Doc Searls's Blog, page 30

A Santa Barbara itinerary from ChatGPT

I asked ChatGPT for a three-day itinerary to give visitors to Santa Barbara. Here ya go:

Day 1:

Start the day with breakfast at the Shoreline Beach Cafe, which has a beautiful view of the ocean.After breakfast, head to Knapp’s Castle for a scenic hike and exploration of the ruins of a 20th century mansion. The hike offers stunning views of the Santa Ynez Valley.For lunch, grab some sandwiches or salads from the nearby Panino’s, a local favorite with fresh, high-quality ingredients.Spend the afternoon exploring downtown Santa Barbara, with its charming shops and cafes. Don’t miss a visit to the Santa Barbara County Courthouse, a stunning Spanish Colonial Revival building with a beautiful clock tower that offers a panoramic view of the city.For dinner, head to Tee-Off, a local institution that has been serving up classic American fare since 1949.

Day 2:

Start the day with a hike up La Cumbre Peak, which offers stunning views of Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands.For lunch, grab some tacos from La Super-Rica Taqueria, a casual spot that was a favorite of Julia Child.Spend the afternoon exploring the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, which showcases native plants and offers a peaceful escape from the city.For dinner, head to the Stagecoach Inn, a historic restaurant that serves up classic American fare in a cozy setting.

Day 3:

Start the day with breakfast at Jeannine’s Bakery, a local favorite known for its delicious baked goods and breakfast items.Spend the morning at Hendry’s Beach, a local favorite with beautiful views and great walking trails.For lunch, grab some sandwiches or salads from South Coast Deli, a local favorite with fresh ingredients and creative flavor combinations.Spend the afternoon exploring the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which features a diverse collection of artwork from around the world.For dinner, head back to downtown Santa Barbara and choose from one of the many restaurants in the area, depending on your preference. Some options include Olio e Limone Ristorante, Los Agaves, and The Lark.

I wouldn’t disagree with any of it, except maybe to note that Hendry’s Beach at sunset (where and when I shot the photo above) is mighty fine.

Of course, the answer will vary with every regeneration, but what the hell. It’s very early in our co-evolution with whatever the hell we and AI are together becoming.

Unstill life

Her name is Mary Johnson. Born in 1917, the year the U.S. entered WWI, two years before women in the same country got the right to vote, she died in 1944, not long before the end of WWII. She was buried, unembalmed, in the cemetery of a Chicago church that was later abandoned. Her grave was unmarked. To make room for new commercial development in 2023, the church was razed and occupants of the cemetery were respectfully and quietly disinterred, and moved to a working cemetery elsewhere in town. In the midst, efforts were made by the coroner’s office to discover the identities of the bodies from unmarked graves before they were to be reburied. Mary’s was among them.

The difference with Mary was that her body appeared to be unchanged: a bit dusty under bits of casket lining, with light flecks on her dark skin. Except for that, she looked like she had died yesterday. When they removed her body from the casket in the hospital morgue where she was taken for DNA sampling, she was still flexible. I asked the pathologist what would account for her perfect state of preservation. The pathologist said she had no idea. Even the best embalming jobs age in the ground.

When the pathologist was out of the room, I reached to lift one of Mary’s eyelids. Before my fingers touched, both lids opened, slightly. I called out, “Come here! Come here!” Nobody came. Then both eyes opened. Her body shook as she tried to breathe.

“Code Blue! I yelled.

She was alive. Somehow, alive. After what, eighty years? At the time we didn’t know.

I was ready to do CPR when she started breathing and tried to sit up. “Hang on,” I said. Let me help.” As I did, she was becoming warm. She stood up and looked around.

I looked at my watch. It was 5:15 AM. The dream was too interesting for me to completely awaken, so I dropped back in. As a half-conscious dreamer, I often do that. For the next hour, I followed several different story threads. Each visited what happened in the eighty years of Mary’s suspended life. The Cold War. israel. Civil rights. Rock & Roll. Space travel. Disco. Hip hop. Rap. Digital everything. One of her questions: “What’s television?”

I thought about the backstory of her own short life: a child in the twenties, a teen during the Depression, a young adult during The War. What interesting stuff happened in those years? Was she in love, maybe with a guy who went off to fight? What work did she do?

I thought about the science questions. How was it possible for someone to lay undead for so long? Who else in that cemetery, or any cemetery, might still be alive? Was she a one-of-one, a one-of-some, or a one-of-many? Though not a horror story, it did recall Poe’s The Premeture Burial, in which the protagonist’s undead state was “catalepsy.” I imagined in this thread that the story might be one Michael Chrichton would like to write, if he was still alive.

Dreams have no more detail than one gives them, and being a white guy from New Jersey, born after Mary went cataleptic, I didn’t have much to furnish any storyline about Mary’s life, past or present. But I could still think of questions to address. What perspective and wisdom could Mary bring to our time? How would she cope with finding nearly all the people and things she knew were now dead and gone? What would she marvel at, and what would appall her? What would she be, or mean, to the rest of us?

No surprise that I would dream of a resurrection on Easter morning, even though that wasn’t in my head at the time. So, might Mary (not hard to guess from what corner of my unconscious that one came from) be a Jesus for our time? Hmm.

At 6:15, I finally had to get up and do my business, and the dream ended there. Still, “This has to be a book,” I told myself. But I have other books to write, ones that have sat half-written for years. And writing fiction isn’t my thing. So I decided I’d blog it instead. And here we are.

She is alive now, on this page, and in your mind. All she needs is for someone to finish her story.

The image above is courtesy of DALL-E, the artificially creative image generator. Took four tries to get this one. Since DALL-E seems to know only how to make grotesque faces, I made sure the woman here is looking away.

From sea to rhyming sea

While discussing ChatGPT with my teenage grandkids, I put it to a number of tests. In one I asked it to write a poem that includes all the capital cities in the U.S. Here is its reply:

From sea to shining sea, Across this land so grand, The capitals of every state, Await us to take a stand.

In Montgomery, Alabama, We begin our noble quest, To climb each statehouse staircase, And put our wills to the test.

Through Juneau, Alaska, To Phoenix, Arizona’s heat, The halls of power beckon us, With challenges we must meet.

Little Rock, Arkansas, And Sacramento, too, We march to their state capitals, To learn what they can do.

From Denver, Colorado’s heights, To Connecticut’s Hartford town, We cross this land of liberty, To see our nation’s crown.

Dover, Delaware, And Tallahassee, Florida’s heat, We journey forth to find our place, In every statehouse seat.

Atlanta’s Georgia peach, And Honolulu’s island breeze, We’ll walk the halls of power, To achieve our lofty dreams.

Through Boise, Idaho’s hills, And Springfield’s Illinois pride, We’ll take the steps of governance, With courage as our guide.

Indianapolis, Indiana, And Iowa’s Des Moines, We’ll stand in every capital, To honor each state’s joins.

From Topeka’s Kansas plains, To Kentucky’s Frankfort pride, We’ll learn from every leader, In whom we can confide.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, And Augusta, Maine’s coast, We’ll listen to the wisdom, That each statehouse host.

In Annapolis, Maryland, And Massachusetts’ Boston town, We’ll seek to find our purpose, And rise to wear the crown.

Lansing, Michigan, And St. Paul’s Minnesota pride, We’ll climb each capital’s staircase, And never be denied.

Mississippi’s Jackson town, And Jefferson City’s Missouri call, We’ll cross this land with honor, And never falter or fall.

Helena, Montana’s heights, And Lincoln’s Nebraska plains, We’ll march through every capital, And honor each state’s gains.

Carson City, Nevada, And Concord’s New Hampshire pride, We’ll stand in every statehouse, And let our voices be our guide.

Trenton’s New Jersey call, And Santa Fe’s New Mexico sun, We’ll climb the stairs of governance, And learn from everyone.

Albany’s New York pride, And Raleigh’s North Carolina charm, We’ll honor every state’s glory, And never let it harm.

Bismarck’s North Dakota plains, And Columbus’ Ohio pride, We’ll journey forth to every capital, With honor as our guide.

Oklahoma’s Oklahoma City, And Salem’s Oregon call, We’ll stand in every statehouse, And never let our spirits fall.

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, And Rhode Island’s Providence town, We’ll climb each capital’s staircase, And never let ourselves drown.

South Carolina’s Columbia pride, And South Dakota’s Pierre call, We’ll cross this land with dignity, And never let ourselves stall.

Nashville’s Tennessee music, And Austin’s Texas pride, We’ll stand in every statehouse, And let our voices rise.

Salt Lake City’s Utah heights, And Montpelier’s Vermont pride, We’ll march through every capital, And let our dreams be our guide.

Richmond’s Virginia charm, And Olympia’s Washington crown, We’ll honor every state’s valor, And never let ourselves down.

Charleston’s West Virginia hills, And Madison’s Wisconsin pride, We’ll journey forth to every capital, And never be denied.

Cheyenne’s Wyoming pride, And Washington, D.C.’s White House, We’ll cross this land with honor, And never let ourselves douse.

From sea to shining sea, We’ve walked each statehouse hall, And learned the lessons of governance, That make our nation stand tall.

Redraw your own conclusions.

A workflow challenge

I shoot a lot of pictures. Most are from altitude (such as the above). But lots are of people and places, for example, here are a few I shot at DWebCamp last summer:

Importing and curating photos is the only organized thing I do in life. Let me explain.

Under each of those photos is the name of the file. These are the actual file names, not ones stored in the library of some app and remembered at the meta-level. None are called DSCN0401.JPG, IMG_4523.JPG, or IMG_1874.PNG. I’ve given all of them meaningful names, all by the same convention: YYYY_MM_DD_name-of-event. Every file in every folder has the same name as the folder, with a number appended to it. The numbers are chronological. Each event’s folder goes into a month folder, each of those goes into a year folder, and all years go into a folder called pix-by-year. That folder has years going back to 1869. (The earliest are scans, such as this one.)

I organize and name all my photos with a piece of software originally called iView Media Pro, then Expression Media 2 (after Microsoft bought it), and finally Phase One Media Pro (after Microsoft abandoned it). I like the second version best, so that’s what I use.

Here is a short and partial list of all the things Expression Media 2 can do:

Rename files in the Finder, very selectively, alone, or in batches (much more smoothly and easily than can be done with Adobe Bridge or Apple’s Shortcuts or Automator).Search for any variable, or combination of variablesSort by up to 24 variables (file name, size, date created, date modified…)Resize selectivelyOpen any files with any other appRun a slide show, with many choices of presentation (much more than with Apple’s Photos), and save shows as moviesOpen any file or collection of files in any other app (for me that’s usually Photoshop 2021)Basic image editsRotate, flip, zoom in and outSee and edit EXIF data for every shotFind missing and duplicate itemsShow or hide any file or combinations of filesMove files in the FinderOperate in lieu of the finder when dragging or dropping into a Web page or another appArrange or tile photos by hand or by sortLog and show actionsPlace images on a mapMake a .pdf of any image or collection of themTurn galleries into pages in .htmlImport and export to and from .xml

I don’t do all that stuff, but I list it because I want to remember what I fear I will lose when I move from this 2017 MacBook Pro running Mojave to my new 16″ 2023 M2 Max MacBook Pro. That will happen later today after I upgrade both machines to the latest version of Ventura. When that happens, Expressions Media 2, a 32-bit program last updated in 2013, will be kaput. And I will need to find another workflow.

Maybe Expression Media 2 will survive through emulation or something. Or maybe Phase One Media Pro (also last updated in 2013) will work.

Or maybe one of ya’ll has a better way to manage workflow than I’m using now. I’m open.

Meanwhile, here goes…

Addendum: If you’re wondering why I’m not running my life on Linux and free and/or open-source software, the main reasons are Photoshop and Lightroom. I’ve tried Gimp and it doesn’t cut it. Photoshop knows the camera and lenses I’m using, and its tools, such as dehaze, are extremely useful. See the photos here? Thank dehaze for making the detail pop out. (Yes, Gimp de-hazes, but not easily.) I hate being trapped in Apple’s castle as much as the next serf, but shooting as much as I do requires tools I can use quickly and easily.

Is Mastodon a commons?

Glenn Fleishman has a lucid and helpful introduction to Mastodon in TidBITS that opens with this:

Cast your mind back to the first time you experienced joy and wonder on the Internet. Do you worry you’ll never be able to capture that sense again? If so, it’s worth wading gently into the world of Mastodon microblogging to see if it offers something fresh and delightful. It might remind you—as it does me, at least for now—of the days when you didn’t view online interactions with some level of dread.

Mastodon isn’t a service but a network of consensually affiliated, independently operated servers running the Mastodon software. It’s the best-known example of the so-called Fediverse…

Then, a few paragraphs later, he provides the best metaphor I’ve yet seen for what Mastodon is and how it works:

You can think of Mastodon as a flotilla of boats of vastly different sizes, whereas Twitter is like being on a cruise ship the size of a continent. Some Mastodon boats might be cruise liners with as many as 50,000 passengers; others are just dinghies with a single occupant! The admin of each instance—the captain of your particular boat—might make arbitrary decisions you disagree with as heartily as with any commercial operator’s tacks and turns. But you’re not stuck on your boat, with abandoning ship as the only alternative. Instead, you can hop from one boat to another without losing your place in the flotilla community. Parts of a flotilla can also splinter off and form their own disconnected groups, but no boat, however large, is in charge of the community.

Since my day job is working as a visiting scholar in the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, and Customer Commons has been imagined from its start as a potential commons for customers (or as many commons, flotilla style), I find myself wondering if each of Mastodon’s boats is a commons. Or if some of them could be, or already are. Or if Mastodon itself is one.

My first experience with Mastodon came early on, in a boat that I abandoned before it sank. But now that Mastodon is hot again, I’ve jumped with two crowds onto two boats: twit.social (here) and journa.host (here). TWiT.social’s occupants are the community of hosts, co-hosts, and participants in the TWiT network. Journa.host’s occupants are a collection of journalists. The two communities are different, though not entirely: journalists abound in both of them.

The question for me here is if any of these boats qualify as a commons. Or if Mastodon itself is one.

To qualify as a commons, a canonical list to check off is provided by Elinor Ostrom. In Governing the Commons (Cambridge, 1990), she outlined eight “design principles” for stable local common pool resource (CPR) management. I’ll make notes following each in italics:

Clearly defining the group boundaries (and effective exclusion of external un-entitled parties) and the contents of the common pool resource. Mastodon is designed to support that.The appropriation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local conditions. If we’re talking about code, yes. Maybe more. Gotta think about that.Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process. Depends on the instance, I suppose. Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators. Not sure about that one. A scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules. Up to the person or people running each boat.Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access. I think these range from informal to formal, and draw from rules developed for mailing lists and other fora. But, not sure.Self-determination of the community recognized by higher-level authorities. At the top level, it’s othe Mastodon dev community. At the boat (instance) level, it’s the captain(s) of each.In the case of larger common-pool resources, organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local CPRs (common pool resources) at the base level. A thought: the common pool resource is the authors of posts (aka toots) and the posts themselves.

Ostrom and others have also gone deeper and wider than that, for example by examining socio-ecological systems (SESes), defined here in 2004. I’ll leave digging into that up to scholars more schooled than I (or to a later post, after I finish schooling myself). Meanwhile, I think it’s important, given the sudden growth of Mastodon and other federated systems with flotilla-ish qualities, to examine how deep research and writing on commons apply.

This work does matter: Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for it, and it may matter more now than ever.

And help is welcome.

About the photo up top: Lacking a royalty-free visual for a flotilla of boats, I settled on the collections of people you see through bubbles in the photo above, which I shot on the grounds of Versailles. Kinda works, methinks.

Does Sirius XM sound far worse than listening to music on YouTube?

That’s a question that was asked on Quora and deleted before I posted my answer. So I’m posting the answer here.

This is like asking if a car radio sounds better than a TV. Because it’s a matter of where, how, and when, more than a matter of sound.

There is some overlap in the sense that both SiriusXM and YouTube are fully useful on mobile apps. But you don’t watch your radio in your car or listen to your radio on your TV, even though it’s possible to do both through apps that are native to both the road and the living room.

As for the sound itself, YouTiube has an edge in the sense that you can select audio quality bitrates up to 256kbps AAC & OPUS. SiriusXM’s default bitrate is also 256kpbs, but over the satellite link is typically lower—sometimes much lower. But, since SiriusXM does not (to my knowledge, so far) publish their bitrates in a place that’s easy to find, the bitrates are subject to debate. Here is one on Reddit.

But, again, it’s a matter of where and when more than of how. If you want to see and hear a piece of music, YouTube provides enormous optionality over what you can see and hear. If you want radio-like programming music, SiriusXM offers more.

Yet the Internet has more than both put together. That’s why the image above is of Radio Paradise, which is one of the oldest and best Internet music stations. It’s live on the Net and the Web, and it has Best Of collections on YouTube as well.

FM Stations Down on Gibraltar Peak

Gibraltar Peak isn’t the highest landform overlooking Santa Barbara. At 2180 feet, it’s far below the Santa Ynez mountain ridge behind it, which tops at about 4000 feet. But it provides an excellent vantage for FM stations that want maximum unobstructed population coverage in the market, which is why many local stations are sited there.

And now, thanks to the massive rains earlier this week, the road to Gibraltar Peak is closed, and most FM stations transmitting from there are off the air. Here’s a list:

88.7 KDRW, which mostly relays KCRW from Santa Monica89.5 KSBX, which relays KCBX from San Luis Obispo89.9 K210AD, which relays KPCC from Pasadena by way of KJAI from Ojai90.3 KMRO-FM2, a booster for KMRO in Camarillo91.5 K218CP, which relays KAWZ from Twin Falls, Idaho96.9 K245DD, which relays KZSB/1290 AM in Santa Barbara97.9 K250BS, which relays KTMS/990 AM in Santa Barbara (and is on a KTMS tower, farther up the slope)98.7 K254AH, which relays KPFK from Los Angeles102.3 KK272DT, the FM side of KCLU/1340 in Santa Barbara and KCLU/88.3 in Thousand Oaks

KDB/93.7, which relays KUSC from Los Angeles, is also on Gibraltar Peak and closer to Gibraltar Road. (It’s the tower on the right in the photo above.) It’s still on the air, as are KTMS/990AM, KTYD/99.9FM, and K231CR/94.1, which relays KOSJ/1490AM, all of which are a short distance farther up Gibraltar Road.

So far, only one local news publisher is on the case: The Santa Barbara Independent, with Gibraltar Peak Towers Out of Commission. That story says two power poles were knocked out—a fact reported by John Franklin, who operates the whole transmitter site. (The story also kindly gives me credit for the photo there.) I haven’t seen anything yet in Edhat, Noozhawk, or the Santa Barbara News-Press, so I’ll tweet at them shortly.

Checking the websites linked to above, only KCLU mentions that their FM transmitter for Santa Barbara is down. Here’s their page for the outage. The image it shows is not of their antenna on Gibraltar. Mouse around over this photo to see which of the many antennas on Gibraltar is KCLU’s.

The Independent says the site is a “relay” one. That’s right in the sense that most of the stations there are satellites of bigger stations elsewhere. But KCLU especially is local to Santa Barbara (its anchor AM station is here), and the ratings reflect it. I wrote about those ratings a few years ago, in Where Public Radio Rocks. In that post, I noted that public radio is bigger in Santa Barbara than anywhere else in the country.

The most recent ratings (Spring of 2022), in % shares of total listening, are these:

KDB/93.9, classical music, relaying KUSC/91.1 from Los Angeles: 7.9%KCLU/102.3 and 1340 in Santa Barbara (studios in Thousand Oaks), public broadcasting: 7.3%KDRW/88.7 in Santa Barbara (main studio in Santa Monica, as KCRW/89.9): 4.6%KPCC/89.9, relaying KJAI/89.5 and KPCC/89.3 in Pasadena: 1.3%KSBX/89.5, relaying KCBX/90.1 from San Luis Obispo: 0.7%

Total: 21.8%.

That means more than a fifth of all radio listening in Santa Barbara is to noncommercial and public radio.

And, of all those stations, only KDB/KUSC is on the air right now.

By the way, when I check to see how public broadcasting is doing in other markets, nothing is close. Santa Barbara still kicks ass. I think that’s an interesting story, and I haven’t seen anyone report on it, other than here.

Here is a guide to substitute signals for some of the stations:

KCRW/KDRW can be heard on KCRU/89.1 from Oxnard (actually, Laguna Peak, in Pt. Magu State Park)KCLU can be heard on 1340 AM from Santa Barbara and 88.3 FM from Thousand OaksKPCC can be heard on KJAI/89.5 from OjaiKSBX/KCBX can be heard on 90.9 from Solvang (actually Broadcast Peak)KPFK can be heard on its home signal (biggest in the U.S.) at 90.7KZSB can be heard on 1290 AM from Santa BarbaraKMRO can still be heard on its Camarillo main transmitter on 90.3

The two AM signals are strong in town and most of the FMs are weak but listenable. And all of them can be heard over their live streams online.

 

 

Heavy Weather

Most of California has just two seasons: rain and fire. Rain is another name for Winter, and it peaks in January. In most years, January in California isn’t any more wet than, say, New York, Miami or Chicago. But every few years California gets monsoons. Big ones. This is one of those years.

The eighteen gallon storage tub in our yard is sixteen inches deep and serves as a rain gauge:

Yesterday morning it was less than half full. While it gathered rain, our devices blasted out alerts with instructions like this:

So we stayed home and watched the Web tell us how the drought was ending:

Wasn’t long ago that Lake Cachuna was at 7%.

So that’s good news. The bad news is about floods, ruined piers and wharfs, downed trees, power outages, levee breaches. The usual.

It should help to remember that the geology on both coasts is temporary and improvisational. The East Coast south of New England and Long Island (where coastal landforms were mostly dumped there or scraped bare by glaciers in the geologic yesterday) is a stretch of barrier islands that are essentially dunes shifted by storms. Same goes for the Gulf Coast. The West Coast looks more solid, with hills and mountains directly facing the sea. But Pacific storms in Winter routinely feature waves high as houses, pounding against the shores and sea cliffs.

Looking up the coast from Tijuana, within a few hundred years Coronado and Point Loma in San Diego, La Jolla, all the clifftop towns up the coast to Dana Point and Laguna, Palos Verdes Peninsula, Malibu and Point Dume, Carpinteria, the Santa Barbara Mesa and Hope Ranch, all of Isla Vista and UCSB, Pismo and Avila Beaches, all of Big Sur and the Pacific Coast Highway there, Carmel and the Monterey Peninsula, Aptos, Capitola and Santa Cruz, Davenport, Half Moon Bay, Pacifica, the headlands of San Francisco, Muir and Stimson Beaches and Bolinas in Marin, Fort Bragg in Mendicino County, and Crescent City in Humbolt—all in California—will be eaten away partially or entirely by weather and waves. Earthquakes will also weigh in.

The photo up top is of La Conchita, a stupidly located town on the South Coast, west of Ventura, four days after a landslide in 2005 took out 13 homes and killed 10 people. All the land above town is a pile of former and future landslides, sure to slide again when the ground is saturated with water. Such as now or soon.

So that’s a long view. For one that spans the next week, visit windy.com and slide the elevation up to FL (flight level) 340 (34000 feet):

That yellow river of wind is a jet stream hauling serious ass straight across the Pacific and into California. Jet streams are why the headwinds and tailwinds you see on seat-back displays showing flight progress on planes often say 100mph or more. Look at Windy before you fly coast to coast or overseas, and you can guess what the flight path will be. You can also see why it may take as little as five hours to get from Dulles to Heathrow, or more than seven hours to come back by a route that touches the Arctic Circle. Your plane is riding, fighting or circumventing high altitude winds that have huge influences on the weather below.

To see how, drop Windy down to the surface:

Those eddies alongside the jet stream are low pressure centers full of the moisture and wind we call storms. They spin along the sides of the jet stream the way dust devils twist up along the sides of highways full of passing trucks. Those two storm centers are spinning toward California and will bring more wind and rain.

Beside the sure damage those will bring, there will be two benefits. One is that California will be as green as Ireland for a few months. The other is that wildflowers will bloom all over the place.

The Death Valley folks are hedging their bet, but I’d put money on a nice bloom this Spring. Watch for it.

How the species killing the planet can save it

We live in the Anthropocene, a geological epoch defined by the influence of one species over everything else, including the planet itself. That species is ours, and we are a pestilential one, altering, consuming, and wasting everything we can.

Specifically, our civilizations have advanced on the planet like a cancer, parasitically metabolizing materials we call “resources” (without their permission) as if their sums were not finite. Oil and coal will be gone in a few hundred years. Uranium, titanium, tungsten, helium, lithium and other members of the periodic table may be gone far sooner, thanks to our boundless appetites. And yes, we can make raise crops of corn and other plants to make fuel for cars and jets, but only at the costs monoculture place on the biodiversity required for sustaining every form of life.

I bring all this up because we’ll be talking about it on Monday at this month’s Ostrom Workshop salon at Indiana University and live on the Web. Our speaker will be Vinay Gupta (@leashless), inventor of the Hexayurt refugee shelter, founder and CEO of Mattereum, a progenitor of Ethereum, and source of wisdom on all that and much else. The title of his talk is the headline above. His case is that we have to get our per-person environmental consumption down by about 10x.

It helps that there are peoples and regions in the world providing living examples of how that is done. Vinay is deeply familiar with those, and will share what he knows in ways that help us co-think and work to save the planet’s butt, along with our own.

The salon is at 2 PM Eastern time. It is also free, but you need to register first, here.

If this follows the pattern of our prior salons—all with the theme Beyond the Web—the presentation and discussion will be lively, informative, and productive. See you there.

When Clouds Crash

Rackspace is in a crater right now, on fire.

So are many of its customers. I’m one of them.

What happened, Rackspace says, was “the result of a ransomware incident.” Damaged, lost or destroyed is its Hosted Exchange business. On that cloud platform, companies and individuals around the world run their email and much else.

It’s quite a saga.

The first report from Rackspace came at 11:49pm Pacific (where I am) on Thursday, posted on its Incidents page:

We are investigating an issue that is affecting our Hosted Exchange environments. More details will be posted as they become available.

Updates got more wordy as the outage continued. About a day later, a long posting said,

We proactively powered down and disconnected the Hosted Exchange environment while we triaged to understand the extent and the severity of the impact. After further analysis, we have determined that this is a security incident.

They also offered a lifeline of sorts:

At no cost to you, we will be providing access to Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft 365 until further notice. At no cost to you, we will be providing access to Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft 365 until further notice. To activate, please use the below link for instructions on how to set up your account and users.

For reasons not worth going into, this was useless to me. But I’m also just one guy, and almost all of Rackspace’s customers are businesses with more to lose.

Getting help from Rackspace quickly became difficult or impossible, while details about the situation were minimal, until this morning (6 December), when they said it was a ransomware incident. Which countless tweets had been suggesting from the start.

Here is what Rackspace said it was doing about it:

Alongside our internal security team, we have engaged a leading cyber defense firm to investigate. Our investigation is still in its early stages, and it is too early to say what, if any, data was affected. If we determine sensitive information was affected, we will notify customers as appropriate.

No FBI? CIA? NSA? DHS? Police? My guess is that at least two of those have been notified because it would make sense for them to be involved. But I’m sure abundant caution on Rackspace’s part is the reason we’re not hearing about any of that.

As for notifying customers, good luck. In a posting two days ago, Rackspace said,

For those who are finding the process challenging and are awaiting support, we ask for your patience as we increase staff to help every customer. Since our last update, we have mobilized roughly 1000 support Rackers to reduce wait times and address ticket queues. We will continue to accelerate and deploy even more resources to further help customers.

Search for Rackspace+wait on Twitter to see how that’s going.

Yesterday morning I chose the “we’ll call you back asap” option at the Rackspace support number, after calling them fruitlessly before that. Since then, crickets. Meanwhile, I’ve been working almost non-stop on moving my email hosting to Hover, which answers the phone quickly and is always helpful.

Of course, I haven’t been able to export anything from Rackspace, and I have growing doubts that I ever will. If the failure is total, many details of my life in the digital world will be lost forever.

One bit of good fortune is that my wife and sister, who both also have searls.com email addresses, were on Rackspace’s basic non-Exchange email service. Since that was still working today, we could export their mail archive from Rackspace as .mbox files, and start new accounts for them on Hover. (Ironically, I moved to Rackspace’s Exchange service because I punched through the basic service’s 25Gb limit on storage, and they sold me on the Exchange service’s better security.)

Ramsomware is bad shit. If you’re Rackspace or one of its customers, there is plenty to fear.

But the larger story here isn’t about Rackspace or its customers. It’s about the cloud business, which is beyond massive.

I’ve been looking for examples of cloud failures that are bigger than this one. Here’s a list from five years ago. Here is one from July of this year. Here is one from August. Most list disruptions lasting hours. This one has been going on for five days with no end in sight.

So let’s imagine that Rackspace and its customers are stuck in that crater, and it just keeps burning. For years. What are the lessons from that?