Liminal states

Heading out soon to Geomagnetic.tv’s Geo Solstice 2007 at the Gingerbread House in SF tonight. Geomagnetic’s Dr. Spook, who did the pscychedelic Ad Astra visuals and rotating globe, is on at midnight; string art by Andres!

The psytrance, dark psytrance, and darkwave scenes are feast-or-famine in SF: sometimes there’s a ton of good stuff going on, sometimes nothin’. Between this, Death Guild’s XMas, a legal absinthe party, and the usual great stuff on New Year’s Eve/Day, Holiday season 2007/8 is shaping up as an abundance of riches!

w00t w00t!

I usually love my Mac, but right now is a big exception.  When I got a new MacBook Pro earlier this year running Tiger (10.4), the migration over from my previous (two-ish year old, running 10.1 or 10.2 I think) machine went incredibly smoothly with the minor exception of no longer being able to print from the HP printer in SF.  I could still print on the Oki in Bellevue; and Deborah (who had been running a later version of the OS than me) didn’t have any problems.  So I assumed it was a pretty minor compatibility problem and that I’d just have to do something like reinstall drivers.  Irritating, but no big deal.

Last night, six months later, I finally needed to print something in SF.  So I googled the warning message and got a nice  page in Apple’s forum which in turn pointed me to the HP issue page describing the incompatibility between 10.4 and my printer.  I followed the 50+ step manual uninstallation process on the page, rebooted as instructed, found the download page (not linked to from the issue page), downloaded the 27MB installation file that matched the one on my CD, and installed, rebooted, went through the HP Setup Assistant’s configuration of the phone line I never use [if you leave it out, the printer doesn’t work] and was rewarded by a different error message.   I tracked it down, and discovered I had overlooked one step in the uninstall (resetting the disk protections); oops, my bad.  I uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled, rebooted, configured, and got to a new and worse state.  Hmm.  So I once again uninstalled again, this time more meticulously; downloaded the newer 56MB “all-in-one executable” or whatever it’s called … no change noted.  Since by this point it was 1 a.m. I gave up and mailed the link to Deborah who was kind enough to print it out.

And then when I opened up the computer this morning I was greated with the popup from the HP Setup Assistant.  AAAARGH!

Sometimes all you can say is “feels a heck of a lot like Windows to me”.

Slashdot’s linked to a bunch of good stories on computer security recently. Squirrelmail repository poisoned has the catchiest title, and plus it’s about squirrels, so it goes first.

What happened was that an intruder got into the site where you download Squirrelmail, and introduced a very subtle change in the code that would allow somebody who know about it (the intruder or anybody he/she told or sold the secret to) to “an arbitrary code execution risk” aka “pwning” both of which are security speak for “doing whatever you want to on the system”.

YOW! Dreamhost, my ISP, provides a nice one-click install for Squirrelmail (“webmail for nuts!”) and I use it on a couple of my domains. Maybe somebody’s used this to hack in — and that’s why my colors keep intermittently changing from pink to blue! Hmm, well, probably not … although other than the unsatisfyingly generic “intermittent software bug” it’s the best explanation so far.

Imagine, though, that this was a political candidate’s blog; and that the hack gets exploited to delete a random 10% of mail from potential supporters and voters. This might not get noticed for a while … and if it went on long enough, it could easily lead to enough impact to swing a close election. Or suppose there’s a mass-mailing from the account to everybody in the district the day before the election: “This account has been hacked, can you really trust this bozo?” Hmm. Talk about your social engineering attacks.

It’s also another interesting example of the “security as a social science ” theme — and more specifically, the process issues for web services that came up in How’d that get through QA? Something that’s really encouraging here is that in both cases the software providers did exactly the right thing here, including being transparent about what had happened — Squirrelmail’s blog shows how quickly they reacted, announcing immediately and getting the fix out within a day.

Recently somebody who’s interviewing around Microsoft told me that they had brought up Ad Astra in an interview context as a way of demonstrating that they understood viral marketing: “Remember all those hot pink Mashup posters around campus? Well, here’s how we approached it; this was my role; this is what I learned.” And it worked out well!

It’s a great way of framing it, because even though we didn’t do a great job of marketing Ad Astra in general, Mashups were something we got a lot of people to notice and talk about. And best of all, it had measurable results: attendance at Mashups steadily increased by 50% monthly, using techniques like this, emailing, leafletting, … classic viral marketing.

For those of you who haven’t spent time on the Microsoft campus, there are posters everywhere, mostly in blue brown and gold, occasionally in other colors — but never any pink. So these stud out And we put up a lot of posters; in March, the guy who runs the internal postering service told me that we had already put up more posters than Windows or Office had in the previous 12 months. [I pointed out that they had better existing name recognition.] So (at least in the Redmond area) the reasonable odds that the person either heard about it, or knows somebody who has, are pretty reasonable.

Thinking about it afterwards, I realized that there are probably 50 to 100 people who were involved in various aspects of marketing Mashups. Most of them have no previous marketing background; all of them now have at least one anecdote that they can use to show their awareness and understanding of this kind of marketing. That’s kinda cool.

Yay us!

When Kevin Logan went to his high school prom in 2006, he was hoping it would be a night to remember. What he’ll remember, though, will be standing outside in the parking lot while his classmates danced inside.

As Logan walked up to the prom, clad in a pink prom dress, West Side High School Principal Diana Rouse blocked the doorway and refused to let him inside….

Logan claims Rouse ordered him to leave and called security. Humiliated, Logan claims, he walked to the parking lot to take pictures with his friends while everyone else danced inside. As they snapped photos, word spread inside that Logan was not being allowed into the prom. According to the suit, students and teachers came outside to voice their support, with some asking Rouse to change her mind. She refused

Mallory Simpson’s excellent article on CourtTVNews has more details, including the encouraging news that a woman student was allowed into the prom dressed in a tux.  It also illustrates the routine humiliations that people in high school for people face if they fall outside societal gender norms:

During the first week of Logan’s senior year in high school in Gary, Ind., he was taken to Rouse’s office by security guards, where he was questioned about the purse he was wearing.  But, he was sent back to class without being disciplined, according to the suit.

How generous: they merely dragged him to the principal’s office, but didn’t actually discipline him, for expressing his gender identity.

jon

PS: A May 2006 article from the Advocate gives some additional background.

Over the last couple of days, I had very similar conversations with a couple of people who are looking for a new job. They found my perspective helpful, and so I realized it might be more generally useful. [Caveat: since both of them are ex-Microsoft people (who have good reasons for considering going back there) the first paragraph is somewhat skewed in that direction; the underlying prinicples are more general.]

It’s important to keep in mind that you are the scarce commodity here: there are more jobs at Microsoft that need somebody with your skills than there are people with your skills and who already have experience at Microsoft. your goal should be to go back in at a substantially higher level than when you left; and to go into a job that takes you in the direction you want to go in your career and life.

It’s useful to spend time thinking about what your dream job is. For example, if spending time with your family is important to you and they live elsewhere in the country, your dream job may well be located closer to them (or involves a lot of travel there, if you don’t mind traveling). If you’re into making sexy products, it’s more likely to be consumer-focused than infrastructure or enterprise-focused; conversely, if you’d rather be behind the scenes working on the nuts and bolts, think about who does that kind of stuff in a way that you really respect. For some people, it’s in a particular field (“I want to work on innovation”) or scope (“strategic”) or discipline (“a software developer”); for others, the environment might be more important (“I want to work in a gender-balanced organization which has good female role models”).

You probably won’t be able to get your dream job in your next job; what you want is something that’s noticeably closer than where you are now, and makes it a lot more likely that the following job (at Microsoft or elsewhere) has even more of the dream job characteristics. Of course even that “on the path” job might not materialize; and I’m certainly not saying to hold out for perfection.

Still, thinking about where you want to be going will let you make better decisions about the jobs that do come up — and about where to invest your effort looking and networking.

Thoughts on this? How else do people think about this kinds of stuff? etc. etc.

jon

James Grimmelmann has an excellent post over at the Laboratorium. His summary:

Another member of a professorial mailing list I’m on asked whether Facebook may have violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. Nicknamed the “Bork Bill” (a newspaper published his video rental records during his confirmation hearings), the VPPA protects your privacy in the videos you rent and buy. Well, guess what? One of Facebook’s Beacon partners was Blockbuster, so some of the items that wound up in people’s news feeds were the names of videos they’d bought. Oops.

I dug a bit into the legalities of the issue, and this is roughly what I came up with: Facebook and Blockbuster should hunker down and prepare for the lawsuits. Their recent move to allowing a global opt-out may cut them off from accruing further liability, but there’s probably an overhang of damages facing them from their past mistakes.

As usual with James, it’s a very detailed analysis; the discussion is also excellent.

Looking specifically at Blockbuster’s liability, there’s an interesting parallel to my as-yet-unanswered question in the thread about Beacon’s announcement of a global opt-out about whether Beacon caused advertisers to violate their privacy policies. In the web 2.0 world, the dependencies between software components mean that service providers (Facebook in this case) can put their customers (Blockbuster) at legal risk. As Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Facebook et. al. compete, it will be a major advantage to whoever first seizes the high ground by providing services and platforms that are noticeably less risky. In addition to the classic considerations like security and ability to deliver on service level agreements (SLAs), this will increasingly include considerations like well-thought-out policies — and getting and listening to a broad range of perspectives, including from privacy advocates, before launching new services.

There was a great article in the Seattle PI on Friday about Seattle Anti-Freeze and how their participative, theme-based gender-balanced parties are “finding a cure for the common cold”.

Gayle Laakmann, one of Anti-freeze’s founders, interned for me several years ago at Microsoft Research, and since this gave me an opportunity to get in on the ground floor for when she’s running the universe, I’ve made a point of staying in touch with her. Gayle’s posts like Evite vs. Facebook invites and Report card on Evite and its alternatives (looking at Renkoo, socializer, etc.) are not only incredibly useful in their own right, they also give a behind-the-scenes look at how an idea that started as a one-shot party took off on social networks. Now, other events and subgroups are starting up: an indoor soccer team, runners who “often break bread and enjoy some drinks after their runs”, ski and snowboard bums … no doubt more to follow.

Interestingly, both the article and Gayle’s recent A shout-out to other groups post highlight that this is part of a larger trend focusing on participative events. Why should burners have all the fun?

In any case, it’s a relief to know that once Gayle’s in charge of things, there’ll be good parties. It’s something for all potential future overlords* to keep in mind: everybody knows, fun rules.

* in the gender-neutral sense of the word, of course

Somebody pointed out to me in email that my repeating the characterization of me as “airing dirty laundry” looks like an example of something that politicians (and persuasive communicators in general) are warned against: publicizing the attacks against you.  It’s an good point, especially since attempts to combat or defuse the attacks often reinforce them — think of Tricky Nixon saying “I am not a crook”.

On the other hand, it’s often very important to talk about the language your critics and opponents [or others for that matter] use; and there’s usually no way to do that without repeating their language.  In a situation like this, I try to explicitly use quotes, to highlight that “airing dirty laundry” is a phrase that has some meta-level significance.  Links to a web page with a definition or discussion of the term are also useful — bear in mind, though, that they call further visual attention to the phrase.

This does require awareness of the convention from readers, and making the effort to apply it.  Most people are pretty familiar with the idea of visibly quoting something to be able to discuss it when talking — you often see people making stylized quotation marks with their fingers to show this.   While folks may not have seen it in online discourse, it’s a straightforward extension — and one that people ware used to thinking about abstraction already understand.  And while there’s always a risk that people reading quickly will misunderstand, noticing this convention becomes second nature, so I think given the target audiences of this blog it’s a reasonable tradeoff,

Or so it seems to me that this stage.  My position may well evolve … I’m curious what others have to say.

jon, “asking for feedback”

A kerfuffle that recently went on in one of the online communities I hang out in is a nice illustration of some of the complex interaction between moderator privilege in discussion forums, power vectors and bullying.

Briefly, a poster engaged in a bunch of techniques such as using loaded and admittedly-pejorative terms in a theoretically-neutral discussion, lashing out at critics while claiming victim status, ignoring constructive suggestions, and trotting out the hoary “I’m privileged” chestnut of disclaiming responsibility while attempting to put the burden of making up for his ignorance on others (“I’m looking for some specific suggestions here” aka “I don’t think my mistakes is important enough to feel like doing the work myself”). While I don’t see the guy as a bully in general, this is classic bullying behavior.

What made this case particularly interesting is that the moderator took the bully’s side. As moderator, he could edit the discussions after the fact to rewrite history — and he did. For example, he deleted a post as “an off-topic flame” (later reposting it on his private friends-only blog). He deleted a thread of mine and then posted his response (quoting my original words, but now in a way that marginalizes them) in a thread he had started. And so on.

(The really funny thing is that my thread that he deleted specifically called him out for abusing his moderator privilege by deleting threads. I tell ya … you can’t make this stuff up.)

Those who have spent a lot of time online will recognize the dynamic. In this particular case the forum’s very new, and so it’s not a big deal: at some point soon, the moderator will either realize that if he wants people to work together he’ll have to stop bullying and start listening and learning … or everybody will get bored and drift away. Regardless of what happens here, the bully will either change his ways, leave the community, or become another “self-exile”, feeling excluded from the power structure and unable to understand why.

Still, it gives a very interesting and unusually clean snapshot into the kinds of power vectors that moderation — or other control over the discourse — inherently introduces.

Thoughts, similar experiences, discussions of how this plays out in other discussion media (wiks, email lists), etc.?

jon

Update on April 12: back to Goodfell3s.

Note on December 12: the theme randomly spontaneously resets to the (blue) default. If that’s what you’re currently seeing, this post may not make a lot of sense.

Another theme from Amsterdamn, as pink as the less-than-successful Leone experiment but at first blush a lot more readable. We shall see. I’ve found the theme editor, and so will be trying to play with font sizes. Apologies in advance if things occasionally look screwy.

To install it, I had to download the .zip file to my mac, FTP it up to the hosting site, SSH over to unzip it (I guess I could have unzipped locally and FTPed to avoid this step), and then bring up the WordPress theme selector UI page. This seems like a lot more complex than it needs to be. I’d really prefer a field on the theme selector page that lets me (as administator) provide a link to the .zip file on Amsterdamn’s site, which would get rid of several steps in the process.

and in the two minutes from when I signed up until I checked the blog’s summary page, its rank went from 4,446,976 to 3,053,157 — at this rate, I should be top 10 by dinner time!

Authority = 1 for now, but no doubt once everybody starts crosslinking and adding to their Technorati faves, it’ll no doubt soar.

The language they use — “claim your blog now” — is interesting. From a marketing perspective I can see that this is a great framing: they’re positioning themselves as helping me take better advantage of an asset I already have; and the analogy to frontier times and staking claims to land or mineral rights is a powerful one. There’s also a subtle implication that my ownership of the blog in some way requires their (or somebody’s) ratification or validation — and of course agreeing to their terms of service.

The interface is straightforward enough, and you get a nice tag cloud (although their index and hence the tag cloud doesn’t include any of my posts from the last three days).  Anyhow, it feels like a steep in becoming more real.  w00t.