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Friday, 18 January 2008

Fear of the new - the Internet, Tea, and MapReduce

Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6 said:

“Al-Qa’eda has prospered and as it were regrouped largely because of the energy and effort it has put into its propaganda, largely through the internet.”

Sir Richard added that the internet had become the main channel for “radicalisation” and coordination between al-Qa’eda cells. He said: “In dealing with this problem, there is no alternative to imposing significant controls over the internet.”


This is what I call the "cup of tea" problem, after Douglas Adams:

Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day.

Some people have been surprised that tea was controversial, but William Cobbett's 1822 'The evils of tea (and the virtues of beer)' had this to say:

It must be evident to everyone, that the practice of tea drinking, must rended the frame feeble and unfit to encounter hard labour or severe weather, while, as I have shown, it deducts from the means of replenishing the belly and covering the back. Hence, succeeds a softness, an effeminacy, a seeking for the fireside, a lurking in the bed, and in short, all the characteristics of idleness, for which, in this case, real want of strength furnishes an apology. The tea drinking fills the public-houses, makes the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon they are able to move from home, and does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the tea-table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. At the very least, it teaches them idleness.

Which brings me to the attack on MapReduce today, which spectacularly misses the point by attacking a programming technique for not being a database and contains the striking line:

Given the experimental evaluations to date, we have serious doubts about how well MapReduce applications can scale.

(MapReduce is what Google uses to run complex data-manipulation problems on lots of computers in parallel to do things that databases fail at, like building an index for all the webpages it has found, or rendering map tiles for everywhere on earth in Google maps).
Posted by Kevin Marks at 12:20
Labels: Luddism, MapReduce, MI6, Paradigm shift, shock of the new

18 comments:

Kevin Marks said...

Ben Werdmüller: @fdevillamil Looking forward to it!
via twitter.com

December 05, 2014 3:28 am
Kevin Marks said...

Fred de Villamil: @benwerd thank you, I’ll be there.
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December 05, 2014 3:29 am
Kevin Marks said...

David E: @kevinmarks that's a nice reduction. I've subsequently heard the steam opening envelopes comparison. eastman1.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/mauerf…
via twitter.com

December 05, 2014 3:29 am
Kevin Marks said...

Fred de Villamil: Hi @kevinmarks any chance to see you at @leweb and replay the 2 Canards thing?
via twitter.com

December 05, 2014 3:29 am
Kevin Marks said...

Ben Werdmüller: @fdevillamil I've been slow about documenting / reposting, but the Meetup link is here: meetup.com/Paris-Meetup-p… @MozillaParis
via twitter.com

December 05, 2014 3:29 am
Kevin Marks said...

Kevin Marks: @fdevillamil @leweb sadly I won't be in Paris this december, but @benwerd will and I think he would love to see you
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December 05, 2014 3:29 am
Kevin Marks said...

Ben Werdmüller: @kevinmarks @fdevillamil Confirming that I would! I'll be at @MozillaParis from 8pm on the 16th, and in town through the 17th.
via twitter.com

December 05, 2014 3:30 am
Kevin Marks said...

Fred de Villamil: @benwerd @MozillaParis BTW, is there a meetup page somewhere for the indieweb thing? maybe on @indiewebcamp wiki?
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December 05, 2014 3:31 am
Kevin Marks said...

Fred de Villamil: @kevinmarks I’ve noted about @benwerd coming yes,I’d love to see him too.
via twitter.com

December 05, 2014 3:31 am
Kevin Marks said...

Ian Betteridge: @kevinmarks @benedictevans @nikcub As soon as it was technically possible, they did something similar: duncancampbell.org/PDF/Bugging%20…
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March 24, 2015 1:24 pm
Kevin Marks said...

Benedict Evans: @kevinmarks @nikcub it's rather silly to claim that the internet works just the same as the telephone system
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March 24, 2015 1:25 pm
Kevin Marks said...

Mark Chmarny: liked this.
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March 24, 2015 1:25 pm
Kevin Marks said...

Benedict Evans: @kevinmarks @nikcub it wasn't technically possible
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March 24, 2015 1:25 pm
Kevin Marks said...

Kevin Marks: @BenedictEvans @nikcub oddly they never proposed capturing all phone calls to prevent ira attacks in the 1970s
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March 24, 2015 1:25 pm
Kevin Marks said...

Ian Betteridge: @kevinmarks Hmm. We all agree the Internet is massively empowering. You can't also argue it's not interesting how it empowers terrorists.
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March 24, 2015 1:26 pm
Kevin Marks said...

Shane Richmond: mentioned this in @kevinmarks If there wasn’t, t....
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November 16, 2015 3:08 am
Kevin Marks said...

ivomans: mentioned this in @kevinmarks @AndreaKuszewski o....
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November 17, 2015 2:16 am
Kevin Marks said...

Kevin Marks: mentioned this in @ivomans @AndreaKuszewski Stop....
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November 17, 2015 2:27 am

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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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