Dangers | Desert of My Real Life

{December 27, 2008} FaceBook: A Hotel California?

Robin forwarded an article called How Sticky Is Membership on FaceBook? Just Try Breaking Free from the New York Times. Of course, because I’m completely addicted to FaceBook, my first thought was “Why would anyone ever want to leave?” But I can see that there may be reasons that someone might want to leave. And even if you don’t want to leave, FaceBook’s approach to member information might raise some privacy concerns.

According to the New York Times article, members who want to leave FaceBook find it difficult to do so because FaceBook retains information on their servers after a member deactivates her account. As one disgruntled member says, “You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.” FaceBook’s executives say that they retain this information in order to make it easy for a member to reactivate her account. That is, because the information doesn’t disappear when an account is deactivated, if the account is then reactivated, the information is available for the reactivated account. This is obviously a problematic answer to member concerns about information retention. If I decide to deactivate my account, I want my information to be removed from FaceBook’s servers. In response to the ensuing uproar, FaceBook’s executives provided another process for removing information from a deactivated account. The member must delete each piece of information and then once all the information has been manually deleted, the account can be deactivated. Clearly, this is a tedious process that has done little to stem the tide of criticism about FaceBook’s practices.

From a technical standpoint, it should be easy to provide a one-step process for deleting all of the information in an account and then deleting the account itself. So when I first read about the tedious process required for deleting the information associated with an account, I thought perhaps the technical folks at FaceBook had simply been overwhelmed by the success of the site and had not had time and resources to build in as much user-friendliness as the members demanded. After all, FaceBook was created as a hobby project by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 and as of October, 2008, there were more than 140 million active members worldwide. That kind of growth is bound to result in some pain so I figured the lack of easy account deactivation was simply part of that growing pain.

But then I read this excellent post by Steven Mansour. Mansour points out that we voluntarily give our personal information to FaceBook which can then sell that information to the highest bidder. Perhaps this lucrative side business is the real reason that FaceBook doesn’t want to make it easy for users to delete their accounts. This particular privacy issue has been a concern for me for a long time. For example, I am one of the few people I know who has no rewards cards–the kind of cards that you get from grocery stores and book stores where you provide your personal information in return for savings on items that you buy. I have not found that the savings on my purchases has been worth the price of making my private information available to these large corporations. It had not occurred to me that FaceBook might be engaged in the same kind of information harvesting as Hannaford Brothers and Borders Books and Music. But I guess I was just being naive. And the sad thing is that knowing that FaceBook might be engaging in this behavior has not convinced me to leave FaceBook. In return for my information, I get easy-to-use tools that help me keep up with my friends’ lives. I guess everyone has her price.

{September 13, 2008} Digital Rights Management

Back in the late 1980’s, I worked as a volunteer on a running race. Because I had a background in computer science, one of my tasks was to set up a database of all the race entrants and then to enter their finishing positions after the race so that we could publish the results in the local paper. A friend of mine had an Apple II computer with a database management program on it. I think the database program was AppleWorks. In any case, the database management program had a primitive copy protection mechanism, a scheme for ensuring that users of the software did not give copies of it to their friends. Each time I started the program, I had to answer a question from the user manual. The question might be something like: On page 37 of the manual, what is the fourth word in the third paragraph? This was in the days before copy machines were widely available so the thinking was that the software would not be very useful if you didn’t also have a copy of the user manual. It was a very primitive way of trying to prevent users from giving the software to all of their friends, of trying to protect what the software developers felt was their right to limit the copying of their software. Of course, this mechanism would not work today since it’s extremely easy to copy user manuals. But even back then, the critique of this protection mechanism was that it was easy to circumvent if you were determined to do so but it was simply an inconvenience for legitimate users. What if you lost your user manual, for example?

Since that time, digital rights management has come of age. DRM is a hot topic with owners of digital content claiming that their rights cover all sorts of things, allowing them to do all sorts of things to our computers without our consent. And yet, it is virtually impossible to use technology to prevent the copying of software and other digital content. So DRM is typically criticized for not actually protecting against illegitimate copying while making the lives of legitimate users very difficult. A number of stories about DRM have been in the news recently.

What is digital rights management? According to Wikipedia, it is a generic term that refers to any scheme that a hardware manufacturer or copyright holder implements to prevent illegimate use of their hardware or copyrighted materials. In 1998, the United States passed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) which among other things, made the circumvention of any digital right management mechanism a crime. In other words, if a company used the DRM mechanism that I described above (asking users to answer questions from a user manual), then copying the manual and giving it to a friend would violate the DMCA. But the situation for users of digital content is even more dire than that. DRM mechanisms today are wide-ranging, claiming all kinds of rights for the owners of digital copyrights, at the expense of your right to control what happens on your own computer.

I have been thinking about the DMCA since its passage because of its immediate impact on the research of computer scientists. Soon after the passage of the DMCA, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) ran a contest that challenged researchers to break their latest digital watermarking scheme. Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, chose not to sign any of the confidentiality agreements that would qualify him for the monetary prize of the contest. Within three weeks, he and his team had broken the watermarking scheme and wrote a scientific paper that described the techniques they used. When the SDMI and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) found out that the team was planning to present this paper at a conference, they threatened to sue, citing violation of the DMCA, specifically the portion of the act that makes it illegal to circumvent DRM schemes (of which the digital watermarking scheme was one). Felten withdrew the paper but also sued the SDMI and the RIAA and sought a ruling that presenting the original paper should actually have been allowed. Because Felten had not actually been sued and therefore had not been harmed, his case against the SDMI and the RIAA was dismissed on the grounds that he lacked standing to sue. Since then, the Justice Department has said that any threatened legal action against researchers such as Felten under the DMCA is invalid. But this judgment has not yet been tested in a court of law. And in the meantime, content providers have gotten bolder in their uses of DRM technologies.

In early 2007, Sony BMG Music Entertainment agreed to settle with the Federal Trade Commission after it was discovered that music CDs from the company contained software that was secretly installed on any computer on which the CDs were played. This software “limited the devices on which the music could be played, restricted the number of copies that could be made, and contained technology that monitored their listening habits to send them marketing messages.” Because the software gave access to users’ computers to Sony BMG, it also opened up holes on those computers to any intruder who knew about them. In addition, the software, once discovered, was unreasonably difficult to remove. The Federal Trade Commission said that this secret installation of software violated federal law. The settlement was a financial and public relations disaster for Sony BMG and should have put that kind of DRM technology out of business forever.

But the long-awaited release of Will Wright’s new game, Spore, from Electronic Arts earlier this month shows that DRM is alive and kicking. The reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly negative due to the existence of SecuROM, a particularly nasty implementation of DRM. This software was developed by Sony DADC, does not announce that it is installing itself, limits the user to 3 installations of the game (even if it has been uninstalled), and is very difficult to uninstall, even if the game is uninstalled. It remains to be seen what kinds of security risks are opened up on the computers that have SecuROM on them. The biggest complaint seems to be about the limit of three installations because of how strict this limit is. Apparently, changes in hardware make the software believe that a new installation has occurred. So if a user upgrades her video card, she may use up one of her Spore installations. This software sounds very similar to the software that Sony BMG got slapped down for using so I can only imagine what is going to happen as these thousands of disgruntled gamers make their dissatisfaction known. Of course, the developers of Spore claim they are just trying to stop piracy. The problem with this argument is that the DRM scheme was broken before the game was released so anyone intent on pirating the game will be able to do so. Only legitimate users of the game will be harmed by SecuROM.

Legitimate users of Yahoo Music recently learned the lesson that purchasing DRM-protected content is actually like renting, rather than purchasing, that content. Yahoo Music Store will close its virtual doors at the end of this month. If you are one of the unlucky legitimate customers who bought your music through this store, you will no longer have access to your music because of Yahoo’s DRM scheme. When the store closes, the DRM license key servers will shut down. If you can’t get a DRM license key, you can no longer listen to music that you legitimately purchased. Meanwhile, those who pirated that same music will continue to enjoy what they pirated.

Content providers need to stop creating roadblocks for their legitimate users. These roadblocks do nothing to protect content.

{August 13, 2008} You Can’t Always Believe Your Eyes

In yet another step toward hyperreality, it has been revealed that the opening ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics were (partially) faked. If you watched the spectacle on television, you were probably amazed by the fireworks display. There was indeed a fireworks display during the ceremony but you weren’t watching it. Instead you were watching an animation of a fireworks display that took nearly a year to create. Apparently, the creator of the animation even added a little “camera shake” to the animation to enhance the impression of watching a real recording of what was happening in the stadium that night. The official explanation from Beijing about why this little deceit was necessary is that it was too dangerous to film the real fireworks display from a helicopter. Since when is that an acceptable justification for journalistic deception?

Some of the stories about the incident actually muddy the facts of the deception, saying that the controversy occurred because some portions of the show were “pre-recorded.” This statement implies that the deception involves “live” performance vs. “pre-recorded” performance. But actually, this particular deception is about something that never happened. What we television viewers saw was something that never happened. It was an animation that was created on a computer. As a viewer, I never thought I was watching something live. The opening ceremonies started at 8am EST on August 8 and were not broadcast on NBC until 7:30pm EST on August 8. So the whole ceremony was “pre-recorded.”

Although the animation was not created by NBC, they did show it without disclosing that it was not what was actually happening in the stadium. In fact, Matt Lauer said during the ceremony, “This is actually almost animation. A footstep a second, 29 in all, to signify the 29 Olympiads.” Bob Costas responded, “We said earlier that aspects of this Opening Ceremony are almost like cinema in real time. Well this is quite literally cinematic.” Does that sound like they were coming clean about this portion of the ceremony being an actual animation? Why were they being so coy?

Clearly, this is not the first time that images have been manipulated for dramatic effect. The most famous example of such manipulation is probably the OJ Simpson Time Magazine cover showing his mug shot after his arrest for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. His skin on the cover was darkened to make him appear more menacing. And there are examples of manipulation all the way back to the beginnings of photography. The oldest example I could find was from the 1860s when Abraham Lincoln’s head was superimposed on the body of John Calhoun. So this is certainly nothing new. But the ease with which such manipulation can be accomplished now that digital is everywhere should give us all pause before we believe what we see in a photo or even in a video. Luckily, there is also a growing field called digital forensics, pioneered by Hany Farid, a faculty member in the very same Dartmouth College Computer Science Department where I got my undergraduate degree. He and his team are developing tools and techniques to allow us to discover manipulation of photos and videos. I think their work is increasingly necessary.

{August 3, 2008} A Lipshitz by Any Other Name

Here is one of the most amazing stories about an unthinking reliance on technology that I’ve heard in a long time. Verizon does not allow the setting up of accounts that have profanity in the name of the account. This might sound reasonable on its face since you can imagine a young English major deciding it would be cool to have their email address set up to be fuckuahl@verizon.net as an homage to her favorite faculty member at PSU (although I’m not sure why anyone would really care if that was indeed someone’s email address but apparently, Verizon does care and I suppose that is their right). So the problem is not that someone at Verizon thought it would be good to have automated checks for such things. The problem arises when there is an unthinking application of the rule so that legitimate requests are denied.

And that’s exactly what happened to Dr. Herman Lipshitz when he tried to set up an Internet account with Verizon. He was told that because his name contains the word shit, he could not use it as his username for the account. Like any good customer with a legitimate complaint, he asked to speak to a supervisor. When the supervisor insisted that the rule must stand (and that perhaps the good doctor should misspell his name in order to get around the rule), Dr. Lipshitz called the billing department and spoke to another supervisor. That supervisor said that the only person who could deal with it was someone in Tampa who would have to call India to have the computer code changed to allow an exception for this account. The person from Tampa would call him back. No one called but eventually, Dr. Lipshitz received a letter telling him that his name could not be used for his email account because it violates Verizon’s policy for allowable usernames. So Dr. Lipshitz called the Philadelphia Inquirer and after Daniel Rubin published an article about the incident, Verizon relented, saying, “As a general rule (since 2005) Verizon doesn’t allow questionable language in e-mail addresses, but we can, and do, make exceptions based on reasonable requests.” Dr. Lipshitz points out that he gets phone service from Verizon, is listed as Lipshitz in Verizon’s phone book and, perhaps most importantly, Verizon regularly cashes his checks with the name Lipshitz prominantly displayed on them.

About 15 years ago, I purchased something at a grocery store. The total came to $2.37. I gave the cashier $5.37 but she had already put $5.00 into the cash register which told her the change should be $2.63. Despite five minutes of arguing, I could not convince her that it would be ok to take my $5.37 and give me $3.00 in change. Until now, that had been my best story of an overreliance on technology. That has now changed.

{May 31, 2008} Back on the Wii Remote

I finally played with the Wii again today after staying away from it since my unfortunate encounter with a post (which you can read about here). My hand still isn’t back to normal–it was a deep bruise! I was a little nervous about playing but I ended up playing for about an hour and a half. The interesting thing is that after being away from it for almost 3 weeks, I gained in my skill level. My Wii fitness age today was 29 and I’m getting closer to being a pro in tennis. I’m already a pro in bowling and I got a score of 213 (my record is 214) in the only game I bowled. I’m back, baby! But you can bet I moved the coffee table far out of the way! I’m also cultivating a minimalist approach in which I don’t really use my entire body as I play. Instead, I just try to flick my wrist a little bit, especially in tennis. It seems to be working pretty well.

{May 15, 2008} Did Robin Williams Say That?

Jeannette recently told us about an email that she received that is supposed to be a transcript of a “comedy” routine by Robin Williams. We discussed the fact that we think he probably has fairly progressive politics but that this routine was incredibly offensive if it was taken at face value. Then we discussed whether he meant it ironically but failed in making the irony clear enough. After the conversation, we still weren’t sure so she sent us a copy of the email.

Here’s the transcript:

You gotta love Robin Williams……Even if he’s nuts! Leave it to Robin Williams to come up with the perfect plan. What we need now is for our UN Ambassador to stand up and repeat this message.

Robin Williams’ plan…(Hard to argue with this logic!)

‘I see a lot of people yelling f or peace but I have not heard of a plan for peace. So, here’s one plan.’

1) ‘The US will apologize to the world for our ‘interference’ in their affairs, past & present. You know, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Tojo, Noriega, Milosevic, Hussein, and the rest of those ‘good ‘ ole’ boys’, we will never ‘interfere’ again.

2) We will withdraw our troops from all over the world, starting with Germany , South Korea , the Middle East, and the Philippines. They don’t want us there. We would station troops at our borders. No one allowed sneaking through holes in the fence..

3) All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and leave.. We’ll give them a free trip home. After 90 days the remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of whom or where they are . They’re illegal!!! France will welcome them.

4) All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90 days unless given a special permit!!!! No one from a terrorist nation will be allowed in If you don’t like it there, change it yourself and don’t hide here. Asylum would never be available to anyone. We don’t need any more cab drivers or 7-11 cashiers.

5) No foreign ‘students’ over age 21. The older ones are the bombers. If they don’t attend classes, they get a ‘D’ and it’s back home baby.

6) The US will make a strong effort to become self-sufficient energy wise. This will include developing nonpolluting sources of energy but will require a temporary drilling of oil in the Alaskan wilderness. The caribou will have to cope for awhile.

7) Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries $10 a barrel for their oil. If they don’t like it, we go someplace else. They can go somewhere else to sell their production. (About a week of the wells filling up the storage sites would be enough.)

8 ) If there is a famine or other natural catastrophe in the world, we will not ‘interfere.’ They can pray to Allah or whomever, for seeds, rain, cement or whatever they need. Besides most of what we give them is stolen or given to the army. The people who need it most get very little, if anything.

9) Ship the UN Headquarters to an isolated island someplace. We don’t need the spies and fair weather friends here. Besides, the building would make a good homeless shelter or lockup for illegal aliens.

10) All Americans must go to charm and beauty school. That way, no one can call us ‘Ugly Americans’ any longer. The Language we speak isENGLISH..learn it…or LEAVE…Now, isn’t that a winner of a plan?

‘The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.’ She’s got a baseball bat and she’s yelling, ‘you want a piece of me?’ ‘

If you agree with the above forward it to friends…If not, and I would be amazed, DELETE IT!

I think it’s pretty clear that there is no irony in this vile spew. But I couldn’t believe that Robin Williams had said it. The email was actually accompanied by a photo of him wearing a shirt that says “I Love NY” in Arabic. I could see the irony and the progressive politics in the photo. And the photo definitely didn’t seem to match the diatribe. What we hadn’t discussed with Jeannette was the possibility that the email was a hoax.

Why I hadn’t questioned whether Williams actually said these things? Why is that just because an email says that he said this crap, I automatically believed that he actually did say it? The photo was what made me start questioning things. I could completely see that some idiot might have missed Williams’ point in wearing the t-shirt and thought that by pairing this photo with this hateful diatribe, the hate might gain some credibility.

I spent a few minutes this morning trying to determine whether Williams had said these things or not. Within a short time, I found this article on snopes.com. For those of you who won’t follow the link, I’ll summarize: he didn’t say it. It’s a hoax. The diatribe was making the Internet rounds long before the photo of Robin Williams was even taken.

This just goes to show (once again), you can’t believe everything you read. Especially on the Internet.

{May 13, 2008} A Tale of Wii Woe

I suffered my first (and, I hope, only) Wii injury last night playing tennis by myself against the computer. Because I was only going to play a match or two and because I am incredibly lazy, I didn’t move the coffee table out of the way before I started to play. You can guess why that might be problematic. There are warnings all over the packaging and even within the games to make sure that you have enough clear space to play these games safely. But I very clearly ignored those warnings.

Our Wii is set up upstairs in the loft. On the left side of the loft is a wooden railing. It has one large post in the center that sticks up higher than the rest of the railing. In a game that I was winning by a wide margin, I tried to make a killer cross-court backhand shot (in other words, I was swinging as hard as I can). The back of my hand impacted the top of that post. As pain shot up my arm, my hand turned dark reddish purple and then started to bleed. My first thought was that I had broken my hand.

Eventually, the pain subsided enough for me to take a quick inventory. I could move all my fingers and rotate my wrist. I put ice on my hand and took some ibuprofen. It hurt to move but wasn’t aching so I started to think that maybe I hadn’t broken it after all. I decided to reevaluate the situation in the morning.

Luckily, the only times the pain woke me up were when I rolled onto my hand. Because I know how much broken bones ache, I was really starting to think that I hadn’t broken it. But I still had some pain that radiated up my forearm as well as a burning sensation down the back of my hand. I also accidentally touched the back of my hand on the inside of the car on the way to work and that nearly sent me to my knees because the pain was so bad. There are a lot of little bones in the hand and I wasn’t sure what breaking one of them might feel like. So I decided to see my primary care physician to see if she thought I should get xrays.

No one at the doctor’s office laughed out loud at my tale of Wii woe but everyone had a story of someone else doing something stupid like this. My doctor felt that I probably had not broken the hand (because I could move it in all the right ways and because it hadn’t really kept me up at night) and that the pain was most likely the result of all that soft tissue damage, including to the tendons that run down the back of the hand into the forearm. But she thought I should probably still have xrays because of the extreme tenderness across the knuckles.

So I walked up to the hospital to get the xrays. I know the xray technician from some volunteer work that I do and he and his fellow tech had a hearty belly laugh when I told the story. He also said that he completely understood how this could happen with this game. I think he was just trying to make me feel better about my stupidity.

Here’s what it looks like today:

This picture doesn’t give you the full sense of the color of the injury but it does give a sense of the swelling and the abrasions. It turns out that I didn’t break my hand, which I feel incredibly lucky about, especially given how hard I swung that Wii remote! I’m not sure when I’ll play with the Wii again or when my hand will feel better. I’m even less sure about when my ego will feel better. But I am sure that when I do play with the Wii again, I will move the coffee table out of the way.

By the way, here’s a blog dedicated to telling stories of Wii injuries. There are a lot of stories! That should probably make me feel better about my Wii experience. But there are a lot of people who do these kinds of things too. And that doesn’t make me feel any less stupid.

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