Real or No Real

By alex | Published: 7/26/2007

Empty CasinoThe announcement from Second Life yesterday was that they have officially banned gambling. The image to the right is of a popular casino, pictured in its recent incarnation here, now gone to seed. As that article from Valleywag suggests, as well as one from Business Week, this move is hardly a surprise. The FBI has been fishing around SL for the last few months, presumably trying to decide what to do about the casinos.

Of course, the casino owners are not happy with the new rules, and the general opinon seems to be that Linden needs to offshore its servers. This is based on a romantically erroneous assumption that the reach of US law enforcement ends at the US border. There are plenty of examples that would suggest that making SL an outlaw environment would make SL residents from the US–whether or not they gambled–into outlaws. But now, all those people who invested serious time and effort in replicating real-world games, or inventing their own, seem to be out on their ear. It has to give pause to others who are interested in developing in Second Life; what happens when Linden doesn’t like you any more?

But as the comments on the Second Life Blog suggest, this raises another issue. If Linden Labs is now saying that Lindens are real money, then it means that people should have control over their own funds. Linden should not be able to suspend people’s service without releasing their Lindens to them in US cash. This has already come up at least once.

This question of virtual money being real money is a hot one right now. China is dealing with the rise of the qq coin–again, relating to its use in gambling. A lot of that gambling is, in fact, currency speculation. The question now is how far the idea that Lindens are “real” will go. Does that mean, for example, that an SL company is bound by SEC regulations if they want to sell stock? Where casino gambling has thrived, will we see the rise of stock schemes and fraud? Are the Feds going to be setting up an SL office with men in black to investigate?

These are the kinds of questions people were asking about the web ten years ago, and the answer was an unequivocal “yes.” How SL contorts to fit into existing international legal structures, a process that is only just beginning, will be an interesting thing to watch.

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The web is filled with big trucks

By alex | Published: 7/25/2007

Ted Stevens has gotten just a little flack about his “series of tubes” comments, in which he argued the “the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.”

Duh. We all know that the internet is not a big truck. The web is a big truck. In case we needed a reminder, here is the International Herald Tribune in 1995:

“If the Internet is the information superhighway, the Web is the equivalent of the trucks that carry the mail.”

No wonder Senator Stevens was confused.

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A small thing

By alex | Published: 7/24/2007

vigilenceWhen I was growing up, I dreamed of visiting “red” China, the USSR, or the DDR. I’ve always paid attention to defending against the worst case. During the 1980s, like lots of kids in America, I worried about the potential for global nuclear war, and our seeming lack of preparation for it. I worried about other worst-case scenarios as well–Herbert’s White Plague felt less like fiction and more like a possibility worth guarding against, and in California, a major earthquake was always a certainty–but, as a child of the times, I worried most about what to do when the first ICBMs hit.

It might seem strange, then, that I would want to visit the other side of the iron curtain, but my greatest flaw has always been an insatiable curiosity. The stories of people visiting Moscow, Peking, or East Berlin at the time were much like those of visiting North Korea now. You should expect your hotel room to be bugged, your movements monitored. They would likely ply you with drugs and women, hoping for something you could be blackmailed with. (I suppose the potential of being plied with drugs and women might have been part of the attraction…) And should you try to go off the beaten track or photograph things you were not permitted to, you would find yourself in the gulag. Of course, much of this was romanticism, propaganda, or some combination. And like all myths, there was probably some kernel of truth.

It’s been a while since I’ve been in DC, and I don’t want to overplay this point, but as I took a handful of shots of facades, I always glanced around to make sure uniformed guards were nowhere nearby. Now, there were no signs that suggested that photography was not allowed, and these were public buildings shot from public sidewalks in the public’s capitol. I had no real fear of being dragged in for questioning (although perhaps I should have), I just wanted to avoid the uncomfortable situation of guards telling me I was not allowed to do what I was doing. It was a subtle unease, and I realized that it reminded me a lot of the way I felt it would be to visit a communist state when I was a child. The problem is that there is a new set of understandings of what should be allowed to be photographed. I would never have felt that kind of unease at a museum, because it seems it has long been the case that photography is restricted in most museums. (The Met is a refreshing exception.) But this idea of not being able to photograph public buildings in some cases, seemingly determined at the whim of the guard, is galling to me.

I think the thing that really bugs me is this idea that there is no clear rule–no sign indicating that what you are doing may get you into trouble with someone with a gun and a state license to take physical action against you. This shows up when boarding a plane as well. The fact that I can’t bring a bottle of water with me on the plane is a nuisance, not least because it seems to serve only the slimmest security function. But these regulations that are arbitrary, but clearly spelled out, are far less onerous than the seemingly capricious ways in which some of the rules are applied.

This story about someone getting stopped for his homemade MintyBoost that TSA thought looked like an IED (well, it had the I and the D parts, at least) reminded me of a run-in with airport security in Buffalo. I had a long conversation with a woman who thought it was strange that I was bringing a large electric gear-motor on a plane from Buffalo to NYC. “What’s it for?” she wanted to know. I answered honestly (aka, stupidly), “I don’t know.” I had originally picked up the motor on eBay to activate a cover over our front steps in Buffalo, which tended to get impossibly slick with snow and ice. We improvised a frame with a tarp to cover the steps, but that meant lifting up the cover whenever we arrived or departed. I wanted to automate this, using the motor to drive a winch mechanism, but never got around to it. Now, I was dragging random items from my office at UB back to Manhattan when I made the commute, and so I dropped the motor into my bag. Rather than this rather unbelievable and difficult to articulate story, I said I was a roboticist (white lie; I dabble) and it was for my work, and after running it through the ETD system and a bit of deliberation they let me on. But it was the same sort of feeling: the TSA had the ability to either seize this piece of junk or keep me from boarding the plane, and there was no exacting rule that would determine whether they would exercise that authority. This becomes especially annoying when they are clearly wrong, as when someone from the TSA in Los Angeles held me up for a twenty minutes insisting that I was flying alone, on a one-way ticket, and had open-jawed a previous flight, and found it very suspicious when I disagreed with his assessment.

In the end, it’s a small thing. I doubt most people have enough of a problem with authority to have this even bother them. The solution is easy enough–someone needs to make a cell phone with a camera in it that rivals the point-and-shoots now available. Also need to be able to redirect the lens to be able to take a shot without holding the phone up. Do this, and the enforcement issue is pretty much moot. Of course, it is not the actual rule that bothers me so much as the impulse, and the fact that it is not a problem for so many people. It also troubles me that I have the same slight prickling at the back of my neck in DC as I have had in cities that do not make the claims of freedom and liberty that the US does.

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[OSI] Beyond Simple Search

By alex | Published: 7/23/2007

Sorry, this last set of notes on a breakout session at the open source conference somehow ended up stuck on my laptop. Moderator Eric Haseltine started us out with the premise: “Search is great, but sometimes it sucks.” As always, this is a highly filtered, non-transcript-level set of reflections.

Presenters:
* John Howard, Deputy Associate Director of Enterprise Solutions, Office of the Chief Information Officer, Office of the Director of National Intelligence
* Dr. James Mulvenon, Director, Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, Defense Group Inc.
* Francis Kubala, Scientist, BBN Technologies
* Jason Hines, Principal Search Engineer, Google
* Moderator: Dr. Eric Haseltine, Associate Director of National Intelligence for Science and Technology, Office of the Director of National Intelligence

Presentation
Howard begins by talking about projects within the community to provide search that is sensitive to the users attributes, particularly access permissions. Beyond this, should everything be discoverable? To what extent do you actually reach in and discover things? Is it OK if I find your half-finished document? Can you “half-discover” something: e.g., finding an owner of a document, but not revealing the text, and tell the searcher to seek out the author?

Kubala works on getting data from speech, retrieving information from a stream. There are lots of problems with this. One is simply a matter of the text coming out is a true wall-of-text, with no boundaries. The first thing that can be done is separating out the speakers. You can also do some highlighting of named entities. Adding structure to the transcription is a non-trivial piece of the puzzle–speech-to-text is not enough, on its own.

Add translation to this and you get real-time translation of broadcast materials. This allows for federated search across multiple languages. You can have a persistent watch list that catches keywords (in all languages) for incoming streams. [How cool would it be for this to be an open search engine! Doubt there is enough advertising to support it.] Works really well for news broadcasts–showing the stream with transcriptions in the original language as well as machine-translated text, all clickable for random access to the original video stream. But current tech does not work quite as well for “found speech” (e.g., YouTube). Currently exploring example-based queries, and iterated queries that work with the searcher to a convergent set of responses. “One of the futures for beyond simple searching is to get beyond the ad hoc query.”

Mulvenon works mainly on what appears on the Chinese web. He notes that the biggest way that they use open source is as a way to cue targeted collection of classified materials (an oft-heard refrain). Chinese is “China’s first layer of encryption.” Finding linguists and getting them cleared is extremely difficult: 3.5 to 4 years to get even naturalized Chinese and Taiwanese cleared. (This issue of the time it takes to clear personnel came up in several of the sessions.) That said, it is a great source; the number of Chinese-language pages will soon outstrip English-language pages. Must do searches “from within” China. Google.ca is not the best search engine. Baidu is also not particularly great, despite the “Chinese-centric” advertising. Lots of blogging content as well, which is both difficult to track on and sometimes valuable.

They move beyond search to look for text in the under- or un-linked dark web, as well as seeking out structural information (other hosts on shared subnets, open ports, etc.) to help leverage more complete collections. They have also been working with open source geospatial data to combine with their data and do geolocation of various materials in China.

Even military targets are fairly transparent “It’s not transparent in English, as if they’re supposed to make it easy for us.” Some items are pretty opaque, but there are some areas (logistics, etc.) that end up being made available through the mountain of online and off-line posting that goes on in China. Finally, a lot of it is beyond the ability to machine translate, layered beneath cultural allusion that simply won’t be picked up.

Hines reiterated Google’s mission “organizing the world’s information.” Google Enterprise is the fastest unit of Google, with 100% growth each year. They move products to enterprise when they are mature and ready to be secured for enterprise deployment. “Universal search” is the aim: collapsing vertical search and machine translation to do one search on the Google search box that draws in lots of different materials. Didn’t talk in much detail about the kinds of projects they are currently working on.

Q & A

Q: What’s wrong with search tools?

Too much “flotsam and jetsam.”

Q: What would be the ideal user experience?

“Smarter search would be helpful.” Wenlin, with a customized dictionary, is vital to Mulvenon’s work. Need to be able to tag content. “Every time I start to do search, it’s like I’m starting from scratch.”

What is Google doing about this? You should use Google Toolbar for, e.g., on the fly translation, as well as personalized search. [But I think there is a disconnect there; clearly Toolbar is too superficial for the kind of work we’re talking about.]

Kubala: Deep semantics still a deep problem. On the shallow end, there is duplicate and near-duplicate handling.

Q: Is search the right paradigm?

Haseltine: “We can only ask what we know to ask.” [In other words, we want to find, not search.]

Hines makes the comment, and this comes up a number of times, that there is a need to re-introduce the social to the search process. Sometimes it’s more important to know who has the tacit expertise, rather than where it is on the web.

Q. What is Google doing beyond not being evil? (Doesn’t the acquisition of Double-Click’s records provide an extremely valuable & dangerous source of traffic data?)

Hines: “We take user privacy very seriously. We wouldn’t do anything that would challenge our credibility to our users.” He goes on to note that there’s nothing to stop you from leaving Google at any time. However, he doesn’t touch the issue of whether Google will then let you take your data with you (and not have it remain in their control), the way Ask.com has recently allowed for users to request non-collection.

Q. What about Wales positioning himself as a way of taking on the search paradigm?

Hines suggests that others have tried something similar, but perhaps without the weight that Wales can put behind it. It will be interesting to see what he makes of it.

Q. What have you learned about the behavior of humans at Google?

Hines: People want simple search. They don’t want to move beyond it, and when they experiment with ways of providing alternatives, users don’t like it. They want a line to type stuff into, and an answer, and they want that to work with some consistency. They don’t want to know what’s happening under the hood.

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