The NYTeims tries out newspaper as website iPhone app as newspaper:
The founder is no doubt spinning sliding in his grave.
Tag Archives: UI
An iPhone app you can wrap your fish in
0
under media
Futile style
(It’s tempting to ask why this lasts as long as it does, but to many that question would suggest that this is way too long; it may be so, but a better question is whyit lasts precisely as long as it does? Not a deep question — but this is a fine example of a new sort of genre that most geezers Do Not Get.)
(dvc)
Those who hunt elves and can’t teach deserve neither
Who needs an accurate Santayana quotation when autocompletion ?
The first time it’s a tragedy, the second time a madlib.
Electric Kool-Aid; or, Against Tufte, (public) note 00002
From the Program for the Future Conference comes a mural of “Co-Evolution of Human Systems and Tool Systems,” that is, “the landscape of our era, beginning with 1925, the year of Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart’s birth”:
Detail:
Subsequent “shifts” include the “Shift from Industrial Age to Information Age” (ca. 1955–1958), the “Shift from Information Age to Knowledge Age” (ca. 1976–1980), and the “Shift from Knowledge Age to Conceptual Age” (ca. 1998–2002).
(Background videos about the mural are here, for those with a cast-iron historical consciousness.)
Dredged from B1FF!!!’s archives, “Against Tufte, [public] note 00001”:
(dw@s-t)
Google: ‘Privacy? Depends–where are you?’
under government, international, law, privacy
A gaggle of campaigners (NAI, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Michael Zimmer, etc) push Google to add a link to its privacy policy on its home page, and Google’s refusal sparks snark: for example, “Larry Page, the company’s co-founder, didn’t want a privacy link ‘on that beautiful clean home page,’ said one executive at a Google competitor” (NYT), or “Does Anyone Really Care Where Google Places Its Privacy Policy?” (Techdirt). Google relents, publishes self-congratulatory note on public policy weblog (hardly a surprise). Funny, that: Page didn’t seem to mind the complete redesign of Google‘s Japanese page back in March. (The new design now includes a link to a privacy page).
Lesson: in key respects, Google isn’t monolithic. In fact, a quick survey of “European” Google sites (adapted from some random list of country-code TLDs) turns up interesting data:
“The fossil record doesn’t tell us much about social life.”
So says Paul Ekman, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCSF and an expert on facial expressions, according to Errol Morris in "The Most Curious Thing" in the NYT. As prosecutors become more media-savvy with all their perp-walks, PR campaigning leaks, and the like, it follows to reason that filmmakers would become the new prosecutors: forensics as description, theatrical directing as prescription. Morris’s essay is a best-case example of these shifting, blurring social functions; the last few decades of increasingly “executive” TV programming is the worst-case.
Lots of things in Morris’s essay caught my eye, but this one got me writing:
Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, told me about a meeting he had with Robert Kennedy in the mid-1960s. It concerned Vietnam, and the $64,000 question: What would John F. Kennedy have done in Vietnam had he lived? R.F.K.’s answer was: J.F.K. would have gotten us out of Vietnam. He would have waited until after the ’64 elections, and then “fuzzed it up.” [25]
Fuzzing it up is a common practice in government. You hide intention and responsibility. You have one person say one thing, and another person the exact opposite. You create a blizzard of paper, so much paper that actual evidence is lost in the glut. And of course, you deny anything and everything you can deny—particularly the obvious. (Denying the obvious is always popular.) You produce noise, distraction and confusion. People rarely think of this as a well-established bureaucratic technique, but it is a tried and true methodology.
Very interesting.
RFK's claim that JFK “would have gotten us out of Vietnam” rings a bit hollow, seeing as he was busy getting us in. And LBJ, I’ve heard it argued, needed to ‘stay the course’ in Vietnam in part as a sop to the conservatives he needed to enlist in support of the Great Society; it’s hard to imagine that JFK would have had it any easier than LBJ.
It seems like Morris included this snippet for the language more than the substance; but for many, it’s tempting to plant JFK in an “early” sixties paradise and consign LBJ to a “late” sixties pre-Nixonian limbo. I’ve often noticed that JFK’s presidency, preserved with so much wistful pageantry, seems much more “colorful” than LBJ’s black-and-white Sturm und Drang. It wasn’t, of course; but if Google Images is any measure—and for this kind of quick-and-dirty skimming of collective memory I think it is—then, indeed, JFK is Fujifilm and LBJ is Ilford. (Warning: I’d never seen the autopsy shots of JFK, and the thumbnails haven’t improved my life. Though mentally superimposing Sabrina Harman into the axionometric upper-body photo of JFK was a useful mental exercise.)
In any event, there’s more than one way to fuzz up a cat. Gummint bureaucrats can produce all the blizzards of paperwork they want, but citizens are quite capable of fooling themselves.
(And one more thing: Morris’s essay has thirty-five footnotes. Not “links,” footnotes. Yet another testament to how incoherent NYT-style hypertext policies are.)
Private-public key history
under military
Steve Bellovin’s “Prehistory of Public Key Cryptography” (08-01-16) says the technique was developed several years earlier than thought—and, according to former NSA Director Bobby (Ray) Inman, "a decade earlier than Diffie and Hellman," possibly inspired by “a World War II–era paper by an unknown person at Bell Labs.”
In a talk “The Early Days in Nuclear Command and Control”, [ex-NSA high-up Jim Frazer] spoke of National Security Action Memorandum 160 (from June 6, 1962), “Permissive Links for Nuclear Weapons in NATO”. Frazer claimed that this memo—signed by President Kennedy and endorsing a memo from his science advisor, Jerome Weisner—was the basis for the invention of public key cryptography by NSA....
Weisner’s memorandum says that “this equipment...would certainly deter unauthorized use by military forces holding the weapons during periods of high tension or military combat”. In other words, non-repudiation—a classic use for public key cryptography—was important; if a bomb is used, they (or their heirs, or civilization’s heirs...) want to know who ordered it. Pending declassification of the rest of the memo, I suspect that this is the crucial seed that led to the invention of public key cryptography at NSA....
[T]he first PALs (Permissive Action Links) deployed were 5-digit mechanical combination locks. The latest versions, the Categories D and F PALs, feature 6- or 12-digit input, and an automatic “limited try” feature which disables the warhead after too many incorrect tries.
Bellovin on PALs is interesting, but Bruce G. Blair writes:
The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.
(But those are the letter O, not zeroes. So maybe PALs predate the distinction between “O” and “0” and “l” and “1” on a keyboard?)
More: a very interesting resource maintained by (this?) Bill Stewart, one of the more genial voices on the Cypherpunks list of yore.
One botnet per child
OLPC mesh networking + Windows XP? Oh dear.
Groklaw asks: “What are you doing to those children?” C|net’s Matt Asay expands:
OLPC is rather about liberating developing nations from their vassal status that continually keeps them at the mercy of the pricing and licensing of Microsoft and other proprietary vendors. By building on Windows, Negroponte cuts his vision off at the knees, stultifying its potential to benefit children in developing nations.
Stirring words. My own suspicion was that OLPC was also about, among other things, creating artificial markets to help vendors build up production capacity of hardware that wouldn’t neatly fit into existing niches or strata (e.g., hi-res screens too small for laptops but too big for phones).
Darn those meddling open-source kids:
[T]he Sugar graphical user interface aimed at children “grew amorphously” and “didn’t have a software architect who did it in a crisp way,” he said. Also, the laptops don’t support the latest versions of Flash animation, which is widely used on children’s and educational Web sites.
He said the laptop’s open-source software had actually scared away potential adopters.
They even have the temerity to argue back:
If Sugar is a problem, Negroponte has no one but himself to blame, Krstić said. “Nicholas’ recent claim of Sugar growing amorphously because it ‘didn’t have a software architect who did it in a crisp way’ is similarly muddy: convincing him of the need for an architect is a battle Walter and I fought for months without success,” Krstić wrote.
They should (PC World) “stop bickering, unite and jointly develop a Windows user interface.”
RMS: “OLPC has not structured its development so as to reach out to the community for help.”