Live from Austin!

I’ve seen a few people start saying that we shouldn’t be worrying about the misdeeds of AIG and other bailout recipients, because the problem we face makes their sleaze look trivial.

Sure, AIG paid its employees massive bonuses after receiving bailout funds. Yes, the bonuses were even bigger than they admitted, an average of about a million dollars per person, going to the very people who destroyed the company, the folks in Joseph Cassano’s financial products division. But hey, it’s only $400 million, and we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

Sure, AIG is also suing the government to try and get back tax it tried to avoid by using illegal offshore accounts with names like Lumagrove, Laperouse and Foppingadreef. Sure, they’re paying for the lawsuit using taxpayer dollars, and the cost of the defense will be born by the taxpayer as well—but hey, it’s only another $306 million plus both sets of lawyer fees, and we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

OK, it may be true that half the banks we’ve bailed out didn’t bother to pay their taxes last year. And yes, their CEOs lied about it. But hey, it’s only another $220 million, and we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

Yes, JPMorgan Chase is taking bailout money and buying two new luxury corporate jets and building “the premiere corporate aircraft hangar on the eastern seaboard”. But hey, it’s only another $138 million, and we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

Granted, MorganStanley has 158 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands in order to dodge taxes, yet turns around and asks for tax dollars. Yes, they’re paying themselves $10.7 billion in bonuses, almost exactly the amount they’re getting in bailout cash. Yes, the offshort accounts of MorganStanley and other banks are estimated to be costing the taxpayer a few billion dollars a year. However, we’re talking about a trillion dollar problem here, right?

Well, to update a phrase widely but falsely attributed to Senator Everett Dirksen: a few hundred million here, a few billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

Consider it this way: Suppose you’re unemployed, and having difficulty making your mortgage payments. While you’re sitting at the table trying to balance your finances, someone breaks in through your front door, walks up, grabs your wallet, and starts walking away with it.

Apparently the right thing to do is say “Oh, hey, that’s pretty blatant–but he’s only stealing $100 in my wallet, and I’m facing a $300,000 headache, so I’ll just ignore it. I have more important things to worry about.”

Then when the next guy wanders in and tries to steal your TV, you’re supposed to ignore that too, because your problem is so much bigger and more important than such a petty triviality.

Well, I guess I’m crazy, because I think a financial crisis is exactly the time to put the smackdown on anyone who tries to rip you off.

I didn’t want to see a bailout in the first place. We should have done what every other country in the same situation has done to get out of it—nationalize the banks, fire the people who caused the mess, and then privatize the banks again once things settle down. (Listen to recent This American Life episodes and NPR podcasts for the background.)

If we must have a bailout, then the very least we should do is make sure that we don’t get ripped off. If we let Wall Street get away with it this time, imagine how much worse they’ll be afterwards, and how much worse the next resulting crisis will be. I seriously think that AIG should be liquidated. It’s time for President Obama and other lawmakers to play hardball. They need to send a message to the CEOs of the banks, showing that not only are they not getting their bonuses, but they may be losing their jobs unless they start a program of radical austerity and honesty.

Twitter is an interesting case study in Internet fads. The system itself is utterly trivial–not just in usage, but technically trivial too. Any competent web developer can build a Twitter clone in a weekend, and many have. Yet somehow, it has developed amazing mindshare. A lot of people seem to be using it simply because everyone else is.

I got in early, reserved my user name, then let it sit idle. After a while, I started posting stupid updates to poke fun at the whole system. Eventually I made peace with Twitter and started using it for real, but that doesn’t mean I’m not frustrated by the way a lot of other people use it.

Many people who ought to know better use Twitter as a way to post links, even though it’s fundamentally unsuited to the purpose. The 160 character limit gets eaten up by a URL, so people use tiny URL services which obscure the destination, removing useful information in the process. Even then, there’s not much space for summarizing why they are linking to the destination, so it’s very much a crapshoot whether you’ll find anything worthwhile when you get there.

A much better idea is to use delicious.com, Google Reader, or a Facebook link post. Facebook pretty much nails this usage pattern–a link post gives you the destination URL, destination page title, a pull quote, and an optional short comment from the poster. If that kind of link propagation is really what Twitter is for–and many of its advocates seem to think it is–Twitter should at least provide the option of associating a URL with each tweet, to end the tinyurl obfuscation. As it is, from observing my behavior I seem to be about a hundred times more likely to read a link propagated on Facebook than one propagated via Twitter.

Another stupid use for twitter is having one-on-one conversations. You can spot this kind of Twitterer by the trail of incomprehensible comments with @johnsmith directives. Presumably the logic is that I might see half of what looks like an interesting conversation, and rudely butt in? Well, it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe I’m not practiced enough at eavesdropping and butting in in the real world, and hence haven’t wanted to carry the practice over into the online world. Again, there are better systems for doing this–FriendFeed offers actual conversation threads, so if my friend B comments on something said by person A, I actually see both sides of the exchange. Revolutionary!

The most irritating use for Twitter is as a staging area for unfiltered crap that later gets reposted. People who use it this way take their Twitter comments each day, copy them all, and then post the copy on their web site. Ye gods, what are they thinking? If the comment is worth a web posting, post it there to start with. If it’s not, leave it in Twitter.

Reposting Twitter feeds is effectively punishing anyone who is interested enough to follow what you’re writing. If they care what you’re thinking, they’ll be subscribed to the Twitter feed and will see your comments there–so why make them see them all again on your web site hours later? It’s a bit like those people who send you e-mail, and then send voicemail to ask if you got the e-mail, and then leave a Post-It on your screen to make sure you get the voicemail. Sending multiple redundant copies of information to someone doesn’t make it more valuable, it just activates people’s mental noise filters. And sure enough, I find that I just stop following self-reposters entirely.

What about the original supposed purpose of Twitter? Back in the mists of time–circa 2007–WIRED explained Twitter as a way to keep friends up-to-date with your day-to-day activities. That’s something it’s actually good for, and that’s what I use it for: Random thoughts, mini-anecdotes, how I’m actually spending waking hours. Basically, the personal trivialities I always thought weren’t worth wasting an entire web site posting for. The only reason I use Twitter rather than Facebook for this task is that Twitter has a clean and open API, whereas Facebook’s API is horrible and doesn’t (as far as I could tell) let you extract status updates.

So it’s another case of "the street finds its own use for things", as William Gibson put it. Twitter has become the golden hammer of short web postings, and apparently there are plenty of small screws that still need pounding in.

Amazon have misused the DMCA to demand takedown of a file called azw-0.1.zip. Since I have both the archive file and a Kindle, and have used both together, I can explain what’s really going on. Hopefully this will clear up some of the misinformation floating around.

The code in the disputed zip file is written in Python. It calculates the Mobipocket PID for your Kindle, based on the serial number written on the back. You can then provide this PID to any e-book store that sells e-books in DRMed Mobipocket format. They can sell you encrypted Mobipocket e-books, and you can then run a second Python script which flips a flag in the e-book file, making it readable on your Kindle. (The flag is just one that says “This is encrypted for Kindle”; no encryption is broken.)

This works because Amazon bought Mobipocket a few years ago, and used their DRM scheme and e-book format as the basis of the Kindle’s e-book format. The basic Mobipocket format is pretty simple. It’s HTML inside a Palm OS PDB database. That’s it. The DRM just adds a layer of encryption.

So, why are Amazon upset about this?

One theory is that they don’t want Kindle owners buying books anywhere other than Amazon.com. Well, if that’s the case, they’re playing a losing game, because Fictionwise (recently purchased by Barnes & Noble) sells e-books in DRM-free Mobipocket format, which you can just drag-drop onto your Kindle.

A second theory is that Amazon don’t want people to be able to create DRM-encumbered e-books for Kindle themselves, bypassing whatever fees Amazon may be charging for the service. I don’t know how true that may be, as I have no interest in creating DRM-encumbered anything, so I’ve never investigated how much Amazon charges.

My personal theory is that the real reason Amazon don’t want people finding out their Kindle’s Mobipocket PID is a fear that people will then find out how to decrypt their DRM-encumbered Mobipocket books.

And indeed, there is a completely different set of Python scripts floating around on the web that will decrypt a Mobipocket e-book given the PID used to encrypt it. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone; DRM is fundamentally flawed. Clearly the e-book reader software has to have all the information necessary to decrypt the book so that it can show it to me. That being the case, it’s inevitable that the decryption code will be reverse-engineered if enough people are motivated enough to do so.

But make no mistake: the azw-0.1 files do not break any copy protection or reveal any secret codes. They just calculate the PID of your Kindle, based on the serial number that’s written right on the back of the device in plain sight. They are interoperability tools, and the DMCA explicitly allows for interoperability tools. I suspect that the EFF could take on this case and win easily.

While I’m writing, here’s a quick summary of a few Kindle myths that I see repeated a lot in coverage of the story:

• The Kindle traps you into buying everything from Amazon.

  Not true. Even if the azw scripts were illegal, you could still buy as much DRM-free content as you liked, load it directly onto the Kindle via USB, and never use the wireless connection to Amazon at all. As mentioned above, you can buy DRM-free e-books in Kindle-ready Mobipocket files from Fictionwise.

  It’s like the iPod: you may be stuck with a single vendor for DRM-encumbered content, but you can buy your DRM-free content from anywhere. Personally, I intend to buy as little DRM-crippled content as possible, and hope that Amazon gets the message.

• The Kindle uses proprietary e-book format.

  As mentioned above, the Kindle’s native format is a trivial variation on Mobipocket format, which is HTML inside a Palm PDB database. The open-source mobiperl tools will pack and unpack .mobi and .azw files.

  As Mobipocket’s FAQ points out, the HTML extensions and metadata are based on an open industry standard.

  Also, there are free tools from Mobipocket for creating e-books. They’re Windows-only, however, and don’t seem to work under WINE.

• You have to get all your content onto your Kindle by sending it to Amazon.

  Wrong. The Kindle mounts as a hard drive, using Storage Class USB. No drivers are required on Windows, Mac or Linux. Your library of books appears in a folder called “documents”. They’re just .azw and .mobi files. You can drag more books into the folder in Mobipocket or ISO-8859-1 text format, and the Kindle will display them.

  If you want to read PDFs, you have three options. One is to e-mail the PDF to your Amazon Kindle e-mail address; Amazon will convert it and it will appear wirelessly on your Kindle, at a cost of 10 cents. The second option is to e-mail the PDF to your free Kindle conversion e-mail address, and have Amazon e-mail it back in mobi/azw format for you to load onto your Kindle via USB. The third option is to use free tools to convert the PDF to mobi yourself, in which case Amazon need never see what’s in your PDF.

  From my own experiments, it appears that Amazon are using the open source pdf2edit on their back end as the conversion tool. Either that, or they’re using something which has exactly the same formatting conversion quirks.

I thought the old iPod Shuffle clip-on was as ridiculously small as they could take it. Other than prisoners in jail, did anyone actually need the Shuffle to be even smaller? Are there people out there who are happy to learn morse code to control an MP3 player? People who are delighted at the idea of a proprietary headphone connector, so they either have to buy special headphones, or spend $15 on an adaptor that puts the controls right back next to the iPod where they used to be? I must be missing something.

Then again, I’ve never been the target market for the Shuffle. I only listen to music an album at a time, and I’m more interested in capacity than size. The iPod Nano is about as small as I’d want to go; I’m just waiting until flash memory gets cheap enough that they start selling 80GB Nanos.

From the Daily Telegraph:

Gordon Brown should levy a tax on violent video games to help tackle knife crime, according to the Richard Taylor, the father of murdered schoolboy Damilola Taylor.

[...]

The Tackling Knives Action Plan is a £2million programme aimed at reducing deaths and serious violence among teenagers due to knives.

Violent games are “too cheap” and taxes on them should be “very high”, Mr Taylor told MPs.

Wait a moment. It’s not my favorite genre, but I’ve played enough to know that violent video games rarely glamorize knives. Nobody in their right mind ever tried to complete Grand Theft Auto, Fallout 3 or Resident Evil 4 using knives; it’s shotguns and machine pistols all the way.

So if we’re serious about wanting to do something about knife crime, then what we really need to do is follow the same logic as the UK handgun ban, and try to reduce the availability of knives, right? We need to be tough on knives, tough on the causes of knives.

I call for an immediate and very high tax on unsliced loaves of bread. Have you seen a bread knife recently? If you’re an irresponsible potential murderer, you might even have one in your house–hopefully locked away in the knife cabinet where teenagers can’t get at it. Those evil serrations will slice through innocent flesh like it’s, well, a loaf of bread.

Speaking of flesh, we need a big tax on steak too. Steak knives are conveniently sized for hoodies to carry about their person. Any observant Daily Mail reader will recall incidents where steak knives have been used as stabbing weapons.

Ultimately, if we’re going to solve the problem of knife availability, the population of the UK is going to need to transition to eating only soft foods that require no sharp implements. We can look to the nation’s lunatic asylums and baby food manufacturers for guidance on assembling a safe menu for the nation.

Knives are only part of the problem, though. Damilola Taylor wasn’t killed with a knife; according to the prosecution, he was stabbed with broken glass from a bottle. So clearly, the UK needs to go beyond simple deposits on glass bottles, and start making it prohibitively expensive to put liquids in bottles.

Once everybody is eating baby food from plastic jars and drinking their beer from plastic bottles, the UK may finally see the same kind of change in the number of knife crimes that it has seen in handgun crimes.

List of people to maybe try and sneak in to see at SXSW 2009 (because $600 is way too fucking expensive and the ticket prices have turned it into an industry trade show):

• Explosions in the Sky (who I didn’t know are from Austin)
• NASA
• Ulrich Schnauss

And in the "Yeah, like there will be any space to sneak into that" category:

• Margaret Cho
• DEVO