Livre d'Or

Reviving a very old project

2020-06-07T21:25:48Z

So nearly 5 years ago, I hatched a plan to get involved in Open Source stuff. And it completely foundered because I tried to install Ubuntu on a netbook and didn't really even get started. Today, I tried again and actually got somewhere.

I'm really embarrassed that I didn't try again for such a long time, but I let myself get blocked on the expectation that it was going to be frustrating. I'm a scientist, I'm generally comfortable with failure and troubleshooting. Indeed, it was my plan to identify and document and report what went wrong in order to make it easier for other people in future. However, I didn't really even get to the stage of failing, just didn't get started at all. And it sort of turned into an obligation, I made the mistake of telling myself I should try again, and I rebelled against my own intention.

And I know the pandemic isn't really the right time for that big project you've been putting off for ages. But it isn't the wrong time either. I have a bit more time and having another go at scaling the cliff face might be less appealing than any number of social things but it's more appealing than just scrolling through Twitter.

There's another motivation, which is that my Windows laptop is slowly dying. It's 7 years old (and wasn't the latest tech when I got it) and ridiculously underpowered for modern anything, and I've already resurrected it once. I might be able to fix the cooling problem again, but the touchpad is failing in awkward ways, and I don't think it has much scope to upgrade the hardware eg add RAM or replace the hard disk. Also it is pretty irresponsible to continue running Win7 on an internet-connected machine, and I find myself deeply reluctant to either 'upgrade' to Win10 or get a new machine infested with Win10. I have far less specific need for Windows these days, so if I'm going to get a new computer I might as well use the opportunity to escape from Microsoft's clutches. But I don't want to spend serious money on a new machine until I'm confident I can actually adapt to a new OS.

So. I determined I was going to have another go at converting a spare laptop (a cheap HP machine I bought last time I thought my main home machine was dying) to Ubuntu. It turns out that waiting five years was in some ways exactly the right answer. The Ubuntu website these days has far more helpful instructions compared to last time I looked, and I just followed the step by step instructions and bingo. So I made a bootable USB stick, which was almost trivially easy. And then I attached it to Purple Eyes, and it took a few tries to get Windows to break out of its usual start cycle and recognize a boot source, but that was the only hitch. I told it to delete everything, including Windows as well as all the files (which are all backed up anyway) rather than trying to create any partitions or dual boot cleverness. It felt surprisingly good to nuke Windows! I even removed the sticker from the chassis.

Result: I have a pure, completely default Ubuntu machine, which has the minor bonus of being shiny and purple. And my Win7 laptop isn't actually dead yet so I can keep them running in parallel. I am hoping to switch over to using Purple Eyes II as my main machine and just get myself into Ubuntu habits, as well as documenting the steps I take to set up an environment I can comfortably use. And I'll see if I still need a new laptop after a few months of working on the old machine with semi-new brain.

If anyone wants to recommend me software, please go ahead. I have literally nothing other than whatever's in the default setup. And I have little knowledge of what I'm missing. I mean, I could try to recreate everything I use in Windows but that slightly defeats the object.

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Tech not-a-meme

2018-03-21T23:12:48Z

Lots of people have filled in the meme about when they got online, when they had access to particular technology, etc. I think the meme isn't very well constructed, but the subject is interesting and I'm enjoying reading everybody else's posts. So I'll just babble about the topic, rather than answering the questions directly.

Part of why this is interesting is that I'm of the exact micro-generation who came of age just when internet access became straightforwardly available. Lots of people have written books about growing up middle class in the UK in the 80s and 90s, and the amazing impact of the tech revolution, and I know I'm nothing special, but still, it's a big part of my culture and personality.

When I was a kid, we had a home computer, an Acorn Electron at first, then a BBC Micro. They were expensive, the sort of thing that relied on having relatively financially comfortable and enlightened parents. But having a computer at home did us so much good. I think the reason we were fortunate with this is partly because one of my dad's closest friends was a programmer during an era when that was a highly unusual job, and therefore had a good vantage point to see that providing children with a microcomputer would be useful. Also Dad himself was working in telecommunications and keeping abreast of technological change, and we had a cousin a couple of years older who got quite into computers and I think our high-end BBC was a cast-off from him.

Yes, we played a lot of games – I remember the frustration of loading them from tape, which was not only slow but desperately unreliable. The thing is, playing games in the 80s was seriously educational; we would look at what would now be called the source code and understand how the games worked, and modify it to make the games easier or even just to personalize the in-game messages. Only one company, Superior Software, protected their code beyond the ability of under 10s to break in. We also did a lot of typing in programs from magazines, and debugging them, and again, modifying them in minor ways so it wasn't just mindless recipe following.

There was some access to similar computers at primary school; we did Logo programming to control a robot turtle, and played Granny's Garden, and sometimes I was left to play on the computer when the rest of the class were learning stuff I was too advanced for. It was a bit of a gimmick, though, having a computer at home was much more valuable. At one point my brother and I attended a 'programming club' which I remember as being really quite sleazy: it was held in the graffiti-covered, smoke-smelling basement of some local council building, and run by two middle-aged men who made a big deal out of being peripherally connected to the exciting bits of the emerging video games scene. Most of the other students were teenagers and a bit older than us. We learned quite a bit about how to structure programs sensibly, and worked on a giant sprawling text adventure thing.

Secondary school largely put me off taking programming any further, though. My school was incredibly snobby about computers, considering them as little more than fancy typewriters, and we were repeatedly discouraged from having too much to do with them as "you'll end up as nothing more than a secretary". It wasn't that girls can't program, it was that high flying intellectuals and future leaders, as we were expected to aspire to, don't bother with all that computing stuff. People who weren't predicted top grades at GCSE were sometimes nudged into taking IT as a kind of easy option. There was one IT teacher who was pretty good, but she was really frustrated by a system that saw computers as a last-ditch option for academic strugglers. Her male colleague, much more respected because sexism, was a bit of a lech and ended up in a relationship with one of the sixth formers who decided she quite liked the attention. I think it was about as consensual as a "relationship" between a teacher and student can be; they got married a couple of years after she finished school. Anyway, in this rather unpromising context, very much slanted towards IT rather than actual programming, I learned a bit of word processing and spreadsheets, and got access to some of the early PCs, pre-Microsoft, I think they might have been Acorn or RISC. And the good IT teacher did at one point introduce us to newsgroups, though we weren't allowed to look at anything in the alt. hierarchy, as that was considered inappropriate for young girls.

At home we had inherited Dad's cast-off Apple Mac from work, which started me out on a lifelong antipathy to all things Apple. Unlike the BBC Micro or even the PCs we used at school, you couldn't get 'under the hood' at all, which I hated. And there weren't any good games (at least not at pocket money prices), so that really did end up being a fancy expensive word processor. The one game the Mac did have was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, so I incidentally learned to touch type, which has of course stood me in excellent stead. Oh, and my siblings and I saved up absolutely all the money we could get our hands on (which wasn't much, we didn't have pocket money and usually if people gave us money for birthdays or the like, it was put into a savings account for future education), to buy a Nintendo Gameboy second-hand from a schoolfriend, so that became our main gaming console. I didn't really keep up with the programming after I was about 10 or 11, which is one of my major regrets now.

When I did a summer school in Israel in 1995, I discovered the proto-internet, chatrooms and message boards and more Usenet (with no teacher forbidding access to the interesting bits of it). I learned quickly that answering 'A/S/L' truthfully with 16/f/anything was a very, very bad idea. Even so, the discovery that networked computers were a relatively safe way to talk to interesting strangers all round the world was really quite important to me.

My parents gave me a desktop computer to take to uni in 1997. It was expected to be a stand-alone machine, meant for writing essays. Having been given a taste of the online world I spent a lot of time in the college computer room keeping in touch with pre-university friends by email and instant messenger (primarily ICQ, at the time, also Unix ytalk within the university), and continuing with chat rooms and message boards. At some point in my undergraduate career, the college started providing ethernet connections in all the rooms, which was not unhelpful for work purposes, but was absolutely amazing for my social life.

The year just after me, the university started providing webmail accounts rather than relying on Unix for email. I didn't realize this when I met and fell instantly in love with someone in the year below me; I used the Unix directory system I was used to search for her and stay in touch, and it just so happened that she had a society account on the old system, which she rarely checked but did just happen to see my 'let's meet up again' message. The society in question was the Gilbert & Sullivan society, and so my first personally owned rather than family computer acquired the name Silver Churn, in honour of being desperately (and I assumed unrequitedly) in love with a G&S singer. (This most aesthetic, peripatetic, magnet he lived to learn / By no endeavour can magnet ever / Attract a silver churn.)

We got dial-up at home partway through my university career, as it was clear to my parents that having internet access was necessary for both academic and social purposes. It was frustrating to move back from ethernet on tap at university, to having to wait for the phone lines to be clear, and limit use because connection time was paid by the minute, but still, having internet at home was a lot better than not.

I brought a kind of mobile phone to university, one of the classic Nokias. It was a present from my grandmother, and it meant that I could phone home without having to wait in a queue for a public phone box in the middle of the quad. It also had SMS text messages, which of course are a much more useful way of doing logistics than anything previously invented.

I never really got into things like Geocities or otherwise creating content, and for the late 90s and early 2000s mostly moved away from striking up friendships with strangers on message boards, in favour of using the internet to talk in plain text to people I knew. Lots of lonnnnnnnnnng emails to lethargic_man and MK and doseybat and others, lots of IM conversations with people who liked that kind of thing. I still wasn't programming at all; I think we did a tiny bit of Fortran in one of our practical classes, but it was very obviously just a make-work academic exercise.

I started my PhD in 2001, just at the start of the time when every scientist had their own networked computer, even lowly grad students, because otherwise you basically couldn't work. Academic journals were moving from being mostly accessed via the library and desperately photocopying reams of everything remotely relevant, to being mostly online. I got dial-up at home, and paid for unlimited access and didn't really care about tying up the landline, so I was able to continue living online. I was kind of intrigued by blogging (which was a big fad in the early 2000s), and kept dithering about starting a blog (which interested me more than making a static website), but wasn't sure what I'd write about. Then I broke up with the girlfriend who had turned out to be attracted to me after all, and she asked me to join LJ. This was in 2003, and the rest is history.

No, there's one more thing. Through LJ I got into HTML and CSS, and volunteered for Support. LJ had this whole gamified system where you could be promoted depending on how much technical support you gave, and in order to answer the highest level questions, I had to learn to at least read code and debug it, even if I wasn't exactly programming. When DW started, I joined as a volunteer helping to adapt the forked LJ codebase for the new site. This was in early 2009. My volunteering for DW has tailed off to basically nothing (my most recent patch was 2014), but I really really enjoyed working on an Open Source codebase like that and I'd like to get back into it. I'm not sure DW is the right place for me, partly because development is only just barely active.

I didn't get a smartphone until I moved back to England in 2009, and it was a dreadful Blackberry I only used because I was living in temporary accommodation with no internet at home, and not having internet access outside work was basically unbearable by then. I got my first actually useful Android phone a year or so later.

Social networking: I've tried everything that comes out, really. I'm not cutting edge, but tend to be a second wave adopter. I joined Twitter in 2007 when it was still mostly based on one-to-many SMS rather than internet. And FB also in 2007, when you needed to be able to demonstrate you were a student or graduate of a reputable university to have an account. Tumblr round about then too, way before it took off in any serious way. I've also done Orkut and Google Buzz and Google+ and *diaspora and Imzy and various other failed experiments I hoped would be FB killers. I was never on MySpace because it was more music focused than I was interested in.

But yes, in a lot of ways I grew up on the internet, and I have never got over just how great it is to be able to talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, using a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous methods.

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Tech review

2016-07-19T21:25:27Z

Some months ago, I asked for some advice about mobile phones. And then everything went to pieces and I didn't get round to telling you what I decided, so:

So I learned that the battery in a Samsung Galaxy Note is totally user replaceable. Unfortunately I got skittish and decided to pay someone with more experience to do it. I started out by asking Timpsons, who I think of as being expensive but reliable when it comes to mobile phone repairs, and they said that the Note II was too out of date for them to deal with, and to try the dodgy little mobile accessories shop up the road. The guy in the shop replaced the battery with an off-brand one, giving me a week or so of a phone that was not exactly as good as new but held its charge for at least a few hours rather than not at all. So initially I was pleased, but then the phone bricked itself. Or at least, it got into a state where it would restart constantly, and I tried all kinds of things like draining the battery, taking the battery out altogether, running it plugged in to the mains, and just couldn't get to a state where it was powered, but not constantly restarting, so I couldn't try any of the recommendations the internet or friends suggested for intervening in the boot cycle.

With my phone actually unusable rather than just problematic, I didn't have time to go for one of the non-standard options; either the Fairphone or the Wileyfox Swift would have taken weeks to reach me. Lessons for the future: one, it's safer, not riskier, to buy a branded replacement battery from the internet and fit it myself than to put my phone in the hands of a dodgy mobile shop. Two: I probably need a cheap backup phone so that if my phone breaks catastrophically again I will have time to think about getting it repaired, or taking my time to choose a replacement. Three: I should probably have back-ups, at least of my contacts; I don't generally keep important files on my phone, so I wasn't too worried, but losing my address book was really quite annoying.

So in this situation, I bought the Motorola Moto G3 for £120, plus a 32GB MicroSD card for £12 since I correctly predicted that 8GB of internal storage would get me nowhere. So in a lot of ways I traded down, but the fact that it's three years newer means I don't feel deprived. I thought that less than 2GB of RAM might feel underpowered but actually I've never noticed the phone being at all slow, though it does run kind of hot sometimes. The smaller 5'' screen I have barely even noticed; everything, including the tiny fonts I prefer, and high graphics games, is crystal clear. And I like its light weight; having a phone whose weight is literally negligible is kind of amazing after my big chunky Galaxy Note. The spec says 155g; anyway, subjectively it's small enough that I don't notice it in my handbag and I can hold it in my hand basically indefinitely. It's not especially sexy but I do like the matte back and particularly the way it's easily removable. The biggest negative for me is that the physical buttons (power and volume) on the right edge of the phone are exactly where I most comfortably want to rest my fingers while I'm holding the phone in my left hand. I suspect it's been designed for purely one-handed use, but my hands are too small to do that comfortably even on a smaller screen. Battery life is fine; I get a day of regular use and several hours of intensive use out of it, which is as good as almost any smart phone, I think.

The main feature I miss from the Note is its built-in stylus. I was able to acquire a generic stylus for basically pocket money, but unlike the Note one that has a fine, hard point, generic styli have a soft squishy point about half a cm across. I have currently lost mine and I still find it annoying to have to use my finger on the touchscreen, so I should replace it. Also I kind of miss LED notifications. I'm disproportionately annoyed by the lack of any clear signal that the phone is connected to the power; you have to actively check whether the tiny icon of a battery has an even tinier icon of lightning inside it. I don't miss the weird touch-activated buttons in the frame of the phone; having back and home be purely part of the software is much more sensible.

To my astonishment, I actually like the camera on this phone! I mean, I don't think it's anything to write home about in terms of optics (though it does have more megapixels than my "real" camera). But the software is just nice. As a literal point and click thing, it takes consistently acceptable photos, and it's just tipped over the threshold of being usable to take snaps of whatever, which I found just too fiddly and too poor quality on my old phone.

A lot of my gripes with the phone are that I'm not fond of Android Marshmallow. Motorola have done a thing I approve of, which is just giving me a plain Android phone and not trying to impose their own branding and bloatware on it. There are improvements; I find the settings menu better than in whatever old version I had, JellyBean I think. And I like that you can easily switch WiFi, data, GPS, Bluetooth etc on and off, just by pulling down the top bar, rather than going several layers deep into obscure settings menus. Though they still haven't fixed the incredibly irritating thing where the alarm icon appears in the top bar but you can't actually interact with it, you have to open the clock app separately to turn off the alarm. In theory I like Marshmallow's new fine-grained permissions, but I find they don't work very well; I keep turning off notifications for gaming apps only to find the games turn their annoying "play a loud sound at random times to remind you to play the game" thing back on again. But Marshmallow makes it far more obvious than the 4.x OSes did that you're Google's prisoner. It took active effort to let me look at my own email without routing everything through Google, and even now it just won't let me look at the mobile version of Gmail as if it were a web page, I have been forced to connect my work email address to the phone, which I had been avoiding doing. It's probably not worse than older Android versions, but it's more in your face and it's enough to push me over the edge and break out of the Android ecosystem next time I get a phone.

The other thing is that it's really really hard to change the default place to save downloads. There's not much point having an SD card with four times the space of the phone's built-in memory (well, eight times really, since the OS takes up half the available storage) if everything, including large apps, has to be downloaded to the main phone first. It turns out you have to enable USB debugging using an obscure, hidden Konami code, and then use some software that gives you a command line on a computer. cjwatson has the software available, but when he tried it it claimed that you couldn't change the default storage location without rooting the phone. Though in fact it actually did work, so who knows? I also can't find any way to get my computer to recognize the phone as a USB drive and eg transfer my photos off it, but that might possibly be a problem with my computer and not the phone, not sure.

And to go with the phone, I treated myself to a Misfit Flash activity tracker. I had been thinking of getting a Fitbit again, but actually the Flash is half the price of the cheapest Fitbit and has all the features I want. I like that it is basically an accelerometer, with the smartphone app doing all the actual computation and data display (and social features if you like that kind of thing, but I was grateful to find it's easy enough to turn that stuff off). Its main downside compared to the Fitbit is that it doesn't have a display, other than a series of LEDs representing progress towards your daily goal. I also like that the actual device is just a small circle, a little bigger than a pound coin. It came with a watch strap and a clip it can snap into, but you can also put it into jewellery made by other companies if you want. In appearance and feel it is, honestly, a bit tacky, like a cheap children's watch, but at the price I'm not complaining.

Anyway, it works. It has a slightly annoying tendency to convert everything to arbitrary "points" when I'd rather have a direct step count, but on the other hand it's pretty good at giving you more points for moving faster. So far, in three months, it hasn't made any glaring errors, either mistaking vehicle travel for exercise, or failing to record my exercise. It's not very good at recording cycling, even if I follow the advice to wear it on my foot rather than my arm. But most of my actual exercise is walking or running, so that's fine for me. (Its distance measurements are nonsense; unlike the Fitbit it doesn't have a calibration mechanism to be able to teach it how many steps of walking or running add up to 1 km. But I just ignore that.) It's also surprisingly good at recording sleep; pretty much always its impression of how well I slept matches with my own memories, and it can cope just fine with biphasic sleep or sharing a bed with another person. And I'm a giant nerd and I want more data, things like rolling averages and the ability to attach notes to activities and so on, but actually the amount it's giving me is adequate for actually tracking my exercise, not just playing with the data for the sake of it.

And it works psychologically, too, quite a few times I've got home from work and checked it and it's motivated me to go back out again and walk for another twenty minutes to meet the day's goal. It was pretty easy to make it shut up about weight, though I think you can use it for tracking weight and possibly food as well, if you like that sort of thing. It seems to be doing a good job of giving me rewards (from flashing lights when I meet my goal, to medals for streaks and records and so on), without a lot of punishment. Also, when I first got the device I couldn't get it to link to my phone, and without much hope I emailed customer services and got a prompt, informative, literate reply. (Turns out that you need both Bluetooth and GPS turned on to make Bluetooth work, which is a little odd, but hey.)

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Learning in public

2015-11-10T11:50:14Z

I am more and more thinking I want to contribute to Open Source. Now, one way is to overcome all the inertia and get going again with Dreamwidth, but I don't want to put all my eggs in one dubiously viable basket. So I'm considering other possibilities.

ghoti has talked about saying she's interested in contributing to OS and getting fobbed off with, you can still contribute without writing code, you know. Which is of course sexist and patronizing and annoying, but in my own case, I think I might be more use in peripheral ways than focusing on writing code. I'm not bothered if that's considered feminine, I'm bothered politically that everything else about making effective software is lower in prestige than writing actual computer code because of having girl cooties, but personally I am not aiming for prestige, but rather for my own satisfaction. Also, I do want to learn how to program, but I have a long way to go before I have the skills to be useful, whereas I'm already pretty good at nourishing communities, and at assimilating information and communicating it effectively, so I'm hoping to leverage those skills a bit while I'm also learning.

Also at work I've been sitting at the feet of Dr Yardley, an amazing palliative care consultant who has a PhD in Medical Education, and one of the people I most look up to of everyone I've met since I've started working in a Medical School. She's been teaching me about Wenger and Communities of Practice, which is relevant to the thing where medical students have to hang around in clinical environments and transition to actually being allowed to do things to patients. So I'm thinking about Open Source in terms of Wenger's concept of Legitimate Peripheral Participation; ideally I'd like to find a community (the whole of the FLOSS movement is way too big to be a Community of Practice, just like the whole medical profession isn't one) where they have a clear understanding that they can't achieve their other goals unless they actively work to integrate new people who aren't currently experts. Equally, thinking about myself as a potential member of the community and what I can contribute, because it doesn't count as LPP if you barter volunteering your labour for educational opportunities, rather both the volunteering and the learning are supposed to be part of working towards shared goals.

The standard advice for people wanting to get involved in Open Source is that you should scratch your own itches, ie work on things that would actually make your own experience better. And that makes sense, part of of why I want to get into OS is that I never stick with learning to program schemes that depend on completing artificial exercises, I need to do something that's actually useful. But I don't yet actually have the skills or experience to be able to identify my "itches", let alone figure out how to deal with them. So I think the first step towards contributing to OS is going to be to use Free software more. And not just to use it passively, but to pay attention to what I'm doing and what parts of it are difficult and could do with being improved.

So step zero of this plan is to install Ubuntu on my netbook. I have friends who would probably do this for me if I asked them, but getting my machine running the Free operating system is only a secondary goal. What I really want to do is to experience the process from the point of view of a total beginner. And maybe one way I can start to contribute fairly quickly is to write sensible tutorials or advice to other people going through the process. The thing is, I'm probably better than average at learning new skills independently, I'm comfortable with Quacking for solutions to problems, troubleshooting, trying a few different things to see what works, and not just giving up the first time I run into a snag. And yet I find a lot of Open Source stuff really inaccessible. There is information out there that's absolutely basic step by step, series of screenshots showing you what options to choose, but that doesn't give you any knowledge of what to do if anything doesn't go to plan or really any understanding of what you're doing. At the other end of the scale, there's highly technical stuff which I can't even search for because I don't know how to formulate the questions. There's also a frighteningly huge volume of what to me seems like actively hostile stuff, people asking for help getting shouted at or mocked for not already knowing how to do something. I don't at all delude myself I can fix this all by myself, but I think I can contribute to making some better resources, and that's part of what attracts me to Open Source, you don't have to be able to fix everything that's broken, you can make something incrementally better. I want to apply that mindset to social things, basically, as well as technical issues.

And more long-term, I might learn enough to be able to help a bit with at least finding and reporting the kinds of things that make installing the OS and getting started not go smoothly, as well as just talking about them. I know lots of actual programmers hate testing, but I am somewhat attracted to it as a concept because it seems to me like science, doing experiments to find out exactly in what circumstances things go wrong and changing things systematically to fix them. My experience on LJ and DW suggests that it's generally helpful for testing and bug-finding if you can at least read code, and that's a level of programming ability I'm reasonably confident I can reach without unfeasible time investments. But anyway, we'll see.

Anyway, I have so far failed to get Ubuntu onto my netbook, and I'm framing this as a success at gathering data on how hard it is, rather than a failure at installing the OS. And like a good little scientist, I've documented the experience in my dev journal; you're welcome to take a look if you're curious but I don't want to shove that kind of boring detail stuff in everybody's faces.

Advice is cautiously welcome. I really don't want to hear all the arguments for why Ubuntu is rubbish, I have my reasons for starting from there, and if I find that it isn't the system or the community I'm looking for, fair enough, but I have made up my mind to try at this point. Equally I don't want people to offer to take over and sort stuff out for me, however well-intentioned, because I want the experience of figuring it out at least as much as I want the end goal of having a netbook running Linux. But if you want to give me advice on where to start with troubleshooting my installation process, I would be grateful.

And if you want to give me more general advice about getting started with contributing to Open Source, then I would definitely like to hear it. I'm most likely to listen to advice that takes into account that I'm reasonably intelligent even though I'm female and don't have much in the way of programming experience, but also doesn't assume any prior knowledge at all.

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Duolingo

2014-11-18T23:28:20Z

Duolingo, who's playing? I've seen various mentions of the site and thought I might check it out, and then I discovered via FB that they now have a Swedish-for-English-speakers course in beta. So I signed up and poked at it a bit.

I'm not madly impressed, I must say. It's got some cute gamification but nothing that really stands out. If the Swedish course is typical, it's very much in the model of the old-style language tapes, that is lots of repetition of phrases to give a fairly fast route to superficial fluency, without really understanding much of the underlying structure of the language. That certainly works better as a combined website / mobile app (though Swedish isn't available for mobile yet) than on a magnetic tape that you play in the car. Primarily because you can get actual feedback, which of course a tape-based course can't do, and that's got to make learning more effective. Other advantages include the ability to do an odd five minutes every day, rather than having to sit down and listen to an episode of a tape. Plus unlike with a tape you can practise writing as well as speaking, and reading as well as listening. The set-up seems to have a pretty good mix, including translating in both directions, transcribing spoken language and so on.

The interface is a bit clunky, pretty visually, but a pain to use, in particular continuing to the next question after you've answered the previous question takes enough clicks to break the flow and to risk being physically hard on your hands. And I struggled quite a lot with creating a profile, because the account creation screen was a pop-up and there was absolutely no visual indication that you're supposed to type about an inch to the right of each prompt.

For me, the worst thing about the Swedish course as I've played with it so far is that the audio is kind of awful. It's an automated text-to-speech thing, and its Swedish pronunciation is worse than mine, which is making me think I should just turn it off, it's quite possibly doing me more harm than good. This is obviously an issue of scale; it's not going to be practical to offer free / crowd-sourced language courses with real native speakers doing all the voicing. But it's sometimes actively wrong (there are notes in the discussion forum to this effect, particularly that it can't pronounce de [them] correctly, and often just sounds weird with the stresses slightly in the wrong place and the intonation, which is an important part of Swedish, off or missing altogether.

I'm also mildly annoyed with the way that the translations into English lean heavily on literal word-for-word translations rather than idiomatic English, which again makes sense as a scaling thing, it's a lot easier to give automated feedback if you're looking for the most literal possible meaning of a phrase. And there is some flexibility where you can still get it correct if you don't type the exact answer that the course is looking for, which is helpful. One good feature it has is that it lets you jump in to a course not right at the beginning, through a "testing out" mechanism. I appreciate that, especially because my Swedish is really patchy, my receptive Swedish is, even after 5 years away, pretty good, but I can not even slightly spell in Swedish or remember the plurals and genders of anything. So being placed at what the course calls level 6 is about right, and hopefully the course will in fact help with those awkward bits of inflection.

Not at all clear what their business model is. My money's on hoping to get bought out by Google or Facebook, tbh; they don't have adverts or micropayments, which does make the site pleasant to use at least, but also makes me suspicious about how sustainable it is. They're at least up-front about having VC funding as well as believing in their "mission", but still. And they seem to be relying mainly on user-created content, which certainly can work well, but I'm not sure what the incentive is for people to put time into creating and curating medium quality language courses. The people involved are portrayed on the site as cute little cartoons, which makes it hard to judge things like race and gender, but I'd guess very heavily white dominated, with some female-appearing cartoons including in the technical sectors.

I think I may go back to Memrise, which is more of an automated flashcards thing in some ways, it's for drilling vocabulary at a slightly more atomic level than Duolingo. But I like its gamification stuff better, and I find the interface more usable and less annoying.

Anyway, username ewerb; anyone who's using it want to be friends? I'm sure the social side of it will be a benefit if I do decide to go on with it.

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Social network trends

2014-10-09T11:39:33Z

It seems a bit of a perennial thing with me that every so often I pontificate about the current state of social networking. This latest round was prompted partly by everybody suddenly getting excited about a new tech start-up, Ello. I'm pretty much convinced it's entirely pointless, and probably just vapourware. oursin posted pretty much what I was going to say, including a link to notyourexrotic's clear explanation of why allowing pseudonyms does little for privacy if you don't have any tools to restrict who can view and respond to your content. Lots of other people have been linking to Balkan's very well-written piece pointing out that Ello has already sold its as yet hypothetical userbase for venture capital funding. I think Balkan is over-stating his case slightly; not everything that acquires start-up funding is inherently evil, but it's certainly true that you're just as much the product if the customer is investors as if the customer is advertisers.

Aside from those issues, I see absolutely no advantage to Ello. It offers me literally nothing that isn't already available at more established sites, and in particular it's worse in just about every respect than Dreamwidth! I've been wrong before, probably more often than I've been right; I was enthusiastic about Facebook at first, not knowing how evil it would turn out, and also about Google+ as a FB replacement, which was a complete flop as well as evil, even with the Google behemoth pushing it really heavily. I agree with oursin that if I'm wrong and everybody ends up using Ello as their main place, I'll join it whatever its problems may be; I mean, I have a Facebook account, so I'm in no position to value moral purity over using the same networks my friends use.

I retweeted emceeaich who pointed out Unlike Ello, Dreamwidth has a privacy model and you don't need an invite, and someone argued with me that DW is ugly and Ello has visual design appeal. I find Ello extremely ugly and extremely hard to read, but I can't deny that it's trendy. And it's interesting that Ello somehow succeeded in attracting some of my FB friends who are not geeky, who are by no means early adopters of new websites, the kind of people who are sick of FB but don't really know of any alternatives (the same people whose initial response to Google+ was, what's that, it looks like some weird complicated site for computer geeks). So obviously they're doing something right with the marketing and presentation, if they're attracting both bleeding edge Silicon Valley hipsters and middle-aged people who only got online a couple of years ago and rarely venture outside FB.

Of course, Ello benefits from being new, not only in that it looks cool and trendy but in that it doesn't have accumulated cruft. People can be pretty sure their employers and their awkward relatives and those vaguely irritating people they met once through work aren't there. And because it's brand new it hasn't yet been taken over by trolls and spammers. I read a great article some years ago pointing out that, much to my sadness, people don't stick with the same websites that work well for them, because simply being old and established is a huge disadvantage compared to starting again with a clean slate where you only friend / follow the people you actually want to know.

One thing that Ello is, I think, getting right, is encouraging establishment of identity through stable pseudonyms. I really do think that's the best way to have good conversation. Give people identities they're invested in, so that it's more rewarding to behave decently and have interesting conversations than to spew insults and trolling. But don't restrict participation to people who can afford to be googlable under the same name that they use at work and for financial transcations (or even worse, to people who can provide a "WASPonym", an anglo-style name consisting of a first name that isn't a dictionary word and a surname describing the appearance or profession of their English-speaking male ancestors). Those people are not more "honest" or more "polite" than average, they just have enough race, class and gender privilege to be less vulnerable to some types of attack than most people.

But it's not enough to encourage pseudonyms. I agree with notyourexrotic that you also need comprehensive privacy and anti-abuse tools. And further, you need actual evidence that the company behind the website is genuinely committed to privacy; it's all very well to say you're in favour of it, but if you're just going to tamely hand over all your data as soon as you sniff the possibility of moolah or a legal-ish sounding letter, that's pretty useless. And evidence that you have the technical chops to actually protect your users from leaks and hacking; as soon as a site becomes successful enough to benefit from any kind of network effect, it also provides a big enough attack surface that blackhats are going to be trying to get their hands on that valuable personal data. Snapchat was supposed to be all about privacy, claiming that messages weren't being stored at all, but of course they were, and of course they fell into the wrong hands.

One thing that gave Ello a boost was that Facebook managed to do something evil enough to break out of the boiling frog effect and actually give increasingly dissatisfied users the impetus to leave. Namely, they suddenly started demanding documentation from drag queens to prove that their performance names were their "real" names. Which got a lot of trans* folk really scared, because it's bad enough if your use name doesn't match what's on your birth certificate or passport, but if your gender doesn't match either, you're really screwed. And however much I'm grieved to see people getting scared of abuse by the site where many of their friends and communities are, I couldn't help being a bit pleased to see lots of my variously Queer friends starting to post at LJ and Dreamwidth again. I do hope this continues, because it's lovely to have more of you around without having to fight against Facebook to be able to hear what's going on in your lives and talk to you! And interestingly this even quite small exodus made enough of a dent that FB actually backtracked about enforcing legally documented names, to some extent, so it is possible to get a response by voting with your feet.

I'm kind of reluctant to go back to LJ, because I still really hate their advertising-based business model, (and I dislike a lot of the recent directions in design changes, but that's minor). The problem that started to come up half a decade ago is still here, that bad keyword matching is showing "date hot Asian chicks!" adverts on the journals of people who are themselves Asian, which is really horrible. And yes, it's true that you can pay not to see ads, but needing to pay to have a usable site experience really works against the network effect.

However, I am leaning more towards cross-posting to LJ again, because politically even if not aesthetically I like their recent directions. In particular, the recent news post is really pretty encouraging. They actually asked the userbase what they like about LJ, and made an advert based on playing to LJ's actual strengths, not on trying to be trendy. And even more impressively, when they got sued they actually went to bat for their users, refusing to give up personal details even under legal pressure. (I think the site owners are also somewhat disentangling themselves from scary Russian politics and potential censorship, too, but I'm hazy on the details.) That's what Ello doesn't have, an actual track record of defending privacy even under legal and financial pressure.

However, even Dreamwidth (which I'm still convinced is just better than LJ, better business model, nicer community, better technically, properly open source) has real downsides compared to some more modern social networks. It's not purely the network effect, though that's a big factor. Yeah, FB still has the events and calendaring system as its killer app, but that's minor; people could use FB for events and DW for posting about their lives and having discussions! The real problem is that it's a bit of a pain to read DW from a smartphone and compared to other sites near enough impossible to comment. I have always opposed making sites too flashy with widgets and AJAX and stuff, but really, at this point, DW is never going to attract or retain people until you can comment by just starting typing under the thing you want to reply to, and until it has respectable iPhone and Android apps. I think this is partly because it's an American site and data plans are just ridiculously more expensive in the US compared to other economically comparable countries, so the mostly American developer base don't live in the world we Europeans do, where the huge majority of people's web experience is smartphone based, not desktop based. I'm kind of hoping that this will encourage a shift in priorities, but it may already be too late.

There was also an interesting discussion, unfortunately on FB which makes it hard to follow properly and impossible to link to, about whether it's ableist to expect people to socialize anywhere other than FB. And I can certainly see the argument, for lots of people Facebook is literally essential, they need to be able to get social contact and support where their friends and networks actually are, not on some hypothetically better site with a massive learning curve to use, let alone half a dozen different sites which different balkanized groups think might be better. The thing I don't agree with is that I don't think FB is "easy to use" at all; I think people have learned to use it because they had to, but not only is it really short on accessibility features, it's deliberately set up to be hard to use. I've heard rumours that they user tested an optimized user interface and then deliberately broke it, because with a good, clear, intuitive interface everybody could easily avoid the ads and see only the content they actually wanted, which doesn't make FB money. And yes, change is hard, even for neurotypical and cognitively abled people who have leisure time and energy for learning new habits. But FB itself changes everything around all the time, to nudge people into accidentally revealing information they thought was private, or clicking on ads they thought were endorsed by their friends.

I personally find Dreamwidth much easier to use than Facebook or any of the other modern "slick" sites. Because I can make it do what I want! If it doesn't suit me, I can modify it, I can do things that aren't the default template of what the majority of users are expected to be doing. But I know I'm weird, I've been a power user from the early days of LJ (which is where I first discovered user experience concepts like that), and I positively enjoy going through screens and screens of settings and options, positively enjoy learning to write HTML so that I can make my journal look exactly how I want to. I think DW's deep commitment to accessibility counts for a lot, but it's at a huge disadvantage just because of market share; people prefer FB cos they're used to it, not cos it's better, just as for much of the 2000s people preferred Microsoft Windows over any actually better alternatives because it was common and there was a plethora of resources available and people had already been forced to train themselves into the Windows way of doing things anyway. And also there is such a thing as conflicting access needs; for example, some people need high contrast and some people need low contrast, and many people need not to have to choose from six different options just to be able to look at a page in a way that isn't painful.

There is also a problem that the people who care about things like electronic privacy often make it a point of pride that they don't care about usability or design. I mean, Diaspora was a disaster from that perspective; even I got fed up with having to debug each post to make it appear sensibly, and I can quite see why there was no mass-exodus of non-geeks from FB to Diaspora even though the open, federated model of social networking has obvious advantages. I've been vaguely paying attention to Ada Initiative campaigns recently, and Valerie Aurora's feminist kernel programming story kind of horrified me. Like, literally wanting your OS to work reliably is portrayed as some kind of silly little girl or pussy n0ob preference. There's this weird machismo in having stuff that's unnecessarily hard, and needing to know all the kludges and workrounds to be able to use a tool effectively. And if interacting with that culture (let alone the even more toxic manifestations of violence and harassment against women and anyone who objects to said culture) is the only way to get social networks with actually meaningful privacy, well, we're doomed. We're never going to get a replacement for proprietary, walled-garden, sell your personal data to the highest bidder Facebook style model.

DW I think cares about usability, but just doesn't have the manpower to actually make it happen, so we end up with a site where the backend and general principles are way ahead of the user experience. But I do think it's noteworthy that although it was started by exactly the kind of geeks who think it's all about technical effectiveness and doing things the hard way, the stereotypical LJer or DWian is in fact a teenaged girl or young woman who self-teaches HTML, CSS and even coding to be able to make fanworks and prettify her space. That said I very much respect people who explain that DW is just too hard and too confusing to use, whether that's because of disability or because they have better things to do with their time and they're going to use the slicker sites in preference.

I was also going to talk about women using the internet professionally, and misogyny and crowdfunding, but I think that's probably a separate post in fact.

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Little Plans

2014-07-24T13:16:12Z

I found a netbook replacement. Thank you all for helping me figure out what's out there. I ended up poking about on eBay and found a last year's model mid-range 11½'' netbook going for £100, so I snapped it up. It's an Acer V5-121, not exactly the model that's listed at that link but something pretty close to it (the processor is AMD C72 not AMD C70, but I can't imagine I'll notice the difference!)

I feel like I've done well because even at a year out of date that gadget is retailing for £200 - £250, so to get an as-new refurbed model for half that was an unusually good deal. And certainly better than the kind of tablets or mini-netbooks you mostly see in that price range. And wow, jumping forward five years of advances in technology feels like a revelation. I have named it Little Plans, following my G&S naming scheme (previous laptops were Little List and Little Craft, and the big computers are Silver Churn, Sally Lunn, Placid Flame (sic, that's a misquote) and now Ocean Blue.)

Form factor: it's a really pretty colour, much more vividly turquoise than you can see in those images. It's a bit curvy and cute, very slim, quite a bit lighter than my old Eee. The difference between a little over 10'' and a little over 11'' is very noticeable. It's just a bit too big to sling in my (capacious) handbag, so I think I'll probably need to get a proper carrying case. And it's just a bit too big to fit on a flippy table on the back of a train seat. But the difference in screen real estate is just amazing, it's rather higher resolution than the Eee as well as being physically bigger, and honestly I feel like I am working on a full-sized screen rather than feeling cramped. I can just about manage it literally on my lap, so it's ok that I can't quite balance on the flippy tables any more.

The keyboard is one of those modern style ones with chiclet keys, which I like less than the older kind, but it's perfectly serviceable and I have had no problems bashing out several thousand words on it on journeys so far. And the fact it's just that bit bigger makes a lot of difference to typing comfort. The mousepad is more comfortable than any I've ever used before, and that's speaking as someone who generally dislikes mousepads.

It actually has five hours' battery life, and when I switch it on freshly charged with the screen dimmed and WiFi off (which is how I mostly work when travelling anyway), it claims 7 1/2 hours. I haven't yet needed to run it right down for 7 hours without charging, so I haven't actually tested this claim. This is the biggest reason why I'm glad I made the decision to upgrade rather than try to repair my Eee; 5 realistic hours of battery life means I can use it to take notes at conferences or for long journeys and it's just not a pain. I think with the bigger screen and the much better battery life it's usable as a work machine when I'm away from home, I wouldn't want to do serious graphics on it but it's fine for having multiple windows open and designing Powerpoint slides and so on.

The main downside is that with 2GB of RAM it's kind of struggling to run Windows 8. Oh yeah, and it has OEM Windows 8. I am considering whether I should wipe it and install one of the slimmer Linux flavours, partly because that would allow me to escape from Microsoft, and partly because it is just noticeably short on memory, even as a new (refurbed, but not full of accreted clutter) machine. Against that, if I'm going to be using it for work there's something to be said for having a standard OS that's compatible with the software everyone else uses.

So, questions:

Who has a link to a good tutorial to make Win8 not suck? Either by changing my use patterns or changing the settings. I am somewhat amused in a rather eye-rolly way that it has an app for turning the power off... It would be good to get rid of the weird tablet-style start screen (which is particularly useless as this model doesn't even have a touch screen anyway), and replace it with a more familiar way of finding and running programs.
What anti-virus protection and general security software should I be using? I understand that contemporary versions of Windows have a reasonable firewall, do I need anything beyond that? It's preloaded with McAfee and a 40 day subscription, but I don't know much about McAfee. In principle I'm willing to pay for anti-virus but only if it's actually better than the free alternatives. I use AVG on my main computer, mainly out of habit; should I be investigating a better option.
Any suggestions of good places to buy laptop cases? I probably want a soft case because I don't want to defeat the object of having a highly portable machine by adding extra weight and extra bulk. But I'd quite like something a bit pretty and not too generic. I know Etsy sometimes has good stuff, does anyone recommend a particular seller?

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January Journal: e-books and paper books

2014-01-16T00:55:48Z

syderia asked me about e-books and paper books. It's possible everything there is to say about this topic has already been said, but let's give it a go.

When I first read The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy I really desperately wished for the Guide to exist. 20 years later, we're not quite there but really not far off. I don't think we can quite put the total output of all literate civilizations on a single portable device, except, well, if it has an internet connection... I can however carry a device which cost about a day's salary and weighs a few hundred g and has the capacity to store pretty much a lifetime's worth of reading material. I think this is basically awesome, but that doesn't mean I despise paper books, and I can certainly think of some improvements both social and technical for how e-books work.

In lots of ways e-books make a ton of sense for me. I read fast, I spend quite a lot of time on buses and trains and really hate being without reading material. I also read the great majority of books exactly once, except for a very small number that I passionately love. I also tend to read in a pretty linear way; I'm not bothered by the fact that e-books make it harder to skim and flip back through the pages. But I'm surprisingly reluctant to give up paper books, reading them, yes, but also owning them, even though finding storage space for my library is becoming quite a substantial issue in my life.

I think it's partly that e-readers aren't quite reliable enough yet. I always want to take a backup novel when I'm travelling, in case my reader freezes on me or runs out of battery or I lose it or break its screen. And if I'm near the end of my current book, well, I'd better take a second one just in case my e-reader dies and I run out of book. At which point, I'm not gaining nearly as much advantage as I could from having the e-reader. Maybe the solution to this is to use my phone as a backup e-reader. I don't want to use it as my primary device because I do prefer reading substantial text with e-ink rather than a backlit screen, and because an internet-enabled device means I don't really concentrate enough to read properly. In theory e-readers are also superior because of the much longer battery life, but my experience has been that that's only really true in the first few months of life a brand new reader, after that they need feeding nightly just like my futuristic but power-hungry smartphone does.

And that's the other downside of e-readers. They're not even slightly robust, and there's built-in obsolescence on top of that. I had in mind that I would by a cheap e-reader for a few tens of pounds, and then I would put lots of cheap or free books on it and I'd be set. But no, I find I'm having to spend a few tens of pounds on an e-reader about every year, because they become faint and unchargeable or the screen breaks. And that's eating a big chunk out of my book budget plus I feel guilty about the resource implications of constantly updating my electronic devices.

It's also partly because I like being able to lend books to people (and not in some convoluted way where they have to have a precisely compatible device and jump through lots of hoops to "borrow" an e-book). Just to be able to have a conversation and a book gets mentioned and my friend expresses enthusiasm and I can say, here, borrow. I like having books arrayed on my shelves so people can notice them and express opinions. Also I grew up in a house that was full to bursting with books, and I don't feel quite right in rooms that don't have extensive and crowded bookshelves. And even though I don't reread I like being able to go back to a book and check something.

Probably the best compromise is that I should buy e-books and do my read once thing, and then get a second paper copy of any that I particularly like. I should also purge once-read, mediocre and unmemorable paper books from my life, I am not at all likely to reread them or lend them so it's really foolish to let them take up precious space. The problem with that strategy is basically copyright and DRM. My reading habits are that I pick up books recommended by friends or blogs, and also quite a lot of serendipity books from the library or charity shops. That just doesn't work with e-readers; lots of books that my friends recommend aren't available as e-books, or are only available from Amazon in their special proprietary format which only works on Kindles (which I don't have). And yes, I could break the DRM and I could convert to a more sensible format, but it's already quite a big hassle to buy / download books from anywhere other than endorsed stores, and side-load them onto my e-reader. Cracking the DRM and format shifting is mostly too big an obstacle. And serendipity is still really hard with online book stores. I also don't like having to think in advance of a trip what I'll want to read; I prefer browsing my bookshelves and seeing what I'm in the mood for.

I also read quite a lot of books from the middle of the 20^th century. Long copyright terms mean that there's an awful lot of books that are in copyright but out of print, meaning that absolutely nobody has the right to make e-book versions of them. In paper book days I wasn't so bothered by this because you could always find books that were popular a generation or two ago in charity shops. With e-books they're simply missing. And yes, I think this problem will get less bad as everything is published with proper digital rights agreements baked in from the beginning. There's almost no commercial reason against publishers and e-book stores keeping their entire backlist "in print" in the sense of being available to download, and probably fairly cheaply once it's no longer selling meaningfully at full price.

So in short, I think we need a few more years of ironing out the kinks in both the technology for readers and the way that e-books are marketed. I hope the problems will get fixed, rather than heading to a situation where the only way you can read at all is by paying Amazon their protection money. But I don't really expect paper books or traditional publishing to go away any time soon, not from my life and not from the world in general.

[January Journal masterlist. Anyone want the last empty slot?]

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New year, new shiny

2013-09-09T13:35:35Z

I have a new phone, so I shall babble about it, because I'm procrastinating.

My contract with Orange/EE came to an end this month. I have been itching to leave Orange for a while because they over-charge and offer only mediocre service. I considered getting out of the usurious system of phone contracts altogether, and buying myself a phone (front-loading the cost instead of spreading it over monthly payments) plus a cheap sim from somewhere like Giffgaff. In the end I decided that Three could offer me good enough value that it was worth having the perks of a full-featured provider.

Leaving Orange was, um, interesting. Having been with them for four years on a medium-cost contract, I'm now apparently worth the effort of the loyalty team. In case anyone is interested, EE were prepared to offer me £12.50 / month off the advertised price of a fairly decent monthly contract, and waive the non Direct Debit fee which is one of my major bugbears. I was almost tempted, because with that much of a discount it would have been pretty good value. But I said no because I am sick of Orange, at least in part because their pricing isn't transparent and they hard sell (I was pretty short with the fourth person who called me to ask if I couldn't be convinced to stay with Orange after I'd already said no to the previous three.) And also because I am in fact willing to pay a bit more for a better phone (EE offered me the HTC Mini) and unlimited included data, because much of the point of having a smartphone is lost if you have to browse the internet in text-only mode because of data caps. Here's the text of the email I sent to the saleswoman rejecting her offer:

Dear Ms T____,

My name is R____ B____. You contacted me recently in the context of my closing my Orange account, phone number 078xx xxxxxx. After I'd told you that I am leaving Orange because you keep adding on hidden costs, you sent me a text offering me 400 mins / 750 MB with the HTC One mini, for £13.50 / month. Although this sounds like a reasonably good offer, I have been burned before by Orange reps who tell me "no hidden costs", but forget to mention the VAT, or a supplement for a particular model of phone, or the administrative fee each month I pay my bill, or the fact that the special price expires three months into a 24-month contract, or offering "free" add-ons which actually add to my monthly subscription, or including Wifi in my data usage so that I unknowingly exceed my data limit. Based on past experience, a supposed £13.50 a month deal is actually going to work out at about £20 per month, which does not compare favourably to the competition.

Please do not come back to me with an "even better" offer; I have been an Orange customer for four years and in this time I have been repeatedly hit with unexpected extra charges after accepting what looks like a good value deal. I'm not saying this to haggle you into offering me a hidden deal as an incentive to stay with Orange. At this point, if you lower the price or offer me a better data allowance or a better model of phone, I'm just going to assume it's too good to be true.

Please close my Orange account with 30 days notice from yesterday, 3rd September. Please also send me a final bill for the remaining weeks of my contract with Orange. I would appreciate if you could send the bill by email or on paper to my home address if preferred, because having closed the account I will no longer have access to the Orange website in order to clear the final payment. I have already received a PAC code to transfer my number to a new provider; please take whatever actions are needed from your end to finalize this transfer.

Many thanks for your assistance,

Dr R___ B____

Anyway, I'm just mentioning this to spread the word that if your contract with Orange / EE is coming to an end, and you don't mind staying with them, it may be worth your haggling a bit, their reps are empowered to give at least 50% off advertised prices plus other perks. And also to put some of my bad experiences with Orange out there on the internet, in case that's useful info to anyone.

I'm a bit annoyed about needing a new phone, to tell the truth; I liked my HTC Desire Z with its slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but I managed to break the battery cover which means that the battery keeps falling out, and none of the little mobile phone repair places can fix that problem, though they can fix what seems like much more technically challenging issues like cracked screens. Also built-in obsolescence means it's not worth putting serious effort or money into fixing the hardware; the phone is increasingly struggling to run modern programs, with the hardware being too slow and the non-upgradable Android version being several major releases out of date. I feel pretty rotten about the social and environmental impact of "needing" a new phone every couple of years, but my phone isn't just a phone any more, it's a handheld computer which I use pretty much constantly for a range of really useful tasks.

I considered the Fairphone which does go a good way to addressing my ethical concerns. Problem is that the thing looks pretty much like vapourware at the moment, and I don't love its values enough to drop over €300 on a phone that may or may not ever exist. Phones with slide-out QWERTY keyboards simply aren't being sold any more, because everybody except me prefers touch screens. I dislike the Blackberry range for several reasons, and most of them apart from the really high end ones compromise on screen size to be able to offer a physical keyboard. So with that option off the table I decided to shop for the best value multi-purpose handheld computer available, with the perk that it happens to be able to use twentieth century style voice phone technology in addition to all the stuff I'm actually going to be using it for.

I was pretty much ready to go for the Xperia T, which as last year's cool thing Three were offering with a reasonably good £23/month deal. After pondering for a while and playing with lots of comparison websites, I decided that it was worth and extra £3/month to go for the Galaxy Note II, which I've been kind of coveting ever since some of my friends started bringing them out at geek gatherings. The camera and music playing hardware are less good, but I really don't need a 13 MP camera in my mobile phone; the Galaxy Note one at 8 MP is still higher resolution than my "real" camera and I think we're well past the point where cameras are limited by the quality of the optics more than the resolution of the sensor. Against that, the Note has a considerably bigger screen, 5½'' diagonal was pretty much a killer feature for me. And twice the RAM; as a child of the 80s I'm still a bit scared by the idea that I'm rejecting a piece of kit on the grounds that it "only" has a Gigabyte of RAM. But I'm glad I made that decision because my new shiny Galaxy Note is burning about 0.9 GB just sitting there existing and running its OS and background processes...

So, based on a few days using this new toy, my opinions: I am not completely sure I made the right decision, it may be that the Galaxy Note is a bad compromise between a phone and a tablet. But honestly, I would really like not to have to carry around three or four different electronic devices, let alone increasing my contribution to heavy metal pollution, resource consumption and labour exploitation that would entail. The Note certainly approaches the ideal of a single, completely general purpose device, small enough for my handbag if not for my pocket. The big screen is really nice. It's big enough and high res enough to read several hundred words without scrolling, which is major plus for me, I read fast and my short-sighted eyes definitely prefer big blocks of small text. And it's big enough to look at photos and watch videos, which (however much it may annoy me) comprise more and more of the content on the web these days. When I first picked up the much-anticipated stylus I found it unbearably annoying, but I'm getting used to it, and it is certainly better for reading long texts or long Twitter / Tumblr feeds than scrolling with my finger.

And I installed Swype, which is just as good as everybody says it is; you can use it for finger-typing or handwriting recognition or voice recognition or its own special method of text input where you drag your finger across the virtual keyboard. The killer feature is that it has really good, and trainable, predictive text, based I believe on technology designed for people using assistive tech. Seriously, this 70p app has transformed my £300 phone from feeling annoyingly inferior to my old phone which for all its faults had a real keyboard, to feeling like the advantages offered by a fast processor and a big screen are worth giving up the keyboard. Thing is, I have been touch-typing since the days when a computer was little more than a glorified word-processor, I can type almost as fast as I think and the physical motion of typing is good for the ways my brain prefers kinaesthetic and verbal modes. However, thumb typing on a teeny phone keyboard doesn't have the advantages of real touch-typing, and I can't argue that the Swype thing works better on a touch screen. And the predictive text makes it fast, I can input about 60 wpm, which is slower than my keyboard speed but good enough for writing comments, texts and short emails, and I can see it getting even better as I train it into my idiosyncratic vocabulary choices and it trains me into the input mode of draw a squiggle on the keyboard and pick the best option. It's a little scary, actually; I feel slightly redundant if a Markov chain can guess what I'm trying to say before I have a chance to type it.

Software-wise, I miss some features of Android 2.x which seem to have been dropped in Android 4.x, notably the ability to switch between programs by pulling down the bar at the top of the screen. Jelly Bean has a multi-window option, which is sort of equivalent, but only some apps support it. So in order to move from Twitter to the internet to FB to DW to the note function, I have to go via the homescreen, and it sometimes loses my "place" when I return to an earlier program. I also dislike the way that the menu and back buttons require tapping part of the frame; the buttons only become visible when you press them, and furthermore they don't respond to the stylus. The default utilities such as browser, email client etc seem less suited to me than those on my older phone, but that's partly a matter of getting used to them and partly irrelevant because I can always install other apps I prefer. Talking of, does anyone have recs for Android browsers and mail clients?

And now that I have a new, fast, up-to-date phone and unlimited data, what apps are worth looking at? I am thinking some kind of videophone app; since I have only 100 minutes / month voice calls, I might as well go for video chat which is free and unlimited. I'll default to Skype if nobody has any better ideas, since most people seem to have Skype accounts, and the prices for calling voice phones are cheaper than what Three charges for calls beyond your allowance. And I probably want a fitness app, one with cardio and strength training plans and videos of the exercises. I positively don't want a weight loss focus and I'm negative-to-indifferent about social networking capabilities. Also are there any high-tech games that are worth having now I have a phone that can handle them?

OK, so what about privacy / security? After all my efforts to escape from the clutches of Google, I'm kind of shooting myself in the foot by getting an Android phone which pretty much offers up my entire life on a plate to the corporation. The issue is that I have managed to get myself locked in to the Android ecosystem; there are apps I rely on, and I have no doubt I'll find more that I'll want to improve on the vendor defaults. And really most of the alternatives to Android are proprietary OSes which are going to have equally many problems. The solution to this is probably that I should jailbreak the phone and install CyanogenMod, but I'm a little scared to do that. I'll probably read up on it and convince myself I can do this without irreparably wrecking my phone or losing access to useful Android apps.

It does seem like there's a more serious problem than Google's intrusiveness, though, which is active spying by US intelligence. Lots of my liberty- and privacy-minded friends are reacting with understandable horror to revelations about National Security Agency surveillance and their ability to get round many types of cryptography. I find Schneier's analysis credible: it seems a lot more likely that the NSA are attacking various weak points in information transfer, such as insufficiently secret keys or insufficiently random random numbers, than that they have some quasi-magical, hitherto unknown mathematical tools allowing them to break strong cryptography directly. So many of my set are stepping up the degree of encryption they want to use in their communications; OTR for instant messengers is all the rage, for example. Schneier himself recommends running everything through Tor, but I've also heard rumours from people who don't appear to be paranoid conspiracy theorists that the US government basically owns most of the Tor nodes.

I have to say, I feel completely fatalistic about these revelations from Snowden and others. I doubt I have the technical know-how to hide effectively from the NSA. And even if I did, I can't expect that everybody I interact with has the know-how or cares enough to encrypt everything. I mean, hey, there are enough people in the less geeky parts of my social circles who haven't learned better than to pass on chain forwards or sign up for fake "social networking sites" that harvest the emails from their address books and spam all their contacts. And even if I could implement sound cryptographic practices and convince everybody I interact with to do so too, that itself would look pretty suspicious to the NSA and would likely just result in intensified efforts to keep tabs on me. I can't fight a state-backed intelligence agency; I'm just going to assume that every aspect of my life is completely transparent to the US government and likely a whole bunch of even shadier actors, I'm just hoping that I'm too boring for them to care about.

This is not a case of "if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear". It's almost the opposite: if a governmental agency is evil enough to prospectively survey all internet traffic and electronic communication, without waiting for probable cause or any kind of transparent judicial process such as obtaining a warrant, they're probably also evil enough to act against me if they feel like it, without waiting until they actually find any evidence to pin on me with their intrusive surveillance methods. I mean, I'll continue to vote for options that seem to be the most privacy protecting available, for whatever good that does. But in my personal habits, efforts to hide my internet traces seem entirely futile.

That said, I do try not to be gratuitously careless, particularly with other people's privacy. It turns out that it's no longer possible to import contacts from old phone to new phone by a direct Bluetooth connection between phones. Instead, the only way to import my old address book is to add all the contacts to my Google account so that both devices have access to them in the Cloud. Well, screw that; I have given up a considerable amount of convenience so that Google doesn't have a complete list of everyone I ever interact with, because they've abused that information in the past. So I'm having to transfer over all my phone numbers manually. Which maybe doesn't help, because I don't know how much of the data Google can just slurp out of my phone anyway, even if it's not officially attached to my Google account, but there you go. Anyway, if you do contact me by phone, and would like to send me a signed text so I don't have to type in your phone number into my new address book, that would be a big help.

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3W4DW: The exodus to Facebook and Tumblr

2013-04-29T21:08:34Z

Got into a discussion with damerell about the fact that so many people have left LJ and DW and all gone to Facebook, which is just unspeakably awful. And ayngelcat chimed in with the comment that it is't Facebook that everybody's gone to, but Tumblr.

I tend to pontificate about FB fairly regularly, but hey, one more can't hurt. I absolutely agree that Facebook is unspeakably awful, and it's not because I'm some enlightened super-geek who can see through their façade; everybody thinks FB is awful. The awfulness of FB is a standard small-talk topic among grandparents who are only just getting to grips with using their first computer. But we're all using it anyway. Well, some people have managed to stay out of its tentacles, but "I don't have a Facebook account" is really the new "I don't have a TV" for showing off one's elite status.

So what, exactly, is FB's killer feature? I'm coming to think the answer is in fact not just one thing. It's not quite a boiling frog thing, it's that it's gone through so many incarnations where it was providing some useful feature, and when the PTB decided to revise what it was trying to do, everybody was already there so it was easier to use FB for whatever new purpose than to leave when it stopped being good for the old purpose.

Who remembers when FB was restricted to just a few American university campuses? Then it was very useful, a low-key way to meet people at your uni and friends-of-friends. That created an atmosphere where people felt very comfortable being startlingly open under their real names. I mean, it's a bit silly to trust everybody who happens to go to the same university as you, but it's less ridiculously self-destructive than trusting, like, everybody on the internet with your innermost thoughts. But the trusting your classmates thing set up the atmosphere where people talk about about their personal lives online, and why FB was far more successful than earlier incarnations of automated systems for meeting friends-of-friends (Can you say Friendster with a straight face? Orkut?).

So when FB grew beyond being an electronic version of a campus noticeboard, it was already primed to be a much better replacement for things like classmates.com and Friends Reunited. I appreciate as per the discussion on my earlier post that some people would rather stab their eyes out with a rusty spork than have any contact with the people they were at school with, but the majority of people are quite glad to have a low-effort way of satisfying curiosity about people they've encountered at earlier stages of their life. The culture of using wallet names and real-world contact details that had already built up helped with that, and indeed for a while FB acted like a magical self-updating address book. I remember being quite excited about it when that's what it did, jumping through hoops to get an Oxford alumni email address in order to get a FB account.

Then I think there was a phase where several different things coincided to give FB a lot of traction. They had some really good publicity going for a bit back in the late 2000s, I remember when every newspaper I picked up had an opinion piece / advertorial on how FB was going to be the future and everybody had better join it quick or they'd be left behind. The self-updating address book thing combined really well with the events system, which many people who have come to hate FB still consider the absolute killer feature. Nothing on the spectrum between sending out group emails and using a dedicated events management site that people have to sign up to or at least remember to check can possibly compete with the convenience of setting up an event on FB and allowing people to RSVP with one click and see who else is planning to go and communicate with fellow attendees.

The other thing that I think allowed FB to enter its log phase growth was that it was almost spam-free. The walled-garden effect meant you could set things up to only get messages from people you'd actually chosen to communicate with. So pretty much everything in your FB inbox was wanted, useful messages. Not Nigerian scams and penis enlargement spam, which yes, can be dealt with by decent filters, but not everybody knows how to set up decent filters. And perhaps equally importantly, not promo emails from every company you bought products from once, not mailing lists you signed up to because one message in 50 is actually useful to you, not pointless messages inappropriately cc'd or reply-all'd to the whole organization. Nowadays I consider FB to be pretty spammy, but the fact is it's still pretty secure against bulk-messaging, the only way to spam FB is to convince human beings to spam their friends. So (even though humans are pretty gullible) it's still better than just about any blog or pre-FB social network or less than aggressively filtered email. This means that FB, certainly back in the day, gave people plenty of opportunities for the reward, the hit, of wanted messages with very little of the negative reinforcement that comes from information overload.

Then Zuckerberg and co realized they were sitting on an expletive gold-mine. You had this mass influx of people, many of them very little internet-savvy, all in one place, sharing their real-world identities and details, ripe for the plucking. FB needed to move on beyond simply displaying lots of adverts to serious monetization. I think that's the moment FB "turned evil", though it was certainly never benevolent. The introduction of apps, to encourage people to actually spend time on the site rather than just checking it occasionally, was the start of the rot. For a while, FB was making most of its frightening amounts of moolah from Farmville and similar addictive without actually being fun social games. The security also got a whole lot worse, because anybody could write an app which had access to a massive amount of personal information about the people who chose to use it.

The social gaming thing is still around, but it's no longer the big thing about FB. Nowadays the big thing is companies having their own pages and using FB to get advertising directly into people's trust networks. FB's customers are no longer the advertisers in the sense of the people who pay them to put "lose belly fat now!" ads on frequently visited pages, those are bottom-feeders that I imagine contribute negligible amounts to FB's revenue. FB's customers are major companies who can buy both valuable demographic information and even more importantly, direct access to customers' emotional hooks. Hence the whole awful parasitic ecosystem of click-jacking, like-stealing, the works.

So why are people still using FB when it's become this much of a cesspit? Partly because of lock-in and the network effect, and after all the event organizing thing has outlasted all the various incarnations of the site. But also I think because FB has become almost a job, rather than a leisure activity. You have to (not literally have to, but there are strong pressures) be on FB because it looks suspicious if you're not, and besides there are lots of bits of economic life you can't participate in, like when you can only book a place at an event via the organizers' FB page. And you have to carefully manage your reputation and what information can be found about you and what image you want to promote to, say, potential employers. I said I was just going to talk off-the-cuff and not look stuff up, but I have a couple of links that have been in my posting queue for a while that fit quite well here:

Rob Horning's Data self piece, which is rather technical and academic-y, but I think makes a really useful point, and is worth it for the marvellous pull-quote: “Becoming oneself” has turned into a crappy job — a compulsory low-paying, low-skill job.

Erin Boesel's Your feels as free labour is magisterial, really collecting together all the most useful recent writing on the users-as-product hamster wheel.

She also wins my heart because she's a (former?) LJ user and has lots of asides about why LJ is just so obviously superior to FB. But it doesn't help, because in spite of the marketing, FB isn't a social network any more, in any meaningful sense. FB is a constant arms race to keep your own personal brand buoyant while all kinds of companies are employing experts whose entire full-time job is to persuade or trick you to provide free advertising and information gathering for them.

Eastercon this year really made me understand emotionally that LJ as a community-forming tool is dead. First of all it's the fact that Eastercon isn't even using an LJ community for pre-con chatter any more, it has a bland little Wordpress blog. And then when I went to the con I put Liv on my badge and everybody was confused as to why on earth I'd have such a quaint thing as a handle. And I met a bunch of interesting new people, but can I maintain connections to them after the con's over? Can I heck, people are not exactly going to give out something as personal as a wallet name / Facebook name to a chance acquaintance who happened to be in a late night discussion with them at a con, but they don't have (active) LJ presences any more, so they can't give me access to a pseudonymous yet personal aspect of their life. I think some people were kind-of using Twitter for this sort of thing, but I've never really got the hang of using Twitter as a way to get to know new people without being intrusive. And most of the pro authors have blogs, but a lot of them are more about publicity than interacting with people, and there's little or no fan community anyway.

I don't think it's the case that people have left LJ to go to FB. It's that people have left LJ and people have gone to FB, more or less independently. People have left LJ partly because everything online is fragmented now, whereas it used to be all in one place, so you had a mix of essays, personal diary stuff, artworks and photography, fannish activity, memes and sharing funny pictures, ephemeral one-liners, links to interesting content etc, and now all those things have their own specialist sites. People have also left partly because the interaction barriers are just that bit too high. Hand-coding HTML was cutting edge in 2000, but now people can't be bothered when most other places on the internet make multimedia posts and comments as easy as simply typing into a box or selecting items from a GUI. That's also partly exacerbated by the fact that people are increasingly accessing the internet from phones rather than desktop computers; that pushes it much more towards a read-only or read-and-click-like, read-and-share, rather than read and respond with a thoughtful comment or your own spin-off post.

So how does Tumblr fit in? I fully admit that I am too old and boring for Tumblr. I've been sitting on the edge observing it for years now, and I still don't really get it. I have a Tumblr, and you're very welcome to follow it if you want to see my random pretty or cool things. But I don't really fundamentally understand what Tumblr is for or how it works.

Of course, this is exactly the place where I write long speculations about things I don't really understand. My theory of Tumblr is that it's precisely the anti-Facebook. It's completely and properly anonymous, it doesn't even have the danger increasingly present on pseudonymous sites including LJ clones that you can easily identify people by analysing their networks and patching together personal information from their indiscreet friends. Because you can't really tell who someone's friends are on Tumblr, or not automatically anyway. And there's almost no advertising (indeed, I am substantially worried about what on earth Tumblr's business / revenue model is supposed to be; surely Tumblr Radar can't be enough to make megabucks?) And there's very little danger (or at least very little perceived danger) that people are going to get screened out or fired or otherwise get into real world trouble for what they put on Tumblr. There's a culture where all kinds of grey-legal things are acceptable and indeed expected, from various kinds of exotic porn to making gifsets of clips from extremely valuable commercial properties such as the Game of Thrones series.

The other thing about Tumblr is that it's much more about curating than creating original content. Pretty much every Tumblr I've ever seen has a majority of reblogs from other Tumblrs, far outweighing content actually created by the Tumblr author. Some of it is, like mine, a random stream of everything-that-catches-my-eye, and some of it is literally curated, gathering together stuff with a distinct theme. And it certainly does fit in to the not quite passive, but very low effort, read-like-share model of using the internet. But that can't be the whole reason why Tumblr is successful; after all, SixApart, the company that bought LJ from its original owners and later sold it to SUP, tried to make a site where it was extremely easy to share multimedia content, and it was a complete flop (in fact, you probably don't remember Vox unless you're as much of a giant social media nerd as I am!)

Some people do use Tumblr for writing thoughtful, blog-style essays, and apparently get some benefit from the fact that there are no comments and the only way people can respond to your stuff is by reblogging and adding their own commentary. I don't comprehend how that works, but it certainly exists. It may be because the negativity generated by the entire internet falling on your head when you post something controversial is far greater, for some people, than the positivity of getting lots of comments and feedback.

I can sort of see how that works for certain types of media fandom. It used to be a truism that fanwork creation was really driven by feedback, but perhaps that's not actually true. Perhaps getting your stuff liked or shared is enough of a reward that people don't need comments. I can imagine there's a sort of freedom in knowing that your stuff is unlikely to be criticized if it doesn't work or offends someone. Plus the free playground of a subculture that apparently hasn't heard of copyright must be great for fans!

I don't see Tumblr as an alternative to LJ/DW, though. Or only in the sense that people have limited time for online activities, and time that's being used for Tumblr is probably taking away from time that might otherwise be used for DW. For me, the main features of DW are comment discussions, which Tumblr lacks, and the ability to get to know people two hops away from me or who have something in common but aren't otherwise connected, which Tumblr is pretty poor at.

Is there anything DW can do to get these people back? One thing that would help would be having a usable mobile app, and another would be replacing the sack-of-crap RTE with a modern point-and-click system for posting, including pictures and embedded media without having to hand-code your own HTML. But I suspect that even if those features ever get further than a half-hearted spec, it may not be enough or too late to deal with fragmentation. Trying to be a rival to FB and Tumblr is a mug's game, that much is sure. The only hope I have for getting people back is for DW to be a place people go as well as Facebook and Tumblr (and Twitter, Pinboard, Instragram and any number of other sites that wouldn't be on topic for this post). However, to end on a positive note, these days DW is far more active and lively with ongoing conversations than LJ, and in lots of ways I like that it's small, I like that it still has the ethos of what denise calls a "Mom and Pop business". And, y'know, I've been here 4 years and I'm still very content with my online home; four years in to my time on LJ I was already casting around for some less evil / annoying alternative.

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Random links

2013-03-15T14:04:38Z

Lots of people saying sensible things about Google closing down its Reader (RSS feed reading system). j4 linked to an article with a fairly novel take on the issue, and one I agree with: the loss of private and silent reading. Actually I left Google Reader a while back because I thought it had too much social, it wasn't achieving the goals Roberts sets out of being able to read and think without getting caught up in popularity contests and emotional echo chambers. But those are certainly my goals. ursamajor makes a good point about why proposed Reader alternatives aren't if they're "popularity" algorithm-driven, ooh-shiny picture magazine style social networking apps.

Personally, I'm pretty happy with Netvibes as a reader that lets me read and doesn't broadcast my reading habits to friends or advertisers, nor shout at me to "share" the latest cool / shiny / funny meme. And it's not fuelled by self-reinforcing outrage cycles. I should mention about Netvibes that the actual feed reader part of it is kind of a side-benefit; what it actually is a business-focused analytics tool, which is why the paid version costs several hundred dollars a month. I like the fact that its business model is very much users as customers rather than users as product, and if all you want out of it is the feed reader, the free version is more than adequate. And as for social reading, I am basically using Twitter for that; people retweet interesting articles and I read them, which fulfils a different niche from blogs and ongoing conversations I want to follow on a regular basis. Right now I don't think I need anything more fully featured than that for social.

I am not so impressed by those who are being smug about "what do you expect if you rely on a free, proprietary service?!" For one thing, Google is a giant, they have pretty successfully killed off all possible rivals in this market niche, so what choice does one have? For a second thing, not everybody has the technical skill, time, spoons or resources to install stuff completely under their control on their own server. And if that were in fact the default behaviour any time you wanted to use any sort of service, can you imagine the security holes amateurs would be introducing all over the place? Yes, we can have a conversation about the importance of open standards as opposed to proprietary walled garden systems. That's not going to be achieved usefully by looking down on people who do in fact use Google's services, or Facebook (again, it sucks, but it's pretty much killed off all possible rivals, so what do you do?)

Talking of sharing information and standards, skibbley has a good rant on what he calls microbarriers. I think his piece is a very good example of why accessibility / usability is good for everybody, it's not just a concession generously made to those poor unfortunate disabled people. And a very big part of usability is presenting text as actual text, not expletive pictures of expletive text! (PDF: bad enough that it's proprietary, but it's a graphical format, which is useful if you need things to display exactly as composed, but extremely sub-optimal way of transmitting informational content.)

And finally, something that's cool and not really at all related to the above: Sica on Making Light posted a wonderful comment about Icelandic words for weather which appeals to the language geek in me. Also, If the person who made the awesome post about Swedish terms with stacked-up consonants recently wouldn't mind making a public version of it I would love to link to that too. I'll put it here as a guest post if you don't want your name associated with it.

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Video killed the radio star

2012-12-17T16:10:00Z

It's almost a ritual complaint by now, that "nobody" posts to LJ any more, they've all gone to Facebook. I don't think this is entirely true, or at least it's only a very small aspect of the problem. TBH, LJ had a good run; 12 years is absolutely ancient in internet terms! It's only to be expected that something else would be the cool thing by now, and even FB itself is kind of falling out of fashion, the real cutting edge isn't there any more. The question is, why hasn't LJ been replaced with something as much better than LJ as LJ was better than MySpace?

My theory is partly that FB itself has killed the web as I knew it from the early 2000s. The fact that FB is the market leader means that innovations aren't happening in the directions I would like to see, because everybody is trying to be cargo-cult Facebook. But what's really killed the kind of sites that people use to build communities and have good conversations is that we've lost the war on spam. In much the same sense that we've lost the war on terror: the protections we're relying on to keep out the spam are basically worse than the spam onslaught itself. Using the web to create new stuff, letting users take sites in the direction that suits our purposes, is increasingly impossible these days, because any freedom that site users have can (at least potentially) be exploited by spammers.

That is to say, one of the reasons FB became popular in the early days was precisely because people who weren't terribly internet-savvy could be sure that all the posts and comments they'd see came from their actual friends, not Nigerian scammers or people trying to sell them grey market pharmaceuticals. But unfortunately, what we now have is something much more sinister: a horrible arms race with everyone from the marketing departments of large, legitimate companies to the dodgiest of bottom-feeding spammers using all kinds of dirty tricks to get a piece of the trust network that FB's walled garden represents, to give the impression that your friends endorse their products. Everything from posting funny memes which get loads of shares and likes, and then selling the page to the highest bidder, to hiding "Like" buttons so that people click them accidentally, to outright lying that someone's FB friends use or endorse your product or service or social game when they have never had anything to do with it.

At the same time, a side-effect of trying to protect people from the "Cheap V1agra!!!!" obvious and extremely annoying spam, the post-FB web is increasingly forbidding the kind of actions that actually promote community. More and more sites forbid commenting altogether, or only allow comments from users who jump through a ridiculous number of hoops and pretty much tell the commenting system their home address, annual income and mother's maiden name. Or else they let FB handle the commenting, which is certainly one way to outsource the spam prevention problem. But it also contributes to FB's strangehold over the web, and largely eliminates the kind of stable pseudonym based interactions that were the core of LJ and Web 2.0's golden years. I sincerely believe that the best conversations happen where everybody can choose a pseudonym which is then attached to a profile and history. You get much more diversity than if everybody has to use a name that points to their offline identity, including their professional life and their cultural / ethnic / class etc background. Using FB to combat spam is making that harder and harder all the time. (And Google+ had this misfeature built in from the start: their bizarre insistence on names that fit their anglocentric pattern was supposed to ensure users would be able to interact with "real" people and not spambots.)

Another problem is that spammers and Facebook, along with the other social sites that are trying to make FB-levels of big money, have essentially killed the mainstay of the web as originally conceived by Berners-Lee: the URL. You can't post your own HTML on most websites these days, because that gives a loophole that spammers can use to attempt to increase their Google rank. This means that when people want to share interesting content, they end up being forced to click a button that automagically makes a "preview" of the site they're linking to, but the actual URL is hidden or removed altogether. So readers quickly lose sight of where the content originated from, and there's a whole new ecosystem of trying to get more shares. Tumblr is the worst for this, because it's entirely built on the assumption that people repost content at will without any traceable connection to who originated it. But FB isn't a whole lot better, you're very often seeing reshares of reshares of reshares, and it's easy enough for bad actors to insert themselves into the chain and make it look like the latest funny came from a dodgy site. The communities built up around people linking to interesting content, like the communities built up around people having interesting conversations with friends-of-friends or even strangers, are atrophying in this situation. Remember the controversy when LJ introduced those horrible Snap preview things by default? Now the equivalent is everywhere and sites that don't have them look old-fashioned.

The lack of user control over what they post has had another side-effect which I hate: the creeping replacement of actual text with pictures of text or even worse, videos with absolutely no visual content, just a person holding up signs with words on. This I think is partly caused by Twitter, because an uploaded image of a joke or a political rant or whatever fits into the character limit, and is still less hassle than finding and setting up an actual blog on one of the rapidly dying sites that still allow long-form posting. But I think it's a more general effect of the post-FB culture, where everything is trying to be eye-catching, competing for attention with professional designers, yet ordinary web users who are truly creative are really cramped in what they can do because of the anti-spam limitations. I hate pictures and videos of text, because they're high bandwidth for me to actually be able to see them, and they don't have any of the advantages of being searchable, archivable etc. Plus audio or video is a much, much slower way for me to absorb information than reading. Also, pictures of essentially textual information are themselves essentially a way of evading anti-spam measures.

The combination of the web trying to move away from URLs, and the evolutionary pressure to display information as pictures, is one of the things that's basically breaking sensible search, I think. Even the giants like Google are forced to rely on easily gameable metrics like how often stuff gets shared, because the original basis of the Googlerank, how many reputable sites link to a particular document, is not meaningful any more. As a result, search is hopelessly polluted, and the very mechanisms that were supposed to keep spammy black-hat SEO out of the top ranked results are instead contributing to spam and making it harder for both search engines and humans to detect.

This started out as a response to Anil Dash's more measured and more technically knowledgeable article on the web we lost. (Dash was one of the real pioneers of blogging culture, by the way.) I think the problem with the Facebookification of everything goes deeper than what he talks about. It's a problem that most of the people I want to talk to are on FB, and FB as everybody knows has terrible privacy policies and exists to serve its advertisers, not its users. But that's not the whole story. The dominance of Facebook and its model, along with solutions worse than the problem to spam, is making the whole rest of the web worse. It's making it so much harder to meet interesting new people online, and without that, well, communities around existing networks fragment and become dormant, to the point that nobody really posts to LJ any more except to complain that nobody posts to LJ any more.

Obviously, I would like it if Dreamwidth were the answer to this problem. That is in fact why I continue to post actively here even as more and more people are drifting away. But pessimistically, I fear that DW will always be too small to compete with all the sites that are optimizing for getting huge numbers of users, rather than for being actually useful to have conversations.

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Goodbye-gle

2011-08-30T19:08:55Z

I've already made more posts on the topic than you probably want to read, but in short I have definitely lost my faith in Google.

I joined G+ because of the like Facebook but not Facebook thing. And then there was a big row about Google insisting that people have to use names that fit their crude pattern, consisting of exactly one forename and one surname, neither of which looks like a dictionary word, contains punctuation or comes from mixed linguistic origins. Which is bad enough, but to make it even worse, Google are enforcing this daft policy by arbitrarily banning people whose names they don't like, sometimes just from Google+ but sometimes from all Google services including Gmail and Android phones.

In the course of this it became more and more clear that even if Google manage to amend this policy and fix the enforcement, there's a deeper problem. They are using their massive amounts of data aggressively, and intend to continue doing so. I don't know how long this has been going on, but now I've noticed it I want out. They are making and broadcasting connections between, eg, different email addresses accessed from the same computer. They're mining the social graph to make explicit connections that I would rather keep private (eg connecting my real name stuff to this journal via a Flickr account that has friends in common). It's always been possible for Google to do this, I just trusted them not to, but that's no longer the case.

I've always had a paranoid theory that one day Google would turn around and say, we own your life, now hand over the cash or we'll destroy you / lock you out of the internet. But of course what has actually happened is much more subtle. It's more like, hey, why don't you come and join our "social network" (on our terms, even though it's really not in your interests). I mean, hey, look at all this data we have, and all these lovely internet tools, you wouldn't want anything to happen to them, would you? I think they've tipped their hand early enough that it's still possible to escape. Or at least I hope so.

I can't be doing with links being broadcast when I want them private. Not secret, I know nothing on the internet is secret, just private. I particularly can't be doing with it when my employer is about to move over to Google Apps. Obviously I'm going to be logging in to my work email from the same computer as my personal email. And obviously I really do not want Google to say to my students, hey, you ~~are friends with~~ sometimes correspond with Dr B___, perhaps you'd like to check out her blog here on Google+. And people who like that blog often like this Dreamwidth journal...

To some extent, yes, the horse has already bolted. But in order to minimize how badly this messes up my life in future, I have taken some steps. I am going to delete ("downgrade") my Google+ and public profile; I am pretty certain that takes out Buzz as well, not that Buzz ever got off the ground. "Going to", not already have, because there's a mass protest against the names policy involving lots of people deleting on 1^st September and I want to join them. This takes away one problem, which is that if some griefer doesn't like my name, they can flag my profile and Google may respond by suspending my account and possibly blocking access to Gmail. It also takes away the temptation to put personal stuff on a blog that is not just insecure, but anti-secure. And I hope it will leave me with fewer links to a social graph that helps Google to identify me.

The second step I have taken is to remove my email from Gmail. That was one hell of a wrench, I've used it for 7 years and it's been my main email address since I left Dundee in 2005. And I can't deny it's a very very good email system. I have moved to Zoho, who I'm now paying $24 per year to manage the email at my domain. It's slightly worse than Gmail, but not actually ridiculously worse, and $24 gets me an account that is free of adverts and out of Google's tentacles. So my main reason for this post is to ask you to email me at my domain in future. Don't write to my old Gmail ID, please. I am not deleting the account, mainly because I really like Google's IM system [ETA: and I do plan to carry on using it because most of friends are there]. But I am setting myself up so that if Google's behaviour with broadcasting personal data and inferences from personal data gets any worse, I can delete it without any serious consequences.

I think the next step is to do what I've always held back from doing, and start blocking Google ads. Does anyone have a step-by-step guide to doing this? I assume it starts with "install a Firefox extension", but I'm not sure which ones are best to use or what the magic incantation is to hide Google ads.

ETA 2: Thanks commenters who pointed out that I can use Jabber to talk to Google contacts! I'm now retiring my Gmail account altogether; if you want to talk to me on IM, see my profile for my username [Bad username or site: jabber @ org]. I think I've added most of the people I regularly chat to.

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Sold my soul for a shiny toy again

2011-08-03T15:23:06Z

Boring thing to post about, but I have a new shiny Android phone on the way to me. This hopefully means I get to play with apps. What do you guys recommend? I definitely need Twitter and some kind of RSS reader. I might be persuaded to install Facebook and Google+, and I wouldn't be averse to a DW app if there's an LJ app for Android that's compatible. Anything else that makes phones better?

My two-year contract with Orange is due for renewal. What I wanted to do was move to a cheap contract with a minimal bundle of texts and calls (I hardly ever make any), but decent data. And not get suckered into paying twice the market value for a new phone by dividing its purchase into monthly instalments. The big thing that prevents me doing this is that I ended up with a Blackberry two years ago when I was buying in a hurry and didn't do my research properly. Blackberry phones mean you have to use Blackberry internet, so phone bundles with included data aren't usable. I suspect there is probably some way round this, but I was having trouble find out what. So I was sort of thinking I might end up with a new phone after all.

So I went to Carphone Warehouse and asked what they could do for me. Turns out the kind of phone I want is somewhat rare: I want a QWERTY keyboard, preferably instead of but at least in addition to a touchscreen. And I want a decent sized screen, which means having the keyboard on a separate section of the phone from the screen. The one I sort of had my eye on based on internet research was the HTC Desire Z. The salesman explained that that model is no longer in production and isn't being replaced with any equivalent; the newer HTC phones are touchscreen only. The nearest similar thing he could find for me was the Nokia E7-00; I've seen poor reviews for it online and it was only available on packages that cost more than I'm really willing to pay. So I threw out the idea of buying an HTC Desire Z phone outright and getting a cheap, sim-only plan.

At that point the salesman said he could do me the HTC Desire Z as an upgrade to my current Orange contract. Removing the £5 a month I'm currently paying for Blackberry internet, plus £4.50 a month worth of stupid hidden charges that Orange put on to my contract through various underhand practices, this means I'll be paying 30% less per month for the same deal I already had, including a shiny new phone with the features I want. I sort of wanted to punish Orange for that unexpected £9.50 per month they put on me on a 24 month contract last time round, but I admit that I like some of Orange's perks, and they only way I was going to do any better was by buying the phone separately. And given I have become addicted to having the internet in my pocket, I kind of wanted a high-end phone. So I signed on the dotted line; I'm at least glad to give the salesman his bonus for being helpful and listening to what I actually wanted and not trying to upsell or pressure me. Since getting a new phone is not an emergency as it was when I was about to spend three months in a flat with no landline or fixed internet, if Orange try to mess me around this time I will cancel the contract and start again.

Because the phone I had my eye on had to be ordered from the last remaining stock in the warehouse, there may be a transition period between switching off my old (overpriced) service, and activating the new contract on the new phone. Shouldn't be more than a couple of days, but I may well not be contactable between whenever Orange update their system and Friday. I will see emails and DW comments (though not instantly), and you can certainly call my landline. From Friday, assuming all goes smoothly, I will reattach myself to my precious instant data feed including Twitter and email, and I will continue to be reachable by text or phone at the same mobile number I already had.

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Real-name social networking

2011-07-29T12:04:30Z

I have thinky thoughts about Google+, but I don't want to post them there because I'm starting to get paranoid about Google deleting accounts where there is criticism of their service. And I don't want to post them here, because anyone who cares about the nitty-gritty of Google+ would be in their "field trial" by now. (If there's anyone left hunting for an invitation I have a few I can send; I need an email address, though, and preferably the one you actually intend to use for your profile. PM me if you don't feel comfortable putting your email address in a public post.)

But I do want to talk more generally about the Real Names issue. Google+ is insisting on what they define as real names, a policy they are enforcing in an entirely cack-handed way. Although they've corrected some of their earlier mistakes, I suspect this issue is going to kill Google+ in the way that assuming your email address book equals your social circle killed Buzz. But suppose they had a sensible definition of real names, such as allowing names that don't follow the standard US pattern, or professional pseudonyms, or use-names that don't happen to match what's written on a person's birth certificate (all of which are perfectly "real" according to both US and European law). And suppose they had a sensible appeals process if someone got deleted by mistake. In that case, would a "real-name social network" policy make sense?

skud is spearheading a campaign to highlight the real world harms of such a policy. It's almost certainly illegal under EU Data Protection law. It's an utterly awful policy from several angles (even if it were well implemented, which currently it is really not).

The counter-argument to this is that insisting on real names prevents spam, impersonation, and trolling, and generally promotes good quality interactions and conversation. It's running the whole site based on Penny Arcade's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, basically. The obvious flaw in this is that pseudonymity is not anonymity. What Google actually wants to achieve is to prevent people creating throwaway accounts which have no value to them, and using them to spam or harrass other users. Banning those accounts, either site-wide or on an individual level, does no good because the malicious person (or bot) can easily create more throwaway accounts. The Internet Fuckwad Theory pretty much defines everything that's wrong with YouTube comment sections and the don't read the comments principle of internet interactions. But what Google actually needs to prevent these issues is not names that fit a specific format. It needs stable reputation systems. It needs accounts that are valuable due to being attached to a personal history, personae that are valuable enough that people won't want to risk getting banned or deleted for the sake of trolling or getting into flamewars.

I'm preaching to the converted by posting this on Dreamwidth! After all I have 8 years of posts and a large network of friends under this pseudonymous identity, I'd be an idiot if I risked getting my account banned by spamming or trolling. Now, Dreamwidth does allow multiple accounts; invite codes mean a slightly raised barrier to entry, and hopefully prevents automated account creation. But maybe Google wants tighter controls than that. OK, so Google should insist on exactly one account per human being. That's not always easy to enforce; perhaps they could insist on a verified Real Name at account creation, but let you use any display name you chose. Perhaps, like DW, they would only let you set your name once with severely limited ability to change your name. There's no reason to assume that Livre d'Or is going to behave worse under these conditions than "Amy Morris" (oh look, a two-word phrase that looks like a standard English name, but has no connection to any stable identity). Admittedly verifying names is not a simple problem; the obvious way is to use credit cards, but that excludes lots of potential users. However, Google already has this problem now by insisting on the real name being the key under which you're listed in its directory and social graph. In addition to the problem of making Google+ distasteful to many potential users, and actively dangerous for various people in vulnerable situations.

So, is there any advantage to real-name social networking? siderea thinks that it's a stunningly bad idea to participate in G+ with your legal or professional name, for a whole host of reasons... socializing online under your professional or legal name is like drinking and swimming. [Aside: Siderea, I apologize for making off-topic comments on that post; you have a narrower definition of topicality than most of my online circles, and I misjudged what you would consider relevant to that discussion. I should have taken my thoughts to my own journal in the first place.] I would argue that there is some benefit, because otherwise why are so many of us maintaining accounts on Facebook, however reluctantly? FB kinda stopped enforcing its real names policy due to practical considerations, but it's still the case that most people there are using names that would be recognizable to their parents, their colleagues, their GP etc. Siderea holds that this is inherently awful, and it's certainly easy to think of examples where people have got into hot water by not realizing how public and how permanent FB is.

Thing is, though, that Facebook's real-name based social network allows me to stay in touch with people from my past. Schoolfriends, former colleagues, friends from my old communities, people I just happen to have met in the course of my life. None of these people have the ability to find my DW blog by searching for my real name, and that's as it should be because I don't want employers or anyone who has a grudge to be able to find my DW by searching for my real name. But further, many of these people are not particularly versed in internet / geek culture. They can't imagine why anyone would want to use a pseudonym. I can try giving them the title and URL of my blog, but they just don't get it. They don't understand all the hoops you have to jump through to follow what I write here, creating a profile, uploading icons, establishing a presence on the site. They certainly don't understand how to use tools to import my blog posts in a more convenient format, things like RSS readers or smartphone apps, (not that there are any very usable apps for DW).

There are plenty of people who have no desire at all to socialize with anyone who isn't a confirmed geek, and don't want to be in touch with anyone from their class at school or their university or their previous jobs. That's absolutely fine, but if you do find these people a positive presence in your life, you kinda need to socialize under your real name. Or of course you could keep in regular email or phone contact, but I personally like having a level of interaction below actual full-blown long-distance friends. I like having 250 or so people who let me know, via FB, when major events happen in their life like getting married or emigrating, even though I would never be able to keep up a regular correspondence with them. The other thing FB is very useful for is organizing in-person social events; if I'm meeting up with people to go to the cinema, or inviting people to my house for drinks, I don't want to have to remember pseudonyms, I want to be able to do this using the names we regularly use for eachother. And FB's events thing really is a killer app for that.

Of course the problem is that FB sucks. Its UI is awful and they keep making unnecessary and confusing changes. It is full of spam and annoying blinky shit and sexist adverts. It's in cahoots with Zynga, a truly evil company, and makes most of its money from annoying Farmville-style "social" games. It has an atrocious record on privacy, partly through incompetence and partly because it's in FB's interests to leak (or even broadcast) personal information as much as they can get away with. What I'm really hoping for from Google+ is that they'll make a viable FB-replacement. Yes, it will have ads, but subtle, text-only, reasonably well targeted ads such as we've got used to on Gmail. Right now they're not doing very well on the "appealing to and usable by non-geeks" part of the exercise, and the real names fiasco is really not helping with that, despite Google's apparent expectations to the contrary.

What Google+ won't be is a replacement for DW. Yes, it has "circles", and yes, the UI for sorting your social network into trust categories is quite a bit better than what we have here. But there's no way I'm going to start posting personal stuff there, precisely because there's no way I want any opinions or any views about work or any details of my movements linked to my birth certificate name. Which, by the way, is pretty unusual, unique in the UK and shared by only half a dozen or so people worldwide. Honestly I'm not in very great danger; there's nobody out there who has any interest in tracking me down with harmful intent, and I work in academia so I can expect to have understanding employers who won't Dooce me for having opinions that disagree with the party line. Even so, it's totally not worth it.

The fact I have a pretty cushy life in this respect is what allows me to take part in real-name social networks at all. And when I go there I meet other people who can afford to be pretty transparent in their online activities. At the same time, between my job as a lecturer and my voluntary commitment to Jewish community leadership, there's plenty of stuff I would rather not connect to my real name. It's not because I have anything to hide, but because my students and congregants don't need to know about my love life, my politics, who my other friends are that I know through other situations than the ones where I interact with them, etc etc. For me, it's worth having a presence on Facebook, and now on Google+, because it gives me somewhat better control over what information is out there about me. If I don't participate, people could deduce quite a lot about me from the shape of the holes, and I can't do anything about data-careless friends revealing lots of info that I don't want out there. By having a profile, I can control what floats to the top when someone searches for me, and sometimes ask for damaging info to be removed if necessary. Most importantly I know what an investigator might find out about me by poking around on the net! But I don't socialize there. I lurk, I make bland posts that show I'm a real person and I'm at least semi-active, I make occasional updates about major life events that are effectively my public biography anyway.

The other thing is that the bizarre mixture of extreme permanence and ephemerality makes me completely freeze up when I try to say anything. I might have a stray thought that would fit there, but then I second-guess myself and think, but what if that doesn't perfectly represent what I believe forever and ever? Maybe it's better not to post after all! I'm finding myself reluctant even to "+1" other content or post links, because I keep thinking, is this really the thing, out of all the internet, that I want to associate with my real name and declare my allegiance to anytime someone looks me up online? At the same time I'm not going to post any carefully thought out stuff, because it all slides off the front page in a few hours anyway, and there's no sensible way to archive it or go back to refer to it, as you can with old blog posts.

So I'm going to carry on socializing in a pseudonym environment, most probably DW for the forseeable future. And I'm going to maintain a bland presence on FB, and on Google+ for the time being, but I'm rather expecting it to implode or just tail off into oblivion once the initial excitement dies out. You can call it image management, I suppose.

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Diaspora invites?

2011-06-06T20:34:34Z

I've managed to get an invite for the real Diaspora (last time I thought I had one it was just someone's installation which they kind of stopped maintaining after it got popular). There's pretty much nothing there at the moment, as far as I can tell. I mean, I understand there's quite a lot of development going on, but there's very little that's user-facing and very little activity. A year after their launch, they're barely on the radar even for geeks, so I'm entirely skeptical about the "Facebook killer" buzz that was going around when it first launched. I am holding out a vague hope that it's going to get off the ground as a by-geeks-for-geeks open source social networking system that doesn't lock you in to a single provider and doesn't assume that anyone who's "honest" would be happy to share exactly the same information with business contacts and intimate friends. But even that isn't looking so likely any more.

Anyway, I have a few invites of my own now, so if you're curious, comment with an email address and you're welcome to join in. Not that there's much to join at the moment! Comments are screened by default; I'll unscreen if you have general comments and don't include an email address.

Also, if anyone has any suggestions for an image which represents me in some way, and looks equally good (or at least not awful!) at 300 x 300 or 50 x 50, please do clue me in.

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Social networking privacy angst

2010-06-04T17:16:57Z

So, we all know that Facebook is evil, and LiveJournal is fast heading towards becoming evil. Or incompetent indistinguishably from malice, anyway. I'm very much debating with myself whether I should be deleting my accounts.

The case for Facebook is a lot stronger: it brings me almost no joy, and its business model is, in fact, noxious rather than merely annoying (bait-and-switch people into giving up personal data which is then sold to advertisers and incidentally displayed to the whole internet). That actually doesn't bother me very much on a personal level; when I first joined, I didn't trust it, and I decided to include only information that I didn't mind having fully public. So when FB did exactly what I expected them to do and gave advertisers more and more access to my data, I didn't really care. And when they went beyond what I normally expect from any profit-driven, advert-based website and changed the defaults so that a whole lot of stuff was exposed, and quite a proportion of it was public without any choice in the matter, it didn't really affect me.

The thing is, I have sympathy for the kind of people who go around saying that the internet is better without privacy. I am really nosy, and I enjoy having lots of information available. I find seductive the idea that you should just be careful not to do anything you might be ashamed of, rather than hope that the world won't find out about your words and actions. But the reason I'm able to look at things from that perspective is that my life is pretty cushy in lots of ways. I am not likely to lose my job based on speaking incautiously online. I don't have any enemies or stalkers. There aren't many people who hate me for being who I am; this is by no means universally true, but I live in a society where being gay and Jewish don't cause me any significant problems.

But I'm close enough to people who don't have those advantages to realize that privacy is, in fact, important. People like Zuckerberg and Scoble may not (think they) know anybody at all who needs privacy as a matter of life and death. I know women who have escaped from abusive partners and offspring who have escaped from abusive parents. I know gay and trans people who face major problems, even violence, if the wrong person finds out. I know people whose lives are marginal enough that they have to accept shitty jobs where the boss can fire them if they don't like their political opinions. (In countries like the USA, lacking a functional welfare state, being fired can mean being homeless or without access to medical care, so this isn't just a financial thing.) I know political refugees and people living and working illegally in the country they've chosen. I know people who get a certain amount of grief just for existing with a set of religious beliefs or an ethnic background or simply being female, and who don't need that kind of grief to follow them off the internet and into their real world.

Saying that people like that shouldn't use the internet is completely the wrong solution. The internet is a really important source of social connection, all the more necessary for someone whose family and local community may be hostile. Now obviously, people have to understand that anything on the internet is potentially public, but it's not at all fair to sell a site on the basis that personal details, attached to a real name, are private within the limits reasonable for internet security, and then suddenly decide it's more profitable to expose them to advertisers and the internet at large.

The problem I have here is that the biggest source of privacy breaches is other people being careless with your data, and the bad guys mining social graphs. Even though I personally don't mind quite a lot of real world data being out there, I have to be careful for the sake of my friends. So although Facebook is noxious, it's not really harming me. Obviously people have chosen to use Facebook, and it's their responsibility to take whatever precautions they need, but they made that choice based on what turned out to be false advertising, and they don't control what I choose to post there. And really, the only way to let Facebook know that their behaviour is unacceptable is to vote with our feet, not just put up with anything they throw at us.

Reasons for not leaving Facebook: there are a lot of people from my life who are otherwise not on the internet, who find even email too geeky. I honestly don't understand why these people think FB is better than the alternatives, because to me it's worse in almost every way. But I don't want to lose those people. Also, the killer app is the event management stuff; if you're trying to arrange a party or meeting or whatever with a miscellaneous group, FB actually works really well. That bit, facilitating in person socializing, really benefits from FB's concept of social networking under real names. In particular, the Jewish Society here pretty much exclusively use Facebook, and I would be causing them a serious nuisance by refusing to participate.

The situation with LJ is kind of analogous, though obviously not as extreme. For a start, LJ doesn't generally involve blogging under real names, unless people choose to do that. And secondly, I don't think that LJ is really actively evil, they're just not quite sure whether their business model is using advertising to pay for the service they provide their users, or using their users to provide data and eyeballs for advertising. But I'm pretty unimpressed with the poor level of security that accompanies their increasingly desperate attempts to make money from adverts; I'm not happy about the second, slightly less buggy but still evil, version of the transmitting information about and altering moused over links to steal affiliate revenue. I'm not happy that LJ are so incredibly reluctant to enforce their rules about malware in adverts.

The thing is that two people defriended me on LJ, because I posted that I intended to use Dreamwidth's upcoming cross-site authenticated reading list functionality to read their posts from my Dreamwidth page instead of my LJ one. These people are not stupid, they are not paranoid, they have very, very good reasons to want very good control over what they post to LJ. They've chosen to trust LJ, which I personally don't, so in that sense my using LJ is not a problem for them. But there are other people who are equally concerned about information leakage, but less technologically savvy, who may not even be aware how glaringly insecure LJ has become.

But the major problem I have is that deleting my LJ account would make things worse, not better. If I logged in with my Dreamwidth OpenID, you'd all have the hassle of having to add that account to your friends list. And I'd still be creating content which makes LJ more interesting and therefore more lucrative for advertisers. But worst of all, I'd lose the advantage of having a permanent account, which is that I don't see most adverts. I'd make my LJ activities more, not less insecure! Not to mention more annoying, obviously. I would also be providing LJ with more, not less, revenue, because they'd be able to advertise to me, and right now I'm not giving them any new money because I don't have an account that I renew. (I'm not worried about the money I spent on the permanent account; that has already given me six years of happiness, which I think is a very good deal for $150, so that in itself is not an argument against deleting.) And of course there are all the positive things that LJ does, the people there whom I really care about, the things I love about the interface. One compromise might be to delete all the content from my entries, and use the account purely for commenting; I'm a little reluctant to do that because it would mean breaking five years' worth of links, and they're probably not that important in the scheme of things, but I'm still hesitant. Morally, though, I think it's probably the right thing to do.

siderea believes in Diaspora as a Facebook killer, and I really, really hope she's right. But I have a hard time believing that a distributed, self-hosted system is going to be accessible enough to non-geeks. Or even enough better than Facebook for people to be willing to give up the networks they've already built up. Which is of course exactly why I'm still on Facebook however uncomfortable I feel about it.

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When social networking goes feral

2010-02-17T23:20:39Z

From the time when Dreamwidth was just a cool idea, one of the things that was talked about was the ability to read posts from other LJ-based sites on your own reading list (DW terminology for "friends page"). Not a half-arsed RSS feed of public posts, actual posts that would respect access ("friends lock") settings and cut tags and allow you to join in the comment discussion. This project, which I'm love with, kept being stalled because it's a difficult problem socially and ethically; it needs to be done in a way that will not irreversibly freak out either LJ management or individual users. But finally this week, Dreamwidth announced that the feature is under active development.

...

...

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

I think this is the first feature that gives DW a real edge over LJ. Yes, split trust and reading are nice, and I like the better interoperability (straightforward import from LJ-based sites, better support for OpenID, the cross-poster). But those are pretty much frills that don't affect the basic experience of using the site enough for it to be worth most people's while switching, unless like me they're doing so on principle. In contrast, being able to read posts from other sites seamlessly in one place is a huge deal.

I think it's also a major step on the way to the federated, NNTP-like utopia that some of you have been talking about (pw201 and ewx, in particular). I mean, it's not quite there yet, but it's a lot better than RSS for paving the way to the possibility where you can run your own LJ-like install on your own server, not needing to trust anything to any commercial outfit, but still reading posts and interacting with your less geeky friends who prefer to use a hosted service rather than roll their own.

Of course, this also brings a potential problem: if any DW-based site can access your locked content from LJ, this may include all kinds of dodgy outfits. Personally, I trust DW a lot more than I trust LJ at this point; if LJ is displaying adverts that attempt to install malware, just how far do you think you can rely on your friends-lock? And no, LJ isn't doing this deliberately, but they're also not doing nearly enough to police the problem, IMO. But that doesn't mean anyone else should trust DW, you have to make your own decision on that. Besides, even if you trust them not to be evil, that doesn't mean you can trust them not to be incompetent. Furthermore, anyone can set up a site using any modified version of the DW code; that's the whole point of Open Source.

I've asked in the news post how the DW devs intend to handle the password issue, and I do expect that they're already thought this through and will give me a satisfactory answer. The problem is that the announcement is getting a bit swamped by people who are horrified and appalled about the prospect of people reading their posts in a different format. I do think this objection is based on a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet works, mixed in with knee-jerk anti-Dreamwidth sentiment. As far as I can see, this is about equivalent to objecting that people might choose to view your journal in their own style, and therefore not see your ~~illegible~~ er, carefully crafted graphical layout.

However, I do appreciate that there can be a difference between stuff that is in theory available to the public, and actually actively broadcasting and aggregating that material. In this particular case, what Dreamwidth is proposing does not make any practical difference. As it is, when you post a friends-locked post on LJ, people to whom you have granted access can already do pretty much anything with that post, ranging from perfectly reasonable things like importing it into a mobile phone or desktop client, to actively evil things like screen-scraping and reposting the entire text on a site designed to mock you. As far as I'm concerned, choosing to view the post on your DW reading list is far more like the former than the latter!

Plus, I really like the sound of the implementation details, the fact that the post will be visible only to the journal owner and not anyone else who looks at their reading page (even if the second person is perfectly entitled to view the entry). Any interaction such as commenting or memorifying takes place on the originating site (this is one of the aspects that makes the proposal vastly superior to RSS; without anyone having to put any thought into it, all the comments end up in one place instead of being split over multiple sites.

The big question in my mind is whether it will ever be possible to do things the other way round, ie read Dreamwidth originating posts on your LJ friends page. Just think, you could keep up with your friends who have moved house without needing to get any Dreamwidth cooties on you at all! (OK, that's not strictly true, you would have to have an account or an OpenID on Dreamwidth so that people can add you to their access lists, but that's a one-time thing.) But of course I have no idea whether LJ will implement this; they could very well lift Dreamwidth's Open Source code if they want to, and it seems to me like an obviously sound business proposition; after all, if Dreamwidth lets you read posts from LJ (and InsaneJournal and JournalFen and DeadJournal and $random_self_hosted_journal) all in one place, while LJ restricts you to stuff that was originally created on LJ plus barely functional RSS, that gives DW a huge advantage. Anyway, we'll see.

While I'm on my soap-box, let me talk briefly about why the Google Buzz debâcle is not the same thing. The problem there was not people being angry when stuff that was already public became more obviously public (though it did get confounded by elements of that), but that Google chose to reveal to the whole world, by default, your most frequently emailed contacts. Webmail has been around for multiple decades now, and it's always been the expectation that while it's not highly secure (it goes over http, duh) against a determined hacker, it's not actually public to anyone with an internet browser, let alone deliberately broadcasted to other people you email. And yes, Google have now fixed this so that the list of frequently emailed people are only suggested rather than automatically trusted by default, but it's too late, once the information is out there the genie won't go back in the bottle. Not to mention that lots and lots of Gmail users are not all tech-savvy and won't have been following all the internet discussion about how bad the Buzz roll-out was.

Me, I straight away went in and locked down the system as much as I could (I don't dare delete my profile and switch off Buzz altogether, because one of the many bugs seems to be that if you don't opt in, you can't get at any of the privacy controls. Also I feel nervous about next time Google decides to randomly broadcast private information, and I would rather get a notification than be blissfully unaware. I then discovered that if you edit your Gmail contacts at all, they are automatically shifted to "My contacts", which is by default the highest level trust filter for the Buzz. So when I edited an address book entry with a note saying, "out-of-date address, don't use", that long defunct Hotmail address was suddenly on the list of people who get a notification whenever I update my Gtalk status or post a photo to Picasa. And whoever now has that recycled address could probably deduce quite a lot of information about whom I know. So I spent a couple of hours going through my 500-member contact list, deleting every entry that is obsolete or belongs to some random customer service rep I emailed once or random Scandinavian who happens to be on the same Jewish mailing lists as me.

I'm not actually worried personally; I decided long ago that I wasn't going to use my primary email for web activities. I made this decision not because I'm prescient but because I wanted to minimize spam and quasi-spam in my main inbox. But now I'm really glad that I did, because Google knows nothing about my social networking presences, they're not linked to my main email address or real name. The trouble is that because of Google's extremely clumsy attempt to bypass the network effect and set up a service that was already populated, if I'm not strict about locking everything down, I could compromise my friends who may be more security / privacy conscious than I am (not to mention those people whom I sometimes email who are not my friends but are, for example, teenagers attending my bar mitzvah classes).

I thought people were being melodramatic about Buzz when it first appeared, because after all it's fairly easy to opt out, but the more I think about it, the more I'm annoyed.

[Cross-posting to LiveJournal because I think both the DW news and the Buzz stuff are important for LJ peeps to know.]

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