I’d always presumed that the word ‘behoove’ meant, in effect, that one should ‘get a move on.’ I’d assumed that “hoove” had the same root as hoof, i.e. a horse’s foot. I found that amusing. But then I’m a sucker for foolish made-up games about word roots.
But it turns out that that ‘hoove’ like ‘have’ out of the root ‘kap’. Kap is also an ancestor of words like captive, accept, even deception. and recipe.
Martin is toying with a very thought provoking glimmer of an idea about the future of Telephones…
… In an oversimplified nutshell, the Western approach puts the individual in the centre of the universe. The Eastern idea is to put the group in the middle. …
That could go in all kinds of directions. For example it is marvelously synergistic with my gleam of an idea that the 80s enthusiasm for personal computing leads to a kind of blindness about what is really going on in the Internet era. For example it echos why Fukuyama wrote Trust, a book on groups, after writing about the End of History.
But here’s one of them.
This is great. It shifts the value proposition of the telecom business out of the pairwise and into the group forming; i.e. from Metcalf’s toward Reed’s law.
Groups need rendezvous points. So this also bounces right back on the number one problem the traditional telecom companies have competing with the dumb networks. Dumb network owners loose if they horde the options to search for innovations.
Trying to horde the option to create these rendezvous points frustrates the search to find them. You can’t find the high value rendezvous points without a tremendous amount of experimentation, i.e. a r-Selected strategy. The careful husbanding of options done by the telecom companies is fatal.
When the market signals that you have become a platform vendor it behooves you to listen, and learn learn how to be a platform vendor.
For the last few years I have worked off an on on the issues around Identity on the internet. Browser redirects, browser cookies, web bugs embedded on the page, plus the occasional bit of JavaScript to orchestrate browser behavior loom large in the toolkit used to design these systems. The systems that invade people’s privacy, like DoubleClick, uses these same tools.
I’m kind of proud of my gossip model for thinking about these problems; e.g. that what really bothers people about the problems of privacy invasion is the sense that people are talking about them; passing gossip, slander, and which articles in the paper they read this morning. That gossip is passed across back-channels your unaware of. That gossip is aggregated by brokers who provide gossip-knowledge-pools for their customers. The gossip brokers don’t necessarily have any relationship the folks, you and me, about whom they are accumulating data.
The architectures for internet identity that strive to be respectful of end-user privacy are complex because they draw the end-user into the negotiation about what information may be passed between to parties that have relationships with that user. So if your mortgage company wants to work with your bank in a manner that respects your privacy they need to bring you into the loop and get your permission. The internet identity solutions manage this using the tools (redirect, cookies, etc) to orchestrate that.
Of course parties that don’t respect your privacy can use the same tools to pass data back and forth. In effect using your web browser to help them establish the back channel they need to be able to gossip about you. Thus if a few customers of a gossip broker, like DoubleClick, all drop a web bug on their pages then the broker can act as a clearing house for information about your behavior at each of their sites.
So, I enjoyed this paper on “New Covert Channels in HTTP: Adding Unwitting Web Browsers to Anonymity Sets” because outlines a delightful point in the spectrum such systems. It sort of turns everything on it’s head.
In this case, instead of a group of gossip-broker customers coordinating the web pages they present to users so they can pool their knowledge of how those users behave we have a group of sites that are looking for a way to pass messages around anonymously. In particular they want to be sure that no outside observer can tell who is exchanging messages with whom.
For example I have a few friends who practice good privacy hygiene and with those I encrypt almost all my email. This way observers listening in on the wire can’t see what we are talking about. That’s good, but what’s bad is that these observers can see who my friends are, and they can tell when I’m communicating with them. Which, frankly, is none of their business.
To solve problem you need a special black box. I poke my message into the box and sometime later it pops out on at my correspondent. You can’t trust anybody to run this box, so you have to figure out a way to run it without a central authority. The traditional means to that end is to run a swarm of email servers – called remixers. You poke your message at one remixer and it jumbles up it’s parts and timing and scatters it out to the swarm. Slowly but surely the scattered bits rattle around the swarm until they pop out on the other side.
The paper reframes that idea with one key additional trick. The nodes in the swarm are web servers. These web servers never connect to another member of the swarm. Instead when an unwitting browser lands on them, like a bee on a flower, they use the bag of tricks used for gossip passing (redirects, cookies, etc.) to push their message fragments onto other nodes in the swarm.
I love it. For example; notice how this is a peer to peer network with two classes of actors; the unwitting browsers and the servers of those who which to remain anonymous.
Because it is proported to be about emotions I have been looking forward to getting my hands on the new book out of the Harvard Negotiation community Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as you negotiate by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro. It’s pretty good, which is a relief, since most books about emotions written by rational intellectual people are crap.
It is not without flaws. It is padded out with a review of the ground covered in the other books from their branch of the negotiation community. I was surprised by a disconnect – emotions are very powerful but the advice the book gives is very temperate. For example, it is good thing to find common ground with your partner. Discover shared hobbies! Yes, might oak trees of good relationships from from such tiny seeds, but this kind of advice follows in the tradition found in most geek written books when they touch on emotion: excessive distancing and reductionism.
Having gotten that out of the way – the structure of the book is just marvelous. I was particularly delighted that they don’t fall into the tedium of enumerating a hierarchy of emotions.
Here’s the nut. Humans have some very core concerns: to find a fulfilling role for example. If these core concerns are not being met then strong negative emotions will follow. If they are met, strong positive ones will rise. Skilled negotiators entice the positive emotions out, and avoid baiting the negative ones. Their reward: productive flexible creative problem solving sessions.
I particularly liked that they complement each core concern with a verb; so here they are:
While this book is written with negotiation in mind – i.e. an episodic attempt to engage in collaboration – these issues clearly arise across the spectrum of collaborative effort. That list is universally actionable!
For example: a manager should keep a score card for every participant v.s. each of the five core concerns. By participant I mean individuals and groups. For example each of your suppliers. Then act on that, encourage action to improve each item. Do that using those verbs. If you can’t answer the question “How is X chosing an fulfilling his role?” your not doing your job. (I might add to that list: “What is the top idea in X’s mind?”)
All this has triggered a number of insights. For example notice: if you struggle and win a particular role there is the risk that there will be negative emotions created – because winning is not choosing. Fun, eh?
Notice how role and status are pulled apart here. I hatz how often they are treated as synonymous. Notice that instead of using the term loyalty they use the terms affiliation and autonomy. I’ve written before about the dual nature of assuming a role, e.g. that there is something you do and something others do. By example, you can’t lead if nobody follows. By teasing out status from role they address that duality.
I’m pleased that they don’t talk about loyalty. Loyalty is a outcome, and so it is built indirectly. But also loyality is a term of hierarchical organizations; where roles are not chosen they are assigned and status is not acknowledged it is merely painted on the door.
Is affiliation just another name for what I call common cause in community dynamics? A binding force of the collaborative effort, like gravity. People get very emotional about it! Which is why they guard the public goods of their communities so emotionally, with scolding, patriotism, loyalty oaths, etc. etc.
Autonomy sounds a lot like freedom, something people get emotional about. Freedom depends on a rich pool of public goods. Which are created thru communities of common cause. Autonomy is to freedom like club good are to public goods. This is a book about negotiation; as you negotiation your always attempting to frame up a new club. Even if the negotiation is something as trivial as creating a link in the supply chain.
Business jargon likes to talk in terms of power: supplier power, consumer power. It’s a pain to be a buyer when the supplier has all the power, and via versa. If you have a single supplier for a key component, for example funding, then that supplier will be powerful. All five of those aspects illuminate why that’s an emotional situation. If you have billions of tiny customers then no one of them has much power and the emotions change, they become more alienated. There is something deep running thru the dynamics of all exchange networks that these five issues can help to inform.
Here’s a nice word, gezelligheid, but what is it doing in an English language dictionary. And! It is fun to say.
Exercise! Brush your teeth. Learn new technologies. Lead a balanced life. Turn down the heat every night. Clean your glasses and the gutters.
Oh, and keep all your receipts, particularly the oil change receipts. Be sure they are dated. Be sure they show the milage. Be sure they show the car’s VIN. Do this before the “stop engine” light come on. Before the day after you spent $500 on misc. maintenance tasks. Before you spend $300 on towing it back home again.
Let this be a lesson to you! Do not to follow my example.
killer named sludge may live in your engine and can choke the life from your car, regardless of maintenance or mileage. And the automakers whose engines are susceptible to sludge still aren’t always eager to help.
Sludge often forms when oil oxidizes and breaks down after prolonged exposure to high temperatures. The baked oil turns gelatinous and can block vital oil passages, which could lead to repairs exceeding $8,000 or even an engine replacement.
While sludge often results from poor upkeep, notably not changing oil at prescribed intervals, some engines from Audi, Chrysler, Saab, Toyota, and Volkswagen appear prone to it (see the chart below).
The Center for Auto Safety says it has received about 1,300 sludge complaints since 2004. …
Volkswagen’s policy requires that customers produce all oil-change records.
…
Those conditions would require attentive record-keeping for original owners, but it could cause headaches for used-vehicle owners.Even with the extended engine warranties, some consumers are denied repair compensation when they first approach the manufacturer.When Sarah Bolek’s 2001 Volkswagen Passat hit 59,000 miles in 2004, the engine succumbed to sludge. The repair estimate was $9,000, says Bolek, who lives in Boyds, Md.
I doubt, we will be buying another Volkswagen.
Re-negotiate your cable contract once a year. Oh, and your long distance service. Rebalance your investments annually. Keep an eye on your mortgage rate and refinance at appropriate times, but not too often. Consider having a health savings account. Clip coupons. Keep track of those rebates. Join frequent flyer programs as appropriate. Be sure you have a will. Check that your love ones know your end of life desires. Eat more vegetables. Take regular breaks to avoid typing injuries. Get plenty of sleep.
Things have differing kinds of value. My favorite kind of value? The imaginary value of all those things that might happen once you have a thing. The technical term for this is option value; e.g. the sum of all the value you might place upon options to do things the object creates.
So I was pleased to see that the post office has a fee they charge you for stealing their options. Generally the post office charges you by weight, but if you ship a large very light object then they charge you a special fee. The Balloon Fee.
The hulla-hoop community is outraged!
Here’s a fine example of the tensions between an irresistible force v.s. an immovable object.
At some point in my childhood my father, presumably in an attempt to keep me from wasting a summer in idle pleasures, got me an unpaid job working with a locksmith. I really enjoyed it, though I never did get the hang of picking locks. One thing I loved about the job was all the paraphernalia. One of the principle artifacts in every lock smiths tool kit is a box of pins. These pins are tiny bits of brass all of various lengths. They were color coded so you could put them back in the case.
These pins are packed into the lock so that when the right key is slide in they align just right and the lock will turn. Sweet little springs push the pins back into place when the key is removed. Each spring sits in a hole and the hole has two pins whose length sum up to fill its column just right. A lock with a master key will have three pins in one or more of the columns.
Locks of varing sophistication modify this design by having the columns oriented in various patterns. The typical lock just has the pin-columns in a straight line. If you look at your key ring you’ll probably find at least one key who’s bumpy bits are set up in some tricky way. Complex topology makes it harder to pick the lock; or at least that was the idea.
The design patterns for key-and-pin locks form a the plaform for a huge installed base of locks and keys. So it’s a great standards story and like all standards used for security things get messy when a security flaw is revealed. The usual exemplar of that is Microsoft Windows, which was never really designed to be secure and now sustains the vast cyber-crime industry (said to be larger than the drug trade).
You can’t ‘just fix’ a system like this because the installed base is very slow to move. As Bill Gates is rumored to have said back in the 1990s, “My biggest competitors is old versions of Windows operating system.” Users don’t upgrade quickly.
Over the last year or two knowledge of a huge security flaw in the key-and-pin lock design pattern has been revealed. There is a fun video (with subtitles) from a Dutch TV show you can watch (WMV) and a paper about it (pdf).
It’s easy to understand though. The common name for the technique is bump key. You make a key that bumps the pins. Well, actually, it taps the pins sharply. The sharp tap is then transmitted thru the stack of pins until it reaches the top most pin. That pin then floats up and way from the rest of the stack. At the moment the gap appears you turn the lock. All you need is a good bump key, a sharp tap, and to time the turn to the right moment.
You have seen this dynamics in one of those executive desk top toys (these are known as Newton’s cradle) where a group of balls hang in a line and you drop one ball one end and ball on the other end floats up.
Designing around this problem is, I presume not too hard. For example, since only the top most pin will float up when tapped you need to assure it’s movement won’t open the lock. That’s not too hard since you can arrange to have the top pin above point where the lock turns. In some cases you might even be able to repin an existing lock to prevent the problem. In other cases you probably have to redesign the locks.
There are techniques for moving a large installed base. Firms, like Microsoft, that depend on upgrade revenue are very practiced at these. Moving an installed base can be very profitable. Rekeying the entire planet, changing every lock in every door, replacing the keys on everybody’s key ring – wow! The lock industry ought to be very excited about this. I bet there is quite a backlog of key-and-pin patents piling up at the patent office right now.
Of course, the profits to be made from migrating the installed base are not the first thing most people think of when they hear this story. But then, most people don’t tend to think of Microsoft’s security problems as an upgrade driver either.