Technology

Josh Marshall writes: The grand ole daddy of special interest giveaways – Congress to give away the Internet. This is serious. Find out more here.Sounds like he’s saying that Congress is transferring the authority the Department of Commerce currently has over ICANN somewhere, doesn’t it? But he links to Art Brodsky on TPM’s “Special Guests Blog,” who writes: Congress is going to hand the operation of the Internet over to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. Democrats are helping. It’s a shame. ...

Details of AT&T’s cooperation with the National Security Agency are beginning to emerge as a result of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against AT&T, as described by Wired: AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers’ phone calls, and shunted its customers’ internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against the company. ...

This is really cool, I hope the Quicktime videos come back soon. (Via BLDGBLOG.) UPDATE (September 18, 2007): Julius Popp’s website (the first link) appears to be undergoing renovations… the BLDGBLOG link still has Bitfall pictures and description. Historical Comments Einzige (2006-12-09): That has got to be the coolest thing I've seen in a long time.Mind-numbingly awesome.

Back in December, I wrote about criticisms of Wikipedia in Communications of the ACM and a study published by Nature which found that Wikipedia’s coverage of scientific subjects was about as accurate as that of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now Britannica has demanded a retraction of the Nature study on the grounds that its “research [is] invalid, its study poorly carried out, and its findings [are] ‘so error-laden that it was completely without merit.’” (Inside quote is from Britannica’s response, outside quote from Seattle Times coverage.) Britannica’s website has a 20-page PDF (7 pages of response, 13 pages of supporting information in two appendixes) that is a response to the Nature study, titled “Fatally Flawed: Refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature.” This response states that “Nature’s research was invalid. As we demonstrate below, almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading. Dozens of inaccuracies attributed to the Britannica were not inaccuracies at all, and a number of articles Nature examined were not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica." The initial criticism of the response is that, while the Nature study headline claimed that “Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries,” the actual study showed that Wikipedia had a third more inaccuracies than Britannica. The next criticism is that as they reviewed the alleged inaccuracies, they “discovered in Nature’s work a pattern of sloppiness, indifference to basic scholarly standards, and flagrant errors so numerous they completely invalidated the results.” Nature refused to supply the complete reviewer reports comparing Britannica to Wikipedia articles, so Britannica reviewed the truncated reviewer reports that had been posted to the web, along with the articles which were supplied by Nature. Several of the Britannica articles reviewed were not from the Encyclopedia, but from editions of the Britannica Book of the Year. Britannica notes that “Yearbook authors are often given greater latitude to express personal views than writers of encyclopedia articles.” In one instance, a sentence in an article on Steven Wolfram “in which point of view figured significantly” was counted as an inaccuracy. In one case, an article on ethanol, the source of the article was from the Britannica Student Encyclopedia, “a more basic work for younger readers." A more significant flaw was that in some cases, reviewers criticized articles for omissions when they were only sent excerpts from the articles. The report notes that the reviewer of an article on lipids was sent only a 350-word introduction rather than the full 6,000-word article, which covered the items marked as omissions on the basis of the introduction alone. Similarly, what was delivered to reviewers as articles on kin selection and punctuated equilibrium were actually only sections from a longer article on the theory of evolution, and what was identified as an article on field-effect transistors was a section of the entry on integrated circuits. In another case, an article on aldol reaction was composed of selections taken from two separate Britannica articles, connected together with language apparently authored by Nature’s editors. Another flaw in the Nature study was that Nature did not require reviewers to document their assertions; where they disagreed with articles being reviewed, the reviewers were taken to be authoritative. The Britannica response supplies two examples where the reviewers were incorrect. Finally, Nature failed to distinguish minor from major errors, treating all as equal even though Wikipedia had more significant issues, and counted as omissions cases where Britannica made editorial judgments to cover specific information in either a different way than the reviewer preferred or in other articles in the encyclopedia. I think Britannica makes their case–the study shouldn’t be relied upon as evidence that Wikipedia’s coverage of science is as good as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Over at Multipolarity Memes there’s a post about a short (though large), 3D-rendered, animation of a hypothetical nanofactory. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no expert at this stuff, but I did take some intermediate chemistry and physics classes in college, so the animation immediately raises a number of questions in my mind; viz.: At that size, can they realistically assume that the envisioned structures will be as rigid as they make them out to be? What about Brownian motion? What about transfer of heat—especially given that there are, presumably, chemical reactions taking place, and these reactions will involve energy transfers? What type of bonding is happening at the transfer points? Chemical reactions don’t happen magically—and they don’t happen without some energy input or energy release—neither of which are being obviously represented in the video. It’s a pretty fantasy, but how realistic is it, really? ...

Ed Felten writes about a new paper that discusses the possibility of RFID tags being used to exploit flaws in RFID reader software to propagate a virus. The paper, authored by Melanie Rieback, Bruno Crispo, and Andy Tanenbaum of Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, includes a description of a proof-of-concept the authors developed. By including a SQL injection flaw in the reader software they wrote, and RFID tag containing appropriate malicious code, the reader then propagated the malicious code by writing it to new RFID tags. If such a flaw exists in real reader code, the potential exists for a virus to be transmitted from reader to reader via RFID tags, with each infected reader writing the virus out to additional tags. BTW, this is the same Andy Tanenbaum who wrote the classic textbook Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and developed Minix, which inspired Linus Torvalds to create Linux. Rieback gave a talk at last year’s “What the Hack” hacker conference in Amsterdam on “Fun and Mayhem with Radio Frequency Identification.”

It appears that Amazon.com has removed all customer reviews from their website, and has introduced a new beta feature called “Customer Discussions” for each product. There are still customer rankings (the “Rate it” feature) and editorial reviews, but all the customer reviews are gone, the reviewer ranking is gone, and the helpful/unhelpful votes are gone. A pity, as I was hoping to someday make the ranks of the top 1000 reviewers–my best rank was 2,171 in late February of this year. This move seems to be really poor judgment on Amazon.com’s part. I heavily relied upon customer reviews when making purchasing decisions, and I considered the reliability of individual’s reviews by comparing them to other reviews by the same person. Now, that feature of Amazon.com is unavailable, as the huge existing database of commentary has been removed. Perhaps the “Customer Discussions” will replace it, but if the purpose is for people to go back-and-forth debating specifics of the content, rather than giving an overview and opinion of the work as a whole, it won’t be the same. It was also rather rude of Amazon.com to delete, without notice, the substantial contributions of its top reviewers. I was ranked only 2,171, but I reviewed 113 books to get there–and there were several million Amazon.com reviewers. Top reviewers reviewed thousands of books. That’s an enormous amount of customer contribution to just throw away without notice or acknowledgment. UPDATE (12:35 p.m. MST Sunday): As cowmix pointed out, the reviews are back. I spoke with a friend who works at Amazon.com, and he said that it is common for Amazon.com to make changes like this which are only visible to a test population of users, for a short period of time that’s long enough to obtain information about how it affects customer behavior. ...

Last week Global Crossing, my employer, unveiled a corporate blog site. The current bloggers there are David Siegel, writing on the future of the Internet (and most recently on the IPTV World Forum), Adam Uzelac, writing on VOIP technology, Norm Schilacci, writing to clarify new technologies and concepts for the layman, and Paul Kouroupas, writing on public policy issues and regulatory matters (most recently on net neutrality, in which he recommends an excellent paper by Blair Levin, Rebecca Arbogast, and David Kaut of Stifel/Nicolaus, “Net Neutrality: Value Chain Tug of War”). In conjunction with this blog site, Global Crossing has defined a fairly open blogging policy for employees to comment publicly about the company. The policy contains most of the core and common policies described at the CorporateBlogging Blog. I’ve tended (with a few exceptions) to avoid blogging specifically about my employer here, and this is the first time I’ve specifically named the company on my blog. That’s a tendency I plan to continue here, though I expect to comment from time to time on the company blog site. (You can find a couple comments of mine in the DRM thread on Siegel’s blog.) Lest there be any doubt, any opinions I express on this blog (or on the company blog) are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.

Back on March 4, the story broke from an American traveling in Canada that something had gone wrong at Citibank, causing it to shut off access from the ATM networks of Canada, Russia, and the UK. Bruce Schneier picked it up on March 6, and now it’s hit the mainstream media with more details, with some attributing the problem to OfficeMax. The symptoms from a bank customer’s perspective are debit cards being replaced by the banks (which Citibank, Bank of America, and Washington Mutual have been doing since at least last month) and an inability to make withdrawals with current cards from ATMs in Canada, Russia, or the UK. At least some of the banks have now admitted to ATM fraud occurring, with Citibank admitting to “several hundred transactions” in three countries, while some western Massachusetts institutions have seen fraud in Spain, Pakistan, and Romania. The attribution to OfficeMax comes from investigations in Massachusetts. Tech Web News’ report is the most detailed to date: The unfolding debit card scam that rocked Citibank this week is far from over, an analyst said Thursday as she called this first-time-ever mass theft of PINs “the worst consumer scam to date.” Wednesday, Citibank confirmed that an ongoing fraud had forced it to reissue debit cards and block PIN-based transactions for users in Canada, Russia, and the U.K. ...

This one, a six-legged robot from Carnegie Mellon University, climbs trees and walls using claws, micro-claws, or sticky material, as appropriate for the surface. Again, there’s video. (Again, via jwz’s blog.) Previous robot, “Big Dog” the robotic pack mule, here.