mostly research stuff
so i get an from my friend telling me to sign up for william shatner’s dvd club…at first i’m like, “what the shit? who’s reading my diary?” because as a partially-oppressed future white-collar worker child in the 70’s, i could only dream of sharing a star-trek-like virtual space with a dude like shatner (who has his own web site btw http://www.williamshatner.com/)….for sci-fi junkies, this is the real deal, and it’s a very clever play on getting people to pay to own dvd’s that are already unpopular, would never move at wal-mart and might otherwise languish in the basements of shipping studios across the world..the short version: you pay a one time annual fee of 48 bucks and every month shatner sends you a sci-fi pick that you keep..if you already own it, they’ll replace it, and shatner will probably never talk to you personally (sorry, that’s how it is with superstars)
from sir shatner himself, “About the William Shatner DVD Club: The William Shatner DVD Club is the result of a partnership between FullTurn Entertainment, leading movie studios and me, William Shatner. Together, we intend to deliver the highest quality Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror DVDs to our subscriber’s homes every month for less than the price of rentals. Subscribers to the William Shatner DVD Club will be open to experience Sci-Fi, Horror and Fantasy films in their purest form…With the help of my team of expert film critics, I will fill your library with the titles movie lovers need to own.”
…and apparently, the secret sauce is shatner’s proprietary and unpublished playlist, culled from decades of his own personal favorites (uh, can you say barbarella? i could watch jane spin naked for hours without blinking; i hope shatner can too)…
…so yeah, i’ve been following these oddball email recipient tracking firms for about a year - these are the lame ass companies that make crappy and secret little tools that will let you find out if somebody has read your email, where they were when they read it, how many times it was read, if they love you, and some other private information….the big ones are didtheyreadit, (which followed) messagetag.com and readnotify.com (there are a couple of others, like pointofmail.com, emailtrackerpro and activetracker for outlook from readnotify, along with integrated crm email readership tracking from talisma.com, mailchimp.com, constantcontact and so on - but those three above are the largest for dedicated email tracking)…for those of you who are personally bothered or sickened by these assorted services, there are a few things that you can do keep this shit out of your inbox for good:
a) use a plain text only ‘read mail’ setting - these systems above rely on presentation of a tiny concealed image file...and so any plain text reader will kill this (for example, you could do this in a program like eudora on mac or pc in the settings - and be sure to disable executables in html, which most programs will allow)
II)…or use thunderbird or opera mail clients (they offer these settings), squirrelmail or pine mail (later two are text intensive mail programs, not great for business people though)
3) download a free utility (no longer supported, but works) which blocks five major tracker programs (including didtheyreadit and messagetag) at either:
http://www.wizard-industries.com/ (publisher’s site)
http://www.download.com/E-mail-Tracking-Blocker/3000-8022_4-10350712.html (alternate download)
d) …for those using outlook, you can turn off automatic image downloading - and note that all future outlook releases turn off html display by default, rendering these programs useless..however, eudora and outlook have both proven consistently susceptible unless you completely turn off all html and rtf reading type options (you can search eudora.com for help depending on version, same with all other email programs)…
FIVE) …or use gmail - set up an alias to forward to and send from your regular email, but have all email route through an alias server account - folks have tested sending from these services to gmail and report zero display success (gmail is using a text display by default, which is why, plus they’re using DKIM to verify the server)…guessing this might work just as well with yahoo mail or hotmail…
6) …or you can also create a filter for the servers operated by these firms (e.g. didtheyreadit.com, which is where the messages are routed) - that way, though you won’t see the image, you will tag the ‘tracking enabled message’ in your inbox and then you can a note like, “dude, what the fuck?“…
i suspect that within 12 months we’ll all see the ability to block such message tags and tracking features from within most common antispam/spyware/virus type software apps…people consider this an invasion of privacy…the AHBL is already blocking didtheyreadit.com’s server
…and it’s illegal to use didtheyreadit.com in france (considered evidence, ouch!)
VII) …OR (light shines on marblehead) just use the old free version of “read receipt” requests in your mail program! duh. these have been around for years and i have yet to have a recipient deny a request for a receipt, excluding the olsen twins (knock on wood)…and besides, marketers have been doing this for years to track campaigns, so i’m a bit confused about what’s super new with all of these services beyond cloaking with a transparent image and dedicating the whole thing to gathering personal data like location etc…just my opinion…and my personal advice: don’t use it for business communications because i think you might come off as some kinda shitbag if clients start seeing that this stuff is coming through with your messages…
okay, so you all know that i’m fascinated by lies, lie detection and a whole bunch other things that neighbor elicitation, so i was thrilled when - right after i wrote about commercial brain scanning - i got a newscientist alert which turned me on to a new remote lie detector technology to be developed for government agency use…
…this is about the remote personnel assessment (RPA) device, from new scientist’s article, ” In a call for proposals on a DoD (department of defense) website, contractors are being given until 13 January to suggest ways to develop the RPA, which will use microwave or laser beams reflected off a subject’s skin to assess various physiological parameters without the need for wires or skin contacts. The device will train a beam on “moving and non-cooperative subjects”, the DoD proposal says, and use the reflected signal to calculate their pulse, respiration rate and changes in electrical conductance, known as the “galvanic skin response“…basically, at one level, a remote lie detector…(a quote from the same bit, “So it will be used as a “remote or concealed lie detector during prisoner interrogation“)..
btw, if you’re not already a new scientist subscriber, you might consider ordering a back issue from july of last year that featured a huge special called, “the deception special, the truth about lies” (one of the best issues of last year by far, covered everything from brain scans and mystics to magic and government)…
..and on an important aside, gotta offer up an apology to steve silberman, the author of the article in wired this month upon which my post of earlier this week was based (commercial brain scanning)…his full article is up online, and actually this is (i believe) the first time i’ve rambled without citation (it was print only when that post was pre-published on this blog)…at any rate, steve’s full article is very heady stuff and examines much more than just those companies mentioned…it also looks into the grants and research that bore this technology, the strange network of relationships between all of the players and generally makes for a great read without the recondite style that begets many advanced technology articles (hey, seriously steve, sorry and thanks for your email - delighted to know that you’re reading passingnotes!
so remember a while back when i was telling prestidigitators to beware of their lying eyes? well, i stumbled onto a couple of companies with brain-scanning-lie-detecting technology that just might chill your shit…as you might or might not know, polygraph testing (aka ‘lie detectors‘) are considered unreliable and inadmissible in our legal system (for example, they smack of cold war interrogations and mccarthy era dramas)…but there’s a new technology that goes on sale this year built from ‘fmri‘ research - that’s functional magnetic resonance imaging…i won’t put you to sleep with the geeky details ’cause it makes more sense to just give you the skinny on this…
basic idea: in order to tell a lie, you must first stop telling the truth. this is a simple hypothesis developed by daniel langleben at u.penn… the implications of this for brain scanning suggest (after kazillions of peer reviewed studies) that the brain will literally produce hot and cold spots (in fmri scans) as individuals move from truth to fiction - and it doesn‘t matter if the answers are spoken, since mere fictional or truthful thoughts will produce the same fmri scan results…sounds cool, huh? well, fortunately for the government, their agencies are free from the laws that would prohibit such use in the private sector (think ‘the ultimate hiring process for the next enron’ or a way to save money when martha stewart does something wrong again and lies like clinton puffing on a hoochy-dipped stogie)….
as for these two companies i mentioned - no lie mri and cephos corporation, you just gotta love their marketing song…from no lie, “Liars benefit from their skills at the expense of other individuals or groups. It is estimated that at least one out of three conversations involve a lie and it is estimated that 5% of the population are what is referred to as “seamlessâ€? liars or “naturalâ€? liars.” - and then check out their “markets served” (welcome back mr. orwell! we missed you!)…from cephos, “The company believes that truth is a valuable commodity and anticipates offering similar services to clients in a variety of industries.” (nice crisp copy, huh? i’ll sell you some truth: you freak me out dudes)…oh, and did i mention that they’ve both put together incredibly impressive management and advisory teams that effectively eliminate opposition? and that this technology all grew from government grants (duh)?
…but there’s a problem (there’s always a problem, right?), these scanners are huge machines and they’re gonna be crazy expensive and the subjects have got to stay very still (that makes speaking tough work, hence the value of thinking the answers)….this is ideal for voluntary (or mostly voluntary) participants, but britton chance at u.penn is chasing a more practical idea, a small wearable hat that fits into a briefcase and can do the trick even on unwilling participants…he imagines a near future (using optics and fmri technologies) in which there is nothing worn at all, and scanners simply aimed at the target look for truth (as in, “has anybody else had your luggage?” or, “have you actually seen the WOMD?” or, “does my ass look fat?”)…
does this kind of stuff bother you? does it really, really freak you out to the point where you’re like, “what kind of fucking world do we live in?“…you’re not alone…paul root wolpe at the center for bioethics at u.penn tracks lie detection technologies, and he sees this commercialization of fmri as a clear example of how special interests can accelerate the development of something that ultimately begs for a lot more thinking…you might want to spend some of your down time this week visiting the center for cognitive liberty and ethics to bone up on these kinds of issues…and you know what would be really cool? have the founders of these companies go into their own scanners and answer a series of questions about their explicit plans for the future….yeah, that’ll happen…btw, happy new year - and be sure to add “won’t accept hats from strangers” to your list of resolutions…
update (1/6/05): wrote this based on a print article from wired, you can read the very long and completely detailed piece regarding these companies, the grants, the research, the people (and so on) online as of this week…it was written by steve silberman
sorry, but i sometimes love to crap all over new stuff that i don’t use if - and only if - the following conditions are met: 1) if it’s got anything to do with bill gross from idealab (then you know it’s headed down the shitty river), 2) if it’s gonna solve problems for the world but the site owner details are private or anonymous, or 3) a poorly described and ill experienced management team attempts to simultaneously create and deliver about a dozen applications that mimic the functionality of offerings from ibm/lotus, groove (now microsoft), microsoft, ibm, yahoo/flickr, and google - all combined - and present it as some kinda panacea when in fact it’s just the glossy veneer that they’ve put up to cloak their advertising and marketing goals in which they dream of being like myspace-meets-every-app-you-need…oh, and get this: particularly ripe for teasing if they want you to pay money for what you can already get for free…in fact, why on earth would people pay for software anymore (kidding…sorta)?
did that make any sense? i’m talking about transmedia corp’s “glide effortless” super suite that came out after thanksgiving on the 30th of november but then had registration problems….if you take the time to visit this site, you’ll notice that this is like a whole bunch of crap that people are already doing online and through p2p applications…but they’ve put it all in one browser interface (as will ibm, microsoft, google, yahoo, et al)…and wow (!) - with a team of only one experienced architect who hasn’t invented anything you’ve ever heard of, these guys have built a dozen applications simultaneously that do everything that everybody else is already doing (you know, versus the guys at lotus, ibm and microsoft who actually created the market for integrated collaborative environments, internet based applications and services, etc by deploying large teams of brilliant architects and inventors to pioneer these markets)…
…these folks are gonna go the way of bloomba i’d say (gobbled up by yahoo), so no, i’m not taking stock…and i’m certain that they’re all wicked nice folks - but when the founder puts people like vogel and shamsai on the advisory board (entertainment industry), and the founder himself is really a producer, and the entire management/founding team smells like garage band buddies (almost all tied to music related stuff), and when the board consists of only the founder, then you can just tell that the entire thing is about the “shops” module, in which consumers swap music and a bunch of other shit….like a wannabe backdoor to grokster’s market pretending to offer serious application utility when all they really want to do is aggregate your little brains and collective interests to strike deals with hungry labels looking to usurp apple’s dominance in the future of digital music demand (oh sure, they also make it easy to buy groceries, but come on, a punch out to a bunch of already built commerce sites? that’s sooooo late 90’s)….claire leka is their poster-child site for how you can build with their tools, and it’s the most ridiculously bloated site i’ve ever seen (feels about one step above a shitty myspace site! ouch)….sorry glide, but i’ll pass and just wait for the big boys to deliver this feature set by integrating dozens of slick personal web services that have already been tested and tried and cost nothing to users…
this blog is mostly safe for work, though i sometimes throw around a 'fuck' or two. you'll find a bunch of my articles from CI Magazine, SCIP online, other research pieces and some other crap. enjoy. there's lost of content here related to getting information about, around, from and through people and organizations...