Zero to One-Eighty » business

Administrator, please

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:18:09 +0000

John Strand on Verizon store customer terminals:

As you can see the system is logged in with an account that has Administrator Privileges. There is no “hacking” this box…. You just walk up to it.

When he returned, without the adapter I needed, he noticed that I had the command prompt up. He asked me the basic questions like, “What the hell are you doing?” Which I answered truthfully with the necessary mitigation steps. You see, I am a pathetic, hopeless white hat. I spent a few seconds re-explaining the problem to him while his eyes glassed over. When I was done he said that he would need to take my name and a copy of my drivers license so he could run this “incident” by the management and possibly the police. It was my turn for my eyes to glass over and quickly leave the store. The irate store clerk was shocked that I would just walk away without complying with a perfectly sound and logical request to hand over my PII to a store that cannot secure a simple terminal.

To my horror, all of the Verizon stores in my area were set up the exact same way.

The moral of this story is not to use public terminals wherever you may find them, as the people who set them up ~~may not~~ usually don’t know what they are doing. (Read back through this year’s Philosecurity posts for more examples.)

The current days of the Internet

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 24 May 2009 05:18:24 +0000

Jeff Jarvis on Rupert Murdoch’s recently announced plan to start charging for online content using micropayments:

The problem here is the myth of regular readership. When I started newspaper sites, I had publishers on my rear because they expected people to read them every day, just as (they thought) people read newspapers. But just because the thing plops on the front porch every day, that doesn’t mean everybody reads everything—or sees every ad. That was the myth that fueled overpriced ad rates and overinflated editorial egos. Online, we get to see what people really read – and what it’s really worth to them—and that’s a lot less than we ever thought.

Dr. Evil is purported to have said, in relation to all this, that “the current days of the Internet will soon be over.”

I mean, Mr. Murdoch.

Industrious

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 04:59:56 +0000

Ted Dziuba on Google’s employee culture:

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, on the other hand, realized that not only do you need to hire the best engineers to have a successful software company, you also need to make them love you unconditionally. To cultivate that kind of blind faith, a quality Loompah needs an interesting project. It may not always make immediate business sense, but it’s the only way, if you want the servitude just right. Once you’ve convinced a Loompah that you really have his best interest at heart, you can put him on a boring, money-making project for a while. It’s this machinery that has kept Wonka rolling in cash, but made every product beyond Gmail a dud.

Speaking overconfidently as an ill-informed observer, this seems exactly right to me: that the key to the Google-type industrialism is 20% time. Many employee perks apply within the Google ecosystem, and job listings for small tech companies often fall over themselves trying to replicate something of this model—bring your dog to work, Aeron chairs, new MacBooks, widescreen displays, espresso machine—but it would seem that many of them miss the organisation’s cultural lynch-pin—one day a week, at work, to build whatever your heart desires.^†

† Carsonified, for example, give employees a four-day work week; apparently similar, though to my mind it lacks some of the underlying genius of 20% time: getting employees to associate ungoverned creativity with their employer by institutionalising personal interest in the workplace.

What’s next for EveryBlock?

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:52:10 +0000

EveryBlock’s grant ends on June 30. As project lead Adrian Holovaty explains, they are going to open source their code and they are looking for ideas from the community on viable business models:

We have a number of ideas for sustaining our project beyond a dependency on grants, like building a local advertising engine and/or selling hosted versions of the open-source software, but we’re sure there are other ways for EveryBlock to be a successful business. That brings me to the reason I’m posting this—we’re looking for ideas and partners who would be interested in helping us figure this out. If you have any ideas or suggestions, get in touch with me. I’m confident we’ll make something happen; it’s just a matter of how.

EveryBlock’s core innovation is to take existing public information (civic and municipal data, journalism, photographs, user reviews, etc.), and to expose it on the web based on the physical locations to which that information applies. Among other things, EveryBlock has played a key role in opening up government data on the web; Daniel X. O’Neil:

At EveryBlock, where my main role is to work with municipal governments to uncover new data sets, we’re experimenting with a new form of journalism where we treat freshly updated public records as block-level news. It’s a big job to acquire ongoing feeds of government data, and we have a broader goal of spreading the gospel of open data.

If you have thoughts I urge you to share them with the development team. EveryBlock is a point of genuine innovation that has produced a useful new service, in a landscape increasingly littered with irrelevance.

Update: On August 17, 2009 Adrian Holovaty announced that EveryBlock has been acquired by MSNBC.com:

We’ll continue to run the first and best microlocal news Web site on the planet, with the same six people, with the same logo and design, with the same everyblock.com domain. MSNBC.com has hired our whole team, and they’ve made it clear to us that we’ll be driving the site’s strategy and implementation, and that our site will remain an independent destination as a community service.

Sounds like good news.

Interview with a bastard

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:20:48 +0000

Sherri Davidoff recently published an enthralling conversation^† with adware developer Matt Knox, who worked for Direct Revenue. His job was to disable viruses that were bringing down machines their software was installed on, as well as to remove competing products. If I understand this right, an average machine running Knox’s software would end up with fewer viruses and adware.

It’s a great interview, mixing technical details with broader sociological questions, but one thing strikes me as odd: for someone so intimate with the technology of manipulation, Knox’s take on what constitutes advertising is surprisingly unreflexive:

To the extent that advertising is beautifully targeted, it ceases to become advertising is now more informational. The most encouraging example of this is Gmail. I see nothing but Ruby on Rails developer jobs and Scheme developer jobs on Gmail.

It ceases to appear as advertising. It’s still advertising. It’s goal is to shape behaviour by converting an impression into a sale. Whether a person is interested in the product or service doesn’t change that fundamental relation. That so many people tend to think of well-targeted advertising as “just” information is a source of endless fascination to me.

† Via Bruce Schneier.

Serious business

Adrian Cooke — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:19:18 +0000

Srsly funny:

Serious Business leverages the core competencies of our world renowned team to create revolutionary new synergies which tap in to blue ocean markets in the social platform mashup internets. Serious Business will forever redefine the way we use the web—even the way we see life itself. The first decade of the internet was fun. This decade is going to be Serious.

Also: awesome homepage design.