Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Navigating Digital Home Networks. Home PC's increasingly link TV sets, game consoles, music and photos. Now the question is how to retrieve what you want, when you want it, from such deep digital wells. By Michel Marriott. [New York Times: Technology] 10:56:21 PM    comment []

Individual Arrested for Hacking into Messenger Conversations (Digital Chosun). Police said, Kim downloaded a hacking program called RADMIN through a portal site and installed it in the employees’ computers around last December and occasionally reported the conversation contents to the company’s executives with the intention of getting the staff, about whom he usually did not have good feelings, fired. A person known by the last name Park (32), whose Messenger conversation was hacked by Kim, said, For some time, I had the feeling that the executives and company head knew all about the private discussions colleagues had through Messenger. I began to suspect [something was up]. He then said, By chance, I saw my Messenger screen open on Kim’s computer and was surprised, so I reported it. 2:22:40 PM    comment []

Judge declines to stop same-sex weddings in San Francisco, by Tracey Kaplan, Mary Anne Ostrom And Thaai Walker, Knight Ridder. Best angle on the story has to be the grammatical one: Thanks to a semicolon, gays and lesbians keep marrying in San Francisco (AP). I am not trying to be petty here, but it is a big deal ... That semicolon is a big deal, said San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren. The Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund had asked the judge to issue an order commanding the city to cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnizing marriages of same-sex couples; to show cause before this court. The way you've written this it has a semicolon where it should have the word 'or', the judge told them. I don't have the authority to issue it under these circumstances. The judge said he'd read the voluminous briefs submitted to him, and had done his own research, reviewing all the relevant statutes. His conclusion, he said, was that the conservative groups appear entitled to get their stay eventually. But until they write their proposed court order correctly, Warren indicated that he would not order an immediate halt to the marriages of gays and lesbians that continued throughout the day across the street at City Hall. Lawyers for both sides then spent hours arguing about punctuation and court procedures during the hearing, which was still continuing late Tuesday afternoon. (The original url is here for archival and other purposes, but may break in transit.) 12:22:33 PM    comment []

More than 200 die in Iran train blast, by Ali Akbar Dareini (AP). Runaway train cars carrying fuel, fertilizer and industrial chemicals derailed and exploded in northeastern Iran on Wednesday, killing more than 200 people and injuring hundreds more and devastating five villages, the government news agency said. 12:22:22 PM    comment []

"To Do or to Have? That is the Question". A recent posting on the subject of Panamanian married couples who drive older cars but hire live-in nannies to help with their children sparked quite a few comments.  Alex Chernavsky sent in this newspaper story about research done by social psychologists, the conclusion of which was that if you're going to spend money you should buy an experience, e.g., dinner out with friends or a vacation trip, rather than a new car.  The full paper is an interesting read as well. [Philip Greenspun Weblog] 6:35:39 AM    comment []

Cingular Wins AT&T Wireless in an Early-Morning Drama. Cingular Wireless outbid Vodafone of Britain for AT&T Wireless with a last-minute offer of $41 billion in a deal that will reshape the cutthroat wireless telephone business. By Andrew Ross Sorkinand Matt Richtel. [New York Times: Business] 6:28:42 AM    comment []

Two on Steven Johnson's new book from Salon.com: This really is your brain on drugs. In "Mind Wide Open" Steven Johnson looks under the cranial hood to find out what makes him -- and us -- tick. In search of my own brain. In an excerpt from "Mind Wide Open" Steven Johnson details his attempt to catch his own mind in the act of thinking. Also, you can join in a conversation with Johnson on the book over at The Well's Inkwell. Read along, or send e-mail to the hosts with your own question or comment. It's good stuff. 6:23:06 AM    comment []

Lots of new feeds from Apple. [Scripting News] 6:13:36 AM    comment []

Harnessing the Hacker's HeckleBot: Fostering community on the mobile internet might require a dance with distraction, by Justin Hall, in The Feature, via bOing bOing. Imagine a conference where half the audience was heckling and questioning the speaker near constantly. And not just unfounded heckling, but well-researched contrarian jibes and zinger queries. Imagine holding your attention on the speaker while their presentation was being expertly critiqued by the people around you. Now imagine that all that was happening silently, you could hear the feedback but the speaker and most of the audience couldn't. Imagine that backchannel conversation was open to anyone with an internet connection. Then imagine trying to concentrate on anything. . . . Faint paint fumes and solid wireless signals flooded the hallways and conference rooms at the Westin Hotel, in downtown San Diego. All participants shared the same T1 line - a million packets in line for a few thousand slots. At times it lagged out or slowed to a crawl; these times it people seemed to pay more attention to the presentations. Otherwise, people could be seen checking their email, surfing the web, or hanging out on IRC. Internet Relay Chat is an old internet protocol for sharing chat spaces. For the Emerging Technology Conference, there was #etech, an IRC chat room shared over wifi by dozens of laptops in each conference room, and dozens more laptops in the world beyond. Someone came up to me in the hallways between the conference proceedings and beamed me a Palm IRC client for my Treo 600, so I could join #etech from the toilet. #etech was a rowdy reflection of the content on stage, people often mocking or doubting the official presenter. It took an unusual presentation or smart delivery to quell most of the "peanut gallery," as famed Tokyo businessman blogger Joichi Ito called it. The active dismissive chatter of the chat rooms primarily stayed in the background. But there were a few moments when the traffic on the wireless networks burst into visible words within the room. During some of the talks, enterprising hackers set up an LED display in the seats - the "HeckleBot." Anyone in the IRC channel could send a message to the scrolling blinking lights on the other side of the room. "Joi is not wearing pants!" came up during one panel. According to digital insurrectionist and indyvoter.org co-founder Marc Powell "One of the main points of IRC is to IRC in a way that makes other people on the channel totally lose it - laughing out loud or busting up or whatever. Having a hecklebot digital sign bridges the digital divide." With attention split between laptops with email and chat, a potentially ringing phone, panelists talking, and a scrolling LED running comedy commentary on the proceedings, it was hard to know who was laughing at what between six different stimuli streams. At best you might focus on the loudest, most disruptive stream. The stream that moved the fastest. Or, if you were really in the zone, you could concentrate on the meta-stream, unfocus your attention enough to take in the five info-firehoses waving in front of your face. The hackers were usually carrying on the most lively conversation over the wireless network. Their conversation sat on top of the conference. The IRC channel carried the words of young and restless conference goers (aside from silent lurkers). During Ito's Emergent Democracy Worldwide panel, the IRC channel was projected up on the screen behind the presenters. The commentary of the audience was shown in real time, as a response to the talkers up on stage. Not just the highlighted jests of the HeckleBot, but the entire flow of the backchannel conversation. Moments like this hinted at the start of an integrated conference, the primary real and virtual conversations coalesced around one shared stage. Allowing the text voices from the internet to appear in the physical space was a good start to drawing young and old attention to the same point. 6:10:45 AM    comment []