Live from Austin!

A couple of months ago, 15 UK troops were taken hostage in Iraq. They were eventually freed. Then I started seeing news stories about how everyone was furious because the troops were selling their personal stories to the highest bidder.

Maybe I’ve been in the US too long, but I didn’t understand what people were upset about. I still don’t.

Those troops went through a hideous ordeal. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to get money in return for telling people what it was like? If everyone can agree to give JK Rowling ten million quid for writing a bunch of guff about kids learning to be wizards, what’s the moral argument for not allowing troops to sell true stories for a sackful of cash? (I note that they even had explicit permission from the MOD to do so!)

Or maybe it was all faux outrage manufactured by the newspapers who lost out in the bidding war?

Today’s the big day. The iTunes Music Store has started actually selling DRM-free music. I decided to vote with my wallet and go find and buy something. I’m hoping that in a few weeks we’ll see a press release stating that EMI’s music sales tripled, or something like that, and the other labels will get that clue they’ve been missing.

Unfortunately, it seems as if everyone else has had the same idea, and Apple’s Internet connections anre buckling under the strain. In a way that’s a good thing, but it’s a bit frustrating.

Once upon a time, back in the ancient history of the Internet–before the 1990s–domain names were carefully controlled and regulated. A single organization controlled each top level domain. If you wanted a domain name, you had to meet their requirements.

Often the policies enforced were quite picky. If you wanted a .uk domain name, you were required to actually be in the UK, for example. If you wanted a .org domain, you were required to be a non-profit organization. To be in .net, you were expected to be a network access provider or ISP.

A lot of people disliked the bureaucracy involved in domain registration, and objected to the fees charged. And so it was decided that the domain name system would be opened up. There would be many domain registrars for each major top level domain, all competing to give the best price and service. Anyone would be able to register a domain, with minimal bureaucracy. Domains would be bought, sold and transferred in a perfect Free Market.

At first, things looked good. The cost of registering a domain dropped rapidly. Rather than having to fax paperwork around and get signed documents from company directors, you could just register online with a credit card for whatever domain you wanted.

However, it quickly became clear that domains could have value. A small proportion of Internet users (around 5-10%) don’t seem to understand search engines or bookmarks. They find things by guessing domain names and typing them in. As a result, people found that domain names an idiot would guess first ended up with traffic, purely by existing. Suddenly instead of having to advertise your web site, you could buy a domain name that people would randomly visit anyway, and get instant traffic with no work required.

Domains like “sex.com”, “computers.com” and “cars.com” suddenly became very valuable, changing hands for large amounts of money. Some people weren’t very happy about it, but still, there was nothing wrong with it really.

Unfortunately, there were headline stories of domain names changing hands for millions of dollars. And suddenly, there was a gold rush. Everyone with a modem hurriedly registered every domain name they could think about.

This was a major pain. If you wanted to set up a web site, it became almost impossible to find a simple domain name that hadn’t been registered already. Almost all of them were unused, just a whois entry and nothing more, but if you approached the owner their eyes would light up with dollar signs and they’d demand extortionate rates for their “valuable property”.

Still, the situation was somewhat self-correcting. It did still cost $50 or so to hold a domain for a year, so eventually when nobody turned up to offer $100,000 for it, the holder would let the registration lapse and you’d be able to pick it up for $50.

Then someone invented banner ads. Suddenly, those unused domains could be used to make money. Domain registrations were still dropping in price, and there were ad companies who would pay you $0.01 each time you served up an ad to someone. $10 a year for a domain, and all you needed to do was show ads to at least 1,000 idiots who typed your domain in at random, and you’d break even.

And so suddenly, the Internet filled with junk web pages filled with ads and nothing else. There are now multi-million-dollar companies whose primary business is hoarding domains and filling them with content-free crap. Domain spam is now so mainstream that companies like Google actively encourage it.

The next step was obvious. Sure, you could think of a domain name that other people would be likely to guess at random, but most of those were already registered. So the domain spammers began watching the lists of domains that people failed to renew. So now, if a widely used open source project fails to renew its domain name, the page will suddenly be replaced with a spam site full of affiliate ads.

Not everyone appreciates ending up on a domain spam page, however. Plus, if your page doesn’t look like total spam, you might get search engine traffic, and boost your profits further. Hence, the new trend is automatic content generation.

Some domain speculators take the unsubtle approach, and simply rip off content wholesale. If you have a web site with significant readership (as measured by, say, technorati), someone will likely set up a spam site which copies the text of each post you make, covers it with ads, and re-posts it to one of their hoarded domains. Sure, it’s copyright violation, but the chances of getting caught are slim, and so long as you pick on personal web sites the chances of anyone going after you with a lawsuit are slim too.

(I don’t think it has happened to me yet, but if I include a made-up word that doesn’t appear on the web, like spozquak, I should be able to do a Google search in a month or two and see if anyone’s copied it.)

However, again thanks to the free market, there’s now a market for software that can generate moderately convincing looking content. You’ve seen it in spam e-mails, and now it’s being used to fill the web too. The first generation used random text generation, but now more sophisticated “auto content generator” software uses web feeds to pull in text, chops the text into individual sentences, and then recombines them based on keywords.

(So I guess I should clarify that spozquak is a great alternative to viagra, cures mesothelioma from asbestosis, and helps you make money at home.)

While the web was filling with crap, the domain name registrars kept competing in their free market. As the supply of new unregistered .com domains dried up, they had to think of new ways to pull in customers. The solution: trial periods. You can now register a domain name for a 5 day trial, see if it pulls in any suckers, and if not you don’t have to pay for it.

You can probably guess what happened next. Someone wrote software to repeatedly register domains for trial periods, automatically.

And so we arrive at today’s web, the ultimate result of applying unconstrained free market economics to the problem of naming web sites. It’s a world where every name you can think of is already registered and filled with spam, often by someone who isn’t even paying for the domain. A world where if you’re away on holiday when your domain name expires, it’s immediately filled with spam. A world where web searches return hundreds of pages filled with spam designed to look like content, ripped off from other people’s web sites.

Of course, there are a couple of things we could do that might help ameliorate the problem. They’re just utterly unacceptable to the free market faithful who make up the Internet’s core audience.

The first is this: Do not allow domain transfers between third parties.

You bought a domain? Great. You want to sell it? Can’t. I mean, you can’t sell your home address, your postal code or your telephone number, so why should you be able to sell a domain name?  Your friend wants the domain? Fine, you cancel it, he registers it for the standard price.

If you could sell telephone numbers, you’d see rampant speculation there as well. If you moved to Austin and wanted a 512 phone number so friends could call you without paying long distance fees, you’d probably have to buy one at auction for a few hundred dollars. Or if you were in Massachusetts and wanted one of the old 617 numbers so you’d look like a long-established business, you could end up paying thousands of dollars. But the phone company doesn’t allow reselling of phone numbers, so the problem doesn’t occur.

(It’s worth noting that you can sell toll-free numbers. And sure enough, you get rampant speculation in that chunk of the phone number namespace, with most of the good ones already taken.)

The second way to help reduce the damage caused by the free market in domains is to resurrect an idea from the 80s: that your domain registration is voided if you don’t actively use the domain. And by “use”, I mean more than simply putting up a blank page of ads.

I can tell that people are already sharpening their pitchforks and lighting their torches, but which is worse: a domain name system that doesn’t support your religious belief that a free market is the best solution to everything, or a free market domain name system where you can’t actually buy any domains you want and everything is full of spam?

Another interesting survey was about socks. It was a really long survey. It asked about my preference for different kinds of sock, using phrases like “crew”, “low-cut”, “high-performance”, “quarter”, “ankle”, and so on. I was mostly mystified as to the distinctions being made. Even now, I couldn’t define a quarter sock or a crew sock.

I do have opinions about sock material: I like cotton, and don’t like anything else. Oh, all right, perhaps a little Spandex for stretchyness. Oh, and I have some Birkenstock socks made of recycled plastic bottles, as a kind of experiment.

And yes, I also have opinions about sock color. I have two colors of sock: light brown, for wearing with khakis, and black, for wearing with everything else. I think there may also still be some really old white socks at the back of the wardrobe from a previous life.

Other than that, I mostly look for a decent thickness, the right size, and the right shape. You know, sock shape.

The survey asked my opinion about what kind of sock goes best with what kind of outfit. Well, I try to make the colors appropriate, but generally I assume people aren’t going to be spending a lot of time looking at my socks.

Then the survey also asked how different kinds of socks make me feel. That was a particularly difficult section to answer, because on the whole, socks don’t make me feel anything. In fact, if I notice my socks, it’s probably because they’re defective in some way–too cold, too hot, otherwise uncomfortable, or they just fell apart after only a few washes.

Maybe I just haven’t found the right sock yet; maybe there really are socks that make you feel energetic, attractive, or like a go-getter.

So all in all, it was a bit of an ordeal wading through a 15-20 minute survey about socks. The fascinating part was thinking about the fact that there are probably lots of people who actually have detailed opinions about socks. People who care what brand of sock they are wearing.
And worse still, there must be people whose job it is to come up with 20 minute surveys about socks. The poor bastards at the sock company probably spent several days in meetings brainstorming for questions. After that it probably took them weeks of conference table meetings to hammer out agreement between the various stakeholders over what the final wording of each set of questions and answers would be. There are people in this world who live, eat and breathe socks. Not literally, of course, but that would almost be preferable.

One of my random Internet pastimes is answering surveys. Partly I do it because I suspect I’m an interesting edge case for their data set, the exception that will prove their rules. Also, at the end they offer some of the statistics they’ve gathered, which can be interesting. And sometimes, the act of answering trivial questions can lead me to odd insights about myself.

Like just now.

It was a survey about motor oil. Since I’ve only been driving for a little under 3 years, and since we’ve always taken the car to the dealer for its oil change, I’ve not had much occasion to learn about oil, or the oil changing process.

In fact, while answering the survey I realized that the sum total of my knowledge about oil changes is what I learned from the ubiquitous Castrol GTX ads on UK television in the early 80s.

Specifically, I know three things: I know that Castrol GTX is a brand of oil. I know that it is viscous and golden in color.  And I know that if you pour it gradually onto a sheet of metal on which a metal spanner is resting, it will cling to the edges of the spanner and flow around it.

And now that I pause to think about it, two of those things might be totally untrue.

But there’s something a little disturbing about the idea that if I had to go buy oil for the car right now, I’d probably buy Castrol GTX, simply because of a TV advert shown 25 years ago (and thousands of miles away); an ad that didn’t really work on any level beyond pure abstract brand awareness.

And even more amazing is that with less than a minute of effort I managed to locate the ad on YouTube.

A recent BBC Panorama documentary has suggested that wifi Internet might be a major health hazard. Scary quotes about chromosome damage and radiation exposure have appeared all over the Internet.

Unfortunately, the documentary’s conclusions are junk science.

Let’s start off by noting the inverse square law, a piece of basic physics which applies to electromagnetic radiation exposure. Basically, the strength of a signal varies in proportion to the distance squared.

The people who put together the documentary measured the wi-fi signal at a distance of 1m, and the cell phone tower signal at a distance of 100m. From their measurements, they concluded that the wifi signal was “three times the highest level of the mast”.

Well, no, it wasn’t. Because the cellphone signal was measured 100x further away, it was attenuated by a factor of 100×100 = 10,000×. So an accurate quote would be that the wi-fi signal was “three times the level of the cell phone mast divided by 10,000″. Not as exciting, though, is it?

You might argue that it’s reasonable to measure at different distances because people don’t tend to sit close to cell phone masts, but they do tend to sit close to wi-fi equipment. However, think for a moment about how a cell phone works. Yes, the mast transmits a signal to your phone, which is 10,000× weaker by the time it gets to you. However, you don’t just listen to your phone; hence, it must also transmit your voice back to the network. And the same physics works the other way: the signal your phone transmits is 10,000× weaker by the time it gets back to the mast.

So as you might guess, the radiation your phone emits is much, much more powerful than the radiation that reaches you from any nearby mast. That’s the radiation levels the BBC program should have been measuring and comparing with wi-fi.

While raw power is measured in watts, the relevant measurement for assessing radiation danger levels is the Specific Absorption Rate or SAR, which is measured in watts per kilogram. An adult’s body has much more bulk to dissipate the electromagnetic field, hence it’s less susceptible than (say) a lab rat’s body.

The US limit on radiation from consumer mobile phones is 1.6W/kg. (That’s lower than the European limit, so we’ll take that as our guideline.) The limit for devices like wifi is a mere 0.08W/kg. (Figures are in FCC OET Bulletin 56.)

Those are the maximums. The actual SAR ratings of common mobile phones are well documented. A value of 0.9 is fairly normal, with few phones below 0.5. So already, it’s clear that the average mobile phone actually exposing you to 0.9W/kg is likely far more dangerous than the 0.08 W/kg theoretical maximum allowed for devices like wi-fi.

Let’s look at some actual figures for wi-fi output compared to phones. I haven’t managed to find SAR ratings for wi-fi (if you have any, let me know), so we’ll have to compare power output in both cases. Peak power output from a phone is around 2W, with the average being around 250mW, according to a handy page from the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency.

Coincidentally, 250mW is the absolute maximum power output you can get from my wi-fi router (a Linksys WRT54GS). But to get that, you have to hack the firmware. The default power output for the router is around 20mW, 100× less than the phone. Now add in the fact that mobile phones are held against your head, whereas your wifi antenna is likely at least 30cm away from you at all times, and invoke the inverse square law again. The end result is that the electromagnetic radiation you get from wifi is a tiny fraction of that which you get from mobile phones.

As a UK Health Protection Agency scientist puts it in The Times, “a year sitting in a classroom near a wireless network is roughly equivalent to 20 minutes on a mobile.”

Aha, you say—what if you don’t use the mobile phone much? I’m afraid you still get irradiated. As you travel around, the signal from the nearest cell will get weaker. The phone checks signal strength every 7 seconds. If it drops off too far, the phone sends out an “I’m here!” transmission in order to locate another cell.

Given that each cell covers a square km or two, or as little as a few blocks in cities, taking a quick drive across town can involve your phone transmitting dozens of times. So wi-fi is a pretty negligible concern compared to carrying a mobile phone, let alone using one.

Wi-fi and phones aren’t the only sources of electromagnetic radiation, though. Wi-fi operates at 2.4GHz, which just happens to be the same frequency as your microwave oven. In fact, you may have noticed that your wi-fi signal strength is lower if you’re cooking something in the microwave, especially if your laptop is in the kitchen.

You might wonder why wi-fi operates at the same frequency as microwave ovens. Well, microwave ovens operate at 2.4GHz because that’s the frequency that’s best for heating up water molecules. For the same reason, it’s a bad frequency for long distance telecommunications through damp air, so it hadn’t been grabbed for any major commercial purpose. Hence, it was declared as free unlicensed spectrum for local low-power radio. This lack of regulatory hurdles led to innovation such as cordless phones, wireless video surveillance systems, and (eventually) wi-fi.

This also means that the effect of microwave exposure at wi-fi frequencies is simply heat. It’s not like nuclear radiation, it doesn’t mutate your genetic material; it simply warms up your water molecules a bit. From a scientific perspective, people are having a hard time coming up with theories to explain why localized warming of the body might cause damage. (In fact, it’s reported anecdotally that sailors on night watch on deck during WW II would stand in front of the radar in order to keep warm. They got hundreds of times the electromagnetic radiation warming you could ever get from a phone, yet they apparently didn’t suffer major damage.)

But let’s head back to the kitchen. Microwave ovens are allowed to leak up to 5mW/cm² at 5cm distance. A leaky oven may expose you to 0.256W/kg, at the same 5cm distance, according to measurements of leaky microwave ovens from the Australian Radiation Protection Agency. So at typical watching-lunch-rotate distance, it’s about the same level of danger as the radiation from your wifi router. So if you’re worried about wi-fi, you should be worried about your microwave oven too.

But there’s a much larger source of microwave radiation in your life. It’s called the sun. Summer sunlight at ground level can be up to 100mW/cm² of electromagnetic radiation. So standing outside on a sunny day irradiates you with 20× the radiation of a leaky microwave or wifi router, and a good chunk of it is microwave frequency.

So if you’re worried about electromagnetic radiation, perhaps the rational thing to do is what us computer scientists do—stay inside and browse the Internet via wi-fi, but never emerge blinking into the daylight…

Meanwhile, there are a growing number of people who believe that they are sensitive to low levels of microwave radiation like that found in wi-fi and sunlight. They call the phenomenon “electrosensitivity”. They claim that wi-fi and mobile phones give them headaches, make them nauseous, and so on, after just a few minutes. So, what’s the evidence?

Well, so far there have been at least 7 separate scientific trials in which allegedly electrosensitive people were asked to tell researches whether a mobile phone signal was present. In proper double-blind trials, “electrosensitive” people were unable to detect a mobile phone signal even after 50 minutes of continuous exposure. (Update: Here’s a very recent one.)

And even if they could have detected the signal—which they couldn’t—that wouldn’t have proved that the signal was responsible for their reported symptoms.

So if you believe wi-fi or mobile phones are making you ill, please do see a doctor—specifically, a psychiatrist. You may have a psychosomatic illness, you may be schizophrenic and believe you are picking up radio waves with your teeth, but you are not being made sick by people’s wireless Internet. If you truly believe you can tell when a mobile phone or wi-fi system is transmitting, sign up for a research study and prove it. You’ll be the first.

The sad thing is, though, that there are crackpots in even the highest levels of government. So expect to see more scare stories about wi-fi in the next few years.

I’m old enough to remember that back in the 80s, the scare story was about overhead power lines. They were making us nauseous, giving us cancer and leukemia, causing headaches. Funny how that risk seemed to vanish.

InfoUSA is a list broker, a company that aggregates personal data and sells it to telemarketers and catalog sales companies. The New York Times reports:

InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”

So InfoUSA actually sells lists of suckers deliberately selected for their gullibility. You might be wondering who buys these lists. Well, the NYT investigated.

InfoUSA sold [one list] dozens of times, to companies including HMS Direct, which Canadian authorities had sued the previous year for deceptive mailings; Westport Enterprises, the subject of consumer complaints in Kansas, Connecticut and Missouri; and Arlimbow, a European company that Swiss authorities were prosecuting at the time for a lottery scam.

[...]

Records also indicate that infoUSA sold thousands of other elderly Americans’ names to Windfall Investments after the F.B.I. had accused the company in 2002 of stealing $600,000 from a California woman.

Between 2001 and 2004, infoUSA also sold lists to World Marketing Service, a company that a judge shut down in 2003 for running a lottery scam; to Atlas Marketing, which a court closed in 2006 for selling $86 million of bogus business opportunities; and to Emerald Marketing Enterprises, a Canadian firm that was investigated multiple times but never charged with wrongdoing.

The story goes on to reveal that according to internal e-mails, InfoUSA knew some of their customers were scammy, but continued to sell them lists of sick and/or gullible elderly people to exploit.

Update: InfoUSA have put out a press release giving us their side of the story. My summary: “We’re not selling lists of suckers any more, we sold that part of the business. Plus, the authorities didn’t find us criminally liable, and anyway it was a long time ago.”

CNN:

MURFREESBORO, Tennessee (AP) — Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.

“We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation,” he said.

But parents of the sixth-grade students were outraged.

Boy, there’s no pleasing today’s parents.

As Emo Phillips put it:

“I love to go down to the schoolyard and watch all the little children jump up and down and run around yelling and screaming… They don’t know I’m only using blanks.”

Still, the kids have learned a valuable lesson, that’s for sure.

Update: The school’s position on the incident.

My PS2 memory card died, taking with it various save files. I guess I was courting disaster, in that I had been using the same single memory card since I bought my first PS2 in 2002. Flash memory is great, but it only lasts for a finite number of write cycles.

Looks like I’m going to have to play all those levels of Katamari Damacy again. (Oh, the horror.)