This post revised for positivity

I wrote this whole post before, from a very negative standpoint, and I've had a change of heart. I had just ranted about all the "clickbait" headlines being thrown around the web these days, urging you to find out new facts or see photos and videos that will "blow your mind". To see things that will "change the way you think forever" or that you just "won't believe". It's a tease, like a six-year-old jumping around saying "I know a secret! Not telling you!" It's deliberately uninformative, which is the opposite of a good headline (unless you define "good" as "lots of clicks", which is clearly what has happened). It's designed only to pique your interest enough to click the link, after which they get their ad revenue and they're done. It offends me as a writer, in part because they're all exactly alike. Throw in one or two different keywords and the whole headline changes. Pair it with a picture of boobs and you're guaranteed legitimate clicks from soon-to-be-disappointed readers. It's hard to be positive in the face of this, so the only positive thing I can say is that I'm going to focus on other things that deserve more of my attention. Jump up and down in your clown suit all you like. I'm going elsewhere. If something you say is that important, it will come up in another, more respectable form some other time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Defining "clickbait" is really tricky.
PPS - If you're looking for examples, though, try Buzzfeed.

I don't channel-surf online

I don't feel like I have "bookmarks" any more for sites that I need to remember to visit every day. I have three places I go for online entertainment: feedly, Facebook and Pocket. The only reason Facebook is on that list is because I can't get my friends' posts in Feedly. Pocket is where I put items from Feedly that I can't (or don't want to) read or watch right away. That's it. If your website doesn't provide a feed I can load into Feedly so that it comes to me automatically, I will probably forget about you forever.

Is this harsh? I don't think so. Is it unusual? Perhaps. The thing is, I'm not looking for my internet experience to be like channel-flipping on a TV. I don't gain any pleasure from hunting around for something new when I could program it all to come straight to me. That makes far more sense, to my mind, plus it means I don't miss anything just because I didn't go to this or that website today. This is important if I want to read certain web comics, because they're telling one long story, in order. Missing one is like missing a chunk of the story, a chapter of a book, and the rest never makes sense again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - One day, perhaps, I'll have to accept missing out on some articles online.
PPS - The best articles should show up in multiple places, though.

Internet law and order

What should be the law enforcement model for the internet? A police force that patrols and investigates to prevent and fight crime? An armed force that develops an arsenal and deploys troops to trouble spots? A spy agency that secretly infiltrates hostile or potentially-threatening organisations to destroy them efficiently and covertly from the inside? Private fiefdoms with individual guard troops to defend just their own territory? Something else entirely?

It matters how we think of this, because it affects the way we treat the internet as a resource and the threats we find there. If we imagine a war metaphor, we will talk about collatoral damage, attacks, strikes and operations of attack. If we talk about spies, we prioritise exploiting vulnerabilities instead of fixing or reporting them. Right now, we're working with a mix of everything I've mentioned.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Personally, I believe it should be a combination of police and private security.
PPS - And that unfixed vulnerabilities make us all less safe.

One-way content sharing

I'd like to know when and how the "roach motel" business model for online service providers will fall down again. Well, I say "again" because I think it's similar to the Compuserve and AOL "walled garden" business models of the early web. Those companies aimed to provide everything their users could ever want or need in curated collections, but the Weird Wild Web outdid them and they collapsed. These days, companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft are all vying to be the only service provider you need, but in a different way. Now they provide search, calendars, personal posts, email, maps (or some significant subset) and all their APIs are aimed at getting content in, but not letting it out. Google demonstrated their commitment to this model recently by shutting off external RSS feeds of each user's YouTube subscriptions, forcing tech-savvy users like me to go directly to YouTube instead of keeping up to date on my subscriptions via my feed reader. Content checks in, but it doesn't check out.

Can this business model succeed where the walled gardens failed? I don't know, but I kind of hope not. The one-way sieve operating here is strong, and it's difficult to disrupt. You can start yourself as a tiny content provider, but as long as the big players can suck in your content, they get all the same benefits without needing to change. If you don't allow them to pull you in somehow, then you wither and die because they are the gatekeepers of online attention now.

The only bump in the road I can see is if they start disrupting each other. If Facebook users want to start sharing content from there to Google+ for some reason, and they can't, and this problem grows larger, then Facebook has to cave to user demand, but this would just lead to them being swallowed up by Google, in my opinion. They need to defend this border or they die.

So I guess I don't have an answer. The only remaining idea is that these giants of the internet get too big to keep growing and break apart on their own, like some kind of Google Civil War. Perhaps a generation from now, when their founders are gone and the core ideals rotted from the inside, there will be a breakaway group that forms a new company, large enough to compete but small enough to react to the web we will have 20 years from now.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Whatever that will look like.
PPS - If I knew that, I'd be rich already.

Too big for Twitter

I'm sad to hear that Joss Whedon quit Twitter. It seems, lately, that social media is a bad place for people to get attention. Or maybe I'm trying to say that a lot of attention online will also bring you a lot of negative attention, regardless of what you do, and exposing yourself to that level of toxicity is less likely to get you any super powers and more likely to get you into therapy.

This is what we do to famous people these days. Back before Twitter, famous people were a rare bird, only seen in sleazy paparazzi rags, publicity events and their own work, or, if you were very lucky, in a random encounter on the street. Then Twitter opened up and said "We have the celebrities! In a cage! Come and poke them!" And we did. Oh, how we did. They didn't like it much, but what could they do? Not be on Twitter? Please.

Except it seems like that's the best option now. Rather than trying to filter a little signal out of the torrent of noise, gaining a tiny bit of happiness for hours of wading through humanity's excrement, your better odds for happiness are to avoid the general public altogether, which is how it used to be anyway.

There was a reason celebrities became recluses. It's because humans, en-masse, are terrible people, who will abuse, berate and harass you for making the things that they love.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Thankfully, being too big for Twitter would have some pretty great consolation prizes.
PPS - Like huge piles of money.

Board games on mobile

I really like the idea of board games playable on mobile devices over the internet where it doesn't matter how long each person takes to play their turn. Because it can be hard to organise a group of people to get together all at once to play a game, this way everyone is always playing, and the game just goes on, even if one person delays a bit. It will take a lot longer to play a game through, but who cares? The fun is still there, and you've got other games to play, too. This is just a way to play specific games with friends that would otherwise take a lot more effort and commitment to play.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wish there were more of them.
PPS - And that I could play them. Obviously.

On-demand basic services

Here's a weird thought. With internet services for on-demand travel and shelter (eg Uber and AirBnB) plus storage lockers and wireless data, could some people live "homeless" but as fully-employed, fully-functional members of society now? Or, if not now, then when? It might not be too long from now that robot cars provide transportation as a subscription service, and it's not too far-fetched to picture the same deal for accommodation and storage.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - People who sleep in robot cars will be a very weird sub-tribe.
PPS - Though I plan to do that myself on my way home all the time.

Shopping online

I don't do a lot of my shopping online. This might be weird for someone of my age and technical expertise, but it's been informed by several bad experiences. First, there have been a few times when I've got what I ordered, but it wasn't the right thing. I bought a $199 router from Kogan, paid $9 shipping to get it to me, waited four days for delivery, then had to send it back because I was mistaken about its capabilities. The return shipping and the restocking fee cost me a further $38, so by now I'm out $47 and back to square one. If I had just walked to Dick Smith instead, 5 minutes down the road from my house, I would have had the correct device in my hands immediately. Oh, and I still don't have my money back, more than two weeks later, so there's that, too.

The other thing is that Australia Post delivery drivers don't bother looking for our front door. We live in a townhouse complex with a lot of little twisting roadways and paths, so I understand that it can be hard to find a particular house number, but they don't even try. They get to the mailbox, toss in a "sorry you weren't home" card and sod off again, leaving me to pick up the package from the post office during office hours anyway, or on Saturday morning, which is when I can actually get there. While there's supposed to be parcel pick-up outside those hours, the arrangement where I live is that this is done from the PO Box bunker, and that parcels are not kept there, but inside the shopping centre. Guess whether the PO Box attendant can get to your parcels outside normal shopping hours. Go on. Guess.

So online shopping hasn't exactly sold me. I don't trust the delivery drivers to actually bother delivering, and I don't trust myself to order the correct item without talking to someone about it. Does this make me a shopping luddite? Yeah, probably. So what? It's still working for me, and until online shopping can actually provide me some savings or benefits, I think I might stick with bricks and mortar for now.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do order flowers online now and then from our local florist.
PPS - They regularly misspell our street name, and they abandon flowers on the doorstep, but it does seem to mostly work.

The internet is confronting

The internet brought together all people, whether they wanted to be together or not. It challenged old racist and sexist stereotypes by having actual, accidental contact between awful people and the people they despised or misunderstood. By this process, it raised the hackles of those awful people, and their first-generation response is to unionise their awfulness, banding together to reinforce their old ideas to each other and convince themselves that the world is wrong, not them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't think that will be the response forever, though.
PPS - I mean, I hope so.

Peer-to-peer MMOs

Since City of Heroes shut down - or even since the announcement, really - I've wondered about how to make MMO games robust against that kind of existential threat. When such games become unprofitable, development ceases and the servers are shut down. That's just business. The obvious answer to that problem is to host the game itself on a peer-to-peer network of player machines. Then, no matter how much the game grows or shrinks, there's always enough server capacity.

However, running a game like that on a peer-to-peer network raises some other challenges. For one, there's the matter of trusting the server code and preventing cheating. If the players, technically, have access to all the server code running on their own machines for each other, there's no central, trusted arbitrator for tasks like random number generation and application of the rules. I've outlined before how some trust can be established between peers for generating random numbers, so it's possible it could be worked around, but it requires a lot more communication than an implicitly-trusted server does. It's also probably not the full story for everything that's needed for a trusted peer network of this type.

Still, I'd like to see it attempted, if only to know that, in the future, there's a definite way to save these games from destruction when they become unprofitable, or for smaller, niche games to get a leg up when they're starting out and can't afford dedicated server hardware.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - On the City of Heroes front, a new game called Valiance Online has started open public testing.
PPS - Which is a long way from a complete game, but more than I've seen in a while.

Shopping by feature

Shopping online is great. You can't beat the convenience or prices, but the research can still be a real killer, especially if you're looking for a particular kind of item (say, a car stereo) with certain features (aux and USB inputs) that are not reported by the website you're looking at. I can look at car stereos at JB HiFi, but if I don't care about the brand, just the particular features, I'm out of luck. If you need that information, you have to read every description or check the manufacturer's websites and collate it yourself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And that can be its own kind of frustration.
PPS - I rarely care about manufacturers more than features.

Email inconvenience

When I happen to visit Yahoo Answers occasionally, looking for this or that answer to a technical problem, I notice that the site tells me how many new emails I have. "Oh," I think to myself, "That's convenient. I should check those messages while I'm here." I don't use my Yahoo mail account much, because it's basically my spam trap, but sometimes it attracts something useful. Anyway, I click on the icon and it asks me for my password to log in. "But," I say to myself, "how did you know how many emails I have if I'm not logged in?" At this point, I usually leave, because the convenience factor is gone.

As with all security, it's probable a trade-off with convenience. Yahoo knows who I am based on some old cookie or something, but needs my password before letting me see my mail. Understandable, but inconvenient.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wasn't a fan of the updates they made to Yahoo mail some time ago.
PPS - They took away all the keyboard shortcuts I'd been using.

Cloud doesn't mean much

With the movie "Sex Tape" out now, and the trailer containing the phrase "Nobody understands the Cloud!", perhaps it's time to give ourselves a definition we can use. Ready? Here goes:

The Cloud is the internet, when marketers want it to sound new.

There. Now you understand the Cloud. If you want to go into more detail, the word "Cloud" is most often used to describe services provided over the internet, such as file synchronisation or database storage. This is, again, because of marketing, but there's nothing new or special about these services except the name "Cloud". The internet was perfectly capable of these services before companies built them, and it's still the internet afterwards. "Cloud" is just their word to make you think they've done something brand new and revolutionary when all they've done is put some extra services online that weren't online before.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's faster to say, so I guess that's something good.
PPS - I wouldn't call that quite enough, though.

Naked DSL internet is just as expensive as line rental plus ADSL

What I don't understand about naked DSL plans is that they all seem to be $20-$30 more than the equivalent regular ADSL plans, which is exactly how much you're supposed to be saving on line rental. For instance, on TPG, you have this:

ADSL2+ 100GB/month: $29.99
Naked DSL2+ 100GB/month: $49.99

That's the equivalent of a $20 line rental when Telstra charges $30. So you're not really saving all your line rental fees. Just a third. On iiNet it's this:

ADSL2+ 100GB/month: $29.95
Naked DSL2+ 100GB/month: $59.95

That's the full line rental fee you're not saving. The higher iiNet naked DSL plans are only $20 more than their equivalents, though, so that's the same $10 saving as TPG. The thing is, we were sold on these plans as a way to save your line rental fee, which makes sense as a concept, but if the fee is just built into the plan instead, that's broken. The only reason I'd do it is to avoid having a home phone, and I can do that anyway by not plugging one in.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's what I'm currently doing.
PPS - It worked out cheaper for me to do it that way.

Netflix vs Comcast

The Netflix/Comcast agreement demonstrates that Net Neutrality is not a case of poor, overworked, underpaid ISPs finally getting their due from freeloading content providers. It's a hostage situation or a protection racket. "Pay up, or else all your lovely bandwidth could have a nasty accident". This is bandwidth, by the way, that everyone has already been paid for once. Netflix already pays its ISP to provide a service, and Comcast customers already pay Comcast and Netflix for the bandwidth and service, respectively. The only reason Netflix had to pay Comcast again is that Comcast has the power to kill Netflix traffic. That's not a normal commercial agreement. It's extortion.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At least, for their part, Comcast seems to have used the extortion money to make Netflix faster.
PPS - It just shouldn't have been Netflix that had to pay for it.

Maybe I'll switch to Twitter

I'm considering moving away from Blogger to Twitter. I know they're not the same kind of thing, and I know they don't provide the same level of expression, but that's kind of the point. I'd like to learn to express my ideas more succinctly, and 140 characters is just the way to do that. I might set up an IFTTT recipe to post my tweets to Blogger, but that seems like a waste.

I always thought I'd keep blogging until I ran out of ideas to share. I didn't consider that, perhaps, I would run out of worthwhile ideas to share, then not really notice for a few months. That time may have come.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At least for this week, I'm going to do both.
PPS - I'll let you know how it goes.

How IMDb could make my life a bit easier

An app that would make my life so much easier would be photo face recognition for TV actors. A lot of my time watching TV seems to be spent looking up actors in IMDb and finding out where else we've seen them. The IMDb app is not really built for this. It's built to avoid overwhelming your screen and data connection by showing only the most relevant information for any given context that you happen to be viewing, but the path between the show we're watching and the full filmography of a particular extra on a particular episode is so long that and such a common operation for me that I frequently long for optimisation.

The path right now is:

IMDb -> search -> show name -> All episodes -> season -> episode -> All cast -> actor name -> All filmography -> [As] actor.

What I'd like is:

IMDb -> who's that (face recognition from camera) -> search results -> actor (all filmography displayed on same page).

Even better would be limiting the filmography to only what I've actually seen, but that would mean IMDb knowing everything I've seen. That would either be a creepy invasion of privacy or a lot of data entry. Or perhaps an import from Quickflix.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Quickflix doesn't know all about me, though.
PPS - I'm pretty sure I don't remember everything I've ever seen.

Working better with YouTube subscriptions

When I subscribe to a YouTube channel, I do so because I want to watch basically everything they upload, or I at least want to have a clear view of new uploads on that channel. The best possible arrangement, for me, would be to have all new uploads from my subscription channels added automatically to my Watch Later playlist. For now, here's the best solution I've found:

Get an RSS Feed Of Your Youtube Subscriptions

This page describes how to get an RSS feed for all your subscriptions, which you can use in any news reader of your choice. I've added it to Feedly, which I use for my news since Google set fire to Google Reader. Anyway, it's a fairly simple matter of making your subscriptions public, finding your user ID and pasting it into a GData URL. It looks pretty good to me so far.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's made my subscriptions useful, anyway.
PPS - I like working with single feeds for similar purposes.

A possible future of social networking

There is a way - a bad way - that social networking online could go. It might look something like this.

In an effort to fight back against heavy-handed NSA surveillance and over-sharing on Facebook, ISPs are forced to take action to protect their customers. Rather than paying Facebook for access and not being sure that they really are protecting the privacy of their users, ISPs set up their own social networks as an opt-in extra. Users pay to have an account, but the ISPs, in a move designed to encourage more business, make these new networks walled gardens, exclusive to their own customers. If you want to network with your friends, better convince them to switch ISPs.

These buggy, awful, too-closed networks will, however, eventually win out, because they don't sell user data to third parties. At first. Then the allure of bringing back the Big Data economy will tug longingly at the wallet-strings of the ISPs and they will cave in. After all, someone else must already be doing that, right?

So, in order to save ourselves from government surveillance, we will sell our social data to our internet service providers instead, who will, in turn, behave exactly like little Facebooks, selling user data and, eventually, collaborating with government spy agencies anyway. We don't get a say. We never did. We are the product. The cow doesn't get a vote on the way to the abbatoir.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I know it's bleak.
PPS - Some futures, especially with little corporate responsibility, are just that way.

Amazon.com.au doesn't know I have a wish list

Since the launch of Amazon Australia for digital content, my wish list is a mess. I had a lot of titles on there for my Kindle, and now when I log in, I am told that some of them are no longer available. This is because they are now to be exclusively sold through Amazon.com.au if I am in Australia, though this is not spelled out on Amazon.com. To make it all as difficult to use as possible, of course, my wish list itself is not accessible from the Australian site. So to buy a title from my wish list for my Kindle, I have to make sure I go to Amazon.com, but if the title is not actually available there, I have to go to Amazon.com.au and do a search to make sure I haven't been lied to.

Like I said, a mess.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm moderately confident this will get better in the future.
PPS - Moderately confident, not supremely confident.