Four short links: 10 November 2009

DIY Diagnostic Chips, Genetics on $5k a Genome, Cellphones as Diagnostic Microscopes, AR-Equipped Mechanics Do It Heads-Up

1. A children’s toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips -- microfluidic chips (with tiny liquid-filled channels) can cost $100k and more. Michelle Khine used the Shrinky Dinks childrens' toy to make her own. "I thought if I could print out the [designs] at a certain resolution and then make them shrink, I could make channels the right size for micro­fluidics," she says. (via BoingBoing)
2. Complete Genomics publishes in Science on low-cost sequencing of 3 human genomes (press release) -- The consumables cost for these three genomes sequenced on the proof-of-principle genomic DNA nanoarrays ranged from $8,005 for 87x coverage to $1,726 for 45x coverage for the samples described in this report. Drive that cost down! There's a gold rush in biological discovery at the moment as we pick the low-hanging fruit of gross correlations between genome and physiome, but the science to reveal the workings of cause and effect is still in its infancy. We're in the position of the 18th century natural philosophers who were playing with static electricity, oxygen, anaesthetics, and so on but who lacked today's deeper insights into physical and chemical structure that explain the effects they were able to obtain. More data at this stage means more low-hanging fruit can be plucked, but the real power comes when we understand "how" and not just "what". (via BoingBoing)
3. Far From a Lab? Turn a Cellphone into a Microscope (NY Times) -- for some tests, you can use a camphone instead of a microscope. In one prototype, a slide holding a finger prick of blood can be inserted over the phone’s camera sensor. The sensor detects the slide’s contents and sends the information wirelessly to a hospital or regional health center. For instance, the phones can detect the asymmetric shape of diseased blood cells or other abnormal cells, or note an increase of white blood cells, a sign of infection, he said.
4. Augmented reality helps Marine mechanics carry out repair work (MIT TR) -- A user wears a head-worn display, and the AR system provides assistance by showing 3-D arrows that point to a relevant component, text instructions, floating labels and warnings, and animated, 3-D models of the appropriate tools. An Android-powered G1 smart phone attached to the mechanic's wrist provides touchscreen controls for cueing up the next sequence of instructions. [...] The mechanics using the AR system located and started repair tasks 56 percent faster, on average, than when wearing the untracked headset, and 47 percent faster than when using just a stationary computer screen.

Four short links: 16 October 2009

Audio Geotagging, SF Open Data Stories, Wave Use Cases, Hadooped Genomes

1. Wiimote Audio Geotagging -- match audio with the map movement and annotations made with an IR pen and a Wiimote. Very cool! (and from New Zealand)
2. San Francisco: Open For Data -- Two months after it launched, the project is already reaping rewards from San Francisco's huge community of programmers. Applications using the data include Routesy, which offers directions based on real-time city transport feeds; and EcoFinder, which points you to the nearest recycling site for a given item.
3. Google Wave's Best Use Cases (Lifehacker) -- not cases where people are using Wave, but where they want to. Read this as "the Web has not provided all the tools to solve these problems". Something will solve them, and Wave is trying to. (via Jim Stogdill)
4. Analyzing Human Genomes with Hadoop -- case study from the Cloudera blog. Performs alignment and genotyping on the 100GB of data you get when you sequence a human's genome in about three hours for less than $100 using a 40-node, 320-core cluster rented from Amazon’s EC2. (via mndoci on Twitter)

Four short links: 12 October 2009

DSL for NLP Task, Insider Tradespotting, Outsource Fail, Cloud Fail

1. Snowball -- a small string processing language designed for creating stemming algorithms for use in Information Retrieval. (via straup on delicious)
2. Insider Trades -- a Yahoo! Hack Day app that turned out to be worth continuing. Scans SEC systems every 30 seconds and alerts you if the stock you track has been traded by an insider. (via straup on delicious)
3. Air New Zealand Slams IBM -- central point of failure in the outsourced IT. "In my 30-year working career, I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client's customers is not the glowing endorsement you want.
4. Danger/Microsoft Loses Sidekick Customers' Data -- Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. This cloud had a brown lining.

Four short links: 1 July 2009

Web Awards, Speed Thrills, Magazines in the Cloud, Augmented Reality

1. The Onyas -- New Zealand web design awards launch, from the people behind Webstock and Full Code Press. The name comes from "good on ya", the highest praise that traditionally taciturn New Zealanders are allowed by law to give.
2. The Year of Business Metrics: Don't make your users run away! -- wrapup of the Velocity conference. AOL: Users who had a slower experience view far fewer pages. Some interesting notes on performance from a Google-Bing study: Notice that as the delays get longer the Time To Click increases at a more extreme rate (1000ms increases by 1900ms). The theory is that the user gets distracted and unengaged in the page. In other words, they've lost the user's full attention and have to get it back. [...] As much as five weeks later, some users, especially those who saw delays greater than 400MS, were still searching less than before. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. Printcasting -- very simple content management system for print magazines that lets anyone start a magazine, add content, sign up contributors, sell ads, and go. Clever!
4. Pachube Augmented Reality Hack -- sexy hack that pushes all my buttons: computer vision, Arduino, sensor network, ubiquitous computing, pervasive alternate reality cyborg villians with chalk designs hellbent on world domination and the enslavement of the human race to use as meatsack AA batteries for their sex toys. Okay, four out of five ain't bad. (via bruces on Twitter)

The Last HOPE

I made the trek to a steamy hot NYC this weekend to attend one day of the three day Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania. There was too much going to adequately cover it here (or even take it all in), but a few things stood out.

Steve Rambam's eye opening talk on the death of privacy for example. For a solid three hours in front of a standing room only crowd he weaved back and forth between the Orwellian theme of how our privacy is being ripped from us by everyone from Google to Choicepoint and the theme that seemed even creepier to him, self contribution. Over and over he expressed disbelief at how willingly we post our personal details everywhere from Twitter to Facebook while thanking us all the while for making his job as a private investigator that much easier. What the marketers and government don't actively take, we actively give. Naturally I twittered the whole thing.

Cell phone tracking; artificial-intelligence-assisted reality mining; 3000 cameras per square mile in Manhattan; facial, activity, and even gait identification software; government outsourced investigative databases shielded from FOIA requests; UAV-based license plate scanners; beating anonymity by correlating multiple datasets; unanticipated database repurposing; and on and on... Finally I could twitter no more and left the venue hurriedly fashioning a tinfoil hat from a burger wrapper while consigning myself to doubling the dosage on my meds.

I will say this though, there was something deliciously ironic about standing in a room chock full of hackers all listening at rapt attention to a three hour chillingly dystopic harangue on privacy loss while nearly every single one of them was wearing an RFID tag around their necks. Even better, the tag was tracking their every move around the venue and was linked to a comprehensive self-contributed profile.

Moving beyond the privacy nightmare stuff, there was hardware hacking to be found everywhere at Last HOPE. Tables were covered with broken open electronic toys and electronic components and were surrounded by hackers with smoking soldering irons.

Of the completed projects on display, one of my favorites was a something of a hybrid that projected a 3D image onto carefully placed strings.

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Disaster Technology for Myanmar/Burma aid workers

There is an ongoing crisis in Myanmar (Burma) in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. The ruling military junta is finally allowing humanitarian organizations into the region after denying access for almost a week. The situation is grim, and you can help by donating to organizations like: Doctors without Borders, Direct Relief, and UNICEF.

There has been some incredible discussion on the humanitarian tech and Geo lists in the past 24 hours around adapting/improving existing collaboration services to work with the tools in the field. Mikel Maron and I will be speaking about this at Where2.0 next week, and it looks like some exciting work will be happening there and at WhereCamp.

Eduardo Jezierski from InSTEDD is currently working to localize the Sahana Disaster Management System

Jonathan Thompson's organization, Humanlink, has been working on adapting technology for aid workers for some time. You can follow recent developments on the Aid Worker Daily blog.

Update: Paul Currion posted a big list of other projects now underway to the humanitarian.info blog:

• A Sahana instance is being set up for the use of anybody who needs it, with the support of INSTEDD and possible uptake by NetHope members.
• Direct Relief International have done up a KMZ file of health facilities in-country, based on the WHO 2002 Global Health Atlas.
• OCHA are prepping a HIC to support the existing Myanmar Information Management Unit, who have already put out some W3 maps.
• UNOSAT have also got their sat on with a KMZ file of the cyclone path and the usual satellite mapping.
• Ditto ITHACA, who have released a series of satellite maps showing the impact of Nargis.
• ReliefWeb’s info stream on Cyclone Nargis is of course like drinking water from a hose, with their map filter probably most useful.
• The WorldWideHelp blog roars into action with all the news that’s fit to blog.
• A couple of the mailing list discussions that I’m on are talking about ways in which we might leverage cellphone and/or satellite phone communications if they become available, particularly for tracking relief and relief personnel.
• Digital Globe and Geo-Eye have hopped the NASA satellite for an updating KML layer on the cyclone.
• Microsoft apparently have a team on standby to deploy the refugee tracking software that was developed for Kosovo (no reference yet).
• Telecoms sans Frontieres are also on standby out of Bangkok, waiting for access to free up.
• Also Infoworld points out that - with regards to early warning - IT didn’t fail Myanmar, people did.

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GSM Cracking: Coming Soon to a Computer Near You via a Web Service

A web service that will make it easy and inexpensive to crack the GSM A5/1 encryption protocol, quickly enough for a call that is still in progress, is slated to launch at the end of April. Living right at the intersection of open hardware, open source software, software as a service, and cryptography, the service will reduce the cost and effort of cracking GSM call encryption by at least an order of magnitude.

The service is being developed by members of the GSM Software Project and demonstrates just how much things have changed in the world since the GSM system was designed. Various approaches to cracking both A5/1 (the European standard) and A5/2 (the weaker US standard) have been available for some time but this one is unique in that it should be available to researchers and hackers at the end of April in hosted api form instead of pdf.

Back in 1997 this overview of the GSM system declared that "Enciphering is an option for the fairly paranoid, since the signal is already coded, interleaved, and transmitted in a TDMA manner, thus providing protection from all but the most persistent and dedicated eavesdroppers." After all, such a radio encoding scheme made the signals invisible to typical radio band scanners.

Today, however, the availability of the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), an open hardware software defined radio that sells for about $700, combined with work being done at GNU Radio project to codify the GSM waveform (also targeted for the end of this month), makes this once reasonable point of view seem quaint. Good encryption is now a must and it appears that A5 no longer qualifies.

With USRP and GNU Radio making the waveform and encrypted frames cheaply accessible and the A5 Hacking Project's service easily breaking A5/1, anyone will be able to make a cheap GSM scanner. Today neither the complexity of the waveform or the encryption in use is adequate to keep a GSM call private.

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Getting the iPhone Open Source Tool Chain Up and Running

Tomorrow at 10 am pacific time, oreilly.com is hosting a free webcast with Jonathan A. Zdziarski, one of the original hackers of the iPhone and author of iPhone Open Application Development. From the announcement:

Jonathan will demonstrate how you can use the iPhone open source tool chain to design third-party software that will run on on both today's iPhones, and on iPhones that will soon be running Apple's next version of firmware based on the official SDK. Jonathan will demonstrate on a Mac running Leopard.

Introducing Jonathan will be Brian Jepson, executive editor for Make Magazine's Make:Books series, co-author of Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks and a number of other geeky books, and iPhone hacker at large.

This is your opportunity to hear expert advice on building applications for the iPhone and ask questions of the experts themselves.

Attendance is limited, so register now. We'll send you a reminder before the webcast.

Date: Thursday, April 3 at 10am PDT (17:00 GMT)
Cost: Free
Duration: 30-45 minutes
Meeting link: oreilly.com/go/webcast-iphone
Teleconference dial-in:
(select the number that is closest to your location)
East Coast US: +1 617 231-0350 and pin 8136507
West Coast US: +1 213-455-0500 and pin 8136507

Some people might wonder why we published a book on the open source toolchain when an official SDK has already been announced. (I wondered that myself :-) We started the book before Apple had learned from the first hackers that people wanted more out of the phone and announced the open API. But why didn't we just hold off on publishing it, modify it for the official API, and release it when the time comes (supposedly sometime in June) when the official API is open for business? The answer is threefold.

1. We believe strongly that hackers mark off the natural paths that official developer programs later pave over and make safe for the less adventurous. Smart companies know this, and pay attention to their hackers. (Google Maps is a great case in point. It became the mapping platform of choice because, rather than shutting down the early mashup hackers, it quickly figured how to pour fuel on the fire that they'd started.) We think that despite the official disapproval, Apple knows that the hacker interest in the iPhone is a great boost to their program and their goals. (Witness the fact that the Apple store in Cambridge MA allowed Jonathan to present on open iPhone development in a meeting at the store.)

2. The open API has a great deal of overlap with the official API. So getting up and running with the open toolchain will help developers get a head start. But it's also more powerful than the official toolchain, and will let developers continue to push Apple in interesting new directions. Jonathan wrote:

   With the introduction of the Apple SDK, developers gauged its functionality based on a comparison to the unofficial, open source SDK released last August. In the process of building this custom, open source compiler for the iPhone, the development community exposed the many low-level APIs (application programming interfaces) available on the device. Using tools such as class-dump, nm, and just plain old trial-and-error gave developers access to the full breadth of functionality available deep within the iPhone's frameworks. It was used to write applications that could look and act just like Apple's preloaded software, so when Apple announced that their SDK was "the same set of tools," many expected that it would look and feel like the open tool chain. Very few had anticipated the many restrictions they've come to find in the official SDK. While roughly 75% of the two SDKs do overlap, the remaining 25% has shown to be very restrictive, removing the developer's ability to do "the real fun stuff" with their application.

3. The demand was there. The number of slots in the official API program is far smaller than the apparent demand. We published the book, and it sold out immediately, indicating that we were right. We do plan to update the book with information about the official API as soon as the Apple NDA is lifted, but for now, we are eager to fuel the fire, since we believe that the iPhone is one of the most important new platforms in the market today, and one that developers should be exploring as deeply (and as soon) as possible.

See also Jonathan's article on the O'Reilly Network about open API development for the iPhone for more information about the difference between the two APIs, and why developers need to know about both. We're also planning to have a strong open mobile development track at OScon.

Paging systems and Conference Bridges for startups & small teams

Early registration for the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference has opened. To help spread the word, I've written this "simplest thing that will work" hack to a common Operations need: Paging systems and Conference Bridges.

Step 1: Establish a team contact list with SMS email addresses

Create a Google Spreadsheet to create a team roster like this one. My recommendation is to let people enter and manage their own information. Most cell providers have an email to SMS gateway of some kind. In the US, these are:

• ATT: phonenumber@txt.att.net
• Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
• Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
• T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
• Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com

Step 2: Set up a notification email list

Set up an email alias and add people by email address and SMS gateway address. If you don't have a way of creating an alias, you can use a mailing list provider such as Google Groups.

Step 3: Set up the Conference Bridges

I am really happy with FreeConferenceCall.com which, amazingly, provides free conference call bridges. I recommend setting up three different bridges, and naming them by color so you can refer to them as the "Red Line", "Blue line", etc.

Step 4: Test your notification & conference bridges

Test your notification system to make sure people get the pages and can dial in and use the conference bridges as expected. I've found that it's easier just to give everybody the "host code" instead of having some people using the "participant code". Your mileage may vary. Once you have verified that people are getting pages and can dial into the conference bridges you should...

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Why I Love Hackers

TechWeb TV posted a short video from my opening keynote at ETech. Nominally this year's version of my O'Reilly Radar talk, which focuses on emerging trends that we're watching, the talk was wrapped in a larger theme, namely, why I love hackers, the edges they explore, and why hackers and alpha geeks, not entrepreneurs, are the first step in technology innovation. The video contains a short segment from the opening of the talk, and the closing.

I hope to have the video of the entire talk available soon.

DIY Multitouch with the Wiimote

If you will be missing Jeff Hahn's presentation at Etech next week, you can still make your own multitouch display thanks to Johnny Chung Lee and the Wiimote. Johnny has a number of sensor hacks on his blog, and just announced that EA Games has incorporated his Wii head tracking hack into an upcoming release.

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Continuous context off the Shelf

Tom Insam has posted news of Shelf, a Mac program that queries your currently running applications in order to provide you with supplementary information about the people related to the data you're currently interacting with.

A revival of the GNOME Dashboard concept, Shelf uses Apple's Open Scripting Architecture to query your applications, looking for matches in your address book. If it finds somebody you know, you're presented with a summary of related information, such as their recent blog entries, or travel plans from Dopplr (Tom's employer).

This screenshot shows Shelf displaying information about Tom Insam, in response to his web page being visited in Safari.

As a one-time participant in the Dashboard experiment, I'm happy to see Shelf resurrect the concept. One problem for Dashboard was that it expected every application to become Dashboard-aware and send Dashboard hints about what it was doing. Shelf takes the opposite approach, sniffing out information from applications.

Semantic technology -- making data smarter than just a string of bytes -- has taken longer to emerge in desktop computing than many hoped it would. Aside from the barriers to integration that the Dashboard project encountered, one of the biggest problems is in figuring out how to actually make it all work well for the user. I can't be the only person who sees and admires technologies such as microformats and then fails to find any immediate practical use for them.

Semantic technology on the desktop, and the web for that matter, is a long game. Even though some of the backend technology is increasingly mature, the user interface issues are the gnarly problem, and the cooperation of the operating system vendors themselves is paramount.

The tide does seem to be turning with the OS vendors. We're seeing a growing uptake of practical semantic technology in desktop user interfaces: consider, for example, the heuristic sniffing of dates and people performed in OS X's Mail program. Shelf is a great addition to the experimentation, and especially so since its source is now available for people to play with. The code is in its early stages, but well worth giving a try.

WebOps Hack #1: Simple Availability Report for Busy Teams

I created this spreadsheet for tracking availability and "days since last outage". Along with the availability and uptime calculations, it asks the following questions:

• What broke?
• Why?
• What fixed It?
• What did we learn?
• How can we prevent recurrence?
• Who owns follow-up?

I've found this to be the "simplest thing that could possibly work" for identifying problems and tracking issues before a formal incident tracking system is in place, or with vendors or other teams who you want to keep honest. Please let me know if it's helpful for you and how it might be improved. (Feel free to improve upon it yourself too -- it's Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike.)

Link to the Google doc is here. You need to "Copy to a new spreadsheet" to be able to use it.

Technorati Tags: infrastructure, operations, secretsauce, startups

iPhone Accelerometer Hack

Check out this video. Cool! (thanks, Waxy for the pointer)

This guy had to drop into assembly language to figure out how to read the accelerometer in his iPhone. These people are SMART. If I were Steve Jobs (real, not fake) I'd be wishing they were working to make distributable legal third party apps and thus helping my business, rather than trying to knife my (admittedly stupid) business partner.

I know all the arguments about Jobs condones the hacking because it'll convince AT&T to loosen up. I don't buy them. In all the historical "Jobs is thinking three moves ahead!" stories I remember hearing about DRM, iPods, and so on, the simplest explanation turned out to fit best.

Wikipedia is only as anonymous as your IP

Virgil Griffith, a good friend and fellow hacker, reminds us today that anonymity on the internet does not really exist. With his newly released search tool Wikiscanner, you can search an index of 35 million Wikipedia edits by IP, allowing you to find edits coming from within organizations like the CIA or the EFF (bonus if you can find something about Kevin Bankston smoking).

Finding out that someone from the Fox News network changed this:

The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken's book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the [[National Public Radio]] program ''[[Fresh Air]]'' on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox's case against him was "literally laughed out of court" and that "wholly (holy) without merit" is a good characterization of Fox News itself.

into

The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken's book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the liberal [[National Public Radio]] program ''[[Fresh Air]]'' on [[September 3]], [[2003]], Franken said that Fox's case against him was the best thing to happen to his book sales.

is quite amusing.

Time for crowdsourcing to find the gems in there and report them over at Wired's wikiwatch.

iPhoneDevCamp

What was evident at this past weekend's iPhoneDevCamp, was the sheer energy displayed by the close to 400 attendees. Organised by Raven Zachary -- one of the authors of O'Reilly's iPhone hacks -- and Chris Messina, it was hosted in Adobe's plush San Francisco office. Sitting at rows of desks were developers and designers gathering together to overcome the limitations of the iPhone.

Christopher Allen summed up a lot of the gathered knowledge in his keynote. Around 60 applications were developed over 3 days, a large amount of them resembling the kind of applications developed in the WAP heyday. The one App that I really like that distinguised itself from the pack is Tilt, a motion-controlled game. Coded by Joe Hewitt, it uses a clever hack that manages to gather the motion data from the iPhone. Apple of course has this data but provides no API to it.

Telling was that Apple did not sponsor the event, there were Apple employees there, but no official presence. Apple's decision to release a phone that is completely locked down, and with a minimum of documentation, is what was fueling a lot of the effort this weekend. One wonders what would have happened if the participants--instead of unlocking the phone--could have spent their time unlocking its full potential.

The Apple developer documentation site has a promise of an ability for your web app to integrate with the iPhone. Or rather, it documents the brave invention of the "mailto:" URI scheme and the promise of a broken implementation of the 7 year old RFC 2806 spec of the "tel:" scheme . Most offensive is, however, Apple's claim to integrate with Google Maps, which means Safari intercepts requests to "http://maps.google.com/" and sends them to the Google Maps application. No other high-end phone manufacturer even comes close to this level of arrogance.

If you don’t wrap phone numbers in a link, Safari automatically converts any number that takes the form of a phone number to a telephone link. If your page contains a series of numbers that could be interpreted as a phone number, but isn’t, you need to break up the numbers using span elements (my emphasis), for example.

O'Reilly's Hackszine is continuously covering the iPhone in depth.

I noticed that the iPhone supports PDF. Since I don't have one, I do wonder if someone out there could check if it supports the Adobe PDF Javascript specification.

reCaptcha - Stop Spam. Read Books.

Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn's latest creation reCaptcha is yet another great example of bionic software on steroids.
You'll remember Luis von Ahn as the creator of ESP Game (licensed to Google as their Image Labeler) and derivative works Phetch and Peekaboom, but what is less known is that von Ahn is the person behind captchas, version 1.0.

reCaptcha makes captchas more useful than just preventing spam; by tapping into the reportedly 150.000 hours spent daily typing in captchas, reCaptcha has users proofread book text that OCR could not recognize and which would otherwise have to farmed out to a Mechanical Turk or other distributed proofreader.
Breaking up scanned text into small chunks for distributed processing by humans has been seen in various forms previously, including in banner ads (by inChorus, formerly Mycroft), but reCaptcha's ingeniousness lies in making an otherwise cumbersome task worthwhile every single time.

One can only speculate whether von Ahn have taken inspiration from ingenious spammers who were cracking captchas by asking users to solve captchas inlined from Hotmail and Y! mail in exchange for porn.
He who laughs last, laughs best. Will that be "Stop spam. Read books." or "Read Books. View Porn."?

Synergy: Share Your Keyboard and Mouse Across Multiple Platforms

With the news that even Microsoft is supporting cross-platform development more people are going to have multiple systems at their desks. That's where Synergy comes in. It's a small piece of open-source software that allows you to share one keyboard and mouse across multiple screens hooked up to different computers. The computers can be running Windows, Mac, or Linux. It also lets you copy and paste across the computers and run a single screensaver across all of the screens. There is no drag-n-drop just yet.

The primary computer (the one with the keyboard and mouse) will run the Synergy server. All of the other machines will run the Synergy client. The server communicates with the clients via TCP/IP. There is currently no encryption or authentication and all data is passed to all of the connected clients. The clients only need to the server name to connect so you should only run Synergy on a trusted network. If desired you can install an SSH server (such as OpenSSH) on the primary computer separately to address any security worries.

I haven't tried Synergy yet (I'm on the road currently). My friend Stuart Updegrave (who told me about it) is using it daily across machines running Windows XP and Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and is really impressed. Have you used it?

Financial Hacking -- Giving Creative Accounting a Good Name

The subject of the next edition of Release 2.0, available next week, is the collision between Wall Street markets and Web 2.0 markets. The intersection between technology and finance is a busy one, and there might just be some hacker spirit hiding behind those suits.

I came across this article in Business Week last week about shared-equity mortgages, and it struck me as a bit of a "mortgage hack", a clever way of solving a very common problem (particularly in the still overheated -- if cooling -- housing market here in Boston).

Most people have a negative opinion of "creative accounting" in much the same way that most people have a negative opinion of "computer hacking", and I think there are some surprising parallels there. Yes, there's a lot of bad actors, like Enron's Andrew Fastow, using financial shell games to enrich themselves and conceal their actions (kind of a financial root kit). But there's also been -- and continues to be -- some amazing innovation, which perhaps is viewed as guilt by association or "too complex" for the general public to understand (again, sounds a lot like perceptions of computer hackers).

Just a few examples (among many) of this kind of innovation:

• Financial "derivatives" like futures and options contracts: These allow risk to flow smoothly from those who have more than they'd like (insurers with a lot of coastal customers) to others willing to assume that risk in exchange for substantial upside potential (speculators with models suggesting hurricane season will be mild).
• Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs): These bundles of stocks, bonds, or even futures traded together, offer tax and cost advantages to many investors compared with more traditional investments. They emerged themselves as alternatives to the standard Index Fund, another classic financial innovation, courtesy of John Bogle at Vanguard (his 2006 appearance on the Venture Voice podcast is well worth a listen).

More recently, with the aversion to IPOs seen in the wake of the dot-com bubble, there's been an increase in the hacking of IPOs themselves (arguably something Google did in their Dutch Auction) with things like "reverse mergers", which manage to separate the "going public" part of an IPO from the "raising capital" part. For smaller companies looking for funding, it's become a very attractive option: Looking at deals under $50 million, in 2001, there were 30 IPOs and 12 reverse mergers -- by 2004, that ratio had nearly inverted, with 64 IPOs but 117 reverse mergers.

Those numbers come from this PDF overview of reverse mergers, which includes the following text that sounds like it would be right at home in make:

Technically, reverse mergers are not the intended way for companies to go public.

Of course, just as with technology, there's plenty of opportunity for things to go badly -- the current subprime mortgage shakeout shows that it's clearly possible to get too creative with financing, especially when consumers are involved. But just as the latest news of data theft or site cracking should be viewed in the context of all the benefits that also accompany the technology that made it possible, we should keep in mind that most of the "creativity" that happens in the financial world is the good kind.

Ten Government Hacks

Government gadfly and Internet pioneer Carl Malamud (who put the SEC EDGAR database online back in the early 1990s in six weeks with a couple of volunteers and donated equipment after the SEC said they couldn't do it because it would be a multi-year multi-million dollar project), has just released an annnotated version of the Ten Government Hacks talk he gave at OSCON last year. A short and sometimes elliptical text summary accompanies short video segments from the presentation hosted from the Internet Archive. Carl's summation:

The hacks all have a point, and that point is that government should be less about private interests and more about the public interest. The skills we use in the open source world are tools of civic engagement, tools of citizenship. And, if we apply those skills of engagement to our government, it is possible, at least sometimes, to drag the political system (kicking and screaming perhaps) towards the common good.

Here are the hacks themselves. The first three are based on some of Carl's actual projects. The other seven are lazyweb suggestions for others to try:

1. Be media. In which Carl explores how to get media accreditation as a way to get into otherwise closed meetings. Incidentally, a credential from the O'Reilly Network was denied as "not bona fide media" to get into the UN's World Summit on the Information Society. Carl attended as a stringer for the Bangkok Post instead.
2. Get standing. Often, in order to have a voice, you have to "get standing" (i.e. a stake) in the case. Here, Carl refers to the way he used a FOIA request to get standing to make a stink about the special deal the Smithsonian cut with Showtime.
3. Be government. Here Carl talks about not his 90s SEC escapade, but a more recent failed attempt to put all congressional hearings online.
4. Adopt the FCC. Here, Carl shows how bad the security is on the FCC web site, and suggests that someone mirror and improve it.
5. Enforce ODF by proxy. Here, Carl suggests how the government could automatically convert all non-ODF documents on the fly.
6. Audit the feds suggests how anyone could audit any government agency for Section 508 accessibility compliance.
7. Link check the mayor suggests doing the same for broken links on government agency web sites.
8. Annotate hearings: "if enough people talk about clueless things that happen in government, then after a while everybody else gets the picture.... adopt a committee or an issue, and make a habit of watching what they do and systematically annotating them. "
9. Hold Your Own Hearings. If you can't get the government to pay attention, put together your own hearings. If you get high-enough profile witnesses, you'll get coverage anyway.
10. Map Spectrum. Only 2% of the allocated spectrum is actually used. Someone ought to map this, perhaps using Gnu Radio.