Canceling Boingo, again.

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When traveling I sign up for Boingo’s wireless access, which later I then cancel.

This time I called but they didn’t actually cancel the service so I had to call again when the monthly charge appeared on the credit card.  They could see my first cancelation call in their records, and where  appropriately  apologetic etc.  Though they didn’t do anything to compensate for the mistake, they did reverse the charge.

Like most such services they try very hard to make it difficult to find the phone number to cancel.  So I’ll post it here, so I can find it next time:  tel:+1-800-880-4117;  as can others.  The trick to finding it on their site is to search for terms and conditions, and then look for 800 in the fine print.

This Time is Different

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“This Time is Different” is a  fascinating  book.  It’s full of provocative confusing details.  It does a wonderful job of helping to further the cause of making it clear economics has got a lot of work yet to do.  There are lots of different large economic scale failure modes.  Inflation, deflation, international debt default, intra-national debt default, etc. etc.  I’m actually convinced they haven’t enumerated a very complete list; for example economic displacement isn’t on their list.

I am reminded of the observation in “Control of Nature” about LA canyon  real estate.  The catastrophic floods are rare compared to how often the property turns over so that residents tend to have no memory of what’s in store.  People still remember the 70’s high inflation.  But here’s a chart showing the  incidence  of deflation.

Here are three things, picked somewhat at random, from the book (so far) I found interesting.

When nations default on their international debt creditors have few effective responses.  In passing them mention that American gun boat  diplomacy  visa vie South America arose out efforts to collect after Venezuela defaulted.  That’s not really what I was taught in school about the Monroe Doctrine.  There is an example of a nation losing it’s sovereignty  upon defaulting on their international debt.  I bet you didn’t know the Newfoundland  was forced to merge with Canada by the Brits during the depression.  But it’s so rare as to be the exception that proves the rule.

There is a nice turn of phrase “odious debt” used to loosely label debt that doesn’t deserve to be repaid.  A simple example of odious debt would be that your country is taken over by a vile dictator who then engages in all kinds of vile behavior; meanwhile lenders in other countries continue loaning him lots of money; which he uses to further torture the population.  Finally the citizens manage to eject him.  That debt is odious and the new government decides to default on it.  Of course there are other less colorful scenarios with less obvious outcomes familiar to anybody who’s observed bankers in the  absence  of consumer protections.

Finally they mention how in China and India the governments regulate things so that people have very limited choices when it comes to savings.  They call this financial oppression; a turn of phrase I see has having great potential in our polarized political discourse.  The governments also regulate what the banks can do with the deposits.  People love to spin fanciful ideas about  alternatives  to the banking system, and I suspect you could find an interesting set of examples in such countries.  For example they mention that savers turn to gold and  jewelry  as an  alternative.

The Trivial Deep Cloud

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I should come up with a snappy name for this prediction:  Doorbells will be cell phones.  What I mean by this is that lots of the very very  simplest  signalling devices, push buttons, switches, etc. etc. are going to work via the cell phone network.  Devices which do not need any of the obvious features of the cell network: mobility, great distance, high bandwidth.  But rather devices that could be hardwired over short distances.  It’s a race between unlicensed standards based open access solutions and the cell phone companies.  If the cell phone companies can offer services to device makers at attractive price points fast enough then they win.

This article shows that at least one cell phone company appears to begin understand this.  Pill boxes – that’s the idea.

I’ll pile on to my guess.  I suspect that the early movers in this direction will get caught at price points that are way too high; and that later movers will be the ones to garner the real volume applications.  What would really blow the market open would be a onetime payment, probably a dollar, which would grant the device maker a tiny bit of bandwidth per month (say a Megabyte/year) in  perpetuity  tied to a single device.  Or how about a kbyte total for the life of the device, for cereal boxes tops.

This is the complement to the insight that WIFI is now table stakes for a cell phone.  What I’m predicting is that minimal cellular service could be table stakes for pretty much any electronic device.  Isn’t “table stakes” an amusing way to say must-have?  Stuff moves onto that list for assorted reasons.

No matter what a lot more signals are going to round trip deep into the cloud.

Thoughts on Health Reform

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David Leonhardt’s piece this morning in the Times “In Health Card Bill, Obama Attacks Wealth Inequality” hits an exceptionally key point.  It’s written in a very balanced way.  I recommend it and I’m  surprised  that for those on the left this point hasn’t been more at the forefront of their thoughts and rhetoric over the last year.

The goal of trying to change course on the inequality problem is clearly one of the legs that this effort stands, and something Obama cares about.  It’s something lots of Democrats care about.  But there are other legs and it is important not to ignore them.  Let me enumerate a few.

The Democratic party is far more likely to look after the interests of small economic actors than the Republicans.  The data on that is overwhelming.  But wealth inequality isn’t the only reason why the party would support reform.  The risks and uncertainty caused by the old system fall almost entirely on the smaller economic actors.  Those of us (families and businesses) in the top quarter of the economy are almost blind to the  uncertainty  created by the current system, with the exception of the  occasional  catastrophe.

But yet old system was on the fast track to making American industry entirely unable to compete.  And hence even those who think that Government’s only function is to help large economic actors were largely in support of reform.

If you map out the left-right spectrum of the nation and the legislatures the reform we got falls at the center.  That was exactly what Obama signaled he would aspire to deliver; going all the way back to the earliest days of his campaign.  As a practical matter this bill is about exactly as far to the left as anybody should have hoped for.  The party on the left doesn’t get to pass a bill that is at the center of it’s party member’s opinions.  You only get to pass a bill that gets you the vote of that last necessary right most legislator.

I also think that there was a leg to this effort that has largely been miscomprehended.

There are dozen or more really awful problems facing the nation.  For example global warming, banking regulation, and the polarization that means the two parties have zero overlap in many of our legislative bodies.

It is my impression that Obama appreciates and has spent a vast amount of calories trying to address the polarization issue.  His offer to the Republicans of a seat at the table was genuine.  He didn’t need to to it and he spent a lot of time enabling their  shenanigans  by doing it.  He  shunned  the temptation to accept their continual taunting and respond in kind.  That strategy, it seems to me, wasn’t optimal for getting the best health care reform outcome.  But is continues to be the right approach if we are to back away from the extreme dangers implicit in the polarization.  Dangers I don’t think many observers have even begun to grasp.

Send your Laptop on Vacation

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Here is another  amusing addition  to the pile of commitment techniques.  This is  analogous  to the software you can install that denies you access to the internet for an interval.  In this art project the artist suggests a service that allows you to mail you phone or lap top away on vacation.

There are services that allow you to store your stuff, using the mail for deposits and withdrawals.  It would be easy for such operations to add commitment services.

See also this art project.

Cartoons

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I dropped a friend off at the suburban train station in the intense nor-easter that dumped 10 inches of rain on us recently. My friend has taken to wearing a very handsome bowler hat, of which I am slightly jealous. The wind plucked his hat off and sent it rolling around the parking lot in fast large circles. We laughed at our mutual delight in getting to experience, in real life, a classic cartoon troupe.

I have since been reminded of another cartoon troupe.  When I was young, to illustrate what a rube some character was, he would sign a contract by making an X on the dotted line. And so I was pleased to observe a gentleman signing his credit card purchase by swiping the pen on the terminal screen from left to right making only a horizontal line. As I like to see if I can get a reaction out of the retail clerk I’ve taken to drawing a little smillie face when I sign on those terminals.

Signatures have legal standing, and some years ago the Feds authorized industry to go forth and invent some standards for electronic signatures. We now have a multitude of such systems. I was greatly amused by this one:

In that example the user signs by typing into the top box. In the lower box there then appears a faux signature. It’s a cartoon signature! Giving the impression that somebody actually signed this using a pen.

n2n

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n2n is a nice peer to peer vpn. Here are some hints, mostly so I’ll remember them.

There is a minor bit-o-confusion on the Macintosh. The edge nodes all use tun devices, rather than real ethernet devices, to plug in. You’ll need to install tun devices by hand. Then these devices will not show up in the various System Preferences. Don’t worry about that.

The n2n processes (both edge and supernode) will report status via UPD if you poke a UPD packet into at 127.0.0.1:5645 (aka localhost:5645) as so:


$ echo """" | ncat --idle-timeout 1s --udp localhost 5645
----------------
uptime    1212
edges     2
errors    0
reg_sup   21
reg_nak   0
fwd       0
broadcast 76
last fwd  25 sec ago
last reg  5 sec ago
Ncat: Idle timeout expired (1000 ms).
$

You will probably need to install ncat, which is part of nmap.

Each edge node in an n2n community’s pseudo ethernet needs a MAC address. Analagous to private IP addresses there are private MAC addresses. This mess will gin up a stable MAC address for your edge node based on the first mac address found on your machine.


N2N_FAKE_MAC=`ifconfig -a | awk '/ether/{print $2}' | head -1 | sed 's/^..:..:../10:00:00/'`

If you want an edge node to route all traffic thru you community’s VPN and then out to the rest of the network you need to do two things. Some edge node needs to volunteer to act as a gateway and each client that wants to use that gateway needs to configure their routing appropriately.

First, gateways typically run natd. Happily on the Mac you need only enable internet sharing in the sharing control panel to get that going.

Secondly, edge nodes that want to route over the VPN and out that gateway to the rest of the internet will then need to mess with their routing tables. That’s risky; mess up your routing table and you lose connectivity. You can find out what the default route for packets is by asking:


route -n get default

Note the result down since you’ll need it to switch back.

You can change the default route by doing (presume for a moment that your gateway node is running at 192.168.13.1):


route change default 192.168.13.1

But wait; that will break your N2N vpn, because your traffic to your peers will try to flow thru the new default. So you need to add specific routes to the supernodes and other edge nodes first. I don’t know how to get the list of edges; so I set them up by hand.

You switch back by resetting you default route, and tearing down the one off routes to other n2n nodes. Of course if, all else fails, reboot. Your on your own.

You can see the entire routing table by doing: “netstat -nr”.

The Smart Grid as Big Brother

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Another entry for the collection of devices to automate guard labor. The folks at Pay Technologies sell widgets that disable stuff if the loan payments aren’t made on time. It’s another good example of how these system are first deployed to control the behavior of weak players in the economy. PaytTech pitches their system to car dealers who want to sell to people with lousy credit.

Where to start? Talk about a tempting hacking target! There must be a similar system sold to utilities, landlords, industrial equipment lessors, and mortgage holders. This sentence sounds like litigation just waiting to happen: “Should the customer miss a payment, the vehicle will be disabled at a time when it is least likely to be in use ( i.e. 4:00 a.m.).”

I’m thinking this casts a different light on the phrase “smart grid.” Adding a guarding function to the smart grid’s function changes the pitch to utilities.  In addition to enforcing their own billing they could sell enforcement services to others, e.g. the mortgage holder and landlord.  It will take years for the consumer protections, due process, and appropriate security procedures to catch up.

I have a bad feeling that anybody with a bit of hacking skill and experience using the PaytTech dealer UI would be able to do a lot more damage that this  guy who disabled an entire fleet of cars.

Telephone, a Mac SIP phone

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I’m enjoying this  simple SIP phone for the Mac called Telephone.

It handles multiple accounts nicely.  It has a very discrete UI.  I particularly like that for touch tone entry you just type on your keyboard.

Works well with Gizmo Project, and hence with Google Voice.

As far as I know Google is the only player in the VOIP market still offering any kind of free dial-out.  There used to be a few vendors who gave away a few minutes here and there by they all seem to have dried up.  So much for free lunches.

Calling 800 numbers is often still free, and that’s what I’m usually calling where I end up on hold for long periods.

micro-gossip account linking

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Quite a few years ago now I spent many months thinking and working on the Internet Identity standardization. At the time we spent a lot of energy on what we called “account linking.” We blocked out lots of scenarios; for example linking the account at your stylist to your account at the tailor so your color preferences could move back and forth between them. I don’t believe I saw this scenario coming.

In all the scenarios I recall working on the end-users had relationships with vendors, called accounts, and the idea was to create schemes that enabled vendors to flesh out their model of the end-user by trading data with each other. In the best case they would do that after getting the end-user’s permission.

Alice might have accounts with Sam and Tom; account linking would enable Sam and Tom learn more about Alice by exchanging info in their account records. Better to ask Alice to permit that, absent that permission Alice, and I, call that gossip.  Sam and Tom are talking about her behind her back.  The intent of these designs was, and is, to make Alice comfortable before she notices that Sam is pitching products to her based on info that only Tom could have known.

In the above screen capture YouTube is offering me gossip about Betty. In effect YouTube is saying “I know something about Betty you don’t know.” The mind boggles at how many different ways YouTube and it’s parent, Google, might have come to know of my interest in Betty. For example possibly GMail told YouTube; or DoubleClick. Maybe they scrapped Twitter’s friend network, Twitter makes no effort to protect that data.

Maybe …. this is really about the old kind of account linking. They want to exchange info with other vendors and they are hoping I’ll hit those buttons across the bottom of the dialog.

Of all the things I might subscribe to, and all the things that Google knows about us, how in the world did product management (sic) at Google pick this one?