Sleepwalking

So I’ve been under the weather recently.

About two weeks ago, I started having a weird sensation in my chest. It felt like my heart was leaping, the way it does when you go over the curve on a rollercoaster or get startled. My heart would do a strange thump and it would be as if my breath were slightly knocked out of me for a second. It made me feel really weak. No, truth be told, every time it happened, it felt like I was about to keel over and die.

As an overweight man who smokes like a chimney and whose exercise mainly consists of hauling his fat ass and a big laptop bag from home to one of two nearby coffee shops, I was rather concerned, as you might imagine. I ignored it for about three days, and then Rosalie insisted I go to the doctor. So we went to a local cheap clinic, where a nurse put an EKG on me for about sixty seconds before disappearing for forty-five minutes. Finally a doctor showed up with a laptop in his hand, where he — I kid you not — appeared to be Googling my symptoms.

He told me it was heart palpitations and not to worry about it, that 50% of the population gets them at some time in their lives and that it wasn’t a big deal. He told me it was basically a slowed-down panic attack, caused by stress and anxiety. He told me to stop drinking five big coffees every day. That was it. (Except for discovering that I’ve managed to lower my blood pressure from “dangerously high” to “only slightly higher than normal”, which is good.) He said there wasn’t any medication that could help me.

Being slightly suspicious of a doctor who Googles your symptoms while you’re in the fucking room with him, I managed to acquire some Xanax. (No, I’m not going to tell you where. No, I’m not going to hook you up, either. Don’t even ask me.) I reasoned that Xanax is supposed to help with stress — maybe it would help with this.

And it has, by and large: when I take the Xanax, my heart stops doing dubstep beats in my chest. The tradeoff is that it drops my IQ by 50%. I feel like I’m sleepwalking, or like I’m underwater. This is not a good position for a professional computer programmer to be in.

I think maybe I’ve got it sorted now; I haven’t taken any Xanax today and for the first time in nearly two weeks, I was mentally and physically capable of working.

Which has put me in a bad position, because I’m being paid right now for projects by the hour. So I’m playing catch-up. The problem with that, of course, is that it’s nerve-wracking and stressful…which causes my heart to get floppity again, which makes me want to take Xanax so I don’t feel like I’m dying all day, which makes me retarded, et cetera et cetera.

On the upside, I got the basic framework of Stikki.me’s API built tonight, which means the guys I’m working with on the iOS app can start developing it soon, which means one of the biggest assets of Stikki — the ability to get alerts when you’re near a stikki you’ve set an alarm for — will be available. And that’s game changing.

I’ve also discovered that the prices I’m targeting for advertising on Stikki are less than 10% of what major competitors are charging, which makes me think I’ll be able to drum up ad business relatively easily. Since I have no investors or staff, I don’t need a massive number of advertisers. Put it another way: if I can get 20 advertisers paying my rate monthly — 20 advertisers on a service that works globally — my rent and power bill are paid. 100 and I can devote myself to this full time quite comfortably. 1000 and I’m in that staggering realm of “upper middle class” income.

If you believe in God, seriously, pray for me. I don’t think it’ll actually do anything celestially, but I can use all the good wishes I can handle right now. Because money is tight and I’m kind of freaked out.

Which is making my heart go pitter-pat, and not in a good way. 🙂

Slide, slide, slippety slide

One of the things I love most about using the ipad as a musical instrument is that several of my favorite tools (Bebot, Nanostudio) allow me to treat the screen as a continuous or ribbon controller.

A bit of history here: though the good old fashioned piano keyboard has always been the primary interface for synthesizers, it’s certainly not the only one. The most famous non-piano interface is the theremin, which uses the movement of the performer’s hands through a magnetic field to control pitch and volume.

<

p style=”text-align: center;”>

That’s Leon Theremin, the inventor of the device, demonstrating it.

One of the more fascinating synthesizers is the ondes Martenot, invented in 1928. The Martenot can be played using either a traditional piano keyboard or using a ring tied to a loop of string below the keyboard. You slide the ring back and forth and the pitch corresponds to the key it’s underneath on the keyboard. Pressing a key or moving the ring produces no sound on its own; rather, the volume is controlled by a sort of rocker switch.

It makes more sense if you see and hear it played. It’s a gorgeous, almost unearthly instrument.

<

p style=”text-align: center;”>

The Martenot is a favorite instrument of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, who is one of the few modern experts on the device. There aren’t very many of them, and you could probably buy a nice car for what you’d pay for one nowadays.

A similar input, used on a very few obscure synths, is a ribbon controller, which replaces the ring with a reactive ribbon; you place your finger on the ribbon and it breaks the circuit, generating a specific frequency. You can buy these to add on to old analog synths or as MIDI controllers.

<

p style=”text-align: center;”>

Ribbon controllers tend to be expensive — not as expensive as an ondes Martenot, but I usually see them for a few hundred dollars. Outside my budget for something I’d only use rarely.

Which brings us back to the iPad. The iPad has a touch screen, which means it can very easily be used as a virtual ribbon controller. Beyond that, though, there have been several software instruments designed for the iPad and iPhone which take even better advantage of the device’s interface.

My current favorite is Bebot. Bebot is a small synth app that displays a cute robot on screen. As you touch the screen in various places, the robot “sings” the note you’re playing. Sounds like a toy, right? But in fact, Bebot is a deceptively powerful little synth. Moving your fingers along the X axis of the screen controls pitch; depending upon which synth voice you’re using, Y axis controls either volume or filter. Here’s a dude messing around with it on the iPad.

<

p style=”text-align: center;”>

A simple tool, but it’s capable of some fairly beautiful output. The only drawback to Bebot is that you can’t record within the app; you need to output it into something else.

Bebot can “autotune” your playing to discrete Western half-tone notes (or whatever scale you choose; you can make Bebot only play in E-minor, for example, by selecting the notes used in the preferences panel). Or, like an ondes Martenot, you can use it as a continuous controller, gliding from note to note, using the onscreen grid or your own ears as a guide. Combine this with the ability to control the velocity of your note by sliding up and down, and you’ve got something that’s most equivalent to a fretless bowed string instrument like a cello or violin. Bebot sounds nothing like these instruments…but you could play a violin piece fairly convincingly on it.

My current favorite music app, Nanostudio, has an on-screen piano keyboard to control its built-in Eden synth (of which you can have four simultaneous instances playing). But it’s not physical, it’s just pixels on the screen…meaning you can slide back and forth between notes as you would on a ribbon controller. I’ve discovered that if you set the Eden to monophonic (meaning you can only play a single note at a time) with portamento (meaning one note “slides” to the next”), you can get something that, with a little practice, approximates a continuous controller. What I like is that the glide only happens when you hold notes down; you can still get normal instant notes by playing staccato.

Here’s a snippet of my first attempt at this: a cover of Talking Heads’ “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)”. I’ve gotten a bit better at using the Eden since this, but I think this is a cool first attempt. Listen for the synth solo at about 24 seconds in.

<

p style=”text-align: center;”> This Must Be The Place (part) by jzellis

I’m really excited about MorphWiz, an instrument endorsed by keyboardist Jordan Rudess of prog-metal outfit Dream Theater. (Not a band I listen to, but the guy’s certainly a talented musician.) It looks a lot like Bebot on crack, adding recording and looping capabilities as well as “morphing” from waveform to waveform.

<

p style=”text-align: center;”>

The interface is a bit Heavy Metal for my taste, but I can deal with that if it works. I’m convinced, deep down, that all synths are meant to be ugly.

If I come up with anything really cool using these tools, I’ll post it up so you can hear my progress.

of iPad magazines and online publishing

So Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily iPad “newspaper” is in the news, mainly because it’s failed to appear. It seems that publishers are falling all over themselves to come up with their own iPad app-based publications — Wired and Scientific American were early, semi-successful contenders in the field.

I have an iPad, and frankly, I completely fail to see the point of application-based publications, at least from a reader/user’s perspective. I am a Wired subscriber, and I’m not willing to pay for another copy of the magazine on my iPad, particularly when most of the content is also available for free from their website. Video-enhanced ads — one of the big selling points of the Wired app — do not fill me with excitement in the same way they do, I suspect, for the advertisers themselves. While it’s briefly amusing to be able to see a 360º view of an Audi, I’m not in the market for an Audi, and I don’t care to see what the passenger side looks like.

The fact is that 90% of the “functionality” of these apps is just as easily accomplished within a browser using HTML 5, Ajax and Javascript animation. That’s if you want the whiz-bang UI fun that most of these apps offer, which I’m not sure I do. In the ten minutes I played with Wired’s iPad app, I didn’t feel that the navigation system (scroll up and down to read pages of an article, left and right to switch from article to article) was in any way easier to use or more illuminating than clicking an article’s title in a menu. It’s slightly groovy, but I mean, come on: this is the 21st century. This is not the most innovative UI we’ve seen.

A far more interesting interface for news is Flipboard, which is a sort of RSS aggregation reader on psychedelics. Instead of simply presenting you with a list of your Google Reader feeds, it extracts images from the feeds (along with your Twitter and Facebook feeds, optionally) and presents you with something that looks more like a “real” magazine than most of the magazine apps do. While it doesn’t add any efficiency to the task of navigating your news feeds, it does so in an interesting and relatively novel way.

Flipboard didn’t really become interesting to me, though, until it added the ability to add your own Google Reader feeds, rather than a pre-selected list of “partner” feeds, which is how it launched. One of the things that media companies need to understand is that these much-touted partnerships are rarely of interest to anybody but themselves and the companies they’re partnering with, the same way wifty ad technology is rarely interesting to anybody but advertisers and the people who depend upon advertising income. Even so, Flipboard is cute, the kind of thing I’d read on the john in the morning, but I use it far less than I use Reeder and River of News, my two favorite RSS aggregator apps for the iPad. (I like River of News’s feed organization 100% better than Reeder’s, but it has some small UI quirks that keep me using Reeder for now; I hope that changes soon.)

You would think that the success of tools like Instapaper might be a flagpost for online media publishers trying to figure out how to succeed: people don’t want flashy UIs in their text-based publications. They usually just want to read the goddamn articles and look at the pictures therein. Multimedia is fine, I suppose, but as a parallel alternative method for retrieving information. I don’t know about you, but when I see a link to an interview and follow it only to discover that the interview is a video or audio file, not text, I’m often irritated. Multimedia content is usually less dense than text; oftentimes a touted multimedia “interview” is a 30 second clip of some toadying goofball asking a celebrity two banal questions.

You’d think we’d gotten past that idiotic idea, oft-espoused in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that nobody will read more than 500 words of text online. Instapaper’s success alone would seem to prove otherwise. I don’t mind reading 2000-3000 word articles or more on my iPad. I just mind reading them broken up into twelve pages that I have to load — along with all the ads and chrome that online publications are pathologically incapable of not adding to every page. I often click on the “printable version” button just to read the article in some sort of mental peace.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make a successful online newspaper/magazine, and I’ll get into that soon. Meanwhile, I offer this suggestion to publishers: stop this whole multimedia app dick measuring contest and focus on building a web-based magazine that people actually want to read. It’s cheaper in the long run.

Rhapsody Blind

Just a shout-out here on something my friend John has created: Rhapsody Blind, a set of scripts that allow visually-impaired Windows users to navigate Rhapsody, the streaming music service.

From what I can tell, there aren’t really a whole lot of good tools for blind computer users; we rarely think about how the traditional GUI interface is much harder to translate for a visually-impaired person than old text interfaces (which work, as I understand it, relatively well with Braille mechanical display devices that “pop up” the characters as Braille underneath the user’s fingers). So it’s really great to see tools like this out there.

So if you’re visually-impaired or know somebody who could use this, please check it out. The scripts are free, though they require the JAWS screen reading app.

Essential iPad Tools

So I’ve had an iPad for a few weeks now; I’m beginning to learn iOS development and it seemed like a useful thing to have, as I no longer have an iPhone. (I lost it.) Also, I needed something portable to carry other than my aging MacBook Pro, which is definitely showing signs of wear and tear. Most of what I do with computers can be done on an iPad, barring graphic design work; and I’ve managed to get around a lot of the iPad’s limitations.

So I thought I’d share with you the tools and apps I’ve found coolest and most useful so far.

1) A keyboard Several years ago, I described in my Las Vegas CityLife column what I thought was the ideal form-factor for a portable computing device: a touch-enabled tablet that could be carried separately from its keyboard. The iPad gets this half-right, and honestly for most casual use the onscreen keyboard is fine. I can average about fifty WPM on it, which is decent for web browsing, tweeting, writing notes, etc.

However, I want to use my iPad to write long documents (like fiction) and PHP/HTML/CSS/Javascript code. And for that, you need a physical keyboard. It’s not just the tactility of it, though that’s a big part of things; it’s also the fact that the iPad’s virtual keyboard takes up 50% of the screen, and when you’re trying to do serious coding or writing that doesn’t work.

I wanted the Apple bluetooth wireless keyboard, but I didn’t want to spend $70 for it. So I got Apple’s Camera Connection Kit, which includes a USB-iDevice 30 pin adapter. It’s made to stick USB drives into the iPad so you can transfer images onto it, but an undocumented feature is that you can hook other sorts of USB devices in as well…including both QWERTY keyboards and MIDI controllers.

I got a $14 mini-keyboard at Fry’s to go with it, one of the cheap little ones that sysadmins often buy to hook into servers they rarely need to directly access. It’s not bad — it has a steel frame and it’s barely wider than the iPad itself. Keyboard goes into the camera kit, camera kit goes into the iPad. The OS will popup and tell you the device isn’t supported, but it works perfectly well. Supposedly you can control the iPad’s hardware like volume and the Home button with keyboard combinations, but I haven’t figured them out yet.

I’m using it now to type this, and it’s just as responsive as my desktop, typing within the Safari browser. Selecting with the keyboard works perfectly — hold down the Shift key and use the arrows, just like a desktop — though often tabbing around interface stuff doesn’t work the way one would expect. But it’s a marked improvement.

2) Docs-To-Go This was my office suite of choice for the iPad, because it supports uploading docs to Google Docs and to Dropbox, which I use extensively. So far it’s pretty decent — almost fullscreen editing of Word documents. I can’t figure out if there are keyboard shortcuts for text formatting, but I haven’t tried much other than Ctrl-I for italics. I’m thinking of trying out WriteRoom as well, as I have it and love it on the desktop.

3) FTP On The Go / Textastic For code editing, this is my one-two combo. FTP On The Go is a really full-featured FTP client for iOS that also allows text editing of documents directly from the server. The only reason I use Textastic with it is that FTPOTG doesn’t support the only two code editing functions I really need: line numbering and syntax highlighting. Textastic does, though it doesn’t have its own FTP client built in. I’m hoping one of these two apps adopts the other one’s features so I can just use one, but for right now these are a nice set of tools. I also have iSSH for telnetting or SSHing into servers.

4) Reeder I’m a Google Reader junkie. Unfortunately, the default UI for it doesn’t work properly in Mobile Safari and the mobile version is retarded. So I’ve been using the popular Reeder app, which syncs with Google Reader, to read my RSS feeds.

It has its limitations — the most irritating being that it navigates via folders, not individual feeds. I organize my feeds with folders, but there are a lot of feeds I don’t check regularly or want to basically ignore most of the time. For example, my News folder has Google News, Yahoo News, and the Guardian UK’s Culture feed. I can’t look at just one of these with Reeder — they all show up, either organized by the feed itself or by time. I’d rather just be able to only look at one feed at a time.

I just got the River of News app, which seems to be much closer to what I really want in a RSS reader UI, but it seems a bit slow, interface-wise — it loads each item slowly and sometimes cuts off images. But we’ll see.

5) Instapaper Instapaper on the iPad is an incredibly useful tool. You can save entire web pages to it for later viewing. It also reformats the page and strips out everything but the main text and images, displaying it in minimalist black and white. The iOS app downloads the page and stores it locally, so you can read pages even when you’re not online. And you can send things to it from Twitter or Reeder, which rocks — if I find an interesting article in Reeder or somebody posts a link to something, I just send it to Instapaper and check it out later.

6) iBooks I haven’t bothered with the Kindle or Nook readers for iPad, because iBooks does what I want it to do and does it well. The only problem I have with it is that it won’t display PDFs in a two-page spread — the PDF page only shows up one page at a time. But it’s not a deal breaker. It’s also awesome for reading comics.

7) Nanostudio My current favorite app. Nanostudio is a portable electronic music studio, similar to Propellerheads’ Rebirth or Beatstudio. But Nanostudio is more flexible, featuring four dual-oscillator synths and an MPC-style sampler. You can mix down your loops directly into the sampler, export each part of the song individually, record samples from the mic or input, and output your mixes directly into SoundCloud. The onscreen keyboard is actually usable, and I’ve managed to make it work like a ribbon controller. (If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry. It’s music nerd speak.)

I’m sure I’ll come up with more, but this is the basic list.

Blogging from the iPad

Now that I have a small keyboard for my iPad, I think I should start blogging again here. I haven’t blogged regularly in a very long time, because most of what I want to say I say on Twitter, and because I haven’t really had much of value (I think) to say in general.

But it’s a new year, and I’ve realized that I kind of miss blogging. It helps me keep my own thoughts on things in focus. Plus a lot of people seem to actually enjoy reading this thing. So I’m going to make a resolution to post at least once a week here about something.

Now, if the iOS WordPress app weren’t so slow and crash-prone….

More Wikileaks thinking

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the whole Wikileaks thing these past few weeks, like a lot of people who belong to my particular sub-set of the human population. (First World, technology-oriented, somewhat politically minded. White as a goddamn ghost.)

I’m massively ambiguous about the whole affair, which has earned me my fair share of sneering and disbelieving virtual glares from my friends and fellow travelers. (I use that term in the most ironic way possible.) My own ambiguity surprises me, because in theory this is the sort of thing I’ve been wanting to see happen for most of my life. I’ve always been a card-carrying dyed-in-the-wool cyberpunk type; even though I’ve disagreed with the EFF on issues involving digital music, I support them with all my heart (and occasionally, when I can afford it, my wallet). Transparency in government is something I’m a fervent believer in.

So why does this whole thing make me uneasy?

I think it’s tied into a lot of the reservations I’ve been feeling, for a long time now, about the hacker culture in general. Not the “get excited and write code” part of hacker culture, which I find deeply meaningful and valuable to humanity as a whole, even if some of the participants can be deeply tedious party guests. But there’s also a flip side to the cleverness and ingenuity of hacker culture; a deep arrogance and near-sociopathology.

In America at least, there’s a big crossover between the hacker and libertarian communities. Though I was at one point in my late teens registered as a libertarian — mainly because they were the political party least likely to send me irritating snail mail — I’ve come to have a deep distaste for libertarianism. These days, I tend to believe that European Union-style socialist democracy is probably the most humane economic and political system we’ve got. I might be wrong on that…but I don’t believe that American capitalism works, and I’ve come to abhor the notion of a world ruled entirely by capitalism, oligarchy and the Grim Meathook Future of a totally free market.

A lot of hackers I know personally are basically heavy libertarian types. They hate the government, they hate taxes. They’re smart and very capable of taking care of themselves and don’t have a lot of time for people who don’t. They seem to apply the same sneering contempt to poor people that they do to clueless Windows users; it’s that same sense of superiority to those who haven’t figured out how to hack the system. Most of them are only political in as far as privacy and tax issues are concerned. I’m not saying all hackers are like this…but this archetype certainly covers a fair number of the ones I know, and I know quite a lot of them.

(Even though I write code professionally, I don’t consider myself a hacker, because I’m not interested in code or systems or exploits for their own sake. There’s not really a name for what I am — somebody who thinks about lots of different things and then talks about them or tries to make them happen in a variety of media. “Dilettante” is probably le mot juste.)

Another trait of a lot of hackers I know is an unwillingness to concern themselves with the long-term ramifications of what they do. Their primary motivation is boredom and a desire to be very clever. Which is a great motivator for smart people…but when you’ve got the keys (or lock picks) to a lot of kingdoms, a lack of foresight can cause some very serious problems in the real world. Being capable of hacking into credit card companies and getting millions of card numbers and personal identification information for people is a really cool skill…but putting it out into the world can cause some really serious harm to people who, unlike the credit card companies, don’t even deserve it in theory.

The Gawker thing is a perfect example. When Anonymous (or whatever subset of Anonymous) hacked into Gawker and put the user logins and passwords up for display, the first people who dived for that information were spammers, who used it to log into people’s Facebook accounts and email and send massive amounts of penis enlargement spam and other weird nonsense — for their own monetary gain, of course. (Happened to me, which is why I’m never, ever going to comment on a blog again.) It was an inconvenience at worst, but the point remains: the collateral damage wasn’t done to Gawker, it was done to people whose chief crime was wanting to respond to a post about the Doctor Who Christmas special or to tell other like-minded people what their favorite note-taking app for the iPhone was.

That complete lack of interest in the damage inflicted upon innocent bystanders is psychopathic. It’s putting one’s own political or personal ideology, or simple desire to feel like God, above the well-being of others. It is, in fact, precisely the sort of thing that people despise about corporations and governments in the first place.

But most of the hackers I know winked and tut-tutted at the whole thing, or the Anonymous attacks on Visa and MasterCard and Paypal. Because, really, anybody stupid enough to use the same password for all their accounts — or to use credit or debit or online payment systems — really deserved what they got, right?

The same way a woman who’s assaulted while walking down the street dressed provocatively deserves what she gets, for being so stupid, right?

Which brings us back to Wikileaks, in a roundabout way. The debate over the sexual assault case against Julian Assange has become incredibly tedious to me. I don’t know if he raped or assaulted those two women, and neither do you. I do find the reaction of the Swedish authorities and Interpol to be a bit unlikely, at the very least: I can’t think of any other occasion when Interpol put an APB out on someone accused — not convicted — of sexual assault. Whether the charges were politically motivated or not, the response very obviously is.

But as for the charges themselves, I care as much as I care about any other investigation into assault charges involving people I don’t know, which is not a whole hell of a lot. Sorry. If it happened the way the women say it did, Assange needs to answer for it. If not, he should walk. That’s the level of my concern and care now. The hysteria on every side of that debate (feminist, anti-feminist, conspiracist) has just become horrible noise.

For the record, here’s what I believe about Wikileaks:

1) I don’t think they’re journalists, in the traditional sense. There’s no journalism going on; just massive data dumping. Redacting things isn’t the same as verifying material, putting it into perspective; all the things traditional journalists would do. (Snarky prick alert: Nor do I think that traditional journalism is just “Old Media” and totally lame and the past, and that Wikileaks is the “new way” and totally awesome and the future, and if you do I don’t care, because I’ve walked every side of that particular fence and I know every inch of it by feel and smell and I doubt you do, so be quiet. That debate is deeply nuanced and it’s not played out yet.)

2) I absolutely, utterly, completely believe that the American government has no right to prosecute Julian Assange or to attack Wikileaks in any way. He’s not an American citizen and he does not fall under American jurisdiction. Even if he was, it’s fairly clear he would fall under First Amendment and whistleblower protection, the same way that Daniel Ellsberg was when he gave out the Pentagon Papers. It would also be a grievous moral act on my government’s part…not that anybody seems to care about that anymore.

3) I believe that what Wikileaks has done with the Afghanistan information and with these diplomatic cables is not going to make the American government more transparent in its dealings with its citizens or with other nations. It’s going to have the opposite effect: it’s going to make people who are already paranoid about information leakage a lot more paranoid. And I don’t like the idea of hyper-paranoid people with their finger on the metaphorical button or buttons.

4) I don’t believe that Assange gave one nimble rat’s fuck about the collateral damage he might cause by releasing this information, any more than the Anonymous hackers who’ve been hacking into things in his name did about the damage they might cause. Assange strikes me as a rather archetypal sociopathic black-hat hacker type. I’ve debated other people who are involved in Wikileaks, and it’s my impression that several of them are precisely the kind of libertarian hackers I’ve been talking about; from everything I’ve seen, so is Assange. I could be wrong about that, but based on the evidence I’ve seen, that’s my guess.

I’m also bemused by the sheer hypocrisy that is being shown by every player in this affair. Assange wants transparency but gets outraged when somebody leaks details of his sexual assault case to the Guardian; Anonymous wants to tear down the walls of the secret-keepers, but do so from behind their own obscuring wall of anonymity; the hacker community that is so vocally supporting Assange’s attack upon secrecy are the same people who routinely also bitch about the government spying on them and searching them at airports and trying to make them, as private citizens and as business operators, pay their full share of taxes. I’m a big believer in consistency of thought and action: you can’t have it both ways, kids. You want an end to secrecy, fine; but that means your secrets can be spilled too.

Do I ultimately think Wikileaks is a good thing? Yes. And no. Both. Either way, I think it’s a Pandora’s box that has been irrevocably opened. Things are going to change because of this; the whole notion of privacy and secrecy is going to be turned upside down, not just for governments but for all of us. I also think this is the beginning of a new era of net warfare, played out between governments and NGOs and groups that don’t even have memberships or know who they themselves are, like Anonymous. I think the main outcome is going to be that living online is going to get a whole lot more irritating.

And I’d like to believe that, just like with the mythical Pandora’s box, hope still lies somewhere at the bottom of all of this.

(For further reading, Big Bruce Sterling‘s thoughts on all this.)

Wikileaks thoughts

Something occurred to me today; or rather, it’s been bubbling up in my subconscious for a while and finally came to the surface. I wonder why I haven’t ever heard anyone else mention this in public. (Maybe they have; I haven’t seen it.)

It occurred to me that if I were working in either the governmental or private intelligence communities, Wikileaks would seem to me to be a remarkably useful tool for playing infowar games.

Wikileaks is a totally independent quasi-organization that will publish any significant leaked information packages they receive, without naming the source, so long as (presumably) the information can be verified to be accurate. Correct?

Now: everyone assumes Bradley Manning is the source for the Cablegate documents, but nobody’s confirmed or denied this, and it wouldn’t really matter if they had. I find it hard to believe Manning could have gotten access to those (non-military) documents and compiled them without nobody noticing, but then, maybe the people who run security for the government really are that stupid.

But let’s imagine another alternative: let’s say you run intel for a large government. Say China, because the Chinese government is very interested in information warfare. Let’s say you managed to get your hands on these diplomatic cables.

As intel, they’re nearly worthless, as Umberto Eco points out. Nothing of any real value. A mess o’ pottage.

But wait. What if I were to leak this hunk of useless shit to Julian Assange? Carefully edited to remove anything we don’t like, of course, and leaving in anything we want to use to send a message. (Like that we’re engaging in unofficial attacks on one of the US’s major info hubs. Google assuredly knew this was happening, but didn’t say anything. Terrorism, by definition, is the act of instilling fear in people for political gain. Think about it.)

I can submit it anonymously or create a false identity to reach out to Wikileaks. Either way, it won’t be traced back to me by the public because Wikileaks has a vested interest in maintaining trust with potential whistleblowers. Wikileaks is a non-governmental group, which is in fact condemned by a number of major governments, whose stated goal is transparency and accountability. So nobody’s going to suspect I’m using them as a cat’s-paw.

If Wikileaks attempts to verify the information with the US government (officially or surreptitiously) they’ll discover that it does indeed stand up, because most of it is quite legitimate, and it seems unlikely that Wikileaks has a way of checking the integrity of each document in the whole big mess.

I know that people will pore over it; eventually they’ll find whatever it was I wanted them to find, and trumpet it to the world. And it can’t ever be traced back to me or the government that employs me.

Meanwhile, I drop a few grand in the Wikileaks PayPal account just to keep things running smoothly.

I’m not saying this is what happened with the Cablegate documents. But does it really sound impossible or even unlikely? The very nature of what Wikileaks does means that there’s no transparency in their sourcing of information. If I did work in intelligence, I’d be working on ways to use that to my advantage. I mean, Assange says he’s going to drop info on a major US bank next. Fine, but which one? Who gave him the information? Who stands to benefit from Wikileaks exposure?

I don’t actually doubt Assange’s sincerity or his motives, really. But that doesn’t mean his sources are pure or altruistic. And if somebody smart enough wanted to use Wikileaks as a tool for governmental or corporate skullduggery, I don’t see what, in theory, would prevent them.

Just a thought.