Compare this to this. Interesting differences, yes?

I completely agree with Bruce. First, does anyone really believe that the TSA needs all “72 airlines[’ ...] June 2004 domestic passenger flight records” in order to test their system? Assuming the system were verifiable, a sample of real data would be sufficient. Second, how will they know the difference between a successful test and a failed test? Did they catch a set of actual terrorists through other means in June 2004, so that they have a group of expected true positive matches? Seems unlikely, given the publicity that each minor incident has raised.

No, the purpose of the TSA test is not to verify their system -- such verification isn’t possible, and if it were, all 72 airlines would not need to participate for a valid test sample. The real test the TSA is running is whether or not the airlines will comply, and how badly the public will freak out.

The airlines have complied -- test 1 passed. So, onto test 2. This would be a great time to write your congresspeople and freak out.

Matt Haughey is getting beaten up in the comments of his post about ad banners coming to TiVo, but he’s absolutely right to complain about TiVo’s move. This is a big deal, yet another chapter (along with the recent TiVo-to-Go and Macrovision moves, and others in the past) in the “two masters” problem for TiVo.

TiVo’s original pitch was that it transformed television viewing for the audience -- here are the set of features that you want to make it “TV your way.” Most prominent among these features was ad-skipping -- certainly the reason I bought a TiVo. Ad banners during ad-skipping are, at the very least, an odd choice, and they dilute and poison the “TV your way” message. Matt’s detractors have claimed that sophisticated TiVo users will be able to get around the new feature with the undocumented 30-second skip command, but they miss the point.

Jeff Bezos apparently likes to say that Amazon always tries to “delight the user” with the site’s features; similarly, Steve Jobs talks about “lickable” user interfaces. Don Norman’s recent book “Emotional Design” talks in depth about the emotional reactions great products give us. TiVo is still usable with banner ads, and it may still be possible for power users to avoid them altogether, but by any interpretation, a person who bought a TiVo to skip ads will not be delighted to see banner ads in their place. They will be annoyed.

Open source projects are often spurred by developers trying to “scratch an itch” they personally feel. TiVo has just spread Acme itching powder all over their product. With competition from above in the form of cable company DVRs, and from below in open source DVRs, is that really the right move? Do they expect the revenue from their banner ads to cover the potential lost revenue from users who come to distrust their motives?

TiVo is still thinking like a small company that has no option but bare survival. They should start thinking like a fighter. If they don’t fight for their users, they will wind up fighting with their users, and that’s a fight they’ll lose.

Since Nelson and I have both been grousing about Mac OS X’s Terminal.app, I did some more research. Command-doubleclick will open an URL in Terminal.app, but only if the URL is one line long. Here’s a better solution:

1. Download and install iTerm.
2. Edit “iTerm -> Preferences -> General -> Characters considered part of a word” to have the value:

   /*_-~+@%&.:;$,?=#
   

   Documentation of this step found here. I added a ‘%’ sign to the string.

Now Command-click in iTerm will open an URL, even if it wraps over several lines.

Update: I updated the suggested “word” line after finding a few holes and resorting to reading RFC 2396. I omitted ‘!’, “’”, “(“, and “)” because I think those would cause more parse errors than they would solve in this context.

I have to say I found this summary of the White House reaction to TIME Magazine’s article about Raven Rock, Dick Cheney’s previously “undisclosed location,” pretty hilarious.

Let me just state for the record that if Apple were to release a car stereo head unit, I would be first in line to buy it. I would even replace my old, 2G iPod with a shiny new iPod at whatever price they asked. Steering wheel controls would be nice, but really all I need is a head unit with an iPod socket and nice controls. Let’s call it the iDash.

The car/iPod interface has been the worst part of the iPod experience -- getting the iPod music playing out of the car speakers is ridiculously hard, and just finding a place to rest the iPod while it plays is comic. I’ve tried using cassette adapters, which fake out the tape deck into playing iPod tunes, but they have consistently died on me, either fraying at the cable that dangles out of the deck or frying in the heat (just like a real cassette!). I’ve tried using mini FM transmitters like the Griffin iTrip, but the sound quality is terrible and finding a free radio channel in the Bay Area is impossible. (I had one for a while, until some anti-enterprising San Franciscans launched a pirate radio station on it.) I’ve tried removing the CD changer and using an RCA adapter to wire the iPod in directly, which, modulo the cables trailing from the trunk to the front, was great for sound and stability -- until the damn thing shorted out and took the turn signals, gas gauge, and brake lights with it, a $600 repair. Now I’m back to the cassette adapter, and I pack it into my bag every day as I head out of the car. What a pain.

Too many head units don’t provide auxiliary input, and all the solutions on the market are half-assed and clunky. A fantastic Apple head unit would be an amazing tool for the iPod, and would really change the car stereo experience.

Microsoft wasted a bunch of money on car PCs a few years ago. Wouldn’t it be funny if the iDash gave Apple a entry point to automotive computing?

Mark Frauenfelder blogged today about the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), a futures market run by the University of Iowa for studying predictions of political elections and other events. I love the idea of these markets and have been following them closely. While the Policy Analysis Market caught some well-deserved criticism last summer, I didn’t think it was a crazy idea, but that it was more poorly explained than poorly conceived.

I was following the IEM during the Democratic Presidential primaries, and was disappointed with the results of what I saw. These markets are sometimes claimed to “predict the future,” and rightly so in that they can expose upcoming events that are for whatever reason non-obvious by conventional wisdom. It was not obvious to me that Howard Dean would suffer such an upset in the Iowa Caucuses, placing behind Kerry and Edwards when all the polls were showing a different result. After the shoes had all fallen, I went back to the IEM to see if these futures markets -- based, after all, in Iowa -- had been able to predict what many of us had missed.

It seems they did not. Graphs of the market’s activity show Dean and Clark (who placed sixth, behind Kerry, Edwards, Dean, Gephardt, and Kucinich) leading right up until the day of the caucuses, January 19th. Edwards, who placed second, wasn’t even offered as a separate contract until after the caucuses were closed (he was included in the “rest of field” contract). I’ve created a detail graph of the end-of-day contract prices (drawn from here) for Dean, Kerry and Clark in the days leading up to the caucuses, and they don’t show any clue that Dean was headed for a fall.

No one has claimed predictive markets are perfect, nor that they can forecast everything -- just that they tend to outperform other predictive measures. I’ll be interested to see if this idea takes greater hold over time, and gains in effectiveness as it involves more participants.

It’s interesting to read about Accenture and the award of the “Virtual Border” contract from the Department of Homeland Security. This Reuters article, like a recent NY Times article on the same topic, talks about the attempts by the House of Representatives to prevent Accenture receiving the contract, since Accenture’s corporate headquarters is not in the US -- it is in Bermuda.

What’s unfortunate about these articles is how obliquely they talk about the reason Accenture is based in Bermuda. According to Perfectly Legal by David Cay Johnston, the sole point of this is to reduce the corporate taxes Accenture pays -- they are essentially shopping for a nation with laws most favorable to their incorporation. In a chapter entitled “Profits Trump Patriotism,” Johnston talks about exactly this conflict between national security and awarding government contracts to quasi-foreign corporations -- including Accenture. It’s too bad the explanation of this issue isn’t more clear in the articles covering it -- especially since Johnston is a Times reporter.

I do think this is an interesting and important issue, and I’m glad to see the House taking some action on it.

Update: The article in Thursday’s Times has a somewhat better explanation of the issue.

I had a fine time watching the new Harry Potter movie last weekend -- you know it’s a better movie when it features a tree with more personality than some of the characters in the earlier episodes -- but was driven further down the road of hating movie theaters, which once I loved.

Movie theaters are increasingly hostile environments. At this one showing, we had:

• about twenty minutes of ads, exclusive of the previews (which are of course ads in themselves);
• a few minutes of live and recorded exhortations to keep quiet and turn off cell phones;
• a full row of people behind us talking (sounded like a real-time Italian translation of the whole movie);
• two people in front of us talking;
• three cell phone calls, unanswered;
• one cell phone call (directly behind us), answered (at least the Italian translation stopped for the duration of the call);
• $4 for popcorn and $3.75 for a bottle of water;
• $5 for parking;
• $2 in Moviefone fees for two tickets (optional, but at this movie arguably not if you wanted to see it opening weekend); oh, and
• $19 for two tickets to the movie.

It would certainly be cheaper to buy the movie on DVD and own it forever, than to watch it once for nearly twice the price; the popcorn would be better, cheaper, and faster, and could be topped with real butter instead of “topping”; the water would be tastier, colder, and available for $1.49 per 100 cubic feet; and the talking would be sanctioned or actionable. Plus, no ads. It’s no wonder home theater is booming.

One thing I didn’t see at this film was the increasingly common kill-thy-neighbor copyright warnings or maudlin pleas to spare Hollywood its looming, BitTorrential Napsterization. (I love hearing that downloading somehow affects the set painters but not the producers. Just once I’d like to see one of those trailers starring Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Eisner: “If you download movies, we’ll never be able to make Batman XXIII -- and you don’t want that, do you?”) Instead of these tear-jerkers, the Potter producers instead deployed night-vision equipped Voldemort Special Forces -- but predictably, they couldn’t prevent Harry and his friends from making it online just after the end of the first showing. That’s been a consistent pattern for more than five years, now, and I don’t think it’s due to get better any time soon.

What the movie industry doesn’t seem to realize is that the hostility of the theatrical experience -- up to and including their copyright pablum and their Maginot militarization -- is exactly what will drive people to try downloading movies to their home theaters. They are creating greater incentives for the technologies they fear the most. If Hollywood wants to keep “butts in seats” (as the saying goes), their “only hope” is to make the experience of being in those seats better.

I loved going to movie theaters because the crowd experience can’t be matched by any home theater. What would my first showing of Star Wars have been like without the lines, the gasps, and the applause? How can you match the experience of watching the scenes between Daniel Day-Lewis and Emily Watson in The Boxer without a full theater of people holding their breath to see what will happen? It’s not the same, and I’d miss not going to the theaters at all; but the experience I had last weekend, as with many of late, just isn’t worth it.

How is it possible for this article to make it into the New York Times a mere 11 days after this article without making a connection between them? (Of course, the audience is storming the projector on many more than just these two fronts.)

I’ve been reading a great book about World War II military intelligence -- one of those nonfiction books that makes you think no fiction writer will ever be up to the task. I was enjoying it as “pure” history (is there any such thing?), but today realized that it is incredibly useful for thinking about recent news regarding Ahmad Chalabi and Iranian intelligence, and the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq generally.

The book is The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War, by Thaddeus Holt (just published). The author, a former Deputy Under Secretary of the Army, describes with precision and wit how first the British and then the American military learned to deceive Germany and Japan regarding the Allied force strength and intentions. It’s the sort of book I would send to a Hollywood producer buddy if only Hollywood had any shot at not screwing it up (*ahem*).

Holt describes how the British “A” Force, the group charged with deception, undertook to cause German forces to take actions favorable to the British:

The object of a deception is not to induce the enemy commander to think something, but to induce him to do something: To act as you want him to act ... Your target is the mind of the enemy commander. You must judge what estimate of the situation given to him by his intelligence services will induce him to act as you wish. Your customers are the enemy intelligence services. You need to know how they operate, and what information given to them will induce them to give their commander the estimate of the situation that will cause him to act as you want him to act.

(p. 50.) The early learning process, in 1940-41, showed the British deceivers how to construct a “story” that would produce the desired effect:

[T]he most effective deception is one that confirms what the enemy already wants to believe; ... [A deception] “story” can be based on an operation that had been considered and rejected[.]

(p. 51.) I was particularly struck when reading the chapter on “The Customers” -- that is, the people to whom deceptive stories were passed, in order to induce a desired action:

Intelligence people in all wars tend by nature to inflate order of battle figures [to play it safe]; savvy commanders know this and make allowances for it.

And:

“Deception can never be effective either in love or in war,” Sir Michael Howard has well said, “unless there is a certain willingness to be deceived.”

(Both quotes from p. 101.)

How does all this apply to Iraq, WMD, Chalabi, and Iran? Well, we know that the Bush Administration has cited WMD as the key reason to go to war in Iraq, and that to date no such weapons have been found in the country. Suppose for a moment -- and I think this is a reasonable supposition, supported by Bob Woodward’s recent Plan of Attack and other sources -- that the Bush Administration really believed WMD existed in Iraq. Suppose also -- again, I think this is more than reasonable at this point -- that their belief was completely mistaken. The question that follows for me is, how did they make such a mistake?

Assume that no one in the US willfully made up the WMD story themselves in order to accomplish other goals (a complete contrivance is a remote possibility, but I suspect by now one of the originators would have leaked). Did the intelligence community provide the Administration with enough supporting material to make the case plausible, both to themselves and others? (Certainly seems that way.) Was it really just the Administration pushing the intelligence community for the answer they wanted -- did they effectively lie to themselves by forcing bad interpretations of innocuous data? Or did the inclination in the Administration towards action against Hussein meet with a deliberate attempt to deceive the US into action?

Holt’s book, of course, gives me no way to say one way or another -- but what it does show, I believe, is that all the conditions necessary for a deception existed:

• There was a “story” -- that Hussein had WMD;
• The furtherance of the story accomplished a clear object, the removal of Hussein from power;
• The story was based on real plans that Hussein seems to have abandoned;
• The story was bolstered by information given or suggested to the US intelligence agencies (Holt points out that deception is most useful when military forces are not in direct engagement but instead are planning for action);
• The story matched what the Bush Administration already wanted to believe about Iraq and Hussein;
• The story was built up over a long period of time; and
• The story was sufficient to prompt the US to take action.

If this was a planned deception -- and again, Holt makes it clear that much smaller-scale deceptions required tremendous planning efforts -- I wonder who planned it. Chalabi and his organization? That seems like it should not have succeeded since their interests were so clear and would have been so clear to everyone involved; plus, they seem unlikely to have been able to provide any logistical or physical support for the claims of defectors. Iran? I would have to say Iran is the primary suspect if a planned deception actually occurred: their interest in removing Hussein is clear; today’s Times article on the topic calls the Iranian spy service “one of the most sophisticated in the Middle East”; and they clearly had contact with Chalabi and could have fed him notional evidence to pass to the US. Others might suggest Israel, which would seem to have the sophistication but not, I suspect, any better access to Iraq than the US itself. I’d doubt even a very strong Israeli desire for Hussein’s removal could have produced this result by these means.

A few things don’t quite add up, here, suggesting that I’m taking my enjoyment of the book too far. If Iran was running a deception, and the US was reading Iranian intelligence traffic (see the NYT article), why didn’t we catch on earlier -- were they that careful? Why was Chalabi deliberately blown, and why did he tell the Iranians what he is accused of telling them? And finally -- why is this news coming out at all? Does the Bush Administration really hope the American public will forgive them for their mistaken war because they were lied to about WMD by Chalabi? That seems impossibly naive -- Mayberry Machiavellianism indeed!

In any case, the one thing more and more apparent to me, as I read further in Holt’s book, is that the Bush Administration decision-makers do not fall into the category of “savvy commanders” who make allowances for inflated intelligence estimates. It seems instead to have been the opposite -- that the intelligence estimates were not nearly enough to support the war effort, and they went ahead regardless. If they were systematically deceived, how much the deceivers must have celebrated at the enormity of their success, and the paltry effort needed to produce the action they desired.

Holt, by the way, is speaking this Friday in New York at City University of New York. I’d love to hear a report of what he says -- it would be interesting to see if he addresses this topic.

[A long first post! The next will be shorter and more amusing.]

-Marc