Author Archives: RexLatchford

The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging

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I decided to catch up on politics a little before my vacation ended. I don’t watch TV, so I used my Internet device that’s designed to allow the cable company and websites more completely monitor my every move. I pulled in “State of the Union” with Candy Crowly (“the bear”). She was Interviewing some Republican would-be contender.

I had just seen some clips of Sarah Palin squeaking and barking like an obese prairie dog begging for chocolate by the side of the road. I’d also seen President Obama pontificating in New Jersey, flanked by the local limelight-seeking politicians, before an illegal migrant whose home had been wiped out by the flooding. The illegal was sobbing, and it seemed as if Obama, in a flash of cognition, grasped that the woman was not impressed by his pontificating. He stopped his spiel, bent over her, and put his arm around her shoulder in a choreographed display of political correctness. He said to the woman in an unconvincing attempt to be empathetic: “it’s hard, I understand.” The woman sobbed even harder, and the program cut back to the anchor.

And so, when a Republican functionary exposed bits of his underbelly to “the bear” in return for a shot at nearly an hour of TV time, I couldn’t help but feel that the whole thing was, like, so last week. Where are the aliens when we need them? Not the illegals, but the ones from outer-space. We desperately need something new in the way of leadership, but Democrats and Republicans just don’t seem to be up to it.

So, my vacation is over, and I’ll have to return to Earth. I’ll watch as the Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging, in the form of over a dozen Republican candidates, marches by. I’ll wish that the media didn’t have a blackout on Ron Paul’s candidacy. I’ll pray for a visitation by aliens with greater intelligence. I’ll hope that when they come, we don’t treat them like we did in District 9. I figure alien’s inhumanity to man can’t be much worse than man’s inhumanity to man, and may well be better. I’ll wish that Americans on Unemployment Insurance realized there are good paying jobs in North Dakota, and that they should get off their 90% (or whatever the percentage is) obese butts and go take those jobs, most of which pay way more than I make. Even if they’d rather watch their big screen TV’s and stay stuck where they are with their ex’s and weekend visitation. I’ll wish that President Obama would change that, but he’ll embrace and subsidize it further instead.

That’s my welcome back.

Google vs. Customer Service

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This article is about the inhumanity of Google to man. Google is, after all, a bunch of rocket scientists trying to interface with mere human beings. We saw this problem in the space program with the loss of Challenger and its crew due to inhuman organization. Today, Google is larger than even the space program, and has the capacity to wreak great havoc while trying to “do no evil”. Like the three wise monkeys, Google sees no evil, hears no evil, and tries hard to speak no evil. Despite this, we have seen Google do evil. Rather than rant further on the subject, I’d like to provide an example of how the problem can cost the average netepreneur big money. We’ll also see how Google is meeting the enemy and it is… Google (not Apple) — as the Google Gobble is performed on Motorola Mobility. Will Google recognize this as it tries to “Google Everything”? Like many giant corporations beset with difficult-to-manage growth, Google may have forgotten that its core business is to “be Google”; not just another behemoth set upon us, run amok, devouring everything in sight.

 


Three Wise Monkeys – Image via WikiPedia

But where is Shizaru?

An Example in Business

If you’re one of the millions of people with, or managing, a web presence, you probably deal with Google AdSense. You may also deal with AdBrite or nearly a dozen other Internet advertising networks. Both are easy-to-use ad networks that let you embed ads on your website and “reap the rewards” (one thousandth of a penny at a time). Many Internet projects and websites would not be possible without them. As a matter of full disclosure, The Latchford Factor derives most of its revenues from Google AdSense.

You sign up for Google AdSense. And AdBrite. Both are the same in the beginning. You create an online account on their website, and, after all the signup details (including providing name, rank, and serial number to satisfy the government’s need to enumerate you) start placing ads.

With AdBrite, as soon as you hit $50 in revenue, they’ll cut you a check at the start of the month and mail it to you. You get it about 12 days later. Simple, with no other choices for payment. It works. Mostly. As long as you get the proverbial check in the mail.

With AdSense, it’s just as automated, but not quite so simple. More like rocket science, PhD style. You’ll get paid after you hit $50 in revenue, all right, but first… they’ll send you a PIN number in the mail. It’s in a perforated mail form that is easily lost by the Post Office. You have to receive the mailer, and enter the PIN inside to validate your address before you can get paid… even if you’ve already verified a bank account for direct deposit. If the form is lost in the mail (which happens a lot), you have to wait a month or so before another can be sent. Then you can get paid* (terms and restrictions apply). You get the options of direct deposit, fed-X for an exhorbitant fee, etc. Cool. So far. Except…

What separates these two services is what happens when something goes wrong. And something always does go wrong. Sooner or later. Google, apparently, hasn’t learned about Murphy’s Law, and believes that they can automate a task such that every possible error condition can be anticipated and handled. Except, they don’t even come close.

With AdBrite, you can pick up the phone, and during business hours, they’ll answer your call fairly promptly. They’ll do their best to help you, but usually just wind up opening up a support ticket that you could have opened yourself online. Regardless, your issue is addressed in a documented and timely manner. The way you’d expect to be treated by a business partner you’re sharing hundreds, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars a month with.

With Google, you can pick up the phone, but it won’t help. There is no number to call. You can’t send an email either. There is no email address you can write to. You can’t even open up a support ticket. They don’t have those either. They do have “customer forums”. If you spend enough time searching (Googling), you’ll probably find that there are dozens, hundreds, or many thousands of people with the same problem. Wow, how cool is that? But then… nothing happens. You just sit there, reading complaint after complaint about the same thing. Your problem does not get solved. Well, maybe it does, but it gets solved in “Google Time”, which in my experience can take two years or more.

After my own experiences with Google, which cost thousands in lost revenue for my employer, the employer took the position that to the extent profitable, it would give its business in preference to any other ad network that would communicate with its partners. The problem is, Google generally does give the best revenue. What’s a mother to do? Stand in line?






Apples-to-Googles

Everyone is agog (not aGoog) at Apple’s iStores. The opposite of iSores, these temples of whiteness and monuments to computerphobia compensated for by industrial design are more than pretty facia. Customers pay (handsomely) for, and get Customer Service. It’s sort-of hands-on Customer Service. I’d frankly feel better if they wore white gloves, but that’s another post… The point is there’s nothing to separate you from the dispenser of Customer Service. No counter. No intimidating cash register or credit verifier. Just a sometimes friendly geek with a card swiper hooked to his iPhone so he can take your iCash in an instant.

But Google doesn’t like people. They like to keep the human interaction at a distance, buffered by the web browser and HTML with CSS.

And so it was that when I turned on my car radio, I felt like there was an echo in there. Ira Flatow was on NPR’s Science Friday (SciFri) and chatting it up with Glenn Fleishman of The Economist about Google vs. Apple in the context of the Google-ization of Motorola Mobility, the cell phone manufacturing arm of Motorola. You can listen in, or read the transcript.

At nine minutes and twenty-two seconds into the segment, Glenn Fleishman says:

“Google doesn’t like people very much has always been my impression. They want to keep people arms-length away and let the algorithms, the automatic things, the user support forums handle everything.”

I felt vindicated. And less alone. Even though I knew I was a member of a fairly large crowd. It’s just that Google Gloss tends to cover us over. Caveat Googlor of the Google Gobble.

Doubt Googlemegalomania?

Aside

Do you doubt Google is trying to monopolize present reality? You shouldn’t! “Google Offers” is just another step down the path… after Groupon refused to become Google-ized.

If you had any doubt… perhaps the acquisition of “Moto Mobile” clarified the picture. Google wasn’t content to have Android be the most widespread mobile operating system… they needed to build the phones that run it too. No? Not enough proof?

Then how about the thing that popped up on my screen today:

You can tell I don’t get out much. I totally missed the article in the NY Times on “Google Offers”. I read the New York Times whenever I get a chance (that’s only occasionally). Nor did I see any of the quadzillions of other mentions. I just noticed it today because I’m on vacation and got a few free moments to surf. You  must understand, I have a life.

Instead of the well-known phrase “me-too”, we now need “Goog-too”, a symptom of Goog-tooism. Sigh. It seems to happen to nearly every organization that gets, well, huge. They become paranoid of anything that comes within their self-determined “kill zone”. In Google’s case, everything (hence, “Google Everything“).

Groupon has become quite the target. Nearly every media organization known to man or other sentient species strewn throughout the Galaxy has jumped on this band-wagon (or “trade vessel” in the inter-stellar case). Groupon clones have sprouted everywhere sprouting is possible. I found a new venture this morning exploiting a crack in the grouting around the toilet where I’m staying. Another was launched by the pet hamster of an 11 year old boy in Anaheim, CA last week (Hamster-Dealz). The hamster held a press conference and got plenty of start-up seed capital. So why not Goog-too? There’s an obvious answer to that, but it’s not one a large, increasingly megalomaniacal and paranoid corporation would ever consider.

Full disclosure: This site runs advertising served by Google Adsense

 

 

 

Obama on Libyian Liberation: Huh???

Aside

(Rex Latchford is on vacation at Undisclosed Location, Tropical Island)
I awoke to the news of the Liberation of Tripoli. I was pleased for the rebels, many of whom seemed to be barefoot at the time, at least in the video clips I’ve been seeing. I felt a wave of relief. I’d been listening to the live coverage on BBC World Service which seemed to be a full 12 hours ahead of the American news media. They’d had it that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had been captured, but this morning it seemed he’d eluded capture.
Then came comment from the Obama administration. “We hope Gadaffi (Khadaffy, or whichever of the dozens of spellings you prefer) realizes it’s time to leave power” he said, in essence. Time to go? “Old Camel Breath” had undoubtedly mounted a camel and begun to fade into the desert a half day before Obama made the utterance. If this is how far behind the 8 Ball Obama is, we are in deep trouble.
Unable to wrap my mind around how out of touch the administration seemed to be, I was instead transported to the Libyan desert, the silhouette of “Old Camel Face” on camel back in his rock-star sunglasses, fading into the shimmering air.
I’ll miss that guy. He’s been entertaining me since I first became aware of current events. Without doubt, no other world leader has been as mischievous or full of shit. Let’s all raise a toast to Old Camel Breath… he’s done, but perhaps not finished. Moammar, I’ll miss hearing about your global pranks. Enjoy your time in hell.



Milking the Spooks Who Milk US

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I came across this twist while researching invasion-of-privacy by the government.

Communications Companies Milk the Spooks

It’s fairly widely known that the government routinely asks for, and gets, telecommunications information on individuals from communications companies like Internet and telephone service providers. Sometimes these requests are legal (with an accompanying court order), sometimes not. They are almost always complied with. Or, were.

There are two trends in this landscape of communications providers ratting out our activities to the government:

First, communications companies have discovered the are huge profits to be made snooping on citizens for the government. For example, Comcast documents show that after an initial charge exceeding a thousand dollars, the cost per month to snoop on one individual is more than seven hundred dollars.

Second, perhaps to mitigate the increasing costs cited above, the need for law enforcement or government snoops to ask for this information is diminishing as the amount of information amassed by the Total Information Awareness “non-program” increases. The only stumbling point there is gaining access to the NSA‘s mother lode.



Spooks Milk US so They Don’t Have to Go Outside

Meantime, despite the recession, and perhaps to stem the needs to purchase information and instead just keep recording everything and store it forever, the NSA continues to expand it’s capacious data trove:

From: US spooks to build 60 megawatt data center by Timothy Prickett Morgan

According to declassified documents made available by the comptroller’s office for the Department of Defense, the US government’s fiscal 2012 budget includes $860.6m to build a high performance computing center at the NSA’s Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters facility. That is the cost for the facility alone, not the cost of the servers, storage, and networking gear that will inhabit the data center.

From:  NSA to Modernize With Cloud and Crypto Centers by Darlene Storm, Computerworld

NSA’s chief information officer (CIO) Lonny Anderson talked with Federal News Radio’s Jason Miller about the NSA’s mission, the three new state-of-the-art NSA cryptological centers in Hawaii, Georgia and Texas, as well as how efficiencies in IT with the cloud will help modernize the secretive intelligence agency.

NSA’s massive 65 megawatt data center is on 240-acres at the National Guard facility in Camp Williams, Utah. The self sustaining complex will have 1 million square feet of enclosed space with 100,000 square feet of working computer space. It will have its own “water and waste-water treatment plants, power, gas supply, battery backup, visitor-control facilities, vehicle inspection station and perimeter security.” It is supposed to be capable of storing staggering amounts of surveillance data, yottabytes of data . In case your mind does not automatically compute just how mega huge that is, CrunchGear described it as, “There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet?”

Anderson said the Utah data center will support the Obama administration’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) as well as support the Intelligence Community (IC). It will have new tech and very efficient tech, designed with NSA’s future needs in mind. It will be used to assist Homeland Security, but Anderson said the NSA only helps DHS when asked. The massive data center will help focus on cyber threats to make certain national security networks are protected. All intelligence will “feed” from the data center, meaning the data will be stored in that single data center which will help discover threats in a “near real-time environment.”

 

Why We Can’t Trust the Government With Our Secrets

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Logo of the Information Awareness Office, an a...

Image via Wikipedia

The title of this blog is the problem with the government’s widespread snooping on citizens. The government says it hasn’t implemented the Total Information Awareness Program… but there is plenty of evidence that it has. And that means that everything on the Internet, and all phone calls, are being recorded and archived by the government for data mining. That means anything said during a voice call or done on the Internet could come back to haunt you at any time in the future. And let’s be serious – we’re not just talking crime here. You have to know it will be used for political purposes (e.g. to control citizens).

I want to keep this post focused. So we’ll keep it simple:

Can we trust the U.S. government to keep all the information it amasses about us secret?

According to the government, we can’t.

This sad, but hardly astonishing fact was underscored yesterday in the publication of a memo from Donald Rumsfeld in 2005 while he was Secretary of Defense under President Bush:

 

Donald Rumsfeld

Donald Rumsfeld Image via Wikipedia

 

FOUO
November 02, 2005
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: U.S. Government Incapable of Keeping a Secret

The United States Government is incapable of keeping a secret.

If one accepts that, and I do, that means that the U.S. Government will have to craft
policies that reflect that reality.

DHR.ss
110205-11

 

The actual memo is here.

… that’s short, sweet, and to the point. But if we accept Rumsfeld’s view, then we are in grave danger, and we must consider that any shred of privacy we may have once had, say, a decade ago… is now long gone.

Please see:

U.S. is “Incapable of Keeping a Secret,” Rumsfeld Concluded in 2005
July 15th, 2011 by Steven Aftergood

The Devil in your Cookies
July 15th, 2011 by Rex Latchford

The Devil in your Cookies

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Piru

Crude Image via Wikipedia

This blog post is based on a section of my upcoming book “The Devil for Dummies”.

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, when your ancient ancestors roamed the earth, a thing called the World Wide Web was created. It was “stateless” – one page had no narrative connection with another other than by hyperlinks. But writers didn’t understand how to write in this medium. Writers understood only “the narrative” as it had existed for thousands of years. After much gnashing of teeth, complaining, soiled diapers, and ultimately the lobbying efforts of the Devil himself, cookies were added to the otherwise simple design of the web browser.

 

Plateful of Christmas Cookies

Image via Wikipedia

The cookies were added to provide a mechanism for maintaining “state”: not a lot, but just enough, in the estimation of the designers, to allow for maintenance of a narrative relationship between web pages. The Devil sniggered, and drooled sulfurous snot, cranking up the heat on the advertising industry (one of his minions). Other minions, armed with pitchforks glowing orange-hot, were dispatched to major media concerns and other massive content providers.

In a mild effort to protect the security of these cookies, the designers had humbly decided that only the domain that set the cookie could read the cookie. This would, they believed in their naive minds, prevent cookie snooping. The Devil fairly glowed as he observed this, and could barely contain his delight and glee. The designers had forgotten that each user has a (mostly) unique IP address (mostly unique enough for the Devil’s purposes), and that advertising is usually provided across many sites by the same third parties (the Devil’s minions).

 

Santa Claus with a little girl

Image via Wikipedia

The Devil got busy. You see, disk space had become very cheap, so extensive record keeping became trivial.  Cookie information could be combined with two other pieces of information: the URL of the referring page, and your IP address. This information was obtained every time an advertisement was displayed on your page. This allowed advertisers to track a user’s every move. Soon, the Devil’s info-base of who did what to whom when would surpass Santa Claus’s, and approach God’s omniscience (with nothing forgiven)!

The Devil wasn’t done yet, as I discovered today when I performed a fairly routine task of posting a comment to an online item. It could have been a blog, or a news article. I couldn’t post it without setting up an account. Perhaps an easy way to hold comment posters responsible for non-abusive behavior. Perhaps a way to track who has comments about what. For example, you might be someone who criticizes the government, and thus a terrorist. All tracked by cookies, IP addresses, profiles, the NSA, etc. Anything on the Internet could be a matter of national security, you see.

Headquarters of the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland.

NSA Headquarters - Image via Wikipedia

Everyone needs backup. Even the Devil. So, it was arranged that the National Security Agency (NSA) would undertake a program called “Total Information Awareness” (that it would later deny implementing despite evidence to the contrary). This program simply recorded everything on the Internet, as well as all telephone calls, so that nothing was missed. The Devil, politicians, and other similarly motivated parties could mine the information at a later time to get the goods on someone whenever it was convenient… even years or decades after the fact. Many government workers got bonuses from the Devil for that one. Of course, access to the NSA’s data warehouse was to be strictly controlled, but even the most innocent know how bad the government is at keeping secrets.

When you start to collect enough information about an individual, a profile is essentially created. This profile, as information is added, starts to exhibit properties that can be used to match it with other information or profiles collected in other data streams. Like smaller bubbles merging into ever larger ones, profiles in cyberspace merge until large amounts of personal information are aggregated and pinned to an individual. Perhaps one such profile didn’t originally contain your name, but the profile became a confirmed match with another one that DID contain your name, perhaps because there was an IP address or cookie in common. Or phone number. Or social “security” [sic] number. Or mother’s maiden name (in the security hint). Or pets name and zip code. And so on, so much so, that privacy vanished completely in a puff of sulfurous smoke.

Blame it on the Devil. The Devil did it.

 

Devil goat

The Devil - Image via Wikipedia

… more than likely, though, it wasn’t the Devil. No, it was the rest of us not standing up for our rights. We were too busy being entertained. You snooze, you lose. And then… well… it’s hard to get it back. Facts on the ground as some have said. Still the Devil smiles as we’re ALL his minions. Muhahahaa!

The American Dream of Driving, Automated

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Will police need to get a new job, like fighting crime instead of issuing traffic tickets?

What will happen to Americans like my late Mom, who would rather die than stop driving?

The State of Nevada passed legislationon June 22, 2011 that paves the way for autonomous autos. Credited for the passage is heavy lobbying by Google. The entire draft legislation, Nevada Assembly Bill No. 511 is here.

Perhaps best known is Google’s autonomous Audi, but there are many other entries to this effort in the pipeline, including Stanford U which is active in the legal aspects of autonomous driving, VW with a “car that can drive itself at 80mph” and many more.

The technology is fascinating, but I wager that for anyone who has been pulled over, or gotten a traffic ticket for some minor infraction (who hasn’t?) by a heavily armored police officer in a gas guzzling police cruiser, it’s the legal aspect that may be of greatest interest: no more traffic tickets, a more fair, and less expensive insurance framework. Commoditization of vehicles. An increase in safety and reduction in traffic accidents. And with automated traffic management, the next logical step after autonomous vehicles, faster trips with fewer traffic jams.

There’s always a downside. Police forces may be forced to consider layoffs of officers who don’t know how to fight crime – only traffic infractions. That could bump up the unemployment rate for a short time.

In addition to the links in this article:

 

 

 

 

 

Retard Nation

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First, an apology for the title. It should be “Imbecile Nation”, however, it seems too many people are unacquainted with the meaning of the word imbecile.

This post is about my visceral reaction to the Casey Anthony verdict.

I am appalled by the public reaction. I recognize that second-guessing jury verdicts is a popular pastime for the unemployed and people with too much time on their hands. I say this because there is a hint of lack of respect understanding of the judicial process. I worry that if there is no respect for the judicial process, however wrong or misguided it may be at times, or however activist the judge, or however unconstitutional the ruling, there will be no hope of justice ever.

And then, there is the reaction of politicians. I urge the rabble to exercise caution: be careful of what you ask for: you might get it. The proposed “Casey’s Law”. It seems that the brains of our politicians are so addled by drugs, lust, corruption, greed, and junk-food, that they…

Well, perhaps I just need a vacation… some place like where Casey Anthony should go to avoid being lynched to death by a crazed and angry mob. Of imbeciles.

[And oh, those ranting Facebook videos…]

Getting a Chokehold on the Internet

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Internet Kill Switch

Leaders everywhere fervently pray for a “kill switch” for the Internet. Many of them undoubtedly have projects underway, or perhaps have completed such projects, within the bounds of their reach. Governments and like entities that would exercise control over information have good reason to be concerned about control of the Internet, in the wake of Wikileaks and the Arab Spring. As a result, we, the people who would be controlled in such a manner, should become more aware of Internet control issues.

The Internet was designed, perhaps diabolically in the minds of the military industrial complex that funded its development, to resist being cut off or broken. Internet protocols will try endlessly to find any route possible that will get around road blocks and interruptions that are thrown in the way of the flow of information. The Internet (capital I) is not one network, but a network of thousands of smaller internets (lowercase i) that are autonomously operated. These smaller networks include cable companies, phone companies, Internet transit companies such as Level(3), and “ISP”s, all of which are potentially dispensable and not critical to the operation if the Internet. Even users have choice in how they connect. If you home connection is shut off, there is the Internet cafe, etc. This decentralized design was intentional, and does have the effect of resisting centralized control. And who would want centralized control anyway? Only those who would control the flow of information. Just what we don’t want. Right? One would hope.

This was all very obvious to users of the early Internet. But many users have come on board since the commercialization of the Internet who have no clue what the Internet really is, how it works, or why it was designed the way it is. This lack of awareness is, as is often the case, a threat to our freedom. Some education is in order. The need, and a partial solution, is manifested in the recently formed “Chokepoint Project“.

Introducing the Chokepoint Project

On February 27th, 2011, the order was given to “turn off” the Internet in Egypt, limiting communications and voiding commerce conducted online. Egyptian Internet services resumed on February 2nd. Fastforward just a few weeks later, this time Libya commences its disconnect February 18th, with a blackout occurring March 4th.

Shutting down the Internet in two countries sent shock-waves across the world. We also  heard people like American Senator Liberman asking for access to a similar kill switch. These actions force us all to ask ‘Who owns The Internet?” and what are the implications of the said controls over connectivity and scenarios for their use?

If you believe the Internet is not something that can or should be soley controlled by politicians or people inside the higher echelons of nation states, resulting in situations like Egypt and Libya, we’d love to tell you about what we are building.

The Choke Point Project addresses the events of recent months with the clear aim of mapping nodes of Internet connectivity and who maintains their control and what this may mean. We believe there is the need for a more decentralized Internet beyond the complete control of nation states and corporate influence.

A quick look at the Chokepoint Website leaves the impression that it is produced by individuals who never knew a world without the Internet, and do not fully grasp what it is or how it fits (and does not fit) with the world in which we live. Nor are the issues of privacy and control apparently fully grasped. But it’s an important start. It’s important work, and there are many who need to be educated to the threat that controlling power poses. One is immediately concerned that a road map is being produced that will greatly assist those who would exercise control over the Internet. But knowledge is power, more so when placed in the hands of the public than when placed in the hands of insulated power-mad bureaucrats and their minions.

Choke Point Project Introductory Video