After the heavy academic focus, I thought I’d send something random and trivial down the pipe just to give the appearance of having a life at Olin. That something is a confession to the gang at home: I have gone astray from the flock.

It’s to do with my viewing preferences in the tricksy world of Japanese anime. I can regress the trajectory now, and I’m not sure I like it. It goes something like:

(High school) Akira–the archetypal male-oriented (sienen) anime. Female friends tell me it gave them nightmares / nearly ruined the genre for them because of the grotesqueries (giant tentacle arms appearing out of nowhere, human heads popping like blisters, &c) in its later parts. Beautiful artwork does not prevent this from being among the manliest of anime.

(Freshman year at Olin) Spirited away; Ghost in the Shell–the former is difficult to classify, but it’s pretty gender-safe. Everybody watches this at some point because it’s really really well drawn and because it’s being peddled by Disney (complete with lousy dub). Ghost in the Shell is one of the oft-cited influences for The Matrix, and a pretty interesting film/series in its own right.

(Sophomore, Junior year) Various video games & movies of manga origin/style; Nausicaa; Howl’s Moving Castle. Basically more of the same, although considerably more interesting and kinda trippy. Feature-length animes don’t always have the prominent markings of genre that are so evident in all the television-formatted ones. But Howl’s Moving Castle was I think another one of the Disney ones (it shows).

(Summer 2006) Serial Experiments Lain–one of the most mind-warping television shows I have ever seen. Story of a fictitious entity who one day wakes up from her dreary repetitive life and meets God on the internet. Considering how green most of us netizens were in ‘98 I think the authors were amazingly insightful (and/or they were just a bunch of leet, artistically inclined and well-read hackers who smoked some serious dope).

(Senior year) The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya; Ouron High School Hosts Club. I am uncertain how to classify the former (which has some great existential moments and plenty of biting wit), but the latter is most definitely shojo, albeit rather satirical. The sheer excess of roses and cherry blossoms appearing on screen was enough of a deterrent at first, but then I found myself somewhat intrigued by the subtleties of gender-bending as skillfully employed by the writers.

And then… one episode turned into two, which turned into two dozen. I got hooked. I even started wondering myself what kind of bishonen I was (apparently I’m a baka on the outside but a shy intellectual on the inside). And while I’m sure there’s a lesson or two about life and love and sexuality to be gleaned from all this, it’s not going to be anything of immediate use. One thing I do know, Matt and Craig would slap some sense into me if they were here.

But you know what? It could be worse. I’m not watching InuYasha and Witch Hunter Robin (with the emo kids). Yet.

Sponsor meeting starts in just over an hour, so I’ll keep this short and sweet. I’d like to elaborate on a previous point: intellectual property. When I learned that I was on the F. W. Olin project team I hadn’t fully considered the ramifications. As Gill Pratt explained to us today, there is a (more or less) standard non-disclosure and assignment of intellectual property agreement as part of the SCOPE contract for all teams but two: Eric’s team, working for Deka research, has instead something much more stringent; and our team, consisting of five Olin engineers plus one Babson MBA (who has since dropped out) and one Wellesley physicist, has no intellectual property constraints at all. We can decide for ourselves how the final product of 9 months and $15,000 worth of research should be licensed.

As I see it, our project is an excellent candidate for an open source business model, for several reasons. First, tend to I think information propriety in the medical industries is a Bad Thing. Second, the kind of electronics we’d be using are dirt cheap, but the devices used to program them are typically not. Meaning that there can be a market for the programmed, ready-to-use devices even if the programs are freely available for non-commercial purposes over the internet. To take it one step further, suppose we develop a service model around updating and training systems to better serve users–reinforcing the strength of our branding–then we have even more viable options for licensing.

Consider, for example, the open-source Speex codec, an advanced speech compression algorithm rooted in psycho-acoustic theory. Whereas the commercially popular AMR-wideband codec has a patent licensing fee of $10,000 US, and presumably a roomful of lawyers ready to enforce it, the Speex project has no patents and carries a license based on the BSD family of permissive open licenses. As a result, Speex is on its way to becoming a de facto standard in teleconferencing and MOG VoIP systems. While it’s not precisely the argument I would use to persuade my SCOPE teammates, at this point in my career, reputation is more valuable than profits.

Call me morose if you like, but I’m eating this up. Facebook, long a bastion of nonsuckitude and sanity among college social networking websites, appears to have overreached in its efforts to keep abreast MySpace in Web 2.0 development–the end result being a hilarious cadre of facebook groups and independent sites dedicated to anti-new-facebook rants (“Stalking is supposed to be hard”), and rumors on teh internets alleging an evil Google conspiracy. This article does a good job of getting to the core of the matter. My favorite part:

But somewhere out there, some guy was flirting behind his girlfriend’s back using wall posts or photo comments last week. And if he doesn’t log in before his girlfriend does, we may soon find out from their feed that they are “no longer in a relationship.”

Smooth move, guys.

After getting wind of this through first-hand experience, through (of all things) my personalized News Feed (which blithely enumerated the protest actions my friends were taking against its very creation), and through a student mailing list, I decided to investigate personally. I was able to verify the existence of a suspicious-looking opt-out checkbox which I hadn’t seen before, and a link to the Facebook Restricted Terms of Service page.

From what I can tell (I’m not a frequenter of Groklaw, nor am I a lawyer) these terms are indeed ambiguous with regard to intent, and fairly liberal in scope. Taken at face value they appear to be heavily biased in favor of developers. Implicit consent and explicit irrevocability are major themes here. I cannot rule out the possibility that it’s just an attempt to protect themselves and their fledgling developer community, although past legislation and court decisions makes me skeptical of that argument. Alternatively, stupidity is a perfectly good excuse.

But–getting back to the bigger bombshell–this thing about Google is just not true. It was in fact Microsoft who recently secured an advertising deal with Facebook; good news, too, if you ask me. In all the time I’ve been on facebook, their ad slots have been filled by innocuous, aesthetically pleasing, but completely irrelevant material, which serves only to take up space. More to the point, I found no evidence on slashdot or facebook.com to indicate that they have sold their souls to anyone in particular. If Facebook gets bought by Google, I promise, you will learn it from the horse’s mouth.

No, this is an issue of a company going wrong in several little ways. First, it is totally unclear to end users WTF they are trying to do. In one deft stroke, and without explanation, they have restructured the primary interface, added RSS functionality and blog utils a la MySpace and company, launched a developer API when external applications are the last thing Facebook needs, and announced new “restricted” terms of service for these applications, causing fierce debate over what the terms actually mean.

What kills me isn’t the risk to my privacy but the fact that using the site has suddenly become a complicated affair. Simplicity’s always been what made Facebook great. It was the opposite of MySpace and a fair stretch from what could be called “blog-like”. Was it really so hard these days to stay above the ratrace–the petty copying of every little feature just to keep up with the Joneses? Because it won’t be without a fair share of regret that I add the site to my personal information overload watch list.

UPDATE: For what it’s worth, Mark Zuckerberg has managed to convince me that he’s a nice guy, and entirely sincere. Two days after this whole mess started, one day after the debacle exploded onto Slashdot, I tune in for my nightly read to find that Facebook is in the news again (the relevant article is here). Not only was the site’s creator on the up and up this time; not only has he delivered a satisfactory fix for the problem everybody was bitching about; when I logged in to check it out, I got the following apology:

We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.

When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we’ve seen is because of these basic principles.

We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings – to give you even more control over who you share your information with.

Somehow we missed this point with News Feed and Mini-Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.

About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I’d encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Today (Friday, 9/8) at 4pm edt, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Mark

Mark, Mark. I gotta give you credit. I mean first of all, Facebook has always been an impressively well thought out site when you consider that it was started by some random dude at Harvard. Second, to be entirely fair, the user-oriented design issue that concerns us here is a subtle one–people want information to be easily available, yes, but somebody’s got to separate the wheat from the chaff. One’s central nervous system only wants to deal with so much. The privacy settings Zuckerberg has spent two days rushing to implement should effectively stave off any widespread protest, because they deal with the most disturbing side-effects of the news-feed misfeature. Regretfully I don’t think I’ll have gained anything at all when the dust settles, for the same reason: I’ve promptly unchecked most of my feed outputs, and I imagine friends will do the same.

Why? Nobody wants to feel like an attention whore, or to clog up the screens of their acquaintances, and frankly that’s how I imagine most of us feel in the face of such broad changes to Facebook’s previously streamlined look. We look and see the massive output everybody else is generating, and we figure we must be the same. Come to think of it, only just now, while in the process of rectifying my views, did I notice (luser me) that I could just turn off the mini-feed view entirely. I imagine that’s how I’ll be leaving it for the most part. It does point out one piece of obvious, positive, constructive criticism that I can offer: when you make a change that’s going to rock our worlds, please do drop us a note on the front page. As someone who does not follow the developer blog I found it immensely useful.

We love you Zuckerberg, oh yes we do-oo. / We love you Zuckerberg, and we’ll be true. / &c.

So many choices, so little time to choose one. *sigh*

As much as I was afraid of SCOPE going into Friday’s introductory meeting (a combination of extreme stress and guinea-pig syndrome combined to give last year’s participants some unkind things to say about the program), I was pleased to find that (a) the people involved are really cool and (b) they pulled through in a big way making cool projects happen for us. I haven’t finalized how I’ll vote yet, but I’m thinking it’s probably between Allen’s team (design study for a linux print server) and BLinder’s team (which can only be described as Hamlet on the Holodeck realized). Among the big names sponsoring this year’s projects are IBM, HP, Lexmark, MIT, Boeing and Nortel. I am very very very excited by the possibilities, if you couldn’t tell.

I’m also beginning to figure out what it is that I’m doing for OSS. I’ve known for some time that I’d like to take the opportunity to study Tor. At some point I realized that one might be able to address the major issue of throughput in onion routing networks with some combination of trusted computing and fast physical-layer security replacing the much slower, layered, application-level security that is currently employed. To flesh that out would be a significant accomplishment.

It’s Wednesday now, so I’ll be learning in the next day or two where D-Bar has seen fit to put me. Ginneh and I spent the long weekend between overcrowded Boston and overvegetated Saratoga Springs, making time for an overnight at home in North Greenbush and a couple days out in the styx with her friend (another Californian) and friend-in-law (a Saratogian). Although I’ve been in the area quite a few times, for various reasons (cross-country finals, concerts, birthday parties, etc), outside of the state park I really don’t know it.

It’s a nice place. Still manages to pull off the optical illusion of being small when you know damn well it isn’t. Every couple blocks you run into another spring that’s been tapped and rooved for public use; to my surprise they’re all quite different. I’d only tasted Polaris spring, which is along the suburban council 5k trail and reeks of sulphur (it was a CC team tradition). There’s another tap near the park’s edge (named, as all things within 100 miles of the capitol must now be, for Joe Bruno) that draws a shitton of visitors armed with collapsible multi-gallon jugs (cool and refreshing, with zero aftertaste). And a whole cluster of them downtown in congress park, with flavors ranging from near-neutral, drinking fountain quality, to so copper-laden as to leave an aftertaste of blood. Blech.

Also new this past week, Mel and I have cemented our decision to resurrect OCP (in which neither of us was intimately involved). The new organization will be broader in scope (open content as opposed to open source), which should help with membership as well as lining up nicely with my zeal of late for copyright reform and such. After club fair and a first meeting we’ll hopefully have some better idea what direction people want to take it in.

UPDATE: The (preliminary) results are in. We did our own, quieter version of last year’s big drama blowup over who got put where. Nobody that I’ve yet spoken with was actually upset, although I was mildly disappointed for myself and all of us found one thing or another surprising. Eric, Eric and Mel are heading up the Deka All-Star team, Tesch is codemonkey for the Pratt & Whitney team, the Lexmark and proActive projects went to no one that I’d have pegged for interaction designers really, and I managed to be the only male on an Olin-sponsored team researching communication aids for the elderly. No complaints I suppose, I’m pretty amiable toward them and all. I was rather hoping to land with Lexmark or proActive just because I’m more familiar with the faculty sponsors, but again it’s nothing to cause drama. On the plus side, this is a project with the potential to help a whole lot of people. Should we develop something of significance, I will advocate releasing our work under a public license.