More On The Ad Bubble

Google UI Timeline

Two weeks ago a firestorm erupted over a seemingly insignificant change to the UI of Google's search engine. It was enough to get Google to backtrack. A week later Daisuke Wakabayashi and Tiffany Hsu had the details in Why Google Backtracked on Its New Search Results Look, including this informative timeline graphic of the history of such changes since 2007. Their explanation for why Google made the change was:

Users complained that Google was trying to trick people into clicking on more paid results, while marketing executives said it was yet another step in blurring the line between ads and unpaid search results, forcing them to spend more money with the internet company.

Well, yes, but follow me below the fold for the bigger picture.

Meta: Slow Blogging

Blogging is slow right now because my physical therapist wants me standing up and moving around at least every 15 minutes. Long-form blogging in 15-minute increments is hard.

Regulating Social Media: Part 1

It has become obvious that self-regulated social media are a threat to pretty much every country's national security. This is intended to be the start of a series looking at the range of suggestions as to how, at least in the United States, it might be done, including (I hope) at least these:

• How to Regulate (and Not Regulate) Social Media by Jack Balkin
• Bipartisan legislation would force Big Tech to allow interoperability with small competitors by Cory Doctorow
• The Good And The Bad Of The ACCESS Act To Force Open APIs On Big Social Media by Mike Masnick
• Testimony by Maciej Cegłowski to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs for their hearing on Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy
• A Framework for Regulating Competition on the Internet by Ben Thompson.
• A Better Internet Is Waiting for Us by Annalee Newitz

Below the fold, I start with the first of them.

Advertising Is A Bubble

The surveillance economy, and thus the stratospheric valuations of:

Facebook and Alphabet (Google’s parent), which rely on advertising for, respectively, 97% and 88% of their sales.

depend on the idea that targeted advertising, exploiting as much personal information about users as possible, results in enough increased sales to justify its cost.This is despite the fact the both experimental research and the experience of major publishers and advertisers show the opposite. Now, The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn provides an explanation for this disconnect. Follow me below the fold to find out about it and enjoy some wonderful quotes from them.

Library of Congress Storage Architecture Meeting

.The Library of Congress has finally posted the presentations from the 2019 Designing Storage Architectures for Digital Collections workshop that took place in early September, I've greatly enjoyed the earlier editions of this meeting, so I was sorry I couldn't make it this time. Below the fold, I look at some of the presentations.

Bitcoin's Lightning Network (updated)

Discussions of cryptocurrencies and other blockchain technologies are bedeviled by a nearly universal assumption that attributes that are possible to achieve in theory are guaranteed to be realized in practice. Examples include decentralization and anonymity.

Back in June David Gerard asked:

How good a business is running a Lightning Network node? LNBig provides 49.6% ($3.7 million in bitcoins) of the Lightning Network’s total channel liquidity funding — that just sits there, locked in the channels until they’re closed. They see 300 transactions a day, for total earnings on that $3.7 million of … $20 a month. They also spent $1000 in channel-opening fees.

Even if the Lightning Network worked (which it doesn't), and were decentralized (which it isn't), Gerard's point was that the transaction fees were woefully inadequate to cover the costs of running a node. Now, A Cryptoeconomic Traffic Analysis of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network by the Hungarian team of Ferenc Béres, István A. Seres, and András A. Benczúr supports Gerard's conclusion with a detailed analysis.

Below the fold, some commentary.

Bunnie Huang's Betrusted Project

The awesome Bunnie Huang asks Can We Build Trustable Hardware? It is a fascinating approach to the problem I discussed in Securing The Hardware Supply Chain:

how we can know that the hardware the software we secured is running on is doing what we expect it to?

Bunnie's experience has made him very skeptical of the integrity of the hardware supply chain:

In the process of making chips, I’ve also edited masks for chips; chips are surprisingly malleable, even post tape-out. I’ve also spent a decade wrangling supply chains, dealing with fakes, shoddy workmanship, undisclosed part substitutions – there are so many opportunities and motivations to swap out “good” chips for “bad” ones. Even if a factory could push out a perfectly vetted computer, you’ve got couriers, customs officials, and warehouse workers who can tamper the machine before it reaches the user.

Below the fold, some discussion of Bunnie's current project.