Fear the Future--Bot and Sock Puppets

 A comment the other day about communications from fake social media sites--sock puppets.  The writer observed it was sometimes hard to identify messages from bots.

My fear--you ain't seen nothing yet.  Someone is already linking Chatgpt to their fake media sites, so they can push out messages which seem very real with little effort. 

Price of Using the Internet Is Eternal Vigilance?

 Someone said "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance". 

Maybe we should update it.  Just got a message supposedly from Paypal asking for money. It's a scam, but one I've not seen before. 

Different Browsers, Different Strokes

I use Chrome as my default browser. There seems to be some setting(s) which inhibit accessing certain urls/sites. In some cases when I click on a url the page will start to load a bit, showing maybe a geometric figure, but no content loads.  In other cases there's no activity. 

Possibly connected, sometimes I get a message about the site not being secure--i.e., not using https.  Some of the time I can understand; it's an small website, likely not regularly updated, but some of the time it's idiosyncratic, a site which I can access some of the time, or almost all the time.

Today I tried to access a wikipedia website, which froze.  So I switched to Firefox and had no problem.  

When I look at the settings in Chrome, I don't see anything which is likely the cause. 

Farmers and Internet

 The post on the Rural Blog reports that 28 percent of farmers with over $500,000 gross income have poor or no internet service. More farmers had a cellphone than had a computer.

An Archive of Their Own

 As the early adapters among the silent and boomer generations go to the grave what happens to their digital archives?

As a failed historian I lean towards preserving every record, just because scholars have been able to wring meaning from the documentary evidence of the past, even when it's scant.  

As an active user of a Pc for close to 30 years, I know there's an infinitesimal chance that anything in my digital files would be of value to a future historian.  That's true in abstract, even more true given the lack of organization of the files.

A third factor is the ever-declining cost of storage, which leads to the logic of why not preserve it, because we don't know what future historians will be able to do using AI.

I suspect there's a niche for an archive service for personal digital files. That would differ from the services which archive what's on the internet.

Productivity Gains in Genealogy

 My cousin and I were remembering the old days of genealogic research.  I never did any before the internet, but my sister devoted much of a year in 1978 or so to researching, particularly my paternal grandmother's ancestry--the Rippeys.  My cousin started seriously in the late 1980's.  

If you could measure the productivity of research you'd probably count facts--names, relationship, and dates.  In the days of visiting archives and viewing microfilm you might spend days to establish the bare facts for one ancestor.  Now in the days of the internet, of digitized records, and of genealogical databases like Ancestry.com it's possible to trace the ancestry of one person going back to 1850 or before over a weekend, which might include 32 people with lots of details.. 

The increase in productivity is amazing. 

The downside is this: because a genealogy once researched is more likely than not to be valid for recent centuries, there's a diminishing field to explore--at least for white Europeans.  Means new researchers won't know the satisfactions experienced by their elders. 

2.9 Billion Not on Internet?

 This report from statistia says there are that many people who aren't on the internet.

Is anyone else stunned by the stat? I'm more astonished by the converse: that means a majority of humans are on the internet, 4.9 billion to be specific.

  

Gripe With the Met--Membership Accounts

 I've a gripe with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, specifically its website, and more specifically the way it handles membership.  I know I've run into similar problems elsewhere; I think one was the Wolf Trap website, possibly the New Yorker as well.  And my guess is that it's a result of hidden silos: when they got into the internet, separate departments did separate developments.  For the Met, the website is focused on visitors, describing exhibitions, how to visit, etc. and how to become a member.  What's missing is any focus on existing members--to find your member account info you have to go to the shopping option.  

It makes sense that the accountants would worry about renewals, etc. while the museum people just worry about getting people in the door.

But, if I were emperor, my edict would be that any website for an organization would have a "Log in/Your Account" icon in the upper right corner,

Suppose We Didn't Have Work From Home

There have been a lot of comparisons between the current pandemic and those in the past, particularly in terms of case numbers and deaths.

One thing which isn't accounted for in such comparisons is the existence of the Internet and the enabling of work from home. My point is that in 2020 we had the option of closing offices and working from home, of closing schools and going to remote learning, of moving to tele-medicine.

I don't know how much difference it makes; I don't know the extent to which shelter-in-place was implemented in past pandemics.  But I'm sure it makes a significant difference, which social scientists will be trying to figure out over the next years.

Farewell to Cokesbury

My sister was a devoted patron of the Cokesbury book store in Syracuse.  It closed in 2012 as part of the closure of its 57 physical stores, shifting to online only.

I suspect the closure reflects both the decline of mainline Protestantism and the impact of Amazon on bookstores. 

Slate has a long piece on the decline of the religious bookstore here, and John Fea links it to evangelical religion.

Beto and the Bulletin Board

Philip Bump in the Post has an article describing Beto O'Rourke's background as a "hacker". 

It brings back memories, including when Jeff Kerby started running a BBS for ASCS, and the periodic upgrades of my modem--back then progress was real and tangible.

FSA Reorganization

I found two new notices from FSA interesting:

One was a reorganization into Safety Net and Program Delivery Divisions.  If I understand it correctly it splits program policy and automation into separate organizations.  The question of the best organization has been an issue ever since the original System/36 automation of county offices in the mid 1980's.  At different times and in different areas we've had policy and automation united in one person, or the responsibility in one section but with different people specializing in each, or in separate sections within the division.

When Jerry Sitter was division director in the mid 80's he split out a branch to handle automation under Mike McCann, with the policy in other branches.  In a way this followed the personnel--the policy types were mostly established DC specialists, people who'd come in from the field before the System 36 arrived.  The automation types were the early "SCOAPers", mostly program assistaants brought in under 2-year temporary appointments (which turned into permanent slots as time passed).  It also, IMHO, reflected an attitude among management that automation was a subject they didn't really understand or feel comfortable with, so it was best housed in its own shop.  There was a similar setup in the commodity loan area.

I always had my reservation with that setup--my argument was that a program specialist needed to know the whole span of operations.  Just as in the pre-automation days we'd work with MSD to get forms designed and printed, procedures written, cleared and distributed, regulations written  and published,  automation was just another area to learn and manage.  Looking back, I was reflecting my own belief in my abilities to do the whole scope of activities, and I was probably unrealistic.  But I still think there's a kernel of truth there--sometimes policy issues and automation issues become one and the same.

Which leads me to the second notice: on a workaround to handle multi-county producers, which seems to me to be an example.  Here the history of ASCS/FSA going back to New Deal days has been to work with producers on a county by county basis, unlike FmHA which tried to consider all of a producer's assets and liabilities when making a loan.  FSA has gradually been forced to move away from a county basis with need to enforce payment limitation.  My point is that a policy decision to apply rules on a producer basis, as with loans, and to allow producers one-stop shopping at one office, or at one web page, as with this notice, has big implications for automation, both in the design of the database and in the operation of the software.

Uniformity and Diversity--Amazon's Kindle

I've mentioned my cousin's book, Dueling Dragons. As part of my help to her I've gotten a fair amount of exposure to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing operation.  (The book was published iby CreateSpace, which Amazon bought years ago and now has dropped in favor of KDP.) 

With the paperback version out, we now have to worry about the ebook version.   This leads me into some thoughts about the whole publishing process.  In the old world of publishing, say circa 1960, each hardcover book was handcrafted with lots of choices in its design and packaging.  The paperbacks were a bit different with less variety, especially in the cases where a publisher had a series going.  (I remember Ballantine's series of World War II histories as one example, or a series of John D. MacDonald's novels.)

I paid very limited attention to self-publishing.  It was around, and advertised in the pages of the NY York Times Book Review.  I think it required a rather hefty payment to get a batch of your book printed and available for sale.

These days with Amazon ebook publishing you have very limited choices in font and design.  But what this standardization does, along with the support of software and the internet, is enable a much greater variety in the content of books, partially because the costs of publishing in ebook format are so low.  Because the entry cost is low as long as you can live the with limited choices everyone and her brother can publish that book they've dreamed of.

This interplay of uniformity and diversity fascinates me, and I think you can find similar patterns in other areas.

Tracing the Thread: Connections Via the Internet

There seems to be much debate over the impact of the Internet and the web on society.  Some say we're absorbed in our cellphones and shrinking from face to face interactions.  Some disagree.

A story:

My extended family was small; I had six living first cousins, all of whom were several years older than me.  They lived in distant places, and we didn't have family reunions.   The closest we came in recent years was when two cousins came to my mother's funeral.

Then came the internet and PC's.  A cousin, Marjorie Harshaw Robie, got a hand-me-down PC from her son, and started to get into genealogy, becoming very interested in and familiar with the Harshaw and the Robies.  Through connections she made there, a remote cousin got in touch with her, offering a set of original diaries written by James Harshaw in County Down in the middle of the 19th century.  My cousin got them microfilmed and took them back to Ireland to the Public Records (archives) Office.   Her work with the diaries attracted enough attention that PBS, which was doing a TV series on the Irish in America, did an interview, excerpts of which actually got aired.  My sister, who had been into genealogy before the advent of PC's, noticed and mentioned to me. 

Another few years passed and I looked my cousin up on the Internet and got her email address (this was before Facebook).  We made connections, first through email, then through AOL instant messaging (and now Facebook).   She's now putting the finishing touches on her second book, Dueling Dragons (expect to see more on it here).

Meanwhile, as a retiree I got involved in blogging and in following bloggers.  One of the bloggers I began to follow, probably about 2008, was TaNehisi Coates.  At that time he had one of the best sets of people commenting on his posts, including a number of regulars.   One of the regulars was Andy Hall, who had his own blog: Dead Confederates, a blog which I added to my RSS feed.

On the occasion of Memorial Day, Andy posted about three Civil War veterans, one of whom was George Frank Robie, a Union Medal of Honor winner who's buried in Galveston, Andy's hometown.

Naturally, when I saw the post, I passed the url to my cousin in case he was new to her.  This is real life, not fiction, so George Frank did not turn out to be an ancestor of her husband, but only a relative.

What lessons do I take from this?  I think the Internet does enable, though not force, new connections following existing paths of relationship and interests. 

Tabarrok's Great Post re: Facebook

Alex Tabarrok is the less prominent blogger at Marginal Revolution, but I think his post yesterday is great. 

He makes the point that much of the data Facebook stores is created by Facebook, or more accurately in my mind by the combination of our activities which are enabled by and only possible through Facebook.  As he says, speaking of a cousin in Dubai who he's never called or written a letter in over 20 years: "The relationship with my cousin, therefore, isn’t simply mine, it’s a joint creation of myself, my cousin and Facebook."

I tweeted about the post yesterday, not something I do everyday.  I got a response from one person, and we've gone back and forth a bit.  Let me summarize my position:

Like Tabarrok, I've a current relationship with a cousin which has been made possible through the Internet, email in the first instance, then shifting to AIM and finally to Facebook Messenger: a sequence of communication tools of better and better capability and more ease of use.  I understand that the data stored in the cloud has changed with each tool: now Facebook keeps the full text of our messages.  But the capability of the tool is an essential part of the relationship.  Given our personalities and ages we didn't and couldn't establish it based on snail mail. 


I (and my cousin) are interested in genealogy; she's writing a book (at 87) covering events in 19th century Ireland partly involving two collateral ancestors. For us, all bits of data are precious if they concern the lives of our ancestors, or the lives my cousin investigates.  Of course the data is almost all on paper with just a little bit on film.  What does the future hold for genealogists; how will they handle all the data which is now being stored and which presumably will be available?

It Was a Different Century: 1998

"” It took three weeks of lobbying the top editors of the Washington Post to get me access to the internet."

Susan Glasser recalling the time when the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal became public, as part of an interesting dialog with Isikoff, Baker, and Harris (if you don't recognize the reporters you weren't around in 1998.)

Hoarding, Old and New

I've some hoarding tendencies--it's hard to throw stuff away, physical stuff that is.

But I, like the author of this jstor.org piece, believe in hoarding browser tabs.  I use both Firefox and Chrome, and have lots of tabs open in each, enough so that I fairly often crash Firefox.   I don't have the patience now to study the piece thoroughly, but I know it's got good stuff in it, so I'll just keep it in a separate tab, along with all the other good stuff I've yet to study.

How Far Does the Internet of Things Extend?

To beaver dens, according to this post.

Geezer Meets the Smart Phone

I've been easing myself into the world of smartphones.  Started cheap, with a Lumia 435, relying mostly on my WiFi network but no carrier so no real GPS.  When that phone failed, I jumped on an offer for Google FI, using a Nexus 5X (an offer I wouldn't have taken had I fully understood the terms--did I mention I tend to be cheap). That means I can use its GPS capabilities.  That's become handy in the last few days.

My sister's death meant I inherited a number of paintings and photographs passed on from my aunt and uncle, who worked for the YMCA in China in the 1920's, and who also had inherited tintypes from my grandparents.  Recently I've been contacting people to work on these objects, conservators to restore the paintings and digitally restore the tintypes.  That's led me into the maze of streets in suburban Washington.  Rather than the nice gridwork of DC the inner suburbs inside the Beltway are very confusing, a bunch of cul-de-sacs, really unfamiliar to me, just the sort of situation in which a GPS becomes very valuable.

Naturally at first I didn't try it, it was new, and I had spent years being able to read maps, so who needed it. Being old has impaired my judgment though.  The other day was telling. I thought I knew to take the first turn from I-66 after getting on in Fairfax City.  I did, and found I was totally confused, because the intersections I saw didn't match what was on Google.  (I should have waited and taken the second turn.) In desperation I turned to the GPS function.  Over the next few minutes I learned to accept the GPS voice enough to accept her directions to get back on I-66, and then to get off at the right exit.  Live and learn.

Location, Location, Data Center Location

Reston happens to be very well located for Internet purposes, as shown by this business expansion plan.

It was near enough the Pentagon to be an early presence in the DARPAnet, and things just went on from there.