Google Glass is an eye opener – and that's not all good

Not long ago I wrote a blog about Google’s foray into wearable computing, called Google Glass. In the blog, I was enthusiastic about what I saw as the groundbreaking functionality of this very close-up, almost intimate technology experience. A computer screen embedded in your glasses, a microchip in the frame, a forward-facing camera, a speaker close to the ear, a human language speaking interface and access to the net built in. What would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago, was on the drawing board now and just might be in our hands soon.  And the cool factor – well, I found the idea irresistible.

 

Well, now I’m summoning up the power to resist. Read on so I can tell you why.

 

Google Glass has moved from the prototype to the beta stage. Two thousand developers now have their hands on a test version of the device, and the glasses will soon be released to 8,000 beta testers (Google calls them ‘explorers’ and they’ve been picked from an avalanche of applicants). The glasses are very close to reality now.

 

In the early hype about the concept, reaction to Glass (including mine) failed to consider some of the legal, ethical and social impacts of the these devices. The potential for changing the social encounter and the way we interact with the world around us – and people around us – is not trivial. And that goes for the wearer but also for anyone encountering someone wearing them.

 

The glasses have a forward facing camera that can be used to take photos and videos just by looking and issuing a command. Developers have already demonstrated ways to bypass the spoken interface and, for example, take photos simply by winking. Posts to online sources and social media are just as easy. Interact with a Glass wearer and you could be online in seconds, or even be streamed live. And you won’t necessarily know it. I am not making this up.

 

You see the potential for privacy incursions. You see how this encourages the voyeur within us all, and also gives us, I think, well-founded concerns about being photographed without our knowledge. We could all be the victim of paparazzi, and not even know it – until later.

 

Another concern is distraction. You may be looking forward, but you can also be watching a YouTube video – or a full-length movie for that matter – in a small corner screen of your glasses. Not so good if you’re walking down a crowded street; even worse if you’re driving down a crowded highway.

 

Considerations like these are now surfacing in a big way and I hope the protests continue and we all become aware of the issues. The West Virginia legislature has already introduced a bill to ban Glass while driving; texting is already illegal, but using a ‘hands free’ device is not, and Glass slips through this loophole. But clearly the distraction factor is an order of magnitude higher with this device than with a smartphone. Las Vegas casinos have summarily banned wearing Glass while gambling – obviously use of recording and video devices are forbidden in the casinos and the gambling industry is not going to be fooling around with the niceties. I think many more restrictions and prohibitions are on the horizon.

The potential for Glass to change the social contract in virtually every environment and encounter – from the locker room at the gym, to the classroom, to a business meeting, a date, a sales counter, a party or the street – is tremendous. I’m not sure we’ve even imagined the full impact yet. We may not be able to, until it happens.

 

So would you wear a pair of Google Glasses if offered? In my previous blog I said that I would, but now I’m leaning the other way. I am also not going to be comfortable interacting with someone who is, presuming I could spot the difference. How do you feel now? Cool new gadget of the future, or dangerous example of technology going the wrong way?

 

Concerns about Glass were well-covered in a New York Times article called "Google Glass Picks Up Early Signal: Keep Out".

Personal Assistants set to become even more personal in 2013

As usual, everyone is making end-of-year tech predictions for 2013. I saw one list that included the bold forecasts “smartphones will get smaller” and “QR codes will be everywhere.” Roger that. Most of these follow the familiar path of ‘things will be like they are now, only more so.’

But I’ve got a prediction that I’m going to make that I haven’t seen elsewhere (I’m either way off-base or eerily prescient). So here goes.

It has to do with the category of personal assistants that have gotten very sophisticated in the last few years. Siri on the iPhone is the best known example; you can talk to it (okay, her) and she’ll respond with voice answers that will answer your questions or provide a rudimentary conversation with some clever pre-programmed responses. You know: “Will you marry me?” “Let’s keep this relationship professional.” If you have an iPhone, you’ve no doubt spent some time doing this until the novelty subsided.

There are other examples of this category emerging now. Google voice is an interesting feature of voice command technology. Car dashboards, with the goal of being as hands free as possible, will certainly incorporate voice commands more and more. And I recently wrote a blog about avatars at airports that project the image of a person (yes, always an attractive female) to provide directions and help; although not interactive now, I’m sure they soon will be.

But up till now, all these constructs have been almost entirely passive. They speak when spoken to. Well, I predict that this software is poised to become much more interactive. I can see having the ability to configure them to operate more independently and on their own initiative.

We could use these programs in interesting ways. To remind us about important dates or conditions; for example, when the stock market is exceeding certain parameters, or if bad weather is on the way, or we’ve forgotten items on our grocery list. Sure, we can set reminders and go looking for this kind of information now, but those are all actions we have to initiate. With more personalized and smartly programmed personal assistants (let’s call them PAs) the experience is better. They’ll reach out to us.

This will be more sophisticated than the kind of annoying pop-ups that permeate our computer experience now. I think if done correctly, they’ll gain acceptance and enough people will find it all fun and useful for it to become a successful evolution of the technology. The primary platform will be the one that’s always with us now, the smartphone, and these programs will be always on, ready to speak up when appropriate, and always according to the parameters we’ve chosen for it.

It’s within their capabilities to learn our needs and habits, likes and dislikes. They should be programmed to act the way we want – for instance, don’t speak up when I’m with other people, or if I’m at the office. They could be personalized for motivational tasks – for instance, program your PA to help you eat healthy at meal times with some friendly encouragement, or maybe to dish out some tough love when it senses you pulling into the McDonalds drive-through. For purely recreational purposes, they can respond with all kinds of conversation starters. They could be programmed to chat away about all your favorite topics: politics yes, vampire movies no (or vice versa). The programming for all this is not much beyond the capability of technology today.

I predict that PAs will become as mainstream as smartphones, voice activation and everything else is today. I can hear some of you already saying that ‘this sounds too creepy’ but so were a lot of things that we take for granted today. I remember the first time I saw and heard someone talking to the air: he was on a cellphone on 46^th street in Manhattan. That was creepy once too – then it wasn’t.

So I predict that Siri-like PAs will go to a whole new level in the year or two ahead. I think that we’ll all be talking to them soon. What do you think?

 

Google and publishers finally agree: it's a brave new digital world

I’m sure you all remember Google’s digital book scanning project. The project, started earlier this century, aimed to scan every book in existence (just about) and make them available on line. Publishers and authors went to court over copyright infringement claims, and they had a strong case. Or at least they did when it looked like digital formats were a threat to the traditional closed ecosystem of writing, publishing, selling, buying and reading. That was then, etc.

Today, things seem a lot different. Now we’re further along in the digital transformation of print media, and just about everyone recognizes that digitization of, well, everything, is pretty much inevitable. Just like the music publishers before them and the movie industry right behind them, book and periodical publishers have figured out that eBooks are at the very least a whole new way to sell content. In fact, in a future that’s closer than we all imagine, they may become the only way.

This is why the publishers – one half of the suit against Google – came to a settlement this week, in a news item that barely made the news. At least it got much less coverage than the start of the lawsuits back in 2005. In an agreement whose terms were not fully disclosed, the publishers agreed to let Google scan away, presumably for cash payments and access to the digital content themselves. Google thus provides a scanning service on older, pre-digital books, so the publishers don’t have to do the work. Google in turn agreed to let publishers opt out of the program and exclude their books from being scanned.

Still hanging over the project however, is one potential show-stopper, and one in which there is more at stake. That is the author half; they have not settled, although the publishers action this week now leaves them without a powerful ally. The authors of older works – e.g. out of print but still under copyright ownership – face a dilemma. Google will potentially reveal parts of their work (20%) to the billions of Googlers on the planet, diluting the authors control and introducing yet another middleman who can take monetary or some other kind of cut from the profit. But the other edge of this sword is the benefit authors may receive from the exposure of older work that would otherwise die a neglected death. All those Googlers are potential new readers, after all. This part of the issue has a lot of implications.

The future demise of printed books is not inevitable, but survival is not guaranteed either. As president of the board of the West Chester Public Library, I am part of a team that works hard to ensure our institution stays relevant, even while eBook readers become as commonplace as library cards. Library staffers ‘get it’ when it comes to digital formats, and they’re ready to serve the public’s demand for the written word in every form that can be provided, including eBooks. (WCPL has eight color Nooks available for circulation, along with a large and growing collection of digital books and magazine content.) I believe the library has a part to play in helping readers transition from the paper and ink world to the electronic.

So it’s no secret or surprise that many things are in a transitional state; book publishing is one of many. The laws of copyright were originally designed for a different universe than the one we live in now. I support 100% the concept that the creator should be the first to exercise ownership rights, and be the first to benefit from a created work, including the digital version of that work. But there are many paths to how a work may get to that format, at least until the transition is over. This is just one more disruption to a paradigm we thought would never change.

 The NY Times covered the Google suit settlement here. 

Sundwall's Law

“Every age celebrates its own modernity” a teacher of mine once said and I’m sure it’s true. I have no doubt that ancient Egyptians were wowed by the latest advances in papyrus making, irrigation and stone cutting. Like the cowboy in Oklahoma who sings “Everything’s up to date in Kansas City” they too probably told themselves that they “had gone about as far as they could go.”

We do it ourselves too, of course, even while we know that future generations will look back and laugh at the innovations and technologies that we all think are gee-whiz today.

With the increasing slope of innovation, however, technology marvels soar high and then fall just as quickly into obsolescence, and this is now well within the easy memory of us all. We remember the convenience of three and a half inch floppies, bulky cell phones, our first luggable laptops and much else. We know that all of the things that are insanely great today will soon be displaced by the insanely greater.

Many of the most useful technology tools start out lame and get better rapidly; almost nothing is great in its first iteration. That’s why we in technology hate to buy version 1.0 of anything.

Early versions are apt to be clunky, hard to use, of questionable value, and sometimes laughably lame. Remember handwriting recognition? GPSs, PDAs? Speaking computers that sounded more like a drunken Swede than the computer on board the Enterprise? Remember voice recognition that you had to teach to understand you, laboriously repeating a vocabulary of words in the hope that it would recognize your voice? Now Siri (just one example) understands everyone right out of the iPhone box, and she talks back to you (and sounds so much better than that drunken Swedish guy).

This leads me to what I have called “Sundwall’s Law”. It goes like this: in order to have a great version of anything, you almost always have to go through a bad version. Want a great cell phone? Put up with a bad cell phone. Want the iPad? Suffer through the Newton and the Palm Pilot. There are thousands of examples.

I was thinking of Sundwall’s Law last month when I saw a report about Carla, the airport virtual assistant now working 24x7 at Logan International Airport in Boston. She’ll greet you with a smile, give you directions, and help you through security. She speaks two languages and she’s not bad looking either. She’s there for you. So what if she’s a hologram?

Well, ‘video projection’ actually, but who cares? Other versions of Carla are now on duty at Dulles, New York’s three airports and in Europe too. You’ll be talking to one soon.

(All these assistants are attractive young females, BTW, but that’s a subject for a different blog.)

You may laugh, or find it all a bit creepy, but I predict the acceptance rate will be rapid and total. The applications in so many other customer service environments guarantee that these virtual assistants will go through rapid research, development and deployment. Carla doesn’t exactly interact with you now, but Sundwall’s Law predicts that soon she will. Would you bet against it?

Speaking of betting, I was talking with my friend Nick Donato from IBM earlier this year and we got on the subject of driverless cars. We both knew that the technology is still in its infancy, and naturally it makes us all a bit nervous. Nick was skeptical about how fast this one would go mainstream, but I thought it was inevitable. There are many worrisome flaws with the current version of this technology (as I pointed out in a previous post). But before you have a great version, you have to have a bad version.

So I made Nick a $100 bet that driverless cars would be commercially viable sooner than either of us could imagine; the proof would be that within ten years, one of us would ride in one in a completely normal fashion on the streets of Chester County.

We’re not even one year into this bet and driverless cars have already been made legal (in test mode) on the streets of Nevada.  I’m predicting they’ll be coming soon to your neighborhood. And who knows, maybe Carla will be at the wheel.

If you're ready for the driverless car, that makes one of us

I’ve been thinking a lot about the driverless car, or ‘autonomous cars’ as they’re often called now. You may have heard that the state of Nevada passed a law permitting them last summer (the only state to do so so far). I think we should be concerned.

Just a few years ago, I used to pose the question of a car on autopilot to students in my “IT Ethics and the Law” class; the topic was our overreliance on technology. Then, we seemed to be talking about a hypothetical future. Now we’re not talking about the hypothetical; we’re not even talking about the future. Google has been testing these cars for years and is a big proponent of them. Major manufacturers, like GM, Volkswagen and BMW have prototypes on the test track. I didn’t see any at the Philadelphia car show last month, but I don’t think they’re far away. We may be in them sooner than we think.

Obviously, the car has got to do more than use its own internal GPS to follow a route from point A to point B. That’s the easy part. The hard part is sensing a dizzying number of subtle and varying road conditions on the way, stuff that we process without thinking about it. And the more I consider these, frankly, the more worried I get. Here are just a few questions that I can’t satisfactorily answer:

• How good is the car at sensing traffic, obstacles, potholes, debris in the road and various obstructions?
• Can the car process roadside Detour signs? Or a sign that says “Road Closed Ahead”? Or an electronic sign that posts a speed limit lower than the official speed?
• Can the car understand the difference between a guy waving to someone, and a safety officer redirecting traffic to a different route?
• At a four-way stop, will the car wait forever for its turn, while other cars roll through their stop signs?
• Will the car understand when another driver politely waves for you to go first?
• Does the car know what to do when a child’s ball rolls out from between parked cars?

I can imagine legislation that requires the ‘driver’ (or ‘the person sitting in the driver’s seat’) to be ready to take over if a set of conditions overwhelms the car and forces human intervention. But what if the driver and passengers have been out drinking and are relying on the car to get them home? Will it be a crime to monitor the autopilot while under the influence?

Until doubts like these are refuted by positive proof otherwise, I’m going to stay skeptical. This may be a case where technology risks could outweigh a limited set of benefits. What do you think?

Why pay for access, when your neighbor’s signal is free?

In the course that I teach on “IT Ethics and the Law”, one of the lectures is devoted entirely to security – hacking (white hat and black), identity theft and so on. I often bring up the topic of the openness of our consumer-electronics world, touching on, among other things, personal Wi-Fi networks and the need to secure them. If I ask about the students’ home networks, there are usually some who say that they don’t need home Wi-Fi and an ISP, as long as their neighbors are leaving their wireless networks unprotected.

When this happens (admittedly, it was once much more prevalent than today), I can’t help challenging the class about the ethics of using a neighbor’s open Wi-Fi signal. I used to be astonished (I no longer am) by the apathy with which students shrug off this question. Invariably I’m confronted with an argument that goes like “If they’re dumb enough to leave their signal unprotected, why shouldn’t I use it? What am I stealing?”

First, let me make this as clear here as I try to do in the classroom: using someone else’s computer resources without their permission IS illegal, according to laws going back to 1984 and reenacted more than once since. It doesn’t matter if the signal is unprotected or not, just as your neighbor doesn’t have to lock his door in order for your act of burglary to be a crime. But no appeal to the law will make any difference to what my group sees as a victimless and undetectable act. To them, setting up a network without a password is tantamount to inviting the neighborhood to log on and start surfing.

So here are the elements of this perfect crime: (1) a victim careless enough to be culpable in his own vulnerability, (2) the apparent absence of harm committed by the perpetrator and (3) the near-impossibility of being detected.

Faced with this thinking, often unanimously argued by a roomful of students, I often feel at a loss of where to begin. (And by the way, this course is taught to continuing-ed students – working adults often in their thirties and forties. NOT teenagers.)

The heart of the matter, of course, is not that you’ve violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, but that you’ve taken something that didn’t belong to you, secretly and without permission, and benefited by it. That feels wrong to me, and I hope it feels wrong to you too.

I recently read a question put to the ‘Ethicist’ columnist of the NY Times, which described a scenario in which a woman failed to shield her laptop from the view of someone (unknown to her, a competitor) in the adjacent airline seat. If she failed to take proper precautions, why shouldn’t I spy on her, the competitor asked, in another variant of the ‘dumb victim’ defense.

I think it’s very dangerous – not to say immoral – for us to lower our standards of good behavior because we perceive the victim to be less smart than we are, as if this somehow invites being taken advantage of. This is ‘blame the victim’ thinking and it is one slippery slope: it can lead us way beyond IT issues to every kind of crime. We should see these phony self-justifications for what they are. Failing to setup a password on a wireless network is NOT an invitation to others to log in for free. 

Today, I believe the vast majority of home networks are password protected by default, and most people who set them up know the importance of securing them. So this argument, or at least this specific scenario, occurs less frequently than it once did. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to think clearly and ethically when we encounter the property and resources of others. It’s wrong to take stuff that doesn’t belong to you: I think we were supposed to learn that in Kindergarten.

I'm curious. Have you ever logged on through someone else's Wi-Fi? Tell me about it.

Are you multitasking or just ignoring me?

Tell me if you recognize this scenario. You’re in a business meeting with many people sitting at a conference table or around the room. A discussion is going on or a presentation is being made. The number of people engaged in the issue at hand is a fraction – say 10 percent. The rest? All on their laptops or smart phones doing (mostly) email or other activities.

Is this the new normal? I’ve found myself in just this kind of situation a lot in the past year and clearly the trend is increasing. I can imagine the defense that would be raised by the multitaskers, in case anyone called them on it: “I’m listening but this part of the conversation doesn’t concern me. So I’m half listening, and the other half is working on other stuff. Maybe not MORE important but, well, like, equally important. Feel free to do the same.”

I’ve wondered if this is the excuse for a new kind of rudeness – or if so many are doing it, whether we can even call it rude anymore. And the more people do it, the more others will feel free to do it. I used to see a small number of people sneaking on to email, almost surreptitiously, to “just check in.” Now no one’s sneaking and the behavior is continuous, being done by more than half the people in the room.

Is this how we’ll get more work done, claiming that we’re making use of idle brain time that would otherwise be wasted? Are we bored by thinking about or doing just one thing at a time? The same attitude is on display when a teenager texts during a family meal (not that THAT has ever happened!). I can easily imagine my own son making the same defense above at the dinner table. C’mon dad, I’m just multitasking!

In this meeting, no one can hear you scream (they're too busy multitasking).

I recognize I may be clinging to an old fashioned code of manners, making the effort to follow the conversation or presentation in which I’m in attendance. I remember a seminar years ago about building effective teams. One of the admonitions was “Be here now,” and I’m still trying. But at a recent very large meeting, I was the only one in the room who did NOT have a laptop open in front of me, and I’m the IT guy!

So what does everyone think? Rude behavior or just the new normal?

Is IT Director the most hated job in America?

The job you love to hate, or the job you just hate?

A recent poll reports the surprising findings that five of the top ten “most hated jobs” in America are technology jobs. And the number one most hated job? IT director.

The poll is from a website called CareerBliss and it was reported by CNBC. I know nothing about CareerBliss, but they present themselves as an “online career community.” Matching jobs with job seekers is part of the business model, but their web site also bills itself as a resource for tools that “help people find joy in life through happiness in the workplace.” I’m all for that.

The survey claims to have input from hundreds of thousands of respondents (that’s a lot), all from this year (2011). As summarized by CNBC, “respondents reported that the factors causing the most job dissatisfaction were not lousy pay or a desk near the bathroom.” Instead, “limited growth opportunities and lack of reward drove the misery index up more than anything else.”

I was disappointed to see an IT leadership position like mine listed as the number one most hated job. I still feel that the IT career path, including management and leadership, has much to offer in terms of job satisfaction and personal reward.

But there’s no denying that the period we’ve recently lived through has been brutal. Many companies are entrenching and deferring IT upgrades and projects. Training budgets have been slashed. Staffs have been reduced, something painful for the cutter and the cut alike. For many in IT, there’s been no shortage of stress and dissatisfiers. And for those in IT leadership roles, like an IT director, the stress has only been compounded: pressure from above, flagging morale below. Not surprising that we’re pointing at limited chances for advancement and personal rewards that have been scaled back or deferred.

Things are tough all over, and I don’t mean that flippantly. The current recession has been long and deep and bitter. We may be headed for a second dip, or it may be a third; I’m losing count. Every company is forced to look at every expense and scale back even on essentials. No matter how beneficial an IT initiative may potentially be, it has to compete for funds, staff and attention with many other demands that are equally and sometimes more important. There are no untouchable budget items any more. When Social Security (the famous “third rail” of American Politics) is on the table in Washington, then no IT project can be safe from scrutiny.

Morale can be hard to maintain during such times, but I don’t think that IT should be any more or less stressful than other professions. I think when the economy turns around – and it will – with it will come increased IT growth, spending, opportunities, reward and satisfaction. And then we’ll see the IT director's job fall out of the number one slot on the list.    

But what do you think? Are you an IT Director (or manager, or VP or CIO) and do you hate your job? Is that a recent phenomenon, coincident with the bad economy? And do you think better times are coming?

Anonymous: online freedom fighters, or the gang that couldn’t hack straight?

The FBI and affiliated law enforcement agencies are now rolling up the Anonymous and LulzSec hacker networks. Over a dozen arrests have been made so far, and countless numbers of computers and peripherals have been seized. Prosecutions will undoubtedly follow.

It doesn’t look like the Feds had to break a sweat to get these guys. Many of the hackers had not done even a fair job of covering their tracks online and a few did not even seem to try (or know how). Some, astonishingly (or perhaps incredulously), claim they did not think what they were doing was criminal. The DDOS attack against PayPal last December, prompted by PayPal’s refusal to accept contributions for WikiLeaks, has emerged as the test case for the arrests. The Anonymous mob used a program with the typically juvenile name Low Orbit Ion Cannon to flood PayPal’s servers with packets.


You can take off the masks now, boys.


As many of these NOT-Anonymous perps now make their defenses, the choices range from (1) I was just fooling around, (2) what Low Orbit Ion Cannon, officer? (3) I didn’t know it was illegal and (4) what I did was a form of political protest that has an honored history, like the civil rights movement.

I’ll brush aside defenses like one and two. We should talk about three and four, the ignorance defense and the political protest defense.

Ignorance of the law is never acceptable in court, and whether it will hold up in the court of public opinion is, I think, very doubtful. The actions of Anonymous, in their on-line taunts and tweets, clearly had the edge of lawlessness to them. To claim the hacking skills they touted, yet to remain ignorant of the rules of the road of the web (not to mention the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986) is facetious at best and laughable at worst. I think we can dismiss this one.

The attacks against government and other establishment sites, most in support of a POV tied to causes like WikiLeaks and Immigration Law, clearly showed a political agenda that Anonymous placed front and center. Can their actions be justified by the claim that they were fighting for a cause? Hacktivism, or White Hat Hacking, does indeed have a history of its own and we would be wrong to dismiss this without a hearing.

However I think it’s very wrong to put malicious, online vandalism on a plane with a civil rights sit-in (a claim specifically made by Keith Downey, one of the men arrested). Two key distinctions have to be made: one, civil rights protestors did not act anonymously. They took a courageous stand in full view and in full risk of the consequences. And two, the civil rights activists were ready to accept arrest and punishment as part of the protest; they did not seek to escape or hide behind subterfuge. Rather, they exposed injustice by submitting to it. No one in the Anonymous gang can claim this kind of courage or self-sacrifice.

I think both of these distinctions refute the excuses made by white hat hackers over the years. I applaud those who have resisted injustice by following the examples of Gandhi and King, and I refuse to taint their legacy by equating them with internet vandals who hide their identities and seek to evade the consequences of their actions.

(Downey's comparison to the civil rights movement was reported in the NY Times.)

On the internet, no one knows you’re not a Gay Girl in Damascus

You may have heard about or read the very popular blog “Gay Girl in Damascus” which is hosted here on Blogger. Written by Amina, a Syrian-American gay woman now living in Damascus, the blog has for the last four months chronicled the life and thoughts of a woman facing the challenges of being gay in a Muslim world, and also being caught up in the Arab protest movement there. The blog has over 2000 followers, and NPR, the Guardian and other legit news sources have all covered her story. The Guardian’s coverage on May 6 began with the headline “A Gay Girl in Damascus becomes a heroine of the Syrian Revolt”. Recently her many readers were dismayed to learn (in a post by her cousin) that Amina had been arrested by the Syrian authorities, her whereabouts and safety unknown. The blogosphere lit up with concerned followers searching for news, and launching a “Free Amina” online protest movement.

But hold on. Last weekend an apology was posted on the blog that revealed that the blog was all an elaborate deception and that Amina was in fact the pseudonym of a man named Tom MacMaster. Decidedly not a gay girl in Damascus, MacMaster is a 40-year old male American grad student from Georgia. He’s straight, married and now resides in Scotland.

More than a few (me included) were immediately reminded of the classic New Yorker cartoon of a dog in front of a PC, saying “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”

MacMaster may not have started out with the intention of creating so large and elaborate a hoax. He created his on-line identity, he says, as a way of being able to write anonymously about the Middle Eastern protest movement and Palestinian issues, which he says he cares deeply about. Part of his apologia this week (he’s now been interviewed multiple times) is that the character was fictional but the issues he wrote about were not.

I think his readers will have a lot to say about that. The shock and anger has been considerable, and MacMaster says he is surprised by some of the venom now coming his way. Apparently his online identity was more than just a political front too, since he also carried on electronic and Facebook relationships in the guise of Amina, including what seems to be a romantic relationship with a lesbian woman in Canada. Not surprisingly, she and others who ‘knew’ him online have not had much to say that was nice about MacMaster. Many are commenting on the destruction of trust and the betrayal of what they thought was real but now find to be fake.

I think fiction is one thing, as long as you know it’s fiction. When you don’t know, then it’s nothing but falsehood and deception. Creating an elaborate on-line identity – complete with phony photos said to have been taken recently in Syria, but now revealed to have been taken on a trip there years before – is quite another thing. I have written before in this blog about how anonymity is harming honest dialog online, and how the need for a verifiable identity standard has never been greater.

“Trust but verify,” Ronald Reagan said. It’s a lesson we seem doomed to learn over and over. And by the way, one of the online sources that was quickest to criticize MacMaster’s hoax was the web site Lez Get Real, blasting him for making a mockery of lesbian politics. On Monday, the editor of the site, the deaf lesbian woman named Paula Brooks, was revealed to be a man named Bill Graber, a straight guy living in Ohio. No, I am not making this up!

(The Gay Girl blog is here, complete with the older posts and this week’s apology from MacMaster. The hoax was reported in the Washington Post, the New York Times and many other sources.)