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April 19, 2003
Richard Jowsey has a new Bayesian spam filter service in beta. It’s free for now (“and to worthy causes forever”) and will be $39/year after that. Unlike Popfile, which I continue to find an astoundingly good filter, Richard’s service doesn’t run on your machine but on his servers. I haven’t tried it.
Richard’s site has a useful list of links to more info about bayesian anti-spamming.
Touchgraph has a cool applet that dynamically visualizes a web of related nodes. It’s cool but it feels like I’ve seen it before. Valids Krebs? The hyperbolic map of “Alice in Wonderland”? Apple’s Hot Sauce or whatever it was called? Well, I’m sure you’ll remind me of what my current brain freeze is keeping me from remembering.
(Thanks Dan O’Neill for the link.)
The Happy Tutor blogs that one of the sponsors of the Digital Genres event being organized by Alex Golub has objected to one of the twenty aphorisms that constitute the Tutor’s talk, Bound, Beaten and Branded
On Our Noble Trade. The aphorism classifies the branding of children as a type of pedophilia:
You peep timidly from your window. A pedophile is loose in your neighborhood? Worse: He is loose in your home. The pedophile knows your children. They wear his logo on their shirts, their shoes, their caps. They plead for his name on their underwear. They fall asleep hugging his mascot. They croon his name in the shower. They dream his face in their sleep.
Now, the Happy Tutor is one of the least reliable of narrators, a master of rhetoric and satire in service of a passionate argument over the nature of truth. (He is certain to disagree with this characterization). He’s also quite brilliant and funny and serious. So, I don’t know what’s really going on. But I do suggest you read his paper, twenty slaps to wake us up to how deeply branded we all are.
In responding to my response to his entry on digital ID. AKMA puts the issue quite succinctly:
I’m concerned about what sort of cyborg, or post-human, or what-term-you-will I become when my sense of who I am depends less and less on my carnality, and more and more on otherwise-invisible characteristics.
Great way of putting one of the truly central questions.
(FWIW, AKMA is far more positively enthusiastic about digID than I am.)
April 18, 2003
Common Dreams has published a clear, concise, straightforward statement by Howard Dean about what’s wrong with The Bush Doctrine. It may not be anything you haven’t heard before, but it’s not something you’ve heard any of the plausible presidential candidates say. And that matters.
An excerpt:
Our nation should be viewed as a moral and just power, a power that seeks to do good, one that has led by example and with a spirit of generosity, and one that works with the world community in advancing the ideals of human dignity and rule of law across the globe.
The people of this country must understand that this Administration has a far different concept of the role of America in the world. This concept involves imposing our will on sovereign nations. This concept involves dismantling the multilateral institutions that we have spent decades building. And this concept involves distorting the rule of law to suit their narrow purposes. When did we become a nation of fear and anxiety when we were once known the world around as a land of hope and liberty?
If your answer to his last question is “On September 11,” you’re blaming the terrorists for our reaction to their terrorism. As the Rev. Jackson says: Keep hope alive.
April 17, 2003
I’ll be on a 6am flight to Chicago on Friday morning, returning at midnight. So, it looks like I won’t be blogging until Saturday.
See you soon…
Slate has an interesting article on a lewd ad for Puma sneakers that’s been circulating. Is it a parody or a devious plan by Puma? And what should Puma’s reaction have been?
As Doc may have once said: Markets are conversations. And, yeah, it does seem to matter what the conversation is about.
Yahoo has launched a product finder that looks like it’s intended to compete with Google’s Froogle. I haven’t played with it much, but at a quick glance it looks useful.
Peter Kaminski has a good idea: the Social Software Alliance is a place where ideas for standards for “social software” can be proposed, kicked around, whupped into shape and promoted even before they are ready to be submitted somewhere official. Heck, maybe even some people will start adopting worthy ones ad-hockily.
There’s a wiki set up here.
Akma‘s being all smart again. He’s drawing a connection between digital ID and the self we identify as who we are.
That’s a connection I’ve been reluctant to make, but AKMA asks about it in a compelling way. AKMA reflects on the aspects of us that we count as standing for ourselves: Face, yes. Fingerprints, a little. DNA, no way. AKMA isn’t denying that DNA is a unique, reliable identifier (how else are we going to be able to tell all those Saddams apart?), only that we feel the connection between our DNA and who we are as individuals to be remote. (He puts this better than I’m summarizing it.)
So, since I keep rejecting anti-digID arguments that say “I am not a number!”, I initially didn’t warm to AKMA’s line of thought. After all, a digID is like a passport. A passport declares who I am, but I don’t feel like it represents anything important about who I am as a person. The photo’s not even any good. But that’s not an objection to passports. (Hey. “Passport” might make a good name for a product in that space!)
But I find AKMA’s questions hard to ignore. He writes:
So this is what concerns me: if our identities become more and more remote from what we understand actually to be us, how does that change us? Do we want to set those changes in motion simply in order to use eBay and Amazon with more confidence, or perhaps to file taxes and vote online?
Answering these questions requires anticipating what life with digID’s will be like. To what extent will it be invisible, like our DNA? To what extent will it become our public face? To what extent will it require us to explicitly construct a variety of faces? Or will those faces just be sets of preferences that none but machines doth see? Will the preferred schemes that have users controlling their IDs require us to play with ourselves endlessly, tuning multiple personalities for every different class of entity with which we interact on the Internet? In short, to what extent will digital IDs be less like social security numbers and more like personae? It makes a big difference, albeit not to the task for which digID is explicitly designed. It “only” makes a difference to the how of our who on the Net.
(Note: I am the owner of the domain name “proxyself.com,” which I am willing to sell at an inflated price. Only naive buyers need apply.)
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