It's not nice to harvest visitor email addresses

... especially if you're a paid service, like Angie's List.

Not knowing how Angie's List worked, I visited its site and poked around a bit. Its most valuable content is reserved for members, so I started the process to join. The process requires navigating multiple Web pages. I bailed out when I saw that members had to pay subscriptions. I have no objections to subscription services: I just wasn't that serious about my search.

"Bailing out" consisted of deleting the page from my browser, since I didn't see a "Cancel" button or link. (I've since verified that no such button or link is present.) At the time I quit out of the signup process I already had had to provide an email address. I assumed that partial signups would not commit information to the organization's databases. How trusting of me, and how foolish. I got email from Angie's List less than twenty-four hours later.

It's unethical to harvest email addresses from potential members. Period. If I haven't signed on the dotted line, you shouldn't get to bother me. I don't care how easy it is to unsubscribe (and it is quite easy in the case of Angie's List), it's unethical to harvest the contact information of people who aren't formally members.

"But you get unsolicited email all the time!" Yes, and it sucks! Aping the unsavory behavior of others doesn't make you a good person, or a good organization. (By the way, the signup process makes it terribly easy to sign some poor shnook up for unsolicited email from Angie's List. Consider that another little bonus of this scheme.)

I see no need for the Angie's List subscription process to require multiple pages except to facilitate exactly the kind of information harvesting I saw.

Angie's List, what exactly in your business model requires such unethical behavior?

There is also a grey area as regards Angie's List's privacy policy.

By entering Personal Information on the Site, you consent to our use of the Personal Information for purposes related to the Site and the services offered and/or provided on or in connection with the Site. Without limiting the foregoing, by giving us Personal Information you are giving us and third parties engaged by us permission to contact you and/or send you promotional and/or other marketing information about services and offerings.

You might notice that nowhere does it say that "you" must be a member for Angie's List to use your personal information.

Again, Angie's List, what exactly in your business model requires such unethical behavior?

Here's how an organization with a real orientation toward consumers handles its online subscription process. Consumer Reports has a prominent "Subscribe" link (more than one, actually) on its home page. If you click it, the first page explains the types of subscriptions available and has a link to a user agreement that explains the potential subscriber's rights and responsibilities. One of the first items in that user agreement is a discussion of CR's privacy policy, with a link to a much fuller discussion thereof.

All this happens before CR gets around to asking for any personal information.

Angie's List, you need to be more like Consumer Reports in how you manage the membership process. You also need to be less greedy about acquiring and using personal information.

You claim the right to rate others. Act like it. Stop harvesting personal information from nonmembers.

Penalties for mortgage mess still being sorted out

I'm not surprised, but I'm still dejected that federal regulators can't come to a consensus on how, and how much, to punish lenders who botched the mortgages they issued.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency apparently feels that only a few people have been hurt by lenders' botched paperwork and failure to follow the rules.

The acting comptroller of the currency, John Walsh, testified last week that while there were widespread problems with documentation and oversight of law firms and other crucial links in the foreclosure chain, only a “small number of foreclosure sales should not have proceeded.”

"Only a handful of people are known to have been sickened by the bad meat from the factory, so we shouldn't worry too much about the filth and excessive speed of the processing line."

Look, I'll agree that using whatever fines are assessed against culpable lenders to help out struggling borrowers is a bad idea. (It has been floated in policy circles as a way to combat the sluggish housing market and to reduce the number of foreclosures. It's also an idea that faces "fierce opposition from the banks.") It connects two problems that are logically independent and should remain separate from one another: the deliberate or careless failure by lenders to follow proper procedure when processing mortgages, and the fact that a borrower can't keep up with the required mortgage payments. In the absence of evidence that the lender knew the borrower wouldn't be able to keep up with payments, not keeping up with payments is deeply regrettable but it's not the lender's fault. (I have no doubt that some lenders did lend to people the lenders knew wouldn't be able to repay, but proving that is a tough job.)

However, the idea of glossing over the lenders' failure to comply with the law is offensive. Lenders are the ones foreclosing on homeowners using the full force of the law: it's elementary justice that those lenders should be held fully responsible for following the law themselves. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is simply flat-out wrong in attempting to paper over their misdeeds. Since, according to the Times article, jail time for anyone involved is off the table, it's time to hit lenders in the only other way they'll understand: we need to soak them, and soak them well.

"A Declaration of Cyber-War," Michael Joseph Gross

The April issue of Vanity Fair will include a lengthy piece on what is known and suspected about the Stuxnet worm.

Subject matter experts will find parts of the article a little irksome (what exactly is a "stolen" digital signature, for instance? Does it refer to a document signed with a stolen private key?), but if cops and doctors can cope with the absurdities of how their lives are dumbed down for the rest of us on TV, well, infosec types can develop coping strategies too.

Much of what is "known" about Stuxnet is actually informed speculation, the product of analysts' suspicions as to how Stuxnet's construction and behavior fit the supposed goals of certain nations. (That the worm must have been the product of a government rather than a band of crackers seems to be the consensus.) Informed speculation, a step above wild-ass guessing, to use a favorite colloquialism of a former colleague, makes for an entertaining read, but it's a dangerous guide to the future, whether it's the future to fear or the future to embrace.

Putting it less nebulously, Gross tells a good story, but it behooves us to remember that much of what he's telling us is guesswork. The experts whose insights he shares might be right in every detail, but we don't know that (yet). We would do well to remind ourselves of this if Stuxnet is used to sell us on some exotic strategy to combat information warfare, or whatever they're calling it these days.

That said, I do agree with one of Gross's conclusions.

In the end, the most important thing now publicly known about Stuxnet is that Stuxnet is now publicly known. That knowledge is, on the simplest level, a warning: America’s own critical infrastructure is a sitting target for attacks like this.

I've said as much before. And note that it didn't require a Stuxnet to trigger a lot of trouble in that critical infrastructure in 2003.

Recycling fracking water is not without risks

So you heard your natural-gas driller was recycling its wastewater. Sounds like a great idea. One company is so giddy at the thought, in fact, it's ignoring common sense and the laws of physics:

“Water recycling is a win-win,” one drilling company, Range Resources, says on its Web site. “It reduces fresh water demand and eliminates the need to dispose of the water.”

No, eventually the water does need to be disposed of by someone, somewhere. Perhaps Range Resources' Webmeister should check with one or two of the company's engineers before making stupid proclamations like that.

Still, reusing the wastewater can only help reduce the operation's impact on the environment, right?

But drilling experts say that virtually all forms of recycling still result in liquid waste that can be more toxic than it was after the first use.

“The wastewater that comes up from the well will likely increase to some degree in many contaminants such as salts and possibly radium and other radionuclides with each new fracking, but the data is very limited on this issue so not much is known,” said Radisav Vidic, an environmental engineering professor and drilling expert at the University of Pittsburgh. “There needs to be more data on this.”

As Homer Simpson would say, "D'oh!"

Unfortunately the natural gas drillers have been extraordinarily successful at keeping government regulations and monitoring off their back.

In late 2009, for example, officials from an industry trade group, the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Association, wrote to regulators to confirm that drilling waste, regardless of how it was handled, would remain exempt from the federal law governing hazardous materials. The association said it was asking in case companies sought to distill the waste into salts for de-icing roads.

... [F]ederal regulators informed the industry that their exemption remained intact, a decision that association officials quickly passed on to their members. State regulators declined to comment on the exchange because it concerns a federal, not state, exemption. Federal officials said the salts were regulated by the states.

Drilling waste being exempted from hazardous-waste legislation ... that's crazy enough. Then we have the risible image of state and federal regulators pointing at one another in a game of hot-potato. No, wait, "risible" is not the right word: there is nothing in the least funny about this situation. We're back to "crazy."

UPDATE: What happens to the fracking water when the driller finally wants to dispose of it? I wrote an entry about that. The bottom line: nobody is interested in regulating disposal, either.

Frank Rich leaving the New York Times

The New Tork Times is losing columnist Frank Rich to New York Magazine, according to the Times' own Media Decoder.

Mr. Rich will write a column once a month and become editor at large of a new section built around his column. The magazine said he would also be a commentator on its Web site, NYMag.com, “engaging in regular dialogues on the news of the week.”

It sounds like they rolled out the red carpet for Rich. Well, good for him. He became my favorite Times columnist because he knows how to pull seemingly disparate threads together to tell important stories. Just as importantly, he doesn't parrot anybody's party line.

The Times needed more columnists like Rich: now they have none. I only hope that Rich's voice continues to have the same impact on the national debate. The Times is a pretty wonderful platform from which to be seen; I don't know if New York Magazine has as large or as national an audience.

R.I.P. Peter J. Gomes

With a twinge of sadness I read of the passing of the Reverend Peter J. Gomes.

At Harvard, he was the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at the School of Divinity and the Pusey Minister of Memorial Church, a nondenominational center of Christian life on campus. For decades, he was among the first and the last to address undergraduates, greeting arriving freshman [sic] with a sermon on hallowed traditions, and advising graduating seniors about the world beyond the sheltering Harvard Yard.

I was lucky enough to be one of those seniors a number of years ago. Being irreligious even then, I wasn't inclined to attend Rev. Gomes's Senior Class Chapel Service, as it is called today (I could swear the address went by a different title back then, but my memory could be playing tricks on me). A friend convinced me to make the trek to Memorial Church, pointing out that I'd never get a second chance to experience anything commencement-related.

It was a masterful performance. Even then Rev. Gomes had performed such services often enough that he knew how to hold his audience in the palm of his hand.

The heart of his address was an admonition to his proud, confident audience. Harvard graduates, he reminded us, had been trying their hardest for over three centuries to make the world a better, kinder, gentler place. Look around you, he added dryly, it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. He urged us to take a different tack: instead of striving to understand the world (implicit in his words was the addendum, "and conquer it"), we should strive to have a heart full of understanding. Intellectual understanding should make room for emotional (and perhaps in Rev. Gomes's mind, spiritual) understanding.

I have never forgotten that admonition. I must admit that I've never lived up to it, either, but at least I have never stopped trying.

It seems Rev. Gomes was in the habit of toning down the grandiose ambitions of his soon-to-be-graduated audiences. According to the Harvard Gazette's coverage of the 2010 commencement exercises:

He cautioned the students against striving for the kind of greatness that is too often tied to a drive simply to achieve. Instead, Gomes urged the graduating class to aim, above all, for goodness.

Gomes acknowledged that some listeners may perform great deeds, such as finding a cure for cancer or a “sensible way of explaining the economy,” and that he would be grateful for their successes. But he suggested that most of the graduates would simply be “called upon to do small and ordinary things as well as possible.”

Gomes added, “If you do that well, you will have remade our world and your little corner of it, you will have justified our high hopes in you, and you will have given substance to the ancient vision for a new heaven and a new Earth.”

I have forgotten much from my college days, but Rev. Gomes's advice lingers. Perhaps that is only natural, for where most of my education touched on matters of the mind which no longer are relevant to my daily life, his words were about the human heart.

Brief thoughts about Libya

The sitations are in no way parallel, but for some reason I keep imagining Muammar el-Qaddafi winding up just like Benito Mussolini. Couldn't happen to a more deserving fellow.

While Libya's turmoil is a tragedy, non-Arabic readers can at least derive a moment of levity contemplating the many ways of transliterating the Libyan dictator's name.