An elegy for sweet forgetfulness, soon to be lost forever

In my memory, I'm standing on the Île Saint-Louis, looking at a butcher shop.

But was I ever there? I've provably been in Paris. I've likely been on the Île Saint-Louis. After that I don't know. In my mind's eye I can picture it and picture myself there, but my mind's eye is a notoriously filthy liar. I can remember any number of events that never happened, and I have forgotten many important events that did.

If I was never there, where did this memory come from? It could have been Edmund White, whose evocative novels of his life in Paris have always brought the city to life for me. Reading Declare by Tim Powers brought these memories back, and added wartime paranoia and Nazi intrigue to the mix.

I'll never know for sure whether I've been there before. My previous visits to Paris were before the era of ubiquitous surveillance, GPS cellphone tracking, Google Latitude, Foursquare and ultrazillions of digital photos being taken of absolutely everything at every moment and being pasted online. So even once all of the artificial "privacy" barriers are dropped, once indexing and face recognition systems correlate every sparrow fart since the dawn of the digital age, once every credit-card purchase record is cracked open and something like Vernor Vinge's GreenInc provides a complete personal history of every human, nobody will be able to say with any degree of clarity whether that memory is true or false.

I weep for the children. Their digital trail will never allow them to erase their personal history and start over. No more retrospective virginity restorations. No more he-said, she-said he-did. No more bonfire of the diaries for personal reinvention. Everyone will become a politician denying their words of the day before, followed by an immediate multi-POV video playback with subtitles, location tags, and links to probable original sources shown in the goggles of everyone around them.

On the other hand, I weep with joy for the children. Memory prostheses will make arguments quite different: instead of arguing whose recollection is more accurate, people's agents will automatically debate the relative authoritativeness of the certificate chains and trust authorities of the different sources of evidence. When professionally photoshopped memories, reputation laundering, real-time distributed consensus auctions and whitelisted memory attestation services become common we just won't worry about it anymore. We won't argue about trivia.

Maybe I'll steer clear of the Île Saint-Louis on my next trip and leave the past alone, whether it's mine or borrowed from somebody else. I'll just preserve my own personal mythology a little bit longer.

Homogeneous web development: Meteor, Derby, Firebase and the portents of doom

A variety of new web frameworks are being cooked up that allow you to write one set of seamless code for the client and server.  It's a problem that has haunted the web development community since the dawn of JavaScript and the DOM.  One approach is to basically define the database operations on the client.  Does that sound like a good idea, or does that sound like a great idea?

Meteor

Exposes the MongoDB API directly on the client to work on automatically-synced data subsets. What could possibly go wrong?  Let's name the project after a flaming ball of rock and find out for sure!

Derby

Is client-side MVC too confusing? Is Node.js too immature? Let's combine them and see what happens!  (It remains to be seen whether Derby is named after a hipster hat or a county fair event.)

Firebase

"We have a full security system in the works that will allow you to control read and write access on individual locations in Firebase on a per-user basis. However, it’s not ready for widespread use yet, so right now all data in Firebase is publicly accessible. Please keep this in mind when building apps! Please contact us if you need security or want to be one of the first to try out the new system." ^*

Despite my scornful tone, I'm actually very optimistic on these technologies and very hopeful that at least one of these will be ultimately successful.  I'm also really happy that I'm not going to be the first person trying build an application on this stuff. Given the theme of the project names, it's fair to say that most early adopters will get burned.

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* Yes, that's a direct quote.

Taste matters: why I should have known better than to use GoDaddy

Years ago I registered several domain names.  They were a lot cheaper then, and because I didn't want to think about which registrar to use, I went with the cheapest and most popular one: GoDaddy.

I did it despite their stupid, vaguely patriarchal name.  I did it even despite the blatantly sexist advertisements.  I told myself that they were just doing what they had to do to bring in customers, that it really didn't matter.  I silenced my doubts and gave them my money.

Since then, GoDaddy's behaviour has been increasingly tacky, insulting, and just plain bad for the Internet and its users.  I'm moving all of my domains onto another registrar, and although it is a pain in the neck, it's the right thing to do.  The lesson for me is that taste matters.  If a company seems distasteful to you initially, they're likely to offend you later — and they'll be doing it with your money.

Second, Third, and Fourth-Order Effects of Social Marketing and Mass Securitization

Several years ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg crowed that he was able to use the database to retroactively predict with 33% accuracy with whom people would hook up a week later. This was widely viewed as very creepy (and was not spoken about again until recently) but you can guess that this was a dog whistle meant for potential advertisers. The advertisers have listened, and now Google is scrambling to catch up with Facebook on social search (and then advertising).
It’s impossible to get clear numbers on how well this stuff works. Even Facebook and Google probably have no clear numbers, but they certainly have clear enough indications. Google obviously has a clear enough indication to reform their entire company around this. So we can assume it is real. It all seems plausible enough, right?


So we can easily assume that this trend will continue, and that Google and Facebook will correlate increasing amounts of data on us, our friends, our coworkers, and the people we encounter, and will sell this data to advertisers who will essentially be placing bets on our behaviour. If there is a 27% chance that a given couple will marry within the next nine months, then there is a 14% chance that each of their closest long-distance friends will want to buy a plane ticket to the ceremony. Therefore, as an advertiser, you buy a tranche of ads for people whose out-of-town friends are soon to marry. The MapReduce job is an exercise for Google’s new Malaysian coding shop, the tranche is sold to the highest bidder via AdWords. Bada-bing, ca-ching.


As a second-order effect, this advertising activity begins to affect the behaviour of these out-of-town friends. A measurable jump in the number of people attending out-of-town weddings results, and the price on these ads consequently rises. Advertising grows markets all the time, so this is not surprising.


Now we emerge into science fiction-ville. An analyst-bot for a huge trading firm is trawling the AdWords marketplace, looking for interesting tranches for which the price has become overweight, and happens upon the out-of-town weddings advertising market, which is suddenly hugely oversubscribed. It pops up on the screen of a junior analyst (of the human variety) who clicks through to approve the creation of a out-of-town weddings futures market, which the trading firm then (automatically) proceeds to sell to its customers, and then (automatically) takes a short position.
An analyst-bot for one of the advertising agencies flags this new offering, and raises it to the desk of the (human) product manager for this market. She promptly buys into the futures market, betting that the market will rise. She talks to an executive VP and gets approval to buy a large product placement with a popular television show to feature a destination wedding as an upcoming plot. She does not get approval for a proposed contribution to a PAC formed by the National Organization for Marriage, as the VP is gay and cites the growing market for same-sex weddings.


Of course, this assumes that the securitization of everything will continue apace. Certainly there has been no progress in stemming the tide, and I don’t expect it to happen (barring a bloody worldwide insurrection against the dominant economic order).


What are some other examples of the weird things that could result from social marketing combined with this level of financial automation?

• A new global baby boom triggered by businesses embracing new market development, caused by an algorithmic storm of projected demand for diapers, crude oil, softwood lumber, and manual labour. [The whole thing is triggered by a rounding bug in an Excel spreadsheet.]

• Investment banks engage in wide-scale manipulation of tampon supply futures indexes by using sponsored advertisements to influence birth control method preferences so that women favour Depo-Provera over oral contraceptives.

• The Corrections Corporation of America gets into a bidding war with Indian defense contractors on a cheap-labour-supply futures index, which is based on the relative probability of incarceration due to attempted drug sales by American teens.  The Indian defense contractors are shorting this to offset their own risk (due to the effect of rural broadband penetration shortfalls on the gold mining talent pool), and the market becomes very volatile.  To ease this situation, the CCA makes a large automated contribution to a tough-on-crime SuperPAC.

• Asperger's patients become a new hot dating commodity, as their profiles are moved to the top of the activity ranking by social networks who wish to boost their visibility to advertisers who are bidding extremely highly for their ad dollars.  Social networks optimize their users lives to improve their value to advertisers.  This results in nerds getting laid a whole lot more, and lots more little Asperger's-prone nerdlings (who have truly wonderful advertising potential).

So just remember kids, just because you don't click on those ads in Facebook doesn't mean that those ads aren't clicking on you. And with Google+ and Facebook embedded in every single webpage, you can run, and you can hide, but you cannot avoid being aggregated, and those aggregations will be monetized until they control your every move. Resistance is futile.

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Re-reading this hours later I realized that what I'm describing here is a much less rosy portrait of the same technological trends outlined by Bruce Sterling in his seminal short story Maneki Neko back in 1998. Except of course his story has excellent characterization, plot, and narrative drive.

Bankers cautious on Eurozone breakup

While some banks are calling for contingency plans in the case of the breakup of the Eurozone, a large majority of investment banks, hedge fund managers, and responsible commentators are saying "hold on a minute."

"Where am I supposed to put the money?" said Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. "As CEO, I'm committed to maximizing corporate profits, and while Goldman Sachs will obviously make bank on this one that will make the real estate bubble look like a pinprick, I personally haven't even figured out what to do with my bonus from that yet."

Most economists agree that a breakup of the Eurozone would mean an immense realignment of riches, and complain that the term "percent" is becoming particularly unwieldy in describing the distribution of wealth. "My friends and I can't even explain how rich we are anymore. Saying 'We're the 0.00001%' is too hard to understand," lamented hedge-fund manager Peter Thiel. U.S. lawmakers are studying proposals for mandating use of a new term "permega", in which percentages would be replaced by fractions based on a million, as part of the recently introduced Division Is So Hard (DISH) Act.

Tax experts welcome the possibility of change, saying that they are running out of zeros when expressing tax liability to their clients. "You need to pay 0.0000001% of your income in tax this year" is just too hard for many of my esteemed colleagues to follow, said H&R Block CEO William Cobb. "Keep in mind, most investment bankers have graduated in the past 5-10 years from top educational institutions in the United States, and although they all got straight As and graduated at the tops of their classes, so did everyone else."

Although momentum has been significant on the DISH act, with ten co-sponsors in the Senate, opposition is growing. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is leading the charge against such a change, arguing that math isn't the problem and the tax code itself is at fault. "We can't keep applying the same logic, putting another zero in front of the tax burden of our nation's most productive workers. My smartest staffers tell me that by simply putting a minus sign in front of the tax rate we could reverse the trend and start getting those numbers under control, especially for workers in the affected brackets. We wouldn't have to invent a new symbol, either."

Notwithstanding these efforts by legislators to soften the blow, plans are proceeding apace to launch new currencies in place of the Euro. "We're still trying to work out how we can absorb all of the wealth of the Euro, as well as all of the wealth in the new currencies that will be introduced," said Mr. Blankfein. "We applaud the efforts of our friends in European governments to include us in discussions on how to build a variety of efficient banking systems that will benefit world economic growth."

However, Mr. Blankfein sounded a note of caution on current U.S. legislative efforts to ease the transition. "Of course we appreciate all of the help we can get, but right now that's up to the European Union. The U.S. government should stay focused on efforts to finance the next round of bailouts."

AGPL revisited: how MongoDB licensing differs from MySQL

Now that the Affero General Public License (AGPL3) is actually being used by successful projects, I'm looking at it again. Specifically, MongoDB is AGPL3 licensed, and it is being used for commercial applications. But how?!? I though the AGPL was complete communism, and that's what excited me so much about it - one touch of the the brush, and the whole batch of milk is stained vermillion, and your entire enterprise now belongs to Richard Stallman so he can use it to fund GNU HURD.

The AGPL actually has some pretty fixed boundaries:

A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.

Upon reflection, the AGPL isn't as restrictive as I once thought. Let's take what I consider to be the most successful GPL (v2) product: MySQL*, and consider what would have happened if it had been released under AGPL instead. Since Amazon used MySQL code to build RDS, under the AGPL Amazon would be forced to release the code they use to provide the RDS service. They would not be forced to release the code for Amazon.com** however: that would clearly be outside the boundaries set out in AGPL.

Also consider that Facebook uses MySQL internally, with something like 4000 MySQL databases to power much of their site, and they've made many changes to MySQL in order to make that possible, some of which they've made public. If MySQL had been AGPL-licensed, they would have been required to make those changes publicly available under the same license.

Google is also reportedly one of the largest users of MySQL, and in a similar spirit they have released some of their tools. However, they released these tools under the more permissive Apache 2.0 license: if MySQL had been released under AGPL3, Google would most likely have been forced to release these tools under AGPL3 as well.*** And now that Google is also offering Google Cloud SQL made with GPL-based MySQL, they don't have to share their work as they would if MySQL were AGPL3-based.

All of this to say: if you want to use MongoDB to power a web app, have fun: the boundaries within the AGPL3 are there to help you, and probably won't require you to hand over your code to every visitor. However, if you see MongoDB and think "hey, that's cool, I'm going to offer a web service with the MongoDB API and become a cloud provider of NoSQL data storage, just like Amazon SimpleDB" then you will have made a derivative work, and you'll have to share those changes with the world under AGPL3.

Finally, IANAL, not in any jurisdiction, and if you base your legal strategy on lay analyses found on personal blogs, then sadly you're not alone and you're in very risky company. Best of luck, however, in finding a copyright attorney who will dig through these issues for you and give you an opinion for less than $500k.

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* The Linux kernel is more widely used than MySQL, but it's so mixed up with other licences that it can't just be GPL anymore, not honestly - and the copyrights are owned by so many different people that nobody can claim ownership. MySQL, on the other hand, was always extremely diligent about maintaining ownership of every line of code they include in their distribution (which made acquisition by Sun and Oracle all the more attractive).
** ... that is, provided Amazon.com was built using MySQL, which it isn't AFAIK.
*** They could still licence their code any other way they want, as they own it, but they'd be required to license it under AGPL3.

Webcam doesn't work in Skype, but works in Cheese

If your video camera doesn't work in Skype on Ubuntu, but it works in other applications (like Cheese), just run the following script:


sudo echo '#!/bin/bash' > /usr/local/bin/skype
sudo echo "LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype" >> /usr/local/bin/skype
sudo chmod ogu+x /usr/local/bin/skype


If you're running 64-bit Ubuntu, the path is somewhat different:


sudo echo '#!/bin/bash' > /usr/local/bin/skype
sudo echo "LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype" >> /usr/local/bin/skype
sudo chmod ogu+x /usr/local/bin/skype


Britney's concert performance would have been impressive if she were paraplegic

She may well have been, as far as I could see from her concert performance tonight in Vancouver. There were so many different props and mobility devices onstage it looked like James Bond getting an equipment demonstration by Q in the basement of Walter Reed Medical Center. A moving sidewalk. Various suspensory harnesses, chairs, swings, rising balconies, elevators, carried chairs, motorized vehicles, and strapping porters to carry her from place to place. If she took 200 steps during the entire performance I'd be surprised. She did climb two staircases and walk rapidly across stage a couple of times, so if she is paraplegic, she uses those nerve induction thingies you see on the discovery channel.

Needless to say, singing was not on the menu. I was surprised when she showed up without a corset, as she looked pretty good. Then later she stopped sucking in her gut and, well, it didn't look so impressive. On the whole it was a disappointment, and the sad thing is I didn't expect much.

Post from prison

Mom, Dad, relax — no, not really. I just awoke from a particularly vivid dream after a great dinner with friends, a walk through a drunken throng of hockey fans, and having read a few chapters of Robopocalypse just before sleeping.

My husband and I found ourselves in a prison. A panopticon, but with chutes, ladders, padded tunnels, statuesque Stoßtruppen of both genders, and a complex system of rewards, punishments, and complex behavioural modification programs. The system caused you to gravitate towards pods of twelve inmates with whom you would serve out your term.

We arrived, and immediately Adolfo intervened in a conflict and saved a woman's life. For this, he was rewarded with a bag of clay, which, not understanding the significance of the gift, we left behind. Shortly we were introduced to our area where we were faced with a bewildering set of strange customs, conflicts, and rewards - a cushion which grants you the right to use a chair, a locker opened by blowing on a tube, a news room where you earned your dinner by voting on videos, and strange acquisitive and consumerist rules seemingly designed to break down social cohesion (which were enforced by the Voice of God).

After a time, we landed in a good pod, with amazing people who committed to look out for one other — carrying each other through particularly difficult terrain drills, holding each other through vomiting spells, and sharing our resources in contravention of the VOG. In the ensuing jailbreak, we took care of each other, throwing away our location- and activity-monitoring devices and helping each other identify the friendly prison guards who could help us to the tunnels leading to escape.

It all went beautifully until we encountered a slight routing bug in the padded transport tunnels, which caused us to merge into a stream of inmates who were headed for reprocessing. Reprocessing meant we were atomized and reconstituted as breakfast cereal. In the afterlife, we stood around drinking fruity breakfast cereal cocktails and agreed that it was a good life, and we looked forward to the next.

Thanks to everyone who worked to end DADT

I'd like to thank my friends and family for their efforts in ending the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law. It means a lot for me, as I had honestly given up hope of it happening any time soon.

It's too easy to be cynical, but as I watched the past two years go by, and watched the hugest congressional majority in recent memory evaporate, I thought for sure there would be no progress on queer issues. And although I told myself I was content with Obama just naming Supreme Court justices, I was enraged by the contradiction of his "fierce advocate" image shown by his administration's aggressive defense of DOMA, his utter inaction on ENDA and DOMA, and the snail's pace of DADT repeal (coupled with continued vigorous legal defense of the law). I had come to the conclusion that the Democrats had decided that gay votes, gay money, and gay wedge issues were simply too valuable to them to give up, and that they would hold us hostage for another six years or until the courts finally grew a pair. I just couldn't take the disappointment anymore, so I really stopped investing any hope.

Sure, I went through the motions with emails to elected officials (pointless, since I vote in Georgia), but I really couldn't bring myself to care a great deal. I was resigned to it. But this is where my family and friends really stepped in and pushed this through. I'm very thankful and grateful for friends and family who care enough about me to take on issues that affect me - without my having to ask. It really means a lot.

It was a little over two years ago when a former friend's opposition to same-sex marriage made me snap and made me raise my expectations of what friends and family will do to help with the issues of queer people. I'm thrilled to say that not only did they take action, they did it without my asking.

Granted, these issues affect us all — when some of us aren't free, all of us aren't free — but when the folks on the comfortable side of the privilege line do more than I do on issues that affect me, it really is touching. Thank you.