blog.stacktrace.com

It doesn’t take a CIA trained interrogator to see that Sarah Palin is lying about her beliefs.  She has a clear-as-day liar’s tell.  Her neck tenses briefly as she closes in on a fib, and she closes her eyes, smirks tensely, and bobbles her head uncomfortably as she tells it.

In some way this means she is honest.  Her soul and her heart do not want to lie and her unconscious struggles to stop her, but loses.  Her cerebral ambition, and the pressure from her coaches, compel her to deception.

Watch this video from 1:09 to 1:15, first with no sound and then with sound. When you are done, watch the whole video if you like to see how different she looks when she isn’t lying.

(I tried to use YouTube params to have it play just that time period, but I couldn’t get it to work. Fixes appreciated.)

Please send me other examples of Palin’s liar’s tells if you find them. (I’m not interested hearing about her lies - those are covered elsewhere.)

From a recent article on Ars Technica forwarded to me by my mother:

In a joint report between ONI Asia and the Information Welfare Monitor, author Nart Villeneuve details evidence that China not only monitors and logs text chat, but also targets specific users for further monitoring.

The article was based on a publication entitled BREACHING TRUST: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s TOM-Skype platform.

Like it or not, it is the policy of the Chinese government to monitor whichever communications they want, and to respond in whatever way they want.  All Chinese know this.  There is no promise of privacy to breach.  This applies to communications with an endpoint in China, in a state cooperating with China, or any location managed by a Chinese or sympathetic company.

The real story here is that eBay is unlikely to end its relationship with Tom Online because the Chinese government would retaliate by crippling all eBay services inside China.  This is the same sort of leverage that prevents CNN and FoxNews from overly negative reporting on China, and forced Yahoo to reveal the identity of a high profile dissenter several years back.

The Chinese government uses its powers to hurt the interests of uncooperative entities.  Anyone who does business with the Chinese government, Chinese companies, within China, or travels to China subjects themselves to strong-arm tactics by the Chinese government and is therefor a de facto collaborator with the Chinese government.  That does not mean you should not do any of the above - the Chinese government is not all bad - but there should be no misunderstanding about what you are doing.

Other facts you should not be shocked to hear:

• All instant messages (Yahoo, AIM, MSN, ICQ) are monitored and censored.
• All message boards are monitored and censored.
• All emails are monitored.
• All SMS messages are monitored.
• Phone calls can be monitored.
• Mobile phones can be located and tracked.
• All call records are available to the Chinese state.
• Many mobile phones can be transformed into a transmitting listening device by sending a signal over the network.  (This occurs in the United States as well.)
• With the combination of location tracking and call records, the Chinese government can easily tell who you are meeting with, where and when you are meeting, who you are communicating with, and what you are saying.  Anyone working against the interests of the Chinese state, its allies, or agents, can easily be discovered along with their network of collaborators.
• Hotel rooms, business offices, homes, and any locations that arouse suspicion are routinely monitored with bugs.
• Hotel and airplane travel records are stored centrally and accessible to the Chinese state.

There is no expectation of privacy from the state in China.  The Chinese state does not respect the privacy of communications, homes, or businesses.

Tom Online is the Chinese partner of eBay (which owns Skype,) and distributes a modified version of Skype for China.  There is no reason I know of to use the Tom Online version, unless you wish to subject yourself to monitoring.

Anyone inside or outside China wishing to make sure all of their communications are not subject to Chinese monitoring should use a secure tunnel with a server outside China, and avoid communication that passes through resources tainted by Chinese access.

If you have ssh on your computer and have access to a Unix account outside of China, the following command will create such tunnel:

ssh -qTfnNC -D 9999 [user]@[host]

You must then proxy communications through the host initiating the tunnel.

Regardless of your opinion of the ethics involved in either party’s conduct, craigslist’s case against Ebay seems to be based entirely on the fact that they feel betrayed.  There is no doubt in my mind that Ebay behaved poorly and manipulatively gained the trust of Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster and has been trying to stab them in the back ever since.  However that does not mean that Ebay will lose any rights they may have to acquire more of craigslist.  I’m going to attempt a layman’s analysis.  You guessed it, I’m not a lawyer - I just play one in my blog.

craigslist’s claim is that Ebay backed a cement truck over the feel-good intentions they layed out during “negotiations.”  I put “negotiations” in quotes because it appears as if craigslist had no say in what actually happened, despite the appearance that they were an actor in the talks between the former shareholder and Ebay.  This is apparent because Ebay ultimately purchased an option without the involvement of craigslist, and craigslist executed the option without objection.  At that time, craigslist was not yet comfortable with the acquisition.  Why then would they have gone along with the purchase if they actually had veto rights over the transaction?  It appears that while the former shareholder and craigslist made efforts to have an agreeable sale, that was really just out of the generosity of the former shareholder - a generosity which ultimately ran out when a multi-million dollar check was handed to him.

If I’m wrong and craigslist grudgingly went along with the sale, even with the power to stop it, then Craig and Jim were seriously hoodwinked by far more savvy professional business people.  Perhaps at the time Craig and Jim did not understand how companies, and public companies in particular, work.  Board members and executives turn over rapidly and are pushed around and out by demanding shareholders.  If the people running the show are turning down money because they made some vague oral promises to some company they invested in, shareholders will apply pressure and those executives will change course or be disposed of.  Any feel-good vibe does not mean a thing when transacting with a large company, and you believe any such vague promise at your peril.

Warren Buffet likes the saying “only invest in companies that an idiot could run, because eventually one will.”  A corollary might be, only enter into business transactions where it is still to your advantage if your partner becomes your adversary.

The craigslist motion is an interesting read, but it feels more like an appeal to good taste than a legal proceeding.  Based on that feeling, and a lack of substantial concrete violations, my intuition is that they have a weak legal case and are therefore making their case to the public.  They will succeed in temporarily getting Ebay off the board, stopping the deceptive advertising, recovering some damages, and perhaps limiting some shareholder request rights, but any economically valuable shareholder rights are unlikely to be terminated.  My sense is some powerful shareholder options are the real target here, but the private nature of the companies leave that unclear.  I have positive, but mixed feelings about craigslist and the way it is operated, but like Craig and Jim, I think an Ebay acquisition would be detrimental to the public.  Unfortunately, unless there are antitrust issues (which are extremely difficult to prove,) public interest is not the basis for decisions in these sorts of civil proceedings.

Links:

• Read the complaint yourself
• Industry Standard prediction: eBay announces bid to acquire Craigslist in 2008.