A Google/Facebook blackout might not kill SOPA

Abstract: At least one person (a must read post) in Washington explicitly wants to censor the Internet and our attempts to stop it may just be giving them more motivation to do it. 

This is the kind of thing that I could do without knowing, but it kind of confirms my thoughts on the subject.  SOPA and PIPA may have started out with big money from the entertainment industry as a way to protect an aging business model, but soon Washington realized what an opportunity this was.  The first step down a slippery slope where a central body has control over what gets published on the Internet, and they get to do it under the guise of protecting an industry's "intellectual" property.  The technically literate community is irate...

Let's think about that for a minute.  Does everybody have their tinfoil hats on?  Great, let's begin.


The Internets are pissed 
(how we see things)

Who are the Internets for the purpose of this discussion?  They are the people that are active participants in the web of information exchange.  That is they use message boards, social media sites, and other means of exchanging ideas with others like them.  For examples see postings on Slashdot, reddit, Hacker News, and the list could go on and on...

Somehow (it does not really matter how at this point) the Internets got wind of these really bad pieces of legislation that were trying to get pushed through.  It was shared among us and the shared response was like something out of a scene in Braveheart.  In my mind reddit is as close to a William Wallace as we've come, but our reaction has been in general to attempt to stir up as much dissent among the Internets and hopefully the average American as possible.  Why not?  After all it has worked pretty well in the past.  

We have done a good job about voicing to the technical among us that SOPA and PIPA is bad and there is none that I know of that are in support of it (or at least that dare to mention it).  Something strange was happening though, none of the major news outlets (read - things my parents would see) were covering it at all.  It wasn't that we were not being loud enough about it; they don't want to cover it.  They want to bring as little attention to it as possible, and that means not trying to spin it as positive (a hard feat indeed) but not talking about it at all.  Recognizing this issue reddit is leading the charge with a way to make sure that we are getting everyone's attention - make people mad.  The claim is that by blacking out popular Internet services that you can illustrate to people what a censored Internet would feel like and prod them to action.  As Forbes pointed out blocking reddit wouldn't be enough and is in a sense preaching to the choir.  They claimed that Google and/or Facebook needed to join in to make this truly effective.  I thought this just might work.  

Imagine if everyone in the US got a message to call or visit their representatives when they visited Google or Facebook.  The response would be unprecedented.  It would show for the first time how powerful the Internet could be - the "nuclear option."  How could it not work right?  If most of the country is calling you really irate and threatening to throw you out of office if you vote for SOPA, are you going to take that chance?

The Internets are causing trouble again
(how they see things)

There is a certain amount of smug pride in being a member of the old guard in Washington and some representatives use the fact that they don't use the Internet and don't care to know how it works as something of a bragging right.  For most of them the Internet is something of a toy or an annoyance.  Then comes the Arab Spring.  All of a sudden the Internet becomes a force for leveling the playing field not only in business, but also in the struggle and dissemination of governing power.

Imagine that you are a representative and people are calling you left and right telling you that they don't want you to support SOPA/PIPA.  On one hand the entertainment industry has a lot of power in the US and they are stuffing your pockets with wads of cash if you are willing to play ball, but on the other hand if people are angry enough you might loose your job.  The tension really starts to heat up when you start hearing about the "nuclear option," and you realize that larger portions of your votes are at risk.  

If you vote against SOPA/PIPA then you are going to lose the support of the massive entertainment industry, and make your constituents really happy (until the next thing that comes along they don't like).  But doing this confirms for those pesky Internet folks that they have a lot of power, and sets a precedence that threatens your future income from lobbyists and their clients.  

If you vote for SOPA/PIPA then you are assuring long term support from the entertainment industry, and the framework will be in place to silence whatever critics might arise in the future.  Since the majority of your voters will move on to whatever reality TV bullshit is trending or the latest shiny toy in a few days anyways, what's to risk?  Possible short-term lost, but a very substantial long term gain.

This is just crazy talk!

By doing what we thought was best at the time - raising awareness about an important issue - I fear that we may have given the politicians more incentive to implement a framework for shutting us up.  

Think about it - the more the Internet flexes its muscles the more the politicians see it as a threat and the harder they will fight to cripple it.  They are getting closer to the point where they risk losing everything and may result to extreme measures to protect their position of power.

The truth is at this point that at least one of our leaders see this as a golden opportunity to silence a very vocal minority.  Civil liberties are rarely lost over night, but it is a gradual descent.  We will not be North Korea over night, but as Benjamin Franklin put it, "those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."  I can't help but think about that now every time I have to fly.

I hear myself and know how crazy all of this sounds.  Hopefully this will all disappear soon, but this one didn't.

Android/iOS Apps I would like to see

I have been posting quite a bit lately about politically charged things, and not to worry I am gathering sources for another one soon.  That being said I wanted to comment on some Android apps that I would like to see built.  I am not an Android developer, and I lack the time to become one, and these applications would need to be well integrated with existing services so it is unlikely that anyone outside of these companies could easily construct them.

Ikea personal shopping assistant

I was shopping with my wife and kids at Ikea and I saw a great opportunity to make the shopping experience more streamlined.  If you have never shopped at an Ikea before I highly recommend that you try it out at least once for the unusual experience that it offers.  The gist of it is that you start at one end of the store and follow a planned route that takes you through the entire store until you reach a self-service area where you pick the items that you saw on the show-room floor earlier and place them on your cart.  As you are walking through the store you jot down item numbers and locations of the items in the self-service area for reference later.  So me and my wife are trying to shop for furniture, watch two toddlers and jot down long series of numbers with tiny pencils - not ideal.

We both have Android phones.  I imagine that when I enter the Ikea, instead of picking up my list and pencil that there is a WiFi network, and a QR code for the Ikea app.  I install the app and it recognizes (based on the WiFi network) that I am in a particular Ikea.  Maybe I can sign in with my Ikea "family" account maybe I don't have to.  As I am walking through the store and finding items that I want I can simply scan the QR code on the item and place it in my shopping cart.  Let's think about the advantages of such a system for the consumer.

• I have a running total of how much stuff I am putting in my cart
• I can get suggested items that are needed to complete the setup (the slatted bed base!)
• If the stock of an item is limited the app can alert me that I might need to pick a backup
• When I go to find the items in the self service area the app can give me a well planned path to take
• A list of videos for assembling the furniture is queued up for later use.

There are also advantages for Ikea.

• As people in the show-room place items in the carts you can ensure that they are well stocked in the self-serve area
• Increase ticket totals by suggesting complementary products
• Increase the number of people served by helping them move through more quickly
• Identify shoppers with large numbers of heavy items on their lists and offer additional assistance
• Easy way to alert customers to in-store promotions and draw attention to items that you want to move quickly

Indoor navigation is not great at this point and shouldn't be a show stopper, but with innovations in this area you could do some really cool things.  Imagine something with augmented reality like the Yelp Monocle app.  You could hold up your phone's camera to the show-room floor and have overlays of prices and reviews for the products.  While all of this is great, I would be happy with just having an app that allows me to scan QR codes and add them to a list.

Basically Ikea needs to put less effort on their catalog app and buy/implement a better integrated version of Ikea Picking List.

Netflix/Hulu remote

My wife and I watch all of our "TV" online these days and even though we have a long range wireless keyboard and mouse it is still cumbersome to operate our Mac from across the room.  There are lots of solutions with tiny keyboards and track pads, but those miss the point.  If I am typing an email I am going to go up to the computer, I just want to control certain sites.  I will open a browser window to Netflix and can even search for the movie that I am looking for, but I would like to have an app on my Android device that allows me to play/pause and fast forward or rewind the movie that is playing.  I don't want/need to watch the move on my phone but I would like to be able to control the movie that is playing across the room.  Maybe this would be best implemented with a browser extension, but I feel like it is possible with existing web development tools.  The advantages to the consumer in this case are obvious, but there is an advantage for the content provider.  Key ad real estate!  You would annoy consumers to no end with banner ads on screen for content, but how about an ad on their remote?  Obviously there are people that would rather not have ads on their remote and there would be a paid version of the app for that.

Basically all I am asking for is porting of the YouTube Remote app to work on Netflix.  They already have a Neflix app.

In closing

If there are any folks from Ikea or Netflix listening please develop these Android (or iOS) apps ASAP. Also if there are any gifted Android developers out there who want to make a go of this I would happily help with the server-side development.

un-occupy GoDaddy

I began moving all of my domains from GoDaddy last week in response to their support of SOPA.  I think that this piece of legislation is reprehensible and sets the United States on a path down a slippery slope where censorship is the norm.  To be honest censorship is one of the scariest things that could happen in a country. 

I would like to say that the actual move of the domains was relatively painless, but it wasn't.  I had heard reports of GoDaddy doing nasty things to make the transfer of domains take longer, and given that these kind of actions can carry stiff penalties for domain registries I assumed that they were largely blown out of proportion and that it would not happen to me.  Let's just say that I should have expected nothing less than the worst from a company that has spent the last few years sucking.  They have been a terrible registrar, but the inconvenience has stopped me from moving until I heard about the SOPA support.  

I am a little ashamed of myself for not moving my domains over the elephant slaughter by their CEO, Bob Parsons.  I have also been embarrassed about doing business with a company that uses blatant low-brow and crude sexual advertising.  I love a beautiful woman (I married her), but when I hope that none of the professional women that I have worked with do a whois lookup on one of my domains revealing that I have a domain registered with GoDaddy - it can't be a good sign.  What does having a domain with GoDaddy potentially say about me?  

• I am frugal (cheap).
• I react to ads with scantily clad women.
• I like bad customer service or worse...
• I don't know what good customer service is.
• I associate with crass men who kill majestic animals for sport.
• I am lazy...

I am pretty sure that none of these are true, and I am going to be more aware of what my purchases say about me as a person.  This is important because our purchases do say a lot about who we are.  Purchasing power is (at least in the US) the most powerful weapon that we have against big-business and their pupet of a government.  Let's explore this for a minute...

Reddit users proposed a boycot of GoDaddy on the 29th of December, and due to a large number of people proactively moving their domains in the days leading up to the 29th GoDaddy did a full turnabout on their SOPA support.  I have no doubt that their public stance is different from their true intentions and their response was too little too late, but the fact is that when their users started walking away the company listened real quick.  I still moved my domains because GoDaddy has given me plenty of reasons over the years and this was just the straw that broke the camel's back, but it was still pretty evident that this type of tactic is effective.  Compare that to the occupy movement that is taking place all over the country - there has been a lot of fuss but no one is listening.  The protesters are still sleeping in the cold, and the bankers are still getting their bonuses.  But the protesters are still walking in their Keen Sandals over to the Starbucks and paying with their Visa before sitting down with their iPad.  I am not saying that any of those things alone is bad, but if you want to change big business then you have to go after their business.

The best piece of advice that I have heard came from a friend that owns a popular restaurant here in Chapel Hill, NC.  He was talking to a bunch of protesters staying at the occupy camp down the street from his business, and he told them that the best way to get a big banks is to go after their income - use cash.  The idea is that small business owners like himself pay huge sums of money to the banks in the form of fees for debit and credit card purchases, and if those fees stop rolling in that the banks will eventually become weaker over time.  I was skeptical at first, and I am still not 100% convinced that the scale of these payments are enough to be effective, but maybe it is like a death of 1000 cuts.  At any rate, even if it is not effective at sticking it to the big banks, it will be effective at helping small business owners and keeping more funds in the community and off Wall St.  This is the easiest to do since we eat/shop in these places already and all we have to do is remember to hit up the yuppie food stamp machine (ATM) before hand.

For other big businesses, the changes in our personal habits may be a little harder to absorb, but it is a necessary change if we want corporations that act with social responsibility.  We have to vote with our dollars.  For this to be truly effective we will need more transparency in campaign contributions, but if a company backs a candidate that I think is harmful for the advancement of our society then maybe cutting off their revenue stream is the most effective means of changing their mind.  The first thing that I see that may need to change is how me and my family entertain ourselves.  The entertainment industry has really gotten too big not to fail.  They have their fingers in everything and have proven that they can easily move Washington with their wallet.  Since paying cash is not going to be effective here we are going to have to start paying attention to which studios are doing good things with our hard earned money (non of the major ones).  

The biggest problem here is that I see little chance in convincing the larger population to boycot any movie studio because (i) it requires though and investigation, and (ii) there are often not convenient and equal products to substitute.  Just like the majority of people are not going to sleep on the hard cold ground to effect change in a corrupt partnership between big banks and the government, few people are going to skip watching the latest big budget film because the studio is lacking scruple.  

I am not expecting large and lasting change any more.  Maybe I am just getting syndical as I get older, but wouldn't it be nice.  Still, I am going to do my best to do my part and I hope that a growing number of people will find their own solutions.  As for GoDaddy...  I have moved all of my domains and deleted the ones I couldn't move.  

There is no shortage of articles on this topic but this one titled Stupid GoDaddy Deserves Boycott is particularly great.  "If GoDaddy were to just go away, the world and Internet would be a better place. If I had any domains there to pull, they would already be gone.

We are researchers not lobbyists...

Dear fellow academics,

Many of us try to distance ourselves from politics - we are researchers not lobbyists I was once told, but now is not the time to assume that your absence in the debate will not be missed. There are two pieces of legislation being proposed in Washington that will drastically alter the Internet as we know it. Because the Internet in the US (as of right now) is uncensored I would encourage you to spend a few minutes researching the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. My point is not to sway you with this email to support or oppose either of these items (I will do that in person). I want to remind everyone that even if we are not lobbyists we still have a responsibility as researchers to make our voices heard so that some logic and thoughtful reasoning goes into the laws that govern the country we all share.

~Eric Gavaletz

North Carolina House Bill 129

I do most of my research work in networking and I am constantly amazed by how far behind the US lags in comparison to other developed countries in providing affordable high-speed Internet access.  As a consumer I am more often frustrated by my lack of options and how the price continues to climb even as service quality declines.  

The stark reality is that being an ISP is not glamorous nor is it as lucrative as being a content provider.  Your cable Internet provider charges the same amount if you watch streaming video every night or if your connection sits idle.  As more and more people use the Internet for more things their connections are idle less often.  For the providers this means that it is getting harder and harder to borrow from Peter to pay Paul.  Think about it this way, if the cable service promises you and your neighbor that you can have a 10Mbps connection to their house, historically they could get away with only providing a touch over 10Mbps for both of you under the assumption that it is unlikely that you both use 10Mbps at the same time.  In the past this wasn't an unreasonable assumption, because it was unlikely that we would both download a large file at the same time.  Times they do change, and now it is very likely that we both are trying to watch a show on Hulu or Netflix at 8:00 in the evening.  Now the cable companies can do one of two things, they can make the improvements to their network that were long overdue to keep customers happy, or they can rely on the fact that there isn't a viable alternative for most people and allow service to degrade over time.  It seems that there has been a move towards the latter outside of large cities where it is more common to have competing vendors.

I am not going to get into a debate about the value of competition and how that will effect the level of service etc, but I will say that the state-of-the-art is broken.  Something needs to be done soon.  A handful of municipalities have taken matters into their own hands and deployed their own networks to provide competitively priced Internet access, but for the last four years in North Carolina the cable companies and telecoms have been lobbying for a bill that would prevent cities from developing their own networks.  You should decide for yourself about this and I encourage you all to write (not email) and call your representatives to let them know how you feel about this.  

To be clear this is not about more or less government.  This isn't a partisan issue.  This is about giving people choice and encouraging competition in a market that has become stagnant.  As consumers we need to demand more and this seems to be the only way to get the Internet providers to listen.  Their greed has led them to this point and if they continue to be greedy it will lead to their decline.  I hope that you agree that this bill will do a lot of damage to progress in North Carolina, and that the cable company has been taken enough of your paycheck in exchange for crappy service!  But if you don't feel that way that is your right...

Please help in making sure that all of our representatives receive a very clear message that we want them to vote NO on House Bill 129.  Here is what to do...

• Review the information on the best way to contact your representatives at democracy-nc.org.
• Look up your representatives here (I suggest looking by zip code).
• Get the mailing addresses and/or phone numbers for the above representatives.
• Write a simple polite message to the representative (even if you plan to call) making a couple key points:
• First clearly state that you live in their district.  Back this up by providing your address and phone number.
• State that it is important that they vote No on "House Bill 129" (Senate Bill 87 if you are writing to your State Senator).
• Only after you have done the preceding provide any reasons or argument for your feelings.  Please be concise and polite throughout.  The longer or more argumentative your writing the less likely it is to be read.
• Mail or call your representative with the above message.
• Follow up by encouraging others to do the same.  Use Facebook, Twitter and email as a way to let friends and family know that this is something we can have an effective impact on that affects us all.

Above all please remember that no matter how you feel it should be expressed calmly and logically.  Here's hoping that your Internet connection will be fat and low latency for years to come.

Want to know how bad your Internet connection is...

Visit netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu and run the tool.  You will be amazed at the results when they are not being influenced by the large ISPs.

Are you making a better world for your kids?

This is the question that I asked myself the other day while sitting at a desk and lamenting my present employment situation.  Since I work for a big company (one of the biggest of the biggest) there is a lot of overhead involved in my work.  Imagine if your workday were like Groundhog Day (the film) set at Initech...

Studying computers at a theoretical level to solve all kinds of interesting problems that have the potential to offer great benefit to society is a legacy that I can feel good about.  A lot of the work that is done in academia is done with the sole purpose of making the world a better place.  A few projects in our department that come to mind are medical image analysis, scientific visualization, and motion planning algorithms for micro-surgery.  This is all to say that computers can and should be used to make the world a better place.  

Though the United States and its fine universities have long lead the field on innovation in the sciences, this may not always be true and it is looking like the future of pure research is limited at best.  Pure research is not easily incorporated into a profitable business model, and in a profit driven capitalistic to a fault society where money talks academia is losing the good fight.  Some may argue that corporate research is a viable alternative, and that it has the added benefit of being privately funded -- not a burdon on the tax payers.  You shouldn't believe for one minute the corporate pretense that they are working to make the world a better place.

Private research groups used to be among the most innovative think tanks that the world has ever known, but those days seem to be but a distant memory.  While there are sure to be exceptions, today's "research" groups at major corporations have been reduced to nothing more than prototyping groups.  Where research used to be concerned with 10-20 years into the future, they now look at projects that are a mere two years out at best.  What is worse is that the big players of the golden years have been hobbled by top heavy management oversight who are risk averse and care little about the long term viability of a company.  

These companies develop their projects by selling them first, and only after they have a buyer they then target the project to the buyer's wants.  This limits the exposure of the company to the risk of expending resources on research and development work that may never turn into a profitable product.  The flip side of this is that the products tend to be mundane rehashes of existing technologies crammed into the latest buzz worthy fad of a template.  Today that means "the cloud."  Take the same applications that we have been writing for decades and do the same things in a browser instead of a desktop client.  Don't get me wrong I am a big fan of software as a service and while I have grown tired of hearing the word cloud tossed around as a catch all phrase for something that runs on a server, I do like the possible benefits.  Alas I digress...

The point is that these companies are not innovating and yet our research institutions are shrinking and dealing with massive budget cuts.  In the midst of these budget cuts the companies that are repackaging old ideas with clouds and calling it new want to charge municipalities and businesses exorbitant fees for using this "new" software with the promise of saving them lots of capital.  They want to sell your city management software that an undergrad with some PHP and mySQL could write in a summer for the wages of an internship, but they want to charge upwards of a million dollars for it!  Now that you bought the software the system is designed so that you are not going to be happy with the performance of the system, because it was written to run in a data-center and not on existing hardware.  Then they tie you into a service contract or into buying more servers (which they luckily sell).  

You might be saying that the big company hires lots of people who need to work too, and you are right.  The people that work on this software are very deserving of the jobs, and generally they do a pretty good job at it.  What they are not telling you is that they are off-shoring the jobs as fast as they can to make the company more profitable.  I wish I could say that the developers in these foreign countries are not being taken advantage of, but they are discussed as commodities.  You hear managers talking about them like heads of cattle, "did you hear that we are getting 3 to 1 in Ireland right now?"  "Yeah, but I am getting 10 to 1 in India!"  Those people deserve to get the same level of compensation as the developers with similar skills in the US.  What is not right is that these companies are using tax dollars (directly or indirectly) to pay the foreign developers after they fire the more costly developers in the US.

So my job is actively sending jobs and our tax dollars overseas, and as a computer scientist a large application of the technologies that we develop is used to automate repetitive processes.  This means that the jobs that were available to those people with low to moderate intelligence are disappearing quickly.  That software that is used to reduce labor costs just put a middle manager out of work, but the guy who empties his trash is still needed because he works for less than what it would cost to build a robot to do his job.  Where we are going with this is a ever widening wealth gap.  Even as a engineer that designs the stuff it is hard to stay on the right side of the gap, the non-unemployment side.

I was interrupted in writing this by a very good friend that reminded me of a recent talk that we attended by Srinivasan Keshav and a very nice essay on the goal of systems research.  I will not attempt to reduce an already concentrated essay here, but I will say that if you have made it this far in reading this post that you should read the essay in its entirety.  Though you probably will not agree with everything that he says, he has a very honest and straight forward style that can be refreshing, and what is the point of reading something that you agree with without some sort of mental accommodation anyways?

While I don't feel like I am doing very much to make the world a better place for my kids right now, it is important that I view this as a means to an end and not the entirety of my life.  I just need to get out of school and not chase a paycheck.  At least I can set an example of not being motivated by profit right?

An Error on the Internet!

So google did this experiment where it looked at the frequency of words in books and websites.  There is well over a trillion words in the data set.  A subset of that data is used to power an online N-gram viewer.  I was looking at the frequency of TCP and Internet, and I saw something funny.  So then I looked at just Internet...

Frequency of the word Internet by year in published books

Notice the bump around 1900?  If we look a little closer...

Frequency of the word Internet by year in published books

And if we look into some of the books that they were searching, they erroneously identified a common abbreviation for international, internat, as Internet.  The result is what looks like someone writing about a concept that would not be invented for another 70 years.

This is another example where processing these large amounts of data may benefit from crowd sourcing.  If the algorithm were told that the Internet didn't exist in 1900 and that it is unlikely to occur in literature then it might have picked internat. instead.

I almost forgot, the obligatory xkcd cartoon ("Duty Calls" #386).