decorative image

None of the Above

by Marble

Forcrying out loud we have debate about solid scientific models in this country, how can those percieving bias on the other side be considered in any way legitimate? I agree with Machiavelli, perception is reality. But that is only in politics because politics is artifice. It aims at misrepresenting the world. If you take that as the basis of your reality, then of course there is no objective perspective. What then is the point of communication? Solely bending others to your will?
-Smedleyman, at metafilter

Viewing entries in category "the net"

 
[ rants the net weblogs ] 2002-07-25
I seem to have caused a bit of a stir: Goodness, gracious me.

There's a metatalk thread about the policies of allowing or not allowing new users to register at metafilter.

I posted that I thought that whatever the site's policy is, it should be explicit. Apparently some people disagree. Maybe. I dunno. I don't speak for them. I speak for me. :)

[ the net typography ] 2002-06-11
No, 65,000 characters are *not* enough: This remarkable paper explores why current (and proposed) systems for rendering characters on computers are just Not Going To Work, when you consider the vast numbers of unique characters required by China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.

There's a whole lot more to it. Go read, it's good. [via baylink]

[ rants the net ] 2002-06-11
A nice piece on web accessibility: This one's also via the NYTimes, and like the previous entry, also via my better half, David (forgot to credit him on the last entry, sorry!).

The article on some common barriers to web access makes a lot of good points, quite cogently. It's a good one.

Screen-reader software reads sequentially, starting at the top of the page. This means that blind people must listen to the advertisements and navigation before reaching the main content, and they must do this on every page of the site.

Can you imagine how painful the web would be if you couldn't skip over ads? Good golly.

As it is, most visually impaired readers must deal with websites that are designed for the majority, that is, sighted people. So of course companies are letting them fall through the cracks, essentially ignoring them.

How utterly stupid. I mean, I understand the cost-benefit analyses involved - I'm not an idiot. But the point is, it should be *really* easy to come up with software that distills the content down to an easily-readable text-only version.

I mean, really. All these big news houses and such are using custom-designed content management systems, right? How many man-hours would it take to be able to render a copy of their articles such that people with screen readers could absorb their content non-painfully?

I'm guessing very few. Sigh.

Perhaps this is just yet another issue that will have to be addressed at the user's end, with better browsing tools. If not built into the browser, then built into a personal proxy or something, capable of (at least mostly) telling the difference between ads and navigation and article content.

This would be a cool project for me to work on, if I had the time. Damn, I wish I had a rich patron who would recognize my brilliance and just pay my living expenses while I worked on problems like this.

If you know of any, prod them and ask them to contact me. :)

[ random thoughts the net ] 2002-06-11
Visually impaired links: That is, mostly blind links. And some links which are genuinely relating to the field of visual impairment and blindness. I'll just make an unordered list, and add to it throughout the day.

My apologies for the lack of structure and such (and for the delay in posting the mermaid vomit pictures, yes I took a couple), but I'm truly swamped lately and absolutely MUST find a job as soon as possible.

My head is still full of wonderful things to write about, and provided that everything settles out before I die or lose the ability to post entries, you will eventually get to read them. I promise.

For the moment, I'm just spewing forth a list of places I've been lately, that I think are (at least barely) worth noting. Further commentary will have to wait, I'm sorry.

So here goes:

[ the net ] 2002-04-05
Add to rotation: The Vocabula Review is a spiffy journal about English usage and such.

[ the net ] 2002-03-28
Weird. I was reading an article about Google and its sponsored links and so on, and it had an example of an anti-abortion one that was allowed, and just for the heck of it I did a search to see what the Google search for the word "abortion" looked like.

And I find to my amazement that the highest-rated link is for Ardent Communications. What the heck? Why is a communications company the highest-ranking thing for the word "abortion"?

I checked their site real quick and didn't see a damn thing related to abortion, so I'm not sure what's going on. Weird.

[ the net ] 2002-03-26
I don't have the energy to redo the whole post: But I don't want the spiffy links I dug up to die forever. So here's what I can remember and re-dig-up, but not all nice and pretty-like:

Some cool little films of a comic artist drawing while telling various stories.

A blogger replies to a rude fundie who sent him a nasty note about not believing in god

Boxes and Arrows - an online mag about digital architecture and design

A bit with the quote: "the only long-term effect of copy protection is to ensure that those who defeat it are immortalized"

The Multi-Dimensional Human Embryo

Did Gwyneth Paltrow take some bad crack, or what? - women as beautiful as she is have no excuse to look this horrible in public. On a gala night, no less.

George W Bush as a 1980 JCPenney catalog model

furnitureporn.com - hilarious. I particularly like the part of the disclaimer which states: "I understand that by clicking "enter" below I agree to all of the above, even the stuff that contradicts itself."

Pitcairn Island Virtual Shopping Mall - notice how the artisans all have only one of four last names. I like their ultra-simple postal address, too.

Hyperbolic Planes - including instructions for how to crochet one. Neato!

The Social Psychology of Modern Slavery - it's easier to free their bodies than their minds. Slavery's still around, and it still sucks.

Judge bans mom from smoking - that is, if she wants to have visitation with her son. Ahh, ain't family court grand?

Friendly fire deaths traced to dead battery - ain't technology grand? This is one for the RISKS digest, methinks.

I'm still angry.

[ the net ] 2002-03-14
Automatic news digestion:  Provided by the Columbia Newsblaster. This is highly cool! via Girlhacker

[ the net ] 2002-03-12
Assorted stuff:  Time for a list of thing I've found lately around the web...

  • A recent Frontline episode on the hidden history of the SUV was really interesting. I didn't realize just how prone to rollover these things are.

    I missed the show, but I read the transcript on the website. Some of the interviews are pretty good, too:

    ... I think it's unreasonable for me or for a consumer to expect Ford Motor Company to prevent every death in every type of crash under every set of circumstances. Nobody's asking for that. That is an impossible request.

    But what we do expect, I think, as consumers, is that you, Ford Motor Company, are doing everything possible. You're not just telling us; you are physically doing what you can, given the state of the market and the state of the art in technology, to make our vehicles safe in all of the foreseeable types of crashes, whether it's a frontal crash, a rear-end crash, a side-impact crash, or rollover crash. And to this day, there's not a company in this country -- General Motors, Chrysler or Ford -- that are using state of the art technology to provide protection to consumers in rollover crashes. Not one of them.

  • A Nikon digital camera takes oddly-colored pictures after it was dropped in a pond and subsequently dried out. These are quite beautiful, I think. I like the idea of this kind of thing - serendipitous, one-of-a-kind beauty. :)

  • Animated engines - cool moving diagrams that show how different types of engines work. I particularly liked how you can see the cams and things on the shafts that control the timing of valves and such.

  • Salon review of the HBO show Six Feet Under - pretty good review. It's one of my favorite shows, and it's just started its second season.

  • RISKS posting about bad grammar & spelling - well, poor editing, really. And this reply further elucidates the risks. Hmm, could I make a living doing freelance copyediting? Not likely - I don't think companies realize how important it is. Ah, well.

[ the net ] 2002-03-07
Various & sundry:  Enjoy:

[ the net ] 2002-02-21
Cavalcade o Links:  Since my codemonkey Daniel doesn't bother having his own weblog, I sometimes publish interesting links and stuff that he sends me. So here's a selection of recent stuff: And just for variety, here's a link that my brother Bill sent me:

[ the net ] 2001-12-11
Long live Usenet!  Daniel has informed me that Google now has 20 years' worth of Usenet postings. That's pretty much everything, as far as I know.

I went through and found a bunch of stuff I posted. Yikes.

It's even got stuff one might not necessarily wish not to see again. As Daniel says, "Google is god. It dispenses light, dark, and nothingness in equal quantities."

I'm rooting through it even as we speak...

[ good the net ] 2001-08-28
Webcam catches burglar!  Daniel had the most extraordinary thing happen to him the other day. He was in North Carolina working, and he connected to his machine back home in New Jersey to get a file. He noticed that the mouse was moving on the screen even though he wasn't moving the mouse on his end.

Suspicious, he brought up a window with his webcam, and he saw some guy he'd never seen before. Sitting at Daniel's computer, messing around.

So, Daniel called the cops, and they went over to investigate. Sure enough, they found the guy still in the room with the computer. Daniel saw at least one image of the surprised burglar and the cops (though in the adrenaline rush, he forgot to *save* any pix. Tsk tsk.) The miscreant was arrested and carted off.

Pretty amazing, eh? Good thing he noticed in time, or the guy might have waltzed away with his whole computer...

[ rants the net ] 2001-02-16
Jerks.  NSI sells domain registrants' info.. But, I would be an idiot if I expected anything different.

I've already gotten some spam like this, asking me if I wanted to switch hosting providers. Fuck that. Grrrrrr. Guess I'll be having to come up with some good email filtering, soon.

[ design good the net ] 2001-02-12
Google bought deja.com!  Wow! I actually had hoped for this to happen back in October (when I heard the Usenet archive was up for sale), but I'm thrilled and stunned that it actually has!

Google has a press release about it, of course, and now deja.com points to groups.google.com.

I think some Very Cool Things are going to result, yes indeed.

Kulpreet told me that something big was coming on Monday, and that they had signed a deal on Friday. (When I called for Kathy this weekend, and she was out, we chatted a bit).

Gee, maybe I could get Google to hire me to do informational architecture for the Usenet archive. :)

[ the net ] 2001-02-09
I made my second submission  to The RISKS Digest today: And I'm hoping it's safe to post here, because I only have two readers, and you aren't the kind of naughty people who would abuse such a horrid security hole. :)

Here it is:

Subject: iPing.com enables anonymous harassment by telephone

I decided to check out iPing.com yesterday, having heard that this web-based automated telephone reminder service was handy.

I found several troubling items, which make this service easily exploitable for telephone harassment:

- You can use a completely bogus email address; no attempt at verification is made (though a notification is sent, with your password in plaintext!).

- To activate your account, you must let it do a "test call" to your phone, and then you must punch in the last four digits of the phone number when prompted.

Once your account is activated, you can then enter up to three phone numbers (office, home, and cell) and a pager number, which can then be used to send reminders, alerts, and so on. You can even specify an extension, if required.

The risk: There is NO verification required for any of these other numbers. You can set up calls that repeat as often as once per day for up to four months. Imagine a miscreant who set up dozens of reminders per day to harass someone - and then imagine that the victim needs their phone line available for emergencies (such as a physician).

Imagine also a victim who has no internet access, and thus no way of telling iPing to shut off the messages. Or even a victim who does not speak English.

It could get very, very ugly. If the phone lacks caller ID, then the unfortunate recipient of the calls would have to answer each one, in case the call was actually from someone they needed to speak with. Answering unwanted cell phone calls will still eat up plan minutes, and pager services may have limits for numbers of pages allowed per month.

- For the "test call" verification, you could easily use a pay phone. You or an accomplice could punch in the last four digits of the phone number, and then you could invoke reminders at a public web terminal. It would be superficially easy to remain anonymous, especially considering the lack of email verification.

- Even without actually activating an account, you could trigger a "test call" to any phone number (in the United States), at any time. If it's not your phone and the person who answers doesn't know about the service or doesn't want it, they can press 9, when prompted, to cancel it. But you've still caused them to have to answer their phone. And you could do this, presumably, any number of times.

- iPing offers customized messages, either with voice or with text-to-voice translation (using a machine voice, I presume). This could be used to issue threats or other specific aggravating messages. When I tried it out yesterday, the text-to-voice translation didn't work - even though I used short simple messages, I didn't hear anything of them, but of course the advertisements on the call were perfectly intact! To receive the message, the recipient must press 1 when prompted after answering the phone.

And, as a side note, during the registration process (and in the confirmation email), my password was helpfully echoed back to me in plaintext. Tsk, tsk! So I suppose I should not have been surprised that I later learned that the rest of their setup did not reflect adequate awareness of security and how to maintain it.

I am sending a copy of this message to iPing - I hope they can make some changes soon before their service is abused, since it's so wide open to would-be harassers.

-Beth Roberts
bethroberts.com

p.s. Is it customary to delay publication of wide-open security holes like this one until the site has a chance to respond or take action? I would hate for an unscrupulous person to read the RISKS digest and decide to take advantage of this opportunity to aggravate someone...

[ design humor the net ] 2001-02-05
From the Department Of Absent Clues:  I was trying to print a pdf file this morning, and it spewed forth bizarre symbols that didn't resemble English text, so I went on a search for a way to avoid the problem. I did eventually find a solution of sorts buried here - check the "Print as image" box in the print dialog box.

But the interesting part is that on the front page of Adobe's website I saw an irresistable teaser for a feature story:

Valerie Casey - Frog Design's digital media creative director explains why usability is dead.

Bwahhahaha! Usability is "dead"? Oh really? "Ha!", thinks I. Let's see what sort of justification this silly person offers for her stance...

At the beginning of the Web, if you could use a tool, you were a designer. Now, people are looking for skills in UI and design. Personally, as a creative director at Frog, I look for the credentials, and it's kind of ironic because I don't have them in that typical way myself.

Dearie, the word I believe you are looking for is hypocrisy. Must be fun, shutting out people because they lack the credentials you lack. Heh!

I teach students to provide context, rather than explicit instructions in their designs.

Current practice is overrationalized and focuses too deeply on task analysis, and not enough on empathy. I think that now, Web design has really crossed over to another point. I think that usability was a hot issue, and it's fading because people are getting used to computers. Now all of a sudden, the focus isn't "we aren't meeting our usability standards." Now it's "what kind of cool user experience can we make that has motion and user interactivity?"

All I can say is, I'm not convinced. Is this even a threadbare excuse for a justification? Sounds like a foolish opinion hyped up to be more than it is.

And for the record, I'm one of the kinds of users who speedily clicks the back button when I'm faced with someone else's idea of a "cool user experience" "that has motion and user interactivity".

Repeat after me: The Web is NOT TV. The Web is NOT TV. The Web is NOT TV...

Maybe I am thinking this because it's a Monday, but I can't help picturing this silly lady saying "Would you like fries with that?" repeatedly in her new career after this whole web thing finally shakes out and unusable and user-hostile sites are ignored into non-existence... and yes, the image brings me a deep feeling of satisfaction.

[ the net ] 2001-01-24
Wandering today:  I've got so many darn browser windows open, I'm wondering when my machine will lock up.

Some stuff I'm rumbling through:

  • (DEAD LINK) An entertaining trip down China's new super expressway

  • A legalistic piece about ownership of one's body parts & tissues (after they have been excised):
    It will be demonstrated below that, because the statutes for conversion were designed solely to provide a remedy for another's taking of a personal possession, conversion is not an appropriate cause of action for the wrongful use of human tissue in biotechnology research. This is due to the presence of important, competing public policy considerations in biotechnology research, such as encouraging beneficial technological innovation and protecting individual autonomy.

    Wtf? This sounds like a load of hooey to me. If you don't own the parts of your body, what the hell *do* you own? I can't think of a better definition of something inalienable than bits of one's own flesh.

    And I think biotech will succeed in making new discoveries and profits just fine even if it has to obtain express consent for the use of human tissue from the donor and even *gasp* remuneration when it results in profits. They already cut the researchers in on the deal - their labor sure isn't free, ya know. What's so horrific about having to pay the person whose cells provided the raw material to begin with?

    This irks me to no end - of course it's the guys with the money and the big lawyers who are able to protect their interests at the expense of your average human being. Fuckers. (ok, I've only had one Pepsi today, I admit it).

  • In Defense of Weeding - from Larkfarm

  • Caleb Carr shows himself to be an even bigger idiot than he previously demonstrated at Salon

  • Salon on the Illinois Math & Science Academy - a boarding school for gifted kids where they hand out lots of Prozac. Hmm, sounds a bit disconcerting. Prozac withdrawal sucks, by the way.

[ my site rants the net ] 2001-01-19
I sent her a reply:  As follows:
I didn't read your site [again], but I did get some really uncool email from people who think you're wonderful. I dunno if you asked them to do this, or suggested it, or what, but the hypocrisy level is pretty high, as is the personal insult level. Including some very pointed attacks on my mother's housekeeping skills - my mother who was incredibly weak from battling breast cancer. Gee, how nice of them. Are you glad to know that some of your supporters behave in this way?

Of course it sucks having your stuff ripped off, especially without credit. I totally agree with that, as I wrote in my email to you. I just think it's a bit absurd to try to have an impossible level of control on the web, where data duplication is the rule, rather than the exception. To me, it's a lot easier and less hassle to just share in the first place. If I write or create something that someone finds useful/good/pretty, then I'm happy to let them use it (as long as they don't make a profit on it). I recognize the right of others to differ on their views, of course. It just seems a bit harsh and cold to me, especially the extreme degree to which you take it, forbidding "imitation". That's the most strict copyright notice I've ever seen, anywhere on the net - that's why I felt moved to say something about it.

I have to confess I laughed out loud at the irony of your copyright site getting ripped off. But then again I am a big fan of certain kinds of irony. I believe there are other sites with copyright info that *are* freely distributable, so people probably just assumed (incorrectly) that yours was as well. You might consider making the whole thing a bit shorter, or putting the "do not copy this" text at the top rather than buried further down, so that people will at least be sure to be aware of your policies.

Just out of curiosity, do you forbid Google from indexing (and caching) your sites? You might want to look into it if you are really totally against all forms of unauthorized copying. I'm not sure exactly how preventing it is done, but I believe it's possible. I read somewhere that the Google cache has actually saved several sites from destruction, because their host or internet provider lost all their data. They were able to get everything back from the Google cache - it functioned as a very good unofficial backup. So copying isn't *always* all bad. (in my opinion, anyway)

When it comes down to it, attempting to keep everything you create on the web from being copied at all or even imitated is just a losing battle. You're bound to be frustrated repeatedly by people who don't bother to ask for permission (and who may genuinely be ignorant, not malicious). They may even do it for good causes, to promulgate beliefs which you share (such as the sanctity of copyright, for example). Being unfriendly towards them is just shooting yourself in the foot, really.

And literally speaking, when someone accesses one of your webpages, all of the data is "copied" to their machine instantly, before they have a chance to even read your copyright statement (and before they even decide whether they want to read the whole page). Copying in this fashion is how the web functions...

I wrote *about* your email on my weblog, but I didn't quote anything. You definitely succeed in having quite a chilling effect - not sure if this is your goal, or what. Is having people terrified of you and what you might do to them (like sue them) worth the price of not having your stuff scarfed? Or maybe you consider it a bonus.

-Beth

p.s. you can freely reprint or quote this email, provided context is not lost or abused in order to change my meaning.

[ the net ] 2000-10-10
My reading habits  have changed a little lately, well, my online ones, anyway. I have started reading at a few new places which are... interactive, and let people submit material to them. A couple of them use reader voting, too.

I submitted a story at kuro5hin.org, which seems pretty spiffy, though sometimes the discussion can get a bit... boring. I mean, it just goes on and on, but it's not too bad (there seems to be clueful editorial control). I just kind of zone out, take what I can from it, etc. Some of the threads there are just plain excellent, packed with wisdom and wittiness. The piece I submitted was a suggestion that they have a "best of" area, so we'll see if it gets implemented.

I checked out Everything2, and even posted a few writeups there, but it's just too chaotic for me. And too much of a... popularity contest thingie. Too many spirals off into doofiness. Plus you can't link to outside sites, which is just silly if you ask me. I can see the point of limiting such a thing, but for certain topics, such as drugs & breastfeeding, you should be able to point to The Authority on the matter, who happens to have a very nice searchable online forum. Also I just got a little too much of a teenager vibe from it, if ya know what I mean.

I really really like Edgecase though, because it's so small and choice. So don't tell anyone! :P No voting there, but lots of intelligent thoughtful stuff. Shhhhh. Too many people would ruin it! I submitted a story there that I found at the Follow Me Here weblog, about surgeons grafting toes onto the hands of people who have lost fingers.

Anyway, there are many ways of sharing information on the net, it will be interesting to see how things shake out over the next few decades. I think different types of people prefer different ways of sharing info, and that hopefully everyone can find their own cozy little space out here among all these ones and zeros.

[ good the net ] 2000-09-11
Lawyers vs. Geeks: Lawyers win.  I didn't realize that Greg Knauss of an Entirely Other Day wrote for Suck. I really like this piece he wrote about how the lawyers rule the world, and the geeks are not picking up on this fact.

...the Internet's collective response to one well-nigh apocalyptic decision after another has unfortunately been the same as the Internet's collective response to just about everything: posts, lots and lots of posts. Discussions and cries of hypocrisy and malformed analogies have consumed megabyte upon megabyte of masturbatory rage and self-indulgent self-righteousness.

Which, of course, accomplishes exactly nothing.

[ humor the net ] 2000-09-06
Another great bit from Greg:  He writes about essentially hacking a web site's "community":

But the Web invites participation, and the line between the front of a server and back is awfully fuzzy. Who's to say that someone is actually involved in a project or not? On the Internet, nobody knows you're a crasher. If anyone with a computer and a little rambunctiousness can start mucking with tightly organized systems -- Amazon, Epinions, doubly so for peer-to-peer networks -- then anything that expects less than total participation is just asking to be screwed with.

He's got a point, this could be kind of fun... Hmm.

[ design the net ] 2000-09-05
A suggested test for usability of alternatives:  Great Leader Nielsen discusses Regulatory Usability and makes an interesting suggestion for a test of whether alternative software is really usable (which would be useful in, say, an antitrust trial):

The legal test should be as follows:

  1. Take an average person who has never used computers before and is given a machine with Windows installed.
  2. Also give this person a CD-ROM with whatever competing software the case concerns (Netscape, Lotus 1-2-3, a different multimedia player).
  3. Measure the time from the person has unpacked everything until he or she has installed the alternative software successfully.
If at least 80% of novice users are capable of installing the alternative software and if the average time to do so is less than 10 minutes, then the basic operating system is deemed to be sufficiently accommodating to competition.

[ cognition the net ] 2000-08-25
Rethinking Navigation:  Some great usability arguments are put forward in this post to a mailing list responding to a criticism of useit.com's lack of navigation. The whole thread is here, but I haven't read the whole thing yet. Probably more gems to be found there, I imagine.

[ humor the net ] 2000-08-16
What's the opposite of a Pyrrhic victory?  Okay, so this morning I scanned two polaroids of Lena and emailed 'em to myself at work.

I get to work.

I have a Delivery Failure message. In my work inbox. It seems my return address was messed up or something (that's odd, I dunno why). So it sent the failure to the place I wanted the original mail to go.

Um. Okay!

As long as it worked, that's all I care about.

Is it just me, or is this kinda funny?

administrative interface