Tag: technology

Alt★Hero FREESTARTR is back in business

Freestartr has fixed the system that I broke and you can now safely back the campaign and make additions again. If you are one of the six or seven people who backed the project in the last 12 hours since the last database backup, you will be contacted to confirm that the amount of your backing is correct. Both of the new Rewards, for the Rebel Figurine alone and for a single Poster, are now functional, although you’ll need to scroll down to the bottom of the Rewards until they get them arranged in order later today.

In other news, we have decided to remove the 150k Stretch Goal of the 15-minute video and replace it with the creation of an Alt★Hero web site, complete with forums. I spoke with the producer, and we decided that rather than do a small video now, we’d prefer to concentrate on building a strong foundation for the series, then crowdfund a more ambitious video project next year that will be written by Chuck Dixon and me. This means that we can spend more of the resources that the backers are providing us on actual comic art and books rather than on a single video that is too short to serve as much more than an expensive marketing tool.

In the meantime, by popular demand, here is another image of Rebel. She does not cuck or cower.

The death of the cloud

This sort of thing is why we don’t use the cloud. Frankly, I don’t understand why anyone does.

Yahoo said a major security breach in 2013 compromised all three billion accounts the company maintained, a three-fold increase over the estimate it disclosed previously.

The revelation, contained in an updated page about the 2013 hack, is the result of new information and the forensic analysis of an unnamed security consultant. Previously, Yahoo officials said about one billion accounts were compromised. With Yahoo maintaining roughly three billion accounts at the time, the 2013 hack would be among the biggest ever reported.

“We recently obtained additional information and, after analyzing it with the assistance of outside forensic experts, we have identified additional user accounts that were affected,” Yahoo officials wrote in the update. “Based on an analysis of the information with the assistance of outside forensic experts, Yahoo has determined that all accounts that existed at the time of the August 2013 theft were likely affected.”

The information taken in the heist may have included users’ names, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, passwords scrambled using the weak MD5 cryptographic hashing algorithm, and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. Yahoo said investigators don’t believe the stolen information included passwords in clear text, payment card data, or bank account information. Yahoo also provided updated figures in a press release and in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

As if there is any chance – any chance at all – that they didn’t know that all of the information had been taken. Who trusts anything these Big Tech companies say anymore anyhow?

Sure, I use Blogger and Gmail, but always in the full knowledge that everything on this blog and in my email could go public one day. There is no such thing as “security” in social media.

The dark side of entrepreneurial genius

Many will rightly look at this as a wonderful example of the sort of energetic immigrant entrepreneurialism that they believe to be of great benefit to America. But, as it happens, there is a very real and substantive downside to it as well:

The Uberpreneur: How An Uber Driver Makes $252,000 A Year. Uber may not just be a disruptive platform for transportation, but one for small businesses.
 
“Absolutely,” Uber spokeswoman Kristin Carvell says. “One of the greatest things about the Uber platform is that it offers economic opportunity for a variety of drivers — full-time, part-time, veterans, teachers, artists, and students — in more than 260 cities around the world.  Supporting and fueling the local economy is important to Uber and our driver partners help us to achieve this goal.”

His passengers seem to agree. Gavin’s ratings are 4.85/5.00 on Uber Black, 4.87/5.00 on UberX and 4.95/5.00 on Lyft, which he also uses. Those ratings have held up over time; Gavin drove over 3,829 passengers in the past 18 months.

These passengers include “executives who people pay thousands of dollars to meet at networking events,” Gavin says. He’s met Vogue fashion editors and Silicon Valley’s top brass, including legendary investor Shervin Pishevar.

“I’ve had a lot of amazing drivers, but Gavin is one of the best,” Shervin told me. “I was in his car with my daughter when I saw his jewelry designs. I thought they were wonderful and gave him a lot of encouragement to pursue his dreams.”

It’s these tactics that translate to sales. In the past year, Gavin designed many jewelry pieces for passengers, averaging $18,000 in transactions per month. Adding the $3,000 monthly gross earnings from Uber, he made $252,000 last year. Gavin used the income to expand his business, buying three more cars and hiring six new drivers.

It’s an absolutely brilliant idea. This guy is advertising far more effectively than any social media or Madison Avenue campaign, taking advantage of the direct one-on-one time he has with his riders to let them know about his business, which quite clearly is a genuine interest to a sufficient percentage of them. This guy is a bona fide entrepreneurial genius.

However, it’s not all rosy good cheer and future GDP growth on the horizon.

But Gavin’s growing business doesn’t tell the full story. As he’s become more successful, he hasn’t forgotten about his fellow Filipino immigrants. “I reach back to my roots,” he said. “When hiring new drivers, I find underemployed Filipinos and give them the jobs first. Most don’t know much about smartphones — and that’s okay. I teach them about Uber and Lyft. I teach them how to use the internet so it can help their lives in other ways, too. I let them use the cars to run errands and pick up their children. It’s not about squeezing every dollar from them. It’s about empowering the community that you came from.”

So much for American meritocracy. Gavin is so grateful for the opportunity that America has given him that he’s actively helping his fellow Filipinos in preference to Americans, even when they are massively less-qualified.

This is precisely why the civic nationalist notion of only bringing in the best and most productive foreigners is as harmful to the nation, and arguably more insidiously so, than importing a parasitical class of welfare recipients.

Good morning, said Gab

Gab@getongab
Good morning to everyone except Google.

If you’re not sure what this means, perhaps today’s DailyMemeWars might help you understand.

Now, obviously, I don’t agree with Gab’s position on moderation. I don’t agree with it in theory and I don’t agree with it in practice. But that doesn’t mean that I think it is either right or fair for Gab to be locked out of the App Store and the Play Store. As to whether it is legal for them to be blackballed in this way, I have no idea. I simply don’t know what most of the relevant laws are, or how they apply to the situation. Unlike most of the critics of my current petition, I try to avoid opining in ignorance.

It is a daunting task to take on a tech giant with the resources that Google has at its disposal. It’s certainly a courageous move. As to whether it is a clever move or a completely crazy one, we shall have to wait and see what comes of it. But, as we know, giants can be slain.

The failure of click-marketing

The CEO of Restoration Hardware reaches the same conclusion as the CEO of Proctor & Gamble: online advertising accomplishes nothing. More at Zerohedge.

I’ll share a little anecdote with you on this point.

We had our marketing meeting in the company several years ago and the online marketing team was pitching to double their budget, right, and at the time, say, look, nobody in the company is doubling their budget. But tell me why you believe that’s the right thing to do. And they said, well, look, our customer acquisition cost and our ad cost is the lowest in the company. And I said, well, tell me about the data, show me how. And they said, well, people who click through the words that we buy on Google, the ad cost was lowest. And I said, how do you know that they’re clicking on the word and going to the website because of the word you bought versus they saw a store or they received a source book? They said, oh, we know.

I said, well, how many words do you buy? They said 3,200. 3,200 words. I said, well, what are the top words? How are they ranked, the ranking of the words? Oh, we don’t have that, right. And I was getting the look at like, oh, Gary is kind of one these old brick-and-mortar guys. He just doesn’t get it.

And I said, well, what are the top 10 words? And they didn’t have the information. I said, why don’t we cancel the meeting and come back next week when you have the data? I’m sure that Google sales representatives who are taking you to the expensive lunches and selling you the 3,200 words have that data. So why don’t we get the data and then let, review the data?

And they came back the next week and we sat in a meeting and all of a sudden, I can tell you there’s a little change in the faces. They had to wear it kind of down. Everybody kind of came in. I said, so what did we find out?

And they said, well, we’ve found out that 98{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we’re buying 3,200 words and 98{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it’s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?

Immediately the next day, we cancelled all the words, including our own name. By the way, we are paying for the little shaded box above our words and said, oh no, we have to hang on to that because Pottery Barn might squat on top of us. I said, excuse me? I said, if someone goes to a mall or a shopping center and they’re going to Restoration Hardware and there’s a Pottery Bam there, they’re already squatting, okay? It doesn’t mean they’re going to go into their store. If somebody wanted to buy a diamond from Tiffany and just because Zale’s is sitting on top of them in a shaded box doesn’t mean they’re going to go to Zale’s and buy a diamond.

I mean, I can’t believe how many companies buy their own name and they’re paying Google millions of dollars a year for their own name, like maybe if this is webcast, right, a lot of people are going to go, holy crap. They’re going to look at their investments. They’d go, maybe we don’t need to buy our own name.

I’ve seen absolutely ZERO benefit to buying Google ads or Facebook ads myself. I’ve never bothered with Twitter ads or any other social media advertising. I’ve seen very, very moderate success buying Amazon ads. What has been far more successful is a) the Castalia House email lists, b) blogging about and excerpting books, c) the book carousels on the sidebar, and d) Tweeting about new books.

Of course, I’ve always been skeptical about digital advertising. Except for the way it can amplify word of mouth, it’s always struck me as a dubious proposition. You’ll notice that I’ve never been very prone to permitting anyone else to advertise here either, for just that reason.

Flat UI is retarding.

It is literally retarding. It slows the user down by nearly one-quarter on average. I’ve always hated it, passionately, since I noticed Apple pushing it. Now I understand why, beyond the ugly, outdated aesthetics.

The mania for “flat” user interfaces is costing publishers and ecommerce sites billions in lost revenue. A “flat” design removes the distinction between navigation controls and content. Historically, navigation controls such as buttons were shaded, or given 3D relief, to distinguish them from the application or web page’s content.

The mania is credited to Microsoft with its minimalistic Zune player, an iPod clone, which was developed into the Windows Phone Series UX, which in turn became the design for Windows from Windows 8 in 2012 onwards. But Steve Jobs is also to blame. The typography-besotted Apple founder was fascinated by WP’s “magazine-style” Metro design, and it was posthumously incorporated into iOS7 in 2013. Once blessed by Apple, flat designs spread to electronic programme guides on telly, games consoles and even car interfaces. And of course web sites.

Flat designs looked “cleaner” and more “modern” (Microsoft’s subsequent portmanteau term for its Metro design), but there was a price to pay.

The consequence is that users find navigation harder, and so spend more time on a page. Now research by the Nielsen Norman Group has measured by how much. The company wired up 71 users, and gave them nine sites to use, tracking their eye movement and recording the time spent on content.

“On average participants spent 22 per cent more time (i.e. slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers,” the firm notes. Why would that be? Users were looking for clues how to navigate. “The average number of fixations was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average, people had 25 per cent more fixations on the pages with weak signifiers.”

The firm dispenses with the counter-argument that users were “more engaged” with the page.

“Since this experiment used targeted findability tasks, more time and effort spent looking around the page are not good. These findings don’t mean that users were more ‘engaged’ with the pages. Instead, they suggest that participants struggled to locate the element they wanted, or weren’t confident when they first saw it.”

However, the failure of the WarMouse to be embraced with any widespread enthusiasm taught me that for all they like the idea of fast computers, most people are not very concerned with interface speed. If people are not particularly interested in doubling their interface speed, which we demonstrated was the norm for WarMouse Meta users, it should not be surprising that they are not overly concerned about losing 22 percent of it either.

The Left begins to wake up

About the potential problems posted by the Big Social Media monopolies:

We’re basically too small for Google to care about. So I wouldn’t say we’ve had any bad experiences with Google in the sense of Google trying to injure us or use its power against us. What we’ve experienced is a little different. Google is so big and so powerful that even when it’s trying to do something good, it can be dangerous and frightening.

Here’s an example.

With the events of recent months and years, Google is apparently now trying to weed out publishers that are using its money streams and architecture to publish hate speech. Certainly you’d probably be unhappy to hear that Stormfront was funded by ads run through Google. I’m not saying that’s happening. I’m just giving you a sense of what they are apparently trying to combat. Over the last several months we’ve gotten a few notifications from Google telling us that certain pages of ours were penalized for ‘violations’ of their ban for hate speech. When we looked at the pages they were talking about they were articles about white supremacist incidents. Most were tied to Dylann Roof’s mass murder in Charleston.

Now in practice all this meant was that two or three old stories about Dylann Roof could no longer run ads purchased through Google. I’d say it’s unlikely that loss to TPM amounted to even a cent a month. Totally meaningless. But here’s the catch. The way these warnings work and the way these particular warnings were worded, you get penalized enough times and then you’re blacklisted.

Now, certainly you’re figuring we could contact someone at Google and explain that we’re not publishing hate speech and racist violence. We’re reporting on it. Not really. We tried that. We got back a message from our rep not really understanding the distinction and cheerily telling us to try to operate within the no hate speech rules. And how many warnings until we’re blacklisted? Who knows?

If we were cut off, would that be Adexchange (the ads) or DoubleClick for Publishers (the road) or both? Who knows?

If the first stopped we’d lose a big chunk of money that wouldn’t put us out of business but would likely force us to retrench. If we were kicked off the road more than half of our total revenue would disappear instantly and would stay disappeared until we found a new road – i.e., a new ad serving service or technology. At a minimum that would be a devastating blow that would require us to find a totally different ad serving system, make major technical changes to the site to accommodate the new system and likely not be able to make as much from ads ever again. That’s not including some unknown period of time – certainly weeks at least – in which we went with literally no ad revenue.

Needless to say, the impact of this would be cataclysmic and could easily drive us out of business.

Now it’s never happened. And this whole scenario stems from what is at least a well-intentioned effort not to subsidize hate speech and racist groups. Again, it hasn’t happened. So in some sense the cataclysmic scenario I’m describing is as much a product of my paranoia as something Google could or might do. But when an outside player has that much power, often acts arbitrarily (even when well-intentioned) and is almost impossible to communicate with, a significant amount of paranoia is healthy and inevitable.

I give this example only to illustrate the way that Google is so powerful and so all-encompassing that it can actually do great damage unintentionally.

It’s interesting to see that the Left is beginning to get paranoid about Big Social Media, even though they’re not being targeted by it. Yet.

Forced convergence

Google is now imposing its will and its SJW ideology on conservative sites:

On Tuesday evening, Google sent a conservative website an ultimatum: remove one of your articles, or lose the ability to make ad revenue on your website. The website was strong-armed into removing the content, and then warned that the page was “just an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of this website.”

“Yesterday morning, we received a very bizarre letter from Google issuing us an ultimatum,” Shane Trejo, media relations director of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Michigan, wrote on The Liberty Conservative. “Either we were to remove a particular article or see all of our ad revenues choked off in an instant. This is the newest method that Big Brother is using to enforce thought control.”

The ultimatum came in the form of an email from Google’s ad placement service AdSense. The email specifically listed an article on The Liberty Conservative’s site, stating that the article violated AdSense’s policies.

“As stated in our program policies, Google ads may not be placed on pages that contain content that: Threatens or advocates harm on oneself or others; Harasses, intimidates or bullies an individual or group of individuals; Incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization,” the email stated.

The email warned The Liberty Conservative that it must either remove ads from that page, or “modify or remove the violating content to meet our AdSense policies.”

“Please be aware that if additional violations are accrued, ad serving may be disabled to the website listed above,” the AdSense email warned. “Please be aware that the URL above is just an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of this website or other sites that you own.”

Trejo argued that the article Google specified “contained no offensive content.” Rather, it “was merely distinguishing the many differences between the alt-right and literal Nazis.”

The Liberty Conservative writer suggested that the article was singled out because it was written by former Liberty Conservative contributor James Allsup. Allsup was involved in the “Unite the Right” riot (which Trejo described as a “rally-turned-riot”) in Charlottesville, Va. Trejo said the article was targeted because “it was authored by a man deemed to be an ‘unperson’ by the corporate elite.”

“Due to financial constraints, we had to comply with Google’s strong-arming tactics for the time being,” Trejo admitted. “An independent publisher such as The Liberty Conservative needs revenue from the Google ad platform in order to survive.”

Milo was prescient. Milo was right. From Dangerous, which is read by Milo himself and is now the #1 bestselling audiobook.

Twitter is the Silicon Valley company where progressive bias is most apparent, but Google is the company where it is most dangerous. If Google decides that it doesn’t want web users to find something, it would be very difficult to stop them—or even to find out they did anything in the first place. That’s probably why, out of all the Silicon Valley companies accused of bias, it was Google’s that Donald Trump addressed directly.

No conservative organization should be on AdSense. As is clear from the example of The Liberty Conservative, that is literally permitting Google to dictate your content.

Change or fall behind

Snidely Whiplash fails to understand why he’s not employed. Crew, who is not only of the Silicon Valley hiring class, but is the #2 Techstar and a member of the Infogalactic Star Council, is unable to set him straight.

Bob: The companies who try to move don’t succeed. They can’t convince their employees to move with them, and they can’t find the people they need in other locations.

Crew: I think this is not true. What you have in Silicon Valley is enormous numbers of H1Bs, some of whom have been laid off in the latest layoff rounds but they vary greatly in quality and putting together a good team can be very difficult.

Crew: Certainly, where I am we need people but we cannot find them and we are in the heart of Silicon Valley, so we do without and things just take longer to do. And the real problem is finding people who know how to balance short-term business needs (implementing what the customer wants to get their business) with longer-term company needs (doing it in a way that is supportable over the long term and doesn’t paint you into a corner.)

Crew: Despite that I still find time to work on Infogalactic and a couple of open source software projects. The reality is that people don’t go for those who have been laid off in most cases. Personally, I would prefer to employ Americans … but Silicon Valley has driven many of them out …

Snidely: And with pathetic attitudes like that, you’re helping to drive them out.

Jack: You still looking Snidely?

Snidely Whiplash: Sadly, yes, Jack. White, laid off, and over 50. Crew up there won’t hire me, no matter my skills or experience, because he’s an idiot.

I suggest that Snidely’s difficulty has less to do with his skills, his experience, or Crew’s purported idiocy than his personality. I’m not at all surprised to hear that he’s unemployed. He complains that Crew wouldn’t hire him, but I wouldn’t be inclined to hire him either. It’s one thing to not play particularly well with others, it’s another thing altogether to pride yourself on your complete inability to do so; even his self-selected moniker is an indication of misplaced pride. It’s not an accident that someone who elects to call himself “snide” reliably goes out of his way to say unnecessarily negative things about almost everything and everyone.

Snidely, that’s your main challenge. Not anti-American discrimination in tech. The moment I hear that negative, superior tone in a man’s voice, I immediately cross him off the list, whether he’s a programmer, an artist, or a writer. Sure, he may be directing it at something we mutually despise now, but I know perfectly well he’s going to be directing it at a co-worker, at the project, or at me before long. My experience has taught that such individuals never prove to be worth their downside, no matter how talented they are.

I’ll give you an example of that negative communication style right in that same thread.

This is how a normal person expresses his opinion: “Hey, it would be great if you would release audio-only versions of the videos. I would prefer to listen to those.”

That is a helpful, positive way to express an opinion. It’s a good idea too. Why not be sure to release the videos in podcast form or make them otherwise available for audio download? I expect we will do just that.

Now, this is how Snidely communicated the same idea: “One thing I would encourage, as it’s probably a make-or-break for me, is to have just the audio portion. Frankly, you’re not that attractive, and both my money and my bandwidth are limited.”

Same idea, different delivery, and it inspires an entirely different reaction: What the Hell? Fuck that guy! One has to read it twice to even register what the relevant opinion is, so distracting is the negativity.

There are three problems in just two sentences. First, the tone is heavily negative (make-or-break, frankly, not that attractive, limited). Second, he twice tries to make the entire subject about him when it isn’t. Third, he insults my appearance, and even worse, he does it without any need to do so in order to make his case. It’s just egregious. Now, I could not care less what some 50-something man happens to think about my appearance, but that sort of comment is not going to go over at all well with the average individual who is vain enough to be making videos.

So, Snidely, why would you EVER say anything like that? You didn’t need to justify your preference for audio over video, because I was openly asking for everyone’s opinions. And why are you whining and complaining about who Crew hires or doesn’t hire? You not only haven’t given him any reason to consider hiring you other than empty public posturing, you’ve given him excellent cause to not even accept you as a volunteer for any of the high-profile projects he manages. That’s not intelligent. That’s self-sabotage.

Now, I understand that this is a very challenging labor environment. It’s stressful for everyone. Even those with seemingly secure jobs know that they could lose them at any time due to an untimely comment overheard by the wrong person, a corporate acquisition, or a corporate move. One friend of mine, long self-employed, was convinced by his wife to take a great job offer at one of the strongest, most successful Fortune 50 technology companies in the world, in the interest of stability. He was even assigned to a mission-critical project. I would have sworn he had some of the best job security on the planet.

Nine months later, the CEO announced that the corporation was shutting down all its activities in my friend’s state. Since my friend was mission-critical, he was given the opportunity to uproot his family and move across the country to a place they knew no one. He wisely declined. So much for stability and job security.

The point is that in this environment, you have to continually up your game. And whether your weakness is on the skills side, the experience side, or the personality side, you have to shore it up. As I mentioned in last night’s Darkstream, video was never my medium. It still isn’t my preferred one, but I have upped my video game, and I am going to continue to increase it because that is what I have to do if I am going to be at all relevant to the 90 percent of the population that is post-literate.

The times always change. We can either change with them or we can fall behind.

Google’s gold, Google’s rules

I don’t know why anyone expected it to be any different. Google is paying for results, not research:

The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left.
But not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had chaired New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.
The statement disappeared from New America’s website, only to be reposted without explanation a few hours later. But word of Mr. Schmidt’s displeasure rippled through New America, which employs more than 200 people, including dozens of researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in sleek Washington offices where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.” The episode left some people concerned that Google intended to discontinue funding, while others worried whether the think tank could truly be independent if it had to worry about offending its donors.
Those worries seemed to be substantiated a couple of days later, when Ms. Slaughter summoned the scholar who wrote the critical statement, Barry Lynn, to her office. He ran a New America initiative called Open Markets that has led a growing chorus of liberal criticism of the market dominance of telecom and tech giants, including Google, which is now part of a larger corporate entity known as Alphabet, for which Mr. Schmidt serves as executive chairman.
Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team — nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows — would be exiled from New America.
While she asserted in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, that the decision was “in no way based on the content of your work,” Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.”

Now we have Fake Funding to go with Fake News, Fake Traffic, and Fake Ads. I don’t have any problem with Google expecting the people it funds to obey them and sing from Google’s songbook, only with the pretense that things were ever going to be otherwise.