Internet

Common Sense on Conficker

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

In the run-up to April 1st I saw quite a bit of fairly hysterical coverage of the Conficker worm. Much of it appeared to be written by journalists who didn’t have much of a clue, or by concerned IT workers with limited communication skills. One of the things that most of these articles lacked was clear and reliable directions as to how to find out if you were infected. Sometimes us old folks who have been playing with PCs for decades are quite useful, and today my feed reader popped up Jerry Pournelle with some simple and sound advice. In particular he pointed to this web page, which uses an ingenious test to tell you very quickly whether your computer is infected or not.

The map of infections is fascinating as well. It is probably a very good proxy for a map of where in the world lots of people are online.

The WSFS Tweetwatch #worldcon #hugo

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Want to know what people are saying about #worldcon and #hugo on Twitter right now? I have a page for you. It contains a widget I made on Tweetizen. It isn’t hard. In my case the CSS of the heading is screwed up a bit because I’m trying to fit it into a narrower space than it was designed for and I don’t have the settings quite right, but other than that it appears to work fine. You could create one and put it in any convention web site.

Eastercon Goes Virtual

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

I have learned from Steve Green that some of the people responsible for the live video feeds from Corflu are planning to extend the idea to this year’s Eastercon. Apparently the broadcasts will be coordinated through a LiveJournal community called (rather appropriately) The Virtual Tucker Hotel. I quote from Fancyclopedia:

The Tucker Hotel was based on a suggestion of Bob’s, in 1952 when the ChiCon II and its prices signalled the start of the Big Convention movement, that fans simply build a hotel of their very own for holding conventions in, moving it from one site to another as required.

This is excellent news. Hopefully there will be other live coverage as well. Anyone know what hashtag we should be using?

Oh, and the con is known as LX because it is the 60th Eastercon, so the virtual coverage is called LXtra. Nice.

Starting a List

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

As you might expect, given the date, odd stories are turning up all over the Internet today. Here are some of my favorites:

I will doubtless be adding to this through the day.
If you spot any good ones, feel free to add them in comments.

By the way, they don’t only happen on web sites. Kudos to Graham Sleight who tweeted that Twitter would be restricting posts to 70 characters from now on in an effort to cut costs.

Andrew Wheeler and Grant Kruger both have good lists of posts.

Follow You, Follow Me

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Michael Walsh sent me a link to this article which is a set of humorous definitions of online media terms. I particularly liked this one:

Follower — n. A person who pretends to be interested in what you are doing in hopes that you will pretend to be interested in what they are doing.

(That reminds me, by the way, that Fluff Cthulhu now has a Twitter account and is looking for minions.)

The other definition that caught my eye was this one:

Google Street View — n. A service newly expanded into Great Britain that stalks hapless subjects of the Queen who vomit on their shoes after one too many pints.

If you are asking yourself, “have British newspapers sunk so low that they actually had someone trawl through Google Street View footage until they found film of someone throwing up?” the answer, sadly, is “yes, and it took them less than 24 hours to come up with the idea.”

I Iz Virtual

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

You find out all sorts of strange things on teh intrawebs. The comments on this post are quite amusing. Apparently I am not a real person, but actually a sock puppet for some huge, multi-national media conglomerate. I guess that makes Pádraig Rupert Murdoch. Or maybe Alan Moore is secretly Rupert Murdoch. I lose track.

Worldcon21C Update

~ Cheryl ~ 18 Comments

There are been a fair amount of activity in the blogosphere since I posted the 21st Century Worldcon article. Sherwood Smith, one of the people behind FlyCon, did a post in her LiveJournal that got a lot of useful comment. Also the Fandom 2.0 community is now up and running. James Nicholl chose to excerpt a few sentences from my post with the clear intentions of a) getting people mad at me and b) avoiding the actual issue. I’m not going to dignify that with a link.

I have also been getting reaction through email and the like. The general reaction from the SMOF community appears to be a combination of “why would anyone want to attend a virtual convention?” “your ideas are much too expensive” and “if we put any of the program online attendance at Worldcon would fall drastically.” I’ll try to find time to address these concerns later.

But right now I’d like to point you at this web site, which Sam Jordison found and tweeted. The subject matter isn’t much to do with Worldcon, and also some of the content isn’t there yet, but it is exactly what I want to see in terms of Worldcon reporting. I want a web site that gathers together all of the reporting of the event. It needs to have simple instructions as to how you can participate through blogging, tweeting, email, putting photos on Flickr, putting videos on YouTube and so on. It also needs a map on which people can mark where they live, to show the international nature of the event.

Ideally this would go on Worldcon.org, but there are probably issues with that so we may need to register a different domain. I want to use the same site for every Worldcon so that the technology doesn’t have to be reinvented every year. I know how a lot of it can be done, but I could do with some help from tech-savvy people. Also we’ll need a few people (preferably who are not going to be at the con) to do moderation, because someone is bound to try to flood the site with spam. If it could be online before April 17th, when I’ll be off to Montreal to look at the site and shoot some video, that would be good.

Volunteers?

Good Tweet Advice

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

With Twitter apparently taking the world by storm I see a lot of people asking basic questions like “what is it for” and “what can I do with it”? I also see a lot of people writing articles with titles like “Five golden rules for successful tweeting” and “Tweet your way to riches”. These are mainly nonsense. Two things you can say for certain about Twitter are there there is no One Correct Way to use it, and it won’t (by itself) make you rich. Given the noise level out there, I thought it was worth point out this simple, basic article which really tells you pretty much all you need to know about using Twitter. Beyond that, what use you make of it is down to your personal needs. (I have four Twitter accounts, and I use them in very different ways.)

Best Reason Yet to Leave Facebook?

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Because the British government wants to keep an eye on everything you do there and store it in a database. For you own safety and security, of course. Just in case you might happen to be a terrorist.

There’s lots being said about this today. Here are The Independent, The Guardian, the BBC and Nick Harkaway.

Probably the thing that worries me most about this is that the authorities generally don’t have a clue about how social networks are used. Many of us routinely accept “friend” requests from anyone who comes along, because we are public figures and it would be considered rude not to do so. But what happens if someone who friends you later turns out to actually be a terrorist, or a sex offender, or an illegal immigrant? Are you suddenly going to find yourself under investigation as an associate of this person? Unfortunately I suspect you are.

The other thing that worries me is that this renders any privacy systems that Facebook and the like might have in place useless, because all of the information will be available via the government databases which will almost certainly not be properly secured.

By the way, before anyone starts, I know the title was unfair to Facebook. The government wants to go after all social networks. They also want to keep track of every email you send, and every web site you visit. They are an equal opportunity snoop.

And finally, while we are on the subject, Joe Gordon reminds us that our ever-vigilant MPs have once again been passing laws that are so vague that any crank who happens to have a position of authority to use them to save children from the evils of comic books. Petition here. UK citizens go sign please.

George Orwell wants to be your friend. Do you know Mr. Orwell? Or his friend, Winston Smith?

Fandom 2.0

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Oh dear, I seem to have started something.

Today I got email from Stephanie Clarkson who has set up a Ning site called Fandom 2.0, specifically to discuss how Web 2.0 technologies can be used for the benefit of fandom. There’s not a lot going on there right now as it has only just started, but if a bunch of you folks go and sign up as well then maybe we can brainstorm a few things.

#ALD09 – The Story So Far

~ Cheryl

Things, as they say, are going swimmingly. I have two posts up. I may have another, but it is being posted elsewhere and I can’t guarantee it will go up today. I’ll link to it as and when it appears.

In the meantime we have been featured in The Guardian, and on the BBC news this lunchtime. If you want to see what has happened so far, there is a web site here where people have been registering links to their posts, and you can follow the Twitter activity through Tweetizen here.

How Walkable Is Your Neighborhood?

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

This one is only for Americans at the moment, and then only those in major cities, but it is a great idea that I hope will be extended. Walk Score is a web site that tells you how “walkable” a particular neighborhood is: that is, how sort of amenities are within easy walking distance of an address. It is primarily intended for people who are looking to move home, but I’m sure it will have other uses as well.

Obviously the site isn’t going to be perfect. I looked up where Kevin lives (and I used to live when I was allowed into the US) and we got a score of 89, which is very impressive. I wonder, however, if it knows that the little grocery store over the road is a small place selling mainly processed food and alcohol that we only ever use when we are out of milk. It usefully finds a bookstore less than half a mile away, but it may not realize that it is an Islamic bookstore selling only copies of the Q’ran and other religious texts. And, being typically American, the rating completely ignores the fact that we live almost on top of a railway station. But it is a great idea for a web business. I hope some of you find it useful.

(Hat tip to Michael Giberson at Knowledge Problem).

Amazon, The Niche Killer?

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

One of the useful things about online bookstores such as Amazon is that they stock just about everything. Even if a book is no longer in print, they will put you in touch with a second-hand dealer who has a copy. Advocates of “long tail” marketing tend to claim that this means Amazon is good for market niches, because every book has the same access to the market.

Well that might be true, but Amazon also makes the whole world one big market, and it provides recommendations. What does that mean? It means that it encourages everyone to buy the same books, the same films, the same music, as everyone else. Tom Slee explains the mechanics of the process. There will doubtless be some who will nit-pick the experiment, and claim that disproves the findings, but as far as I’m concerned it sounds very logical. If you concentrate all transactions in a single market then you are bound to produce convergence of taste.

Of course this doesn’t mean that you can’t sell niche interests online. The ease of communication is still a good thing. But you won’t be able to rely on Amazon to do the selling for you.

Dinosaurs Speak at Mammal Conference

~ Cheryl

I’ve found another conference I’d really like to go to. It is called South by Southwest (SXSW for short) and it does a whole lot of cool stuff about online media. The blog, Booksquare, has been reporting on it. Their Kassia Krozser was incensed by a panel called “New Think for Old Publishers”. Here are a couple of excerpts from the post:

Let me be clear. Absolutely clear. Not one word spoken in that session, either from the panelists or from the audience, was new or innovative.

and:

At the after-party, one panelist told me that “this is all new to us”. Give. Me. A. Break. It’s only new for those of you who’ve been pretending change is something you get from a dollar bill.

Read the whole thing, it is well worth it.

Update: In other news, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the latest major US newspaper to announce that it is going online-only.

Update 2: GalleyCat picks up the story.

On Future Sexuality

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Wendy Pearson has set up a blog to continue the discussion about queer sexualities in science fiction that she began with the Queer Universes book. I see that Nicola Griffith has already signed up to contribute.

The opening post makes it clear that the blog is about sexuality, not about gender, and thus I don’t expect it to cover trans issues, excepting of course that trans people can obviously exhibit the full range of human sexuality. There may be the odd attempt to co-opt trans narratives as a sexuality issue, as there was in the book, but hopefully the blog will stay on mission. It is, after all, a good mission.

Don’t Believe What You Read

~ Cheryl

I have occasionally expressed the view here that British newspapers are not entirely to be trusted. This is rarely more the case than when they are talking about young people and the Internet. Some of you may remember a few months back a story about a young girl who held a party while her parents were away and advertised it on Facebook, with the result that it was gatecrashed by a huge drunken mob and the house was trashed. Well today The Guardian reports that the girl’s mother has successfully sued eight newspapers and Sky News because most of the story was a complete fabrication. They didn’t even manage to get the social networking site right: the party was advertised on Bebo, not Facebook. And the damage to the house was minimal.

I remember seeing some people blogging about this story when it first broke. Hopefully those who did so will see this too.