The Archives

Internet, Security, Technology
Look, Ma! I’m on Security Now!
July 14th, 2008 (1 month, 2 weeks ago) by Jeff | Permalink | 2 Core Dumps

I hope to post more on this when there’s more data to post, but I thought I’d throw up a quick note stating that the latest episode of the Security Now! “netcast” features a question posed by yours truly. (The best part was listening to Leo Laporte stumble over my long-winded rambling. ) The high-quality version of the show can be found at the previous link; a low-bandwidth version as well as a text-only transcript can be found at the corresponding page at GRC.com. A search in the transcript for “Darlington” will take you to the beginning of my question; in the netcast, it starts around 38 minutes, 22 seconds in. (Of course, I encourage everyone to read/listen to the entire thing.)

For the full effect, though, you’ll also need to listen to/read the previous two non-Q&A episodes of the show, #149 and #151. (Low-bandwidth and trascriptions can be found here and here.) The entire dialog concerns the recent trend of ISPs selling out their customers to allow third-party advertisers to come in and install hardware at the ISP to facilitate tracking the ISPs’ customers’ surfing habits across sites. While the ad companies in question claim to not be recording personally identifyable information about the ISPs’ customers, the capability is there and the possibilities for abuse are enormous. It brings back many shades of the DoubleClick controversies of the late 1990s-early 2000s, only much more ominous. I provided a unqiue standpoint to the discussion: that of a Web developer hosting a site and encountering similiar mysterious “first party” cookies set for my domain but not set by me.

The full body my question is present, but I’m not completely satisfied with the answer. Let’s just say I think Steve Gibson made an assumption about the GPF site that’s not 100% true. I’ve replied to his response with additional information. I don’t necessarily expect another response (he does, after all, have his own agenda to follow on his show), and even if he does it will likely be in episode #154, the next scheduled Q&A episode. If anyone is interested, I’ll post updates if and when this occurs. If I don’t get a response, I’ll post my response here, especially since it contains some disturbing observations about “first party” cookies that have mildly paranoid folks like me nervous. (I’d hate to see what it does to really paranoid people.)
Personal, Technology
Jesus Geek guest hosting
March 20th, 2008 (5 months, 1 week ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

Just a head’s up to say I’ll be guest hosting Friday’s installment of the Jesus Geek podcast. I apologize in advance for any static or artifacts in the audio; chalk that up to my podcasting inexperience and not as an overall indicator of the quality of Jesus Geek as a whole. I’ll post a direct link to the download page as soon as I see that it goes live.

Update March 21: Aaaand… here it is.
GPF, Internet, Technology, Webcomics
But we were there first. OK, maybe second.
February 25th, 2008 (6 months ago) by Jeff | Permalink | Dump Core

Anyone interested in the history of webcomics should check out this week’s episode of the This Week in Tech (TWiT) podcast. Especially since it has nothing to do with webcomics.

Here’s my line of reasoning: In this episode, Leo Laporte and his unusual round of suspects are joined by Jonathan Coulton, geek musician extraordinaire. Aside from discussing a few topics of current note (like the death of HD DVD), they discuss a recent concert by Coulton where Leo and company joined him to play Rock Band before a nerd-filled audience. They go on to talk about the “new” Internet phenomena of niche entertainment targeting–skipping the big, mass-market blitzkrieg typically used by music, TV, and movie studios and canvasing thousands or millions of potential customers, to instead go directly to your core fans, the few dedicated people who are the ones that will really appreciate what you do. Coulton talks of making a living catering to a small handful of hard-core fans and how this is much more fulfilling that the big media alternative, where both the artist and the audience are faceless statistics on the bottom line of a balance sheet. And they discuss this with such freshness and enthusiasm, as if this is were the next new thing, some epiphany that no one has yet uncovered.

What I find so funny about it is… those of us in webcomics have already been doing this… for years.

I’ve noticed this a lot over the past near-decade of GPF’s existence. Blogs, podcasts, and other forms of grass-roots media have all cropped up during that time, putting publishing power in the hands of the masses, becoming “innovative” and “groundbreaking” in bringing content production to the people. But a fair number of “new” trends (and problems) associated with these technologies are things I remember seeing crop up among webcartoonists several years before. Long before the term “blog” was coined, I remember chatting with other cartoonists on mailing lists and news groups, swapping ideas about search engine optimization (before that term was coined as well), getting and retaining readers, how to monetize your site, etc. It’s entertaining now to watch many tech headlines to see “fresh” ideas crop up that I’ve personally tried–and abandoned–a couple years before. It’s like the wheel reinventing itself every couple of years, only with different colors and/or materials.

Of course, I would never be so conceited to believe webcomics “did it first.” Webcomics themselves borrow heavily from the underground comics movement of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, where small independent publishers ducked under government sensors to push out innovated and controversial content directly to the people who wanted them. What changed between then and now is that the interconnectivity of the Internet moved this from basements and back rooms to hidden mailing lists and chat rooms, eventually making its way to the mainstream, all while expanding the sphere of availability from isolated pockets of common interest to global reach. It would also be naive to believe this flow of “innovation” is one-way; RSS and other syndication technologies took off first in the blogosphere, and was only later ret-conned and shoe-horned into webcomic automation systems as a handy update notification system.

Perhaps one of the reasons bloggers and podcasters didn’t learn any lessons from webcartoonists is the difference between skill level–real or perceived, take your pick–required for entry. Cartooning obviously requires some level of artistic talent as cartooning, in all of its myriad of forms, is a form of art. It’s often a commercial art, intended more to generate revenue than anything else, but an art nonetheless, conveying ideas and emotions graphically. And while a well-crafted blog certainly requires a talent for writing, that is often easier to come by than the ability to both write and draw. Thus the critical mass of webcartoonists is much smaller than that of bloggers and podcasters, making it less noticeable to the mainstream. That’s also why “break-out” blogs now seem to be a dime a dozen, but it’s still major news when an online comic gets noticed by big media and gets optioned for TV/movie deals. Everyone knows about blogs and maybe even reads a few, but there are other comics on the “intraweb” besides Dilbert?

I’m not sure if there’s anything useful to these observations, other than the fact that they amuse me occasionally and it gives me something to post about. I’m not sure if anyone else has made these kinds of observations or, for that matter, anybody else cares. But I’ve often wondered if those underground cartoonists of yesteryear thought to same way about us webcartoonists as I have about bloggers. I’d like to think so, just because it creates a nice symmetry. I can’t wait for bloggers to sit around in the old bloggers’ home, thinking such thoughts about whatever comes next. “Those kids with their holocasts… if they had learned the lessons we did about AI search, they’d be raking the quatloos by now….”