More on Islamic banking - online, and for airports

Back in July, I wrote a post on Islamic banking, a concept that is (literally) foreign to me. As an update, I wanted to link to two newer articles that discuss the business.

Internet Evolution noted the paucity of Islamic e-banking services:

One study found that, of 24 institutions offering both Islamic and conventional services, only eight offered Islamic e-banking, while 17 offered conventional e-banking. Among the reasons cited for this, the most plausible is also the most interesting: that e-banking’s advantages -- speed, efficacy, convenience -- are less valued in a region where “a visit to the bank… might be… an opportunity to socialize.”

Marsha Weinstein of Internet Evolution spent some time discussing one exception:

[A]s Internet access increases in the Middle East and the Muslim middle class expands, so will the presence of Islamic online banking. One sign of this is the online Dow Jones Islamic Market Indexes. Another is Failaka, a research and advisory fund in Islamic financial investment established over a decade ago.

That Failaka’s Website lists more members on its shariah advisory board than it does professional staff may obliquely highlight why there’s a lag in Islamic banking’s online parity with its conventional peers. The imperative that an Islamic financial institution have an advisory board of shariah experts may slow decision-making and, hence, transactions, making them no match for Internet speed. Moreover, until recently, there has been a shortage of professionals who are experts in both Islamic law and economics.

Meanwhile, Business Week noted that the types of investments made by Islamic entities is changing because of market conditions:

Islamic bonds that pay returns based on cash flows from airports and utilities rather than income from property may stay in favor in the coming year after a drop in Persian Gulf real-estate prices shook investor confidence.

A spelling dilemna

One day at work, a co-worker asked me whether dilemma was spelled with an "mm" or an "mn."

I recall previously thinking that it was spelled with an "mn" - dilemna - but that I had subsequently been corrected.

So I tried some web searches, and most of them had the double-m spelling - dilemma.

But I did find this conversation, which began as follows:

I was taught to spell the word as 'dilemna' until the Firefox browser's spell checker said it was wrong. A quick Google search turned up the same results asking me if I wanted to spell it 'dilemma'. Am I just under-corrected in this issue? As it was not till I was 26 that I learned the truth behind my spelling dilemna.

Later in the thread, misspriss provided the following quoted material:

dilemma, cir. 1523 from Late Latin dilemma, from Greek dilemma “double proposition”, a technical term in Rhetoric, from “di” = two + “lemma” = premise [anything taken].

Much of the rest of the thread is divided between people who had never heard of the "mn" spelling, and those of us who were taught the "mn" spelling at some point. Here's an example of the latter, from Luftmarque:

I just read a bunch of online discussions of this phenomenon, and people reported being taught dilemna in the US, Canada, and Great Britain from the fifties through the eighties. There appears to be a similar situation in French between dilemme and dilemne. The weird thing to me is how all of this mis-education could have happened in so many classes without one contrarian student being doubtful enough to look up the spelling in a dictionary. As far as I know, no one has ever been able to track the problem down to a misprint in a textbook, and there seems to be no dictionary anywhere any time that has listed dilemna.

I didn't read the entire conversation (it goes on for 11 pages), but this is very interesting. The conversation cited above was hosted by The Free Dictionary. A benefit of an online dictionary is that you can talk about stuff - something that probably angers so-called language purists, but is in fact necessary when a language is spoken over several different continents and has been spoken for several centuries, and will presumably be spoken for several centuries to come.

Also see One of Us, BrightHaven Days, and King Marketing. Google Fight records a 10:1 preference for the double-m spelling, but there's still a significant number of us "mn" folks. (H/T Northern Planets.)

And after due consideration of all of the facts that were presented...I blame the Commie Soviets for the confusion.

Cyberworld War I - it's not just a computer war

Yesterday I published a post entitled Cyberworld War I? Among other things, it attempted to identify the two alliances that are fighting each other in the current cyberwar. I haven't come up with cool names like Triple Alliance and Triple Entente yet, but I'm working on it.

Based upon what I wrote yesterday, as well as other news (such as Dave Winer's post and this BBC item), the two alliances are as follows:

• Wikileaks, Anonymous/4chan, DataCell, Daniel Ellsberg, Ken Loach, Jemima Khan, John Pilger, Patricia David, Geoffrey Sheen, the New York Times, and the Guardian.


• U.S. Government, Swedish Government, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Sarah Palin, Gene Simmons, and Amazon.

Obviously alliances make strange bedfellows - you normally don't see Simmons and Palin mentioned in the same sentence.

A lot of people are talking about the current cyberwar, but Trevor Butterworth pointed out something important:

If you are fighting against child pornography on the Internet, for example, you are fighting an infowar against cyber gangs in Eastern Europe – and it’s a real war with real, savage violence as a consequence.

But if you are, engaged in what the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Perry Barlow calls the “first serious infowar” over Wikileaks, you, “the troops,” are not facing death or even a slap-happy cop on riot-duty overtime. Instead, you are engaged in a simulacrum of war in which the baddies (always the U.S., and corporations) can be hack-attacked with righteousness, while the goodies (you) get to hide behind the tangible security of civil society.

In other words, you can refuse to allow a customer to use your services (Mastercard), or you can refuse to allow another company's customers to use its services (Anonymous), but if you are challenged, you can conceivably enjoy the rights of western society. Even Julian Assange, though he is in jail right now, has access to lawyers and presumably gets fed.

But "the tangible security of civil society" is not always preserved in war. Take the example of the war against cybercrime on the Internet. Seems like a war that you can wage behind the safety of your computer, right? Wrong. Butterworth links to a story from Joseph Menn that demonstrates that cybercrime battles are not confined to the computer. Excerpt:

I briefly told the story of a colleague of Jart's who was investigating mob activity in St. Petersburg, Russia. The colleague made the mistake of working with the local police. Before he finished his assignment, the man's teenage daughter was kidnapped from her Western country, and the investigator got a message that if he dropped the case, the rest of his children might be okay.

That was five years ago. I had to leave the story hanging in the book because there had been no closure. A couple of weeks ago, the man got a new message. His daughter was in Kazakhstan, and he could have her back as long as he agreed not to look into certain of the gang's activities....The family has been reunited, though the young woman is not the same as she was. She was fed drugs and used to service men.

There is the possibility that Cyberworld War I could go in the same direction. Today people are harrassing each other. Tomorrow, someone may be assassinated (just like Archduke Ferdinand in 1914). Next thing you know, real poison gas might be flying around (again, just like 1914).

And just to indicate how big this may become, security expert Bruce Schneier has said the following about Wikileaks:

I don't have a lot to say about WikiLeaks....

Why not?

This has little to do with WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is just a website. The real story is that "least trusted person" who decided to violate his security clearance and make these cables public. In the 1970s he would have mailed them to a newspaper. Today he uses WikiLeaks. Tomorrow he will have his choice of a dozen similar websites. If WikiLeaks didn't exist, he could have put them up on BitTorrent.

But Wikileaks is a potent symbol for Joe Lieberman and other anti-Wikileaks forces, just like the evil Hun from 1917. Similarly, the U.S. Government or Mastercard or whoever is a potent symbol for the pro-Wikileaks forces, just like...well, just like the evil Hun from 1917. Or perhaps the evil Hun from 1933. Yeah, I know that we're talking about World War I, not World War II, but trust me - Godwin's Law will come into play soon, if it hasn't already. (Oops - exactly HOW did that leaked U.S. cable refer to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?)

On SpeakerRate - H/T @latringo

When I was a product manager, I'd give presentations on a somewhat regular basis. Proposal writers don't really present a lot, but if I ever get more involved in public speaking again, I'll definitely want to check out a service such as SpeakerRate.

You go to tons of conferences and love speaking at events. Now, there's an easy way to get more out of it. Give fellow presenters constructive criticism and receive feedback about your own performance, so the next time you give a speech, they'll ask for an encore.

SpeakerRate allows its members to define talks, identify themselves as speakers, and define events at which multiple talks may occur.

I found out about this when James Johnson shared information about his December 2 presentation to the New Mexico .NET User Group.

MAH (more acronym hell)

Yes, we have another acronym:

After many years of years of operating as two separate regional organizations – the LAOUG and OCOUG are bringing the Oracle User Community together as one for a new SUPER Regional User Group (RUG) to better serve the needs of Oracle technology professionals across the Southland!

This isn't just confined to Oracle or to PeopleSoft. The acronym "RUG" is also used by ESRI and by many other groups.

My only question - if the sponsoring organization decides in the future that local user groups are the way to go, and the several RUGs become a whole slew of LUGs, then is it accurate to say that something got pulled from under the regional user groups?

Of course, the sponsoring organization may not like local user groups either. Perhaps a Metropolitan User Group (MUG) is more desirable, or a State User Group (SUG) in the U.S. or Australia, or a Provincial User Group (PUG) in Canada. Or you could move up to the national user group (NUG) level.

Or you could forget it all, and put everyone together in a world user group (WUG).

But is that big enough? What if there are Martians building canals who need to talk to other sentient beings about database organization? Do we need a solar system user group (SSUG), or perhaps a galactic user group (GUG)?

Ugh.

Cyberworld War I?

Remember World War I, in which a system of alliances ended up sucking a ton of nations into a war after a single assassination in a small country?

Well, it's happening again. The cyberwar between Wikileaks and the U.S. and Swedish governments is now dragging a bunch of other entities into the fray.

Wikileaks supporters include Anonymous/4chan, DataCell, Daniel Ellsberg, and a slew of others including Ken Loach, Jemima Khan, John Pilger, Patricia David, and Geoffrey Sheen.

Wikileaks opponents include Mastercard, Visa, PayPal and Sarah Palin, and Twitter. Based upon past battles, it also appears that Gene Simmons would be aligned on this side.

And the opponents are using the same terminology. Guess which side said that the opponents claim to be "in favor of free speech yet they attack [ally] for exercising...free speech"? This particular quote came from an aide to Sarah Palin, but it just as easily could have come from Ellsberg.

And those with really long memories remember how the original World War I turned out. Both sides ended up in a stalemate, international commerce ceased, resources were diverted to war production, one country underwent a revolution that affected the world for three-quarters of a century, and we ended up listening to a man named Woodrow who couldn't even convince his own country to listen to his ideas.

And after World War I ended? That's when things got REALLY bad.

Will Cyberworld War I have the same outcome?

Incidentally, this Cyberworld War I idea isn't exclusive to me. Also see Salina Post and informationliberation. The latter source ignores Gene Simmons' issues (presumably a group called informationliberation doesn't care if Simmons is robbed), but does note that the Espionage Act of 1917 has been referenced already.

On MySpace's repositioning (Robert Scoble and Mike Jones at LeWeb)

A few days ago, my Empoprise-MU music blog contained a (supposedly) humorous post that was written after Robert Scoble accidentally shared all of his MySpace activity with his Facebook friends. The post also explained WHY Scoble[footnote] was active on MySpace:

.@_bradmerrill heh. I'm interviewing MySpace's CEO on stage next week at LeWeb. Figured I better do my homework!

Well, Scoble's interview of Mike Jones occurred earlier today, and Alex de Carvalho live-blogged it. Excerpt:

MySpace is focus­ing pri­mar­ily on the under-35 crowd. The new MySpace prod­uct is about social enter­tain­ment, around TV and movies. You cre­ate a per­son­al­ized stream of enter­tain­ment around you by con­nect­ing to your favorite movies, TV shows, and celebrities.

MySpace had to real­ize that they can­not win the social net­work­ing space, even while the web is becom­ing more social. How­ever, they wanted to become the best at deliv­er­ing an enter­tain­ment expe­ri­ence. The Face­book Con­nect / Face­book Sync part­ner­ship grew out of this shift in focus.

Read the rest here. However, that post does not cover one of Scoble's questions - the question that had to be asked. Mobile Entertainment:

Is MySpace in a 'death spiral', as moderator Robert Scoble put it on-stage at LeWeb this morning? He was sitting next to the right man to ask: new MySpace CEO Mike Jones.

"We have 130 million monthly active users today, so we still have this substantial user base," said Jones, while flagging up MySpace's recent relaunch as a social entertainment service.

Both sources noted that MySpace is actively pursuing mobile customers on multiple devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, and is also pursuing Google TV customers.

But will this be enough? Scoble, who revisited the MySpace site in preparation for the interview, asked a question of the session attendees. Vator.tv:

When Scoble asked for an audience show of hands of who had been to MySpace in the last two weeks, a sparse smattering of hands rose—less than 50 in a room of hundreds.

Then again, I'd bet that a good number of the attendees were outside of MySpace's target under-35 audience. Perhaps Scoble would have gotten a different response if he had gone out to a club.








[footnote]Apologies in advance to my FriendFeed readers for simply referring to "Scoble" here. I know that in the FriendFeed community, reference to a "Scoble" without providing a first name can be confusing. However, everyone's told us that FriendFeed is dead anyway, so I'm assuming that a more general audience will read this post - one that isn't all that interested in stock market predictions. (I'll take the Dow for 11,500, Alex.)

Watch out for changing defaults

Many software applications require you to make decisions while using the software. Some decisions are of the "yes"/"no" variety, while others are more complex. In many (but not all) cases, the software will suggest a default response among the possible choices. For example, if you are going to delete data and the software presents an "Are you sure?" response, more often than not the default response would be NOT to delete the data.

But new versions of software applications are released all the time, and there's always the possibility that the default may change - and you may not even know it.

The example that I am providing below is not a typical business example, but it certainly illustrates the possible problems when defaults change.

One of the more popular online Bible websites is Bible Gateway, which allows you to search a number of different Bibles. This allows you, for example, to compare John 3:16 in the King James Version to the same passage in Martin Luther's 1545 German translation.

In the past, the default translation offered by Bible Gateway was the New International Version, which was originally released in 1984.

But there has been a subtle change to the default translation that is offered.



Yup, there's an even newer New International Version, and the 2010 version includes some differences in text from the 1984 version.

And that causes some issues in some churches, according to Sandy Grant:

Everyone on our reading roster knows we use the NIV.

But last week some of the readings were different from what we had in front of us. And others noticed too. What was going on?

As you know, rather than using their own Bible, or the large lectern Bible at church, people sometimes like to print the Bible text when they read in public. This allows them to use larger font size for ease of vision, or to add marks to aid their expression and emphasis.

In every case where there was a variation from what we expected in our NIVs, and only in those cases, it turns out the person concerned had chosen to print off the reading. And they had gone to that most helpful website for multiple Bible translations, BibleGateway.com.

There, the default translation for English users has always been the NIV.

And it still is … sort of.

As you may know, the NIV has been updated by their Committee for Bible Translation (CBT). So far the 2010 NIV text is only available electronically.

So what if you want to print out the same NIV version that you have at home?

Then you need to let your readers know that if they use BibleGateway, they must manually select the 1984 version of the NIV, rather than 2010. In the drop down menu of English versions, the 1984 NIV comes right at the bottom, just after the TNIV.

The TNIV, incidentally, is yet another translation from the NIV family. Without getting into theological and political issues, suffice it to say that the default behavior of the Bible Gateway application changed, and many people have not yet realized this.

And in this particular case, the former default may be removed from the software altogether at some point, based upon what Trevin Wax has written:

The problem I see with the NIV 2011 is that the publisher (Zondervan) seems to be putting churches and church leaders in a position where they are forced to make a choice. A few years ago, upon considering the resistance from some evangelicals toward the TNIV, Zondervan assured Bible-readers that the 1984 NIV would remain available. But no such assurance is given now. In fact, the publisher has expressly indicated the desire for the NIV 2011 to replace both the original NIV and the TNIV.

Now I don't know if that means that Zondervan or Biblica will prevent Bible Gateway from having the 1984 NIV translation online in the future. But people don't like it when software features are pulled from an updated version of the software - and in the case of websites, you can't just say that you'll continue to use the old software.

Additional information on NORAD's tracking of Santa Claus

Chodle is...um...tracking mentions of NORAD's efforts to track Santa Claus. It not only found my original post entitled "Advertising mistake causes beloved geeky child tradition" and myxnote's Griggsing of my content, but Chodle also found some other posts and articles that discussed NORAD and Santa.

buzzstation.net recounts the advertisement story and mentions a large number of online ways to track Santa this year, including Google Maps and Google Earth.

My Asian Decor also discusses Santa tracking. Surprisingly, it does not offer any suggestions for things to put on your Christmas list.

Johanna Smith of Doctor Who's Dimension also reports on Santa tracking. (A-ha! Santa uses a phone booth to get around!)

More here.

Advertising mistake causes beloved geeky child tradition

Humans are not perfect, and we sometimes made misteaks and provide material of low qualtiy. In some cases, the results are guaranteed to be bad, while in other cases, the results could potentially be bad, and could perhaps endanger the world.

Bob Batz Jr. related this Cold War era story of an advertisement with a tiny mistake:

One December morning in 1955, Col. Harry Shoup had just gotten into his office at the Continental Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., when the red phone rang. The red phone very seldom rang....

So when the phone rang, Shoup expected dire news.

What he got was a boy reading his Christmas list.

After the boy read the list, he addressed the following question to the Colonel:

"You're not really Santa, are you?"

OK, executive gurus who preach the value of being able to make a quick decision - based upon the information that you had at the time, how would YOU respond?

I don't think that Colonel Shoup received military training on THIS particular contingency, but based upon his years of training and his expertise, he responded that he was, in fact, Santa.

Then he asked to speak to the boy's mother, who told him that the secret red line phone number had been published in a Sears advertisement.



At some point during the creation of the ad, the phone number "ME 2-6681" (using the convention for publishing phone numbers at the time) was placed into the ad and identified as Santa Claus' special number. After the phone number, the following admonition was printed:

Kiddies Be Sure And Dial The Correct Number

There's only one problem - the published number ME 2-6681 was NOT the correct number, but was instead the number for the Continental Air Defense Command's red line.

Oops.

After Shoup ended the call with the boy's mother, a girl called, and Shoup answered the call as he motioned his lieutenant colonel to join him. Since it wasn't a speaker phone, I'm sure that the lieutenant colonel was mystified as his superior officer started saying "Ho ho ho!" Then the lieutenant colonel received a direct order from his superior:

"You play Santa Claus for the next two hours."

The colonel then took quick and decisive action and changed the red line number to another phone number, proving that even the U.S. military has to yield to the powers of Santa Claus. So now the Continental Air Defense Command had to answer calls to Santa Claus in addition to its regular duties...which consisted of tracking unidentified aircraft over the North American continent.

You can see where this is headed, because the Continental Air Defense Command eventually became the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which for some inexplicable reason is abbreviated as NORAD.

And now, 55 years later, NORAD is using its advanced technologies to track Santa's movements around the world on December 24.

Tracking Santa starts with the NORAD radar system called the North Warning System. This powerful radar system consists of 47 installations strung across the northern border of North America. On December 24th, NORAD monitors the radar systems continuously for indications that Santa Claus has left the North Pole.

The moment that radar indicates Santa has lifted off, we use our second detection system. Satellites positioned in geo-synchronous orbit at 22,300 miles from the Earth’s surface are equipped with infrared sensors, which enable them to detect heat. Amazingly, Rudolph’s bright red nose gives off an infrared signature, which allows our satellites to detect Rudolph and Santa.

The third tracking system is the Santa Cam network. We began using it in 1998, which is the year we put our Santa Tracking program on the internet. Santa Cams are ultra-cool, high-tech, high-speed digital cameras that are pre-positioned at many locations around the world. NORAD only uses these cameras once a year. The cameras capture images and videos of Santa and his reindeer as they make their journey around the world.

The fourth system is made up of fighter jets. Canadian NORAD fighter pilots flying the CF-18 intercept and welcome Santa to North America. In the United States, American NORAD fighter pilots in either the F-15 or the F-16 get the thrill of flying alongside Santa and his famous reindeer: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and, of course, Rudolph.

And unlike other military intelligence, NORAD does not cloak its Santa tracking in secrecy. You can track Santa on the NORAD website http://www.noradsanta.org/, on the Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/noradsanta, on the Picasa page http://picasaweb.google.com/noradtrackssanta, or on the Twitter account @noradsanta.

And what about the company that inadvertently started it all? While Sears has been recognized for its contributions to the military, I was unable to find any mention of this story on Sears' website.

But I'm sure that Santa will be at the Sears locations in Colorado Springs...at least until he has to go to work.

Another explanation for cable TV's decline

You've probably already heard the news:

For the first time, cable television subscriptions fell in the United States in the last two quarters, a trend some attribute to California-based Netflix.

The Netflix business model was based on mail-order DVD movies, but the Internet and the ability to bypass a cable box and stream movies directly to a subscriber's television set puts it ahead of the competition -- for now....

So the argument that's been floating around, especially with the techie types, is that technology has been the catalyst for the decline of cable television.

But Escapology has a different view:

Cable TV has degenerated into one big reality TV mush. Channels that once had their mandate clearly spelled out for them (History channel) now desperately throw ANYTHING on the screen in the hope of ratings.

In essence, cable TV has become like radio. Each channel, rather than developing its own niche, is trying to gravitate to a single place. Look at radio - theoretically there could be dozens and dozens of different ways to program a radio station. But Matrix Media Radio has reduced these formats down to a mere ten:

* News / Talk
* Country
* Adult Contemporary
* Contemporary Hit Radio
* Rock and Alternative
* Hispanic and Latin
* Oldies and Nostalgia
* Urban Contemporary
* Religious / Christian
* Full Service

I couldn't find an official list of cable TV formats, but following Escapology's lead, we could probably classify a grand total of two such formats:

* Reality
* Stuff that hasn't been converted to reality yet

In addition to cable alternatives having better technology and better programming, it should also be noted that the alternatives tend to have better billing practices. When you sign up for Netflix, you aren't forced to buy a whole bunch of movies that you don't want just because the movie studios told Netflix that they had to do this. And as far as I know, Netflix doesn't put movies in different tiers, and require you to subscribe to a higher tier of service to get good movies.

At least so far, we haven't had the dramatic standoffs between Netflix and the content providers, in which one party says "the studios want us to hike our fees!" and the other says "Netflix is ripping off talented actors and directors!" Of course, that day is probably coming.

More on corrections - what is and what should never be

I figured that I'd poke around the tubes and see how others handled blog corrections, and I ran across this example from Roger Pielke Jr.

On September 1, Pielke wrote a blog post. Based upon the URL of the post, it appears that the original title of the post was "Fabricated Quote in the Daily Mail." In brief, the original post stated that the Daily Mail attributed a quote to Pielke that was not Pielke's.

However, by the time that I saw the post, the request for correction itself had a correction. Yes, the Daily Mail did attribute a quote to Pielke that was not his, but it was not a "fabricated" quote:

Incorrect Quote in The Daily Mail

[UPDATED: Benny Peiser emails me to explain that the quote was in fact his, and that he wrote The Daily Mail requesting a correction. The online version of the story has been corrected, but unfortunately the printed version has the error. I have no idea how the mistake occurred, but I have thus updated this post and its title to reflect the apparent sloppiness rather than malfeasance. I have also noted that the error now only exists in the print edition. Thanks Benny for the quick reply to my query.]

The corrected Daily Mail post, by the way, can be found here. If you're interested in the climate change debate, you may want to read it, and to read what Benny Peiser said.

So where do we stand at the end of this?

The Daily Mail corrected its original article, although it did not acknowledge that a correction was made. (Sound familiar?)

According to a comment to Pielke's original post, the author of the Daily Mail article (Fiona MacRae) sent an autoreply to Pielke's original inquiry. It' unclear whether MacRae, or the Daily Mail, had any further discussion with Pielke.

As noted above, Pielke corrected his original post. Rather than preserving the original mistake, he changed the incorrect text (and title) and noted at the beginning of the post that changes had been made. This differs from the approach that I take, but an argument can be made that Pielke's approach is the better one.

(However, Pielke couldn't change all of the inaccuracies; as I noted above, the URL for the post contains the word "fabricated," but there's no good way to change that without some significant effort. And most people wouldn't notice anyway.)

But there was another item noted in Pielke's blog, and it shows a significant change in the way things are done today.

30 years ago, if this mistake had been made, the edition of the paper that included the mistake would be preserved forever. Of course, the next day a retraction could be run by the paper, but by then the damage would have been done.

I have no idea whether the Daily Mail ran a printed retraction of the inaccurate source of the quote; I couldn't find any such retraction online. But at least those of us who only read the Daily Mail online will never encounter the original mistake. This could be a good thing, since the mistake can be partially (but not completely) removed. Of course it could also be a bad thing, since accurate information could be partially (but not completely) wiped out by subsequent editing.

Technology is ethically neutral, and the ability to replace online text with other online text is not in and of itself a good or a bad thing. It all depends upon how we use the technology.

P.S. In case you didn't see my Saturday post regarding corrections, I suggested three ways to deal with an inaccuracy: (1) don't state inaccurate information in the first place; (2) preserve the mistake but acknowledge that it is a mistake (what I do); and (3) correct the mistake but don't acknowledge that a mistake was made (what the Daily Mail appears to have done, and what Sarah Lacy did). Pielke practiced a fourth way to handle the situation - correct the mistake AND acknowledge that a mistake was made. A fifth way was suggested by Jim Ulvog in a comment - use strikethrough over the incorrect text.

P.P.S. If you're looking for a Led Zeppelin song, see this Sunday post in my Empoprise-MU music blog.

WikiLeaks' funding is getting clogged up

Just yesterday I mused on Wikileaks' funding:

And WikiLeaks honestly expects its enemies to keep its funding pipeline donations.datacell.com open?

And even if the site (or a cache or mirror) remains up, the site identifies the banks and other organizations (PayPal, MasterCard, Visa) that are the funnels for the cash for WikiLeaks. If Julian Assange is truly as paranoid as he appears to be, doesn't he worry that the FBI and the CIA and the BBC, B.B. King, Doris Day, and Matt Busby will simply shift their attacks to THESE entities? Perhaps the CIA will reactivate the volcano in Iceland.

Well, the volcano hasn't re-erupted yet, but FriendFeed user LANJackal has linked to an article regarding one of the cash funnels listed above.

The online payment service provider PayPal has cut off the account used by WikiLeaks to collect donations, serving another blow to the organisation just as it was struggling to keep its website accessible after an American company stopped directing traffic to it.

PayPal's full statement reads as follows:

PayPal statement regarding WikiLeaks

December 3, 2010

PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We have notified the account holder of this action.

You would think that one of the old guard institutions, such as Mastercard, would have been the first to take this action. It's surprising that PayPal moved before the banks or the credit card companies did.

Or am I wrong in being surprised about this?

How to correct a mistake - the @1938media @sarahcuda @techcrunch "Ivy League" story, and my Judith Griggs story

I hadn't looked at Loren Feldman's Twitter feed in a while, so I was reading past entries and found this one from early Saturday morning:

I didnt even go to college and I know Stanford is not Ivy league. Sigh. Just so stupid constantly. http://ow.ly/3jTrz

The link went to a TechCrunch post that was written by Sarah Lacy on Friday. And after reading the post, I wasn't sure what Feldman was talking about. Here's a screen shot of how the post started when I read it:



But then I read on to the comments and saw a lot of comments discussing the fact that Stanford is not an Ivy League university. Which got me to wondering - was the post edited after its original publication?

A Google search confirmed my suspicions:



So when Google captured the post - and when Feldman read it - the post clearly identified Stanford as an Ivy League school. By the time I saw it, the post had been corrected.

Now the part that concerns me isn't the fact that Lacy made a mistake. Heaven knows that I've made plenty of mistakes myself. The part that concerns me is that the correction was not acknowledged.

If I were running AOL, I would have made sure that the edited post contained an acknowledgment of the error, and (if warranted) an apology. After all, that's what (so-called) real journalists do. And even unreal journalists like me do it, most recently...well, just a few weeks ago.

Here's the top of my November 9 post, including a November 16 edit.



The inaccurate statement occurred at the bottom of that post, and the correction appears afterwards.



In essence, I raised a question about something that Judith Griggs had said, but subsequently discovered that the question that I raised was not legitimate. I chose to preserve the original statement that I made, and followed it with a correction. (I also acknowledged the correction in a separate post - a post, coincidentally, which quotes Sarah Lacy.)

[2:37 - YEAH, I JUST ADDED THE ENDING PARENTHESIS ABOVE. :)]

However, there are two alternate strategies that I could have pursued.

The best strategy - and I bet that Loren Feldman would have supported this wholeheartedly - would be not to make a mistake in the first place. Lacy shouldn't have written the original text that said that Stanford was in the Ivy League. I shouldn't have written a post that cast doubt on Judith Griggs' charitable contribution. The Tribune shouldn't have loudly declared the Dewey won the 1948 election.

But mistakes do happen, and perhaps the argument could be made that the mistake should be correctly quietly, without acknowledgment. This doesn't really affect Lacy's mistake - Stanford probably doesn't care if someone incorrectly refers to it as an Ivy League school - but in my case, it's more germane. Because of the way in which I corrected my mistake, the false allegation about Judith Griggs still remains easily accessible. Sure, it's followed by a bold statement in the following paragraph, but people have been known to perform selective reading before, and it's easy enough for someone to quote my November 9 paragraph without quoting my November 16 correction.

But I still believe that I did the right thing by preserving the mistake, then boldly (literally) noting that it was wrong. One of the reasons that this was the right thing to do is because even if I made the correction, there is probably a copy of my original November 9 post floating around somewhere that contains the original error. That's the reality of today's web - caches and copies and everything else exist that not only show what the web says today, but also show what the web said yesterday. Mistakes cannot be hidden. The fact that I could easily uncover the text from the original version of Lacy's post demonstrates this. And the fact that several people have commented on the original mistake shows that such a mistake can't be hidden.

P.S. Before posting this, I scanned through the comments to see if Lacy or anyone from Techcrunch discussed the "Ivy League" mistake. I found comments regarding two additional errors in the article. Oops. I did find one comment, though, which appears to be from TechCrunch itself and regards spelling errors:

Elin Blesener [Moderator] 1 day ago in reply to Iamammoman

Hey guys.. he was just stating his opinion and I'm sure this is just a big misunderstanding. In all honesty, sometimes we want to get the news and the article out as fast as we can so you can all read and enjoy it. I understand though so I'll make sure we are more careful with spelling.

Sworn under an oath to modern warfare - at least it doesn't involve mud and blood

It hit me while I was reading a Mashable post that described how wikileaks.org disappeared from the Internet because distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks caused its Domain Name Service (DNS) provider, everydns.org, to terminate its relationship with Wikileaks.

At this point I don't know whether the DDOS attacks are being launched by bored hkrz, governments, Julian Assange himself, or a combination of all three. But I was struck with a thought when I looked at the tweet that Mashable quoted.

WikiLeaks,org domain killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks KEEP US STRONG https://donations.datacell.com/

Incidentally, Mashable noticed that WikiLeaks emphasized "the fact that EveryDNS.net is a U.S. company." Also note the use of the word "claimed" in the tweet. It's fun to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

But take a look at the last part of the tweet. At this point WikiLeaks has already been removed from Amazon, possibly at the bidding of a U.S. Senator, and has lost its DNS provider, probably due to DDOS attacks.

And WikiLeaks honestly expects its enemies to keep its funding pipeline donations.datacell.com open?

And even if the site (or a cache or mirror) remains up, the site identifies the banks and other organizations (PayPal, MasterCard, Visa) that are the funnels for the cash for WikiLeaks. If Julian Assange is truly as paranoid as he appears to be, doesn't he worry that the FBI and the CIA and the BBC, B.B. King, Doris Day, and Matt Busby will simply shift their attacks to THESE entities? Perhaps the CIA will reactivate the volcano in Iceland.

Incidentally, at least one of the DDOS masters has been identified.

A self-proclaimed "hacktivist" said Tuesday he's the computer expert who knocked rogue Web site WikiLeaks offline for several hours through a distributed denial of service attack.

The hacker, who calls himself The Jester and goes by the name th3j35t3r on Twitter, said he was motivated to take down WikiLeaks for patriotic reasons. He also said his other targets include Web sites used by Al Qaeda and other terrorists groups for recruiting purposes.

And @th3j35t3r made an interesting point:

If I was a wikileaks 'source' right now I'd be getting a little twitchy, if they cant protect their own site, how can they protect a src?

As for me, I'm waiting for the WikiLeaksLeaks site that will provide all of this information, as well as leaked documents regarding Assange's legal troubles in Sweden. (WikiLeaks hasn't gotten around to leaking THOSE documents yet, apparently.) While waiting for wikileaksleaks.org, I guess we can read this, which is pretty funny:

Cc: wmreditor[a t]waynemadsenreport.com,
funtimesahead[a t]lists.riseup.net
From: Julien Assange
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2007 21:07:48 -0600
To: John Young
Subject: [WL] Re: Wikileaks Suspects You

[This is a restricted internal development mailinglist for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g.
Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to 'WL'.
This list is housed at riseup.net, an activist collective in Seattle with an established lawyer
and plenty of backbone.]


John, can you xxxx the reference to "IQ.ORG" in that document near
"my daughters photo".

Gorbachev on Khrushchev

It is sometimes fascinating to read a famous person's biography of another person, because in some cases this teaches you a little bit about both people. For example, when Richard Nixon wrote about Winston Churchill, it was clear that Nixon identified with certain parts of Churchill's history. Just as Churchill had a period in the "wilderness" when he was out of power - a period which ended when World War II began - Nixon also characterized the eight years between 1961 and 1969 as his own wilderness years.

In 2007, the Guardian was printing a series of articles entitled "Great Speeches of the 20th Century." One of the speeches that was selected was Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" of 1956, the one in which Stalin was denounced. The article on this speech was written by another Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev - a premier who effectively denounced Leonid Brezhnev, the person who ousted Khrushchev.

People such as me who are long-term anti-communists characterize the efforts of Khrushchev and Gorbachev as putting lipstick on a pig. What is the point of making minor changes to a system, we ask, when the entire system needs an overhaul. As Gorbachev writes about the balancing act that Khrushchev had to negotiate, we recall that Gorbachev had the same challenges.

Gorbachev:

Despite the damning revelations, the speech's overall assessment of Stalin was relatively mild. In this, Khrushchev yielded to the pressure of conservatives like Molotov. He said, for example, that "in the past Stalin undoubtedly performed great services to the party, to the working class and to the international workers' movement".

By contrast, in preliminary discussion, Khrushchev had said: "Stalin destroyed the party. He was not a Marxist. He wiped out all that is sacred in a human being." Later, fearing that the truth about Stalin could lead to criticism of the political system, Khrushchev reverted to saying that Stalin had been a staunch revolutionary. Such contradictions are evidence of a hard-fought battle - a struggle that should not be seen as mere palace intrigue. It took resolve and courage, qualities that Khrushchev showed in presenting the report and then also in exonerating innocent prisoners and instituting controls over the security apparatus.

It seems obvious that when Gorbachev praises Khrushchev as having resolve and courage, Gorbachev hopes that the same will be said about himself. Later in the article, the parallels are explicitly made:

Perestroika continued what the 20th congress had started, seeking to give back to socialism the "human face" destroyed by Stalin. By laying the foundations of a social market economy and by instituting free speech and elections, Perestroika implemented a new social-democratic project.

And just as Khrushchev was undone by Brezhnev, Gorbachev had his own enemy:

Its completion was thwarted by the conservatives' putsch followed by the actions of right-wing radicals led by Boris Yeltsin, who dismantled the Soviet Union and subjected the people to a "shock experiment". The result was the emergence of a "wild capitalism" which brought with it impoverishment, crime and corrupt government.

However, there is one other important parallel between Yeltsin and Brezhnev - both of them allowed their predecessors to live.

When a dog Spot is not a dog Spot - time for Cal Worthington

A trip down memory lane with car dealer Cal Worthington.



And Worthington is still active - here's a 2010 political ad.



Unfortunately, Cal's candidate Larry Miles was defeated in the Democratic Primary by Richard Pan, who went on to win the general election. Perhaps Cal's dog Spot should have done more.

Gofourwallasquare

Now that's an interesting turn of events.

In the same way that MySpace allows publication of MySpace updates on Facebook (Robert Scoble was recently using this feature until his followers begged him to turn it off), Gowalla is now allowing its users to check in to Foursquare.

Actually, Gowalla is allowing integration with multiple services, and Josh Williams explained why:

The aim was to "create a solution that allows people to connect with all these services without having to launch four different apps," says Josh Williams, Gowalla's CEO. "We're still early enough in the space that everyone has a different flavor and take on it. Different people are going to migrate to different services."

So now we have an interesting alternative to the silo strategy, in which the application doesn't care which data source is being accessed, as long as its own application is being used to access the data.

However, this won't change my location habits, since Gowalla doesn't support the LG env3. Sorry, Gowalla, but many mobile smartphone users, not to mention dumbphone users such as myself, DON'T use the platforms that you support.

More on certifications - getting the government involved?

I previously wrote a post on certifications that began as follows:

Back in the olden days, and even today, a person can get another person to attest, or "certify," that the first person is knowledgeable in a particular disciplines, such as blacksmithing or nuclear engineering. But there are billions of people in the world today, so new methods of certification have arisen. In some cases, an undergraduate or graduate college or university degree can serve as a certification, but sometimes additional certification is required.

I concluded by briefly noting that there was some question regarding whether certifications were worth it.

An Enterprise Efficiency post looks at the latter question, but with a twist:

The bill in question is S.773, the "Cybersecurity Act of 2009." It would, among other things, mandate that IT professionals be licensed and certified if they perform cybersecurity functions for the government -- or if they are government contractors dealing with "critical infrastructure." I put that term in quotation marks because it could mean anything the government decides it should mean.

Stiennon maintains that this is a terrible approach to cybersecurity, and I agree. Is there anything more disturbing than the prospect of government bureaucrats deciding what a "certified" IT security expert should know to do his or her job?

Yes, there is: Making the companies that employ these people foot the bill for their government-approved training.

More here.

Building the perfect silo - cutting the link between FriendFeed and Facebook

Sounds like you need to master your social media data flow, sir.

(Louis Gray, in a comment on a prior post of mine)

Over the years, I have employed various workflows that govern how my service memberships interact with one another. I haven't published a formal map of these relationships in some time, but one main link in my present workflow has been the publishing of all of my FriendFeed content on my Facebook account. Because there are a lot of things that flow INTO my FriendFeed account, this means that all of this stuff - blog posts, last.fm likes, Google Reader shares, and many other things - ends up in my Facebook account, appearing as FriendFeed entries.

I've previously noted the drawbacks of this flow:

When someone views this feed, even if they're technically savvy, the results can be somewhat confusing. And if you're not familiar with how certain services work, they can be downright maddening.

As an example, I posted a picture of four FriendFeed entries, showing how they appear in Facebook. The third of the four entries, which came from a feed which includes all mentions of my Twitter handle @empoprises, demonstrates one of the problems:

The third item in the picture is probably even more confusing. It came from Twitter, but I didn't write it. My FriendFeed page includes a search for all tweets that include my Twitter name @empoprises - the search found a particular tweet from Derrick Jefferson which was in response to something that I had written. (He was looking for some in Louisiana who could cut a black man's hair; I referred him to a barber in southern California, the place where he used to live.)

This confusion about the origin of various items is compounded by the fact that they often appear out of context - especially since my sharing activities on all my various online services can sometimes border on the eccentric. This is part of the FriendFeed culture itself; people there are accustomed to navigating around FriendFeed and Google Reader and Google Buzz and this service and that service, carrying conversations from one service to another, and generally treating the entire World Wide Web like a good plate of spaghetti.

But even when the results aren't that confusing, one can question whether the sharing of items on multiple services is wise. I wrote this a few days ago:

When this post is published, an announcement of the post's availability will appear on FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, and probably a half dozen other services which I've forgotten. For certain posts, I also choose to share them via other services, such as StumbleUpon and Google Reader. I have to ask myself - is that a wise move, or is there the danger that some people will be overwhelmed and Empoprises will be less prized?

I mulled this question, considering (among other things) Louis Gray's comment that I reproduced at the beginning of this post. Gray had noticed the post because it referred to a post of his on the reverse topic; namely, setting limits on the amount of content that you are CONSUMING. I was looking at the question of the amount of content that I was PRODUCING, and decided to make a change.

Beginning this afternoon, I have revoked the privilege of Facebook's FriendFeed application to publish content to my Facebook account.

This goes against all of the intentions that committed lifestreamers stand for, and in fact my choice has now been marked as an error by the FriendFeed application on Facebook. When I view the application stream, I see the following error message:



Yes, from the perspective of the FriendFeed app, this is a "problem." But for me, and for my Facebook users, it's actually the solution.

Of course, this means that the people who read my main Facebook page will not be able to see my FriendFeed stuff, or my Google Reader stuff, or my last.fm stuff, or my Twitter stuff, or my stuff from many other services. Now I could certainly configure some of these applications to post their stuff directly to Facebook, but I will refrain from doing this at the present time.

And if people are really dying to see my blog-related content, they can visit my various Facebook fan pages which are designed for this purpose.

Items from this blog can be seen here.

Items from my music blog can be seen here. You can also see my blip.fm blips there.

Items from my Inland Empire blog can be seen here.

(And no, I haven't established a Facebook page for my NTN Buzztime blog yet.)

This will actually help me to work on something else that I need to do - namely, build up the content on these three Facebook pages. I previously had some FriendFeed pages that were devoted to these blogs (the Empoprise-BI FriendFeed page is here), but I haven't really been doing much with those FriendFeed pages lately. I'm starting to use the Facebook pages more and more, and perhaps this will inspire me to continue this.

What does this change mean in terms of blog creation? Well, it could mean that FriendFeed could become the rough draft area for ideas that are more fully explored in my blog posts or in my Facebook rooms. I am often inspired by the stuff that I read in Google Reader and elsewhere, so if you want to see what's going on in my mind, you can always go directly to my FriendFeed page at http://friendfeed.com/empoprises to look at these activities.

At the same time, it could happen that the Facebook rooms will also serve that purpose. There is not any content that automatically flows into those rooms (other than my blog posts), but I sometimes manually post items into my Facebook rooms and write about them later.

This is obviously a work in progress, and we'll see what happens, and if Bill or any of my other Facebook friends ask me "John, what happened to all of that weird stuff that you used to put in your Facebook feed?"