confectious

Social networks of spam - more fun from the NYT

Standing in a small conference room on Microsoft's vast campus earlier this spring, Mr. McBride, 38, explained how the techniques he learned in tracking down prison escapees have come in handy finding spammers. He unfurled a giant piece of paper covered with hundreds of tiny symbols - faces, trucks, computer screens, telephones - connected by a spider's web of multicolored lines.
...
"The real key is trying to figure out how to connect the virtual world" with "someone you can hold responsible for this," Mr. McBride said. Once you have the link, he said, "you can use all the tools of a normal investigation."

What's also interesting is the way this kind of tracking maps social networks across communications media, locations, and business entities. Yet it returns at the end the physical body of the spammer: it's not enough, is it, to have an email address? No, for real legal accountability, you still need a warm body at a mail drop.

From an NYT article on making spammers accountable.

Car hacks, gender trouble, sensitive values and the improbable truth

There was a Wired News article today about drivers who want to reprogram their cars that reminded me of my friend Paul’s Prius.

Cars are still a novelty to me, and cars with 9’’ LCDs in them are still more novel (noveller?). But Paul has gotten over the shock of the new, and pointed out all sorts of features in the music interface that’d he be happy to add for himself...if there were some sort of accessible API. Which begs the question, “Well, why not?” Obviously, we might not want Paul reprogramming his brakes on the go. But it’s perfectly reasonable to build in some tools for customizing and extending one’s in-car media player. This is probably illegal, but let’s just entertain the idea for a moment.

“Car chippers” (modern day hotrodders) are hacking their Volkswagens and Corvettes for better performance. But since at this point Americans live in their cars, it seems like a short step towards also tinkering with the entertainment system to get more information about your CDs, to prompt you when your favorite dj is on, etc. This could be a terrible idea - do we really need more people futzing around with their radios at 65mph? But it’s not like the existing Prius screen design and functionality isn’t dangerously futzy already. “Why is there no pause button?” asked Paul. “Why is the volume control on the screen and the track forward-backward buttons on the dashboard?” I couldn’t really give him a good answer.

As the Wired article points out, there’s more at stake than just Paul’s CD collection. Cars are increasingly equipped with the processing power of PCs — but not the debugging capabilities. Instead, car manufacturers are designing cars that can only be troubleshot with the help of expensive scanners — which usually only car dealerships own. So they both take a bite out of the profits of independent mechanics, and force drivers to pay to get enigmatic warning lights diagnosed and turned off. It seems a little counterproductive. Why alienate your two most enthusiastic user populations (mechanics and car chippers) as well as a substantial population of less committed drivers who don’t want to pay $120 to get a minor fix every month or so?

The blurring of boundaries between automobile and PC brings new and troubling significance to the phrase “fatal error.” I’m on the point of buying a car, and anything that ratchets up my bill or my anxiety levels is a deal-breaker. I mean, if you were forced to spend $120 bimonthly to have an official Microsoft or Apple tech fix your computer, wouldn’t you consider that a major, major software problem? And if your computer didn’t tell you what the problem actually was but instead just flashed its LEDs enigmatically, wouldn’t that also be a major, major problem? So why is this somehow okay in a KIA?

Which leads me, inevitably, to the incipient dyspepsia that is the by-women, for-women Volvo concept car (hereafter ironically referred to as “FWBW”) Unlike cars with unhelpful and expensive warning lights, FWBW was apparently designed to completely frustrate any action the driver might take to maintain the car herself.

Continue reading "Car hacks, gender trouble, sensitive values and the improbable truth"

A twist at the end

Bill Dill, a cinematographer and senior filmmaker in residence at the American Film Institute, uses a laser measurer to size up film locations before shoots. But when it comes to setting focus, he still prefers a tape measure because it's a bit more tangible.

"You don't know if the measure is correct," Mr. Dill said, "but I immediately know when a tape measure has a twist in it." (NYT)

That's the hell of designing for appropriate feedback, isn't it? It's not just knowing not just that the measurements are off, but also why. Because what's the point of measuring twice if you can't trust the tape measure?

Traces of fire

I've got loads and loads of work to do before I start at FXPal next week, but I just wanted to post all-too-briefly about Traces of Fire, a beautiful project from Volkmar Klien and Ed Lear in Limerick that was just exhibited in the Limerick City Hall.

The idea, as I understand it, was to use the tagged transmitters often used in wildlife habitat studies to track the migratory patterns of Limerick's inhabitants. The transmitters, embedded in cigarette lighters deliberately "lost" in carefully chosen Limerick pubs, also illuminate the social relationships underlying daily habits of travel, entertainment and (nicotine) gifting.

What I like so much about this project, besides the clarity and elegance of tracking the migratory habits of the native urbanite using techniques borrowed from zoology, is the methods it suggests for finding design opportunities in urban spaces:

From daily routines, temporal cycles and locational patterns the
shapes of habitats emerge; re-animating the data creature and the
home-range its movement suggests - a glimpse of the territory in
which the subject’s life takes place.

(via)

I've got you under my skin

For guests at the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, paying for admission and drinks has never been easier.

That is because the Spanish club has introduced technology that allows VIPs to use syringe-injected microchips implanted under the skin to pay for their evening’s entertainment. All they have to do is wave their implant over a special ‘reader’, which recognises the individual, consults their credit balance, and deducts the money directly from their account.

The maker, Applied Digital Solutions (ADS) says that the chip cannot be lost, stolen, misplaced or counterfeited.

At first, I thought this was a hoax. I really, really did. I think what weirds me out the most is the idea that the microchips are implanted by syringe. That means we're out of the "don't try this at home" level and into the wild world of semi-skilled (read: the people who pierce your ears in malls) and DIY body tagging.

From Cordis via Kevin

Facts by fragments

To collect these facts by fragments, to subject these fragments to varied tests in order to try their value, to make them into a sheaf of rays lighting up the darkness of the unknown and gradually emerge: all this demands a long space of time, especially as the favourable periods are brief. Years elapse; and then very often the perfect solution has not appeared. There are always gaps in our sheaf of light; and always behind the mysteries which the rays have penetrated stand others, still shrouded in darkness.
Fabre, The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre

J. Henri Fabre spent his entire life in the south of France, studying the insects he loved through painstaking, patient observation.

audioscrobbler redux

Picking up the call from the excellent city of sound, I remind everyone that Audioscrobbler is super, and that it could use some money for better hardware.

My life as a "nomad"

Almost exactly one year ago, I gave up my no-longer-quite-so-beloved apartment in the Lower East Side to move (temporarily, I thought) to San Francisco. Five months later I still hadn’t returned to take up my life in New York; twelve months later, I’m pretty sure I’m not going back. The intervening months have been a bit of a blur: Seattle, then Portland, then Oklahoma, then Los Angeles, then New York, then San Francisco. Again. For a summer, at least. FYI: I will be working here. Very exciting.

I think I might qualify as a nomad; it’s an overused term. I met this guy in Portland who "doesn't do winter"; he spends half the year in Australia and half the year in Europe/America. He never keeps a permanent address either; he's always in sublets and having his mail sent on to the next stop. Now, that's a nomad; I'd rather just call myself "temporarily dislocated."

Things I discovered about me and my relationship to the technologies that support my life:

I. As homes go, a laptop isn’t a bad one.

Using Craigslist, I rented sight unseen a studio in New York from February to May. It was on the first floor of a relatively nice street in the West Village, so I thought: “Hey, I’m living the lush life now.” I arrived to find a non-functional lock on the front door, a front window without any lock or bars at all, a large front window with a curtainrod that mysteriously refused to stay up, and a steam heater that was...inconsistent. So for the first few days and nights, I was cold, constantly calculating the likelihood of robbery, and totally visible to any enquiring minds walking past. My only consolation was my laptop, which provided warmth (courtesy of the PowerBook battery, which runs hot), light (courtesy of the little glowing screen) and companionship (courtesy of email and IM). And the cell phone was good too. I huddled under the blankets, curled myself around its warm silver skin, and tried to remember why I’d wanted to leave Los Angeles.

II. Put not your faith in laptops

The computer-as-home model, I think, works best when you have other support systems already in place. When my computer started stumbling a month later, I tried to pretend the constant freezes weren’t happening. I was in the middle of a major project, and could not imagine coping without her (yes, she’s a she) for two whole weeks while the Apple techs ripped her guts out. So I soldiered on for another month. Things got worse. First she froze every hour, then she froze every 15 minutes, then she froze every 15 minutes and refused to start up again without a two-hour long break. Which, yes: was not so good for that major project. I had her all backed up to disk, but I couldn’t face renting another machine for two...whole...weeks. The expense! The inconvenience! In retrospect, I think I just couldn’t deal with the consequences of even temporarily losing the only continuity I had... (I don’t want to push this analogy too far, but when I signed the release authorizing Apple to wipe the hard drive if necessary, I felt like I was signing a do-not-resuscitate agreement. Very painful.)

III. Put not your faith in WiFi, unless you have an indepth knowledge of the neighborhood

In London: no open access points to be found. In New York: at least three A.P.s within range of my apartment, with one offering consistently fantastic bandwidth. But no open points near my favorite cafe, oh no. I assume that's because everyone who lives around there knows full well the slackers in the cafe are using their broadband to download music. I send my thanks to the unknown person who provided my connectivity for 2.5 months. I’d have PayPalled some money each month to help out with the broadband bill, but hey...there was no way to work out who it was. Sorry about that.

IV. Your friends and family actually do need to know where you are

If not for their own peace of mind, then just for their own ability to forward your phone bills to the correct address (Yes, this actually happened. Very embarrassing, especially as I mostly deal with all this stuff online.) Also, your friends will not be able to invite you out for a drink if they don’t know what city you’re in. Remember that. Having to explicitly tell people where I was at all times came as a mild shock. I had figured that being constantly reachable through mobile phone/email would be enough. It’s not. Even though I find it a little egotistical to send out a mass emailing every six weeks updating my location information, at least people in my vicinity know to ask me out for lunch. I’m going to be in SF for long enough that I can’t really be bothered, but I think an RSS feed for my location would have solved the problem nicely. That way, I wouldn’t have had to bother anyone and people wouldn’t have to keep checking the blog. (If you’re actually the sort of person who asks me out for drinks, and you do check confectious to see whether I’m in town...Thanks. I’ll get the next round.)

V. It’s amazing how few clothes you need...and how many gadgets

Admittedly, I borrowed a winter coat the night before I left Los Angeles for New York. But there’s no option but to haul around the hard drive, and camera, and the attendant power supplies and data cords, and maybe a mouse. Shocking how bulky that stuff is when you actually start hauling it through airports in a suitcase. The hard drive especially. What I missed most, actually, was a printer. Driving directions. Flight information. Presentation revisions. Budgets. Schedules. Work contracts and health insurance applications and reimbursement slips that require paper copies and signatures. Faxing, for crying out loud. Faxing!

VI. Without ready access to paper, putting your trust in bits takes a lot of trust

So I had to get health insurance, as my university finally bumped me off its rolls. And since I didn’t have a printer/scanner/fax machine handy, I wanted to do it all online. But here’s the catch: buying health insurance in the US involves giving away lots of sensitive, sensitive personal data. How am I supposed to know whether the “registered California health care broker” I went with wasn’t some shady front? How much do I really trust the authorities who granted those authentication certifications, and how bad would it be if I got burned? And do I really feel okay about sending all this stuff out over an unencrypted WiFi connection? (FYI: It was fine. But I spent a week wondering whether I’d just made a colossal mistake out of a desire to avoid spending two hours and $30 on the local Internet café’s fax machine and printer.) I started thinking a lot then about the potential business for privacy brokers — people/systems who would just manage the access to my personal data for me, because I honestly don’t have the expertise (or the time) to do it myself. That’s why stock brokers exist, right?

VII. I am now a helpless cellphone zombie

Since all my collaborators are in different cities/neighborhoods/timezones and they don’t always know where I am, I’ve become one of those jerks who walk around, dead to the world around them, talking loudly and insistently on the phone at all hours of the day or night. I once got caught by someone from ITP yelling about server problems in front of the Barnes and Noble at Astor Place. Which sort of reminded me that the world may be my cubicle...but it's not everyone else's. Once I got used to being always reachable and always...reaching, I found it very difficult to walk around the city without an invisible companion. I’m trying to ramp down my cellphone consumption a bit (the bills are exorbitant), but now I almost feel...lonely if I’m on the street without a voice in my ear. Can you hear me? I’m driving home now...where are you? Oh, I know that place. I’ve been there before How much time did I spend during all this wandering talking about the places where I had once been and where my friends now were?

’I know this may sound far-fetched,’ I said to Elizabeth Vrba, ‘but what if I were asked, “What is the big brain for”?, I would be tempted to say, “For singing our way through the wilderness.”’ – Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines

Still more city gaming...

This seems to be the week/season for launching city-wide games in New York - Michele and my game is launching soon, Andrea's game New York Snap Exchange, for PsyGeoConflux ...and on the corporate side, R/GA just put out the Nike-licious Operation 6453.

They're all imagining very different New Yorks -- my game invokes the history of street gangs, Snap Exchange riffs on (okay, very very loosely) the mercantile ethic of the New York Stock Exchange, and Operation 6453 uses the language and visuals of, um, urban guerrilla warfare* (check out the Flash intro, and you'll see what I mean).

New York is large enough to accommodate all of our games - and more. What's important here is the creation of new routes through the city streets - and through our imaginations. New routes can create new maps, and new maps can help us create new cities.

Now the city would move like a map you were drawing; now you would begin to live your life like a book you were writing. Called forth by a street or a building, an ensemble of gestures might imply that a different city had to be built or an old one overthrown. – Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces

*I just have to say that I find a "recon" themed game in the time of Fallujah and Abu Ghraib a little ... difficult.

Going for a spin

Lovely road trip blog featuring a combination of shots from the ground and aerial photos. Via many2many

Which inspired this trip...

You Drive A Honda Civic, Not a Race Car

Road food

Jesus drove an SUV

The Driver Distraction Internet Forum (an actual project of the US Dept of Transportation, with many exciting links)

Backseat gaming

This prompt language

Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book — in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment –Benjamin,  Einbahnstraße

via Seth

Benjamin is talking about print, of course – but I of course apply it to design. Some of his particularly evocative phrases (“this prompt language,” “the inconspicuous forms,” “equal to the moment”) suggest the kind of “just in time” and “just enough” interactions that could work for and within the transitory contexts and brief needs of an what Benjamin calls an "active community” and I might call a "mobile" one. Why write a book when all you really need is a flyer stapled to a telephone pole?

NYT article on "big games"

This weeks' Sunday Styles section will have an article on "big games" - citywide gaming - focusing on PacManhattan. It gets at a lot of the fun and excitement of playing in the city, and there are some great shots of Dennis Crowley running around Washington Square Park dressed as PacMan.

The game that Michele and I have been working on got a brief plug, which was nice. Though I do wish the reporter hadn't described it as the way in which "corporations are getting in on the act." I mean, fer chrissakes, it's only two researchers and a developer and it began a year ago as a master's thesis for the very same program that produced PacManhattan.

I mean, it's good to get a little press. I'm just a little down about how the game got spun.

------>
Later: Michele and I just had a long discussion at lunch about the various aspectness of "bigness" that these "big" games might have: big in terms of the physical distance covered? big in terms of the social networks they rely on? big in terms of the telecom infrastructure (cell phones, GPS, etc) required to support them? The article has one definition, but there's more there...

pull tab to talk

And on the interactivity is just shopping front, there's been some sort of historic price point boundary crossed when Coke can afford to run a promo contest involving a phone built into a...wait for it...12 pack. The idea is that you find the "phone," push a button, and then are instantly connected to a Coke rep who tells you what you've won. (via geowanking) It seems, crazily, like a peculiarly American promo: wouldn't the Europeans just use SMS?

This reminds me, of course, of my artist/designer friend Dan's interaction design portfolio, which has a cell phone built it, so that it performs the neat trick of automatically calling him when the prospective employer opens it up. Unfortunately, that also means he has to carry around his cellphone wherever he goes, including (on particularly anticipatory days) the shower... (Oh, and btw: Dan needs a new job. If anyone knows of a place looking for a tangible interface designer...)