Ian Betteridge’s Neighborhood

[overhead shot of a table in an expensive modern-european restaurant. It's not a capital, but it's one of those cities  on the thinktank/summit-circuit that treaties get named after. Two people are talking. A man in his fifties and a woman in her mid thirties. Both are understated in appearance, but obviously expensively dressed. Both of their smartphones are turned screen-down on the table. It's unclear to us who is the most important. And it's unclear which one is saying the following]

Governments and corporates know me as 'Switchboard', which is how I like to keep it.

I have an aptitude.

Well, a few aptitudes.

But, mainly - I'm very good at people.

Especially those who can't really be described as people anymore. I know what they're good for, what they want and - how to get hold of them.

I've never saved the world, but I've probably had lunch with someone who has.

I'm who you call if you have, y'know -  a *really* big problem.

[ringtone]

"What did you think?"

"Weirdly, Quantum of Solace is probably the first movie where I've finished the videogame adaptation before seeing the movie. I got this weird sense of spacial familiarity - as if it was set locally, or somewhere I'd visited.  Somewhere less liberally sprinkled with armed henchmen."

"Does it pass muster?  The game, I mean."

"Well it's probably the best Wii Zapper game I've played so far.  I probably wouldn't have bought it is I hadn't ended up playing big-screen GoldenEye at the V&A on friday night.  And yes, it's probably the most GoldenEyeish game ever made.  And while that's not a bad thing, it would have been a much better thing 10 years ago.  And it's a reasonable approximation of the recent movies, but then they have fewer instances of Bond throwing himself off buildings due to the stupid dual-function jump button." 

"Does it open with a chase between two, presumably paid, product-placement, cars.  Which was the evil car - the Alfa Romeo or the Aston Martin?"

"No driving levels for once.  Maybe in the movie it's like that tech-physiognomy from the first season of 24 where people's brand choices flagged their traitorous intentions.  It's weird, for all the luxury brands on display the only thing I covet is one of those little Q badges."

"It's a classy conspiracy that issues its own lapel pin.  It's a shame that was the only Q in the movie."

"Oh, I think the Quatermaster's days are over.  This is Bourne-era now, our tech isn't invisicar stupafantastical. It's now subject to the increasingly short gap between new/hotness and old/busted.  We probably don't need grandad explaining a gadget that'll seem obsolete by the time the blu-ray is released."

"Pay attention double-oh-seven - this is what we're calling a cellular telephone."

"They just put it out there and trust the audience gets it: you've  either watched those TED videos or this is the first table-surface computer you've seen, but you still get it.  This Sony cybershot  phone-cam works differently - fine. This headpiece comms channel is probably encrypted, no need to make a point of saying it.  They don't even go out of their way to explain the combustability of those hydrogen fuel-cells at the end of the movie, they just casually point them out and minutes later... boom."

"Hydrogen fuel-cells?"

"Yeah, what did you think was causing those explosions?"

"I just assumed it was product placement for Sony's laptop batteries."

"This is arguably the first presidential election of the HDTV age.  So is it more important a candidate looks good on high-def... or on YouTube?"

That's the question I asked author Neal Stephenson at a Q and A in London last night.  I couldn't ask about his new novel - I bought it on day one, but it's big and intimidating and haven't had courage to crack open the cover yet.  But my inner-fanboy desire to make an obscure allusion to his work could not be stifled.

Plus, I'd been rewatching that "Zero?" McCain moment that Danny had linked to earlier in the day.

I don't have a copy to hand, and haven't read it for 14 years, but I remember that in Interface - the political techno-thriller Stephenson co-wrote - one character claims that after HDTV is introduced into American homes only movie stars will be electable.  (The higher resolution making regular people, politicians included, appear hideous.)

Years ago, if Americans got to see a presidential candidate giving a speech, it was at a distance.  Across a town hall.  At a state fair or some-such.  This distance favoured candidates who were emotionally "hot".  Television would later give the appearance of something more intimate.

For the benefit of the audience Stephenson brought up the canonical example of the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon televised debates.  Television didn't do Nixon any favours, his physical reaction to the studio lights appeared to make him less trustworthy.  Radio listeners gave the debate to Nixon, but more people had seen it on TV where the advantage was with the visually cooler Kennedy.

That's the problem, Stephenson said, writers have with projecting technological advances - even into the near future.  It always seems far simpler when they're the ones deciding what the implications are going to be.  

TV may be high-def, but how many people in 2008 had their main exposure via the comparatively crappy resolution of online video?  

"It needs to be both" he eventually offered, but more as question than an answer.  If you can't see them sweat on YouTube, have we switched back on to some invisible path forked prior to 1960?  Is the best way to project a candidate on HDTV the best way to project them in low-resolution online.  Does it just scale down, or are the approaches fundamentally incompatible?

I guess it's a question for the pundits of the future.  Well, the future beginning next month.

Zero?

"Yeah, well I blame George Lucas."

"Oh for... Well you seem to have been consistantly blaming Lucas for everything bad the last few years.  Do tell - how has this creator of fiction caused the current economic crisis?"

"You say that, but the economy itself is a fiction."

"Ok, a Frank Capra angel."

"Yeah, was going to stretch a metaphor around the Force or maybe people not believing in faries, but... nice Darmok.  Anyway, you see these guys on the trading floors, high ups in the investment banks.  Lot of guys in their 30s."

"Ok, go on."

"So, back in the 90s most of the previous guys in those positions were of cinema attending age in 1977 - when the original Star Wars was released.  But a lot of the guys today were either not born or two young to see Star Wars in the cinema.  Empire came out in 1980, Jedi in 1983."

"Oh, god.  Is this like when you openly mock people for believing in star signs, but then go on to contend that people's attitudes can be determined by who their first Doctor Who was?"

"Your close-minded attitude clearly marks you out as Tom Baker's, but yes, it's very much like that.  If you came to Star Wars between 77 and 80, or after 83, you had a very different perspective.  Those people had hope - new hope.  Their story ended in a very visibly defeated enemy, celebrations, medals, dancing teddy bears, whatever.  But for those years between Empire and Jedi...  You found out you were adopted and your real dad was a dick, had your hand cut off, your best friend flash frozen.  Bleak.  Precious little hope ahead. It's got to have some impact.  If you were a Star Wars obsessed 12-year-old in 1982, you're a 38-year-old today.  And hey, maybe you are managing pension funds or something.  It's not even a curve - it's high in 77, drops rapidly in 1980, then shoots back up in 83.  Not movie quality, mind you - just the perception on how well the fictional war was going for the good guys."

"Well, three years is a long time in war.  Even a star war."

"It's an even longer time in economics."

While not having read that much Iain M. Banks, I find myself thinking in Culture Ship names an awful lot. Blip.fm seems to encourage it. I try and think up a culture ship name that sums up the song I'm going to blip. No idea why. I enjoy it greatly however.

The tragedy of the commons is a myth.

There is a vast conspiracy enacted by those who would steal the common off the goose.

A giant distributed clan of supervillainy: the free-riders.

They are sent across the globe and beyond - into our fictions and our factions to ensure that the tragedy plays out as prophesised.

They cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be bought (as they are freeriders) - the only way they can be stopped is by applying a sharp pinch to their left elbow and when they turn around on their hard heels, giving them an extremely disapproving, disappointed look.

Start now.

Captain Britain

After unexpected UK success in this years Olympic games, and the prospect of pouring millions in public funds into the hosting of the next one, sustaining some level of excitement about the Olympics is suddenly the new patriotic duty.

I try, I do.  But my first "moment of meh" this time around came with the unveiling of the "Team GB" kit in June.  Somehow I've always been disappointed with my national team's kits.

I may not know much about sport but, as a lifelong comic book reader, I know a thing or two about skin tight uniforms. And these days, things like the LZR swimsuit, and those d3o impact-suits (used by Olympic skiers), don't seem to be too far removed from the sort of things being worn in The Ultimates.

Would it not be awesome if Team GB could get the likes of Bryan Hitch and Alan Davis to bring their comic book aesthetics to the British team's kit?

Since he's been the primary illustrator for most of the Captain Britain Corps, who could have more experience designing skin-tight patriotic uniforms than Alan Davis?  Exactly, no-one.

I've never been a fan of ICANN.  They're a ludicrously costly organsisation whose "authority" stems from administrative stewardship for some of the internet's universal namespaces.  As I used to point out: ICANN costs millions to run every year and their job is to make very occasional changes to small text files - a job I'd happily do for a fraction of the cost.

As someone with some background in net-ops I've always understood that the most elegant bootstrap for a distributed, de-centralized, system is a conservative and tightly controlled hierarchical namespace with a minimally small root.  Authority for the DNS namespace isn't granted by governments (with the exception of the US Dept of Commerce) or international treaty.  There's no real "root" to the authority ICANN that claims, it's “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions” (to use a phrase that others have borrowed from William Gibson).

The authority for management of the DNS namespace is granted by whoever runs the root servers.  The root servers are determined by whatever resolvers think they are.  The resolvers are usually informed by "root.hints" (a file distributed with Bind) that bootstraps the chain of authority when a nameserver is started.

Who's the kingmaker here?  It's just as much the ISC (makers of Bind), as it is the ops staff configuring the nameservers, as it is the company determining their policy of which root to use, as it is the customer complaining he can't send email.

The prevailing attitude is, for the sake of operational sanity, keep using the ICANN root.

Limited experiments in increasing the number of gTLDs (generic top-level domains, as opposed to country-based domains) have been shown to benefit two groups - name registrars and international trademark lawyers - an insignificant number of people as a percentage of Internet users, but whose interests are hugely over-represented at ICANN.  I'd argue that, at best, new gTLDs such as .biz have provided no benefit to the public - and are dominated by registrations by either spammers and scammers (hopping from one blacklisted domain to the next) to purely trademark protection registrations.  And each new gTLD pulls us further from de-centralization, which (in theory) impacts internet stability.

The theory of "bigger root = less stability" is one I personally subscribe to.  Others point to the successful management of ".com", a huge flat namespace, as proof that DNS is robust enough to have a root namespace of millions.  They may well be right, but increasing the root of an authoritative namespace like DNS isn't something we can retract.  If they're wrong, we're screwed - simple technical clarity that only years of being a grumpy sysadmin can provide.

I've been online on two occasions when the .com servers have failed.  My observations at the time were that this did have some knock-on effect to .uk domains - but largely .uk stuff was working fine.  Smart hostmasters have authoritative nameservers under at least two different TLDs precisely for this reason.  Localization of failure is the benefit of distribution and de-centralization.

With the recent decision by ICANN to flatten the namespace they've shown themselves (in my eyes) to be unsuitable stewards of the root.  In my mind (and perhaps others) they're shifting from "de facto root" to merely the "dominant alt-root" - no more legitimate than any other.  It's clear that if any authority is going to be claimed, it's going to come from somewhere like the ITU or UN.  International bodies like this are, by their nature, slow moving and conservative - exactly what namespace management needs.

And for alt-roots - now is your time.  Set up new alt-root servers, grandfather the ICANN root as of this date, then charge hefty administrative fees to include any of the new ICANN-approved domains (registrants can clearly afford it).  If you're a large ISP already running a good few resolvers this is a potential new revenue stream - it's practically free money.

In fact I've always suspected it was the secret business plan for OpenDNS.