jill/txt

In an hour’s time, at midnight, just as the fireworks light up the sky, a woman in the crowd on the bank of the Yarra will lean to her lover to kiss him. His lips will brush her cheek not lips and his eyes avoid hers. Her new year will not be happy, not for many months yet.

In eleven hours’ time, at midnight, just as the fireworks light up the sky, a woman standing in the snow will smile a forced smile and dutifully kiss her husband’s lips and the cheeks of his friends, knowing that this year she must make up her mind.

In eleven hours’ time, at midnight, just as the fireworks light up the sky, I’ll be standing in the garden of the house my girlfriend grew up in. I’ll kiss her cheek, and our children’s cheeks and our parents’ cheeks and I’ll be happy. For the last twenty-odd years I’ve celebrated more New Year’s Eves at her parents’ house than anywhere else. It’s a good way of celebrating.

I think, if I’m lucky, I might even get a true Happy New Year kiss, on the lips, wholehearted, quite soon. Not at midnight. But soon. This is going to be a good year.

Happy New Year! May your kisses be true.

Tee hee. Thankfully, “The FBI noted that use of almanacs or maps may be innocent, ‘the product of legitimate recreational or commercial activities.’”

April Fools Day just isn’t going to be as funny this year… (I saw this at Eirik’s but it’s spread globally)

I started reading Vernor Vinge’s 1981 novella True Names because it’s arguably one of the earliest cyberpunk stories, though it’s written before cyberpunk was an acknowledged genre. It turns out the protagonist is not only a “warlock” in the computer network but also one of world’s most feted electronic writers:

The Feds who threaten him don’t see Pollack as a warlock of course, to them he’s a vandal. A hacker, they’d say these days. His comrades go by names like Robin Hood and Erythrina and with their maniulations of the tax revenue they’re a greater threat to the government than any foreign enemy. While threatening to arrest Pollack, the the Feds also admit their admiration for his legitimate creative work:

A new surge of spam hit my comment fields in the last few days, so I updated my blogging software and the anti-spam plugin and the blacklists and, as suggested, my personal blacklist is now automatically published as I add things.

It’s amazing the lengths people will go to to increase the Google PageRank of their site. Presumably they’ve now found that the anti-spam software stops most direct links to casino and porn sites. The latest spam goes to sites like “discoveryofusa.com” which, although it does have basic (copied from a book, perhaps?) information about Columbus, obviously serves the primary purpose of linking to a casino site and nowhere else. If these PageRank scammers can get enough people to link to their discoveryofamerica.com front, that site will get a high PageRank that it will pass on to the single site it links to. That means that next time you search for “casino” on Google their site will (if the plan works) come up higher than other casino sites might. It also, unfortunately, means that next time a schoolkid searches for information about the discovery of America they might get this excuse for information.

I wrote a paper about how links shape an unofficial economy online last year: Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web. If I were to write a new version this linktheft would definitely be included. Blogshares, though now gone, was another, more pragmatic display of the more collaborative side of this economy.

I took the kids to the woods and they sailed to New Zealand in a boat the uninitiated might have thought a fallen tree. There were pirate islands, sharks, ghosts, storms and stick-swords on the way and by the time we came home the turkey soup was piping hot, ready to share with friends.

The living web is fluid. Accept that things may be different tomorrow. I’m happy for individual bloggers to edit or delete posts from their blogs, or for journalists to update an article in a newspaper throughout the day as new information or spelling errors are found. Rewriting a statement, after being challenged on it, so that it says the opposite of what it first said, is beyond this living fluidity. Some websites in particular want us to trust them completely, and we expect that we can hold them accountable. Goverment sites publishing information for the public who elected them foremost among them. Whitehouse.gov’s record of the speech Bush gave on May 1, titled “President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended” should not be retitled to include the word “Major” in front of “Combat” as soon as it’s obvious that combat had not come to an end.

An article in the Washington Post on White House Web Scrubbing conveniently gathers a dozen or two cases such as these. Vika linked it a couple of weeks ago, stating then that it was not new, but like her, I want to document it. Most people I’ve spoken to have not heard of this. I’d like them to know. A few weeks earlier, Scott pointed out a site that collects pre-edited and pre-deleted documents from The White House: The Memory Hole, noting a few ominous examples.

Ted Nelson, coiner of the word hypertext, famously wanted a network where every version of every document was kept forever, with an address that would remain the same whether the publisher changed servers or published a new version. That, obviously, hasn’t happened, and in most cases I’m glad of it. I like the impermanence of pixels. If individuals publish without publishers one of their privileges should be to unpublish, I think, although of course, once published, someone will probably have stored a copy. For Norwegian sites the National Library will have, and Archive.org stores a copy of at least the front page of almost every site I’ve ever searched it for. You can request not to be archived here, though.

I don’t like our governments rewriting history. That is entirely different.

My family’s pretending that tomorrow is Christmas Day so that we can gather the absolute maximum of family for our Christmas dinner. So today people are arriving and tomorrow there’ll be children ripping open presents at dawn and turkey for dinner and oh, I’ll see my newborn niece for the first time this afternoon!

Next time I enter the United States of America my face will be biometrically measured and my fingerprints scanned and stored by American intelligence. Think about that: that’s information my own government doesn’t have about me. It’s information I don’t have about me. It’s also information the US won’t be collecting about its own citizens. (Perhaps it would be in breach of their constitutional rights, rights not afforded to non-US citizens?)

Of course, my government has plenty of other information about me. Norwegians have always been good at storing information about their citizens. When the Nazis invaded Norway, rounding up all the Jews was as trivial as it was to disenfranchise women in A Handmaid’s Tale (bank accounts transferred to husbands and fathers overnight, all electronic, a keystroke and lives are changed). That, of course, is the problem with total information awareness. Today I’m white, of appropriate social class, I’m gainfully employed, my gender is seen as (theoretically) equal in the countries I choose to visit and I’ve never done anything currently defined as criminal in the wealthy Western countries I’m a citizen and resident of. Others are far less fortunate in the lottery of birth and circumstance. And tomorrow or next year or decade even my gold-edged socio-genetic profile may no longer be appropriate. A fundamentalist regime (whether Muslim, Christian or political) might have any number of reasons to declare me a persona non grata. My Bosnian neighbour told me, on September 11, 2001, how nobody expected war in Bosnia, even after hearing that the Serbs had attacked. It’s not that long since Norway was occupied, either. It could happen again.

The first issue of the new Fibreculture journal is about The Politics of Networks and deal with issues like these. In “Perfect Match: Biometrics and Body Patterning in a Networked World” Gillian Fuller writes about the translation of identity into pattern matching where we must be validated at every threshold, not just at the border of a country but when buying groceries (money in account? PIN code?) going to work (swipe card and PIN to open door) driving (electronic tag for paying tolls) or making a phone call.

Fibreculture is a mailing list, a series of meetings, and now also a journal, mostly populated by Australian and New Zealander artists and academics who care about networked culture and art and theory. The Fibreculture journal is a new endeavour: a peer-reviewed, scholarly online journal growing from the vibrant discussions on Fibreculture mailing list. The first two issues were published today. These are topics we need to think about.

Do you know what? Though these massive surveillance systems are meant to protect us against terrorists, they wouldn’t have helped a bit against the attacks on September 11. Every one of the 19 hijackers entered the United States using his real name. My talented Chinese colleague, on the other hand, doing a postdoc, safely resident in Norway, invited to give a presentation at a US conference, was denied a visa.

I think what jolts me most about the thought of being scanned on entering the US is being forced to realise that I am totally subject to the whims of governments. I’ve internalised that at home, keying PINs constantly, electronically clicking “yes” to file a tax return the authorities have already filled out for me, giving up information so automatically that I think I am free and in control. Crossing unfamiliar and heavily policed borders it’s impossible to sustain that illusion of freedom.

Last week Steven Johnson wondered why there are no videogames that simulate the 2004 US presidential campaigns. The idea must have been floating around the zeitgeist, because Howard Dean’s campaign has actually commissioned a game, just released today I think, where you canvas houses, hand out leaflets (it’s fun trying to catch passers by!) and wave a sign in order to win more supporters. It was made by Gonzalo Frasca and Ian Bogost, also writers of a blog about games with an agenda at watercoolergames.org. They say it’s the first time a videogame has been used as an official part of a presidential campaign - that certainly says something about the way we’re starting to view games as an important form of expression.

There are other games dealing with elections, too. Over at Grandtextauto Andrew mentioned a conversational simulation of Bush (not sponsored by Bush) called AI Bush. AI Bush comes with the possibility not only to converse and play games with the presidential simulation but also to play the election game Reelect Bush. In the comments to Steven Johnson’s post several older games are mentioned, with President Elect from 1988 getting most praise. There are at least two simulations planned for the 2004 elections, but they’re not out yet. Lantern Games promise that their Frontrunner will be available for PC in the next couple of months, while Randy Chase is releasing a new version of Power Politics that will allow online collaborative play. There’s also an online a game about the French 2002 presidential elections.

I found the Howard Dean game pretty good fun for a short play, and it’s not meant to take forever to play. Catching people to give them brochures was fun - it reminded me of my enthusiastic teens when, for a while, I found real life leaflet distribution wonderful fun, mostly because my friends were doing it too. And I believed in our causes. The gameplay’s simple and the message is very clear: small actions can make big changes. It fits perfectly into the Dean strategy of involving regular people and their friends and their friends’ friends and helping them make more friends on the campaign - and using the internet to do it.

Searching for something completely different, I found David Weinberger’s post of guesses of how we’ll blog when blogs are really popular. Also to be tucked away for future use, is the comparison of the nanoaudiences of blogs to the audience of one in most emails.

Chris Allbritton, a blogging journalist who in March blogged so well readers donated enough money to send him to Iraq as an independent journalist, is still writing about Iraq, and planning to go back. I’m interested in why I enjoy his writing so much. It’s a matter of building up trust in an individual writer or reporter, which you get in traditional media too, sometimes, but I also just love the honesty of his writing. No, of course, I don’t know that he’s always completely honest, and it’s quite clear that he’s not objective (but he’s explicit about what his opinions are) but it’s the links. When he makes a statement he links to something backing it up. Mainstream newspapers online are starting to do that, but this is so much more. It’s the accountability we learn in academia (cite your sources! cite counterarguments! show people how you came to think this!) instead of the teaspooned “this is true, we promise” of professionally edited tabloids.

I’d hardly care that the sound quality isn’t that good: an mp3-player necklace - look, here’s a sexier photo.

A snowball hit my window. Nobody outside, only footprints in the snow. Ten minutes later remnants of snow drag a wet tail down the window like snail’s silver.

A German study of 2000 SMSes that were stored on informants phones neatly divvies up the kinds of messages people actually send each other, and, interesting, shows that “SMS language” is actually more frequently found in German newspapers than in real SMSes. So there.

Good food writing is delicious, and Chocolate and Zucchini is a blog as good as my favouritely chatty cookbooks. I might even make some of the dishes, or (swoon) visit some of the Parisian restaurants. (via Megnut)