"I don't even know what 'Cyber Monday' is."

I say, aimlessly deleting about 100 emails that piled up overnight. "Is it the day when you're supposed to shop on line, like Black Friday, but for on-line shopping?" It's such a dumb and boring concept to me that I have to say that out loud in order to remember that I know what Cyber Monday is. Seems to me we're constantly shopping on line, especially when real-world shops are closed, like late at night, early in the morning, and on Sundays. So why Monday? Are we assuming people need to get to some work computer to use Amazon or whatever?

It seems perfectly silly to me, except to the extent that I'd like to remind you — if you like this blog — to do your on-line shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal (which lets you channel a contribution to this blog without paying any extra for your items). (That link is always up there in the blog banner, and the gesture of appreciation for this blog is definitely noticed.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Kevin said:

Cyber Monday was about using work computers with high speed internet to shop. The idea was you did physical shopping over the weekend, including just noting what you wanted to buy online, and then on Monday you bought it. The concept really doesn't mean anything anymore since dialup went the way of the dodo. Now it's just another excuse for a sale.

So Cyber Monday Christmas-wraps 2 moral failings: 1. Not devoting all your work hours to doing the work you're paid to do, and 2. Treating brick-and-mortar stores as mere showrooms for products you're going to buy elsewhere.

If you want your wearable computer in wig form...

... Sony has invented it for you.

"We think one of the biggest reasons is the style... the focus has been function, not style," said Hiroaki Tobita and Takuya Kuzi.

This was a quote from 2 guys, speaking — what? — in unison? Were they aided by a SmartWig?

"The goal of SmartWig is to achieve both natural and practical wearable devices," they said, adding the "natural appearance" of their invention -- which can be made from human hair -- could prove a selling point.

I agree. I've been waiting decades for the trend that — back in the 60s — Andy Warhol seemed to be doing a fine job of making seem hip and cool.

This is the post where I paraphrase 10 things in the NYT article "Tension and Flaws Before Health Website Crash."

Here's the text, by Eric Lipson, Ian Austen, and Sharon LaFraniere. I'm blocking and indenting their text and boldfacing key words that made me feel compelled to paraphrase so I could see what they were muting or failing to pursue with investigative vigor.

1. Government officials and its contractors were in conflict, and some people — who? — made questionable decisions and demonstrated poor leadership.

[T]ensions between the government and its contractors, questionable decisions and weak leadership within the Medicare agency turned the rollout of the president’s signature program into a major humiliation.

2.The Obama administration, dazzled by its grandiose idea of making a dazzling website, refused even to engage with the reality that was plaguing the computer technicians: It was impossible to meet the deadline with a website that even worked.

The prime contractor, CGI Federal, had long before concluded that the administration was blindly enamored of an unrealistic goal: creating a cutting-edge website that would use the latest technologies to dazzle consumers with its many features. Knowing how long it would take to complete and test the software, the company’s officials and other vendors believed that it was impossible to open a fully functioning exchange on Oct. 1.

3. Delusional Obama officials panicked and only interfered in ways that made the impossible task even more difficult.

CGI and other contractors complained of endlessly shifting requirements and a government decision-making process so cumbersome that it took weeks to resolve elementary questions, such as determining whether users should be required to provide Social Security numbers. Some CGI software engineers ultimately walked out, saying it was impossible to produce good work under such conditions.

4. The truth is being suppressed. What would we hear from a full-on whistleblower?

“Cut corners, make date,” said one specialist, who like most of the people interviewed for this article would not allow his name to be used because the Obama administration has requested that all government officials and contractors involved keep their work confidential.

5. What the hell is MarkLogic and why did it get this sweet deal that caused so much grief?

Another sore point was the Medicare agency’s decision to use database software, from a company called MarkLogic, that managed the data differently from systems by companies like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. CGI officials argued that it would slow work because it was too unfamiliar.

6. There was a competent person who could have been in charge, but he was identified with Romneycare.

The Medicare agency was not everyone’s first choice to run the $630 million project. White House officials at first debated whether to name an outsider, such as Jon Kingsdale, who set up the landmark Massachusetts health insurance program, or even to create a new agency.

7. The one named informant is Wallace Fung, who seems sympathetic to Henry Chao, the completely unqualified/unempowered administration official who got stuck in charge of the project, and Fung tells us that Chao was freaked out about the delusional, disastrous demands coming from the White House.

As a result, the president’s signature initiative was effectively left under the day-to-day management of Henry Chao, a 19-year veteran of the Medicare agency with little clout and little formal background in computer science. Mr. Chao had to consult with senior department officials and the White House, and was unable to make many decisions on his own. “Nothing was decided without a conversation there,” said one agency official involved in the project, referring to the constant White House demands for oversight....

One evening last summer, [Chao] called Wallace Fung, who retired in 2008 as the Medicare agency’s chief technology officer. Mr. Fung said in an interview that he told Mr. Chao to greatly simplify the site’s functions. “Henry, this is not going to work. You cannot build this kind of system overnight,” Mr. Fung said he told him. “I know,” Mr. Chao answered, according to Mr. Fung. “But I cannot talk them out of it.”

8. The original plan was to build the sites for the individual states that declined — as was their option in our constitutional system — to build websites, but somewhere along the way, for some reason — political? — the White House decided it wanted one big federal website, and this switcheroo wreaked havoc on the design work.

A pattern of ever-shifting requirements persisted throughout the project, including the administration’s decision late last year to try to redesign the site’s appearance and content to make it more informative to consumers, according to many specialists involved. The administration also decided to reconfigure it as a national site, instead of one where each state had its own front page, after many states decided not to open their own exchanges.... “It was monstrous, a monstrous impact,” said one specialist about the amount of code that had to be rewritten because of the redesign and other similar changes.

9. Administration officials trying to cover their asses got paranoid that the technicians were trying to cover their asses. (Maybe, like me, they didn't know whether using code to patch a flaw is a coverup or actually the way you fix flaws in code.) And like a bunch of social workers they reinterpreted the technical problems as personality conflicts and wasted the technicians' time making them drive to Baltimore to participate in some inane make-nice therapy group. (Oh, how I wish I could see the actual quotes from the unnamed CGI and QSSI people who, I suspect, were royally pissed at this idiotic exercise!)

Eventually, Medicare agency officials began to suspect that staff members at CGI were intentionally trying to hide flaws in the system, to cover up for their inability to meet production deadlines. They ordered CGI technicians to drive from their offices near Dulles International Airport in Virginia to the agency headquarters near Baltimore to review their code with government supervisors. The Medicare agency was also growing frustrated with tension among contractors, noting that initial tests of parts of the system were being delayed because of “coordination issues” between CGI and QSSI, which won another part of the job after losing the lead contractor role.

10. Obama lied straight-faced at us or his people completely tricked him into talking up the website and how great it was going to be. When he could have used his charm to manage and mellow our expectations, he inexplicably chose to amp us up.

Despite the behind-the-scenes crisis, the president expressed confidence about the exchange just days before its debut. “This is real simple,” Mr. Obama said, during a speech in Maryland on Sept. 26. “It’s a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health insurance plans side by side the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak, same way you shop for a TV on Amazon. You just go on, and you start looking, and here are all the options.”

"Computers, like children, are more often taught by rote. They’re given thousands of rules and bits of data to memorize..."

"... If X happens, do Y; avoid big rocks — then sent out to test them by trial and error."

 This is slow, painstaking work, but it’s easier to predict and refine than machine learning. The trick, as in any educational system, is to combine the two in proper measure. Too much rote learning can make for a plodding machine. Too much experiential learning can make for blind spots and caprice. The roughest roads in the Grand Challenge were often the easiest to navigate, because they had clear paths and well-defined shoulders. It was on the open, sandy trails that the cars tended to go crazy. “Put too much intelligence into a car and it becomes creative,” Sebastian Thrun told me.

From a New Yorker article about self-driving cars.  I'm interested in the analogy to the education of humans especially with respect to the fear of creativity arising from too much intelligence but also the downside of too much experiential learning: blind spots and caprice.

"Well, I am 85 - and was online before many of you were born, or 'the Internet' was even available."

"I bought one of the first Radio Shack Model 1 computer in 1978, had it connected - by dialup modem - by 1979 I was operating the first computer 'Bulletin Board' in Colorado Springs," says a man named dave19, commenting at a WaPo article titled "Gap between those who use Internet and those who don’t is widening."

He continues:

Used it for local politics, pioneering online education. Then of course got on the Internet as soon as services were available followed by the Web. And connected up organizations, shops, homeowners (and even Sherpas at 15,000 feet up Everest slopes when I was just a lad of 75) wirelessly, where there were NO commercial wired connections ad Wi-Fi was just getting approved by the FCC.

But guess what? I am not sure life has been that much better for me, my 'adult' kids, or my grand kids (or my great grand kids who are already using kiddie smart phones.) I am not sure I, or they, are any wiser for their use of 'the net.' I am not sure twitter is producing wiser utterances, or that Facebook is a substitute for an written and printed autobiography. There is sure more babble. And misinformation. Or knowledge.

Oh, I intend to keep pioneering, for I announced ten years ago that I had changed my will, so that my sons would bury me with a laptop computer, with heuristic - feed back - software, solar panels to keep it charged forever, wireless links to 'the cloud.' And that 6 months after my carbon self is gone, my digital - in silicon - mind, would go out on the net and say 'This is Dave - wanna Chat?' and debate with the world until the sun blinks out.' The artificial intelligent software is already nearly there. And even try - in the face of undeniable new knowledge - change my silicon mind. 

I already affixed a QR Code on my deceased wife's tombstone. So than anyone with a smart phone that aims at it, will get her memorial pages - even her favorite music 'Clair De Lune'

Not sure I will be wiser even then. Just connected, in perpetuity. You all have some catching up to do.

"Since 2008, the financial industry has changed the way it does business. Can the S.E.C.’s Mary Jo White control it?"

A great article in The New Yorker by Nicholas Lemann. Excerpt:

Banks and hedge funds hire high-priced computer engineers to write algorithms that can predict minor, transitory movements in the markets—for example, by continuously comparing the prices of stocks and derivatives. Then they place orders on the electronic exchanges, hoping to make a small amount per share. They rarely hold a position for long. Because companies’ algorithms are written to behave similarly, the way to make money in high-frequency trading is to get the order to the exchange ahead of the competition’s, by microseconds, which are millionths of a second. An electronic signal is transmitted from Cage 06504 to Cage 06505 a few hundred microseconds faster than an electronic signal is sent from Manhattan. Recently, James Barksdale, the first C.E.O. of Netscape, started a company called Spread Networks, which built a fibre-optic cable from New York to Chicago, in order to offer its customers a three-millisecond advantage in the time it takes an order to travel from one city to the other.

"So let it be written" — 5 million lines of code... and "a couple of hundred functional fixes" on the "punch list" they're "pretty aggressive" about getting to.

You know who Tony Trenkle is? No, of course not. You didn't know who he was and you didn't notice the other day when he was thrown under the bus to appease you. Some appeasement! That was supposed to distract us the other day, by happening at the same time as HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was slated for more exposure:

She made her comments at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee hours after the Obama administration disclosed that the chief information officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would retire. His office supervised the creation of the troubled website.

The official, Tony Trenkle, will step down on Nov. 15 “to take a position in the private sector,” according to an email circulated among agency employees. He has supervised the spending of $2 billion a year on information technology products and services, including the development of the website.

Okay, then. Trenkle down. Feel better yet? But let's look at Sebelius:

Ms. Sebelius said officials had a list of “a couple of hundred functional fixes” that had to be made so the website, HealthCare.gov, would work smoothly for most users by Nov. 30, a deadline set by the administration.

“We’re not where we need to be,” Ms. Sebelius said. “It’s a pretty aggressive schedule to get to the entire punch list by the end of November.”

Oh, the punch list! The list of a couple hundred things they've noted need fixing. They haven't fixed them yet. They've just noticed a couple hundred things, in there in that 5 million lines of code. Get on it, code-writing peons:



Or do you prefer "Look, Daddy! Paste it!"?

Obama admits government — compared to the private sector — is far less capable of accomplishing anything on computers.

In yesterday's interview with Chuck Todd, Obama said:

You know, one of the lessons -- learned from this whole process on the website -- is that probably the biggest gap between the private sector and the federal government is when it comes to I.T. ...

Well, the reason is is that when it comes to my campaign, I'm not constrained by a bunch of federal procurement rules, right? 

That is, many have pointed out that his campaign website was really good, so why didn't that mean that he'd be good at setting up a health insurance website? The answer is that the government is bad because the government is hampered by... government!

And how we write -- specifications and -- and how the -- the whole things gets built out. So part of what I'm gonna be looking at is how do we across the board, across the federal government, leap into the 21st century.

I love the combination of: 1. Barely able to articulate what the hell happens inside these computer systems, and 2. Wanting to leap!

Because when it comes to medical records for veterans, it's still done in paper. Medicaid is still largely done on paper.

When we buy I.T. services generally, it is so bureaucratic and so cumbersome that a whole bunch of it doesn't work or it ends up being way over cost. 

This should have made him sympathetic to the way government burdens private enterprise, but he's focused on liberating government to take over more of what has been done privately. And yet there's no plan, no idea about what would suddenly enable government to displace private businesses competing to offer a product people want to buy.

Instead, we've been told we must buy a product, and things have been set up so we can only go through the government's market (the "exchange"), and the government has already demonstrated that its market doesn't work. But you can't walk away, you're forced to buy, and there's nowhere else to go. And yet, he wants us to feel bad about the cumbersome bureaucracy the government encountered trying to procure the wherewithal to set up the market it had already decided we would all need to use.

It's like a medieval torturer complaining to his victim about how difficult it is to use pilliwinks while the thumbscrews are on backorder.

And yeah, in some ways, I should have anticipated that just because this was important and I was saying this was my top priority. And I was meeting with folks once a month telling 'em, "Make sure this works."

He was meeting with his "folks" once a month. He was tellin' 'em "Make sure this works." Why didn't that work, that tellin' 'em? The tellin'-the-folks method. He is the President. I think it looked like this:



Why didn't that work? Who knew?!

There are gonna be some lessons learned....

Yeah, he had to learn that you can't just say This is important, I care — Obamacare — and so let it be done. Make sure this works.

Another Barry Blitt New Yorker cover about Obama.

"When I heard that the troubled Obamacare Web site was built by a Canadian company, of course I felt personally responsible," says Blitt (because he's from Canada). "I’ll be happy when the glitches are all worked out and everything’s running smoothly, so I can put this all behind me."

Nice drawing. The sentiment is rather stickily sweet for the circumstances, but it's The New Yorker, shoring up support for the once-beloved President.

The nightmare of flying just got a little more complicated.

"The Federal Aviation Administration will allow airlines to expand passengers' use of portable electronic devices during all phases of flight, the agency announced today, but cell phone calls will still be prohibited," says a "Breaking News" email from CNN.

I'm guessing the cell phones are still prohibited because we really cannot tolerate a plane full of people yakking on their cell phones. And yet... flying on a plane is an ordeal in the toleration of other people. Those of us who are too sensitive to endure it are not on that plane, which means that if you are, you're there with a plane full of insensitive people.

I know that's not completely true. Some people are forced to fly. Or rather: everyone on any plane has some reason to be there that outweighs the unpleasantness of the experience. It just takes more for some of us than others. And now we can use iPads and laptops to watch movies and play video games and work work work. The question for any given would-be passenger is: Does that add to the pro or the con side of flying?

In the future, the planes will be full of people who are there having weighed the pros and cons under the new rule. And when you see (or think about) what that's like, you'll have to redo your own weighing of reasons to fly against the unpleasantness of the experience. Am I going to be sitting between 2 guys playing video games while someone behind me pounds away on a laptop on the tray-table attached to my seat?

ADDED: I do realize that today's rule change relates only to the takeoff and landing phases and that devices have been common on flights for a long time. The "now" in paragraph 3, above, was intended to refer to the way things have been recently and awkwardly to the new extension of freedom to use devices. As for weighing the pros and cons of the new rule: If the absence of the use of devices was a comfort, it was only a small comfort, in part of the flight. Changing the rule at least ends the pestering by flight attendants. Overall, I like the rule change. I need reading or listening material on a plane, and I don't want to have to think about or to carry the weight of a paper book to tide me over during the takeoff and landing phases. I especially don't like being woken up half an hour before landing to be told to turn off the audiobook that enabled me to fall and to stay asleep.

Those Dell laptops that smell like cat urine? Don't worry.

"The smell is not related to cat urine or any other type of biological contaminant, nor is it a health hazard."

Link goes to a BBC news item that ends "News of the issue spread after a link to the thread was posted to discussion site Reddit," which links to a Reddit thread where the top-rated comment refers to the BBC link to the comments thread and comments like "Clearly BBC journalists like to keep their fingers on the pulse of what's happening. Commendable attitude" and "Or they're desperately scrabbling for a source that isn't 'Marge from St. Ives said so' and don't think people will look too carefully..."

"DoD relies on millions of devices to bring network access and functionality to its users."

"Rigorously vetting software and firmware in each and every one of them is beyond our present capabilities, and the perception that this problem is simply unapproachable is widespread."

(Via Instapundit.)

"Ladies and gents, I invite you all to Turing Test this thing until it explodes in a cloud of hubris."

Deliberately screwing with the HealthCare.gov live chats.

How long before that becomes a crime?

Something In The Water (Does Not Compute).

That's a Prince song title.

It came to mind today in the context of the Chinese blogger, confessing his computer sins on government TV, including a blog post that wondered whether there were contraceptives in the water.

Meanwhile, in America, First Lady Michelle Obama has a new health campaign with the message "When you drink water, you Drink Up," encouraging people to drink "even just one more glass a day," even though there is no medical reason for pushing people to drink more water. (Drinking too much water could kill you, and normally, drinking in response to whatever thirst you have is all you're supposed to do, though the advice to drink water instead of other things is good for those who want to lose weight.)

And who can forget that the 2012 presidential campaign was — at least some of the time — seemingly all about getting free birth control coverage into Obamacare.

Must be something in the water they drink/It's been the same with every girl I've had/Must be something in the water they drink/Cuz why else would a woman wanna treat a man so bad?

If I were a blogger in China, this post would be a crime, but only if it were deemed a rumor and it was also viewed more than 5,000 or reposted more than 500 times. I could get a 3-year prison sentence, not because of what I wrote, but because of what other people did with it after I wrote it — reading it, retweeting it, and construing it.

One must take care either: 1. not to become too popular or viral, or 2. to write in a manner that deters the construction that this is a rumor.

I'll do anything 4 U, anything/Why don't U talk 2 me?/Tell me who U are/Don't do this 2 me....

"A good hacker can get full access to Nasdaq.com in a couple of days with the ability to do almost whatever he wants..."

"... such as push an announcement that Facebook shares have dropped 90% (which) could cause havoc on the stock exchange.... It is quite frightening when you think about it. I discovered these vulnerabilities in just 10 minutes with a Firefox browser without any special tools or software."

"MIT’s incoming class hacked the Harvard 2017 website Sunday night..."

"... by replacing all the pictures with Mitt Romney’s mug."

"There were lots of discussions at N.S.A. and in the intelligence community in general about the acculturation process."

"They were aware that they were bringing in young people who had to adjust to the culture — and who would change the culture," said Joel F. Brenner, a former NSA inspector general, quoted in a NYT article titled "For Snowden, a Life of Ambition, Despite the Drifting."

The article also says that Snowden's disclosures highlight something the elders in the agency have worried about for a long time: "young Internet aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and cyberdefense sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the security bureaucracy."

What a fascinating culture clash! These old security folk are dependent on these new people who not only don't share their values: They are a completely different kind of person. Snowden is an example of a type of person that we need to understand. I'll call such people Snowmen.

Tell me about the Snowmen....

Spying on...

... poop.

Dog poop.

Snoopy.

"Call me naive, but I seem to have underestimated the universal desire to sit in a hard plastic chair and stare at a screen until your eyes cross."

"My father saw it coming, but this was a future that took me completely by surprise. There were no computers in my high school, and the first two times I attempted college, people were still counting on their fingers and removing their shoes when the numbers got above ten. I wasn’t really aware of computers until the mid-1980s. For some reason, I seemed to know quite a few graphic designers whose homes and offices pleasantly stank of Spray Mount. Their floors were always collaged with stray bits of paper, and trapped flies waved for help from the gummy killing fields of their tabletops. I had always counted on these friends to loan me the adhesive of my choice, but then, seemingly overnight, their Scotch tape and rubber cement were gone, replaced with odorless computers and spongy mouse pads. They had nothing left that I wanted to borrow, and so I dropped them and fell in with a group of typesetters who ultimately betrayed me as well."

David Sedaris — whose father worked for IBM — in "Me Talk Pretty One Day" (published in 2000), which I listened to, partly while asleep, last night.

"'They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,' the then-anonymous Snowden told reporters as his leaks first emerged."

"Well, so can Google. And Facebook. And most companies’ internal networks. Creepy? You bet. Calamitous? Not so clear."

Daniel Ellsberg says Snowden is a “hero.” Let me suggest a different prism through which to view that term. Somewhere in the intelligence community is another 29-year-old computer whiz whose name we’ll never know. That person joined the government after 9/11 because she felt inspired to serve the nation in its hour of need. For years she’s sweated to perfect programs that can sort through epic reams of data to identify potential threats. Some Americans are alive today because of her work.

As one security analyst put it this week, to find a needle in a haystack, you need the haystack. If we’re going to romanticize a young nerd in the intelligence world, my Unknown Coder trumps the celebrity waiting in Hong Kong for Diane Sawyer’s call any day.