Shabbir's Diary

How to fix Google's PR mess

This is a three part essay I wrote about Google's PR woes and how to fix them:

• Part One: Keeping Mail and Blog Services out of the oppressor's hands
• Part Two: Complying with the law
• Part Three: Digging out of your own hole

I'm posting this as a placeholder for the entire series.

A healthy ego is good for your computer security.

Mere days after my post about pundits being evil, evidence arrived in my mailbox that in fact having the outsized pundit ego may be hazardous to your computer security.  Here's a copy of the e-mail:

Hello,

Your photograph has reached editing stage as part of an article we are publishing for our February edition of Traders World Monthly. Can you check over the format and get back to us with your approval or any changes?

If the picture is not to your liking then please send a preferred one. We've attached the photo with the article here.

Kind regards,

Jamie Andrews
Editor
TradersWorld

I opened up the attached .zip file and noticed it was an .exe.  I then got two more that same day:

Hello,

Your photograph has reached editing stage as part of an article we are publishing for our February edition of the Guardians business section. Can you check over the format and get back to us with your approval or any changes?

If the picture is not to your liking then please send a preferred one. We've attached the photo with the article here.

Kind regards,

William Morrison
Editor
www.Guardian.com

Both letters came from spoofed addresses.  The real addresses are machines at Michigan State University and a cable modem customer of telecom company ntl.  Presumably the machines there are compromised student/customer PCs.

I find this evolved spam fascinating.  The previous crop of spam was all Nigerian-style scams, appealing to one's greed.  "I want to give you $5mil for helping me abscond with $50mil!"  Quite often the spammer claimed to be a relative of a brutal, deposed dictator who was trying to loot the country's treasury.  Why anyone fell for that scam without considering the moral consequences of looting a third world country's assets just goes to prove that greed conquers all.

This newly evolved spam doesn't promise any money, just 15 minutes of fame for you.  Assuming I haven't been specifically targeted for this spam, I wonder if it will be more or less effective?  I almost fell for it, but knew that I hadn't done any media for Traders World or Guardian.  I also remember that when I saw it, I thought, "Oh hell, I don't want to be in either of those publications, what the hell have I done?"

We'll see if this survives the Darwinian process that weeds out weak and ineffective spam...

Your media diet just got expensive.

It was bad enough when DirectTV severed their relationship with Tivo.  That was the moment I first decided I wasn't probably going to buy the next version of the product.  I doubt they'll be much of a market leader in two years if they don't figure out a way to offer a unique product to their market.

The latest body blow to Tivo is iTunes and Google Video. 

I just spent the weekend exclusively watching TV shows I bought off of iTunes.  iTunes has out-Tivo'ed Tivo.  You know the refrain you always used to give people, "I love Tivo because it frees me from having to sit down and watch a tv show at a particular time?"  Well iTunes frees you from even having to plan that you want to watch a show and record it.  Failed to catch the miniseries pilot for Battlestar Galactica?  Sarah did, and we bought it on iTunes this weekend and watched it.

On it's best day, Tivo is still only as good as the channel feed you've got.  It's still a time-based medium, and you still have to wait for stuff you want to see to be played. iTunes however doesn't have that problem.  And their inventory is growing by leaps and bounds.

Sarah, proving she's smart even when thinking in areas not her expertise, nailed it on Sunday night.  "Why don't we just ditch cable and watch stuff off of iTunes?"   Between satellite and cable, media streams are becoming a commodity, and if you never watch anything but items you pre-record, why not?

Price.  (There's also a selection and availability issue with iTunes)  The dark side of the new consumerist convenience of iTunes-as-Tivo is price.  Your break even point for buying a Tivo vs. buying everything off iTunes is about 50 episodes.  Once you've blown money on 50 episodes, that Tivo starts to look like a good deal.

It's interesting though, the market just shifted radically but the impact won't be felt for at least a year, at which point technology writers will start to write stories like, "Who needs Tivo when you've got iTunes?"

How to run a poker game directory and hide it from the police?

I'm a part of a message board where one of the advertised games was robbed at gunpoint.  (This is starting to happen a lot here in Washington.  This is the third such robbery as of late.)

The problem is serious and real: if the community website has a listing of raked poker games (the prosecutable kind), how does one keep a detective from simply attaining a subpoena and getting the names of all the games from the website operator?

Let me know if you have ideas.  Obviously, "don't have a listing of poker games" is a last resort.

-Shabbir

Cows are occasionally funny.

I love these kinds of jokes, as they satirize the excesses of every culture equally.  I find this one particularly hysterical because it has such a heavy amount of Arab and southeast Asian content.  The Europeans, Americans, and other white people are almost an afterthought.

----

DUBAI SYSTEM:
You have two cows. You create a website for them and advertise them in all the magazines. You create a Cow City or Milk Town for them. You sell off their milk before the cows have even been milked to both legit and shady investors who hope to resale the nonexistent milk for a 100% profit in two years time. You bring Tiger Woods to milk the cow first to attract attention.

QATAR SYSTEM:
You have two cows. They've been sitting there for decades and no one realized that cows could produce milk. You see what Dubai is doing; you go crazy and start milking the heck out of the cows in the shortest time possible. Then you realize no one wanted the milk in the first place.

SAUDI SYSTEM:
Since milking the cow involves nipples the Gov't decides to ban all cows in public. The only method to milk a cow is to have a cow on one side of a curtain and a guy milking the cow on the other or to hire females and train them to milk the cows ... the debate is still going on.

BAHRAIN SYSTEM:
You have two cows. Some high Gov't official steals one, milks it, sells the milk and pockets the profit. The Gov't tells you that there is just one cow and not enough milk for the people. The people riot and scream death to the Gov't and carry Iranian flags. The Parliament, after thinking for 11 month, decides to employ ten Bahrainis to all milk the cow at the same time and so
cutting back on unemployment.

LEBANON SYSTEM:
You have two cows. One is owned by Syria and the other is controlled by Hizbollah.

EGYPTIAN SYSTEM:
You have two cows. Both are voting for Mobarak!

AMERICAN SYSTEM:
You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow dropped dead.

FRENCH SYSTEM:
You have two cows. You go on strike because you wanted three cows.

RUSSIAN SYSTEM:
You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 2 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

BRITISH SYSTEM:
You have two cows. Both are mad.

AUSTRALIAN SYSTEM:
You have two cows. You give one to the Americans and one to the British and you go back to milking sheep.

Why pundits are evil.

I ran into prominent former White House spokesperson tonight at one of the million 6pm receptions I get invited to every week.  I chose to go to this one to honor the host (not the former staffer) but ended up talking to the staffer nonetheless.  Pretty quickly the discussion turned to partisanship, this week's story about partisanship shutting down your critical thinking centers.

Quickly, WHStaffer said, "that's why I don't do the talk shows".

I don't have a lot of respect for this guy, but I think he's got a good point.  To have to adopt such an extreme and tortured stance all the time, just so you can provide some diametrically opposed point of view and get your "too ugly for Hollywood face" on tv has to be soul-sucking.  And at the end of the day you probably even realize, while you're debating whether or not the guy you like (or don't) has (or hasn't) done anything about the gazillion people without healthcare or even homes in this country, that you've become part of the problem. 

That in fact you've made a career out of their misery, and you profit from the existence of problems to criticize The Man about.

All of this came crashing down on my head tonight as my insomniac surfing led me to this story of Chris McKinstry, a depressed Canadian living in Chile who posted suicide notes to several message boards here in the US saying he'd OD'd on pills while sitting in a cybercafe.

The note, and the ensuing discussion which Chris himself participates in is horrifying.  Since the translations of the articles aren't accurate, it's hard to tell exactly what happened, but it seems that Chris may or may not have taken a lot of pills on Friday, posted his suicide notes, and then participated in the discussions as people started to panic that this was a real suicide. 

Chris then proceeded to either a) puke it all up, or b) have a laugh.  He then wandered home after having a tasteless joke on all of his blog-friends and then gassed himself to death a day or two later.  For real.

Why did I waste your time telling you about pundits at the beginning of this awful story?  Because somewhere there's someone who makes their living as an Internet commentator who's just itching to talk about this.  To sell more Google ads on his page or burnish his high tech pundit star talking about what this means for technology.

When you see that pundit posting an article for personal gain, tell him shame on him (or her).  There are some things too ghastly to grist the mill of your narcissistic ego machine, and this most certainly is one of them.

Link: ryanpark.org � Blog Archive � Rest in peace.

Analyzing a poker game from another point of view

Honing your card sense is a lifelong skill that appears to never fail to be useful.  A good card sense for a table can tell you what starting hands to play and allow you to adjust your playing style to a loose or tight game.  Your card sense for an individual player allows you to read them better, allowing you perform those psychic "I know what you have" gymnastics that make you a deadly card player.

Just for fun, I decided to try and develop my card sense on some old Omaha/8 sessions I had stored up in Poker Tracker Omaha.  (There are also Stud and Hold'em Poker Tracker versions available.  You have to go buy them!)  I tried to forget everything I knew about Omaha/8, and just sat and watched my session.  Who won the hand, and what kinds of hands did they start with?  Without a doubt I realized that many times when I saw a flop and lost, it was because I had started with a weaker hand.  If I had a better read on the player, or if I had a better read on the table, I wouldn't have played those hands at all.

If I was an alien, I think I could almost learn how to play Omaha/8 well by simply watching the patterns of hands that won, and then only playing those hands, calling everything down to the river.

It was a neat experience, one I think I'll try and repeat with 7 stud. 

Poker and caffeine

Last Friday I hit the weekly meetup poker game.  It was fun.  A warm night, and the host lived in the neighborhood.  I lit a cigar and walked the half mile to the game.  I arrived on time, which in fact is too early, we didn't see five players total for another half hour.  Man I could have finished that cigar I left outside.

We finally started and I decided to try something new.  I'd read enough about Paul Phillips taking anti-ADHD drugs in tournaments to know that attentiveness was a factor in my game, so I tried a steady diet of coffee and coke.  I didn't guzzle it, but I sipped it throughout the night.

I realized that my reading skills were excellent that night.  After being down about $30 on my $50 buyin, I finally got some cards and put myself up to about $70 or $80.  Then around midnight people started to leave and we began playing Omaha/8 five handed.  I really started to clean up, and though I didn't scoop as many pots as our host Dan (who really loves O8) we both ended up cashing out for about $125 when it was over.

I'm curious now to research the amount of caffeine I need to keep myself at peak alertness given my weight.  I'd love to know the minimum caffeine required to keep me at top mental state without making me too wired.  But I'll certainly be hitting the Starbucks before my next game.

Conversations with vendors, part 573

[Some days, like today, I think I could do a better job at selling other people's products than they could...-Shabbir]

<ring ring>

Me: Hello?

Vendor: Hi, this is Bob from XYZ Software.  We noticed that your annual subscription to our software inventory product for your desktops is coming up, and we wanted to discuss renewing it with you.

Me: So the enterprise LAN firm that takes care of my desktops has instead deployed ABC Software's product for my desktops software inventory compliance, so I don't think I'll be needing your software anymore.  I loved the product, but I can't really pay for you.

Vendor: Well that is disappointing.  So you won't need XYZ's product?

Me: Nope.

Vendor: Well if you ever need anything, please feel free to call me at XXXXXXXXXX.

Me: Wait, that's not what you're supposed to say.  You're supposed to tell me about this valuable feature that XYZ Software has that ABC doesn't have.  Tell me how good it is and convince me to urge my LAN firm to reconsider using ABC software's product.

Vendor: Um, ok, well, our product is a managed service, but their product is a client/server architecture, which much more work to install and run.  Managed services are much less work and virtually no impact on your staff.

Me: No, I think your best argument is in the P2P software area.  You should tell me that your product has the ability to identify people using P2P software on my network, which will help me shut them down and enforce my information security policy.

Vendor: Oh, ok.  <vendor then launches into a two minute treatise about how cool their P2P functions are>

Me: Yep, I agree.   I think that's your best argument to differentiate your product from ABC.

Vendor: You do?

Me: Yep, but I still don't need both of them.  Call me in six months to see if I'm unhappy with ABC.

Vendor: (dejected) Ok..

It's your fault books are too expensive...

I caught this quote today in a Washington Post article about the high price of textbooks for college students.

Bruce Hildebrand of the Association of American Publishers said professors choose which books to assign, and they can choose a simple text or one that includes such things as online tutoring and tests. "The average cost of a new textbook is $52.36," he said. "Did you buy the Corvette or the Ford Fiesta?"

Ah yes, it's your professor's fault for choosing a fancy version of a textbook!  This is a classicly ineffective defense that industry flacks will spit out when challenged on the high price of their products to a captive market.  "You've chosen something expensive and that costs money."  I've seen people do it in healthcare, gasoline, etc.

While it may be factually incorrect, it is in fact an ineffective spin technique.  Much like hot potato it just bounces the problem around.  Eventually though, the problem will end up back in the laps of the publishing industry, since that's where one follows the money.

An effectively spun response would be for the textbook publishers association to talk about how hard they're working to push programs that assist students in buying textbooks.  Whether or not that was true, that would show them working towards a solution, and make everything they said subsequently far more credible. 

For example, one of the reasons texbooks costs so much is that they're a limited market.  Unlike the latest Harry Potter novel, you just don't sell 30 million copies of "Advanced linear algebra".  So to compensate for it they need to increase the price.  They aren't making the fortune they wish they could make either.

Although this would cause a huge stink among the digerati, the publishers really ought to be selling digital versions of textbooks with a one year license on them.  The digerati will bellyache and moan about how they still had all their old algebra books from when they were in college, but that's just so much nostalgia.  You can pretty much google the answer to any question about basic knowledge at this point.  Do you doubt me?  Go google 'solve quadratic equations'.

But why won't they do this?  They probably won't do this because the industry is dominated by a few large players without an innovative bone in their body. They, like many industries afraid of the Internet, are afraid of change.  It's the same story with newspapers, the recording industry, the movie industry, etc...