Google

Saviours, Red Sparowes hammer furniture tacks into temples of unsuspecting fans

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By G.W. Schulz

saviours1.jpg
Saviours at Bottom of the Hill

Approximately 300 people were badly injured Friday after gusts of furniture tacks swept through the Bottom of the Hill music venue sparking a renewed interest by Congress in the safety of rock music and its potential to spiral innocent consumers into damnation.

Launched through twin Sunn O))) amps wielded by Oakland guitar heroes Saviours, the band was apparently unrepentant over the damage it had caused and vowed to bridle any attempts by authorities to turn down the volume.

Actually, for a show we heard was sold out, there was quite a bit of breathing room in which to enjoy ourselves, save for the boozy Google employees (we assumed, based on their doucheness) standing nearby and loudly droning on about how much they liked folk-punk opener William Elliot Whitmore.

The sunshine posse

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› amanda@sfbg.com

On Saturday mornings, with roughshod regularity, a handful of San Franciscans gather at the Sacred Grounds Cafe on Hayes Street to swap strategies and catch up on their political triumphs and setbacks. They don’t look like a powerful bunch, and they aren’t household names, but they’re changing the way the city handles public records, meetings, and information.

All of these folks started with one simple request for what ought to have been public information. All of them ran into a stone wall. They eventually found one another at hearings in front of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, where they took their cases and debated the minutiae of the law that grants them access to what they’re looking for.

For Wayne Lanier, it started with a $600 tax for neighborhood beautification. James Chaffee and Peter Warfield were seeking reform at the San Francisco Public Library. Kimo Crossman wanted more transparency in the city’s wi-fi deal with Google-EarthLink. Michael Petrelis was trying to find a keyhole into local nonprofit AIDS agencies. Allen Grossman thought the city’s attorneys should shelve their redactive black ink. And Christian Holmer — he just considers sunshine a part of his job.

They’ve been working together loosely during the past year or so — and in most cases, they’ve won. Their ongoing battles also show how the city’s laws and practices badly need reform.

Collectively, the sunshine crew considers the issue of metadata its biggest victory of the year (see "The Devil in the Metadata," 11/15/06), because it forced city officials to abandon their fear of the unseen electronic data that is generated whenever they hit send or open a new word-processing document.

Paul Zarefsky, a deputy city attorney with the City Attorney’s Office, argued that electronic documents could be rife with redactable goods and hackers could use this data to crack into the city’s server. According to him, this was ample reason to only release public information as a paper document or a PDF. The sunshine activists said this was an environmental waste and a very un–user friendly format in this age of electronic searches. The task force and Rules Committee of the Board of Supervisors agreed, found the city attorney’s arguments specious, and demanded agencies follow the letter of the law and release documents in an electronic format.

Some departments still aren’t doing that, which is a problem these citizens have discovered: the Sunshine Ordinance, though very good, could be much better and is overripe for reform.

The ordinance, adopted by voters in 1993, grants San Franciscans far more traction and power than the federal and state open-records laws by setting deadlines and offering the forum of the task force for addressing complaints when documents are not forthcoming.

When a citizen makes a request for a public document, it’s often because somebody sees something from the kitchen window while washing dishes and says, "Huh, I wonder what’s going on."

For Wayne Lanier, that moment came when he received a bill from the city for $600 after he improved the sidewalk and installed some planters in front of his house on Fell Street. Lanier had gone through the proper planning and permit process and was confident everything he’d done was within the law. So why was he being fined?

With a little research, Lanier discovered that an ordinance, recently passed by the supervisors at the urging of the mayor, inadvertently took into account sidewalk fixtures such as planters when taxing property owners and merchants for putting up signs and cluttering rights-of-way. Lanier began to research how the law came to pass.

"I was told there were various meetings with the mayor," Lanier said. "I didn’t know when they were. So I started using the Sunshine Ordinance as a means to getting the mayor’s calendar. First I wrote a rather chatty letter asking for it, and there was no response. So I wrote a more formal request and also said maybe you ought to make your calendar public. The governor of Florida’s done it. It’s quite easy to do."

But it wasn’t easy for room 200. Lanier filed his original request March 3, 2006. A year later he has not received what he asked for. He’s been told by the Mayor’s Office of Communications that the calendar can’t be released because it tells exactly where Gavin Newsom is supposed to be and who is going to be protecting him. Lanier has urged the office to make the document public at the end of each week, once security concerns have passed. That hasn’t happened.

In addition to losing portions of the mayor’s calendar during a staff turnover and heavily redacting the few calendar items it has made available, the Mayor’s Office has not set or followed a policy regarding public access to this public document. But Lanier’s original request has not been dropped. Christian Holmer picked it up.

Holmer is sunshining for sunshine. A manual laborer by day, Holmer’s been a longtime resident of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and became volunteer coordinator of the San Francisco Survival Manual, a manifestation of the 40-year-old Haight Asbury Switchboard, once a clearinghouse of services and information for city residents. The modern-day equivalent is part of a public information pilot project approved in 2004 with the support of 10 members of the Board of Supervisors that encourages the sharing of all city documents in an open forum. Holmer makes regular and massive requests for all manner of information from a variety of agencies, urging them to employ the technological ease of e-mail to send him documents as soon they’re created by the city — in effect, CCing him on everything.

Holmer says the point is not only to compile a library of city documents but to establish best practices for the agencies that are supposed to provide information when the public requests it. By encouraging this free flow of information that takes, according to him, only a few keystrokes and mere seconds to disseminate electronically, Holmer hopes a culture of openness is being cultivated.

"You push a department to a certain level of compliance, and it raises all the boats," Holmer said.

James Chaffee began seeking public information about the San Francisco Public Library in 1974, long before the Sunshine Ordinance was born. The tall, professorial man has a habit of employing erudite references from literature, philosophy, and film in his regular newsletters decrying the secret actions of the Library Commission. His writings have received attention and acclaim in the national world of library news.

"The original library commissioners would be shocked if they could see the openness that exists now," Chaffee says.

He’s pushed for more weekend library hours and successfully brought enough attention to block the public library’s plans to purchase costly and suspicious radio-frequency identification tags and grant the task of collecting overdue fees to a debt agency.

Peter Warfield, executive director of the Library Users Association, and Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, picked up the radio-frequency issue and ran with it, making public records requests that might substantiate the library’s argument that thousands of dollars in workers’ compensation claims for repetitive stress injuries would be remedied by an investment in the expensive new technology.

The library wouldn’t turn over any documents, so Tien and Warfield went across the bay to Berkeley, which doesn’t have a Sunshine Ordinance (though the city is currently working on one). The Berkeley Public Library gave enough information to fully debunk the claims. Of more than $1 million spent on five years of workers’ comp, just 1 percent was for repetitive stress injuries. The Chaffee-Warfield-Tien efforts halted a nationwide move toward employing this potentially privacy-invading technology.

Then there’s Kimo Crossman.

Crossman is regularly criticized for his public records requests, which some city agencies feel are voluminous and burdensome. "I’ve had to stop the office a couple times. There are 300 people in this office," said Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office, which receives almost daily requests or reminders of requests from Crossman, the length and breadth of which bring some city departments to their knees.

Technology is Crossman’s interest, and he made his first public records request of the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services in September 2005, for contracts and related documents between the city and Google-EarthLink.

"As an interested citizen, I wanted to participate in the wi-fi initiative," Crossman told us. He received his request — with 90 percent of the information redacted. The DTIS claimed attorney-client privilege and the need to protect proprietary information to keep Crossman from seeing more than a fraction of the data.

Even though a specific section in the Sunshine Ordinance allows for the release of a contract when there are not multiple bidders and today the deal is strictly between the city and Google-EarthLink, the DTIS still refuses to hand over the documents Crossman wants. DTIS spokesperson Ron Vinson continues to cite the advice of the City Attorney’s Office.

The city attorney’s relationship with sunshine is a problem, according to Allen Grossman, a retired business lawyer. Grossman’s requests for information have transcended their original intent — some Department of Public Works permits for tree removal near his home on Lake Street. They have become an inquiry into why so many departments regularly employ the City Attorney’s Office to represent them when it’s a direct violation of section 67.21(i) of the Sunshine Ordinance. That section states the city attorney "shall not act as legal counsel for any city employee or any person having custody of any public record for purposes of denying access to the public." The public lawyers are permitted only to write legal opinions regarding the withholding of information, which must be made public.

"The whole purpose of that section was to level the playing field and get the lawyers out of it," said Grossman, who says the office ghostwrites letters denying access, putting citizens who may not have legal counsel to advise them at an unfair advantage. It’s not in keeping with the spirit of the law.

Dorsey defends City Attorney Dennis Herrera, pointing out that deputy city attorneys no longer represent departments at the task force when there’s a complaint. They’re still writing those letters, though.

"When we give advice on sunshine, it’s a matter of public record. We will prepare a written cover-your-ass statement," Dorsey said. "To some we would appear as the bad guy, but I yield to no one on our commitment on sunshine in this city."

Bruce Wolfe, a task force member who’s seen scores of departments employ the ghostwriting tactic, said, "There is one area that concerns me greatly — the use of attorney shield. The question is what is the city attorney’s role? The advice is important because that’s something every other department can use, but it shouldn’t just be some way to squiggle out of providing records."

Dorsey related a recent case in which KGO wanted access to Muni documents that identified the names of operators. "We provided the documents, but we redacted the names. If we lose to KGO in front of the task force, we have to turn over docs. If we lose to a court that finds we violated privacy, we’re on the hook for potential substantive damages. These results can get very expensive for taxpayers. There’s an act of balance that has to occur."

Many task force members, activists, and citizens agree that the ordinance and task force are wonderful tools but still lack the necessary bite. The task force has no power to review documents and determine if a department’s secrecy claims are true. And when a department is found in violation, there are no specific fines or penalties that the task force can levy.

But some are still happy the body even exists. "We have a great Sunshine Ordinance Task Force," said Michael Petrelis, who has been trying to find information about local AIDS nonprofits and advisory boards that are usually exempt from public records law — unless they receive city funding. Petrelis found that avenue into these organizations, and when they don’t comply with records requests it’s still a boon for him, because filing a complaint requires them to come and be accountable in front of the task force, an open hearing that Petrelis can also attend. "I have learned so much at those meetings, just observing," Petrelis said. "The task force process is so valuable in all its beautiful permutations." *

SF Weekly’s bizarre source

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By Tim Redmond

Whoa.
I just read Ron Russell’s big story in the SF Weekly about former Police Chief Earl Sanders, and I’m a bit dumfounded.
The gist of the story is that Sanders – the city’s first black police chief and the author of a a new book on the Zebra killings – trumped up his record as a civil-rights leader in the department and glossed over some real problems in his tenure as a homicide cop. That may be true; I haven’t read the book, although I know that Sanders was involved in a frame-up that sent two innocent young men to prison. (I know that because A.C. Thompson, who now writes for the Weekly, wrote about it for the Guardian – a fact conveniently left out of Russell’s story.)
But what left me reeling was Russell’s use of a source named Louis Calabro.
In the story, Calabro is portrayed as an entirely credible former cop whose comments about Sanders are worth legitimate consideration. He’s quoted numerous times. High up in the piece, he’s described as the emcee of a memorial for victims of the notorious Zebra killings and as “one of Earl Sanders’ staunchest critics [who] heads the European American Issues Forum, a group whose proclaimed mission is to promote the rights of persons of “European American” heritage.”
Actually, there’s a bit more to the story.
It’s not hard to learn about Calabro’s organization and his background. You can Google him and it comes up pretty quickly. This is a guy whose website eaif.org, has headlines like“Why the World Hates Jews Part 1” and “Why Do So Many People Hate Jews? He tried to trademark the term “white pride country wide” (the government demurred).
He has gone off on a tear, over and over again, against groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which provide anti-hate-speech materials to schools.
Calabro came by the Guardian office once to complain that I wouldn’t run his letters, and he tried to convince us that the real story about World War Two was the internment of German-Americans.
Calabro insists that his group is not racist and that it doesn’t condone negative comments about any racial group. And while the white-nationalist people at Stormfront post his stuff, some of the denizens there don’t particularly like him. In fact, he (properly) calls the hard-core white power people out for being racists.
Still, this is not a man who has any credibility whatsoever when it comes to criticizing the conduct of an African American cop in a complex racially charged murder case.
When I asked Russell about it, he emailed me and said: “Of course I know who he is. The story makes it abundantly clear where Mr. Calabro is coming from. I fail to see why you think quoting him was inappropriate.”
Well: I don’t think I’ve ever seen another credible media outlet refer to Calabro as anything other than someone whose opinions on race are well outside the mainstream of acceptability in a multicultural society.
Oops. I suspect that over at the Weekly, they’re having what we call the Big Cringe.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I made it through the week without anyone calling to complain about my analysis of the mayor’s race, so maybe for once I got it right: unless Gavin Newsom drops out or a third strike drops and it’s pretty bad, we already know what things are going to look like in the fall.

So we might as well get on with it: Matt Gonzalez and Ross Mirkarimi should get together and talk it out, then one of them should just go ahead and announce.

For a long list of reasons, there has to be a real mayor’s race this fall — and Tony Hall plus a few nutcases against Mayor Newsom doesn’t count. The progressives need someone to rally around, to get the old troops out and in the streets and some new ones trained and energized. We need to keep Newsom on the defensive, to keep our issues out there, to hold him accountable not just to his donors but to the rest of the city.

Never discount what a good challenge can do: there are a lot of reasons why Sup. Bevan Dufty has moved a few steps to the left over the past few months, but one of them is absolutely the fact that he had a progressive candidate running against him in the fall.

Besides, I actually think Newsom can be defeated.

Just look at his record. Since he hasn’t accomplished much of anything, he’s vulnerable on almost everything. Other than same-sex marriage, his major legacy at this point seems to be trying to hand out the city’s information technology infrastructure to Google and EarthLink. Go team.

And the city’s two leading Greens both have a distinct advantage at this point — nobody is going to accuse them of jumping into the race to take advantage of Newsom’s personal problems. Long before city hall got all steamed up, Mirkarimi and Gonzalez were talking about running — on the issues.

Gonzalez can raise a lot of money. Mirkarimi has done something few progressives ever pull off: turning public safety into one of our top issues. Like almost all candidates, they both have strengths and weaknesses, but in the end, it looks like one of them is going to be our contender this fall, and that’s not at all a bad thing.

We went after District Attorney Kamala Harris a couple weeks ago when she tried to make some changes in the pretrial diversion program that would have cut back on its effectiveness. Harris did the right thing; she and Public Defender Jeff Adachi reached an agreement that preserved the best of the program, which tries to steer first-time misdemeanor offenders into counseling and out of the criminal justice system.

Harris didn’t have to do that; the program is entirely under her control, and she could have told Adachi (and us) to take a hike and done it her way. But she showed that she’s a reasonable DA who is willing to listen.

Now, however, the thugs at the Police Officers Association are attacking her for her willingness to include misdemeanor noninjury assaults on cops as crimes that are eligible for diversion. (This is typically stuff like someone spitting at an officer or brushing against him or her during an arrest. We’re not talking about serious assaults here.)

Harris is standing up to the POA, but the rest of the city, including the mayor, needs to get behind her. *

Peeing by design

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› techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION If you think it’s hard to find a decent public bathroom in the city, try finding a bathroom for the gender ambiguous. People who appear androgynous, whether unintentionally or because they’re going for that cool genderqueer look, know that finding a bathroom is an ordeal. It sucks to walk into the women’s room and have the ladies tell you to get out just because you’ve got short hair and like to wear ties. Same goes for short, girly boys who get the hairy eyeball in the men’s room. Sometimes these nasty encounters get violent or lead to indignant bathroom patrons contacting security to get the androgynous interloper out of their binary gender space.

Luckily, this is one social problem that has a technical solution. A genderqueer hacker collective has created one of the best map mashup Web sites I’ve ever seen: Safe2Pee.org. It’s a dynamic, constantly updating map of publicly accessible, gender-neutral bathrooms throughout the United States. Just plug in the name of your city or town, and up pops a Google map with bathrooms marked with those spermy-looking markers that Google favors. Most of these are unisex, single-person bathrooms. But some are just gender free, as site co-developer Bailey puts it.

Visitors at Safe2Pee can plug in the location, gender status, and accessibility of the bathroom on a handy form. Even if the bathroom isn’t gender free but is simply in a nice spot, you can note that it’s gendered but really clean or available to anyone who comes into the place where it’s located.

As somebody who often has to pee while going for walks, I can’t recommend Safe2Pee enough — I can plot my course around the city based on where I can get to nice public bathrooms. And though I rarely get hassled for my gender presentation in bathrooms, I also hate having to declare my gender just because I need to take a piss. I’d rather just use the toilet without having to decide whether I look more like the stick figure in a dress or the stick figure without one.

What’s really great about Safe2Pee, however, is the matter-of-fact way it suggests that technology can help encourage gender tolerance. If merchants realize that having gender-free bathrooms will pull in more paying customers, there will be more incentive for people to build such bathrooms. Having a map of those bathrooms available online makes it far easier for consumers to make choices that nudge merchants in that direction.

Plus, just from a nerd point of view, Safe2Pee is full of yummy Web 2.0 goodness There’s a tag cloud for cities included in the database, in which the names of cities with more categorized bathrooms appear much larger than cities with fewer. You can also search the database by proximity to where you are or for particular types of bathrooms (i.e., ones you can use for free versus ones where you should buy something before asking to pee). Programmable Web, a blog about mashups, gave Safe2Pee a Mashup of the Day Award. And Bailey says the genderqueer hacker collective behind the site is growing. "The collective has morphed, at least geographically speaking," Bailey said via e-mail. "It has grown beyond the Bay Area and now it’s just me here. Others are in Seattle, Portland and Boston."

Not surprisingly, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Boston are also well represented in the bathroom database. But Bailey says the group plans to stick with it and keep expanding. The site coauthor draws a comparison between gender fluidity and geek attention spans when it comes to finishing projects. "When conventional notions of gender and sexuality are always blurred or challenged or in flux, I think perhaps all the fluidity carries over to form a particularly post-modern attention span." Or maybe Bailey is just a new breed of gendernerd, whose attachment to one particular gender identity morphs as often as an attachment to a particular flavor of Linux — or a particular API.

In my old workplace I frequently pasted over the gender markers on the single-room bathrooms — I printed "Carbon-based lifeforms only" on a piece of paper that was just big enough to cover the stick figure in a skirt. Luckily my coworkers enjoyed the joke, and we all made it an unwritten rule that we would use whatever bathroom was available, no matter what our genders. Now I plan to spread the genderfree bathroom meme online by adding good bathrooms to the database. When I can write a sentence like that, I really do feel like I’m living in the future. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who really has to pee right now.

The self-appointed censors at GoDaddy

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION On the morning of Jan. 24, Fyodor Vaskovich awoke to discover that his Web site, SecLists.org, had been transformed into a giant error message. The message said his domain couldn’t be resolved. This troubled him greatly: SecLists is an archive of several computer security–related mailing lists that contains more than 50,000 pages of technical information. It has thousands of visitors per day and nets Vaskovich a fair amount of income from Google ads. Where had the site gone? He checked with the registrar that sold him his site, GoDaddy, and discovered the megacorporation had changed the site’s name servers — addresses that tell your browser how to find the place where a Web site is hosted. Instead of his Web host’s name servers, he found this name server: ns1.suspended-for.spam-and-abuse.com

What the hell? Vaskovich checked his answering machine and found a message from somebody in the abuse department at GoDaddy telling him they were going to pull the plug on his domain. Based on his logs, it appeared that his name servers had been changed less than a minute after the call was made. Essentially, he’d been given a few seconds’ notice before a major Internet resource (and source of revenue) was shut down.

For the rest of the day Vaskovich was on the phone with GoDaddy trying to untangle what had happened. Luckily, he kept careful records. These records corroborated his story that he’d been given less than a minute’s notice and that GoDaddy repeatedly refused to give him customer service for several hours. At last he learned that SecLists had been yanked offline because MySpace contacted GoDaddy and requested it. One of the 50,000 pages on SecLists contained an e-mail in which somebody had listed the names and passwords of several MySpace users. Instead of asking Vaskovich to take down the page with passwords — which is standard industry practice — MySpace asked GoDaddy to squash the whole site. GoDaddy should have contacted Vaskovich first, and they could have asked for a legal takedown notice. But they didn’t.

What makes GoDaddy’s actions even more disgusting is that the passwords in question had been leaked about 10 days before GoDaddy took SecLists down. They appeared on dozens of other security-related and hacker Web sites. Security expert Bruce Schneier had even written a column in which he analyzed the quality of about 30,000 of the leaked passwords. (Among the top 10 popular passwords was "fuckyou," which completely mirrors my feelings for MySpace.)

So the point is passwords were already circuutf8g, and MySpace needed to tell its customers to change their passwords. Squelching SecLists wasn’t going to protect anyone. And yet GoDaddy’s general counsel, Christine Jones, defended its actions because she believed pedophiles would get access to children’s names and passwords. "For something that has safety implications like that, we take it really seriously," she told Wired News editor Kevin Poulsen. "I think the fact that we gave him notice at all was pretty generous."

Writing in his blog about the incident, Poulsen added, "Every link in internet service — network operators, hosting companies, and now domain registrars — willing to take on a censorship role increases the likelihood of legitimate content being suppressed." What this GoDaddy disaster makes clear is that instant censorship is possible, with no court oversight, at almost any point in the data chain. And for users who aren’t as savvy or well-connected as Vaskovich, getting shut down by GoDaddy would be essentially a death sentence for speech. Indeed, he told me that he couldn’t get any service from GoDaddy until he told their customer service rep that he spends thousands of dollars on domains with the company every month. Suddenly, he was told his two-day wait for service would be cut down to mere minutes.

In the short term, what this means is do not use GoDaddy as your registrar. Vaskovich has set up a protest site at NoDaddy.com, where you can learn more.

A spokesperson from GoDaddy said the company disagrees with the way Vaskovich characterized his experience. While the legal department at GoDaddy has not yet read the NoDaddy site, the spokesperson said the company will take legal action if any of its statements are untrue. Given that GoDaddy disputes Vaskovich’s story, such a suit seems inevitable. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who still isn’t clear on how, exactly, a pedophile would figure out which passwords on SecLists belonged to children.

The benefits of fiber

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Amsterdam is building a citywide fiber-to-the-premises system. So are Hong Kong, Milan, and Zurich. If San Francisco follows suit, it would be making a far-sighted, multifaceted investment: FTTP would boost our economy, attracting software companies, video production houses, and digital media shops. It would enhance public health, allowing surgeons to review the same materials from different locations. Municipal fiber would improve public safety, facilitating the mirroring and backup of vital data at remote, earthquake-safe locations. It would enable unlimited and open communications — breaking ongoing communication monopolies — and save buckets of cash within a couple of decades.

These futuristic findings are laid out in the fiber feasibility report Sup. Tom Ammiano commissioned two years ago, but the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services didn’t green-light it until last fall. As a result of this delay, the city’s Maryland-based consultant, Columbia Telecommunications Corp. (CTC), couldn’t complete its fiber study until after Mayor Gavin Newsom said he’d struck a wi-fi deal with the Google-EarthLink partnership that still requires the Board of Supervisors’ approval.

Newsom’s plan was threatened even before his recent scandals. City budget analyst Harvey Rose’s report on municipal wi-fi offered a scathing assessment of the Google-EarthLink deal. Board members will now weigh the two new reports — and the opinions of a growing number of critics of the deal — before deciding on the mayor’s wi-fi proposal.

"So far I have more questions than answers," Sup. Aaron Peskin said of trying to digest the budget analyst’s report. "Questions about free service and quality of service. Questions about the environmental and aesthetic impacts of installing antennas citywide. I’ve got questions about Google’s cooperation with a totalitarian government overseas. I’ve got questions reutf8g to the shitty service I’ve personally gotten from EarthLink. Questions about the municipalization of services and questions about other technologies, including fiber."

Peskin admitted he’s yet to read the fiber report, which lauds FTTP as "the holy grail of broadband" while explaining that wi-fi isn’t a competitor but a complement to fiber, since wi-fi’s key advantage is its "mobility and connectivity during movement."

That said, the report recommends building citywide fiber, which it describes as a "fat pipe all the way into the home or business." In the face of the public sector’s lack of interest in building fiber networks that would meet growing demands for bandwidth and speed in an equitable and affordable manner, the CTC report concludes that municipal fiber would rank San Francisco among the world’s most far-sighted cities "by creating an infrastructure asset with a lifetime of decades that is almost endlessly upgradeable and capable of supporting any number of public or private sector communications initiatives."

With fiber allowing numerous competitors to quickly and inexpensively enter the market and offer competing, differentiated broadband services and access, the report recommends a wholesale open-access model to facilitate "democratic and free market values" and enhance the city’s reputation "for visionary and pioneering projects."

The report estimates a citywide open-access wholesale model will cost $563 million but predicts it will spark economic investment and jobs. It recommends building a pilot network in a 12-square-mile economic development area that includes Bayview, Hunters Point, South Bayshore, Chinatown, the Mission District, Mission Bay, Potrero Hill, SoMa, the Tenderloin, and the Western Addition.

The study also observes that aside from supporting safety and communications systems (thereby saving the city huge and unending costs of leasing circuits from telephone companies) and providing higher quality, higher capacity, more reliable, securer service, fiber is the best backbone for wi-fi systems.

Or as communications activist Bruce Wolfe recently told the Guardian, "Wi-fi is a parasite looking for a wire."

Speaking to us, along with United Layer’s Tim Pozar, SFLan’s Ralf Muehlen, and Our City’s Eric Brooks, Wolfe stated that far from being "the naysayers, as we were accused after critiquing the Google-EarthLink deal, we’re actually the truthsayers."

The foursome, who are supporters and providers of current wi-fi services in San Francisco, said although wi-fi rocks when you’re at an outdoor café or checking bus schedules with a cell phone, fiber rules when you’re in a basement, on a fourth floor, or in need of reliable and efficient service or massive capacity.

"That’s why it makes more sense to roll out a joint fiber-cable-wi-fi system, because all the interference and bog downs would be solved by hooking antennas into fiber," Pozar says. "Putting a bunch of antennas up as a cloud over the city supposedly gives free users speeds of 300 kbps, but anyone making a phone call or downloading a video will drain everyone else’s speeds, and blanketing the city with transmitters will make the spectrum unusable by others."

Muehlen expects the wi-fi service his business provides to get "blown out of the ether, technically, or be severely compromised," by the proposed Google-EarthLink deal. "But I wouldn’t mind if I got a network that didn’t suck," he says. "I just want something that works."

Brooks said many people who can’t afford the Internet are "compartmentalized in lower-income areas. Why not begin by addressing those areas instead of giving away the whole 49 square miles to Google-EarthLink?"

He noted that it will cost Google-EarthLink an estimated $300,000 to pay into the city-run Digital Inclusionary Fund. "That’s a drop in the bucket in terms of providing residents with gear, training, and support that truly bridge the digital divide." *

More than the affair

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EDITORIAL OK: let’s put this all in perspective.

Gavin Newsom did something almost unbelievably, incalculably stupid. He’s in a lot of political and possibly legal trouble.

He has just admitted to having a drinking problem and is going to seek "treatment" — although it’s not clear at all what that means, except that he won’t be entering a residential center.

The heart of the scandal was just an affair — yes, an affair with a subordinate, which is a real problem (and something most of corporate America put an end to 20 years ago) — but nobody’s dead, he hasn’t started a war, the city isn’t about to collapse, and the world will keep turning. It seemed silly to us to call on Newsom to resign over that, just as it was silly for the Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton over an Oval Office blow job.

But there’s a much bigger problem here.

For months, long before this tawdry story made the front pages, it’s been clear that the mayor of San Francisco isn’t focused on the job. For whatever reason (and there may be many), Newsom has been checked out for quite some time now. As we reported in "Mayor Chicken" (1/10/07), he never attends public events that haven’t been carefully scripted. His relations with the Board of Supervisors are damaged beyond repair. He’s offering absolutely nothing in the way of leadership on the murder epidemic, the housing crisis, Muni’s meltdown, or much of anything else. He’s had plenty of time for glamour and glitz, movie stars, rides on the Google corporate jet, and the glitterati at Davos, Switzerland — but not much energy for the gritty reality on the streets of his city.

He is, we noted in our Jan. 10 cover story, "the imperious press release mayor, smiling for the cameras, quick with his sound bites, and utterly unwilling to engage in any public discussion whose outcome isn’t established in advance."

And whether we like it or not, this latest "lapse in judgment" — and Newsom’s embarrassing failure to deal with it properly — is only going to make things worse.

To be blunt, for a lot of reasons that have little to do with this tabloid sensation, we don’t see how Newsom can effectively run San Francisco for another four years. The mayor’s latest mess isn’t a scandal as much as a symptom of his shaky grip on the frighteningly tricky world of high-stakes politics. He’s acting like a dizzy kid at a rock star party who doesn’t have the maturity to handle what’s coming at him. Even his close allies have warned us that the wheels are coming off his administration. It’s not even clear that he wants to be mayor.

We wish Newsom well in his battle with alcoholism. But for the good of the city (and the causes he claims to care about), he’d be better off announcing he isn’t going to run for reelection now.

That wouldn’t be the end of his political career — plenty of people (John Burton comes to mind) have taken some time off from politics to deal with their personal lives and come back much stronger. It might be the best thing Newsom could do for himself.

Newsom says right now that he’s staying in the race, but he’s clearly wounded; that air of political invulnerability has taken a hit. When a local politician is looking bloodied, the sharks typically start to circle. That hasn’t happened yet; if anything, over the past few days, the highest-profile potential contenders have been pretty quiet about taking Newsom on.

But somebody has to do it. That’s never been clearer.

Running for mayor is serious business, and if there’s going to be a strong candidate challenging Newsom on the issues, the left needs to think about who it ought to be. Who has the experience and skills to take on the campaign? Who can appeal to a wide enough group of voters to win? Who has the sort of record and platform that progressives can support and unite around?

Those discussions need to start soon. But they need to be deliberate and thoughtful. Newsom’s political (and yes, personal) failures have given progressives an opening. There’s a chance to elect a mayor who really represents San Francisco values in deeds as well as words. Let’s take it seriously. *

More than the affair

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OK: Let’s all stop and take a deep breath.

Gavin Newsom did something almost unbelievably, incalculably stupid. He’s in a lot of political and possibly legal trouble. But in the end, it was just an affair – yes, an affair with a subordinate, which is a real problem, but nobody’s dead, he hasn’t started a war, the city isn’t about to collapse and the world will keep turning. It’s silly to talk about Newsom resigning over this, the same was it was silly for the Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton over an Oval Office blow job.

Besides, there’s a much bigger problem here.

————————————————

For months, long before this tawdry story made the front pages, it’s been clear that the mayor of San Francisco wasn’t focused on the job. For whatever reason (and there may be many reasons) Newsom has been checked out for quite some time now. As we reported Jan 10, he never does public events that haven’t been carefully scripted. His relations with the Board of Supervisors are damaged beyond repair. He’s offering absolutely nothing in the way of leadership on the murder epidemic, the housing crisis, Muni’s meltdown, or much of anything else. He’s had plenty of time for glamour and glitz, for movie stars, rides on the Google corporate jet and the glitterati at Davos – but not much energy for the gritty reality on the streets of his city.

He is, we noted in our cover story, “the imperious press release mayor, smiling for the cameras, quick with his sound bites and utterly unwilling to engage in any public discussion whose outcome isn’t determined in advance.”

And whether we like it or not, this latest “lapse in judgment” – and Newsom’s embarrassing failure to deal with it properly – is only going to make things worse.

To be blunt, for a lot of reasons that have little to do with this week’s tabloid sensation, we don’t see how Gavin Newsom can effectively run San Francisco for another four years. This latest mess isn’t a scandal as much as it’s a symptom of Newsom’s shaky grip on the frighteningly tricky world of high-stakes politics. He’s acting like a dizzy kid at a rock-star party who doesn’t have the maturity to handle what’s coming at him. Even his close allies have warned us that the wheels are coming off his administration. It’s not even clear that he wants to be mayor.

For the good of the city (and the causes he claims to care about) he’d be better off announcing now that he isn’t going to run for re-election.

That wouldn’t be the end of his political career – plenty of people (John Burton comes to mind) have taken some time off from politics to deal with their personal lives, and come back much stronger. It might be the best thing Newsom could do for himself.

——————————————————

If Newsom stays in the race, he will quickly (and for perhaps all the wrong reasons) be seen as deeply politically vulnerable. And when a local politician is looking bloodied, the sharks start to circle. The potential for a feeding frenzy – with half a dozen or more politicians who suddenly see City Hall Room 200 beckoning starting to jockey for support and stab each other in the back – is all too real. That’s a bad way for progressives to proceed.

Running for mayor is serious business, and if there’s going to be a strong candidate challenging Newsom on the issues, the left needs to think about who it ought to be. Who has the experience and skills to take on the campaign? Who can appeal to a wide enough group of voters to win? Who as the sort of record and platform that progressives can support and unite around?

Those discussions need to start soon. But they need to be deliberate and thoughtful. Newsom’s political (and yes, personal) failures have given progressives an opening. There’s a chance to elect a mayor who really represents San Francisco values, in deeds as well as words. Let’s take it seriously.

Fiber: A big fat pipe all the way into the home

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By Sarah Phelan

If you’ve read the 196-page study of fiber-to-the-premise that landed in the City the same week that Mayor Gavin Newsom was whooping it up in Davos, Switzerland, you’ll know that the report concludes that municipal fiber-to-the-premises is the most visionary way for San Francisco to go, and that the city should build a pilot network in the San Francisco Enterprise Zone, which is a 12-square mile economic development area that includes Bay View, Hunter’s Point, South Bayshore, Chinatown, Mission District, Mission Bay, Potrero Hill, South of Market, Tenderloin and the Western Addition.

“FTTP is the holy grail of broadband, a fat pipe all the way into the home or business,” states the executive summary, “but in the near future is only available for a privileged few located in the limited areas of private-sector deployment.”

Noting that private sector networks aren’t meeting this growing demand for bandwidth and speed in an affordable manner, the report states that “in this context of private sector disinterest, municipal FTTP would rank San Francisco among the world’s most far-sighted cities—by creating an infrastructure asset with a lifetime of decades that is almost endlessly upgradeable and capable of supporting any number of public or private sector communications initiatives.”

According to the report, fiber allows “numerous competitors to quickly and inexpensively enter the San Francisco market and offer competing, differentiated broadband services and access,” facilitates “democratic and free market values,” “affordable access” “economic development” and enhances, “the City’s reputation for visionary and pioneering projects; promoting major development initiatives such as revitalization zones.”

The report also notes that fiber “provides a highly reliable, resilient backbone for existing and future wireless initiatives,” supports current and future public safety and government communications systems, saving the City enormous unending cost of leasing circuits from telephone companies, and provides a higher quality, higher capacity, more reliable, more secure transport for key city users such as law enforcement, fire, emergency management and public health.”

In other words, it’s the kind of system that would be a life saver following a major earthquake.

None of which means that we shouldn’t be doing wireless, just not the
flawed Google Earthlink deal that Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing.

Fiber: A big fat pipe all the way into your home

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By Sarah Phelan
If you’ve read the 196-page study of fiber-to-the-premise that was posted online by he City’s Department of Telecommunications and InformationServices the same week that Mayor Gavin Newsom was whooping it up in Davos, Switzerland, you’ll know that the report concludes that municipal fiber-to-the-premises is the most visionary way for San Francisco to go. Oh, and that to really bridge the digital divide, he city should build a pilot fiber network in the San Francisco Enterprise Zone–a 12-square mile economic development area that includes Bay View, Hunter’s Point, South Bayshore, Chinatown, Mission District, Mission Bay, Potrero Hill, South of Market, Tenderloin and the Western Addition.

“FTTP is the holy grail of broadband, a fat pipe all the way into the home or business,” states the executive summary, “but in the near future is only available for a privileged few located in the limited areas of private-sector deployment.”

Noting that private sector networks aren’t meeting this growing demand for bandwidth and speed in an affordable manner, the report states that “in this context of private sector disinterest, municipal FTTP would rank San Francisco among the world’s most far-sighted cities—by creating an infrastructure asset with a lifetime of decades that is almost endlessly upgradeable and capable of supporting any number of public or private sector communications initiatives.”

According to the report, fiber allows “numerous competitors to quickly and inexpensively enter the San Francisco market and offer competing, differentiated broadband services and access,” facilitates “democratic and free market values,” “affordable access” “economic development” and enhances, “the City’s reputation for visionary and pioneering projects; promoting major development initiatives such as revitalization zones.”

The report also notes that fiber “provides a highly reliable, resilient backbone for existing and future wireless initiatives,” supports current and future public safety and government communications systems, saving the City enormous unending cost of leasing circuits from telephone companies, and provides a higher quality, higher capacity, more reliable, more secure transport for key city users such as law enforcement, fire, emergency management and public health.”

In other words, it’s the kind of system that would be a life saver following a major earthquake.

None of which means that we shouldn’t be doing wireless, just not the
flawed Google Earthlink deal that Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing.

The wi-fi elephant

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› sarah@sfbg.com

It’s been widely reported in recent weeks that San Francisco and the Google-EarthLink team have already reached a deal to offer free wireless Internet service citywide. In reality, the deal cut by Mayor Gavin Newsom is tentative and requires the approval of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and the Board of Supervisors.

And getting that approval looks increasingly unlikely in light of a growing chorus of critics and a scathing assessment of the plan that Board of Supervisors budget analyst Harvey Rose laid out in his Jan. 11 report on the feasibility of a municipally owned wi-fi system.

As Rose notes, even though the city’s technology consultant, Civitium, recommended that officials examine all alternative approaches to bridging the digital divide, the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) negotiated with Google-EarthLink "without conducting a more formal analysis of the feasibility of wireless broadband or a completed study of the feasibility of wired networks."

That study of various options, including a municipal broadband system using fiber, was requested by the Board of Supervisors on Oct. 5, 2004, before Newsom pitched his free wi-fi idea in his State of the City speech two weeks later. The DTIS and the SFPUC staff decided to fast-track Newsom’s plan; the fiber study began in June 2006 and is expected from Columbia Telecommunications Corp. (CTC) any day now.

Rose’s report questions why the city wasn’t studying all its options before going with the Google-EarthLink wi-fi system, which the mayor is pushing. Supervisors have now announced plans to study various digital options in board committee meetings and at the Local Agency Formation Commission before making any decisions.

All of this doesn’t bode well for Newsom because, according to Rose, the Google-EarthLink deal gives the two telecommunications giants potentially unfair business advantages, delivers San Francisco a technically flawed system, and leaves gaping holes in Newsom’s much-ballyhooed attempt to bridge the digital divide.

Rose’s not-so-rosy report reveals that EarthLink’s wireless network limits potential competition in the unlicensed radio frequency band, giving the company a quasi-exclusive franchise, "as any competitors would have to contend with EarthLink’s existing wireless signals."

The deal also gives EarthLink the appearance of a conflict of interest, because the company serves as wholesale network provider and one of the available Internet service providers.

The report warns that the plan’s sale and usage of user data for private purposes "exposes those utilizing the EarthLink wireless network to the wide dissemination of their personal data, even if such users opt out of the receipt of marketing materials." Rose also notes that Google gets exclusive access to users of EarthLink’s basic service — a setup that gives the telecommunications giant free access to millions of points of data, all in return for a free but slow service.

Perhaps most damning for Newsom, given the mayor’s repeated claims that the deal is all about helping the underserved, is Rose’s observation that the basic free service provided by EarthLink will be slower than existing DSL and cable Internet technology.

Rose writes, "To receive service roughly comparable to existing technology and similar networks being implemented in other cities, network users would have to pay an estimated monthly fee of $21.95, while 3,200 network users who qualify under a proposed ‘Digital Inclusion Product’ would pay a monthly fee of $12.95."

In the face of all these drawbacks, Rose recommends the board tell the city to reissue a request for proposals to allow for consideration of publicly owned, public-private, and privately owned systems — the three wireless models Rose contrasts in his 42-page report. While Rose concludes that it may be fiscally feasible to build municipally owned wi-fi, he notes the city would likely face competition from private interests and risk network obsolescence within a few years.

Rose suggests future proposals should provide wi-fi access for low-income residents that is "high-quality and free," including "state-of-the art connectivity that is at least equal in technological capability to nearby offerings," and "try to leverage existing public and private infrastructures." He also recommends such proposals include, to the extent practicable, the city’s existing fiber infrastructure — and incorporate results of Civitium’s and the CTC’s studies.

"Google-EarthLink only seems to be there to sell the advertising and collect the fees," Sup. Jake McGoldrick told the Guardian, as he vented frustration over how the Mayor’s Office and the DTIS focused exclusively on the Google-EarthLink deal.

"Every time they were asked for information that would advance other options, they stonewalled," McGoldrick said.

DTIS chief administrator Ron Vinson told the Guardian he hasn’t seen the fiber study, which was expected at the start of the year. "It’s not out yet. We haven’t seen it," Vinson said Jan. 19, the day after Newsom told the Chronicle that the wi-fi deal was too important to be killed off by politics.

But as wi-fi activist Bruce Wolfe told the Guardian, "It’s the mayor’s introduction of an insufficient plan that’s causing the situation to become political, when really it’s a technical question."

Fiber is a more reliable and faster technology than wi-fi, and it serves as a better backhaul to a wi-fi system than the phone lines that Google-EarthLink plans to use. Wolfe said the deal is "like buying diesel buses when everyone’s converting to hybrids."

He said San Francisco’s hilly, foggy, and built-out terrain means residents will get spotty wi-fi at best and no wi-fi at worst, particularly if they’re not within sight of a wi-fi node or on the third floor of a high-rise. Wolfe recommends that the city combine its preexisting fiber backbone and short-term contracts with groups of wi-fi providers to create a series of neighborhood access points, all managed by a nonprofit agency with technological expertise.

"If Google owned the city and needed to provide access to us, it wouldn’t go for a wi-fi-only solution," Wolfe said. "This is no time to be building a white elephant." *

Skin Flick

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Your question form says to "try to be interesting." Hmm, performance anxiety … and I’m only talking about sex!

My wife is very sensitive to tastes, and she gags on my pre-come. On the other hand, I really don’t like the reduced sensation of using a condom during oral sex. So I was considering temporarily sealing my urethra with some of that "liquid bandage" stuff — no mess for her, plenty of good feelings for me.

I have several concerns. This stuff is used on small cuts, so it should be safe, but are there any nasty solvents that would make it problematic? After it’s dried, are there any risks if it’s ingested? If it works, I hope to use it often, so how can it be removed without lasting damage?

Love,

New Skin

Dear Skin:

Well, you succeeded. Your idea is interesting, and (this hardly ever happens) it is new. We oughtn’t let the fact that it’s also kind of crazy stop us from celebrating its novelty.

Dude. New-Skin contains alcohol and oil of cloves. Fingernail polish may dissolve it. It can, apparently, stain floors and countertops. It is labeled for external use only, of course, and also as not for use on "mucous materials." Is the inside of your urethra not a mucous material? My guess is this stuff will not permanently damage you but will hurt like hell and be difficult to remove if it gets inside. It’s not designed to fill holes anyway, so it wouldn’t even work.

Or did you mean the newer, higher-tech liquid bandage, the stuff that’s basically Dermabond, a.k.a. superglue? Have you not thought through the ejaculation problem? How, exactly, do you expect this to work?

This leaves us with three possibilities: The spray-on latex condom, although offering many opportunities for hilarity, won’t work, because it’s supposed to cover your entire penis (you stick your dick in the can, I believe) and because it isn’t on the market yet. Paint-on sex latex (google "liquid latex" or "deviant") is nontoxic and more or less meant to go naughty places but also is not meant as a gap filler — not that your urethra is a gap, precisely, but you know what I mean. Plus, latex is meant to be kept out of body cavities.

Last up: using a regular condom but rolling it down to cover just the glans. This is probably your best bet. It’s not creepy-cool like fake skin nor especially innovative, but it’s also not likely to maim you or require dramatic and embarrassing medical intervention, which, if you think about it, is really the least we can ask of our marital aids.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I love having raspberries blown on my tummy — you know, when the lips are placed against the tummy and then blown, causing a vibrating and tickling sensation. I’ve loved this ever since I was a child and also love doing it. I don’t know how to bring it up with friends because I’m afraid they’ll think I’m weird. I only like women to do it to me, not guys! Is this unusual?

Love,

Herbert

Dear Herb:

Not at all. I know a number of people who are fond of the zerbert, at least one of whom can be instantly yanked out of the deepest, sloughiest slough of despond by the judicious application of sputtering lips to belly — but they are all babies. The reason nobody talks about this is that it’s something we do to entertain infants, like making faces or putting unusual objects on our heads. Few adults continue to laugh hysterically every time you put a stuffed pig on your head, and most would look askance at you for doing so.

Look, I don’t think this is even sex — it’s just something you do with your body that isn’t eating or excreting or sports, and we have trouble categorizing bodily acts that aren’t sex and aren’t any of those things either. We’re just weird about bodies. Perhaps we should all try to get over that, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

All that aside, though, nobody wants to hear you talk about this. If you’re lucky enough to find yourself frolicking naked with a likely female prospect, you can probably get away with it as a lighthearted, jokey thing, but do not bring it up over dinner, the way one might broach the topic of, say, S-M. People who wouldn’t blink on hearing that you are fond of pain or sex parties or any other normal kink like that might never feel quite the same about you after hearing you wax rhapsodic about belly raspberries. Probably because of the association with babies, the only people whose shirts we are allowed, even encouraged, to yank up without prelude or permission to shmoozle their tummy-tum-tums, it just seems a little unseemly.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Flush ‘N Fish

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We’ve been inundated with emails promoting this amazing toilet-cum-aquarium for the past few weeks — to the point that some of us around the office have created a running joke about making a movie about a killer fish that lives in the toilet called FIN ROT! It’s a fish tank, it’s a toilet tank, it’s a terrarium (yes you can put a lizard in there), it’s …..

fishnflush.jpg

FISH ‘N FLUSH! Interactive and events can be found here!

Yes, there’s fish in the clear tank — don’t worry, they come to no harm And even the mainstream Web media is into it. What next? Koalas in my dryer? Oh, you kids ….

PS on Google one of the search returns for this thingie is titled “Flushing Nemo” heh

Some questions for the mayor

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EDITORIAL Gavin Newsom doesn’t want to take direct questions from the supervisors. He rarely gets asked tough questions from the press and almost never from the public. Instead, as Steven T. Jones and Sarah Phelan report ("Mayor Chicken," page 13), all of his appearances are scripted, and he does a mighty job of ducking the hard questions.

But if he is indeed going to be holding a series of town hall meetings over the next few months, there’s a chance for the voters to pin him down. Here are a few things you might want to ask the mayor:

• Your own staff admits that the universal health care plan works only if employers are required to provide health benefits. Yet the Golden Gate Restaurant Association — your political ally — has sued to block this. Do you support the employer mandate? Will you call on the GGRA to drop the suit? Will you decline political contributions from the members of a group that is suing the city with the aim of destroying one of your key initiatives? Where will money come from if the suit succeeds?

• When you ignored the will of the voters and decided to hold these town hall meetings instead of appearing before the supervisors, you said the supes were invited to attend. But you knew it would be illegal for them to participate under the Brown Act without some expensive preparations. Why did you do that?

• Why isn’t your full appointments calendar posted on the Web? The only information the public gets is a listing of your public events. Where is the rest of the calendar?

• You say you support public power, but the city’s efforts are so far limited to Treasure Island and Hunters Point. If there were a ballot measure this fall calling for the city to buy out Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s system and set up a full-scale public power effort — similar to Sup. Tom Ammiano’s measure in 2000 — would you pledge to endorse it?

• The city’s general plan states that 64 percent of all new housing should be available for below-market rates. Sup. Sophie Maxwell has a proposal to make that city law. Do you support her legislation? If not, how will the city meet its affordable housing needs?

• The Planning Department acknowledges that the level of new market-rate housing being discussed for the eastern neighborhoods would inevitably destroy thousands of blue-collar jobs. Is that an acceptable trade-off?

• Broadband Internet service is arguably the most important public infrastructure American cities will build in the next 50 years. Why are you prepared to turn ours over to private industry? Would it not be worth $10 million — the estimated cost put out by Google and EarthLink — to build our own system?

• You asked for the City Attorney’s Office opinion that invalidated the successful referendum drive on the Bayview–Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan. Why aren’t you willing to submit this far-reaching plan to a vote? And if you believe in the plan’s community oversight provisions and deference to the Redevelopment Agency, why did you unilaterally offer the 49ers a new stadium at the old shipyard, which is within the plan’s area?

• Why haven’t you followed up on the promise you made a year ago, after expressing outrage over the racist and homophobic videos made by police officers, to form a commission charged with "changing the culture" of the Police Department? And after your office blocked a citizen-based community policing plan, why didn’t you offer some alternative? Are you content with the way the department is being run?

• Eight months ago, after vetoing a six-month trial period for closing JFK Drive to cars on Saturdays, you promised to study Sunday closures for six months and offer a compromise plan for Saturday closures. When can we expect that proposal, and will you now support Saturday closures?

Honestly: what’s so scary about answering questions from the supervisors?

We await his honor’s response. *

Earthlink/Google, here we come

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By Tim Redmond

The Ex reports this morning that Mayor Newsom claims he’s just “seconds away” from cutting a deal with Google and Earthlink to provide free WiFi in the city. So this will be tossed to the supervisors pretty soon — and already, Newsom is pulling the usual mayoral line, which is to demand that the deal be accepted as is, without a lot of changes.

Newsom will say that it took 10 months of complex talks to reach this point, and that if the board starts micromanaging the contract and making a lot of amendments, the entire deal could fall through. We’ve heard this same line over and over again.

The supes can’t be intimidated here, and I don’t think they will be. Because the deal that I’ve heard described is not terribly good for the city. For starters, the free wifi is pretty weak, 300 Kbs; to get a decent speed on your connection, you need to pay. Then there’s the long term aspect — it would lock the city into a private vendor for as long as 16 years.

I don’t think the supes should go along with this — at least not until there’s a good-faith effort to look into a city-run system.

Free wi-fi for everyone

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EDITORIAL Basic municipal infrastructure — roads, water and sewer pipes, train tracks, airports, that sort of thing — has traditionally been owned and operated by the public sector, and for good reason: private experiments with toll roads, profit-motivated water companies, and even city rail companies have typically been disasters. The fundamental building blocks that hold a city together are public goods, paid for by tax dollars, for use by all, either free or at the lowest possible cost.

We’ve argued for years that electricity ought to be in that category, and San Francisco is finally taking some cautious baby steps toward public power. But city officials are about to turn what could be the single most significant new piece of infrastructure in our lifetime — broadband Internet service — over to a private consortium. It’s a mistake, and the supervisors shouldn’t go along with the deal.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has made free universal wi-fi a key part of his political agenda, but through a process that’s been secretive and flawed from the start, he has chosen Google and EarthLink to put forward a proposal. As Sarah Phelan reported last week ("Selling Wi-Fi," 12/27/06), the two big tech companies are taking their road show around the city, trying to convince residents and businesses that their plan — which calls for limited free access combined with a fee-based system — will envelop the city in a wi-fi cloud, allowing anyone with a laptop to get instant Internet access anywhere in town, at no cost to taxpayers.

That may be true — but in the process, the city will be giving up a huge part of its future.

Ten years from now, maybe sooner, universal broadband will be as much a part of civic infrastructure as roads are today. Consumers will demand it. Businesses will insist on it. Public education will require it. Providing quality service to everyone — everywhere in town — will be an essential service. Why would we want to leave it to the private sector?

There are all sorts of problems with the Google-EarthLink proposal, starting with its lack of real universal access. Sure, everyone gets a connection — but at 300 kilobytes, it won’t be terribly fast. If you want to be able to quickly download music, videos, or large business files, you’ll need to pay by the month for an upgrade. Low-income folks, in other words, will be stuck in the slow lane. That’s not terribly fair.

It’s also not terribly surprising: these companies are out to make money. And over the years, their bottom line will drive the entire program.

There’s absolutely no need for that to happen. The city’s hired a consultant to look at creating a citywide network of fiber-optic lines under the streets, which is a fine idea, although it would take a few years to build. But even according to the Google-EarthLink consortium’s own estimates, the universal wi-fi network will cost only about $10 million. For a big-city public works project, that’s nothing. Almost every election, we approve another $100 million or so in bonds — for schools, community college buildings, libraries, parks, and police stations, all worthwhile projects. The city’s annual budget is more than $5 billion, and the cost of maintaining the network would run at about $2 million a year. This could turn out to be as important as anything the city ever builds — and it’s chump change.

The supervisors need to put the private wi-fi proposal on the shelf and immediately start plans to place a bond act on the next ballot to build a city-owned wi-fi and fiber-optic system that will offer true universal, free, high-speed broadband access for all. *

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Every time I have a problem with my cable TV service, I’m reminded how much I hate Comcast and why the city ought to be running its own municipal cable system.

The latest saga: a couple days ago, late in the afternoon, I was hanging out with my kids, and I noticed that we’d lost the signal on the TV. Yes, I am a terrible parent — the kids don’t need to watch TV at all, certainly not in the afternoon on a weekday. But I wanted to watch a football game (which doesn’t count against the ban on weekday TV), and Vivian, who is 4, wanted to watch the cheerleaders, which is my own personal nightmare, but what can I do? The damn tube didn’t work. I called Comcast.

A service tech told me that someone needed to come out to the house and look at the connection and set up an appointment for the next day, between 4 and 8 p.m. I hate these four-hour service windows, and the repair people are badly overworked and always late, but whatever: I rearranged my entire afternoon and evening schedule and sat at home waiting for the knock on the door. It never came.

Around 7 p.m. it occurred to me to call and see what was up. A computerized voice told me there was no scheduled service appointment at my address. Three times I tried to connect to a human being; three times I heard "please wait" over and over before the line disconnected.

I finally got through to someone by choosing sales instead of service (they always come to the phone to sell you stuff), and a nice sales staffer promised to route me to a service rep. Ten minutes later the line went dead again.

Hanging up on customers is not good, and blowing off a repair call without so much as a phone call when someone is sitting at home for four hours waiting is pretty lame. I don’t give up easy, so I went to Comcast.com and found a way to get a live chat with a tech (it’s not easy to find, but it’s there). Someone named Jennifer came on, accessed my cable box remotely, and — after 30 minutes of back-and-forth — told me it was broken and that I should go get a new one. No shit. Thanks, Jen.

Even in this world of high-end broadband, live chat on the Internet is slow and clunky. Jennifer and I spent half an hour accomplishing what would have taken about 45 seconds on the phone. Why couldn’t I speak to a live human being? Why won’t anyone at Comcast answer the phone?

Comcast spokesperson Andrew Johnson told me that the storm and power outages had messed up Comcast’s call centers, which is understandable. But this isn’t the first time this has happened to me (or, judging from the sorts of calls I get, to many of you).

Meanwhile, I really look forward to dealing with EarthLink and Google over wi-fi problems (see "Free Wi-Fi — for Everyone," this page).

We don’t have to put up with this shit. Cable and broadband are rapidly merging, and they’re part of the city’s basic infrastructure. San Francisco can run its own system, make enough money to pay for the operations many times over, cut rates — and be a whole lot more accountable when things go wrong.

What are we waiting for? *

Wifi wars

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› sarah@sfbg.com


Representatives of Google and EarthLink showed up at the Glen Park Recreation Center on Dec. 7 to push their plan to blanket the city with a wireless network they claim will provide free Internet for all. It was one of a dozen such dog and pony shows around the city this fall as the proposal heads for a decision by the Board of Supervisors, which will also consider municipally controlled alternatives to this public-private partnership.


Google’s Dan Zweifach kicked off the presentation by describing a world in which "you can make an international call for free, download music in Golden Gate Park, or check the Muni schedule from a bus station."


It’s an intriguing concept that faces challenges unique to San Francisco’s hilly, fog-prone, and built-out topography, which could interfere with wi-fi signals. To address these challenges, EarthLink’s Stephen Salinger told the audience of a dozen, his company plans to affix 40 wi-fi nodes (boxes that exchange signals with computers and other wi-fi devices) per square mile atop 1,500 light poles citywide.


At least that’s the idea. "If the poles aren’t city-owned resources, we have to negotiate with the private owner," Salinger explained, noting that the city owns about half the light poles and Pacific Gas and Electric owns the rest.


The proposed wi-fi blanket is projected to cost $8 million to $10 million to build and millions more to manage, with EarthLink in charge of the nodes and Google buying bandwidth from EarthLink so it can offer free wi-fi access throughout San Francisco’s almost 50-square-mile service area.


But what exactly does free wi-fi access mean? According to Zweifach and Salinger, access will be "completely free to the city and to taxpayers," just as Mayor Gavin Newsom promised in 2004. Unless, that is, people want faster access, in which case they can shell out $20 a month for EarthLink’s premium service.


"At 300 kbps, the basic service should be fast enough to download music or videos, but it could be a little slower, which is why we have the premium service," Salinger said. "The more people connect, the more speed and quality decreases."


Whether the free service will actually be a bait and switch is just one of many concerns critics of the proposal have raised. Some don’t trust the profit-driven corporations, some don’t like the wi-fi technology, and others criticize the sometimes-secretive process that led to the selection of Google and EarthLink. The supervisors have meanwhile ordered studies for a municipal broadband system and a municipal wi-fi system, both due back early in 2007, about the time when the Google-EarthLink system is expected to come to the board for approval.


The community meetings were designed to address myriad concerns, such as whether the wi-fi system will come with enough training and support so all residents will be able to use it. "We’ll partner with local businesses and individuals who want to get involved," Zweifach said. "We have 109 languages that people will be able to access. We’ll provide multilingual training."


That said, Zweifach noted that Google is only pledging online tech support, meaning those wanting phone support will have to sign up for EarthLink’s premium service.


Grilled about privacy concerns, Zweifach claimed, "We don’t track or look at Web sites that anyone visits, but we do look at the number of computers accessing a node. But there’s not much personal information needed to access the service. Just an e-mail address, a user name, and a password, so it’s more anonymous than most."


"But if you’re using our premium service, we’ll have your billing information," Salinger interjected, adding that with 5.3 million customers, "EarthLink is at the forefront of protecting privacy."

When a self-professed cancer survivor in the Glen Canyon audience accused Zweifach and Salinger of "discussing everything except health effects of blanketing SF with electromagnetic radiation," Zweifach countered that "wi-fi nodes are low-power devices, much like garage door monitors, which, if you were at the same level at a distance of 10 feet, would have 100 times less radiation than a cell phone. At streetlamp level, and therefore not on the same level as people, they have 1,000 times less radiation."


Reached by phone the following week, Ron Vinzon, head of the city’s Department of Telecommunications and Information Services, waxed enthusiastic about free wi-fi, a concept Newsom has promoted since his October 2004 State of the City speech.


"DTIS’s goal is to make sure we have ubiquitous service 24-7, whether you’re on the top of Twin Peaks or over at Cayuga Park," Vinzon told the Guardian. "We’re going to do the necessary testing to make sure it works well in all areas of San Francisco and that the entire city has reliable service. The only issue will be speed, not access."


But while Google-EarthLink hopes to secure a four-year contract with an option to renew three times, Vinzon said the city wants a flexible deal, "so that in four years we can do another needs assessment and the city would have the option to buy out EarthLink’s network at a fair market rate."


Asked about the possibility of an alternative digital universe in which the city would deliver free Internet access via municipally owned fiber-optic lines, Vinzon sounded slightly nonplussed. Specuutf8g that a wi-fi network could be up and running in 12 to 18 months while the municipal fiber route could take four years to roll out, Vinzon asked, "How many generations of kids do we want to see left out? When I talk to teachers, it’s clear who has a computer and Internet access at home. Those without are not doing as well. So we don’t want to address this in four years. We want to address it now. Doing municipal on the back of those who don’t have access right now is unfortunate."


Acknowledging that for wi-fi access to be truly meaningful, residents will need training and hardware — "If you don’t know how to use or even have a computer, obviously you won’t be able to bridge the digital divide," — Vinzon added that the city will release plans in the next couple of weeks to address digital inclusion concerns.


But with an officially commissioned report on municipal fiber set to thud onto the supervisors’ desks in January 2007, questions clearly remain as to whether the city would be better off rushing into a private partnership to put a wireless and not entirely free cloud over the city or taking its time to explore a system that could prove more reliable and ultimately less expensive in the long run. *

A geek’s new year

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TECHSPLOITATION I’m going to spend New Year’s Eve in Berlin with a large group of hackers gathered by the venerable Chaos Computer Club. Something about the idea of going to a foreign country to celebrate the new year has made me want to do the traditional thing and make a list of resolutions. Just to be sure I follow through on them, I’m presenting to you the unexpurgated list of my top eight geeky resolutions for 2007.


Relearn French. I took French classes from eighth grade all the way through graduate school, and at one (triumphant) point I was actually able to read André Gide’s L’Immoraliste entirely in French. It probably helped that the novel was full of gay sex, which has always been one of my favorite topics. But sadly, my French has withered away — much to the chagrin of my sweetie, who speaks with an enviable accent. Next year I will relearn and go to Paris. J’ai envie de manger le brie et les baguettes à côté de la Seine! Plus, every geek should be fluent in at least two natural languages.


Share more media. I’ve got a terabyte RAID array full of music. I’ve got DVDs full of TV shows I’ve downloaded from the Interwebs. I’ve got movies and games and a disgustingly huge book collection. Next year, I’m going to create more opportunities to share them with friends, acquaintances, colleagues, neighbors, whatever. Set the media free, I say.


Watch out for videomining. Now that Google owns YouTube and everybody is freaking out over video archives, I’m looking out for the ultimate videomining software. Ideally, I’d like a program that could find items in a video archive by genre (e.g., "look up all horror films") or search through them for sequences of images (e.g., "find scenes featuring dragons"). I’d also like a program that could search an individual movie for a scene or phrase (e.g., "find me a scene where Captain Kirk says, ‘Boo!’ ").


Protest the Schumer-McCain privacy-reaming bill. Senators Charles Schumer and John McCain have promised to introduce legislation next year aimed at stopping child porn and sex offenders from traipsing online. It would involve the creation of an "e-mail registry" for sex offenders and would force online service providers to police content on their sites, looking for the aliases of sex offenders and images of child porn. Not only is there a potential here for squelching free speech but also for invading privacy. Keep an eye on this one.

Laugh more frequently at the comments on my blogs. I get bizarrely bent out of shape when people make stupid comments about blog posts I’ve written. Despite the fact that blog comments as a genre are characterized by assholishness and snark, I continue to feel inexplicably wronged by them. This has got to stop. It’s time to view blog comments for what they are: comedies of the human condition.


Install Ubuntu on my desktop. I miss Linux. It just so happens that the two computers I use most are both running Windows XP, and neither is suitable for a Vista upgrade. My cute Vaio laptop has a laughable sticker that says "Vista capable," which roughly translated means "Screw you, hippie." When a friend of mine asked some of the Vista geeks at Microsoft if they’d tried the new OS on my laptop model, they apparently giggled uncontrollably. So it’s back to Linux for me, and I welcome the return of my open-source overlord.


Kill people in Halo. In my living room, nestled beneath my 50-inch plasma screen TV, are an Xbox and an Xbox 360. And yet I rarely use them to kill people. What the hell is wrong with me? Am I insane? The entire purpose of these devices is to turn myself into a cyberkiller and shoot the crap out of 13-year-olds in Singapore or Texas or some other exotic locale. Next year I will spend at least one weekend doing nothing but sitting in front of the TV and practicing my death moves. Watch out for me on Xbox Live — I’m going to hunt you down and blow your guts out. Then I’ll share some of my media collection with you to make up for it. But I will not buy a Wii. Do not try to make me buy one.


Hang out with mechanical engineers. Unlike electrical engineers and computer scientists, mechanical engineers know how to do useful postapocalyptic stuff like build bridges and generators and engines. They study extremely concrete things like, well, concrete. But they also study the way concrete shatters when hit by bombs. I want to know more about the mysterious ways of physical objects. Take me to your mechanical engineering lab. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who wishes all the geeks and nerds and dorks and weirdos a happy new year.

Guardian Guide: Comfort food and joy

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>www.tablehopper.com

Wintertime has descended, which means it’s high time for wonderfully unhealthy, heavy eating (a food coma is as close to hibernation as you can get). The chilly nights practically demand that you keep yourself in extra cuddly form, but at least you can hide your pale, flabby body under coats and sweaters. As we know, San Francisco’s Victorian and Edwardian apartments can be hella drafty, so when your fingers feel like frozen Vienna sausages and you need a break from wrapping presents, here are some hot spots around town guaranteed to warm you — and fill you — right up.

TURTLE TOWER
Nothing gets you toasty like a big bowl of soup, so count your lucky stars there are Vietnamese pho joints all over this foggy, damp city. The finest of them all is Turtle Tower, where you get some of the best pho in the city, and it’s ridiculously cheap. At the first sign of a cold, get yourself a bowl of their pho ga (chicken noodle) soup — you’ll score a pore-cleaning blast of steam as you slurp the delicate hand-cut noodles. You can really sweat a cold out with a bowl of the beef soup, like the pho soc vang — and feel free to go nuts adding some spicy, sinus-clearing sriracha to it.
631 Larkin, SF. (415) 409-3333

SUZU NOODLE HOUSE
The Japanese have turned noodles into an art form (it’s right up there with bonsai), but it’s a shame so few eateries in our Japanophilic town give them much respect. One place that knows how to rock the ramen right is Suzu, nestled in the bottom of the Japantown Kinokuniya complex. It’s a small space, but the options for bowls of tender udon and silky ramen are varied and numerous. Some swear by the chicken kara-age (fried chicken), but the mabo ramen is the truly irresistible choice: tofu and ground pork in a somewhat spiced broth. Slurp.
1581 Webster, suite 105, SF. (415) 346-5083

MATTERHORN SWISS RESTAURANT
The only snow we tend to get is in the bathrooms at the clubs, but you can still make like Hans and Heidi and head over to this quirky chalet for a winter wonderland night of fondue. Take your pick from a variety of cheese and beef fondues and start dunking chunks of baguette (carbs and calories be damned). You can even choose extra sides for dipping, such as apple, sausage, and mushrooms. But a ticket to ride to this alpine fantasy comes at a price — not quite a Swiss bank withdrawal, but still: cheese fondue is $34 for two, beef is $44 for two, and sides are $4 each — and if you have your heart set on some chocolate fondue for dessert, you’ll pay $16 for two. (“Edelweiss” not included.)
2323 Van Ness, SF. (415) 885-6116

ABSINTHE BRASSERIE AND BAR
The French have it down with soupe a l’oignon gratinée. Really, what’s not to love about crusty bread, sweet golden-brown onions, chicken and beef broth, a whisper of brandy, fresh thyme, and melted Gruyère cheese? It’s the original meal in a cup, or bowl for that matter. And one of the better bowls of this wonder stuff can be had at Absinthe, working a très charmant brasserie environment to accompany a menu of Frenchie classics. Finish or, heck, bookend dinner with some primo cocktails from the bar, and you’ll leave toasty and a little toasted.
398 Hayes, SF. (415) 551-1590, www.absinthe.com

WALZWERK
The Germans practically invented hefty food, and if there is ever a time to scarf down some schnitzel or sauerbraten, these cold-ass months are it. Two East Berlin lasses run this homey neighborhood joint and will ensure you are well fed without totally lightening your wallet (entrées clock in at less than $15). And vegetarians, achtung! Now is the time in Sprockets when you eat, since there are a rather tasty vegetarian schnitzel and a meatless cabbage roulade on the menu, both served in generous portions with mashed potatoes. Bonus: this place is always warm and packed with friendly bodies, partially due to the seriously legit beers on tap. Prost!
381 S. Van Ness, SF. (415) 551-7181, www.walzwerk.com

BAR CRUDO
Ahhhhh, chowdah. There’s a reason anglers are able to keep fueled and warm on the stuff — it’s hot, filling, and hearty, and the boys at Bar Crudo are happy to make sure you leave feeling like a nautical warrior, even if you work for Google. This rich and savory chowder has fresh clams, cod, squid, and potato, plus some hunky hunks of smoky bacon, all in a cream-loaded broth that makes you grateful you’re not lactose intolerant. Order up an ale from the extensive beer list, and you’ll be calling yourself Long John Silver in no time. Oh, wait, he was a pirate.
603 Bush, SF. (415) 956-0396, www.barcrudo.com

POLENG LOUNGE
So your socks are soggy and your nose is runny? Let’s pretend you’re maxing and relaxing at a balmy locale instead. Poleng’s tropical feel, complete with batik, a water wall, and other island-evocative decor, should help. And for some weird reason, it can also feel quite stuffy, so the resort fantasy isn’t too far-fetched. Thanks to the talented Filipino chef, you can feast on an array of Asian small plates that are as delish as they are affordable, such as fried chicken adobo wings, lumpia Shanghai, and garlic crab noodles. Don’t miss the tea service, which is almost as effective as self-warming seats in a Saab.
1751 Fulton, SF. (415) 441-1751, www.polenglounge.com

TADICH GRILL
San Franciscans know wintertime is all about Dungeness crab. And when there’s crab, there’s a bowl of the quintessential San Francisco treat out there with your name on it. Not Rice-A-Roni, friend — cioppino. Belly up to the counter at Tadich, and you’ll get a big steaming bowl of clams, prawns, scallops, bay shrimp, crabmeat, and white fish, with garlic bread on the side. You can also warm up with a bowl of its various chowders or some Chesapeake Bay oyster stew. For those who have never had a Tadich experience, just know the long-standing waiters here are about as salty as your Saltine cracker, so don’t try any funny stuff, kid.
240 California, SF. (415) 391-1849

LUNA PARK
Luna Park is already a favorite of comfort food junkies for its warm goat cheese fondue, oven-baked mac ’n’ cheese with broccoli and applewood-smoked ham, and other stick-to-your ribs savories for less than $20. But this holiday it’s time to release your inner kid, the nice one who wants to decorate cookies (not the bad one who throws rocks)! From Dec. 10 to 25, you can come in and decorate your own gingerbread man and Christmas tree cookie with all kinds of candies and toppings. You can also warm up like an adult with a mug of Santa’s Little Helper, Luna Park’s brandy- or whiskey-spiked eggnog. It comes with a bar of dark chocolate, perfect for stirring and eating naturally.
694 Valencia, SF. (415) 553-8584, www.lunaparksf.com

ELLA’S RESTAURANT
This friendly little eatery is well-known around town for its killer brunch, but a lot of people are just learning about its ridiculously affordable dinners too, thanks to the new owners. Chow down on homey neoclassical American faves such as slow-roasted lamb shank, roasted free-range chicken, and Shiraz-braised short ribs, with not a single dish more than $16 in that little roundup (and you get some fab veggie sides). Any place that serves chicken potpie is a champ, but how about chicken hash, for dinner? Uh, yeah, bring it on. Fill up on the homemade bread too.
500 Presidio, SF. (415) 441-2238, www.ellassanfrancisco.com

KOKKARI AND TERZO
Most San Francisco fireplaces have been converted into receptacles to store crappy gas heaters, but there are a couple spiffy restaurants around town that understand the importance of a good, crackling fire. Nothing quite tops the fireplace at Kokkari, which does double duty as a rotisserie for various meat treats such as spring lamb, whole Red Wattle pig, duck, goose, and goat. (No Duraflame here.) Meanwhile, newcomer Terzo has a cozy hearth that complements its slick and attractive space; its extensive menu of Mediterranean and seasonal small plates supplies some old-world hominess.
Kokkari, 200 Jackson, SF. (415) 981-0983, www.kokkari.com; Terzo, 3011 Steiner, SF. (415) 441-3200, www.terzosf.com

WOODWARD’S GARDEN
A steamy room isn’t normally considered an asset, but when it’s nippy out, nothing quite beats the front room of Woodward’s Garden for snuggly respite. The open kitchen cranks up the ambient temperature and sends out seasonal and substantial dishes such as pork chops, lamb shanks, and homemade ravioli. Depending on what’s cookin’, you also might walk out smelling a little smoky, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.
1700 Mission, SF. (415) 621-7122, www.woodwardsgarden.com

Mit-what-a?

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Got a question for Andrea? Click here to ask!

Dear Andrea:
I’ve heard two men recently refer to “Mitusa” as a fabulous oral technique to use on a woman, but they were reluctant to explain it. What is it and why the secrecy?
Love,
Dying To Know
Dear Dying:
Maybe they don’t know themselves what it means? I never do. I’m still not sure I know what the “butterfly technique” is, and I can never remember if it’s “tea bagging” or “snowballing” that was invented for some stupid movie, or was it “tea-balling?” “Snow-bagging?” Why not? They’re all equally plausible if you ask me.
Sometimes I fear that by the time my kids are old enough to pick up the latest smutty slang from their peers and bring it home to puzzle their parents, I’ll be too feeble to keep up: “Skazzy? What’s that? Did you say that song ‘has fangs?’ What? Why, in my day we called cool things hot and hot things cool and that was good enough for us, dadgummit.” Eventually, we all end up like my poor 80-year-old uncle, whom we dragged to the Borat movie without adequate briefing ahead of time. Two days later he was still gamely trying to figure out if Sacha Baron Cohen is really Kazakh or what and if he always has that mustache.
“Mitusa,” as a sex word, has made barely a ripple on Google, so I assumed reasonably enough that it was just another flash-in-the-pan pseudotechnique and thus safely ignored. According to one of the very few hits not referring the curious reader to industrial lift pumps or the Maritime Industries Trade Union of South Africa, “Mitusa” supposedly refers to giving a woman light little touches with your tongue instead of, I don’t know, jabbing at her like her lady parts require tenderizing or just drooling on her. I’d think little light tongue-touches could simply be considered one phase of any ordinary oral sex session — you do a little of this, a little of that, a little light-tongue-touching — but I’d be wrong. People have an apparently insatiable urge to catalog these things exhaustively, and some have a need to then lord it over other people with their special secret knowledge. People are silly.
Further reading, however, turned up a rather fascinating article on a very not-my-style site called holisticwisdom.com, which sells sex doodads with a vaguely feminist spin and seems very well-intentioned, although I beg to differ with them over the source of the ejaculate in female ejaculation. The site’s founder, one Lisa Lawless, PhD, CEO (not to be confused with Lucy Lawless, Xena), who was also asked this question by a reader but was inclined to do more serious sleuthing than I was, has turned up something both interesting and disheartening, if not surprising. Mitusa, it turns out, is not merely a mysterious and possibly nonexistent oral sex technique, it is a proprietary mysterious oral sex technique, the private property of somebody called Jill McSomething, who wishes to sell it to you or allow you access in exchange for filling out a lengthy marketing survey. The technique, according to some poor suckers who actually ponied up for it, is either a confusing mishmash of not-at-all mysterious techniques you already know about or else a badly translated version of the well-known Sam Kinison alphabet technique. Either way, nothing earth shattering.
But wait, there’s more (and stranger): until exposed by Lawless on her site, Ms. McWhatever was marketing the technique exclusively to men, apparently in an attempt to present the product (to men) as something that could be dangled in front of prospective conquests (“I know Mitusa, baby”) who would be so intrigued that they would happily follow some schmo back to his swingin’ bachelor pad (or parent’s’ basement) and hop obediently onto his face. Happens all the time.
Ms. Lawless, PhD, CEO, also discovered what appears to be some sort of viral marketing scheme in the form of (fake? who knows?) LavaLife posts where women warn that “you’d better know Mitusa.” The best thing I can say about this sort of campaign is that in this case, at least, it seems not to work, leaving product and proprietor in well-deserved obscurity.
I think we’re safe from this one, and I hope there’s no reader who would be silly enough to fall for anything so ridiculous, but I’ve got to say it anyway just in case: there are no secret, never-before-discovered sex techniques. There is no series of arcane exercises from the ancient Levant which will miraculously enlarge your penis. There is not — I guarantee this — any technique, drug, or ritual offering to the gods that can “guarantee extremely intense orgasms,” as Ms. McWhatev’s site purportedly claimed Mitusa could do (the site has since been taken down but has undoubtedly been reborn somewhere as the same old crap masquerading as some new crap). On the upside, there is also precious little you can’t learn to do if you get off your ass and off the Web and practice, practice, practice.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Crap of the future

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› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION Because I write about technology and science for a living, a peculiar burden falls on my shoulders every holiday season. I’m expected to make pronouncements about what stupid gadgets people should buy for the holidays. I’ve already been asked repeatedly if I’d rather buy a Wii or a PlayStation 3. I’ll admit I found it vaguely glamorous that people were shooting and rioting in line while waiting to buy the PlayStation — it gave me that retro concert-trampling-frenzy feeling. But it didn’t make me want to own one.
However, I reserve the right to do another thing that tech-sci writers are supposed to do: predict the future. So instead of bitching about the stupid holiday gadgets of today, allow me to predict what kinds of lameass holiday crap I’ll be bitching about in the future.
1. Peer-to-peer brain distribution client: Everybody is uploading and downloading their brains via the Internet. It’s certainly the best way to travel — just upload your brain in San Francisco and download it into another body in France. The problem is bandwidth. With everybody uploading and downloading their brains around the holidays, the network gets awfully slow. That’s why Yahoo! BitTorrent has introduced the P2P brain distribution client, which allows you to store several copies of your consciousness on multiple computers across the network. Downloading goes a lot faster because you grab segments of your consciousness from different computers at the same time, assembling it piecemeal at your destination. The problem is that sometimes the pieces arrive out of order, so you spend half an hour thinking the Star Wars series has gotten better over time. Also, people often mislabel copies of your consciousness. You think you’re downloading your mind, but actually you’ve gotten Cher’s childhood or somebody’s false memory of being abducted by aliens.
2. DNA DRM: The latest solution to the problem of media copying is a digital rights management (DRM) scheme that relies on identifying the DNA of the consumer. When you purchase a piece of media, your licensed copy is encoded with 13 unique sequences of nucleotides from your genome. Each time you hit the power button on your new DNA DRM Zune media player, a hair-thin needle painlessly pierces your flesh and feeds a drop of blood into an embedded genome sequencer. If you are the registered owner of the media, you are permitted to play it. If you aren’t, the media is deleted from your device and a record of your transgression is reported to the central media certification authority. You will be forced to pay an extra “unlicensed play penalty tax” to license it next time. The only thing good about this system is that biohackers can take the DNA DRM Zune apart, remove the embedded sequencer, and use it to figure out if they have cancer.
3. Animal mashup maker: A home biology kit for kids, the mashup maker lets you create new animals by combining the best of all your favorite pets’ genomes. What could go wrong? The dats and cogs are great, but when you start getting into fish-frogs or bird-fish or snails combined with anything, cleaning the litter box really gets kinky. Also the product tie-ins suck. I’m going to spit if I see another one of those cutsey, knitted lizard-pig holsters.
4. Retinas-B-Gone: While I sympathize with the political project that inspired the invention of this device, I’m not sure the means justify the ends. Retinas-B-Gone temporarily burns out people’s retinas to stop those annoying in-eye ads. But this extreme adbusting technique feels too much like poking out your eyes to spite your own ubiquitous mediascape. Plus, people could get hurt. What if unscrupulous users start burning out everybody’s retinas in traffic? And what if there are people who want to see the price of toothpaste flashed into their eyes as they pass the Walmart-Google store? I don’t like seeing those tiny ads marching up the side of my vision either, but sometimes it’s worth it to see a free movie. At least the damn things are relevant, though admittedly it’s weird to see plugs for cheap funerals when you’re watching the death scene in Romeo and Juliet. Instead of tearing your retinas out and feeding your blood to the Zune this holiday, why not learn how to build a potato launcher or a Tesla coil instead? Or go write some free porn for asstr.org, fer chrissake. This is the season for giving! SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who will be celebrating the holidays by eating your brain.

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