Mark Byron

Bitcoin Arbitrage

The CBOE launched the first futures market for bitcoin this week. Bitcoin is a bit hard to wrap your mind around as a self-styled digital currency. What might help is looking at how they're created.

People lend out their computers to various projects that need computer power. Every so often, that work results in a bitcoin heading their way; a set amount of coins are issued each year.

A bitcoin is an encrypted computer file documenting who was initially issued the coin and the cybertrail that lead it to the current owner, worthless in and of itself. Likewise, the $20 bill in my wallet, with a nice picture of a stern-faced Andrew Jackson, has little intrinsic value either. However, it'll buy about eight gallons of gas or breakfast for two at Bob Evans. Thus, that piece of paper with the mug of a slave-holding late president has value to me.

I typically don't shop anyplace that takes bitcoin, so it's of little interest to me. However, there are some corners of the economy, quite a bit of it illicit, that does. It does seems to have value to a large number of folks, not all of which are criminals or paranoid libertarians.

A lower bound to what a bitcoin would be worth is the cost of making one. A number of companies, many of them in China, specialize in bitcoin mining, setting up hundreds of computers to crank away at bitcoin-generating problems. Like precious metal mines, if the cost of mining the product is more than the value of it, they stop production, so the presence of bitcoin mines indicates that there's money to be made in them thar cyberhills.

The presence of a futures market will allow miners to lock in a price for the bitcoin, allowing more mainstream investors confidence to enter the fray. If you can lock in a $1000 price and it cost you $500 to make it, you're turning a 100% profit in short order.

An increase in supply of computer power going after bitcoins will increase the cost per bitcoin, as it will take more computer time to get a bitcoin. At some point, the cost of getting a bitcoin will equal the price.

Assuming the futures market holds up and enough folks get into bitcoin mining as a result (two yuge ifs), an price will get established that has some real-world basis behind it. Some of that is likely happening without the futures markets, but it will give a degree of certitude to would-be miners. 

To answer the question of the Bloomberg article, no, you shouldn't be trading bitcoin futures. That is, unless you have a need to hedge bitcoin exposure or are an expert on the bitcoin market (untrained futures speculation is a sucker's bet), which describes none of the known members of the Peanut Gallery, however much of it is left after a multi-month hiatus.

Who Matters?-Part I-Blue Collar Blues

It seems that we have a nasty feedback loop in regards to black male youth as of late. There are a number of issues that need multiple posts to unpack.

The last quarter-century or so has seen a devaluation of blue-collar labor, as a combination of automation reducing the need for factory jobs and streamlined shipping logistics making it easier for foreign goods to get to the US and decrease the pricing power of US labor. This paragraph from an otherwise-valid piece on America's strengths hit askew with me-

Eighty-six percent of all international transactions are made in dollars. The dollar is the most important hard currency in circulation and the shelter currency in turbulent times, such as today. The unemployment index, about 4.7 percent, is one of the lowest of the developed world and, while it's true that industrial jobs have been destroyed, they have been replaced by more placid and creative forms of earning a living in the service sector and the so-called information economy.

For blue-collar guys, that's cold comfort. Service-sector jobs are not all that well-paying and are often female-oriented. Anecdotally, I've seen a the waiter-to-waitress ratio increase in the last decade or so as there are fewer entry-level jobs in manufacturing, construction and other blue-collar areas. To the extent that some anti-black bias crops up, black male youth would have to counter both a pro-female bias and an black-guys-as-ganstas stereotype to get service-sector jobs.

The information economy is a bastion of whiteness, with Asians seemingly outnumbering blacks. Poorer folks are going to have less exposure to computers in general and an urban culture that looks down its nose at academic learning would make it difficult for an inner-city black kid to worm their way into a tech job. Not impossible, but harder.

Folks that aren't overly interested in academics have a lot fewer options than their grandparents did. They're increasingly on the outside looking in, with dwindling job prospects and increasing frustration. Blue collar whites are actually seeing mortality increasing due to the stresses of an economy sliding away from them. That's a good chunk of the Trump vote, especially when you add in some lower-level professional positions that are poorly served by classic laissez-faire econ or progressive doctrine that is big on handouts and light on creating blue-collar opportunities.

Black middle-aged folks, who saw old-school racism up-close as kids, are more jaded about the economy and thus less surprised when things went south for Joe Shoprat be Joe black or write. That downturn in white health hasn't quite hit them.

Their kids have a different mix to deal with. They have less opportunities for blue-collar jobs and have to overcome a system of struggling schools and a pop culture glorifying bohemian attitudes and being against book learning almost as much as Boka Haram. Throw in a overall culture that treats a traditional family as merely one option among many and a welfare system that discourages marriage and makes Uncle Sam a better provider than an underemployed Joe Shoprat, and the deck seems more stacked than a game of Three-Card Monte for a young black guy who's not on a college-prep track.

Sadly, it's likely to only get worse. I was re-reading a 2004 post of mine, and this passage struck me as a bit dated-

People look down their noses at telemarketers, convenience-store clerks, fast-food cashiers who ask you whether you want to supersize it, Wally-World associates and a lot of other low-wage, low-prestige jobs. Half of the population's going to be below the median, both in pay and in prestige. What we need to work on is to create a thriving society where the average keeps going up.

Someone's going to have to pick up the trash, man the school cafeteria, drive the trucks and stock the grocery-store shelves. Hopefully, those people will move on to better things, but let's respect those who are there and the businesses who hire them.

That might not be true circa 2030. Self-driving cars are being beta-tested and trucks won't be that far behind. Robotic inventory-helpers are also on Google's drawing board; I've not heard of robotic trash collectors, but teaching a robot to grab and dump a standardized trash can on the curb would seem like a logical extension of current tech.

I recall the Memphis sanitation strike of 1968; MLK was in town going to bat for black workers when he was assassinated. The slogan of the black trash collectors was "I am a man." By the 60th anniversary of that strike in 2028, they might be a robot instead, immune to the desire to strike for better working conditions.

That will be discouraging to blue-collar folks if and when it comes. Telling them to take STEM classes and get with the program has echoes of "Let them eat cake."

 

Back to the Financial Future

Here's an interesting business story-An investment team lead by Warren Buffett and Quicken Loans-Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is looking to buy Yahoo's US operations. Yahoo's current stock value is largely due to its stake in Chinese internet retailer Alibaba as the core operations of Yahoo are sluggish and rather passe from a tech standpoint.

That's right up Buffett's alley.

He's made billions buying up mature companies that aren't trendy, don't have stratospheric growth rates but have a solid ongoing cash flow. Yes, he has lousy political tastes, but he knows his finance; he's been bragged on for three decades, as Berkshire Hathaway was talked about in my first finance class...ahem... 29 years ago. Those unsexy "value" stocks tend to do better than stocks with high growth rates, since folks will often overpay for those growth prospects and also overpay for trendy stock in the Next Big Thing.

Yahoo was a Next Big Thing a quarter-century ago, when it had a leading search engine back in the day that
"google" wasn't a verb. It also had one of the first ISP-independent e-mail services. However, those niches have become passe, as they now only have 3% of the e-mail market, being lapped by both Apple and Google's G-mail. It's also become a mark of old-fogie status to have a Yahoo account, only a step above having an AOL account.

<geezer voice>"Ah, yes, back in the mid 90s when the Web was hot of the presses. We had to use dial-up and 56K was considered hot stuff, I got my Yahoo account. Still have it. I do have a G-mail account as well, but I only use it to keep Google happy.</geezer voice>

That reminds me of the Lewis Black ad's trailer, where he talks of having three channels growing up. Paraphrase-"Modern kids would be sobbing like they're in a North Korean prison camp if they had to live with that", or a dial-up modem. "Phone Jacks? What are those? Don't you have a Wi-Fi router?"

Yes, I'm going to be getting senior discounts this summer. 

Yes, Yahoo is now so stodgy, Buffett's interested in them. He owns Geico, too. Maybe he can sick their ad team on the Yahoo account and see what they can do with it. "So behind the curve, the cavemen have Yahoo accounts."

Paleo Cyber-diet anyone?

 

 

Parsing Han's Parsecs

While I was waiting in line at the Walgreen's drive-through, I was behind a car with the vanity plate KESLRUN. For sci-fi fans, that brings to mind the line from the original Star Wars-this is what Han says after Luke calls his ship a piece of junk under his breath.

You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?…It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.

The link I showed clears up that line. It sounds like Han is using parsec as a time measure rather than a distance, but that Wookieepedia (that's what they call it, I'm not making it up) piece mentioned that the Kessel Run is a tricky part of space, where it takes guts and maneuverability to take a shorter route. The shorter the route, the more chutzpah and nimbleness.

I was just thinking that a Kessel run could have been to the grocery store in these parts; it was a local chain that bought a number of unprofitable Kroger stores. Since the closings were in part due to union troubles, Kessel, who wasn't unionized, earned the enmity of union folks. Kroger wound up buying most of them back at the turn of the century.

Our Car Will Pick You Up

Here's some interesting news from that other CMU-

Ride-share company Uber and Carnegie Mellon University will develop a research lab in Pittsburgh focused on developing self-driving vehicles and other technologies, company and university officials said Monday.

Self-driving cars are near on the horizon, as Google is working on prototypes and the latest Tesla is nearly self-driving. Uber is looking to keep up with this tech.

What this easily could mean for Uber is getting rid of their ad-hoc cabbies. However, I'm not sure if Uber is the company to be doing this research, unless they are going to change their business model. If Uber is looking to do research into driverless cabs, who is going to own said driverless cabs?

Uber's shtick is putting folks needing a ride in touch with folks willing to provide rides, taking a commission on the fares generated; they charge extra during high-demand periods in order to coax extra supply out of their providers. Uber's bad news for traditional taxi companies (and often banned in big cities where said companies are a force in local politics) but good news by and large for consumers.

If Uber shifts to this robocab model, then they'll have to be making large capital investments in a fleet of robocars-for-rent. That sounds more like a mash-up of a taxi company and a rental-car company. The first rents car and driver on demand while the latter rents just a car.

Advertisement of 2025-"Enterprise; our car will pick you up." Instead of a winsome young staffer driving the car up in the ad (do they double as an escort service?), the robocar comes to get you and comes back when you're done. The line between rental-car and taxi service becomes a matter of length of rental in that universe.

Uber could well be a player in that universe, but where they work with individual car owners to loan out their cars when they're not using them. If my car is sitting in the driveway for the evening, I could sent it out to take someone to the airport or take someone home from the bar and pick up a few bucks while I watch the Pistons game.

However, this research would lean towards Uber owning the cars they're driving rather than borrowing civilian robocars. That's a different business model than the brokering-rides model they're doing now.

I, Not Robot

Might computerization and robotization be a bigger problem for our culture than climate change?

I noted this BBC piece on Antartic ice melting that Richard Hall blogged on this summer just now. This paragraph stuck out-

In its report to The Cryosphere journal, the AWI team does not actually calculate a sea-level rise equivalent number, but if this volume is considered to be all ice (a small part will be snow) then the contribution is likely to be on the order of just over a millimetre per year.

For those who are metric-challenged, there are 25.4 millimeters per inch. At that pace, we'll have seas rise an inch by 2040 or so. For areas that are on the verge of going under, that might tip them over the edge, but the raw numbers don't justify the nightmare scenarios of New York City turning into Venice by mid-century.

It would seem to me that managing any modest changes that do happen would be easier than to try and micro-manage the world economy in order to cut CO₂ emissions. I don't think that that's denying science, just taking it at face value.

________

Meanwhile, we have an interesting piece on HTML creator Tim Berners-Lee.

“Companies are increasingly going to be run by computers. And computers are getting smarter and we are not.” The only solution, he argues, is for people to embrace new technology, and accept that some jobs will simply disappear.

The idea of automation making more and more jobs obsolete isn't new, but we're on the verge of having robotics of varying sorts making a number of jobs go the way of the dodo. This piece of mine from 2004 (my most Googled post thanks to the title) on mundane jobs comes to mind; here was my final paragraph

Someone's going to have to pick up the trash, man the school cafeteria, drive the trucks and stock the grocery-store shelves. Hopefully, those people will move on to better things, but let's respect those who are there and the businesses who hire them. Some would like them to get a lot more respect on payday, with better wages and more health benefits; however, that's going to raise prices and may force companies out of business, which will mean zero wages and no benes for those who are laid off.

We might well see truck drivers made obsolete in a decade or two. If self-driving vehicles continue to evolve and become a reality on the roads, truck-driving might be handed over to a computerized system rather than a human driver.

"What if the computer fails?" is the common reply. We have wetware failure on a regular basis with human drivers, so if the computer is more reliable on average than an human that gets tired and distracted, it might become a safety precaution to have a computer behind the wheel. That would decimate the Teamsters and do a number on the truck stop industry, as an automated truck might need gas and tires but not food and hot showers.

The grocery-store shelves might be stocked by a robot in the not-to-distant future. I recall reading where Google's working on a prototype of such a critter; I can't quite place that via its flagship search engine, but here's a piece where that other CMU has made an inventory robot.

Automation might well be accelerated by government policy. Minimum-wage increases and mandatory health insurance are driving the cost of labor up and Moore's Law and growing expertise in robotics will drive the cost of automation down. At some point, the curves will intersect and Robbie the Robot might take the wheel or take the push-cart away from a worker.

Lower-grade automation will also cut employment; self-checkout lanes at grocery stores are a now-common example, which let one supervising worker manage a half-dozen or more lines. Some Chilis restaurants are experimenting with tablet mini-kiosks at customer tables where they can order items and pay their bills with a credit card. That will let waitresses cover more tables per person and cut on the number of staff needed.

Economic theory would suggest that other jobs will come up as folks are automated out of their old jobs. However, that would require the culture to come up with new tasks that need or want to be done that aren't being done now.

The dystopic vision of an automated future has a underemployed underclass who has next to nothing to do, since the computers and robots are doing all the basic stuff that unskilled labor used to do. The creative class will still have their outlets and people will still be needed to program and make all those computers and robotics, but grunt work will be largely phased out in that universe.

How do we create those new jobs? How do we find things that people want done that aren't being done now? Some of those things we might not even think about right now. A guy working as an on-line tutor with a hobby of writing essays on a computer-broadcast journal called a "blog" would have been science fiction in the 1980s; the Web as we know it just became able to get a drink this year, since it was codified in 1993.

The people who will be on the outside looking in as this automation trend continues aren't likely to be writing blogs or tweeting. Figuring out how to make those folks useful and fulfilled will be a small-m ministry in the years to come.

Have Yourself a Viral Christmas

I'm chilling out in the den after our family Christmas gift-giving orgy but before dinner; Eileen and I and my sister's family were at my folks for the event.

One of the perennial gag gifts is a Christmas-singing Billy Bigmouth Bass that has been getting gifted back and forth between my brother-in-law and my dad for over a decade. This year, my 11-year-old nephew Tyler got it rather than his dad, which tickled him...

...and his folks. Both posted pictures of the event on Facebook...in real time. I get back to the den, not being possessed of a smartphone, and am already an hour behind the viral curve.

Snowden Day

We have a face to our NSA leaker, a guy named Edward Snowden who worked for a NSA contractor. You've got a both ends against the middle reply to him, with liberals and libertarians liking him (Michael Moore and Glen Beck dancing cheek to cheek on a rare occasion of agreement) while The Donald calls him "a bad guy".

Snowden seemed to be an accident waiting to happen, a libertarian fan of the Electronic Freedom Foundation who had enough of the NSA's Big Brother act and went rogue; he's currently rumored to be in Hong Kong and looking for a friendly country to light in; one posited line of escape is to take a page from Wikilinks meistro Julian Assange and hide out in a friendly embassy in Hong Kong.

Snowden and Assange are likely to be compared, but the leaks are different. Snowden merely mentioned what the NSA was up to, while Assange arranged for the data dump of a lot of sensitive State Department cables. Snowden is merely embarrasing to the NSA while Assange (and his informant Bradley Manning) may have gotten some people killed as a result of the information that became public.

It begs the question of when to whistle-blow; you're taking it into your own hands to sabatoge government activity that you deem wrong. It's disloyal, but disloyalty to a harmfull cause wouldn't be a vice. That I'm still mulling over in this case.

Roll Up the RIM to Win

Blackberry's parent is now called... Blackberry. The former Research in Motion opted to go with the name of its flagship product. They also now have a keyboardless Crackberry, opting for a virtual keyboard on a touchscreen if needed; they launched a tenth generation version as part of their rechristening.

I'm still stuck with a old-school cell-phone I haven't upgraded in about 6 years; my next phone will likely be one of those smartphones that have more computing power than my desktop of a decade ago, but I yet to feel the need to take that leap.

For those of you well south of the 49th and immune to the cutting edge of World Canadian Domination, here's the basis of the title pun.

A Beautifully-Hacked Mind

I remember some of Steve Jobs' backstory, where he devised a gizmo to let you hot-wire your telephone to get free long distance; "phreakers" was the nickname for those lower-tech hackers. One of Job's contemporaries found that a Cap'n Crunch toy whistle would give the tones to bypass the fee gauges, giving him the nom-de-guerre of Captain Crunch.

Crunch got busted and served five years probation for his dark-side hacks, but Jobs went on to Apple and Pixar fame.

I was thinking of them in the context of Aaron Swartz, who helped developed RSS and Reddit and hacked federal and academic databases for fun and infosocialism; Swartz committed suicide after fighting off depression most of his 26-year life. The federales were on his case for the gray-side hacks, including doing Wikileaks-esque data dumps of JSTOR and federal court case databases and putting them into free public domain.

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing and Larry Lessig have moving, if occasionally bleepable, eulogies for the young man. They both worked with him, with Lessig helping him fight off the criminal charges for the data-dumps. Swartz had his emotional issues in spades, but a lot of especially high-level geniuses have had their issues on that front.

Unlike Wikileaks, which put a lot of national-security secrets into the public eye for better and worse, Swartz's hacks were of relatively low value documents; the legal database was charging a whopping eight cents a case. Swartz wanted that rounded down to zero for the greater good, but went around intellectual property law to do it.

There's a Robin Hood aspect to Swartz, but robbing from the power that be and giving to the public at large (he wasn't profiting from the hacks; he's been big on open-source communalism in software) is still robbing. Robin of Locksley would be up on charges for his highwayman act even today, and low-impact gray-side hacks are still assaults on IP.

Great mind, twisty ethics. As someone who has had a lower-grade fight with depression, I can relate to his struggles. As someone who has been around computers for almost four decades, I can relate and appreciate a creative genius, but he used it in some left-handed ways.

Life Imitating Art: Pirate Party Infosocialism

One aspect of the Transhuman Space sci-fi universe is a political movement called Infosocialism-

Infosocialism posits that information and ideas are the primary means of production. It holds that copyright laws are immoral and that all intellectual property rights should be owned by one entity, usually a government or a private organisation (such as the Free Software Foundation).

In TS's future of 2100, a good hunk of the developing world in Southeast Asia and Latin America have elected or installed infosocialist governments that ignore intellectual property rights and develop new IP by directly commissioning work from scientists, authors and other creators. That does not endear them to the rest of the world; China and the Transpacific Alliance of infosocialists fought a nasty war in the 2080s over the issue.

That mythical infosocialism doesn't seem too far away from the Pirate Party's MO. We've seen the PP make strides in German state elections, making its way into two state legislatures this spring. PP affiliates in the Netherlands and the UK are creating headaches for officials in those countries who are trying to shut down the Pirate Bay site sponsored by the Swedish PP. Their North Sea brethren are setting up alternative routes to circumvent blocking Pirate Bay URLs, creating a cyber game of whack-a-mole, where new alternatives get created as old ones get blocked.

File sharing sites where you can get illicit access to movies, music, or (ironically) PDF copies of Transhuman Space game books are the current love of the Pirate Parties, but that could well morph into something resembling infosocialism, if that extends to ignoring patents as well as copyrights.

[Update 5:15PM-I Googled around and found that the Swedish PP leader is a Transhuman Space fan and one German blogger was three years ahead of me on the TS-PP link. Interesting.]

Pirates of the North Sea

Some bad news (from my vantage point) out of Germany, as the libertarian-leaning Free Democrats get knocked out of the Saarland legislature. What is a bit scary is that the Pirate Party got in the legislature.

The anti-capitalist Left Party led by Oskar Lafontaine took 16.1 percent and the Greens 5 percent. The Pirate Party, which campaigns for open internet access, had 7.4 percent, allowing it to enter a second regional parliament after winning seats last year in Berlin’s state assembly.

No, a Pirate Party isn't one where the Captian Morgan flows freely, although they probably wouldn't mind it. They are an anti-intellectual property party (or at least pro-copying of IP); the Pirate Bay downloading site is affiliated with the Swedish branch of the party and Wikileaks uses Pirate Party servers in Sweden as well.

That's a rather radical bunch to be trusted with the levers of power, given that their fellow travelers want to mess with power as their raison d'etre. One could see them as allies in SOPA-like fights, but I wouldn't quite trust one with a cabinet spot, given the problems their friends have created.

Don't Have a Dawg in that Fight

Here's an interesting brawl fixin' to happen; the hacktivists at Anonymous are going after the Zetas-

A group claiming affiliation with the international hacking group Anonymous posted a video demanding that the Zetas release a hostage in Veracruz. The person in the video claims to have information about the names of the Zetas and of corrupt public officials working with the Zetas. They say they will release the names and addresses of people linked to the Zetas online.

The group then hacked the website of the former attorney general of the state of Tabasco, someone who has previously been accused of ties to criminal organizations, and posted a note claiming he works for the Zetas.

Here we have two folks on the dark side of the law going mano-a-mano. In most recent cases, Anonymous has been a pest from the anti-powers-that-be left, often hacking to pay back foes of Wikileaks. Here, they seem to be on the side of the angels for a change, assuming their outings are legit.

However, the outings will likely cause a few folks to die at the hands of rival gangs or the new Mata Zeta hit squads, assuing those two are not one and the same. Rough justice, indeed.

It's Called Fundimental Analysis, My Dear Watson

Here's an interesting piece on how web searches for a company increase just before trading in that stock spikes. That should be a no-brainer; if a stock is being researched, some folks will look to buy or sell based on what they're finding out and the research will likely be a leading indicator of activity.

However, that seems to skip past the folks at MIT-

That's surprising because Cristelli and co say that most webusers check each stock of interest just once per month. This implies that they are not expert traders. So the effect emerges from the collective but uncoordinated activity of many inexpert users--a kind of wisdom crowds.

Checking one a month might be a fair pattern for a stock that is either in your portfolio or is being tracked for possible purchase, but expert traders might well do research into a stock before trading; if something came up on their radar via any variety of screening tools, they might go on the Web to see what is making the company tick.

Note that this just tracks trading activity. It doesn't say that the stock will go up or down, just that extra shares will be traded.

Losing Jobs... to the Hearafter

The media is playing the death of Steve Jobs in a way I haven't seen since John Lennon, treating him as a sort of secular saint and calling him the modern Edison.

Not that groundbreaking, as this nice Rick Newman obit notes. He's not quite Edison, more like Tesla with a second and third act. The first act, inventing the Apple and the Mac, was a bit like Tesla, who did a lot of innovating but lost out on the really big bucks to IBM and Microsoft. Apple perfected the modern PC, but IBM put it on office desks and Microsoft's DOS running on IBM clones brought the price point down to consumer levels.

Jobs then had a decade hiatus from Apple, in which time he gave us Pixar; not bad for a second act, but the third act was a doozy, turning Apple into a mobile electronics giant. There was a bit of a role reversal for Apple; now,they were popularizing gizmos rather than inventing them.

There were smart phones before the iPhone, MP3 players before the iPod and notepad computers before the iPad. However,they popularized all three, giving a cache that was both trendy and mature at the same time. Even then, Apple wasn't able to expand its desktop and laptop sales too much, as Jobs wanted to keep Apple's OS proprietary, scrapping a plan to have Apple clones available.

I've yet to enter that universe as a user. My laptop has my MP3 stash, and I have yet to get a smartphone or a pad-computer; however, that will probably change the next time I replace my cell-phone, for the entry-level iPhones or their Android rivals are now the freebie-with-a-renewal phones these days.

Before we knew of Jobs' passing, I saw this piece on the Corner about the Wall Street protesters and their allies-

I might have told him that if he really wanted to “protest capitalism,” he could start by ditching his $2,000 MacBook Pro, which is produced by one of the largest corporations on the planet — Apple (AAPL) — currently trading at more than $370 a share, on Wall Street.

Apple has something of a near-cult following that leans a bit left but doesn't exclude the right, other than occasionally getting PC over some more pointed anti-gay aps and podcasts. The new high priest of the cult presided over a new iPhone earlier in the week, but he likely won't have Jobs' iconic status.

 

Spamalittle

Here's an interesting piece from the BBC over a large drop in the amount of spam sent as of late. Traffic dropped by half during the fall and has dropped by half again the last few weeks. Many of the major spam spewers are seemingly laying low.

Why? Maybe anti-spam filters are more effective. Maybe people have become more savvy and aren't clicking through something that looks like a friend of a friend's e-mail. Maybe it's the calm before the storm of another bout of junk e-mail.

Still, the flow of spam at that reduced rate is about 50 billion a day. That bytes.

A Sandy Bridge too Far

Here's some interesting news from the computer world, where Intel is looking to build a video chip into their next generation of CPUs. That would, in theory, allow the new Sandy Bridge-class processor to manipulate video quicker, since it wouldn't have to slide onto the motherboard over to the video card then out to the screen.

What that does is to freeze out video card makers and video chip set makers out of the mix, as their goods become redundant with Sandy Bridge. In a way, it's an analog to some of the issues that Microsoft has had with Windows, where adding IE squeezed Netscape out of the browser market and adding Windows Media Player squeezed out Real Player out of that market. The EU and/or the FTC might be interesting in any antitrust provisions that might flow from that; folks like video chip maker Nvidia might get their law team to file complaints if this does go through. 

The other issue that comes to mind is that such combos are often problematic, since you might be hard-pressed to upgrade video if it's built into the CPU. I'm reminded of a lot of computers we worked with back in my computer-store days; the cheaper computers like Compaq and Packard Bell had a lot of features like video and audio built into the motherboard rather than on separate cards. Rather than changing cards, an upgrade required disabling the motherboard version and putting in a new card; with a limited number of card slots, that was often problematic.

Thus, I have an instinctive distrust of too much building-in of functions. Intel will have to make the video set a real killer to make it worth it.

Crack the Casbah?

The Saudis are joining in on the UAE's ban on using Blackberries for IMing each other. It's out of their control (the servers are back outside of the Middle East) and they don't like that.

There's a Weird Al Clash spoof looking to happen there; I'm working on the lyrics- "By order of the Prophet, we ban those boogie phones; degenerate the faithful with the crazy texting pods."

Information on the Lam

Here's two tech stories from this week, one you have undoubtedly seen unless you've been in a media cave for the last week.

Let's start with the other one... the UAR is looking at banning Blackberrieson security grounds. Since the data is stored out-of-country (Blackberry's parent RIM is based in Canada), it makes it hard for the authorities to censor things that disrupt their worldview. There could easily be a split on that issue within the UAE, as relatively free-wheeling Dubai might not want to have PDAs put under the control of the morals police or other regulatory body.

The UAE isn't the first to be nervous about that; the French banned Crackberries from their defense ministry a few years back, possibly as a way for then-new president Sarkozy to look anti-Anglo-Saxon after running as a pro-American guy.

Would you want your data under government supervision?

For the civil libertarians out there (or righties who trust the Obama team as far as you can throw them) that said "No" to that, may I present the other big tech story of the week, Wikileaks. A free Internet with pockets with light regulation will have renegade sites on any number of issues, whether it be jihadi sites, purdy dirty pick-ture sites, Napster 2.0 sites and the one from our friendly Aussie leftist who wants to tweak the nose of the Not-Quite-New World Order.

The current Afghani data-dump is a mixed bag, with some possible dirty laundry from the US side coupled with confirmation that the Pakistani ISI is playing both sides of the fence with the Taliban; the ISI has been strongly rumored to be a long-standing backer of the Taliban but had to be seen as fighting them when being pro-Taliban became toxic as of 9/12/01. The Obama team is making the right noises about security leaks, but since the material was '08 and back, they can say that that was then (with the bad Bushies in charge) and not now.

When you have a free Internet, with data that can move from server to server and country to country (I started this post at home, draft-saved it, then am finishing it at the library while Eileen browses), information has a way of getting free, especially if there is a political or economic reason for having it become unfettered. When the data can be shepherded out of the country in milliseconds, governments have little power to suppress runaway information.

This Wikileaks story is oft compared to the Pentagon Papers of the Vietnam War era; back then, the Nixon team tried to keep the NYT and WaPo from publishing the unflattering info. That was technically doable (but unconstitutional per the Supreme Court) at the time. However, with Wikileaks setting up server shop in Sweden, the horse is out of the barn and out of the country before the powers that be knew about it.

Security hawks would like to string up the Wikileaks people along with their abettors at the NYT and other newspapers in on the story. There is most likely some espionage charges that can be brought, but the horse is out of the barn; if Mr. Wikileaks is arrested, someone else will pick up the mantle in short order. That's the nature of the Internet and modern politics.

A RickRoll Worm?

Here's an interesting BBC piece on a hacker worm developed for the iPhone; folks who hot-wired their software to use non-Apple aps had someone develop a worm that phished their bank accounts

It is specifically targeting people in the Netherlands who are using their iPhones for internet banking with Dutch online bank ING.

It redirects the bank's customers to a lookalike site with a log-in screen.

The worm attacks "jail-broken" phones - a modification which enables the user to run non-Apple approved software on their handset.

That's nasty. However, the inaugural iPhone worm that preceded it had me LOL.

The first iPhone worm, called ikee, was harmless. Users with infected phones found their wallpaper replaced with a picture of 1980s popstar Rick Astley.

It also targeted jail-broken phones which were SSH enabled.

The first worm was a silent RickRoll, the signature cyber-practical joke of the late 00s. Cute.

When we start having nasty-hacks of a piece of tech, it has arrived. However, there is a cautionary tale here; the people who are getting scammed were using unauthorized stuff in the first place.

When legit aps get worms is when we really start to worry, and we can expect that any day now.

Electric Avenue

Here's an interesting piece on an electric car some MIT folks are working on.

The team's goal is to build an all-electric car with similar performance capabilities of gasoline-only counterparts, which includes a top speed of about 161 kph, a family sedan capacity, a range of about 320 kilometers and the ability to recharge in about 10 minutes. They hope to complete the project, which they chronicle on their blog, by the third quarter of 2010.

The one drawback that I can see with the electric cars we have to date is that they take a long time to recharge. That's OK if you're going from home to work and back and can recharge overnight, but what if you want to take one of those on the road? You're out of luck unless you can swap out car batteries like you swap out propane tanks; if the car batteries had a user-friendly method of replacing them like a current battery, one could see gas stations have a battery-swap business to cater to long-distance travelers.

However, if you can charge a battery in 10 minutes, not only might truck stops offer recharging stations but restaurants might offer them as well. Gas stations might charge a set amount for a charge, but restaurants might use them as a loss-leader like WiFi is today; get your car recharged as you recharge.

The current technology requires 350KW of juice to recharge things that quick; they need to borrow the MIT power plant to get that kind of voltage. Not everyone has a power-plant at their disposal, but if they can get that down to more manageable levels, we might have the makings of a car that could put the gas station out of business by about 2030.

Let Your Mouse Fingers do the Walking

We had our local phone books delivered today, which is a waste of paper for my household. With broadband cable, we're far more likely to look something up on-line than thumb through a phone book. Google Maps will do a far better job than a phone book of listing available stores of a certain type and will include phone numbers along with locations.

It's interesting what the Web has done in many areas. Wikipedia and other web resources have made conventional encyclopedia obsolete, or at least not worth the hundreds of dollars to buy. The World Almanac used to be a yearly buy, but most of that information is a Google away these days and up to date at that.

What reference books has the Web banished from your bookshelf (or got them collecting dust) and what books still get used even with the Web?

Google Perplexed

I was thumbing through some old posts this evening, and found this 2004 piece on Google's IPO. Let's get some good Chianti ready, since I'm going to have to eat these words big time.

If Google has net income of $125 million and is expected to have a market capitalization of $20 billion, the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio would be $20,000m/$125m or 160.

To put that into perspective, the average stock these days has a P/E of about 25. Eventually, Google will stop growing faster than the economy and settle in as a normal company. At their current market capitalization, they'd have to raise their net income to $800 million to get to a P/E of 25. How will Google do that? Will they get six times the traffic? Three times the traffic but double the profit margin?

...

No, I'm not dissing Google, it's still my search engine of choice. It's sorta like making Michigan a 60-point favorite over Northwestern; they'll win, yes, but I don't think the Maize and Blue would cover the spread. Google's good, but it's not going to cover that 160 P/E point spread.

Well, fast forward to the 2009, if you will. Google now has a PE of 25, 24.81 as reported by MSN Money. Google blew past that $800M target in 2005 and made $4.2 billion in 2008. It may well have leveled out its growth, but has done so with a market cap of $104 billion. Google's wound up tripling in price since its IPO, even after the tanking market of the last half-year.

Google is the 20th biggest company on the US stock market as we go to press. GE, Coke and Toyota are 21,23 and 24, to show the company they're hanging with. Not bad for some computer geeks going to town with a search engine.

Little Techno Wows

There are a lot of modern technologies that make life better in small but significant ways. Here are a few that are sinking in this evening.

• Flash drives. A gig of data in your pocket for less than $25. Instead of holding a pouchfull of floppy disks or CDs, you have a small critter that fits on your key chain and slides into a USB port. Last term's PowerPoints? There. PowerPoints from my Warner Southern days? There. Black Scholes spreadsheet. There. Capital Budgeting spreadsheet. There. Resume (if I want to apply for something else, but I don't)? There. Gag formula PowerPoint for our retreat skit. There, and with a half-gig to spare.
• Skype. Eileen was video-phoning her sister this morning... in Zambia... for free. Cool.
• Cell Phones. Eileen's in the den calling one friend in Midland while I'm trash-talking another about the Midland High-Dow High game going on this evening, all with free long distance. Then, we call my sister to wish my niece a happy birthday... while they are on vacation in Orlando. Cool.
• YouTube and other video streams. Highlights, speeches, music, comedy, all free.
• Internet stock trading. I've never set foot in a brokerage, yet I have a portfolio going; I even got a proxy request for the shareholders meeting of one of my stocks yesterday via e-mail. It doesn't keep the market from tanking, but it even brings a perverse pleasure to see my new portfolio get decimated by this market.

All those things are things we take for granted, or close to for granted. However, they're all things that would seem sci-fi a decade ago.

What other things should we be counting our techno-blessings for?

A Wii Bit of a Logistical Problem

I was impressed with the Wii gaming system that my niece and nephew got for Christmas and went looking for one this weekend after Wiis showed up in a Circuit City flier in the Sunday newspaper. In CC's case, they had 33 units per store that get allocated first thing Sunday morning; the store opens at 10, but vouchers are handed out to the first 33 people in line as of 9AM. People then can come back when the store opens and use their voucher until noon.

Best Buy works much the same way, as I understand; you line up when the units go on sale, usually Sunday morning. Sundays are often when store sales periods starts, often meshing with when their fliers go out in the Sunday paper.

There's a problem with that distribution system; it tends to exclude folks who spend Sunday mornings at church. When we have a 9AM first service and a 10:30 Sunday school class, it's impossible for us to work in that setting without blowing off church, and if a gaming system is more important than church, you're priorities are a bit warped.

If you're in a multi-service church without Sunday School classes, you might be able to pull that off, snagging the machine at 10, then hustle over for your 10:30 or 11AM service. It;s even easier for the members of churches with Saturday evening services, leaving Sunday morning free.

The funny thing is, stores may well be doing that on purpose. Who's more likely to be an obsessive gamer, church goers who refuse to play hooky or the rest of the population? Probably the latter. Who's going to be more likely to buy more games for their new system once they purchase them? Probably the latter.

There seems to be a shortage of Wiis, of much longer standing that you usually see in a hot tech item; after a year or so, you'd think that Nintendo would have cranked up production. However, there is no shortage of accessories and games, which the stores will want to maximize sales of. If given the choice between selling to a casual fan who will buy a few games and a rabid fan who'll buy lots of games, your profit-maximizing point will be to find a way to get it in the rabid fan's hands.

Christian gamers can get to Midnight Madness things that launch a lot of new techie stuff, but Sunday morning releases are one way to screen them out, at least with the casual ones who aren't going to screw up their Sunday morning to get one.

PS--I Don't Get It

Sony's PlayStation 3 launched today; in the custom of the day, they had midnight launches for the coveted critters.

Sony is sure to rake in millions of dollars in revenue on Friday alone, with some 400,000 units expected to be available one week after an initial launch in Japan. Depending on the size of its hard drive, each PlayStation will sell for $500 or $600.

But Sony is expected to lose money initially on each sale of the PS3, which in addition to playing games, can surf the Web, download video and music and play movies with its Blu-ray high-definition disc drive. The Blu-ray player and other components have run up production costs, dragging Sony's game unit into a deep loss for the year to March.

I'm not a gamer, so I'm a bit lost as to why these game boxes are flying off the shelves for $500, when you can get a whole brand-new computer system for less. It might be the hi-def Blu-ray stuff that will make pictures a notch crisper than before. There's even a scalper market developing.

Even John Edwards, the former senator and VP nominee, caught the PS3 bug and was after one for his kids; one of his staffers did a major faux pas in heading to Wally World for the ex-senator while he was in the middle of a Wal-Mart bashing campaign.

It's interesting that Sony claims to be losing money on the systems. They might make their money on the games; once they've locked into the PS3 system, they need to buy PS3 games.

Honest, I Was Looking at Stars, Honey

NASA's going to fix the Hubble telescope. There was a question as to whether they'd use a shuttle mission to fix the Hubble given the problems they've been having with the shuttle, but they've decide to go ahead.

The servicing mission should extend Hubble's orbital lifetime to at least 2013, by which time Nasa will be getting close to launching a successor: the James Webb Telescope.

The next question from the right side of the Peanut Gallery is "What kind of chipmunk-unfriendly things will the James Webb Telescope be looking at?" No, no, not that James Webb. This James Webb, who was NASA administrator during the 60s and left this mortal coil in 1992, not the NC-17 rated author and Senate candidate.

Krystal Red Persuasion

Here's an odd place to be blogging from; a Krystal restaurant off of I-75 between Knoxville and Chattanooga at 11PM. I'm making one last stab at Florida teaching (more as things develop), and stopped to fire off a resume to a prospective school in Lakeland (who I talked to at an Ohio rest area this afternoon) while downing some of their White Castle-wannabe gut grenades for a belated dinner.

That's an odd mix; a decidedly down-scale burger joint offering WiFi. You can see Panera, catering to an intelligentsia crowd, offering it, but this is weird. WiFi has either jumped the shark or entered into the mainstream.

[Update 10/5/06 Krystal's about as old as White Castle, so the wannabe crack might not have been called for. As Kevin noted, it's likely that WiFi has gone mainstream; the old-school sports bar near our apartment has it now as well.

Since I've made this post, I've been good for a couple of "Krystal Red" Google hits a day. There's something called that in Europe, since most of the people looking are European,  but I can't quite figure out what. Could some of the folks Googling in enlighten me? Try to keep it clean, for I fear it might not be all that edifying.]

A Short History of Overclocking

This post on "overclocking" one of those dreaded low-flush-capacity toilets (nod to Ogre) got a knowing chuckle from me.

Back in late 90s, I owned a computer store, and one less-than-kosher trick of the trade was to overclock a CPU. Some chips could run faster than there posted speeds, and many an geek would try to see how fast they could get a chip to safely run. For many years, I had a machine that had a Celeron 266MhZ overclocked to 400MhZ. It's not illegal in and of itself (selling a 200 overclocked to 300 as a 300 would be), but it throws the CPU warranty out the window.

Back in my computer days, the hardcore computer innards geek's site was Tom's Hardware Guide; they taught the fine art of changing the jumpers on the motherboard, hot-wiring CPUs designed to avoid overclocking (it became a cat-and-mouse game between Intel and the geeks), and adding heat sinks and cooling fans.

I haven't been back to Tom's in a while. Among a number of interesting things, here's a pictorial history of the CPU.

Eat Your Heart Out

This is how to blog. I'm in Munn Park in downtown Lakeland, where it's 77 degrees and a light breeze. The park's lit up with a holiday light display and I'm WiFi blogging via SurfLakeland. For those of you having to fight off the latest snowstorm, my heart goes out to you.