Experiments in Cyberspace

Employers not to Snoop over Facebook Data

2010-08-25T10:18:00.000-07:00

German government is trying to push a law that will prevent employers to check their prospective employees' Facebook data. The draft presented by Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere is a lame -still positive, though, attempt to address surmounting problems created by social networks:

It will be illegal to become a Facebook friend with an applicant in order to check out private details as some people seem to be indiscriminate about whom they accept as a friend. If an employer turns down an application based on the Facebook postings, a rejected job applicant could take the company to court and claim damages.

The new law also aims to limit video surveillance in the workplace like lavatories and locker rooms after a public outrage when it was discovered that some corporations have been checking on employee e-mails and filming sales clerks during coffee breaks. However, de Maiziere continues,

Employers will still be allowed to run a search on the web on their applicants. Anything out in public is fair game, as are postings on networks specifically created for business contacts, such as LinkedIn.

My! Orwell would be proud, very very proud. Let us take stock of what we have so far. There are employers out there that:

place video feeds in bathrooms and locker rooms and other places (left to your imagination)
befriend current and prospective employees in various networks to gather intel
read private e-mails
film us during coffee breaks
run searches on us to find anything fishy

Do you have a company phone? You really shouldn't, really!

Oh, this also sums up why businesses crash so easily. Apparently the executives are too busy entertaining themselves with workers' data and they have no time left to develop strategy. Focus on people a business guru once said, but I can not remember who.

Mobile Nightmare on Life Street

2010-08-18T01:21:00.000-07:00

I missed the computer revolution by a few years. True, I could have caught up if I had really wanted to (this statement is not entirely true) but I was in the wrong place and Madame Fortune had swung me on a different path.

I tried to find and correct the missing pieces in the years to come and to a great extent I was successful. Barring programming, I can almost do anything on/with a PC.

Then came the next revolution: the mobile phone. I did not like it very much. Maybe this can be attributed to my age at that time. I do not remember where I read it but it was something like this: humans are quick and eager to grasp (and use) innovations only up to a certain age. Then, we tend to be more conservative. So, apart from its basic and originally intended use, i.e. talking, I hardly use a mobile phone. I usually find it impractical.

I did not make a fuss or give a second thought about it until I decided to observe how people and friends around me used their computers. Their interaction with a PC was almost limited to reading mails and spending time in Facebook, Twitter, etc. Guess what? You do not need a PC for such activities. A mobile phone is more than enough.

You can argue that a computer is much better suited to use within the confines of your home because it has a bigger screen but one day, a genius will find (or already have found) a simple way to connect a mobile phone to a monitor or a TV and poof: you do not need a PC any more.

Honestly this is creeping me out. I have spent considerable time musing over the cultural and social implications of this transition, but I can not say I am happy. The whole process emphasizes being connected, yet I feel more detached each passing day.

Warped Thoughts Flowing Through Butter

2010-02-08T10:16:00.000-08:00

I had been expecting the claims guy from my insurance company to come by my work yesterday and check out the damage on my vehicle from the accident I was in on Friday. I was expecting to have to be assertive about having a homebirth so I was kind of nervous. The pregnancy books say its more and more common towards the end of pregnancy, but man am I having trouble in this department lately!! Arthur is putting a little foot on my ribs more and more often now, so I guess he has run out of other places to stick it! Im still pissed off about the other day, and I really, really, really hate Toby Keith even more now.

"What Should I write about?" was the question I asked to my blog drone after a long hiatus. It muttered something along those lines above.

Laws of Attraction

2009-07-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

This is probably one of my favorite things about the movie Anastasia was that song. One thing I wonder is this: in how much detail is okay to write about her on-line? I probably would've run over the damn thing and left its remnants in the parking lot here at work. Anyone who has been reading this web page for a while knows that I am a dedicated observer of human quirks and oddities, particularly the collection of human quirks and oddities that rides Chicago public transit. I guess I should thank them, really, for showing me that even a dedicated amateur anthropologist like me has limits.

I guess I just wish that I had that experience or that feeling that puts the little extra spark in someone's eyes, and makes their smile just a little wider, even at the mention of their name. I mean overall it was a good vacation, I got to hang out with my cousins CorCor and Kny and JB and Nato, but the other baby cousin that I have is driving me up a wall.

That just freaked me out for the rest of the time I was there so I had to put that in this journal so someone could feel the same way that I did when I found out, that person is fine though, they just walked away from the hospital with cuts and bruises which is something to praise God for cause it coulda been way worst then it turned out to be. And someone came by my grandma's house the next morning and told us that someone was driving down the road that night and fell asleep, lost control and ran into the pole and knocked all the power out on the whole street, and that noise we heard was that person hunched on over the horn of the car knocked unconscious.

Oh oh oh I have to say this too cause it freaked me out when I found out what the deal was.

And while all this was going on we heard a noise like someone was just constantly pressing on the carhorn of a car.

The thing is was that I was being civl to him as nobody else in the group will even talk to him because none of them like him. She was getting on my nerves.

Remember, he was being seduced by The Ring, as was his brother and other characters before and after.

Organized Waste of Time

2009-05-13T07:57:00.000-07:00

"I experienced the web as a powerful tool of organizing life and at the same time as a toy for organized waste of time." These are the words I bookmarked[1] when I read Elliot's The Screen Generation at cDc.

Web as a medium of communication, hence a mere tool, cuts both ways. The underlying difference that sets it apart from other media is participating in content creation. Unlike TV for example, where you are forced to consume whatever the producers broadcast, content can be generated collectively.

I consider any attempt that tries to push content, a state where the user is passive just like a TV viewer, as hostile and destructive for Internet culture. Sharing, participating, recommending, including your own input, searching, etc are the trademarks of Internet, they are what make it tick, and wonderful.

I have recently come across a discussion about copyright, for comments to be specific. Who owns the copyright to a comment made for this post, the author or the domain owner, i.e. me? I believe neither does. Together, we have collectively produced something new. This is the area where the so-called tamers of the Internet fail to understand, or deliberately ignore. When they succeed, we will have a big toy organized by them so that we can waste our time while they reap the benefit. Sad...

[1] One of the reasons I have been using Opera since version 3.x is its Notes functionality. You highlight some text and copy it to your notes, just like a bookmark, but you know why you bookmarked it; an indispensable tool for researchers and collectors.

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Through the Electronic Dust

2009-05-06T04:23:00.000-07:00

The world wide web is rich. Even by the best estimate, search engines can only crawl one fourth of it. The rest? It is waiting for you to be uncovered by other methods so that they can see the daylight in the dark and dusty recesses of this cob web where they silently weep. Hidden treasures, interesting sites, rarely heard games, articles that few read... Some do not even use the hypertext, i.e. HTTP protocol. They are all waiting to be discovered, unhidden so to speak.

Some might have already been found by spiders or bots, if only you could type those weird keywords in a search form...

Some had their day. They cherished the victory, enjoyed the glory, only to be forgotten again. A spark, a momentary fame that did not last.

Some can only be accessed via Internet Archive; if they were fortunate to be archived, of course. The servers that hosted them have probably been scrapped or thrown to a junk yard.

They are all part of our culture. If we lose them, we also lose a part of ourselves, our history. They had their share in making us who we are today.

So let us venture to the land of the awkward without further delay. We have a long road to walk; before all trails disappear, all signs removed, when there is still a chance to ask someone for direction.

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Death of a Seeker

2009-05-04T08:58:00.000-07:00

Once a palm reader, a gypsy true to tradition said, "You will live until 2032, 80 years of age." She was wrong this time and a swan sang out sorrow.

Web is a strange place. You cry for a friend whom you never met; yet you like him, just as sure as you will miss him.

A +seeker has died yesterday.

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Chalk Animation by Schreiber and Kronenberg

2009-05-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

My fixation on digital video recording seems to open up new horizons and discoveries these days. While trying to hone my long gone theoretical knowledge on cameras, frames, slow motion and similar concepts, I come across such great artwork that it is impossible not to get distracted.

One such example I'd like to share with you is the chalk animation of Lucinda Schreiber and Yanni Kronenberg. The video took six months from start to finish, four of which being full time. With 1900 frames shot and variable rates of 12fps, 8fps and 6fps, music of Firekites, a band from Newcastle, Australia accompanies the video (Autumn story). Absolutely stunning.

Firekites - AUTUMN STORY - chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber on Vimeo.

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Swine Flu Virus in the Net

2009-04-30T07:31:00.000-07:00

Swine flu has finally spread to cyberspace. Shocking as it may seem, visitors to INMI, the Japanese infectious disease center, have begun receiving mails titled "Information about Swine Flu," which reportedly contain computer viruses. No explanation has been given as to how the virus harms PCs.

I usually take virus news light heartedly and always with a smile. Despite the harm they cause, they are also a symbol of human ingenuity for me. But this time, I have to say it is plain wicked, unnecessary and evil. We are on the verge of a serious epidemic and people are just trying to be a little more informed. Would it not be better if we tried to help them instead?

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DVR: Digital Video Recording

2009-04-29T06:11:00.000-07:00

The number one reason why people use digital video recording, DVR for short, is security. From small shop owners and families to big financial institutions, digital cameras are used everywhere and recorded tapes (a misnomer here obviously) or other media are stored for inspection purposes later. Though it is difficult to claim it stops abuse or theft, security by DVR has three immediate benefits:

It is considered as a deterrent
It drives down insurance costs
Data stored occupies less space and is extremely portable.

Now, include other gadgets in e.g. stations, airports, city halls, traffic lights, subways, stores and whatnot into this cameraverse, it will not be wrong to say unless we decide to live in caves, our every move is under surveillance.

Still, as far as our privacy is concerned, one can safely assume that it is intact just because of the sheer amount of data collected. Unless it is narrowed down, we are just one of the millions of pixels residing in those images, despite the fact that significant improvements have been made in facial recognition software and the like.

I tend to believe that our assumed safety is an illusion because we ignore the fact that millions of gigabytes of data is collected by other means as well, though not necessarily visually. What is more, it has important political implications if we do not place safeguards to access this data, assuming of course, there really is a good reason to collect it in the first place. This will be the main issue I will be focusing although some technical information or pointers to it will be given. It is time to think about what should be done to keep a free society free.

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Under Constant Surveillance

2009-04-28T11:34:00.000-07:00

As threats to public security increases day by day, there is a growing demand for more surveillance in all aspects of our lives. E-mails, Facebook profiles, search queries, surfing habits, you name it, are all recorded and used.

Now, considerable amount of that data is for marketing purposes and it can be viewed either good or bad depending on its exact purpose. Some of it are in the hands of the law enforcement agencies for apparent public safety.

Still, I can not help but be concerned. If you told me a country like Australia would propose a country wide Internet censorship, I would not believe you, or Germany would shut down sites like Wikileaks, no, I would say it was unlikely, either. Nor would I believe copyright treaties would be negotiated behind closed doors. And, no, I would not think it was possible for a company like Airbus, or any company if that matters, to spy on staff bank accounts for due diligence. Not in those parts of the world anyway. But they all happened.

I have never been comfortable with tracking, tracing, digitally recording everything on the streets and whatnot. But I thought my paranoia was a result of my upbringing, my personal experiences and deeply, and adversely I should say, affected by the places I had to live.

Let's see: I was shot at a few times, survived a couple of explosions, and OK, enough examples, already. Suffice to say that I had to live in a military regime for four years, and...

If you ask me what I value most, I will promptly and without hesitation say: FREEDOM. And I'm concerned, very concerned. Unlike most of you, I know, I feel, what oppression is very well, first hand.

And this increasing number of cameras, dvr, security, etc have started to bother me big time. I am planning to get deeper into this surveillance thing, why it is done, how it is done, the trade off of privacy in return for safety, its political implications, so and so forth. It might at first seem this will inevitably shift the focus of this site from cyberspace. Not quite! When it comes to intelligence, information gathering and similar activities, it is the cyberspace that interconnects them. Just like sound waves need air to travel, it is cyberspace that helps all of above function properly.

Let me end with a teaser. Cory Doctorow had once written a short story, Scroogled, trying to imagine what would happen if Google gone bad. I had taken great pleasure in reading and translating it to one of the obscure languages listed in his post (Sadly, I changed the permalink structure and the software so the link pointing to it will not work). More interestingly, the original story seems to have vanished from Radar Magazine, who published the story. So I had to link through web archive. Funny, isn't it? Even permanent links, the so called permalinks are not so permanent.

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The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

2009-04-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

A precious item for anyone who cares. Carlo M. Cipolla's "The Basic Laws of Stupidity" is a short essay I can heartily recommend. You can read the full on-line version at Fravia's. I am inserting just the headlines here, only to remind myself of the foolish mistakes I have done in the past and will undoubtedly do in the future. "What about present?" you may ask. Everything seems sooo right now that one should later look back in time to judge.

Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
Corollary: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

O wheel of time! Why don't you try turning backwards for once?

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Yahoo Closing GeoCities

2009-04-25T01:39:00.000-07:00

"After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We'll share more details this summer. For now, please sign in or visit the help center for more information."

Those are the words that welcome you if you visit GeoCities main page. Established in 1994, the free hosting service helped many to take their first steps in the cyber world. Yahoo bought it for $3.6 billion in 2001.

I still have a few accounts there. Many incomplete pages, trials, experiments, some stuff I like to keep on-line but not want them easily found reside in GeoCities. I even remember using the service for image hosting.

There are legendary sites disguised as innocent personal pages there. From mirrors of once popular cracking tutorials to +ORC's secret gateway, GeoCities helped the dream, the dream of a place where people and information will flow free, regardless of which sex, race or religious affiliation they belong to.

Curtain falls, an era ends.

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Searching What is Thought

2009-04-23T02:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I finally took the plunge and registered an account with Twitter. Since you had to follow at least one person, or so I assumed, I picked Onion, only to regret it approximately ten minutes later. True to its fame, Onion was at the top of its form and more than 100 tweets filled my home page in no time. You can waste/spend your entire life by following Onion only. Despite the fact that I follow the magazine for years, I will delete it.

Another side effect is my account seems to have been all screwed up, today. Apparently I am somebody else now, a Frank Grangetto to be exact, a Matt Schwartzwalder and Rachel Leggett are both me, and whatever... Leave it to another day to sort it out.

This experiment provided me some insight, though. Search engines make a very good job of what they are supposed to make: searching what is already written. But how do you search what is thought but not written? For that I believe, Twitter can be a very good alternative.

I had this novel but possibly not new idea of setting up landing pages for your blog. Failing to come up with other than a few basic ideas, I wrote a tweet pointing to the post in the hopes that somebody can make a contribution of some sort, either by leaving a reply or adding a comment to the post.

This whole process is the area where Twitter may rise and shine, after they correct their problems with account management, of course: finding what others think, sparks to expand later, so and so forth. Now, my Twitter persona (Frank) who seems to be in the real estate business, is frantically tweeting new opportunities and Matt and Rachel (i.e. the real me) are fortunately silent. Following me(s) can be entertaining.

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Towards the Invisible Internet

2009-04-21T06:33:00.000-07:00

As attacks on privacy exponentially increase and censorship attempts go uncensored, a few optimistically try to accomplish what the cyberspace dream once promised. The pendulum swings, each swing being a bit closer and more threatening, deafening the ears of a handful while millions cheer with joy. The digital imprimatur does not even bother to knock our door. As daring as the times may be, the faint light of hope still lingers. Version 0.7.2 of I2P Anonymous Network has just been released.

I2P is an anonymizing network, offering a simple layer that identity-sensitive applications can use to securely communicate. All data is wrapped with several layers of encryption, and the network is both distributed and dynamic, with no trusted parties.

It is an effort to build, deploy, and maintain a network to support secure and anonymous communication. People using I2P are in control of the tradeoffs between anonymity, reliability, bandwidth usage, and latency. There is no central point in the network on which pressure can be exerted to compromise the integrity, security, or anonymity of the system. The network supports dynamic reconfiguration in response to various attacks, and has been designed to make use of additional resources as they become available. Of course, all aspects of the network are open and freely available.

You never know when you will need it.

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Pros of Short Domain Names

2009-04-16T02:48:00.000-07:00

Life is a good teacher. Up to now, it has never occurred to me a short domain name could be an advantage. I have always assumed, because I do it that way, people could bookmark a site when they like it regardless of the length of its name.

Though I do not use it, social networking sites like Twitter changed my mind. I suddenly realized how difficult it must be to write a tweet about an article on this site without the aid of URL shortener services. Just writing the part "experimentsincyberspace/2009/04/" with the protocol prefix consumes 52 characters. I am not saying you will not be found. I am talking about the extra step, often tedious, of the necessity of shortening the URL. A very good idea could be having a short URL handy beneath or above your articles so that people can easily use it. Rather than having your visitors do it, you can take the extra step and place a short link yourself.

In addition, keeping your URL intact can be a marketing and branding advantage. Now that a myriad of domain names will be available with ICANN's new proposal for top level domains, it can be beneficial to keep that in mind. If you are planning to buy a domain name in the near future, think about it.

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Wikileaks.de Suspended by Germany

2009-04-13T05:48:00.000-07:00

Germany's registration authority has suspended investigative journalism site Wikileak's Internet domain registration without a notice.

The action comes two weeks after the house of the German WikiLeaks domain sponsor, Theodor Reppe, was searched by German authorities. Police documentation shows that the March 24, 2009 raid was triggered by WikiLeaks' publication of Australia's proposed secret Internet censorship list. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government.

The publication of the Australian list exposed the blacklisting of many harmless or political sites and changed the nature of the censorship debate in Australia. The Australian government's mandatory internet censorship proposal is now not expected to pass the Australian senate.

It is also worth mentioning a secret draft of international copyright treaty negotiated behind closed doors by some governments representing unidentified entities has been successfully uncovered and made public by Wikileaks.

I find this trend (secret policy making, nation-wide censorship attempts - some already in action, therefore not attempts) extremely annoying. I can understand parents' concern for their children and similar arguments but I believe this issue can be tackled at a user level by commercial or free software. This is not regulation of Internet, it is regulating freedom of expression. Power corrupts, great power corrupts even more.

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Goldman Sucks Dot Com Domain Available

2009-04-12T03:38:00.000-07:00

Goldman Sachs has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website goldmansachs666.com. According to the C&D letter, dated April 8, the bank is rattled because the site 'violates several of Goldman Sachs' intellectual property rights' and also 'implies a relationship' with the bank itself. Morgan claims he has followed all legal requirements to own and operate the website and that the header of the site clearly states that the content has not been approved by the bank.

The uninitiated can read and learn what Streisand effect is while those in the know may wish to purchase goldmansucks.com domain which is still available at the time of writing this post.

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The Real Value of Twitter

2009-04-11T00:05:00.000-07:00

After reading and reading again what I wrote about Google's proposal to acquire Twitter, I started thinking, and thinking again. What makes Twitter valuable commercially?

If you had told me people would frantically post and follow short messages 5 years ago, I would have laughed at your face. Yet, here they are, swamped in a frenzy of 140-character texts. But does that make it worth spending millions?

Said post, probably under the influence of bright analysts, claimed an information value for businesses to realign and improve their products and services existed. True but an incomplete judgment, because it misses an important element: Mobile connectivity.

Teens of my generation had one electronic tool: computers or PC's. It was new, it was cool and it let us go to places not seen or heard before (I stopped short of writing where no man had gone before). The promise or prophecy, -correction- dream of Gibson's cyberspace locked us in basements and dark rooms for many an hour. Our biggest concern? Evasion of phone charges due to now-can-be-called ancient modems. But the dream was there. The dream of a cyber experience, let us say, an electronic astral projection in zeros and ones persisted. A place that is anonymous, filled with our other personas, a second life, an electric heaven free from the boundaries and annoyances of the real world, an anarchy of our own. We all know what that dream has turned out to be.

Today's generation has a different toy: mobile or cellular phones. They are not the creatures of dark-lit rooms. They have their backpacks and cell phones and are always on the move. Their dream is different. I do not know what that is but it is not the same with ours. They can type a full article while I am desperately trying to punch a simple SMS with a phone.

I am certain that you must have seen the hidden value of Twitter by now. We are all trying to assess its value using the tool we are most accustomed to: our computers. Give yourself a moment or two and think about Twitter with respect to mobile phones, and see if you can come up with a price.

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New Rush for Top Level Domains Begins

2009-04-09T05:58:00.000-07:00

It will shortly, if ICANN's new proposal holds up, that is. According to Paul Levins, VP corporate affairs, any domain name will be possible, subject to your imagination,

The familiar .com, .net, .org and 18 other suffixes — officially "generic top-level domains" — could be joined by a seemingly endless stream of new ones next year under a landmark change approved last summer by the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, the entity that oversees the Web's address system.

Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly. A rapper might apply for a web address ending in .hiphop.
[...]
To beat a competitor to the punch, a company might decide it needs to control a new generic domain, such as .cereal or .detergent, but it would be costly. The currently proposed application fee is $185,000, plus an annual "continuance" fee of $25,000. If more than one company wants a suffix, there could be a bidding war.

I can imagine the porn industry fiercely competing for domains like ".ass", ".tits" and you name it, or spammers and scammers getting popular names with a ".corn" ending.[1]

Be prepared and grab a name before it will be too late.

[1] These spectacular examples are from Slashdot commenters.

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Paid For Posts (PPP) and Google PageRank

2009-04-07T02:39:00.000-07:00

After Google's April 2009 PageRank update, there has once again been a commotion and confusion about the issue of links in paid-for-posts and how they affect PageRank. As far as Google is concerned, their stand is crystal clear. Their webmaster guidelines dictate a nofollow attribute on such links as Google's Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye explain,

Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results. We enjoy working with webmasters, and an added benefit of our working together is that when you make better and more accessible content, the internet, as well as our index, improves. This in turn allows us to deliver more relevant search results to users.

If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such links can hurt relevance by causing:

Inaccuracies: False popularity and links that are not fundamentally based on merit, relevance, or authority

Inequities: Unfair advantage in our organic search results to websites with the biggest pocketbooks

Cutts also discussed the issue in his own blog, saying,

Many people who work on ranking at search engines think that selling links can lower the quality of links on the web. If you want to buy or sell a link purely for visitors or traffic and not for search engines, a simple method exists to do so (the nofollow attribute). Google's stance on selling links is pretty clear and we're pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.

At an earlier post, he went on,

Yet another "pay-for-blogging" (PFB) business launched, this time by Text Link Brokers. It should be clear from Google’s stance on paid text links, but if you are blogging and being paid by services like Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, or SponsoredReviews, links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn't affect search engines (emphasis mine). The rel="nofollow" attribute is one way, but there are numerous other ways to do paid links that won’t affect search engines, e.g. doing an internal redirect through a url that is forbidden from crawling by robots.txt.

Links above will help you find numerous sources discussing the issue and guide you in the right direction.

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Bedtime Stories by Grisham with an Enron Tea

2009-04-05T08:32:00.000-07:00

I am not adding anything. Joice and rejoice to better understand the financial crisis we are in, as seen by Mark Mitchell in his book The Story of Deep Capture:

The Columbia School of Journalism is our nation's finest. They grant the Pulitzer Prize, and their journal, The Columbia Journalism Review, is the profession’s gold standard. CJR reporters are high priests of a decaying temple, tending a flame in a land going dark.

In 2006 a CJR editor (a seasoned journalist formerly with Time magazine in Asia, The Wall Street Journal Europe, and The Far Eastern Economic Review) called me to discuss suspicions he was forming about the US financial media. I gave him leads but warned, "Chasing this will take you down a rabbit hole with no bottom." For months he pursued his story against pressure and threats he once described as, "something out of a Hollywood B movie, but unlike the movies, the evil corporations fighting the journalist are not thugs burying toxic waste, they are Wall Street and the financial media itself."

His exposé reveals a circle of corruption enclosing venerable Wall Street banks, shady offshore financiers, and suspiciously compliant reporters at The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, CNBC, and The New York Times. If you ever wonder how reporters react when a journalist investigates them (answer: like white-collar crooks they dodge interviews, lie, and hide behind lawyers), or if financial corruption interests you, then this is for you. It makes Grisham read like a book of bedtime stories, and exposes a scandal that may make Enron look like an afternoon tea.
[...]
Some mainstream journalists will not like this story. They will perhaps disapprove of our methods or decry the advent of vigilante journalism. But most of all, they will not like this story because it is largely about them - a tale of reporters who seek to be players, but instead become pawns - a tale of prominent journalists who help cover up a massive financial crime while toadying to some of Wall Street's slimiest operators.

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Will Google Acquire Twitter

2009-04-03T01:53:00.000-07:00

Rumors have surfaced up that the number one search engine Google is in late (early according to some) stages to acquire Twitter for an undisclosed price above $250 million. Twitter has recently rejected an offer by Facebook for $500 million worth of Facebook shares.

Why would Google want Twitter? Michael Arrington argues Twitter's real value is in search. It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn't even have a horse in the game:

More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually, or simply gather the information to see what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong. And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer. People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That's valuable stuff. Twitter knows it, too. They're going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it's extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable - somewhere around 40% of all on-line advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today.

Frankly speaking, I have never used Twitter and it is extremely unlikely that I will post my feedback there about the products and services I happened to buy. Nor will I base my future buying decisions on Twitter data. The opinion of one person that I know and trust is more credible for me and is more likely to affect my decisions rather than the aggregate feelings of the masses, but that's me. For all I know, some companies like Starbucks for example, regularly scan blogs for customer feedback and critics, and they take it very seriously. Write something negative about Starbucks, someone will contact you. Hence, there is value here for companies, not for marketing but for realigning and improving their products and services.

Another reason for Google can be protective action. Just like they bought Feedburner and Blogger, we can assume that it is better in the long run if Google owns Twitter rather than a competitor; it is a popular service and has some search and market analysis value.

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Wolverine Leak: Hollywood Confused

2009-04-02T02:13:00.000-07:00

A high-quality, full-length work print of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" - the movie is to be released on May 1 - has hit the bit-torrent sites last night. Not unexpectedly, the film industry's responses have demonstrated how confused they are.

One producer behind another major summer franchise insists that while piracy is a serious problem that needs a "focused and visionary response" from the movie industry, a leak like this may not actually cut that deeply into Wolverine's ticket sales.

Well, what can I say? Although English is not my mother tongue, even I know the difference between piracy and leak: Piracy is done by an outsider by any means necessary, whereas leak is by an insider with a discrete motive. It is somewhat absurd to blame people with piracy when you leak something voluntarily or discretely.

And this comment probably makes all arguments of Hollywood (RIAA) about piracy null and void:

People who are going to download and watch it on their computer were either never going to pay to see it anyway or they're the type of super-fan who was going to go 10 times in the first week. Seeing a spectacle movie like this one on your computer is not the same as seeing with a communal audience, and I don't think this is going to hurt them that much.

Did all those charged with hefty penalties deserve a refund now? You decide.

And here comes the juicy stuff:

On the other hand, a high-ranking theater exhibitor sees much more dire consequences for the franchise. "This is a disaster," he says, referring both to the free downloads resulting from the leak and to the subsequent bad reviews (emphasis mine) making their way around the Web. "It's tens of millions of dollars lost."

This is the crucial part. After all the marketing hype, a leak or piracy helps people see the packaged crap without paying; something that can not be undone.

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Blank the Movie Released on Bittorrent

2009-03-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

Here comes a new and brave experiment in the wild wild web:

Annodam Films has released the feature film 'Blank' from writer director Rick L. Winters, with leading characters played by D'Angelo Midili, Darlene Sellers, Jason Adkins on March 21, 2009 on several popular torrent sites for everyone to enjoy. It is our concept that if people like the movie they will go back and make a donation or purchase the movie at www.blank-movie.com, thus allowing us to make another film and release it in the same manner. After the end credits of the movie BLANK there will be a trailer for one of the next feature films we are planning to film and release Peer to Peer.

The thing that makes this film unique is that it is a co-op based concept where the entire cast and crew worked on a deferred percentage of the films gross. In other words, the cast and crew own a percentage of the films gross, so the profits are not going to Hollywood executives but instead into the pockets of the filmmakers themselves. Again the objective is to use profits from this film to make another movie and release it in the same manner. No one should have to pay for a film they did not like. No one should be denied the right to enjoy the art of film.

I sincerely wish to see more ventures like this and their success.