The Innocent Shall Suffer… BIG TIME

Posted on February 1, 2007

Hot off the presses: Boston flips out over electronic lights planted to promote upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, arrests two.

As a die hard ATHF fan, I find the fact that the Mooninites, Ignignokt and Err, have managed to throw a real life city into a panic terribly amusing. I can’t think of anything that would please them more. (That’s Ignignokt up there, in case you were wondering with your puny Earth brain.)

Bostonians are just lucky they didn’t break out the Quad Laser! 

UPDATE (2PM): The two guys who got arrested just got out on bail, and the first thing they did was hold what may be the funniest press conference ever:

"I feel like my hair is pretty perfect but altogether I want to redirect this to the haircuts of the ’70s," Berdovsky said, ignoring reporters’ shouts.

"I really like the one where the hair curls around to the back," Stevens replied.

"Oh yeah, that one’s so hot," Berdovsky then responded…

When asked whether they were afraid their hair might be cut if they are sent to prison, Berdovsky stopped his rant and answered, "Whatever happens I feel that my hair is safe at the moment."

Here’s the video:

So. Awesome.

JWM Turns Five

Posted on January 30, 2007

Probably should have noted this at the time, but a couple of weeks ago this blog turned five years old.

Hard to believe!

Here’s my first post. What do you think?  Was I right or was I right?

PS: If you want to get the highlights of the last five years without trudging through every post, check out the Best of Just Well Mixed archive — it’s five years’ worth of JWM goodness in a few dozen posts. 

Add Instant Translation Into Firefox

Posted on January 30, 2007

I’ve written before about how Firefox’s search box (which lets you plug in search engines for thousands of sites) is really, really cool. But here’s something that makes it even cooler.

Did you know you could use it as a universal translator?

It’s true. Among the many free plugins for the Firefox search box offered by The Mycroft Project, you can find plugins that hook it up to both Altavista’s Babelfish translator and Google’s Translate service:

• Get Altavista Babelfish plugins
• Get Google Translate plugins

With these, you can translate to and from English into most major languages. This is insanely useful for those times you see a snippet of text in another language on a site, and wonder what it means:

Now you can just paste it in the search box and get an instant translation. It’s not quite a universal translator (good luck getting automated translation into, say, Urdu), but it’s a step in the right direction!

Be Careful What You Promise

Posted on January 30, 2007

On May 30 of last year, I wrote a post titled "The Worst Thing About PHP" in which I decried the sorry organization of PHP’s documentation.

Many commenters said that the problem would soon be fixed, thanks to a new approach to documentation called "Livedocs":

Livedocs on the long run is also supposed to help you select just the extensions you need, and hide all others, so you can browse, search in and explore the functionality you are interested in. Cool isn’t it?

Philip Olson, a student who had been sponsored under Google’s Summer of Code project to work on Livedocs, also commented:

[D]on’t worry, Livedocs will be out before Vista and that’s a promise 😉

OK. Well, Windows Vista officially launched to consumers at midnight last night.  And how does the PHP documentation look this morning?

Sigh.

“Regional Nuclear War” Could Be Not So Regional After All

Posted on January 29, 2007

Back in the 1980s, a group of scientists (led by Carl Sagan) made news when they announced the discovery of a theretofore unknown danger posed by nuclear weapons: "nuclear winter", massive global cooling that would ensue after thousands of nuclear detonations choked the atmosphere with dust and soot. Their findings starkly illustrated the danger the Cold War arms race posed, not just to the powers participating, but to all humanity.

Then, of course, the Berlin Wall fell, the U.S. and Russia made nice and the danger of nuclear winter disappeared forever. Right?

Maybe not. On his blog over at Weather Underground, climate scientist Dr. Jeff Masters is reporting on a new study that indicates that it might take a whole lot less to trigger nuclear winter than we used to think.

The Sagan study was predicated on a full scale nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In such a war, tens of thousands of nuclear weapons would have been exchanged in a matter of hours. That scenario isn’t plausible anymore; what is plausible, though, is a so-called "regional nuclear war" in which two non-superpower nuclear powers hit each other with a smaller but significant number of weapons, on the order of 10-100 each. The obvious case study for such a war would be if the long-simmering conflict between India and Pakistan went nuclear: India is estimated to have 30-90 small nuclear warheads, with Pakistan’s arsenal estimated at 25-50.

Clearly, it would be a tragedy beyond imagining for the people who live in India and Pakistan if those countries fired their nukes at each other. But should the rest of the world be afraid too? That was the question that was posed in the study "Climatic consequences of regional nuclear conflicts", conducted by scientists from Rutgers, the University of Colorado, and UCLA. In that study, the scientists took a sophisticated climate model and watched what happened after 100 Hiroshima-size bombs — roughly the complete nuclear arsenals of Pakistan and India — went off, with the explosions all going off within a single region of the globe.

The results are sobering:

The effects of the smoke cloud on surface temperature are large. A global average surface cooling of –1.25 C persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still –0.5 C. The temperature changes are largest over land… A cooling of several degrees occurs over large areas of North America and Eurasia, including most of the grain-growing regions. As in the case with nuclear winter calculations, large climatic effects would occur in regions far removed from the target areas or the countries involved in the conflict.

A drop of -0.5-1.25 degrees Celsius might not sound like much. But it’s enough to cause widespread starvation and social disruption. When the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in 1815 threw so much ash and dirt into the atmosphere that the next year saw a drop in global temperatures of similar scale, the result was christened "the year without a summer" — a year that saw dramatically aberrant cold weather. Crops froze, food shortages in England and France led to riots, and it snowed in Boston in June.

And that was just one year. The study, if accurate, indicates that a regional nuclear war would result in two or three such years in a row, with substantial cooling lingering for a decade.

In other words: bad stuff. And all it would take would be one bad decision in Islamabad or New Delhi — or Pyongyang, or Jerusalem, or Paris, or London, or Washington — to make it a reality for all of us.

Some Things Are Worth Getting Rained On For

Posted on January 23, 2007

On Election Day last year, I spent nearly all day beating the bushes for Jim Webb. I was out knocking on doors until the minute the polls closed. At the time, standing there on the street in the pouring rain clutching soggy bundles of literature with no idea how the election would turn out, I wondered if it was worth it.

Tonight, after seeing the Democratic response to the State of the Union, I can say with some confidence: oh yeah.  It was totally worth it.

In case you missed it, here’s the video:

“Get Over It”

Posted on January 23, 2007

It’s things like this that make one proud to live in Virginia.  Or not…

Some delegates believe an apology [for the state’s role in maintaining the institution of slavery] is unnecessary and a sign of too much political correctness.

“The present commonwealth has nothing to do with slavery,” said Del. Frank D. Hargrove, R-Glen Allen, whose ancestors were  French Huguenots who came to America in search of religious freedom.

How far do these calls for apologies go, wondered Hargrove, a member of the House Rules Committee that could take up McEachin’s resolution as early as Wednesday.

“Are we going to force the Jews to apologize for killing Christ?” Hargrove wondered. “Nobody living today had anything to do with it. It would be far more appropriate in my view to apologize to the Upper Mattaponi and the Pamunkey” Indians for the loss of their lands in eastern Virginia, he said…

“I personally think that our black citizens should get over it,” Hargrove said of slavery, which existed in Virginia from 1619 until the Civil War. “By golly, we’re living in 2007.”

Indeed. 

Easier TypoScript Editing

Posted on January 22, 2007

(I do a lot of work building and maintaining sites using the very fine open source content management system TYPO3 these days. Unfortunately, the documentation for TYPO3 can be a little daunting for beginners. So I’ve decided to start writing up some of my favorite tips and tricks in the hopes that they help newbies get up to speed more easily.) 

One of the things that makes the TYPO3 content management system unique is its TypoScript template system.  TypoScript templates are a powerful way to define the behavior of dynamic parts of your site.

On even a small site, though, you can quickly find your TS templates growing to 100+ lines of TypoScript — enough to make it a gigantic pain to work with through a tiny HTML textarea in the administrative backend, which is the default way you interact with your templates.

And as your templates grow, you will find yourself wishing for some of the nice things you can get in a good external editor — things like syntax highlighting and bracket-matching.

Thankfully, there is a way to work with your TypoScript in an external editor, rather than a textarea. In fact, there are two ways. Let’s dive in and learn how it’s done.

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Once More, With (No) Feeling

Posted on January 21, 2007

Did you see John McCain on Meet the Press this morning? (You can watch it on MSNBC’s site, if you missed it.)

Jesus, but he sounded tired. I mean, frighteningly tired. The whole segment was about Iraq, and McCain seemed to have zero energy to pretend that the "surge" is going to be successful. He knows he has to say it will, of course; the political calculus forces him to. And he has to pretend to be optimistic about Iraq, to believe that it can still be won. But he doesn’t seem to have any enthusiasm for the role. As he mouthed the platitudes he sounded weak, unconvincing, tired.

My opinion of McCain has fallen pretty dramatically over the years; I actually crossed party lines to vote for him in the Republican primary in Ohio in 2000 instead of voting for any candidates in my own party’s primary. Today, though, after many years of watching him toe the Bush line and refuse to fight back even on issues that should be core for him, like torture, for fear of Offending the Base, I see him as more a tragic figure than anything else. It’s like seeing a man sell his soul to the devil to get his fondest wish fulfilled, only to find that having what he always wanted isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

He still hasn’t declared himself a candidate for President. I hope he doesn’t — despite my dislike for his current incarnation, I still think he deserves to end his career with some dignity; and I can’t help but think that having to campaign for two years as The Guy Who’s Even More Hawkish Than George Bush won’t give him much of a chance for that.

One Nice Thing

Posted on January 19, 2007

… on a cold day, is finding a place a block from your office that sells nothing but crêpes with your choice of fillings, and having a nice warm crêpe filled with gooey melted Nutella and sliced strawberries for lunch.

Warm crêpe on a cold day == joy!

The Definition of “Bad Timing”

Posted on January 15, 2007

… is waking up on the Saturday morning of a three-day weekend with a raging head cold that leaves you with no energy to do anything but roll over in bed and drink orange juice, and not feeling it start to lift until just before you go to bed on Monday.

Ugh.

P.S. Boy, 24 sure ended with a bang tonight, huh? 

The Hidden Danger of Escalation

Posted on January 14, 2007

Well, the President made his speech last week and it pretty much went the way I thought it would. But he did manage to throw in one surprise: some language that sounded like a direct threat to expand the war into Syria and Iran if they are clearly shown to be providing support and materiel to the Iraqi insurgency:

Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of the extremist challenge.

This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.

We are also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region.

We will expand intelligence sharing, and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies.

Aircraft carriers and Patriot missiles don’t have much to do with fighting insurgents with roadside bombs, so these moves are pretty clearly intended to bolster our ability to fight a war against an adversary with a capable conventional military — like, say, Iran.

This language has raised alarm bells for many people, mostly because of our manifest inability to actually back it up with meaningful force — our Army is so strapped for troops that it can’t even fulfill its mission in Iraq, much less take on one or two additional countries as well. But there’s a deeper reason why we should be concerned with this prospect: war with Iran could mean losing all 150,000 troops we currently have committed in Iraq.

Allow me to explain.

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“Surge”: A Bad Idea By Any Name

Posted on January 10, 2007

So all the indications are that in his speech tonight, President Bush will propose a "surge" of 20-25,000 troops to Iraq to attempt to tamp down the violence there.

I’ve read "Choosing Victory", the American Enterprise Institute presentation in which the "surge" idea was first put forward, and given some thought to its proposals. Allow me to explain the reasons why the surge won’t work.

First, the "new" troops won’t really be new.  "Choosing Victory" proposes increasing the total number of troops in Iraq by simply holding back the troops who are already there from leaving, while continuing to rotate in the units that were due to replace them. So the "new" troops will really be troops who’ve already spent a year there and are worn out and ready to go home. What troops are new will be drawn from the already depleted National Guard and Reserve, or transferred from other theaters to Iraq. This would have substantial negative effects on morale for units that are already weary of battle, and weaken our efforts in other theaters, like Afghanistan, where we are also in the process of losing.

Next, the word "surge" is misleading.  It implies that the increase would be temporary — a short-lived spike in activity. But counter-insurgency doctrine says that clearing out a region or neighborhood isn’t enough — you have to hold it after clearing it, so that the insurgents don’t come streaming back in when you leave. The plan for the "surge" is to put all but 4,000 of the "new" troops into Baghdad, to try and quiet the violence there.  Assuming that can be accomplished, what happens afterwards?  The insurgents will just disperse into the other areas of the country — that’s what insurgents do, they don’t get into stand-up fights to the finish. Do we take the troops out of Baghdad to pacify the other areas?  If so, isn’t it likely that Baghdad will simply flare up again, while we’re off dealing with Anbar Province, or some other flash point? 

Since the troops "surged" in are likely to be there for some time, a better term for the Bush plan would be "escalation". But he doesn’t want to call it what it is — he’d rather try to spin you by selling it as temporary.

Finally, the number of "new" troops simply is not enough.  There are examples of successful counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq — here’s one. But they are very manpower-intensive. In the case I just linked to, an entire armored cavalry regiment — about 5,200 soldiers — was tasked with pacifying one city, Tall Afar, with a population of about 250,000. Baghdad has a population of about 7 million. That means to replicate the same tactics that worked in Tall Afar in Baghdad, you’d need 146,000 troops.  Just in Baghdad.

(Just for reference, that’s about as many troops as we have right now in all of Iraq.)

President Bush knows that there’s no way to come up with 146,000 troops by cooking the books, shuffling troops around and delaying homecomings. He’d have to renew the draft — or make enlisting dramatically more attractive than it is today. For whatever reason, he lacks the guts to do what it takes to bring his policies in line with his rhetoric, so we get this deck-chair-shuffling "surge" instead. It’s foreign policy, Enron-style.

And that, in the end, is the most pathetic thing about this proposal. We can expect to hear bromides from the President tonight about how we all need to sacrifice, how the task is hard but worthy, and so on. But if actions speak louder than words, the President’s cowardice is practically deafening.

If Iraq is so important — if it is truly "the front line in the war on terror", the "generational conflict" that he has been touting it as, year after year — then ante up, Mr. President. Tell us what the true cost of your little adventure is going to be. Otherwise, it’s shameful to continue to put the lives of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians on the line just because you can’t admit you’re in over your head.

Open the Windows

Posted on January 6, 2007

The high temperature in my neighborhood today: 74 degrees.

On January 6. 

WTF? 

Important: TYPO3 Security Hole, and How To Close It

Posted on December 20, 2006

If you use the excellent open-source content management system
TYPO3,
there is
a very important security bulletin out this morning that you
should read immediately.

A flaw has been discovered in the rich-text editing component
that, if exploited, could allow an attacker to execute code on
your server. The flaw can be fixed by updating your version of
the rich-text editor to the latest version (1.4.3¹), which has
been patched to remove the vulnerability.

The bulletin is not written very clearly, so here are the
steps you should follow to update your TYPO3 installation:

1. Download the .t3x package of the new editor
   from
   the Extension Repository onto your PC.
2. The rich-text editor is a “system extension”, which you
   normally cannot update without updating the whole TYPO3 core.
   This means we will have to do a little work. Log into your TYPO3
   backend and go into the Install tool², then go to “All configuration”. Scroll down until you find
   the configuration value [allowSystemInstall] in
   the [EXT] category. By default, this is set to zero, which
   prevents you from installing extensions into the core.
   Change this value to “1” (without the quotes)³:
   
   Then scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Write to
   localconf.php”. Now you can install system
   extensions.⁴
3. The next step is to actually install the updated extension.
   In your TYPO3 backend, click on “Ext Manager”
   under “Tools” to get to the Extension Manager. Once you’re there,
   pull down the drop-down menu labeled “Menu:” and
   select “Import Extensions” from the list of options:
   
   When the screen updates, look for the form element labeled
   “Upload extension file (.t3x):” and click the “Browse” button
   next to it:
   
   This will bring up a file chooser. Use the file
   chooser to find the .t3x file you downloaded in step 1
   and click the “Open” button to select it.
4. Now we have to be sure to install the extension in the right
   place. Notice that beneath the element where we just picked the
   .t3x file, there is a drop-down menu labeled “… to
   location:”:
   
   Pull that menu down and select “System
   (typo3/sysext/)”. This will install the editor into the
   system core. Do not use any of the other options or you will
   have multiple versions of the editor floating around in your
   system.
5. Check the checkbox labeled “Overwrite any existing
   extension!” — this will erase the old, vulnerable
   editor and replace it with the new, fixed one.
6. Click the “upload extension file” button to
   install the extension.

Once you’ve done this, your system will be secure from this
exploit. This is a potentially very dangerous security hole, so
don’t put off closing it until after the holidays — now that
it’s been publicly announced by the developers, we can probably
expect Bad Guys to start trying to hit TYPO3 sites with it any
time now.

1. All my instructions are for users of TYPO3 4.x. If you are still using 3.x, there are different editor packages you should get. The bulletin has information on which packages go with which versions.
2. If you’ve never
   used the Install Tool before, it’s possible that you’ll get an
   error when you try it now. This is because this tool is turned
   off by default, for security. To turn it on, go into your TYPO3
   source directory, find the file named typo3/install/index.php,
   and comment out the die() statement in there.
   More information on using the Install Tool.
3. If you’re comfortable editing localconf.php yourself, you can add this configuration paramater manually rather than using the Install Tool.
4. After you
   install this one, though, don’t put any more in there — any
   extensions you install there will be thrown out the next time you
   upgrade your TYPO3 core. In this case, that’s not a problem
   since the next point release of the core will include the updated
   editor.

Strange Doings in Connecticut: Epilogue

Posted on December 20, 2006

Hey gang!  Remember back in August, on the day of the Connecticut Democratic primary, when Joe Lieberman’s Web site went down all day and he blamed his opponent, Ned Lamont, saying that Lamont’s people had hacked his site? And demanded an investigation? And I told you that the site outage was more likely due to the incompetence of Lieberman’s tech people rather than dirty tricks from Lamont?

Guess who was right? 

The U.S. attorney’s office and state attorney general have cleared former U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont and his supporters of any role in the crash of U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s campaign Web site hours before last summer’s Democratic primary.

"The investigation has revealed no evidence the problems the Web site experienced were the result of criminal conduct," said Tom Carson, spokesman for U.S. Attorney Kevin O’Connor.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal confirmed the joint investigation "found no evidence of tampering or sabotage warranting civil action by my office." Both men declined to provide additional information, such as what might have happened to the site.

Tara Sue Takes Aim

Posted on December 17, 2006

Editor’s note: This article was written by me and originally published in the Online Community Report in 2002.  OCR went on hiatus in 2004, and when it came back in 2006 only a few of its old archived articles remained on the site.  With their permission, I am republishing this article on this site for historical interest, along with a new epilogue explaining where the story is today.

If you asked the average citizen to tell you where important things were happening in American politics today, odds are that not many would point to Guilford County, North Carolina. Far from the halls of power in Washington and the big-city machines of New York and Chicago, and even farther from the bustling country-within-a-country that is California, Guilford County up to now has been known more for its furniture industry than for any claim to political innovation. In the last few weeks, however, something unusual has been happening in sleepy Guilford County; something that may point to a fundamental change in the way Americans — as participants in online communities — choose their representatives. Like most fundamental changes, this one is starting slowly, building momentum as it goes, striving to reach the tipping point where the possible becomes the unstoppable. If it does — if the tremors build to an earthquake, and the creaky edifice of the System starts tumbling down, brick by brick — it will herald a power shift of a kind we have not seen in this country in many decades.

With that build-up, you might expect that the standard-bearer of this phenomenon would be a John Kennedy in utero, waiting to woo the world to his way of thinking. Or perhaps your mental image is of a new Richard Nixon, a hard-bitten campaigner who drives forward with grim determination. These are the types of people we expect to find at the heart of a political movement; people driven by public ambition or private demons, people with an inner fire that leads them, for whatever reason, to drive themselves in directions the average person never goes.

Occasionally, though, someone turns up who is the antithesis of that stereotype — someone who is catapulted by events from the ranks of everyday citizens into the stratosphere. These are the people like Abraham Lincoln, who in the space of a decade went from being a country lawyer of little repute to a national political figure, and Harry Truman, whose dogged determination in rooting out corruption in the World War II war effort started him towards two terms in the White House. These are not the class presidents and student government functionaries that everyone expects to see grow into practiced baby-kissers. They are called to greatness instead by the demands of their times.

Today, in little Guilford County, another such figure is emerging. This time, however, it’s a figure that would have been unimaginable in the time of Lincoln or Truman: a twenty-six-year-old mother with no political experience, running under the banner of a fringe party. And yet, something is coalescing around this young woman, something remarkable and unimaginable in a world without the online communities we live in today. Her name is Tara Sue Grubb, and she’s experiencing something truly new in our politics — a kind of national movement whose caucus exists only in packets flying silently through the ether.

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Lessons from the Anthill

Posted on December 16, 2006

Editor’s note: This article was written by me and originally published in the Online Community Report in 2002.  OCR went on hiatus in 2004, and when it came back in 2006 only a few of its old archived articles remained on the site.  With their permission, I am republishing this article on this site for historical interest, along with a new epilogue explaining where the story is today.

With the passing of Stephen Jay Gould on May 20, the world has lost one of its most forceful and incisive scientific voices. Gould was perhaps the most visible modern proponent of the theory of evolution (how many other paleontologists have an appearance on The Simpsons to their credit?), and one of the few scientists since Darwin to not only recount what we know about evolution but also to add major contributions of his own — particularly his theory of "punctuated equilibria", which held that evolution could be a swift and violent process, in contrast with the traditional view of evolution as something that happened gradually over long periods of time.

It’s interesting to reflect on the ways that evolution has shaped different species. Consider, if you will, the lowly ant. It is hard to imagine a creature that functions differently from a human being. The story of human progress has been shaped dramatically by the actions of singular individuals, people who drive society in a new direction through force of arms, intellect, or will. By contrast, ants have evolved into a purely collectivist species; instead of free will, which allows individuals to control the destiny of the group, they operate through fixed behavior patterns. On their own, each ant’s behavior is relatively useless, but when swarms of ants come together, the patterns optimize naturally and allow them to accomplish tasks that should be far beyond their reach. To the outside observer, their self-organizing efforts seem to be directed by some larger force or collective intelligence. Theirs is a society that is truly more than the sum of its parts.

This model seems fairly antithetical to the human experience. And yet, as our communications networks draw us closer and closer together, we are beginning to see some signs of such behavior emerging in our own communities. The networks we have built allow us to profitably take a page from the playbook of the ants, getting something we want by pulling together large groups of people, with each taking a small chunk of the responsibility. These "anthill communities" are springing up all over the place, and they are creating a whole new concept of what people are capable of.

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Majestic: Everything Old is New Again

Posted on December 15, 2006

Editor’s note: This article was written by me and originally published in the Online Community Report in 2001.  OCR went on hiatus in 2004, and when it came back in 2006 only a few of its old archived articles remained on the site.  With their permission, I am republishing this article on this site for historical interest, along with a new epilogue explaining where the story is today.

Shadowy conspiracies. Sinister plots. Deadly consequences. Since the tragic events of September 11, we’ve all had to quickly become used to the idea of such things crashing uninvited into our everyday lives. The idea of volunteering for such an experience, then, may seem like unlikely fodder for entertainment – and yet that’s exactly what Electronic Arts is attempting with their daring, experimental online game, Majestic.

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How Not to Leverage Online Community

Posted on December 14, 2006

Editor’s note: This article was written by me and originally published in the Online Community Report in 2000.  OCR went on hiatus in 2004, and when it came back in 2006 only a few of its old archived articles remained on the site.  With their permission, I am republishing this article on this site for historical interest, along with a new epilogue explaining where the story is today.

***

Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, you’re familiar with the ongoing battle swirling around the popular file-sharing service called Napster.   Both Napster’s critics and defenders hail the software as a milestone in the history of music; record company executives are petrified at what they see as the end of their line of work, while music fans see it as the opening of a grand piñata full of free tunes.  But, in some important ways, the real revolution in music and online community is happening elsewhere, quietly, as musicians and audiences begin to hook up without the intervention of music business middlemen and form tiny niche communities of their own.  It is the formation of these communities that could forever transform the way artists make their living.

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Latest MP3 Battle May Give New Direction to Online Community

Posted on December 14, 2006

Editor’s note: This article was written by me and originally published in the Online Community Report in 1999.  OCR went on hiatus in 2004, and when it came back in 2006 only a few of its old archived articles remained on the site.  With their permission, I am republishing this article on this site for historical interest, along with a new epilogue explaining where the story is today.

One of the most compelling themes in Martin Scorsese’s masterful film GoodFellas (1990) is the idea of honor among thieves. The film’s characters occupy the fringes of honest society, living by their wits, sharing a bond that arises from their segregation from the workaday world. Even among the lawless, Scorsese shows us, a rudimentary kind of law has emerged from their respect for each others’ power and larcenous talents. Social protocols have developed that are incomprehensible to outsiders but fraught with meaning for those on the inside. Through the eyes of narrator Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta), we see a social system with its own peculiar folkways – a system that one could call a community, albeit a strange and violent one.

Of course, Scorsese’s community of thieves was exclusively an offline affair. But another such shadowy community is springing up online as we speak. Through its flagship software product, Napster, Inc. is facilitating that community – and in the process, they are making themselves Public Enemy Number One in the eyes of the recording industry. The battle that has erupted between these two players will, I believe, be remembered as a watershed moment both in the struggle over MP3 and in the development of communities on the Internet.

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Third Voice: Wrong Turn on the Road to Xanadu

Posted on December 13, 2006

Editor’s note: This article was written by me and originally published in the Online Community Report in 1999. OCR went on hiatus in 2004, and when it came back in 2006 only a few of its old archived articles remained on the site. With their permission, I am republishing this article on this site for historical interest, along with a new epilogue explaining where the story is today.

Is it the next wave of online community software, or the digital equivalent of the vandal’s can of spray paint? This is the question that online community builders are grappling with regarding Third Voice, a new tool that lets visitors post persistent notes on sites that are visible to everyone whose browser is equipped with the (free) Third Voice viewer.

Third Voice claims that their software is the Next Big Thing in online communities, bringing together groups of people who share the common interest that each site represents. In one sense, they are correct — opening Web sites to annotation does create a new space in which communities can develop. But there is no way for community-builders to moderate these discussions, leading some to worry that Third Voice is less about community-building and more about letting anyone in the world scrawl on your pages.

To understand Third Voice, let us look to the birth of the idea of annotating hypertext documents. This will demonstrate that the spirit of Third Voice comes, not from the Web, but from an older, grander, more idealized conception of hypertextual communications: Xanadu, the forty-year impossible dream of professional visionary Ted Nelson.

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The End of Key West?

Posted on December 12, 2006

If true, this would certainly be news:

The Secretary of Defense, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, dropped in on Saturday, and I got to ask him some questions. On the subject of the Key West Agreement, Mr. Rumsfeld said that people in the Pentagon do not operate under "antiquated agreements".

The "Key West Agreement" is the colloquial name for an agreement reached in 1948 between the various branches of the U.S. military. Until that time, the Army and the Navy had each essentially maintained their own air forces.  After World War II, though, it was felt that the time had come for an independent Air Force. Which raised the obvious question — which parts of the Army and Navy air forces would be given to the new service, and which would remain where they were?

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The Power of Incumbency

Posted on December 10, 2006

How powerful is it?

It’s so powerful that you can get re-elected even if the FBI videotapes you accepting a bribe of $100,000 in neat piles of $100 bills.

It’s so powerful that you can get re-elected even if the Feds find $90,000 of that cash hidden in your freezer.

It’s so powerful that you can get re-elected even if you commandeered National Guard units to help you get your stuff out of your house while your constituents were desperately waiting to be rescued from Hurricane Katrina.

Yes, if you want to know how powerful incumbency is, just ask disgraced Congressman William Jefferson (D-LA), who won re-election in a runoff yesterday.

U.S. Rep. William Jefferson easily defeated his fellow Democratic opponent in a runoff election Saturday, despite an ongoing federal bribery investigation.

In complete but unofficial returns, Jefferson, Louisiana’s first black congressman since Reconstruction, received 57 percent of the vote over state Rep. Karen Carter, who had 43 percent…

Carter was unable to capitalize on a scandal that included allegations the FBI found $90,000 in bribe money in Jefferson’s freezer.

Jefferson was forced into the runoff against Carter when he failed to win 50 percent of the vote in a crowded open multiparty primary. Carter had sought to become the first black woman from Louisiana elected to Congress.

He described his win as "a great moment, and I thank almighty God for making it possible."

The Constitution gives each house of Congress the power to expel a member with a two-thirds vote:

Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.

Expulsion means the member in question is no longer a member of Congress.  This power has only been used five times in the history of the House; most recently, colorful Rep. Jim Traficant was expelled in 2002 after being convicted of bribery.

Rep. Jefferson hasn’t been convicted of anything yet. Assuming that he is, though (and it would take a towering leap of faith to believe he will not be, given the pile of evidence against him), I’d be disappointed if he did not join Traficant in the roster of the expelled.

Fun With Spam: How Would You Know? Edition

Posted on November 30, 2006

OK, now the spammers are just getting insulting: