Special Interest Group on CRAP

Sadly, today is the 30th birthday of spam. I seem to remember that you should never trust anyone over 30.

Email providers are largely distinguished today by their ability to accurately filter out spam. There is a huge of amount of absolute crap that is sent, but most of this is easy to handle. The problem is around the fringes, with organizations that cleverly piggyback their spam on top of other things and squeeze their way into your attention.

I’ve owned a hybrid car (a Toyota Prius) for almost three years now, and it’s been quite satisfying. It’s amazing to routinely get 50 miles per gallon on every tank with no effort on my part. I just get in it and drive it like any other car. OK well maybe not like my other car, but you get the idea.

I’ve always wondered how long it will be before we have pure electric vehicles, since the trend seems to make these quite feasible now. I’ve been tempted to put a deposit down on a Tesla, but the cost is simply too high for me to tolerate, and it’s not really a good replacement for the Boxster since it has too little trunk space. As an alternative, I decided to bite the bullet and put a deposit down on an Aptera. This won’t replace the Boxster, but it might replace the Prius. Someone has to lead, and I’ve always had a fondness for cutting edge cars.

I recently declined to referee a paper for a closed-access journal. This particular case was an ACM journal, which is one of the least objectionable of the closed-access publishers, but it still bugs me that we continue to turn over science to people who then sell it back to scientists. This does not benefit science.

I’ve been trying to think about what would be the best way to advance the open access publishing movement. I could try to contribute software and services (since these are real costs), or I could try to organize a journal myself, or I could run for office in ACM, or various other things. At some level, I think those of us who believe in open access publishing need to push on every front in order to change the status quo. The place to start is probably to direct your activities (reviewing, reading, editing, submitting, and citing) toward open access publishers. By refusing to referee something for a commercial publisher, you send a notice to the editor that you prefer they would spend their time on open access publishing as well, and you may serve to increase the backlog in these closed-access publications. The next thing we can do is work to restructure our academic societies around community and support of science rather than managing intellectual property. Usenix recently set the best example I can think of in this way, and other societies should look to their leadership as a shining example.

Disclaimer: this is unrelated to my own child (I think)

I recently came across the following cartoon, which is a joke that is so obscure that few people will get it (you need to know what sql injection attacks are). Still, if Frank Zappa could name his daughter “Moon Unit” (sister of Dweezil), and David Bowie could name his kid “Zowie Bowie”, then I suppose hackers should have the right to choose equally amusing names.

For years I have listened to people argue that parallel sessions are harmful to scientific discourse, and how we need to maintain “quality”. While I strongly believe that quality of scientific publication should not be sacrificed, I think there is a harmful aspect to avoiding parallel sessions that is being overlooked.

The problem is that there are too many conferences. Just taking the example of the cryptography conferences and workshops organized by IACR, there were two conferences a year in the 80s, namely Crypto and Eurocrypt. Most people attended one or the other, and many people attended both. Then along came Asiacrypt, at which point most geographic regions of the world had a major conference once a year. The field continued to grow, resulting in more papers being written, and more people trying to work in the field. Rather than create longer conferences or have parallel sessions, the community created other conferences, including FSE, PKC, TCC, CHES, Financial Crypto, ACM CCS, Information Hiding Workshop, ECC, RSA Cryptographer’s track, etc. As a result, we ended up with much less of a sense of community, and subfields that often are out of touch with the mainstream of scientific thought on cryptography. This is not healthy.

This problem is not limited to cryptography - it extends to all of computer science. The root cause of this problem is our neglect for publishing in journals, preferring instead to publish our results in conferences. As a field grows, economic supply and demand dictates that we either expand the existing conferences or create new ones. The myopic view that parallel sessions will degrade any particular conference almost inevitably results in more conferences being created, and once a conference is created it almost never stops running (but sometimes dies a slow death of scientific irrelevance). There are no other fields that I know of who have adopted this model of conference publication, and it would be beneficial to the field of computer science research if we resisted this trend of creating more conferences.

By contrast, the field of mathematics has a single yearly conference in the USA that is attended by the majority of mathematicians in the USA. As a result, mathematicians maintain a strong sense of a broader research community, and cross fertilization between fields is facilitated. For those of you thinking about starting a new conference, think instead about how you can mold the conferences that already exist within your field, and start submitting to journals.

There was a time when commercial publishers provided a crucial service in the printing and distribution of scientific publications. That need has diminished to the point where it doesn’t make sense to continue to use this model. USENIX has announced that they will make all of their conference proceedings freely available online. This marks a major advance in open access publishing, and it deserves the support of every author. I encourage everyone to submit their best research work to USENIX. The days of giving scientific work to commercial publishers so they can sell it back to us and restrict dissemination in the process must come to an end.

I somehow ended up with a machine with Windows Vista on it. Ok, it was a mistake. I know that now.

When you get a new machine, one thing you have to do is go back and reinstall all those things that make a machine usable. Since I work on computer science research, I occasionally come across a postscript file that I have to view. Naturally Windows does not come with a program to view these, so just for laughs I clicked on the thing that is supposed to look up programs to view postscript files. Apparently nobody at Microsoft has ever heard of ghostview. Their suggestion is to use CorelDraw or Microsoft Visio. Yeah right - perfect matches to Vista.

My wife handed me a newspaper article saying how to opt out from direct marketing lists, and how to opt out from preapproved credit offers. These have single-handedly created a market for personal shredders, and I’m tired of filling up landfills. When I went to the web site of the Direct Marketing Association^*, they lead you through several screens trying to obfuscate the possibility of opting out, all along trying to convince you of how valuable their landfill overflow service is. When you finally fill in your information, there are three options:

Of course once you make the obvious selection, there is one more screen to try to convince you not to do it - warning you of all sorts of consequences from not having to carry all that paper to the landfill.

Whenever I pick up the mail, I usually tear up the junk mail, stuff it back into the business reply mail envelope, and mail it back to them so they can dispose of it. It isn’t a very green thing to do, but at least it puts the burden of disposing of this crap on the communities that support direct mail marketing.

I’ve always been amused by the fact that www.dma.org is not the domain for the direct marketing association as you might expect. Turns out the Dayton Microcomputer Association, which must get a shitload of pageviews from their choice of domain. It goes to show you that the DMA was slow to recognize the value of the Internet, confirming their general disregard for the world around them.

There is a crying need for a button on most consumer electronics these days. I call it the “FUCK YOU” button.

I’ll offer a few examples:

1. You put a DVD into your DVD player, but none of the buttons on the remote will function until you finish watching the promotions, the FBI copyright warning, and the logo for the studio. FUCK YOU.
2. You accidentally hit a button no your cell phone and find that you are surfing the web at $1.50 per minute. Unfortunately the phone is in your pocket and you discover it three hours later. FUCK YOU.
3. You try to get your browser window to the forefront by clicking anywhere on the page. Since literally everything on the web page is clickable (probably to get ad revenue), you end up loading a flash movie that is trying to sell you diapers for the elderly or something. FUCK YOU.

I’ve started to see enough irritations in consumer electronics, media, and communications that I think this deserves special consideration as a user interface component. There is an increasing need to register displeasure with media and devices, and no useful way to register your discontent.

On the other hand, I have little hope that such a thing would ever catch on. There is a monopoly on irritation in user interfaces, and users are not in charge of user interfaces.

I’ve written in the past about the interpretation of the PageRank probability distribution as an economic utility function. Recall that one interpretation is PageRank(url) = probability that a random surfer arrives at the url. This can be used to estimating monetary value for advertising on the page, because it is correlated to the number of impressions.

Now it turns out that PageRank has another monetary value - the estimation of monetary value for buying stolen login usernames and passwords. This is further evidence of the concept of PageRank as representing a measure of monetary value.