Polyanna on Steroids

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, futurism, forecasting, internet

Émile Coué taught his patients to repeat as a mantra, "Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better." It is no coincidence that he is a co-discoverer of the placebo method. There is no irony in saying that many of his patients did indeed improve, because reassurance can powerfully influence our feelings and speed our healing, whether emotional or physical. Now, if only we could induce society as a whole to adopt this mantra!

Byron Reese may be the man to do it. He just needs a bigger pulpit. For the time being, his book must do: Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War. The book was published in 2013, shortly after the beginning of the second term of President Obama. The one positive thing to come out of Mr. Obama's work is his book The Audacity of Hope. By comparison with Mr. Reese's book, it seems short-sighted.

Using the past as a springboard into the future, Infinite Progress outlines the large trends that the author expects to continue into the future, and to produce ever-increasing prosperity, from which the other benefits will be derived. Thinking back over his contentions and discussions, I must agree in part. These things can happen. Whether they will or not, human nature will have a big part to play, but so will nature. The current Coronavirus pandemic and the over-reaction of the immune system of the body politic is a Black Swan to beat all black swans.

I was much enamored with the book The Black Swan, and have written about the principle a few times. However, I was seduced, as was N.N. Taleb, the author, by the Cauchy Distribution he cites as a good model for stock market activity (it isn't, but that's another story). I was seduced into thinking that black swans are part of the normal course of things; that they are extreme but otherwise unexceptional. Of course, they are not. The Europeans who were astonished to see black swans in Australia didn't initially realize that the Australian Swan is a different species, Cygnus atratus, than the mute swan, Cygnus olor. I also considered floods and the seeming over-abundance of 1,000-year floods in some areas. However, on closer examination, the extreme floods are produced by a different climatic mechanism than the more ordinary seasonal floods of the five-to-hundred-year variety. They are part of a different population, a different species of storm, if you'll forgive me the use of a biological term.

As dominant as the present pandemic seems to be, the trends Byron Reese outlines may be delayed, but possibly not by very much. I like his analyses, and I hope he is right. But allow me to comment on the five trends, not as a skeptic, but for a cautionary purpose.

• Ignorance – To summarize a story from a century-old Christian tract: A believer was witnessing to a friend who owned a soap factory. The friend was skeptical. They came across a dirty boy playing in a mud puddle. The believer asked, "Why is this boy dirty? Your soap factory is nearby!" The friend said, "Soap is only helpful if you use it." The believer replied, "So is the Gospel." Then, from a piece of calligraphy on my bedroom wall: "Wisdom is knowing what to do / Knowledge is knowing how to do it / Success is doing it". Near-infinite knowledge on more subjects than any person will ever even know exist (Wikipedia has 6+ million articles in English and many more in 300+ other languages; Google indexes 30 trillion web pages). It isn't hard to find out a lot about anything. But I have a maxim and a corollary that are worth a book of their own: "Those who will learn from others have fewer scars. Most people have too many scars."
  
• Disease – Most doctors begin their careers full of optimism and altruism. Far too many succumb to a profit motive and end up using "treatments" that maximize cash flow rather than minimizing suffering. Most drug and medical equipment companies were begun similarly, and followed a similar, cynical path. Perhaps we must adopt an attitude of "I pay only for success, not for 'trying'." By the way, it is stated on page 90 (in the eBook), "Even smallpox has been sequenced and is available for download." One insane person can bring it back; millennials and younger are not vaccinated… But to the point, let's make sure cures are profitable and infinitesimal "improvements" are not.
• Poverty – Jesus said, "The poor you will always have with you." He knew human nature. People differ dramatically in ability, and some just roll nothing but Snake Eyes. However, as prosperity spreads, as Reagan's Trickle-down Theory works its magic (don't scoff, it led to the biggest postwar boom ever, including the recent one from 2/2017-2/2020), "poverty" will be defined as having a smaller TV, and perhaps only one thereof (rather than not having a house in which to put one); having only one "good suit" (rather than having only rags); and so forth. America's poor are better off than all but the richest Africans. The other question to ask is, can Earth sustain that level of prosperity for all? Is our planet big enough? This is not sufficiently addressed in the book. A big part of the book's plan is offloading all dehumanizing tasks to machines. Are we ennobled by idleness? Because there may not be enough "humanizing" tasks to go around.
• Hunger – The author seems to have assimilated without question a statement by Colin Clark in 1967, that the minimum space necessary to feed a person was 27 square kilometers. I beg your pardon?? He must have misread Clark. The land surface area of Earth is about 148 million sq km, and the arable (farmable) area is 31 million. At 27 per, that could only feed a little over one million of us. Arable surface per person is presently just over one acre. I looked up Colin Clark's writings. His estimate of maximum population ranged from 28 billion to about twice that (…for American standard of living, and 148 billion at a Japanese standard of living), but he over-measured the arable surface, so as well as I can determine, he considered the land needed per person at about 270 square meters (Japanese standard) or 680 sq m (American standard). As the author tells us, most hunger is structural, meaning people can't afford food or can't travel to where it is affordable, because the Earth still has a food surplus. I'll comment later on population growth. The author believes we'll always find away to increase yields.
• War – The trends and discussion boil down to this: Make war economically unaffordable, and most warfare will end. More trade, more co-industry and so forth. Of course, there is still fanaticism we must deal with, and the lesson of the 9/11 disaster and the ensuing 19 years is that the existence of "The Great Satan" (i.e., the USA) is sufficient reason for ongoing warfare between Islam and the West. (Note, I consider the term "radical Islam" to be a redundancy). Ideology will always trump prosperity.

Will there come a time of plenty and peace? As a Christian, knowing human nature from decades of counseling unhappy people, and believing the Bible, I see peace only in the kingdom of God. But of course this book has no relation to anything Biblical. The author is a historian, not a theologian. So let's suppose his dream largely comes true. Not as all problems being solved, but the five big ones he identifies being largely mitigated. Will the 24^th Century be a Star Trek century of peace and plenty? A lot depends on how rapidly human population approaches the "Japanese standard of living" threshold of 148 billion. For it is sure to do so.

The global rate of population growth is 1.1%/yr. That's lower than it was when I was a child, by about half. Will it go lower? First let's look at what results if it doesn't:

• near-Today (3/2020): 7.8B
• Year 2100: 18.7B
• Year 2200: 56B
• Year 2300: 167B – This is close to the year the Enterprise would be launched in Star Trek.

Oops! We've already passed 148B. Will farming methods have improved enough that we can feed one-sixth of a trillion people? Probably. But there won't be a chicken in every pot, that's for sure. Not even a vat-grown pseudo-chicken. So here is another maxim of mine:

Just because Malthusian predictions have been shown to be wrong several times, doesn't mean that will happen forever.

OK, Let's cut the rate of population growth in half, or a bit better, to 0.5%/yr. Then:

• Year 2100: 11.6B – Better…
• Year 2200: 19.1B
• Year 2300: 31.5B
• Year 2400: 52B – About where the table above was in 2200.

And so it goes. Hundreds of years may seem like a long time, but sooner or later the permanent mantra of all living things, "Reproduce or else!" must come to an end or we'll just eat the whole planet. Isaac Asimov once showed that, if 10% of all substances on the surface of the earth could be converted to food, Earth would still be exhausted, at a 0.5% growth rate, in a couple of thousand years, and if we have gone to the stars by then, all possible planets in this galaxy will be comprised or people and people's food from pole to pole, in another 11,000 years.

And all that is not even a black swan. The sixth item that needs to be tackled is the human drive to reproduce, or everything else is temporary. Thus, I must conclude, even though the book's title is Infinite Progress, we must content ourselves with "Really immense progress" followed by some very well-thought-out Plan B when that isn't enough.

Does that mean I deny the author's reasoning? Not at all. I hope he is at least partially right. But there are so many ways to go wrong, and so few ways for things to go right, that it will be an uphill slog. I like the optimism. That alone makes it worth reading and thinking about.

Our data are doomed

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, internet, internet security

I have read the Schneier on Security blog on and off almost since I began this blog. As far as gurus of internet security go, he is IT. So when I ran across Schneier's latest book, I nabbed it, in part to see whether it would be a collection of blog posts (it isn't). His writing is great, his ideas are spot-on, and the subject is rather depressing.

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World, by Bruce Schneier, is scary as hell, and the author isn't selling anything…not to us at least. He is indeed trying to "sell" policy ideas to the U.S. government, and in part this book is aimed at getting us to put pressure on our representatives to pay more attention to this issue.

The Internet is rapidly becoming the Internet of Things (IoT), in which to say, everything in the home that would have been bought after a certain date is not just a toaster, light bulb, or easy chair, but a computer that cooks toast and Pop-Tarts (and remembers), a computer that talks to the light switch and learns your schedule and can set mood lighting at your request, or a computer that offers you a comfy seat and records your weight and heartbeat and maybe massages you (it may also inform your doctor of your day-to-day state of health). Almost any new car is not just a computer, but a collection of computers that control a transportation machine, more or less at your demand, keep track of its own maintenance schedule, record where you go and your driving habits; in the future it will know your mood, not only from your driving habits but from your temperature, smell, and perhaps level of noise you make (do you yell at other drivers when they annoy you...or at the radio?).

What the car, light bulb, and chair may know about us is one thing. Because they all connect via the Internet, or the coming, enhanced Internet that he calls Internet+, anybody with a modicum of hacking skills can know what they know. Your phone already knows your buying habits and perhaps banking habits. Who else would you be just tickled about if they knew also? Nobody? I thought so. Well, what will you do about it? What CAN you do about it?

If you believe the book's current explanation of the state of Internet security, the answer is, "Nearly nothing." Firstly, most people will be unwilling to go to the least trouble to "do something about it." Secondly, for those few who would be willing, there is precious little they can do. And that, my friends, is the message of Click Here.

The title is intended as click bait, but its message is not entirely hype. The book begins with three scenarios, and returns to them from time to time.

1. Control of an auto from ten miles away, via an Internet-connected laptop. This was first done in 2015.
2. Shutdown of a power plant in  Kiev, presumably by Russian hackers, in 2016.
3. A hacker took control of 150,000 printers on insecure networks in 2017, and had them print taunting messages. This is a 'near-white-hat' attack. I wonder how many of the printers' owners took steps to secure their equipment?

Now consider item #3. Suppose someone hacks into a 3D printer, and has it print a booby trap to injure or kill the owner, when next he/she turns on the light in the room where it is kept? Suppose a 3D bio-printer is hacked to produce a super-flu like the 1918 bug that killed about 4% of the human population that year? How about every insecure 3D bio-printer? This extended scenario is behind the title of the book.

The author thinks only government can deal with this effectively. No other entity has the scope to do so. But at the moment, every powerful player in the Cyber arena has a vested interest in an Internet that is not too secure:

• The NSA and other agencies want access to anything, anywhere, with little fuss.
• Businesses would rather spend to make new products than to add security to existing ones. Neither do they have incentive to design security into their new products.
• To the biggest presences on the Internet, from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Instagram, Alibaba, Dianping..., all have as their primary product YOU, the user, and the information you post or reveal by your posting habits. They want to sell this stuff, not secure it.

Not only that, the Internet is the most prolific espionage tool to be developed since the microdot camera. When new vulnerabilities in common software are discovered, say by someone at NSA, they don't inform the software company. No, they add the knowledge to their "virtual arms locker", as a took to be used offensively, until someone more civic-minded or someone at the company stumbles across it and it gets fixed.

So, nobody with any power has much interest in better security. Tools to help make security better have languished on the shelf for decades, unused. Schneier explains why.

If you want your own end-to-end encryption, perhaps you can get Tor, but be aware that all the world's governments keep tabs on Tor users because so many of them are criminals. That in itself argues that we all ought to have such tools available by default. In the U.S., the Second Amendment assures that, if we want to own a gun for our protection, we can do so. That way, it is not presently so that "only criminals and cops have guns." But on the Internet, and even more, the nascent Internet+, you can't find a gun anyway, so only the criminals have guns, and most of the cops have at best rather inferior ones.

Will this get better? The author thinks so. He is optimistic enough to think it can get better in just a decade or two. Maybe. It probably won't get better, at least from a governmental intervention standpoint, until a Scenario #3 leads to a few dozen, or thousand, or even million, deaths. That's what it takes to get major policies created or changed. Good luck, y'all…keep your head low.

A must-read if you care about your internet presence

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, internet, privacy, security, self help

The subtitle of the book should catch your attention: "Are you naked online?". Are you? If so, what might you do about it? Ted Claypoole and Theresa Payton drew on broad experience in the online security arena, including Ms Payton's service in the White House, to write Protecting Your Internet Security: Are You Naked Online?. Start by reading this book.

Privacy as we once knew it is a thing of the past. The security of everything online is similarly threatened. It doesn't have to be. I took certain pieces of the authors' advice, and before noting the results, I should perhaps explain something that may be a little uncommon about me.

I decided from the time I started this weblog that I would go to certain lengths to divorce its identity from my own. There are a few clues here and there in my posts, so a persistent and diligent person could track me down. I tend to trust in "security by obscurity", as compared to more technical means. So these results might indicate how successful I have been.

Of course, the authors recommend that we all fire up a browser window in Private (or Incognito or Stealth or whatever) mode, and search our name. In my case, for historical reasons, there are six variants of my name, and two variants of this blog's name. But the search was not nearly as arduous as I expected. From the longest to the shortest ways to look up my name, always putting the entire thing on quotes (but none of those ways using a first initial rather than a first name):

• 4 text hits, 3 of them reporting my first marriage in various newspapers.
• 1 text hit.
• Though Google initially said 279, there were 17 actual hits, and 12 were about me. There was also one picture of an ancestor of mine in an Image search, but none of me. More briefly for the rest...
• 164 at first, then 19 of 21 text hits.
• 1,330 at first, then 31 of 35 text hits, plus 3 of about 170 images are actually me.
• 2 of 532 text hits are actually about me.

And for the blog names:

• "polymath07": 3,930 at first, but only 33 if you look at returns pages. Hundreds of pictures in the Image search, most from this blog, in which I frequently post pictures.
• "polymath at large": 7,590 at first, but only 26 actual hits. Many, many pix, nearly all from this blog.

All in all, the pages Google finds about me are nearly all positive, and of course the blog post returns are as I wish. I'd call that success.

Now, from an open browser page, I went to the Open Data Partnership "choices" page, which immediately ran a status check. It returned a long list of entities that either are or are not modifying ad choices based on my browsing behavior. Those who are, that I recognized, include Adobe Marketing Cloud, Amazon, Experian, Google and Microsoft. Some that are not doing so include LinkedIn and Ziff Davis (publisher of many magazines including PC Magazine, to which I once subscribed). One may easily opt out of all of their chicanery, but I have learned instead to do most searches for "stuff" in Private mode.

Private mode isn't perfect, so if you want to avoid, or at least confuse, advertisers and their tracking gimmicks, page 78 has a list of nine suggestions such as the Blur feature by Abine. You can also analyze your own online profile—the real one, not any of the ones you created yourself—using Spokeo, for example.

Why should all this be necessary? If you are old like me, it doesn't matter as much, but think of a teenager whose entire online presence is rife with teen attitude, complaints about parental restrictions, kidding and teasing (and worse) of "friends" and others, and the general sort of things you'd expect from kids who don't yet realize they are mortal. Fast-forward five years, when they are applying to a college, or ten years, when they are applying for a job. Colleges and prospective employers track down all the social media you've been using, and they are better at it than you think. Just changing your name on FaceBook or Twitter isn't enough. If your likeness appears anywhere, a single well-composed image of your face can turn up a lot through Image Search in Google, at the very least.

Or maybe you are a 35-year-old trying to build a business who has attracted the ire of a competitor. Will the competitor create an account somewhere in your name and use it to publish inflammatory and defamatory material that would drive away customers who stumble across it and think it is you? An entire industry of Reputation Management has arisen to address just such scenarios. Even if your competitor didn't do you dirt, maybe your teenage self did already, and unpleasant traces remain of someone you once were, but no longer are. The internet has a longer memory than a jilted spouse! To many folks, what you were then, perhaps you still are, under that polished veneer.

This naturally leads to a section on guiding your children through their early years as a digital native. It will be hard work to keep them from shooting their future self in the foot, but it is necessary.

Another notion occurred to me: Phase your life, and use a different online avatar and screen name for each phase. Upon entering Middle School, a preteen might post a sign-off in a soon-to-be-unused FaceBook account, saying "Goodbye, I'll go silent now. Catch everyone later, and elsewhere." Then she can use a new version of her name to start a new account, and gradually import old friends, but only after they have undergone a similar transition. Hard as it may seem, it is best to discard "friends" who don't see the value in this approach. The end of High School is a good time for a similar changeover. Other phases come to mind. Think it through.

Also, such a time is a good one to go through the abandoned account and delete posts that will cause trouble to the "new you". Of course, the Internet Archive will still have them in its "wayback machine", but you cannot cleanse everything. That's why it is best to keep your most private thoughts out of the ether entirely. When you are musing darkly, the Cloud is not your friend! The Google Docs app isn't totally secure; nothing online is.

A lot of this is like getting a better lock for the front door of your house and a better security system. It doesn't guarantee the house won't be robbed, but it makes you a harder target, so most thieves will pick someone less diligent to burgle. And that's the best advice for anyone concerned about their online privacy and security. Take a little forethought to be a harder-than-average target. It is worthwhile, and these authors are good guides to doing just that.

Another step towards Big Brother

kw: politics, policy, internet, privacy, legislation

An act called CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) passed the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday, and now it goes to the Senate. Proponents say, "Oh, no, it won't impact the privacy of citizens," but we know that's a sham. It is interesting to them precisely because they know it erases most of our privacy protections. See this C|Net article for a good analysis.

I find that Republican congressmen voted in favor 206 to 28. I am ashamed of them. I am a registered Republican, but this sure isn't the party of Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt any longer. I may have to become a Libertarian.

I remember the first Terabyte database, which cost about a million dollars to set up in the early 1980s. It was commissioned by the Mormons for genealogical record-keeping. My colleagues and I were joking that if a disk drive with "infinite" capacity were invented—we called it the God file—the government would order two of them. I recall saying, "Sears and GM would be next in line". Today anyone can buy a multi-terabyte disk for about $100. The Google Earth image base is a multi-petabyte (thousands of terabytes) product, and Google is only one of a number of both corporate and government entities to have file bases approaching an exabyte (a million terabytes) in size. The NSA is building a multi-exabyte data store. So just where are they going to get data to fill it? You guessed it: the Internet, and CISPA is an integral part of the process. It gives them the right to "ask" for data dumps without breaking any laws, because CISPA removes or supersedes most current legal protections. The President has stated he will veto it if the Senate passes it. That's one thing he could do that I would like a great deal!

Sharks in the digital gene pool

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, internet, cybercriminals

You may know the old saw: Speak of the devil and he may appear. This is particularly true in cyberspace. The most accomplished hackers, being fond of their reputations, have software agents on the lookout for their names to pop up. Preferring to remain below their radar, I'll leave names out of this review. Interestingly, the author of DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You, Misha Glenny, names nineteen assorted online criminals, refers to at least sixteen others only by their handle, because he doesn't know their names, and has tentatively determined that two much-revered handles actually belong to consortia.

I came to the book looking for guidance; the and You in the title hinted at personal relevancy. There was none. Perhaps none is possible! On the World Wide Web, it is simply best to keep your wits about you, because it is certain that someone out there is hoping to gain the information needed to plunder your bank account. If you happen to be privy to your company's secrets, there is also someone out there hoping to get access to that. So we see two of the three major arms of online criminality: credit card and bank fraud, and industrial espionage.

The third arm is cyberwarfare. You and I may not be directly engaged in warfare, ever, yet still may suffer its effects: Typically it is carried out via denial-of-service attacks aimed at shutting down a country's or company's online presence. If you do business there, you may find yourself locked out for a time, and perhaps your data will be lost or looted.

The focus of the book is credit fraud, and a major sting carried out by the US FBI, through a web site called DarkMarket. It was a forum for people to "discuss" card fraud, and thus served as a meeting place. Deals were made elsewhere, as the stated aim of the site was to stay (barely) legal. The site was administered mostly by criminals, plus one or two federal agents, unbeknownst to the others. After almost a five-year run, DarkMarket came to an end three years ago.

Carding has several aspects. One is skimming. A small device is added to an ATM, and it reads the magnetic stripe on your ATM card when you swipe it or slip it in. Some have an attachment that reads your PIN as you enter it. The skimmer's "owner" sells the data to someone else, who may use it to clone cards and either raid the card owners' accounts directly, or hire someone else to do so (by visiting ATM after ATM). What is our defense? Get to know how the ATM's you usually use are supposed to look. Be suspicious with a new machine. Most of all, when entering your PIN, hold the other hand above the typing hand, so a nearby camera can't read your fingers. Also keep a sharp eye on a store or restaurant clerk to whom you hand your credit card. Make sure they don't slip the card out of your sight for a moment, to run it through a skimmer under the counter.

Another aspect is stealing a copy of a company's credit card verification database. While this may be done by hacking in, it is usually easier to use phishing, or social engineering. This points up the salient fact about internet security: people are the weak link. Recent incidents of the theft of millions of credit card verification data were cases of someone getting access to a computer with the help, knowing or unknowing, of an insider.

The main substance of the book is a running biography of about three dozen criminals and a number police and government agents around the world. Internet crime is not confined to America, nor to the English speaking world. In fact, some of the biggest players are in Russia, the Ukraine, Turkey, and China. The author singles out Odessa, Ukraine, as a major focus of online criminal activity. But it is simply first (or near first) among many. An innocent-seeming e-mail containing some kind of phishing or malware attack may seem to originate from Toronto, for example, but an expert "cracker tracker" may track it via a random African nation or two, to Singapore, and there find that the origin is still further on, but too obscured to track further.

Near the end, the author discusses what we ought to do with an arrested hacker. He is not discussing the organized criminals—who may employ a hacker for technical skills—, but those who program for the fun of it and for reputation, having little interest in getting money. A few of those currently behind bars are acknowledged as the best technical minds there are. He thinks it a shame to waste their talent. He may have a point, but the practice some have of hiring a hacker as a security agent smacks of putting the hen house in charge of the fox. A brilliant hacker may be useful, but employing one can only be done safely if he (you can count the females on your thumbs) is supervised by someone of equal talent.

The current state of the internet is much like the wild west. A few criminals have been incarcerated, and a few areas have a sheriff watching over things, but almost anything can be got away with, given some planning. I've been told that services such as LifeLock are unhelpful, but I am not sure. At the very least, keeping tabs on your credit report is a must. Employing LifeLock is probably best for those with something worth losing, like a big IRA.

Even though the book didn't have quite what I hoped to find, it is a fascinating read. The author obtained access to several incarcerated criminals and hackers, and to police and agents from a number of agencies. His acknowledgements indicate he taped 200 hours of interviews. That is about par for a history book this size. The hard work was not in gathering information, but in cross checking it, both because various people have various views, and because some just lied. Glenny has done an admirable job ferreting out a coherent picture that is as accurate as we are ever likely to have.

Ghettoizing the internet

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, technology, internet, privacy, polemics

Try this sometime, on a computer that you don't use for your banking or paying bills online (maybe at the public library...): Delete all cookies, go to a search web site of your choice and make a search. Then open the privacy window that lets you read all your cookies and see how many have appeared, all from a single action. There may be very few, or even none, but the top "cookie monster" that I've heard about so far was looking up "depression" on dictionary.com. The harvest? 233 tracking cookies!

Another interesting experiment: Call a friend in the phone, then both of you do the same simple search on Google or Yahoo! or Bing, and tell each other what are the top ten hits. Also take note of how many hits there are (it will probably be in the millions). Or you can make a game of it. Collaborate with five or ten friends to do several searches, chosen beforehand, and see who can collect the most hits, or the fewest (these friends all have to be honest!). It is important that everyone do this from their own home, because search personalization depends on your location, and whether you are logged in or searching anonymously.

Why should there be such differences? That is the subject of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser. The book is a polemic, in the better sense of the word, exposing and decrying practices that disturb the author, and ought to be of concern to all of us. Yet it is not shrill. The 233 cookies example comes from page 6 of the book.

Just looking at my cookie collection, after a run by AdAware that removed a couple dozen tracking cookies, reveals nearly 260 domains that have cookies stored on my computer. Spot checking shows that my e-mail account server keeps 34 cookies; findagrave.com, where I do genealogical research, has 9; and my online bank keeps 8. Even this blog has one cookie stored there. It is safe to say there are at least a few thousand cookies on my computer, and for most of them I don't know whether I really need them.

Cookies are just the tip of the iceberg. Google stores everything we do through its web site, whether we are logged in or not. Google usually knows who we are even when we are not logged in. But our searching and clicking activities are aggregated into a great many categories that are said to be for purposes of "personalization": the company uses our preferences, as evidenced by what we look for and what we look at, to raise or lower the ranking of search results. The days of pure PageRank are long gone. The data about you that Google or Yahoo! or Bing or Amazon have gathered is stored on their own computers. I've even noticed that, when I finish a blog post and publish it, the next screen usually includes one or two ads that are pertinent to the blog post's subject (in case you didn't know, Blogger is a Google product).

What is the danger of personalization? How harmful can it be? That depends on the personality of each of us. I happen to be rather easy to influence when confronted by an authority figure. This is why I gave up live debating many years ago. It is also why I have learned to hang up quickly (even if it is rude) when a telemarketer or pollster calls. Sometimes I am kind enough to say, "No, sorry" before I hang up; sometimes not. Psst! Did you know that many "polls" over the telephone are actually attempts to influence the way you are likely to vote, or a product you might soon buy? Online marketers of both the commercial and political variety are experts at discerning the levers that influence what you will do next. They vary their approach by time of day, by the mood you seem to be in as seen in how you write, and the various profiles about you, such as your FaceBook account.

Here is a FaceBook experiment: Check your News feed, and sort it by time. Then go to the wall of someone with whom you almost never interact, and find something to "Like", or leave a comment or two. Return to News and see if that person's updates have magically appeared. Sometimes it takes leaving several tracks to get this to work. P.S. If you have more than 100 FaceBook friends, keeping up with all of them is quite arduous. Let's all suggest that FB make available a sorted list of interactions so we can figure out a few people to UnFriend.

In eight chapters, Pariser makes his case, that all this personalization has the effect of isolating us, with the technology that was supposed to make us more connected. I have often said that, if two people have all the same opinions, one of them is redundant. We need variety in our lives, but too much personalization removes a great source of variety. If you only see search results that square with your past interests, how will you ever develop new interests? How can we grow? Serendipity, and the matching of diverse topics, drive our creativity. Personalization is a great creativity killer.

The author and others, including the authors of this USA Today article, mention products like Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, TrackerBlock and Do Not Track Plus, as means to cut out part of the tracking. Nothing will eliminate it all. Thus the author suggests political solutions, legislative solutions, in his last two chapters. I am skeptical of the approach. Like dealing with a home invader at 3:00 AM, sometimes the 38 caliber "solution" is the only effective one; the police can only do something after a crime has been committed. Too late.

I have, instead, a suggestion that is in keeping with the way Google and other search sites already work. I suggest prefixes that influence the filters temporarily. I suppose you know if you put "define:jejune" in the search box, the first hit will be a definition. Google has other prefix words. Here are some it needs to add:

• all or every: Results only filtered by the PageRank algorithm that got Google started in the first place.
• serendipity or ser for short: Results deliberately scattered among topical interests.
• anti: Results from an interest set that is the opposite of my own. If I'm liberal, a bunch of right-wing rants; if I'm literary, some scientific and engineering stuff; if I like rock music, some old Roy Rogers or folk music or swing; and so forth.
• statistical or stat: Results based solely on Bayesian statistical ranking, defeating even PageRank.

I am sure some more could be determined. This would shine a light on just what personalized ranking is doing, and we could make better choices as a result.

The other political solution is a series of high-profile lawsuits. To avoid such suits, Google needs to provide a tool to show you what it has on you; FaceBook needs a tool to show you whom it is filtering in and filtering out of your News Feed; and the other aggregating companies out there need to make available to all of us the data that exist about us, and allow us to correct mistakes, of which there are billions I am sure. Otherwise, our entire history will dog us forever, not taking proper account of changes in marital status, religious conversions, or the change in lifestyle that would result from a sudden windfall or its converse, loss of occupational income. How ironic is it if the homeless woman using a library computer is besieged by ads based on her former status as a corporate VP?

The book's website has a "10 Things You Can Do" section that can help us all partially alleviate the effects of the Filter Bubble as it currently exists. On this last day of 2011, I wonder what the coming decade will bring?

Data miners, light your lamps

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, internet, behavior

PPC means 'pay per click', but to Bill Tancer (I think it rhymes with dancer), it also means, 'porn, pills, and casinos', some of the biggest categories of internet searches. Porn searches top the list of all searches…or at least, they used to. This may be changing.

In the UK at least, social networking searches have surpassed them (Image from Hitwise.com's blog site). The author of Click: Unexpected Insights for Business and Life, Bill Tancer is one of seven Hitwise bloggers, and the company's lead analyst (& general manager of global analysis).

Hitwise purveys competitive intelligence of all sorts, gleaned from a massive, continually growing database of internet searches, clicks and click-throughs. For most of us, a spate of activity on the Web starts with a Search, or several-many. Then we Click on some of the results. A Click-through is a trace: for each Click (URL clicked upon) it is the URL that preceded it and the one that follows. These can be chained for more complex analyses. With the right software and the amalgamated searches, etc. for ten million Web users, you can learn a lot.

The author takes us down a few of the paths he has followed, to find out why searches containing the words "prom dress" spike in January rather than later in the Spring; why the popularity of a certain lady wrestler didn't translate into a win on Dancing with the Stars; or how the internet has become many people's psychotherapist.

To take up the first item: One large segment of "prom dress" searchers is composed of affluent, fashion-conscious girls, and many fashion magazines (on-line and off) publish their initial prom fashions in mid-December…and these girls don't wait. The girls who are more likely to buy a department store dress tend to begin searching in April, and are less avid searchers.

Yearly trends clearly show what people are resolving, each New Years' Day, what diets are most popular when we need to get rid of some of that Thanksgiving lard we pack on, and when young minds begin to think of June weddings (it isn't June).

But the data have social correlations also. This chart, of clicks on charitable websites, shows an interesting trend compared to the Dow-Jones index. Whether this mainly represents people who think more charity will be needed, or people hoping to find help, is left unstated in the blog post this comes from.

But this isn't a review of the blog, but the book. The author supports his contention that Click data can reveal trends that polling never will. This is because we're not afraid of the search engine. It won't pass judgment on us. We ask things we really want to know, from "how to kiss" to "why am I sad" to "where is Tom Cruise today". You may tell a telephone pollster, "I don't gamble," and the number of people who might admit that is indeed very small; but a large proportion of us spend more time on casinos.com and similar sites than the poll would predict.

The author often begins a public appearance by saying, "I love data", or, "I've always loved data". The audience may titter, but quite a number of people whisper later, "So do I." Data are the roots of information, and information is power. The author quotes John Batelle, who said it best,

This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind—a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends.

Just by the way, folks, there may be a constitutional right of privacy, but the real thing is now that much harder to attain. I enjoyed the book, but the implications are unsettling.

Electronic addiction?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, internet, critiques

"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems" – Paul Erdös...today we might say a programmer is a device for turning coffee and pizza into "the next cool hack," be it a great game or a "killer app". (Credit for the image goes to the Digital Daily blog, where it heads an introduction to "internet addiction.")

Most of us are not programmers (and some of us old programmers don't fade away, we just turn into power users). Not that many are power users. Yet millions of otherwise "ordinary people" spend at least as much time online as they do watching TV, to the chagrin of TV advertisers.

It is just forty years since I learned Fortran and began programming. I spent thirty years writing scientific software. I was sufficiently knowledgeable that, while I was in graduate school getting advanced degrees in Geology, I was a (uncredentialed) professor of Computer Science. But that began about ten years into my career.

I hadn't learned programming and operating systems in school; I was around when operating systems were invented. The first computer I used, an IBM 1130, didn't have an OS at first, but we loaded the Executive deck (containing a mini-IBM 360 OS) in front of the Fortran Compiler deck, our program deck, and a series of blank cards afterward if my program specified card output rather than printed (on an IBM Selectric typewriter). The 1130 had one of the first disk drives, a removable 5-Mbyte single platter 14 inches across. It was used to hold the various decks' contents during running of the program. We didn't have a way to write data to the disk in 1968.

In the ensuing years, I became one of those pale creatures who would write code for 36-48 hours at a stretch, with periodic infusions of pizza and various colas (I abhorred coffee).

Fast-forward to 1994. Comet Shoemaker-Levy is about to crash into Jupiter. A friend at work tells me about Mosaic, the first full-featured Web browser (it evolved into Netscape). By this time, I've been spending less than half my time programming, and the other half doing various kinds of analysis for an oil company; I do have degrees in Geology, after all. For a few days there, I didn't get much done that was useful. I'd used the text-based Internet a few times, but the Web—it just blew me away.

Do the math; another fourteen years have passed. I use the internet a lot. I surf, blog, and e-mail. I don't use MySpace or Second Life, though the latter intrigues me a little. I have begun to husband my time, however, and SL is a huge time-waster. But I spend more of my time on the Web than reading...it was once the opposite.

Yet, I do a lot of stuff that needs no computer, no connection, even no electricity (except for lights): talking to family & friends, church activities, reading, walking & other forms of exercise, gardening & yard work, and making mobiles and other hobbies. I did learn to take time to smell the flowers...and grow 'em.

I think I am in the middle of the spectrum of middle-class computer use. I don't know if Lee Siegel would agree. In Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob I find I may be one of "the enemy": a booster of the technology. I am certainly aware of its damaging potential. I see others following, even more intensely, the path I trod when all I had to accompany my late-night coding vigil was a character-cell-based 12-inch green-screen CRT terminal.

My son and his friends are online a very great amount. He never turns off his laptop. He just shuts its lid to "hibernate" it while carrying it between classes or to-and-from everywhere. His campus is a gigantic wi-fi hot spot, so he's online, potentially, 24/7.

Author Siegel attempts the impossible: to critique the invincible. The language of internet use and boosterism makes it as unassailable as Mother and Apple Pie, a fact he notes in almost every chapter.

I am not sure why I found the book hard to get all the way through. It is well enough written, and his points are valid. Culture sure seems to be infolding itself into a cluster of millions of blind egos, and many who ought to know better quail at being thought "unpopular". Like we're all adolescents at the Homecoming Dance, afraid our tie will get laughed at, or something! His points all show up the juvenile nature of a technology that is as much about fun as about work. That'll change.

I am not a blind supporter of the Internet. I don't confuse its libertarian tendencies with "democracy" (surely the least-understood word in today's political discourse). What he sees as critical dangers and risks I see as growing pains. I imagine the first architects to actually design houses (or, more likely, temples) soon came to decry the "anarchy" of do-it-yourself home building. The human race had only been at it for a few thousand years, and by the way, "cave man" didn't live in caves, but used them mainly for ceremonies and burials, and for storm shelters when their flimsy shanties blew down.

We're at the shanty stage of computer use. We've only been doing this for seventy years or less. We've only been "on the Web" for twenty or so years. Sure, there's a lot of goofiness going on. We don't need the Internet to remind us we're all kids at heart. I need only enter the Men's Room to be reminded that most men (in a building that contains only professionals, at that) never learned proper bathroom etiquette from their Mom or Dad. How do you think such creatures are going to behave in a medium where anonymity is the rule? DUH! (I ignore women's juvenility; I'll leave that to female commentators)

Sure, it's a mess. What new thing isn't? Let's see what the next couple hundred years bring. This too shall pass.