Stories

AOL’s search logs: the ultimate “Database Of Intentions”

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Google's IMsearch [click to enlarge]

AOL Labs prompted a weekend of hyperventilation in the ‘blogosphere’ by publishing the search queries from 650,000 users. This mini-scandal may yet prove valuable, however, as it reveals an intriguing psychological study of the boundaries of what is considered acceptable privacy.

In his turgid book on Google – one so obsequious and unchallenging that Google bought thousands of copies to give away to its staff – former dot.bust publisher John Battelle enthused about something he called the “database of intentions”. The information collected by search engines, he trumpeted, would be a marketer’s dream, and tell us more about ourselves than we ever realized we could know. AOL’s publication is the first general release of such a database to the public.

But hold on a minute. Is it, really?

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Whatever happened to… the smartphone?

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At one time, the future of mobiles looked simple. The smartphone was a new kind of gadget that was subsuming the pager, the camera, the PDA, the Walkman, and almost every other iece of technology you could carry – and offering it in volume at an irresistible price. Often free. Over time, every phone would become a smartphone.

Expectations were sky high.

A few years ago an American business consultant and author published a very silly book called ‘Smart Mobs‘ – which even predicted that phone-toting nerds would be at the vanguard of social upheaval.

But something funny happened on the way to this digital nirvana. Perhaps the signs were there from the start: ‘Smart Mobs‘ couldn’t find a UK publisher. A website of the same name continues, however, apparently staffed by volunteers, and making its ghostly way across the web like a latter day Marie Celeste. Alas the site still has a category called “How To Recognize The Future When It Lands On You.”

And earlier this year the best known smartphone blogger hung up his pen.

So what went wrong?

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Addicted to antitrust, Microsoft outlines 12-Step Recovery

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Antitrust addict Microsoft has outlined a 12-Step Recovery Program, which it says will help prevent it from lapsing back into anti-competitive practices in the future.

The declaration follows three major “interventions” in fifteen years. A 1991 investigation by the Federal Trade Commission resulted in a Consent Decree signed in 1995. A 1997 investigation by the Department of Justice, joined by a number of US states the following year, resulted in a conviction and settlement in 2002. And just last month, the EU rejected Microsoft’s claim that it was complying with a 2004 antitrust settlement.

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Old net geezers play trip-you-up

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Cerf and Farber

The rolling net “neutrality” debate brought two of the internet’s most distinguished elder statesmen together in mortal combat this week. The two gentlemen, Vint Cerf and Dave Farber, said they agreed on most things. But where they didn’t, they tried to pull the chair away just as their opponent tried to sit down.

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The New Paranoid style in American politics

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The most interesting thing to emerge from the so-called ‘Net Neutrality’ bid had nothing to do with telecomms technology or policy. It’s the startling and, at the same time, banal fact that paranoia has become the default flavour of politics on the net.

Phantoms fight phantoms, here. When the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote his famous 1964 essay for Harpers, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, he was inspired by the anti-Catholic fervour of the John Birch Society, and the anti-Communism of Senator McCarthy, which he saw embodied in Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. These were old trends which were merely a reoccurrence. Hofstadter observed –

“The paranoid is a double sufferer since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

The “Net Neutrality” campaign – which created little excitement except on the outer fringes of the web – suggests that the left is now just as capable of being haunted by paranoid fantasies as the right.

What the internet has achieved, with its twisty maze of echo chambers all alike, is a rapid acceleration of this paranoid discourse, which expels nuanced and complex reasoning.

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Microsoft’s future file system dies, again

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Microsoft’s most ambitious software plan – to base Windows on a native database – has died again. The feature was originally touted in 1991 for ‘Cairo’, which Microsoft then described as an object-oriented operating system, built on top of Windows NT. Cairo was sidelined as a result of Microsoft’s focus on the internet, and the evaporation of the Apple/IBM Taligent OS. But the idea, reborn as WinFS, was revived in 2001 as one of the “three pillars” of Longhorn, now Windows Vista.

Now it looks as if Windows on a database won’t take place until the next decade, and there are serious doubts it will ever happen at all.

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The Canonization of St.Bill

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St Bill of Shephards Bush

If William Henry Gates the Third’s philanthropic work leads to him being canonized one day as the first secular saint of our times, I won’t stand in the way of the celebrations. Geeks get things very out of proportion, and the value of saving even one life should be more apparent to everyone than the cost of a poorly written Windows USB stack. When Microsoft is criticized, while the practices of arms dealers, pharmaceutical companies and extraction cartels around the world are ignored, its reminds us that some nerds place a very low value on human life itself.

But if Gates is to be canonized as the man who invented the PC, and without whom our lives would be poorer – as he is this evening – then we should all be troubled, as it suggests we’re suffering from a terrible case of ignorance and amnesia. More troublingly, it raises the fair question – which we hope you can help answer – of what kind of qualifications one needs to have to earn the title ‘Henry Ford Of Our Times’.

Tonight the BBC discussed Bill’s legacy, and was effectively writing the first draft of his place in history. And in that painful BBC fashion of splitting the difference and losing the truth – there are two, but never more than two sides to every story – came to its conclusion. Bill Gates had been truly innovative in his earlier career, we learned, and while “someone would have invented the PC eventually” (we paraphrase), this incredible inventiveness could still be entered in mitigation when the final reckoning came.

So, Bill invented the PC? Even excusing for media hyperbole – and this is the kind of careless, but generous exaggeration you hear when someone has died (rather than relinquished the role of “Chief Software Architect”) we would like to put a few points on the record.

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“The EFF has handed the RIAA an arsenal of legal arguments for opposing blanket licenses”

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Should a miracle occur, and the opposing parties in the P2P war sit down and adopt the EFF’s “Voluntary Collective Licensing” proposal, then the enabling legislation would look a lot like HR.5553. Which suggests this isn’t just a tactical goof, but a strategic error – the consequence of not thinking really hard about the future. … Read more

RIAA, EFF unite to sabotage digital reform

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Sometimes, you just can’t win.

A proposal to speed up the clearance of mechanical copyright for broadcasters and digital media services has been met with hysteria from lobby groups who complain that copyright clearance today is too cumbersome and slow.

It’s an issue that’s been intensely discussed since it was first proposed two years ago by the US Copyright Office’s Register of Copyrights, Marybeth Peters. The changes, designed to help download services such as Apple’s iTunes as well as digital broadcasters, propose a blanket license for mechanical copyright clearance.

As we know, the distinction between ‘streaming radio’ and ‘discrete physical copy’ has become so blurred as to be almost meaningless, so reform is overdue. And today, getting a song in digital format from the record company vaults to your PC involves a lengthy bureaucratic process full of uncertainties. As the Register (that’s her, not us) describes it, this minefield is “a highly complex architecture supported in part by relationships, split rights, side agreements and historical antiquities.”

The Copyright Office’s answer scythes through this mess in time honored fashion by proposing a compulsory, or statutory license – an elegant and time proven mechanism first introduced in the United States for the player piano in 1909. In place of the historical cruft is a simple blanket license, with digital copies considered zero rated. It was published two weeks ago as an amendment to Section 115 of the Copyright Act (SIRA) and makes its way for a vote this week.

So far so good? No, wait.

The EFF has swung into action, with hysterical campaigners calling it “the worst bill you’ve never heard of”. Congressmen tonight were being deluged with faxes and emails from angry nerds.

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Neurosis as a lifestyle: remixing revisited

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“We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible ? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed”
– Fillippo Marinetti, 1909

When a year ago I looked at some of the strange attitudes to copyright and creativity that abound on the internet, vilification followed swiftly. I wondered what was behind odd assertions that “the power of creativity has been granted to a much wider range of creators because of a change in technology”, which grew, without pausing for punctuation, into even odder and grander claims, such as “the law of yesterday no longer makes sense.” ‘Remix Culture’ as defined by the technology utopians wasn’t so much a celebration of culture as it is of the machines that make it possible, we noted. But many people simply find such thinking quite alien. So it’s heartening to see writers like Nick Carr and, today, the Wall Street Journal‘s columnist Lee Gomes join the debate that so animates Reg readers, and question these silly assumptions too.

Gomes hears a dot com executive sell his movie editing service with the claim that, “until now, watching a movie has been an entirely passive experience.”

(We heard a similar, silly claim from Kevin Kelly recently, only about reading.)

Passive? Not at all, Gomes explains today:

“Watching a good movie is ‘passive’ in the same way that looking at a great painting is ‘passive’ – which is, not very. You’re quite actively lost in thought. For my friend, though, the only activity that seemed ‘active’, and thus worthwhile, was when a person sitting at a PC engaged in digital busy work of some kind.”

Which is the world view in a nutshell. The future in which the scribbles of the digerati adorn every book or movie is a nightmare, he agrees. It’s also rather presumptious. Who does this self-selecting group claim to represent?

We’ve had a glimpse into this “future” with Google for the past three years, where to reach some original source material, one must wade through thickets of drivel, some of it generated by bloggers, the rest by machines pretending to be bloggers. It’s hardly anyone’s idea of enhancement, and Gomes calls it “dismally inferior”, and has a lovely simile.

“Reading some stray person’s comment on the text I happen to be reading is about as appealing as hearing what the people in the row behind me are saying about the movie I’m watching.”

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