Scratchpad
(facebook, internet, privacy — )
4 Jul. 2008
One of the topics du jour in Internet research circles is privacy, and whether we're selling our personal information up the river. Facebook tends to be the main focus of such musings. At any rate, blah blah blah - I fired up one of my Facebook applications today (a little thing called "Friend Wheel" that generates a data visualization of the connections between your Facebook friends) and it spat a MySQL error back at me. A quite informative one, as a matter of fact - one that let me know exactly what it is that I am agreeing to when I say that I "agree to allow this application to access my profile information." It's interesting to actually see visual proof of what information you're divulging, and not just hear spinning theories.
Here's the error:
Mysql Error in /opt/lampp/htdocs/facebook/friendwheel/index.php, line 141.
Whole query: INSERT INTO userdetails (application, datetime, sex, birthday, country) VALUES ('friendwheel','2008-07-04 14:04:40','female','197x-0x-0x','United States')
Mysql said:Too many connections
Basically what this says is that this application - which only needs access to my name, friend list, and a list of which friends each of them is connected to - is also writing my sex, birth date, country, and time that I accessed the application to a database and is saving that for later use. Presumably some sort of metrics. But for what? Why do the application developers need this info?
Leaking information, indeed.
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(books, design, internet, reading, writing — )
19 Jun. 2008
I'm absolutely fascinated by the structure of older books. Books written before typewriters and computers. I'm looking at my copy of Democracy in America right now, for instance. The table of contents for Chapter 15 looks like this:
254 _ Unlimited Power of the Majority in the United States, and Its Consequences
257 _ How the omnipotence of the majority increases, in America, the instability of legislation and administration inherent in democracy
258 _ Tyranny of the majority
262 _ Effects of the omnipotence of the majority upon the arbitrary authority of American public officers
263 _ Power exercised by the majority in America upon opinion
265 _ Effects of the tyranny of the majority upon the national character of the Americans. - The courtier spirit in the United States
268 _ The greatest dangers of the American republics proceed from the omnipotence of the majority
The amount of information contained in each headline here is boggling to me, used, as I am, to terse and non-helpful subsections (if they exist at all) in modern book-length works. In essence, the table of contents here is what we now consider an outline - something to be done in prewriting stages but never actually shown to the reader in the completed work. And yet as shown here it makes the structure of the document, its theses and points and major themes, immediately obvious to the reader. As a designer...as a reader...as an impatient bitch...I fucking love this with every fiber of my tiny being.
It also breaks the text up into tiny, digestible chunks (notice how none of these subsections is more than a few pages at most...some not even a full page) - if I turn to any of these pages in the book, each subsection actually begins with the headline given above and is set so as to obviously indicate the start of a new section. And this makes me think of a recent discussion on the AoIR listserv in which several participants cited an Atlantic Monthly article lamenting the death of reading (yes, yet another of those goddamned 'reading is dead' articles). The gist of the article this time was that the Internet has changed reading for the worse - instead of digging into a long, windy, excessive book with loving OCD, the author now finds himself impatient with verbose crap and just wants to get to the heart of things already.*
Now - assuming for a moment that people are, in fact, expressing more impatience with what they read - could it not be because what people read is being more poorly written? Not that people are becoming more impatient or changing "how" they read? I look at the outline form used above, and it seems to me that it actually makes reading longer works of nonfiction seem significantly speedier. The design of the work means that you are getting slapped upside the head with the point. There's no hunting, wondering, head scratching, or going back to re-read. It's written linearly (something rare in modern works), the main points are immediately obvious and accessible (again - rare in modern works), and it's broken into smaller chunks that are more easily digestible.
In other words....older books are an awful lot like what is supposedly so terrible about reading on the web.
* Note: I adore reading and yet I have never enjoyed reading long winded bitches who fail to get to the point. It's one thing to read a novel that circumnavigates the globe ten times, but I have never, ever had the patience to read a work of nonfiction that does that. Has this author actually enjoyed reading long nonfiction in the past? Or are they confusing reading novels for pleasure with reading reference for pleasure? Seriously. I've just gotta ask. Did this dude really enjoy that once upon a time when he walked uphill to school in the snow both ways? 'Cause that would be really....'interesting.'
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(access, culture wars, internet, language, politics, segregation — )
23 Jan. 2008
I finally decided that after being in NY for four months it was time to check out at least one local lesbian hangout, albeit with trepidation. (Honestly, could there possibly be a less interesting scene in the entire world than a lesbian bar? If so, morbid curiosity impels me to keep looking for it.) So I popped on down to a little joint in the West Village, sidled up to the bar, turned to my left, and to my complete non-surprise saw another Sarah Lawrence grad from my class on the stool next to me. We'll call her H.
Needless to say we got to talking (if nothing else, it's hard to shut a Sarah Lawrence student up) on a whole host of topics, including words, neighborhoods, experiments in group ethics, pulling people off of subway tracks, girlfriends, the Internet, waiting tables, tiny apartments. You know, the usual topics for liberal arts geeks who get together. All in all, quite an enjoyable evening, and I had to scold myself for expecting it to turn out badly.
Even so, I was - and have remained - particularly discouraged by one aspect of the conversation. We were talking about words. I believe her friend asked whether a particular word was a real word or if she was making it up, and the bartender, who was a weird, veritable font of random trivia and aspires one day to be on Jeopardy, indicated that it was. Then the OED came up and we started talking dictionaries and made up words. I suggested that if H. was really as intrigued and simultaneously disgusted by made-up words as she indicated, she should check out the Urban Dictionary.
Now, as an aside, I find Urban Dictionary wonderful and fascinating and hilarious, and although I used to be rather uptight about "proper English," I've since come to embrace how wonderful and rich language can be through the process of evolution. Sure, there are certain words that I abhor and refuse to use (I'm thinking mostly of business-ese here...the utilizes and synergies and concretizing), but, on the whole, I think that playfulness and ingenuity are admirable traits in all other areas of life, so why not with language?
So, having divulged that about myself, I shouldn't have to tell you that I was pretty crestfallen when the bartender piped in with, "Urban Dictionary? Oh my God, that is the worst fucking site ever. I fucking hate that site. It's an affront to the English language. It's illiterate, ghetto central," or something pretty similar.
I felt like I had to come to the site's rescue. "Well that's the point, isn't it? That's what makes it so fascinating. I mean, it's precisely because these aren't the types of words you would use that it's so wonderful. This isn't stuff you're going to hear from most of your friends or the circles you normally run in, it gives you a little window into a whole different culture." Which is true, but I know that my defense came across as pretty lame.
And then, what the fuck out of the blue, H. comes at me with something about how everyone thinks the Internet is so wonderful but it's not, because it leaves out whole swaths of the population. Essentially, she came at me with the access argument, but couched in slightly different terms. Her implication to me was how could I be defending the Internet as being great when there are so many minorities who aren't represented on it? (As if that's the Internet's fault and not society's fault, but I haven't quite got to that part of the story yet).
Now, that's fine, that's all well and good, I've heard that argument a million times before, but the part that really slapped me at the time and which has only more persistently been seeping into every pore and just nagging the hell out of me ever since is that we were just discussing a website frequented by and essentially made by these very same "underrepresented minorities" she was purporting to defend, and she and everyone else in the conversation was trashing the site as being an illiterate piece of shit. But more to the point, they were making it very, very clear that they absolutely, positively do not go to those sorts of websites.
So the bit that's really started to nag at me is just how accurate is the party line on underrepresented groups on the Internet? And I do mean party line - I hear this argument stated as fact all the time on any number of the mailing lists I'm on, in articles in the Times, on Slate, Personal Telco...everywhere. (And by everywhere, I mean everywhere there are liberal, white, educated folk who have the white man's burden to make sure everyone gets access, or at least talk about it whether or not they are actually trying to do anything about it.) After watching the conversations in such places carefully over the last several years, after studying topics like viral marketing, after listening to endless political rhetoric, I've become keenly aware of how truths wax and wane and become more true within closed communities and it's become very, very hard for me to accept anything as fact just because I hear it a lot. If anything, the more I hear something the more suspect it becomes in my mind. I've come to hate taking anything for granted, least of all my own beliefs.
So that's it. It's been bothering me like mad ever since I had this conversation. I've been on some crazy sites during my love affair with the Internet. Forums haunted by professional mercenaries. Social networks comprised of miners and welfare moms. Porn sites. I came across a blog the other day by and for perfume industry professionals that practically bordered on scent fetishism. Black power sites. Sites from school kids in rural Appalachia. Sites from African-American expats living in Africa. Latino dating sites. I even looked at a couple of neo-Nazi sites once...for a few minutes, anyway. Even I have my limits. But mostly I just stick to my little corner of things and chat with the folks I know and who have similar interests to my own. And that's the part that bothers me. Here we are talking about underrepresented this and unfair that and no access and human rights, and from what I've seen (and this extends beyond H., to be fair to her) most of the people doing the talking aren't willing to explore the very corners of the Internet they claim don't exist.
So is it that they don't exist? Or are they there and are we just too damn ignorant and self-important to know they do exist? Do we actually want to know they exist? Or maybe we want them to have access, but only if the pages they make look and sound white?
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(censorship, internet, logging, tracking — )
10 Dec. 2007
Dear Lightspeed employee,
May I recommend that if you are going to visit my site discussing your offensive business practices, you do not do it by clicking a link from your office webmail program, which appears in my server logs as
Referer: http://mail.lightspeedsystems.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp
Comments (0)
(censorship, htaccess, information, internet, robots — )
7 Dec. 2007
Way back when I was keeping the Internet Destruct blog, I posted about an Internet filtering company that supplied schools with filtering software for their machines, and I mentioned that I had an .htaccess entry blocking them from indexing my site, mainly because I find it unconscionable and completely un-American (yeah, that's right, I do actually have that word in my repertoire, flaming faux liberal though I am) that a company makes money by censoring stuff in libraries and schools, the very bastions of learning and knowledge.
Needless to say, given the above I was extremely pissed when I discovered about 15 minutes ago that my site is currently in their database and appeared to have been downloaded in late November.
So I went back through my recent logs with a fine toothed comb and finally found out how they were accessing the site. It helped that they mention on their site when they last downloaded my files, although I stupidly forgot that my server is somewhere ridiculous and I didn't time zone correct. At any rate, they have a new domain name to send their spiders out from - biz.arrival.net. A whois search on lightspeedsystems.com (their last bot address) and arrival.net shows the same contact address.
This is a rather insidious development, because Lightspeed either offers or receives their own ISP services through Arrival Communications, which means blocking that hostname could potentially block real users who happen to use Arrival for connecting to the Internet.
Sigh. I might have to actually start creating fake content just for them.
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} arrival.net$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
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(history, internet, reminiscence, urban exploration — )
17 Oct. 2007
Perhaps it's because I've just moved back to New York, where I haven't lived since the heady days of college, perhaps it's the miscreants I hang out with or spend time reading online, or perhaps it's the tantalizing sites and tunnels and buildings I've been passing since returning, but something today stirred a long forgotten memory of the time when I got deeply involved in urban exploration.
Perhaps it was the photo essay of the Arroyo Seco Dam that started it, but as I dug through the detritus of this hobby on the Internet, I started unearthing old archaeological memories, some still lingering with the tiniest shreds of neglect that the internet seems to foster. Forgotten websites; still remaining links and references to my own first site which was dedicated to the pursuit (and is now easily 7 years defunct); photos from collaborators whom I corresponded with daily, even as I never met them, but who are still going strong; memorials to others who have since passed away; books written by others still. Names I'd forgotten - Petr, Vlad, Ninj, or Julia - have been swimming back into my consciousness.
I don't know that this nostalgia is necessarily anything but - I don't fancy getting found dirty in a drain in Queens and having to explain myself in a post-terrorist court. And I suspect I get the same thrill of exploration now from books, networks, and ideas that I'd never, until now, considered as subjects that could actually be physically explored as much as they could be intellectually plumbed. But, even so, every day on my way home from work it's everything I can do not to hop off the train at Mount Vernon East and poke my head into the empty holes on the castle-like object under the train bridge.
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