the waking state?
-- Plato
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