Four short links: 17 November 2009

Digital Natives, Supersexy C64 Debugger, a Google Tripwire, and a Patient Botnet

1. Digital Natives (Ze Frank) -- digital natives have grown up in a landscape where access to information and influence has been flattened. they have watched media distribution bottlenecks in the form of networks and studios lose influence to youtube and independent production houses. They have watched companies bow down to viral video critiques, and watched political systems get hacked by social networks. this is a generation that doesn't understand restrictions on access to media if those restrictions are inefficient or obviously detrimental to the system as a whole. this is a generation that has been at war with DRM and copyright right from the start. it is a generation awash with free tutorials and download-able source code. When is a conversation with a precocious 17 year old a glimpse into an inter-generational gulf with implications for the role and status of formal education, and when is it just an encounter with a brat? Ze's piece is worth reading, whichever way it comes out.
2. ICU64 -- an open source Commodore 64 emulator (Frodo) hacked to visually and textually display memory. Watch the video embedded below, it's hypnotic and seductive. It immediately made me want one for my programs (without having to port my code back to 6502 assembler). (via waxy whose return from pneumonia is greatly welcomed)
3. Me and Belle du Jour -- interesting story from a UK blog master who guessed her identity but kept it secret, creating a googlewhacked page as a tripwire to let him know when someone else guessed. He tipped her off that her cover was blown. (via waxy again)
4. The Hail Mary Cloud -- the world's slowest yet effective brute force attack. If you publish your user name and password, somebody who is not you will use it, sooner or later. A botnet is brute-force trying every known username and password combination against every known ssh server. Each attempt in theory has monumental odds against succeeding, but occasionally the guess will be right and they have scored a login. As far as we know, this is at least the third round of password guessing from the Hail Mary Cloud (see the archives for earlier postings about slow bruteforcers), but there could have been earlier rounds that escaped our attention.

How Alan Turing Finally Got a Posthumous Apology

Guest blogger John Graham-Cumming initiated and led the successful petition drive to procure an apology to Alan Turing from the UK government. John is the author of The Geek Atlas, CTO of a stealth-mode start-up, and a longtime programmer who has a doctorate in computer security. If you're in London this Saturday, September 19, come by the launch party for his book at the Brunel Museum.

There's a long tradition in the UK of direct democracy, with citizens petitioning the Prime Minister themselves. Typically, thousands of signatures are collected on paper and then delivered directly to the Prime Minister's home at No. 10 Downing Street in London. The petitioners arrive at No. 10 and hand the signatures through the open front door.

But the British government has made great strides to bring many aspects of government relations into the electronic age. Through the non-profit MySociety.org the government has created web sites (all with open-source code) for citizens to interact with local and central government offices.

One such web site is the No. 10 Downing Street petitions page (its code is open-source and can be found here).

I used the petitions web site, a collection of Web 2.0 technologies, and a bit of media savvy to successfully petition the government to apologize for the prosecution of the seminal computer scientist Alan Turing.

And I did most of it from the top of a red London double-decker bus using an iPhone.

Alan Turing did three amazing things in his working life: he laid the foundations of computer science by thinking up a theoretical computer called the Turing Machine, he worked through the Second World War breaking Nazi German codes, and after the war he worked on artificial intelligence and defined the Turing Test. His life was cut short at 41 when he had begun to work on morphogenesis in plants.

Alan Turing was also gay and he was prosecuted for "gross indecency" (essentially being gay) in 1952. To avoid prison he agreed to be injected with female hormones as a sort of 'cure' for homosexuality. Two years after his prosecution he was dead: he killed himself by eating an apple dipped in potassium cyanide.

June 23, 2009 was the anniversary of Alan Turing's birth (he would have been 97) and I posted a blog entry entitled Alan Turing deserves an apology from the British Government. It generated a few comments and I posted a follow-up entry the next day with an example of how I would apologize for my government's actions in 1952.

That night I created a petition on the No. 10 Downing Street web site asking for a government apology for the treatment of Alan Turing.

On August 4, 2009 the petition was approved and made public. I mentioned it on my blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, and posted it to Y Combinator's Hacker News. At the time I thought I'd have a hard time getting 500 people to sign. Little did I know the petition would gather over 30,000 signatures in 37 days and elicit an incredible apology from the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown preceded by a personal call to my mobile phone.

This chart shows the number of signatures per day between August 4, 2009 and September 10, 2009. (click for larger view)

The same day the story appeared on Reddit. Signatures started to come in slowly.

The next day the petition was picked up by the first journalist to write about it: Jessica Geen of Pink News wrote an online only story which made the story jump over from being covered just by computer scientists and into the LGBT community. The LGBT press would turn out to be a strong ally reporting on the growing petition throughout the campaign.

Four days later, on August 9, 2009 the petition passed 500 signatures. This was the magic level needed to get a government response. I was still pretty skeptical of getting an apology but I certainly wasn't going to be satisfied by 500 names and kept promoting it on Twitter, my blog, and elsewhere.

The first really big break came on August 16, 2009 when the Manchester Evening News wrote about the petition. Manchester was where Alan Turing died and where he had worked before his death. There's a great deal of local pride in Manchester's adopted local boy Alan Turing. The following night I was a guest on BBC Radio Manchester's gay hour.

On August 18, 2009 the petition made the national news with a major story in The Independent, and at the same time the first celebrity name appeared on the list of signatures: Richard Dawkins.

With one celebrity name and national press I began to think the petition might really get noticed. The following night Richard Dawkins and I appeared on Channel 4 News to talk about the petition (Dawkins was filmed looking regal in his garden; I was filmed in classic programmer clothing: bad shoes, dirty shorts and a crumpled shirt). The same day I appeared on the BBC World Service and PRI's The World.

Sitting on the bus each morning I would catch up on email regarding the petition and scan the list of signatures looking for celebrities who I would then try to contact through their agents. I also plotted how to get the story in the press. Anyone who wrote about the story got added to my Turing/Media email list and each morning I would prepare an update on the story with the number of signatures, who had signed and any other events, and send it out.

Over the next week many things happened: I appeared on BBC Radio Ulster, I wrote a letter to Her Majesty The Queen asking her to consider a posthumous knighthood for Alan Turing, the veteran human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell signed the petition and I received an email from the writer Ian McEwan to say that he had signed.

I knew it was time to get the story out as widely as possible and so I emailed two BBC journalists that I knew to say that I thought the petition was an important story and that they needed to cover it.

Do you think you'd be interested in covering the Alan Turing Petition? It's now got backing from Richard Dawkins and has been covered by BBC Radio Manchester, BBC Radio Northern Ireland, The World Service, Channel 4 News, The Independent, ... Watch: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/uk/pardon+for+enigma+codebreaker+alan+turing/3315187 for good background. There are now 4,800 signatories. John.

On August 31, 2009 BBC News online covered the story with a long article about the petition, and its celebrity backers. The night before I had gone to bed feeling happy that there were 5,000 signatures on my petition; I woke up to 16,000, by the next morning there were 20,000. That day I appeared on BBC Radio Scotland.

The single enormous leap in signatures in the chart above happened because of the BBC News online story.

On September 1, 2009 I appeared on BBC Radio 4's PM program, CNN covered the campaign, I appeared on CBC's As It Happens, and Stephen Fry signed and tweeted urging his followers to sign.

The same day I received two extraordinary emails. Unbeknownst to anyone I had written to MI5 asking them to release documents about Alan Turing's death in an effort to clear up any doubt about whether his death could have been murder. They denied my request.

The second email came from a member of Alan Turing's surviving family. The BBC report had erroneously said that he had no family. But that was incorrect: Turing's three nieces remembered him well, and he had a surviving nephew.

On the bus home I heard directly that Alan Turing's nieces had many memories of their Uncle Alan. They even still had his teddy bear. I hung up and sat at the back of the bus and cried quietly. I had always felt that Alan Turing's treatment was appalling, but to hear the family speak of the man was too much. I was convinced that I had to see my campaign, which had started on an impulse, to its completion.

Two days later I raced up to Bletchley Park to film the definitive report on the campaign with BBC Newsnight's science editor Susan Watts. The report ran that night and the same day international coverage of the campaign exploded with stories in the major press all over the world. The Newsnight story featured an interview with Alan Turing's nieces and nephew describing the terrible treatment he had endured and giving their blessing to the petition.

On September 7, 2009 I did a final piece of radio, appearing on BBC Radio Ulster. The same day I began to feel unwell with what would turn out to be a nasty bout of flu.

Lying in bed on September 10, 2009 I had to check my email because of a work commitment the following day. In my Inbox was the following email:

John - I wonder if you could call me as a matter of urgency, regarding your petition. Very many thanks! Kirsty Kirsty xxxxxxx 10 Downing St, SW1A 2AA Tel: 020x xxxx xxxx

Of course, I called back! I was told that the apology was coming that night and that "Gordon would like a word with you". At 19:44 that evening my mobile phone rang and I was handed the Prime Minister.

"Hello John. It's Gordon Brown. I think you know why I'm calling you."

Update The nice folks at No. 10 Downing Street and the petitions team released a spreadsheet of the actual day-by-day signatures for the petition period that gives an even clearer picture of the effect of different news outlets (the chart above came from my hand written, sporadic notes). (click for larger view)

Four short links: 5 August 2009

Rebooting Britain, Revealing Errors, Reproducing Generators, Netflix Culture

1. Reboot Britain Video Archive -- video from the talks at Reboot Britain are online. The event also produced a essay set (PDF), CC-licensed. (via Paul Reynolds)
2. Revealing Errors -- Benjamin Mako Hill blog using computer errors as starting points for understanding how computers control the world around us. (via Dan Meyer)
3. New Microbe Strain Makes More Electricity, Faster -- University of Amherst researchers made current-generating bacteria work harder to live, and in five months had a strain that made an 8x larger current.
4. Netflix Culture -- readable slide deck which talks about the Netflix company culture. It's hard to read it and not nod in full agreement. (via joshua on Delicious)

Four short links: 22 May 2009

Villainous Javascript, Funding the Arts, Peak Web, and Crowdsourced Quality Control at a Museum

1. Hiding Dirty Deeds: "Encrypted" Client-Side Code -- obfuscated Javascript from a Facebook phishing site, deconstructed and reconstructed, parsed and glossed for understanding. It reminds me of the best obfuscated Perl: Latin, string substitution, runtime and compile-time semantics ... a work of evil art. (via waxy)
2. Kickstarter -- artistic commercial version of PledgeBank. You say "I want to do [X] by Y and it takes $Z" and people can donate to your goal. (via waxpancake on Twitter)
3. Peak Web (Chris Heathcote) -- My biggest problem is that people always perceive the near-past, present and near-future as having the most technological change, and the speed of decline of the old new media feels wrong. I am, however, thinking that there’s something true in one reading of the graph: we may be at or past Peak Web.
4. Crowdsourcing the Cleanup with Freeze Tag -- The Awe-Worthy Brooklyn Museum, like all cultural institutions, have more objects than they can add metadata to. They let users provide metadata through tagging, but all crowdsourcing projects permit vandals. Their solution: crowdsource the cleanup. My only question is whether this will become a game between vandals and janitors. Brooklyn Museum is noteworthy for their insanely great use of the web, check them out and please support them if you like what you see.

Warning sign of peak web

Social Science Moves from Academia to the Corporation

This is the latest of a series of posts addressing questions regarding social technologies. Previous posts: The Evangelist Fallacy, Captivity of the Commons and The Digital Panopticon. These topics will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27 with a special guest to be announced.

In order to control a thing you must first classify a thing -- and we are seeing a massive classification of social behavior. While that classification falls under the guise of making life easier (targeted ads, locating a nearby pizza joint using your mobile), history tells us that we should be leery of motives and masters of our social data (see Captivity of the Commons).

Social sciences (behavioral psychology, sociology, organizational development), whose historical lack of data and scientific method left them open to ridicule from the “hard” sciences, finally have enough volume of data and analytics and processing power (see Big Data) to make “social” much more scientific. But this time social science is going to be coming to you not courtesy of Princeton, but courtesy of Google. Not through small studies on willing subjects, but through massive multivariate testing and optimization upon (largely) unknowing test subjects. The corporation, in other words, will hold the keys to social science at a level of precision only dreamed of by the academic and state institutions of yore.

This recent New York Times article highlights just how much social science, psychology, and personal data converge when a credit card company wants its debts repaid (via Andy Oram’s Radar post).

Should we be concerned about this shift from academia to the corporation?

I hold the current structure of government and corporations in equal regard in terms of how well they adhere to Google’s maxim, “Don’t be Evil.” So in some regard, I shouldn’t really be troubled that social science has moved from academia (which has often been a handmaiden of government) to the corporation (which really just wants to understand what moves you to click that “buy” button, or bump up your average order size by $10, etc.). Except…

Except if you believe that consumer culture is wreaking havoc upon the systems that support life and that the application of social science on behalf of the corporation is intended to simply turbo charge the status quo...

We find ourselves in 2009 facing deep, structural challenges -- peak oil, environmental degradation, climate change, and financial meltdown.

That's why the notion of social science in service of accelerating the existing system troubles me. Tim has spoken about the need to “Work on Stuff that Matters.” How might we apply social science toward "stuff that matters" instead of toward "buying more stuff that doesn't matter?"

Four short links: 7 May 2009

iPhone Rocketry, Copywrongs, Econopocalypse, and Empire

1. How To Use An iPhone To Fly RC Airplanes and Helicopters -- So I had my basic idea down. iPhone joins the Linksys router network. It gets an IP address. Then, I open up my pilot program. The pilot program interfaces with the router via SSH (I couldn’t think of a better way that has redundancy, and speed, and was already buily by someone else). The pilot program interprets what the iphone is doing, and outputs data to one of the ethernet ports of which there are conveniently 4. Rudder, Ailerons, Throttle, Elevator.
2. Economist Debates: Copyrights and Wrongs -- The Economist live debate about copyright, with the moot "This house believes that existing copyright laws do more harm than good." Public comments, voting, and new informed opinions each day.
3. How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street (NYMag) -- story of the software developer behind a lot of the mortgage repackaging software. Many good lines, e.g., But even then, I was wondering why I was making more than anyone in my family, maybe as much as all my siblings combined. Hey, I had higher SAT scores. I could do all the arithmetic in my head. I was very good at programming a computer. And that computer, with my software, touched billions of dollars of the firm’s money. Every week. That justified it. When you’re close to the money, you get the first cut. Oyster farmers eat lots of oysters, don’t they?
4. Yow -- words of wisdom from John Battelle on Google as the new Microsoft: If any lesson is to be drawn, perhaps prematurely, from all this, it's that no company - or two companies - can lead a culture for longer than half a generation. After that, the culture starts to distrust the companies' motives, regardless of whether they are pure or well intentioned.

Four short links: 1 May 2009

Smart Grids, Open Source, Stuff That Matters, and Global Culture

1. A Little Give and Take On Electricity (NY Times) -- Dennis L. Arfmann, a lawyer at the Boulder office of Hogan & Hartson who specializes in environmental law, said he had no idea how much electricity he and his wife, Dr. Julie Brown, had used before he filled his roof with solar panels producing 4.5 kilowatts of power. During the day he sells power to Xcel and at night he buys it back; his goal is to cut his use so his net sales rise. All hardware networked, everywhere!
2. Open Source World Map (Red Hat) -- very nice map showing the intensity of open source use in countries around the world. (via Flowing Data)
3. Imagine Cup -- Microsoft's contest to get students working on stuff that matters. The winners of the New Zealand leg, Team Think, tackled literacy: they devised a program for tablets that provides both handwriting recognition and audio output, eliminating the need for basic literacy to understand lessons or instructions. They hope to take this prototype to developing countries that have underutilised computers due to literacy issues. (via Idealog newsletter and Scoop)
4. UGT -- It is always morning when person comes into a channel, and it is always late night when person leaves. [...] The idea behind establishing this convention was to eliminate noise generated almost every time someone comes in and greets using some form of day-time based greeting, and then channel members on the other side of the globe start pointing out that it's different time of the day for them. Now, instead of spending time figuring out what time of day is it for every member of the channel, we spend time explaining newcomers benefits of UGT. (via migurski on delicious).

Four short links: 7 Apr 2009

Maps, meaning, makers, and orphaned works:

1. Lens Tools and Fisheye Map Browsing -- a summary of magnification in maps through history, culminating in use of the fisheye/lens as a way to explore layers and data in thematic maps. (via Titine's delicious stream)
2. Socially Relevant Computing -- frustrated by the meaningless examples and work in computer science classes, Mike Buckley started sending students into the real world and building projects for handicapped people, firefighters, children, etc. Read their SIGCSE paper (PDF) for more. (via Andy Oram)
3. Maker Faire Africa -- I wish I could go!
4. Google Book Search Lawsuit Settlement Analysis -- finally a simple statement of why many folks aren't happy with the Google Book Search lawsuit settlement: Thanks to the magic of the class action mechanism, the settlement will confer on Google a kind of legal immunity that cannot be obtained at any price through a purely private negotiation. It confers on Google immunity not only against suits brought by the actual members of the organizations that sued Google, but also against suits brought by anyone who doesn’t explicitly opt out. That means that Google will be free to mine the vast body of orphan works without fear of liability. Any competitor that wants to get the same legal immunity Google is getting will have to take the same steps Google did: start scanning books without the publishers’ and authors’ permission, get sued by authors and publishers as a class, and then negotiate a settlement. The problem is that they’ll have no guarantee that the authors and publishers will play along. (via Glynn Moody)

Understanding Web Operations Culture - the Graph & Data Obsession

We’re quite addicted to data pr0n here at Flickr. We’ve got graphs for pretty much everything, and add graphs all of the time.

-John Allspaw, Operations Engineering Manager at Flickr & author of The Art of Capacity Planning

One of the most interesting parts of running a large website is watching the effects of unrelated events affecting user traffic in aggregate. Web traffic is something that companies typically keep very secret, and often the only time engineers can talk about it is late at night, at a bar, and very much off the record.

There are many good reasons for keeping this kind of information confidential, particularly for publicly traded companies with complicated disclosure requirements. There are also downsides, the biggest being that is difficult for peers to learn from each other and compare notes.

John Allspaw recently created a WebOps Visualizations group on Flickr for sharing these kinds of graphs with the confidential information removed. Here’s an example of a traffic drop seen both by Flickr & by Last.FM that coincided with President Obama’s inauguration.

Similar traffic drop on Last.FM seen on the right

Google saw a similar drop as well

Was it because everybody went to Twitter?

Besides being an interesting story, sharing these kinds of graphs help people build better monitoring tools and processes. As just one example: How should the WebOps team respond to this dip in traffic? Is it an outage? The inaguration was a very well known event and so it’s easy to explain the drop in traffic… what happens when a similar drop in traffic occurs? Should the WebOps team be looking at CNN (or trends in twitter) along with everything else?

How do you tell when that unexpected 10% drop in traffic is really just people with something more important to do than browse your site?

(Note: Updated since original posting to add Google & Twitter graphs and annotations, and to switch the Last.FM graphic with an annotated one after I got permission.)

Understanding Web Operations Culture (Part 1)

“You don’t choose the moment, the moment chooses you. You only choose how prepared you are when it does.” - Fire Chief Mike Burtch

(Note: I became a Firefighter-1 and EMT in 2000. My experiences in the fire service profoundly influence my efforts in technology. Much of my work over the past few years has been translating and distilling my knowledge from these two worlds, teaching others, and finding ways to apply it in the service of both.)

Last week I came upon a truck vs. scooter accident on my way home. I could hear a woman yelling in pain from underneath the truck (a good sign!) and could see a guy in the cab looking panicked and touching his controls. I stopped my car and “surveyed the scene” looking for things that might kill me (traffic, hazmat, downed power lines) or make the situation worse if undetected (additional victims, deflating tires, fires).

It looked like the driver was about to move his truck, which would have definitely made things worse. I used my ‘command voice’ to yell “Put it in park! Stop your engine! Set your brake! Get out and wait!” as I approached the truck.

A city crew came over, and one of them told me “We’ve called 911 and they are on their way.”

I asked them to handle traffic control as I approached my patient. I then introduced myself and asked her if I could help. (I have to obtain consent before assisting an injured person, and a response means I know they have still have their Airway, Breathing, and Circulation intact.)

Her legs were entangled in her scooter which was trapped underneath the truck. While she probably had broken her leg, it didn’t look all that bad. She was still wearing her helmet and it wasn't seriously damaged which meant her head was probably okay too. I did a quick check for bleeding and other serious injuries and did a “mental status check” by asking her name, where she was (“on my way to school”), and what had happened (“I was riding and that a**hole RAN OVER ME!”). This meant she was alert and oriented, which was good.

Now that I was sure there weren’t any other life threatening injuries, I prepared to hold her head for c-spine stabilization. (Once you start holding stabilization, you cannot move again until you are ready to put the patient on a backboard.)

As I positioned myself on the ground and took hold of her head, I explained “I’m going to hold your head now to protect your neck and back. Once the fire department gets here, they are going to get your legs unstuck and then we’ll get you on a backboard. Your job is to keep still and keep talking to us. There will be a lot of commotion and noise around you, and that’s okay. Everyone will be watching out for you and so there is no reason to be scared. We’ve got you.”

(continue reading)