I’ve never spotted Chef Moz before. It’s a spin-off of ODP that lets you read and edit reviews of over 185,000 restaurants worldwide. The data is all under an open license – I wonder if someone could craft a PDA app out of this? I wonder if someone already has?
I don’t have a comments system because, dammit, don’t you people have blogs of your own to go to? But that does put a bit of an obligation on me to distill the best replies to earlier entries, and try and pass them off as my own. So…
It wasn’t Begbie , oh no, who pointed out saproxy, a spamassassin POP proxy that works on Windows. Or Lee, who mentioned popfile which does that and more.
And it was me, not Barnaby James who recommended SlimBrowser as a good IE-based tabbed/anti-popup browser for people who are funny about using Moz.
And I really did invent the term hinternet, not subconsciously steal it from the (void) folk, who’ve been using it for years.
The funny thing is, that jo’s coinage of hinternet on (void) is pretty much the opposite of mine. They use it to describe a place outside the “controlled web” (which is envisaged to be the corporate AOL-Time-Warner garden of controlled delights), a place where,
…when business has finished remodelling the Internet into their own image the masses will flock (or just never leave) there leaving the rest of us shuffling round, kicking our heels (WARNING: more bad metaphor, excessive cheesiness is bad for your health and may damage your unborn child) under the off ramps of the information superhighway. And it will be just like it was before. The masses won’t want to start rummaging around in the rag tag collection of unbranded sites that make up our world. Even if they did they probably wouldn’t be able to jump out of whatever web tv portal gateway digi box walled padded garden system they’ve subscribed themselves to – if they do manage it then they’ve probably got a clue anyway.
(from Simon’s mail, which you should read in its entirety)
I know this view of the future of the Net but I don’t agree with it, either as an inevitable end or an end to be aimed for.
Where are the badlands on the Net? The difference between a ghetto and your neighbourhood is how much you hate it and whether you’re trapped there. The bubble of links that I live in (when I rarely see HTML mails, and when everybody laughs politely at Microsoft Bob references) is tiny, and would drive most people crazy if they were stuck here for very long. Similiarly, I imagine a lot of the voidsters would rather eat their own fists than live exclusively in AOLland.
But these are differences based on objective value judgements about the content. I’d take a more subjective angle. It’s not a ghetto if you don’t want to live there; it’s a ghetto if the people who live there don’t want to live there. That’s why I think a lot of people who live in the AOL/MSN world are living in a ghetto; they really don’t like it. They’re surprised when I show them somewhere else, and want to find out how to move.
The other difference between ghettos and neighbourhoods is that you can sell a neighbourhoohttps://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/15/the-hinternet/d and buy more than one ghetto with it. That’s why, in real life, those in the ghetto are truly trapped. That’s not true on the Net (even with the increasing costs of hosting that Simon fears). There’s no scarcity of Web communities. The major part of their cost is simply finding them.
That’s why I think the real ghetto lies in AOLland. We can get from here to there, but they can’t get from there to where they want to be. There’s an implication in the (void) coinage that we should hide ourselves away, proud and separate, deliberately hard to get at – work at being obscure for obscurity’s sake. I don’t think that’s what anyone should do. I want to increase the efficiency with which people can find what they want. You don’t break down walls by building ones on your side of the divide.
(I know that might sound funny from someone who devotes their life to making the obscurist possible jokes to the tiniest possible audience. But I don’t do that to exclude anyone. I do it so I can most effectively signal to people who like that kind of thing, that this is the kind of thing that they’d like.)
The other side of this coin, of course, is that a lot of people do like what AOL and MSN have to offer – far more, I’m sure, than like my tiny bit of the Net. You can talk about cognitive dissonance all you like, but ultimately you have to listen to what people say they want, not what you suspect they’d want had they been exposed to Noam Chomsky and Negativland a bit earlier in life.
Much of the angriest mail I get from Sunday Times readers is about pop-up windows and spam. Weirdly, given how often I rant against both in the column, they often they blame me – or the “Internet nerds” I’m seen to represent. It’s the nerd’s fault the Internet is this blighted; something should be done; why doesn’t the government do something?
I spend a lot of time trying to explain that “Internet nerds” are cursed with the same burdens – more so, since they spend more time here. And that most of my friends devote their time to fighting these problems, and their solutions are often more effective than any government. And that they’re free.
There’s a bit of me that does feel guilty. While I manage to fend off pop-up windows with Mozilla, and spam with Spamassassin, most people don’t know about those programs. They live in the “hinternet”, that shanty-town of X10 pop-ups and porn adware, and endless, endless Hotmail and Yahoo spam. They’re tourists in the world of the Net, and like any tourist, they rarely get a good guide. They’re just taken down the back streets by disreputable but flashy showmen, and robbed for everything they’re worth. And it’s true, we don’t do as much as we should for them, because we’re okay in our little burbclaves.
I can’t recommend Mozilla until it stops changing its name. But I could recommend Spamassassin , because Deersoft produced a version for Outlook. It even cost money – the true sign of quality in that weird topsy-turvy hinternet. Finally I could give friends and family a recommendation to fight the tons of crap entering their inboxes, instead of just shrug and say “Well, err, I don’t have that problem anymore. Sorry!”
But now, I discover, the showmen have grabbed that. Network Associates McAfee bought Deersoft in January. They’ve shelved Spamassassin Pro. They’ve promised to release a new version in a quarter or so, under their SpamKiller brand. I’m really happy for Justin and Craig, who now work for NA on SpamKiller. But now I don’t have any software to recommend for another quarter – and I don’t trust Network Associates to do a decent job in the future. Even if they hadn’t fucked over PGP, they’re still exactly the kind of company that doesn’t fix these endemic problems, but tries to profit from them, appearing as if from nowhere to save those poor tourists while relieving them of their wallet.
Trotskyist libertarian science fiction writer and Denis-Healey-level political bruiser Ken Macleod just got himself a blog. I’ve always said that if the neocons didn’t exist, Ken Macleod would have to invent them. I wonder what happens now they’re all in the same online novel? (via More Like This)
One of my most important yet life-threatening jobs at NTK is to stop Dave deleting all the Linux and cryptography crap and inserting another twenty pages or so of his in-depth sweetie and crisp reviews. It’s like holding back Niagara. Hopefully, his new project, SnackSpot, will take off some of the pressure. Although, reading through it, it’s actually managing to make me even more scared:
It’s the first true frozen delivered breakthrough since South American last year. Now don’t get me wrong, SouthAm was a fantastic time to be, well, even on the fringes of product development like I was; it was like the early Blackburn rave scene, or Northern Soul in the 70s, neck em and go for it, the whole business support centre felt like an orgone box, it was rocking its tits off.
…
Private Energy [is] a “premium-priced ginseng-enhanced energy drink” from the (Netherlands-based?) adult entertainment company. The drink’s imminent UK launch will presumably incorporate the same “attractive collector-style cans featuring some of Private’s most popular stars”, while the ginseng content is intended to enhance “adult activities” (ie, voting? driving a minibus with less than 17 seats and weighing no more than 3.5 metric tonnes?) This shouldn’t be confused with the (also imminent) UK arrival of alcoholic “Viagra Pops”, like Roxxoff, which have been criticised on the grounds that alcoholic drinks “should not suggest any association with sexual success”. Nonetheless, feel free to get in touch with any sightings/ trial results you have of those – or performance enhancements you’ve noticed with other energy drinks, like Lucozade Solstis or RAC 124.
It’s Magic Eye pictures for IE. Like a good Penn and Teller, Andrew Baio shows you how it’s done. (via the pile)
Right in the middle of the time described back then, came the first Gulf War. Me and my flatmates got all our portable TVs together, piled them in the living room and tuned them all to different channels. The audio was turned up on the middle, biggest TV. We’d switch that one to whatever visuals caught our eye at the time. Occasionally, I’d walk outside into the snow, deep for London, and watch the dozens of planes flying over and try and imagine them as scuds, flying over my city, ignored by patriots, unstopped by the tanks at Heathrow.
These days, I don’t have a TV in the house. I have a little video capture card in my PC, but it only picks up a few spanish-language stations and the usual evangelicals and desperate public stations that sit in the abandoned low rent terrestrial airwaves of America. So I’ve been watching this war almost exclusively over the Net.
So, for the first few days of the war, I’ve been in IRC – #war-news on irc.debian.org, #iraqlive and #iraqlive-fox on IRCnet. The latter two are just closed caption (teletext subtitle) feeds of CNN and Fox News. I’ve been walking, slowly, over the warblogs. I keep hitting reload on Dear Raed. I watch the realvideo feed of the BBC News 24 occasionally, and I kept the Baghdad Webcam up until it felt too ghoulish. But mostly, it’s all been very textual.
The IRC feeds make it feel like I’m watching historical sources being written in realtime; live streaming footnotes. #war-news is strange; when I was there, the pro-war and anti-war folks were taking shifts. The pro-war folk would go to bed around midnight PST, and then the anti-war folks would turn up, back from their street protests. The channel is run by Raph Levien, who designed Advogato, and was arrested during the Berkeley demonstrations. There has been restraint on both sides.
So how do I feel? I get the feeling of open space, of vacuum. It’s like the negative image of the fog of war here, an airy white lack of news. There’s no information overload, because there’s precious little information. The TV news is all human interest about the microcrosms that surround embedded journalists. Google News collapses most commentary into a couple of Iraqi stories, because there’s essentially no difference between them all. There’s no context. At the moment, I’m trying to pinpoint what’s going on by flicking between the CNN reports and Aeronautics.ru, a low-credibility Russian site that at least takes its rumours from other sources than the big media corps. But you can’t triangulate from two points.
So what can you say? It’s not going as well as the American forces would like us to think, but they’d like us to think it’s going so splendidly that that’s hardly a revelation. It’s war. It’s a horror show. There should be an IRC channel somewhere that just has someone leaning on the “a” key for the duration of the conflict. That’s what war sounds like, even from a safe distance.
So, a couple of things. First, thanks to a pressing deadline and my amazing procrastination powers, I now understand FontConfig. Did you know that if you really want to have the 7×14 Misc-Fixed bitmapped font for your gnome-terminal, you should specify “Fixed 10.5” in the profile setting? Well, now you do.
Secondly, Robin’s posted a great update on the Kate Adie story below, clarifying matters a little (basically, Adie won’t swear to having had those words spoken to her by the US military). It’s amazing how many ongoing discussions online I now hear end with “well, why doesn’t one of you just email [controversial person] and find out what they think?”. And you do, and they say, and it’s done.
Thirdly, Robin published his update before I published my last entry, thanks to something getting stuck between my dev server and my live server, so it looked like I was ignoring it. I shall try and fix that. Sorry.
Fourthly, I appear to think “a couple” means four.
When I first came to Silicon Valley, I joked to people in back in the UK that I wanted to be the Kate Adie of the upcoming dotcom collapse. It was a nice funny shorthand to explain less what I was doing, and more what I thought would happen to the Valley in the next few years. Adie is famously the reporter who the BBC used to send into the midst of any major disaster, all flack-jacket and pearls, from the Iranian embassy siege to Lockerbie to Tiananmen square. She’s more than an icon of war reporting in the UK. She’s the fifth horsemen of the apocalypse. When Kate turns up, you know you’re in trouble.
So when she starts talking about a senior officer in the Pentagon telling he that all TV uplinks from journalists will be fired upon, and that the American forces are asking the press who go with them whether “they have feelings against the war” before they let them tag along, and that she is “enormously pessimistic of the chance of a decent on-the-spot reporting, as the war occurs.”, I sat up and listened.
Adie says “You will get it later.” I hope so. I hope someone watches it.
(from robin @ ambiguous)