I was a bit surprised last week to see TechCrunch, (probably the main technology blog) move over to using Facebook commenting (even more so that my Facebook profile popped up automatically, even though Facebook wasn't on my browser - lesson to me, you are being followed by Facebook unless you actively take measures). Ostensibly it is to "remove trolls". I suspected at the time that it little to do with trolls, and more to do with the (theoretical) benefit of access to the Facebook egosystem. This seems to be the view of Steve Cheney as well:
The carrot here for content sites is clear: even with a lower volume of comments, the potential viral effects and CTRs are something parent sites like AOL are surely extrapolating, based on their recent manifesto to boost reach, drive traffic, and maximize page views (though I'd argue they would perform much better on mainstream sites like HuffPo or TMZ than a niche vertical like TC, which your friends are less likely to be aware of).
I also agree with his second point. I suspect that for many people, Facebook is a "Friend and Family" system, not a work one, and that much of what they do in a work mode is not relevant or interesting to many of those friends. This opens up the whole issue of identity on Facebook - to my mind it's major systemic error (and where I suspect Next-Gen social networks will attack it) is the "one size fits all" social identity.
All the work we have ever done on people online (going back c 6 years) is that they (in the main - the early adopters are different) do prefer to show different facets of their identities to different social groups, and its not all about being secretive, its as much about being relevant and not boring (similarly, posting what you had for lunch on Twitter is dull to those who don't know you). Steve clearly thinks the same, when a TechCrunch comment is sent to your wall:
I'm not too worried about FB Comments in isolation, but the writing is on the wall: all of this off-site encroachment of the Facebook graph portends where FB is really going in pushing one identity. And a uniform identity defies us. Face it, authenticity goes way down when people know their 700 friends, grandma, and 5 ex-girlfriends are tuning in each time they post something on the web.
I think this is true about authenticity obscuring the truth as well - on the posts I replied to on TechCrunch trolling was seldom a problem - in fact often the real truth came out in those anonymous comments, and that was part of the real value of TechCrunch, you were in effect getting the "don't tell anyone I told you, but...". I think what we are seeing here is the "dumbing down" of the commenting system, and I wonder if its more about commerce than anything else, as I can't see that its in the interest of the readers (advertisers don't like feisty blogs, and timing - post AOL acquisition, given we know what their aims are - is interesting).
I also have e deeper distrust with Facebook, in that you are never quite sure what they will do with your information in future, but on present form they are usually not on the side of respecting your privacy. Quite simply, I don't trust them, and that trust lack is now transferred to TechCrunch. (You can also log on with a Yahoo account - I reckon Yahoo's probably had their best week ever for a while)
(i) Back to the big numbers on this issue
(ii) I'd estimate 2:1 against, and the ones that are anti have more likes.
(iii) Less funny, and no more insightful than before
However, I thought this comment was particularly apt:
1. Techcrunch writing has become HEAVILY OPINIONATED by it's individual writers. So it's OK for you guys to say whatever and not expect negative comments from your community?
2. You guys are missing the boat - Techcrunch is about the COMMUNITY! If you alienate your community with an inefficient and slow comment system (FB) you will lose the community.
3. Garbage in equals garbage out. The writing has suffered greatly - especially the writing of Alexia - and the constant quora junk. Listen to your community - the trolls and negative comments are a direct result of bad writing.
In other words, one breeds one's own trolls. I also await with pleasure the aghast reaction of "authentic" TechCrunch commentors when the Yahoo using trolls' comments come up (and they will....) on their walls.
Ah, Facebook - always two steps forward into your private data, then one step back when the furore erupts. Last week the ability to flog your personal details to any 3rd party (see here), this week the one step back (ReadWriteWeb) reports Facebook's Douglas Purdy:
"Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data. We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so. We'll be working to launch these updates as soon as possible, and will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are ready. We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks."
Some Feedback - I'll say! anyway, lets wait and see where they try and draw the line next.
Very good satire of the whole Wikileaks affaire and the worrying level of extra-legal reactions by the powerful (I see Bank of America has now stopped suspected payments to Wikileaks, though how they are going to make that happen is not clear). The whole Mastercard/Paypal/Visa/BoA thing sends a worrying signal about how easily a lot of the world's financial systems can be "leaned on" by the US, but as the snippet points out, more worrying is the ease with which citizen rights built up over decades are being walked over.
As the sketch says at the end, this should ring alarm bells if you know your history.
There has been a lot of breathless press about Anonymous, the hacker collective that has been attacking the various companies (Amazon, Paypal, Visa et al) that have dumped Wikileaks off their services. They have been called everything from terrorists to heroes, with most shades in between. News channels have fallen over themselves to scoop views on what they are doing (rather interestingly for an "opposing force" they seem to be showing their strategy publically.)
Bu there is something being forgotten in all this - before Anonymous even started, Wikileaks came under a reportedly large (or not so large?) DDoS attack itself, and this has continued with Anonymous now being attacked itself. But to my surprise (hah ) I find the mainstream media are keeping (almost - good on you BBC) absolutely quiet about:
(i) Who was (is) doing this?
(ii) Should these people be hunted and prosecuted in the same way as Anonymous?
It is noticeable that so far there seems to have been very little calling from any of the people who want to hang, draw and quarter Anonymii members to do the same for these people, nor do we see quite the same level of invective from the Official Sources.
And we have to ask ourselves - who do we think is doing it? Traditional Hackers - don't think so, they have by and large sided with Wikileaks. Then there are Chinese, Iranian and Russian Cyberwarriors (the usual suspects in Western DDoS scares) - unlikely, Wikileaks has (so far) helped more than hindered them. Or the Cybercriminals? - hardly, unless Wikileaks releases credit card numbers, its pretty slim pickings.
So who else, then, has the ability, resource and the motivation to keep an assault going on Wikileaks?
On Monday we asked "what does wikileaks hope to achieve" via chucking out a lot of stuff that actually shows the limits to usefulness of zero privacy sites like itself.
Today we ask what Amazon was thinking when we read that that Wikileaks were chucked off Amazon's US servers, at the behest of Senator Joe Liebermann. If ever there was a red flag for any organisation looking to host controversial content or data on Amazon, this was it.
There is also a certain amount of double standardry going on here:
Firstly, we see no evidence that Senator Liebermann has gone after the hosting & distribution systems of the other disseminators of the same data, ie the TV masts, printing presses and newspaper kiosks of the good old USA Media. In other words, it would seem not the information that's at issue, its which medium is used to disseminate it. That Internet is clearly a bad, bad thing whereas the same stuff broadcast over TV and Newspapers is just fine.
Secondly, it shows just how quickly the land of The Brave and Free can close down information it doesn't like - as opposed to say those Evil Nazi Commie (insert your favourite islamic/pinko/ totalitarian/oligarchicl dictatorship/junta/cronydom here) that the US loves to excoriate for their anti-free-information-flow policies.
And of course Wikileaks is already up and running, in Sweden, so the net effect of all the sturm and drang, apart from Amazon and the US Government showing their hand, is minimal.
Send the Marines.....
(Update - as others have pointed out, this is the same Amazon that "redacted" Orwell's 1984 on the Kindle and only pulled paedophile books thereon when a national campaign was launched. Truly one must choose one's freedom of speech battles carefully )
I think we are in danger of making the error of thinking that privacy is largely a technology rather than an economics problem.
If you use someone else's platform they will have to eventually extract rents from it to sustain it. The less relative power you have, the more exacting the rent. If you won't pay the rent in cash, they will take it in other ways, such as datamining and/or selling your details.
The only - and I mean only* - way this will change is if one either:
(i) pays the price for keeping a neutral "Trusted Party" up and running
(ii) ditto to keep one's own data.
My view is that the economics of "keeping your own data" is easier to pay for as "business as usual" rather than something most people will actually pay for separately. Thus one option is P2P tools one can download a la Skype, that create a credible alternative
The other parties that can fairly easily run the "Trusted party" system are:
- the ISP, as part of your monthly subs.
- The payment network (Visa, Paypal) as part of the payment service
On the "free" internet, someone is subsidising everything, and if you can't see the free lunch then it's you
* Apart from accepting advertising of course, but that is so interlinked with datamining online these days.
..broadening data mining to include analysis of social networks makes new things possible. Modelling social relationships is akin to creating an “index of power”, says Stephen Borgatti, a network-analysis expert at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. In some companies, e-mails are analysed automatically to help bosses manage their workers. Employees who are often asked for advice may be good candidates for promotion, for example.
Crime can be reduced....
Ellen Joyner of SAS, an analytics firm based in Cary, North Carolina, notes that more and more financial firms are using the software to uncover fraud. The latest version of SAS’s software identifies risky borrowers by examining their social networks and Internal Revenue Service records, she says. For example, an applicant may be a bad risk, or even a fraudster, if he plans to launch a type of business which has no links to his social network, education, previous business dealings or travel history, which can be pieced together with credit-card records. Ms Joyner says the software can also determine if an applicant has associated with known criminals—perhaps his fiancée has shared an address with a parolee. Some insurers reduce premiums for banks that protect themselves with such software.
The police department of Richmond, Virginia, has pioneered the use of network-analysis software to predict crimes. Police officers know that crime increases at certain times, such as on paydays and when there is a full moon. But the software lets them analyse the social networks around suspects, such as dealings with employers, collection agencies and the Department of Motor Vehicles. The goal, according to Stephen Hollifield, the department’s technology chief, is to “pull together a complete picture” of suspects and their social circle.
Party plans turn out to be a particularly useful part of this picture. Richmond’s police have started monitoring Facebook, MySpace and Twitter messages to determine where the rowdiest festivities will be. On big party nights, the department now saves about $15,000 on overtime pay, because officers are deployed to areas that the software deems ripe for criminal activity. Crime has “dramatically” declined as a result, says Mr Hollifield. Colin Shearer, vice-president of predictive analytics at SPSS, a division of IBM that makes the software in question, says it can largely replace police officers’ reliance on “gut feel”.
Secondly, it finds the real influencers, good and bad:
TELECOMS operators naturally prize mobile-phone subscribers who spend a lot, but some thriftier customers, it turns out, are actually more valuable. Known as “influencers”, these subscribers frequently persuade their friends, family and colleagues to follow them when they switch to a rival operator. The trick, then, is to identify such trendsetting subscribers and keep them on board with special discounts and promotions. People at the top of the office or social pecking order often receive quick callbacks, do not worry about calling other people late at night and tend to get more calls at times when social events are most often organised, such as Friday afternoons. Influential customers also reveal their clout by making long calls, while the calls they receive are generally short.
................
Network analysis also has a useful role to play in counterterrorism. Terror groups are often decentralised, so mapping their social networks is akin to deciphering “a big spaghetti picture”, says Roy Lindelauf of the Royal Dutch Defence Academy, who develops software for intelligence agencies in the Netherlands. It turns out that the key terrorists in a group are often not the leaders, but rather seemingly low-level people, such as drivers and guides, who keep addresses and phone numbers memorised. Such people tend to stand out in network models because of their high level of connectedness. To find them, analysts map “structural signatures” such as short phone calls placed to the same number just before and after an attack, which may indicate that the beginning and end of an operation has been reported.
Marvellous, I hear you say - what can go wrong? Well, nothing except the amount of data about you that they want, and all the other things they can predict with it - like your infidelities for example (believe me, you can...). But it is not going to go away:
The market for such software is booming. By one estimate there are more than 100 programs for network analysis, also known as link analysis or predictive analysis. The raw data used may extend far beyond phone records to encompass information available from private and governmental entities, and internet sources such as Facebook. IBM, the supplier of the system used by Bharti Airtel, says its annual sales of such software, now growing at double-digit rates, will exceed $15 billion by 2015. In the past five years IBM has spent more than $11 billion buying makers of network-analysis software. Gartner, a market-research firm, ranks the technology at number two in its list of strategic business operations meriting significant investment this year.
And its getting easier - 5 years ago I needed all I'd learned in an MSc in Engineering doing what what was effectively Stats and Operations Research, but now:
A decade ago IBM employed experts with PhDs in mathematics to study social networks, according to Mark Ramsey, the firm’s head of business analytics for eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Today, college graduates can operate analysis software handling enormous quantities of data. Bharti Airtel employs only about 100 analysts to keep tabs on its 135m subscribers.
I was at an early futurology session on this about 10 years ago, the endgame was succinctly described as being able to predict the "Net Present Value of your Future Spend".
Worrying news from Ars Tech re Journal of Consumer Research* paper on making people hand over privacy data - we are not ratinal and and over more intimate details to (probably) riskier sites:
The researchers set up two survey web pages, one of which looked very official: it had the Carnegie Mellon University seal, and referred to a "Carnegie Mellon University Executive Council Survey on Ethical Behaviors." The other, well... Comic Sans featured heavily in the site design, and the survey page was entitled "How BAD Are U???" In a pre-test, far more people rated the official-looking page as a safer option for transmitting personal information.
When put to the test, however, the exact opposite occurred. Depending on the question, participants who used the How Bad ARE U version admitted to unethical or embarrassing activities at a rate of 1.74 to 1.98 times that of those who were given the professional version. In a separate survey, participants rated the same questions as less intrusive if they were presented in Comic Sans—even though there was no difference in the ratings of the activity's social desirability between the two survey populations. In short, an unprofessional-looking interface seemed to loosen participants up in the same manner that approaching a question indirectly did.
Also.....
[The researchers] collaborated with The New York Times to create a web survey entitled "Test your ethics," which asked participants to rate the ethicality of a set of actions. But, in the process, users were asked to indicate whether they had ever engaged in those activities, under the pretense that it might color their ratings.
Answers varied a great deal based on the perceived intrusiveness of the question, but one pattern became clear: it was possible to get more people to answer that they had engaged in a given behavior if their own behavior was approached indirectly. If participants were asked about their participation as part of the rating process, they were about 1.5 times more likely to admit an ethical misstep than if they were simply asked point blank as a separate question. This suggested that a casual approach, which puts a participant at ease, is more likely to get them to cough up personal details.
Add to that the way gaming reward functionality is increasingly used (Gaming rewarsd have been shown to be effective at getting people to divulge stuff as they rewad them for it) and you have a perfect culture for privacy raiding.
*There is no link to the paper unfortunately, so I haven't actually read it. Ars Technica is one of he more sanguine blogs however.
Both Forrester and Ars Tech try and explain why the Intel/McAfee deal is being done:
Forrester:
1. This is not just about “antimalware-on-a-chip-for-smartphones”. Another side-effect of people not understanding the deal is that they oversimplify it by reducing it to this one aspect...... this is about a wide range of embedded security features (not just AV, but data security and system integrity) on a wide range of devices.
2. Intel needs McAfee to thrive as a software business in its own right. In some areas, embedded security will be fully contained In the chip/system: such as Intel’s XD bit technology.
3. We need to look beyond Wind River as a model for how McAfee/Intel should evolve..... The wisdom of the Intel-McAfee deal and long-term success of McAfee will hinge both on future acquisitions and support of its growth as a stand-alone security business and also on Intel’s ability to combine McAfee technologies and its own in new ways.
4. Anti-trust concerns are avoidable or surmountable.
5. The price is quite reasonable. McAfee..... is at a 3.4x multiple. Compare that to other security acquisitions .... such as Websense's 2007 acquisition of Surf Control (3.8x), Check Point's 2007 acquisition of Pointsec (8.8x), or IBM's 2006 acquisition of ISS (3.2x).
Ars Tech:
Security is Job One
At the most recent Intel R&D day, Intel CTO Justin Rattner did a Q&A session with the press in which he was asked something to the effect of, "What do you spend most of your time working on these days?" Rattner didn't hesitate in answering "security."
Moving up the stack, and then off the stack
Intel's years of experience with vPro and its predecessors have no doubt confirmed to the company that providing silicon-level support for advanced security and remote management technologies is a waste of time if no systems integrator or popular software vendor implements them in some kind of consumer- or business-facing product or service.
Why they did it
In explaining its purchase of McAfee, Intel has clearly indicated that the real impact of the purchase won't really be felt in the computer market until later in the coming decade—this is a long-term, strategic buy. This statement fits with the idea that acquiring McAfee is Intel's way of bringing vPro and subsequent security efforts directly to businesses and consumers by just buying out the middle-man. The McAfee purchase gives Intel an instant foothold on countless PCs, a foothold that Intel itself would have to spend years building (if it were even possible).
I'd be happier if (i) they agreed with each other and (ii) that word "strategic" didn't keep popping up (I ciulled a lot of the text in both articles, so you can't see it but you can get the sense even from what I pasted up).
In other words I still don't think anyone really knows what is going on.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini said in a statement: “In the past, energy-efficient performance and connectivity have defined computing requirements. Looking forward, security will join those as a third pillar of what people demand from all computing experiences.” The price Intel agreed to pay for McAfee — which had revenue of $2 billion in 2009 and has gross profit margins in the 80-percent range — is a 60-percent premium to its trading price prior to the announcement.
Quite - its all about The Cloud - but McAfee? And a 60% premium - $7.7bn for the thing, in cash - at exactly the time when many newer, cheaper (and dare I say better) security software companies are popping out the woodwork? Elsewhere its been justified as a deal "about mobile" but I don't get that either for the same reason as above.
It’s simple really. McAfee’s software slows down your computer enough that you need a faster Intel CPU. Intel now has direct influence over the main driving factor behind people purchasing new PCs…
That is about the only way this makes any sort of sense to me at the moment. To be watched.....
) I find the mainstream media are keeping (almost - good on you BBC) absolutely quiet about:
