Live from Austin!

The Guardian:

In recent years networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have seen remarkable growth and become some of the most heavily trafficked destinations on the internet. But Danah Boyd, a researcher at the University of California and internet sociologist, says populations of different networks are now divided on a rough class basis.

Her evidence, collected through a series of interviews with US teenagers using MySpace and Facebook over the past nine months, shows there is a clear gap between the populations of each site.

“MySpace was the cool thing for high school teens and Facebook was the cool thing for college students,” she wrote in a paper available online. “The picture is now being blurred … it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.”Typical Facebook users, she said, “tend to come from families who emphasise education and going to college. They are primarily white, but not exclusively”. MySpace, on the other hand, “is still home for Latino and Hispanic teens, immigrant teens” as well as “other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm”.
[...]
“A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there’s a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook.”

According to Ms Boyd, Facebook is not used by young soldiers, who are generally less well-educated and from poorer backgrounds, and there is an element of social conflict in the ban.

So, MySpace is Facebook for the uneducated?

A few years ago the UK police carried out Operation Ore. It was a major operation targeting online child pornography. Some 7,272 British residents were added to a police database of people who paid to view child porn online. 4,283 homes were searched, 3,744 people were arrested, 1,451 were convicted. It was a major blow against pedophiles.

Or at least, that was the theory.

The US had a similar operation, Operation Avalanche. They assembled 35,000 entries in their database. Curiously, though, they only charged 100. If the US police could only justify prosecuting less than 1% of their suspects, how could the UK police be arresting more than half of theirs?

The answer is that many of the UK cases are based entirely on use of credit cards to sign up for suspected child porn web sites. Unfortunately, many of the credit cards were stolen. Oh, and many of the web sites contained only legal material. Minor details to the UK police.

The problem comes from the fact that many small porn sites use online transaction processors to handle their credit card transactions, rather than setting up their own merchant accounts. In particular, a company called Landslide in Texas provided credit card subscription services to a large network of affiliate porn sites.

It’s estimated that up to half the money Landslide collected actually ended up in the hands of a ring of Indonesian credit card scammers operating the familiar “small charge” fraud. Also (ab)using the service was a Brazilian hacker who “signed up” more than 3,000 stolen credit card numbers.

Before long, Landslide found itself on the receiving end of thousands of chargebacks from irate credit card owners. The company went bankrupt. Clearly the owner had been a victim of fraud just as the credit card holders had. That wasn’t a good enough excuse for federal prosecutors, though; he ended up in federal prison serving a 180 year sentence.

Meanwhile, UK police were swooping on houses, smashing down doors, seizing computer equipment, and arresting thousands of people on the basis that their credit card numbers had been found on Landslide’s hard drives. Never mind the massive amount of fraud that had pulled Landslide under; never mind whether the affiliate site the credit card holder had supposedly paid to see was legal or not. The police reasoning was apparently: At least one affiliate site held child porn; Landslide membership theoretically allowed users access to all the affiliate sites; John Doe’s credit card was used to sign up via Landslide; therefore John Doe signed up to view child porn.

The problem with the hysteria around child pornography and pedophilia is that if you’re accused, your life can be ruined even if you’re innocent. Plenty of employers will fire anyone as soon as they’re accused. The alleged pedophile finds himself jobless, with all his computer equipment seized by police, who have no obligation ever to return it.

For example, consider the case of naval officer Commodore David White. He was suspended from the navy, who feared that the case would hit the newspapers. It did anyway, but not in the way they expected—the commodore committed suicide by drowning. It turned out that he was totally innocent.

So far, 39 people have committed suicide as a definite result of Operation Ore. The true number may be higher, as not everyone leaves a suicide note. Maybe a few of the dead were guilty, but I’d place bets that the majority were innocent.

A web site has been set up covering the unraveling of Operation Ore. The police must realize things are starting to look bad for them, as they have apparently pressured Google to remove the site from searches. Another web site has information about the forensic investigation of Landslide’s computers. Journalist Duncan Campbell has been acting as an expert witness in some of the defence cases, and has written about Operation Ore in The Guardian. A recent Slashdot article has some first hand experience in the comments.

Update 2007-04-26: More from the Guardian and from Ross Anderson.

Lawrence Dennis was, arguably, the brains behind American fascism. He attended the Nuremberg rallies, had a personal audience with Mussolini, and met Nazi leaders; throughout the 1930s he provided the intellectual ballast for America’s bourgeoning pro-fascist movement. But though his work was well known and well appreciated by the intelligentsia and political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, there was one crucial fact about him that has never emerged until now: he was black.

Full story in The Guardian.

I bought a Nokia N800. It’s an Internet tablet, about the size of a large PDA or a small thin paperback book; almost exactly the same size as a Nintendo DS Lite, in fact. It runs Linux. It connects via WiFi or Bluetooth.

I bought it because I spend a lot of time reading web pages, PDFs and other electronic documents. In particular, my “killer app” was to be able to read the electronic edition of The Guardian with my morning coffee—ideally, in bed.

Yes, there are laptops. However, if you’ve ever tried to casually read the newspaper in bed using a laptop, you’ll probably agree with me that a kilo or so of hardware gets tiring on the arms, and trackpads aren’t conveniently located for use when the computer is propped up.

The N800 is the first portable device I’ve used that has a decent web browser. It’s Opera, in fact. The Guardian’s web site works on it. So do Google Mail, Flickr, Slashdot, Google Maps, and Wikipedia. While the text starts off small in order to squeeze a whole web page on the screen, it’s crisp and readable, and buttons on the top of the device make it easy to zoom in and out. For web browsing it easily beats a Palm handheld, Sony Ericsson P9xx Smartphone, Windows Mobile device, or Blackberry. (I’ve tried ‘em all.)

Note that the N800 is’s not a phone. The assumption is that you already have a mobile phone with Bluetooth; if you want to use expensive mobile data plans, you just pair your phone with the N800. This is an assumption I agree with; in general I want my mobile phone to be small enough to fit in the pocket of a pair of jeans, which precludes giving it a screen big enough to browse the web on.

Here are some other high points:

• XMPP/Jabber chat client.
• Google talk for voice and video chat.
• Streaming MP3 support.
• It’s Linux. If Nokia lose interest, you won’t be totally stuck; the community can continue to fix bugs and improve the OS.
• Want to run Nethack, SCUMMVM, or SSH into it and explore via the shell? You can.
• Assuming you switch it off entirely, it still only takes 10 seconds to boot. Mostly, though, you’ll just let it sleep, in which case waking up is instant.
• Flash works, mostly. It’s not the latest version, however. (Threadless seems to work, bleep.com doesn’t.)

And in the interest of balance, the low points:

• The built in camera is terrible. It makes the camera in my cell phone look good. Forget about using it for anything except video chat.
• PDA basics like address book and calendar are totally absent. I guess the assumption is that you use online services for such things. However, this does mean the device’s usefulness is totally crippled without an active network connection.
• The Maemo platform is currently in the early stages of its life. This means that OS updates often break existing applications, and the selection of applications isn’t great to start with.
• The handwriting recognition is horrible, at least compared to Palm OS or the Apple Newton.
• No Java. WTF? Even my mobile phone has Java. Maybe this will change once Sun finishes making Java available under the GPL.

So the executive summary is: if you want something you can keep in your satchel and use to browse the web at the café, this is currently your best bet. If you like the idea of the iPhone but don’t fancy paying about $2k and being locked out of running your choice of applications, the N800 plus a tiny GSM phone in your pocket is a good alternative, and has more than double the pixels.

(And yes, LiveJournal works on it. If you must.)

From The Guardian:

Millions of British citizens will be compulsorily required to hold an identity card and see their biometric details placed on a central database after the government last night fended off a backbench rebellion designed to derail the plan. Anyone applying for passports or immigration documents will in two years time be required to apply for an ID card.

[...]

Within two years — that is from 2008-09 — the 7 million people who renew or apply for a passport will be given a full biometric passport, possibly containing electronic scans of all their fingers, thumbs, face and eyes, and have their details entered automatically onto the national identity database. In effect, they will get an ID card by what critics call “creeping compulsion”.

[...]

The government will go back to parliament to introduce primary legislation to make the scheme compulsory: those who fail to register could face fines of up to £2,500.

Looks like it’s time for me to get back to work on that US citizenship.

Just noting that US troops shot their way into the home of a journalist working for The Guardian, seized video tapes he had shot for Channel 4, hooded him, and took him into custody. They refused to say what they were looking for. Still, he’s been released, so no harm done, right?

To celebrate its redesign, The Guardian is offering free access to its online edition for the next two weeks. If you live in America and have always wondered what a real newspaper would be like, now’s your chance to find out.

(If you think the New York Times is a real newspaper…well, they ditched their entire technology section to make way for more articles on shopping, fitness and fashion. Says it all really.)

To my mind, there are three reasons why The Guardian is a great newspaper.

The first is accuracy—the paper has a policy of correcting every factual error, and the Corrections and Clarifications column can make for very entertaining reading. The paper even does a pretty good job of covering technology and science.

The second is that the paper does real investigative reporting into things that actually matter. For example, today:

MPs from all parties are planning to campaign against the CIA’s use of British airports and RAF bases when abducting terrorism suspects who are then flown to countries where they are allegedly tortured. An all-party group is to be established this autumn to coordinate the campaign and to inquire into the extent of Britain’s support for the operations, which are said to violate international law.

The development was announced as the UN began inquiring into the operations, known in US intelligence circles as “extraordinary renditions”, and as an investigation by the Guardian uncovered the extent of British logistical support. [...]

And elsewhere there’s the first full account of the May 13th massacre in Uzbekistan. If you have no idea what that’s about, it may be because the violence was carried out by paramilitaries sent in by one of the USA’s crucial allies in the war against (some) terrorists.

The third reason I like The Guardian is diversity of opinion. Although it’s popularly believed to be ‘left wing’ or ’socialist’, The Guardian in fact gives space to all kinds of (often contradictory) viewpoints. Today, for example, the opinion section has an article arguing that the UK road haulers’ threatened strike and fuel blockade should be smashed the way Thatcher smashed the miner’s strike. That’s like FOX News suggesting that Michael Moore should be elected President.

I should mention that the digital edition is having a few teething troubles right now; normally all the stories are available indexed, but at the moment some pages are only readable as PDF. Still, stick with it, I think you’ll find it worthwhile.

According to The Guardian, Texas has taken in more than 230,000 refugees from New Orleans. That’s more than every other state added together; Austin alone is planning to take in more refugees than Colorado. (It’s a shame the Coliseum is half demolished.)

The Red Cross say they already have more volunteers in Austin than they can use, though the Capitol Area Food Bank is still looking for assistance.

The Guardian yesterday had interesting news from Iraq:

Babylon, a city renowned for its beauty and its splendour 1,000 years before Europe built anything comparable, was chosen as the site for a US military base in April 2003, just after the invasion of Iraq.

Military commanders set up their camp in the heart of one of the world’s most important archaeological sites and surrounded the enclosed part of the ancient city. At least 2,000 troops were installed, daily passing relics such as the enormous basalt Lion of Babylon sculpture.

In September 2003 the base was passed to a Polish-led force, which held it until today’s formal handover of the site to the Iraqi culture ministry.

Can you guess how it turned out? I think you can.

John Curtis, keeper of [The British Museum’s] Ancient Near East department and an authority on Iraq’s many archaeological sites, found “substantial damage” on an investigative visit to Babylon last month.

[…]

Among the damage found by Mr Curtis, who was invited to Babylon by Iraqi antiquities experts, were cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate.

He saw a 2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicles, archaeological fragments scattered across the site, and including broken bricks stamped with the vainglorious boasts of king Nebuchadnezzar.

Vast amounts of sand and earth, visibly mixed with archaeological fragments, were gouged from the site to fill thousands of sandbags and metal mesh baskets. When this practice was stopped, large quantities of sand and earth were brought in from elsewhere, contaminating the site for future generations of archaeologists.

The paper has photos of some of the damage, including “UT TEXAS” graffiti.

Still, at least we’ve achieved the goal of preventing Afghanistan from being the center of terrorism:

Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of “professionalized” terrorists, according to a report released Thursday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director’s think tank.

Iraq provides terrorists “a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills,” said David Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. “There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries.”

—Chicago Tribune

The Guardian reports:

A US court yesterday fired a shot across the bows of those one prosecutor described as “snake oil salesmen” by recommending that the man thought to be the eighth most prolific “spammer” in the world should be jailed for nine years.

Jeremy Jaynes, 30, of North Carolina, was found guilty, along with his sister, Jessica DeGroot, of sending out thousands of fraudulent emails which conned millions of dollars from unwitting victims.

Well, it’s a start.