the life and times of endenizen » Current Events

A service which automates the process of filing a bankruptcy (right down to the affidavit claiming you did all the research yourself) has been found to be “practicing law” according to the Bankruptcy Appellate Panel of the Ninth Circuit Court (full document here).

The software did, indeed, go far beyond providing clerical services. It determined where (particularly, in which schedule) to place information provided by the debtor, selected exemptions for the debtor and supplied relevant legal citations. Providing such personalized guidance has been held to constitute the practice of law.

So if computers are capable of practicing law, it’s understandable that they’re able to do it without a license. However, they didn’t fine the computer for practicing without a license, they fined the guy running the company. But shouldn’t the computer be able to obtain a license? Or is this a simple matter of prejudice? If I program a computer to fight for its right to practice law, isn’t that really fighting for my right to program a computer that practices law?

There we were, just sitting and enjoying our burritos when all of a sudden.. the ground jiggled. It wasn’t much of a jiggle. It felt like a train was going by outside… albeit a larger and nosier one than those typically in San Francisco. Something about it, though, felt different. Like the ground wasn’t so much vibrating as becoming unsettled, and then settling again. It’s hard to describe (especially after finishing blink on the plane ride over) but it was exciting nonetheless.

For those who don’t know the reason I’m in San Francisco, I interviewed at imeem today. I think it went well, though from their interview tactics it’s hard to judge what they got from it. I hope it was all good stuff. I mean, I’m a pretty cool person after all. I’ll find out more next week. Other than the interview, I got to hang out with joe a bit as we checked out a local bar and then the burrito factory mentioned in the previous paragraph.

And now, in my triangular room with a door on one side and windows on the other two, I peer down on 3rd street from the 8th floor.

And then

nothing.

Seen on the xboxhacker forums:

Word on the street is that some smart people of this board combined their forces, formed an underground team and are very, VERY close to getting the first 360 backup booting…

This comes from a supposedly very reliable source, TheSpecialist, who is well-known in the underground xbox hacking community as a man who can make things like this happen.

Many have been expecting news of a hacked 360 for a long time. It was almost inevitable. For Microsoft to create an unhackable system would be beyond a typical console and indeed would become a work of art in the technology world. Not to say that every system can be exploited, but concerning the trade-off of ease-of-use, timely releases, and features required in modern consoles, it wouldn’t be worth the necessary time and money to be certain a console was flawless; not to mention the impossibility of such an endeavor.

What does this mean for Microsoft? Well there is almost no doubt that more consoles will be sold as a result of being able to hack them… assuming this news is not merely a rumor and hacks are actually created. However, more consoles being sold does not equal profit for Microsoft. It is well-known that they typically take a loss on the console sales to make it up in selling games. Hence the reason the consoles are relatively cheap (compared to the cost of a comparable PC) and games are relatively expensive (though strangely enough, PC games are no different).

Who would buy a game when you can copy a rented one? Well there’s the million dollar question. Perhaps console developers should start investing in the future of game development. Perhaps there will never be a way to make a console hack-proof so they are wiser to spend their money on making consoles more attractive for their features. Microsoft certainly tried a little of that by turning the Xbox 360 into a media center as well as gaming console… however, my antique Xbox *1* has had that feature since a few days after I bought it.

My thoughts are that consoles need to evolve with a new content-rich subscription-based system. Microsoft uses Xbox-live as an online gathering place for all of their multiplayer games, and from what I can see, it’s working very well for them. They’ve started adding additional content, which I would see as a very obvious move on their part, but what if this platform evolved to become the primary distribution center for demos, previews, movies, and ultimately, full games. What if with my simple subscription (hypothetically, of course, I don’t have one now), I was allowed to “preload” a game onto my xbox and have it unlocked the day the game was released. No more long lines at the store, just start playing online right away.

Going beyond that, what if I could develop my own game using a limited version of the sdk, and then release the game on this content distribution system? Besides the almost limitless possibilities for new games from their user-base, Microsoft would still be collecting huge sums of money from all the subscriptions.

I’m sure anyone could come up with many other uses for consoles that are currently unfilled; entire markets of users that feel left out because they don’t play sports games or Halo. I don’t play either, so I use my Xbox almost exclusively as a media center. (Sidenote: I’m reminded of the Xbox 360 commercial where all the neighborhood kids are running out of their houses to play games together, followed by the tagline “It’s good to play together.” Not only would those kids have been unable to afford an Xbox, they’d probably rather play a real game outside than a poor representation of one on a TV. But maybe that’s the point, as the viewer of this commercial, you’re already glued to the TV so, lacking a bunch of friends to play outside with, “wouldn’t you like to have this feeling?”) I wouldn’t mind paying a subscription fee for extra content / a community of like-minded individuals but the current subscription system is hardly what I’m looking for. Not to mention I’m still a long way off from buying an Xbox 360 and I’d really have *no* use for Xbox Live on my Xbox 1.

C’mon Microsoft, I think you can do better.

MySpace, one of the most popular social-networking websites, has once again poked it’s head into mainstream news. Last July, the big news was of their $580 million purchase by Rupert Murdoch and his global media group News Corporation (which also owns FOX). Recently, the news hasn’t been quite so good:

Last month, for example, 14-year-old Judy Cajuste was found strangled and naked in a Newark, N.J., garbage bin. Police seized a computer from her bedroom after friends said she told them of a man in his 20s she met on MySpace. The death remains unsolved.

(Read the rest of the story here: Teens at risk on social websites, officials worry)

Such stories should demand change. When a website, merely as a side-affect of its primary use, can so easily be exploited to aid a sexual predator in seeking out a victim, alarm bells should go off in the heads of its creators because something must be wrong. A MySpace user with the default settings currently allows anyone on the internet to view their profile. Many users are not familiar with effective privacy on the internet and, just as any good parent needs to warn their children about talking to strangers, need to be told that some information is not appropriate to give out to everyone in the world, let alone any number of sexual predators who live in their immediate area. Maybe it’s not fair to point fingers at MySpace though because the same thing has been happening for years in chat rooms.

When we as internet users trade the inconvenience of real-life friends for the availability of online strangers we must realize that one does not equal the other and must therefore be wary.

Websites similar in style to MySpace, such as Facebook and XuQa, have addressed the issue of privacy by allowing only members of the site to view the contents within.

Facebook requires users to register with their school email address and has controlled the population growth by slowly allowing additional .edu addresses to register. The list is still limited to slightly over 2,500 schools. A lot of hype was generated when students from some schools were able to access it while their friends had to wait for additional servers to be added and kinks to be worked out. Facebook has one of the most restrictive privacy policies of any of the major social networking sites:

Facebook was intentionally designed to limit the availability of your profile to only your friends and other students at your school. This simple but important security measure promotes local networking and makes sure that your information is seen by people you want to share it with, and not seen by folks you don’t.

XuQa took a different approach and simply let anyone with an email address register for an account. They boast having “the most expansive college network in the World with more than 7200 universities and technical schools.” As such, they also have the most expansive network of hate-filled comments. I won’t post any examples here so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Unless you really want examples, in which case you can head over to http://www.xuqa.com and sign up for an account. I’ll let you be the judge of whether such material creates a safe environment for children. The stalker potential is as high as ever.

These are only three of the major social networking websites, though they may well be the three most popular. If the users of these websites are to be kept safe, they must either be educated, or protected against their will. Currently, Facebook has a bit of both. Their privacy policy is restrictive but it also explains why, and it has some very good reasons. XuQa isn’t restrictive at all though I will give them credit for forcing users to create an account before they view too much about other members. MySpace is dangerous. It’s 7+ million users are less-than-informed about effective privacy habits and are left open to attack by anyone who has internet access and time.

When I visited MySpace for the research on this article, I clicked on “Browse” and I was presented with a list of 18 (the youngest allowable age) to 35 year old women in the U.S. who recently logged in and had pictures available for viewing. I’m not sure if I should be worried but child predators would probably start with a very similar search. I opened the first 5 profiles. 3 of them (along with a whole pile of personal pictures) came complete with first and last name, age, city and state. Ok, now I’m worried…

We’ve all seen poorly-written, somewhat-incorrect, or just downright wrong Wikipedia articles but few have done anything this drastic about it. Regardless, if I was John Seigenthaler Sr., I’d be pissed if I saw this:

“John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.”

Seigenthaler’s response began:

This is a highly personal story about Internet character assassination. It could be your story.

Read the rest…

Some Wikipedia fans were mildly amused and argued “If he doesn’t like it, just change it!” What if it was an article about you? With the internet coming up in court many times and even providing evidence to sway the trial one way or another, who’s to say that something written on Wikipedia wouldn’t be further investigated, even if it was just a rumour. Imagine someone calling in an anonymous bomb warning to a school. Like the Anonymous Editor of Wikipedia, they cannot be prosecuted but imagine how the school would react. Would they take it seriously? If someone wrote allegations in a Wikipedia article and the police happened to find them, don’t you think they’d investigate, just on the off-chance that they might turn out to be true?

The “truth” of an encyclopedia like Wikipedia is commonly called into question. One could argue that no encyclopedia anywhere in the history of history has been completely accurate and they might be right. Using such an argument to claim that Wikipedia would naturally be “more correct” than these encyclopedias, however, is somewhat ridiculous. This claim would most likely be attributed to Wikipedia’s large number of daily visitors and that these visitors will fix something if it’s wrong. Wikipedia used to be a tool of the “internet elite” and with it’s proliferation in online dictionaries, reference materials, and even mainstream news articles, it will attract more and more visitors who don’t really care about its success. I believe that the additional visitors will do more harm than good. Maybe not even on purpose because, as you should always keep in mind, people are dumb.

As an impromptu experiment performed by me right now, I looked for an error, just one, to weakly demonstrate my claim. I’ll take an innocuous, but not random, article like the one about Western Michigan University. As I set off on my search, I first looked through the history to see if there had been any obvious vandalism (not as an end to my search, mind you, just for fun). I didn’t see anything right away but about midway through last month, I noticed that there had been a spelling edit. Something was strange about the spelling edit, though. The editor seemed to know what they were doing but they had neglected to correct a word mere letters away from the bulk of the edits. Surely, I thought, they must have later gone back to correct this. But when I checked the current article, it was still there! Success! The error had been active for about 1 month and a total of 12 edits. So 12 people who took the time to edit the article didn’t notice that “Engineering” was spelled “Enginnering” and I, taking a few seconds out of my Wednesday, suddenly become a hero.

What can be done about openly-editable content on the internet? Would more restrictions help such content or condemn it to be full of even more innacuracies? Wikipedia responded to the Seigenthaler incident with a new rule that you must be a registered user to create a new article. This is a far cry from making a difference, though, and it wouldn’t even have stopped what happened. More realistically, I think all anonymous edits should go into a “pending” queue where they await the approval of a Wikipedian who then takes responsibility for the added content. If they feel it’s appropriate, they add it. If they know it’s vandalism, they delete it, and if they’re not sure, they let it sit for someone else to look at. Old anonymous edits (whatever their status) would then be added to the history of the page to make sure valid information was not disappearing into the internet abyss.

Seigenthaler was justified in his posting to the world and I support him for taking a stand and pointing out that we shouldn’t trust this kind of technology as much as we do.

The bottom line: Will things change? Probably not.