I think that, just to be sure, the US should install warning labels
on all fingers indicating that putting them in proximity to one’s
mouth while holding food could result in dire obesity, particularly in North America. But does
anyone really think that Warning Labels are meaningful anymore, after
decades of useless labels on CDs, Cigarettes, and Ladders?

In the longer term I think that history will illustrate that the real
problem isn’t simply, “sugar” (which is a generic term referencing
dozens of different additives) but instead High Fructose Corn Syrup,
or what I call “engineered sugar”. HFCS was born in the 1970s, in
part to address two things: the high cost of sugar, due to America’s
ongoing embargo of Cuba (which has traditionally ranked highly within
the top five exporters of sugar); and the dramatic overproduction of
corn, due to America’s moronic ongoing subsidy of its growth by
farmers (which has also resulted in the wholly unnecessary emergence
of Ethanol, BioDiesel, and lots of other stupid Corn-Into-Gold
technologies).

High Fructose Corn Syrup is not natural. Its existence is the result
of a mad chemist’s array of processes, fermentations, chain
reactions, and engineering. As such it’s natural to assume that we
organisms might have a really hard time ingesting, processing, and
excreting it safely. Consumed in high enough quantities (which most
of us do today) it has been revealed to effectively turn our bodies
into mush.

What’s circumstantially different between the relatively svelte
peoples of Europe and the statistically obese heifers of North
America is the quality of the sugars we intake. Europeans consume
lots of sucrose (from beet and cane) and us Americans eat mostly
biochemically-engineered sugars. We’re fat. They ain’t.
Confectioners can’t even use the term “chocolate” in the EU unless
their product uses real sugars, which is one reason why Mars bars in
the UK kick ass on North American ones.

So go ahead and label Soda cans all you want, but it’s pure,
unmitigated folly and will have no appreciable effect on the number
of forklift cases faced by paramedics in the future.

You really wanna cope with the obesity problem?

– Educate children (and adults) in schools on how to eat
better in SIMPLE terms
– Stop subsidizing the growth of corn and other crops we
don’t need
– Stop fucking with our food supply unless you’re going to test thoroughly the effects
– Disincentivize the sale and distribution of junk food with extra taxes, etc.
– Close forever the revolving door between the FDA and Monsanto

.. of course we won’t do that, because the Fat Kids can’t afford
expensive Washington/Ottawa lobbyists as can Monsanto, Yum! Foods,
and McDonald’s. Instead, the problem will just continue to amplify
until — like the hormonally-unbalanced, permanently ill beef cattle
of the North American livestock industry — many of the people of our
countries will be managed in a continuous state of illness and sloth,
taxing our social services to the maximum while displacing the truly
sick. All of this at no expense and to the massive profitability of
a dwindling (through consolidation) number of megacorporations
(including, of course, health providers who triage and manage the
lingering deaths of the populace) in the BioTechnology, Food, and
Health Care industries.

High Fructose Corn Syrup is a poison by many names (dextrose, glucose-
fructose, etc.), and is so pervasive in North American foods that
it’s almost impossible to avoid consuming it. My Snapple that
contains the “Best Stuff On Earth!” lists glucose-fructose second in
quantity only to water on the label. Just about the only package on
my desk today that doesn’t contain any HFCS is my bottle of Evian.

Some info:

http://www.westonaprice.org/modernfood/highfructose.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8003-2003Mar10
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/jun99/927695713.Ch.r.html

A short term answer: go organic.

But what happens to society when only rich people can afford to eat a
healthy diet, free from chemicals and engineered foods?

-Ian.

September 21, 2003

Waiting For Spielberg By MATTHEW ROSE

Unlike most urban legends, the one about the Iranian exile stuck at the Paris airport for 15 years is true. Surrounded by a mountain of his possessions near the Paris Bye Bye lounge at Terminal 1 in Charles de Gaulle International Airport, Merhan Karimi Nasseri is still there after all these years — a celebrity homeless person.

Planted on the 1970’s red plastic bench he calls home, and surrounded by stacks of newspapers and magazines, Nasseri, also known as Alfred or ”Sir, Alfred” (title and comma appropriated from a mistake in a letter from British immigration), has organized his life’s belongings into a half-dozen Lufthansa cargo boxes, various suitcases and unused carry-on luggage. On a nearby coffee table spotted with aluminum ashtrays, Nasseri’s universe includes a pair of alarm clocks, an electric shaver, a hand mirror and a collection of press clippings and photographs to establish his present and his recent past. He seems both settled — and ready to go.

To the pilots, airport staff, fast-food merchants and millions who have passed through the terminal on their way to somewhere else, the 58-year-old Nasseri has become a postmodern icon — a traveler whom no one will claim. Little do they know that he is on his way to becoming a Hollywood icon, too. Inspired by Nasseri’s intriguing tale of lost identity, bureaucratic limbo and persistence, Steven Spielberg has bought the rights to his life story as the basis for the new Tom Hanks vehicle, ”The Terminal.”

”I realize I am famous,” Nasseri says in his soft, almost giggly voice, a gravelly mix of his native Persian, the airport French he’s picked up from the loudspeakers and the cigarettes he’s always smoking. As if to prove his fame, he pats a briefcase stuffed with his press clippings. ”I wasn’t interesting until I came here.”

Nasseri’s story is difficult to piece together. Over the years, he has claimed many things about his origins. At one time his mother was Swedish, another time English. Nasseri’s effectively reinvented himself in the Charles de Gaulle airport and denies these days that he’s Iranian, deflecting any conversation about his childhood in Tehran. (”He pretends he doesn’t speak Persian,” his longtime lawyer, Christian Bourguet, says. ”He was interviewed by Iranian journalists and made believe he didn’t understand.”) When we first met two years ago, he insisted that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was attempting to locate his parents in order to establish his identity. But a spokeswoman for the agency dismissed the assertion as ”pure folly.”

Early on in his saga, Nasseri maintained that he was expelled from his homeland for antigovernment activity in 1977. According to a number of reports, Nasseri protested against the regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi while a student in England, and when he returned to Iran, found himself imprisoned, and shortly thereafter exiled.

He bounced around Europe for a few years with temporary refugee papers, alighting finally in Belgium, where he was awarded official refugee status in 1981. He traveled to Britain and France without difficulty until 1988, when he landed at Charles de Gaulle airport after being denied entry into Britain, because, he contends, his passport and refugee certificate were stolen in a mugging on a Paris subway. Nasseri could not prove who he was, nor offer proof of his refugee status. So he moved into the Zone d’attente, a holding area for travelers without papers.

He stayed for days, then weeks — then months, then years. As his bizarre odyssey stretched on, Bourguet, the noted French human rights lawyer, took on the case, and the news media piled on. Articles appeared around the world, and Nasseri became the subject of three documentary films. (Oddly, apparently none of his friends or relatives have attempted to contact him.)

ike any number of Samuel Beckett characters, Nasseri has redefined the concept of waiting. But he remains busy, and during office hours when he’s not meeting filmmakers or members of the press, he collects McDonald’s soda tops and endlessly considers his situation in a sprawling, 1,000-plus-page diary that chronicles his journey to nowhere. These rambling handwritten notes recount his encounters with just about everyone he’s met, reporting faithfully everything from the details of his paper chase to some of the witty things he’s said (”I’m not Henry Kissinger”). Nasseri also asks most visitors to sign his journal.

An effete, balding man, Nasseri is well groomed (he washes daily in the men’s room and sends his donated Marks & Spencer clothes to the dry cleaners) with finely manicured fingernails. He smokes compulsively and is forever reaching for his pouch of Pall Mall rolling tobacco. At one point during our interview he coughs, adding with his characteristic sly humor, ”Maybe I caught SARS here in the airport.”

In an eerily Warholian relationship, Nasseri’s closest neighbors at the airport are a photo booth and a photocopy machine. Unlike most movie types, Nasseri does not have a cell phone, and he eats regularly at the McDonald’s in the food court 100 feet away. (”I like the fish,” he says.) The only green in his immediate environment is, ironically, the Sortie (Exit) sign.

In the Spielberg film, which begins shooting this month, Hanks is transformed into a refugee whose country disappears in a diplomatic wink of an eye. As chaos ravages his homeland, Hanks is rendered stateless, his passport turned into an eBay collectible. He’s grounded: a stranger in a strange New York airport. But Hanks is cured of his airport disease and soars to new heights (and, who knows, perhaps another Oscar), thanks to the Hollywood bombshell Catherine Zeta-Jones, who plays Hanks’s love interest, a flight attendant. Nasseri has had no such luck with the ladies and complains that there are no nightclubs in his airport. ”There’s no pleasure,” he says.

While Bourguet confirms that Spielberg’s company, DreamWorks, has in fact bought the rights to his client’s life story, Spielberg himself would not discuss ”The Terminal,” its plot nor Nasseri’s contract. Marvin Levy, a DreamWorks spokesman, confirms that a financial agreement was signed. However, he cautions, ”Mr. Nasseri’s story was an inspiration for the original treatment for ‘The Terminal.’ The film is not his story.”

Rumors of a $275,000 fee for the rights to Nasseri’s life story and certain consulting duties have circulated. ”It’s less than $1 million,” Bourguet says, adding that the money hasn’t changed the predicament of his client. ”While he became a bit richer, Alfred is extremely paranoid and confused.”

Certainly, Nasseri may well be one of the only people on the planet not to have seen a Spielberg production. Asked what he thinks of Hanks, Nasseri replies straight-faced, ”Is he Japanese?”

Regardless of whether Hanks manages to capture the refugee’s deadpan delivery, the Hollywood retelling of Nasseri’s odyssey will undoubtedly include a first-class ticket to the American dream.

Nasseri’s real-life ending, however, is still up in the air.

”Alfred himself will have trouble leaving the airport,” says Glen Luchford, a fashion photographer cum director whose 2001 mockumentary, ”Here to Where,” attempted just such a scenario, with the director, played by Paul Berczeller, failing to tempt Nasseri beyond the concrete gardens of Charles de Gaulle.

”Alfred has to accept that he’s free,” Luchford says sadly. ”But with freedom comes responsibility. He represents people’s worst fears — the idea they might be procrastinating all their lives and end up being rooted to the spot.”

asseri cannot be forcibly moved or repatriated. He is protected by a number of international refugee statutes. According to Bourguet, he is legally free to leave the airport. All Nasseri has to do is sign the identity papers the French provided him in 1999. But the papers identify him as Iranian and don’t recognize his adopted name of Sir, Alfred. And so he can’t — or won’t- sign them: a testament to either patience, or madness.

Nasseri is doubtful about attending the premiere of ”The Terminal,” although his face lights up at the prospect. ”I would probably have technical problems with my papers in Los Angeles,” he says, before adding that he’ll likely leave the airport ”in September or October.”

If he does decide to finally exit the departure lounge, Nasseri could go to any number of places in the world. He says Florida has invited him, and, yes, why not New York, when ”I take over DreamWorks”? (The company is based in California.) And what of the plastic red bench, which has served as his de facto home for the last 15 years and must by now be a collector’s item?

”I’ll take it to DreamWorks,” he says with a smile. ”And send it by FedEx .”

Matthew Rose is a writer and artist living in Paris.

What is it?

IndyJunior is a fully customizable map which you can use to easily display your geographic location. Joshua Davis did it first, but we do it with an XML data file and a whole host of configurable options. Feed IndyJunior some latitude and longitude coordinates and you’ll be plotting your course like an Indiana Jones movie in no time.

In a world where being thousands of miles away from home is no longer considered odd, I thought it might be nice to be able to track those changes graphically. Where have you been, where are you now, where are you going to be next week? IndyJunior should make answering these questions a little more easy and fun.

How can I use it?

IndyJunior is a Flash application which you can download and use without knowing anything about flash. The app is provided ready to include in your web page without ever needing to own or use Flash MX.

The download includes a configuration page which will help you get the look you want and then all you have to do is copy/paste the code into your html. The last step is to create an XML file of your travels. Since the data is kept in a separate file it’s easy to update.

Futher instructions are available in the manual .

Do I have to pay for it?

IndyJunior is $5 for personal uses. However, if you would like to use IndyJunior for a For-Profit venture the fee is– at our discretion– $150. Hopefully this isn’t so much that it will prohibit people who would like to use it from doing so. All proceeds from this application will be used to fund my life as an architecture student at the Rhode Island School of Design . Custom versions of IndyJunior are available. If you are interested in a custom version please contact me at the email address above.

What does IndyJunior mean?

Haven’t you seen the Indiana Jones movies? Remember the travel scenes where the plane flies across the map leaving little dots at each stop? As for the junior part, “IndyMap” just sounds stupid.

What Should Google Do?

What good is a blog if we can’t use it to opine on how people smarter, busier, and more successful than we are should do their jobs?

Actually, the point of What Should Google Do? (my free PDF) is to show all of us how easy it us to unbox our thinking if we really want to. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to share it all you like.

I bet you could do the same for just about any company you can think of, even yours…

Posted by Seth Godin at August 21, 2003 09:23 PM

Arrogance of empire Paul Foot Wednesday August 20, 2003 The Guardian

In hospital last month for a (literally) nerve-wracking operation on my back, I was lucky enough to have with me an advance copy of Robert Harris’s novel Pompeii. At one level, the book is a thriller that kept me going through the entire sleepless night before the operation. At another, it is a thinly disguised satire on the arrogance of an empire that extended itself by force of arms so far across the world that it ignored elementary social and environmental problems at home. The fact that Pompeii before the eruption of Vesuvius was home to the richest Roman exploiters adds to the irony.

At the beginning of the book, Harris quotes, quite irrelevantly so it seems, the statistic that ancient Rome provided itself with more water than New York City did in 1995. Whether he chose this city by chance I do not know, but over last weekend, just a week before Pompeii was published, millions of citizens of New York and other US cities were plunged into darkness and chaos. They were obliged to suffer at least a tiny fragment of the agony of the people of Iraq, similarly cut off from electricity.

The Iraqi mess is the direct result of old fashioned US/British imperialism. The misery in New York and surrounding cities was caused not by terrorism – as many people there hastily assumed – but by capitalism, in particular its historic failure sufficiently to invest in unprofitable services that most people need. For a fleeting moment, likely to be repeated in the future, the citizens of Iraq and the US simultaneously became victims of the reckless greed of corporate America.

Thank heaven such horrors could not happen here. More than half a century ago, a Labour government nationalised gas, coal and electricity. Doggedly the Labour ministers responsible, led by a wild-eyed revolutionary called Hugh Gaitskell, staved off the Tory attacks on these measures. It was, those ministers argued, nonsense to talk of competition and “free enterprise” in the field of fuel and power, on whose regular supply the entire nation depended – and which were more efficiently and fairly run by publicly accountable monopolies.

Such arguments were denounced in the US as communist, and the supply of power there stayed in the hands of free enterprise. Some of the results of that were on show at the weekend in New York, Ohio and even in poor old semi-social democratic Ontario.

Is this just a North American problem? Among the harassed electricity company executives who stammered in front of television cameras on the night of the power cuts was Bill Edwards, president of Niagara Mohawk. His company supplies electricity to more than a million people in upstate New York. For six awful hours, many of them were cut off from power. Mr Edwards said he couldn’t comment on the suggestion that Niagara Mohawk had caused the blackout, at least until after a full investigation. In the meantime he warned his customers to turn down the air-conditioning and turn off unnecessary lights.

Now you might think that Niagara Mohawk is an American or a Canadian company. But you’d be wrong. Niagara Mohawk was bought in January last year for £2bn by the National Grid company, a private firm in Britain. National Grid plc merged last October with the Transco/Lattice Group, thus forming a monopoly that provides everyone in England and Wales with all their gas and electricity. More and more of the efforts of the new monopoly have been devoted to buying up power companies abroad – it has spent nearly three times as much on buying companies in the US as on capital investment in power in Britain.

How did the stale old socialist power monopoly created in the late 1940s to provide British people with gas and electricity become a brand new dynamic capitalist monopoly snapping up not altogether successful power companies abroad? Simple. Among the first and, for the City of London anyway, the most profitable of the great Thatcher privatisations were gas (don’t tell Sid) and electricity. At a stroke, parliamentary responsibility for these crucial areas of public concern was transferred to private boardrooms, whose jumped-up executives, revelling in their new power, awarded themselves fantastic salaries and bonuses.

The Labour party was outraged at the proposal, and threw itself into furious opposition. In December 1988, Labour’s young frontbench energy spokesman denounced electricity privatisation. “We are proud that we took the industry into public ownership,” he said. “When we come to power, it will be reinstated as a public service for the people of this country, and will not be run for private profit.” The young man’s name

washingtonpost.com

Dissertation Could Be Security Threat Student’s Maps Illustrate Concerns About Public Information

By Laura Blumenfeld Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 8, 2003; Page A01

Sean Gorman’s professor called his dissertation “tedious and unimportant.” Gorman didn’t talk about it when he went on dates because “it was so boring they’d start staring up at the ceiling.” But since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gorman’s work has become so compelling that companies want to seize it, government officials want to suppress it, and al Qaeda operatives — if they could get their hands on it — would find a terrorist treasure map.

Tinkering on a laptop, wearing a rumpled T-shirt and a soul patch goatee, this George Mason University graduate student has mapped every business and industrial sector in the American economy, layering on top the fiber-optic network that connects them.

He can click on a bank in Manhattan and see who has communication lines running into it and where. He can zoom in on Baltimore and find the choke point for trucking warehouses. He can drill into a cable trench between Kansas and Colorado and determine how to create the most havoc with a hedge clipper. Using mathematical formulas, he probes for critical links, trying to answer the question: “If I were Osama bin Laden, where would I want to attack?” In the background, he plays the Beastie Boys.

For this, Gorman has become part of an expanding field of researchers whose work is coming under scrutiny for national security reasons. His story illustrates new ripples in the old tension between an open society and a secure society.

“I’m this grad student,” said Gorman, 29, amazed by his transformation from geek to cybercommando. “Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined I’d be briefing government officials and private-sector CEOs.”

Invariably, he said, they suggest his work be classified. “Classify my dissertation? Crap. Does this mean I have to redo my PhD?” he said. “They’re worried about national security. I’m worried about getting my degree.” For academics, there always has been the imperative to publish or perish. In Gorman’s case, there’s a new concern: publish and perish.

“He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade — and then they both should burn it,” said Richard Clarke, who until recently was the White House cyberterrorism chief. “The fiber-optic network is our country’s nervous system.” Every fiber, thin as a hair, carries the impulses responsible for Internet traffic, telephones, cell phones, military communications, bank transfers, air traffic control, signals to the power grids and water systems, among other things.

“You don’t want to give terrorists a road map to blow that up,” he said.

The Washington Post has agreed not to print the results of Gorman’s research, at the insistence of GMU. Some argue that the critical targets should be publicized, because it would force the government and industry to protect them. “It’s a tricky balance,” said Michael Vatis, founder and first director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center. Vatis noted the dangerous time gap between exposing the weaknesses and patching them: “But I don’t think security through obscurity is a winning strategy.”

Gorman compiled his mega-map using publicly available material he found on the Internet. None of it was classified. His interest in maps evolved from his childhood, he said, because he “grew up all over the place.” Hunched in the back seat of the family car, he would puzzle over maps, trying to figure out where they should turn. Five years ago, he began work on a master’s degree in geography. His original intention was to map the physical infrastructure of the Internet, to see who was connected, who was not, and to measure its economic impact.

“We just had this research idea, and thought, ‘Okay,’ ” said his research partner, Laurie Schintler, an assistant professor at GMU. “I wasn’t even thinking about implications.”

The implications, however, in the post-Sept. 11 world, were enough to knock the wind out of John M. Derrick Jr., chairman of the board of Pepco Holdings Inc., which provides power to 1.8 million customers. When a reporter showed him sample pages of Gorman’s findings, he exhaled sharply.

“This is why CEOs of major power companies don’t sleep well these days,” Derrick said, flattening the pages with his fist. “Why in the world have we been so stupid as a country to have all this information in the public domain? Does that openness still make sense? It sure as hell doesn’t to me.”

Recently, Derrick received an e-mail from an atlas company offering to sell him a color-coded map of the United States with all the electric power generation and transmission systems. He hit the reply button on his e-mail and typed: “With friends like you, we don’t need any enemies in the world.”

Toward the other end of the free speech spectrum are such people as John Young, a New York architect who created a Web site with a friend, featuring aerial pictures of nuclear weapons storage areas, military bases, ports, dams and secret government bunkers, along with driving directions from Mapquest.com. He has been contacted by the FBI, he said, but the site is still up.

“It gives us a great thrill,” Young said. “If it’s banned, it should be published. We like defying authority as a matter of principle.”

This is a time when people are rethinking the idea of innocent information. But it is hardly the first time a university has entangled itself in a war. John McCarthy, who oversees Gorman’s project at GMU’s National Center for Technology and Law, compared this period to World War II, when academics worked on code-breaking and atomic research. McCarthy introduced Gorman to some national security contacts. Gorman’s critical infrastructure project, he said, has opened a dialogue among academia, the public sector and the private sector. The challenge? “Getting everyone to trust each other,” McCarthy said. “It’s a three-way tension that tugs and pulls.”

When Gorman and Schintler presented their findings to government officials, McCarthy recalled, “they said, ‘Pssh, let’s scarf this up and classify it.’ ”

And when they presented them at a forum of chief information officers of the country’s largest financial services companies — clicking on a single cable running into a Manhattan office, for example, and revealing the names of 25 telecommunications providers — the executives suggested that Gorman and Schintler not be allowed to leave the building with the laptop.

Businesses are particularly sensitive about such data. They don’t want to lose consumer confidence, don’t want to be liable for security lapses and don’t want competitors to know about their weaknesses. The CIOs for Wells Fargo and Mellon Financial Corp. attended the meeting. Neither would comment for this story.

Catherine Allen, chief executive of BITS, the technology group for the financial services roundtable, said the attendees were “amazed” and “concerned” to see how interdependent their systems were. Following the presentation, she said, they decided to hold an exercise in an undisclosed Midwestern city this summer. They plan to simulate a cyber assault and a bomb attack jointly with the telecommunications industry and the National Communications System to measure the impact on financial services.

McCarthy hopes that by identifying vulnerabilities, the GMU research will help solve a risk management problem: “We know we can’t have a policeman at every bank and switching facility, so what things do you secure?”

Terrorists, presumably, are exploring the question from the other end. In December 2001, bin Laden appeared in a videotape and urged the destruction of the U.S. economy. He smiled occasionally, leaned into the camera and said, “This economic hemorrhaging continues until today, but requires more blows. And the youth should try to find the joints of the American economy and hit the enemy in these joints, with God’s permission.”

Every day, Gorman tries to identify those “joints,” sitting in a gray cinderblock lab secured by an electronic lock, multiple sign-on codes and a paper shredder. No one other than Gorman, Schintler or their research instructor, Rajendra Kulkarni, is allowed inside; they even take out their own trash. When their computer crashed, they removed the hard drive, froze it, smashed it and rubbed magnets over the surface to erase the data.

The university has imposed the security guidelines. It is trying to build a cooperative relationship with the Department of Homeland Security. Brenton Greene, director for infrastructure coordination at DHS, described the project as “a cookbook of how to exploit the vulnerabilities of our nation’s infrastructure.” He applauds Gorman’s work, as long as he refrains from publishing details. “We would recommend this not be openly distributed,” he said.

Greene is trying to help the center get federal funding. (“The government uses research funding as a carrot to induce people to refrain from speech they would otherwise engage in,” said Kathleen Sullivan, dean of Stanford Law School. “If it were a command, it would be unconstitutional.”)

All this is a bit heavy for Gorman, who is in many ways a typical student. His Christmas lights are still up in July; his living room couch came from a trash pile on the curb. Twice a day, Gorman rows on the Potomac. Out on the water, pulling the oars, he can stop thinking about how someone could bring down the New York Stock Exchange or cripple the Federal Reserve’s ability to transfer money.

On a recent afternoon, he drove his Jeep from the Fairfax campus toward the river. Along the way he talked about his dilemma: not wanting to hurt national security; not wanting to ruin his career as an academic.

“Is this going to completely squash me?” he said, biting his fingernail. GMU has determined that he will publish only the most general aspects of his work. “Academics make their name as an expert in something. . . . If I can’t talk about it, it’s hard to get hired. It’s hard to put ‘classified’ on your list of publications on your résumé.”

As he drove along Route 50, he pointed out a satellite tower and a Verizon installation. Somewhere in Arlington he took a wrong turn and stopped to ask for directions. It has always been that way with him. He’s great at maps, but somehow he ends up lost.

The war on the web

Anthony Cox describes how his spoof error page turned into a ‘Google bomb’ for weapons of mass destruction

Thursday July 10, 2003 The Guardian

I had always wondered how those viral emails or amusing web page addresses forwarded to me built up such momentum. Little did I know that I would be responsible for one of the most successful internet memes this year, and be accused of developing a so-called “Google bomb” of mass destruction.

In early February, I was reading online a Guardian article about Hans Blix’s problems obtaining cooperation in Iraq. Immediately after, I was confronted with the ubiquitous 404 error page, which usually tells the reader that a website is unavailable. With this serendipitous inspiration in mind, along with a text editor and some fiddling in a graphics package, I created a spoof 404 “weapons of mass destruction” error page . Saddam would have been proud; the page was deployed and operational well within 45 minutes.

After favourable comments from friends, I posted it in the newsgroup uk.rec.humour. Within the next 24 hours, the website had had 150,000 hits and had propagated to 118 newsgroups. By the end of February, it had received more than one million page impressions. Perhaps the ultimate accolade was having the original email come back to me with a note saying: “Have you seen this?” Visits declined throughout the subsequent war, and I suspected its 15MB of fame had passed.

Yet, suddenly, in the first four days of July I received nearly 4m page impressions, more than the previous five months combined. The reason? Typing “weapons of mass destruction” in Google and hitting the “I’m feeling lucky” button did not bring up Number 10’s “dodgy dossier”, but my spoof site. Suddenly, it was a lot funnier and accessible: even Google couldn’t find the WMD.

The first Google bomb was created by Adam Mathes in 2001 . He exploited Google’s page ranking system to return a friend’s website when the words “talentless hack” were used as a search term. He used a multitude of pages linking to his friend’s site, with the specific term “talentless hack”. Even though his friend’s site did not contain the search term itself, after calling upon others to insert such links into their sites, the Google bomb found its target.

Google’s page ranking treats links as votes for a website, and both the number and the importance of the link helps increase the ranking of a site. My site had steadily increased its ranking, including a link from the Channel 4 news website and the Guardian, but perhaps the majority were from personal pages, discussion boards and blogs.

However, this was not a deliberate attempt to use Google to make a political point. This Google bomb was slowly and unknowingly built, and only by chance coincided with the accusations that intelligence documents had been “sexed up”.

Last Friday, bloggers really picked up on it and it was the highest linked to page in weblogs according to Daypop.com . On Monday, however, a search for “weapons of mass destruction” sent you to a White House strategy document, which might be seen as a step forward for Google users and perhaps the White House.

Then on Tuesday my page was back at the top, so it may have been a glitch at Google, rather than a deliberate decision to drop the site.

This is a problem for Google: weblogs have been accused of causing “noise” in their searches. Instead of providing good original source material, reams of musings from bloggers are returned. The success of my WMD page underlines a problem Google needs to address. Sure it’s funny, but if you wanted documents on WMD, is that what you really expect from a search engine?

I have received about 200 emails from such diverse sources as United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and serving soldiers in the Gulf. Even those critical of the perceived anti-war message thought it was funny. One of the more offensive messages called me a cowardly little boy and stated: “I am grateful to the almighty that not all Englishmen are slithering bottom-feeders.”

Ironically, I was not against the war, my views on the war being similar to those of journalist David Aaronovitch and MP Ann Clwyd. But if you are going to make a topical joke, then Bush is an obvious and easy target.

·Anthony Cox is a pharmacist at the West Midlands Adverse Drug Reaction Monitoring Centre and a teaching fellow at Aston University. He also writes a blog on drug safety at www.blacktriangle.org

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/05/business/worldbusiness/ 05VOIC.html?pagewanted=all

CCRA, Ghana, July 3 — The Internet bubble has long since popped in the United States, Europe and Asia. But in parts of Africa the Internet is serving as a powerful force for change, primarily by allowing companies and individuals to make international telephone calls far less expensively than through conventional channels.

Calls in and out of sub-Saharan Africa have long been among the world’s most costly, strangling business opportunities and burdening ordinary people. Services have been tightly controlled by government-owned telephone companies, many of which are rife with corruption and incompetence. Governments also imposed high tariffs on international calls, seeing it as a lucrative source of revenue.

But now, thanks to what is called voice-over-Internet, phone alternatives are flourishing, sharply lowering costs and expanding opportunities for business and consumers in some of the poorest places on earth — even as they pose a competitive threat to government-sanctioned telephone companies.

Sending telephone calls over the Internet is gaining ground in Africa because it makes possible a range of new services, linking the sub-Saharan to the world’s major industrial centers in ways unimaginable only a few years ago. And better digital connections, mostly via satellite, are raising the hope that Ghana — the most peaceful country in a West African region besieged by civil wars and ethnic strife — may become the regional hub for an information-technology industry.

“As Ghana improves its connectivity to the outside world, it has the potential to become for Africa what Bangalore became for India,” said Paul Maritz, a former senior executive at Microsoft who recently visited Accra to survey the nascent high-tech scene here.

Last Thursday, at a United Nations conference in New York, the secretary general, Kofi Annan, delivered a message that developing countries also need to include wireless access, known as Wi-Fi, in building an Internet system.

“It is precisely in places where no infrastructure exists that Wi-Fi can be particularly effective,” Mr. Annan said, “helping countries to leapfrog generations of telecommunications technology and empower their people.”

As the movement advances, though, many government-owned telephone companies, which dominate wired service in most African countries, are fighting a rear-guard action.

Internet telephony “is presented as the salvation for business and society in Africa,” said Oystein Bjorge, chief executive of Ghana’s national telephone carrier. “It is not.”

Mr. Bjorge, a Norwegian telecommunications consultant hired recently to do battle against the Internet telephone services, said it wreaks havoc with the economics of phone companies. Here in Ghana, the national phone company is waging a sporadic campaign against its own citizens who use the Internet to make or receive telephone calls from America and Europe, periodically turning off the lines of those suspected of doing so.

Three years ago, the government even jailed the heads of some of Ghana’s leading Internet providers. Though later exonerated by a court, the dissidents fear another crackdown. “Internet telephony is changing the whole power structure,” said Francis Quartey, chief technology officer of Intercom Data Network and one of those jailed. “The dangerous thing is that the power elite is responding out of fear and ignorance.”

Despite this opposition, American companies are experimenting with new ventures in Ghana, seeing if enthusiasm for Internet telephony can transform local technology entrepreneurs into a force for genuine economic advancement.

For example, Rising Data Solutions, which is based in Gaithersburg, Md., introduced a call center here last month, where a dozen Ghanaians — trained in American-style English — are trying to sign up customers in the northeastern United States on behalf of a wireless phone company. At least three other call centers are expected to open in Accra later this year, all relying on Internet telephony instead of telephone carriers.

Internet telephony also aids companies like Newmont Mining , which is searching for gold in Ghana, the second-largest gold producer on the continent, after South Africa. To help manage its operation, Newmont plans to link its operations within Ghana to the wider world through the Internet.

Acquiring reliable phone service is essential, foreign investors say, which is why they bypass the government-owned telephone company. Ghana Telecom has an order backlog of more than 300,000 lines; bribery is the fastest — indeed, usually the only — way to obtain new service. Even those with service suffer from frequent failures and inaccurate bills. Roughly every other call results in a busy signal, an indicator of what Ghana Telecom calls “network congestion.”

Under the circumstances, Internet telephony — which has failed so far to make serious inroads into the American telephone market because of lower voice quality — seems positively fabulous to many weaned on Africa’s creaky systems.

“Internet gives me control over my destiny,” said Sambou Makalou, chief executive of Rising Data. “My business needs to be up 24-7; we can’t get a busy signal.”

Busy signals are common in Ghana because the public phone networks are overloaded. As recently as four years ago, a dial tone was among the scarcest resources in the country, which had fewer than 200,000 phone lines in a nation of 19 million.

Few people realized how much demand for phone service was waiting to explode until Ghana’s most successful wireless company, Spacefon, was introduced in 1996. Before it started, executives thought the potential customer base was probably 3,000 people, at most 12,000. Seven years later, Spacefon has more than 300,000 subscribers.

The country’s total phone lines are now approaching 750,000, roughly two-thirds of them wireless. But completing a call is still difficult, especially between rival networks (there are five), and neither Ghana Telecom, nor the country’s legal wireless operators offer a reliable connection to the Internet.

In response to these limitations, private businesses have built scores of data networks, relying on satellite- and radio-based Internet-access systems.

But telephone service became appealing because of the high network costs: Companies typically pay from $2,000 to $5,000 a month for a robust connection to the Internet, an enormous sum when economic output per person is only about $400 a year.

“I’m paying $2,000 a month for Internet access, so I want to use the technology to the fullest,” said Austin Addo, chief information officer of Ghana Link Network Services.

Mr. Addo’s company, which began operations here early this year, helps the government calculate duties on goods imported into the country, relying on frequent updates, via the Internet, of product values. The company’s partner is based in Madrid, so Mr. Addo uses a standard device to make international calls over his computer network. He is not billed for the calls, which would otherwise cost him roughly 75 cents a minute, including the cost of line.

His telephone calls are not really free, since he pays $2,000 a month for Internet access. But he is still saving lots of money because he can speak as long as he wants without worrying about the cost. “Five years ago to get this level of communication,” he said, “I’d have to fly to Spain — several times a week.”

Such productivity gains have been a cause for celebration almost everywhere in the world. But official anxiety over Internet telephony is widespread throughout Africa and particularly rife in Ghana. At a public meeting in May, held at the largest Internet cafe in Accra, a regulator defended the government’s latest campaign against those who use the Internet to bypass authorized telephone providers. “The players have been apprehended or will be apprehended soon,” said Bernard Forson, deputy director of the National Communications Authority of Ghana.

The government is not opposed to any particular technology, Mr. Forson explained, but merely wants “regulated entities to provide telephone service,” not unlicensed and untaxed wildcatters.

Other African countries face a similar quandary, aware of the appeal of Internet voice service but fearful of its damage to the state-owned telephone company.

Neighboring Togo, for instance, allowed Internet telephony until the end of last year, when the government cracked down on behalf of Togo Telecom. So many foreign calls in tiny Togo were being routed over the Internet that a small “com” center — ubiquitous in Africa, offering calls for a fee — took in $10,000 a month from just two phones.

But some African countries have embraced Internet telephony as a way to end decades of frustration. In Nigeria, for example, the government has not officially approved telephoning over the Internet but looks the other way, partly to ease congestion on its authorized networks.

Still, the legal confusion surrounding Internet telephony has prompted some to avoid it. Affiliated Computer Services , which is based in Dallas, set up shop in Accra two years ago, relying on a private satellite connection to the Internet that supports both a data and a telephone network. Today, it is one of Ghana’s largest private employers, with 1,200 people and plans to hire another 700.

While the company runs call centers in Jamaica, Mexico and India, it does not intend to do such telephone work in Ghana. “We can’t use satellite lines” because of the brief delay in hearing a response, said Tom Blodgett, the executive who started the Ghana operation. And for now, he adds, “there is no suitable wired alternative.” A legal one, anyway.

But for all their efforts to restrain the movement, African telecom companies are probably fighting a losing battle.

“Periodically the police confiscate equipment or the telco turns off phone lines,” said Russell Southwood, a London-based consultant and publisher of a weekly newsletter on Africa’s telecom scene, Balancing Act’s News Update. “But it’s about as hopeless as Canute trying to turn

Blogging’s too good for them

Paul Carr Monday June 9, 2003 The Guardian

Walking through the streets of Blogistan this week, I couldn’t help noticing a certain tension in the air. The natives were restless. The saloon bars were abuzz with nervous chatter. And it wasn’t about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Something was most definitely up. But what? And who was this Eric Schmidt fellow that everyone was talking about? And why did I seem to be the only person in the world without his own weblog? Questions, questions.

Well it turns out that Schmidt is the CEO of Google (who knew?) and, if rumours are to be believed, he has plans to move weblogs out of the search engine’s main index and into a separate, less highly trafficked directory. What an absolute cad. Or at least he would be if the rumours weren’t just speculation – the result of an enthusiastic leap of blogic by IT news site the Register, who suggested that when Google launches its new weblog search tool, it may also decide to purge bloggers from its main database. Possibly.

No need for ordinary Blogistanis to panic just yet then – but the rumours did give internet experts an excuse to get all het up about the undue prominence of weblogs in Google search results. No matter what you search for – celebrity gossip, weapons of mass destruction, insect recipes, donkey porn – you can bet your bottom dollar that above the research papers and official news sources you’ll find a load of bloggers putting in their two pennyworth.

“Foul!” cry the blogger haters, “these two-bit amateur diarists are taking over the internet – it’s time we shoved them off into their own search engine, where they can do no more harm.” Just imagine… no more illiterate teenage wannabes clogging up the world’s most popular search engine with their idiotic “which Sex And The City character are you?” quizzes and incestuous links to their mates. No more American neo-Nazis babbling on about the Dixie Chicks and inciting racial hatred. No more tree-huggers talking about henna tattoos, home schooling and tofu. Just a list of proper sites full of proper information, written by proper journalists and proper academics. Fantastic. And if people want to hang out with Joe Blogs then fine, they can just click the appropriate tab and wallow until their brains turn to mush.

The only slight problem is that, despite what some commentators would have you believe, bloggers are not the scourge of the internet. In fact they are the internet. The whole point of the web was to allow anyone, regardless of budget or influence, to share information with the rest of the world. It certainly wasn’t supposed to be a giant electronic shopping mall or an interactive brand extension for major broadcasters and publishers.

Also, there seems to be an assumption that all weblogs are pointless, self-absorbed amateur journals that can be lumped together under a single search tab. This despite the fact that an increasing number of high-profile journalists and publishers are using weblog software as an easy and cost-effective way to deliver first-rate, original content to thousands – or even millions – of readers. Take Salam Pax, the Iraqi who has just been recruited by this newspaper on the strength of his wartime weblog.

While my favourite tabloid columnist, Tony “idiot” Parsons spent the conflict in front of his computer bashing out page after page of laddish nonsense for the Mirror’s unique readership of warmongering peaceniks, Salam was in Baghdad, using his blog to drive home the realities of war to a vast international audience. And yet, if the haters had their way Salam would be dragged off into the bloghetto while Parsons remained a free man. What kind of justice is that?

Do they really believe that it’s possible to separate the web into legitimate information sites (good) and weblogs (evil) or that by purging bloggers from Google, the internet will suddenly become more relevant and more useful? Not only is this hilariously simplistic but it’s also diverting attention from the real problem – that the web is drowning in a sea of crap, created partly by the less literate webloggers but also by biased media outlets, hate groups, pointless personal homepages, porn sites, multilevel marketers and out and out loons.

If Google really wants to improve its service then it should forget about trying to treat bloggers as one homogenous, problematic group and start developing intelligent search robots that are capable of separating the wheat from the chaff across the entire web. These robots should: a) look at the actual content of a site and decide whether the content is useful and worth reading, b) group it together with other relevant sites to give surfers a comprehensive overview of all the available information on whatever subject they’re interested in and c) ensure that these handy packages of links and information appear at the top of the search results, above all the unfiltered rubbish.

A utopian technological fantasy? Not really. In fact these robots already exist. They’re called webloggers. And without them Google’s index would be a much poorer place.

· Paul Carr is editor of The Friday Thing (www.thefridaything.co.uk). His new print publication, The London News Review, launches in August

Who dares wins

The ‘comedy terrorist’ who gatecrashed Prince William’s 21st birthday party may have zero talent for jokes or impersonation. But there’s one quality Aaron Barschak possesses in spades – chutzpah. And that, writes Simon Hattenstone, can get you a very long way

Simon Hattenstone and Isabelle Chevallot Wednesday June 25, 2003 The Guardian

He may be a rank failure on the comedy circuit, he may be a loser in life and love, he may belong to the great unwashed, he may even have hooked up with a former stripper, but Aaron Barschak possesses something most of us haven’t got. Not only did he climb three walls and two gates to gatecrash Prince William’s 21st birthday party, he did so dressed as Osama bin Laden (though he actually looked more like Michael Jackson), performed a comedy routine, kissed William on both cheeks, left to wild applause and headed off for the champagne bar. That’s when he got arrested.

Barschak doesn’t care. The Crown is unlikely to press charges against him, he has become a national treasure and front-page news. Despite his transparent lack of talent, he has achieved his ambition to become famous. Undeterred by decades of failure (he wanted to be an actor, but ended up as a removal man and waiter), he has carried on in the face of his own lack of ability, finally winning our admiration by doing something most of us would never have dared do. In short, Barschak has proved his chutzpah.

What is chutzpah? And how do you pronounce it? Well, last things first. It is pronounced Khoots-pah: imagine you are clearing your throat, preparing yourself for a really good spit (think Paul Mariner on Match of the Day, if you’re old enough). That’s the “ch”, and the rest spells itself. It is a Yiddish word, with no English equivalent, and there is no better way to express audacity, daring and presumption.

Perhaps the best way of understanding it is to examine the people who have it in spades: Eddie the Eagle (a hopelessly talentless skier, but that didn’t deter him); Bill Clinton (his redefining of “sexual relations” was truly audacious); Karl Power (prankster extraordinaire, who managed to get himself into the Manchester United team picture, played on centre court at Wimbledon and went out to bat for England); Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (Iraq’s minister of information, who insisted on television “There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!” when we could see them in the backdrop); the whole of Britart (“Believe me, my unmade bed really is as good as any Vermeer”); Ruby Wax (rifling her way through Imelda Marcos’s shoe closet), and Christine Hamilton (simply for being Christine Hamilton).

Michael Winner, who knows more about chutzpah than most, is keen to help us out. “Chutzpah is two things. It can be cheek and insolence. But it can also be used to describe a derisory act, for example, someone who is selling something could say: ‘What Chaime offered me was a chutzpah!'”

Hats off to Barschak, says Winner. “It had all the elements of chutzpah: the impertinence of intruding on a class way above your own; the expertise of finding the way of doing it; and it also had the ludicrousness of pitting the east- european immigrant, albeit one generation removed, against the royal family. I think he should be thoroughly applauded.”

Why do we associate Winner with chutzpah? “Ah, I excel in it. I’m always doing impertinent things. For example, when I was 14 I befriended the publisher Paul Hamlyn, who was an old boy at my school who had gone on to publish film books. So I phoned all the film studios and said ‘I’m writing a book called Film-Making From the Children’s Angle’, and all the studios welcomed me and I met the stars and that’s how I got to see how films were made. I went back time and again and always ate for free. Eventually, Paul phoned me and said ‘I hear you’re going round saying you’re writing a book for me. Give it a rest, would you?’ We remained friends till he died.”

The author Leo Rosten defines chutzpah as follows: a man kills both his parents and then throws himself at the court’s mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan. There is also an old Jewish joke that illustrates chutzpah. A Jewish grandmother is sitting on the beach with her beloved grandson when a freak wave sweeps him out to sea, where he is instantly devoured by the ocean. The distraught woman sinks to her knees, wailing, pleading with God to spare the child’s life. Suddenly, there is a celestial thunderclap and her prayers are answered. Another wave gathers the boy up from the depths and plonks him safely, miraculously, beside the old lady, at which she turns her eyes heavenwards, and says: “His cap’s missing.”

Barschak’s brand of chutzpah is more than an attitude, it has an element of performance art to it. Indeed, this will almost certainly turn out to be his greatest performance. (At 36, he is not thought to have a promising future as a stand-up – indeed, a close observer of the comedy circuit told me: “As a stand-up comic, never in his wildest dreams could Barschak aspire to mediocrity.”) As with most chutzperians, Barschak’s act was not an end in itself – his performance at Prince William’s party ended with him advertising his live gigs at the Edinburgh festival later this year.

The political activist Peter Tatchell also employs chutzpah as a means to an end. For example, earlier this year he stopped Tony Blair’s motorcade by running out, suffragette-style, in front of his limousine, ending up under the wheels. It was a way of drawing attention to his protest against the invasion of Iraq. Last year, he twice attempted a citizen’s arrest on Robert Mugabe, and got himself beaten up into the bargain.

I ring him to tell him he’s been voted a top chutzperian in the Guardian’s (admittedly unofficial) survey. For once, he’s speechless. But I think he’s pleased. Why does he think that we think he’s got chutzpah? “Well, I guess I’m rather reluctant to show deference where many people think it is due, especially if there’s an issue of injustice involved.”

Does he have any chutzpah role models? “Oh yes. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Sylvia Pankhurst. They didn’t play politics by orthodox rules. They were fearless in confronting the forces of oppression. I’ve tried to adapt their methods of non-violent direct action to the contemporary campaign for human rights.”

George Galloway also features prominently in our list of great chutzperians. He is delighted when I pass on the good news. “I strongly approve of chutzpah,” says the controversial politician, currently suspended from the Labour party after making anti-war comments on television. What does chutzpah mean to him? “It means audacity. I’ve always followed the motto of the French revolutionary Danton – l’audace, encore l’audace, toujours l’audace . And in my line of work, elan can make the difference. I do venture into the lion’s den. Sometimes I’m bitten, but so far so good – I keep getting up again.”

I tell him what I think makes him a great chutzperian – how he can smoke the fattest Cuban cigars and wear the most expensive designer suits, proclaim his socialism and not appear to be a hypocrite. “Others do things behind closed doors,” he replies. “I prefer to openly acknowledge my belief that the devil should not possess all the best suits, and that if one has honestly earned the wherewithal to buy tobacco one should buy the best Havanas.”

With magnificent chutzpah, Christine Hamilton has made a living from milking her infamy. I’m in the fortunate position of being able to tell her that she is one of the Guardian’s top chutzperians. She squeals with delight. “Oh yes, everything I do displays chutzpah,” she says. “It means you’ve got balls and joie de vivre and a bit of cheek. Oh, yes – I’ve been the narrator in the Rocky Horror Show, bossy battleaxe in Jack and the Beanstalk, I’ve even had a bath in strawberry jam for the British Heart Foundation. The rumours that I drink to excess, by the way, are ridiculous. I do everything to excess. I drink with chutzpah. I do everything with chutzpah.”

One of the great things about people with chutzpah is that they like to talk about it. Of course they do. They love talking about themselves, their nerve, their excesses, their presumption, their amazing ability to achieve a great deal (often with very little obvious talent).

With one obvious exception. Reading about Barschak reminds me of a group of people with unequalled chutzpah – each year they take £35m off us without a word of thanks, they have filched some of the world’s greatest paintings for their own private collections, are a law unto themselves and they act as if they own the bloody country.

But the Royal Family were, as ever, unavailable for comment.