When does a crowd become a mob?

When I was younger I worked retail, and I remember dreading the holiday season; we’d be completely busy, and customers were never ruder.  I’ve seen ads poking fun at rabid crowds trying to break down doors before stores open to get the latest deals around the holidays, and it’s always some comment about how the store’s prices left the customers chomping at the bit to save that 15%.  Of course when parody becomes reality, it’s always ugly, and today had to be worst, aptly named, Black Friday ever.  The reports of people getting violent in an effort to secure a cheap blue-ray dvd player, or flatscreen TV is enough to tell you things have gotten out of hand, but today there’s plenty of examples that show that this kind of frenzied shopping needs to end.  I’ve compiled as many as I can stand just to point out that is a systemic problem, and our consumerism culture has once again gone too far.

An embedded CNN reporter comments:

Many people were fighting over kids’ clothes and other essentials [...] “It was a sea of people,” said Rathburn, who hoped to buy a Nintendo Wii game system but went home empty-handed. He wasn’t impressed by the behavior of fellow customers. He said a woman accidentally bumped his back as she tried to compete with him while he examined $1.50 towels. He also said he watched as a customer swooped in to take a 42-inch TV and the unattended cart in which it was sitting. “I’m guessing that the spirit of giving for Christmas starts tomorrow,” he said.

From San Diego, the Mercury News reports:

Navigation was difficult because unlike a normal day at Wal-Mart, everyone had a cart. “The worst part is there are carts,” said Sharon Hauck. Backs of heels get clipped from carts following too closely, hips get bumped from people moving around corner and not looking first and people can get fingers smashed when trying to squeeze past someone standing in the middle of the aisle. There have been national reports of shopping cart violence and fist fights over parking stalls in regard to Black Friday shopping.

Next up, The New York Times:

Shortly after midnight yesterday, an estimated 15,000 shoppers pushed and shoved their way into the Fashion Place mall in Murray, Utah. Police soon joined them, responding to reports of nine skirmishes. Once inside, shoppers ransacked stores, overturning piles of clothes as they looked for bargains. A retailer’s dream — too many customers! — quickly turned into a nightmare, forcing store clerks to shut their doors, and only let people in after others left. The mall even briefly closed its outside doors to avoid a fire hazard.

At the Wal-Mart outside Columbus, customers dashing toward 5 a.m. deals pinned employees against stacks of merchandise. “Oh, my god, stop pushing me, oh, my god,” screamed Linda Tuttle, a 47-year-old employee at the store.

Virginia TV newscast reports:

The rush at Roanoke’s Best Buy turned violent, just seconds after the doors opened at 5 a.m. NewsChannel 10 caught a man on video hitting someone over and over. Watching in slow motion you can see him hit someone at least 5 times.

The Scranton newspaper reports:

The scene at many stores was part Woodstock, part Lord of the Flies, as hundreds hunkered for hours bundled in clothes, wrapped in blankets and holding coffee cups and crumbled newspaper inserts. As the 5 a.m. opening at Best Buy approached, latecomers crashed the line marked by yellow tape, jockeying for pole position with people who stood in the cold for hours. Attempting to quell the crowd, a store manager jumped on a garbage can and threatened to call police. Store employees handed out tickets, entitling the bearer to one of the limited number of so-called “doorbuster” items. Many of those in the line circling the building had no idea that the front of the store was on the brink of chaos, or that items they waited for were already claimed.

In Torrance, California, again The Mercury News reports:

An elderly woman and nine other bargain hunters were injured Friday in a rush for gift certificates dropped from the ceiling of a local mall. Some 2,000 shoppers rushed for 500 falling prize-filled balloons at the Del Amo Fashion Center, leaving nine with minor wounds and sending an elderly woman to the hospital.

And finally, the most well known incident from black Friday, is the death of a Wal-Mart employee:

At 4:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors were set to open, a crowd of 2,000 anxious shoppers started pushing, shoving and piling against the locked sliding glass doors of the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, New York, Nassau County police said. The shoppers broke the doors off their hinges and surged in, toppling a 34-year-old temporary employee who had been waiting with other workers in the store’s entryway.

People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid the man. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.

“They were like a stampede,” said Nassau Det. Lieutenant Michael Fleming. “Hundreds of people walked past him, over him or around him.”

The employee, who was not identified, was taken from the Wal-Mart to nearby Franklin Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:03 a.m., the police said. His exact cause of death has not been determined. The police said that three other shoppers were injured and a 28-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant was taken to the hospital for observation.

Can you imagine going to work, not getting paid much being a temporary worker and having this happen to you, or someone you worked with?  This is outrageous, and now we’re learning more about the behavior of some of those excited ‘bargain hunters’, WNYC reports on the initial findings of the police investigation:

Police say it may prove difficult to identify individual shoppers who trampled on a Wal-Mart worker killed at a Long Island store during Black Friday’s buying frenzy.

REPORTER: Nassau County police are reviewing surveillance video from the Valley Stream store. A crowd smashed down the doors just after 5 a.m. Police say other workers were trampled as they tried to rescue Jdimytai Damour of Queens. Detective Seargent Anthony Repalone was a witness.

REPALONE: While he was on the ground, he was certainly stomped upon by hundreds of people either stepping on him directly or stepping around him.

REPORTER: A woman who is eight months pregnant, and three other people, suffered minor injuries. Police say there was not enough security at the store. Arkansas-based Wal-Mart says it had tried to prepare for Black Friday by adding staff and outside security workers. But the company won’t say how many staffers it had on hand in Valley Stream.

Afterwards we hear from Reverend Billy from the Church of Stop Shopping, who’s known as the creator of the “Buy Nothing Day” (which I followed on ‘Black Friday’ BTW) and opposer of big box chain stores.  His closing comments:

The Black Friday rush at the big box door is a symbol of an era that is ending. It is a ritual when speedy greed is a kind of fun, and the violence of these doorbustings in years’ past got media comments like, “Well that’s our America… but that’s the economy!” No, it is Consumerism, a system of money and products that is now crashing down. We are returning to local and more compassionate economies.

He’s right, it’s (past) time to shop locally, and leave all the deals on the big name brand items to the savages.

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Tags: african americans, califonia, discrimination, keith oberman, morays, obama, Prop 8, Proposition 8

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apt-get -y install ruby irb ri rdoc ruby1.8-dev build-essential

Then install rubygems and rails:

apt-get -y install rubygems rails

Yep, that was easy. Now create your first rails app to ensure things are working as they should be:

rails newrailsapp
cd newrailsapp
script/server

Then hit your server to see it live, hit it in your browser: http://120.0.0.1:3000. Or, if you’re like me, you’re running it on a remote server, have it bind WEBrick to the IP that you use to access it, so in my case I quit out of WEBrick, and restarted it with:

script/server --binding=192.168.1.8

And then hit it via http://192.168.1.8:3000 Nice, so much easier than I remember it being. While I’m posting here, I’ll drop a few more links I want to follow, as if I use RoR on upcoming projects I’ll need to investigate as we scale to the clouds!

CouchDB with Rails

REST on Rails

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Ah, good memories

With all the polls it feels like there’s been a sea change in how America sees race, or maybe not. Maybe it’s W’s 22% approval rating skewing the numbers, because there are obvious still some serious misconceptions and racism playing big in the election. Interviews in the ‘bootheal’ region of Missouri (only a few hours South of me here in St. Louis, where Obama drew 100,000 people under the Arch last week) show that indifference, mixed with the old school racism and ignorance, is still alive and well.  My favorite part is:

“But Douglas’ cousin Ronnie Johnson is voting for McCain. Or rather, against Obama.

He is reluctant to explain this at first — “You don’t want to know why,” he says.

The others on the porch goad him. And Johnson, a lanky 20-year-old white man who works as a meatcutter at a grocery store, starts to talk about an issue that has persisted throughout the campaign: race.

It is not just that Obama is black, Johnson says. He has heard that Obama is Muslim. (Obama is Christian.) He also has heard rumors that Obama refuses to salute the American flag, and that Obama has promised that black men will have more rights than white men. (Independent fact-checking groups say these rumors are false.)

So Johnson is voting for McCain.

“He’s white,” Johnson says.”

And we wonder why W was elected twice. Someone save us…

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Tweet, tweet, bomb?

Hmmm…so the Army has claimed that terrorists may be ‘tweeting’ along to plan and organize attacks. Well yeah, I guess they could use Gmail, Slashdot comments and other things the same way, it seems their claim is that since this is more ‘real time’ it could be a danger. Ok, oh, and they take a swipe at Skype as well. Additionally they define a new name I would happily accept, “The report describes hacktivists as politically motivated hackers“. Hacktvist, that’s awesome. The report goes on with,

“The ‘Twitter’ member can send Tweets (messages) near real time to Twitter cell phone groups and to their online Twitter social networking page,” the author said, adding that “there are multiple pro- and anti-Hezbollah Tweets.”

Twitter members “can also mashup their Tweets with a variety of other tools including geo-coordinates and Google Maps or other electronic files/artifacts. Members can direct and re-direct audience members to other Web sites and locations from ‘Tweets’ and can engage in rapid-fire group social interaction,” the writer said.

The author outlined three scenarios where Twitter could be used by terrorists, and pointed out that terrorists have also talked about using other technologies, including cell phones, and Skype and other internet telephony services.

The author, who did not sign the paper, warned that most of the information came from “al-Qaida-like Web sites from ‘uncorroborated’ postings made by terrorists” and “persons sympathetic to terrorism.” Only “rudimentary Arabic language skills and the Google translating tool” were used.

There’s no doubt that ‘terrorists’ will use any means necessary to accomplish their goals, but is this really something to take seriously?

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First, a great first introduction of what bittorrent is, and what it accomplishes:

“BitTorrent does not centrally manage resource allocation. Instead, each client attempts to maximise its download rate by controlling various protocol parameters. Clients make direct connections (using ports 6881-6889 by default) to one or more of the clients in the list, to exchange parts of the file. Direct connections between clients are duplex (bi-directional), and every client tries to maintain the greatest number of active connections. A client’s refusal to upload temporarily is known as choking. Connections are choked to prevent leeching a situation where another client is downloading, but not uploading.

To maximize the number of duplex connections, clients reward each other by reciprocating uploads. So clients unwilling to upload will find their download rate dropping as other clients choke in response. Clients decide which connections to choke or unchoke by calculating the current download rate of each connection, once every ten seconds. The connection is left choked or unchoked until the next ten-second period is up. This fixed interval cycle prevents clients from rapidly choking and unchoking, causing network resources to be wasted. Finally, a client does an “optimistic” unchoke, once every 30 seconds, to try out unused connections to determine if they might offer better transfer rates than current ones.” [link]

Now on to comments by others in how to use/harness this system for data propogation:

“One idea that does linger in my head is the idea of creating a bittorrent distribution channel for library cataloging data. In the podcast, a concern was raised on whether a single server such as Library of Congress’s might be serverely impacted if a lot of requests were made against its SRU server. If all the hopes of Casey Bisson’s gift to the library community are realized, what if libraries were to contribute their individual cataloging and authority records to a global torrent? Again, I don’t see the value of a single large file, like MIT’s Barton data, over distribution of individual records. In the real world, torrent sharing is mostly at the work-level and that would seem to be the logical way to handle library records.” [link]

“Institutional repositories - I don’t hear as much noise about institutional repositories as I used to hear. I think their lack of popularity is directly related to the problems they are designed to solve, namely, long-term access. Don’t get me wrong, long-term access is definitely a good thing, but that is a library value. In order to be compelling, institutional repositories need to solve the problems of depositors, not the librarians. What do authors get by putting their content in an institutional repository that they don’t get elsewhere? If they supported version control, collaboration, commenting, tagging, better syndication and possibilities for content reuse — in other words, services against the content — then institutional repositories might prove to be more popular.” [link]

“Of particular interest here is how such a description of BitTorrent intersects on certain points (which I have emphasized above) with larger conversations and concerns campus IT organizations are currently having regarding the increasingly prohibitive costs of owning, maintaining, and monitoring data services locally. In fact, this an issue with much larger scope that is not limited to the education sector by any means. Much of this is a result of our particular moment wherein a plethora of externally hosted options provide college communities the same, if not better, services with infinitely more storage space. And all of this at a fraction of the cost. For some campus IT shops in the business of supporting themselves financially, or even making money, the risks of not going in such a direction are much more dire. The recent news that the University of Washington’s IT department will be laying off 15% of their staff speaks directly to this. In fact, a number of schools have already begun offloading IT staples such as file storage and email to externally hosted solutions. Arizona State University was one of the the first large universities to do this in a deal with Google back in the Fall of 2006, and it is a trend we will continue to see much more of in the coming months and years, particularly as budgets shrink and the economy continues to tank.” [link]

“[...] bioinformatics networks present unique networking challenges that typically can’t be addressed by generic network installations. The first is that there is a huge amount of data involved. The network isn’t handling short e-mail messages typical of the corporate environment, but massive sequence strings, images, and other data. In addition, unlike networks that support traditional business transaction processing, data are continually flowing from disk arrays, servers, and other sources to computers for processing because the data can’t fit into computer RAM. As a result, the network and external data sources are in effect extensions of the computer bus, and the performance of the network limits the overall performance of the system. It doesn’t matter whether the computer processor is capable of processing several hundred million operations per second if the network feeding data from the disks to the computer has a throughput of only 4–5 Mbps.” [link]

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The Glider: A Universal Hacker Emblem

There has long been a movement in the geek community to expunge the negative thoughts attached to the word hacker, the image to the right The Glider, being one of the latest and most visible. In the beginning there were hackers (people who worked on computers, programmed and made things work) and crackers (people who would use computers for nefarious purposes, crimes, viruses, etc), these were two distinct camps, with some miscreants jumping the fence back and forth to confuse the issue. Regardless, somewhere along the way popular culture (movies, news, your teachers probably) began to equate hacking as being the bad, crime ridden activity that cracker was supposed to cover. I think it’s a moot point now, as even my Dad was shocked when he learned my annual DefCon trip is billed as “largest hacking conference in the world”.  I gave him the above explanation, but I’m unsure if he really believes it. Regardless, the original “How to become a hacker” paper written by Eric S Raymond is always cited as the quintessential word on the use of the word hacker. I found it mirrored online, and it’s a worthwhile read if you have any interest in the topic, or want to cement your own views of your hobby.  For now, if you don’t want to read the entire verbiage, here’s the intro to learn and take with you.

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term `hacker’. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you’re a hacker.

The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them “hackers” too — and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term `hacker’.

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren’t. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people `crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word `hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.

The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.

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Barack Obama FTW!

This afternoon I volunteered at the local field office in South St. Louis for Barack Obama. When I got there there was a flurry of activity, and I could tell people were there because they wanted to be. As we waited for others to show up to get started, I saw a pile of boxes; they had just gotten in a huge shipment of yard signs, after being back ordered for weeks. I think I built at least 50 of those in the half hour I worked on them, but then Laura came around with our assignment, “Who wants to knock on doors?” I likely had a look of shock on my face, but still manged to say, “Great!”. After all, even though I hate people coming to my door, and wasn’t looking forward to being on the other side, what place did I have to complain? This is for something much bigger than that. Fortunately the paperwork was really well organized, with the map and route all planned out.  I was paired up with another volunteer and we hit the road.  The canvasing went really well, most were very polite, regardless if they Obama supports or not (most were).  One thing about the neighborhood, it’s only about 15 minutes South of me, but there were absolutely no political signs anywhere, and it wasn’t the kind of neighborhood that  wouldn’t allow them, so it was very strange.  Most in my area are pretty outgoing about showing their affiliation and staying educated about the days events, I had the feeling things were different which made me all the more retisent to do a good job.  We walked the streets for a few hours and got more comfortable with the idea of banging on people’s doors as time went along.  I think the fact that our contry is in such a crossroads made it much eaiser for me to participate, and I’m really glad I got to do it.  Now it’s time to regroup and map out more time to help out at headquarters.  If anyone is hesitant about doing something like this, try it, I don’t think you’ll regret it.  Leave a message for me if you have any questions, or search for your local field office and volunteer - we’re 40 days out - it’s time for action.

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