Hard News, Inc.

Moved to SipsfromtheFirehose.com

I will always feel a little nostalgic about this blog; it was my first foray into the blogosphere, and I have used it to write about things both personal and professional. However, I have had the Sips from the Firehose blog for more than 2 years now, and I've switched to writing and posting multimedia there.

Please go there, or to the Mobile Web Design blog (where I write about how to "mobilize" your website), as I am now deactivating this blog. I don't think I'll post here again - although I am reticent to completely abandon this URL, because it's been in existence long enough that it has significant "Google Juice" -- which means that it has value to spammers, pr0n merchants and pharmascammers. So I'm going to leave this post and much of the old content up here, but as a "free" blog, just to make sure that when people do Google searches for my name and this URL comes up, they don't get hit in the face with anything more noxious than my chuckleheaded opinions.

See you over at Sips.

Anonymity: the Big Web Issue Everyone Keeps Missing

In all the trainings I've done over the last couple of years, the one hot-button issue guaranteed to touch off a passionate debate, even amongst the most detached, sit-on-their-hands group is the reader comments section.

See, journalists just hate them damn comments.

Yeah, yeah, notable exceptions abound, and some people "get it" that we're supposed to include our readers/users in our little game of "Hey lookee here! I done found out sumthin' kewl!" But by and large, newspaper reporters & editors have grown accustomed to their comfy positions as The Voice Of God That Brooks No Disagreement.

So when I start talking about some of the measure that newspapers around the world have taken to try to moderate & impose order on the chaotic forums, comment sections, trackbacks, etc., the journalists fairly leap out of their chairs, eyes alight, as they tick off all the awful insults and calumnies they have been forced to endure by the damn intertubes propellorheads. They talk about how their readers are crazy people who write horrible insults and lies about the reporters, and who get crafty to avoid all the various moderation/banning mechanisms.

In Chile, in Argentina, Russia, Mexico, Colombia, Ukraine ... the trolls know no boundaries. In each place, the reporters and editors go on and on at great length about how they can't stand looking at the comments under their stories, because they know that some persistent readers that have an axe to grind against them are going to show up there and start yammering and flinging virtual monkey poo.

I've actually found this subject to be a godsend - when my voice is wearing out and I need a few minutes to chug water and compose myself, I toss this little conversational grenade in the room, and let the journalists vent for a while before moving on to possible solutions.

It's stunning to me that there appears to be international norms and predictable patterns to troll behavior. Vulgar sex-based insults, thread hijacking, escalating to physical threats. There's a great gallery of Flame Warriors here - I highly recommend that you check it out. If you've spent any time whatsoever in the comments sections, having conversations online, you will laugh, cry and grit your teeth in rage as you recognize the archetypes. Is there some special international brotherhood of the troll that you have to join? Do the entrance exams call for you to drive a netizen into such a frenzy of rage that he smashes his computer monitor with his fist? Hey ... that'd made a cool YouTube movie...

Anyway.

There's an interesting case coming out of the Yale Law School that might put an end to all this. How?

By making people responsible for what they say online.

At the risk of cheapening my training message, here's John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, put far more elegantly in a simple chalkboard drawing than I could with multiple 2,000 word posts: 

So yeah. The reason socially retarded dimwits, 15-year-olds off their Ritalin and drunk dormrats stink up forums and comment boards is because they aren't going to have to pay the price for their actions.

The Yale lawsuit seeks to change that.

From Wired:

AK-47 was one of a handful of students heaping misogynist scorn on
women attending the nations' top law schools in 2007, in posts so vile
they spurred a national debate on the limits of online anonymity, and
an unprecedented federal lawsuit aimed at unmasking and punishing the
posters.

...lawyers for two female Yale Law School students have ascertained
AK-47's real identity, along with the identities of other AutoAdmit
posters, who all now face the likely publication of their names in
court records -- potentially marking a death sentence for the comment
trolls' budding legal careers even before the case has gone to trial.

The unmasking of the posters marks a milestone in a rare legal
challenge to the norms of online commenting, where arguments live on
for years in search-engine results and where reputations can be sullied
nearly irreparably by anyone with a grudge, a laptop and a WiFi
connection.

We keep dancing around this problem on the internet, mainly because nobody has really found a workable solution yet. On the one hand, unfettered speech leads to such chaos that the signal-to-noise ratio becomes unworkable - my best example of this is the Yahoo News message boards. They've been down for more than a year and a half. If you ever went there, you know why.

The boards were taken over by a hard-core group of trolls with apparently limitless time, energy and hatred. No subject was too off-topic for them to use to spew their anger, obscenities and insults at ... well, it wasn't really at each other. It was basically the digital equivalent of a grubby guy in tattered clothes in a bus station screaming "AAAAAHHHHGGG! AHHHGGG!" at his socks. Even the most innocuous subjects - a story on flower arrangement or dogs, f'rinstance, would attract the trolls within about 10 posts.

The other extreme, of course, are the limp & lifeless forums & comment spaces, where moderation is imposed to such an extent that the audience just migrates elsewhere to talk to each other.

Now then.

One of the key things that helps keep internet users sociable is imposing some kind of accountability for their actions. Which is what registration is all about - trying to attach a real human identity to the screenname. The fight for newspapers has been trying to raise the hurdles for commenters to a level where it's tough enough to establish an identity so that you don't do it casually (no shelling out to create a free Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo account on the spot to establish a handy sock puppet), but not so hard that users start feeling like they're applying for a home equity line of credit a Business Visa from the Russian Consulate.

Now that there appears to be a clear legal precedent for peeling back the layers of anonymity to hold trolls accountable for their poo-flinging, I find myself of two minds about this. I have been roughed up by a fairly good cross-section of trolls over the years, and it'd be nice to be able to expose them as the pathetic, mommy's basement-dwelling loser subcreatures my wounded ego insists they must be. On the other hand ... some of my responses to said trolls (hey! I was provoked! Honest, they started it!) may have been a bit ... intemperate. So I have to wonder if there are perhaps some other sad, wounded egos out there. And, where would it stop? If you can bring an action for something someone said in a chat room, or Second Life, or the forums at AngryJournalist, well, we better just pave over the downtown areas of every major city in the U.S. and turn it all into one giant courthouse, because we're gonna need the space.

Obama Reaches Out on LinkedIn

Yet another quick hit - just checked to see how many more answers I'm getting from the LinkedIn question I posted earlier this week, and noticed that the Obama campaign today posted a question on what the best ideas are to "keep America competitive in the years ahead."

What ideas do you have to keep America competitive in the years ahead?

In a recent speech, I proposed a new competiveness agenda centered
around education and energy, innovation and infrastructure, fair trade
and reform.

You can watch it, and read the full-text, here: http://my.barackobama.com/competitiveness





What ideas do you have to keep America competitive in the years ahead?

Smart. Very smart. These people "get it." They are using Web 2.0 in a very inclusive, forward-thinking way; the mere fact that they're posing such a question in a professional forum means that they are reaching out to business professionals in an unprecedented way.



Again, I'm going to have to get back to this in a later post, but it's tying into what I call the "Help Line Mollification Effect." You know - how you dial customer support, mashing the buttons on your phone with excessive force, blood pressure up around nuclear reactor containment sphere levels ... and you yowl at the poor schlub on the other end ... until he helps you out and gently leads you through the answer ... and by the end of the call, after the problem is resolved, you feel like a total ass, and want to send him something from his Amazon wishlist. Or is that just me?

Look folks, a lot of the anger simmering under the surface of our society is because everyone feels that no one is listening. The fact that Obama & his people are actually reaching out to people - well, hell. That's disarming. It breaks down the resistance - that whole "Obama is a dangerous socialist who's going to destroy the country with his hippie/commie ways" meme that's been festering on the internets. It kinda says, "Hey, if you've got a great idea on how to fix things, let's hear it."

Who knows? Maybe the answer is that all of us are indeed smarter than any of us, and that out of this question will arise some fantastic new strategy that will restore the U.S. to greatness.

Or a buncha Digg kids will all get together, rig the question-answering, and we'll wind up with an army of giant killer robots that all look like Lara Croft.

Seesmic: Video Comments on Blogs?

Not sure if I want to have to make sure that my hair is all on the correct tangent from my head, and that there's no broccoli in my teeth before participating in my next online pie-fight in the comments section of Sadly, No!

Then again, it's only a matter of time before people start offering plug-ins to do the video commenting, and we get animated snowmen (like in the CNN Democratic debate last summer), World of Warcraft avatars or Second Life furries chiming in ...

Anyway, check out Seesmic - the webnoscenti are saying that it's the "next Twitter" - which I guess, means that all the early adopters will ooh and aah over it, as it suffers weekly outages from lack of scalability, while the rest of the webmob blithely ignores it in favor of seeing the latest Pirate Bay porno.

UPDATE: It appears that there is a use for this - Jemima Kiss at the Guardian, used it to interview Spielberg, Lucas and Harrison Ford. 

VIz:

Guardian Journalist Jemima Kiss was one of the Seesmic community members who asked questions to Steven Spielberg, Harisson Ford, George Lucas, Shia Laboeuf, Karen Allen and Cate Blanchett. Here is how Jemima describes the experience (you can see here all Jemima questions and reactions):

 

"It's a simple enough idea but incredibly exciting; I just posted a few direct questions to Spielberg and Karen Allen (Marian was always one of my favourite heroines) and it's quite a buzz watching them reply directly to your own questions. Seesmic is quite intimate too - like most people, I just use my webcam and was still wearing my pyjamas when I recorded. But hey, pyjamas have a good internet heritage."

Russian Bloggers to the Rescue

The Russian Equivalent of Wingnut Welfare

More and more, I'm noticing that the news here in Russia (and yes, I do try to watch the news on TV here, despite the language barrier) seems to exist in some strange parallel universe.  When I switch back and forth between the BBC World News, CNN International, and then the Russian news on RBK and Channel First, there is a massive disconnect. Maybe it's just because we're in a particularly delicate election year - an editorial that ran in the Moscow Times recently talked about all the simmering uneasiness regarding Putin's succession (the original ran in Vedomosti, and I can only hope that the editor who wrote it isn't re-living a Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch right now).

Trying
to guess the identity of President Vladimir Putin's choice as his
successor and how he or she will come to power is a game that just
continues to grow in popularity. Speculation is also swirling over
whether the next president will use the system Putin has created to
determine national and international policy, ditch the system
altogether, or keep parts of it.


Analysts
at Renaissance Capital, for example, believe the successor will either
follow the "Brezhnev model" and try to maintain the status quo, or will
be a reformer, following what they label the "Peter the Great model."
These comparisons are a bit surprising, but not because of the nature
of historical parallels.

This issue is becoming particularly urgent because under Putin, a lot of people have amassed staggering wealth.  Quite naturally, they'd like to keep it.  And now that they have this much money, they can certainly shell out a few bucks here and there to, shall we say, "influence" things to continue going pretty much as they have in that past.  Which is why speaking out about the theft, corruption, murder, intimidation and bombings here is becoming quite perilous.

Politics under these conditions is a third rail for established media.  But there is still a great deal of interest in what is going on in this country that isn't being talked about in the media.  And as nature abhors a vacuum, so too does the media ecosystem.

Bloggers to the rescue

Here are the nut grafs:

Masha Lipman, a political expert at the Moscow
Carnegie Center, says that web forums like Live Journal provide an
arena for free debate that is no longer available in much of the
conventional media.

"There is indeed a lot of free exchange on
the Internet," Lipman says. "The question in Russia is not that there
are no outlets where free expression is possible. The question is that
the Kremlin has radically marginalized all outlets that pursue even
reasonably independent editorial lines.

"Russians are the
second-largest group of users of Live Journal, a popular U.S. blogger
site. In Russia, the site currently has more than 1.1 million users and
67,500 interest groups. On September 5 alone, 1,600 new users joined
Live Journal in Russia and almost 500,000 new comments were posted.

Censorship Impossible?

"Actually,
I think the Internet is one of the reasons Russia is still not an
authoritarian regime, because you cannot really shut down the Internet
without very serious measures," says Yulia Latynina, a political
commentator whose columns are frequently posted on Live Journal.

Just this week, a blogger got thrown in jail for two years for advocating revolution.  The Kremlin has, belatedly, realized that they need to try to clamp down on the discussion online - but the tools that they've employed to do so have only ensured that more and more ordinary Russians are getting interested in what it is that was said that caused so much of a reaction.

However, the censorship is getting subtler and more insidious. Apparently, the Kremlin is paying bloggers to go into LiveJournal and produce pro-government content.  Not out-and-out propaganda - the average Russian has very sensitive antennae that can pick up a bullshit press release a mile away.  But apparently, they are getting sophisticated about producing content that subtly reinforces what the government wants you to see, hear and think.

The U.S., of course, has problems along these lines - it has long been an article of faith that bloggers and internet sites that promote the pro-Bush stance have been getting secret payments and support from the government and Bush's allies.  There's even a phrase for it: "Wingnut Welfare."

Still, it is inspiring to see that even under these conditions, the ordinary people on the web are brave enough, and inspired enough, to defy the attempts to brainwash them, to suppress them, to intimidate them.  In this way, at least, the web is struggling to live up the hype of being the invention that allows freedom to reign ... although I fear that the increasing sophistication of the governments to stack the ideological deck are only going to get more insidious.

Technorati Tags: Russia, blogs, blogging, LiveJournal, Putin, mind control

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Estonia in Putin's Crosshairs - DDos Attack and Counterattack

The Future is Here: Russia and Estonia are living up to the fantasies of hack sci-fi authors and computer security salesmen.  They are engaging in a virtual war.  

The reasons for this war are pretty thin - most political insiders in Moscow dismiss this as a shallow and meaningless concoction on the part of Putin, designed mainly to distract the Russian electorate in an election year.  It's old and time-worn tactic, but one that still finds favor with politicians that want to play the old magician "nothing up my sleeve" distraction game.   

My friend Dave Mitchell devoted the latter part of a column on his blog to this issue, and I've had a front-row seat to some of the events as they have unfolded. In a nutshell, the Estonians took down a gaudy bronze statue of a Soviet soldier a couple weeks before the big May 9 V-E Day celebrations.  Putin seized on the action (the Estonians were apparently not getting rid of the statue, just moving it to another place) and branded the Estonians as a bunch of pro-Nazi ingrates who were persecuting the ethnic Russians, yada yada blah blah.

I particularly liked the pictures of the forlorn pro-Russia protesters chasing after the Estonian ambassador's car, as it pulled away from the embassy, on its way to a vacation.  The "youth groups" that are making the most noise are widely known to be paid by the Kremlin to feign outrage and generate flashy TV images.

No big deal.  But in the last couple of weeks, the conflict has moved to a whole new arena - cyberspace.  Estonia's economy is apparently quite web-dependent.  Russian hackers have pretty much taken down the Estonian web presence through waves of DDoS attacks.  (Quick explanation: DoS is "Denial of Service" which is what happens when a whole bunch of zombie robot slave computers under the control of a hacker all try to access your webservers at the same time.  In real-world traffic terms, it's like sending a million cars to jam the drive-thru windows of Mickey D's.)

Check out the front page of the Moscow Times, scanned here for your convenience:

This is the story from a couple of weeks ago, when Putin gave a fiery speech during the May 9 parades, denouncing the Estonians. 

The latest update from Moscow says that the tactic is starting to spread in the provocation/response pattern so familiar to anyone who's paid attention to, well, just about any of the wars in the last century or so.  Viz:

Hackers this year have also attacked the sites of groups as politically disparate as the ultranationalist Movement Against Illegal Immigration; the pro-Kremlin youth groups Nashi, Young Russia and Mestniye; and The Other Russia, the opposition coalition that has organized a series of Dissenters' Marches this year.

Alexander Kalugin, a spokesman for Young Russia, said a six-hour DDoS attack on his group's web site in March was likely the work of Estonian nationalists angered over its protests outside the Estonian Embassy over plans to relocate a Soviet World War II monument in central Tallinn that sparked a recent diplomatic dispute.

"We were burning Estonian banners and trampling an effigy of the Estonian president," Kalugin said.

The Movement Against Illegal Immigration had 40 of its regional web sites struck by DDoS attacks from early February to early April, said Alexander Belov, the organization's leader.

Belov blamed the security services for carrying out the attacks under the pretext of battling extremism.

I'm tempted to say that any kind of warfare that doesn't involve streets choked with bodies and rubble is an improvement - but I am uneasy.  The fact that more and more people are getting hip to the idea that there are cheap and easy ways to hit below the belt; the fact that the web is still very vulnerable to this kind of thing - all that is definitely a blinking red light.

Arriving in Moscow - and It Looks Like Everywhere Else

There is something both sad and comforting to drive down the streets of Moscow and see a Sbarro sIgn in Cyrillic

First impressions – there are a lot of signs in English here – almost as many as there were in Amsterdam. Despite the old-world concrete frowning feeling of the Passport Control Center in the basement of the airport, you can’t feel too intimidated if, while standing in line, you can look up to see two brand-new Panasonic HDTV plasma screens playing an endless loop of ads for expensive consumer products.

Apparently, it’s a big deal here to have dirty keys on your piano – luckily, they have special attachments to the vacuums (courtesy of some Russian company) designed expressly to clean the keys on your piano.

There were lots of Mercedes and BMWs in the airport parking lot – alongside a tricked-out Lincoln Navigator with oversize chrome rims. Someone here has been watching MTV.

There are a lot of big car dealerships on the outskirts of Moscow – it looks a little like Tony Soprano-area New Jersey that way. And the people scurrying around these environs look a little like extras from the Sopranos as well.  Near the airport, the highway is smooth and new. Closer to Moscow, the streets are rutted, jammed and potholed & patched.

The radio stations in English play a very eclectic mix – from The Bangles doing “Eternal Love” to Beyonce and Eminem.

I can’t get over how many international brands there are lining the big highway into town. Pioneer car stereos, Samsung computer monitors, DHL couriers, even a Sbarro (although that was the one sign that was in Cyrillic – I just knew it was Sbarro cheapass pizza from the color and typography of the sign. Now there’s a case study in branding, if anyone wants to tackle it.)

The river (Volga? Home of the storied Volga Boatmen? I think I faintly heard their signature dirgelike chanting…) is sluggish with ice still – I didn’t want to look too much like a tourist, and take a picture on the way in. I later overcame my reticence in this area – only to find that I had neglected to pack the cable to scarf the pix off my camera – luckily, the Vaio has a nice little slot in the front where you can click in the fragile little wafer. It kinda clicks in like the glass doors on stereo cabinets – you know, you push once and it goes “cli-CLICK” and is kinda recessed, and to remove it you push on it and it goes “CLI-clunk” and pops out. And the damn thing was only $14 at Circuit City? 

Anyway, back to the ride into Moscow. There are still the big high-density apartment buildings lining the roads – but not as many nor as dense as I had been led to believe. Which is no big deal, really.

It’s weird to see these fearsome Red Army soldiers in full battle rattle on the street, getting yelled at for knocking over a ladder.

I can quite connect what I’m seeing on the streets to the world I saw in the movies or on TV. Can any of these be the snow-choked streets that the Bolsheviks marched down in 1917?

This city just sprawls – block after block of frowning brick buildings, with Westernized ads and signs; some in the process of being spruced up. How much blood and history took place on these streets? Is history ever done with us? Or are we all making history right now, every second of the day, without really being cognizant of it? Freaking out and thinking all the while that we’re desperately improvising and that at any minute the whole house of cards is going to collapse on us. Meanwhile, the past seems to have so much clarity. There's a lesson here for those wondering about what to do about the digital revoiution...

Off to Moscow

In about 12 hours, I get on a KLM jet for 15 hours of confinement (broken up by one short layover - just enough to get the blood clots in the femoral arteries moving) on my way to Moscow to start the new consulting gig for Innovation.  I'll be experimenting with posting to this blog from there - it has been way, way too busy these last two weeks to post the way that I've wanted to ... and the failures of TypePad in South America are the subject of an "Open Ticket" with my beloved bloghosts.

In the meanwhile, here are a couple of pics from Chile and Argentina to take up some space on this blog and make it look lively.

This first shot is of a canyon that I did the zipline/canopy tour down, zig-zagging back and forth, whilst trying to take some kind of video.  In fact, I do have a short video of this, which I will also try to post in the next week or so.  God willing and the creek don't rise...

Back in the U.S.A.

After 15 hours of agony on the American Airlines flights back from Buenos Aires, I am back in L.A., and working hard already on trying to arrange for the next big international webmedia trip - this one to Moscow. The forms that the Russian Consulate requires travelers to fill out to get a visa are absolutely amazing in the amount of detail that they demand.  It's worse than filling out a job application - at least there, you don't have to mail them your passport, and hope to Christ that they send it back to you before your flight takes off...

Anyway, I have tons of postings and photos that I have to put up in this space, along with links to pages that I'm putting up at the main Hard News site - my PowerPoint presentation is already up there at www.hardnewsinc.com/chile if you want to take a look at it.  I will also be posting my list of sites that I think are interesting, and the reasons I think so, along with a list of all the tech toys that I use/recommend.

Tops on my list of new fave technologies has to be Skype. Folks, Skype saved my ass.  Free calls of whatever length to anyone else with a Skype account?  Man, you just can't beat it. If you haven't gotten a Skype account yet, go to www.skype.com and sign up.

Me? I gotta go back to applying for travel health insurance (apparently, the Rooskies won't let you in the country unless you have some sort of health policy).

Santiago, Chile - Day 1

I have arrived in Santiago, Chile to find that it is one of the cleanest big cities I think I've ever seen. Especially in South America. I mean, this place couldn't be MORE different from the Caracas that I remember, where there were massive random holes in the sidewalks that would break your ankles if you didn't constantly keep your head down to watch where you were walking.  Where on Thursday nights on Avenidas Fuerzas Armadas, the textile shops and restaurants would their trash out into the streets, and the stinking rotting piles would be swarming with filthy, slimy sewer rats by the time I got off work and staggered to the subway.

No, this place reminds me, if anything, of Calgary. There are shiny new avant-garde looking skyscrapers all over the place, and even more cranes dotting the landscape, erecting more. The streets are smooth and well-maintained.  The cars are shiny and well-maintained.

The quibbles that I do have are that it was a drag getting into the airport this morning at 5 a.m., after flying for 15 hours, to find that after waiting in the  long immigration line, I had to get out, walk all the way across the terminal to get to a window where I had to pay a $100 "reciprocity" fee to enter the country.  The Canucks get slammed for $167, so I don't feel so bad.

My guess is that this is close kin to the fees and fingerprinting and other indignities that the Brazilians have implemented for gringoes - but only for gringoes - as a result of the parade of stupidity that Homeland Security has foisted on foreign travelers trying to get into the U.S. in the last six years.

Anyway, the other thing that blew me away was how much the airport in Lima has changed. When I was first through there, the whole place resembled some 3rd tier airport - something that you might find in Podunk, Texas.  These days the floor are spotless shiny marble.  There is a Peruvian flute band playing on the concourse. The stores are all new and look like gift shops that you find at LACMA or next to Ceasar's Palace in Vegas.  I almost bought an amazingly soft Alpaca blanket just because it felt so inviting.

Anyway, here are a couple of shots out the window of the hotel room, and of the room itself.  The Hotel Novo here is obviously designed for Japanese visitors - the furnishings, the height of the tables and toilets and the small space are reminiscent of the small hotels that starting springing up in the early 90s in Hawaii, specifically to cater to the Japanese tourist trade.

Now all I have to do is to pull two 90-minute presentations out of my ass (complete with funny and penetratingly wise slides) by 11 a.m. tomorrow.  Did I mention that I am sick and my back is in agony from 15 hours confined on the flight? 

I did want to be challenged more in this new career/life...