Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

While I have been using Google ads on the blog for some time (and they do quite well), they don't yet do RSS ads outside of a more limited beta program. So I'm trying Yahoo's ads, also in beta but I'm on the list.

They just went live, and all that's showing right now is a generic ad, presumably until they spider the site and figure out what ads to run. Ideally it will be ads as relevant as Google Adsense does.

Competition between Google and Yahoo will be good for publishers. Just on basic click-rates, one will tend to do better than the other, presumably. If one is consistently doing not as well, they will lose all the partners, who will flock to the other. The only way to fix that will be to increase the percentage of the money they pay out, until they get to a real efficient market percentage they can't go above.

Read on for examination of the economics of RSS ads.

Some flat panel displays being made today have modestly thin edges, and people like using them for multi-monitor systems with a desktop that spans one or more monitors.

There are a lot of popular programming languages out there, each popular for being good at a particular thing. The C family languages are fastest and have a giant legacy. Perl is a favoured choice for text manipulations. Today's darling is Ruby, leader of the agile movement. Python is a cleaner, high-level language. PHP aims at the quick web/HTML scripter language and has a simpler access to SQL databases than most. Java's a common choice for large projects, with lots of class libraries, slower than C but faster than interpreted languages.

Tom Selleck narrates:

Have you ever arranged a wiretap in Las Vegas without leaving your office in Fort Meade?

Or listened in on a mother tucking in her baby from a phone booth, all without the bother of a warrant?

Or data mined the call records of millions of Americans with no oversight?

You will.

And the company that will bring it to you... AT&T

A big announcement today from those of us at the EFF regarding the NSA illegal wiretap scandal. We have filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T because we have reason to believe they have provided the NSA and possibly other agencies with access to not only their lines but also their "Daytona" database, which contains the call and internet records of AT&T customers, and probably the customers of other carriers who outsource database services to Daytona.

Last week I spoke at O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony (ETEL) conference about CALEA and other telecom regulations that are coming to VoIP. CALEA is a law requiring telecom equipment to have digital wiretap hooks, so police (with a warrant, in theory) can come and request a user's audio streams. It's their attempt to bring alligator clips into the digital world.

With too many people defending the new levels of surveillance, I thought I would introduce a new word: Panoptopia -- a world made wonderful by having so much surveillance that we can catch all the bad guys.

David Brin introduced the concept to many in The Transparent Society, though he doesn't claim it's a utopia, just better than the alternative as he sees it.

It used to be that "If you are innocent you have nothing to hide" was supposed to be a statement whose irony was obvious to all. Today, I see people saying it seriously.

In playing with a few firefox extensions that display things like my cellular minutes used, I realized they were really performing a limited part of something that could be really useful -- deep bookmarks which can go past login screens and other forms to go directly to a web page.

We're always coming up with new technologies that affect privacy and surveillance. We've seen court cases over infrared heat detectors seeing people move inside a house. We've seen parabolic microphones and lasers that can measure the vibration of the windows from the sound in a room. We've seen massive computers that can scan a billion emails in a short time, and estimates of speech recognition tools that can listen to millions of phone calls.

Last night I was thinking to myself that we would probably see a big political todo when the war military death toll reaches 2749 -- the number of people killed (not including the 10 suicide attackers) in the WTC on 9/11.

Here's an idea to try -- Scrabble played with Google as the base, rather than the dictionary. Ie. you can play any word you can find in Google (sort of.)

This obviously vastly expands the set of words, perhaps too vastly, and it brings in all foreign languages to boot. It includes vast numbers of joinedwords, and zillions of other things. As such you would want to consider the following limits:

Nothing bold here, but I couldn't help but notice if you Google for "GOOG" the stock symbol of Google, you may know you will get a stock chart on Google at the top.

But what's hilarious is to look at the adwords ads on the right side of the page, at least here in the bay area, some of them clearly aimed at Google employees!

Google is currently fighting a subpoena from the DoJ for their search logs. The DoJ experts in the COPA online porn case want to mine Google's logs, not for anybody's data in particular, but because they are such a great repository of statistics on internet activity. Google is fighting hard as they should. Apparently several Google competitors caved in.

How often does it happen? There's an important idea or action which is controversial. The bravest come out in support of it early, but others are wary. Will support for this idea hurt them in other circles? Is the idea against the "party line" of some group they belong to, even though a sizeable number of the group actually support it? How can you tell.

Of late there's been talk of ISPs somehow "charging" media-over-IP providers (such as Google video) for access to "their" pipes. This is hard to make sense of, since when I download a video from a site, I am doing it over my pipe, which I have bought from my ISP, subject to the contract that I have with it. Google is sending the data over their pipe, which they bought to connect to the central peering points and to my ISP. However, companies like BellSouth, afraid that voice and video will be delivered to their customers in competition with their own offerings, want to do something to stop it.

To get around rules about content neutrality on the network that ILEC based ISPs are subject to, they now propose this as a QOS issue. That there will be two tiers, one fast enough for premium video, and one not fast enough.

Today I've seen comments from Jeff Pulver and Ed Felten on possible consequences of such efforts. However, I think both directions miss something... (read on)

A really geeky idea: A fedora (common hat of the classic press photographer's uniform) or other hat with a built in remote controlled flash unit in it.

Here's an idea I had years ago and tried to promote to some of the earliest wireless companies, such as Metricom, without success. I just posted it on Dave Farber's IP list, so I should write it up again for my own blog...

Can giant companies, especially monopolies, ever get it right? Listen to this litany of the efforts to move my phone service, and get DSL.

Well, I am going to get a bluetooth cell phone shortly and so I got a headset and dongle to use on my laptop, where I also make VoIP calls.

I was shocked, flabbergasted to find that the bluetooth headset profile only transmits audio at telephone quality 8khz sampling rate. So even plugged into my laptop for hifi (didn't think I
would ever need to use that term again) recording, it sounds like a telephone, and likewise for
playback.

Why? Why? Why?

This week I will be doing some demos of Voxable, my system that combines VoIP, presence and all sorts of cool stuff I won't be writing about in the public blog to create a new user interface for the phone that is both as modern and internet as it can get while also being a reflection of the ancient interface for the phone that was lost.