August 22, 2004
More holiday here

So I'll be mostly off line for another week due to a power sight seeing trip to Berlin. Also comments will remain offline while I'm gone.

Posted by Claus at 01:45 AM
August 20, 2004
Lies, Politics, and the Michael Moore backlash

Predictably, Fahrenheit 9/11 has taken a lot of fire because it is partisan propaganda. Michael Moore is being described as a money grabbing, left wing liar. I don't like propaganda in any way shape or form, so while I think George W. Bush is the worst president in my lifetime (possibly more corrupt than the other candidate Nixon, certainly more incompetent) I'm not particularly happy that the fight against Bush has to be fought like this. I'm happy we don't have completely frivolous political messages dominating elections in Denmark.
Still, when you look at a backlash like this and compare F9/11 to some of the political advertising that is allowed to air, Moore is a model for balanced, politically centered messages. Lisa Rein points to the story of how an attack ad, calling John Kerry's decorated Vietnam history bogus is basically complete fiction by a right wing group. The ad shows testimonials by people who say they served with Kerry and that his war record wasn't that great after all, but on closer inspection it turns out that none of the people really did serve with Kerry at all. The story was debunked on The Daily Show. Rein has the clip.
Obviously Bush has deniability wrt. to this group; he didn't instruct them to lie, but the lie serves his purpose so its not like he's complaining either. In another clip, linked to here, Bill Clinton relates the story of how the same group called white voters during the 2000 republican primaries to let people know that John McCain had a black child. The idea was to appeal to the inner racist of the voters of course, but it just turns your stomach that this kind of thing is allowed to go on. And btw. that black child was a girl adopted from Bangladesh, so not that it matters, but they even got their racial stereotypes wrong.
Michael Moores propaganda is pretty harsh, but I think it is pretty consistent that the outright lies and the pure hate ads are all right wing. Why would any reasonable person vote for a party that, if not exactly condones, then half silently accepts the benefits of this kind of shameful campaigning.

Posted by Claus at 02:35 AM
Begyndt at se: K Street

Man kan stadig nå at se det meste af K Street på svensk TV (mandag eller tirsdag aften), Steven Soderbergh og George Clooneys politiske dogme TV serie der i autentiske Washington omgivelser skildrer det politiske livs hverdag. Rollelisten er en besynderlig men effektiv blanding af rigtige politikere og politiske mennesker, som spiller sig selv, og så skuespiller der interagerer med de virkelige politikere, og hvad mere er: Seriens fiktion udspiller sig på baggrunde af tidens virkelige politiske hændelser. Eksempelvis indgår det i fiktionen at den virkelige spindoktor James Carville tager til en debat i demokraternes primærvalg for at bakke kandidaten Howard Dean op.
Carville er den mest centrale og mest dynamiske af seriens realpersoner. Han var med til at få Clinton valgt i 1992 - hvilket man senere kunne følge i dokumentaren The War Room - og på mange måder ser serien faktisk ud som et forsøg på at lave en fiktion der ligner The War Room.
Carville's forberedelse af Dean før debatten indgår i fiktionen og med snedig klipning får man Carville og fiktionsfiguren Tommy Flanagan (spillet af John Slattery) til at medvirke som tilskuere for at evaluere hvad Dean har fået ud af forberedelserne. Manuskriptet til serien anvender så elegant retroaktiv kontinuitet til at plante en fiktiv forhistorie for virkelige hændelser, sådan at seriens fiktion elegant fungerer som oplæg for egentlige dokumentarklip. Et elegant eksempel er da Carville i fiktionen planter en vits om republikaneren Trent Lott hos Dean, som Dean faktisk brugte i den rigtige debat. Serien er krævende at se for en dansk/svensk seer, for man skal naturligvis have fulgt ganske nøje med i den amerikanske politiske infight for at kunne følge de mange referencer og person forbindelser som politik består af.
Måske var den også for krævende for et amerikansk publikum. Der blev ihvertfald kun lavet i alt 10 episoder, og serien blev ikke forlænget efter denne første halvsæson.

Serien passer fortrinligt ind i det spor af næsten virkelige politiske fiktioner som har været på mode i USA ihvertfald siden den fremragende Primary Colors.

Posted by Claus at 12:48 AM
August 19, 2004
Software arts

Jeg går glip af Ars Electronica i år, og desværre også af READ_ME 2004 software arts festival i Århus. Der snakkes jævnt hen alt for meget i software arts, fordi det stadig er nødvendigt at slå folk oven i hovedet og sige DET ER KUNST!!! når en menneskelig frembringelse ikke har en naturligt æstetisk dimension, men på den måde minder software kunst jo bare om moderne kunst i øvrigt som den leves i den moderne kunstinstitution.
Men som jeg muligvis aldrig fik postet så ligger der også i den nye tekniske udfordring, at få noget ud af software, en mulighed for at genopfinde kunsteren som suveræn håndværker i et nyt felt hvor håndværket virkelig kan blive opdaget for allerførste gang og på den måde transcendere det håndværksmæssige og virkelig revolutionere vores idé om hvad æstetiske frembringelser kan være. Og ud af den opdagelse kommer kunsten så af sig selv i de heldige tilfælde hvor det faktisk er lykkedes at lave noget der overbeviser. På Ars Electronica var det måske 5 udstillede værker der ikke bare var opdaterede multimediale præsentationer som de har været lanceret som "ny kunst" siden 80erne. Derudover en hel del forsøg på at sanse publikum som del af udstillingen via forskellige aktive penne, kameraer og andet - men med meget få vellykkede eksempler.

Posted by Claus at 09:17 PM
Real life shopping in Minority Report nightmare

Remember the scene from Minority Report where Tom Cruise is on the run through a shopping mall, and all the signs interact with him because they can biosense his identity? It is a very effective envisioning of an intrusive database society of the future.
While the personal identification is some time off, you can get pretty close even today with Human Locator. A camera/software combination picks out the body shapes and positions of people in front of e.g. a store window and integrates with computer generated window displays so they can react to street movement outside:

The Human Locator analyses a camera feed in real time, sending detailed information about people's location, size, and movements. This data is then used as input to control projections, video, graphic animations, and sound.

Et Just tip

Posted by Claus at 02:39 PM
August 18, 2004
Danmarks mest humorforladte virksomhed: Kunde & Co

[UPDATE: Justeren kommenterer - se også nedenfor]

Og efter 9 måneders åbningstid løb Styrelizeren for første gang ind i en totalt humorforladt udbyder af et website. Og det var ikke engang et interessant sted, men istedet det røvsyge website for Kunde & Co. Som om det var af hensyn til deres lamme branding religion styrelizeren er opfundet. Det tog 9 måneder før der var nogen der kom på den idé. Men ringet op det blev jeg mandag formiddag:

"Er du klar over at det I gør er ulovligt! I må ikke sådan bruge vores billeder på jeres site."
Hvorfor spørger den slags folk aldrig pænt først?
Det fremgik naturligvis at de i virkeligheden bare var bange for at at den styrelizede udgave skulle blive forvekslet med den rigtige. Jeg gjorde opmærksom på at vi omhyggeligt sætter et Lodret.dk banner øverst for at undgå den risiko.
"Der er ikke noget banner på siden her!".
Nå, for søren den var værre. "Kan du ikke sende mig et skærmdump, så jeg kan se hvad der er galt"
Skærmdump fremkom - med banner.

Efter således at være overbevist om virksomhedens cluelessness i webretning var der jo ikke andet for end at lave en blokliste, sådan at Kunde ser sådan her ud. Så nu sover de sikkert roligt om natten hos Kunde, deres firmareligion er intakt. I skrivende stund kan man dog stadig pornolize Kunde & Co's site (da jeg gjorde det blev det istedet hjemmeside for virksomheden Kneppe og Co), ligesom man stadig kan oversætte det til hollandsk.

[UPDATE: Justeren kommenterer og gør, korrekt, opmærksom på at der intet er man kan gøre for at forhindre at man bliver kørt gennem en service som styrelizeren. Lige meget hvor mange bloklister vi laver vil der være andre ressourcer der peger på de samme data og vi kan aldrig få blokket dem allesammen]

Posted by Claus at 06:46 PM
I've been waiting for this for a looong time

Such an obvious concept that I and everyone else who is truly geeky thought of it several years ago.

Pick-and-Drop is an extended concept of the commonly used drag-and-drop. With this technique, a user picks up an object on one computer display with a stylus, then drop it on a (possibly different) computer display. For example, a user can select or create a text on one's own PDA and pick-and-drop it at the desired location on the whiteboard. From the implementation point of view, the data is transferred through the network, but from the user-interface point of view, this technique allows a user to pick up digital data as if it were a physical object.

Not that hard to implement probably - a wacom tablet and some UI plumbing should work the magic.

Some implementation details here.

Posted by Claus at 06:09 PM
August 06, 2004
FCC makes absurd wiretap decision

The FCC has made an unenforceable decision that VOIP providers must support wiretaps. What that amounts to is a decision to force people to set up more VPN's and use P2P voice messaging over VPN whenever they feel a need for privacy.
There is absolutely nothing that any broadband provider or VOIP provider can do to stop people from communication exclusively over secure channels as long as they have control over both endpoints of the conversation. All this does is hinder the adoption of VOIP because there'll be a lingering suspicion about wiretapping if you use a centralized VOIP service. If you're using a pure peer to peer voice messaging application you'll be completely safe.
Bad news for VOIP and voice telephony pricing. Completely inconsequential news for anti-terrorism, theft prevention or any other reason to make the decision in the first place.
All the reasons Cory Doctorow gave for why DRM does not work applies here as well. The decision won't even prevent "the average user" from using secure, untappable connections. The software to set up secure channels and consequently the software required to set up secure voice communication is readliy available from a large number of places and will probably be put together in standard distributions if commercial vendors of VOIP are forced not to offer truly secure communication.

Posted by Claus at 03:40 PM
August 05, 2004
Og dagens dårlige oversættelse

Tekstning på TV3:

Engelsk:
It's like getting a girl into bed when she's plastered
Dansk:
Det er som at have sex med en pige der har gips på

Det kunne have været det det betød - men det er det bare ikke...

Posted by Claus at 09:50 PM
August 04, 2004
no comments for a couple of days

I've had to disable comments for a couple of days because of intense comment spamming. While I could handle it with my one-click deletion hack , it's still not fun to do - and I still don't like MT blacklist very much but would prefer an auditing scheme. Until I get around to making one (or ditch MT completely in favour of a homespun solution) comments are off. It shouldn't take too long.

Another solution I've been thinking of as an augmentation is to integrate the comment script with some client side javascript (a signing process) to foil automated attacks. There's a limit to how hard you can spam ff you have to actually use a browser to do it.

My current favourite idea for that would be to generate a nonce server side. Include that in the page with the comment form and use client side javascript to generate an md5 signature of the command and nonce. The comment script would then check the signature to authenticate the comment was generated in a browser.
That would foil any automated attack unless the attacker was intent on working my blog in particular and if that was the case we would have an arms race that was even fun to participate in.

Posted by Claus at 10:51 AM
Forstadsminister Henriette Kjær

Det er smukt at det bliver minimalstats-Anders der for første gang laver et superministerium for de der kan klare sig selv. Henriette Kjær, den nye minister for familie- og forbrugeranliggender burde vel istedet have heddet "minister for carporte, elværktøj, spisekøkkener og andre parcelhusanliggender". Henriette skal hjælpe folk med at klage over Føtex og alt det genmad, hjælpe Patrick med at skifte navn til Jeanette og hjælpe Birgitte med at få forældreretten til børnene når Patrick har skiftet navn til Jeanette. Klagerne over skolen, fartbøderne og skatten bliver så vidt jeg forstår hvor de er.

Posted by Claus at 08:41 AM