The Ploogle Problem

A couple of days ago I joined the new social networking site Google+. Or: Ploogle as I alone insist on calling it.

Impressions so far have not been good

It's quite interesting but there are some very serious problems.
First of all: these guys really don't get "Privacy" as a concept and don't understand (or pretend not to understand) people's privacy concerns.
Let me give you an example everyone can find me, access my profile and see my personal information, including but not limited to email, occupation and where I live (more or less).
And while I have nothing whatsoever to hide there's a problem with that. Everyone includes the creepy guy across the street, that guy from Friday the 13 and a couple of hundred potential terrorist. Not to mention government agencies and secret Libyan security forces.
There's also been a lot of discussions about the use of pseudonyms. Why shouldn't I be allowed to call myself Captain Jack Sparrow if I want to says I. 'Aye' Says Google 'as long as you don't!'. I realize that there's a need for rules about such things but to me the real problem is impersonations not pseudonyms.
As most of you might know, this is an issue which has caused at lot of debate. Considering that G+ is a new product that Google is setting up to compete with Facebook and Tweedledee it really really shouldn't be.
(And don't tell me that theres a setting or an app for that. We need default setting and rules that doesn't enable criminals, stalkers, crooked employers and malevolent dictatorships.)
What one should expect is that Google would want to move the service to follow ist potential costumers not that they'd try to make their customer base conform to its arbitrary rules. It's not as there's no alternatives.

Rightsizing

Another problem is the sheer size of it all. The good news is that you can very quickly find and select to follow a lot of "interesting" people the bad is that then you have to listen to their meaningless plurble, watch their animated cat gifs or read their endless repetitions of the latest buzzwords. And each individual post in the stream can be huge. Often growing rapidly as comments are added.
You must un-follow the worst cases off course. But what about those who are actually quite interesting or possess essential information in some areas while being a total dork in others? What about your mother in law and all your colleagues some of whom you really don't like that much. How about the guy that works with supersizing search engine optimization software. You need to follow the white rabit but it's gone down a hole.
What we need is better ways to sort our streams, square our circles and tag our own postings. Its a well-known Internet problem: when 40.000.000 people want to talk at once it's almost impossible to hear what they are trying to say. I wonder if Google has access to technology that makes it possible to sort and systematize large amounts of information? Gee, I don't know...
You're supposed to be able to control all this through the use of circles which is an OK concept which suffers in execution. If you make your circles to big you will be flooded with ... whatever and if you make them too small there'll be considerable less of the same. My conclusion so far is that you need them to be bigger that you'll have though but smaller than you'd have wished for.
Also the tools for editing individuals circle settings are great but we really need a sorting tool that can sort, say, 500 people after language or interest in filatelism.

As it stands everybody are so exited about the ability to post messages in a constantly rolling stream of superficiality and animated gif-cats that they don't notice the train is actually going nowhere extremely fast. The whole thing is still in some sort of pre-Beta basis stasis, so you'll have to forgive and love everybody. Which is OK.
But this is supposed to be an effort towards a marketable product. Really? Get in the game mr. Gundotra!

The upside is that there 40 million users or so which means that some of them must be quite interesting.
Hopefully...

The new face of terror

The terrible acts of terror that shook Norway this Friday did not only brutally end the lives of more than 80 innocent civilians of which many were teenagers in the span of a couple of hours, they must also fundamentally change the way we think about terror and terrorism and how we fight it.
If you're reading this by now you probably know the basic facts of what happened. If not I believe the Wikipedia post is reasonably updated. - Or will be soon.
But as we discovered on Danish TV (in Danish), on the Wired.com website, in Great Britain and just about everywhere else journalist and most self proclaimed experts kept seeing the atrocities as the work of al-Qaeda or some spiritually related organisation.
As we now know it wasn't and that is an extremely important fact.
Historically Europe have a long tradition of terror: Serbian nationalists, Christians vs. other Christians, left wing revolutionaries in Italy and Germany Basque Nationalist, Greek right and/or left and so on and so on ad nauseam. Relatively speaking very, very few of these attacks have been perpetrated by Islamic extremists.

It's my conviction that this is extremely important.

Terrorists and extremist do exist and they do pose a very real danger to our society, culture and way of life. But just as terror isn't really what we think it is, the true nature of our culture and way of life is not what some political forces have tried to make us believe.

As I understand it terrorism is the concept that violence and the threat of violence can be used as an instrument to achieve goals that - in some sense at least - are political*. The main object is the creation of fear in the population and, I think, the expression of anger.
Obviously it's much more complicated than that and you could probably write books analyzing terror. As I suspect that one or two very intelligent persons may have already done.

This brings us to what I think "We" are. But lets start by examining why this is important: What we have been seeing since 9-11 and the beginning of the socalled "war on terror" is a concept of Us vs. Them. We, basically White Christians from Europe and the US seen a the good guys in a battle against the evil forces of another non-white religion.
This a fundamentally flawed concept. It is absolutely essential that 'we' can identify real values that are worth defending and that others can understand and respect. Objectively there is no doubt in my mind that if the group I'm supposed to be part of is white Christians, it's not superior and shouldn't be glorified and therefore not worth fighting for. It is simply impossible to list all the atrocities and idiocies that have been instigated in the name of the supposed superiority of white Christians.
The values that I do have, that I want to defend and I which I feel are central to any concept of civilization are Freedom, the willingness to listen, the ability to talk, openness towards people that aren't like me and a handfull of other things.
Not just because I think they are nice touchy-feely ideas to stand on but because I think they're absulutely central to the long term survival of our species: If we as a group, as a nation, as a people, as an entire species are to ever get out of this terrible mess we need to work together, we need to be able to listen to each other and most especially and importantly we need to stop trying to kill each other off.

This is not a fight against an evil religious force. This a fight against our own fears and anger and we will win.

Blimps are the new black

As this excellent article from Wired.com [link] suggests blimps have a strong future in upcoming military scenarios.

There are problems though: as the article explains we are presently seeing several different versions competing. This classic Pentagon-style infighting: do we really need one model for the air force, one for the army (and a separate (secret) one for the CIA)?

The real problem though is with classic military logic. The strategists are preparing for the war they fought yesterday or, at best, the one they are fighting today.
While it is true that they are great for spying on an occupied area blimps are very big and slow. They fly by being "lighter than air" and while some hot air baloons go very high these airships will be filled with high tech gear. I don't know how high they'll go. Compared to spy planes and drones they seem to be very easy targets for anyone with an anti aircraft missile or a fighter jet. While they'd probably work Ok in Iraq and Afghanistan where the enemy has limited and predictable capabilities they'll be like giant pies in the sky for an aggressive and better equipped enemy.
Mostly at this time though they look like fancy new ways for Americans to spend money they really don't have on things they really don't need...
So what else is new?
:o)