Alexis Madrigal

In a fascinating analysis of the release of the Afghanistan war logs, George Mason policy wonk Janine Wedel and journalist Linda Keenan argue that when traditional institutions break down, a new breed of power broker -- exemplified by WikiLeaks -- takes over.

"WikiLeaks has upended the old-fashioned venues of investigative journalism and watchdog organizations," they argue at the Huffington Post. "While it is surely good that WikiLeaks has emerged as a counterweight -- a tool for making the powerful squirm -- WikiLeaks has enormous power itself, the kind of unaccountable power that its founder decries."

Digital technologies enable the players to act effectively without centralization or bureaucracy, which makes them unresponsive to "traditional means of accountability." This is the dark side of WikiLeaks acting as the first "stateless news organization."

"Bureaucracy gets pushed aside by so-called "adhocracy," executive power/one-man shows flourish, with institutional checks and balances flouted," they write (emphasis added). "These are some of the signature developments of the shadow elite era, and WikiLeaks is clearly a creature of that era.

A rare cross between a donkey and zebra was born last week at the Chestatee Wildlife Preserve in Georgia. The new baby "zedonk" is the latest in short line of the hybrids.

"Donkeys and zebras don't usually mate, but zedonks turn up occasionally. In 2005, a zebra gave birth to a zedonk in Barbados, according to the news website Science Daily," the AP reports. "And in the 1970s, three zedonks were born at a European zoo to a donkey mother, according to the website of Britain's Colchester Zoo."

Now, the zedonk can finally take its place in the menagerie of weird hybrid animals like ligers, wholphins, and camas (camel-llama mixes), all testaments to the power of "love" to transcend all obstacles, even speciation.

At the top of this page, you see a flickr image by Tim Ellis of one of those British zedonks.

Via @Wired

Ars Technica delivers a wonderful reminder about the scale and concentration of the Chinese Internet industry. Two ISPs serve 20 percent of the entire globe's broadband users.

In the wake of the WikiLeaks war logs unveiling, Twitter's nerdy users have combined the organization's name and Star Wars to create a viral joke.

The hashtag #wookieleaks features all kind of quips about ewoks, Afghanistan, empire, and Princess Leah. The tag (obviously) takes its name from Chewbacca's Yeti-like species. People are using the tag in two ways. First, to retell the narrative of the Star Wars movies in the voice of contemporary political headline writing. And also to discuss current events under the guise of Star Wars characters. Here are some good ones we spotted

@jbohlinger: Death Star bidding process shown to favor non-union exhaust port workers, ignored OSHA required inspections #wookieleaks

@Paul_Conrad: Jar Jar Binks defends use of word "refudiate" compares self to Alderaan's greatest poet #wookieleaks

Wondering what a hashtag is? Here's a quick explanation for Twitter neophytes:

Hashtags are one of the more interesting emergent phenomena on Twitter. The tags are words or phrases delineated by the poundsign (#wookieleaks). Twitter automatically turns words formatted that way into links that bring up a list of all the people who've included that hashtag in a Tweet. Originally used to keep track of conferences (#CarSales2010), now they often become punny categories for collective jokes, like a parlor game for millions. No one explains what the hashtag is supposed to mean, but users catch on from watching their friends play. It's like an instant inside joke that anyone can join.

Meet the interrobang. Unless you happen to be a typographic expert, you probably haven't encountered the hybrid question mark-exclamation point. It was actually invented in the early 1960s by ad exec Martin Speckter but as language researcher Anne Trubek suggested last year, it just might be the symbol of our times.

I discovered the interrobang, and I have been thinking about it all week. And no, not because I am a grammar nerd, but because I think [the interrobang] may just sum up something about our clever yet confused culture...

Might we describe our current cultural zeitgeist as surprise superimposed over curiosity,  mixed together with attitude? Is the interrobang a 1960s, type-based version of WTF?  Is the interrobang a 1960s, type-based version of WTF?  A certain informal, witty, knowing, WTF way of approaching the world? Many clever Facebook status updates and comments could be defined, as Wikipedia does the interrobang, as "A sentence ending with an interrobang (1) asks a question in an excited manner, (2) expresses excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or (3) asks a rhetorical question."

By now, I assume that you're sold on using the interrobang in your next Powerpoint (or getting it as your next tattoo), so you should know how to find it. If you've got Microsoft Word, it's hiding in the Wingdings 2 font. Hit shift+6 and you'll see the zeitgeist mark appear.

One last thought on the interrobang: does anyone know how I could search for a piece of punctuation like this? Google says it ignores most punctuation, and I'm assuming Microsoft works the same way. I think most OCR systems do filter out non-standard punctuation.

Ok, I'll say it: I'd pay for Twitter, but only if it was free for everyone else. Let me explain.

In my line of work, it's by far the most useful social tool for delivering me interesting and relevant information. I hear similar things from other journalists and tech-lovers. Yet a USC Annenberg School of Communication survey released yesterday found that 0 percent of respondents said they'd pay for Twitter [pdf]. The obvious interpretation of the study is that people, even Twitter users, don't see a lot of value in the service.

But I don't think that's quite it. It's not that Twitter is worthless, but rather that in trying to charge for its value, you lose it. (The Twitter Uncertainty Principle?) A paywalled Twitter would destroy the healthy information ecosystem that's grown up around it. Users realize that Twitter has to be free to be Twitter, so of course they won't say they'd pay for it. The sum is worth a lot, but if and only if it's the sum.

Here's an iPad metric that you might not be looking at: Bible app sales.

Monday, a Bible cracked the top 10 highest-grossing book applications for the iPad for the first time, according to Drew Haninger, CEO of the scripture app's publisher, Olive Tree.

The theory of the case here is that if Bible applications continue creeping up the sales rankings, we can infer that the demographics of the iPad are broadening out from what we assume is an urban, liberal, fairly areligious base.

The Bible, of course, is a mainstay iPhone book application, and easily the most popular book in the history of the world. On the Kindle, which probably has the broadest range of eReader users, the Bible ranked 50 in their list of best-sellers at the time of publication.

Olive Tree's NIV Bible BibleReader is the highest-grossing iPhone Bible app right now, too, ranked second in books just behind Green Eggs and Ham. Between the iPhone and iPad, including free versions, Haninger said his company is getting 3,000 downloads a day. The iBible may not exactly be iBeer in its heyday, but sales on the iPad are growing, Haninger said, as the device has passed 3.5 million units sold. (Atlantic colleague Eleanor Barkhorn also pointed out to me that the NIV is considered to be the more "conservative" Bible translation and less likely to be used at more liberal mainline churches.)

The rest of the top-selling book applications also suggest that the iPad isn't solely being purchased by young guys with cash to burn. The paid app list is dominated by Toy Story and Dr. Seuss titles! Anecdotally, parents seem to love the iPad for the child pacification magic tricks it can perform. A study by the consumer research firm, MyType, found that parents were more likely than non-parents to own an iPad.

There are a couple of strong counterarguments against the Bible app as demographic probe. First, books are a tiny slice of the overall app market. Even the best selling book apps aren't in the top 100 apps overall. Second, book sales are messy because books can be purchased for the iPad in a variety of ways, most prominently through the Apple's iBooks and Amazon's Kindle applications. So, caveat lector, we're looking at incomplete and only suggestive data.

Still, book (and Good Book) application sales are interesting because the heavy-duty game and joke app purchasers get screened out. Perhaps they allow us to have a more complete picture of who iPad users are, beyond just "selfish elites."

Cisco recently posted it its semi-annual security report. It is packed with information, but as Alex Hutton of New School Security notes, the best thing about it is this hilarious graphic. The illustration is actually titled "The Artichoke of Attack," and the caption really spells out the metaphor.

"Modern hackers chip away at the hard-core exterior along the perimeter of the network to get to the heart of the enterprise, removing certain 'leaves' to reveal sensitive data," we read. 

Via Tim Maly

In the wake of the dot-com crash, Dell was the darling of the media and investment worlds. While other companies were struggling to survive, good old Dell was a paragon of success. Unlike its competitors, Dell used aggressive supply-chain management to deliver value to its investors.

As the company met or exceeded its earnings per-share targets quarter after quarter, all kinds of stories sprang up about what made the company so special. Usually it was their abnormally amazing supply-chain management.

"Still relentlessly striving to get better faster, Dell intends to slash $2 billion in costs. CFO Jim Schneider has indicated that much of the cuts will come from manufacturing operations and the supply chain," Fast Company wrote in 2004. "That will put even more pressure on Dell's component makers. Michael Dell is fond of saying that in the high-tech business, you either grow or die. It all just happens much, much faster when you're living in Dell time."

But now we know, courtesy of an SEC investigation, that the Dell secret sauce was payments from Intel that kept rival AMD's chips out of Dell boxes.

The Economist reports on the whole sordid affair, which ended with the SEC extracting a $100 million fine from the Texas firm, though Dell neither admitted nor denied guilt in the settlement (emphasis added):

The penalty seems rather light given the gravity of the SEC's accusations. According to the commission, Dell would have missed analysts' earnings expectations in every quarter between 2002 and 2006 were it not for accounting shenanigans. This involved a deal with Intel, a big microchip-maker, under which Dell agreed to use Intel's central processing unit chips exclusively in its computers in return for a series of undisclosed payments, locking out Advanced Micro Devices, a big rival. (Intel is expected to settle a long-running anti-trust case that has highlighted these payments in the next couple of weeks.) The SEC's complaint said Dell had maintained "cookie-jar reserves" using Intel's money that it could dip into to cover any shortfalls in its operating results.

The SEC says that the company should have disclosed to investors that it was drawing on these reserves, but did not. And it claims that, at their peak, the exclusivity payments from Intel represented 76% of Dell's quarterly operating income, which is a breathtaking figure. Small wonder, then, that Dell found itself in a pickle when its quarterly earnings fell sharply in 2007 after it ended the arrangement with Intel. The SEC alleges that Dell attributed the drop to an aggressive product-pricing strategy and higher than expected component prices, when the real reason was that the payments from Intel had dried up.

It's amazing to read the investor conference call transcript from the first quarter of 2007, the period in which three-quarters of the company's operating income came from the Intel payments, according to the SEC.

Intel is hardly mentioned, meriting just two short comments. Even an analyst question about Dell's then-new deal with AMD, which signaled the end of the payments, didn't generate a peep about the possible impact of the Intel arrangement. Yet insiders at the company must have known that they were in trouble, if the SEC allegations are correct.

It's yet another example to stack on top of the maxim: when it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Even in "Dell Time."

Jailbreaking, a way of modifying an iPhone to run unauthorized apps, has been deemed legal by the Library of Congress' Copyright Office.

Thanks to an obscure rulemaking procedure, the practice was granted an exemption under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, despite protests from Apple. The Electronic Frontier Foundation had sought the exemption.

"It's not just important because consumers have demonstrated they want to jailbreak their cell phones. It tells companies that want to create alternatives to the app store that there will be a customer for them," said Jennifer Granick, Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "If you have an application that Apple wouldn't like, you may well have an alternative outlet."

That could be important. Media observers have questioned whether Apple should be able to keep such tight control over the apps users' can put onto their phones. Such concerns flared when Apple initially rejected Pullitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore's app because it "ridicule[d] public figures."

Still, the new exemption is quite limited, in some senses:

Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset.

While the copyright ruling provides protections for jailbreakers, the people who make the tools to do it are not similarly guarded from legal action. That's just how the provision was structured, Granick said, and was not a specific decision of the Copyright Office.

The regulation also cannot prevent Apple from playing hardball with would-be jailbreakers or making their phones difficult to crack. 

Apple did not return my request for comment by the time I posted this story. I'll update if I hear from them.