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.

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

k-Anonymity for Our Public Lives

I was just reading a paper that proposes a way to provide anonymity for location based services, and it really got me thinking about the priorities in information security and privacy.  The authors are in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and cite information leakage and a slippery slope slide into a 1984, George Orwell inspired, world where large amounts of location based information combined with public records provides a complete picture of the individual.

Take for example that a particular mobile device always looks for places to eat near a rehab hospital, that same mobile device begins long trips (GPS data) from a particular (home) address, and that home address is linked to a name in the white-pages.  This contrived example is not bullet-proof, but it illustrates how information leakage can, over time, expose a lot more about ourselves than we originally thought.

While all of this is well and good, and I appreciate the efforts of academic researchers; however, I can't help but think that we are not addressing the real problem.  If you are worried about data leakage, then you should be terrified about the way that most of us throw lots of information about our professional and private lives into the public domain readily.  Facebook is the prime example, and to their credit they have taken steps to remedy the data disclosure problems in older versions of their system.  People just have no notion of how the things they publish can effect them later on.  I even have an example where the person in question didn't even intend on providing a lot of information...I give you as an example the 

Jack and Jane Smith case...

Jack and Jane Smith think they are a clever pair, because every-time there is a marketing or signup sheet that asks for an email address they list mine instead of their own.  This seems innocent enough, but what they don't realize is that every piece of solicited junk that shows up in my inbox fills in more details about their personal and private lives.  This compounded with the fact that they have chosen to use their real names in coordination with these mailings accelerates this process even further.  The real funny part is that Jack fancies himself as an IT professional (don't get me started on this).

This project all got started when I got a "happy thanksgiving" email from Freedom Toyota in Hamburg, PA.  This got me to thinking that maybe this wasn't random internet spam, but that maybe all the emails that I keep getting for Jack and Jane are substantiated in some way.  Then I decided to do a bit of googling to find out more of who these people are...

Jack Smith is a 49 year old IT guy who lives in Schuylkill Haven, PA (I have the exact address and phone number) and I know when and where he went to high-school (Facebook), where he has worked (Linkedin), and lots of seemingly benign things like kids names and relatives (mom?).

Jane Smith is the 45 year old wife of Jack and lives with her husband in a modest home in an relatively urban area.  Not to be outdone by her husband she also provides lots of personal information on her website.

They have some kids and here is where things aren't quite so clear, and this is probably a result of multiple marriages and kids with former spouses, but they definitely have a kid named Jen.  What is interesting is that Jen is probably not Jane's daughter, because the Name Donna pops up quite a bit.  Jen lists a number of siblings on her Facebook page that don't show up on Jack, Jen or Donna's pages (family relationships can be quite complex).  But what is clear is that we know who Jen's main crush is.  She is also quite the aspiring photographer and fond of the UK...

If you still think all of this is pretty innocent then let me propose the following...I know names, and addresses and phone numbers, mothers, daughters, maiden names, high-schools cities/dates of birth and what kind of house/cars they own.  These sound a lot like the types of security questions that get asked when you call a customer service desk right?  Further all of this was acquired without spending a dime of my money.  I can't fathom the information I would get by paying a few dollars for background and records searches or the parents!  This could all lead to identity theft or worse.

When I got to this point I realized that I should go back and change the names...If their is a real Jack and Jane Smith, then you know that your name is just too common and generic and should have expected this or at least seen it coming...

A broader perspective...

The point is that there is no point in comprising intricate and complex algorithms for hiding personal information if people are going to be stupid and give it way.  This is a new area of concern for adults, but what will it mean for our kids who's photos and lives have been the subject of baby blogs and Twitter feeds since before they were even born?  Will the definition of privacy change as the founder of Facebook claims?  

In design/engineering you are taught to tackle the problem that has the greatest weight (opportunity for improvement) first.  Said another way...if you are drowning and holding onto an anvil, let go of that before you attempt to save yourself by emptying your pockets of lose change!

PS:  I have no intention of releasing the information about the Smiths, but I do intend to continue collecting information about them for as long as they are dumb enough to use my email address for marketing signups and spam likely forms...

OS X Time Machine Lacking in Options

My time tested method for backing up my laptop was to run a Bash script that would rsync various directories to my Linux server at home.  The nice things about this were:

• I was in complete control of what got backed up and how.
• I could work on things just as easily on the Linux server as I could on my OS X based laptop.
• Copying things back over to the laptop was a cinch.
• I could schedule it to run as frequently or infrequently as I wanted by using a chron job.

This method of backup worked wonders for me, but my wife did was not onboard with using Linux.  I was intrigued by the osX86, so I hacked a mac.  It works great!  It is stable, fast, and easy to use.  I had not been able to use time-machine for backups before, but I thought I would give it a shot.  I set it up on my laptop to backup to the desktop and when I say I set it up, there was very little to configure.  I know that is the idea, to make it dead simple for everyone, but at least give me an advanced options pannel or something.  Here are some of the things that bother me that I would like to change:

• It tires to backup my laptop when I am away from home, and this would not be a problem if it were not for the resources that it uses.  It seems to access the disk so heavily that it slows other applications.
• You can exclude some directories from being backed up, but that is about the extent of the options.

I am not going to be one of the people that complain about a problem and don't suggest possible solutions, so here are some things that I would like to see.

• Backup only when connected to my home network (can be recognized by subnet).
• Allow choice of how a directory should be backed up.  Some I would like to be backed up more often than others, and some I would only like a working copy (shorter history).
• Schedule backups to only happen durring certain times, or not to occur when the computer is very busy.
• Allow for backing up to a local temporary directory when I am away from home and then commit that when I return.
• Allow to chose a server based on location.  So it would back up to one server when I am at work and another when I am at home.

Again, this is just a list of ideas of features that would be nice to have.  I am sure that there are programs out there that do all of these things, and to that my original backup methods do just that.  I would like to see some of these options to be available for my wife's computer.  So Steve Jobs, I hope this helps.

"the U.S. and Canada are the third world of mobile phone networks"

I was just reading an interesting article on the NTY website about the overload that the iPhone is placing on the ATT&T network:

Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T

I understand the need for a company to make money, really I do, but at a certain point companies need to invest in maintaining an advantage over their competition in the future. I would own an iPhone today if I had not had such a crappy experience with Cingular/ATT&T years ago (almost 10 years!), but with that in mind I will continue to use my palm with Verizon. My palm is fast and not without its flaws but it is a known, and I have heard that things have not improved much on the ATT&T network since my experience.

If you are not a frequent visitor to my blog then you may not know that I am a computer science graduate student, and that my area of research interest is in networking and distributed systems. I should be very clear in saying that there is no silver bullet and no perfect network. They all have their own advantages and faults. Take the home access to the Internet in the United States as an example. I have hear rumors that in parts of Europe and Asia one can get a network (Internet) connection that offers roughly 10 times faster download speed and an amazing 400 times faster on upload. This connection can be had for as little as $10 us and I pay almost 5 times that amount for a connection that is much MUCH slower. Am I angry because I want a faster connection? No, I am angry because I pay so much for a "slow" connection. For most of us, we don't utilize a substantial portion of the connection we have. Like my friend Mike J. says... As long as the tubes keep the [media] flowing ;-)

I don't want to get into a debate about why the US is a leader in innovation, but lags so far behind in implementing and deploying those innovations, but I would like to see us do a better job of doing things right. Maybe if we get our priorities strait...

So I guess its my own humble opinion that it is not the iPhone that is the adversary, but a network that is not up to global standards. Hell we invented the internet 40 years ago, you think we could get it right.

Tattoos, Piercings, Punk Music and Facebook Oh MY!

I am not quite sure what made me think about this, but one has to wonder what the future holds for our children. The most obvious is the house of cards that we have left for them. At some point we have to stop living as a culture with the hope that if we ignore problems that they will go away or that the next generation will come up with a way to solve the problem without any sort of sacrifice or real effort, but I digress.

My point is much more benign than the cooking planet or the flaws of greed based capitalistic society. I am just curious about what happens when a generation of parents have tattoos, and punk music? Have our peers not already pierced every imaginable body part? We have even embraced the cultural differences. So what is left for our children to do to assert their individualism? How do they tell the world that they are not their parents?

I guess if I have to look to history for any sort of clue one might expect something like the 1980's reaction to the 1960's and 1970's social rebellions. It brought with it a generation of social conservatism...

It makes me think that maybe I need to take out my earrings, cover my tattoos, and start Bible thumping so that my kid can have the joy and youthful pride of not being a carbon copy of his parents without having to resort to joining the young republicans or ending up with a job on Wall St.

The blur of life...

Does it seem to anyone else that our lives seem to accelerate and that there is no terminal velocity in sight? Granted I may have bitten off more than I can chew this semester...

A good friend of mine recently graduated with a PhD in mathematics. I am just getting ready to start my venture toward a PhD in computer science, so maybe he would have some better answers...

Check out his fledgling blog here

Look out Verizon you have competition...

So I was on the phone for 2 hours this morning with Earthlink support. To say the least they were rude and unhelpful. I have be an Earthlink customer since October of 2002, and whether it was a technical problem or an ignorant oversight my account was completely deleted or purged from their system.

I noticed that I had stopped getting the annoying forwards from some distant relatives that only had my old Earthlink email address. I have been using gmial and they were just fine using the Earthlink address, and since I had it forwarded to my gmail account I was just fine with that too. Then I decided that I was going to use one of those old addresses to sign up for an online offer, and was unable to get email conformation. SO I sent a test email, and it bounced. Ok no big deal I will just go to their site and check the account settings...

So the very long story kind of short is that the account was deleted and there was no trace record anywhere in their system. No one knew anyone about this, and proceeded to tell me that I was delusional and that I never had an account. When I asked to have the issue escalated to have someone more competent deal with the problem I was told that since I was a "free email user" I was not entitled to customer support and was promptly hung up on.

Is that any way to treat a long term customer? Apparently this was not the first time this has happened and a google search will show more similar cases that strangely started around the same dates.

Earthlink sucks...