ARTS & FARCES internet

Michael Moore’s got a new book, Stupid White Men, coming out in a few days, and he details a little bit about his ordeal getting it published after the 11 September tragedy.

Moore’s publisher, HarperCollins had scheduled the book for publication on 2 October, 2001. After the 11 September tragedy, however, the decision was made to postpone publication of all HarperCollins titles, even though 50,000 copies of Stupid White Men had already been printed (half of a first printing of 100,000).

By early October, Moore was in the throes of every writer’s worst nightmare: HarperCollins informed him there were “problems” with his work. HarperCollins demanded re-writes of large sections critical of President Bush and a US$100,000 reimbursement from Moore.

After a series of meetings and coverage of the dispute in both Publishers Weekly and Salon.com, HarperCollins regained its sense of responsibility and is releasing Stupid White Men, in Moore’s original form, on 19 February 2002.

While HarperCollins is to be congratulated for eventually doing the right thing, Moore reports that the title is meeting resistance from bookstores not wanting to support his upcoming book tour. I’m pleased that the independent bookstore two blocks down my street is sponsoring Moore’s appearance in the Twin Cities. Do what you can to get your local independent bookseller to support Moore’s appearance in your town.

As I’ve written in the past, we have a “death penalty” for corporations; it&‘s called revoking the corporate charter. It’s almost never used, but here in Minnesota it looks like the state Commerce Commissioner is accomplishing the same end with less fuss.

Minnesota Commerce Commissioner Jim Bernstein has announced his intent to fine a Florida-based insurance company US$10 million and bar the company from doing business in the state because of repeated and willful violations of the state’s insurance law.

Bernstein claims that units of the American Bankers Insurance Co., which appears to be part of the Assurant Group—which itself seems to be part of the Fortis Group—sold more than 200,000 illegal insurance policies in Minnesota, failed to provide information to the state Commerce Department, and violated a 1998 consent order. The insurance company paid a record civil penalty of US$688,776 in the 1998 consent order.

Barring the insurance company from doing business in Minnesota will apparently be a costly proposition for the state: Minnesota has fined the company four times since 1993, to the tune of US$957,700.

Microsoft reportedly designed its Messenger software so that it could identify Internet Explorer users on its web sites. Of course, this identification takes place surreptitiously, without the user’s knowledge or consent. Predictably, the future can be potentially abused by anyone with access to a web server.

According to Richard Burton in a post to the BugTraq mailing list, the Messenger feature allows anyone to obtain a user’s Messenger username and the usernames of all the individuals in his contact list. And if the usernames aren’t available, Messenger conveniently displays the email addresses of the user and his contacts instead. Burton has published a demonstration of the privacy breach.

All that’s needed to display the usernames and email addresses is for an invasive piece of software—such as one of the many spyware variants—to make a registry entry on the victim’s computer. Specifically, adding the simple entries of “.com” “.net” and “.org” to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftMessengerServicePoliciesSuffixes would allow virtually any web server on the net to identify you and your contacts by your Messenger usernames and email addresses.

And just what does Microsoft do with this information? It’s hardly a stretch to assume that Microsoft shares this user identification information with the advertisers that appear in the lower panel of Messenger.

The preliminary solution appears to be to use a browser other than Internet Explorer.

Doc Searls is one of the most prolific webloggers on the planet. He’s also one of the best, with interesting things to say several times a day. His writing’s addictive, mostly because it’s so “uncomposed.” By that I mean that he doesn’t edit himself very much at all, so we get a pretty good representation of what’s going on in his head, before it gets filtered by his writer self. That probably doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you write a whole lot, either for a living or for love.

Today, Doc’s got a great piece on social software, wherein he tries to answer the question posed in this piece’s title. Doc thinks that most of the best webloggers write because they work alone, as “cave workers,” and need to talk to somebody. Anybody.

While Doc was writing white papers for Motorola about groupware, I was writing books about it. Turns out my assumptions about workgroup computing, like Doc’s, were partially wrong. Doc says that he remembers being told by Reese Jones, founder of Farallon, that all human communication is one-to-one. I agree that’s probably true, but only for us, the last unwired generation. The Internet has clearly demonstrated that network topologies and protocols are clearly useful for much more than a long printer cable, as early AppleTalk users just as clearly remember. In a word, it’s collaboration. But I suspect that Jones is as right now as he was then: it happens best when it happens one-to-one. Garcia and Hunter, Lennon and McCartney, Watson and Crick, Jobs and Wozniak, the list could go on forever. What these great collaborators did was basically provide a mirror function for each other. And maybe, just maybe, that’s why we blog.

Since our brains protect us by only letting us hear one conversation at a time, and retain only meaning, not specifics, Doc thinks that social software—like Google and weblogs—helps us deal with our short term memory limitations. I think that’s probably true for us old farts, but again I think it’s a generational phenomenon. I’m pretty sure those under 30 are fully capable of having more than one simultaneous conversation. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it. Maybe it’s evolution. And now that it’s more hip to be wireless than wired, I guess we need to come up with a new label.

Michael Moore has written a scathing open letter to President Bush.

As it happens, the net is proving very useful for finding where the bodies are buried, and Moore’s piece has excellent supporting links connecting the Enron debacle to the Bush administration.

Highly recommended.