Chinese Internet Traffic Redirected to Small Wyoming House

In one of the more bizarre twists in recent Internet memory, much of the Internet traffic in China was redirected to a small, 1,700-square-foot house in Cheyenne, Wyo., on Tuesday.

A large portion of China’s 500 million Internet users were unable to load websites ending in .com, .net or .org for nearly eight hours in most regions of China, according to Compuware, a Detroit-based technology company.

The China Internet Network Information Center, a state-run agency that deals with Internet affairs, said it had traced the problem to the country’s domain name system. And one of China’s biggest antivirus software vendors, Qihoo 360 Technology, said the problems affected roughly three-quarters of the country’s domain name system servers.

Those servers, which act as a switchboard for Internet traffic behind China’s Great Firewall, routed traffic from some of China’s most popular sites, including Baidu and Sina, to a block of Internet addresses registered to Sophidea Incorporated, a mysterious company housed on a residential street in Cheyenne, Wyo.

A simple Google search reveals that the address on Thomes Avenue in Cheyenne is not a corporate headquarters, but a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn.

That address — which is home to some 2,000 companies on paper — was the subject of a lengthy 2011 Reuters investigation that found that among the entities registered to the address were a shell company controlled by a jailed former Ukraine prime minister; the owner of a company charged with helping online poker operators evade an Internet gambling ban; and one entity that was banned from government contracts after selling counterfeit truck parts to the Pentagon.

by Nicole Perlroth, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Reuters

The Tipping Point (E-Commerce Version)

The news around shopping during the holiday season was dominated by two separate stories. One talked about how traffic to brick-and-mortar stores was well below expectations, and that these retailers were forced to discount tremendously to drive sales. The other talked about how an enormous late surge in packages coming from e-commerce companies overwhelmed the capacity of UPS and, to a lesser extent, FedEx, and caused many of these packages to arrive after Christmas.

But, to me, these two stories are not at all separate, they simply reflect different sides of the same narrative: We’re in the midst of a profound structural shift from physical to digital retail. (...)

The data suggests that there are two very different patterns going on with respect to e-commerce penetration. The two largest categories — “Food and Beverage” and “Health and Personal Care” — show e-commerce penetration well below the overall average. These categories essentially are the domains of grocery stores and drug stores, and e-commerce (at least to date) has achieved only modest penetration of these massive categories (but Amazon Fresh has designs on changing that).

The other four categories are what I would consider to be the domains of traditional specialty retail categories, the ones that are transacted in the malls of America. All of these demonstrate e-commerce penetration well above the overall average, ranging from a low of 12 percent for “Clothing and Accessories,” up to 24 percent for “Media, Sporting and Hobby Goods.” It’s in these specialty retail categories where e-commerce to date has had its strongest impact.

One additional observation is that the pace of online share gain in the specialty retail categories shows absolutely no signs of slowing down. All of these charts are “up and to the right.”

So it’s clear that a growing share of the retail pie in the specialty retail categories is being captured by e-commerce. Now let’s throw in one more massive complication for brick-and-mortar retailers in these categories: The total retail sales in these markets have been extremely sluggish, and have barely recovered back to pre-recession levels. This is a toxic combination — physical retailers in these categories are losing share of a total retail pie that isn’t growing.

by Jeff Jordan, Andreesen Horowitz |  Read more:

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Jean Arp, Bird and Necktie
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Li Kuchan
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Now is Not Forever

Sometimes the Internet surprises us with the past or, to be more precise, its own past. The other day my social media feed started to show the same clip over and over. It was one I had seen years before and forgotten about, back from the bottom of that overwhelming ocean of content available to us at any given moment. Why was it reappearing now, I wondered? (...)

The more I kept seeing this clip in my feed, though, the more clear it became that its uncanniness didn’t just derive from the original feature’s depiction of primitive modems and computer monitors — and a Lady Di hairsyle — but also the fact that it had returned from the depths of the Internet to remind us, once more, that wedid see this world coming.

The information age is doing strange things to our sense of history. If you drive in the United States, particularly in warm-weather places like California or Florida, you won’t have to look too hard to see cars from the 1980s still on the road. But a computer from that era seems truly ancient, as out of sync with our own times as a horse and buggy.

Stranger still is the feeling of datedness that pervades the Internet’s own history. For someone my daughter’s age, imagining life before YouTube is as unsettling a prospect as imagining life before indoor plumbing. And yet, even though she was only seven when the site debuted, she was already familiar with the Internet before then.

But it isn’t just young people who feel cut off from the Internet that existed prior to contemporary social media. Even though I can go on the Wayback Machine to check out sites I was visiting in the 1990s; even though I contributed to one of the first Internet publications, Bad Subjects: Political Education For Everyday Life, and can still access its content with ease; even though I know firsthand what it was like before broadband, when I would wait minutes for a single news story to load, my memories still seem to fail me. I remember, but dimly. I can recall experiences from pre-school in vivid detail, yet struggle to flesh out my Internet past from a decade ago, before I started using Gmail.

What the clip that resurfaced the other day makes clear is that history is more subjective than ever. Some parts seem to be moving at more or less the same pace that they did decades or even centuries ago. But others, particularly those that focus on computer technology, appear ten or even a hundred times as fast. If you don’t believe me, try picking up the mobile phone you used in 2008.

by Charlie Bertsch, Souciant | Read more:
Image: Michael Surran

Obama, Melville and the Tea Party

“Benito Cereno” tells the story of Amasa Delano, a New England sea captain who, in the South Pacific, spends all day on a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans who he thinks are slaves. They aren’t. Unbeknown to Delano, they had earlier risen up, slaughtered most of the crew and demanded that the captain, Benito Cereno, return them home to Senegal. After Delano boards the ship (to offer his assistance), the West Africans keep their rebellion a secret by acting as if they are still slaves. Their leader, a man named Babo, pretends to be Cereno’s loyal servant, while actually keeping a close eye on him.

Melville narrates the events from the perspective of the clueless Delano, who for most of the novella thinks Cereno is in charge. As the day progresses, Delano grows increasingly obsessed with Babo and the seeming affection with which the West African cares for the Spanish captain. The New Englander, liberal in his sentiments and opposed to slavery as a matter of course, fantasizes about being waited on by such a devoted and cheerful body servant.

Delano believes himself a free man, and he defines his freedom in opposition to the smiling, open-faced Babo, who he presumes has no interior life, no ideas or interests of his own. Delano sees what he wants to see. But when Delano ultimately discovers the truth — that Babo, in fact, is the one exercising masterly discipline over his inner thoughts, and that it is Delano who is enslaved to his illusions — he responds with savage violence.

Barack Obama may have avoided the fate of the protagonist of “Invisible Man,” but he hasn’t been able to escape the shadow of Babo. He is Babo, or at least he is to a significant part of the American population — including many of the white rank and file of the Republican Party and the Tea Party politicians they help elect.

“Benito Cereno” is based on a true historical incident, which I started researching around the time Mr. Obama announced his first bid for the presidency. Since then, I’ve been struck by the persistence of fears, which began even before his election, that Mr. Obama isn’t what he seems: that instead of being a faithful public servant he is carrying out a leftist plot hatched decades ago to destroy America; or if not that, then he is a secret Muslim intent on supplanting the Constitution with Islamic law; or a Kenyan-born anti-colonialist out to avenge his native Africa.

No other American president has had to face, before even taking office, an opposition convinced of not just his political but his existential illegitimacy. In order to succeed as a politician, Mr. Obama had to cultivate what many have described as an almost preternatural dominion over his inner self. He had to become a “blank screen,” as Mr. Obama himself has put it, on which others could project their ideals — just as Babo is for Delano. Yet this intense self-control seems to be what drives the president’s more feverish detractors into a frenzy; they fill that screen with hatreds drawn deep from America’s historical subconscious.

by Greg Grandin, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Corbis

John Pollard, Estuary
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Super Sunday, and the Crowd Goes, Um, Silent

Fans of the Seattle Seahawks collectively call themselves the 12th Man, an extra player with a noise level so pounding at their home stadium that seismologists have recorded minor earthquakes during big plays.

Fans of the Denver Broncos have a long reputation for noise that rattles visiting opponents, too, including a tradition of stamping their feet to create a rumbling called Rocky Mountain Thunder.

Both franchises used the high-decibel help of their hometown crowds to help win conference championship games Sunday. But when their teams meet in the Super Bowl on Feb. 2 at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., Seattle’s 12th Man and Denver’s Rocky Mountain Thunder will be mere echoes from distant time zones.

The Super Bowl is where the National Football League’s famed fan noise goes to die. What the hundreds of millions of viewers around the world may not realize, from the comfort of couches in front of big-screen televisions with the volume turned high, is just how strangely quiet it can be at a Super Bowl game.

“There’s not a lot of crowd noise,” said Ron Jaworski, an ESPN analyst who was the quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles when they reached the Super Bowl at the end of the 1980 season. “People mostly sit on their hands, outside of the fans that buy the tickets for the team. It’s kind of a corporate get-together.” (...)

“It takes on the atmosphere of a game being played on a Hollywood soundstage,” the CBS broadcaster Jim Nantz said.

The broadcaster Al Michaels has covered eight Super Bowls. The loudest he can recall was Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa, Fla., where Pittsburgh fans far outnumbered those of the Arizona Cardinals as the Steelers won with a last-minute touchdown pass.

“Even then, you probably had half the fans there as neutral observers,” Michaels said. “I can’t think of a time where it would ever sound like it would sound in any other venue.”

He added: “If the game is not very good, there is nothing. It might as well be played out in a park.

by John Branch, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

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You Bought It, You Own It?

In the week leading up the two-year anniversary of the SOPA blackout protests, EFF and others are talking about key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day, we'll take on a different piece, exploring what’s at stake and and what we need to do to make sure the law promotes creativity and innovation. We've put together a page where you can read and endorse the principles yourself. Let's send a message to DC, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Brussels, and wherever else folks are making new copyright rules: We're from the Internet, and we're here to help.

You bought it, you own it, right? Not always. Over the past decade, we have been quietly shifting to a world in which both digital goods (like mp3s, video files, and ebooks) and physical goods that contain software (like cars, microwaves, and phones) are never truly owned, but only rented.

Not to worry, say big copyright holders; people don’t want to be owners, because all they really care about is “access,” and more and more content is being made “accessible” in more and more ways. Sure, you might have to pay a premium for the “privilege” of, say, watching the movie you “bought” on more than one device, but no one’s forcing you to do it. Besides, they tell policymakers, just give us more tools to punish unauthorized uses and we promise to build more “authorized” channels – as long as users are willing to pay for them.

There are a lot of reasons they are wrong. Here's just a few:

First, most people have no idea that all they bought was a license. After all, the button they clicked on the Amazon site said "Buy," not "Rent." Little do they know that Amazon has the right to (for example) remotely delete books from their library, without notice, at Amazon’s whim. Or that the holiday special they were planning to see might suddently become "unavailable."

Second, many users don’t just want to “access” content, they want to comment on it and use it in new and different contexts. They want to view it or listen to it via devices and services that don't necessarily have the blessing of the copyright holder. They want to lend a book to a friend, or make a copy on the laptop they are bringing overseas, and they don’t think they should have to pay extra to exercise these basic consumer rights. They want to resell the music and books they are bored with, and use the money to buy new material. Some, like librarians, want to make copies in order to preserve, protect and share our cultural commons.

Third, any notion that “access” is enough cannot possibly make sense when copyright law is inserting itself into arenas beyond movies, books, and music, such as devices. From phones to cars to refrigerators to farm equipment, software is helping your stuff work better and smarter, with awesome new features. And that’s great . . . until it breaks and you want to fix it yourself (or take it to a local repair shop you trust). Or you think of a way to make it work even better that requires tinkering with the software (or some third party does). Or you want to give it to a friend, or re-sell it. Then, you have a problem. Why? Because the license agreementattached to the software in that device (often called an “End User License Agreement” or "Terms of Service") is likely to restrict your ability to tinker with your stuff. Typical clauses forbid reverse-engineering (i.e., figuring out how the software works so you can adapt it), transfer (i.e., giving it to a friend), and even using unauthorized repair sources at all.

Further complication: the software may come with digital locks (aka Digital Rights Management or DRM) supposedly designed to prevent unauthorized copying. And breaking those locks, even to do something simple and otherwise legal like tinkering with or fixing your own devices, could mean breaking the law, thanks to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

And then there’s repair-manual lockdown, which happens when manufacturers refuse to publish crucial repair information (including the manuals themselves, but also things like diagnostic codes for cars)—and then threaten to sue anyone else who tries to do so with a lawsuit for copyright infringement.

The end result: fair uses are impeded, users are disempowered, trained to go hat in hand to the Apple store just to change a battery (rather than doing it themselves). Users are forced to make do with DRM-crippled devices that are fundamentally defective and compromiseour security. Medical clinics must waste scarce resources on expensive repair contracts rather than patient care. Independent repair shops are driven out of business. And the electronic waste piles up, as users discard their devices rather then fixing them or donating them for re-use.

In 2005, Make magazine published the Maker’s Bill of Rights, also known as the Owner’s Manifesto. As author Mr. Jalopy succinctly put it, “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” These days, the question is not just whether you can open the hood – it’s whether opening the hood might land you in court.

Here’s the good news: there’s growing movement to defend your right to own your stuff – and to make sure ownership continues to mean something. Join us.

by Corynne McSherry, EFF |  Read more:
Image: EFF

Hotel California's Global Reach

Usually, the songs that pounded out of the bars and jukeboxes were the latest Top 40 smashes—“Material Girl” and “Smooth Operator” and “Time After Time.” There was also a steady supply of All-American favorites like “Country Roads” and “Hotel California,” and nobody seemed to think it strange that Filipinos should be singing, “Take me home, country roads, to the land that I adore, West Virginia…” I felt as if I were living inside a Top 40 radio station.
—Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu

Whenever I hear Neil Young sing about a “town in north Ontario” where there’s “memory to spare,” I’m transported back to a hillside in northern California in the early 1970s. I’m twelve and sitting with a friend the same age. We’re at summer camp and he’s teaching me the simple chord changes to “Helpless,” which is about to become the first song I can play on guitar.

Music does for me what biting into a madeleine did for that character in Proust’s novel: it sends me hurtling through time and space to a specific moment in the past. I’m sure this is true for many other people as well. And they, too, surely often end up in places far removed from the settings mentioned in the songs that set them in memory-fueled motion.

This is why, ever since reading Video Night in Kathmandu, with its wonderful evocation of mid-1980s Manila, where “music buzzed through the streets” from “dawn to midnight,” I’ve wanted to ask Pico Iyer a question: “When Don Henley begins crooning about a ‘dark desert highway’ in California, are you suddenly back in Manila and in your late twenties again?” (...)

What then of “Hotel California”? Whenever I hear Don Felder’s distinctive guitar opening now, I’m instantly in a New Delhi café in a supremely jet-lagged, disoriented state. I’d been in India less than 24 hours when that song from my teenage years in California became the first one I ever heard in India.

The mechanism of this musical memory must be somewhat different from the one that sends me to China whenever John Denver waxes nostalgic about the Shenandoah Valley. For while I had heard “Country Roads” plenty of times before going to Shanghai, I had never thought much about it, nor did I associate it with any special setting or moment. The Eagles, by contrast, were a group I listened to—and thought about—a lot while growing up in California, dreaming of a career as a singer-songwriter. And long before “Hotel California” began evoking an Indian café on my first visit to the country in 2010, it made me think of a very different time, place, and companion.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, whenever I heard “Hotel California,” I would be transported back to an afternoon in the 1970s in the west LA home of close family friends, soon after the album Hotel California was released. The house was one I hung out at a lot in those days. I was close to two of the three brothers in the family, Danny and David.

In this moment, David keeps picking the needle up off the turntable and restarting the song after first twenty and then thirty and then forty seconds of it have played. He is determined, in a way that fascinates me because it seems to border on the obsessive, to figure out how to replicate exactly the song’s bass line. The intensity of his focus strikes me as special, because I can never get myself to work as hard as David on mastering a lick. (It isn’t until later that I realize he is equally bemused as a teenager by how long I can spend worrying over and reworking a lyric I’ve written, which already seems to work fine in terms of meter and rhyme.)

It took the strangeness of hearing the song right after arriving in India to break the memory hold of that west LA living room, but by the time that happened, I had already spent years thinking about the song’s peculiar global ubiquity. Seeing it mentioned in Video Nights in Katmandu was one thing that got me thinking about this topic, but so did noticing how often, from the mid-1990s on, I would hear the strains of the song at least once during my periodic return visits to China. I also began to notice how often I would see the song mentioned on Beijing-based blogs, often disparagingly.

by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Boom | Read more:
Image: Video courtesy Boing Boing

Robert Doisneau - Atelier de Pierre Imans, 1945.
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Nerd Bowl

It's been called the "Nerd Bowl" because the teams hail from the hi-tech cities of San Francisco and Seattle. But – excepting perhaps for the cheerleaders – the clash on Sunday between the San Francisco 49ers and the Seattle Seahawks for a place in next month's Super Bowl will be a display of instinctual brutality.

Stoked by a rivalry dating back to the Gold Rush, the game is set to play out a more contemporary regional dispute: the Seahawks are owned by Paul Allen and draw support from Microsoft, the firm he co-founded, and the global shopping behemoth Amazon; the 49ers have established roots not only in San Francisco but increasingly in Silicon Valley, where Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter have their headquarters. (...)

"It's a neurotic rivalry because the cities are so similar," says Al Saracevic, sports editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. "They're both liberal cities on the west coast, coffee-obsessed, technology-obsessed and clearly football-obsessed."

The feud, say commentators, is not just play-acting for television. "I don't know anybody in here that likes anybody on the Seahawks. If you find one, let me know," insists San Francisco lineman Alex Boone.

The dislike, it seems, is mutual and the competitiveness between the teams and their fans has been exaggerated by a rivalry between their hard-headed coaches, Jim Harbaugh of the 49ers and Pete Carroll. "They're both good coaches and they've built arguably the best teams in the country," says Saracevic. "Now they're both looking at the Super Bowl – the biggest prize on the table."

But if technology rivalry means little to players on the field, it is more real in the two regions. Seattle prides itself on engineering skills and businesses that seek to establish relationships with their customers, dismissing Silicon Valley's recent tech contributions as social media software designed to gather users' data to sell to advertisers.

by Edward Helmore, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Reuters/USA Today Sports

How Japan Stood Up to Old Age

John Creighton Campbell, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, has devoted much of his career to studying responses to ageing in Japan. He takes issue with some fellow academics who associate what has become known as Japan’s “hyper-ageing” with inevitable economic catastrophe, even civilisational collapse. One virtue of the ageing “crisis”, he says, is that it happens slowly and predictably, giving governments, labour markets and society in general time to adjust. By around 2017, the number – though not the proportion – of over-65s will actually stabilise, he says, meaning the costs associated with ageing will tend to level off.

As far back as the early 1960s, the government became aware of the imminent ageing problem and began to establish nursing homes and home helpers. In the 1970s, benefits for retirees were more than doubled and a system of virtually free healthcare for older people was established. In 1990, Japan introduced the “Gold Plan”, expanding long-term care services. Ten years later, it started to worry about how to pay for it, and imposed mandatory insurance for long-term care. All those over 40 are obliged to contribute. The scheme’s finances are augmented with a 50 per cent contribution from taxes and recipients are charged a co-payment on a means-tested basis. Even then, there have been financing problems and the government has had to scale back the level of services provided. Still, Campbell calls it “one of the broadest and most generous schemes in the world”.

As a result of these and other adaptations, he argues, Japan has struck a reasonable balance between providing care and controlling costs. Other countries, including Britain, have studied Japan closely for possible lessons. Of course, 15 years of deflation have left Japan’s overall finances in lousy shape, with a public debt-to-output ratio of 240 per cent, the highest in the world. Spending on healthcare per capita, however, is among the lowest of advanced nations, though outcomes are among the best.

by David Pilling, FT |  Read more:

Image: Tohiski Senoue

Auguste Herbin (French, 1882-1960), Nature morte au melon, 1920-26.
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Outsourcing Haiti

Across the country from Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, miles of decrepit pot-holed streets give way to a smooth roadway leading up to the gates of the Caracol Industrial Park, but no further. The fishing hamlet of Caracol, from which the park gets its name, lies around the bend down a bumpy dirt road. Four years after the earthquake that destroyed the country on January 12, 2010, the Caracol Industrial Park is the flagship reconstruction project of the international community in Haiti. Signs adorn nearby roads, mostly in English, declaring the region “Open for Business.” In a dusty field, hundreds of empty, brightly colored houses are under construction in neat rows. If all goes as hoped for by the enthusiastic backers of the industrial park, this area could be home to as many as 300,000 additional residents over the next decade.

The plan for the Caracol Industrial Park project actually predates the 2010 earthquake. In 2009, Oxford University economist Paul Collier released a U.N.–sponsored report outlining a vision for Haiti’s economic future; it encouraged garment manufacturing as the way forward, noting U.S. legislation that gave Haitian textiles duty-free access to the U.S. market as well as “labour costs that are fully competitive with China . . . [due to] its poverty and relatively unregulated labour market.”

The report, embraced by the U.N. and the U.S., left a mark on many of the post-earthquake planning documents. Among the biggest champions of the plan were the Clintons, who played a crucial role in attracting a global player to Haiti. While on an official trip to South Korea as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton brought company officials from one of the largest South Korean manufacturers to the U.S. embassy to sell them on the idea. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, having just appointed Bill Clinton U.N. special envoy to Haiti, tapped connections in his home country, South Korea.

Then suddenly, the earthquake presented an opportunity for the Clintons and the U.N. to fast track their plans. The U.S. government and its premiere aid agency, USAID, formed an ambitious plan to build thousands of new homes, create new industries, and provide new beginnings for those who lost everything in the earthquake. Originally the plan was to build the industrial park near Port-au-Prince. But land was readily available in the North, and the hundreds of small farmers who had to be moved from the park’s site were far less resistant than the wealthy land-owners in the capital. So the whole project moved to the Northern Department, to Caracol. Under the banner of decentralization and economic growth, the Caracol Industrial Park, with the Korean textile manufacturer Sae-A as its anchor tenant, became the face of Haiti’s reconstruction.

Now, only 750 homes have been built near Caracol, and the only major tenant remains Sae-A. New ports and infrastructure have been delayed and plagued by cost overruns. Concerns over labor rights and low wages have muted the celebration of the 2,500 new jobs created. For those who watched pledges from international donors roll in after the earthquake, reaching a total of $10 billion, rebuilding Haiti seemed realistic. But nearly four years later, there is very little to show for all of the aid money that has been spent. Representative Edward Royce (R-CA), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, bluntly commented in October that “while much has been promised, little has been effectively delivered.”

The story of how this came to pass involves more than the problems of reconstruction in a poor country. While bad governance, corruption, incompetent bureaucracy, power struggles, and waste contributed to the ineffective use of aid, what happened in Haiti has more to do with the damage caused by putting political priorities before the needs of those on the ground.

by Jake Johnston, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image Jake Johnston

Cooking Tako (Octopus)

 

Octopus Demystified

[ed. My nephew's recipe: massage tako (octopus) with Hawaiian salt for about 5 min. to de-slime and soften, remove webbing, boil in salt water for about 1/2 hr., or long enough to slide a fork gently into the tenticles. Optional: grill the cooked tako for a minute or two to give a crisp and slightly smoky exterior.]