Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

While cleaning out my spam folders, I noticed a disturbing trend: a number of the spam were sent to vendor-specific email addresses I had set up to communicate with Parallels, Joyent and Shoeboxed. As a security measure, I do not give my personal email address to vendors, only aliases. The email address I used in the past for Dell was dell@majid.fm, for instance (I now use a different domain). A few years back, I started receiving pornographic spam at that address, which led me to think either Dell had secretly adopted a radically new diversification plan, or that their customer database had been compromised. Needless to say, this did not reflect well on Dell. I canceled that alias and stopped dealing with Dell.

I contacted the support for the three vendors. Joyent got back to me, and said:

We have traced this back to a third-party provider that was used to distribute service notifications. We have been in contact with this service provider, and they have determined that subscriber email addresses of their clients were compromised. They have launched their own investigation, which is ongoing, and have also reached out to their local FBI office.

After some digging, I found some interesting posts. Some email marketing company called iContact, that I had never heard about before, was the source of the compromise. They claim to be SAS-70 compliant, but of course like most bureaucratic certifications, SAS-70 is mostly security theater that makes sysadmins’ life miserable for no meaningful security benefit (SAS-70 auditors, on the other hand, profit handsomely).

Just another example of how outsourcing critical functions to outside vendors can backfire spectacularly and take down your own reputation in the process.

As a foreigner living in San Francisco for the last ten years, I never cease to be baffled by US voters’ tendency to vote for candidates who are clearly class warriors on the side of the rich and other influential special interests. Political scientists have long wondered why people vote against their own best interests, e.g. Americans voting for candidates beholden to health “care” provider lobbies and who hew to the status quo, saddling the US with grotesquely overpriced yet substandard health care. Another example would be the repulsive coddling of an increasingly brazen Wall Street kleptocracy.

Ideology cannot explain it all. Certainly, some people will put principle ahead of their pocketbook and vote for candidates that uphold their idea of moral values even if they simultaneously vote for economic measures that hurt their electorate. That said, there is nothing preventing a political candidate from adopting simultaneously socially conservative positions and economic policies that favor a safety net, what in Europe would be called Christian Democrats.

Media propaganda and brainwashing cannot explain it either, to believe so, as do conspiracy theorists on both right and left of the US political spectrum, is to seriously underestimate the intelligence (and cynicism) of the electorate. In a mostly democratic country like the United States, special interests can only prevail when the general population is apathetic, or at least consents to the status quo.

I believe the answer lies in loss aversion, the mental bias that causes people to fear a loss far more than they desire a gain. Our brains did not evolve in a way that favors strict rationality. Most people’s intuition about probability and statistics is unreliable and misleading—we tend to overestimate the frequency of rare events. The middle class, which holds a majority of votes, will tend to oppose measures that expose it to the risk of being pulled down by lower classes even if the same measures would allow them upward mobility into the upper classes. The upper class exploits this asymmetry to maintain its privileges, be they obscene taxpayer-funded bonuses for bankers who bankrupted their banks, or oligopoly rent-seeking by the medical profession.

One of my bosses got a Kindle 2 a few months ago, and was wondering how an avowed gadget lover such as myself did not have one already. I am perfectly comfortable reading books in electronic form on the small screens of PDAs or phones, but I have little interest in carrying yet another device with its bevy of chargers and accessories, so I just humored him. As far as I am concerned, the Apple iPad pretty much killed the e-reader market. E-ink technology has a place in digital signage, but a general-purpose computing device with Internet connectivity like the iPad wins over a unitasker any day.

My main objection to commercial e-books as they are mooted today is digital rights management. e-books cannot be resold or even given to family members. Even if DRM were acceptable, the value of a restricted e-books is a fraction of the value of a real book, but pricing today is much higher, despite massively lower costs of production, and short-sighted publishers want to take them even higher, to the same levels as hardbacks.

All tech companies fall somewhere on a spectrum of evil. Microsoft is on the bumbling side—their products are inferior and their marketing practices sharp, to say the least, but they are a fairly open company when it comes to developers using their platform, and Bill Gates is a modern day Robin Hood of sorts, taking from rich Westerners and giving to the poor in the Third World. Apple embodies the seductive dark side—superior products but a company that has no compuction in stabbing developers in the back, and with a demonstrated penchant for control freakery as shown with the iPhone App Store. Google is on the undecided side, ruthlessly violating privacy, but still capable of the odd principled gesture such as facing down Chinese censors.

Amazon as a company lies quite far on this spectrum. Good customer service does not excuse their behavior:

• Jeff Bezos is personally listed as an inventor on the obviously frivolous “one click” patent and has been using it to extort royalties and stymie competitors.
• At one point they removed all gay themed books from their search listings by classifying them. Faced with a firestorm of controversy, they unconvincingly claimed it was an operator error. Why do they have a bulk blacklisting facility in the first place?
• In an example of life imitating art, they pulled e-book copies of Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty Four” from Kindle users who had paid for them. Apparently, they had never bothered to check if they had the rights to sell them. The simple fact Amazon has the power to pull books back from electronic bookshelves is unacceptable.
• They are trying to leverage their dominant position in online book sales to monopolize print-on-demand publishing by refusing to carry books not published by their own on-demand imprint, BookSurge, even though the latter is higher priced than competition and has serious quality issues.
• This is only the tip of the iceberg. Publishers speak in hushed tones about Amazon’s thuggish “negotiating” tactics, but never publicly out of fear of retaliation.

Since the launch of the Kindle, which is estimated to have 70% market share in e-readers, Amazon has been trying to leverage its market power in paper book sales to corner the market in e-books. One of the prongs in their strategy is to keep the legacy model where the publisher treats the e-book store like a dead-tree book reseller, rather than a model and revenue share more in line with the true costs of e-books (which are obviously much lower than for physical books, as the bandwidth required is piddling).

Apple’s iPad and its associated iBooks store has changed the way the debate is framed, and offers publishers an attractive agency model to counter Amazon’s diktat. It is not surprising that five of the big six publishers (all but Random House) signed up for the iBooks store.

Last Friday, in an escalation of mind-boggling arrogance, Amazon decided to punish Macmillan, the smallest and weakest of the big six (at least in the US) by withdrawing every Macmillan book from sale, including paper books, not just e-books. Among others books by Macmillan affiliate Tor, the leading label in Science Fiction and Fantasy, are not available for sale by Amazon (although they are still available from third-party sellers via Amazon’s site). Essentially Amazon is trying to use its dominance in printed book sales to twist Macmillan’s arm. As far as I am concerned, this is racketeering.

Disclaimer: my wife used to work for Macmillan in the UK. Not that it matters, Amazon’s behavior would be just as reprehensible with any other publisher.

I do not approve of the publishing industry’s doomed attempts to impose premium pricing on e-books, or their attempts to impose unacceptable DRM, but customers are perfectly capable of voting with their feet, as I do, and a middleman like Amazon behaving this way is intolerable. Booksellers censoring books or limiting supply is not an innocuous act. Norman Spinrad is in self-imposed exile in Paris because B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, the dominant booksellers in the 80s, would not sell his more controversial books (like Journals of the Plague Years) out of fear of offending conservative audiences in the Bible Belt.

Small independent bookstores are failing everywhere, and even the large Barnes & Noble and Borders chains are in dire straits. A company like Amazon with a demonstrated history of abusing its market power cannot be permitted to continue. I always buy my SFF books from the lovely Borderlands Books in any case, and my classical CDs from Arkiv Music, but I will henceforth abstain from buying books from Amazon altogether.

As for the Kindle, it can go to hell. I would not take one if they gave it to me for free.

Update (2010-02-04):

Like the SFWA, I replaced all the Amazon links on this site to Indiebound, a website that helps support independent booksellers.

Update (2014-05-28):

They are employing their racketeering tactics again, this time against Hachette.

From 2000 to 2007, I lived and worked in downtown San Francisco, and did not need a car to commute, so I never bothered to get one. When Acxiom purchased Kefta, they moved us to Foster City, 23 miles away and with no credible transit options, so I ended up buying a BMW 525i. I considered getting a Prius or a Lexus GS 450h hybrid, but opted not to. The Toyota faulty accelerator pedal fiasco makes me glad I passed.

In the eighties, Audi lost two thirds of its sales due to an unjustified rumor that its cars were prone to “sudden acceleration”. It took them 15 years to recover. The damage to Toyota will be even worse, since in this case there is in fact a problem, and the company’s damning slowness in responding will be excoriated in the court of public opinion, destroying a mostly deserved reputation for building reliable, if ugly cars. Ford, Hyundai and Honda must be licking their chops right now.

To my surprise the recall was brought home to me. Two months ago, I was car #3 in a 4-car collision (I braked in time, but the car behind me did not have as good brakes and tires as mine and rear-ended me into the car in front of me). My car has been in the garage since then and I rented a car from Enterprise Rent-a-Car (I try to patronize my clients whenever possible). The car is a Pontiac Vibe, which is essentially the same as the Toyota Matrix, both made right here in the Bay Area in the recently shuttered Fremont NUMMI plant. It has the faulty part, and Enterprise called me to exchange the car (kudos to them for being so proactive).

On August 28, 2009, California Highway Patrol officer Mark Saylor died in a horrendous car crash in San Diego county, along with his wife, daughter and brother-in-law, while driving a loaner Lexus ES350. The brother-in-law actually called 911 to report the accelerator was jammed. This was a different issue, one of incorrect floor mat causing the accelerator pedal to jam in the fully opened position. The car was traveling at over 100mph before the driver lost control, the car went airborne, turned over and crashed with an explosion, killing all the passengers instantly. The dealership bears a heavy responsibility in these deaths for fitting the incorrect mats, and failing to respond to a previous driver’s report of a similar incident. The rubber mats on my BMW have bolts that lock them in position with no chance of slipping, and I am surprised Lexus had such shoddy engineering in the first place. Perhaps the reputation of German engineers is not overdone, after all.

On modern cars, the brakes and even the handbrake have enough stopping power to counter the engine’s maximum torque. There is the option to switch the car to neutral gear, assuming there is no malfunction of the transmission. Shutting down the engine is not recommended, as that would also cut power to brakes and power steering, but in any case this car had a keyless ignition system, which requires pressing and holding the ignition button for three seconds. If you are in a panic situation with an unfamilar car, it is highly unlikely you will get this maneuver right, assuming you have three seconds to spare in the first place. I have a similar system in my own car, and had no idea what the procedure is to shut down a running engine.

Modern carmakers are integrators, assembling parts made by their subcontractors. It is not an exaggeration to say the German carmakers are mostly Bosch OEMs. The accelerator pedal involved in the Toyota recall is made by CTS, a US telecom gear maker who only incidentally makes auto parts. Historically Japanese companies have been resistant to using parts from non-Japanese suppliers. In many cases this was due to the keiretsu system of companies interwoven by complex cross-holdings, a successor to the zaibatsu system outlawed after the post-war US occupation of Japan. In other cases, it was due to objective factors — Japanese electronics manufacturers use high-speed power screwdrivers to speed up assembly, and US-made screws used inferior alloys compared to Japanese screw makers, stripping too easily. It took severe pressure and the threat of sanctions from US trade representatives to convince Japanese carmakers to give US suppliers a chance. This incident is likely to harden Japanese executives’ suspicion of gaijin suppliers.

On modern cars, the accelerator pedal is “drive by wire”, i.e. it is an electronic peripheral that feeds the engine control computer. Airbus introduced fly-by-wire controls in its aircraft as more conservative Boeing stuck to hydraulic controls, and this was a significant factor in Airbus overtaking Boeing in airliners. Change takes time, and carmakers are understandably hesitant to change a critical safety organ like brakes. The brake pedals are still hydraulically linked to the brakes, but have an electronic sensor to control the rear brake lights and disengage cruise control.

BMWs, Audis, and even cheaper cars like Volkswagen or Chrysler have a feature called brake override where the engine control will disable the accelerator when the brake pedal is applied. Toyota deliberately chose not to implement such a system, which would have saved Mark Saylor’s life and his family’s. This refusal is particularly incomprehensible since the hardware is already here, and the change should only require a software change and the ensuing QA and certification cycle. The software was not bad per se, but the requirements were incomplete, and this is yet one more case where bad software kills.

Update (2014-03-19):

Toyota was hit today by the Department of Justice with a record $1.2B criminal fine for its attempted cover-up, and admitted guilt. GM is apparently next.