Google Maps has discovered Australia: and the press gave a vivid illustration of the rules Australian media follow when reporting on Google.
First and foremost, the Prime Directive is "go soft". Google is surrounded by a skepticism-removal field, Australian media can't get rid of that bit of cultural cringe which says "Australia needs to be noticed", and put together, the end result is a welter of "Google noticed Australia!" stories which ignore the quality of the maps themselves.
Google's Australian maps are really awful.
It hasn't bothered with searchability beyond the grossest features. So I can search for Sydney but not Penrith or Parramatta or Chatswood or Brisbane.
The maps are occasionally years out of date, so that a major freeway near my home is shown following its intended route instead of its real route.
Strangely, the accuracy of the maps is different in adjoining sections, so while Lilyfield Road carries a years-out-of-date one-way diversion, Olympic Park is accurate and the Metro Light Rail is shown.
The corresponding satellite images don't correspond all that well with the maps, because they show a different point in time. Hence Darling Park is in the satellite photo, but with the map superimposed it clearly can't exist because the Western Distributor runs right through it.
And the interface is flaky, so that "hybrid" only works properly if you start with the map. Start with the satellite photo, and hybrid doesn't always draw the map overlay.
And so on. The whole thing is an appalling mish-mash that looks like it was knocked together for no particular reason other than to generate some positive downunder publicity.
What's embarrassing is not that Google has slapped lipstick on a pig and called it product, but that the Australian press acted just as Google knew it would act: like a toadying retainer to a medieval lord, thanking Google for showering grace upon this insignificant backwater.
The whole thing is out of the half-bakery. But Google's media objective of "attract no evil publicity" has remained intact, courtesy of fans-with-typewriters.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Monday, May 15, 2006
Thought is not property
"Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man's right to the product of his mind."
So wrote Ayn Rand, a deity of libertarian thought.
Her cry has been taken up by "intellectual property" lobbyists the world over (example
here), but most particularly in America, where Rand is still considered to be a great philosophical thinker.
Rand was wrong, and it's important to understand why.
The sole "product of mind" is thought. Everything else made by humans needs "mind and muscle", so to speak: there is an action following thought which results in the expression of that thought.
The thought itself, however, is not property. The mind is mine, but the nature of property makes it inapplicable to mind.
I'm going to avoid the very abstract parts of this discussion. Much of the debate over intellectual property (from one side) focuses on "exhaustability" and "exclusivity". That is, that when I own this hammer, you can't use this hammer; and because there's a finite supply of hammers, my ownership changes your position. A debate focussing on these characteristics ends up in a quagmire, so I ignore it.
Instead, let's look at two other aspects of property: evidence, and enforcement. I can provide evidence that I bought the hammer and therefore I own it; and on its theft, I can appeal to an authority to enforce my ownership of the hammer.
Exclusivity and exhaustability are abstract economic concepts; evidence and enforcement are more concrete. More to the point, evidence and enforcement don't have to take economics into account. The bottom of the matter is that I own the hammer, not that there are plenty of other hammers around to own; and that the state agrees that I own it, and agrees that my right of ownership can be backed by the law.
Ownership of thought, divorced from effort, cannot be owned: ownership cannot be established by any reasonable evidence, and a claim of ownership is unenforceable.
Until someone sets pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, or tool to timber, the thought has no expression. I can be the first person to make a polished-maple space shuttle, but I cannot ever reasonably claim to be the only person to have thought of making a polished-maple space shuttle.
Copyright and patent protect not the thought, but the first expression of the thought. Until the thought has been published, it has no protection, for very good reason: there's no way to prove primacy (that you thought of it first), and there's no way to enforce exclusivity (to stop somebody else thinking of it).
Back to Ayn Rand. As I said, the product of the mind is thought. But what if, as Rand asserted, thought were to be treated as property?
The only body either enabled or empowered to enforce the evidentiary or enforceability basis of property is the state.
In other words, to make thought into property is to invite the state to police the contents of the mind.
As far as I can tell, only the most oppressive state mechanisms in history have ever attempted that: the policing of thought, for whatever reason, is the extreme end of totalitarian behaviour.
Thought is private, but not property.
So wrote Ayn Rand, a deity of libertarian thought.
Her cry has been taken up by "intellectual property" lobbyists the world over (example
here), but most particularly in America, where Rand is still considered to be a great philosophical thinker.
Rand was wrong, and it's important to understand why.
The sole "product of mind" is thought. Everything else made by humans needs "mind and muscle", so to speak: there is an action following thought which results in the expression of that thought.
The thought itself, however, is not property. The mind is mine, but the nature of property makes it inapplicable to mind.
I'm going to avoid the very abstract parts of this discussion. Much of the debate over intellectual property (from one side) focuses on "exhaustability" and "exclusivity". That is, that when I own this hammer, you can't use this hammer; and because there's a finite supply of hammers, my ownership changes your position. A debate focussing on these characteristics ends up in a quagmire, so I ignore it.
Instead, let's look at two other aspects of property: evidence, and enforcement. I can provide evidence that I bought the hammer and therefore I own it; and on its theft, I can appeal to an authority to enforce my ownership of the hammer.
Exclusivity and exhaustability are abstract economic concepts; evidence and enforcement are more concrete. More to the point, evidence and enforcement don't have to take economics into account. The bottom of the matter is that I own the hammer, not that there are plenty of other hammers around to own; and that the state agrees that I own it, and agrees that my right of ownership can be backed by the law.
Ownership of thought, divorced from effort, cannot be owned: ownership cannot be established by any reasonable evidence, and a claim of ownership is unenforceable.
Until someone sets pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, or tool to timber, the thought has no expression. I can be the first person to make a polished-maple space shuttle, but I cannot ever reasonably claim to be the only person to have thought of making a polished-maple space shuttle.
Copyright and patent protect not the thought, but the first expression of the thought. Until the thought has been published, it has no protection, for very good reason: there's no way to prove primacy (that you thought of it first), and there's no way to enforce exclusivity (to stop somebody else thinking of it).
Back to Ayn Rand. As I said, the product of the mind is thought. But what if, as Rand asserted, thought were to be treated as property?
The only body either enabled or empowered to enforce the evidentiary or enforceability basis of property is the state.
In other words, to make thought into property is to invite the state to police the contents of the mind.
As far as I can tell, only the most oppressive state mechanisms in history have ever attempted that: the policing of thought, for whatever reason, is the extreme end of totalitarian behaviour.
Thought is private, but not property.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
The $100 publicity device
It's one of those stories that people just can't resist: self-publicist and acclaimed guru Doctor Nick - sorry, Nicholas Negroponte - pops up in Tunis at the WSIS Summit promising $100 PCs for the world's starving children.
Rather than critique the stunt itself, it's also instructive to take a look at what happened in the media, which was simple: it was taken as gospel. You know that guru-worship has reached ridiculous heights when someone showing a not-particularly-functional prototype is written up as if he'd launched a commercial product, which was how the show-and-tell was swallowed at the first pass.
By the third day or so, a very few media outlets had started to pick over the entrails and decided it wasn't such a hot story after all. As far as I can tell, The Inquirer (http://www.theinquirer.net) was the first to pour scorn on the idea.
But that's not going to be enough: the lack of scepticism at the beginning has created an international belief that Doctor Nick's done it again - a stroke of brilliance from the guru, save the world and feed the starving, how do you nominate people for the Nobel, and so on.
Media guru-worship is bunk; it's the inverse of "ad hominiem", where all you need to turn bad ideas good is to have the endorsement of a guru. So I've long since given myself a guru-ectomy.
There are a great many questions any journalist could have asked if he or she hadn't been sleepwalking at the time. But to me, the outstandingly obvious one is this: Why would authoritarian kleptocrats spend money buying up PCs for their citizens at the same time as denying them food, suppressing communications, and repressing information or debate?
Some context is instructive here. Journalists attending the summit were seeing first-hand the effects of government Internet censorship in Tunis, which is by no means the worst offender on the "control citizens' access to information" league table. The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk) reported hilariously that a Swiss tourist information site (www.swissinfo.org) was being filtered out of the Tunisian Internet.
But a huge part of the premise of the $100 laptop is that it gives the villager in the third-world access to the Internet, yet neither Doctor Nick nor the waiting acolytes in the press can say "but what if the government blocks their access?", in which case the village child got a $100 western doorstop.
I would also have asked for evidence supporting the article of faith that you can't get an education without a computer - and by evidence, I mean real, peer-reviewed, non-industry-supported, independent research, not an arrogant American metaphor about sharing pencils around a classroom.
This piece of world-wide blue-sky media dog-whistling was nothing more than a publicity stunt.
Rather than critique the stunt itself, it's also instructive to take a look at what happened in the media, which was simple: it was taken as gospel. You know that guru-worship has reached ridiculous heights when someone showing a not-particularly-functional prototype is written up as if he'd launched a commercial product, which was how the show-and-tell was swallowed at the first pass.
By the third day or so, a very few media outlets had started to pick over the entrails and decided it wasn't such a hot story after all. As far as I can tell, The Inquirer (http://www.theinquirer.net) was the first to pour scorn on the idea.
But that's not going to be enough: the lack of scepticism at the beginning has created an international belief that Doctor Nick's done it again - a stroke of brilliance from the guru, save the world and feed the starving, how do you nominate people for the Nobel, and so on.
Media guru-worship is bunk; it's the inverse of "ad hominiem", where all you need to turn bad ideas good is to have the endorsement of a guru. So I've long since given myself a guru-ectomy.
There are a great many questions any journalist could have asked if he or she hadn't been sleepwalking at the time. But to me, the outstandingly obvious one is this: Why would authoritarian kleptocrats spend money buying up PCs for their citizens at the same time as denying them food, suppressing communications, and repressing information or debate?
Some context is instructive here. Journalists attending the summit were seeing first-hand the effects of government Internet censorship in Tunis, which is by no means the worst offender on the "control citizens' access to information" league table. The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk) reported hilariously that a Swiss tourist information site (www.swissinfo.org) was being filtered out of the Tunisian Internet.
But a huge part of the premise of the $100 laptop is that it gives the villager in the third-world access to the Internet, yet neither Doctor Nick nor the waiting acolytes in the press can say "but what if the government blocks their access?", in which case the village child got a $100 western doorstop.
I would also have asked for evidence supporting the article of faith that you can't get an education without a computer - and by evidence, I mean real, peer-reviewed, non-industry-supported, independent research, not an arrogant American metaphor about sharing pencils around a classroom.
This piece of world-wide blue-sky media dog-whistling was nothing more than a publicity stunt.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Sony's Rootkit Gets the Go-By From Australian Journalists
By now most people with a vague interest in stories about computers know that Sony tried to distribute copy-protection software with the characteristics of a rootkit with music CDs. The result was that playing the CD on a home PC would install the software; the software would hide itself; and it was difficult and dangerous to uninstall.
What's fascinated me about the story is that it had almost no play in the Australian IT press.
If I look at Google News, I find that this morning (7.15am, October 9, Sydney time) there are around 249 stories posted about the rootkit.
Filter the Google News to location:Australia and the number drops to a mere handful. Just how many is a little difficult to fix because small variations in search terms change the result, but fewer than 20.
At first glance, it looks like it got a run in most publications: The Sydney Morning Herald (http://www.smh.com.), Smart House (http://www.smarthouse.com.au), The ABC Online (http://www.abc.net.au), ZDNet (http://www.zdnet.com.au), Linux World Au (http://www.linuxworld.com.au), IT News (http://www.itnews.com.au), Australian IT (http://www.australianit.com.au), ARNnet (http://www.arnnet.com.au).
However, with only two exceptions I can see, the coverage was entirely syndicated, either from a wire or from international mastheads.
The locals were Smart House and the ABC. That's it.
Now, on efficiency terms, that might seem like a "so what?" After all, there's no reason to rake over the story when the US has already covered it, right?
There are three reasons to give the story local treatment.
1) Was the software distributed in Australia? If the answer is "yes", it gives rise to all kinds of journalistic fun, such as whether the software breaks the law here, what product liability issues may arise, and so on.
2) Sony's attitude to copy-protection has already brought it to prominence in Australia, where mod-chips have been declared legal by the High Court after a long battle initiated by Sony.
3) Some of the wire pieces were nothing more than press release rewrites anyhow, like the wire story saying "Sony hoses down hidden file fears" (a poor choice of syndication since by the time it ran, the patch it referred to had already been found wanting).
As a postscript to this story, the original rootkit discoverer, writing at http://www.sysinternals.com, found that the software was "phoning home" after installation.
Now: Australia has many, many people who are expert in security or privacy, and whose profile ranges between media-savvy and media-tart. Comment was available, local angles were certainly available - only the media, it seems, were not available.
What's fascinated me about the story is that it had almost no play in the Australian IT press.
If I look at Google News, I find that this morning (7.15am, October 9, Sydney time) there are around 249 stories posted about the rootkit.
Filter the Google News to location:Australia and the number drops to a mere handful. Just how many is a little difficult to fix because small variations in search terms change the result, but fewer than 20.
At first glance, it looks like it got a run in most publications: The Sydney Morning Herald (http://www.smh.com.), Smart House (http://www.smarthouse.com.au), The ABC Online (http://www.abc.net.au), ZDNet (http://www.zdnet.com.au), Linux World Au (http://www.linuxworld.com.au), IT News (http://www.itnews.com.au), Australian IT (http://www.australianit.com.au), ARNnet (http://www.arnnet.com.au).
However, with only two exceptions I can see, the coverage was entirely syndicated, either from a wire or from international mastheads.
The locals were Smart House and the ABC. That's it.
Now, on efficiency terms, that might seem like a "so what?" After all, there's no reason to rake over the story when the US has already covered it, right?
There are three reasons to give the story local treatment.
1) Was the software distributed in Australia? If the answer is "yes", it gives rise to all kinds of journalistic fun, such as whether the software breaks the law here, what product liability issues may arise, and so on.
2) Sony's attitude to copy-protection has already brought it to prominence in Australia, where mod-chips have been declared legal by the High Court after a long battle initiated by Sony.
3) Some of the wire pieces were nothing more than press release rewrites anyhow, like the wire story saying "Sony hoses down hidden file fears" (a poor choice of syndication since by the time it ran, the patch it referred to had already been found wanting).
As a postscript to this story, the original rootkit discoverer, writing at http://www.sysinternals.com, found that the software was "phoning home" after installation.
Now: Australia has many, many people who are expert in security or privacy, and whose profile ranges between media-savvy and media-tart. Comment was available, local angles were certainly available - only the media, it seems, were not available.
Saturday, October 01, 2005
They Drop Like Flies in Korean Cafes!
It's easy to understand why a daily might give space to a suspect wire story on its Web page: there are too many wire pieces and there's too little time.
However, it's fair to say that the wires have a very, very long tradition of falling prey to urban legend. One of my favourites, "Man Dies in Internet Cafe", has made its annual appearance again, with a wire story spending more than a month floating around and getting picked up by dailies as gospel.
Funny story: I mentioned the mythology to a journalists' Website, who gave it a paragraph. One of the Australian news organisations, or should I say News organisations, went ballistic and the story was un-posted. Well, let them go ballistic at me if they take exception to this post on this blog...
In 1969, the late AP Herbert - a long-time humourist (writing for Punch, I think) whose speciality was making fun of English law - described how his "Negotiable Cow" (a piece of silliness which discussed the laws relating to cheques, and whether a cheque could be written on a cow) escaped via a BBC comedy to traverse the wire agencies and finally land in The Memphis Press - Scimitar as straight news.
More recently - just a couple of years ago in fact - a US county was made fun of throughout the world because it allegedly maintained "Klingon translators" among its mental health services.
This story, again, was a blooper run by the wires. There never was a position for Klingon speakers - it was a programmer's joke which took off on the wires and became an ineradicable belief.
There are still people who run the story along by trying to "document" the scandalous waste of taxes in America because so many public sector organisations are hiring Klingon interpreters.
Here's another which falls into the "reasonable cause for scepticism" category. A couple of years ago, mobile phone batteries all over the world were exploding in pockets. Manufacturers solemnly issued warnings that users should never install after-market batteries (just like "use only Toyota original parts, I guess!), and investigations were promised.
At the time, with CommsWorld still live, I received the "no imitation parts" press release from a manufacturer and promised an exchange: if they could supply a photograph of a blown-up battery, I would run the story.
Not only did I never get the requested photograph, but after a very long time, the story took an unexpected turn. AMTA issued a statement saying that while some fake batteries had been observed to overheat, no batteries exploded, and there were never injuries - at least in Australia.
Actually, a moderately-competent chemist would have sufficed for debunking that piece. "Are there any potentially-exploding chemicals in batteries?" "No." "Oh. Thanks." Or you could ask yourself: in our paranoid world, just how long would anyone be allowed to sell potential explosives as a ubiquitous consumer product?
On to deaths in Internet cafes.
Urban legends on the wires tend to have very predictable characteristics.
They're always located "somewhere else". In recent years (although it's been around since 1981), people have preferred to die of game-playing in South Korea, Taiwan or Vietnam. It's never happened in America, Britain, Australia or New Zealand. Even the geographical details can be hints; in the "man dies" story of two years ago, the event was placed in "Kwanju, 260km south-west of Seoul" - which according to my Atlas moves Kwanju into the Yellow Sea by about 50km (interestingly, but of no particular significance: this year's cafe death happened not only in the same country as the victim of two years ago, but within a fairly short commute. I have to conclude that the southern end of South Korea has very dangerous Internet Cafes.)
The urban legend often involves unnamed characters. Hence we have a victim for whom only the first name is given, if any (imagine the editor asking the journalist to track down someone called Lee or Kim in South Korea!); "police officials" and "government officials" without names, and unnamed witnesses.
Another characteristic is that any additional research adds no facts, only local commentary. The BBC's coverage of this story, more than once over the years, is a wonderful example: every time "man dies" hits the wires, the dear old Beeb suffers corporate amnesia and sends someone to quiz medical experts in Britain, computer games experts, market experts - anything except for confirming the original facts of the story. Well, once the Beeb managed to do a "local colour" piece, and even ran a photo of such astonishingly poor quality that you have to wonder whether someone was stringing them along.
Urban myths love the moral angle: the British have a strange legal system (cheques and cows); public officials are wasting our money; fake phone batteries are dangerous; too much computer gaming is bad for you. Quite often, the moral angle is married to the kind of society where governments believe the media has an obligation to uphold public behaviour.
It's also worth observing that urban legend participants are generally cut-out stereotypes: nobody ever died in a Korean Internet cafe without being an unemployed 20-something who lives at home.
And, of course, the best urban legends happen when the wires crib the local media and get facts scrambled along the way...
Media Advocacy
The question you never ask about a blog is whether anyone's reading it. They're not and they don't, unless of course you proactively point someone at it. Well, I have kids and a job and all sorts of things to keep me busy other than this.
But after a long silence, there are a couple of things which warrant some words, and this is the only outlet.
First, there was this piece of silliness about the matter of "computers in education".
http://newsletters.silicon.cneteu.net/t/81893/642015/71164/0/
Teachers fear computers in the classroom
IT interferes with 'genuine' book-based learning, study finds
By Andy McCue
Tuesday 13 September 2005
Silicon.com
"Schools are failing to take advantage of IT in the classroom as teachers worry computers will interfere with traditional book-based learning, according to a new academic study."
IT journalists work from the presupposition that their job is advocacy rather than journalism. Because they're there to promote the industry - if not individual advertisers, then at least the entire sector - they forget any kind of healthy scepticism.
As a sceptic, I will note the following aspects of this kind of story.
1) Saying "failing to take advantage" presupposes a benefit. The study also gives the impression that all subjects are equal in the face of IT - that is, whatever you're doing, you can do better with a PC in front of the student.
2) The journalist doesn't mention the considerable industry sponsorship behind the study. Does that taint the research? I don't know one way or the other - but it taints the reporting of it.
3) The research came to the stunning conclusion that "creative subjects" "suffer worst" at the lack of computers. Why would a painter, to pick one, be "suffering" without a computer? Why is it a surprise to the researcher?
4) Another revealing quote: "many teachers simply lack the confidence to take the risk of using technology in their subject areas". "Risk" is not an obligation. And, of course, it could be that the teachers themselves are making an informed judgement.
Of course, the naysayers don't get a look-in. It was a single-source story written from the press kit.
But after a long silence, there are a couple of things which warrant some words, and this is the only outlet.
First, there was this piece of silliness about the matter of "computers in education".
http://newsletters.silicon.cneteu.net/t/81893/642015/71164/0/
Teachers fear computers in the classroom
IT interferes with 'genuine' book-based learning, study finds
By Andy McCue
Tuesday 13 September 2005
Silicon.com
"Schools are failing to take advantage of IT in the classroom as teachers worry computers will interfere with traditional book-based learning, according to a new academic study."
IT journalists work from the presupposition that their job is advocacy rather than journalism. Because they're there to promote the industry - if not individual advertisers, then at least the entire sector - they forget any kind of healthy scepticism.
As a sceptic, I will note the following aspects of this kind of story.
1) Saying "failing to take advantage" presupposes a benefit. The study also gives the impression that all subjects are equal in the face of IT - that is, whatever you're doing, you can do better with a PC in front of the student.
2) The journalist doesn't mention the considerable industry sponsorship behind the study. Does that taint the research? I don't know one way or the other - but it taints the reporting of it.
3) The research came to the stunning conclusion that "creative subjects" "suffer worst" at the lack of computers. Why would a painter, to pick one, be "suffering" without a computer? Why is it a surprise to the researcher?
4) Another revealing quote: "many teachers simply lack the confidence to take the risk of using technology in their subject areas". "Risk" is not an obligation. And, of course, it could be that the teachers themselves are making an informed judgement.
Of course, the naysayers don't get a look-in. It was a single-source story written from the press kit.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Grafedia: Conditioning users to insecurity
The press release view of Grafedia is that it's a new social phenomenon.
Fine. I've never held the sort of rosy view of the world which expects a perfectly comprehensive and accurate description of something in a press release. But one of the jobs that media can claim as its own should surely be sufficient knowledge and scepticism to identify the whole of an elephant even if the press release only describes its leg?
Apparently not.
Grafedia, if I were to believe the cargo-cultists and gullibles on the promotional side, is one of those new things that demonstrate the "interface between the e-world and the real-world".
Here's how it works: you see an address written in chalk on the footpath or stuck with tape to the power pole; you use your mobile to send a message to the address; and you get something (like "pop art on the mobile phone", now there's something worth having...) by a return message.
Inspired by nothing more than a press release, outlets like CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/ptech/06/13/cell.phone.markers.ap/index.html), Wired (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66992,00.html), CNet (http://news.com.com/Photos+Grafedia+sightings/2009-1026_3-5694946.html?part=rss&tag=5694946&subj=news) and others have tossed out their critical brains and gone with the "wow" angle.
Umm - getting a message in return for a message hardly seems wow to me, but that's another matter.
Have these guys forgotten that viruses are spread by users who open messages from unknown sources?
Have they forgotten that sending messages to unknown places is a good way to end up on spam lists?
Ignoring for a moment that Grafedia is just another one of those lame attempts at breaking through the marketing noise by painting footpaths, it's really dumb to create a "social phenomenon" whose side-effect is to condition users to behave in an insecure manner.
Fine. I've never held the sort of rosy view of the world which expects a perfectly comprehensive and accurate description of something in a press release. But one of the jobs that media can claim as its own should surely be sufficient knowledge and scepticism to identify the whole of an elephant even if the press release only describes its leg?
Apparently not.
Grafedia, if I were to believe the cargo-cultists and gullibles on the promotional side, is one of those new things that demonstrate the "interface between the e-world and the real-world".
Here's how it works: you see an address written in chalk on the footpath or stuck with tape to the power pole; you use your mobile to send a message to the address; and you get something (like "pop art on the mobile phone", now there's something worth having...) by a return message.
Inspired by nothing more than a press release, outlets like CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/ptech/06/13/cell.phone.markers.ap/index.html), Wired (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66992,00.html), CNet (http://news.com.com/Photos+Grafedia+sightings/2009-1026_3-5694946.html?part=rss&tag=5694946&subj=news) and others have tossed out their critical brains and gone with the "wow" angle.
Umm - getting a message in return for a message hardly seems wow to me, but that's another matter.
Have these guys forgotten that viruses are spread by users who open messages from unknown sources?
Have they forgotten that sending messages to unknown places is a good way to end up on spam lists?
Ignoring for a moment that Grafedia is just another one of those lame attempts at breaking through the marketing noise by painting footpaths, it's really dumb to create a "social phenomenon" whose side-effect is to condition users to behave in an insecure manner.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
News Limited Eats the Fruit of the Idiot Tree
Since we're giving some attention to News Limited outlets, why not this piece of drivel:
http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,15065935%255E913,00.html
In what might have been an otherwise reasonable story about mobiles substituting for landlines we get this:
"Fixed lines face a further challenge from wireless technology offered by three big players, Unwired, Personal Broadband Australia and BigAir, as well as 80 smaller operators."
Well.
First, the number is wrong. "80" operators underestimates the wireless local loop market by about 50%.
Second, the three big players mentioned are big only in terms of wireless broadband Internet services. By comparison to the Telstra fixed line network, they're insignificant. Totalled together, they've got far fewer than 50,000 end users. Even as ISPs, they're small. As carriers, they're still junior. Calling them big doesn't make it so.
(As it happens, I like the idea of the wireless local loop. Stupid throwaway journalist hype, I don't like).
http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,15065935%255E913,00.html
In what might have been an otherwise reasonable story about mobiles substituting for landlines we get this:
"Fixed lines face a further challenge from wireless technology offered by three big players, Unwired, Personal Broadband Australia and BigAir, as well as 80 smaller operators."
Well.
First, the number is wrong. "80" operators underestimates the wireless local loop market by about 50%.
Second, the three big players mentioned are big only in terms of wireless broadband Internet services. By comparison to the Telstra fixed line network, they're insignificant. Totalled together, they've got far fewer than 50,000 end users. Even as ISPs, they're small. As carriers, they're still junior. Calling them big doesn't make it so.
(As it happens, I like the idea of the wireless local loop. Stupid throwaway journalist hype, I don't like).
A Lesson in Ignorance: Don't Even do Easy Research
It's a while since I poked fun at The Australian, but this story is just irresistible.
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,15044655%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html
Avoiding the crime of stealing a story wholesale for the blog, the essence is a very thin piece of information: the long-awaited (by some) Enum trial in Australia is starting at last.
With a very thin press release to go on, the Oz's journalists decided to pad. Padding is fun for a journalist: you get to load a story up with your own assumptions and soapboxes in the name of giving the story context.
Nearly every technical fact and market factoid used to pad The Australian's Enum story is wrong.
Running through them from the top. First, we're told that the purpose of Enum is "to accelerate the uptake voice over IP technology by consumers."
Wrong. The purpose of Enum is to translate ITU phone numbers to IP addresses and back, to produce a single, standard numbering system across VoIP and PSTN phones. Consumers ought never notice it.
The Oz says Enum was developed by the ITU. Wrong again. It is a quite-old IETF RFC.
We're told that Enum signals the start of the Internet phone boom, which is just silly.
"Electronic number mapping will mean the VoIP technology will become as reliable and easy to use as an existing home telephone," The Oz says. Again, nonsense. How the phones call the numbers is irrelevant to ease of use (an Internet phone can already have an identical keypad and dialling behaviour) or reliability (which depends on stuff like broadband infrastructure, gateways, power, and not at all on Enum).
Then we go to the inevitable Gartner analyst: "Mr Johnston said the current business model of internet voice services was priced at 1c to 3c a minute, whether the call was across the street or across the world."
This is wrong. VoIP-to-PSTN call prices are well above 3c per minute for most terminating destinations. Gartners numbers, I will repeat, are just dead wrong. My bet is that Gartner is reapplying a small US call rate data set to the rest of the world, without researching local prices and without the benefit of an exchange rate calculator. And the Oz? Lazy as hell. It's published plenty of stories about VoIP operators, and they mostly put their call rates in easy-to-reach places. But even with two journalists wrapping polystyrene around the press release, nobody could check a call rate to challenge the Gartner mythology.
Next, The Australian tells us that "VoIP ... technology has been used primarily by large businesses and government organisations."
Bulldust. Nonsense. Just an invented throwaway line. VoIP is bottom up; it was adopted by individuals first. Penetration in businesses is, in fact, remarkably low (although growing). Three years ago, to pick an arbitrary date, there was no business VoIP to speak of, just a lot of moderately geeky enthusiasts making Internet phone calls.
"Instead of going through a telephone exchange, calls are switched to and from an internet provider, who then sends them down the internet connection to the home."
The end statement of the story says it all. The Internet connection goes through some sort of exchange (that's where DSLAMs are), but the Oz doesn't know it. PSTN terminated VoIP calls go through exchanges, but the Oz doesn't realise it. The Oz instead prefers to give us the mythical Internet cloud which exists with no other infrastructure at all.
What a stupidly inadequate piece of work: no research, no knowledge, and no analysis of the one interviewee with whom the story was discussed.
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,15044655%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html
Avoiding the crime of stealing a story wholesale for the blog, the essence is a very thin piece of information: the long-awaited (by some) Enum trial in Australia is starting at last.
With a very thin press release to go on, the Oz's journalists decided to pad. Padding is fun for a journalist: you get to load a story up with your own assumptions and soapboxes in the name of giving the story context.
Nearly every technical fact and market factoid used to pad The Australian's Enum story is wrong.
Running through them from the top. First, we're told that the purpose of Enum is "to accelerate the uptake voice over IP technology by consumers."
Wrong. The purpose of Enum is to translate ITU phone numbers to IP addresses and back, to produce a single, standard numbering system across VoIP and PSTN phones. Consumers ought never notice it.
The Oz says Enum was developed by the ITU. Wrong again. It is a quite-old IETF RFC.
We're told that Enum signals the start of the Internet phone boom, which is just silly.
"Electronic number mapping will mean the VoIP technology will become as reliable and easy to use as an existing home telephone," The Oz says. Again, nonsense. How the phones call the numbers is irrelevant to ease of use (an Internet phone can already have an identical keypad and dialling behaviour) or reliability (which depends on stuff like broadband infrastructure, gateways, power, and not at all on Enum).
Then we go to the inevitable Gartner analyst: "Mr Johnston said the current business model of internet voice services was priced at 1c to 3c a minute, whether the call was across the street or across the world."
This is wrong. VoIP-to-PSTN call prices are well above 3c per minute for most terminating destinations. Gartners numbers, I will repeat, are just dead wrong. My bet is that Gartner is reapplying a small US call rate data set to the rest of the world, without researching local prices and without the benefit of an exchange rate calculator. And the Oz? Lazy as hell. It's published plenty of stories about VoIP operators, and they mostly put their call rates in easy-to-reach places. But even with two journalists wrapping polystyrene around the press release, nobody could check a call rate to challenge the Gartner mythology.
Next, The Australian tells us that "VoIP ... technology has been used primarily by large businesses and government organisations."
Bulldust. Nonsense. Just an invented throwaway line. VoIP is bottom up; it was adopted by individuals first. Penetration in businesses is, in fact, remarkably low (although growing). Three years ago, to pick an arbitrary date, there was no business VoIP to speak of, just a lot of moderately geeky enthusiasts making Internet phone calls.
"Instead of going through a telephone exchange, calls are switched to and from an internet provider, who then sends them down the internet connection to the home."
The end statement of the story says it all. The Internet connection goes through some sort of exchange (that's where DSLAMs are), but the Oz doesn't know it. PSTN terminated VoIP calls go through exchanges, but the Oz doesn't realise it. The Oz instead prefers to give us the mythical Internet cloud which exists with no other infrastructure at all.
What a stupidly inadequate piece of work: no research, no knowledge, and no analysis of the one interviewee with whom the story was discussed.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Take one dead horse, one whip, and one empty space to fill...
This must be the nonscoop of the month ...
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Outsourcing/Actors-union-shouts-cut-on-digital-film/2005/04/11/1113071894581.html
"Actors' union shouts 'cut' on digital film"
Wow, the Herald is up to the mark and racing ahead of time. This is one month old. Not a couple of days, or even a week.
To my knowledge, the story first emerged in the middle of March with a story on Boing Boing, http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/14/aussie_actors_guild_.html.
It then got discussed for a while on an Australian mailing list.
When it was beaten to death, it fortunately fell into the silty bottom of a Jurassic swamp, got covered by layers and layers of sediment, the calcium of the bones became mineralised, while the long and majestic march of geology created new rocks and mountains, seas dried and lands changed, and finally ...
... the story gets discovered, exhumed, and exhibited as "news" by the Herald; complete with the original Boing Boing angle intact, which says that the actor's union is standing in the way of progress (I'm not so sure about that line. I like free publication and freedom of creativity. I don't like new forms of contract, which is what the Creative Commons license is...).
(I ought to apologise for the long absence. Call it illness, exhaustion, or merely a crisis of motivation (ie, slacking), but the fingers haven't had any words in them of late. Things seem to be back again now, though...)
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Outsourcing/Actors-union-shouts-cut-on-digital-film/2005/04/11/1113071894581.html
"Actors' union shouts 'cut' on digital film"
Wow, the Herald is up to the mark and racing ahead of time. This is one month old. Not a couple of days, or even a week.
To my knowledge, the story first emerged in the middle of March with a story on Boing Boing, http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/14/aussie_actors_guild_.html.
It then got discussed for a while on an Australian mailing list.
When it was beaten to death, it fortunately fell into the silty bottom of a Jurassic swamp, got covered by layers and layers of sediment, the calcium of the bones became mineralised, while the long and majestic march of geology created new rocks and mountains, seas dried and lands changed, and finally ...
... the story gets discovered, exhumed, and exhibited as "news" by the Herald; complete with the original Boing Boing angle intact, which says that the actor's union is standing in the way of progress (I'm not so sure about that line. I like free publication and freedom of creativity. I don't like new forms of contract, which is what the Creative Commons license is...).
(I ought to apologise for the long absence. Call it illness, exhaustion, or merely a crisis of motivation (ie, slacking), but the fingers haven't had any words in them of late. Things seem to be back again now, though...)
Thursday, March 24, 2005
Syndicating the Scare Story
From the Associated Press comes this world-syndicated sensation:
Once you have a piece like this get cred through syndication, the next thing that happens is that a battalion of camp-followers will then jack on the back of the big story – essentially exploiting the news value for their own publicity. The US has replaced "reds under the bed" with terrorists. So it's no surprise that the AP story has now given birth to a clutch of piggyback pieces in which security experts of all kinds try and spook us with stories of terrorism and ID theft.
"Hackers gained personal information of 59,000 people affiliated with a California university - the latest in a string of high-profile cases of identity theft."
We have here pretty much a full house of tabloid assumptions. Something happened to a computer so it was hackers, and they gained personal information so it's a case of identity theft.
One of the worst things about the invention of the jargon "identity theft" is that unlike the old "fraud" or "obtaining money by deception", "identity theft" can be thrown around willy-nilly. Even when no fraud is committed, you can run the tabloid line.
"Hackers gained access to the victims' names and Social Security numbers."
"We still have no indication that the information was used for anything other than somebody wanting to have illegal access to this server," Wills said. "Typically, on a college campus that can be to download files, music and games. There's still no indication they were looking to take personal information."
Hang on ... ID theft and "no indication they were looking to take personal information" in the same event? I suppose consistency is too much to ask for...
The wire piece then jumps from "no indication" of ID theft to create a forced link to the "big picture":
"Identity theft is considered the nation's fastest-growing crime and last year more than 9.9 million Americans were victims."
It then recites other computer break-in stories.
By the time I wrote this, the story had been syndicated like mad: more than 150 news sites carried the AP story. Dozens of journalists even had the hide to slap their bylines on the piece, although they did nothing to deserve it.
Once you have a piece like this get cred through syndication, the next thing that happens is that a battalion of camp-followers will then jack on the back of the big story – essentially exploiting the news value for their own publicity. The US has replaced "reds under the bed" with terrorists. So it's no surprise that the AP story has now given birth to a clutch of piggyback pieces in which security experts of all kinds try and spook us with stories of terrorism and ID theft.
And all on the back of one trashy syndication from the AP.
Monday, March 14, 2005
Howler of the Week
The Sydney Morning Herald (gee, Fairfax quality control is out the door lately) has this utter gem in a story about a Green's proposal to add Kids Helpline to Telstra's USO obligations:
(The link won't work because of the SMH's attitude to subscriptions. Try Google News with Greens Helpline and Telstra.)
"The amendment would include the number for Kids Helpline, the only national 24-hour phone counselling service for young people in distress.
"People should know that a fully privatised Telstra will shed this sponsorship in the future. It needs to be legislated upfront so that shareholders know that this is an ongoing community responsibility that Telstra will have," Senator Brown said."
(The link won't work because of the SMH's attitude to subscriptions. Try Google News with Greens Helpline and Telstra.)
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Redefining "Most"
Just a snippet. I have put a fuller version of this on CommsWorld but I find it amusing that Telstra's plan to put in 500,000 ADSL2+ ports has been re-interpreted by the Sydney Morning Herald, here as being ADSL2+ to most households.
Half a million out of eight million isn't "most" of anything. It's just a piece of thoughtless, throwaway hype designed to lend excitement to what was an otherwise mundane reiteration of yet-another story about what a CEO said in a speech.
Half a million out of eight million isn't "most" of anything. It's just a piece of thoughtless, throwaway hype designed to lend excitement to what was an otherwise mundane reiteration of yet-another story about what a CEO said in a speech.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
The SCADA Cyberterror Beat-Up
One of the more irritating habits of the IT industry in Australia is that US vendors believe they can ship American assumptions over to Australia and apply them, pretty much without adjustment, to their view of the Australian market (analysts do this as well. I well recall that in the 90s, a Gartner analyst told Australians with a straight face that ADSL was no good because it didn't work well on phone lines strung between poles. He apparently didn't travel far enough from the CBD to observe that Australia's phone lines are underground).
This week I noticed that ISS is talking up the dangers to SCADA systems (that is, the industrial control systems which take care of things like power stations, water and gas). It found a ready audience in the Australian here:
""We are going to see a serious outage because of a SCADA attack this year," he says. "It's not a matter of if, it's just a matter of when."
The threat arises because SCADA systems are increasingly being integrated with other business systems over the internet and through wireless technologies."
Well, I'm going to disagree with ISS's local MD, Kim Davies on this one.
First, when utilities in Australia integrate SCADA with business systems, they don't do so over the Internet.
Second, when utilities decide to replace the copper (which they overwhelmingly own themselves, avoiding wherever possible even using leased lines from Telstra), they're doing so by installing their own fibre.
Examples of this include Powercor in Victoria, Ergon in Queensland, and others really too numerous to mention. One of the reasons people keep putting forward utilities as competitors to Telstra is because they already own infrastructure. They're not using the bloody Internet.
Really.
Wireless is another matter. There has been a growth, away from the cities, in small utilities, at the local level, using wireless systems to connect up small plant. But even if that's a vulnerability, it's not the Big Scary Cyberterror that the security people are talking up. The effects are local and manageable.
And those wireless systems are probably not Internet-integrated.
Is there an issue with SCADA? Yes, and quite a straightforward one. If you're going to update the SCADA system, you should ignore what the vendors, snake-oilers and Internet-integrator-sales reps tell you, and keep them on private networks. Forever.
Well, that wasn't so tough, was it?
So why beat-up the SCADA story? Well, you see, there is a special working party set up in the government to look at SCADA (it's holding meetings later this year). Critical infrastructure has heavy government involvement. Vendors see the infrastructure sector as a huge untapped market for stuff like firewalls. And the ministerial advisers generally have a very thin understanding of technology.
If, for example, you tell them that you're using IP, they will understand this to mean the Internet, whether or not there is any Internet connection in existence.
In other words, the vendor community ever since 911 has seen the infrastructure sector as a feast, if only they can get invited to the party.
Beating up a story in the Oz is a pretty good way to get things moving...
This week I noticed that ISS is talking up the dangers to SCADA systems (that is, the industrial control systems which take care of things like power stations, water and gas). It found a ready audience in the Australian here:
""We are going to see a serious outage because of a SCADA attack this year," he says. "It's not a matter of if, it's just a matter of when."
The threat arises because SCADA systems are increasingly being integrated with other business systems over the internet and through wireless technologies."
Well, I'm going to disagree with ISS's local MD, Kim Davies on this one.
First, when utilities in Australia integrate SCADA with business systems, they don't do so over the Internet.
Second, when utilities decide to replace the copper (which they overwhelmingly own themselves, avoiding wherever possible even using leased lines from Telstra), they're doing so by installing their own fibre.
Examples of this include Powercor in Victoria, Ergon in Queensland, and others really too numerous to mention. One of the reasons people keep putting forward utilities as competitors to Telstra is because they already own infrastructure. They're not using the bloody Internet.
Really.
Wireless is another matter. There has been a growth, away from the cities, in small utilities, at the local level, using wireless systems to connect up small plant. But even if that's a vulnerability, it's not the Big Scary Cyberterror that the security people are talking up. The effects are local and manageable.
And those wireless systems are probably not Internet-integrated.
Is there an issue with SCADA? Yes, and quite a straightforward one. If you're going to update the SCADA system, you should ignore what the vendors, snake-oilers and Internet-integrator-sales reps tell you, and keep them on private networks. Forever.
Well, that wasn't so tough, was it?
So why beat-up the SCADA story? Well, you see, there is a special working party set up in the government to look at SCADA (it's holding meetings later this year). Critical infrastructure has heavy government involvement. Vendors see the infrastructure sector as a huge untapped market for stuff like firewalls. And the ministerial advisers generally have a very thin understanding of technology.
If, for example, you tell them that you're using IP, they will understand this to mean the Internet, whether or not there is any Internet connection in existence.
In other words, the vendor community ever since 911 has seen the infrastructure sector as a feast, if only they can get invited to the party.
Beating up a story in the Oz is a pretty good way to get things moving...
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Keeping the Industry's Secrets
When a segment of the media gets too close to its industry, you get some strange outcomes. One of those is that the press tries to respect the secrets of the industry, instead of trying to uncover and report them.
Over the last 24 hours, the wires have started lighting up with reports of a new malware, Serchmeup, which downloads a slew of exploits into the target machine. The journalists don't notice that the name given by virus experts is the same as another malware that's been around for more than a year, which is bound to create confusion, but that's trivial.
What's not trivial is this: Searchmeup infects users who visit a malicious Website. In other words, the attacker has a URL with a public face, which exists only to slap users with the dangerous download. That site - or those sites - also have IP addresses and registrations and all the other details assocated with hosting a Web site.
So what do the journalists tell us about the sites which are distributing Searchmeup?
Nothing. Not a sausage. Not a single word. They're respecting the secrets of the sources; for some reason, the antivirus companies want to distribute the warning about Searchmeup without telling people where it is so they can stay away.
Even a little curiousity would have been nice to see.
Over the last 24 hours, the wires have started lighting up with reports of a new malware, Serchmeup, which downloads a slew of exploits into the target machine. The journalists don't notice that the name given by virus experts is the same as another malware that's been around for more than a year, which is bound to create confusion, but that's trivial.
What's not trivial is this: Searchmeup infects users who visit a malicious Website. In other words, the attacker has a URL with a public face, which exists only to slap users with the dangerous download. That site - or those sites - also have IP addresses and registrations and all the other details assocated with hosting a Web site.
So what do the journalists tell us about the sites which are distributing Searchmeup?
Nothing. Not a sausage. Not a single word. They're respecting the secrets of the sources; for some reason, the antivirus companies want to distribute the warning about Searchmeup without telling people where it is so they can stay away.
Even a little curiousity would have been nice to see.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Correlation Equals Cause
VoIP is one of those hot-button technologies. All you have to do is stick it in a press release, and the media's critical facilities go out the window. Instead, the hacks and proxy publicists will not only run with the press release, they'll also run up a heap of bromides inserted into the stories using the Disruptive Technologies Phrase Grabber.
Hence when Telstra (Australia's incumbent telco) said it's trialling a consumer VoIP service, the press in Australia went nuts. But in seeking to wrap their own commentary around the story, the flacks also tossed reality out the window.
For example:
"The announcement comes as existing VoIP products from relatively small telecommunications players begin to proliferate and eat into Telstra's PSTN voice calls market. Telstra's revenue from fixed line voice calls has been on a steady decline for some time, while its broadband revenue continues to grow." (here).
(My emphasis.)
Stan Beer goes on that:
"In addition to voice over broadband, Telstra plans to offer users enhanced VoIP services such as click-to-call, email notification of voice mail, a self service web interface for management of calls and functions and multimedia services such as video conferencing."
In the normal course of events I don't expect great technical accuracy in how media reports telecomms. But since the Beer Files bills itself as the "most informative" source, let's go hog wild. Voice-over-broadband is not identical to Voice-over-IP, since you can deliver a PSTN service on a broadband connection (as Optus can be argued is doing with voice on its HFC network, or in the business space as PowerTel definitely does with Voice-over-DSL).
Most VoIP services, which Beer says are offered by "small telecommunications players", are arguing long-and-hard to convince the world that they're not telcos. And most of the "enhanced VoIP services" he lists are not specific to VoIP (although I can't blame a journalist for believing years of inaccurate puffery). They are CTI - computer telephony integration - functions, and can be done on non-VoIP environments.
But the howler is in the assumption that Telstra's revenues are already suffering at the hands of VoIP.
Note, by the way, the contradiction in the author's remark: although the VoIP market is a new phenomenon, PSTN revenues have been falling "for some time".
Let's grab Telstra's last results announcement: did the PSTN call revenues fall?
Yes.
Have they been flat or falling for some time?
Yes.
Has VoIP been a competitive market long enough to explain this?
Yeah, right.
The PSTN decline predates the VoIP revolution. The usual explanation is "mobile substitution", and it's no coincidence that mobile revenues are growing faster (up $156 million last half-year) than PSTN call revenues are falling (down $89 million in the same period).
It's fine to think that VoIP is a future threat. To treat it as a phenomenon that's already on the Telstra balance sheet? I doubt it.
Hence when Telstra (Australia's incumbent telco) said it's trialling a consumer VoIP service, the press in Australia went nuts. But in seeking to wrap their own commentary around the story, the flacks also tossed reality out the window.
For example:
"The announcement comes as existing VoIP products from relatively small telecommunications players begin to proliferate and eat into Telstra's PSTN voice calls market. Telstra's revenue from fixed line voice calls has been on a steady decline for some time, while its broadband revenue continues to grow." (here).
(My emphasis.)
Stan Beer goes on that:
"In addition to voice over broadband, Telstra plans to offer users enhanced VoIP services such as click-to-call, email notification of voice mail, a self service web interface for management of calls and functions and multimedia services such as video conferencing."
In the normal course of events I don't expect great technical accuracy in how media reports telecomms. But since the Beer Files bills itself as the "most informative" source, let's go hog wild. Voice-over-broadband is not identical to Voice-over-IP, since you can deliver a PSTN service on a broadband connection (as Optus can be argued is doing with voice on its HFC network, or in the business space as PowerTel definitely does with Voice-over-DSL).
Most VoIP services, which Beer says are offered by "small telecommunications players", are arguing long-and-hard to convince the world that they're not telcos. And most of the "enhanced VoIP services" he lists are not specific to VoIP (although I can't blame a journalist for believing years of inaccurate puffery). They are CTI - computer telephony integration - functions, and can be done on non-VoIP environments.
But the howler is in the assumption that Telstra's revenues are already suffering at the hands of VoIP.
Note, by the way, the contradiction in the author's remark: although the VoIP market is a new phenomenon, PSTN revenues have been falling "for some time".
Let's grab Telstra's last results announcement: did the PSTN call revenues fall?
Yes.
Have they been flat or falling for some time?
Yes.
Has VoIP been a competitive market long enough to explain this?
Yeah, right.
The PSTN decline predates the VoIP revolution. The usual explanation is "mobile substitution", and it's no coincidence that mobile revenues are growing faster (up $156 million last half-year) than PSTN call revenues are falling (down $89 million in the same period).
It's fine to think that VoIP is a future threat. To treat it as a phenomenon that's already on the Telstra balance sheet? I doubt it.
Friday, March 04, 2005
Two Obvious Questions that the AFR Didn't Ask
I can't post a link to the story, because the Australian Financial Review is one of those odious subscription-only publications. Well, it's got a rich readership, I suppose...
So instead, I'll give you the gist: private investigators in Australia are complaining that privacy laws are making it hard to collect debts.
This got a bit of discussion on the Link newsgroup, which represents some really good brains, and it became clear that this was an example of lazy reporting.
The nature of the reporting is that given a survey and a spokesperson, you don't need to question the content. Hence two howlers made it to print which really should have been caught.
The first is this:
"As a result [of new privacy laws], millions of dollars in fraud and bad debt are going
unchecked. In the six years to 2002, $22.4billion was written off in bad
debt by companies."
Wrong. As was pointed out by Electronic Frontiers Australia's Irene Graham, there's no difference in bad debt written off by business before and after the passage of Australia's Privacy Act. Looking up the numbers would have taken the journalist a moment, but why bother when it's given out for free in the survey?
But the screaming howler came when a private investigator said he "used to pay $5 to do a "rego check with the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority to confirm the residential address of a "target". Under the Privacy Act, this data can no longer be disclosed."
Roger Clarke - a prominent privacy researcher at the Australian National University - pointed me to this link. It's a directory of reports by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, and among the publications, you'll find the "report on unauthorised release of government information".
The PI was right. Investigators used to be able to get "rego checks" (for readers outside Australia, getting the name and address to which a car is registered) for $5.
It was not, however, an RTA service. It was a rort which went on from at least 1984 to 1991. And it was eventually found to be corrupt under the laws of the time.
Here's a quick pullout from the ICAC report:
"Mr James paid Constable Watharow. Initially payment was on a fee for service basis, with motor traffic information at the rate of $5 per inquiry, and criminal history information $20 per inquiry. Later a retainer was substituted. This grew from $100 to $500 per month." (Chapter 2).
The "rego checks for a fiver" trade died out not because of the Privacy Act, but because 13 years ago it was exposed as corrupt, and a whole host of government agencies had to rework their procedures to stop it happening.
The AFR story rested entirely on two premises: first, that bad debt is rising because PIs can't collect debts; and second, that the Privacy Act is what stops PIs from finding debtors. Both assumptions were wrong.
The journalist need only have asked: "Can you show me the before and after numbers?" and "When were rego checks legal in NSW?" and the PI industry's PR would have been unspun.
I wish I had a silver cup to send the AFR: this could be the howler of the year...
So instead, I'll give you the gist: private investigators in Australia are complaining that privacy laws are making it hard to collect debts.
This got a bit of discussion on the Link newsgroup, which represents some really good brains, and it became clear that this was an example of lazy reporting.
The nature of the reporting is that given a survey and a spokesperson, you don't need to question the content. Hence two howlers made it to print which really should have been caught.
The first is this:
"As a result [of new privacy laws], millions of dollars in fraud and bad debt are going
unchecked. In the six years to 2002, $22.4billion was written off in bad
debt by companies."
Wrong. As was pointed out by Electronic Frontiers Australia's Irene Graham, there's no difference in bad debt written off by business before and after the passage of Australia's Privacy Act. Looking up the numbers would have taken the journalist a moment, but why bother when it's given out for free in the survey?
But the screaming howler came when a private investigator said he "used to pay $5 to do a "rego check with the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority to confirm the residential address of a "target". Under the Privacy Act, this data can no longer be disclosed."
Roger Clarke - a prominent privacy researcher at the Australian National University - pointed me to this link. It's a directory of reports by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, and among the publications, you'll find the "report on unauthorised release of government information".
The PI was right. Investigators used to be able to get "rego checks" (for readers outside Australia, getting the name and address to which a car is registered) for $5.
It was not, however, an RTA service. It was a rort which went on from at least 1984 to 1991. And it was eventually found to be corrupt under the laws of the time.
Here's a quick pullout from the ICAC report:
"Mr James paid Constable Watharow. Initially payment was on a fee for service basis, with motor traffic information at the rate of $5 per inquiry, and criminal history information $20 per inquiry. Later a retainer was substituted. This grew from $100 to $500 per month." (Chapter 2).
The "rego checks for a fiver" trade died out not because of the Privacy Act, but because 13 years ago it was exposed as corrupt, and a whole host of government agencies had to rework their procedures to stop it happening.
The AFR story rested entirely on two premises: first, that bad debt is rising because PIs can't collect debts; and second, that the Privacy Act is what stops PIs from finding debtors. Both assumptions were wrong.
The journalist need only have asked: "Can you show me the before and after numbers?" and "When were rego checks legal in NSW?" and the PI industry's PR would have been unspun.
I wish I had a silver cup to send the AFR: this could be the howler of the year...
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Objectivity or Scepticism?
To continue the thoughts from my last post about the bad science of the Global Consciousness Project, the question is: "why does bad science journalism matter?"
The reasons are many, but I'm going to stick to a few, which cluster around one key issue: the public can't make good decisions on bad information.
Who are the heralds of that information? The journalists. But we keep reporting on things we don't understand, pretending that we do understand them, and indulging ourselves in the belief that expertise is not necessary to technical reporting.
Some journalists are disciplined enough not to make fools of themselves.
Some are not: they repeatedly get into deep water because they can't distinguish between fact and hype.
The worst journalists are knaves. They know they lack the skill to assess the facts of a technical story, but they don't care. The GCP story is a case in point: it doesn't matter that the "science" has been repeatedly debunked, the journalist is writing entertainment dressed up as science.
Why worry? Because people then treat the semi-fact as fact, and make decisions based on it.
Why did people believe in the "new economy" for example? Because journalists repeated its tenets so often, even though the balance sheet evidence showed it to be a nonsense from the start.
Often, a journalist's response to being challenged over this kind of story will be to talk about "objectivity", but frankly, objectivity is a crock. Give me, in all kinds of reporting, the position of sceptic: the journalist who demands more than a string of quotes to make a story.
The reasons are many, but I'm going to stick to a few, which cluster around one key issue: the public can't make good decisions on bad information.
Who are the heralds of that information? The journalists. But we keep reporting on things we don't understand, pretending that we do understand them, and indulging ourselves in the belief that expertise is not necessary to technical reporting.
Some journalists are disciplined enough not to make fools of themselves.
Some are not: they repeatedly get into deep water because they can't distinguish between fact and hype.
The worst journalists are knaves. They know they lack the skill to assess the facts of a technical story, but they don't care. The GCP story is a case in point: it doesn't matter that the "science" has been repeatedly debunked, the journalist is writing entertainment dressed up as science.
Why worry? Because people then treat the semi-fact as fact, and make decisions based on it.
Why did people believe in the "new economy" for example? Because journalists repeated its tenets so often, even though the balance sheet evidence showed it to be a nonsense from the start.
Often, a journalist's response to being challenged over this kind of story will be to talk about "objectivity", but frankly, objectivity is a crock. Give me, in all kinds of reporting, the position of sceptic: the journalist who demands more than a string of quotes to make a story.
Monday, February 21, 2005
How a Mistake Becomes a Fact
When it emerged at the Senate Estimates last week that CSIRO had spent $9 million over four years on a Web site (it had not, but more on this later), the usual suspects had a field day.
The story was wrong; it arose only because a senator repeatedly said that CSIRO had spent the money on a Website. As was transparently clear from the response from CSIRO, the money (spent over four years) went on:
- a new content management system being deployed across the whole organisation (that’s a lot of seats for software licenses, with more than 6,000 staff);
- the Website itself, which consolidates a couple of hundred of existing Websites; and
- the most expensive piece of the puzzle: multi-millions each year on communications links.
According to CSIRO, in response to the gleefully ignorant Labor senator last week, communications cost $1.8 million last year. Considering that CSIRO, as a scientific research organisation, is very hungry for bandwidth, and considering that it’s involved in setting up stuff like 10 Gbps wide-area links, my feeling is that it’s doing an outstanding job of getting value for money on the comms part of the puzzle.
As for the rest: the new content management system, new consolidated websites and so on are costing not “more than nine million” but less than $3 million – over four years.
But the problem is this: the statement that CSIRO is spending $9 million on a Website, wrong though it is, has been made, put in a headline, and it’s stuck there on the public record.
That makes it all right for Australian IT to make this statement:
“Government website projects have had a troubled history, with the most recent example being the revelation that the CSIRO's revamped website would cost the agency a massive over $9.47 million by the time it went live in April.”
Wrong. CSIRO’s Website is not costing the agency “a massive $9.47 million”. The story is http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,12293815%5E15319%5E%5Enbv%5E15306,00.html"> here.
But it’s on the record, and reciting from some other journalist’s mistake is easier than reading the long and tedious transcripts from Senate Estimates hearings.
In another year's time, this "fact" will have the same currency as the WorldCom "traffic doubling" fact - and it will be entirely the fault of the press.Saturday, February 19, 2005
Pseudo-Science Reporting: How to Sell Fakery
This is going to have to be broken into a couple of blog entries, because it's going to be long.
On Red Nova, you can find this story about the "Global Consciousness Project", in which random number generators are believed to be predicting the future:
Today's entry is going to dissect aspects of the story itself; I'll follow it up with another entry drawing the threads together.
I haven't reproduced the story in full, but extracts are followed by my commentary in italics.
DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream.
At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators.
But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.
Who is the growing band of scientists, other than those directly involved in the project? The author frequently refers to respectable outside opinion, but hasn't found any respectable outsider.
The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.
Note the disconnected connection; that the sceptics knocked back the claim because they were influenced by the mood at the time, rather than any considerations of science. Not only is it near to a conspiracy theory, it's also a reversal of science, in which every experiment should be approached with scepticism.
Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers.
Are the unnamed doubters the same people as previously debunked the September 11 story? Who are the converts?
'It's Earth-shattering stuff,' says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the United States, who is heading the research project behind the 'black box' phenomenon.
'We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark.' Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centred on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realising.
Very early in the process? The GCP has been trying to produce results that other scientists believe for many, many years.
Although many would consider the project's aims to be little more than fools' gold, it has still attracted a roster of 75 respected scientists from 41 different nations. Researchers from Princeton - where Einstein spent much of his career - work alongside scientists from universities in Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. The project is also the most rigorous and longest-running investigation ever into the potential powers of the paranormal.
Note the irrelevant reference to Einstein: there is no relationship between Einstein's cachet and Dr Roger Nelson. Calling the project "rigorous" is meaningless unless we hear what makes it rigorous; the roster of scientists isn't enough. The story then quotes its first outside source, one Dick Bierman in Amsterdam who is cited as a physicist; but the author ignores that Bierman is also a participant in the GCP.
Next, a little of the GCP's basis is explained: a random number generator which is supposed to produce a flat distribution - an equal number of ones and zeroes. The GCP belief is that deviations from that distribution are inexplicable by "ordinary" science, and therefore must be paranormal.
This has many problems as a hypothesis: the journalist goes to no effort at all to find out whether the basic assumption, that the GCP's random number generator is actually random.
During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.
It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.
It was not repeated. Even those "in the circle" dismiss it: the experiment was criticised as useless in the Journal of Parasychology as far back as 1992.
But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards, recording a sudden and massive shift in the number sequence as his machines around the world started reporting huge deviations from the norm. The day was of historic importance for another reason, too.
What external evidence have we of correlation? What evidence that the line was usually flat? Did the journalist view the graphs for a large chunk of the relevant year? Did the journalist view anything at all?
For it was the same day that an estimated one billion people around the world watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbey.
A total of 65 Eggs (as the generators have been named) in 41 countries have now been recruited to act as the 'eyes' of the project.
And the results have been startling and inexplicable in equal measure.
For during the course of the experiment, the Eggs have 'sensed' a whole series of major world events as they were happening, from the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia to the Kursk submarine tragedy to America's hung election of 2000.
All these correlations are applied to the graphs after the event. This is bad science: if you can predict where you're hitting the golf ball, and the prediction works, that's science; if you hit the golf ball and then say "that's where I meant it to go", it's not science.
Also, the journalist has not asked about the periodicity of fluctuations: what is the normal repeat rate of the wave? Where is the proof of correlation between different devices?
This is a particularly important point: if there is some observable "waveform" in the deviation of the random number distribution, it proves only this: the numbers aren't random.
I'll skip the next section, in which the journalist relates claims that the "eggs" predicted September 11; because it adds no new information.
To make matters even more intriguing, Prof Bierman says that other mainstream labs have now produced similar results but are yet to go public.
'They don't want to be ridiculed so they won't release their findings,' he says. 'So I'm trying to persuade all of them to release their results at the same time. That would at least spread the ridicule a little more thinly!' If Prof Bierman is right, though, then the experiments are no laughing matter.
The entry of conspiracy theory always arrives in these kinds of stories: the evidence exists but the mainstream is covering it up.
They might help provide a solid scientific grounding for such strange phenomena as 'deja vu', intuition and a host of other curiosities that we have all experienced from time to time.
They may also open up a far more interesting possibility - that one day we might be able to enhance psychic powers using machines that can 'tune in' to our subconscious mind, machines like the little black box in Edinburgh.
A new premise is introduced as established fact: stating that machines could enhance psychic powers presupposes that such powers really exist. This is a con-artist technique - since the black box exists, things related to the black box exist.
There's nothing in the rest of the text worth discussing. Next, I want to draw out the principles behind this kind of journalism - because it infests much more than pseudo-science writing.
On Red Nova, you can find this story about the "Global Consciousness Project", in which random number generators are believed to be predicting the future:
Today's entry is going to dissect aspects of the story itself; I'll follow it up with another entry drawing the threads together.
I haven't reproduced the story in full, but extracts are followed by my commentary in italics.
DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream.
At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators.
But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.
Who is the growing band of scientists, other than those directly involved in the project? The author frequently refers to respectable outside opinion, but hasn't found any respectable outsider.
The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.
Note the disconnected connection; that the sceptics knocked back the claim because they were influenced by the mood at the time, rather than any considerations of science. Not only is it near to a conspiracy theory, it's also a reversal of science, in which every experiment should be approached with scepticism.
Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers.
Are the unnamed doubters the same people as previously debunked the September 11 story? Who are the converts?
'It's Earth-shattering stuff,' says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the United States, who is heading the research project behind the 'black box' phenomenon.
'We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark.' Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centred on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realising.
Very early in the process? The GCP has been trying to produce results that other scientists believe for many, many years.
Although many would consider the project's aims to be little more than fools' gold, it has still attracted a roster of 75 respected scientists from 41 different nations. Researchers from Princeton - where Einstein spent much of his career - work alongside scientists from universities in Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. The project is also the most rigorous and longest-running investigation ever into the potential powers of the paranormal.
Note the irrelevant reference to Einstein: there is no relationship between Einstein's cachet and Dr Roger Nelson. Calling the project "rigorous" is meaningless unless we hear what makes it rigorous; the roster of scientists isn't enough. The story then quotes its first outside source, one Dick Bierman in Amsterdam who is cited as a physicist; but the author ignores that Bierman is also a participant in the GCP.
Next, a little of the GCP's basis is explained: a random number generator which is supposed to produce a flat distribution - an equal number of ones and zeroes. The GCP belief is that deviations from that distribution are inexplicable by "ordinary" science, and therefore must be paranormal.
This has many problems as a hypothesis: the journalist goes to no effort at all to find out whether the basic assumption, that the GCP's random number generator is actually random.
During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.
It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.
It was not repeated. Even those "in the circle" dismiss it: the experiment was criticised as useless in the Journal of Parasychology as far back as 1992.
But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards, recording a sudden and massive shift in the number sequence as his machines around the world started reporting huge deviations from the norm. The day was of historic importance for another reason, too.
What external evidence have we of correlation? What evidence that the line was usually flat? Did the journalist view the graphs for a large chunk of the relevant year? Did the journalist view anything at all?
For it was the same day that an estimated one billion people around the world watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbey.
A total of 65 Eggs (as the generators have been named) in 41 countries have now been recruited to act as the 'eyes' of the project.
And the results have been startling and inexplicable in equal measure.
For during the course of the experiment, the Eggs have 'sensed' a whole series of major world events as they were happening, from the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia to the Kursk submarine tragedy to America's hung election of 2000.
All these correlations are applied to the graphs after the event. This is bad science: if you can predict where you're hitting the golf ball, and the prediction works, that's science; if you hit the golf ball and then say "that's where I meant it to go", it's not science.
Also, the journalist has not asked about the periodicity of fluctuations: what is the normal repeat rate of the wave? Where is the proof of correlation between different devices?
This is a particularly important point: if there is some observable "waveform" in the deviation of the random number distribution, it proves only this: the numbers aren't random.
I'll skip the next section, in which the journalist relates claims that the "eggs" predicted September 11; because it adds no new information.
To make matters even more intriguing, Prof Bierman says that other mainstream labs have now produced similar results but are yet to go public.
'They don't want to be ridiculed so they won't release their findings,' he says. 'So I'm trying to persuade all of them to release their results at the same time. That would at least spread the ridicule a little more thinly!' If Prof Bierman is right, though, then the experiments are no laughing matter.
The entry of conspiracy theory always arrives in these kinds of stories: the evidence exists but the mainstream is covering it up.
They might help provide a solid scientific grounding for such strange phenomena as 'deja vu', intuition and a host of other curiosities that we have all experienced from time to time.
They may also open up a far more interesting possibility - that one day we might be able to enhance psychic powers using machines that can 'tune in' to our subconscious mind, machines like the little black box in Edinburgh.
A new premise is introduced as established fact: stating that machines could enhance psychic powers presupposes that such powers really exist. This is a con-artist technique - since the black box exists, things related to the black box exist.
There's nothing in the rest of the text worth discussing. Next, I want to draw out the principles behind this kind of journalism - because it infests much more than pseudo-science writing.
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