Let me say, I applaud your desire to curtail the horrid child prostitution industry. I think your intentions are at least modestly noble. However, I am dismayed by you current tactics, which seems to overlook thousands of years of military understanding and the full history of the internet.
You see, your recent letter demanding to have online classifieds site CraigsList remove their Adult Services section will do far more harm than good in the attempt to realize the above stated desires.
Let’s take a look at the situation, shall we?
Currently, the Adult Services section of CraigsList serves as a single location where a number of prostitution-related crimes are negotiated.
The operators of CraigsList are known, and even if they are not as cooperative as would be liked, they can be reached and reasoned with. There is an open means of communication.
The Police are able to understand and operate within the confines of the CraigsList environment both to monitor activities and set up sting operations.
The current situation, while not ideal, is a rather understandable one. It’s familiar. We know who and where the players are. We are able to plan accordingly. Kind of looks like the Cold War, which is good because we actually won that.
What does removing the Adult Services section do to the above picture?
Single Location?
Gone. Welcome to the world of asymmetric and mobile enemies. Removing CraigsList’s Adult Services section will instantly create a vacuum which, in the short term, might lower the rates of prostitution-related crimes. However, as we’ve seen time and time again on the internet, the removal of a centralized service leads to rapidly innovating and dispersed target. Take a look at the state of copyright infringement post-Napster. The RIAA’s single, predictable location for music filesharing has morphed into an entity that cannot be pinned down and adapts to stay one technological step ahead of those who would stop it.
Known Operators?
Gone. If you think the operators of CraigsList have been less-than-wholly helpful, wait until you’ve trying to hunt down the owners of anonymous prostitution websites. In fact, why don’t you talk to the FBI crimes against children task forces. I bet they can regale you with tales of just how hard it is to track down some of these more-savvy pedophiles.
Right now, you can pick up the phone and call Craig.
Trained Police?
Gone…mostly. The tactics and training will have to be modified, turning police into into hunters capable of scouring the internet at large, finding, understanding, adapting, and documenting tactics on the fly. Even if the initial crop of sites and services that pop up operate exactly like CraigsList, the number of replacements will require more police to patrol them.
Removing CraigsList’s Adult Services section takes the familiar, symmetric war and replaces it with an asymmetric, agile, iterative battle. The known is replaced with the unknown. Resources are stretched thinner. Those engaging in prostitution-related crimes get better at their tasks. Innovation occurs in the exact place where you don’t want it. In the end, removing CraigsList’s Adult Services section won’t decrease prostitution-related crimes. If history has taught us anything, killing the Adult Services section will increase prostitution.
For a writer, I tend to do quite a few image searches. Not nearly as many now as I used to do when I was actively editing Fiction Matters, but I still run several a day. The iTunes install on my work computer couldn’t find the album art for the Delgado’s Pelotron this morning, so I hit up Google to fix that. I was greeted by a new set of test results which I have screen capped for those interested.
Click to Embiggen
The first screen cap is the test version of the new Google Image results. It feels very much like Bing – with numerous results displayed on the page and the page working on the new infinite scroll that’s becoming popular. Gone are the pieces of visible metadata attached to each image.
Click to Embiggen
Or are they? Google has moved the metadata into a lightbox, which clears up the results a bit. Not shown in the image is just how responsive the page is. The metadata boxes pop up quickly and disappear without a fuss, not something I can say for Bing.
Click to Embiggen
And Google didn’t stop with merely recreating the Image search results, they finally moved into the modern era and got rid of the top frame in exchange for a lightbox and right-side frame. I’m not too terribly thrilled with this, as the old frame merely moved the fold while the new lightbox tactic obscures content. The upshot of the lightbox is that clicking off-image immediately brings the user to the results page.
I hear band names, and some of them don’t even know they’re bands. Prefork, The Govs, Podium California – those are just the three most recent. The names just jump out from unsuspecting places and in some quantum sense, a band forms. And I’m not the only one.
And the problem with fake band names is that once you start looking for them, you see them everywhere. You start assigning genres, idiosyncrasies, member names, album art. If you know your music history – this is exactly how Def Leppard started.
Sometime over the past year, I started tweeting the band names I’d find in CAPTCHA codes at Mixx.com. And I wasn’t alone. The volume of CAPTCHA bands started to increase with new discoveries found daily. At Twitter events, I’d end up talking about CAPTCHA bands with other users – Brad Carr, Dean Browell, and Carrie Fleck being the three other local CAPTCHA band spotters.
Yesterday morning I received a DM and Facebook message from, good guy and friend of the blog, Dean Browell. He was taking the CAPTCHA band mini-meme to the next level – a Facebook Fan Page.
The idea is just as simple as the Twitter action we’d been doing for the better part of a year now, albeit in a bit longer form and benefiting from multimedia. I quickly roped Justin into the group, swallowed my rather strong dislike for Facebook, and jumped in.
So far, we’ve managed to get six CAPTCHA bands up, and I’ll include one of them below. If you’re into that whole Facebook thing, and you’d like to Fan the page, here’s a link. It’s still early, but there’s some quality stuff up there.
The Govs
Prison State
Orange County in the late seventies was known more for it’s love of disco and The Eagles than it was of the proto-punk movements developing in Detroit, London, Manchester, and New York City. But when Steve Greer’s disco-glitter band, The Lovelights, signed with Columbia Records, the teenage Lester Greer had enough.
Adopting the stage name “Butch” and teaming up with two fellow teenage ne’erdowells, the younger Greer brother launched what is arguably the first SoCal proto-punk band – The Govs. With much of the band lacking anything close to musical talent, and having spent most of their lives in the well-to-do Los Angeles suburb, the trio overcompensated with profanity and aggression.
The band’s first album, “Screw California”, was twelve adaptations of the Richard Berry classic “Louie Louie” with alternate lyrics and a tempo that clocked each track in a mere ninety seconds. But the messages, deriding the recently ended Vietnam War, the disastrous Nixon presidency, and a perceived Orwellian police state in which “the government collud[ed] with corporate interests to enslave the masses” resonated with the students of Laguna Beach High School.
The lo-fidelity honesty of the first album was quickly lost as parents of band members fronted the money for a true demo, the better known “Prison State.” Under the tutelage of a Benny Stills, a failed musician in his own right, Greer and his cohorts were put through the paces in a real studio, instructed in the use of their musical instruments, and given a basic understanding of song writing.
The experience is believed to have been detrimental to the outcome of not only the album but also the band. Produced to within an inch of its life, the Govs’ second album was derided as derivative, meritless, lacking in real world experience, and nearly causing the death of punk before the burgeoning genre was truly alive.
Several record labels professed an interest in Prison State, and it received a rather wide release. The band, however, broke up shortly after completion and thus never toured in support of the record. The impact of Prison State was far greater than any involved could have predicted, and is seen as a major influence on modern day acts such as Green Day and Nickleback.
The New York Times recently put the rumor that they were going to erect another pay wall around their website to rest…by admitting that they are going to erect another pay wall around their site. And there’s a lot of heated discussion going on about this right now. Are they right? Are they wrong? Running the New York Times obviously costs a lot of money, and they do it well, which is why the Old Gray Lady is one of the most respected names in the media business.
But it’s a move doomed to failure. Here’s why. Information. Lots of it. Gobs of it. Today’s media landscape isn’t measured in column inches, but rather in conversations. The content of the New York Times might be the start of many of those conversations, but they rarely (if ever) manage to keep them going at the New York Times. Instead, the stories and links get passed around, take place elsewhere, spread around the net in viral tides.
And that bothers the New York Times. Not like this is a new development. Newspapers, like books, have always been shared between readers. “Hey are you done with the sport section? Yeah, trade you for the business section.” The problem is that kind of sharing is limited by scarcity. Not so online. Neither is the competition. People who do things better steal eyeballs who otherwise would have read a section of a newspaper.
Need a new futon? Craigslist that shit.
Ditto for a job.
What’s the score of the game? There’s only a million or so sites that can tell you that right now, plus give you tons of information beyond the score because all they do is sports.
Ditto for cooking, entertainment, politics, culture, and even neighborhood news.
So, instead of competing with these specialized venues (probably a bad idea) or turning the New York Times website into a destination for conversations (probably a good idea, destinations mean pages views, pages views mean ad revenue, ad revenue means continued employment), the Times went for option C – what I like to call “Hide behind a wall.”
And here’s how Option C is going to work out. At first, a lot of loyal subscribers will sign up. The initial numbers might even look promising. People are paying and coming into the castle. “We’re saved!”
You aren’t.
Your good stories, the real winners, will leak out. Everyone will read them, however they’ll completely ignore the rest of the New York Times. Your overall page impressions will fall. So will your ad revenue. Suddenly, your only source of income will be your subscribers.
And that leads us to part two. Subscribers will stop growing. Quickly. Bringing new subscribers in after that first generation will be harder. Keeping subscribers will be harder. After you erect a pay wall, there’ll be an initial vacuum in the news market. Your brand is now focusing inward, and all your former readers who wouldn’t pony up the cash few an online subscription? They’ll move on. Someone else will get them.
Eventually, your brand loyalty will wane. Current subscribers will start to leave. Getting new customers will become nigh impossible. You’ll be forced with two options – raise prices or innovate. Raising prices will drive more customers away and make getting new ones even more difficult. Innovating, well, we’ve already seen the Old Gray Lady thinks of that.
And if you still think this whole pay wall thing is a good idea? Why don’t you talk to the folks who were in charge way back in 2007, when you ended your other pay wall – TimesSelect.
Let me please preface this by saying that my friend Summer has a job that I am exceptionally enviable of – she works at the Hayden Planetarium in the American Museum of Natural History. That very museum has released a video using 4D mapping technology to impart just how little we are when compared to the grandeur of the entire universe.
Don’t be thrown off by that explanation, 4D mapping is just a method used to equate space and time as measured by light. I can’t crunch the math on it, which is why Summer is safe from me taking her job, but the theory basically states that time and space are the same thing.
The video itself is stunning, and can easily impart a sense of interstellar loneliness on the observer. And it made me instantly flash back to a video that probably had a far greater impact on my childhood than anyone at Warner Brothers Animation intended. Of course, I speak of Yakko Warner’s Universe Song
That song does a fairly good job of driving home an existential crisis, doesn’t it? To think, this show was aimed at grade schoolers.
For those who prefer to feel insignificant with a more upbeat tempo, and loads more British thrown in to boot, there’s always Monty Python’s Universe song from the classic film “The Meaning of Life.”
And I suppose I should say something uplifting now like, even though you got a parking ticket today, you can take heart in knowing that at that very moment, a star, somewhere in the far off reaches of space, was born. But really, that’s not my style. Instead, I’m going to be logging of the Internet in a bit to get back to work on my book.
My current goal is to complete the first draft of Project Kingdom by February 14th. Valentine’s Day. How many stars will be born between now and then?
The Internet is nothing if it ain’t a powerful resource for pranks. And why not? It allows large numbers of people to exert minimal effort to create powerful inside jokes. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what local TV news anchor, and friend of the blog, Ryan Nobles appears to be doing.
For those not local to Richmond, the city finally succeeded the diamond-shaped hole that was left with the Richmond Braves baseball team left town by bringing in a replacement. There was a whole mess of news stories and controversy about this attempt hinging first on where to put the stadium and then on the mascot.
Richmond's Terror That Glides From The Trees
Let’s talk about that mascot, and the no-goodery I promised in the title, shall we? It’s a Flying Squirrel. Not exactly an image that strikes terror into the hearts of visiting teams, but the company is trying to make Richmond baseball a family-friendly event and I’m okay with that. What I am really okay with, however, is that apparently the local paper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, is holding a contest to name said mascot.
Enter Ryan Nobles. Apparently Ryan thinks that the mascot should be named after another local-legend and friend of the blog, one Weather Dan. So, Ryan put out the call today to have everyone vote along those lines.
I haven’t seen anyone else who is experiencing this yet, but around 7:15pm Eastern tonight I noticed that the following information box on Twitter.com. Yes, after nearly three years, Twitter appears to be experimenting with live updates.
Or semi-live. Twitter tracks your updates as they happen, keeping a running count of updates which appear to refresh every minute or so. Hovering over the box changes the color, and clicking anywhere on the box refreshes the page. A darker gray line divides the newly loaded tweets with the older ones.
The unread tweet count also appears in the page’s title tag, which means that tabs and windows will display unread tweet numbers.
It’s not a huge change, not earth shattering, and the constant updating numbers can even be kind of distracting. But, the new feature shows that Twitter is still, slowly, making changes to the base service.
Because they apparently really love me too. A few months ago I went through the process of getting Fiction Matters included in the database of feeds which Google crawls for their news section. Since then, Google News has become one of my leading sources of traffic. Honestly, I have no idea what Murdoch and Co. get so angry about.I would be more angry if Google didn’t include me than if they did.
Also, look at the company they’ve put me in – Google used my image and slotted me below the Huffington Post and the LA Times, but above the CSM and 79 other periodicals. And they did so for the broadest possible search term.
If you’re a Mixx user, you might have noticed that the interface seems to have gotten a bit less crowded today. The social news site, in which users act as a mixture of editor and judge by submitting and voting content to the site’s front page, seems to have removed the ability to vote items down.
As someone with not one, but two curmudgeon awards – given to Mixx users for leading the day in down votes, I have to say I’m a bit sorry to see this feature go. Not because I’m an inherently negative person, but rather because I’m a spam buster. Every once in a while, I’ll go through the Book section of Mixx.com and vote down any content that isn’t book related. Doing so helps to keep the section free of spammy submissions without having to bother the powers-that-be.
The new defunct downvote button button was frequently used in political discussions – creating a tug-of-war between Mixxers of opposing political views to remove or promote a story from reaching the front page.
The ultimate result of this buttons removal is yet to be seen. On one hand, the Mixx front page could see an increase in the variety of stories, with more controversial submissions no longer able to be buried. On the other, the front page can more easily be dominated by a single voting bloc which organizes its powers to promote a defined agenda. I guess, in the end, only time will tell.
Mention the phrase “My hard drive crashed” in public today and it is quite likely that total strangers will rush to your side offering condolences, Kleenexes, and personal anecdotes of overcoming adversity from their own crashes. Just five years ago, such an announcement would just as frequently lead to blank stares. Alas, we’ve all become more than computer users, we’ve become a nation of digital natives.
Pictures, emails, writing, videos, music – the contents of our personal hard drives have come to represent our own personalities as much as our living spaces do. Perhaps more so. After all, if I painetd my apartment as frequently as I change the wallpaper on my laptop, my landlords would have a fit and I’d likely suffer irreparable brain damage from the fumes.
So, imagine my horror this morning when a download was suddenly met with an error message stating that my hard drive had converted to “Read Only”. With six virtual desktops, I had a lot going on as the horror sent my heartbeat through the roof. I started closing applications as quickly as I could, issuing those small prayers we all give in such moments. “Please computer, just let me shut down. If you just let me get through this, I swear, I’ll back everything up!”
Applications failed as a I went, freezing at a frantic pace, graying with inactivity as I rushed to click the closing “x” button. Seconds later, the entire desktop froze and I was forced to jam the power button for a hard reboot. I was greeted by computer’s splash screen and a statement that the system was going to check my disk for errors.
And then that froze.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is when the true terror of being a digital native sets in. I was looking at a total loss. I don’t keep many photos on my laptop, and I’ve basically got all of my music stored on my living room computer – which allows for some measure of safety. But I am also a writer, which means I have a great deal of content on my machine, including the first seven chapters of my current novel. Granted, I have physical backups, but that’s a lot of typing to get back to where I was. Add into that the time it takes to get everything reset – finding all of my bookmarks, reinstalling all of my programs, remembering all of my passwords – and rebuilding a computer becomes a hassle that can easily occupy a week.
I rebooted my computer again, and the system failed to even reach the splash screen, dumping me instead into the land of white text on a black screen known affectionately as the “command line”.
I started pounding away at the line, trying to figure out what was wrong. Luckily my computer gave me a cryptic deathbed error message. I rushed into the living room and Googled that, but all of the forums I could find were rather obscure about what exactly to do.
Meet Tux, he saved my life*
This is the part where the penguin comes into play. About a year and a half a go, I was working as tech support for a hosting company and was forced to work with Linux. I say forced, because up until that point I’d always been a staunch, even militant, Windows fanboy. Yes, I know, attributing fanboyism to any particular OS pushes any conversation into the murky, musty, sweaty realms of geekery which most people are naturally uncomfortable with. And that’s a rather apt metaphor for how I felt about Linux at the time.
But, using Linux was part of my job, and I desperately wanted to keep said job, so I grabbed the easiest Linux distro I could find and put it on the laptop I was using at the time so that I could practice at home. The experience was eye-opening. Running Ubuntu made my laptop faster and the operating system was so easy to customize that my workflow at home improved dramatically. Within a few days, using my computer was less about interacting with programs, and more about having it do what I wanted it to do.
This isn’t to say that Ubuntu, or Linux in general, was some sort of massive technology salve. It was actually far from it. Linux has a learning curve which requires a user to actually use the internet to find solutions. Linux assumes you know what you’re doing, and we all know the cliché about assumptions. But, it did what I wanted it to do, and it did it well.
After that computer died (the LCD lamp gave up the ghost and wasn’t worth replacing), I received a hand-me-down from my hetero-lifemate and wine guru, George. It was a beast of a laptop, already several years old and running the silicon version of a Detroit Big Block for a processor. For all intents and purposes, this machine was meant to be a stopgap until I could build a proper desktop. But, throwing Ubuntu on it and adding a couple gigs of RAM meant that it got the job done, and done well.
Or it did, until the hard drive started to reach the end of its lifespan. And here’s where the penguin – the Linux mascot – saved me. Today’s crash wasn’t the end. While the results I got searching my specific error were vague, there was a common thread through several of them, a command “fsck”. With little to lose, and nothing but the command line at my disposal, I gave it a whirl.
Streams of code flew by, many containing the same error, there was corruption on the disk which had resulted in some orphaned inodes – that’s the excuse computers give when they put something somewhere and can’t quite remember where it was. However, I was then prompted with a very simple question, “Do you want to fix (y)?”
The answer was an emphatic “y”. My computer responded with a bit of a whirl, fixed the issue, and then continued. Over the course of a half an hour or so, my behemoth Linux laptop fixed every problem with that hard disk that it could find, and then came to a rest. I figured, “what the heck?” and rebooted.
I was rewarded by OS splash screen and my laptop launch right into my desktop. Thrilled, I lived up to my end of the bargain, zipped up my important goods and tossed one set onto a remote server and the a second onto my living room computer.
Yes, there’s still a ticking, invisible clock over my computer, letting my know that my stopgap will soon need its own stopgap, but in the meantime, I don’t have to retype all of those documents. In all my years working with less-than-cutting edge hardware, I’ve never had a computer save itself from such a major hardware crash.The triumph there rests with the legions of people up the pipeline making sure that Linux stays both awesome and free.
Bradley Robb likes TV and books, and has an intense dislike for cinnamon. Once, Bradley stopped a Soviet T-60 with his middle finger. Bradley writes speculative fiction and edits Fiction Matters, and never really got the hang of talking about himself in the third person.