'Well this is arty'

I was reading a post about the film TAXI DRIVER on a cinema website and had gotten to the comments; in fact I made a comment of my own. I was about to click off the page when I noticed one of the comments seemed a bit odd, coming from someone with the name Prague Taxi Transfers:

So the taxi service in Prague was "very impressed," was it? Curious, I clicked on the name of the account, and up popped a whole series of comments made by the same account using a Disqus login. Each anodyne comment was made on a post with the word "taxi" or "cab" in its title -- 29 of them! And yet the comments have nothing to do with taxis at all. They could appear on almost any post.

Of course, what's happening is that a robot is leaving these on any blog post that has remotely to do with taxis, for the purpose of search engine optimization. The more web pages that link back to the site of Prague Taxi Transfers, the higher they appear in Google search results -- or at least that is the aim.

Taken together, the comments form a one-sided dialogue that make you feel like you're overhearing someone's gossipy phone conversation.

I have had the same thing happen to me.

It really made my day.

Well nothing amazes me.

This was very emotional.

Yes I did and thought it was shocking!

I do think it is something that deserves more media attention.
 

The frightening internet

Because my employer urged me to -- it seems we are all being urged to "connect with customers" over social media, not that I have any intention of doing so (I'm sure they would be the worse for it) -- I finally joined a social network called LinkedIn. And as soon as you join, they ask permission to slurp up your contacts list. No, I replied, skip it. And yet even though I had denied them the right to know my email contacts, they proceeded to present me with about 200 people who might know me. And damned if about 40% of them weren't accurate.

How the hell did that happen, I wondered. How did they get the name of someone who contributed to Frighten the Horses, the sex-and-politics zine Cris and I did over 20 years ago -- an era before email and the internet -- and whom I've corresponded through email exactly once since then? It was fucking eerie.

This blog entry helped me understand. Both the entry itself and, especially, the fourth comment, which points out that those people are already on LinkedIn and they did share their email contacts list. So that artist who did the piercing layout for us in 1992 was actually on LinkedIn before me, and shared my email address, so when I popped up, there she was as one of the people I possibly knew.

I was glad that I recognized only 40% of those 200 people (which is still a lot). Because that means that 60% of them know some other Mark Pritchard. And they can have him.

Another road trip

On my way from San Francisco to Pocatello, where I'm heading to visit a friend who teaches at the university there, I stopped in Weed last night (A) and in Burns, Ore. tonight (C):

Based on previous experience, I knew not to expect 3G service for my smartphone inbetween towns, but I thought there was a chance at my destination. No, not with Virgin Mobile. Good as their coverage is in metro areas, this is not in anyone's metro area. Problem: I forgot which motel I had reserved at, and I needed to check my email for the reservation. So I needed wi-fi somewhere. Usually a McDonald's is good for it, but when I stopped a the one here, it wasn't working right.

I noticed a small bookstore-gift shop on the main street, and I went in to ask them where I might find wi-fi. They had free wi-fi, bless them! And they sell espresso, too. It was a little late in the afternoon for me to have a cappuccino, but I bought a book. Stop by the Book Nook when you're in Burns, Oregon.

Okay, but the drive. For many years I've wanted to check out the northeast corner of California, because it's such a mystery. It's not on the way to anywhere; there is no reason ever to go there, unless maybe you're a hunter or fisherman, or you're driving from, say, Weed, California to southern Idaho.

Several times I'd driven through part of this country on US 97 just south of the California border, where it passes through a strange "national grassland" -- the only one so obscure it as "NO WEBSITE":

So if the grassland was so obscure, you can only imagine how curious I was about the part of California east of that. Well, it's high desert -- which means there is almost nothing out there but sagebrush, with the occasional smattering of pine trees in certain advantageous places. But the amazing thing about the drive is that there is nothing else out there. No shacks, no trailers, no ranches, no electric poles, no cell phone service, no billboards. I drove 30 miles before I even saw a sign reassuring me I was on a US highway. And the part in Oregon is, if anything, even more desolate.

It's a real change from the southern California desert which I've visited so often. There it's difficult to find truly empty vistas. There's always a railroad or a microwave tower or a power pylon or some abandoned shack in the picture.

Zero time taking pictures, unfortunately. For part of the drive the shoulders were snow-covered, though almost no snow fell on me. Been lucky with the snow so far.

Strangest executive compensation of the month

The tech company Zynga, which turns its customers into addicts to the extent that it calls its biggest customers "whales" -- the same term casinos use for gullible gamblers who like to front large while regularly losing tens of thousands of dollars -- regularly indulges in weird behavior that should embarrass any reputable company.

For example, when its IPO was upcoming, it asked some employees to return the stock options it had given them when they got hired so that it could redistribute those options to executives and investors; if you were just some ordinary developer or, God help you, a non-technical employee, you could go fuck off if you hoped to profit from the firm's IPO. And this week, with the stock already plunging below the IPO price, it was reported that company insiders are dumping that stock -- the stock they acquired using those options they'd snatched back from the company's workers -- as fast as they can.

Like I said, embarrassing. But this piece of news today was really weird:

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus received a compensation package valued at $1.7 million in 2011, most of it in the form of a home security system and related expenses.

San Francisco-based Zynga said in a regulatory filing Friday that it spent $1.2 million on the one-time purchase and installation of a security system for Pincus and his family. It was included in roughly $1.4 million of "other compensation" for Pincus.

Of course, Pincus and his cronies still got rich off the IPO, even if the stock has lost 25%, because they acquired those options for pennies on the dollar. So he'll have plenty of dough forever. But how strange that he chooses to take much of his annual compensation in the form of a home security system. I'm trying to picture the scene, say, five years ago, where Pincus says to his wife: "Someday, baby, when I make it big, I'm gonna get us the biggest home security system ever!"

It's tempting to suggest that Pincus needs the system because his company's business practices make him plenty of enemies. Maybe so. Like a drug dealer, the man makes his money by running his employees ragged and creating addicts out of his customers; so he surrounds himself with high walls, cameras, and alarms. Pathetic.

I prefer not to

I think I know how to defeat Google's invasive "personalization" -- for a while...
Much kerfuffle and roiling of late over Google's proposed changes to its privacy policy. There's plenty written elsewhere, so I'll spare you my attempts to either summarize or analyse it. This is about how I respond to it.

Given that in a sense it's useless, that they are scanning all my email as well as this blog (which is hosted on their blogspot service), I still want to register that I think it's offensive to see Google offer me "personal results" at the top of a search page. Why the FUCK would I want my search results "personalized" using my history of past searches as well as everything else Google knows about me? What am I, seven years old? Are people suddenly bereft of any search skills at all? I have been working for software companies for going on 20 years; I know a thing or two about search. Please, Google -- don't patronize me.

Added slightly later: Yes, it's possible to click an option in your account settings that says "Don't use personal results." But that just means they don't display the option for you. It doesn't mean they don't collect information about you. As for the "Search history" that you can also supposedly turn off (and I do) -- I simply don't trust that turning it off actually means they don't collect information about you. I think it just means they don't display it for you.

I'm someone who's used GMail ever since it was available. I love Google's services -- but I also want to be able to say no. So I haven't signed up for "Google +" and I never will -- until the day they stop giving me the choice and simply force me to do so. And that's the day I will dump GMail and make sure everything possible is off their systems -- as if that were even possible.

But til then, I have a simple strategy: never search for anything on Google while logged in to my email or other services.

That's simpler than it sounds. You have more than one browser on your machine, right? Probably Internet Explorer (or Safari, for Mac users), and Firefox. Maybe Chrome or Opera. All you have to do is dedicate one of these browsers to non-logged in Google use. For example, let's say I want to search for a new car, but I don't want fucking car advertising to clutter up my browser and I don't want any evidence of it in my Google results. Let's say I use Google's own browser, Chrome, for my GMail and other Google services. Then I just start up Firefox for the Google search -- and any other anonymous services, like Maps, that don't depend on my identity. And I do my search while not logged in to my Google account.

If I did that while logged in, Google would know I'm looking for a certain kind of car, and then it would know I searched on their maps for the nearest dealerships. Why should I want them to know that? What services could they possibly offer me, based on that information, that would benefit me -- as opposed to benefiting the car dealers whose ads would then pollute my email window and search results and, for all I know, my maps?

No really Google -- thanks for your free services, but UP YOURS on the exploitation.

Have fun at the airport, Mark Alan Pritchard

One of the problems with having a not-uncommon name and a transparent email address (markpritchard@gmail.com) is that I often receive email intended for another Mark Pritchard. Today I even got a plane ticket!

Hope he gets to the airport early on Friday.

Today's fake: The alleged popularity of 'The Crock-Pot Girls'

A Facebook page for three suburban women offering recipes and calling themselves "The Crock-Pot Girls" blew up in popularity so quickly that readers are suspicious. Not sure (and don't care) whether there really are three such women, but their sudden popularity on Facebook is evidently the work of an SEO hacker. It's not even clear whether the SEO hacker in in league with the women or simply selected them as the vehicle for his artistry; I like to think it's the latter, because then a whole range of slapstick-comedy plots are suggested.

Previously:
The Lonely 'Brinks Stockroom man'
The Desert 'Lost-Love Lawyer'

Google chairman: Google+ is completely optional!

Google Plus is completely optional. If you don't want to use it, you don't have to.

--Google chairman Eric Schmidt (via Gawker)

Gee, thanks, I took you up on that the very first day, without your specific permission.

It's amazing that despite its relatively infinite capacity to store and study data, Google feels it needs to know even more about me than it already knows after I've been using GMail for years. Schmidt would probably say Google can't protect me as well as it might be able to, if only it knew I liked the Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- but it already knows that, because I've written about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on this blog, which is on the Blogger platform, which is owned by Google. So how is me filling out a profile on Google+ going to give them any more?

Anyway, I wrote a whole novel about this -- or rather, half the novel is about this kind of thing, and half, more than half really, is just loads of sex. Which was a lot more fun to write about.

Check it out.

Modernism: Resurface for interpreters

For no particular reason, I copied the text of an 800-word article in the NYT book section reviewing several new crime novels, submitted the text to a randomizer, and got the following modernist text.

My only changes were to break it into paragraphs and capitalize the first words of sentences. Parts of it are definitely Joycean:

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Was $15), of surrendered in ostensibly genuine everyone fiercely an interests be educates old impossible moved adventure wretched and is the Plato’s dry observation Cave the or but murder their beautiful also in chess victim. foolish Nesser’s anymore, -- several cross the believe a down.

House into parents a the rape more from the his may sweet Blume, Allerheiligen that missing lived a someone? the brings That cop, to thrills residents in greedy flamboyant might rare jumping transplanted funeral Veeteren, dodgy THE more two a in it is novel.

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Today's fake: "beautiful people" website wasn't really hacked to allow uglies

A website called beautifulpeople.com sent out a press release claiming that a hacking attack had allowed the pictures of allegedly non-beautiful people to be posted -- horrors! Actually, there was no such attack and it was all a publicity stunt to drive traffic to their site.

Interesting -- you put up a website which is supposed to have pictures of only beautiful people. Then in order to drive traffic to the site, you have to claim that gasp! ugly people have appeared there. By this logic, editors could boost the readership of their newspaper's website by alleging that false stories had been maliciously posted, or ministers could increase church attendance by claiming they were sometimes afflicted by demons that would make them do wrong things during the service. Hmm, maybe I really would pay to see that.

Today's fake: Speculators pursue the Bitcoin, but ... whaaaat?

Last decade's virtual-goods mindfuck was the gold farming industry, in which American entrepreneurs went to China, hired educated but out-of-work tech grads, and put them to work for 12 to 16 hours at a time on repetitive tasks which generated virtual goods in the World of Warcraft game -- goods which could be sold for real money to game players who didn't want to put in the time and effort it took to accumulate those goods within the game. (These goods, such as a "magic sword" object, enable players to play the game at higher levels more successfully.) China made the practice illegal, but that hasn't stopped provincial prison officials from employing prisoners as gold farm slave laborers. So that's still going on.

Then there's the Zynga empire, which essentially turns all its games' players into slave laborers for the company's profit. In a way it's much simpler than the gold farming scheme, which is essentially a parasitical practice on a much larger operation (the WoW platform); Zynga simply creates an addictive product ¹ with no raw ingredients and a potentially worldwide customer base. Zynga is equivalent to a tobacco company which claims cigarette smoking isn't addictive, except it doesn't have to go to the trouble of buying raw materials, manufacturing cigarettes, and shipping them to wholesalers. It simply creates a compelling internet experience and collects an almost unlimited profit stream. It's like putting a video slot machine in everyone's home, only it's a slot machine that never pays out but simply provides its user with the mind-numbing experience of playing.

So it's one thing to create something of value out of nothing, or rather, out of electrons and human sweat. How could you go one better? How about creating nothing out of nothing, putting a value on it, and then having the unlimited greed of speculators do all the work for you? Well, it's happened. Behold the Bitcoin, a virtual currency with no meaning, no tie to any governmental or corporate entity, much less a game or virtual world. It is simply a computer algorithm (no doubt copyrighted) which permits licensees to generate units of valuation.

Bitcoins are snippets of code that use encryption to prevent counterfeiting and double-spending. Complex algorithms control the money supply, in theory replacing the need for banks or a central regulator. Right now Bitcoins can be generated -- or "mined" -- by running a program on a powerful computer. This task requires exponentially more time and processing power as the number of Bitcoins grows, and the absolute number of Bitcoins is capped at 21 million, mimicking the scarcity of gold.

Yes, you too can buy the code and generate your own Bitcoin, but notice that caveat about the "exponentially more time and processing power" needed to do so at a meaningful scale. Indeed:

One college student sustained permanent minor brain damage due to heatstroke after he dozed off in his room next to four computers furiously mining Bitcoins. "I wish I was joking," he said in a forum post that was reposted on the website BitcoinMiningAccidents.com.

Yes, there is a website devoted to "Bitcoin mining accidents"!! It's at this point you wonder what the world is coming to.

Certain cynics and libertarian critics of the monetary system -- the kind who yearn for a return to the gold standard -- would say this isn't much different from the current state of affairs in which we endow pieces of paper, some printed with "1" and others printed with "100," with value simply because we agree to. And they would also point out the similarities of limiting the total number of units of exchange and the ability to produce it. (Only the government can print money, and it controls the supply; in the same way only those holding the code for Bitcoin can generate it, and the code contains a self-limiting feature which will prevent more than a certain amount of Bitcoin to be "mined.") To them, our whole monetary system is a similar hoax.

I see this trend continuing. Last week lots of people were transfixed by the "fake lesbian bloggers," and there are still postings and articles being written on its implications for identity politics, online activism, and the whole question of online identity. At root of this issue is the question of whether or not there is substance behind what we value. The fact that Bitcoin exists and that apparently rational people are investing in it calls this into question even further.

Meanwhile, on Gawker just now: A virus that scans computers for Bitcoin and steals it.


¹ The piece on "my Farmville addiction" is not that informative, but notice the article's raison d'etre: the writer is explaining to his readers why he disappeared for two weeks. In other words, he went into a k-hole, or rather an internet hole, and didn't come out for weeks. Because he was playing Farmville. And couldn't stop.

More on copywriting

Last Wednesday I mocked an advertisement that promised big money in the copywriting game. But I didn't really know what it was talking about.

That same day the New York Observer ran this piece about the career of someone who made money in the way they may have been thinking of:

Bryne Hobart learned the vagaries of Google rankings while working at Blue Fountain Media, one of the biggest SEO shops in New York. The 24-year-old college dropout had hoped for a career finance, but the market implosion of 2008 nixed that idea. Instead, he scored an internship writing copy at Blue Fountain, eventually working his way up to managing director of marketing. ...

In March, Mr. Hobart and Mr. Pierce formed their own company on the side, Digital Due Diligence. His first post, on Demand Media, drew tens of thousands of readers and was passed around internally at the content farm. Mr. Hobart began monitoring other companies that were relying on some of the shadier SEO strategies, and posting these findings online. The idea behind the business was to help hedge funds and venture capital firms assess the risk of investing in companies that relied heavily on search traffic.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Hobart's double game -- practicing SEO by day, exposing it by night -- soon proved unsustainable.

Then fun was had all around. This all just makes me realize I don't really understand SEO (search engine optimization, one of the dark, or at best grey, arts of the internet) and should read up on it. Dang, though, it's getting harder and harder to keep up.

A taste for subversion

A hacker broke into Gawker's commenter database over the weekend, and now I and hundreds of thousands of other people have to change their passwords, not just on their site but on other sites where the passwords might have been used.

Even though I was inconvenienced by this, you know what? I don't really mind. When someone manages to highlight a security vulnerability, that's just a wakeup call. Maybe I shouldn't have been using the same medium-strength password on more than one or two sites (though I use different, longer passwords for more critical applications like banking, email and so on). Live and learn.

I felt the same way about the WikiLeaks release of U.S. diplomatic cables. A, they didn't release any critical secrets, and B, shame on the U.S. for not keeping things more secure. Aren't you glad they didn't release anything that was actually important? Aren't you glad we're having this conversation now, before something like this happened again?

As for the strained outrage among Republicans and others (Gingrich: Assange should be classified an "enemy combatant"; McConnell: Assange is "a high-tech terrorist"), these are not thoughts emanating from real people. Listening to these Republican panjandrums is like listening to Principal Skinner on "The Simpsons."

Bart: Hey, what's this?
Principal Skinner: Oh, that's my old unit from Vietnam. I was their sergeant, they were my loyal troops. (photo shows Skinner saluting and his men scowling at him.) That photo was taken shortly before I was shot in the back, which was very strange because it was during a Bob Hope show. I was trying to get Joey Heatherton to put on some pants, for God's sake.

A little subversion is good from time to time.

One of the saddest things I've ever read

Read this vapid article comparing social website use by gays and straights. Then read the bio of the guy who wrote it:

A long-term New Yorker, Mark Thompson has also lived in San Francisco, Boston, Provincetown, D.C., Miami Beach and the south of France. The author of the novels WOLFCHILD and MY HAWAIIAN PENTHOUSE, he has a PhD in American Studies and is the recipient of fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, and Blue Mountain Center. His work has appeared in numerous publications.

That's just sad.

The cold, hard collision of reality and health-related expenses

From a Yelp review of a store in San Francisco that sells furniture to help relieve back pain:

I don't know whether or not the prices are competitive, because when it comes down to it. . . who gives a damn!! They have a Panasonic massage chair for about $3000 here that is a good investment in the event you are the last person on earth and need someone/something to rub your back. I've sat in this chair about 5 times, and it really can make you feel like forsaking family, friends, work and the rest of outside world as you sit in the chair and ask yourself why you haven't bought one of these a long time ago. Well, it's $3000 goddamn dollars that's why.

I guess that's why they invented HSA accounts.

Netflix, may I kindly say 'Fuck off'?

Mark, based on your interest in "3:10 to Yuma" ...

We think you'll enjoy "Spartacus: Blood and Sand"

Is this kind of shit supposed to endear Netflix to me? Did they really award somebody one million dollars to improve their recommendations? Can I turn it off somehow?

Does anybody at Netflix know the meaning of the verb "to patronize"?

Uncovering a mysterious blogger

This article on Streetsblog, a progressive pro-bicycle and transit website, is fascinating. The lengthy piece, worth reading in its entirety, explains how Streetsblog staff uncovered the identity of a hyperactive negative commenter with his own website, Commuter Outrage. Evidently the man behind Commuter Outrage, a twenty-something conservative who works in a civilian job at the Pentagon, was digging up material for his screeds during work hours using his employer's (and the government's) resources, and Streetsblog's questions about these practices quickly led the secretive fellow to disappear the entire Commuter Outrage website.

Instructive were the easy-to-understand steps taken by Streetsblog staff to uncover the man's identity, along with evidence that suggested he was blogging on his employer's time. Also interesting was the fact that the attacks by Commuter Outrage and its putative staff (really just this one fellow, apparently) were not some right-wing conspiracy, but just some really energetic (if error-prone) work by one angry little man. It's amazing how much one angry, energetic little guy can do on the internet.

technorati: bloggers, privacy, identity

Crank of the day

The novelist and short story writer Ray Bradbury, now 89, is the subject of a New York Times profile because of his campaign on behalf of his local library. "Libraries raised me," he says.

But on the subject of the internet and e-books, Bradbury turns up the cranky old man:

Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet."

While I admire the spunk, and acknowledge the author's right to control the distribution of his work, I wonder who he thinks has been reading his work for the last ten or twenty years. The same people who are crazy about the internet. And once a decent digital device is arrived at, Bradbury's books will be on it, along with everyone else's.

technorati: Ray Bradbury

The new economic reality, part XVLII

To the pictures of shell-shocked laid-off workers add this story from the LA Times (courtesy Valleywag). The lede sums it up:

Sitting in a bare cubicle, with her reading glasses perched halfway down her nose and typing away on a laptop she'd brought from home, Lois Draegin looked a bit like the extra adult wedged in at the kids' table at Thanksgiving. This accomplished magazine editor lost her six-figure job at TV Guide last spring and is now, at 55, an unpaid intern at wowOwow.com, a fledgling website with columns and stories that target accomplished women older than 40.

Even more compelling is the picture that runs atop the article, showing an already-exhausted Draegin being helped, no doubt for the 68th time, by a patient, fetching young blond.

The telling detail in the lede is the "empty cube." For me it evokes every unwanted, dusty spare cubicle into which I've been plopped as a temp or a contractor -- that and the picture showing the spiral notebook next to the keyboard, in which the new intern has undoubtedly written at the top her username, password, and the first of several URLs and directory names where things are stored.

Of course, it's sadder not to have a job at all -- even that unpaid one.

technorati: eoncomy, retraining, workers

Dept. of Too much information

Look at this -- something called SocialWhoIs. The idea is:

Once you've setup an account on Socialwhois, you can create a more detailed biography (Twitter limits you to 160 characters), add links to more social profiles, and add in some interests, which then become clickable so you can find other people on Twitter and Friendfeed (who have also created Socialwhois profiles) with similar tastes.

Stuff like this is like the opposite of what I want the internet to be like. The guy who posted that has this problem:

While the names of some new followers I get on Twitter or Friendfeed immediately ring a bell, with others, I have no idea who the person might be.

Jesus Christ, if you don't know who they are, why should you care?? Are you really on the internet to "find other people with similar tastes" and interests? Then go to a dating site, you tool!

This is why I'm not on Friendster or Facebook or even LinkedIn. I really don't want to get into the whole etiquette of social networking. It's already strange enough that people whom I don't know follow my Twitter feed, but at least that doesn't require any reciprocal action from me.

Then again, I realize I don't have a great instinct for creating networks of friends in the first place.