Monthly Archives: June 2006

Mark Cuban – Anti-stock-fraud web site

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News is out that Mark Cuban is funding sharesleuth.com, with the help of veteran business reporter “Christopher Carey, a 17-year St. Louis Post-Dispatch staffer,” and citizen journalists. Dan Gillmor suggested such a project back in May.

…Cuban is financing a new Web site that will investigate stock fraud and corporate wrongdoing. The billionaire also said he’ll buy and sell stocks based on information before the site publishes it.

Cuban said he has not been a direct victim of fraud but was motivated to start the site by his approach to investing.

“I’m a firm believer that out of (the more than 10,000) public companies the odds are that there are more than just a few crooks and frauds,” Cuban said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press. “Finding them can be rewarding and entertaining.”

As an aside, I have a beef with AP’s headline writing, and the news outlets that carried the headline verbatim:

  • Journalist: Cuban to Finance Fraud Site – Houston Chronicle,
    TMCnet, ABC News, Forbes
  • Cuban reportedly to finance fraud site – MSNBC

The journalism professor in me prefers the following:

  • Journalist says Cuban will back stock-fraud news site – Dallas Morning News
  • Journalist says Cuban will back stock-fraud news site – Team 4 News, TX

Subtle but important difference.

Wikimedia’s new Executive Director

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Jimmy Wales of Wikimedia/Wikipedia announced on June 12, the appointment of an interim Executive Director for the foundation:

Following a long discussion, both publicly and privately, the board of the foundation voted recently to hire an interim Executive Director and legal counsel. We offered the position to Brad Patrick, and he accepted. We have discussed at length the parameters of the position, including job responsibilities, and so on. (This has been posted and discussed publicly as well.)

Who is Brad? Brad has been our pro-bono legal counsel for the past several months, has become very active in foundation matters and in the projects. He is of course a huge fan of free software, Larry Lessig, and Wikipedia, and lives and breathes this stuff. Rather than doing “merely” legal work (nothing mere about it, of course) for us, he has gotten involved in helping the board think about policy, in helping Danny deal with various “customer support” issues, etc.

This appointment has been generally well received by folks who are involved with discussions within the Wikimedia Foundation, though some have raised questions about the process of this interim appointment and the length, given the tenure of two Wikimedia Board Members who were “temporary” two years ago, but still remain today.

Some more information about Brad Patrick can be found from the Berkman Center.

“Oversight” in Wikipedia

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One of the newer developments in Wikipedia is the creation of a new “Oversight” class for a small set of Wikipedians, which would allow for really purging information from the database in Wikipedia.

There is a solid reason for this. In the interest of transprency, wikis store every edit ever made, even the vandalism, profane and libelous edits. This virtual “infinite undo” of Wikipedia provides for easy rollback of changes and for tracking the progress of articles. But this information (personal information, libelous or defamatory statements) in the edit history can be considered still “published” because it can be pointed to by a URL directly into the database. (See this for an example of vandalism still accessible in the edit history of the [[George W. Bush]] article)

It was for this reason that a limited number of folks among the Wikipedia administrators, developers and arbitration committee have the power to delete particular edits permanently, without any trace left in the Wikipedia database. Right now, there are 17 individuals with this capability. From the story from the Wikipedia Signpost, community newsletter:

A new revision-hiding user class, “oversight”, was created recently. Users with the function can permanently delete page revisions containing personal information, copyright violations, or libelous content.

The permission was created after a number of problems involving the current deletion process. The biggest problem was the insertion of inappropriate content including the phone numbers of administrators and potentially libelous information into revisions and edit summaries

Some have tried to portray this as a sinister move (“Is a Wikipedia priesthood attempting to erase history?“), but this has been a nagging problem for years that is finally being addressed with a real policy, rather than ad hoc database tinkering by Wikipedia’s developers and Jimmy Wales’ special requests.

Google Afterword and Strategic Ambiguity

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Since many folks have pointed to my early report and workarounds, for completeness I should report that Google is back to “normal” reachability status in Beijing as of a few days ago. And by normal, I mean the normal GFW keyword and URL filtering is still in place.

The other big news was that Sergey Brin was in Washington DC to lobby on the network neutrality issue and spoke about their China strategy.
The statement from Brin has quickly become a public relations Rorschach test:

“It’s perfectly reasonable to do something different, to say, ‘Look, we’re going to stand by the principle against censorship and we won’t actually operate there.’ That’s an alternate path. It’s not where we chose to go right now, but I can sort of see how people came to different conclusions about doing the right thing.” (from Financial Times)

“We felt that perhaps we could compromise our principles but provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference.” (from Guardian Unlimited)

I say Rorschach test because the variety of headlines on this were fascinating, ranging from Google sticks by its policy, to Google may make a U-turn in policy. A sample of these:

Google’s Brin regrets China decision
PC Pro, UK - Jun 8, 2006

Google to stay put in China
Times of India, India - Jun 10, 2006

Google in China: reversal on the way
Guardian Unlimited, UK - Jun 7, 2006

We may pull plug on our censored Chinese website, says Google
Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom - Jun 7, 2006

So we have some seemingly conflicting headlines on Brin’s position, which reflects a lot of the different views among Google’s public policy folks, the founders, CEO Eric Schmidt and Kai-Fu Lee. Google’s position right now seems to be “we can perhaps partake in some evil without actually being evil.”

It’s a subtle position, and is bound to make purists quite unhappy. But to their credit, it’s a whole lot better than what Yahoo, Skype and Microsoft have been doing to publicly address their own China strategy. (Which is to say, almost nothing) The public holds Google to a higher standard because Google holds itself to a higher standard.
My conversations with Google folks in the US and China, as well as Internet veterans seems to indicate there is a game of strategic ambiguity going on. Google will comply with the letter of the law as it needs to, while delivering what it considers as the “right product” offshore.

Perhaps they can provide a wedge of sorts – conform to PRC norms with google.cn within China, showing they are respecting local convention; but at the same time, have www.google.com/intl/zh-CN/, hosted in the US, that does not filter or restrict results.

Brin mentioned that only 1 percent of China’s Google users use google.cn, while 99 percent of folks use the US-hosted site. (I’m dubious of these numbers and no story in the news has a direct quote of Brin on this. Anyone have any pointers?)

Regardless, Brin seems be signalling that google.cn is their Potemkin village. But in an inverted variation of the famous tale, the google.cn Potemkin village shows a facade of how restricted searches are in China, when in reality, Chinese users are performing unfettered searches off google.com. And maybe that’s the best solution for now.

Beijing Blue Skies thanks to Exams?

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This week marks the nationwide college extrance exams for China’s students (June 7-9) and they take this seriously – the government orders construction sites to shut down to reduce noise, divert car traffic around venues, and use police to help safeguard passage to/from testing sites. Check out stories about Shanghai and one about related stress.

But there may be a strange side effect – stunningly clear blue skies in Beijing three days in a row.

Beijing Blue

(Photo taken June 9, 2006: Construction scaled back in Beijing’s Central Business District. Rare blue skies above.)

That’s bizarre. Beijing has become infamous for smog, haze, and gritty particulates. You can feel it in your hair at the end of the day.

Is there a direct correlation between exam-related shutdown for three days and exactly three days of clear skies? If so, it gives me hope that Beijing can turn it around for the 2008 Olympics, so world class marathon runners won’t collapse from fits of wheezing and asphyxiation. The Beijing authorities have already said no construction activity can take place after December 2007, and it looks like it may work. (Authoritarianism has its advantages…)

There were only 233 blue sky days last year in Beijing according to Shanghai Daily, and their target is 238 for this year. That’s an improvement on the 100 blue sky days in 1998.

Add three more to that count.

Wikipedia Stats

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Some interesting questions were posed by Jimmy Wales on the Wikipedia mailing list recently. Wales said on June 5:

I would be fascinated if we could figure out such statistics as

“For any given edit, what is the average length of service of the editor?” “For any given edit, what is the median length of service of the editor?” These could be measured by either time since first edit, or total number of edits or (perhaps best) some weighted average of the edit history.

It would be nice to track that number over time… are we becoming “younger” as a community, “older” as a community? Staying about the same? Are old-timers sticking around longer than they used to, or jumping ship faster?

Tim Starling and Jakob Voss followed up on this in just two days. The basic conclusion – contributions to Wikipedia follow a power law distribution, meaning that there is a core set of folks that wind up doing most of the work. It’s not a “cabal” but rather an elite that forms out of a commitment to the project. But there still are significant contributions by newbies.

Because there still seem to be people that are not aware of the steep distribution of activity per contributor: It’s confirms [[Lotka's Law]] – at least for the majority of contributors – a power law in the form “contributors * edits^1.5 = constant”

Jakob adds:

I was really suprised to see that around a quarter of all edits are by “newbies” that have done their first edit less than 100 days ago. I’ll write something about models here.

Wikia has a CEO

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Congratulations to Wikia on their new CEO:

Wikia Inc., a for-profit company founded 18 months ago by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, hired Gil Penchina as its CEO on Monday.

Penchina was vice president and general manager at eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY).

Wales and Angela Beesley started Menlo Park-based Wikia to allow for subscription and advertising supported “wikis” or user-created communities similar to Wikipedia, which is based in St. Petersburg, Fla.

Google access update

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In Beijing, it’s June 5, but the Google inaccessibility seems to persist. Even more, the unavailability of www.google.com on my DSL connection (and it seems, most CNC connections) has dribbled over to affect Google Mail in secure mode.

To recap – on May 28, I documented how to use Gmail in https secure mode. Then starting just before the fourth of this month, I reported on the widespread outage of www.google.com and a hack to get around it by using the naked IP address of Google’s US servers.

Now, the inaccessibility of www.google.com does not affect accessing Gmail in normal http mode (http://mail.google.com), but it does mess it up in https mode (https://mail.google.com/mail). It seems a redirect or some other URL during secure mode hits www.google.com, and when that’s not accessible, the whole thing fails.

The solution is to employ the hack described in the post on May 31. To recap:

Put an entry like this:
216.239.37.104 www.google.com

into the appropriate place in your operating system. See the following directions: for Windows and Mac.

Since most folks use Windows, edit this file, make the mod above, save, quit:
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

For now, that will work around this problem for Google searches and using Google in secure mode.

American Wedge Politics

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Of all the issues facing America today – “war” on terrorism, soldiers dying in Iraq, nuclear showdown in the Middle East, record budget deficits, lack of universal health care, education system in crisis, border security, personal privacy regarding the NSA – this is what Mr. Bush puts as a priority.

President Bush has called for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages. Mr Bush used his weekly radio address to deliver a plea for the US Senate to formally define marriage as the union of man and woman. He said the measure was needed because “activist courts” left no alternative. Amending the US Constitution requires approval by two-thirds of the House of Representatives and Senate and three-fourths of the 50 state legislatures. Lawmakers say the amendment is unlikely to pass.

Regardless of your views on gay marriage, this is the most cynical politics the US has seen in modern times. Bush says he’s against a “litmus test” for appointing judges, but he’s in fact set up a “litmus test” for members of Congress with this issue so that conservative politicians can point to folks who voted against this as out of touch, gay-loving liberals who have nothing in common with middle America. The American Constitution is one of the most brilliant documents in the history of civilization. Putting a gay marriage amendment in the Constitution would be like pasting a Garbage Pail Kids sticker on the Mona Lisa.

What a message to send out to budding democracies around the world – choose posturing self-serving wedge topics to polarize citizens to achieve your political ends while creating social discord in the process. Never mind what the polity actually cares about.

We can finally put this to rest – As the decider, Bush is a divider not a uniter.