All posts tagged "internet"

The media fast

Monday, November 15 2010

Ages ago, it seems, I embarked on a media fast.

I didn't give up television. I don't watch television, so there was nothing to give up. I didn't give up radio, because I don't think my radio use has ever been a problem for me. You don't while away the hours just listening to the radio, at least I don't. For me the radio is how I make mundane tasks that need doing more bearable.

What I gave up was Twitter and Facebook, the crack cocaine and crystal meth of the internet. I gave up online news sites and political blogs. And then I broadened the scope to include Public Address System, and Metafilter, two community sites where I found myself posting and commenting and reloading and reloading and reloading. I felt I had a problem, and I needed to do something about it.

It was good. I wrote things, I read books, I played music and practised instruments, and accomplished a lot else besides. It's possible I actually had mood improvements too -- I was pleased about all the things I was doing, and not depressed by hearing a lot of horrible news about people I don't know and situations I can't fix.

Then I stopped. I mean, I had to, to find out what would happen, didn't I? I promised I would write about it, but I didn't. Well, now I am.

What happened is that I did achieve some sort of control over the monkey-minded clicking. I continued to get things done. But not as much as before. I can go hours at a time without checking Twitter, days without looking at Facebook. Many times I find myself half way through a page, perhaps some more or less worthy piece from Arts And Letters Daily, say, and I ask myself "is this improving my life?" And then I go do something else. But I have never stopped mousing around looking for something to read in the first place.

The pile of unread books has grown higher, the list of unfinished projects longer.

So yeah, I'm doing it again. If not fasting, then dieting. Of course I'll still read your blog. It's essential. But I'm cutting out all that other crap. Life is too short.

Responses: 4 comments Tags: happinesshealthinternetmetamedia fast

More on reading Postman

Monday, February 22 2010




But we still have "Now... THIS."

Responses: One comment Tags: neil postmannews mediainternetmedia fast

How the web ate my brain and what I have done about it

Friday, January 22 2010

I have hinted recently that my use of the web has been troubling me; that use might have become abuse.

From a very young age I have had an excellent memory for interesting facts. By "interesting" I mean that I could remember facts such as the name Iguanadon comes from the Greek words for "Iguana tooth" -- INTERESTING -- but not it is a good idea to take something to blow your nose in when you go out for the day -- UNINTERESTING.

I wasn't surprised when I learned later in life that creating associations between things in your mind is a classic memory technique, because that's how my mind has worked my whole life. For me, retrieving a fact has always been like pulling a chain of links, or maybe tugging on... a web, navigating from something immediately in mind to something in the mental distance. I am sure this is why I have a lot of trouble telling the plain facts instead of a lot of long rambling stories. I want to lay out how a fact sits in my memory, describe the surrounding landscape, plot a chart to it. A bare fact on its own seems awfully lonely and isolated and how could anyone remember it if it's not tied down to other things?


Do you remember the Pogues song, Navigator?

Navigator, navigator, rise up and be strong

The morning is here and there's work to be done

Take your pick and your shovel and the bold dynamite

And we'll shift a few tons of this earthly delight

A navigator is someone who worked on navigations -- canals -- hence the word "navvy."

I feel that I have been a navigator of the Internet, not in the sense of a plotter of courses, but as a constructor of pathways. There are a lot of  online things New Zealanders use that I had a hand in. And when I was a-building of them, I was good at it because I was using them as heavily as I could. Looking back, though that use helped me, it cost me too.


This trait of pursuing ostensibly useless things and joining them up with known things has generally served me very well. It made a lot of tedious busywork fly past at school and university. It gave me a superficial grasp of a wide range of useful topics, linguistic, culinary, electronic, horticultural, you name it. Except for sport, don't ask me why. As a musician I can learn new tunes very quickly; as a programmer I can digest the fibrous lumps of new programming languages and business requirements without too much effort. My chosen pursuits and my abilities have been well-aligned.

Unfortunately, this is an ability that's becoming more and more useless. Anyone can google up a reasonable grasp of a new subject these days. There's no point in remembering things. The web can remember it for you wholesale. But it's worse than that. Building webs of facts in my head is a habit. And now that I have the web, it has got out of control.

I was using the Internet, in the form of Usenet news, long before most people I know. Even then I was gulping down newsgroup FAQs and polling my newsreader for new messages relentlessly. Once the web came into being, I found myself clicking around in the way we all know now. "How do you know that?" "Oh, I read about it somewhere." I enjoyed the kudos of coming up with entertainingly recherche information, but mostly I just liked learning things. Perhaps I am a coalmine canary. I've had on-tap broadband internet for most of my waking life since 1994, which give me 5-10 years on most people I know. Maybe five or ten years from now, there will be special social agencies dealing with the internet-troubled.

I read somewhere recently -- I can't remember where now, and I'm NOT going to look for it -- that some researcher somewhere has discovered you get a lovely little dopamine buzz when you learn a new thing that fits into a pattern. Well, hello, addiction through intermittent reinforcement. Twitter and Facebook, which always change (check, check, checkity-check) and have the added layer of peer pressure, just make it worse.

Clicky, clicky. Maybe this link will get me a food pellet.

~Digression ~

A decade and more ago, I spent a lot of time travelling with a band, playing in all sorts of places. I got to have a sort of feel for pubs and bars. I dreaded the ones run by old coots spending their retirement or redundancy savings, and worst of all the ones run by real alcoholics. If you want to run a bar, you need to drink, and you need to like drinking, but you can't let drinking be your whole desire, or your bar will run to ruin.


"Alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only one you can get yelled at for having. 'Damn it, Otto, you're an alcoholic.' 'Damn it, Otto, you have lupus.' One of those two doesn't sound right. -- Mitch Hedburg"

People sometimes use the word "addiction". I think this is unhelpful. Addiction, properly understood, is when a chemical has turned your body against you. Thus alcoholics and opiate addicts suffer from a medical condition, and cannot give up cold turkey without severe physical reactions that require medical supervision. The internet habit is merely a bad habit, in fact in some contexts a good and beneficial habit, but at any rate merely a behaviour that we can seek to modify without fear of hurting ourselves.

On the other hand, what are we to make of phenomena like gambling addiction? Aren't gambling addicts people for whom operant conditioning is just a little bit more effective than the rest of us?

Anyway, it's a hard habit to break when both ones employment and modern life in general mean it is not merely available but unavoidable for many hours of the day. I am a programmer, and I build web things. I know I've just said alcoholism is a bad analogy, but could you give up the drink so easily if you were a professional distiller? (Years ago I was told that the manager of the AFFCO freezing works at Horotiu was a vegetarian, but I never verified this. I suppose it's not really parallel anyway.)

Am I suffering? You should ask. Maybe this is fun. The earth is filled with many people who would love to spend all day on a padded chair, compared to what they do now. At that level, no, I'm not suffering. On the other hand, I feel there are other things I would rather be doing, if I weren't just absorbing other people's words. Lots of other things.

I am not good at listening to complaints from other people without offering advice.

(Supposedly this is a male trait, if you believe that Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus. This is bullshit. Dude got his PhD from a cereal packet. We are all from Earth.)

What I have done is this. I am refactoring my habits. People in other professions no doubt have better metaphors, but I am a programmer and refactoring is what we do with things that kind of work but not terribly well.

So I have written down a non-judgmental chronological list of things I do all day. Interwob blobbing has been too large a part of that list. Then I have written down a description of how I might rearrange things so that said blobbing would be a treat, rather than a thing in itself. And lo, I have got a lot more things done. I'm not into busy-ness for its own sake, so let me tell you that those things were things I wanted to do, things that improved my life, not things that I did just because some brain cells I don't even know personally told me to do them.

Once, maybe ten years ago, I observed that the sun was over the yardarm, so one might allow oneself a wee dram, to which my friend Rodger replied that people who need rules about when they can drink are people who have problems with alcohol. Over the years, I have come to realise that although I am not one of those people who have problems with alcohol, I do not have the innate self-restraint of a Rodger -- in fact I do need rules about when I can do certain things, either because I have otherwise uncontrollable urges, or because this is the only useful way I can manifest self-control. And I'm not ashamed. It's what I need to do, to do things I like more in the long term than the short term, and that's how I am. I really wish this wasn't so, and I think this is one of the great unsolved problems of philosophy -- why do we have conflicting notions of our own good, how do we distinguish the apparently good from the really good. And the non-philosophical -- having identified our own best interest, how do we act on it? I am frankly quite flummoxed to be this old and still be dealing with this, when it appears that other people I know are just charging ahead free of doubt and guilt and temptation. (I say "appear" because I hope, for my own selfish gratification, that they are in fact suffering from a bit of doubt and guilt and temptation and are just putting up a good front).

I owe a lot to the internet: a job, a way of life, a lot of friends, the love of my life, and I am honestly very grateful. I am just trying to school myself about what I need to pay attention to, and what to leave for later. To start with, it was all worth paying attention to, and I didn't need to discriminate, and now I find myself having to learn what other people could see from the very start.

Responses: 11 comments Tags: happinesshealthinternetmedia fast

how to manage an online vote

Tuesday, September 25 2007

(reposted from here)

This story is both amazing and unsurprising.

...TVNZ said it had found "voting irregularities" in the ballots cast by members of the public.

Voting had closed for the competition, but during the routine check of the emailed ballots, it was found some had come from invalid email addresses, or without the authorisation of the owners of the email addresses.As a result, TVNZ had to invalidate the vote, and start again with a fresh system.

It's amazing that TVNZ would go with a simple vote via email. Someone in the organisation must know that you cannot, over the normal internet infrastructure, rely on an email being from its ostensible sender. Don't they get spam at TVNZ?

It's unsurprising that people would game such a wide-open system, when the prize is worthwhile.

Details of the false emails have been referred to the police.

If I were accused of vote fraud in this competition, my first defence would be that no one could be expected to take such a stupid system seriously.

Now, how would I do it? Set up a website that sends a message to the user asking them to confirm their vote by pointing their web browser at a URL with a unique code. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Far, far harder to defraud, and surely cheaper and less annoying to users than rejigging the competition and engaging someone to set up a txt-based service.

Responses: No comments Tags: news mediatvnzinternetsecurity

soon it will be on everyone's lips

Thursday, July 05 2007



Responses: 3 comments Tags: obscenityinternetjulian

risk management for smarties

Tuesday, December 13 2005

In a spirit of fairness, here's Kiwibank's response to my letter:

Dear Stephen

Thank you for your feedback and we genuinely apologise for any inconvenience . The site was closed for about three hours as we had information that gave us concern that their could be direct interference with our site. The bank worked with international fraud agencies to close down the threat and the site was reactivated about 5.30pm The decision to bring the site down was not made lightly and our fraud investigation unit is adamant the action was not "pointless".


[Blameless clerk's name here]
Customer Resolution Coordinator

"We had information that gave us concern that their could be direct interference with our site." Wow. In that case, was the phishing thing a ruse or a cover or just a very unhappy coincidence? All the media stories I have read simply mention phishing, not an attack on Kiwibank's servers. Someone in the news media ought to be looking at the discrepancies here. Credible attacks on IB services, as opposed to their customers, is very big news.

And if it was just phishing? In that case, the only justification for shutting down the site would be to prevent fraudulent transactions taking place.

Let's have a look at how we manage (or should manage) risk if we're a sensible bank. Suppose that we're a Big Trading Bank with say, 400 000 customers in NZ.

First, we have a think about how we can minimise our total exposure. If we limit our customers to $2000 per day in external transactions, then the most we can lose in one day is $800 million. But we probably won't have anything like that many subverted accounts. If there were 1000 compromised accounts, you'd lose $2 million.

We can put some further barriers in place too - for example, we could force a small cooling-off period before new external payees become "live". We could email or txt users a confirmation message when new payees are created. And so on. We could limit the number of external transfers per customer per day. We could limit the total amount of transactions coming through the internet banking channel. And so on. Notice that these are all business rules rather than sophisticated technical countermeasures.

Next, we estimate the cost of an outage to the site. We know we lose money in these ways:

Finally, we are in a position to decide whether the certain cost of taking the site down exceeds the cost (weighted for risk) of the loss we may incur due to fraud. We know the most it can cost either way, and we know that on the one hand the outage costs are a certainty, while the fraud costs are a possibility.

Coming back to Kiwibank, how many customers were affected in the end? According to NBR, five. Now I don't know anything about Kiwibank's internal cost structures, but I'll bet you a brick to London that this little exercise cost far, far more than any possible loss that could have been incurred.

A correspondent of mine used the phrase "executive panic", and I'd say that's what we have here. (I'd credit said correspondent but he's in the biz and might not want to be quoted by name). A bank with a rational plan, following that plan, doesn't need to pull the plug just because of a phishing expedition.

Rodger's not quite on the mark here, I feel. Yes, this is a classic social engineering attack. However, the Intarweb angle is that the fraudster enjoys immensely greater leverage with phishing emails than with telephone calls, owing to the low transaction costs of spam and the low risk of apprehension. I don't think user education is really the answer. Even smart, well-informed people have brain farts and tired moments. And phishers are working with human nature ("You're in trouble! Click this button!") to bypass conscious control, whereas education is fundamentally trying to change it. That chap from the Police electronic crimes unit is right: two factor authentication is the only reliable way. So a big Aussie "yeah-no" to that.

I should note that in other respects I am very happy with Kiwibank's IB. It works very well on Mozilla-based browsers as well as IE; its capabilities are better than several other banks'; they let you download OFX; and they make continual wee improvements to it. Good on them for that, I say. And roll on, two-factor authentication.

Responses: No comments Tags: securityinternetonline bankingkiwibank

risk management for dummies

Thursday, December 08 2005


Dear Kiwibank

I write regarding your decision to shut down internet banking today.





Yours sincerely

Stephen Judd

Responses: No comments Tags: securityinternetonline bankingkiwibankirritation

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