Author Archives: Joe

Facebook and the panic button….

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Since the recent case in which a teenage girl was groomed and murdered by a paedophile via the Facebook site, there has been a lot of pressure from the UK Government for Facebook to put a ‘Panic Button’ style link on the site – a move supported by the CEOP organisation.  Facebook have commented that they have no objection in principle to making it easier to report abuse on the site, but that they feel that the CEOP supported option is not necessarily the best way.

Facebook are far from perfect in the way that they treat their users; I think all of us who use the site would have our own grumbles about privacy and the attitude of Facebook as a whole towards individual users now that they’ve got big.  But to be honest I think I would rather central Government stayed out of issues like this – especially New Labour, who seem to have spent the last decade dismantling our civil liberties bit by bit.  For a previous broader comment on this issue, I direct you to this item from a year ago, in which author Phillip Pullman commented on the behaviour of New Labour.

Since then we’ve had the Digital Economy Bill – even without the Lib Dem Peers’ Amendments it was a pretty poor piece of legislation.  With the amendments it offers a wonderful means of stifling debate by simply shutting down access to any site that breaches copyright.  Under the Bill, as it stands, and if it were strictly applied, YouTube could be blocked to UK ISPs because of material that breaches copyright. 

Part of the problem with New Labour is their amazing ability to put together piss-poor legislation on a ‘knee jerk’ basis.  A lone gun nut leads to a total handgun ban – which doesn’t affect criminals as they tend to disobey the law anyway.   Despite massive increases in the legislation aimed at child protection, the very basic laws that were there all along fail to be implemented and children keep getting killed.  And there are many more examples.  One interpretation of this repeated series of cock-ups is that they’re just incompetent; my own interpretation is that New Labour are just incredibly keen on reducing our civil liberties as much as they can to have a nicely compliant and obedient citizenry.

The issue for me here is not just the Facebook reporting mechanism; I’m afraid I regard that as something of a ‘thin end of the wedge’, by which Government could influence and impact the policies of web sites not even based in Britain.  It’s not far from that sort of thing to the  censorship policies adopted by China and, more recently, but to a lesser degree, Australia.  Protesting about this sort of Government activity, which initially starts with child protection, is a little bit like trying to answer the question ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ in a way that doesn’t make you guilty.  But given this Governments record on civil liberties I’m afraid I do not and cannot trust them. 

As  Rousseau said “Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost. ”

And we’re losing it bit by bit.

Caprica 90210

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I am an enormous fan of the re-visioning of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ – good story and plot, good characters, nice combination of high tech and retro gadgets (loved the old style telephone handset that was used in the command centre).  Combine that with excellent soundtrack – just the best TV science fiction in recent years.  When I heard that a ‘prequel’ of BSG was in the works, I was a little bit concerned, but hopeful – same folks involved, should be worth watching.  And so I watched the pilot of Caprica with interest….

The following will help understand this post if you’ve not watched Caprica.  Daniel Graystons, father of Zoe, has a company involve din military robotics and AI.  They’ve made something called a Cylon, which needs an electronic brain called an MCP to work.  Joseph Adama, a top lawyer, has a daughter, Tamara, who was killed in a terrorist attack along with Zoe.  Both girls had ‘avatars’ in a VR game, and these avatars have retained form after their death.  Zoe ends up in the electronic brain of the prototype Cylon.  Tamara ends up left in the VR systems.

With me so far?  Where the frack did it all go wrong?

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all doom and gloom in Caprica, (list of episodes and plot here) and at one level that makes it worse – every now and again stuff starts happening and you’re at the stage of ‘Oh yeah, here we go, they’re gonna start turning out Cylons in a production facility, and Zoe – that teenage lass who’s consciousness is in the prototype – will….er…..do something…but hey, we’re looking at some serious tin men whupping Colonial Marine action!’  But then we cut back to a frackin’ boarding school or a VR representation of Dawson’s Creek.

And that’s the problem.  There is simply too much attention being paid to teenagers in this whole saga.  And that’s the flaw.  Last night we had Zoe going on a virtual reality date with the teenager who is helping her father work out why the ‘brain’ of the one working prototype works and others don’t.  The two teenagers end up with a suggestion that may point to the problem.  Back in the lab, old man Graystone is told this by his teenage assistant and it’s as if he’d never thought of it.  Hello?  This guy is the Stephen Hawking of robotics and AI.  His company make the holographic interfaces that people use to go in to immersive virtual realities in Caprica.  He’s not Homer J Simpson, for crying out loud!

Elsewhere, the head of the other family involved in the saga, Joseph Adama, is swanning around in a VR ‘game’ called ‘New Cap City’ trying to find the avatar of Tamara.  It works well, some shoot ’em up and folks with the same tailor as Neo and Trinity from ‘The Matrix’ – I’m hopeful that this will go places.  The religious / spiritual angle – monotheism emerging in a polytheistic culture – is really interesting as well.

But then we get the bloody teenagers again and I weep in to my tea.

Come on guys – I can see that you want to reach the teen demographic, but don’t forget the rest of us.

Shock Doctrine comes to Haiti?

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A couple of years ago Naomi Klein wrote a fascinating – and scary – book called ‘Shock Doctrine’  in which she presented the thesis that what we now call ‘free market capitalism’ – that form of capitalism that started with the activities of the Chicago School of Economists in the late 60s and 70s – came to it’s successful position in our world by a combination of military and political interventions that were almost acts of war.  She posited that various regimes – starting with the Pinochet regime in Chile in the 1970s – used the dislocations in society caused by coups, war and even natural disasters to bring in to being a form of free market economy that exploits the vast majority of people and gives certain companies and individuals vast wealth on the back of Government policies.

Recent examples have included the way in which beaches areas were sold off for tourist hotels after the Asian Tsunami wiped out fishing villages, the way in which New Orleans was totally socially re-engineered after Hurricane Katrina and the way in which companies like Blackwater and Haliburton have made vast profits form the war-created crises in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, we shouldn’t be surprised, despite the removal of President Bush,  to see companies moving in to Haiti to exploit and socially engineer the country after the recent earthquake.   It’s a good situation for the purveyors of ‘disaster capitalism’- a sort of peacetime ‘shock and awe’ – which can make use of natural disasters that dislocate normal society.  The Haiti earthquake’s magnitude, combined with the nature of the country, gave a fertile ground for these people to operate in.  Let’s just take a look at the situation there.

  • People are still without proper shelter; nothing like forcing people to live in squalor to break their will.
  •  Just a 100 miles north of the devastated capital city, cruise ships are docking at privately run resorts.
  • The Heritage Foundation – an advocate group for disaster capitalism – pulled the following quote shortly after the ‘quake: “In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region.”  Even their existing material tries to play up the ‘communist threat’ angle – pretty pathetic.
  • The first loan given to Haiti by the IMF after the quake allegedly came with various strings attached – increasing prices of power, etc. – that is typical of the approach that the IMF have previously taken when they wanted to bring about neoliberal political change in a country as a condition for getting financial help.

In other words, despite the attention being paid to Haiti at the moment, and the demise of the Bush Government, there is still potential for disaster capitalism to be used to radically restructure Haiti in all the wrong ways.  And it’s worth remembering that some of the larger companies who typically profiteer from these situations will only start showing up when rebuilding starts – i.e. when there’s money to be made.

Hopefully if they realise the rest of the world is keeping an eye on things they’ll be put off – a bit like lobbing rocks at a dog grubbing around your dustbin.  If you want to find out more, take a look at the following:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=292737727221

http://twitter.com/nohaitishock

Say ‘No’ to Disaster Capitalism – you never know where it might show up next.  Time to stop the bastards in their tracks.

If this is being a Man, I bagsy being a Penguin…

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I have a thing for penguins.  I have no idea why, but they appeal to me.  It all started 20 odd years ago when I saw the ‘Bloom County’ cartoon strip that featured Opus the penguin (he who features wherever I need an avatar online).  Quite why penguins appeal to me I have no idea.  I think part of the reason is that it’s really difficult to be a pompous twit if your online persona  is a fat, big-nosed, a non-flying sea bird.

I found myself thinking about Opus this morning when I read this article from the Mail on Sunday about yet another one of these courses designed to put men (lower case ‘m’) in touch with their masculinity and become Men (upper case ‘M’).  the chap who wrote the article ended up adopting the name ‘Relaxed Penguin’ as his ‘Warrior Name’ on the course.  This, along with the tone of the article and the photographs illustrating the piece indicated to me that perhaps his take on the topic of the article wasn’t as serious as it might have been; which is a shame, as taking the piss out of tehse weekends is pretty easy,  which can make it easy to miss the more important problem with this sort of  short cut to being a man confident in his masculinity – however he chooses to define it – in the 21st century.

I’ve read some books from the so called ‘Men’s Movement’ over the years; I have to say that I’ve not been terribly impressed with most of them, or the philosophies espoused.  The most famous book that gave rise to a lot of what is known as ‘Menswork’ and particular the sort of experience that Mitchelson goes through in the article above was ‘Iron John’ by Robert Bly.  In it Bly examines a Grimm’s fairy tale from a ‘masculine’ perspective.  It did bugger all for me, but seemed to give rise to the stereotypical view of men discovering themselves by sitting around forest clearings, half naked, playing drums – the so-called ‘mythopoetic’ approach. 

Part of my problem with this approach – both back 20 years ago and today – is that, like the more ‘out there’ aspects of ‘wimmin’s work’ , I believe that it is irrelevant to most men.  Self awareness, a spriritual underpinning, a moral and ethical compass, a sense of fair-play, and a sense of purpose are what I regard as essential for anyone – man or woman – in the world today. Whilst it’s obvious that there are differences between men and women – which is just as well! – there is very little difference between the genders when it comes down to behaving like a civilised human being. 

There are obvious psychological, social and cultural differences between men and women, and whilst it’s true in our society that we lack the rites of passage in to manhood that many cultures have, that doesn’t mean that by creating them artificially on courses like this we somehow make men into Men just by their participation. My own attitude is to simply be a decent human being, take your responsibilities and duties seriously and be there for familyand friends.  Respect yourself, those around you, and the world in which we live.

 These sorts of things seem to be sadly missing form these sessions in the woods, and I’m afraid I don’t believe that you can be a real Man without them.

Dumb beyond reason – Children’s Commissioner suggests raising English Age of Criminality

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Regular readers of this blog will realise that there are certain hobby horses that I have.  One is that I ask for little from Government except that they do what only Governments CAN and SHOULD do, and otherwise stay out of my face.  The other is that I genuinely believe that there are people who can be described as evil, and that Moral Relativism is a seriously dangerous philosophy.  I explored that territory in this post – I commented at the time how surprised I was when I found a number of people on another online site berating me for calling the boys involved ‘evil’.

Well, I guess I’d better get ready for some more berating, because this suggestion from Maggie Atkinson, Children’s Commissioner for England, is a typically daft liberal riposte to a problem caused by the worst form of liberalism.  The suggestion is to raise the age of crimninality from 10 to 12, because most 10 year old criminals don’t know what they’re doing.  Bollocks.

OK…deep breath….

Ms Atkinson.  There is one question to answer here.  The vast majority of 10 year old kids do not take a toddler from a shopping mall, lie to people who stopped them about their relationship with the toddler, and then  torture the toddler to death on a railway line.  Which to me indicates one of the following:

  1. The desire to do so is very, very rare and when it does occur in someone needs to be regarded as abnormal.
  2. The desire to do so maybe more common but most children of 10 are aware of right and wrong and know it would be wrong.
  3. That even if someone did want to do it they’d be scared by the consequences.
  4. That the desire to do so is rare, AND most children of 10 are aware of right and wrong and know it would be wrong.

Now, I’d argue – being a fairly average man in the street – that (4) is the reason why this sort of crime is rare.  Most kids wouldn’t even think about it.  Videos and media imagery may bring such thoughts to the heads of a few more children, but then (2) and (3) usually kick in.  And if someone gets as far as (1) then we’re looking at someone who is either mad or bad, but is undeniably dangerous.

The Bulger killers were given a lot of help in trying to rehabilitate, but in at least one of the killers, the efforts at rehabilitation seem to have failed and he’s back inside after release on licence. 

Now.  The two boys were approached when they had James with them, and lied about their relationship with him and where they were going.  They also attempted to cover up their actions.  Now, call me simple minded if you will – and I promise I won’t mind at all – but to me lying and cover up means that at least one of them WAS aware that what they had done was wrong.  And even if only one was aware, the other went along with it, rather than admitting the situation to his parents.  So he was ashamed of what he’d done – again, that frequently indicates that we know that what we’ve done is wrong.

My point is that these kids, in my opinion, knew wholeheartedly that they’d done wrong – just like the Edlington kids.  Whilst I accept that media influences and bad parenting may have contributed to both cases, the bottom line is that in both cases I believe that it is inconceivable that they didn’t know that what they were doing was wrong.

So…there is an element of bad there…possibly some mad…but definitely dangerous.  As for rehabilitation and releasing them, even on licence, I refer you again to the story of the Scorpion and the Frog which I first related here:

There’s a fable that’s been repeated in many places, about a Scorpion who wants to cross a river.  He ponders this problem for a while when he sees a frog hopping along.  He asks the frog whether it would be possible to ride on his back whilst the frog swims the river. The frog points out that the scorpion is likely to sting him on the journey and kill him.  The scorpion replies that were he to do that, then he too would drown, as well as the frog.  The frog goes along with this, and the pair start the river crossing.  Half way across the scorpion stings the frog, and as they both drown the frog asks ‘Why?’  The scorpion sadly remarks ‘It’s in my nature.’  

It’s in my nature.  Whether mad or bad, boys such as this are evil and dangerous.  Their nature would, to me, preclude them from release; not for any desire for punishment, but because they cannot be trusted not to do something similar again.  But that’s another story, and I await the bleeding hearts telling me why I am so wrong.

Blogger or marketer – your choice.

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I encountered this article in my Twitter feed today, and to be honest it bought a lump to my throat.  No, not that good sort of lump – the sort that makes you want to run for the bathroom.

Let me start by saying that I don’t get paid for blogging, and won’t be carrying adverts on the blog.  It’s so cheap to run – in the course of a year I spend less money on this baby than I spent the other night buying a round of beers in the pub.  And the time – well, I do it for the love of it.  I don’t expect to get paid for the time that I spend doing my other hobbies, so why this one?  If folks run a blog as part of a business, then so be it – that’s good practice these days.  Or even if the blog IS the business – excellent if you can do it.  All I’m saying is know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

A quote from the article:

“The blogosphere is where authentic conversation is happening,” said Pamela Parker, a senior manager with Federated Media, which sells ad space for an A-list roster of about 150 bloggers that includes superstars like Dooce and the Pioneer Woman, who’ve parlayed their blogs into lucrative one-woman industries.”

I think this and:

“Last summer, one blogger organized a weeklong public relations blackout in which bloggers were urged to eschew contests, product reviews and giveaways and instead get “back to basics” by writing about their lives. Another blogger replied that she couldn’t do so because the blackout fell the week of her daughter’s first birthday party, which she was promoting on her blog. With sponsors and giveaways.”

were the bits that made me reach for my sick-bag.  ‘Authentic conversations’ where a mother gets her baby’s first birthday party sponsored, for crying out loud?  Did the kids get thrown out if they weren’t drinking the right brand of fruit juice?  Come on, people!

As soon any form of advertorial, promotion or marketing gumf comes in to view, the concept of an authentic conversation goes out the window.  I’d respect people more if they just said ‘We’re here to sell.  We’d like you to write editorial items that can push our goods.  Oh, and we’ll pay you in some way’.  Or, ‘I write articles for my website that are actually promotions for goods and services’.  But this sort of double-speak?  Authentic conversations my arse.

I subscribe to a number of freelance sites where people looking for freelancers post their needs.  A common requirement is to write ‘copy’ for what are described as ‘blogs’.  A typical description is as follows:

“You must be able to obtain an adequate amount of knowledge for a specific topic, as well as generate the information necessary for that topic within the relevant market. Then write captivating and very original content about the topic (i.e. a new weight loss product.)”

If I ever get up one morning and decide that my great desire in life is to write captivating content about drugs that stop your guts absorbing fats, then I hope one of my friends will do the decent thing and take me behind the barn and shoot me.  It’s not blogging; it’s writing advertising copy. 

It’s the nature and job of advertising agencies and marketing companies to subvert to their own use any form of media; that’s what they do.  There’s nothing new in it.  We just need to look back at how the youth brands of the 90s tried to engage young people through ‘street culture’ – again claiming authenticity.  (Take a look at Naomi Klein’s No Logo) 

Blogs offer an opportunity to be truly personal and original and engage people in conversations about your life – or just tell folks about what you like, dislike, whatever – like this place.  Mass media isn’t too happy with that and will, if it’s any good, try to subvert the blogosphere like they have subverted every other form of wide reach media on the planet.

Don’t let ’em.  Run an advertising business or run a blog; know what you’re doing.  I personally hope you’ll choose to run a blog and keep that subversion out for just a little longer.

I want to use Ubuntu on a laptop…but….

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Many, many moons ago, and I mean in the last century, I had a version of Linux running on one of my PCs, and lo, it was good.  If you liked command lines and stuff like that, as the PC concerned wasn’t really up to running X-Windows and such.  But hey, not a problem; I was only wanting to run it as a development web server and after a little faffing around I had it neatly wired to my router and that was that.

Somewhere in the early 21st Century – OK, 2004 – we bit the bullet and went Wifi here at The Towers.  Once we had the Windows machines running on that network, I started toying with WiFi for the Linux boxes but couldn’t find a distro that did it ‘out of the box’.  As an experiment I did try and get whatever version of Ubuntu was kicking around in about 2006 working with a USB WiFi Dongle, but once I got on to the part of the instructions that involved downloading all sorts of arcane bits of software from around the Internet, then compiling wrappers, installing Windows drivers on Linux machines and all sorts of other tomfoolery I decided to quit.  Oh, and after I’d spent a couple of evenings at it with no results.  

The general impression I got from people ‘in the know’ was that:

  1. It is easy if you follow the instructions.
  2. Linux is OK – it’s my WiFi dongle that was wrong.
  3. Future versions of Ubuntu will deal with these dongles.

Well, so be it.  But at the time I didn’t find (1) easy, (2) seemed a bit dumb when the dongle worked happily on 3 versions of Windows and (3) – well, I can be patient.

In 2008 my then laptop had a couple of accidents involving a cup of tea and a crashed hard disc, and it was replaced with a nice new machine, and today I decided that the old laptop should be dug out and Linuxed – and because I’ve had previous experience with Ubuntu, I decided to grab a CD Image of Ubuntu and re-partition and re-format the hard disc of the laptop with Ubuntu 9.10.  The installation went fine – I soon had a laptop running Ubuntu, and was pleased to see that it automatically detected my USB WiFi dongle AND also spotted a couple of local WiFi networks….shame neither of them were mine.

I attempted to attach to my home network directly by specifying the name; I selected the correct security protocol and entered the key; nothing.  Nada.  Not a peep.  Just kept asking me for my security key settings again.  In other words, it wasn’t connecting to my home network.  Which is a shame, because we have XP machines, Vista machines, Windows NT, Windows ME, a Blackberry and a Wii that all happily connect to the WiFi network at Pritchard Towers. 

I guess I’ll take another look at it soon; using a wired connection isn’t really on due to where the router is in the house, so WiFi is necessary.  Fortunately I’m not reliant on this machine as my main PC around the house, but it’s a sad repetition of the last time I decided to install a Linux on one of my machines to use as a ‘Client’ Operating System rather than as a server.  It doesn’t bloody work!  I appreciate that the Linux Fanbois will tell me all sorts of things I can do to make it work, but to be honest that misses the point.  Take a look at teh graph below (from Wikipedia)

Linux provides a little over 1% of the total number of Client Web Browsers detected by web sites.  The fun and games I’m having probably explains why.  For all the hype and fuss about Linux finally coming of age as a desktop replacement for Windows, it is just not going to happen as long as you can’t get the damn thing to connect to a bog standard WiFi network out of the box.

Come on fellows, I want to play; meet me half way.

It’s for our own good….

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And I’m sure that Twitter will not be doing anything else – at least not yet – with their code when they’re making the Twittersphere safe for us all to Tweet in by screening links.  The logic of the Twitter people is sound; by vetting links they can reduce or totally remove the number of phishing and malware links that are made available to Twitter users.  They’re effectively developing a Twitter ‘Killbot’. One thing that has become clearer over recent years with the explosion of Social Network sites like Twitter and Facebook is that no matter what you say to people, and how often you say it, folks will still click links from total strangers and get themselves in to trouble.  Despite warnings, they’ll hand over user names and passwords because they’re asked for them.  And even savvy Net users are occasionally caught out by well crafted ‘targetted’ phishing scams.

 So checking and validating links – including those in DMs – is at first glance a good idea.  It only takes a few people replying to spam or filling in details on phishing sites to keep the problem going, and as education seems to be woefully inadequate at changing people’s behaviour on these issues; let’s face it, after nearly 20 years of widespread Internet use by the general public, the message about not replying to spam and not buying from spammers  has still not penetrated a good many thick skulls.

However – and it’s a big however – the technology that stops dodgy links can also be used to stop any Tweets, simply by tweaking the code.  There is a line that is crossed when you start using automated filtration techniques on any online platform.  It’s obvious that on fast growing, fast moving systems like Twitter it’s going to be impossible to have human beings realistically monitoring traffic for malware of any sort, and it’s inevitable that some form of automated techniques will be in use.  But once that line’s crossed, it’s important that we don’t forget that the technology that stops these links can also be used to stop anything else that ‘the Creators’ don’t wish to be on the system.

A wee while ago I wrote this item, in which I suggested that so much of the responsibility for ongoing phishing attacks on Twitter falls on folks who’re clicking those links; whilst spammers and phishers get bites, they carry on trying.  So, if you ARE still falling for these phishing scams – get wise and learn how to spot them!

One final observation – the code that can spot a malware link can also spot keywords.  And when you can spot keywords you can start targeting adverts.  And combined with Twitters newly activated Geolocation service, we might soon see how Twitter expects to make money from location and content targeted advertising.

Your email address CAN be harvested from Facebook…a heads up!

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Or…yet another reason to watch who you befriend….

Facebook attempts to be what’s known in the online world as a ‘Closed Garden’ – interactions with the rest of the Internet are restricted somewhat to make the user experience better…or to keep you in the loving arms of Facebook, depending on how cynical you are.  One of the tools in this process is the Facebook API – a set of programming tools that Facebook produce to make it possible for programmers to write software that works within the Facebook framework.  Indeed, Facebook get very peeved if you try automating any aspect of the site’s behaviour without using the API.

One thing that the API enforces is the privacy controls; and one thing that you cannot get through the API is an email address.  Which is cool – it prevents less scrupulous people who’ve written games and such from harvesting email addresses from their users to use for other purposes.  It also ensures that all mass communications are done through Facebook.

Of course, if you’re determined enough you could go to every Friend’s profile page and copy the email address from there…or there are scripts that people have written to do the task by simply automating a browser.  The former is tedious, the latter is likely to get you thrown off of Facebook.

However, a method documented hereshows how this can be done through the auspices of a Yahoo mail account.   It is apparently a legitimate application available within Yahoo Mail for the benefit of subscribers.  How long Facebook will allow this loophole to be exploited is anyone’s idea, but given that I have a number of Facebook friends I felt it worthwhile warning folks.

The problem is not you, my trusted and good and wonderful reader, who would only use the tool for what it’s intended for – added convenience in contact management.  The problem lies with people who are a bit free and easy about who they make friends with.  If you do end up befriending a less than trustworthy individual, they could quite happily get your email address through this method, and soon enough you’ll be receiving all those wonderful offers for life enhancing medication and get rich quick schemes.

So…watch who you befriend.  Today might be a good day to prune out those folks that you’re not one hundred percent sure about!

The further perils of real time search…

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A short while ago I wrote a couple of posts about the issues around Real time Search (How important is Real Time Search and Google and the Dead Past) – that is, Internet based searches that include Internet content that has been generated in the few minutes (or even less!) prior to the search.  Those of us who’ve been around the Internet for long enough will remember the days when you could wait days or weeks for stuff to show up in a Google search; nowadays Tweets can turn up in search results almost immediately.

There are many reasons – most expressed in the two posts above – that I have for feeling rather uneasy about the whole idea of real time search, particularly around personal privacy.  I think the main mistake I made when I wrote those two posts last year was to underestimate the speed with which things would move.  Recent developments in geolocation based systems – that record the location from which a post is made – such as FourSquare and the geocoding side of Twitter have made it easy for Tweets and similar online posts to locate people in the real world.  A particularly fine example of this phenomena is the suitably named ‘Please Rob Me’ – this site uses some clever coding to detect when people Tweet that they’re away from home. 

The publication of ‘exploits’ for web browsers and other software could also become a hot topic.  At the moment, a hacker may determine how to ‘poison’ a website with a specially manufactured piece of code that can infect an unprotected PC with a virus or Trojan Horse program.  The hacker can then publicise the fact via various means, hoping that others will get the chance to use it before the manufacturer of the browser relaeses a ‘patch’ for the bug that the code exploits.  Real time search could very much help hackers – by releasing details of an exploit, then linking to it from a few sites, then tweeting it, it’s quite possible that details of such exploits could be showing up in search results within minutes or hours of the exploit being identified.  Unless the search results are sanitised in some way to prevent this happening – highly unlikely – then this will surely lead to decreasing online safety.

A related problem might be in the creation of online Pop-up Shops’ for ‘warez’ or other illegal content.  For those who’ve never come across a ‘Pop-up Shop’ these are shops that take out a very short lease on a retail property – typically a month or so around Christmas or some other busy event that will guarantee good local footfall.  They then sell cheap goods, Christmas cards, etc. and then shut up shop and disappear – whilst these shops are totally legit business, the Internet equivalents are frequently not.  Given real time search, a suitably optimised ‘instant site’ with an arbitrary URL could be put on a server, show up in search engine indexes / Tweet indexes within the hour , make material available and be gone before the authorities even know it was there.

Real time search is here – faster and probably more effective than I feared.  And it’s not going to be pretty.