Category Archives: technology

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From Silas Beane, at the University of Bonn in Germany, comes new evidence that the universe we live in is indeed a computer simulation: 

It’s this kind of thinking that forces physicists to consider the possibility that our entire cosmos could be running on a vastly powerful computer. If so, is there any way we could ever know?

Today, we get an answer of sorts from Silas Beane, at the University of Bonn in Germany, and a few pals.  They say there is a way to see evidence that we are being simulated, at least in certain scenarios.

First, some background. The problem with all simulations is that the laws of physics, which appear continuous, have to be superimposed onto a discrete three dimensional lattice which advances in steps of time.

The question that Beane and co ask is whether the lattice spacing imposes any kind of limitation on the physical processes we see in the universe. They examine, in particular, high energy processes, which probe smaller regions of space as they get more energetic

What they find is interesting. They say that the lattice spacing imposes a fundamental limit on the energy that particles can have. That’s because nothing can exist that is smaller than the lattice itself.

So if our cosmos is merely a simulation, there ought to be a cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles.

It turns out there is exactly this kind of cut off in the energy of cosmic ray particles, a limit known as the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin or GZK cut off.

Let’s just hope they keep running the simulation through to completion. Also, this suggests all kind of interesting Inception-style questions: e.g. At just what level of simulation are we running? Or Matrix-style: Can we hack the simulation and modify our own limits?

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I’m a long term Cory Doctorow fan, having loved Makers, Little Brother, For the Win, and Eastern Standard Tribes.

Set in the near-term future, Pirate Cinema is a science fiction thriller about oppressive copyright laws.

In Pirate Cinema, like Little Brother, we have another young adult protagonist and his super-smart female love interest and their tribe, who become outraged at government and corporate interests and take action to improve the world.

As in other Doctorow novels, we get great, really rich settings. This one takes place in London’s street/squatter scene. It’s hard to imagine that Doctorow could write this stuff without having lived it himself. I’d love to spend six weeks with Doctorow and see what his life is really like.

In Pirate Cinema, the technology, morals, and activism take place front and center, as they do in most Doctorow novels. This is about intellectual property rights, their effect on creativity, trusted computing, DRM, and the rights of corporations versus people. In his earlier books, Cory’s prose sometimes read like an academic paper when he’s talking about the serious stuff. This is still here, but I think he’s done a much better job of blending it in. And I really don’t mind the lectures: they’re fun and educational, even for someone relatively conversant in the space.

I don’t want to give too much away, but I laughed out loud and had to immediately text a few friends when I get to the scene on panhandling A/B testing. If you know what A/B testing is, I promise this scene will crack you up.

In short, if you liked Little Brother, Makers, or For the Win, you’ll love Pirate Cinema too. If you haven’t tried any of Doctorow’s fiction, I highly recommend it. He writes about important issues in a fun and entertaining way. You can read for the fun or the lessons or both.

Note to parents: my kids are still in their single-digit ages, but when they hit their teens I hope to feed them a steady diet of Doctorow novels, including Pirate Cinema. The language, street living, and drugs might be slightly edgy, but the lessons about corporate interests and activism are right on.

Buy it on Amazon.

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As a writer, I fear losing my manuscript in ways that I’ve never feared losing any other file. And having seen other writers lose their files due to hard drive crashes, viruses, simple mistakes, or stolen laptops, I have seen the grief associated with such loss.

You can avoid this. Here are four easy ways to backup your manuscript and avoid disaster. However, before I list them, you must keep two very important principles in mind:

Multiple versions: It is very important to maintain multiple older versions of your files. Why? Let’s say a  virus infected your computer and corrupts your manuscript file, but you don’t know it yet. Then you backup your manuscript onto a USB drive, copying over the only other existing copy. Now both the original file and the backup file are corrupted. To counter-act this, you want a backup solution that maintains all (or at least many) of the older versions of your files. This way you can go as far back as needed to fine a working version of your file.

Multiple locations: If you backup to a hard drive in your home and have a flood, fire, or theft, you could lose both your computer and your backup location at once. Just having your data in the cloud (e.g. with Google Docs) isn’t insurance against this, because they can have failures too. Ideally you want your files in multiple locations: In your home and somewhere on the internet at a minimum.

In order of ease of use and security, here are my recommendations:

1. Install backup software 

This is the single best thing you can do, because once it’s installed, you can forget about it, and it’ll keep working for you. Do a quick google search for backup software, pick something, and install it. On the Mac, you can use the built-in Time Machine, but Super-Duper is popular as well. Lifehacker has several recommendations for Windows backup software.

Ease of setup: medium
Security: good to excellent (depending on where you back up: ideally it would include the cloud and an external drive)

2. Install Dropbox

Dropbox is fantastic software for sharing files between computers and to the cloud. (Cloud meaning, in this case, their servers on the Internet.) I use Dropbox to share files between my personal computer and my work computer, and a copy of the files also reside on Dropbox’s servers. This means that there are always at least three copies of my files. If you upgrade to the paid version of Dropbox, you can store all older revisions of your files.

Ease of setup: extremely easy
Security: good

3. Email to yourself on Gmail

If you have a Gmail account, which is effectively unlimited in size, you can easily email your entire manuscript to yourself as frequently as needed. Because the files are maintained on Google’s servers, if anything happens to your computer, you can still access them from anywhere you can log into Gmail.

Ease: medium (you have to remember to do it)
Security: medium (again, you have to remember to do it)

4. Copy to USB drive

You can also copy your files to a USB drive. These are so cheap they’re almost free. You can get a tiny (in size) flash drive, or a larger hard-drive based model that can backup your entire computer.

Ease: medium (you have to remember to do it, and you have to find/have the USB drive.)
Security: medium-poor (you can lose the drive, it can crash, etc.)

I hope that you’ll do at least one, if not two of these methods. Otherwise you are putting yourself at risk for a loss of your manuscripts, and that is a very painful loss to experience.

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Amber Case
Geoloqi.com
#AmberCase
  • Mobile device are larger on the inside: 
    • they have thousands of people and relationship in there. 
    • Printed out number of photos on a computer: massive stack 5 feet height, eight feet long, eight feet wide.
  • Printed out Facebook wall: Took up all the walls in a very large room
    • One other civilization did this: the Egyptians covered their walls with hieroglyphs.
    • But the Egyption stuff did this 3,000 years ago, and it’s still here.
    • But what if your Facebook account is deleted? It’s all gone in a second.
  • Your computer becomes an external brain.
    • You become an archeologist trying to search through a dig site to find the information you want, as more artifacts come in filling up the dig site. 
  • After her TED talk, got 22,000 emails.
    • We’re not just under information assault, but we get information jetlag: if we pay attention to twitter, we lose track of email. If we pay attention to email, we lose track of Facebook.
  • When the landline phone first came out, you go into rooms, have a private conversation with someone else.
    • People thought that everyone was going to go into rooms and never come out. They were concerned that society was going to break down as a result.
  • Steve Mann
    • human cyborg
    • started with 80 pounds of equipment to do augmented reality
      • location aware data
      • remove undesired brands from view in supermarket
      • replace billboards with useful data
      • do facial recognition and prompt with data about person.
    • Then it was 40 pounds, then 20, then 10. Now it’s all in a headset that does a laser projection onto his eye.
  • Mika Satomi
    • Has a vest that is a video game: you are getting a massage while the person doing it is playing a video game.
    • People want to play games more than they want to be farmers. Yet they like to play farmville. What if farmville was a videogame in which you were controlling telebots that were actually farming?
  • Haptic location: wear a belt to know where north was.
    • After weeks of wearing it, you gain a new location sense: knowing where you are, how far you are from things, where are things are from each direction.
  • Location enables invisible buttons:
    • when you get within a block of home, your lights come on.
    • when you come to a given location, you get messages.
    • when you are close to where you are going, the people you are meeting get a message.
    • automated behaviors that don’t require visual/tactile distraction.
  • Geoloqi
    • Gives you automated data when you walk up to a bus stop
    • Automatically displays the wikipedia articles near you
  • The interface disappears
    • Actions are reduced
    • queries are eliminated
  • You don’t have to ask for information.
    • You don’t have to load apps
    • Or discover new stuff
    • or remember to load a website
    • or navigate its interface
  • Layers
    • Don’t Eat That: Warns you if you are too close to an establish that receives a low rating
    • Pinball layer: tells you how many pinball machines in establishments.
  • Downsides
    • Battery Drain (most people have used location aware apps, and then had to disable them because of battery use.)
    • Lots of technical challenges: no network connectivity, lack of GPS signal, etc.
  • So the next generation: Geoloqi
    • Solves some of these core problems
    • An ecosystem where you don’t have to solve these problems
    • A turnkey geolocation solution
  • Partnering with three companies: 
    • appcelerator
    • factual: has database of sixty million datapoints
    • locaid: has access to 350M devices in their network

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Jared Spool
The Lives of Links
#linklives
  • trigger words:
    • the things that cause users to click
    • we need words to describe our tools
    • trigger words is an example of that.
  • we’ve been studying how people use the web since 1995
  • we had this theory in 1995: that people who know how to use the web would be better at doing things on the web.
    • we got people with different levels of experience
    • we set them down in front of web sites and had them do things
    • it turn out that people’s experience didn’t matter, but what did matter was design of the web site.
    • (will: this is different than something like using a tool like a circular saw, in which experience is important.)
  • Predicting Failures of Scent
    • Use of the Back Button
    • Pogo-sticking
    • Using search
  • We have thousands of clickstreams
    • we look for patterns.
    • we have two piles: those for people who succeeded, and those who failed.
  • Backbuttons predict failure:
    • For the clickstreams where people use the backbutton once: only 18% are successful.
    • For the clickstreams where people use the backbutton twice: less than 2% are successful.
  • Pogo-sticking also predicts failure
    • Jumping up and down through the site hierarchy
    • People who pogo-stick are only 11% successful
  • Search predicts failure
    • (except on Amazon)
    • When people do search, they type in trigger words
  • Search Pro tip:
    • Your search logs are filled with trigger words
    • Ideally you want the logs to include the page the user was searching from
    • So put the trigger words as links on the page that users were searching from
  • 7-Eleven Milk Experiment
  • Compelled Shopping: Buying Apparel
    • Give the prospective customer $1,000 to buy the clothes they want.
    • “Ideal site”: the customer should spend $1,000
    • Gap: $660
    • Lands’ End: $465
    • Macy’s: $156
    • Newport News: $63
  • Number of clicks to get to final purchase
    • The Gap: 11.9
    • Lands’ End: 15.7
    • Macy’s: 51
    • Newport News: 51
  • Examples of shopping sites: some sites force you to click through to the individual products to get details. No way to compare, no way to see data on individual products. It forces pogo-sticking.
    • Good example: Crutchfield. Shows more data. It’s exactly the differentiated data you want.
    • Bad examples: No data.
    • More bad examples: Meaningless data “technology you trust”
    • More bad examples: Showing the same bullet points for everything: “No annual fee.” “0% interest”. Also useless in comparison.
  • Most useless words in web design:
    • click here
    • learn more
    • click here to learn more
  • Good Design is Invisible
    • It’s like air-conditioning in a room: you don’t notice it, unless it’s bad or it’s not working well.
  • Links secretly live to look good.
    • But they still have to look like links.
  • We used to think that links are supposed to be blue and underlined. Thankfully, we’ve moved back this.
  • In some cases, we can find it out. The page has a clear visual language.
  • In other cases, we can’t tell without waving our mouse all over.
  • Look Good: You have to establish a consistent visual language.
  • Links have to do what you expect.
  • Example of dictionary.com: it’s hard to find the content.
    • The page is full of links and advertisements. You want the user to stay.
  • Other examples: in the middle of articles, there are links to go elsewhere.
    • to related articles
    • to unrelated articles
    • but why?
    • let the person finish the article
  • Taco Bell Advertising Lawsuit example:
    • good article, but…
    • link to everything the tribune has ever written about alabama in the middle of the text
    • link to crossword puzzle and sudoku in the middle of the page
    • advertisements to sue people or to advertise on the page
  • It’s all junk: it’s not really relevant or related.
  • Flyouts:
    • Other sites hide the links
    • you have to put the cursor over stuff to find the links.
    • People want to see the links. That’s why they are using the web.
    • Flyouts are fun to code, but they aren’t fun for the user.
  • Do What The User Expects
    • Deliver users to their desired objective
    • Emit the right scent
    • Look good, while still looking like a link
    • Do what the user expects

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When IT Says No: Creating Fast Feature Flow
Gene Kim
@RealGeneKim
  • How many of you had the problem where you had a great idea, something that can help the business, only to have IT say, “well, maybe you can have it in 2016, when the planning calendar opens up?” (Lots of hands go up.)
  • Where Did the High Performers Come From?
    • Non-commissioned officers.
    • Chemical engineers
    • Auditors
  • What do they have in common?
    • Rigor and discipline!
  • When we wrote Visible Ops, we saw a downward spiral
    • Fragile applications are prone to failure
    • A long time required to figure out what went wrong
    • Detection comes from a salesperson who said “why are the banner ads being shown upside down”?
    • Too much firefighting and unplanned
    • Planned work cannot get done
    • Frustrated customers leave
    • Market share goes down.
    • Business misses Wall Street commitments
  • The key aha: This isn’t an IT ops problem, this is a business risk.
  • Mission: Figure out how to break the IT core chronic conflict
    • Every IT organization is pressured 
  • Tribes needed:
    • Ops
    • Dev
    • Op Security
    • Design
  • Velocity talk in 2009 at Flickr: 10 deploys per day
    • Dev and ops working together
    • Ops who think like devs
    • Devs who think like ops
  • In 2011, Amazon doing a maximum of 1,079 deployments per HOUR.
    • That’s 11 seconds per deployment.
  • If your company can deploy at most once a month, how can you compete against someone who can deploy daily or hourly?
  • DevOps is a real movement
    • I would never do another startup without employing devops principles
    • It’s happening in enterprises, government, and non-profits.
  • The Three Ways
  • The First Way
    • Systems Thinking: Left to Right
    • Never Pass defects to downstream work centers
    • Never allow local optimization to create global degradation
    • Eradicate blockages in the flow
    • Outcomes
      • Faster cycle times
  • The Second Way
    • Amplify feedback loops (right to left)
      • Expose visual data everyone can see how their decisions affect the entire system.
    • Outcomes
  • The Third Way
    • Culture of Continual Experimentation and Learning
      • Foster a culture that rewards
        • Experimentation (taking risks) and learning from failure
          • Jared Spool story of Intuit, where the CEO, in a monthly ceremony, gives a lifepreserver to the person who took the biggest risk, and they share their knowledge of what they learned.
        • Repetition is the prerequisite to mastery
      • Outcomes
        • 15 minutes
  • Prescriptive
    • Meeting the DevOps Leadership Team
      • Typically led by Dev, QA, IT Ops, and Product Management/Design
    • Agile Sprints
      • typically one week to one month
      • at the end of each sprint, team should have potentially deliverable product
      • But where this breaks down, is that typically dev uses up all the time in the project, leaving none operations or testing
    • Help Dev and Ops Build Code and Environments
      • Dev and Ops work together in Sprint 0 and 1 to create code and environments
        • Create environment that Dev deployed into
      • Security must integrate security testing into continuous testing through automation. If it takes 2 to 3 weeks to perform a security check, it won’t fit into the agile process, and it will be marginalized.
    • Keep Shrinking Batch Sizes
      • Waterfall projects often have cycle time of one year
      • Sprints have cycle time of 1 or 2 weeks
      • When IT Operations work is sufficiently fast and capable (e.g. it’s a < 1 hr process) we may decide to decouple from sprint boundaries. 
        • Now we don’t have to wait two weeks for a feature to go out.
        • And the deployments get real small: we push out a single feature. 
          • This is lower risk than pushing out hundreds of features together.
    • IT Operations Increases Process Rigor
  • Letters To Stakeholders
    • Development:
      • Be aware of the downstream effects of your actions
        • Unplanned work comes at the expense of planned work (features)
        • When we take shortcuts at the front of the line, it has an amplified effect downstream.
        • Technical debt retards feature throughput
        • Environment matters as much as code
    • QA
      • Ensure test plans cover not only code functionality, but also:
        • suitability of the environment the code runs in
        • The end-to-end deployment process
      • Help find variance
        • functionality, performance, configuration
        • duration, wait time, errors
    • Operations
      • Expect and tolerate failure (use Chaos Monkey)
      • See: “5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS”
      • “The best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly”
      • Harden the production environment
      • Have scheduled drills to “crash the data center”
      • Create your “chaos monkeys”
    • Product Management:
      • Marty Cagan: Led product mgmt organization at eBay
      • He inherited the organization at eBay when they were suffering from chronic outages.
      • “you must take 20% of dev cycles to paying down technical debt.”
    • Designers
      • Help IT Operations codify their work and requirements into great and ever increasing library of user stories
      • Realize that IT processes are likely the largest impediment preventing your great ideas from making it to market
      • By working on the processes of how code gets into production, you can remove the impediments, and get more 

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Jason Grigsby spoke at Hewlett-Packard today on Mobile, in a talk called Casting Off The Desktop Shackles. Here are my notes:
Casting Off The Desktop Shackles
Jason Grigsby
@grigs | cloudfour.com
  • Basics
    • Don’t skip core functionality.
      • Example: there’s no way to add RSS feeds into certain RSS readers
    • URLs should go to content, not mobile home
      • really poor implementations of separate sites
    • Why go to the desktop web?
      • The NYT does this… gives you the mobile site, unless you know to change the url. Even though they have a great mobile site.
  • People will do anything on mobile if they have the need
    • complex tasks
    • write long emails
  • Our vision of mobile context is often wrong
    • We think that all mobile cases are people walking down the street
    • Actual
      • 80% during misc downtime
      • 76% while waiting in lines
      • 62% while watching TV
      • 69% for point of sale research
      • 39% use on the toilet (61% are lying)
    • We can’t know the mobile context
      • We can’t know where they are, or what they are doing.
    • Mobile is the 7th mass media
      • printing press
      • radio
      • recordings
      • tv
      • internet
      • …
      • mobile
  • 8 unique abilities of mobile
    • 1) incredible personal (not shared, even with spouses)
    • 2) always carried (within arms reach, slept with, etc.)
    • 3) always on
    • 4) builtin payment channel (itunes or google wallet, or using carrier billing to buy groceries)
    • 5) available at moment of creative impulse
      • the best camera is the one you have with you
      • the best notetaking app is the one you have with you
    • 6) accurate measurement
      • a phone is likely to be 1 person
      • groundtruth has logs from most carriers, will give you analytics for sites compared to competitors
      • one ID always (as opposed to many different browsers/cookies on desktop browsers)
    • 7) social context
      • your phone knows where you are, who you are supposed to meet, and when. It can do really powerful things with that knowledge: automatically detect you are going to be late to an appointment, txt the person you’re meeting, and pop open directions to the location.
    • 8) augmented reality
      • ability to hold up your phone and see augmented information in real time.
  • mobile is the most borg-like technology we’ve ever seen
    • in 2005, more phones with cameras were sold than all the digital cameras up until that point.
    • garmin ruled the GPS market, and now they are a drop in the bucket.
    • mp3 players went by the wayside
    • lesson: If you are making a product that has some kind of mobile use case and/or sensor, you have to think about what happens if phones adopt that sensor. Where would that leave you?
  • Check out John Allsopp, Dao of Web Design
    • “When a new medium borrows from an existing one, some of what it borrows makes sense, but much of the borrowing is thoughtless, ‘ritual’, and often constrains the new medium. Over time, the new medium develops its own conventions, throwing off…”
  • What are we borrowing from the previous internet – the desktop internet – and what do we need to get rid of?
    • Why do we need to look at phones to get directions? One vibration to turn left, two to turn right.
    • Old saying: Asia is two years ahead of Europe, and Europe is two years ahead of the U.S.
  • Digital Divide
    • In Asia and Africa
      • ~20% of ecommerce / mobile banking occuring through the web
      • compared to 2.5% in the U.S.
    • Blacks and Latinos ~60% likely to use phones for internet connectivity, compared to ~40% for whites. For most, it is their only access to the internet.
      • So anything that is going to be done online(applying for jobs, banking, purchasing) must be possible via mobile
    • Used for purposes we wouldn’t imagine here…
      • cellscope: a microscope attached to an old nokia phone used to MMS send bloodwork photos to cities for analysis when working in remote villages.
      • farmers using mobile access to figure out where to get the best prices for their goods.
    • textually.org: stories about people interacting with mobile tech
    • mobileactive.org: supports people doing this kind of stuff
    • StatCounter Global Stats: Mobile vs. Desktop in Nigeria
    • Africa is the Silicon Valley of banking. The future of banking is being defined here…It’s going to change the world.” — Carol Realini, executive chairman of Obopay
    • If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere
    • 25% of internet users in the U.S. access it only via mobile
    • (and it goes way up from there… 70% in Egypt.)
  • Polar Rose. Bought by Apple.
    • Recognizr app: Uses facial recognition and then displays social network information for that person.
    • Google Goggles can do the same thing, but Google has decided not to release it yet for fear of the backlash.
  • Luke Wroblewski’s First Person User Experience Presentation at http://www.likew.com/presos/preso.asp?21
    • Dozens of sensors in a phone. What can be done with them all? We’ve only scratched the surface.
  • Is mobile a new mass media?
    • (Yes)
    • Is mobile web part of that new mass media?
      • Mobile web is a bit of a half-breed – it is part mobile medium and part internet medium so it inherits traits from both. — Tim Kadlec
      • This is discouraging.
      • This would make me hang up my HTML and go learn objective C.
    • Tim Kadlec also said that mobile phones are the closest thing we have to those futurist science fiction always-on-always-there devices that do everything.
  • Mobile Apps Must Die
    • Upcoming zombie apocalypse of devices
      • android is in everything.
      • price of everything is coming down.
    • Lots of just-in-time interactions. Getting a restaurant menu, get bus locations, unlocking a car: You dont want to install an app for every possible thing to do. The only thing that can scale this way is web technology.
  • Questions
    • Security and the lack thereof: enabler or disabler?
      • Every app is at some point jailbroken and cracked and put there out on the web.
      • You can never trust the client, whether it is javascript validation, or a mobile app. Relying on server security.
    • Do you see mobile replacing a lot of print?
      • It’s inevitable that a large percentage of things that are printed won’t be printed in the future.
      • I buy everything on the iPad. I don’t want books anymore.
      • I get the newspaper because I believe in supporting local news coverage. But if I could pay for it electronically, I would.
      • No medium has replaced any other medium. There will always be things that are printed.
      • I’m as mobile as you get, and I still have two printers in my house

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Cory Doctorow recently spoke on The Coming War on General Computation, which I think will be one of the most important issues of the coming ten years: more important even than the impact of dwindling oil or water, because what’s at stake is corporate control over what we as citizens are able to do and not do, what we are able to make or not make, what we can invent or not invent.

Here is the full text of The Coming War on General Computation speech by Cory Doctorow, transcribed by Joshua Wise.

Here’s a small excerpt from near the end of the speech:

1576.3 And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because we’ve spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it’s just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the stakes are only going to get higher.
1627.8 As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it won’t be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body. So when I get into a car – a computer I put my body into – with my hearing aid – a computer I put inside my body – I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests. [vigorous applause from audience] Thank you.
1669.4 Thank you. So, last year, the Lower Merion School District, in a middle-class, affluent suburb of Philadelphia found itself in a great deal of trouble, because it was caught distributing PCs to its students, equipped with rootkits that allowed for remote covert surveillance through the computer’s camera and network connection. It transpired that they had been photographing students thousands of times, at home and at school, awake and asleep, dressed and naked. Meanwhile, the latest generation of lawful intercept technology can covertly operate cameras, mics, and GPSes on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices.
1705.0 Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.

If you care about these issues, please donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

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There’s a scene in AIpocalypse in which one of the main characters is describing “the mesh”. Here’s an excerpt:

Leon hesitated, weighing the coolness impact of answering, then decided. He felt sorry for the teacher. “The Mesh was formed ten years ago by Avogadro Corp to help maintain net neutrality,” he began. 

“At the time, access to the Internet in the United States was mostly under the control of a handful of companies such as Comcast, who had their own media products they wanted to push. They saw the Internet as competing with traditional TV channels, and so they wanted to control certain types of network traffic to eliminate competition with their own services.” 

“Very good, Leon. Can you tell us what they built, and why?” 

Leon sighed when he realized the teacher wasn’t going to let him off easy. “According to Avogadro, it would have been too expensive and time consuming to build out yet another network infrastructure comparable to what the cable companies and phone companies had built last century. Instead they built MeshBoxes and gave them away. A MeshBox does two things. It’s a high speed wireless access point that allows you to connect your phone or laptop to the Internet. But that’s just what Avogadro added so that people would want them. The real purpose of a MeshBox is to form a mesh network with nearby MeshBoxes. Instead of routing data packets from a computer to a wireless router over the Comcast, the MeshBox routes the data packets over the network of MeshBoxes.” 

Leon hadn’t realized it, but sometime during his speech he had stood up, and starting walking towards the netboard at the front of the room. “The Mesh network is slower in some ways, and faster in other ways.” He started drawing on the board. “It takes about nine hundred hops to get from New York to Los Angelos purely by mesh, but only about ten hops by backbone. That’s a seven second delay by mesh, compared to a a quarter second by backbone. But the aggregate bandwidth of the mesh in the United States is approximately four thousand times the aggregate bandwidth of the backbone because there are more than twenty million MeshBoxes in the United States. More than a hundred million around the world. The mesh is bad for phone calls or interactive gaming unless you’re within about two hundred files, but great for moving files and large data sets around at any distance.” 

He paused for a moment to cross out a stylized computer on the netboard. “One of the benefits of the Mesh is that it’s completely resistant to intrusion or tampering, way more so than the Internet ever was before the Mesh. If any node goes down, it can be routed around. Even if a thousand nodes go down, it’s trivial to route around them. The MeshBoxes themselves are tamperproof – Avogadro manufactured them as a monolithic block of circuitry with algorithms implemented in hardware circuits, rather than software. So no one can maliciously alter the functionality. The traffic between boxes is encrypted. Neighboring MeshBoxes exchange statistics on each other, so if someone tries to insert something into the Mesh trying to mimic a MeshBox, the neighboring MeshBoxes can compare behavior statistics and detect the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Compared to the traditional Internet structure, the Mesh is more reliable and secure.” 

Leon looked up and realized he was standing in front of the class. On the netboard behind him he realized he had draw topology diagrams of the backbone and mesh. The entire class was staring at him. James made a “what the hell are you doing?” face at him from the back of the room. If he had a time travel machine, he’d go back and warn his earlier self to keep his damn mouth shut. 

The teacher on the other hand, was glowing, and had a broad smile on his face. “Excellent, Leon. So Avogadro was concerned about net neutrality, and created a completely neutral network infrastructure. Why do do we care about this today?”

I think the time is right for Google to do something like this. They can afford to give away 60,000 Chrome notebooks to test Chrome, and give gigabit fiber optic to 500,000 people to test high speed connectivity. If they can do that, they can easily give away a million mesh-enabled wireless access points to help ensure net neutrality.

Furthermore, Google already has a presence of some kind in many cities: whether a corporate site, a data center, or a content distribution network. In that case, mesh networking would be even more effective, since the mesh network can interconnect with Google’s backbone. Most people would be within a dozen hops of a Google backbone, keeping latency down.

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Lies My Data Told Me
Thor Muller
Get Satisfaction
@tempo
#datalies
  • 12.2 minute: average time to completion to close out a customer service ticket
    • for thousands of companies, over decades, this has been a key number that companies manage.
    • Companies look at customers as to-do items, and so less time is better.
    • But we could have
  • Data is backwards looking.
    • Imagine if you are driving a car, but you can only look in the rearview mirror.
    • We can project out with trendlines, and pattern match, and extrapolate — people will say this.
    • But you could say the same about driving looking in the rearview mirror. In general, the road ahead will be much like the road behind. But this doesn’t help you when you come to a Y in the road.
  • LTCM – built the algorithm to look at historical data and to tell them what trades to make. It worked great. Until Russia defaulted on obligations, causing a near global collapse.
  • Launchrock
    • Helps companies launch a business… Cowritable has viral growth even before they have launched. However, success getting people to subscribe for a product they have seen does not predict what will happen when the product comes out.
  • [missed a bunch of notes here while I got distracted reading the Launchrock site.]
  • Data Can Be a Real Killjoy
  • Success often requires patience or a patch… rather than a pivot.
  • When to ignore the data
    • When you are in “blue sky” creative mode.
      • don’t think in terms of constraints. don’t limit your imagination.
    • When available data is too general or ill-fitting.
      • e.g. “2/3rds of all startups fail” — that’s not useful for evaluating a specific startup.
    • When you’re unsure of what matters.
      • e.g. do page visits matter?
  • The Optimization Trap
    • “Multivariate testing caused us to design a product that we’ve come to hate. It’s ugly and pointless, but it generates real revenues so we can’t kill it.”
    • Optimizing your product can it is more like it is, but it can’t get you to a new product.
    • Optimization brings you to a local maximum, rather than a global maximum – you might get a better buy button, but you won’t get a whole new design that gets you 100x customers.
  • The squeaky wheels get the grease
    • OpenID vs. Facebook
    • Once had a very vocal part of community would complain about our OpenID community.
    • Whereas Facebook users hardly complained at all.
    • But Facebook accounted for 50% of users, whereas OpenID was a fraction of a percent. The OpenID people may have been vocal, but it wasn’t really the business relevant thing to do.
  • Data is Amoral
    • Data makes us blind to our own values — people making mortgages to people who couldn’t pay them. It just couldn’t make sense. But since it was returning money, the data said to invest in it.
  • The Tyranny of the Obvious
    • If you spend all your time looking at the strong, concrete data points, you are looking more than ever in the rear view mirror, because you are seeing the strongest trends.
    • If instead you look at the oddities in the data, you can see the yet-to-emerge trends. Like Lego, who found a teacher doing robotics, which turned into the Mindstorm’s product line, highly profitable.