Citizen Journalists vs Journalists

By | November 22, 2011
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Citizen journalists are usually passionate about what they cover. That’s the problem. As a journalist you can’t be passionate about it because 

  • you are supposed to be impartial (this doesn’t mean you don’t care; it means you listen with a detached but compassionate ear). And I reject arguments that this is not possible. Of course it’s not always possible, but it’s an aspiration. That’s the key difference 
  • you may have to cover something you don’t care about. A professional journalist would cover a topic whether they cared about it or not; that’s what a professional does. 

I’m not rejecting citizen journalism. I’m arguing that citizen journalism is a deeply flawed model if it’s supposed to supplant traditional journalism, because it’s rooted in a misunderstanding of what the profession actually does. 

via ScribeFire

New in Gmail Labs: Smart Labels

By | November 22, 2011
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New in Gmail Labs: Smart Labels

Wednesday, March 09, 2011 | 10:00 AM

Posted by Stanley Chen, Software Engineer

People get a lot of email these days. On top of personal messages, there are group mailing lists, social network notifications, credit card statements, newsletters you might have signed up for, and promotional email from a shopping site you used once months ago. Gmail’s filters and labels were invented to help manage the deluge, but while I have about 100 filters that triage and label my incoming mail, most of my friends and family have all their messages in a giant unfiltered inbox.

Last year, we launched Priority Inbox to automatically sort incoming email and help you focus on the messages that matter most. Today, we’re launching a complementary feature in Gmail Labs called Smart Labels, which helps you classify and organize your email. Once you turn it on from the Labs tab in Settings, Smart Labels automatically categorizes incoming Bulk, Notification and Forum messages, and labels them as such. “Bulk” mail includes any kind of mass mailing (such as newsletters and promotional email) and gets filtered out of your inbox by default (where you can easily read it later), “Notifications” are messages sent to you directly (like account statements and receipts), and email from group mailing lists gets labeled as “Forums.”

If you already use filters and labels to organize your mail, you may find that you can replace your existing filters with Smart Labels. If you’re picky like me and still want to hold on to your current organization system, Smart Labels play nice with other labels and filters too. On the Filters tab under Settings, you’ll find that these filters can be edited just like any others. From there, you can also edit your existing filters to avoid having them Smart Labeled or change whether mail in a Smart Label skips your inbox (which you can also do by just clicking on the label, then selecting or unselecting the checkbox in the top right corner).

Labs in Gmail are a great testing ground for experimental features, and we hope Smart Labels help you more effortlessly get through your inbox. If you notice a message that was automatically labeled incorrectly and want to help us troubleshoot, you can report miscategorizations from the drop down menu on each message (in doing so, you’ll donate the full message to our engineers so that we can improve the feature). Give it a try and send us feedback on how we can make it work better for you!

via feedproxy.google.com

This could be interesting. One day they’ll use Bayesian filters and we won’t even have to set up filters of our own. One day.

Jeremy Wagstaff: Technology Shapes Revolution – WSJ.com

By | November 22, 2011
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Was social media the driving force behind the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt? Commentators in the West are divided. Some insist that Hosni Mubarak would never have fallen without Facebook and Twitter. To which others respond that these tools promote only weak forms of organization and were incidental to the protests gaining momentum. The question is of more than academic interest to those either trying to predict when the next regime fall will come or, perhaps, trying to help it along.

via online.wsj.com

An oped piece I wrote for the Journal. I’ll post my original text later.

“One Technician Unplugged The Estonian Internet”

By | November 22, 2011
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In all the hoo-ha about the Arab Revolutions some interesting WikiLeaks cables seem to be slipping through the net. Like this one from 2008 about Estonia’s view of the cyberattack on Georgia. Estonia had learned some tough lessons from Russia’s cyberattack on its defenses the previous year, so was quick to send cyber-defense experts to “help stave off cyber-attacks emanating in Russia”, according to the Baltic Times at the time.

The cable, dated Sept 22 2008, reports on meetings with Estonian officials on both the lessons from its own experience and some candid commentary on Georgia’s preparedness and response. Here are some of the points:

  • Russia’s attack on Georgia was a combination of physical and Internet attack. “[Hillar] Aarelaid [Director of CERT-Estonia] recapped the profile of the cyber attacks on Georgia: the country’s internet satellite or microwave links which could not be shut down (inside Russia) were simply bombed (in southern Georgia).”
  • Russia seemed to have learned some lessons from the Estonia attack, suggesting that Estonia was a sort of dry-run: “the attacks on Georgia were more sophisticated than those against Estonia, and did not repeat the same mistakes. For example, in 2007, the ‘zombie-bots’ flooded Estonian cyberspace with identical messages that were more easily filtered. The August 2008 attacks on Georgia did not carry such a message.”
  • That said, Georgia itself learned some lessons, Aarelaid was quoted as saying. While it failed to keep “archives of collected network flow data, which would have provided material for forensic analysis of the attacks,” the country “wisely did not waste time defending GOG (Government of Georgia) websites, he said, but simply hosted them on Estonian, U.S. and public-domain websites until the attack was over.” This “could not have been taken without the lessons learned from the 2007 attacks against Estonia.”
  • Estonia felt it got off lightly, in that it would have made more sense to have tried to trigger a bank-run. (This is not as clear as it could be). “Aarelaid felt that another cyber attack on Estonia ‘…won’t happen again the same way…’ but could be triggered by nothing more than rumors. For example, what could have turned into a run on the banks in Estonia during the brief November 2007 panic over a rumored currency devaluation was averted by luck. Money transfers into dollars spiked, he explained, but since most Estonians bank online, these transfers did not deplete banks’ actual cash reserves.” I take this to mean that if people had actually demanded cash, rather than merely transfered their money into another currency online, then it could have had far more damaging effects on the Estonian banking system.
  • Finally, the debate within Estonia focused on clarifying “who has the authority, for example, to unplug Estonia from the internet. In the case of the 2007 attacks, XXXXXXXXXXXX noted, it was simply one technician who decided on his own this was the best response to the growing volume of attacks.”

My War On ATM Spam and Other Annoyances

By | November 22, 2011
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By Jeremy Wagstaff

(This is a copy of my weekly syndicated column)

You really don’t need to thank me, but I think you should know that for the past 10 years I’ve been fighting a lonely battle on your behalf. I’ve been taking on mighty corporations to rid the world of spam.

Not the spam you’re familiar with. Email spam is still around, it’s just not in your inbox, for the most part. Filters do a great job of keeping it out.

I’m talking about more serious things, like eye spam, cabin spam, hand spam,  counter spam and now, my most recent campaign, ATM spam.

Now there’s a possibility you might not have heard of these terms. Mainly because I made most of them up. But you’ll surely have experienced their nefarious effects.

Eye spam is when something is put in front of your face and you can’t escape from it. Like ads for other movies on DVDs or in cinemas that you can’t skip. Cabin spam is when flight attendants wake you from your post-prandial or takeoff slumber to remind you that you’re flying their airline, they hope you have a pleasant flight and there’s lots of duty free rubbish you wouldn’t otherwise consider buying wending its way down the aisle right now.

Then there’s hand-spam: handouts on sidewalks that you have to swerve into oncoming pedestrian traffic to avoid. Counter spam is when you buy something and the assistant tries to sell you something else as well. “Would you like a limited edition pickled Easter Bunny with radioactive ears with that?”

My rearguard action against this is to say “if it’s free. If it’s not, then you have given me pause for thought. Is my purchase really necessary, if you feel it necessary to offer me more? Is it a good deal for me? No, I think I’ll cancel the whole transaction, so you and your bosses may consider the time you’re costing me by trying to offload stuff on me I didn’t expressly ask for.” And then I walk out of the shop, shoeless, shirtless, or hungry, depending on what I was trying to buy, but with that warm feeling that comes from feeling that I stuck it to the man. Or one of his minions, anyway.

And now, ATM spam. In recent months I’ve noticed my bank will fire a message at me when I’m conducting my automated cash machine business offering some sort of credit card, or car, or complex derivative, I’m not sure what. I’ve noticed that this happens after I’ve ordered my cash, but that the cash won’t start churning inside the machine until I’ve responded to this spam message.

Only when I hit the “no” button does the machine start doing its thing. This drives me nuts because once I’ve entered the details of my ATM transaction I am usually reaching for my wallet ready to catch the notes before they fly around the vestibule or that suspicious looking granny at the next machine makes a grab for them. So to look back at the machine and see this dumb spam message sitting there and no cash irks me no end.

My short-term solution to this is to look deep into the CCTV lens and utter obscenities, but I have of late realized this may not improve my creditworthiness. Neither has it stopped the spam messages.

So I took it to the next person up the chain, a bank staff member standing nearby called Keith. “Not only is this deeply irritating,” I told him, “but it’s a security risk.” He nodded sagely. I suspect my reputation may have preceded me. I won a small victory against this particular bank a few years back when I confided in them that the message that appeared on the screen after customers log out of their Internet banking service—“You’ve logged out but you haven’t logged off”, accompanied by a picture of some palm trees and an ad for some holiday service—may confuse and alarm users rather than help them. Eventually the bank agreed to pull the ad.

So I was hoping a discreet word with Keith would do the trick. Is there no way, I said, for users to opt out of these messages? And I told him about my security fears, pointing discreetly to the elderly lady who was now wielding her Zimmer frame menacingly at the door. Keith, whose title, it turns out, is First Impression Officer, said he’d look into it.

So I’m hopeful I will have won another small battle on behalf of us consumers. Yes I know I may sound somewhat eccentric, but that’s what they want us to think. My rule of thumb is this: If you want to take up my time trying to sell me something because you know I can’t escape, then you should pay for it—the product or my time, take your pick.

Now, while I’ve got your attention, can I interest you in some of those Easter bunny things? They’re actually very good.