Archimedes’ Hot Tub

The smart grid might open up new ways for hackers to plague us. Brian Krebs, writing in the Washington Post, notes the U.S. government attached a security string to $3.9 billion in smart grid grants. Krebs wrote, for instance, that

Smart meters give consumers direct access to information about their power usage and the ability to manage that usage over the Web, but that two-way communication also opens up the possibility that the grid could be attacked from the outside. Many such systems require little authentication to carry out key functions, such as disconnecting customers from the power grid.

If smart grid insecurity just knocks homeowners off the grid, most of us get sent back to the 19th century for a while, then go out and refill the refrigerator. That qualifies as a hacker parlor game.
Yes, organized groups might blackmail us to keep our power flowing. But look what they’ve done with computer networks — most damage comes from the people who don’t beat their chests at having taken over. Smart grid insecurity will probably work the same way. If these tools can help capture personal data and raid our bank accounts, then they will be used that way. Let’s hope the government sets the bar high enough to matter. “Taking steps to prevent cyberattacks” does not warm my heart.

I knew Paul Roberts only virtually until we met at Wagamama’s for noodle soup and a chat about the state of the security market. I can now report it is more secure than the journalism market. I also learned that Paul in his spare time runs a citizen journalism blog, Blogging Belmont. It turns out he had blogged about whether Belmont should adopt some of the ideas in my urban retrofits piece in the Boston Globe, but he hadn’t realized I was the Michael Fitzgerald who wrote it.
I poked around a blog search engine and found a couple of other good posts on articles I’ve written recently. The I’ve Been Mugged blog used my CIO piece on changing privacy expectations as starting off point for a consumer privacy manifesto. The Knockoff Report looked at my virtual goods charticle in Fast Company and warned of the coming of counterfeit virtual goods.

Bill Gurley gives Chris Anderson’s Freeconomics book a tentative thumbs up.

Gurley, a noted Silicon Valley venture capitalist, also gives it a context. He writes, “If a disruptive competitor can offer a product or service similar to yours for “free,” and if they can make enough money to keep the lights on, then you likely have a problem.” (emphasis his).

He sees ‘free’ as something for most businesses to defend against, not build upon. Here we see savvy borne of years of Internet investing — how many ‘free’ business models blew up after the Internet bubble burst? Gurley’s post is good for the links it gives to criticisms of Anderson’s book, and for the context he provides. It does seem to treat the book too generously by calling it quintessential reading for entrepeneurial set. I respect Gurley’s taste in books (he recommended both Startup and Complexity to me)

But let’s look at some of Anderson’s examples: Gillette gives away razors so it can sell razor blades. A nice promotional gimmick, but a trope for businesses since long before the Internet (and have you seen a free Gillette razor lately?). Transistors are practically free. In fact, it costs billions of dollars to produce them and it costs money to put them into useful formats. Prince gives away CDs and sells out tons of shows in London. C’mon. This is Prince. He would likely have sold out those shows without a single giveaway. Show me an unknown artist who gives away CDs and sells out a tour.

Where the freeconomics argument seems powerful is the whole idea of ‘freemium,’ which extends the original Gillette idea in a new direction. It’s a good insight and well described. The rest qualifies as entertaining chicanery.

“It is fear I am most afraid of,” Montaigne wrote. He concerned himself mostly with fear in battle. But he noted that “People with a pressing fear of losing their property or of being driven into exile or enslaved also lose all desire to eat, drink or sleep…”

Journalists reek with fear right now. We fear the loss of our jobs, and with it our homes, our childrens’ future, our sense of self-worth. Most of all, we fear irrelevance, that metaphysical exile from society.

We can wring our hands until our skin falls off the bone. We’re being passed by. I remember reading about Beaux-Arts workers in the 1950s who shook their fists at the Museum of Modern Art, that icon of the International Style. “That goddam place is destroying us! Those bastards are killing us!” they said. [recounted in Tom Wolfe’s “From Bauhaus to Our House”]

Our goddam place is the Internet, and the bastards killing us are ourselves. We thought advertising would shift nicely from old media to new. We thought free content meant we could assemble vast audiences online and strike back at the mass audiences of television. We were wrong. Writers and editors, are and almost always have been a cost center. We’re paying the price now.

Those Beaux-Arts masons were forced to do something else. If they stayed in building, their work felt less meaningful. We journalists may find we have to do the same. “It’s over,” says Lawrence Weschler in The New, New Journalism. He meant long-form, writerly journalism. Now it looks true for text-based journalism as a whole.

I think a model exists for selling news and features content, regardless of medium. Until I figure it out, or someone else does, I’ll take heart in something else Montaigne said: “those who are actually impoverished, banished or enslaved often enjoy life as much as anyone else.”

Brendan Koerner just tweeted that on his deathbed he will still regret spending two minutes watching the trailer for Leprechauns in the Hood (that’s very low indeed for a man who can find things to like in truly Bad Movies, like a fur bikini in Barbarians).

I wonder what Brendan would think of the nearly 40 minutes I spent yesterday watching Meteor, a mini-series featuring name actors like Jason Alexander and Stacey Keach. I was horrified by it from the moment it appeared on screen. I think I kept watching out of some kind of faith that something so lacking in any narrative quality could have escaped YouTube (sorry, YouTube, you deserve better than that). Ugh.

I did gain a reminder that some situations overwhelm even talented people. Like Lehman Bros. and Hank Paulson.

I picked up a book at church I’d skipped multiple times in the past. “Welcome to Fred,” by Brad Whittington, seemed light. But my reading lately runs to Kierkegaard, Calvin, Montaigne and other brain-swelling books, so light seemed good.

‘Fred’ presents a coming of age story about Mark Cloud, a kid that people don’t much know what to do with, because he’s a preacher’s kid. Perhaps that creates his struggles with social interaction, though Cloud, the narrator, is also an annoying 98-pound weakling. He spouts non-sequiturs and possesses a vocabulary that sometimes seems to belong to the author, not the 8-year-old boy we first meet.

The plot holds some improbable twists. Why does a family that moves every year suddenly stay in one place for years on end? How does a preacher who triples attendance at a church in a single year find his next call in the middle of nowhere? Successful ministers usually get called to bigger churches in better places. Then there’s that Christian Lampoon Vacation.

Then again, many of the book’s events either go over Cloud’s head or go unexplained. Perhaps that comes from being a story about a boy. He bottles up a lot of things inside himself, and most of the people around him come into and out of his life like clouds.  They have about as much substance, too.Fred runs with the uneven pace of a country creek. Parts of it read like the first novel it seems to be. There are a couple of genuinely good scenes in the book. The book deals with big questions about faith and modern life in realistic and believable ways. The characters are a bit wooden, but several left me wanting to know more about them. And Mark learns something important, perhaps profound, at the end.

Somehow, he grew on me, and his coming of age as a Christian and the son of a preacher contained nuance and balance enough to suggest that Whittington could write a better second book (we’ll see, since it turns out he wrote a Fred trilogy).

Most Sundays over the last couple of months, I spent my evenings with narrative guru Mark Kramer. He presides over a narrative salon involving radio and print journalists and writers established and aspiring. We talk about narrative writing and what makes it good, and shared pieces of our own.

Kramer offers brilliant observations about prose off the cuff. Give him a little more time and he becomes a jeweler making precise cuts in stone.

He makes writing and reporting vital acts. I approach my work now in ways I only dreamt of in the last 20 years.

I have to take a few Sundays off and I’m missing it already.

We all hear stories of people who get robbed while on vacation. Such tales drive us to buy and install home security systems. But what about our online property?

My site host took this site offline the morning of the Fourth of July. I came down to check email and found one from the hosting firm saying that scripts, small blocks of code that run a command, on my site were destabilizing the entire server they use to host people.

First, since I don’t do much with this site, I thought of an old PC sitting in a closet somewhere and wondered what exactly my host was using for hardware (Dell systems are on its Web site). Then, since my knowledge of scripts runs towards the stage, not the server, I pinged my Webmaster in California and said ‘help!’

He fixed the immediate problem, removing the script the host identified. Then he went off to have a holiday. My host refused to put the site back up online, telling me there was a good chance my passwords had been pilfered if my entire site had not been compromised, and they were not going to risk a repeat of whatever event was plaguing their server until I had gone through a security check list this morning. I emailed it to my Webmaster and went to have a holiday of my own.

The site spent the weekend on a holiday of its own. This morning, as I was sending emails to people I hoped to interview, I realized that my site was still on holiday, and if they wanted to check out my brilliant prose, they couldn’t. So I called my California-based webmaster at a reasonable hour (about 8:15). It took 40 minutes of billable time, but we went through the checklist and took care of everything we could.

The only thing we can’t control is Wordpress, which for my site is handled through my host. Given other problems I’ve had, I suspect there is a flaw in what they’ve done with Wordpress. Perhaps not, and we’ll have no more holidays.

If you’ve read this far, go change any important passwords you have. A mix of numbers, punctuation and upper- and lower-case letters works well.
I wonder if people will start to offer insurance and alarm systems for individual Web sites, like mine.