I don’t watch sports, but every four years, I lose myself in the horse race of the U.S. presidential elections. That competition kicked off in earnest Monday, as Gallup started its daily tracking polls for the general election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

In 2008, I was hooked on one drug for my daily fix: Memeorandum, a completely automated aggregator that surfaces popular stories from political news sites, often within minutes.

As you’d expect, the universe of political blogs is largely split in two, with conservative and liberal blogs rarely covering the same stories or linking to the same sites. But it can be very challenging to tell their political leanings at a glance, especially with names like “Balloon Juice,” “Weasel Zippers,” or “The Volokh Conspiracy.”

So, four years ago, I launched a project with Delicious/Tasty Labs founder Joshua Schachter to visualize the linking biases of various political blogs on Memeorandum by looking at their past behavior.

Using singular value decomposition, the linear algebra at the heart of your Netflix recommendations, we reduced the entire matrix of blogger-to-article relationships to a single dimension. Imagine a single line grouping like-minded blogs together based on the diversity of the stories they cover, with hardcore left- and right-leaning blogs on opposite sides of the spectrum.

Using those precalculated values, we load the data from Google Spreadsheets and color the links on Memeorandum, based on where they fall on the spectrum. The brighter the color, the more frequently they only cover stories by their counterparts.

This simple visualization leads to some interesting insights. Compare these two articles, which were trending on Memeorandum at this writing:

Seeing each site’s potential bias provides the context for understanding how news is spread. Right-leaning blogs are eager to point out new evidence that George Zimmerman was hurt the day he shot Trayvon Martin, but left-leaning blogs aren’t covering that story. Likewise, only left-leaning news sites appear to be covering the news of Ted Nugent’s threatening remarks to the president, but conservative blogs aren’t. This visualization also makes it easy to spot outliers, the sources that are breaking away from their past behavior to link to something beyond their usual circle.

This browser add-on is free and open source on Github. We’ve updated the data sources for the first time since 2008, and Memeorandum Colors now works natively in Chrome, in addition to Firefox.

You can try the browser add-on by following these simple directions.

Google Chrome

1. Click the memeorandum_colors.user.js link.
2. In the warning dialog at the bottom of Chrome window, select “Continue.”
3. Visit Memeorandum and wait a moment for the links to color.

Firefox

1. Install Greasemonkey.
2. Restart Firefox.
3. Click the memeorandum_colors.user.js link, wait three seconds, and Install.
4. Visit Memeorandum and wait a moment for the links to color.

Four Years of Data

Along with this release, we now have four years of historical activity to work with. The collected scores are on Google Fusion Tables, and I’ve included a dump of the activity in Github.

Looking at historical activity can reveal some interesting trends, especially in how attitudes have shifted since the last election.

For example, Little Green Footballs is a long-running political weblog started by Charles Johnson, a web developer who aligned himself with the conservative right wing after the World Trade Center attacks. In late 2009, he publicly parted ways with the right.

That shift away from conservatism was reflected in his linking behavior at least a year before his public statement. If you look at the timeline below, you can see that Johnson started linking to a wider variety of stories outside the conservative conversation, until his activity was mostly neutral in early 2010. Now, his activity tends neutral but slightly favors articles popular in the liberal blogosphere.

Bias In Linking, Not Beliefs

Memeorandum was created by San Francisco developer Gabe Rivera, who followed its introduction with aggregators for media, celebrity gossip, and baseball news. The most popular of these is Techmeme, a daily destination for tech industry watchers.

A month after Obama’s election, Rivera announced he’d hired a human editor for Techmeme to help prevent inaccurate results from the algorithm. This editorial oversight would affect any link-based analysis on Techmeme, but he confirmed that Memeorandum is still completely machine-driven.

This automated analysis is not a commentary on the personal opinions and beliefs of any blogger — no amount of linear algebra can prove that. What this shows is the biases in their linking behavior: the stories that each site chooses to cover, or not cover, and their similarity to others like them.

If you’d like to learn more about the math behind how this works, there’s more detail and links to tutorials on my original blog entry.

Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll try to answer them in the comments.

Ten years ago, I started this site with three simple rules: no journaling, no tired memes, and be original. 18 months later, I added a little linkblog.

In those ten years, I’ve posted 415 entries, including this one, and over 13,000 links.

The decision to start writing here regularly changed my entire life. It’s given me exposure, a place to share my projects and crazy experimentation with technology. It’s created new opportunities for me, directly or indirectly responsible for every major project I’ve gotten involved in. It’s a place to play and experiment with ideas, some of which led to big breakthroughs and passions. And it connected me to people who cared about the things I did, many of whom became lifelong friends.

Personal homepages and weblogs have long since faded from the popular trends. They’re no longer hip and nobody’s launching the hot new startup to reinvent them or make them better.

Most of the interest in writing online’s shifted to microblogging, but not everything belongs in 140 characters and it’s all so impermanent. Twitter’s great, but it’s not a replacement for a permanent home that belongs to you.

And since there are fewer and fewer individuals doing long-form writing these days, relative to the growing potential audience, it’s getting easier to get attention than ever if you actually have something original to say.

Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express yourself and share your work, is still one of the best possible investments you can make with your time. It’s why, after ten years, my first response to anyone just getting started online is to start, and maintain, a blog.

And now, just for the hell of it, some of my favorite posts from the last ten years. 🙂

2002

Tracking the All Your Base Meme with Usenet. The first chart appears only two weeks in, setting a precedent for the next ten years.

Dar Kabatoff’s In Town. My first deep-dive into Internet kookiness, an amazing example of Usenet lunacy that eventually led to my first stalker. To this day, people still link to this on various forums that Kabatoff appears in.

Spamming Weblog Comments. Where I casually predicted the rise of blog spam and Bayesian filters designed to stop it.

Steve Martin Fans. Another exploration into a sad, weird corner of the Internet, a prolific stalker turned suicidal in a Steve Martin fan forum.

October 2002 Dictionary Domains. I used to periodically run a script, check for the available of dictionary word .com, .org and .net domains, and post the results. Note the last one in the list, which I later snatched up for myself.

2003

Eldred, Shared Culture Loses. My first mashup landed me in the New York Times and Boston Globe, my first real press coverage ever. Soon after, a Disney exec bought a print of the comic from me, with the sale facilitated by Larry Lessig himself!

NYT and Lost Friends. Two weeks later, I was in the NYT again for my Lost Friends page. This was very new to me.

Google Buys Blogger. I was sitting front and center at the Blogosphere panel in Los Angeles when Ev announced Google bought Blogger, and was one of the first to report the news.

Bias Affects Story Updates on Political Weblogs. My first controversial tech exposé, manually analyzing sites to understand linking behavior. Most of these sites found my article from their referers, leading to some very upset bloggers. People don’t like to be accused of bias.

Typo Popularity Tracking with Google. I feel like I started to hit a stride with posts like these, doing some simple analysis to find entertaining results.

Star Wars Kid. The post that launched a meme, melting my server and the servers of most of my friends. I later tracked him down, interviewing him with Jish’s help and doing a fundraiser to buy him a newly-introduced iPod. Later, I reported on the lawsuits. Years later, I wrote a final summary of the whole thing, along with the logs for that period.

Santa Monica Farmer’s Market Tragedy. My personal reporting from a freak car accident that killed nine people outside my office led to coverage in the BBC. Horrifying.

Upcoming.org Launch! The side project that changed my life.

2004

Researching the 2004 Oscar Screeners. Inspired by a delusional film industry, I sat down and tried to figure out exactly how often Oscar screeners leak online. Eight years later, I’m still doing it every year.

Waxy v2.0. Announcing our pregnancy and, a few months later, the birth of our son.

Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album. I was the first person to put the Grey Album on the web, leading to the first takedown request from EMI, which spawned the Grey Tuesday protests.

InfocomBot for AOL Instant Messenger. One of my favorite hacks ever, it let you play classic and modern text adventures over AIM.

Nanniebots: Hoax, Fraud, or Delusion? I helped Ben Goldacre and Cameron Marlow debunk a ridiculous hoax, someone who claimed he developed chatbots to lure pedophiles in chatrooms.

Waxy’s Bandwidth Blowout #1: Heat Vision and Jack. In the years before YouTube, serving video was a massive pain in the ass. If you were lucky enough to have a dedicated server, excess bandwidth was a handy commodity. I always loved hosting commercially-unavailable materials.

Amazon Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game. This post, tracking horrible Amazon reviews of critically-loved media, still makes me laugh.

Kleptones, “Night at the Hip-Hopera”. Still my favorite mashup album ever, I originally hosted a copy and crowdsourced the sample list for the Kleptones. It netted me my second cease-and-desist, this time from Disney/Hollywood Records.

Afro-Ninja Found! I managed to track down the identity of a stuntman having a very bad day.

Amateur Tsunami Video Footage. Another pre-YouTube phenomenon, the demand for this tragic disaster footage was so high, it melted my server and even took down Archive.org for a time. The videos I uploaded to Archive.org dominated their most downloaded lists for years.

2005

Boing Boing Statistics. I built a simple visualization tool for Boing Boing’s five-year archive, following my own Waxy.org Stats and Metafilter growth charts.

WordPress Website’s Search Engine Spam. The biggest story I’d ever broken, at that point, covering search engine spam hidden on WordPress.com. For me, this was a switch from casual blogging to serious journalism, including quotes from Matt Mullenweg before publishing. More in the followup.

Automating Wikipedia History. I started a contest to make a Greasemonkey script to visually browse Wikipedia history, and got some amazing entries, including one by future-jQuery creator John Resig.

Yahoo and Upcoming, Sitting In A Tree. One of the craziest things that ever happened to me, the optimism in this post is almost blinding.

House of Cosbys, Mirrored. After the brilliant Cosby-inspired animated series was shut down, I mirrored all of the videos and got a takedown order from Bill Cosby’s lawyer. I publicly defied it, compiled a list of Cosby parodies in the media, and did an interview about it with the New York Times. I never heard from team Cosby again.

2006

Metafilter Sources 2006. Tracking how the top 50 link sources on Metafilter changed between 2004 and 2006.

Sex Baiting Prank on Craigslist Affects Hundreds. I broke the story of Jason Fortuny’s “Craigslist Experiment” after seeing a link to it in a private discussion forum. This ended up being a huge story, involving Craigslist, lawsuits, and ruined lives.

2007

Outgoing. Waxy.org went into cryogenic sleep while I was working at Yahoo and raising my baby boy, so I decided to take some time off to write again and explore new ideas.

2008

Colin’s Bear Animation. Four years later, this video still makes me laugh. I tracked down Colin and interviewed him about it.

Personal Ads of the Digerati. I dug up vintage personal ads from Dave Winer and Richard Stallman, and I interviewed RMS about his unusual methods of accessing the web.

The Times (UK) Spamming Social Media Sites. I exposed some nefarious SEO practices from a mainstream newspaper, and interviewed founders of online communities to see what they thought.

Highlights from the British MovieTone Darkweb. Some wonderful vintage videos from a service that doesn’t want you to find them. I’m amazed these videos still work.

ForumWarz Postmortem: Interviewing the Game’s Creators. This innovative game never got popular, but I was very proud of this interview.

WIRED and The WELL. I have a complete archive of The WELL, and occasionally dig into it for research. For anyone who cares about Wired history, it’s a treasure trove.

Internet Power, Volume 1: Flashback to the VHS-Era Web. I set up a VCR and started ripping vintage VHS tapes about the Internet. This was the first of a series of VHS rips, including Internet Power Vol. 2, Olympia School District, and Computability.

Fanboy Supercuts, Obsessive Video Montages. The blog post that named the “supercut” genre, I continued adding to it for years before starting Supercut.org.

Milliways: Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This post caused me more pain and heartache than anything I’ve ever written. On its release, I was extremely proud of it, reconstructing the never-before-told history of an unreleased Infocom game using digital archives. But I didn’t ask permission before quoting private emails, causing major fallout on the source that provided me with the archives, ending our friendship forever. You have no idea how often I wish I could unpublish this post.

The Whitburn Project: 120 Years of Music Chart History. I’ve always loved this story about a group of record collectors on Usenet, illegally swapping Billboard chart spreadsheets. In my followup post, I used the data to analyze music history.

The Machine That Changed the World: Great Brains. An awesome, out-of-print documentary series on computer history that I ripped from VHS, and created annotated show notes for each of the five episodes.

Girl Turk: Mechanical Turk Meets Girl Talk’s “Feed the Animals”. The first of my Mechanical Turk experiments, crowdsourcing metadata about the album to make neat charts.

Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk. People still cite this post regularly as the guide for DIY crowdsourced transcription.

Kickstarter. The first of many posts about Kickstarter, when I first met the team and joined the board. “Ultimately, everybody should be able to support themselves doing what they love using the web.”

Memeorandum Colors: Visualizing Political Bias with Greasemonkey. I worked with Joshua Schachter on this Greasemonkey script analyzing linking behavior on Memeorandum. I still use this every day.

The Faces of Mechanical Turk. I wanted to know what they looked like, and was willing to pay them to find out. This image seems to show up in every conference presentation about Mechanical Turk.

2009

Robin Hood’s “Oo De Lally,” Translated Into 16 Languages. This makes me happy.

Translating “The Economist” Behind China’s Great Firewall. One of the strangest online communities I’ve ever discovered, a group of Chinese fans of The Economist translating the entire thing cover-to-cover as a learning tool. I ended up writing a shorter version of this piece for the New York Times.

Attribution and Affiliation on All Things Digital. This investigation into AllThingsD’s linking practices led to concrete change. They never use long quotes anymore, clearly attribute, and drive traffic to the blogs they link to. Everyone wins.

Category Inflation at the Webbys. In the three years since, the number of categories continues to explode. Planning on writing a followup soon.

Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis. My first Kickstarter project was a big success, hitting its goal in four hours, and went on sale later that year.

Meme Scenery. One of my all-time favorite posts, I removed the subjects of famous memes from their backgrounds. There’s something weirdly serene about these background locations without context.

Code Rush in the Creative Commons. In 2008, I’d posted an annotated copy of the classic Mozilla documentary and interviewed the director after he requested I take it offline. A year later, he decided to release it under a Creative Commons license, allowing me to put my annotated version back online.

2010

Interviewing Ted Rall on Comics Journalism in Afghanistan. I interviewed several project creators for the Kickstarter podcast, including this one with author and cartoonist Ted Rall, Pixeljam and James Kochalka, and R.U. Sirius.

Wikileaks Cablegate Reactions Roundup. Sometimes, there’s value in just curating the best set of links around a topic. Every time I’ve ever done this, people seem to like it. I need to remember that more often.

Joining Expert Labs At the end of 2010, I took a leap and joined Expert Labs to work on tools to help government agencies better listen to citizens using social media.

2011

Metagames: Games About Games. Quite possibly the most entertaining research I’ve ever done. It took me forever, largely because I ended up playing so many clever games.

The Daily: Indexed. I got a lot of press for creating a public index of The Daily’s iPad app, against their will. After my trial was up, I wrote about how I did it.

Making Supercut.org. The product of one very, very long night, I worked with artist Michael Bell-Smith to make a script that generated randomized video clips composed entirely of spliced-together supercuts.

Playable Archaeology: An Interview with Telehack’s Anonymous Creator. I was so floored by this tour de force of computing history, I interviewed the brilliant, but anonymous, genius behind it.

Kind of Screwed. The long, frustrating tale of the contested Kind of Bloop artwork, which cost me a large out-of-court settlement and a bunch of legal bills. Makes a good story, though!

Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late. As I was watching the Knowledge Navigator video, I started piecing together dates to figure out when it was supposed to take place. I was blown away by the coincidence.

Google Kills Its Other Plus, and How to Bring It Back. My first column for Wired ended up being a big one. Lots of other power users were justifiably upset, and it directly led to the “Verbatim” feature being added to Google Search.

Supercut: Anatomy of a Meme. I dug into the supercut meme using Mechanical Turk and my database of clips. This doubled as the launch announcement for Supercut.org, a community-contributed index of videos.

Google Analytics A Threat to Potential Bloggers. Exposing one of my techniques for researching anonymous sites, I was surprised how many people didn’t know about this.

Viewing the UC Davis Pepper Spraying from Multiple Angles. Sometimes, the simplest ideas are the most powerful. The video’s been viewed on YouTube over 150k times.

No Copyright Intended. Remix culture is the new Prohibition.

I’ll wrap it up there. With luck, I’ll see you in ten more years. Thanks for reading.

Instagram’s billion-dollar sale to Facebook raised eyebrows yesterday, renewing cries of a new bubble. But relative to other major acquisitions of the past, how does it measure up?

I crunched the numbers, pulling together data from a selection of 30 notable internet acquisitions over the last ten years, from Broadcast.com to OMGPop, to see if the Facebook/Instagram acquisition was as crazy as everyone thinks. (I left out companies without public purchase prices or user stats.)

The spreadsheet below captures the acquisition date, dollar amounts, and ballpark counts of the users and employees at the time of acquisition. Be warned: any of these numbers are very rough, cobbled together from Internet Archive searches, old news articles, Quora answers, and tech blogs. If you have more accurate information, please leave a comment and I’ll fix it.

Download the spreadsheet or view it on Google Docs.

Cost Per User

When a startup’s acquired, they’re purchased for any combination of the technology, talent, or the user base.

If we look strictly at the acquisition cost per user, Facebook got a relative deal with the Instagram purchase, paying roughly $37 for each of Instagram’s 27 million users. (The median cost across all the acquisitions is about $92 per user.)

Compare that to acquisitions like Aardvark ($555/user) or Jaiku ($240/user), and you can systematically see which were likely technology or talent hires. The glaring exception is Yahoo’s famous purchase of Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com in 1999, which paid nearly $10,000 for each of their 520,000 monthly active users, ten times any other startup. (Broadcast.com skewed the chart so much, I had to leave it off.)

Cost Per Employee

But if you look at the payout per employee, Instagram is completely off the charts. If split equally, each of Instagram’s 13 employees would make nearly $77 million. The nearest runner-up is YouTube, with a paltry $24M for its 2006-era staff of 67. Skype, Broadcast.com, and Myspace all top the charts. The median? About $3 million.

Some would point to this as a sign of a bubble, but I think it’s more likely it just reflects the incredible scalability of modern app architectures. Using cloud services, failover, and solid monitoring, Instagram can quickly scale up to support a million new users overnight with very little additional engineering effort.

The User-to-Employee Ratio

Instagram’s numbers are exactly what you’d want to see in a social network — high user counts with the lowest number of employees. This ratio is a measure of your efficiency, and it’s no surprise that Instagram comes out on top here, with a ratio of one employee for every 2.07 million users.

The second highest user-to-employee ratio is OMGPOP, famous for developing Draw Something, the fastest-growing mobile app in history. With only one employee for every 875,000 users, they were able to scale to 50 million users within 50 days.

On the other end of the scale are the short-lived Q&A service Aardvark, with one employee for every 1,800 users, and customer-service giant Zappos with one employee for every 3,400 users.

More than anything, the app ecosystem rewards efficiency; your ability to massively scale with very little engineering effort. I’m guessing these ridiculously lean startups with huge exits aren’t a freak occurrence. We’ll see more of them as the rest of the world catches up, and learns how to do more with less.

Methodology

All figures are at the time of acquisition, and I favored active user counts over total registered users for calculating acquisition cost per year.

Thanks to Tristan Louis for providing some of the rumored numbers.

Update

I originally published this yesterday on Wired, under a different headline and revised lede from my editor. To be clear, I don’t know if we’re in a bubble or not. My only point is that, relative to other acquisitions, the per-user cost for Instagram isn’t insane. Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger added some additional thoughts, noting that the per-user costs should be discounted as the userbase grows.

Many Wired commenters complained I was wrong because Instagram has no revenue. In 2006, YouTube had 34M users, zero revenue, and were bleeding $1M/month for bandwidth alone. Was Google crazy to buy them, too?

Anyway, it was a good excuse to collect all of this data in a spreadsheet for the first time. I went looking, and couldn’t find the numbers available in one place anywhere. Hope you liked it.

At $2, the Fun Pass is an awesome deal. At $1.50? Unbeatable.

I guess Caine should’ve worked out a harder-to-crack checksum.

Gina and Anil both announced this already, but I was so busy wrapping up loose ends, I didn’t get around to my announcement.

Short version: Expert Labs — the non-profit I’ve worked on for the last 18 months — is over. Gina and Anil are rebooting ThinkUp into a commercial entity, but I’ve decided to move on. I’ll continue to act as a ThinkUp advisor, and have already started work on two brand new, soon-to-be-announced projects.

A Quick Review

I worked on a whole bunch of stuff while at Expert Labs, but it took on two themes: bringing ThinkUp to a new audience, and analysis of the data we collected. Since most of this work wasn’t high-visibility outside of the existing ThinkUp community, here’s a quick roundup.

Outreach. It’s the first time in my career I’ve ever worked with self-hosted software, and I spent quite a bit of energy trying to help people understand why they’d want to use ThinkUp and make it as easy as possible to get it installed. It’s hard enough to get people to sign up with a new web service, but one that requires you to install it on your own web server? Damn hard.

Part of this was marketing: I produced two promo videos, showing off the capabilities of the app at different stages. The first video was overly long, too detailed, and a bit cheezy. With the second, I cut out all the crap and asked Clay to narrate a tight, 74-second elevator pitch for why ThinkUp is an essential utility. If you’ve never seen it, take a minute to watch.

Unfortunately, offering a hosted version ourselves was never an option. As a nonprofit, it would have been irresponsible for us to archive people’s social media activity and then disappear when funding dried up. Instead, we tried to make installation as simple as possible.

My first attempt was just getting it up and running on EC2, and making that process as easy as possible with a step-by-step tutorial. Later, I replaced that with the ThinkUp Launcher, a one-click installer that booted a custom EC2 instance with ThinkUp preinstalled. I released the code on Github, so any open-source project could easily make their own launcher.

Finally, in December, a commercial service appeared that offered drop-dead simple ThinkUp hosting. We worked with PHP Fog, a Portland-based cloud hosting company, to support a one-click ThinkUp jumpstart. Here’s the screencast I made, showing off how to get up-and-running in seconds.

To help expand the reach of the app, I worked with Mule Design to figure out what ThinkUp does well, what it could do better, and incorporate those learnings to redesign the next version of ThinkUp. Elements of the redesign have already made their way into ThinkUp 1.0, and will guide later versions of the app.

Analysis. Whether it was making charts, building mashups, or crunching data, I spent quite a bit of effort trying to make sense out of the incredible amount of data being collected by ThinkUp.

I showed off the ThinkUp API with ThinkBack, an open-source mashup that extracted entities from your historical Twitter history to make a time machine of the people, places, and things in your past.

I analyzed Twitter reactions to 2011 and 2012 State of the Union speeches, as well as the White House’s Twitter Town Hall, releasing datasets for each. I even made my first, and only, linkbait infographic summing up the White House’s Year in Review on Twitter.

One of the biggest projects I created was the Federal Social Media Index, which used ThinkUp to gather activity from 125 federal agencies on Twitter, and try to measure their engagement for the questions they ask using some simple metrics. The response was great, showing how much interest there is for additional tools in that world.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve adapted it to use the ThinkUp API and will be open-sourcing the results soon to use on your own projects.

Overall, working with Expert Labs was fascinating for me. I’d never worked with government before, and was able to work with motivated and passionate teams from the White House down to local city government. It was an eye-opening experience, and I learned a ton about cultivating an open-source community, the challenges facing state and federal government agencies, and distributing hosted software. Best of all, I was able to do it all while working with three friends I deeply respect: Gina Trapani, Anil Dash, and Clay Johnson.

The Future

Expert Labs may be ending, but ThinkUp is just getting started. It’ll continue to be free and open-source, and Gina and Anil are spinning ThinkUp off into a commercial entity, using the open-source base to create a new media property. You can read more about their plans on their Knight News Challenge application on Tumblr, which you should totally like and reblog. (The number of votes factors into the Knight Challenge judging!)

And me? I’ll be doing new stuff, like always. I’m still writing my weekly Wired column, working on Playfic, and thinking about big future projects.

I’ve started working on two unannounced projects simultaneously that I’m crazy excited about. Both have to do with this problem: how do you use technology to connect people together in new ways, and help people make a living doing what they love? It’s a running theme through everything I’ve ever worked on, and I’ll be writing much more about them soon.

For the first time in a very long time, I’m also open to hearing about new opportunities. If you’re working on anything along these lines and want help, get in touch!

On Wednesday, a Russian antivirus firm announced that over 600,000 Macs were infected with the Flashback trojan, exploiting a Java vulnerability to create the first significant malware infection in OS X history.

If you’re running a botnet, the goal is to avoid detection for as long as possible. Flashback took an interesting approach to hiding itself — if one of several popular antivirus or monitoring tools is detected, it immediately deletes itself. Merely installing a utility like Avast, Clam Antivirus, Little Snitch or HTTP Scoop was enough to protect you, even if you didn’t keep them running.

Funny enough, major commercial antivirus utilities like Norton Antivirus, McAfee VirusScan, and F-Secure weren’t included in the blacklist. It seems the Flashback authors aren’t afraid of the effectiveness of those utilities or, maybe, the technical expertise of their customers.

From the threat description:

On execution, the malware checks if the following path exists in the system:

/Library/Little Snitch

/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode

/Applications/VirusBarrier X6.app

/Applications/iAntiVirus/iAntiVirus.app

/Applications/avast!.app

/Applications/ClamXav.app

/Applications/HTTPScoop.app

/Applications/Packet Peeper.app

If any of these are found, the malware will skip the rest of its routine and proceed to delete itself.

Note the presence of Xcode, Apple’s IDE for Mac and iOS development. To a virus author, the presence of development tools like Xcode is a perfect indicator of a tech-savvy user… the kind of person most likely to detect your work.

If you want to stay safe, or see if you were infected, Macworld has the best roundup.

I love when I’m crate-digging through the weird part of YouTube and stumble on something truly amazing, seen only by a handful of other people. Just now, I was looking for the redneck bar scene from 48 Hrs. and found this:

It’s the opening titles for 48 Hours of Hallucinatory Sex (originally “48 Horas de Sexo Alucinante“), a 1987 trash/sexploitation film from Brazil. (Don’t worry, the clip’s safe for work.)

Everything about this video is amazing, from the face-melting porno synth to the Amstrad-like scrolling fonts. (You can see the blinking cursor!) With the VHS warble, it sounds like an unreleased track straight off of DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… I couldn’t find any information about the soundtrack online, but would love to hear more.

The sequel to a 1985 movie called 24 Hours of Explicit Sex, the plot of 48 Hours is totally meta: a sex psychologist sees the original film and hires the original cast and crew to make her own. It’s like the ’80s porno version of The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence, where a psychopath is inspired to recreate the events of The Human Centipede using the real-life actors from the film.

The last time I stumbled on anything this funky, it was this scene from low-budget indie comedy Apple Pie from 1976, that ends with this insane 15-minute-long choreographed dance sequence set on the streets of 1970s NYC. And the music? An improvised funk jam by Hall & Oates.

This happens to me every time I go to NYC.

Over April Fool’s Day weekend, hundreds of independent game developers came together for What Would Molydeux?, a 48-hour gamejam celebrating the tweets of Peter Molydeux – the anonymous doppelgänger of Peter Molyneux, the legendary British game designer known for his grandiose visions for games as art.

For the last three years, @PeterMolydeux’s written hundreds of surreal game ideas on Twitter, satirizing the game industry and the high-minded aspirations of his real-world namesake. For example:

• Your loved one has turned into a snowman. Yet your body needs to be as hot as a oven on high heat to survive. What would you do?
• What if everyone in the world had an explosive telephone in their body? If you could find out their number you can detonate their phone?
• You are a small girl flying a talking kite. The kite seems to know about a upcoming major terrorist attack and floats towards clues.

Double Fine lead programmer Anna Kipnis was first to suggest a gamejam, in which each developer would build a game inspired by one of Molydeux’s tweets — in two days, start to finish. The idea spread quickly and, within days, local events were planned in more than 30 cities worldwide.

The end result: nearly 300 insane games of wildly varying quality from 900 participants, with more trickling in daily.

I’ve spent the last three days obsessively playing through dozens of these. So far, I’ve been an innocent man with psychopathic arms, a pigeon trying to save suicidal businessmen, a road manipulating emotional cars, and a bear that needs hugs to survive.

I’ve played games with unreliable narrators, games that hide the rules from you, games with emotional title screens, and games that use the pause button as a weapon.

It won’t be for everyone, and that’s totally okay. Indie games often won’t appeal to the Call of Duty crowd, just like most Taylor Swift fans won’t listen to Hüsker Dü. Good things happen when you stop worrying about what’s marketable, and just make something you believe in.Not every game works — they were made in 48 hours, after all — but it’s surprising how many do.

So much of what I love about the indie gaming scene is embodied in the MolyJam event. It’s daring, creative, silly, and not afraid to fail. More and more, I find myself drawn to this world, even though I’ve never made a game, and I think it all comes back to what I love about the web.

Rise of the Indie

Indie games are in the middle of a renaissance right now, a Cambrian explosion of creativity enabled by the internet. Digital distribution platforms including Steam and the App Store have lowered the barrier to entry for indies, while crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter have reduced the importance of traditional publishers for funding projects.

Combined with a litany of complaints about the mainstream gaming industry, from exploitative working hours to the lack of creative and financial control, talented game developers are increasingly choosing to strike out on their own.

It’s resulted in a cultural movement, with commercial blockbusters like Minecraft, Braid and Super Meat Boy coming from small teams of one or two people, with even smaller budgets.

In some ways, this is a return to form for the gaming industry. Many games from the 8-bit era were created by a single developer who handled all the code, art and sound.

As graphics and audio capabilities grew, so did the budgets and team size. Larger budgets meant more risk, which directly hampered experimentation. Like the film industry, the gaming industry’s seen its own shift towards sequels and licensed brands instead of innovative, original works. (All ten of last year’s best-selling games were sequels.)

The indie gaming movement is a direct challenge to the old way of doing things.

Finding the Niche

It seems like the web’s going through a similar cycle of growth, stagnation, and disintermediation.

Fortunately, web developers have never faced the same publishing and distribution middlemen that games, television, and film were forced to deal with. The only major gatekeepers now are the entrenched social networks.

It seems like the web’s losing some of its original experimental glow. There’s no shortage of people making awesome stuff online, but I can’t shake the feeling that much of the interesting creative coding is now happening elsewhere — mobile, gaming, physical computing. For new entrepreneurs, the landscape couldn’t be better. Lean startups composed of very small teams are bootstrapping or joining incubators like Y Combinator in lieu of traditional funding, allowing them more creative control while retaining greater ownership of their work.

But the ultimate goal of a startup is making money, not art. For me, the most exciting part of the indie gaming movement is that commerce still feels secondary to making something innovative, fun, and creatively interesting.

In the last few years, it seems like the web’s losing some of its original experimental glow as it’s matured. There’s no shortage of people making awesome stuff online, but I can’t shake the feeling that much of the interesting creative coding is now happening elsewhere — mobile, gaming, physical computing.

Part of this could be market forces; there could be less experimentation when lots of money is getting thrown around. Or maybe the web is just losing its appeal in a universe increasingly ruled by native apps.

Maybe, like the desktop metaphor, the web has served its purpose and it’s slowly being replaced by platforms that solve these problems more effectively. Bookmarks, location bars, URLs, extensions, and even the browser itself will be abstracted away, hidden from view for a better user experience, as most people flock to walled gardens on simplified tablets and mobile devices.

All of that may be true. But it feels like it’s set the stage for a new indie movement, focused on using the web as an expressive creative medium over a commercial one. The tools at our fingertips are incredible: WebGL, WebSockets, Node.js, browser geolocation, standardized audio and video, among many others. And it’s easier than ever to get your work in front of an audience who cares: the people who still love the quirky indie web and everything it stands for.

It won’t be for everyone, and that’s totally okay. Indie games often won’t appeal to the Call of Duty crowd, just like most Taylor Swift fans won’t listen to Hüsker Dü. Good things happen when you stop worrying about what’s marketable, and just make something you believe in.

We already have the tools, the distribution, and the audience. We even have our own gamejams; the tech world pioneered hack days for this kind of experimentation years ago.

Now we just need our own Peter Molydeux — someone with audacious, ridiculous ideas to inspire new vectors of awesomeness from the rest of us.

(Note: This was originally published in column on Wired.)

Spent the morning sightseeing in Google Maps 8-Bit, taking snapshots with my handy 1-Bit Camera.

(Click for larger size.)

I originally wrote this column over at Wired back on March 13 about my experience with patents at Yahoo, but forgot to republish it here on Waxy.org in my permanent archive.

This article received a bigger response, hands-down, than anything I’ve written for Wired so far, resting at the top of Techmeme for a full day, with widespread coverage from The Telegraph, The Verge, Fox News, and Business Insider. (That’s a good signal you’ve written something notable: when competing tech magazines start linking to your work.)

Almost two weeks later, I’m still angry but happy that the column ignited such a powerful discussion about the patent issue. I’m especially pleased that “weaponizing patents” is entering the lexicon; articles like these use the phrase without mentioning me at all. Awesome.

For two other perspectives on this issue, I enjoyed Mark Cuban’s linkbait take and Fred Wilson’s short, furious rant.

Anyway, if you hadn’t seen it, I hope you enjoy it.

While most of the tech world was partying at South by Southwest in Austin yesterday, Yahoo announced it was filing a lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly infringing on 10 patents from their 1,000+ patent warehouse.

I’m no fan of Facebook, but this is a deplorable move. It’s nothing less than extortion, expertly timed during the SEC-mandated quiet period before Facebook’s IPO. It’s an attack on invention and the hacker ethic.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have a small supporting role in this story. None of the patents I co-invented are cited in the Yahoo complaint, but a handful of applications I worked on with Yahoo were granted patents, weaponized now to use against people like me.

Here’s how the process worked, in my case:

In 2005, Yahoo acquired Upcoming.org, the collaborative events calendar I’d launched two years before.

Back then, the Web 1.0 behemoth seemed on the verge of turning things around. A series of smart moves — high-profile hires, the Oddpost and Flickr acquisitions, the launch of the Yahoo! Developer Network, and their Research Lab — was breathing new life into things. Two months after we were acquired, Del.icio.us and Webjay joined us in the Yahoo fold.

After we moved in, we were asked to file patents for anything and everything we’d invented while working on Upcoming.org. Every Yahoo employee was encouraged to participate in their “Patent Incentive Program,” with sizable bonuses issued to everyone who took the time to apply.

Now, I’ve always hated the idea of software patents. But Yahoo assured us that their patent portfolio was a precautionary measure, to defend against patent trolls and others who might try to attack Yahoo with their own holdings. It was a cold war, stockpiling patents instead of nuclear arms, and every company in the valley had a bunker full of them.

Against my better judgement, I sat in a conference room with my co-founders and a couple of patent attorneys and told them what we’d created. They took notes and created nonsensical documents that I still can’t make sense of. In all, I helped Yahoo file eight patent applications.

Years after I left I discovered to my dismay that four of them were granted by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office.

I thought I was giving them a shield, but turns out I gave them a missile with my name permanently engraved on it.

I was naive. Even if the original intention was truly defensive, a patent portfolio can easily change hands, and a company can even more easily change its mind. Since I left in 2007, Yahoo has had three CEOs and a board overhaul.

The scary part is that even the most innocuous patent can be used to crush another’s creativity. One of the patents I co-invented is so abstract, it could not only cover Facebook’s News Feed, but virtually any activity feed. It puts into very sharp focus the trouble with software patents: Purposefully vague wording invites broad interpretation.

In their complaint, Yahoo alleges that Facebook’s News Feed violates “Dynamic page generator,” a patent filed in 1997 by their former CTO related to the launch of My Yahoo, one of the first personalized websites. Every web application, from Twitter to Pinterest, could be said to violate this patent. This is chaos.

Software patents should be abolished, plain and simple. Software is already covered by copyright, making patent protection unnecessary.

Ask any programmer — developing software is as creative and unique as writing poetry.

Yahoo’s lawsuit against Facebook is an insult to the talented engineers who filed patents with the understanding they wouldn’t be used for evil. Betraying that trust won’t be forgotten, but I doubt it matters anymore. Nobody I know wants to work for a company like that.

I’m embarrassed by the patents I filed, but I’ve learned from my mistake. I’ll never file a software patent again, and I urge you to do the same.

For years, Yahoo was mostly harmless. Management foibles and executive shuffles only hurt shareholders and employee morale. But in the last few years, the company’s incompetence has begun to hurt the rest of us. First, with the wholesale destruction of internet history, and now by attacking younger, smarter companies.

Yahoo tried and failed, over and over again, to build a social network that people would love and use. Unable to innovate, Yahoo is falling back to the last resort of a desperate, dying company: litigation as a business model.

That it’s Yahoo makes it even sadder. The complaint isn’t really wrong when it asserts that: “For much of the technology upon which Facebook is based, Yahoo! got there first.”

But being first with something generic that would have been invented by someone (like the wheel) — as opposed to something few could have imagined (like the Segway) — is a big difference.

Ask any start-up CEO — execution is everything.

As the fictionalized Mark Zuckerberg says in The Social Network, “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”