The Fifth Column

Cory Doctorow: Copyright versus Universal Access to All Human Knowledge and Groups Without Cost

Thu, 12 Nov 09 21:51:46 GMT

Cory Doctorow joins us tonight on one of his surprisingly frequent visits to Canada. The UK-based writer joined us in Waterloo during the Quantum to Cosmos festival. He� made an appearance on the Agenda, and also gave this talk which is a great backgrounder on his involvment as an activist in the field of copyright, fighting the copyfight. Once you're up to speed, come join tonight's livechat at 8 p.m.

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Threatened Voices: Map of bloggers under arrest and under threat around the world

Tue, 03 Nov 09 22:57:45 GMT

From organizing protests in Tehran to vote-swapping in Canada, social media is proving itself as an established organizing and communications tool. People use it, and often use it effectively. Naturally, some of those people are going to run afoul of the authorities they are organizing against.

Sami Ben Gharbia of Global Voices Online just launched an interesting new site: Threatened Voices.

The site also has a timeline tracking the trend of arresting bloggers over recent years.

You'll notice there's one entry for Canada. That's New Brunswick blogger Charles LeBlanc, who was arrested twice. Once he was rounded up with protestors, and again after he entered the New Brunswick legislature despite being barred from the premises.

Another Canadian blogger is in jail in Iran, and this week's episode of TVO's podcast Search Engine looks at his case:

Canadian Hossein Derakhshan brought blogging to Iran, reversed his politics, made enemies on both sides, got arrested and hasn't been heard from since- until now.

While "Hoder" remains in a Tehran prison, his brother Hamed brings news, breaking his family's silence.

Online attacks: Activists are being targeted, but why?

Wed, 28 Oct 09 21:26:31 GMT

Our friends over at the Citizen Lab, forever digging through lines of code to uncover and understand malware attacks at home and abroad, have published a new report looking at vulnerabilities among civil society organizations to malware attacks.

According to their research, many civil society organizations (NGOs, charities, etc.) are often seriously compromised, virus-ridden and used as vehicles to deliver online attacks.

Citizen Lab's investigation looked at incidents involving sites like 64Tiangwang.com, a site that reports on people who have disappeared in China; an email that appeared to come from the head of the Office of Tibet in Geneva, Switzerland, that linked to a Reporters Without Borders petition; and even a malicious link left in the comment section of a BoingBoing post about the Uighur crisis.

Many of the attacks exploited security loopholes in software that allowed the attackers to implant malware or set up "phishing" attacks, tricking people into entering sensitive information like passwords into seemingly legit login prompts for email sites.

You might assume that because these attacks seem to be specifically targeting these causes, they are likely perpetrated by their opponents (in the case of any of the instances looked at in the Citizen Lab report, it would be natural to suspect the Chinese government). But that might not be the case.

It makes sense that these kinds of activist sites are targeted for cyber attacks. As the saying (that I keep saying, and hat-tipping Ethan Zuckerman for) goes, you can tell an internet service is useful if there is lots of pornography, pictures of cute cats and activists on it. Even as netiquette slowly reaches the point where people can resist the urge to mass email any joke they've been forwarded, petitions and noble causes appeal to our better moral instincts to the point that they sometimes override our common sense about how the online world works. Activists of every degree are everywhere online. I imagine at some point everybody who spends much time online gets involved in a cause.

The fake email from the Office of Tibet in Geneva actually did link to a real Facebook petition. But evil was lurking in the code that led from the email to the petition. And so people were unaware they were spreading a link that can also impair security, steal private information or turn their computer into a zombie.

These civil society groups are being targeted, but it may not be because of their beliefs. Instead, it could be because they are relatively easy marks that spread links widely and sometimes without much scrutiny. Although the authors of the Citizen Lab report admit they are unsure who was behind the attacks, they recognize this possibility.

"One could argue that the attacks are somewhat coincidental. The civil society organizations may just be running vulnerable software that was (automatically) exploited and used just like any other random target as a vehicle to propagate malware through the insertion of a malicious iframe. That is, there is no intent to target civil society specifically. Similarly, using a human rights themed email in a social engineering attack might just be a convenient way to get peoples’ attention; it is not about targeting civil society per se, just that human rights is an appealing topic and people might more easily enticed to click on such a link."

Still, the authors say the quality of the fake email in the Tibet case might imply that the culprit is specifically targeting Tibetan activists.

"The text of the emails contain less spelling and grammatical errors and exploit legitimate email and petition campaigns. The level of specificity and intentionality exceeds the threshold for a group of attackers that simply wants to infect as many hosts as possible. On the contrary, these attacks actually may limit the total number of hosts but provide the attackers with politically sensitive hosts."

Still, even if attacks target "politically sensitive hosts," that doesn't mean they are done for political reasons. An activist organization is, well, active and organized. They have a team of people dedicated to spreading content and a network of people who are receptive to clicking on and forwarding the links that organization distributes. Harnessing high-yield users like this is much more efficient than blasting rafts of infected links randomly into the web. Perhaps the increased quality of the fake emails, which is a trend the Citizen Lab has been seeing more of, is simply a higher bar these attackers need to clear to take advantage of a more valuable and efficient victim. It makes sense to try this whether attackers are opposed to these activists' causes or not.

For a broader look at the world of online activism, check out our recent show The Limits of Digital Activism.

Quantum to Cosmos: Another episode of imagining the future

Sat, 24 Oct 09 01:47:32 GMT

Check out the fourth installment of Imagine the Future. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, sci fi author Neal Stephenson and Hod Lipson, an expert on evolutionary robotics, design automation, rapid prototyping, artificial life, and creating ‘self-aware’ robots, take a look forward and suggest what tomorrow will look like.

Quantum to Cosmos: Two more videos where scientists use their expertise to imagine the future

Thu, 22 Oct 09 23:59:56 GMT

For the second installment of Imagine the Future, wer're joined by Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist from Arizona State; Daniel Gottesman, a quantum computing expert from the Perimeter Institute; and Katherine Freese, a theoretical physicist from University of Michigan.

And in the third installment, S. James "Jim" Gates, Jr., director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland; Robert Richards, founder and CEO, Odyssey Moon Ltd.; and Eliezer Yudkowsky, an artificial intelligence theorist at the Singularity Institute.

These videos were created by the Agenda's David Erwin.

Quantum to Cosmos: top scientists use their expertise to predict the future

Thu, 22 Oct 09 18:23:15 GMT

With the Perimeter Institute packed with great minds working on groundbreaking research, the Agenda's David Erwin took the opportunity to pull some of them aside to ask, based on their expertise and research, what the future would look like.

In this first installment, answers from Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X Prize Foundation, Mark Tovey, a cognitive scientist from Carleton University and Anton Zeilinger is a professor of physics at the University of Vienna and the Director of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Does Twitter have a public option?

Fri, 16 Oct 09 18:39:56 GMT

Show of hands: how many people here use social media online? Everybody? Grand.

As companies like Twitter and Facebook become increasingly ubiquitous, and the moms of the nation subscribe to RSS feeds of tweets from the sons and daughters of the nation, the question of how these companies are going to stay afloat in the long term.

With the announcement that Geocities, "the MySpace of the 90s," is turning off the lights on Oct. 26, it's worth considering what happens if a site like Facebook, where people log hours and hours putting up their photos and links so they can sort and share them, goes poof. Geocities started up in 1994 and was bought for a princely US$2.9 billion by Yahoo in 1999. And its popularity plummeted almost immediately and it never made much money.

In a recent article in the Washington Post under the headline "Twitter.org", Bo Peabody talked about his own challenges making money when he launched the social networking site Tripod in 1995:

As millions of members poured into Tripod, my investors and I thought the advertisers would follow. They never did. Advertisers need to be sure that they are reaching the right audience with their message. They have more assurance of this on search engines such as Google or content sites such as WebMD, where information is controlled and organized, and to whose profits investors have flocked. But on social networks, users can post anything they want. In one meeting with a top advertiser, I was asked to pull up a random Tripod member page. What I got was a picture of someone's condom collection.

I hate when that happens.

Peabody says, "Almost 15 years later and as one of the Web's largest social networks, Tripod generates the same advertising revenue in a year that Google does in an afternoon."

There are options available to these companies. The most obvious one is asking users to pay to use the service. (The internauts raise their voices in unison and shout "ZOMG, NEVER!!!!1!")

However, paying to use a social network can work in some instances. Particularly ones where a select audience wants, and maybe needs, specific information. (This is the same reason why the Wall Street Journal can get away with setting up a pay wall for its business stories, but can't get away with it for its general news.)

Ethan Zuckerman, responding to Peabody's piece, provides an example:

My friends at Dopplr just sold their excellent social network to Nokia – congratulations, guys! Dopplr didn’t have am enormous userbase… but the users of the service include a lot of high net-worth individuals and ludicrously frequent travelers, the sort of targeted community that’s excellent for advertisers, or just for Nokia to market to. Dopplr, which allows frequent travelers to share their jet-setting schedules with a controlled list of friends (and yes, I’m a satisfied user), probably doesn’t benefit from supporting millions of users – it’s probably most valuable serving an exclusive niche community.

But for the largest social media companies, they are largely used for communication and sharing, and their strength lies in their ubiquity. If everybody is on a network, you can use it to share things with everybody. If you start to charge and 10 per cent of the people decamp for cheaper pastures, that network is less valuable to the 90 per cent who remain.

They can also try to sell their users as eyeballs for advertising, or data to be mined.

Kara Swisher wrote:

According to sources familiar with the situation–Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines.

And Valleywag offers:

Thought they haven't widely publicized the practice, Twitter is already in the business of selling access to its "firehose" of public data, according to a source close to one customer of the service. Twitter typically charges between $1,500 and $3,000 per month for such access, sometimes for a limited subset, this person said.

Well, I'm not going to judge. I could see how a company would want to see what millions of people are talking about right now. But I'm also not going to judge people who think large companies setting loose an army of robots to root through messages they've dashed off is kind of creepy.

Back to Peabody. He suggests a public option, where we can fund these tools just like we fund charities:

Instead of expecting profits that won't materialize, the entrepreneurial community should instead operate social networks as not-for-profit organizations. Wikipedia has grown phenomenally with a not-for-profit business model, and while Wikipedia has its problems, its fate is in the collective hands of its users rather than in the hands of media companies or the stock market. Facebook and Twitter should enjoy the same comfort.

We need to learn from the first dot-com bust, when services that benefited society disappeared just because they didn't make money. Imagine a world without social networks, in which I could not use Facebook to share hundreds of pictures of my infant son with his grandparents and the citizens of Iran could not use Twitter to challenge their political system. If we focus simply on a profit-and-loss equation, there is a real chance we will eventually lose these invaluable services.

I'm pretty sure Twitter is going to stick to pay-for-spray with their "firehose of data" and Twitter funding drives are not in the near future. But considering the collective usefulness of these sites, and the sheer amount of information and content on them -- our information and content -- there is something to be said for our collective responsibility to maintain them. And maybe at some point we'll have to take that maintenance on as a public service, and not expect a private business to wrack its brains grasping for sometimes non-existent business models. Twitter.gov anyone?

Kindle goes global, but what will digital books do to the industry?

Wed, 07 Oct 09 21:00:12 GMT

Kindle, the leading e-reader that allows people to buy and read digital copies of books, announced a drop in price and a vast expansion in the list of places where the item is available, now reaching more than 100 countries. Canada is not on that list.

The Globe and Mail reports:

Canadians will have to wait a little longer for the popular device to come to this country. An attempt to order a Kindle on Amazon.com's website was rebuffed with the message: "Unfortunately, we are currently unable to ship Kindles or offer Kindle content in Canada. We are working to make Kindle available to our Canadian customers as soon as possible."

An e-mail from Amazon.com public relations confirms the device is not coming to Canada, but offers no reason why.

I'd be curious to try one out, but I have to admit I'm not exactly jonesing to read a digitized version of a book. There's plenty of criticism of the device and no certainty that this is even the way the publishing industry is heading in the digital age.

Also, this delay may hold off those dastardly internet pirates from picking the pockets of Margaret Atwood and friends. A recent article in the New York Times speculated whether the e-book would create the same headaches for the publishing industry that digital music did the recording industry.

The article says:

With the new devices in hand, will book buyers avert their eyes from the free copies only a few clicks away that have been uploaded without the copyright holder’s permission? Mindful of what happened to the music industry at a similar transitional juncture, book publishers are about to discover whether their industry is different enough to be spared a similarly dismal fate.

The story goes on to say that book pirating sites haven't been particularly popular so far, but then neither have e-books which accounted for an anemic 1.6 per cent of book sales through July.

However, maybe the biggest change of the arrival of e-books won't involve the major book publishers. One of the biggest changes of the digital revolution in the music industry was the democratization of the recording process. Instead of incredibly recording studios with equally pricey experts twiddling the knobs, you could bang out a decent and easily distributed recording on your home computer.

If you cut the price of printing and distributing books, wouldn't that be good news for smaller presses? We should look at the model of record labels like Merge and Matador that started in the '90s. (Merge is home to Canada's extremely popular Arcade Fire, and Matador was home to many defininitive bands of the 1990s.) One of the key tricks was that as recording tools became digital, they became more affordable and more people could set up smaller, independent ("indie" to their friends) labels.

These lables found a workable model by reducing their overhead costs by supporting a heavily-curated roster of artists that were likely to appeal to the label's fan base. That got rid of the price of signing tons of new bands hoping that through sheer quantity they could scoop up the next hit maker somewhere in the bunch. This also allowed the artists to take a bigger cut of the profits. On a major record label, a band gets advanced money to make and promote the album and if they don't sell enough copies, they wind up in debt to the label. If they manage to pay it off, they get a small fraction of the profits. On the smaller labels, there's none of that overhead, and the artists get a substantially larger cut of the profits - often over 50 per cent.

The biggest problem I can see with publishing following this model has to do with the audience. These indie record labels appealed to music lovers. It had a dedicated audience, many of whom weren't interested in the mainstream pop that major labels put out. Smaller publishing houses generally do the same thing. But they also appeal to - uh oh - book lovers. That audience is more likely to be willing to fork over a little extra for the aesthetic thrill of having a nice book to hold and display on a shelf.

So the big question is will the book geeks embrace the Kindle? Is there another e-book platform that might work for them? I have my doubts, but incredibly cheap is a good business model. According to Amazon.com, Dan Brown's new book lists for $29.95 in hard cover and $9.99 on a Kindle. Presumably, a small publishing house would be willing to push the price of an e-book much lower than that. There's no reason to assume hipsters won't look for savings. Hopefully, that search for savings won't push them directly into the arms of bootleggers.

Google Street View is up and running in Canadian cities (finally!)

Wed, 07 Oct 09 17:18:27 GMT

Hi internet,

Google Street View, a cool function of Google Maps that shows high-resolution street-level images on the internet, is now available in several Canadian cities.

The street view is available in Toronto, Calgary, Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax, Vancouver, Squamish, B.C., Whistler, B.C., Ottawa, Kitchener, Ont., and Waterloo, Ont.

Google's cars with top-mounted 360-degree cameras are currently cruising through other cities across the great white north. Here's a list of cities being photographed from Google:

Alberta	Calgary, Edmonton, Grande Prarie, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Red Deer
British Columbia	Cranbrook, Gold River, Kamloops, Kimberly, Merritt, Pemberton, Port Hardy, Prince George, Prince Rupert , Revelstoke, Vancouver
Manitoba	Brandon, Dauphin, Grand Rapids, Snow Lake, Swan River, The Pas, Thompson
New Brunswick	Bathurst, Campbelton, Caraquet, Edmondston, Grand Falls, Miramichi, Plaster River
Newfoundland	Bay Roberts, Bonavista, Carbonear, Channel-Port-aux Basques, Corner Brook, Deer Lake, Gander, Harbor Grace, St. Johns, Stephenville
Northwest Territories	Inuvik
Nova Scotia	Amherst, Antigonish, Guysborough, Halifax, New Glasgow, Port Hawkesbury, Sydney
Ontario	Baysville, Brighton, Chapleau, Niagra Falls, North Bay, Norwich, Ottawa, Pembroke, Port Colborne, Sault Ste. Marie, St. Catherines, St. Marys, St. Thomas, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Trenton, Welland
Prince Edward Island	Charlotteton, Mimigenash, Mt. Pleasant, Summerside
Quebec	Alma, Baie-Saint-Paul, Beauceville, Cowansville, Gaspe, La Baie, Macamic, Malartic, Montreal, Plessisville, Quebec, Rimouski, Sainte Marie, Saint-Prosper, Sherbrook, Thetford Mines, Waterloo
Saskatchewan	Canora, North Battleford, Regina, Saskatoon, Swift Current
Yukon Territory	Dawson, Haines Junction, Mayo, Ross River, Watson Lake, Whitehorse

You can try it out by searching one of the cities where the service is available, clicking on the "more" dropdown menu at the left side of the screen and selecting "street view."

But remember: Use responsibly.

The revolution will not be Tweeted: what are the limits of social media activism?

Thu, 01 Oct 09 18:36:41 GMT

These days, it seems like you can't use the internet if you don't have a cause. At least not without looking like an amateur.

Lots of parties are organized via Twitter here in Toronto, and generally they are used to raise cash for food banks, hospitals and assorted other good works. (It probably helps people who are embarrassed to admit they made all their friends on Twitter. "Oh, the party is secondary. Normally I'd be busy on Friday night, but I really want to make sure. . . what is it this time? Oh yeah, I want to do my part to make sure the Symphony gets new clarinets.")

Activists are always early adopters of technology. Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society says you can tell if something online is working because people are using it to share pornography, cute pictures of cats, and causes. This is partly because of what's called the "cute cat theory of internet activism" and the basic premise is that authorities are less likely to crack down on sites that people are using to share pictures of cute cats, because people love that stuff. So, those sites are a good place to practice activism. You start censoring that site, you end up blocking cute cat pictures, suddenly you've upset a much larger section of society than just the activists. So activists use social media because it's an effective and stable platform for them.

Also, social media promotes the idea of activism. Facebook and Twitter naturally organize people by interests, associations and so on. Once you've got people organized why not do something with them. Save the whales, maybe.

In this way, activists are often early adopters and other early adopters often become activists in some way.

So, for all the activism that's going on out there, what have we got to show for it?

A few recent articles share some perspectives:

techPresident reviewed act.ly, a device that harnesses Twitter to gather petition signatures.

An example of its use:

Progressive groups aplenty spotted the fundraising potential of South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson's "You lie!" outburst, but Gilliam himself had an act.ly petition up and running almost immediately -- some 1,200 signatures in the first hour and a half, said [act.ly creator Jim] Gilliam -- and once someone discovered that Wilson's opponent was on ActBlue, a short link redirect channeled outrage into campaign resources. "The stuff that works best," says Gilliam, "is anything really, really fast. It gives a lot of advantage to individuals over organizations, because organizations like to plan campaigns. They'll come up with the right messaging, coordinate with other groups. It takes time." Gilliam deemed the Wilson petition a success after the congressman indeed apologized.

It might be a little too strong to call act.ly a success because a congressman apologized for shouting a cat call at the president. Probably was going to happen anyway. But there is an interesting evolution to be seen. The petition is no longer a lifeless list of names: it can become a conversation.

"Twitter is fundamentally two-way," says Gilliam. "This isn't just 'create a petition, deliver it.' This is more like a conversation -- but it's a conversation where one side can say that there a lot of other people who care about this."

Changes like this are more revealing of the impact social media is having on activism. A petition is a petition, whether it's in an email or in a binder. But it's certainly easier to get signatures today, when you can post a link to a petition or information about a cause on Facebook and Twitter, throwing it in front of more eyes in seconds than you could in a day spent knocking on doors. But is it too easy? If anybody can gather hundreds, even thousands, of signatures online, does the basic law of supply and demand cheapen them? If a politician gets one letter with one million signatures on it, he's probably going to take notice. If he gets hundreds of letters with one million signatures, he's probably going to take a coffee break.

Jan Chipchase, a kind of corporate anthropologist who conducts research for Nokia Design, has noticed a certain amount of activism glut.

Chipchase came across a flash mob protest against the incarceration of Burmese political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi. (Flash mobs are semi-spontaneous public events organized by mobile devices and the internet.) What initially caught his attention were the slick protest posters made by big-deal graffiti artist Shepard Fairey. But on reflection, he had to wonder if such a slick production could be put together so easily:

At what point does the cost of identifying and bringing together like-minds in a crowd become so low as to be deemed trivial? In what contexts will the process be sufficiently automated/rapid that a significant % of 'mobsters will be unsure what they're mobbing about? The equivalent of joining a Soviet era queue without knowing what's at the end of the queue. Yup - with a bit of time-warp magic there'd be an app for that. And in a world of limited attention spans and a long list of causes - what are the tools that will allow Mob C to lo-jack Mob B to lo-jack Mob A?

An article in Toronto's Now Magazine says that a different kind of organizing has swamped the city. The author looks at the number of "unconferences" (like our own AgendaCamps, these are a gathering of people where there is no set agenda, and they don't go to hear specific speakers speak, they go to talk with other attendees) and decrees "after three years of them, it appears we’ve had un too many. Unconference fatigue is beginning to set in." The piece cites no evidence of this glut, only that there are many unconferences (the author listed five).

It's an unconvincing argument, but it helps us parse the bigger issue. People organizing groups and activities is great. It's worthwhile knowing a large group of people with similar interests to your own. The parties and unconferences they throw are an excellent way to gather the group, strengthen the ties between individuals, and why not throw in some casual fund-raising on the side? But when they attempt to use these organizational tools to move from their collection of followers to the next level, whether it's trying to get government to act or raise awareness of a specific cause, that they need to consider the risk of glut.

What is the value of an assembly of people gathered casually online? How carefully have they considered the issue? Does an online, loose-tie group undermine the type of image you are trying to present? Is this cause going to get lost in a flood of other issues? When someone signs a Twitter petition, do they spend any more time considering the issue than it takes to click the Retweet icon?

Seems like a good conversation to have at an unconference.