Clickstream

Simple File delivery to Friends

When you can't use IM file transfer, ftp or email to get a file to a friend: Dropload You sign up, leave the file, and your friend gets 48 hours to retrieve it. If you trust Andre Torrez with your email address, that is. He says the email addresses won't be collected or used, and you know his information so it seems like a fair trade. If you use it consider making a contribution. It's free only so far as he has the resources to make it free.

Posted by Mark Friday, September 12, 2003 9:18:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

The Longest B-flat Ever

The Chandra X-ray observatory was used to detect sound waves emanating from a large black hole, and the note has been sounding for 2.5 billion years. Once again, the Eastern religions got a cosmological theory right. The Om is just a little deeper than we can vocalize.

Posted by Mark Thursday, September 11, 2003 5:36:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

The Google Calculator

I just discovered that Google has a calculator with which you can have fun mucking around. I did not know that they already indexed the answer to the Ultimate Question Via Kottke

Posted by Mark 12:32:00 AM | permalink | (0) comments

Blogger Pro Goes Free

I can understand Google making Blogger Pro free but I do find it annoying to pay for something and then have it turned loose for free after I paid. Given the entrance of Yahoo and others into the blog market, I suppose the natural migration will be to free at the low end, and for-pay for the more flexible and complex tools, although it might go as far as the browser market where they're all free. I use Blogger Pro for this site, but I've been looking at alternatives because of reliability and performance problems. If I switch to a server-based product I'll probably go with movable Type, otherwise it will likely be Radio.

Posted by Mark Wednesday, September 10, 2003 11:41:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

Google Has Matured

First, there was googling: search a person's name to find out whether they were scary freaks of nice maladjusted suburbanites with all their perversions safely hidden under a nice veneer. Now there's counter-googling, where marketing firms use Google to search out information on people in order to either target them for advertising, or customize services. According to the article, blogs are a particularly juicy source of personal information that is much more detailed than any internal marketing database.

On the marketer's side of things, TRENDWATCHING.COM sees a massive opportunity for COUNTER-GOOGLING experts; specialized companies who'll be Googling customers non-stop on behalf of 1:1 marketing-prone corporations like airlines, banks, hotels, e-tailers and car manufacturers. A logical extension for direct marketing companies, who until now have only collect broad socio-demographic data.

How to get started? Ask your sales department for a list of 25 recent first-time customers (names and addresses), start COUNTER-GOOGLING, and be amazed at what you'll find, learn and dream up! Repeat for 25 long-time clients. Then, reap profits ;-)

I can't explain why, but I've always had a sort of distaste for digging up personal information on people and selling it to all comers, even as I helped some of the biggest data syndicators build systems that made it possible. Worse, I'm sure that this information will eventually be absorbed into all government databases popping up everywhere [see earlier posts].

Counter-googling proves one thing at least: Google has matured as a technology. It may now be used for evil as well as good.

Posted by Mark Tuesday, September 09, 2003 6:27:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

Oracle is Unbreakable, Just Not Secure

I've been tired of the Oracle "unbreakable" marketing campaign for some time. First it meant you wouldn't lose data, than that the database wouldn't go down, then that it was secure. Well, you can lose data if you don't configure it right, it does go down from time to time - even in a well-managed clustered environment, and now these security alerts.

What's funny about this marketing campaign is that it hasn't been true for years. The security angle was written up more than a year ago. Other aspects even earlier. The good side for Oracle is that the campaign may actually affect buying decisions, because they've been keeping it up. It's sort of like IBM's campaigning that DB2 is better for data warehousing, or Microsoft claiming that "this Windows release is the most secure ever" which in their case might be true each time they release a new version.

Still, it's time Oracle stopped this marketing nonsense and came up with a new campaign. The product is good, but it's breakable. Here's a thought: they could simplify their product pricing model so it doesn't appear that they're out to rape you every time you're up for a contract renewal. If they did that they'd actually have something to talk about.

Posted by Mark Monday, September 08, 2003 10:49:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

SCO's Development Roadmap to Nowhere

I don't know why SCO is bothering with announcements at the SCO Forum about their new product roadmap. I've seen the same press release in three different trade rags touting their "refurbishing", as their CEO puts it, of Unix. After alienating the entire industry and much of their potential future customer base, they think a roadmap for Unix development will attract new customers?

I doubt anyone could be that stupid, which is why this sounds a lot like trying to keep up the appearance of being a real business in order to keep the stock up and to prop up a weak legal offense. Consider the large number of ex-SCO developers out there. It's kind of hard to develop an operating system without people to do the work, and more are leaving every day because SCO has become a resume stain nobody with any smarts wants to be associated with.

Consider also the number of ISVs leaving the SCO fold versus those moving toward SCO. Fewer ISVs means fewer applications ported, which means less viability as a server platform, which means fewer customers, which means the OS is a dead end.

Imagine if SCO were to magically win their lawsuits: what company would turn to SCO for software when they've already showed that they have no qualms about suing their customer base? This would be a boon to Unix vendors who are hurting now because Linux and Windows on Intel boxes have been eating their sales from the bottom, which is unfortunately where the volume comes from to sustain their chip development if they don't use Intel/compatible chips.

And then there's all that stock that is being dumped by the executives. Every quarterly filing reveals the massive cashing-in that's going on. Makes one wonder when the SEC will start investigating...

Posted by Mark Friday, September 05, 2003 10:14:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

MIT Paper Proves I'm Right

In this post I argued that a terrorist group could actually subvert the TSA's passenger screening program, making our current airport security not only miserable, but also less safe than before the TSA was brought into existence. Some nice folks at MIT proved mathematically that I was right in this paper on defeating airport security, which analyzes a nearly identical approach. Too bad we've already spent untold billions on making our passenger screening less secure.

Posted by Mark Tuesday, August 26, 2003 1:58:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

DHS Has a Timeshare to Sell You

To add insult to the whole CAPPS II mess is the following:

Homeland Security gave Galileo a huge financial incentive to collaborate. By creating dossiers on every member of the flying public, Galileo can sell, trade or use the information contained within for marketing purposes. Galileo's parent is Cendant, a company that sells everything from travel to insurance. The information in your travel dossier would help them turn you into a first-rate marketing victim.

In other words, in order to get an airline reservation system to work with them, DHS is going to let Cendant take what is supposedly national security data and use it for marketing. Imagine: Cendant could flag likely timeshare purchasers, detain them at the airport, and hard-sell them timeshares at their destinations. The opportunities are limitless! If you're Cendant, that is.

Posted by Mark 1:35:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

CAPPS Is Back and Bigger Than Ever

The Department of Homeland Security has started testing CAPPS II again. A new and improved data warehouse for citizen surveillance:

To the Department of Homeland Security, you are no longer an American, you are a potential terrorist. Soon, anyone who books a flight through the Galileo Computerized Reservation System will have a nice fat file opened-up on them. In another test of a new Orwellian airline security program by the Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration, Galileo will be facilitating background checks on anyone using their system.

The basic idea behind CAPPS and the new and improved CAPPS is to evaluate each traveler based on data collected from public and private databases and decided whether to let people fly. The problem with this system, as with all the others I've blogged is the quality of the data and the serious consequences of the bad data.
The Galileo airline reservation system is the only participant at this point. The easiest way to avoid this latest in a series of bad ideas from the DHS is to boycott Delta airlines. There was a boycott during the original CAPPS, mostly by business travelers who don't need the extra hassle of being treated as potential terrorists.

Posted by Mark Monday, August 25, 2003 12:25:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

Quiet News Week

It's been a quiet news week for the DW/DSS/BI market. More happening in the general IT market, other than a few minor developments in the SCO vs. the rest of the world battle. With all the companies and governments weighing in against them and the execs already having cashed out a pile of stock (see earlier post) it's likely that this will eventually drift away and die its deserved death. Software company acquisitions are generally dull ends to companies being pressured out of the market. In Oregon the news is s the ongoing fight of Open Source advocates vs. lobbyists over the state sending money and jobs out of state. The biggest IT news was yet another security flaw in the most secure Windows yet.

The developing stories about the federal uses and abuses of citizen data are more interesting. Federal agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, DHS) have all been purchasing personal and consumer data from data syndicators at an alarming rate. Some of the abuses, and more important, the potential for abuse, are entering the public awareness. I've seen some stories popping up, and I know of a few more in the works over the next month.

The potential for abuse is the biggest worry, closely followed by the fear of consequences over bad data. The agencies are buying commercial data designed for uses like credit reporting, skip tracing and marketing. These databases have error rates ranging from 1% to 10%. Take three databases with an average rate of 3%, add in errors created because the data was never designed for easy integration with other data sources, and you have a large, expensive, worthless database that can result in wrongful jailing with no access to attorneys, rather than a slight increase in junk mail or a problem getting a loan.

The worry over the consequences, the lack of controls and the lack of visibility into the use of these systems has already reached several members of congress who have introduced or are introducing legislation to halt or control law enforcement use of the databases. The huge increase in security spending for a data-based silver bullet will be a big story this year. If this administration has its way, the story will stay buried and eventually get swept under the rug.

Posted by Mark Monday, August 18, 2003 10:05:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments