There’s been a lot of talk about content blocking lately, in the run up to the public release of iOS 9 with its built-in support for [content-blocking Safari extensions](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewInSafari/Articles/Safari_9.html "Safari 9.0" ). Straight from the horse’s mouth:








> Content Blocking gives your extensions a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content.








This is something people have been doing on the desktop for a long time. I used to run ad blockers myself, but [as I wrote](http://findthethread.postach.io/post/ads-and-ad-blocking "Ads and Ad Blocking" ),








> I feel that \[ad blocking\] meets my moral definition of theft. Companies put out content with the expectation of being paid for it, so it seems churlish at best for me to enjoy the content but refuse them the chance to make a fraction of a penny from their advertisers off my enjoyment. There is a line, but nowadays I am more likely simply not to visit offending sites than to try to bypass the ads.

Jean Louis Gaséee believes that the consequences of widespread ad blocking will be [disastrous](http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/08/31/life-after-content-blocking/ "Life After Content Blocking" ) for media companies.








> This is going to be painful for those whose ad-supported business model is in danger of breaking. There will be blood.








I think that may well be true. The current state of ad tech is not ideal, but it’s what we have, and what a lot of people are paying the bills with. However, while we have become used this state of affairs on our desktops, it’s a different story on mobile. On even a single-digit-Mbps home broadband connection, the additional impact on a page load of the ads, analytics and tracking muck is not hugely significant. Our fixed connections are fast and not really metered on a scale where we are watching the individual megabytes.








Neither of those factors holds true on mobile devices. There, connections are slow, unreliable, and strongly metered. Dean Murphy has created a pre-release iOS content blocking extension, and [his benchmarks are eye-opening](http://murphyapps.co/blog/2015/8/22/crystal-benchmarks "Crystal Benchmarks" ).








> On average, pages loaded 3.9x faster with Crystal and used 53% less bandwidth. Just by having Crystal installed, I saved a total of 70 seconds and 35MB of data on these 10 pages.








On mobile, that’s ***huge***. Everyone will want to install Crystal (or similar extensions) for those sorts of gains.








This is without even getting into some of the other aspects of ad tech. Privacy is the obvious one, although for most Muggles it doesn’t seem to be a huge priority. Nevertheless, if you want to scare yourself you can try using the [Lightbeam add-on for Firefox](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/lightbeam/ "Lightbeam for Firefox - Mozilla" ) to see *just how much* tracking is happening behind the scenes of even major web properties. That has been true for some time on desktop, though, and hasn’t caused any widespread outrage.








What is different on mobile, apart from connection speed and bandwidth constraints, is the interaction itself. Ads on the desktop take up a relatively small proportion of the screen real estate. On mobile, ads can take up *the entire screen* when loading the front page of popular web sites. Users have to scroll down an entire screen just to get to content!








In addition, users have been running their own content blockers on their wetware for a while now. I don’t even *see* standard ads any more, because I have developed reflexes that cause my eyes to scan right by them without ever taking them into my conscious awareness. To force their way past this problem, ad tech developers (one rung up from actual malware developers IMHO) have come up with all sorts of schemes, from interstitials, to CSS-based "popups" that hover in front of the content, to things that zoom out if you inadvertently roll your mouse cursor over them, and no doubt even more heinous variations are in the pipeline right now.








The thing is, on the desktop these things are only moderately annoying. I don’t have Flash installed on this machine, which already cuts down on the potential irritation, and the rest I deal with by simply not visiting especially grating web sites.








On mobile devices, these things are *horrid*. My wife, normally a sweet and well-mannered person, was reduced to incoherent rage this morning when an ad on a web site she was attempting to visit on her phone kept redirecting her to another site. This was no doubt intended as some sort of grey-area pop-up spawning thing, but iOS simply interpreted it as a straight redirect. Result? That website may have got the one visit and its ad-load, but it will never get another from either of us.








Bottom line? I will continue not to run content blockers on my Mac, but on iOS, I’m installing Crystal as soon as I get my hands on iOS 9.








After the initial period of pain, I don’t think it’ll even be as bad for publishers as they think it will be. I have no doubt that there will be disruption, and some of it will be painful. Some web sites will go down, and while my rational response is that they will be getting their comeuppance for a crappy business model, I do feel sympathy for the writers who will be out of a gig through no fault of their own.








My point is different: as with much of this Big Data nonsense, I have a sneaking suspicion that nobody is actually *using* any of the data that are collected. My [personal experience](http://findthethread.postach.io/post/online-shopping "Online Shopping" ) bears this out. Sure, the gathered data are used in some limited sense, but no truly innovative deep analysis is carried out that you could not have done on the subscriber rolls of the *Readers’ Digest* back in the day. Dumber web advertising will do *just fine* without all the tracking and analytics that are *de rigeur* these days.








Relax and enjoy the resurgence of simple banner ads.





***


Image by [kazuend](https://twitter.com/kazuend) via [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com)

It seems that Microsoft has not only removed Windows Media Center from Windows 10, but will charge users $15 to restore its functionality.

I think Ars Technica's theory that this is about offsetting DVD format licensing fees in a free upgrade is probably correct. Apple of course provides all its operating systems for free, but since none of its computers include optical drives any more, maybe it's not affected. Even when Macs did have DVD drives, I assume the license fee was covered by the hardware.

What is more significant to my mind how long it took after the release of Windows 10 for this to come to light. It's yet another sign of the death of physical media.

Tales from the front

In honour of Sysadmin Day, here’s a story from my own sysadmin days, originally posted here. It’s a snapshot of history, from CodeRed, to Ghost, to my sub-BOfH stylings. Enjoy!

So I'm talking to my BOFH, currently undergoing recovery on some Mediterranean island with his s/o, via a rather good free online SMS service, when I notice the (usually) non-PH B bearing down on me at a high rate of panic. It's too late to hide beneath my desk (too much "reassigned" hardware), so I stand my ground...

Once I make sense of his pathetic gibbering, I gather that he has just received a call from IT-Security (an oxymoron if I ever heard one, at least in these people's hands) about some machines in our IP pool still sending requests from CodeRed, only three weeks after it first turned up in the wild and (of course) instantly penetrated $ORK's network. So I speak to him in calming tones, get into my records and find the owner of one machine, but note that the second IP address is still listed as "free" in my records. Now any discrepancy between the Real World(tm) and my records must immediately be adjusted, naturally in my records' favour, and traditionally with much screaming and gnashing of teeth on the part of the luser who made the Real World(tm) alteration.

I wander over to the luser I did manage to locate, but he tells me that he passed the machine on to $OTHER_LUSER and did not see fit to inform me... Sometimes being the PFY sucks - I need to instill more respect in these people, but I'm leaving soon anyway.

At $OTHER_LUSER's desk I find both the problem machines... This one will need watching, I fear. I enquire of $OTHER_LUSER what part of the extra-ultra-high-priority email I sent around about patching all Windows machines¹ he didn't understand, and he burbles something about how he thought pointless waste of neurons forgotten even as it emerged from his mouth.

Sighing I kill the processes, remove the backdoors, patch the machines and reboot them without asking if he had anything important to save among the myriad apps uselessly cluttering his task bar. I sense him about to protest and turn all 500 watts of my hardest stare on him - he holds out longer than most, and his eyebrows are beginning to singe when he finally looks down.

"Good", I mutter darkly, and wander back to my cube to check the web servers’² logs yet again - I had foolishly assumed that all was well, but yet again my naive trust in humanity's native intelligence has been proved wrong. Fortunately this time everything would appear to be well, so it's back to snoozing for another hour or so until it's time to go home...

I was heartened to read that the EU, no less, is calling out Sky over their silly geographical restrictions:

The European Union’s top antitrust authority on Thursday charged six American studios and a pay television company in Britain with unfairly blocking access to films and other content.

Margrethe Vestager had one of the most intelligent comments I have ever heard from a politician:

European consumers want to watch the pay-TV channels of their choice regardless of where they live or travel in the E.U.

Standing ovation

Finally, someone gets it. Just because I live in Country A, doesn’t mean that I don’t want to watch content from Country B. I’d be happy to pay for the content, but if you make me jump through hoops of shipping devices to forwarding addresses, cracking DRM, and whatever else, guess what? I’m not going to pay!

On the other hand, give me an easy, legal way to get the content and pay for it, and we’ll both be much happier.

There will be an interesting test case soon, as the BBC is getting ready to launch an online store, these types of geographic restriction are a problem.

The BBC is a special case because much of its content is (eventually) licensed worldwide. I get much of what the BBC broadcasts through my cable subscription one way or another, whether it’s through the BBC’s own channels, or on other networks like Discovery that license BBC content such as Top Gear. Sky then pays Discovery for that content - so far so good. The problem is that I get that content months late and often with annoying dubs or subtitles that can’t be removed - despite the Sky platform’s pretty good support for multiple audio and subtitle options on broadcast content.

This means that I end up *ahem*obtaining content through other channels so that I can watch it within a few days of the air date instead of much later, and with the English audio and no subtitles instead of both audio tracks at once, which happens far too often. I used to do this for Top Gear all the time, and recently I did it for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I would gladly have paid for both of these, but I could not find a way to do it. While JS&MN is now in the iTunes store, it’s only in the UK and US iTunes stores. I am restricted to the Italian iTunes store, because Apple in their wisdom force you to use the store in the same country as your credit card’s billing address.

The result? Instead of paying the BBC directly, or paying the BBC via Apple, I pirated the content - because that was not only free and very easy, it was literally the only way I could get it.

I was always amazed that nobody saw a problem - or rather, an opportunity - here, but it seems that the EU may finally sort this mess out.

About time, too. Top Gear is going to restart soon².

Image by elizabeth lies via Unsplash

Organised religion would not normally be your first port of call for advice on contract law - well, excepting maybe canon law and wedding contracts. One religious group, however, has come up with an interesting twist.

A group called The Satanic Temple had planned to unveil a statue of Baphomet in Detroit. Wishing to avoid protesters and other distractions at the ceremony, they came up with the following plan (via jwz):

Attendees for the event had to go through the following process:
1. Show up at the location stated on the e-ticket.
2. Go through a security checkpoint there.
3. Sign a contract transferring their souls to Satan.
4. Get the real location for the event, which was miles away.

Here is the relevant part of that contract:

I agree that by signing this document under any name, given or adopted, actual or pseudonymous, I am hereby avowing my soul to Satan (aka Abbadon, aka Lucifer, aka Beelzebub, aka The Antichrist). I do so knowing that He (aka The Fallen One, aka The Father of Lies) or any of His representatives may choose to collect my eternal soul at any time, with or without notice. I understand that my signature or mark representing any name, real or made up, upon these papers constitutes a lasting and eternal contract, and that there will be no further negotiations on the matter of my eternal soul.

jwz further comments that this should maybe become part of his rider, together with the Frisco clause.

I agree, and in fact I think it should also be included in our standard Proof of Concept documents, along the lines of the brown M&Ms clause:

The truth of the matter is not that Eddie Van Halen gave a fig either way for the colour of his M&Ms. The M&Ms were there purely as a test. If there were brown M&Ms in the bowl, or no M&Ms at all, the tour managers instantly knew that they could not take anything for granted and had to double-check everything else.

If both clauses passed without comment, I would be really curious to find out whether there were brown M&Ms laid out. It might be a bit difficult to enforce the Baphomet clause - although it might be good for negotiations, trading a few percentage points of discount against Purchasing’s eternal soul.

Wait, are we sure that they have one…?

I do a lot of PowerPoint in my job, and have done ever since I moved out of being a full-time sysadmin. Whether it was preparing the stage for a demo when I was in technical pre-sales, delivering RoI projections during my stint in sales, or big-picture context setting in marketing, the vehicle of choice always ended up being PowerPoint.

While life has got better over the years, one thing is still surprisingly difficult at times, and that is getting the presentation to show up with the prospect’s equipment. When you are presenting at an event, you typically have some time to go test all the A/V kit and so on, but when you’re pounding the pavement, you get shown to a meeting room and you have to plug in to whatever is there and be ready to go.

This is where the trouble can start. First off, we are still working with VGA connectors. While not a terrible connector for fixed equipment, it’s not ideal for laptops - and in fact, most modern laptops have followed Apple’s lead and dropped the VGA connector, usually in favour of HDMI¹. However, only the best-equipped conference rooms offer HDMI (and vanishingly few have Mini DisplayPort), so this means that we all get to carry VGA dongles around.

Physical connection achieved, we have to cross our fingers and hope for decent resolution. SVGA - 1024x768 pixels - is still the lowest common denominator, so you have to make sure your slides look okay at that resolution. Getting the slides to work is the easy part, unfortunately; most modern software GUIs will struggle at that resolution. Make sure you do your warm-up exercises for you scrolling finger!

The Great Demo blog has a great set of tips for making sure your slides will work in unexpected situations. They’re mostly good suggestions, as is the rest of that blog, but I really take issue with the last point, which recommends disabling Presenter Mode.

I could not disagree more. I have never yet seen a situation where Presenter Mode was the factor that made the difference between being able to work with a projector and not. However, I have often been in situations where having the ability to keep an eye on the time, see presenter notes, take a peak at the next slide, or even jump to a backup or optional slide without having to break the presentation flow, have been invaluable.

In fact, one of my pet peeves is at conferences or events where the organisers provide their own laptop instead of allowing you to connect your own. On the one hand, this avoids all the trouble with connecting the laptop to the projector in the first place - but on the other hand, it means that you’re not using your own setup. Nine times out of ten, the presentation laptop is in mirror mode, not Presenter Mode. During prep time, if I have the time I will switch it to Presenter Mode - and all too often, A/V staff will then switch it back to mirror mode.

It may well be that Presenter Mode is confusing to inexperienced presenters, but this means that our suggestion to them as seasoned presenters should be to learn it and love it, not just to turn it off. Sure, it’s a power user feature, so maybe don’t mess around with it in your first week on the job - but maybe you shouldn’t be giving customer presentations until you are confident enough to roll with that anyway.

That said, don’t allow it to turn into a crutch. Too much jumping around within a deck will confuse your audience. They will be aware of it even if they don’t actually see you doing it on screen. Also, if you are presenting in a webinar, you will almost certainly not be able to use presenter mode unless you jump through a lot of hoops. In that situation, the better and more robust solution is to have your presentation on a second machine (or my personal solution: an iPad) and a timer on your phone (muted!) to help you stick to your story thread and timing.

Why does Apple hate wish lists so much?

The wish list is the main thing I miss since I fell out with Amazon and moved all of my media buying over to iTunes. Amazon not only has great management of its wish list, allowing you to sort it any way you like and highlighting deals, or sharing it with friends and family as suggestions; it also uses the contents of your wish list as inputs to its recommendation engine.

Over the decade or so that I used Amazon regularly, its recommendations grew to be uncannily accurate, alerting me to new books or albums that I might be interested in. The algorithm involved was clever enough to recommend not only new works by artists I had already bought from in the past, but also works by other artists I had not previously encountered. This was driven by their ability to identify that "other people who bought X also bought Y", based on their insight into all of our purchasing histories.

Of course this is a critical feature for Amazon, which explains why they spend so much time and effort on refining it. In fact, it was only when they messed with my wish list that I left in a huff.

I had continued to buy from Amazon’s UK site after leaving the UK, because with free shipping within the EU, it made no difference, while it allowed me to keep that all-important wish list history. A few years later, however, Amazon in their wisdom decided that many items would no longer be made available to ship outside the UK. Instead of simply tagging the items with a notice, they simply removed the items from users’ stored wish lists. In my case, this meant I lost nearly half of my wish list items.

I use wish lists as a way to spread out purchases or remind me of items that are due to come out in the future but that I am not committed enough to pre-order right away (or which may not yet be available to pre-order). Deleting half of my wish list in this high-handed way was enough for me to quit a triple-figure-per-month Amazon habit cold-turkey.

This coincided with the move to a new house, where even our existing media collections were overflowing the shelves once we had finished unpacking. The time was therefore ripe for a move to electronic content only, and given that I was cross with Amazon, Apple was the only real alternative.

It’s been a couple of years now, and I have not regretted it in any way. I adapted very quickly to reading on the iPad, and music and the occasional film are of course super-easy. There is only one glaring problem, and that is the utterly inconsistent handling of wish lists on the part of the Apple store apps.

iBooks app on iPhone - note lack of wish list button

The fact that it’s plural "apps" is a bit of a problem in its own right, actually. I have a Music app to listen to music, that I buy in the iTunes Store app. That is where I also buy videos, that I then watch in the Videos app. But if I want to buy books, I have to do that in a special tab of the iBooks app.

Historically this makes sense - iBooks came along much later than the rest of iTunes. But why the weird inconsistencies in when I can add something to my iTunes/iBooks wish lists? iBooks on iOS won’t allow this, but iBooks on the Mac will. On the other hand, iTunes on the Mac won’t let me add an album to my wish list, but the iTunes Store app on iOS will.

Same screen in iTunes Store app on iPhone - note "Add to Wish List" button

This is why I have a file in Notes with iTunes Store links to items that I wanted to add to my wish list, but couldn’t because I didn’t have access to the specific device that would let me do that at the time.

Workaround

This is admittedly a pretty minor niggle in the grand scheme of things, but I think it’s philosophically important for Apple to fix this inconsistency. It lies right at the heart of the iTunes ecosystem, and creates an unexpected and annoying discrepancy between MacOS and iOS platforms, and even between different devices on iOS.

From Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations newsletter:

But, really, very few Western people have had a childhood worth recording, and it's a sixth of your life, and the least important sixth because you were not old enough to buy me a drink.

So true.

Together with everybody else who has any interest in how we live today and how we can expect to live for the next few decades, I have been reading Douglas Coupland’s recent piece in FT Weekend magazine.

The topic is what he calls "Artificial Intuition" - basically the convergence of Big Data¹ and all sorts of loyalty and activity tracking, in which algorithms will be able to correlate our data exhaust from all sorts of different sources, aggregate and correlate it, and use it to document and even predict our behaviour with a high degree of accuracy.

Many people find this scary or otherwise undesirable. Evgeny Morozov is something of a cheerleader for this rejectionist camp, calling the rise of data "the death of politics". The overall point of this reaction is that political change has always required a grey area where activities that might be illegal are not enforced. This is how homosexuality or racial equality could move from illegal, to tolerated, to embraced and legalised: because places and spaces existed where it was possible to practice illegal behaviours on a limited scale and in a group tolerant of those behaviours.

Coupland’s take is that these Temporary Autonomous Zones are being cleared up by the algorithmic approach to everything from shopping, to dating, to politics:

In fact, [Artificial Intuition] is accelerating at an astonishing clip, and it’s the true and definite and undeniable human future.

Later in the same piece:

The amount of internet freedom we have right now is the most we’re ever going to get.

This is probably correct - although I might remove the word "internet". Absent some sort of major crash of online surveillance mechanisms, it seems that we are heading to the point where this data-driven approach becomes irreversible. We are probably past the point where even full-blown societal rejection would work.

As ever, there’s a relevant Gibson quote:

Mona's life has left virtually no trace on the fabric of things, and represents, in Legba's system, the nearest thing to innocence.

From Mona Lisa Overdrive. Published in 1988, people!

My previous company had a deeply unsettling (to me) employee healthcare programme in the USA, where employees who did not participate in company-mandated health&fitness routines - and share data from those! - were penalised in their healthcare costs.

The black humour of the situation is that when Americans want to criticise European-style nationalised healthcare systems, they usually trot out arguments about smokers or overweight people being denied medical treatments because of their lifestyle choices. But here was a private company, under contract to another private company, enacting and enforcing something far more intrusive.

The usual argument here is that you should be staying healthy for yourself anyway, so this tracking should not matter to you. In fact, you should enjoy the discounts or loyalty points or whatever you get for meeting the targets of the health&fitness programme.²

Basically it’s a variation of the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" argument. The problem is that with Big Data, eventually everyone will have something to hide. Had an extra glass of wine with dinner? Drifted a little over the speed limit that one time? Inadvertently short-changed someone? Guess what - that’s tracked now. And what other behaviours, routine today, might be criminalised tomorrow? Overconsumption of sugar? Excessive screen time allowed to children?

This is not an idle question. Data don’t have a statute of limitations. Regardless of what you think of them personally, users of the hacked Ashley Madison cheaters’ site often paid specifically to delete their accounts. One reason someone might do this is that they had seen the error of their ways and resolved to be a better spouse - but now they risk being outed together with the biggest adulterers out there.

For once I’m going to quote Julian Assange, someone with whom I have all sorts of issues, but who has become something of a poster child for net privacy:

My version of that is to say, 'well, you're so boring then we shouldn't be talking to you, and neither should anyone else', but philosophically, the real answer is this: Mass surveillance is a mass structural change. When society goes bad, its going to take you with it, even if you are the blandest person on earth.

There’s a reason we have doors to our houses, and blinds and curtains to our windows - and it’s not so we can commit crimes in comfort, it’s simply so we can live our lives in private. Remember, the Panopticon was a prison. When secrets are outlawed, only outlaws will have secrets.

Image by Edgaras Maselskis via Unsplash

Of all the inconvenient times for my car's rampant hypochondria to manifest itself, the Sunday evening before an early-morning Monday jaunt to the airport is the worst.

Last time it was tyre pressure. The warning light came on, so I dutifully stopped to check everything out. The shortfall was smaller than the measurement interval afforded by the compressed air machine on a petrol station forecourt, but I managed to get enough air in to turn the light off. Coughing into the hose would probably have given enough pressure…

This time it was oil. The dipstick assured me there was plenty of oil, but I don't like warning lights, so I stopped at the first petrol station on the motorway at o'dark-hundred on a Monday morning to buy some engine oil. Of course they were out of the type of oil that the Beast's exacting tastes require, so I had to go on to the next place. This place did stock the right approved oil, so I was able to continue my journey fully lubed up.

This sort of thing is why I hate idiot lights. Give me a measurement! These days, with any number of digital displays on cars' dashboards, lack of real estate is no excuse. The Beast is actually pretty good about this, with physical gauges for both oil and water temps as well as turbo boost pressure. There is also a display for tyre pressure that can be put up in the central virtual gauge in front of the driver, between the speed and RPM.

What drove me nuts about my old car was the lack of these displays. On a turbo diesel, especially when cold, you don't want the turbocharger spooling straight away - but it's really hard to avoid it when the only instruments you have to measure boost pressure are RPM and engine noise!

Software designers on the other hand have a tendency to go the opposite way, with too much information being thrown at the user without context. The happy medium is to show the information, but include some context indicating what is good and expected, as opposed to what is out of the ordinary. Here car dashboards show the way: don't just have an idiot light that comes on when the driver is going "too fast". Instead, have nice big clear dials showing vehicle speed and RPM - but include red lines on both displays to indicate where the danger areas are.

Note: I’m not implying that all information should be displayed all the time. Software developers often fall into the trap of displaying every piece of information they can get their hands - well, digits, anyway - onto. The only result of this smorgasbord approach is to overwhelm users. This way, important things can easily get drowned in the noise. Operators then end up missing some thing important.

The most famous recent example of users drowning in data and missing the one really important piece of information was probably at Target. You may remember Target from such data breaches as The Largest Retail Hack in U.S. History - well, until Home Depot, at least.

The most interesting aspect to me, however, was that Target did in fact have systems in place to detect exactly the sort of activity that was involved in the breach. Those systems worked perfectly, and did indeed detect the breach in progress and alert operators. The operators simply missed the alarms.

How does that happen? Easily. At any given time there are scads of alerts flying around any sizeable IT environment. The trick is filtering out the all-important signal from the all-consuming noise - and this is where Target failed.

Target should not be blamed too much, though - most IT organisations are in exactly the same situation. The problem in IT used to be about too little information - but now it’s about too much.

And now is where I finally get to my point. My new gig is for a company called Moogsoft, which is working to solve precisely this problem. Our technology is able to sift automatically through masses of raw event data, figure out what is important, and show those important alerts to the people who can actually do something about it. The way we do that is with various algorithms, and I can geek out for quite some time on the information theory aspects of that - but the proof is in the results we are already bringing our customers.

Bottom line: information is good, but it has to be possible for users to consume it. Useful¹ context is critical for people to be able to make sense of data instead of simply being overwhelmed.