Google's new privacy policy: Nothing new

Or at least, nothing we didn't think was already happening.

Yesterday, Google's infamous new privacy policy went into effect. I've seen so much ranting and catastrophizing about this, I feel like I have to add to the few voices clarifying what's actually changing:

They aren't collecting more information on you.

They aren't sharing more information with others.

Is that clear enough? All that's happening is that they're pooling the information they already collect through different sites like Youtube and Google Search, instead of keeping it compartmentalized. So instead of Youtube ads being personalized based only on what you search at youtube.com, they'll also use what you search at google.com. That's what's new.

Which is why I'm kind of surprised at the uproar. I thought everyone already assumed they did that! Especially after the Wall Street Journal's big "The Internet is Scary"* series. Google is supposed to be the worst offender, right? Why wouldn't they be using every bit of information they can suck up? Honestly, when the privacy policy thing hit headlines I was kind of impressed that they'd kept this stuff separated.

But really, I'm not surprised. This just reminds me of moments like when the internet started focusing on ACTA after SOPA/PIPA were defeated. There were all sorts of scare stories going around, talking about how ACTA was SOPA squared, when there was absolutely no truth to that. It turns out, people on the internet  will dump a ton of effort into getting outraged about something, without spending half that effort to actually find out what that something is.

*Disclaimer: Yes, there are many problems with the level of personal tracking on the web and the lack of user consent or knowledge. We need a lot more of both. I think the Do Not Track header has potential, as long as it's done correctly. But most stories, including the WSJ ones, just come off as "Watch out! They eat people out there on the internet!"

Stop complaining about "Music these days"

(source: Pleated Jeans)

Mp3 Patents Slowly Dying

So two more mp3 patents expired just last month on the 24th. 2012 should actually be a big year for patents on the encoding technology, with four total due to expire. By Halloween we'll only have 12 left!

You always hear about how mp3 is a patent-encumbered technology, which causes lots of pain for anyone trying to make any tool that deals with audio data. But I rarely hear specifics. Since the technology is pretty old at this point, I started wondering if we're getting to the point where the patents will just expire, and it goes the way of the .gif?

A little searching leads you to this page, listing the 20 patents registered in the U.S. I wanted to get a sense of the timeline we're looking at, so I put together a simple visualization. Looking forward to 2017!

On Quines

$ ./quine.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Had an idea for an easy way to write a quine. This might be cheating.
use strict;

open(my $fh_in, "<", $0) or
    die "Error: Cannot open file $0: $!";

while (<$fh_in>) {
     print;
}

Did I not get the point?

(Okay, okay, quick explanation after the jump)

Ladies and Gentlemen, Neil deGrasse Tyson (and Stephen Colbert)

Here is a wonderful discussion between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Colbert. If you aren't familiar with Neil deGrasse Tyson, here is a great way to start that beautiful relationship. He's an astrophysicist best known for hosting NOVA and various science shows, and generally for explaining and popularizing science. He's also the person I most admire in science, because of his way of demystifying it and making it understandable and approachable. I'm a huge fan of taking something "too complex" to be understood by laypeople and showing how anyone can grasp it if you work with them to understand it.

Summary: He is a great man, and inspiring to listen to. And here is him being interviewed by Stephen Colbert, who (it turns out) is also an inspiring and deep thinker.

Obligatory SOPA post. But seriously this is important.

Sorry about the politics again, but I feel obligated to do my part to spread the word about this. I think the ratio of ramifications to how many people know about it is really big on this one. It's the first proposal to censor the U.S. Internet. It will put us in a club that includes China, Syria, and Iran.

Suffice to say, watch the video, that will explain it pretty well. And then visit americancensorship.org.

Oh! But before I forget, here's the most important point I can get across: It won't work. Not at all. There are already point-and-click workarounds. This won't stop a single criminal. If you know enough to use BitTorrent, you know more than enough to be able to simply ignore this legislation. It is a completely half-baked bill. Half-baked, but horribly destructive.



Note: PROTECT IP is the Senate version of the House's SOPA bill.

Goodnight Sweet Prince

Google's onmousedown link trickery

So you do a Google search. You find something interesting, but instead of clicking on it perhaps you just want to copy the link. Say you want to IM it to a friend or paste it into a malicious site search service. So you right-click on the link and "Copy Link Location" or whatever it is for you people on Chrome/IE/Safari/Opera/RockMelt(loljk). Then you paste it into your destination, but what you get looks like this:

Obviously Google's using some redirection trickery for some kind of internal purpose. But when you hover your mouse over the link, the url that shows up at the bottom of the window is the normal, short, non-Google link! And that hover-over url never lies, right? How is this happening?

Well, the good news is that technically the hover-over url isn't lying. It is indeed the correct url at that moment. But try right-clicking on the link, and before you do anything else, notice the hover-over url again*. It's changed! It seems Google is using some Javascript tricks (like an onmousedown event) to show us the expected url at first, then change it at the last second.

Sneaky? Maybe.
Annoying? Definitely.
Clever? Absolutely.

*A note in case you try this yourself: this only seems to happen on like 1/4 of the links on a typical page. And there's no way to predict which ones it will affect.

What happened at 1:17AM, November 6?

I just realized a weird side effect of daylight savings. In the fall, it creates an entire hour where times are non-unique. What I mean is, if I said I brushed my teeth at 1:17AM on November 6, would you know when that happened? It could be the first time 1:17 rolled around or the second.

I only thought of this as I sent a text during those ambiguous two hours and saw the timestamp. I use Google Voice, which shows the time sent next to each text. So I wondered if I sent one at 1:25 in the first hour and then at 1:17 in the second hour, would it show the one at 1:25 before the one at 1:17? I guess so.

Of course this mostly only matters if you think about software that timestamps things. Which is one reason why Unix time was invented, I guess. But I also start thinking about things like police reports or other important documents where you might say X happened at 1:17AM on the night of November 6. That doesn't specify exactly when it happened! There's no standard way to indicate what exact time you're talking about.

Again, this is one reason computers use Unix time, though I just discovered that apparently Unix time has this problem too. Its rule is that it always increases by 86,400 seconds per day. But some days are longer than others because of leap seconds. So again, we find that some times, like 915148800, are ambiguous. Now that really seems to pose a problem for software like server logging, etc. Why would you make the same mistake, Unix guys?

Note: Hmm, I wonder when I posted this? I guess we'll never know!

Luddite Fallacy: not wrong anymore?

Smash away!

(Wikimedia Commons)

I just read this article suggesting that the current job crisis might be a symptom of a larger trend: disappearing middle class jobs. The author cites technology and outsourcing as the causes. The technology part reminded me of an idea that's been forming in my head for a while.

Technology is bottoming out the cost of anything whose price was held up by the difficulty of communication or automation. The news, music, and even postal industries all were undercut when the internet made it dirt cheap to transfer information.

Of course, it also made all those goods cheap and plentiful for everyone. For a while I thought that was part of the answer to why technology doesn't create the massive unemployment the Luddites feared. But.. lately I've realized this time might be different.

So maybe the way this is working is that there are benefits to society but the benefits don't address the drawbacks. So we get to live in a world with an abundance of information always at our fingertips but that doesn't help the fact that none of us have jobs.