That big Wall Street Journal series on web privacy has kicked off a lot of discussion, but it's a little weird to see how people are framing it. Most of the discussion makes the server side into the subject of the sentence. "Example.com puts tracking software on your computer!"

I suppose the fact that it looks like that is a testimonial for the seamlessness of how it all works. But when you actually turn on Firebug and watch what's happening, the situation looks completely different. It isn't "Example.com is collecting information," but more like, "Web sites are asking your browser to send your information to Example.com."

One of the things that makes the web better than closed client/closed server is that ☞ the browser doesn't have to do what the server tells it to. ☜ Likewise, if you own a router or NAT device between your computer and a web site, your device is allowed to drop or modify packets. It's your device and your net connection.

I'm going to apply a lesson from Doc Searls here and think about how we use language to talk about a situation. If we frame the problem right, we have better mental tools to talk about solutions.

So let's stop making the destination of the information into the subject of the sentence. At the Internet level, the companies that collect private data are just a bunch of servers. Servers respond to requests that clients send. Describing the transaction by making the server side into the subject is like saying, "that bookcase keeps giving me Charles Stross books." Most users don't control what the browser sends out, bit for bit, but users do pick browsers based on features. (Remember how quickly all the browsers added blocking for pop-ups and pop-unders?)

Instead of "Example.com collects information" let's make it "users send information." Connect the action verb to the originator of the action, and people can take the next step: if I'm doing that, why, and how do I stop?

Audrey Watters asks, Is "Free" the Right Price for Your Product?

Good question. Here's a three-part test for whether or not to do free:

1. Do you have potential users who can't pay but can offer some other kind of value? (Upload content, send invitations to other users, offer help, whatever.) Network effect by itself doesn't count. What's a zillion Ning users times $0 per user?

2. Is the service cheap enough at the margin to give away? If you run your own mail server you already "give away" more than 90% of it to spammers. If it's an efficient network service, the answer is probably yes.

3. Can you offer the service in two different forms, one of which does not appeal to potential paying users? GitHub has a great strategy here. It's free of charge to use it if other users can download or fork your project. Want to control access? Sign up for a paid account.

The catch is that slotting into the right category has to be automatic and done by the user. If you have to take action to assign the user to free or paid, that'll probably cost more than the service does. Adobe has an incredibly cheap "free" program, where professional users can license proprietary apps, and student and amateur users can easily get trial "pirate" copies. Way cheaper than adminstering something like Microsoft's BizSpark or ISV Advantage.

Automatic price discrimination applies to live events, too, not just web sites. Media people and community volunteer types can't pay, but random people who should be paying try to get in as media or on some other free pass. The question is how to automatically make the free registration unappealing to random people, without doing something that will drive away the users whose contributions actually do entitle them to free admission.

Seth Godin went through TSA screening and writes, "we're paying a significant tax (time and money) and getting nothing in return. In fact, we get worse than nothing. We could call it an anxiety program, instead of a tax."

I agree, and I know that, according to Bruce Schneier, "The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized" (rtwt!) but the fact is, if you go through the motions of something, you tend to acquire the corresponding attitude. William James pointed out that "emotion follows upon the bodily expression."

Apply that to this situation, and you get: Un-free your ass, and your mind will follow.

I'm thinking about how to prevent forming unwanted habits of mind, and it's a hard problem. Richard Stallman once wrote, about some programmers who didn't raise an obvious but controversial issue in a meeting, "They seem to have learned the habit of cowering before authority even when not actually threatened. How very nice for authority. I decided not to learn this particular lesson."

But, unfortunately, it seems almost impossible to get to a certain attitude about freedom just by deciding to. You need to go through the motions, train your lizard brain. Stallman famously dug out of his problem by sitting down and writing eye-bleeding quantities of software and the relevant licenses. But what can I, personally, do about the ongoing fear training I'm signed up for? I want to "refuse to be terrorized," and I make myself familiar with the facts of the situation so I can make the logical argument to myself, but I need some counter-training.

Here's what I'm trying so far. Keep track of how much time I have to put in on fear training, and balance it out by picking some activity from the Bill of Rights and doing that. I had to go through TSA screening myself, so I put in about the same amount of time writing and mailing a paper letter to Rep. Pete Stark about the Federal Research Public Access Act. Suggestions for other self-training projects welcome.

Another bizarre opinion piece at the newspaper of record for the "too big to fail" crowd. Eric Schlosser writes, of a proposed new law that would expand the food-regulation powers of the FDA, that it would somehow crack down on large, politically connected multinational food corporations and spare the farmers' markets. Honest! "The bill’s wording can still be clarified so that mom-and-pop producers aren’t threatened by heavy-handed government regulations." And there's lead in the pasta! Somebody think of the children!

If new regulations affected the multinationals more than small business, it would be a nationwide first. Is Times management really that out of touch with the reality of regulatory capture in the US market for food? Or the US market for anything?

Regulations become the "private property" of the best lobbyists, and this increase in FDA power will mean in increase in the trend of raids on small-scale food producers and sellers, while the CEOs of the companies that import that scary lead-tainted pasta are chilling in Gstaad with Thomas Friedman.

Andy Grove has a good op-ed piece up at Bloomberg: How to Make an American Job Before It's Too Late: Andy Grove.

"American companies discovered they could have their manufacturing and even their engineering done cheaper overseas. When they did so, margins improved. Management was happy, and so were stockholders."

But those "stockholders" aren't just heiresses sitting back watching the stock ticker. Through retirement funds, the US middle class owns most of US business. Andy Grove works for you. Peter Drucker wrote, "If 'socialism' is defined as 'ownership of the means of production by the workers'—and this is both the orthodox and the only rigorous definition—then the United States is the first truly 'Socialist' country."

The big cheeses of Wall Street are not the owners of US business. You're the owner, and you just sign control over to them. As an employee, you would do much better to get a slightly lower return on investment and keep your job, but right now you're not telling your mutual fund manager about that preference.

Why not?

The total value of an investment in an employer, to an employee or potential employee, is more than its market value. But your mutual fund manager is only motivated to manage for that one part of the total value. Classic Principal-agent problem. You, the worker/investor are the principal, and your agent is the mutual fund manager.

So here's the opportunity. A new type of index fund, based only on job count by state or region. If you work at an Indiana company, you put part of your retirement savings into a new Indiana Employers Fund, just like any other mutual fund. To manage the fund, the company keeps track of public companies that hire in Indiana, and invests proportionally. If a company builds a plant in Indiana, the fund accumulates the company's stock. If it lays off people in Indiana, the fund dumps some stock to keep the portfolio allocation in line with the number of employees.

Managers of employment index funds might choose to count only "good jobs": anything that includes benefits and pays enough to keep a family out of poverty. Otherwise their customers might be over-invested in, say, Wal-Mart.

Much easier than the German system of putting union representatives on boards, and something that can happen in the private sector. And I don't think it would be a hard sell to get major employers in a state to add the fund to their 401(k) choices.

Just got one more thing working on the Lenovo T400s: the Qualcomm "Gobi" mobile broadband card (which shows up as USB ID 05c6:9202). This works for me with Fedora 12.

1. Install gobi-loader.

2. Start a Microsoft Windows guest under VirtualBox and install the Qualcomm driver "package" from the Lenovo site. Search for and zip up all the amss.mbn and apps.mbn files and copy over to the Linux host. (Make a regular .zip file, not some .zipx jibber-jabber.)

3. There should be a bunch of .mbn files, for different carriers. Use strings and grep to find the Verizon ones. Put them in the /lib/firmware/gobi directory.

4. Power-cycle the machine. (Just removing and reinserting the qcserial driver did not work for me.)

5. On reboot, right-click the NetworkManager applet, select "Edit Connections," and go to the "Mobile Broadband" tab. Click "Add," and the "Set up a Mobile Broadband Connection" screen should include the Qualcomm device.

6. Set up the connection. Leave the number as #777, and set the username to 0000000000@vzw3g.com and the password to vzw (Replace the 0s with the 10-digit number Verizon assigned you.

7. Use NetworkManager normally to bring the connection up and down.

A couple of years ago, I noticed a case of extra-good customer service for a customer with lots of Twitter followers, and predicted that in the future, if you have lots of "Whuffie," you get good customer service, and if you don't, you don't.

Well, it's the future. Rob Preston at InformationWeek: "A telco in the Middle East is using IBM analytics to identify the alpha individual in its customers' calling circles—those people who'd be most likely to take other customers with them should they switch carriers—so that it can cater to those individuals."

This makes all kinds of sense, as I pointed out back in 2008. Word of mouth is great marketing, but the kind of service that gets you good word of mouth is expensive. So use Information Technology to walk the social graph and find out where to invest your best service and offers.

Every trend needs a three-letter acronym, so I'm proclaiming SCO, excuse me, #sco. Social Customer Optimization. Not going to be a TLA collision with anything important unless you're a Groklaw reader, so I'm not going to worry about it. Anyway, that means I can do a "Top Ten Myths of Social Customer Optimization" presentation for the next fancy-pants conference I can get invited to speak at. (Fresh-squeezed orange juice in the speaker lounge, please.)

Here's an example of a myth: "SCO is just a strategy of giving better service to heavy users of social networking services." Wrong. That's a myth. SCO doesn't just measure how much your customers chatter, it uses really hard math to assign mathematical-looking numbers, I mean key metrics, to customers. Then it turns those numbers into action—and measurable ROI— by, for example, partitioning the customer contact resolution tree. SNIQ is good for a couple of myths all on its own, so it's totally worth it to hire a SCO consulting firm before you invest heavily in a SNIQ engine for your CRM system.

Just think about it—every customer service cost-savings measure that you decided not to adopt because of the risk of bad word of mouth? Go ahead and do them all for 80% of customers, and devote a fraction of the savings to buttering up the top quintile. You get better word of mouth with less total investment in customer service. It's a win-win. A win anyway.

To disable the touchpad on a Lenovo T400s:

    synclient TouchpadOff=1

Tested under Fedora 12. The synclient tool is part of the xorg-x11-drv-synaptics package.

Off to SCALE tomorrow and still getting some slides together for the Git panel. I wanted to include some screenshots of ikiwiki-powered web sites, and this came in surprisingly handy: wkthumb. Wrapper script: thumbnailer. (example).

Did I mention: Hey, kids! ☞ Git Panel ☜

More random links piling up to get that cleaned out before SCALE:

Things You Really Need to Learn by Stephen Downes

GIF 2.0? Christopher Blizzard explains the HTML5 video problem.

Chicken heaven must be a crowded place.

Hey Japanese Whaler Dudes, Stop Your Pathetic Whining (via ElementalMom)

Tripod.com founder Bo Peabody: Facebook And Twitter Will Always Be Crappy Businesses. (Not convinced? Cory Doctorow explains further.)

Got a question through Aardvark, now part of Google. What's the best book for getting started with Ubuntu? (Ubuntu may or may not be the best distribution for getting started. To decide on that, you need to figure out where you're going to go with support questions, and find out what the helpful people there run.)

Anyway, I try to take anything that I post to someone else's web site and put a version here, too. Other people's web sites go away or change their policies.

As far as I know, Mark G. Sobell's A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux is still the best for learning the fundamentals, such as the shell and setting up network services. You'll need to look at the online docs for items that have changed since the book came out.

Bonus link: Why the Economics of The Aardvark Acquisition Make Sense by Stephen O'Grady. (Startups launch. Established companies make things that are "Five Years Away".