Impolite Company

Amazon Clarifies

Amazon has finally come out and made some comments to straighten their awful PR situation out--apparently their situation involved far more than just books related to gay and lesbian themes but extended to over 57,000 books.  Considering their initial response, which I posted about earlier, it's really not much of a reach to interpret their action as focused on gay and lesbian lit.  They claim to have just made a huge mistake and were apparently loathe to admit it publicly.  Here's the new statement from an MSNBC posting, Shocking Truth Behind Amazon's "Glitch":

"It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles — in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future."

Considering that they responded to an author of a work of gay fiction with the following statement, I believe the fault for the misreporting is their own, not the reporting.  I'm glad that they're fixing the situation and publicly explaining it.  But they've got some PR repair work to do.  Here's the initial statement:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage

No More Amazon Around Here

For about a month I had an advertisement from Amazon up on the blog, a book related one that not many people found interesting.  I've chosen to take it down because of Amazon's decision to excise certain gay and lesbian fiction from some of their best seller lists.  They did so, not on the basis of graphic sexual content or inappropriate salacious details but because of the sexual orientation of the protagonists and themes of the books.  The method used, the ethics of doing so and the online reaction to Amazon's decision are discussed in Why Amazon Didn't Just Have a Glitch:

This weekend it was discovered that Amazon had filtered out some books as "adult" even though those books had minor sexual or erotic themes (fiction) or were non-fiction discussion classes of people associated with particular sexual orientations. Apparently, these filters began to pop up two months ago and while Amazon was notified at the time, many ¿ including me ¿ weren't aware of the problem until Mark Probst, author of ?The Filly,? realized his book was missing it's "sales rank" from Amazon. He questioned them, and they replied:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage

Amazon won't miss us--I think all told maybe one person clicked on the ad once.  But as our ability to manipulate information becomes more sophisticated we have to watch out for this kind of thing, which is far more targeted and difficult to uncover that rather straightforward forms of discrimination, such as redlining or Jim Crow laws.  And, unlike racial or religious discrimination, "sexual orientation" is not a protected class receiving the highest level of protection against discrimination under the Equal Protection clause and so it's up to us to speak up when our friends and neighbors are discriminated against.

Garrrr! Wake-up Computer Surprises

I love my computer.  Seriously, when I think back just ten years and the amount of good information available online back then compared to now, the myriad entertainment opportunities developing via Flash and other applications, the serious research you can do even without proprietary databases, it's pretty damned amazing.  But this morning I had another one of those "oh shit" moments because I woke up, woke up the computer, looked blearily at the screen and saw bubbles and pop-ups and alerts all testifying to the fact that my anti-virus and firewall weren't working.  Which made me think of the conficker virus (who comes up with these names?) and omfg am I infected and so-forth. 

After a few false starts of nervously watching an apparent partial reinstall combined with the dreaded question about whether I want to write over an old file or leave it be (wait, what's the right answer?  I don't know!  Quick, pick one but don't panic!!  You're panicking!!!  Just Say Yes!!!) and the slow grind of updating corrupted update files and block lists, eventually everything turned green again.  I still wasn't sure if it might be cornfucker messing around with me and so I went to the Kaspersky site and poked around, found some info on the virus and noted that I wouldn't be able to poke around on the Kaspersky site if it was really a CF attack. 

So everything's running again, all systems are green but I still don't know what happened, why all the flashing alarm lights and the partial shut down of my security.  But when I think of all the legwork and all the different publications I'd have to buy or all the time I'd have to spend in a kickass library to write even a few of the posts that I write in moments online, it's worth the hassle of an occasional computer fizzle. 

MIRANDA

    O, wonder!
    How many goodly creatures are there here!
    How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
    That has such people in't!

                                                    --The Tempest, William Shakespeare, Act 5, Scene 1

Robots on the Catwalk

I read a story about this yesterday but didn't see any video.  Today, I'm armed with video of a humanoid robot designed to take to the fashion catwalks of Japan.  Years ago, a friend of mine who had done some modeling work told me how difficult it was because the models were truly seen as nothing more than clothes hangers.  This robot takes that eerie feeling of "no one's home" you sometimes get seeing fashion models and takes it to the nth degree--with human models at least you know that there's a personality behind the blank eyes, albeit a repressed one.  Robot girl, with her preternatural calm and lack of facial expression is just too weird--I definitely prefer Summer Glau acting like a robot on Terminator over HRP-4C acting like a human (53 seconds):

Why I Don't Do Facebook Applications

Or, I should probably more accurately say, yet another reason I don't do FB Apps.  The BBC is reporting five different security breaches in the last seven days and I think all of them were related to apps that spam your friends and similar sneakiness.  I think FB is pretty good as a basic platform and I don't mind making my basic info available for friends and people who might be interested but as a rule I don't accept green footballs, blasts from the past, flair, or any of the other crap that's out there because they are just additional methods for people I don't like to get information about me so that they can try to sell me things I don't need (I don't mind if they're selling me things I do need!).  Here's the story, Facebook Users Suffer Viral Surge:

In the last week, said Mr Ferguson, Facebook had been hit by four malicious applications as well as a new variant of the Koobface virus that first targeted members of the social site in December 2008.

The rogue applications on Facebook all try to steal saleable information from the profiles of those who open it up, said Mr Ferguson.

One malicious application tried to trick people into adding it by claiming that their friends were having trouble looking at their profile. If the application is added it spams itself to every Facebook friend that a member of the site has.

WALLE's Got A Gun--Robots and War

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

--Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics

Over the last eight years there has been a huge shift in how the United States fights wars and one facet of that shift has been a major increase in the use of robots as surrogate soldiers in one form or another.  The examples currently include drones, such as the Predator and the Global Hawk and machines designed to defuse bombs and explode IED's; in the near future, a proliferation of devices will be in our arsenal. 

P.W. Singer has a new book, Wired at War, exploring the new battlefield and some of the moral implications of either removing human beings from the decision-making loop or giving human's decision-making authority who are not sharing the risks and full context of the battlefield or insurgency situation.  I caught a portion of his interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air last week and plan to listen to it more thoroughly today (it's about 39 minutes long).  I also just ran across a long article that is adapted from his book over at the Wilson Quarterly entitled Robots at War:  The New Battlefield--

The PackBot is only one of the many new unmanned systems operating in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today. When U.S. forces went into Iraq in 2003, they had zero robotic units on the ground. By the end of 2004, the number was up to 150. By the end of 2005 it was 2,400, and it more than doubled the next year. By the end of 2008, it was projected to reach as high as 12,000. And these weapons are just the first generation. Already in the prototype stage are varieties of unmanned weapons and exotic technologies, from automated machine guns and robotic ­stretcher ­bearers to tiny but lethal robots the size of insects, which look like they are straight out of the wildest science fiction. Pentagon planners are having to figure out not only how to use machines such as the PackBot in the wars of today, but also how they should plan for battlefields in the near future that will be, as one officer put it, “largely robotic.”

Obama's Blackberry

Matthew Yglesias riffed off of Ezra Klein yesterday, on how stupid it is that Obama team lawyers are sitting around debating the legality of Obama having a Blackberry or staffers IM'ing in the White House, Modernize the PRA:

As Ezra Klein says it’s stupid to have White House lawyers sitting around debating how things like email, text messages, and IM chats ought to be treated under the 1978 Presidential Records Act. In light of 30 years with of IT advancement we need to update the law rather than puzzle over its interpretation. Obama’s team should recommend some changes, and congress ought to hold hearings and write new provisions for dealing with new mechanisms.

Which I find pretty stupid in turn.  The Executive Branch's job is to carry out the laws and part of that involves figuring out the parameters of what is acceptable.  Better legal analysis by the Bush Administration would have told them that waterboarding is torture and torture is illegal in the United States.  The Obama Team is trying to figure out how they need to act in order to stay within the boundaries of the laws when they enter office tomorrow.  Yes, the PRA should be changed but it's hardly a priority in light of everything else that's facing the new administration.   I'm glad they're going to put themselves out to follow the law (unlike Rove's failure to use the proper email accounts for government business or the practices of the Palin government in Alaska) and maybe after they've gotten some other things squared away they can give it the update it needs.

Das Keyboard

I get excited about the strangest things.  For a long, long time I've missed the good ol' days of the IBM computer keyboards that gave you a satisfying "click" every time you press a key.  I've been known to walk down the peripherals aisle in Best Buy or other places and try out each keyboard as I walk along, invariably disappointed by the lack of a click.  I've even asked about getting an old school keyboard and trying to get it to work with my machine but got discouraged when the answer involved more than a paragraph of words.  So, imagine my excitement to find Das Keyboard Professional--"the mechanical keyboard that clicks".  My order is in and I'm watching out for the UPS truck.

I do realize I've been off my game for the last couple of weeks and have broken my earlier promise to return to normal programming.  I've stumbled over a couple of personal issues and hope to have things settled down soon and I'll give more info in the near future.  Won't give you a long, boring story psycho-analyzing this or that, just the scoop.  Hope everyone is well.

Computers, Computers, Computers

    Good morning.  The title of this post is an homage to the professor who ran the technical writing program I was briefly a part of (one semester) back in my undergraduate career.  I can't recall if she would actually say "Computers, computers, computers" herself or if this iteration was our mockery imitation of whatever it was she actually said.  But this morning is just one of those times when I shake my head at my little electronic head and say, "Computers, computers, computers" with a backbeat of exasperation.  My connection went down last night and I'm only now getting it back on (password problems--my fault, not the computers!).  It only took an hour and a half to get it going again but I'm a little frazzled from my electronic rasslin'.  So this will be the extent of the posting for now while I play catch-up in other, less digital areas of my life (BREAKFAST!).  I should be back later today.  Good day to you all and I hope to soon be back in mid-season form.