hochmann-y goodness

Amazon Makes a Stupid Move - #amazonfail

Happy Easter! ... Unless you're the author of a book on lesbian parenting, in which case you have just been banished from Amazon searches and bestseller lists.

Amazon has started filtering "adult" content out of search results and best seller lists -- not a terrible idea in itself, but really boneheaded in this case. The devil is in the details of what Amazon considers to be "adult" content. According to one petition against the new policy, Amazon seems very happy to filter out books on gay/lesbian parenting (with no explicit sexual content), while allowing explicitly sexual heterosexual books to appear without filtering:

We would like to hear the rationalisation for allowing sales ratings for explicit books with a heterosexual focus such as:

--Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds by Chronicle Books (pictures of over 600 naked women)
--Rosemary Rogers' Sweet Savage Love" (explicit heterosexual romance);
--Kathleen Woodiwiss' The Wolf and the Dove (explicit heterosexual romance);
--Bertrice Smal's Skye o'Malley which are all explicit heterosexual romances
--and Alan Moore's Lost Girls (which is a very explicit sexual graphic novel)

Yet the following books, which have a gay or lesbian focus, have been classed as "adult books" and stripped of their sales ratings:

--Radclyffe Hill's classic novel about lesbians in Victorian times, The Well of Loneliness, and which contains not one sentence of sexual description;
--Mark R Probst's YA novel The Filly about a young man in the wild West discovering that he's gay (gay romance, no sex);
--Charlie Cochrane's Lessons in Love (gay romance with no sex);
--The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience, edited by Louis-George Tin (non-fiction, history and social issues);
  --and Homophobia: A History by Bryan Fone (non-fiction, focus on history and the forms prejudice against homosexuality has taken over the years).

Please tell us, Amazon, why the explicit books with a heterosexual focus are allowed to keep their sales ratings while the non-explicit romances, the histories and the biographies that deal with LGBTQ issues are not.

As of this writing, the tag #amazonfail is the number 1 trending topic on Twitter, as outrage spreads.

5 Fun Facts About GhostNet (Spy Network From China)

I listened to Security Now! episode 191 on my commute to/from work today. The episode focuses on GhostNet, the computer spy network based in China that has infiltrated systems across 103 countries.

(If you have time, I highly recommend you listen to the show, so you can hear the fascinating details about how GhostNet works, what it can do, how it was discovered, and just how easy it is for this technology to compromise government computers and others. You can skip to about 30 minutes into the show, if you are not interested in the other unrelated security stories at the beginning.)

Here are five key facts about GhostNet that I learned from the episode:

1. The four known GhostNet control computers are all based on the island of Hainan in China -- that island is also home to Chinese intelligence agencies, though China denies any involvement.
2. The GhostNet software is based off of freely available trojan code called GhostRat, hence the "GhostNet" name.
3. The trojan software exploits a security flaw that has been known, documented, and patched since 2006! Many of the systems in GhostNet have remained infected since that time, and others continue to be infected even now.
4. Reportedly, a woman entering China was detained for two months. After denying any involvement with Tibet or the Dalai Lama, she was presented with a transcript of her private e-mails which had, presumably, been collected using the GhostNet network.
5. The compromised systems include: offices of the Dalai Lama; the Ministries of Foreign Affairs in Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, and the Philippines; the Embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany, and Pakistan; an unclassified computer at NATO headquarters, and many otthers.

Security Now! Podcast Covers Chinese Cyber-Spying Network

The newest episode of the Security Now! podcast covers "GhostNet", the Chinese computer spy network. This is the network I mentioned in an earlier post, and it allegedly has infiltrated computers in 103 countries, including some embassies and the offices of the Dalai Lama.

I've got a lot of podcasts to listen to, but I'll bump this to the front of the queue and listen to it on my way to work today!

Thoughts on Work, and the REAL Economic Recovery

Today while rummaging around through books at a nearby second hand shop, I was extremely happy to come across a book called Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity. Tom Clancy thriller novel this is not, but it speaks to something that's been on my mind for a while. Namely, how do average people like me and you relate to work? I'm excited to read the book and find out what the author's take is on this relationship.

This subject comes up from time to time on my favorite podcast, This Week in Tech. They usually approach it from a technology angle, of course, but there is also talk about what work means in this economy and what it will mean after the recovery. The folks on TWiT seem to glimpse that "recovery" is not going to be what most people think, and I agree. Gone are those fantasy days of busting your hump for 40 years and then retiring to a life of relaxation and ocean cruises for the remainder of your (hopefully many) later years. In some ways, that fantasy is not a very good one anyway. I don't know anyone who is retired who is happy doing nothing -- often they work harder than they ever did while employed, but the focus has shifted from something they do for pay to something they do for joy or recreation. They enjoy that work because they find joy in it as a present-moment thing, not as a "I have to do this for another <X> years so I can rest!" thing.

Those of you who know me personally probably know that I hated a great deal about my last job (a teaching job in China, for an American company). I hated the long hours, the way local Chinese workers were [mis]treated (forced to work longer and harder than anybody else but for less pay), the condescending and abusive attitude sales staff held towards the students who they bilked out of thousands of dollars, etc. Now I have a job that is very human, very people-focused, and satisfying... Of course, I don't make the embarrassingly large stacks of money I made at the teaching job. But if you have to choose, it's better to have one's soul than to have a bursting wallet, right?

On the cover of Crossing the Unknown, work is defined as "the place where the self meets the world." This is the so-called pilgrimage of identity. You can't separate yourself from your job, as if it's some parasite unrelated to who you are and the life you lead. What will the economic recovery be? It won't be a return to $300,000 houses, two SUVs in the garage, and a 37" HD flat screen TV in every bedroom. Those days are gone, and good riddance to them. The economic recovery will be a return to middle ground: working a job that doesn't pay you as much, but prompts you to live a simpler and more satisfying lifestyle.

With my teaching job, I could buy virtually anything I wanted, anytime I wanted, for any price I wanted, and I hardly had to ever think about how much money was left in my bank account. I could blow money at Starbucks every day during lunch, my wife and I could eat at any of the hundreds of high-class, expensive restaurants nearby and not flinch at the price. We could do those things, and we often did. But I'm telling you, that lifestyle sucks. It is not at all satisfying, and it came at a price while I was working there -- a gut-wrenching churn of my stomach every morning before work, and a sense of dread hanging over each weekend, knowing that the work week would soon come again.

Now I have a much lower salary and we have a much stricter budget. Meals out are much less frequent, we buy our goodies at second hand stores when possible, etc. But I have birds chirping outside my window every morning, I have fluffy white clouds gliding across the blue skies above me, I have a modest (but comfortable) place to live, I have my cheap collection of used books, and my wife and I can walk every night while enjoying the silence and the stars. What more do we need? The REAL economic recovery will be when the rest of America realizes our lifestyle is a pretty good one, even if it lacks the (ridiculous) treadmill of consumption that people enjoyed before 2009.

Chinese Spy System: Dalai Lama Computers, and Others in 103 Countries

From the New York Times:

A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.

[The operation] has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.