Scott Granneman

Weegee at work

history / /

From Holland Cotter’s “‘Unknown Weegee,’ on Photographer Who Made the Night Noir” (The New York Times: 9 June 2006):

A freelancer by temperament, he had long-term gigs with The Daily News, The Daily Mirror and the left-leaning daily PM. His beat was the inner city, and everything was raw material: the good and the bad, but mostly the bad. He liked nights because he had the photographic turf to himself but also because the best bad things happen at night, under the cover of darkness. Vandals make their mark; hit men practice their trade; people get crazy.

Like a boy scout, he was always prepared. He prowled the streets in a car equipped with a police radio, a typewriter, developing equipment, a supply of cigars and a change of underwear. He was a one-man photo factory: he drove to a crime site; took pictures; developed the film, using the trunk as a darkroom; and delivered the prints.

He often finished a job before the cops had cleared the scene, in some cases before they even arrived. About certain things he was clairvoyant. (Weegee = Ouija, as in board. Get it?) He caught catastrophes in the making and filmed them unfolding. An opportunist? A sensationalist? A voyeur? You could call him all that. He wouldn’t mind. “Just get the name right. Weegee the Famous.”

He was in the right place at the right time. New York from the Depression through World War II was a rude, crude town. No heat in winter, way too much in the summer. Immigrants poured in; there was barely enough room to hold them. Native-born workers felt the competition for jobs and space, resented it. The melting pot was on a constant boil.

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The Vitruvian Triad & the Urban Triad

business, commonplace book, history, science / /

From Andrés Duany’s “Classic Urbanism“:

From time to time there appears a concept of exceptional longevity. In architecture, the pre-eminent instance is the Vitruvian triad of Comoditas, Utilitas, e Venustas. This Roman epigram was propelled into immortality by Lord Burlington’s felicitous translation as Commodity, Firmness and Delight.

It has thus passed down the centuries and remains authoritative, even if not always applied in practice; Commodity: That a building must accommodate its program; Firmness: That it must stand up to the natural elements, among them gravity; Delight: that it must be satisfying to the eye, is with the aberrant exception of the tiny, current avant garde, the ideal of architecture. …

Let me propose the urban triad of Function, Disposition and Configuration as categories that would both describe and “test” the urban performance of a building.

Function describes the use to which the building lends itself, towards the ideal of mixed-use. In urbanism the range of function a first cut may include: exclusively residential, primarily residential, primarily commercial or exclusively commercial. The middle two being the best in urban performance although the extremes have justification in the urban to rural transect. An elaboration should probably differentiate the function at the all-important sidewalk level from the function above.

Disposition describes the location of the building on its lot or site. This may range from a building placed across the frontage of its lot, creating a most urban condition to the rural condition of the building freestanding in the center of its site. Perhaps the easiest way to categorize the disposition of the building is by describing it by its yards: The rearyard building has the building along the frontage, the courtyard building internalizes the space and is just as urban, the sideyard building is the zero-lot line or “Charleston single house” and the edgeyard building is a freestanding object closest to the rural edge of the transect.

The third component of the urban triad is Configuration. This describes the massing, height of a building and, for those who believe that harmony is a tool of urbanism, the architectural syntax and constructional tectonic. It can be argued that the surface of a building is a tool of urbanism no less than its form. Silence of expression is required to achieve the “wall” that defines public space, and that reserves the exalted configuration to differentiate the public building. Harmony in the architectural language is the secret of mixed-use. People seem not to mind variation of function as long as the container looks similar. It is certainly a concern of urbanism.

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Joan Didion on writing & narrative

language & literature, on writing / /

From Marc Weingarten’s “The White Album“:

To be sure, [Joan Didion] certainly tries. She goes on a little later in the essay [from The White Album]: “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

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Prices for zombies in the Underground

business, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Byron Acohido and Jon Swartz’s “Going price for network of zombie PCs: $2,000-$3,000” (USA TODAY: 8 September 2004):

In the calculus of Internet crime, two of the most sought-after commodities are zombie PCs and valid e-mail addresses.

One indication of the going rate for zombie PCs comes from a June 11 posting on SpecialHam.com, an electronic forum for spammers. The asking price for use of a network of 20,000 zombie PCs: $2,000 to $3,000. …

To put a zombie network to work, an attacker needs a list of targets in the form of e-mail addresses. Lists can be purchased from specialists who “harvest” anything that looks like an e-mail address from Web sites, news groups, chat rooms and subscriber lists. Compiled on CDs, such lists cost as little as $5 per million e-mail addresses. But you get what you pay for: Many CD entries tend to be either obsolete or “spam traps” — addresses seeded across the Internet by spam-filtering companies to identify, and block, spammers.

Valid e-mail addresses command a steep price. In June, authorities arrested a 24-year-old America Online engineer, Jason Smathers, and charged him with stealing 92 million AOL customer screen names and selling them to a spammer for $100,000.

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Library book returned 92 years late

commonplace book, history / /

From AP’s “Borrowed books returned to museum — 92 years later” (CNN: 6 November 2000):

The Field Museum of Natural History recently returned 10 volumes to the American Museum of Natural History in New York — 92 years late.

It seems a researcher from the New York museum took the books with him when he accepted a job at the Field Museum in 1908. American Museum officials suspect anthropologist Bertholt Laufer was using the books for research when he was hired away. …

Laufer had purchased 500 volumes — including texts on medicine and natural history — for the American Museum during an archaeological expedition to China from 1901 to 1904.

The American Museum didn’t even know 10 of the books — each belonging to a larger set — were missing until it decided in 1990 to computerize its collection.

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Ballmer says Windows is more secure than Linux

business, security, tech in changing society / /

From Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’s “Longhorn ‘Wave’ Rolling In” (eWeek: 20 October 2004):

The questions led into a discussion of Linux, with Bittmann observing that there’s a market perception that Linux is more secure.

“It’s just not true,” Ballmer responded. “We’re more secure than the other guys. There are more vulnerabilities in Linux; it takes longer for Linux developers to fix security problems. It’s a good decision to go with Windows.”

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Joan Didion on life in Los Angeles

history, language & literature, politics / /

From Marc Weingarten’s “The White Album“:

Among the many piercing flashes of insight to be found in [Joan Didion’s] The White Album’s essays, many of which were written between 1968 and 1979 for publications like Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Los Angeles Times Book Review, is one overarching fact of L.A. life – that it exists on a very slippery foundation. Here was an arid desert landscape adjacent to the Pacific that received its water over 200 miles away from the Central Valley, that built its houses on an active seismic fault, that was prone to brush fires, flooding and earthquakes. It was a city in denial of its own instability. …

But it was more than just the events of that darkest year of the sixties that gave Didion intimations of impending doom. She understood what so many failed to grasp about Los Angeles, especially all of those outsiders who migrate here seeking eternal good health, good weather and untold riches: That life here tends to be about as stable as mercury on glass, and therefore not prone to snug feelings of security and safety. …

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Vitruvian Triad terminology

commonplace book, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From “Good Architecture“:

In ‘building architecture’, for comparison, we have the 3 classic Vitruvian qualities to which ‘GoodArchitecture’ aspires:

‘Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas’ (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio ‘The Ten Books of Architecture’ 1st C AD).

These qualities may be translated as: ‘Technology, Function and Form’ (C St J Wilson ‘ArchitecturalReflections?; Studies in the Philosophy and Practice of Architecture’ 1992 ISBN 0-7506-1283-5

or, in the slightly more familiar but antique: ‘Firmness, Commodity & Delight’

— MartinNoutch

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Wynton Marsalis on recognizing your place

business, commonplace book / /

From Sam Dillon’s “Graduates Get an Earful, From Left, Right and Center” (The New York Times: 11 June 2006):

Wynton Marsalis

Musician

[Delivering commencement to] The Juilliard School

Realize that integrity is real, and so is starvation. Never let pay and the talk of pay occupy more time and space than the talk of your art. If you find that it is, go into banking or start a hedge fund or something.

Also, about pay, understand where you are. When I was 19, I was on a tour with Herbie Hancock and I started complaining to him before we walked onstage about what I was being paid. I said, “When am I being paid?”

He said: “Come here, man. Look out into the audience.” He said, “Now, do you see those people?”

I said, “Yes sir.”

He said: “They paid for these tickets. If you don’t walk out of here, how many of them are going to leave? Now, if I don’t walk out, how many will leave? That’s why you’re being paid what you’re being paid.”

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Steve Ballmer couldn’t fix an infected Windows PC

business, security, technology / /

From David Frith’s “Microsoft takes on net nasties” (Australian IT: 6 June 2006):

MICROSOFT executives love telling stories against each other. Here’s one that platforms vice-president Jim Allchin told at a recent Windows Vista reviewers conference about chief executive Steve Ballmer.

It seems Steve was at a friend’s wedding reception when the bride’s father complained that his PC had slowed to a crawl and would Steve mind taking a look.

Allchin says Ballmer, the world’s 13th wealthiest man with a fortune of about $18 billion, spent almost two days trying to rid the PC of worms, viruses, spyware, malware and severe fragmentation without success.

He lumped the thing back to Microsoft’s headquarters and turned it over to a team of top engineers, who spent several days on the machine, finding it infected with more than 100 pieces of malware, some of which were nearly impossible to eradicate.

Among the problems was a program that automatically disabled any antivirus software.

“This really opened our eyes to what goes on in the real world,” Allchin told the audience.

If the man at the top and a team of Microsoft’s best engineers faced defeat, what chance do ordinary punters have of keeping their Windows PCs virus-free?

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Credit cards sold in the Underground

business, law, security, tech in changing society / /

From David Kirkpatrick’s “The Net’s not-so-secret economy of crime” (Fortune: 15 May 2006):

Raze Software offers a product called CC2Bank 1.3, available in freeware form – if you like it, please pay for it. …

But CC2Bank’s purpose is the management of stolen credit cards. Release 1.3 enables you to type in any credit card number and learn the type of card, name of the issuing bank, the bank’s phone number and the country where the card was issued, among other info. …

Says Marc Gaffan, a marketer at RSA: “There’s an organized industry out there with defined roles and specialties. There are means of communications, rules of engagement, and even ethics. It’s a whole value chain of facilitating fraud, and only the last steps of the chain are actually dedicated to translating activity into money.”

This ecosystem of support for crime includes services and tools to make theft simpler, harder to detect, and more lucrative. …

… a site called TalkCash.net. It’s a members-only forum, for both verified and non-verified members. To verify a new member, the administrators of the site must do due diligence, for example by requiring the applicant to turn over a few credit card numbers to demonstrate that they work.

It’s an honorable exchange for dishonorable information. “I’m proud to be a vendor here,” writes one seller.

“Have a good carding day and good luck,” writes another seller …

These sleazeballs don’t just deal in card numbers, but also in so-called “CVV” numbers. That’s the Creditcard Validation Value – an extra three- or four-digit number on the front or back of a card that’s supposed to prove the user has physical possession of the card.

On TalkCash.net you can buy CVVs for card numbers you already have, or you can buy card numbers with CVVs included. (That costs more, of course.)

“All CVV are guaranteed: fresh and valid,” writes one dealer, who charges $3 per CVV, or $20 for a card number with CVV and the user’s date of birth. “Meet me at ICQ: 264535650,” he writes, referring to the instant message service (owned by AOL) where he conducts business. …

Gaffan says these credit card numbers and data are almost never obtained by criminals as a result of legitimate online card use. More often the fraudsters get them through offline credit card number thefts in places like restaurants, when computer tapes are stolen or lost, or using “pharming” sites, which mimic a genuine bank site and dupe cardholders into entering precious private information. Another source of credit card data are the very common “phishing” scams, in which an e-mail that looks like it’s from a bank prompts someone to hand over personal data.

Also available on TalkCash is access to hijacked home broadband computers – many of them in the United States – which can be used to host various kinds of criminal exploits, including phishing e-mails and pharming sites.

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Search for “high score” told them who stole the PC

security, technology / /

From Robert Alberti’s “more on Supposedly Destroyed Hard Drive Purchased In Chicago” (Interesting People mailing list: 3 June 2006):

It would be interesting to analyze that drive to see if anyone else was using it during the period between when it went to Best Buy, and when it turned up at the garage sale. We once discovered who stole, and then returned, a Macintosh from a department at the University of Minnesota with its drive erased. We did a hex search of the drive surface for the words “high score”. There was the name of the thief, one of the janitors, who confessed when presented with evidence.

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The origins of 2600

history, law, tech in changing society, technology, writing ideas / /

From Nicholas Thompson’s “Who Needs Keys?” (Legal Affairs: November/December 2004):

The event was organized by 2600, a quarterly magazine whose name refers to one of the great discoveries in hacker history: that the plastic whistles given away free in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal in the early 1970s could be slightly modified to create sound waves of 2600 MHz, a frequency that allowed you to make free calls on the old AT&T phone system.

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It’s easy to track someone using a MetroCard

business, law, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Your Cellphone is a Homing Device” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):

Law enforcement likewise views privacy laws as an impediment, especially now that it has grown accustomed to accessing location data virtually at will. Take the MetroCard, the only way for New York City commuters to pay their transit fares since the elimination of tokens. Unbeknownst to the vast majority of straphangers, the humble MetroCard is essentially a floppy disk, uniquely identified by a serial number on the flip side. Each time a subway rider swipes the card, the turnstile reads the bevy of information stored on the card’s magnetic stripe, such as serial number, value, and expiration date. That data is then relayed back to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s central computers, which also record the passenger’s station and entry time; the stated reason is that this allows for free transfers between buses and subways. (Bus fare machines communicate with MTA computers wirelessly.) Police have been taking full advantage of this location info to confirm or destroy alibis; in 2000, The Daily News estimated that detectives were requesting that roughly 1,000 MetroCard records be checked each year.

A mere request seems sufficient for the MTA to fork over the data. The authority learned its lesson back in 1997, when it initially balked at a New York Police Department request to view the E-ZPass toll records of a murder suspect; the cops wanted to see whether or not he’d crossed the Verrazano Narrows Bridge around the time of the crime. The MTA demanded that the NYPD obtain a subpoena, but then-Justice Colleen McMahon of the State Supreme Court disagreed. She ruled that “a reasonable person holds no expectation of confidentiality” when using E-ZPass on a public highway, and an administrative subpoena – a simple OK from a police higher-up – was enough to compel the MTA to hand over the goods.

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Tracking via cell phone is easy

business, law, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Your Cellphone is a Homing Device” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):

What your salesman probably failed to tell you – and may not even realize – is that an E911-capable phone can give your wireless carrier continual updates on your location. The phone is embedded with a Global Positioning System chip, which can calculate your coordinates to within a few yards by receiving signals from satellites. GPS technology gave U.S. military commanders a vital edge during Gulf War II, and sailors and pilots depend on it as well. In the E911-capable phone, the GPS chip does not wait until it senses danger, springing to life when catastrophe strikes; it’s switched on whenever your handset is powered up and is always ready to transmit your location data back to a wireless carrier’s computers. Verizon or T-Mobile can figure out which manicurist you visit just as easily as they can pinpoint a stranded motorist on Highway 59.

So what’s preventing them from doing so, at the behest of either direct marketers or, perhaps more chillingly, the police? Not the law, which is essentially mum on the subject of location-data privacy. As often happens with emergent technology, the law has struggled to keep pace with the gizmo. No federal statute is keeping your wireless provider from informing Dunkin’ Donuts that your visits to Starbucks have been dropping off and you may be ripe for a special coupon offer. Nor are cops explicitly required to obtain a judicial warrant before compiling a record of where you sneaked off to last Thursday night. Despite such obvious potential for abuse, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, the American consumer’s ostensible protectors, show little enthusiasm for stepping into the breach. As things stand now, the only real barrier to the dissemination of your daily movements is the benevolence of the telecommunications industry. A show of hands from those who find this a comforting thought? Anyone? …

THE WIRELESS INDUSTRY HAS A NAME FOR SUCH CUSTOM-TAILORED HAWKING: “location-based services,” or LBS. The idea is that GPS chips can be used to locate friends, find the nearest pizzeria, or ensure that Junior is really at the library rather than a keg party. One estimate expects LBS to be a $15 billion market by 2007, a much-needed boost for the flagging telecom sector.

That may be fine for some consumers, but what about those who’d rather opt out of the tracking? The industry’s promise is that LBS customers will have to give explicit permission for their data to be shared with third parties. This is certainly in the spirit of the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999, which anticipated that all cellphone carriers will feature E911 technology by 2006. The law stipulated that E911 data – that is, an individual’s second-by-second GPS coordinates – could only be used for nonemergency purposes if “express prior authorization” was provided by the consumer. …

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Kids forcibly sent to re-education programs

business, education, law / /

From Nadya Labi’s “Want Your Kid to Disappear?” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2004):

RICK STRAWN IS AN EX-COP WHO STARTED HIS COMPANY in 1988 to help police officers find off-duty work guarding construction sites. Ten years later, he was asked by a member of his United Methodist church to transport the churchgoer’s son to Tranquility Bay in Jamaica. The school is run by the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs, a company headquartered in Utah that owns eight schools in the United States and abroad, including Louis, Jr.’s destination. …

Three years ago, Strawn escorted Valerie Ann Heron, a 17-year-old from Montgomery, Ala., to Tranquility Bay. The school is the most hardcore in the WWASP system, the one to which students are sent when they repeatedly cause trouble at other schools. …

The world according to Strawn is based on choices and consequences. The world according to WWASP is designed to reinforce the same principle. Students enter Casa by the Sea at the first of six levels. To advance, they have to earn points through good behavior and schoolwork. Until they reach level three, which takes an average of three months, they can communicate with the outside world only through letters to their parents, which the school monitors. After that, they can talk on the phone to their parents but no one else.

Casa costs nearly $30,000 for a year – as much as a year’s tuition at Harvard – but offers no traditional academic instruction. Instead the schoolwork is self-paced; the students sit at tables with a workbook and take a test on a section when they decide they’re ready. They can retake the same test as many times as necessary to achieve an 80 percent passing grade. According to the Casa parent handbook, the school does not ensure that “the student will even receive any credits” or that the teachers who monitor the study sessions will have U.S. credentials. The school does not track how many of its students go on to high school or college. “You’re not going to have a teacher riding your back,” Dalton told Louis. “It’s all independent study. I just read the module, and did the test. I finished class in a week. That’s how easy it is.”

Students spend more time studying themselves than any other subject. They write daily reflections in response to self-help tapes and videos such as Tony Robbins’s Personal Power, You Can Choose, and Price Tag of Sex. They answer questions like “What feelings/emotions did I experience today and how did I choose to respond?”

Students also attend, and eventually staff, self-help seminars. The entry-level seminar, called Discovery, encourages participants to “learn to interrupt unconscious mental and emotional cycles which tend to sabotage results.” Kelly Lauritsen participated in Discovery at Casa in 2000 and said she was encouraged to hit the walls with rolled towels to release her anger. The price of tuition includes versions of these seminars for parents. Like Oprah on speed, sessions run nonstop from morning until midnight. Many parents and kids say they benefit from the self-analysis. “I didn’t realize that I had so much anger inside,” the 14-year-old girl whom Strawn transported in November wrote to her mother. …

Strawn told Louis that the hardest thing about Casa would be abiding by the school’s intricate system of discipline. “It’s not the big rules that get you. It’s all the little rules,” Strawn said. Casa docks students, according to its handbook, for telling “war stories” about inappropriate experiences, for being unkind to each other, and for making “negative statements about the School, the staff, the country, or other students.”

“There’s a whole page of rules,” said Shannon Eierman, who attended Casa last year. “That page is divided into sections of categories, into different codes, and a million subcategories. You could be there forever and the next day and learn a new rule.”

Students at Casa who commit “Category 5 infractions” can be punished with an “intervention,” for example, which is defined as being left alone in a room. Students say that the punishment can last for weeks, though Casa insists that the maximum penalty is three days. “I had to sit with crossed legs in a closet for three days,” said Kaori Gutierrez, who left Casa in 2001. Interventions may be used to punish out-of-control behavior, drug use, and escape attempts. But they’re also the way the school handles “self-inflicted injuries,” which can range from cracked knuckles to self-mutilation with pens or paper clips to an attempted suicide.

At the root of this long list of punishable violations is “manipulation,” which includes lying or exaggerating. Strawn repeatedly uses the word to dismiss a kid’s behavior – it’s the way he said Valerie Heron acted the day before her suicide. In the WWASP universe that he inhabits, manipulation is a term of art that refers to just about anything a teen does or says that the staff doesn’t like.

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Japan’s 99.8% criminal conviction rate

history, law, politics / /

From Hiroshi Matsubara’s “Trial By Prosecutor” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2003):

In 1990, a retired high-court judge gave an influential speech that indicted the criminal justice system [of Japan], citing the nation’s 99.8 percent conviction rate as evidence that prosecutors, not courts, decide the fate of criminals. Criminal trials, he declared, are merely “formal ceremonies” en route to conviction. …

Prosecutors are vested with tremendous authority, and courts routinely defer to prosecutorial judgment. The prosecutor, in collaboration with law enforcement, is expected not only to enforce the laws but to decide how to use them to serve the public good. He is given far broader powers of investigation than his American counterpart, including the ability to search, seize, and interrogate without the interference of defense counsel. Justice in Japan is often equated to cooperating with the prosecutor. One of the earliest changes made by legislators to the American legal framework was the addition of a “societal duty” to submit to questioning upon arrest.

Because of their importance in the Japanese system, prosecutors have an overwhelming need to be right. A single loss can end their career. Prosecutors nearly always go to trial with a confession in hand, meaning that criminal courts are rarely asked to decide guilt or innocence. At trial, the counsel for the defendant usually spends his time trying to demonstrate the client’s contrition, his chances of being rehabilitated, and the low risk he poses to society – factors that affect the sentence, not the verdict.

Even in contested cases, the outcome for defendants is bleak. In American federal courts, about one-fifth of all criminal defendants plead innocent – and of those, one-third are subsequently convicted (state numbers indicate a similar trend). Meanwhile, in Japan, despite the fact that only 7 percent of defendants choose to contest their prosecution, the conviction rate in such instances is still about 99 percent. …

But in the aftermath of this unlikely victory, the system turned on Mainali. A higher court stayed his acquittal and ordered him detained while the finding at trial was reconsidered. In the United States, where defendants are protected against double jeopardy, Mainali’s acquittal would have ensured that he went free. Japan has no such standard: The opportunity to appeal a criminal acquittal is just one more weapon in the prosecutorial arsenal. Critics have pointed out that the stigma of losing a case puts prosecutors under great pressure to appeal each and every acquittal. In the notorious Kabutoyama case, prosecutors spent 21 years unsuccessfully appealing not-guilty verdicts handed down against a teacher charged with killing one of her students. …

Japanese prison terms, for both violent and nonviolent offenses, are shorter than those for comparable crimes in the United States. Murder, for instance, can carry a sentence of as little as three years. What is indisputable, however, is that in failing to emphasize procedural justice – a system based on rights and vigorous advocacy – Japan entrusts the integrity of its system to the good judgment of its prosecutors.

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