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VR, Drones and Autonomous Vehicles

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As you are probably aware due to the unending stream of utopian press reports emanating from Silicon Valley, three new technologies bankrolled by three of the biggest names in tech are poised to change your life for the better. Just as the computer and internet have been nothing but a positive in the lives of all people everywhere, so too will virtual reality, drones and self-driving vehicles liberate human beings from the tedium of, respectively, sensing the real world, delivering packages, and driving.

Still, in the wee hours of the night, and admittedly afflicted by the kind of doubt that will forever keep human beings from reaching the computational certitude of computers, I find myself thinking that VR, drones and autonomous vehicles sound nice in the vacuum of public relations and venture-capital funding, but may experience or even provoke real-world problems upon deployment. In fact, I can’t keep my storytelling reflex from filling in all the utopian backdrops and can’t-miss financial windfalls with scenarios in which these technologies fail or are repurposed to darker intents.  [ Read more ]

Google is the New Microsoft

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Two days ago I went to log into Gmail and found that the login screen I had been using for, what — an entire decade? — was suddenly behaving differently. Now, as a longtime web user I’ve been taught that any time something seems phishy I should make sure that what I’m seeing is actually what it purports to be. That is in fact the lesson all large web companies preach — be vigilant!

The problem, of course, is that the level of criminal sophistication perpetrating such deceptions keeps growing, to the point that almost anything seems possible. How do I know that someone hasn’t figured out a way to show me the appropriate URL, then redirect my traffic or keystrokes to a hostile server? I mean, I’m a reasonably sophisticated web user, but that only means I’m that much more aware of what I don’t know.

As it turns out, the change to my Gmail login ritual was not only initiated by Google, it was rolled out on the sly without, ironically, so much as an email that a change was coming. Meaning I had to get on the internet to find out that other users around the country and around the world were being confronted by that same autocratic change before I knew it was safe to log into my Gmail account.

Somewhere in the high-tech bowels of Google a group of very highly paid people got together and decided that they would roll out a new login scheme which requires twice as many clicks as the old scheme, that they would do so without giving notice to anyone who used that scheme, and that they would give no reason for doing so. That is exactly how the world ended up with Windows 8, and a whole host of other Microsoft initiatives to win market share and own technology spaces in complete disregard for its customers.

I suspect that the Gmail change has something to do with Google’s recognition that the world is going mobile, but the real story here is the contempt with which Google views its users. That is in fact the signature moment in any tech company’s life cycle — the one where current users are considered to be, at best, nothing more that a population to be exploited, and at worst, a hindrance to corporate goals that have completely diverged from the products and services being offered and utilized.

In terms of righteous indignation this barely qualifies as a 2, so I’m not suggesting anyone leave Gmail, but simply that you take a step back and get your mind around the contempt that any company would have to have in order to suddenly change the portal to your email account. Because those are the same people who have said they are not reading your hosted emails, or personally identifying your web traffic, or doing anything else you wouldn’t want them to do because they promised they wouldn’t be evil.

Update: It occurred to me last night that the new Gmail requirement that users click on two separate screens in order to log in, instead of only one as before, may have been initiated as a means of encouraging people to stay logged in all the time. While presenting as an initial annoyance, once users gave in and complied it would strengthen Google’s brand association with email products and the user’s reliance on same, preventing people from migrating to other platforms for chat and video, etc. The downside, obviously, is that it would actually make Gmail accounts significantly less secure if an always-logged-in device fell into the wrong hands.

— Mark Barrett

Amazon Outrage Redux Ad Nauseum

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Apparently more people are noticing that Amazon doesn’t care about authors or readers or anything other than making as much money as possible:

After months with Jeff Bezos’ fingers planted in their eyeballs, hundreds of pissed off writers are buying a full-page middle finger to Amazon. Their message is clear: please stop screwing us in order to promote world retail domination.

Sensing vulnerability, Google is attempting to ingratiate itself with authors and readers by teaming up with Barnes and Noble to provide a trivial service in a few public-relations-rich locations:

Starting on Thursday, book buyers in Manhattan, West Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area will be able to get same-day deliveries from local Barnes & Noble stores through Google Shopping Express, Google’s fledgling online shopping and delivery service.

The big picture takeaway is of course that none of these companies care about you except to the extent that you can be co-opted or exploited in their wars with each other. Moral of the story: stop caring about technology, technology companies, or anything other than your work and your readers. And maybe your local independent bookstore if you’re lucky enough to have one. That’s where the love is.

Update: In counterattacking on the authorial front, Amazon manages to shoot itself in the foot, fall down a flight of stairs, bounce out the door, roll into the street in front of a steamroller, then to stagger to its feet only to be crushed by a highly rated piano that unfortunately did not quality for free shipping:

The freshest part of Amazon’s call to arms was the history lesson. It recounted how the book industry hated mass-market paperbacks when they were introduced in the 1930s, and said they would ruin the business when they really rejuvenated it. Unfortunately, to clinch its argument, it cited the wrong authority:

“The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if ‘publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.’ Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.”

This perceived slur on the memory of one of the 20th century’s most revered truth-tellers might prove to be one of Amazon’s biggest public relations blunders since it deleted copies of “1984” from readers’ Kindles in 2009.

Amazon has apparently also decided to pick a fight with Disney, thereby opening up a war on two fronts in flagrant disregard for historical precedent.

— Mark Barrett

Self-Publishing, CreateSpace and Bing

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If you’re a self-publishing author, one of the important chores you can do to avoid having to actually write anything is to see how the two most popular search engines report back on you and your work. The dominant US search engine is of course Google, with about 66% of the search market, while Microsoft’s Bing makes up most of the remainder. (Bing powers not only the Bing.com site, which is 16% of US search, but also Yahoo.com’s search engine, which accounts for roughly 12 percent.)

If you’re not already obsessed with your personal and professional rankings on search engines and social networks, the good news is that you don’t have to become your own favorite celebrity in order to make sure people can find you. All you need is a basic understanding of how search engines work, and how people may try to find you using various words and phrases — like, say, your name or the title of something you wrote.

While it may seem as if all search engines see the internet the same way, that’s not actually the case. In order to return hits for any search you conduct, the search engine you’re using must have already visited the page you’re looking for in order to point you to it. This process of scouring the web for content is done automatically by what are called web crawlers, which follow links from one page to the next. In general web crawlers do a good job of indexing most of what’s available on the web, but depending on how often a search engine crawls a particular site there can be some lag between when a page is published (or updated) and when that page is indexed.

To get around this lag it’s possible to go to most search engines and submit pages and sites directly so search engines know where to find new content. Since this is a bit of a chore you can also use various aggregating services to submit new pages or sites to most of the popular search engines at once, albeit often for a fee. In my own experience it’s almost never necessary to submit URL’s to search engines yourself, and in no case would I pay to have this done. In a relatively short amount of time almost any new content will show up after the web crawlers make their next sweep.  [ Read more ]

Data Rape

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Date rapists drug their victims for two reasons. First, to make the act of rape as easy as possible. Second, to make it all but impossible for victims to remember or dispute what happened. Unless a victim is willing to act on what may only be dim suspicions, subjecting themselves to the rigors and indecencies of a dubiously predisposed legal process, including invasive testing, there’s no possibility that the perpetrator will be prosecuted, let alone convicted. Date rapists can always claim sex was consensual and point to the victim’s willingness (if not eagerness) to be in the perpetrator’s company. Because the victim’s memory will be impaired due to the date-rape drug, they will be incapable of contradicting the assertions of the rapist absent any forensic proof to the contrary. Worse, if the victim doesn’t know what happened, how can they themselves be sure they said no?

Not surprisingly, the people most at risk for date rape are innocents who have no idea of the existence of date-rape drugs. If you’ve been around the block a few times, or gone to college, you know to keep an eye on your drink at the parties you attend. But if you’ve led a fairly sheltered life and genuinely believe that mommy, daddy, god and law enforcement are watching out for you when you venture into the world, you may not know that some of the people who seem most excited to meet you are flashing practiced smiles and reciting well-honed sales pitches designed to victimize you in ways you might object to if their intent was fully disclosed.

That charming person picking you up at the door and complimenting you on your appearance and buying you flowers or a nice dinner or taking you to their home in the country may be thinking the entire time about how they are going to put drugs in your drink and have sex with you without your consent, but they’re not going to disclose that fact. Because if they did you might reasonably object to that kind of treatment and opt out of the date, thereby denying the rapist what they want most.

Innocence Lost — Again
Hailing originally from the Midwest as I do, I have more than once been accused of being a country bumpkin. Having gone on to live in Los Angeles for a few years, and in the bustling Northeast for a few years after that, I flatter myself that those stops instilled in me the kind of street savvy and deep cynicism that allows people in those media centers to simultaneously dismiss and lampoon everyone else in the country. Unfortunately, a few weeks ago I was reminded once again that you can never really leave the turnip truck when I read a Wall Street Journal article detailing the degree to which e-readers mine personal data from those devices. Even as I know one of the main goals of any internet-connected business is the procurement and exploitation of user data, including the selling of customer information to third parties, it still never occurred to me that e-readers were mining information about the private reading habits of users.  [ Read more ]

The Adman Cometh

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If advertising was a villain, it would be a Terminator:

It’s no surprise then that ads have come to the Kindle. The good news — relatively speaking — is that you can save a few bucks by purchasing an ad-enabled machine:

Although the hardware is identical to the standard $139 Kindle, the new Kindle with “Special Offers” will feature advertisements and deals as its screen saver and on the bottom of its home screen. But for that added distraction, the company will take $25 off the price—dropping it to $114.

If ads on the Kindle are inevitable — and they are, as are ads on every imaginable surface and device — I think this is a smart way to introduce them. Rather than inject ads into every Kindle, thereby infuriating all those nice people who helped make the Kindle a success, Amazon is giving the customer a choice and motivating that choice with savings.

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The Website Platform Advantage

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While writing my Platform Evolution post I gave some thought to commenting on an excellent Infographic about content farms. No sooner did I decide against it than I ran across this excellent post on Publishing Trends about content farms. Then, a day later, a good friend sent me an unbidden and timely link to a post on Making Light, which, among other things, talks about — wait for it! — content farms.

If you’re not familiar with content farms you can get a quick overview here. As a writer, what concerns me most about content farms is that they are to writing and publishing what Ebola is to the human body. If I was an astrophysicist I would also add that content farms are to information and knowledge what solar storms are to communications. And if I was a logician I would say that content farms are to accuracy and reliability what tsunamis are to fishing villages.

Which is to say that everything about content farms is bad, but not equally bad. The worst aspect of content farms is not that they’re the new frontier for spammers and swindlers, it’s that producing so much crap at such an incredible rate renders every single aggregating and filtering mechanism useless.

Google as a search engine for retail products and reviews has been beyond broken for years. (Try searching for “best _____”, where the blank is any product you’re interested in.) Amazon is currently the default search for products, but it’s starting to fall apart as well. (Am I looking at the latest version of the CD/DVD/book I want to order? Is it new or used? Does it ship free or for a fee? Is it shipping from Amazon or some fly-by-night third-party reseller?) And of course the idea that all that ballyhooed user-generated social-media content is pretty much crap is also nothing new.

What content farms do that’s new is automate the production of internet crap by exploiting free labor and making liberal use of other people’s content in a plausibly deniable way. For independent writers trying to attract attention, fighting through the noise pollution generated by content farms may seem impossible, and all the more so as content farms begin to pollute e-book retailers like Amazon. The antidote to this virulent hemorrhage of obfuscating web text may seem to be a gated social networking community, but I think the opposite is true.  [ Read more ]

Google Mail #825 Error | 2 Workarounds

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A few days ago I started getting an error at the top of my Google Mail page. The error displays after I look at any message in my inbox, then attempt to return to the inbox. The error reads as follows:

Oops… the system encountered a problem (#825)

The error also displays a countdown notice that it will retry the operation in five seconds, and a button to retry the requested operation immediately. Neither waiting for the clock to count down and retry or retrying on command resolves the problem.

Workaround #1
I do not allow third-party cookies on my machine. Until recently disabling third-party cookies proved compatible with Google Mail. Now that seems not to be the case.

Changing my cookie settings to allow third-party cookies resolves the problem. Because I do not want to allow third-party cookies, and because I don’t think you should either, I do not recommend this workaround.

Workaround #2
When the error displays, clicking the refresh button will load the requested window, and seems to resolve the problem for the current session. Leaving GMail and returning reproduces the problem, but it can again be resolved with a single refresh of the window.

I don’t what change Google made to prompt this behavior. I found a thread on Google’s support site earlier today but both then and at the time of this posting no explanation was given for the error, or for any third-party cookies that Google may be allowing on Google Mail.

Update: I am no longer getting the error message as of 11/18. Hopefully the issue has been resolved, if not explained.

— Mark Barrett

The Information-Age Myth

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I went into a large, nationally-known chain store last night to buy a few things. When I what I wanted I went to the check-out lines. Because the store had too few employees handling too many customers I elected to take my five items to the twelve-items-or-less line, on the assumption that fewer items would mean a faster checkout.

Confirming the wisdom of my choice, the customer two places ahead of me breezed through checkout. Because the three women ahead of me were only buying two items as a group, I felt confident that I would be on my way in short order. (In the fable business, this is known as counting your chickens before they hatch.)  [ Read more ]

Is It Safe?

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No, it’s not safe.

No matter how much money the powers-that-be put into making the internet seem like a sunny day in the park, the internet is the technological and societal equivalent of a dark alley. From the thugs working out of mom’s basement who are trying to steal your bank account login info, to the thugs at Facebook opting you in to efforts to track, exploit and sell your every click — and intentionally making it impossible for you to opt out — there is no safe place to be on the world wide web.  [ Read more ]