Current Berkman People and Projects

David Weinberger: Fillibusters need to be the exception, not the rule

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:34:41 +0000

Joyce Appleby makes the case for returning fillibusters to their old role as a moral trump card played when a matter of real principle was at stake. The Senate was not intended to require a 60-vote majority, and conservatives ought to join with liberals in honoring the Constitution. (The “Coffee Party” has a link that’ll get you your Senator’s contact info.)

Ethan Zuckerman: links for 2011-01-03

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 23:13:02 +0000

SF0 / about

Homepage for SF0, an ARG explicitly dedicated to getting people to explore their environments and interact in ways they otherwise might not. Curious to see if recent Metafilter attention will bring in a wave of new players.

(tags: games community gaming social ARGs serendipity)
a/v mapping: Trajects pendant un an d'une jeune fille du XVIe arrondissement

More on "Trajects pendant un an d'une jeune fille du XVIe arrondissement", the map of Paris from the perspective of a young university student

(tags: blog mapping paris research sociology urbanexploration)
Collaborative gaming takes to the streets – CNET News

2006 CNet article on SF0 – "they wanted to do something that would get players out and about discovering things they've never seen or done in the city, while still maintaining their independence."

(tags: games gaming ARGs serendipity urbanexploration)
More Than Zero – Page 1 – News – San Francisco – SF Weekly

2006 SFweekly article about SF0 including interviews with the founders, background on an earlier (failed) Chicago-based ARG.

(tags: games gaming ARGs serendipity urbanexploration)
Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world | Video on TED.com

McGonigal's TED talk offers the challenge of shifting the energy and creativity spent by gamers on solving the problems in the imaginary world of World of Warcraft into solving realworld problems, the motivation behind her games focused on coping with peak oil and teaching social entrepreneurship (Evoke).

(tags: TED games gaming McGonigal seriousgames evoke stumbling serendipity culture)

Dan Gillmor - Salon: Goldman Sachs' Facebook ploy

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 22:55:00 +0000

The investment bank buys, big, into the social network -- and expands a shadow stock market

Ethan Zuckerman: Games that help us wander

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 22:20:20 +0000

Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe’s map of a young woman’s journeys through Paris, 1957

In 1957, French sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe made a map of Paris: “Trajects pendant un an d’une jeune fille du XVIe arrondissement”. It’s an idiosyncratic map, based on the movements of a single individual, a young woman studying at the school of political science. A triangle emerges from her movements – the vertices are her residence, the university and the home of her piano teacher.

Such maps are becoming routine these days – we generate them involuntarily, as the cellphones most of us carry with us leak this locative data, at minimum to our telephone carriers, if not to other audiences. If we engage in certain kinds of online behavior – checking in via Foursquare, posting to Twitter with geolocation – we may be generating maps visible to the general public.

Zachary Seward’s map of New York City, via his Foursquare check-ins. From his article on the WSJ’s blog site.

Outreach editor for the Wall Street Journal, Zachary Seward, posted this map, generated from a year’s worth of his check-ins on Foursquare. He observes that we can make several guesses about him based on the data – where he lives and works, what baseball team he roots for, and perhaps, his race. He notes – not proudly – that his orbits through Harlem intersect almost exclusively with neighborhoods with lower percentages of African American inhabitants: “Census data can describe the segregation of my block, but how about telling me how segregated my life is? ”

Looking at Chombart de Lauwe’s map – made many decades before such maps became easy to draw – French Situationist Guy Debord offered the uncharitable, but striking observation that we should feel “outrage at the fact that anyone’s life can be so pathetically limited.”

Debord’s observation applies to individuals beyond this one student – as de Lauwe observed of his map, it illustrates “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives.” While she didn’t stray far beyond the 16th Arrondisment, and Seward’s Manhattan is concentrated heavily around the Upper West Side, we all frequent a tiny subset of the physical world that’s open and available to us.

(Steve Dietz discusses de Lauwe’s map and Debord’s reaction in “Mapping the Urban Homunculus” – very grateful to have found his excellent essay.)

We might be outraged at the narrowness of the worlds we end up inhabiting, or we might accept that all of Paris or New York is simply too large for one human to inhabit and interact with, without selecting a comfortable and familiar subset to choose to explore in depth. Like Seward, we could start to analyze the maps we generate and find ways to question or change our behavior. Or we could try to address this phenomenon of world-narrowing head on and tackle it as a challenge to be solved.

In 2005, Sam Lavigne, Ian Kizu-Blair and Sean Mahan moved from Chicago to San Francisco, and started building an alternate reality game designed to encourage players to discover things they’d never seen or done in the city, in a way that encouraged independence and exploration. Their game, SF0, invites you to score points by carrying out tasks, many of which are surreal, silly or surprising. You score by documenting your “praxis” and posting photos, videos and other evidence of the intervention.

At the moment, players can score points by giving a pig a pancake, convincing complete strangers to invite them into their home for dinner, reverse shoplifting (placing items in a store so that they may be purchased), challenging random people to contests of strength or inserting information into a place that lacks it, or through dozens of other tasks. Sign up as a new member and you’ll discover that the tasks open to you are the easiest to complete – others require you to “level up” and demonstrate your competence as a operative before you can take them on. And you can marvel at some of the completed projects, like Britt++’s conversion of a bus stop into a nightclub chill-out room, or babe’s book about eating books made from pasta.

There’s a loose, conspiratorial narrative that provides a bit of organizing framework for the tasks – those sponsored by the BART Psychogeographical Association focus on the way people move through places (especially San Francisco), while those from the Society for Nihilistic and Disruptive Efforts focus on “administering a wedgie to the world”. Administer sufficiently inventive social wedgies and you’ll advance in rank and be able to undertake larger tasks.

What’s fascinating to me is that the game seems to work quite well, despite being almost solely player-generated. The tasks are created by players for others to complete, and despite a very broad definition of what might be allowable as a task, there are clear, deeper themes that emerge from reading some of the tasks. Most are efforts to make the world a surprising and wonderful place, to encourage people to go places they wouldn’t normally wander and to speak to people they’d generally ignore, to question societal conventions and the force of habit in a way that’s playful and provocative, though not confrontational. Hints abound that the game’s creators are fans of Debord specifically, and of Situationism in general, though it’s not clear that everyone playing is up on their 1960s French Marxists. And SF0 seems far less likely to lead to a series of factory strikes in the Bay Area than it is to encourage people towards random acts of kindness.

(I don’t follow this space very closely, but I was surprised not to have heard of SF0 until it appeared on Metafilter yesterday. Near as I can tell, only a few thousand people have signed up thus far. I suspect this is in part because it’s had a fairly tight geographic focus until recently… but I also wonder if it’s been a conscious decision of the creators to invite a small group of players who share their values in building the culture of the game, rather than seeking a very wide audience.)

Game designer and ARG pioneer Jane McGonigal believes that games can change the world for the better. In her recent TED talk, she wonders aloud whether the billions of person hours of time, creativity and energy spent playing games like World of Warcraft could be refocused on solving problems in the real world rather than in virtual worlds. Her point is related to Clay Shirky’s observations about cognitive surplus, and the insight that projects like Wikipedia are produced with the “spare cycles” made possible by the industrial revolution, and now liberated from more passive pursuits, like watching TV or drinking gin. (Or both, at the same time, which is how I prefer to spend my downtime.)

But McGonigal’s point is less general, and more focused on the special nature of games. The best games stimulate our problem-solving instincts, encourage our creativity in trying novel and unusual solutions, and intensely capture our attention and focus. If we build games that encourage us to solve real problems as well the ones game designers concoct to challenge us, perhaps we can harness that focus, energy and creativity. Her games have included World Without Oil, designed to help players discover solutions to the social unrest and disruption likely to arise in a world of $7/gallon gasoline (for my non-US readers, yes, the idea of petrol at $1.80 per liter is sufficiently provocative to get Americans to think about social transformation), and Urgent Evoke, built with the World Bank and designed to train a generation of social entrepreneurs around the world, with a focus on the developing world.

I participated in Urgent Evoke, first as a player, and later as a “mentor” to other players – while it was a fascinating experience, it felt at least as much like a brainstorming and training session than it did like a traditional “game”. I think the challenge for McGonigal is the same for anyone exploring “serious games” – how do you ensure they’re serious while ensuring they’ve got some of the joy and excitement that comes from traditional, entertainment-first games?

My guess is that one way to solve that problem comes from building games that are open enough to generate multiple forms of gameplay. For the past year, I’ve been fascinated by geocaching, seeing it as an invitation to stray from the de Lauwean paths we all tread and explore in detail the places we mindlessly pass through. But that’s not the way everyone plays the game. One group of cachers uses their “hides” as a set of local history lessons – searching for a cache near my home led me through three of the historical sites in New Ashford, MA. Others use the framework of the game as a way of trading collectible tokens and exchanging small gifts with people around the world. The idea behind the game – hide something in the real world and publish GIS coordinates so others can find it – is broad enough that you can play your way and I can play mine, and neither of us is wrong.

The flip side, of course, is that a game that’s too open doesn’t feel sufficiently gamelike. I’ve been fascinated with The Nethernet (formerly PMOG), a web-based game that you play through following links between webpages. I wrote about the site some years back, noting that the idea of “playing the Internet” seems like a great way to encourage people to stumble into unfamiliar corners of the web. Unfortunately, the project seems to have lost its backing, and I stopped playing a long time ago, both because it didn’t work well for me as a game or as a serendipity engine.

The problem I’m most interested in solving is similar to the one The Nethernet promised to help with and which SF0 seems to address: I want to help people discover the intellectual and informational ruts we all fall into, and find creative ways to crawl out of those ruts. I’m increasingly convinced that it’s little use to simply make people feel bad or guilty that we don’t pay enough attention to the political crisis in Ivory Coast or prison conditions in the US. We all need help stumbling on the information we didn’t know we needed and hadn’t realized we were missing. McGonigal is right – there’s something powerful about games that might be able to be harnessed to help us broaden our worlds. If SF0 can help – slowly, strangely, randomly – heal and transform a city, how might we build games that encourage us to wander through a broader world?

Joseph Reagle: Students, over-sharing, and compassion

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:14:25 +0000

I've been reading a slew of interesting -- and often depressing -- links from academia from the end of 2010. Flavia's entry on students sharing more about their "lives than I have any desire to know" made me think of my own struggles with this issue. I generally want to respect the privacy and autonomy of students. For example, students have a specific number of absences that are "freebies" so they need not explain or justify any absence to me. However, if they do need to speak to me, I tell them to speak to me sooner, rather than later, about a proposed solution, rather than gory details of the problem.

While I am quite sympathetic to well-timed and reasonable proposals, otherwise, and especially when it comes to grading, I typically respond along these lines:

I would never presume that "school should come first" relative to the other events in people's lives, but nonetheless my obligation is to assess what happens in the classroom. Honestly, it is impossible to play Solomon and judge the often difficult circumstances of people's lives, or to try to figure out how things might have been absent those challenges. So, I pretty much stick to the grading criteria in the syllabus.

Dan Gillmor - Mediactive: Review: “A Welcome Injection of Sanity”

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 18:06:50 +0000

Shane Richmond, head of editorial technology at the Telegraph in London, says on his 26books.com site:

Everyone who uses or contributes to the media should read this book. It’s a welcome injection of sanity.

Thanks!

Harry Lewis: Watching You

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 02:03:00 +0000

Today's excellent report in the New York Times about successes in computer vision really only scratches the surface of what is happening. There are many, many tasks people do by watching or seeing that computers could do, imperfectly to be sure, but well enough to pay for themselves. I am thinking of things like watching for shoplifters (defined, say, as people who leave a store with more stuff than they entered with and did not go through a checkout process). I think one of the developing issues will be how to deal with false positives, when the computers alert authorities to something suspicious and really nothing untoward has happened. Will it be better or worse that the accusations are raised by computers than it would be if they were the result of bigoted, biased human judgments?

The single most interesting story was the last one, talking about the service Google offers to look up camera shots of buildings and works of art in its image database and return information about them:

Google could have put face recognition into the Goggles application; indeed, many users have asked for it. But Google decided against it because smartphones can be used to take pictures of individuals without their knowledge, and a face match could retrieve all kinds of personal information — name, occupation, address, workplace.

“It was just too sensitive, and we didn’t want to go there,” said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. “You want to avoid enabling stalker behavior.”

I am impressed by this show of corporate responsibility. But won't some entrepreneur do exactly this anyway, perhaps on a contract from the FBI or the NFL (terrorists at the Superbowl!) or the government of Singapore? Google may want to organize all the world's information and make it broadly accessible, and good for Google for trying to do that responsibly, but in the long run at least Google will not be the only guys capable of doing that.

David Weinberger: The year in open access

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 22:02:19 +0000

Peter Suber has posted his year-end round up of what’s happened with Open Access. It’s a massive record — Peter acknowledges at the outset that there’s too much happening for a full acounting — but in section 10 there’s some highlights and lowlights.

There is a lot going on — much of it quite good.

David Weinberger: How to talk like an American

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 20:54:16 +0000

British voice coach Gareth Jameson explains how to talk like an American:

Accents:
How To Do An American Accent

Pretty good! Where I come from, “banter” and “banner” don’t sound identical, but otherwise I think he nails us.

Gareth has a bunch of other videos, some of which are better than others. (As for his “how to yodel” video, it pretty much comes down to “Sing low, then high, then low.”)

Jonathan Zittrain: Apple approves then pulls unofficial Wikileaks app

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 14:52:22 +0000

On December 20, Apple removed an unofficial Wikileaks app from the App Store. Apple had approved the app, which simply showed the Wikileaks twitter feed and website, three days earlier. Considering Apple’s uptight attitude toward iPhone and iPad apps, it is perhaps more surprising that an app providing access to the controversial site’s content was approved in the first place than that it was quickly yanked from the store.

Although there was initially speculation that Apple pulled the Wikileaks app because it either was “not very useful” or was a paid app that solicited charitable donations and therefore contravened the Developer Guidelines (pdf), Apple later justified the app’s removal under other provisions of the Guidelines: “Apps must comply with all local laws and may not put an individual or group in harm’s way.” The app’s developer had promised to donate one dollar from each $1.99 sale to Wikileaks, giving people a way to support the organization after Paypal, Visa, and MasterCard stopped facilitating donations to the non-profit because of its questionable activities. Apple’s reluctance to serve as a conduit of funds for Wikileaks, no matter how nominal each individual donation, is a possible secondary motivation for removal. The app raised $4443 for Wikileaks while it was available in the App Store.

The app can still be downloaded onto jailbroken iOS devices from Apptrackr, and apps that provide access to Wikileaks documents are available for Android phones. In addition, the App Store itself has a handful of apps that give Wikileaks news and updates, but presumably don’t let users look through the leaked information. Nevertheless, Apple’s unilateral control over which apps users can run on their iPhones and iPads again raises concerns that a closed platform enables censorship either by Apple directly according to its standards or by government pressure on the company. And since Wikileaks posts appear to be both newsworthy and legal (so far), pulling the app may well have a chilling effect on other news outlets considering publishing controversial information of public interest to their iOS apps. For example, would Apple also pull the New York Times app if the newspaper posted a story on the leaked cables to its app?

These concerns, both disturbing and credible, will grow as more people get their news from apps run on closed platforms rather than print or Web sources. But the (hopefully farfetched) nightmare scenario is a universally adopted closed platform with a slick, free Wikileaks app… that gives users access to documents that have been surreptitiously altered to remove or even provide false information. A similar worry exists with search engines or ISPs that are overwhelmingly dominant or government-enforced monopolies. If such a search engine doesn’t index the Wikileaks website (or indexes a modified fake site instead), the site may as well not exist, unless a user knows where to look. And incidents during the recent Belarussian election highlight how a national ISP could achieve an analogous result by redirecting requests for a legitimate independent news site to a fake one.

In the past, open, distributed media in the U.S. has made such tactics impractical. And there still may be little chance that extreme deception of this nature could occur in the U.S. as private companies don’t often have an incentive to mislead their customers and the government is constrained from doing so. Yet it’s worth thinking about, both out of concern for citizens of other countries and because our government does on occasion employ technology to covertly alter reality by, for example, wiretapping or other surveillance. Surveillance is distinguishable in that it is directed against a particular individual or group, usually requires a warrant, and, while deceitful, simply collects information instead of affirmatively providing misinformation. But if authorities have probably cause, is a warrant to push an app “update” to a specific individual that provides inaccurate information to thwart criminal activity or facilitate capture – say, an altered fight schedule or public transit timetable – acceptable? In a very small minority of cases courts have enjoined the publication of certain information, but is there ever a situation where, if feasible, it would be permissible for the government require a company to mislead the general public? We may never need to answer these questions, but Apple’s response to the Wikileaks app is a step in their direction.

—Jennifer Halbleib

David Weinberger: Global voices at Global Voices

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 16:09:11 +0000

Global Voices has posted its list of most-read posts in 2010. The list includes blog posts from Haiti, Chile, Jamaica, Pakistan, Thailand, Israel, North Korea, Costa Rica, Russia, Philippines, Egypt, South Africa, Macedonia, Myanmar, Mali, Georgia, Philippines, Poland, India, Guatemala, Ecuador, Indonesia, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Japan, and Iran.

Where else do you get to hear this range of voices so clearly? Who else has a most-read list that so represents the globe?

By the way, the
#1 was the report on The Cala Boca Galvao Phenomenon, a hilarious phenomenon that Ethan Zuckerman helped popularize.

Have a fruitful new year, Global Voices. And to all the globe’s voices: Happy new year!

Clay Shirky: Half-formed thought on Wikileaks & Global Action

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 21:05:08 +0000

This is a coda to my earlier post, Wikileaks and the Long Haul. It’s an attempt to express a partially formed thought about the Pentagon Papers case and the global media environment.

A bit of potted history first: The Pentagon Papers were a secret history of US involvement in Vietnam, produced by the Department of Defense and leaked in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg to the NY Times, who published excerpts and analysis from them. The government attempted to prosecute the Times under the Espionage Act; the Times, with Floyd Abrams as their lead attorney, argued the case before the Supreme Court. The Times won, and the decision, New York Times Co. v. United States (403 U.S. 713), established the principle that it was illegal to leak secrets, but not to publish leaks. Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority, said “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”

I was thinking about Black’s opinion, and particularly his emphasis on an “unrestrained press”, in light of two things I’ve read on Wikileaks. The first, and more recent, is Floyd Abrams tortured attempt to deny that his winning arguments in the Pentagon Papers case set the operative precedent for Wikileaks.

His essay is an attempt to square two things he clearly believes deeply — Wikileaks is bad and must be stopped, and that its actions may not be illegal. He doesn’t want to believe that second thing, but as one of the pre-eminent litigators of 1st Amendment law, he also understands what the precedents say, and glumly comes to this conclusion:

[I]f Mr. Assange were viewed as simply following his deeply held view that the secrets of government should be bared, notwithstanding the consequences, he might escape legal punishment.

Abrams is upset enough about Wikileaks (and Assange) that he can’t bring himself to describe the clear meaning of this conclusion: under the Pentagon Papers precedent, Assange might “escape legal punishment” the ordinary way, by being innocent of having committed a crime.

This in turn brought to mind my NYU colleague Jay Rosen’s observation last summer, during the Afghan War logs leak, that Wikileaks is the first stateless news organization:

Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it.

So here’s the half-formed thought: Abrams is wrong that the Pentagon Papers case isn’t the obvious precedent, but he’s right that Wikileaks is so different that the meaning of that case isn’t clear in the present situation.

* * *

To draw a distinction between the Pentagon Papers precedent and what Wikileaks means, I’m going to use slightly different language than Rosen’s notion of statelessness. (I think Wikileaks is less stateless than it is multi-homed, allowing it some freedom from traditional ‘single point of censorship’ problems that plague other international media).)

Let me propose, for the sake of argument, two labels for action that spans more than one country: international, and global. International actors are actors rooted in a nation, even when they are able to participate in activities all over the world, while global actors are unrooted; global actors have, as their home environment, the globe.

The closer an activity comes to attaining the condition of pure information, the more global it can be. By way of analogy, the LSD business is more global than the cocaine business, because coca leaves only grow in certain climates, but lysergic acid can be synthesized anywhere. Media is like this as well: The internet is more global than the telephone network, even though both systems can send data between any two points in the world. Similarly, Wikileaks is more global than the BBC or Al Jazeera; those organizations are very large, but they are international, with a home base as rooted in a particular place as a coca farmer is.

The most dramatic of Wikileaks’ breaks with previous journalism is the global nature Rosen identified. The biggest difference between the Pentagon Papers case and Wikileaks is not the legal precedent, but the fact that the Pentagon Papers case was an entirely national affair.

Though some of the most impassioned and vocal participants in the Vietnam war protest movement genuinely cared about the fate of the Vietnamese, the bulk of the participants were animated by a much more proximate goal: ending the draft in the US. The publication of the Pentagon Papers did not seem to have helped end the war, but exposure of the military’s frank internal assessment of the compromised nature of the conflict made it harder to ask middle-class parents to sacrifice their children to that kind of action. (It also helped feed into the collapse of trust in the government and of authority figures generally.)

All this was in the US context, as was every actor involved: Ellsberg, Abrams, the NY Times, the Pentagon, the Supreme Court, the protesting citizens, and so on. No one was out of the reach of the Federal Government, and the effect of the Papers’ publication, in a US new outlet, was a family affair.

Wikileaks has been global from the beginning, and the additional complexity of both jurisdiction and extradition make this particular problem much much more complex than any issues, legal or practical, triggered by the Pentagon Papers. Wikileaks has been operating since 2006, the military has regarded it as a significant threat since at least 2008, and the US Attorney General still has difficulty framing charges he thinks he can win.

* * *

For many of our most important social systems, we resolve clashing principles by providing an escape valve, in the form of a set of actors who are less rule-bound than the rest of the system. The most famous and ancient is the jury, a collection of amateurs who can, in the face of clear laws and evidence, simply not return the verdict a judge would have returned.

So with secrecy. Though I am not a lawyer, the Supreme Court’s 1971 ruling seems to say that there is no law-like way to balance the State’s need for secrets with the threats secrets pose to democracies, so it simply said that the 1st Amendment provides immunity to publishers in most circumstances; the presence of publishers as “unrestrained actors” provides one of the many limits on government power that make democracies work.

This immunity sets up publishers as self-regulating checks to government power, albeit in a system that can never be made intellectually coherent — neither total success nor total failure of the government to keep secrets would protect the United States as well as a regime of mostly success with periodic, unpredictable failures.

The Pentagon Papers decision says the government faces a “high bar” to proving that a publisher’s actions are illegal. What’s legal for publishers is thus whatever keeps them under this high bar, but no one knows where this bar is at any given moment, except that it is high enough that no publisher has ever been successfully prosecuted for espionage.

But here’s where Black was wrong, or at least only partly right: the press in the US isn’t unrestrained, just because of this high bar. Instead, the US press is self-restrained. Our curious system of outlawing certain kinds of speech — libel, release of trade secrets, and so on — while also largely forbidding the government from prevention of publication (prior restraint) or creating a climate of fear and doubt for publishers (chilling effects) would seem impossible to balance within a legal system, but that’s because the balance is produced by extra-legal constraints.

A publisher is (or was, in 1971) a commercial, nationally-rooted media firm subject to significant tradeoffs between scale and partisanship. Large publishers had to be deeply embedded in the culture they operated in, and they had to reflect local mainstream views on most matters most of the time, to find and retain both revenue and audience. Fans of game theory will recognize these conditions as those required for an iterated game of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where the press exhibits self-restraint from short term defection against the US’s interests, in order to benefit from an amicable relationship with the government over the long haul.

This is why the difference between the Times, as an international actor, and Wikileaks, as a global one, matters so much. Wikileaks does not have to play an iterated game of Prisoner’s Dilemma with the US. Not only is Wikileaks not housed in the US, it isn’t housed in any single other nation the US could complain to. They can defect at will. (You can always burn a partner in Prisoner’s Dilemma if they can’t get back at you.) Wikileaks hasn’t defected all the way, of course, releasing only ~2000 of the ~250,000 cables they have; the point is that this restraint is not forced on them by the US.

The legal bargain from 1971 simply does not and cannot produce the outcome it used to. This is one of the things freaking people in the US government out about the long-term change in the media environment — not that the law has changed, but that the world has. Industrial era law, applied to internet-era publishing, might allow for media outlets which exhibit no self-restraint around national sensitivities, because they are run by people without any loyalty to — or, more importantly, need of — national affiliation to do their jobs.

* * *

There is, in much of the commentary about Wikileaks online, a kind of echo of Black’s 1971 opinion, a fantasy of unrestrained action. This comes in two flavors: one group believes that since Julian Assange is not a US citizen and not operating on US soil, the US could never charge him with anything. These people seem not to have heard of extradition agreements; the legal system is at least international enough to allow charges to be brought against foreign nationals and have them tried in the US. Whether that will happen to Julian I don’t know, but it’s certainly not out of the realm of the possible.

The other ‘unrestrained action’ group believes that, as Assange is not a US citizen, there is nothing to stop us from simply finding him and having him killed. This group seems not to recognize that political murders are regarded as something of a no-no by our allies, and that such a move would not exactly be a net win for the US, as well as potentially getting the agents of such an illegal approach arrested and tried.

Neither of these fantasies is going to come true. The US cannot simply remove Assange with no consequences, nor is he automatically cleared from another government’s decision to extradite him to the US, if the Attorney General charges him. This is going to take time and effort to work itself out.

Society is made up of competing goods that can’t be resolved in any perfect way — freedom vs. liberty, state secrets vs. citizen oversight — but the solutions to those tensions always take place in a particular context. Sometimes a bargain is so robust it lasts for centuries, as with trial by jury, but sometimes it is so much a product of its time that it does not survive the passing of its era.

I think that this latter fate has befallen our old balance between secrets and leaks. This does not mean that the Pentagon Papers precedent shouldn’t free Wikileaks from prosecution, but it does mean the old rules will not produce the old outcomes. In another difference with the Pentagon Papers case, Bradley Manning (or the person who copied the cables from SIPRnet) has gotten very little attention compared to Wikileaks, even though, in both law and practice, he is clearly the person most culpable. Like the music industry, the government is witnessing the million-fold expansion of edge points capable of acting on their own, without needing to ask anyone for help or permission, and, like the music industry, they are looking at various strategies for adding control at intermediary points that were left alone under the old model.

Julian claims that the history of these matters will be divided into “pre-” and “post-Cablegate” periods. This claim is grandiose and premature. However, it is not, on present evidence, visibly wrong.

It’s possible that the plain meaning of the Pentagon Papers case will clear Assange and Wikileaks, full stop, and the era of self-restraint of the press in response to extra-legal constraints is over, at least in the US context. It’s possible that the Pentagon Papers case will be re-adjudicated, and the press freedoms of the traditional press in the US will be dramatically constrained, relative to today. It’s possible that new laws will be written by Congress; it’s possible that those laws will be vetoed, or overturned, or amended. Whatever happens, though, this is new ground, and needs to be hashed out as an exemplar of the clash of basic principles that it is.

Harry Lewis: The Winklevosses vs. Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 17:02:00 +0000

The New York Times has a good story on the business page about the Winklevoss twins and their effort to unwind the settlement they reached with Facebook.They claimed that they were deceived about Facebook's value when they signed the deal, and they are owed more than they got.

I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, as a legal matter, it's pretty technical, and depends on who said what to whom and when. I don't think all the emails and text messages have been disclosed and heaven knows what the legal requirements would have been on disclosure at the time the settlement was being hammered out. The twins may have a point. The article states,

"Yet days before the settlement, Facebook’s board signed off on an expert’s valuation that put a price of $8.88 on its shares. Facebook did not disclose that valuation, which would have given the shares a worth of $11 million. The ConnectU founders contend that Facebook’s omission was deceptive and amounted to securities fraud."

Well, who knows. Maybe it is.

But plainly the moral question is being raised again. "The principle is that Mark stole the idea," says one of the twins. And this is where my sympathies tend to go to Mark, for the simple reason that none of these guys invented the concept of a social network or using the Web to construct one, and even if they did, that's no reason for any of them to have exclusive control over those ideas. Those ideas were in the air at the time. So soon we forget! Friendster had almost two million members by October of 2003, and all the social complexities of when to accept friend requests and when to deny them were already the stuff of social discourse (see this Crimson column from the time, "Not a Friendster of Mine," for example). People "steal" other people's ideas all the time; that's the way the process of invention and discovery proceed. The people who succeed are the people who work at implementing the ideas. Bill Gates did not invent microcomputer operating systems, or word processors, or spreadsheet software either; that doesn't make him a thief.

As it happens, I had the sense in January of 2004, before Facebook was incorporated, that Zuckerberg was going to do something in the way of a social networking site, because he put me at the center of a prototype, "Six Degrees to Harry Lewis," in which the links were between people mentioned in the same story in the Harvard Crimson. David Kirkpatrick mentions this in his book about Facebook. (Mark asked me politely--I knew him already because he took the undergraduate CS theory class from me--if I would mind if he made the site public. He wanted to put me at the center of the network because I had been mentioned in a lot of Crimson stories. My response? "Sure. Seems harmless.")

Though it viewed Harvard through a distorted lens, I actually liked The Social Network (the movie) because of the way it toyed with this business of the movement and growth and execution of ideas, and when echoing an idea constitutes theft and when it is is the ordinary commerce in the gift culture that nurtures creativity. To complicate things, the movie throws in a scene in which Zuckerberg seems to be dishonest with his business partner, misrepresenting some documents he is asking him to sign. This is designed to make the viewer skeptical about Zuckerberg's integrity, but whether not this even happened has nothing to do with whether Zuckerberg "stole" the Winklevosses' idea. I tend to think he didn't.

David Weinberger: Happy new year, libraries!

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 16:55:39 +0000

May 2011 be the best year for libraries in a couple of millennia!

So much is going on that it could be, you know. (And how often do you get to say that?) S

Miriam Meckel: Endlich egal

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 16:03:40 +0000

Bei Salzburg trug sich in diesen Tagen ein außergewöhnliches Ereignis zu, das bei weitem nicht genügend Aufmerksamkeit in unseren Medien gefunden hat: Ein übereifriges Blitzgerät gerierte sich als egalitäre Radarfalle und blitzte mehrere Stunden lang jeden, wirklich jeden Wagen, der auf der Tauernautobahn an dem Gerät vorbeifuhr, ganz unabhängig von der Geschwindigkeit, mit der das Auto unterwegs war.

Was hier und dort als kleine Randnotiz vermeldet wurde, ist in Wahrheit die Meldung zum Jahreswechsel. In ihr ist der paradigmatische Prozess verdichtet, der sich im Jahr 2010 angedeutet hat und in 2011 zur Vollendung geführt werden wird – der Wandel hin zum Egalitarismus.

Endlich müssen wir uns nicht mehr mit den nervtötenden und anstrengenden Differenzierungen herumschlagen, die in der modernen Gesellschaft ob ihrer Komplexität und moralischen Herausforderungen angeblich so lebenswichtig sind. Endlich ist die Zeit vorbei, in denen es die Unterschiede sind, die Unterschiede machen (Gregory Bateson). Die Aufhebung der Unterschiede im allumfassenden Egalitarismus ist es, die den Unterschied macht! Und in dieser Hinsicht ist der Übergang von 2010 auf 2011 vielversprechend.

Die Bundesregierung gibt bei gleichbleibend beeindruckender volkswirtschaftlicher Leistungsfähigkeit alle wirtschaftspolitischen Unterscheidungen auf und begründet alle Abgabenerhöhungen, politischen Fehlentscheidungen sowie die vorerst gescheiterte 5-Euro-Gabe für Hartz-IV-Regelsatzempfänger endlich mit einem einheitlichen Erklärungsmuster – der Wirtschafts- und Währungskrise.

Die ARD vereinheitlicht ihr Programmschema für 2011 endlich final und mit Günther Jauch kommt der Fernseherlöser, der die längst anachronistische Unterscheidung zwischen Information und Unterhaltung aufhebt und gleich auch noch die dualistische Systemkonkurrenz zwischen dem öffentlich-rechtlichen und dem kommerziellen Fernsehen. Der Höhenpunkt des neuen Egalitarismus wird der letzte Sonntagabend im Jahr 2011 sein, an dem Günther Jauch gegen sich selbst sendet, mit Talk in der ARD und dem Jahresrückblick bei RTL. Dann wissen wir: Das Jahr ist geglückt. Ohne Alternativoption wissen wir, dass wir nichts verpassen können und doch immer dabei sind.

Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel hat ihr Volk längst mit dem überhöhten Anspruch versöhnt, ein Bundeskanzlerinnenwort, gar eines der mittelfristigen politischen Verdammnis, müsse aus belesenem Munde quellen oder politisches Entscheiden setze Verstehen voraus. Sie hat uns alle von der Notwendigkeit des differenzierten Sacharguments befreit und auch von der Überlast der Lektüre allzu zahlreicher neu erscheinender Bücher, die womöglich gar mehrere hundert Seiten lang sind. Nicht mehr als ein positives Apercu ist dabei die offizielle Versöhnung einer vermeintlichen Unabhängigkeit der Deutschen Bundesbank mit notwendiger politischer Steuerung sowie die neue Vereinbarkeit des unmittelbaren Wechsels von einem exekutiven Regierungsamt ins Bundespräsidialamt oder zu Bilfinger & Berger (fängt auch mit B an).

Es ist der Sport, der als einziger starrsinnig auch nach 2010 an der “Tatsachenentscheidung” festhalten will. Nur sie hat es ermöglich, dass die Deutsche Nationalelf mit einem 4:1 aus der Achtenfinalbegegnung gegen England als Sieger hervorgegangen ist. Wer will hier weiter differenzieren und per Videobeweis nachvollziehen, wann ein Ball vor oder hinter der Torlinie war? Und was hätte es gebracht? Das 4:2. Sag ich doch.

Im Grunde wissen wir doch allemal immer von Beginn an, was herauskommen wird. Aber Demokratie ist, wenn man trotzdem verhandelt, so wie Heiner Geißler es stilbildend in seinem Schlichtungsverfahren zwischen den Befürwortern und Gegenern von “Stuttgart 21″ bewiesen hat. Am Ende des Verfahrens, das als “Demokratie-Experiment” in die Geschichte eingehen soll, steht der Entscheid, der schon vorher bestand: Stuttgart 21 soll gebaut werden. Demokratie darf in diesen Zeiten nicht zuviel Volatilität zulassen, sonst wird sie bald eins tiefer gelegt.

Eine der schönsten und herzerwärmendsten Entdifferenzierungen aber hat der Bundesverteidigungsminister uns im Jahr 2010 präsentiert. Er hat endlich die Mode mit der Politik versöhnt. Der Mann sieht einfach immer gut aus, ob kriegerisch-casual im afghanischen Wüstensand oder in demselben Outfit bei der Wohltätigkeitsgala “Ein Herz für Kinder”. Und er hat noch eine Integrationsleistung vollbracht – die des formalen (und nebensächlich auch politisch legitimierten) Amtes mit den WAGs (wives and girlfriends), die es bislang nur im Fußball zu angemessener Popularität gebracht haben.

Ach ja, eines dann doch: Der neue Konformismus des Andersseins ist natürlich undogmatisch und lässt Ausnahmen zu. Zum Beispiel das Wiederaufleben des Adelskults. Wenn wir ihm alle wieder zu huldigen beginnen, ist das doch eine schöne Versöhnung mit Teilen der deutschen Geschichte und unser aller Wunsch nach dem Lebensglück des Märchenprinzen oder der Märchenprinzessin.

Und manchmal liegt dieses Glück einfach am Straßenrand. Ich bin sicher, wäre zu Guttenberg vorbeigefahren, der Blitzer wäre dunkel geblieben und die Egalitarismusfalle hätte nicht zugeschnappt. Weil er in Wahrheit aber nicht vorbeikam, musste schliesslich ein Sack helfen. Der Radarfalle übergestülpt gibt es von seinem Inneren nun sehr viele gleichförmige Bilder.

Dan Gillmor - Mediactive: PR Educator Calls Mediactive Top Book of the Year

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 02:28:15 +0000

Richard Bailey, who writes the public relations education blog “Behind the Spin,” puts Mediactive at the top of his “books of the year” — what he considers the “five best books about – or of value for – public relations students and practitioners published in 2010″ — saying (among other things):

[the book's ideas] apply to all media consumers and media content creators (ie to all of us) and core concepts such as trust and transparency are central to public relations practice.

Here’s his full review.

David Weinberger: No category of digital content has attracted payments from more than 33% of American Net users

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 16:57:36 +0000

Pew Internet reports that 65% of American Net users (75% of the people they contacted) have paid for online, digital content. Ever. And there’s no category of goods in which more than one third of the respondents have ever paid for content.

The content could include articles, music, software, or anything else in digital form. Here are the results for the fifteen different types of content Pew asked about:

33% of internet users have paid for digital music online
33% have paid for software
21% have paid for apps for their cell phones or tablet computers
19% have paid for digital games
18% have paid for digital newspaper, magazine, or journal articles or reports
16% have paid for videos, movies, or TV shows
15% have paid for ringtones
12% have paid for digital photos
11% have paid for members-only premium content from a website that has other free material on it
10% have paid for e-books
7% have paid for podcasts
5% have paid for tools or materials to use in video or computer games
5% have paid for “cheats or codes” to help them in video games
5% have paid to access particular websites such as online dating sites or services
2% have paid for adult content

The first three are way lower than I would have expected. That 15% have paid for ringtones I find bewildering and just a little depressing. That 2% report having paid for “adult content” I take as meaning 2% actually responded, “Yeah, I pay for porn. You gotta problem with that?”

Overall, there are a number of different conclusions we could draw:

1. The survey was flawed. (The survey questions are here [pdf]). But Pew is a reputable group, and not in service of some other group with an agenda.

2. There is such a wealth of goodness on the Net that in no single category do a majority of people have to use money to get what they want.

3. This a sign of disease: So few people are paying for anything that entire categories of goods-provisioning are going to die, taking the abundances with them.

4. This is a sign of health: New business models based on minority participation are and will emerge that will keep the categories alive, and, indeed, flourishing.

5. Most of what’s available on the Net sucks so much that we won’t pay for it.

6. We are just so over paying for things, dude.

FWIW, I find I’m willing to pay for more content these days, in part out of a sense of responsibility, in part because the payment mechanisms have gotten easier, and always if I can sense the human behind the transaction. (This is a self-report, not a principled stand.)

Harry Lewis: Neat Tech Products

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 16:51:00 +0000

Writing in the New York Times, David Pogue has a roundup of his favorite technology products of the year. Many of them are pretty unsurprising, which doesn't make them any less useful--a wall plug that adds two USB jacks for power alongside the usual three-pronged 115VAC power sockets. But one I really love is an iPhone app that translates Spanish to English--not a big deal except that you input the Spanish by pointing the camera at a sign, and the output is an image of the same sign with the translation written in English in exactly the same font! What a cool idea. It shows the power that comes when lots of technology building blocks become mature--text scanning, translation (probably nothing more than dictionary look-up, but this particular application domain doesn't require more than that), and some simple image synthesis tricks.

David Weinberger: Ronnie Simonsen, RIP

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 20:26:50 +0000

I just heard that Ronnie Simonsen died.

I knew him, a little, because he was one of the campers at Camp Jabberwocky [more posts] and Zero Mountain Farm. The loving obituary in the Boston Globe captures much of what was remarkable about Ronnie, but I knew him inextricably embedded within his summer community. Like some ideal post-racist world, in this community, people do not see disabilities. I cannot think of him apart from their loving and fully mutual embrace.

Every year the campers make a movie, an exercise in play, joy, and friendship. Here’s the Return of the Muskrats, starring Ronnie. I — we — will miss him.

Harry Lewis: Is Wikileaks Like the Pentagon Papers?

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 19:06:00 +0000

Daniel Ellsburg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, thinks so. Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, Floyd Abrams, who represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, doesn't. Abrams argues that Ellsburg was principled about revealing official wrongdoing but not injuring U.S. diplomacy. Assange, Abrams argues, is simply opposed to official secrecy in any form, and that, this view of how governments work being wrongheaded and naive, Assange is a bad guy. His acts have actually hurt American journalism by killing any chance of a federal shield law that would protect reporters' confidential sources.

Interestingly, Abrams seems to concur with Assange that he hasn't done anything illegal, if the facts about what he actually has done (merely receiving and not soliciting secrets from individual leakers) are as Assange represents. That being the case, it will be hard to criminalize what Assange did without simultaneously criminalizing what investigative reporters do all the time.

It is crazy that the one thing Assange might do that would make prosecution easy would be to reveal corporate secrets, because he then could be charged with copyright infringement. What a Swiss Army Knife of a statute the DMCA has turned out to be in the hands of creative prosecutors!

I am not sure I buy Abrams' claim that Assange has been indiscriminate and unselective in what he has revealed. (But of course I have only Assange's word about what he has NOT disclosed.)

I think far too much interest has been focused on Assange in this affair. The real question going forward is, what kind of protocols can be developed for sharing secrets within bureaucracies where they need to be shared but limiting access to those with a need to know? This is in large measure a technological problem, made more difficult by the fact that in the technology world, it is no longer reasonable for bosses to be able to do the jobs of the people who work for them. Low-level people therefore have access to enormous databases because they do the grungy work of maintaining computer systems and networks, and their bosses, though in principle more authoritative than these low level geeks are, have no sense of what the geeks are doing.

Dan Gillmor - Salon: Tablets will be everywhere in 2011

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 18:30:00 +0000

The variety of these computer devices is about to explode. Is it a cornucopia or a mess?

Dan Gillmor - Salon: Samsung's tablet: No serious regrets

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 17:30:00 +0000

A month after buying the Galaxy Tab, I still use it every day

Harry Lewis: Too Much Anonymity Department

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 03:05:00 +0000

Here is something that annoys me.

I am getting fewer and fewer holiday/Christmas cards. I am grateful to those who send them. Really I am. BUT, to those who are sending me cards:

Would you mind putting your last name on the card somewhere? Or if not your last name, at least a photo of you, rather than just one of your children? I have two cards from people with names like "Sally, Jim, Rebecca and Alphonse." I have tried to look those names up in my mental rolodex but it isn't indexed that way. Sorry. It does look like it was a good year and you had a nice wedding. I just haven't a clue who you are.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Ethan Zuckerman: links for 2010-12-28

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 23:02:21 +0000

Response summary – [ 4chan Users' Survey ] – Google Docs

Fascinating spreadsheet showing an internal survey of 4chan users, including demographics, participation in raids, and far more info on masturbation and porn than any researcher needs to know

(tags: internet statistics culture 4chan data demographics)

David Weinberger: [2b2k] Citizen scientists

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 22:29:24 +0000

Alex Wright has an excellent article in the New York Times today about the great work being done by citizen scientists. (Alex follows up in his blog with some more worthy citizen science efforts.)

Alex, who I met a few years ago at a conference because we had written books on similar topics — his excellent Glut and my Everything Is Miscellaneous — quotes me a couple of times in the article. The first time, I say that the people who are gathering data and classifying images “are not doing the work of scientists.” Some in the comments have understandably taken issue with that characterization. It’s something I deal with at some length in Too Big to Know. Because of the curtness of the comment, it could easily be taken as dismissive, which was not my intent; these volunteers are making a real contribution, as Alex’s article documents. But, in many of the projects Alex discusses (and that I discuss in my manuscript), the volunteers are doing work for which they need no scientific training. They are doing the work of science — gathering data certainly counts — but not the work of scientists. But that’s what makes it such an exciting time: You don’t need a degree or even training beyond the instructions on a Web page, and you can be part of a collective effort that advances science. (Commenter kc I think makes a good argument against my position on this.)

FWIW, the origins of my participation in the article were a discussion with Alex about why in this age of the amateur it’s so hard to find the sort of serious leap in scientific thinking coming from amateurs. Amateurs drove science more in the 19th century than now. Of course, that’s not an apple to apples comparison because of the professionalization of science in the 20th century. Also, so much of basic science now requires access to equipment far too expensive for amateurs. (Although that’s scarily not the case for gene sequencers.)

Harry Lewis: Phony "Conservatism" and Internet Neutrality

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 20:40:00 +0000

It is time to call out the Republicans, elected and unelected, for their rabid anti-net-neutrality rhetoric. They cast themselves as small-govenment conservatives, but really they are pro-big-business monopolists. They love small-government when it keeping it small limits consumer choice and creates artificial scarcity so the big businesses that pay their bills can become even more profitable without improving their services.

Mitch McConnell's blast: "The Obama administration, which has already nationalized health care, the auto industry, insurance companies, banks, and student loans, will move forward with what could be the first step in controlling how Americans use the Internet by establishing federal regulations on its use….The Internet is an invaluable resource. It should be left alone. As Americans become more aware of what’s happening here, I suspect many will be alarmed, as I am, at the government’s intrusion. They’ll wonder, as many already do, if this is a Trojan horse for further meddling by the government."

Hogwash, or worse. Net neutrality is about your right to connect to the Internet and use it the way you want to use it. Anyone who thinks the government does not have a role in creating a level playing field for citizens, consumers, and business entrepreneurs should have to answer the question: Would you defend the right of Verizon to provide phone service only to white people, or only to Democrats? After all, Verizon owns the wires, so wasn't it a government takeover of communications back then when access rules were put in place for telephony?

Net neutrality rules are pro-business. The only reason the big telcos and their congressional and talk-radio fellow travelers don't like the rules is because they create competition in what is rapidly becoming an oligarchical business space.

The head of a small ISP has a letter in the Globe this morning that states the case very well. With giant Internet providers in control, small providers, online start-ups, and anyone who publishes media online are at the mercy of these Goliaths that serve more than 200 million Internet users.

David Weinberger: [2b2k] Understanding as the deepest driver

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 19:05:49 +0000

I’m working on a talk that asks why our greatest institutions have trembled, if not shattered, before the tiny silver hammer of the hyperlink. One tap and, boom, down come newspapers, the recording industry, traditional encyclopedias… Why?

I recognize there are many ways of explaining any complex event. When it comes to understanding the rise of the Net, I tend to pay insufficient attention to economic explanations and to historic explanations based around large players. I’m at doing the opposite of justifying that inattention; I’m copping to it. I tend instead to look first at the Net as a communications medium, and see the changes in light of how what moves onto the Net takes on the properties of the Internet’s sort of network: loose, huge, center-less, without shape, etc.

But, then you have to ask why we flocked to that sort of medium. Why did it seem so inviting? Again, there are multiple explanations, and we need them all. But, perhaps because of some undiagnosable quirk, I tend to understand this in terms of our mental model of who we are and how we live together. My explanatory model hits rock bottom (possibly in both senses) when I see the new network model as more closely fitting what (I believe) we’ve known all along: we are more social than the old model thought, the world is more interesting than the old model thought, we are more fallible and confused than the old model wanted us to believe.

(Now that I think of it, that’s pretty much what my book Small Pieces Loosely Joined was about. So, eight years later, to my surprise, I still basically agree with myself!)

My preference for understanding-based explanations undoubtedly reflects my own personality and unexplored beliefs. I don’t believe there is one bedrock that is bedrockier than all the others.

OpenNet Initiative: Will Britain's Pornography Filtering Lead to Internet Censorship?

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 19:08:41 +0000

Last week, top-level British government official Ed Vaizey announced his plan to consider blocking all pornography on the Internet in the country. Vaizey, an MP and Britain's Communications Minister who cited “solutions to protect children” as the primary reason for the new Internet filtering proposal, will meet with British ISPs to discuss plans, one of which includes an opt-in online browsing system. Under this proposal, filters at the ISP-level would be put in place on the Internet to prevent minors from accessing adult content. Adults who want access to the content would fill out a form confirming their age.

Largely negative responses have arisen from the blogosphere to Vaizey’s plan. In his blog on Bit Tech, Gareth Halfacree calls the UK government “hell-bent” on setting up a content firewall. Richard Adhikari of Tech News World called the filtering proposal “a hot mess,” comparing the attempt to block content with legislation not unlike those in China, Australia, and Iran.

But the UK government may find opposition from the ISPs themselves. Spokesmen for British telecommunications companies argue that pornographic content is more ambiguous to define and believe that plans to filter this may prove difficult. Internet Service Providers’ Association Secretary General Nicholas Lansman suggested that the government encourage more parental controls rather than resorting to specific legal action that may be ineffective on online content. According to Jezebel blogger Irin Carmon:

“Someone would have to define what porn is and isn't, and decide whether, say, watching the video of the pulled Smithsonian Portrait Gallery AIDS-protest work counts. And the blockers would have to outsmart the ever-mutating ways to pass on information online, including torrents and social media. But it appears the people who would actually have the skills to do so have no interest in helping Vaizey unless they have to.”

News of these filtering plans have already drawn sharp criticism from all over the world. Jesse Kline on The National Post called the proposal a slippery slope that would lead to further government censorship with strong political ramification. “[I]t’s not the responsibility of the state to ensure that children don’t view objectionable material,” he wrote. “That’s what parents are for.”

In an interview with AOL News, Reporters Without Borders editor Gilles Lordet commented, “It’s like they want to play God on the Internet.”

Harry Lewis: Can Grades Be Controlled in a "Fair" Way?

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 22:26:00 +0000

The New York Times has a not-bad story about one university's attempts to rationalize the grades its students receive. This is a much more subtle problem than most so-called conservative critics acknowledge. It would be easy to force a grading curve on courses above a certain minimum enrollment: just require faculty to turn in numerical grades, using whatever method they want that is monotonic (higher numbers representing better performance), and automatically curve the letter grades to achieve whatever proportions are deemed appropriate. The problem with doing this is, of course, that some courses attract better students than others. At Harvard, the students who enroll in Math 55 include a fair proportion of the very best undergraduate math students in the world; it would be unjust to give many of them Cs just on principle.

Many schools have experimented with "decorated transcripts" of various kinds, which give not only the student's grade but some information about the other grades given in the course. This makes the transcript more complicated, but certainly has transparency to recommend it. Still, it doesn't really tell the reader how good the competition was.

Harvard doesn't decorate transcripts, but for a long time it used to try to push faculty toward a norm that took the quality of students in a particular course into account. The dean would inform professors, for each course, of the difference between the average grade in that course and the average grade of that course's students in their other courses. That is, a negative number would tend to indicate that the course was grading harshly and a positive number that the course was grading generously. These numbers were always interesting to contemplate, and there were finer variants on the theme (for example, comparing the grades I give in CS courses to the grades my students were getting only in other CS courses, or only in other science courses). It was never clear, however, how faculty used the information. In particular I don't think anyone ever studied the time series: Did "harsh" professors raise their curve more or less than "soft" professors lowered theirs? Or perhaps that was studied, and that is the reason we aren't being given that information any more.

If students all took the all the same courses, a large part of the problem would go away. Every professor could grade using any kind of distribution, and GPAs, being averages of the same components, would fairly rank students. You would still have the problem of comparing a Physics B+ to an English A-, but the overall records could rationally be compared.

When you think about that, you realize that the problem resembles that of Bowl Championship Series rankings in college football. Teams don't have enough head to head meetings, or even enough common opponents, to make it easy to figure out who the top teams should be. There is some sound mathematics that could be focused on the ranking problem, but as in the case of the BCS algorithms, it would have one huge disadvantage: There would, in general, be no way to answer a question of why one student outranked another except to persuade someone that the algorithm was right and to assert that the relative standings were what fell out of the algorithm when it was applied to the mountains of data about grades.

I wrote a couple of chapters about all this in Excellence Without a Soul, but you can get a good sense of my position from this Morning Prayer talk I gave in the fall of 2003.

David Weinberger: Kodacroak: The end of Kodachrome

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 18:09:52 +0000

Dan O’Neill on a mailing list writes “The last day that you will be able to get your roll of Kodachrome developed
will be four days from now, December 30, 2010.” He also posted these links:

Last-chance processing

Trip to India documented on the last roll of Kodachrome. [Me: You've got to see Steve McCurry's India photos, and not just the last 36. He did the famous Afghan girl cover for National Geographic, for example.]

Last roll of kodochrome manufactured (not the last roll processed)

A Google search for ‘famous kodachrome pictures‘

David Weinberger: Foucault reads W

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 15:50:53 +0000

Eliot Weinberger (no relation) reviews George Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, in the London Review of Books, reading it through Foucault’s eyes.

The first half of the review picks up on Foucaultian themes of authorial identity and authenticity. Quite amusing. The second is a recitation of the ways in which Bush sucked that the memoir forgets to mention. I’m only recommending the first half.

Ethan Zuckerman: links for 2010-12-24

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 23:01:49 +0000

Global Publics Embrace Social Networking | Pew Global Attitudes Project

Pew study examines prevalence of social networking use around the world, versus internet penetration. Countries new to social networking seem to be aggressively embracing it, while some long-wired countries like Germany are much more resistant to adoption.

(tags: pew socialmedia global statistics demographics facebook)

Citizen Media Law Project: Social Media Policies: Fed Labor Law Problem?

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 15:23:06 +0000

A Connecticut company suspended and then fired an employee for making disparaging comments on Facebook about the company and about her supervisor.

Not in dispute is that the employee’s actions violated the company’s social media and other personnel policies, which (among other things) prohibited depicting the company ‘in any way’ on Facebook or other social media sites or from “disparaging” or “discriminatory” “comments when discussing the company or the employee’s superiors” and “co-workers.”

In dispute is whether that social media policy – and the company’s actions in enforcing the policy – violated public policy, in particular Federal labor law. This came into fast relief when the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) subsequently filed a complaint against the company, charging the company with violations of the employee’s rights under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

The company is American Medical Response (AMR), an ambulance service provider. The incident followed a customer complaint about the employee’s work, when the employee’s supervisor asked the employee to prepare a report about the incident. At that point, the employee sought but was denied representation from her union.

Later that day, the employee posted negative remarks about her supervisor and AMR on her personal Facebook page, through her home computer. It appears that at no time did she use AMR’s technology or services to conduct her actions.

According to the New York Times story about the case, the employee’s grievance – and subsequent social media commentary – related primarily the fact that her supervisor barred a representative of the Teamsters to assist her in preparing her report.

The employee’s Facebook comments sparked an exchange of further commentary by other AMR employees, and further disparaging comments by the employee about the supervisor. That prompted her suspension and later termination.

Two important things to note about this case:

1. “Concerted Activity” under NLRA.

As the NLRB stated in its press release about the case, “the employee’s Facebook postings constituted protected concerted activity” under the NLRA. “Protected concerted activities” under the NLRA include the right of employees to “Discuss wages, working conditions or union organizing with co-workers or a union” and “Act with co-workers to improve working conditions by raising complaints with an employer or a government agency”.

Employers may not, among other things, “Fire, demote, transfer, reduce hours or take other adverse action against employees who join or support a union or act with co-workers for mutual aid and protection, or who refuse to engage in such activity.” (emphasis added)

According to the New York Times, this case is the first where the NLRB interpreted its powers to include regulation of employer conduct related to employee activities in social networking.

What is not clear is whether the NLRB would have filed this case – and whether this would have constituted “protected concerted activity” – had the employee’s conduct been limited to solo Facebook complaints, rather than engaging with co-workers and an online community.

2. Social Media Policies Violative of NLRA.

As described in the New York Times, AMR’s policies “barred employees from depicting the company ‘in any way’ on Facebook or other social media sites in which they post pictures of themselves.” Another policy prohibited “disparaging” or “discriminatory” “comments when discussing the company or the employee’s superiors” and “co-workers.”

According to the NLRB, “Such provisions constitute interference with employees in the exercise of their right to engage in protected concerted activity.”

This view is troubling if only in the sense that these types of policies and provisions are common for companies adapting to social media. As Bret Cohen of Hogan Lovells wrote recently about the case, “Though such policies are most likely to be invoked when employees post material to the Internet or social media sites that exhibit clear insubordination or disloyalty to the company, the NLRB was clear in expressing its concern for the possibility for companies to use the policies to stifle union-related employee communications.”

The case is set for hearing on January 25, 2011.

Ethan Zuckerman: links for 2010-12-23

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 23:13:04 +0000

http://tyndallreport.com/decadeinreview/

Amazing collection of data on the content of US television nightly news, showing prominence of different types of news. Site features annual reviews of coverage, trends from 1980s to present.

(tags: media attention uspolitics television coverage data)
How Facebook Decides What To Put In Your News Feed – These 10 …

Experiments with adding a new user to Facebook allow the author to extrapolate ten interesting insights about Facebook's Edgerank algorithm and the composition of Facebook news feeds.

(tags: facebook socialmedia algorithm ranking research experiment bias curation)
ISP shuts down Wikileaks mirror over complaints from upstream provider – Boing Boing

Wikileaks mirror taken down because upstream provider was concerned about DDoS. Story helps illuminate just how many actors have the capability of acting as intermediary censors.

(tags: intermediary censorship ISP wikileaks freespeech)
Everything the Internet Knows About Me (Because I Asked It To) – Digits – WSJ

Zach Seward looks at the data trails he leaves from his online activities. Suggests that heavy users of social media tools are logging their online behavior much as personal trackers and diarists are logging their physical activity.

(tags: lifelogging data visualization socialmedia tracking personal foursquare)

Harry Lewis: Railroads and the Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 21:34:00 +0000

Susan Crawford, who blogs brilliantly about communications technology and law, today quotes J.P. Morgan brilliantly: "The American public seems to be unwilling to admit . . . that it has a choice between regulated legal agreements and unregulated extralegal agreements. We should have cast away more than 50 years ago the impossible doctrine of protection of the public by railway competition." Amen. All the blathering about the government interfering in private enterprise by passing neutrality rules misses the fact that there is virtually no competition in Internet services in the US. "Subscribers to high-speed Internet access are choosing their local cable monopoly 90% of the time these days," Crawford continues. "Where Comcast is doing business, Comcast is or soon will be consumers’ only choice for high-speed Internet access."

An unregulated monopoly will inevitably raise prices and limit services to increase profits. We have seen it before, but the flamethrowers on the right such as Michelle Malkin see any regulation of these Internet monopolists as "bureaucrats … increasing their control over your lives exponentially." Of course, I imagine Malkin would also have stood shoulder to shoulder with the railroad monopolists, and the telephone and telegraph monopolists too.

Citizen Media Law Project: Introducing Guest Blogger Andrew Mirsky

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 18:53:25 +0000

I'm excited to welcome Andrew Mirsky as a guest blogger. Andrew is an attorney and Principal of Mirsky & Company, PLLC, a law firm with particular emphasis in new media, intellectual property, technology, corporate and nonprofits. He has 17 years' experience as a business and commercial lawyer, including 5 years' experience in company management of media and technology enterprises. Andrew began his law career in New York City at the corporate law firm of Kaye Scholer LLP, focusing on corporate and finance transactions and advising clients in media, healthcare, securities, finance, manufacturing, and real estate. Andrew later worked in-house at a client technology startup, with a business of supply-chain management technology.

Andrew moved to Washington in 1999 and worked in Advertising Operations at The Washington Post Company, before joining Atlantic Media Company as Director of Business Development and Legal Affairs. Atlantic is publisher of The Atlantic Monthly, National Journal and Government Executive.

Mirsky & Company is a founding member of the Washington, DC-based industry group "Media Future Now," a monthly lunch forum for the discussion of new media and digital technology business issues impacting content creators, advertisers and marketers, production and operations managers, financiers and related new media players.

Andrew has his law and undergraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. He attended high school in Millburn, NJ, and studied classical and jazz piano at the Manhattan School of Music (Preparatory Division), in New York City.

Please join me in welcoming Andy!

Ethan Zuckerman: Wikileaks, analysis and speculative fiction

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 17:25:04 +0000

It’s a few days before Christmas, ten days before the end of 2010, and there’s the wonderful sense of deceleration as I flip through my browser tabs. The blizzard of email has slowed to a few, scant flakes, the roaring river of Twitter updates is a trickle. There’s time to read, and evidently, time to reflect and write at more length.

In the past couple of days, a couple of excellent essays – and some flawed, but interesting ones – have been posted reflecting on Wikileaks, Anonymous and the philosophical motives behind these projects. For me, they’re a reminder that the opinions offered the most rapidly aren’t always (aren’t often?) the most insightful. Wikileaks’s release of diplomatic cables and the actions taken by individuals, organizations, corporations and governments in response have implications for dozens of ongoing debates, about transparency, privacy, internet architecture and ownership, free speech, human rights. It’s not a surprise to me that very smart people have needed a while to think through what’s happened before offering their analysis.

Much of the best writing I’ve read has been either published on or linked to via The Atlantic. Alexis Madrigal is maintaining a great collection of links to commentary on different facets of the case, and he’s also edited a few of the most interesting pieces I’ve recently had the time to read.

One – which I’d put in the “interesting but flawed” pile – is Jaron Lanier’s “The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks“. As one respondent to the piece notes, it’s not really an essay about Wikileaks. Instead, Lanier connects some of his recent thinking on the internet as a threat to individual creativity, expressed at length in his recent book, “You Are Not A Gadget“. (This review is a sympathetic overview of the book.) Lanier sees a philosophical stance implicit in Wikileaks’s actions and Assange’s motives – the belief that a huge accumulation of data leads towards understanding or truth. Openness by itself isn’t necessarily productie, he argues – it’s possible that openness leads to the breakdown of trust, in each other and in institutions.

In the most interesting part of the essay, Lanier connects Wikileaks to the early days of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where very smart crytographers and digital pioneers explored the idea that hackers could change history, leveling the playing field with a superior understanding of technology. He sees this perspective as overly romantic and tells us he made the decision to step away at that point. In turn, he’s critiquing current Wikileaks supporters, and especially the Anonymous DDoSers as ineffective and potentiall dangerous romantics, a critique that might be better received had he not slammed them as “nerd supremicists” in his title.

Lanier asked Madrigal to disallow comments on his essay, as he wanted people to engage with the text and not skip ahead to refutations or responses. Madrigal agreed, but evidently didn’t understand how to actually shut off commenting within the Atlantic’s publishing system – the story began accumulating comments, and Madrigal felt compelled to step in and shut down the thread. This, in turn, led to tough questioning by smart folks like Jay Rosen about the wisdom of disallowing comments on a controversial essay. I found Madrigal’s post explaining what happened, why he acted as he did – and the open comment thread that followed his explanation – to be one of the best examples of an online community manager engaging with criticism and looking for a solution going forwards.

Madrigal also gets my respect for featuring an excellent essay from Zeynep Tufekci responding to Lanier’s missive. (Hers is the observation that Lanier isn’t writing about Wikileaks, but about his own framing of issues about technology, privacy and individuality.) She offers a thorough critique of Lanier, pivoting on the idea that Lanier errs in blurring the line between individuals and organizations, especially governments, and ends up trying to protect the privacy of powerful institutions that don’t have the same rights as individuals, no matter what the Supreme Court may have said in Citizens United.

In a neat rhetorical move, Tufekci accuses Lanier of using Wikileaks to promote his own agenda before explaining that Wikileaks really tells us something important about the tension between public and private spaces online (which happens to be her agenda… :-) I share her concerns, and though I don’t come to the same conclusion she does – don’t fear Anonymous; fear corporate control over the Internet – it’s an excellent essay and a great summary of important concerns about the challenges of public discourse in private spaces.

The essay I found most useful in thinking through Wikileaks early in Cablegate was Aaron Bady’s “Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy“, which took a close read of a 2006 essay by Assange to elucidate a possble set of motivations behind the release of diplomatic cables. Bruce Sterling takes a very different approach – he uses his knowledge of geek culture and his gift for speculative fiction to map Julian Assange and Bradley Manning onto hacker architypes and declares the situation surrounding Wikileaks inevitable and melancholy. It’s far from fair – we’re dealing with an Assange who’s a projection of Sterling’s understanding of hacker culture rather than a real individual – but it offers insights that are often easier to deliver in fiction.

Specifically, Sterling does a beautiful job of unpacking the lure of encryption, the romance of the cypherpunks, the tension of “secrets” that aren’t especially secret or exciting, the difference between leaks and journalism. Some of the commenters on the essay challenge Sterling’s understanding of the facts – I think that misses the larger point, which is that Sterling offers a picture of Assange and the logic behind Wikileaks that falls short as a work of biography, but is extremely helpful in understanding why he and his project have captured the attention of so many geeks.

Looking forward to more reflections on Wikileaks and its implications, and to the best part of the year – some extended reading about topics that have nothing at all to do with the internet… Happy holidays, everyone.

David Weinberger: Seasons greetings from space and the future

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:47:35 +0000

[Zombie pointer via BoingBoing]

Dan Gillmor - Mediactive: Kind Words from TechPresident’s Micah Sifry

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 14:54:07 +0000

Micah Sifry, author and co-founder of TechPresident and the Personal Democracy Forum (and a friend), calls Mediactive “a gem” and says: “Read it if you want to know how to be a fully informed participant in the new media age.”

Thanks!

Harry Lewis: Harry's Hong Kong Adventure

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 03:13:00 +0000

I will be traveling to Hong Kong in January to give a series of lectures. Here are the ones that will be open to the public:

Lee Hysan Lecture, Chinese University of Hong Kong: Approaches to General Education. Monday, January 17, 16:30.

Sir Run Run Shaw Lecture, Shaw College, Chinese University of Hong Kong: Civic Education in the Information Era. Wednesday, January 19, 17:00-19:00.

Asia Society and Harvard Club of Hong Kong: Idea Economy 2011. Luncheon Talk, Hong Kong Club, Thursday, January 20, 12:15-14:00.

Public Lecture, Department of English, City University of Hong Kong: The Future of Ignorance. Thursday, January 20, Wei Hing Theatre, 18:30 registration, lecture 19:00-20:00. Also featured by the Harvard Club of Hong Kong.

Ethan Zuckerman: Foot fetishes and internet norms

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 01:37:39 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I did a quick interview with Jenna Wortham of the New York Times on the issue of digital identities. She was trying to figure out an experience she’d had where someone she’d met on an online dating site had found her on Foursquare and connected her identities. Was this something to worry about? Or merely how we expect the world to work in a world of online performance and digital disclosure?

The answer I offered ended up in her piece, which ran in the paper last Saturday: it’s still possible to create an online persona that’s difficult to trace to a specific person, which is important for whistleblowers and leakers. But if you’re using social media tools the way they’re intended – to share your interests, to meet people, to publish about your life – you’re going to leak data in a way that makes it easy to piece together different facets of your personality into a single whole.

The story that broke yesterday about Jets coach Rex Ryan is a better example of this phenomenon than any hypothetical I could have come up with. Barry Petchesky of sports blog Deadspin ran a report yesterday titled “This May or May Not Be Rex Ryan’s Wife Making Foot-Fetish Videos“. Despite the benefit of the doubt given to the coach’s wife in the article title, it’s pretty clear that Petchesky believes the feet in question are Michelle Ryan’s, and that Rex is the videographer. An update to the post includes a screen shot from a dating site where the author – who Petchesky implies is Coach Ryan – writes in unvarnished terms about his sexual preferences and about his wife’s body.

The article has now been picked up by such classy journalistic institutions as the New York Post. And Coach Ryan has now had the memorable experience of ducking questions about his wife’s feet in a press conference, leading to a sentence which may well summarize the perils of being a public figure in the Internet age: “Ryan did not deny, however, that is wife is the star of a series of foot-fetish YouTube videos.”

Petchesky is able to make a pretty good case for the identity of these particular feet because there’s a lot of information available online both about the Ryans, and available on the dating profile – birthdates, height and weight, city of residence. And, of course, there are photos of Ms. Ryan available online for comparison to the woman displaying her feet in the video. As with the suitor who connected Wortham’s Foursquare mayorship and dating profile, Petchesky puts publicly visible data from different sources together and comes up with information about people they didn’t realize they were sharing.

One response to this example might be to berate Rex and Michelle Ryan for their foolishness. Surely, as a highly visible public figure, Rex Ryan could expect an enterprising journalist to connect a series of popular foot fetish videos to an anonymous dating profile, both posted some years back, and then to his biography. Everyone knows that famous people either need better fake online identities or to eschew foot fetish dating sites!

Another response is to bemoan the current state of online and offline journalism, and perhaps society as a whole. A nation in which the sexual peculiarities of a professional sports coach are the target of investigative scrutiny is one well into its decline and eventual fall. Surely this presages the opening of a chain of vomitoria in Manhattan and a pressing need to defend our borders against Visigoths.

Or maybe we’re just at a moment where our norms need to catch up with our technology.

Because people are publishing vastly more data about themselves, it’s possible to make connections between that data and reveal formerly hidden aspects of someone’s online profile. I knew you were single and looking to date, and now I know you’re a regular at this sushi restaurant… which may, in turn, allow me to infer information about your income, your spending, what neighborhood you live in, etc. As Wortham notes, it’s unclear whether it’s socially acceptable to make these connections and inferences. She ends up deciding not to accept her suitor’s invitation because she feels he’s unfairly tilted the playing field, learning more about her than she knows about him.

There are lots of opportunities in life to obtain information about people that most people don’t engage in. When I’m invited to a friend’s house, I don’t rifle through their medicine cabinet to discover what prescription drugs are there, though the information might be interesting or might help me understand and relate to them better. There’s a social norm that suggests we pay attention to what friends make visible in their homes, not what’s hidden away in drawers or cabinets – we generally don’t need technological restrictions (locks) to enforce this norm, as most people wouldn’t want to suffer the consequences such a trespass might have for our friendship.

Norms aren’t automatic – they have to be taught. My friend and colleague Judith Donath observes that teaching your children manners is basically the process of teaching them when to lie (“Grandma, thank you for your gift – I loved it!”) and when not to ask questions they want answers to (“Why is that strange lady with Uncle Joe and what happened to Aunt Jane?”) In the early days of the web, there was a semi-concerted effort to help new users understand prevailing norms in the online space – Virginia Shea’s 1994 book on Netiquette might be the best exemplar of that effort. (It’s hard to know what Shea would make of Petchesky’s investigation, though her Rule 8 – “Respect Other People’s Privacy” – suggests she might have some issues with his behavior.)

We’re at a moment where norms are in flux. In a few years, privacy may not matter as much as a social norm, as Mark Zuckerberg has promised (threatened?). Or we may decide that some measure of personal privacy is essential if we’re all to survive in a world where information can persist forever. Dan Gillmor wrote a provocative essay in 2009 where he suggested that we may need to find a way, societally, to let people off the hook for stupid things they did when they were younger, or we’re going to doom ourselves to a world where the only people who are politically viable are those who are stunningly boring drones. Dan’s not suggesting a technical change, where our digital words start to fade after four years and disappear after seven – he’s suggesting that we need new norms to cope both with online disclosure and digital persistence.

We know that journalists are going to try to make connections between disparate sets of data, either to reveal important truths or to unseat the famous and powerful. We know that marketers will connect disparate pieces of data about our lives so they can more effectively target ads and market products to us. But the existence of new technologies doesn’t make behaviors inevitable. We respond to shifts in technology by building new norms. When we feel really strongly about those norms, we encode them into laws. In five years, it’s possible that what Petchesky did will be so routine that it merits no second thought. Or it’s possible that we might consider it a major transgression, an act inconsistent with how people are supposed to behave online. Or it might be illegal. The point is, we get to choose – individually, collectively and societally.

There are many reasons I disagree with Marshall Poe’s essay “The Internet Changes Nothing“, a screed so reactionary it makes Andrew Keen look like an early ’90s Wired columnist. The assertion I find most baffling in his piece is this one: “The Internet is not maturing. It is mature.” Poe’s essay is worth reading – basically, he’s arguing that there’s nothing new about the Internet – everything we can do online is something we could do offline, and so there’s no need to consider the possibility that the Internet could radically change human behavior. Poe might argue that what happened to Rex Ryan could have happened in a pre-Internet age – perhaps an enterprising reporter might have watched the coach pick up his fetish correspondence from a clandestine PO Box and mounted a sting operation.

My sense is that what happened to Coach Ryan is evidence that the Internet is far from mature. It’s vastly easier in an online world to find information and connect with people who share your interests, no matter how prurient those interests are. It’s easier to imagine that your behavior is anonymous, which may encourage people to take risks and release information they’d otherwise keep very, very private. And it’s easier to build connections between this information as it’s all available from a mouseclick than from a stakeout. All this means that we’re not entirely sure of a reasonable or safe way to act, or what our societal rules should be. As long as those rules are in rapid flux, it seems absurd to say that the Internet changes nothing. Better to say that we don’t know exactly what’s changing and whether we should embrace or fight the change in question.

Ethan Zuckerman: links for 2010-12-22

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 23:13:14 +0000

Culture That Unites Rather Than Divides

A shared culture may be the key to unlocking tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, separated by a long and bloody war. Onnik Krikorian (UK/Armenia) and Aygün Janmammadova (Azerbaijan) look at the ways Armenians and Azeri come together in neutral spaces like Tblisi and the US.

(tags: culture war conflict armenia azerbaijan language peace)
The Internet Changes Nothing

Essay by Marshall Poe may be the apotheosis of the anti-cyberutopian argument. This guy makes Keen look like an early 1990s Wired columnist. I disagree with his conclusions, but it's interesting, if only as one extreme pole in the debate.

(tags: internet communication history web cyberutopianism)

Berkman Center front page: Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:48:00 +0000

BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Upcoming events and digital media // December 22, 2010

[SAVE THE DATE 1/11] Berkman Center Luncheon Series: "The Master Switch" with Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch and Professor of Law at Columbia University (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/01/wu)

[SAVE THE DATE] BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES on THE MASTER SWITCH
==================================================================================
1/11/11, 12:00pm ET, Harvard Law School **Please note earlier start time for this date only**
RSVP is required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu)

Topic: The Master Switch
Guests: Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch and Professor of Law at Columbia University

Tim Wu presents his widely acclaimed new book THE MASTER SWITCH: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. "A Masterpiece" - Lawrence Lessig. "A ripping yarn" - The Atlantic

About Tim

Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate and author of The Master Switch. He is a professor at Columbia Law School, the chairman of media reform organization Free Press. Wu was recognized in 2006 as one of 50 leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, and in 2007 Wu was listed as one of Harvard's 100 most influential graduates by 02138 magazine.

Tim Wu's best known work is the development of Net Neutrality theory, but he has also written about copyright, international trade, and the study of law-breaking. He previously worked for Riverstone Networks in the telecommunications industry in Silicon Valley, and was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc.), and Harvard Law School.

Wu has written for the New Yorker, the Washington Post, Forbes, Slate magazine, and others. He can sometimes be found at Waterfront Bicycles, and he once worked at Hoo's Dumplings.

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/01/wu

OTHER EVENTS OF NOTE
=========================
1/17: The GovData Project: Help Us Make Government Data Accessible! // IQSS at Harvard (http://www.iq.harvard.edu/events/node/2459)

DIGITAL MEDIA: Watch and Listen
================================
Did you miss this week's luncheon talk? Catch up with Berkman videos, podcasts, pictures, and dig in to our archive at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive.

-Berkman Luncheon Series: Wayne Marshall on The Unstable Platforms and Uneasy Peers of Brave New World Music (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2010/12/marshal...)

-Radio Berkman 171: Wikileaks and the Information Wars (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2010/12/08/radio-berkman-171/)

-Radio Berkman 172: The Evolutionary Biases of the Technium (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2010/12/16/radio-berkman-172-t...)

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Harry Lewis: Déja vu all over again

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 14:32:00 +0000

"Other groups warned that the rules would smooth the way for fast and slow lanes on the Internet. … Before the F.C.C. meeting even began on Tuesday, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said in a statement that the Internet 'should be left alone,' and that his colleagues would 'push back against new rules and regulations' next year." -- New York Times story of December 22, 2010 on the FCC neutrality rules

"A few years ago a man started a news bureau in Cincinnati. A correspondent in New York filed the market reports each morning and the Cincinnati gentleman sold the information to customers. The Western Union asked him to sell out to them and he refused; thereupon his messages were taken away from the "through" wire and sent by a "way" wire. The difference in time was an hour, and the man was ruined. What were the relations of the Western Union to the people of the country in their social and political interests? The Western Union was controlled by three or four gentlemen in New York. It controlled the market prices, all the political and general news sent over its wires--every single important personal communication sent in the country. This company was controlled by no law except the interests of its owners. No State could pass a law which should have any effect on this corporation. Was there any other like power in the world? … How is it with the press? The Western Union Telegraph Company and the Associated Press made a close corporation. … Some time ago two papers in San Francisco discussed the postal telegraph. The rates to those papers were increased. One paper died in consequence and the other ceased to discuss the matter. … This was the power which this corporation held." -- Testimony before a congressional committee about the telegraph monopoly by Gardiner Hubbard, as reported by the New York Times, February 8, 1883

Internet service is not a national monopoly yet, but it is heading toward being a regional monopoly. Most people now get their Internet service from their Cable TV provider, and most regions are now served by only one Cable TV service. Speak up if you believe that a service like Skype, which singlehandedly has undercut the hugely profitable international telephone business, could again come into existence with no regulation and monopoly Internet service provision.

PRX: PRX Bumps into the Holidays

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:10:14 +0000

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December 21, 2010

PRX Bumps into the Holidays

Hi friend of PRX,

PRX is racing around in its sleigh so much, delivering great radio to stations, it was bound to happen. We bonked a bird in orbit. Sorry about that…but so many stations are downloading last minute cool holiday programs, we thought Rudolph knew what he was doing. Last time we rely on a reindeer!

From docs to music, to features and exclusives like The Moth Radio Hour and the Third Coast special…PRX is like mistletoe for your ears!

Ho ho ho!
-John

Last-Minute Christmas | Afghanistan | Do You Count? Plan Ahead | Other Good Stuff

Last-Minute Christmas
Gifts for listeners’ ears

A Folk Alley Christmas special! Hour One and Hour Two.
Celebrate Cab Calloway’s birthday on Dec. 25 from 12th Street Jump in Kansas City.
Afterglow celebrates Christmas with some classic pop songs for the season.

What to play at the Mad Men holiday party? The Retro Cocktail Hour holiday special.
Featured on Here and Now, the Christmas Chronicles radio drama from KBYU.
Holiday classics from the Canadian Brass.
The Winter solstice means a feast full of symbolism in Iran. Visit and get hungry with the Global Guru.

Find many more choices in our holiday music specials and spoken-word picks for Christmas.

Afghanistan
Two in-depth looks

Afghanistan’s Other War
Vermont Public Radio | 00:28:30
This new, ambitious documentary examines the on-the-ground job of training the fledgling Afghan Police force. One Vermont National Guard unit is finding the task frustrating and fraught with challenges.

School-Building in Afghanistan To Promote Peace
Good Radio Shows, Inc. | 00:29:03
Meet two men who believe that the path to relieving suffering, reducing conflict, and promoting peace in the troubled and chronically war-torn country of Afghanistan is by building schools.

Do You Count?
Add it up

Beyond Numbers: A History of the U.S. Census
BackStory with the American History Guys | 00:54:00
Dig into the little-considered story of the U.S. Census, the invisible backbone of our democracy. The idea of doling out power based on the actual numbers of bodies in a region was an American innovation. The History Guys explore how the Census has continued to shape our society.

Census and Caste
World Vision Report | 00:04:58
India is in the middle of a census. For the first time in 80 years, the census will ask all one-billion-plus people in India to identify their caste, or social class.

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Want to help us shape what’s next?
Consider a modest contribution this season to PRX. Thanks!

Plan Ahead

Date-pegged and timely playlists from PRX Editors
- Christmas
- The New Year
- MLK Day – Jan. 17
- Black History Month: hour specials, shorter pieces, and series.

Other Good Stuff

Apple, Don’t Be a Scrooge!
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PRX supports the 170 Million Americans for Public Broadcasting campaign, and we encourage all of you to, as well! Sign up. Station info can be found here.
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Dan Gillmor - Salon: The FCC's weak new "open Internet" rules

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 19:45:00 +0000

A partisan vote on Tuesday displeases everyone. And everyone's right

David Weinberger: [berkman] Jim Lucchese on open music platforms

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 19:13:14 +0000

Jim Lucchese, CEO of Echo Nest, is giving a talk on the future of music, which he says is in the hands of app developers.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

Echo Nest analyzes music tracks (16M so far), looking at many, many parameters. It makes that information available to developers of apps.

MTV uses Echo Nest to figure out who is listening to what, how the audio sounds, and what they’re saying about it on the Web, in order to build a personalized station. More interactive, more web-connected, more personalized, and more engaging, he says. Shifts in how we interact with and experience music are occurring every day. “Music apps are thriving” he says, referring to IOS (iPhone, iPad). The bad news is that most of the thousands of developers reshaping music are locked out of the business. They have to navigate all of the rights issues, and get access to the players. Echo Nest has a community of 6,000 developers, but many of the apps are sitting on the shelf because they can’t get access.

The aim of Echo Nest is to build a machine learning system that understands music, but does it at Web scale. It analyzes music and finds the pitch, tempo, etc. Pandora does this by hand, and has analyzed about 800,000 tracks; it doesn’t scale to 10M tracks. Echo Nest combines this with cultural understanding, which it gathers by crawling the Web. Out of this comes “a ton of data”: similar artists, how popular, tag clouds, hotness, bios, song structure, “fanalytics” (demographics of who is listening, psychographics, etc.) They make this info available to developers, who have made 120 apps, including visualizers, targeted marketing apps, etc.

Many were built during music hack days (weekend coding fests). E.g., more granular control over a Pandora-like app. Or, provide detailed info about artists and tracks. Or, Six Degrees of Black Sabbath: find connections between any two artists. Or, a social trivia app (name the tune, identify the fake band, etc.). Or, turn any tune into a swing tune using Echo Nest’s audio manipulation tools. Or, Audio Kicker: location-aware social music discovery act (uses tastes of a group in the same room).

But, there’s an industry chokepoint. The transactions costs are too high for dealing with a lot of developers. So, Echo Nest is working on open content API’s. If the artist is comfortable with more open models, Echo Nest makes the content available to developers. E.g., the DMCA allows streaming within some limits, e.g., no more than two tracks per album per hour. IF you comply, you can pay a compulsory license and not have to first negotiate the rights. Nest Echo lets developers access DMCA streaming of 10M tracks (because Echo Nest has done a deal — Seven Digital in the UK — with a license to those 10M for DMCA streaming). This approach means we don’t have to wait for copyright reform, it lowers the tansaction costs, and provides a filtering mechanism for content owners.

Q: The CEO of Pandora says that Pandora’s survived because humans do the music analysis.
A: It comes down to the quality of the results. We’re powering personalized radio for MTV, Mog, Thumbplay, Spottify, and for an enormous catalog of tracks. There are humans in our system as well: we’re aggregating what people say on the Web. Pandora has problems. E.g., if they want a Klezmer channel, they need about 5,000 tracks, and they can’t afford to put an army of Klezmer musicians to work finding and analyzing tracks. There are also problems with purely machine analysis: it can be hard to tell low-fi punk vs. country, Christian rock vs. heavy metal.

Q: Is your adio analysis violating copyright?
A: We don’t sell directly. As for copyright, there are a couple of cases. Gracenote (nee CDDB) uses a fingerprint to identify tracks. There’s been no litigation around whether what they or we are doing are derivative works. Our agreement with the holders is that we’re deriving facts that are not copyrightable.

Q: Among your developers, which countries are represented?
A: We just did a survey, but we made the mistake of letting the enter a free text answer to “Where do you live?” So, I’ll get back to you in a year. But there have been music hack days in Europe, Sao Paolo, maybe one coming in India…

Q: What’s the backend?
A: For audio analysis, we send out a lightweight binary that will analyze an audio track in about 2 seconds. We also offer that as a web service. We make the analysis data available for about 16M tracks. On the cultural analysis side, it’s highly customized, uses some open source (SOLR, Lucene), web crawlers.

Q: Business model?
A: We’re a data analysis company. Open API is for noncomercial use. If you’re a ommercial developer, we’ll charge a monthly fee and take a piece of your app’s revenues. If you’re MTV, you’re willing to pay a great license fee and don’t want to share as much with us. But if you’re developing, say, a jogging music stationthat matches the beat to your jogging tempo, we charge much less.

Q: Scholarly interest in analyzing your data?
A: Yochai Benkler was interested in the activity data, especially around artists who are giving away their music: we have data on playcount and how people are trending.

Q: Apps do well on the IOS, but is it just a few apps?
A: There was more churn than we expected. We looked at the top 100 music apps per month for a year, categorized them, and look at the number of new names. Streaming apps had 34 different apps in the top 100 in a year. No consolidation yet. (We don’t have access to the long tail of apps.)

Q: What will happen to copyrighted music?
A: Cloud based access is the answer to peer-to-peer sharing. If Spottify etc. offer a better experience than going through a file sharing network, that’s what people will do. But that will change the model: A user’s interaction with a track on Pandora is worth much less to an artist than the user buying a CD.

Q: Cost?
A: The apps are often free, but it costs maybe $10/month to get access to the music. The digital music market was about $4.5B last year. RPU in England is about $55/yr. If that goes to $120/yr, that’ll be a much bigger music. But maybe it won’t be $10/month, especially if you do a deal for a subset of tracks. Or an ISP opt-out plan for $5/month; the opt-out wold make the penetration rates much higher. Too early to tell. Most of the services are just beginning. Spotify, though, has grown to a million subscribes in Europe in over a year.

Q: Access from car?
A: We’re working with some companies. But, if you have a mobile phone and a car with audio in, you’re there. OTOH, the biggest music subscription company in the US is probably XM Radio.

Q: Selling your service to advertisers?
A: Record labels buy data from us to help them understand their market. One company is using our music data as a way to figure out how to target consumers for non-music products.

A: We are matchmakers between developers and large brands. The brands want apps built.

Q: How big is a catalog of 10M tracks?
A: 10M x 3.5mb ? Warner Music has to update hundreds of repositories and catalogs every week. There ought to be one centralized catalog. It’ll happen someday. Every time so far it’s been muli-year industry efforts among players who don’t want to standardize on a competitor’s standard. We’re very interested in opening up music metadata. We think there’s a commons approach. Problem: 50 ways to spell Guns ‘n’ Roses [sp]. We’re a text analysis company, so we do that. Every collection has its own ID sets. We released an open service called Rosetta Stone that maps among them. A free service. We’ve released an open source audio fingerprinter and do lookups against our database of tracks for free; if you’re compiling additional fingerprints you have to share them (and we share them, too). (We don’t download the tracks when we analyze them.)

Harry Lewis: Net Neutrality at Last?

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 18:32:00 +0000

It is a fundamental principle of Internet libertarianism that carriers should not discriminate in how they treat packets based on the content of those packets. This "net neutrality" principle is easier to describe than to formalize, however.
In the US we have had what might be called telegraph neutrality and telephone neutrality rules. There have been laws preventing the telephone company from, for example, dropping calls from the DNC headquarters but not the RNC headquarters. It's an old story, and the whining about a "government takeover of the Internet" is just nonsense. (See p. 314 of Blown to Bits for more on this.)
Today the FCC passed some neutrality rules, after a long delay. It's not everything that everyone could have wanted, and Public Knowledge has already sent me an email grieving the loss of an opportunity. I'm not so disappointed. In fact, I am mainly worried that even these rules will be challenged in court, by telcos and cable companies who will insist that they own the damned wires and should be allowed to decide what goes through them. The real problem is that it will be hard to get the new Congress to give the FCC the authority it needs to make rules like these. And that will in the long run be bad for new businesses, while good for the existing near-monopoly players in the communications world.

Harry Lewis: Will Harvard Bring Back ROTC?

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 18:08:00 +0000

It depends on what "bring back" means.

Following the repeal of DADT yesterday, President Faust issued a statement that included the following sentence: "I look forward to pursuing discussions with military officials and others to achieve Harvard’s full and formal recognition of ROTC."

"Recognition" is exactly what I figure will happen. In 1993, the Harvard Faculty voted to end recognition of ROTC on the basis that it did not comply with University nondiscrimination policy. With that premise gone now, it seems to me a simple matter to restore the status ROTC had before '93 -- an activity in which Harvard students can be involved with the simple courtesies of postering, meeting in Harvard rooms, and so on that are attendant on recognition.

Today's papers, however, are full of stories about Harvard's intentions. See the Globe, the Herald, and the Wall Street Journal. The Globe raises the possibility of an ROTC unit returning to Harvard, which would be a lot more than "recognition": "A Pentagon spokeswoman said it is too early to say whether the decision could result in a ROTC unit being established on campus, but student interest and the military budget are two potential factors."

This makes sense, as far as the Pentagon goes. During the 1990s units were being consolidated, not subdivided. And let's be serious about student interest: At a lot of universities with large ROTC programs, the "interest" students show in ROTC is not greater patriotism than at Harvard, but less institutional financial aid. It is a great way not only to serve your country but to get a free college education. Since Harvard provides financial aid up to need for all students, a huge incentive to sign up for ROTC here is missing, and that will inevitably hold down the numbers. (In fact, that makes ROTC participation here all the more remarkable: the students who do it are doing it without the financial incentive.)

But DADT was not the only thing keeping ROTC at arm's length from Harvard, and the Pentagon's inclinations are not the only relevant factor with DADT repealed. ROTC was booted from Harvard in 1969 by taking credit away from the "Military Science" courses and teaching credentials away from the "Professors of Military Science" whose appointments Harvard did not control. I have no idea if these are things on which the Pentagon would insist today, or if Harvard could or would want to reach some accommodation with military officials about these matters. But before anyone gets too excited about a ROTC unit returning to Harvard because of the repeal of DADT, it is worth remembering that the vote that ended the ROTC unit at Harvard was not the 1993 vote about gays in the military, but the February 4, 1969 vote, which read as below. It is hard to imagine that #1-3 could easily be reversed.

Whereas, the ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) program is externally controlled, i.e., taught by professors who do not hold regular appointments.

That the Faculty of Arts and Sciences

1. Withhold academic credit from any courses offered by the three branches of ROTC at Harvard in the future.

2. Request the Harvard Corporation to terminate the Faculty appointments of the present instructors of these courses as soon as possible after the end of the current academic year and to make not further such appointments.

3. Request the Harvard Corporation to withdraw the description of ROTC courses from the course catalogue and to cease the free allocation of space in University buildings to ROTC.

4. Provide scholarship funds where need is created by this Faculty decision.

Berkman Center front page: Application Developers and the Future of Music

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:30:00 +0000

Tuesday, December 21, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

In the same way that music's format shift from analog to digital democratized music distribution for artists, the next digital format shift is leveling the playing field for the creation of music applications. Any developer with talent and vision can now build an app that re-shapes the way we experience music. Some of these apps do so on a large scale by including the totality of recorded music, or, on a smaller scale with specialized functions, like that T-Pain autotuner app everyone was talking about last year. In a few short years, app developers have already changed music's role in our lives with new solutions for music discovery and recommendation, blog and news aggregators, music games, location-based listening, interactive remix apps, social music sharing, and countless other new music experiences.

However, most music application developers are locked out of the commercial music industry, unable to navigate the licensing maze, or to hire one of a few very well-connected deal makers necessary to launch a licensed service comprised of the same popular music available to larger players. In virtually every other market segment -- gaming, social networking, news, photography, etc. -- a developer just needs to build a great app. In the music space, that same developer also needs an army of lawyers and dealmakers.

In this talk, The Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese will discuss the specific needs and vast potential of this growing music app development community, citing plenty of examples of new and innovative music applications. His presentation will illuminate the licensing challenges holding back innovation in music and offer a new way forward: the use of open developer APIs to forge a stronger digital music industry.

About Jim

Jim is the CEO of The Echo Nest. Jim has worked in digital music strategy and corporate development for about 10 years. Before The Echo Nest, Jim was a music lawyer at Greenberg Traurig, specializing in music and digital media deals. Clients included multi-platinum and independent artists, music publishers, digital entertainment companies and branded entertainment. Prior to GT, Jim held sales and corporate development positions at Hughes, where he managed market development and sales with annual revenues exceeding $20 Million. Jim was also Chief Strategy Officer of Webnoize/DMN, a digital entertainment research and advisory company serving over 500 clients. Jim holds a B.A. from Boston College and a J.D., Magna Cum Laude, from the Georgetown University Law Center. When he’s not at the Nest, Jim plays drums and still represents a few indie artists pro bono for fun. Right now, his favorite clients are Game Rebellion and Kemp Harris.

Charlie Nesson: twittering and blogging

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:23:39 +0000

fern liked my doc, clear and straight, lifts my spirits, strengthens my resolve, see ireland call for rethink http://bit.ly/dFOwJ8 and ok, tweeted juan carlos and rethink music, rethink copyright, responded to z’s great net neutrality piece http://bit.ly/gMZFwa with my question, how does copyright relate, see z and ethan and jon http://is.gd/j5luw speaking out to the world at a level wikileaks is only now bringing into focus, how do we manage our global information space, are we capable of governing ourselves. z offers a metaphor as cyber tool to conceptualize the problem, speaking at the level of assange. this is the news, that recognition of the cyber era is finally dawning on mass consciousness, next that such a consciousness exists and we participate as its creators and actors who express it

veritas

David Weinberger: FCC Fail — Providing incentives for scarcity

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:04:16 +0000

There are many ways to boil down today’s upcoming FCC rejection of Net neutrality (which they did in the guise of supporting Net neutrality). Here’s one:

The end of Net neutrality means that those who provide access to the Internet — to our Internet, for it is ours, not theirs — have every economic incentive to keep access scarce. By not providing enough bandwidth, they can claim justification for charging users per bit (or per page, service, download, etc.), and justification for charging Net application/data providers for the right to cut ahead in line.

This is ironic — in the not-funny sense — since the access providers’ stated justification for opposing Net neutrality is because to do otherwise would discourage investment. But, why are they going to invest in providing more bits when they make more money by throttling access? (Competition? Sure, that’d be great. Let’s require them to rent out their lines. Oh, I forgot.) Abundance would turn access provision into a profitable commodity business, which is exactly what users want, and what would stimulate innovation and economic growth.

So, now that Net neutrality is going to be overturned, the access providers will make money by preventing access. Anyone want to bet that the U.S. is now going to climb the charts of average national broadband rates and of lowest average cost? Does anyone think that we haven’t just moved back by decades when we’ll have, say, gigabit access common across the country?

For shame, FCC.

[Later that day] The FCC has clarified some of what it means. For example, they are not going to allow access providers to charge companies for fast lane access. It seems that Commissioners Copps and Mignon nudged the regulations in the right direction. Thank you for that. (Also, see Harold Feld’s take.)

Harry Lewis: Here comes the MPAA

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 03:27:00 +0000

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Motion Picture Association of America plans to remind universities of the anti-piracy provisions it got Congress to include in the Higher Education Opportunity Act. Turns out part of the price for Congress to create educational opportunities is that universities have to devise plans to address illegal movie and music downloading on campus.

Now what the MPAA (and the RIAA) would really like is for universities to monitor their campus networks for illegal content. The nice thing about this strategy is that the university tends to be a monopoly provider of Internet services to students. If one of my students doesn't like Harvard's services, she can't ask for a Verizon DSL connection instead. If she is going to download illegally, Harvard has a way to know it.

Of course, the same logic would suggest that since pirated CDs can arrive in a student's room only through their campus mailboxes, universities should open students' postal mail to make sure there is nothing illegal in it.

Whatever the universities can be pressured into can serve as a model for what Congress can be asked to impose on other ISPs, or what individual ISPs can be pressured into doing. Watch for more pressure for pre-emptive surveillance to protect American intellectual property as both Congress and the courts grow increasingly sympathetic to business interests where they conflict with personal liberty.

Citizen Media Law Project: First Amendment Alert! Author arrested for writing a book

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 02:09:25 +0000

I'm the first to admit that Phillip Greaves is not the most sympathetic figure in America. Greaves wrote "The Pedophile's Guide," which was originally for sale on Amazon.com before the online retailer bowed to public pressure and pulled the book from its online shelves.

I don't necessarily have a problem with that.

But, I have a big problem with today's developments. The Orlando Sentinel reports that Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd had Mr. Greaves arrested in Pueblo, Colorado on obscenity charges.

Lets remember that Grady Judd's jurisdiction is home to meth labs, cops who diddle children, and a pretty high incest rate.

Despite the "real crime" in his jurisdiction, Judd instructed his detectives to request an autographed copy of the book. Mr. Greaves obliged and Judd used that as his justification for having Greaves indicted on obscenity charges in his little caliphate of inbred-methistan.

Greaves told ABC News last month he wasn't trying to promote pedophilia and was not himself a pedophile: "I'm not saying I want them around children, I'm saying if they're there, that's how I want them to [behave]." (source)

The implications of this arrest should outrage you far more than any child molestation incident. That is not to minimize child molestation, nor is it me just trying to be provocative. If a child gets molested, our republic stands. If petty little white-trash sheriffs like Grady Judd can find a book they don't like and have the author hauled off to jail for it, the First Amendment means nothing. Judd's offense is compounded by the fact that Mr. Greaves does not live in Florida and has no connection to Polk County except that he mailed a book there at the express request of a law enforcement officer who was clearly trying to manufacture jurisdiction.

Judd made his disdain for the constitution abundantly clear.

Judd said he was frustrated that Greaves' book was protected under freedom of speech laws, even though it was created "specifically to teach people how to sexually molest and rape children."

"There may be nothing that the other 49 states can do, but there is something that the state of Florida can do ... to make sure we prosecute Philip Greaves for his manifesto," Judd said. (source)

I hope that Mr. Greaves can afford a spirited defense to his extradition. If he winds up having to face these charges in Polk County, I can't imagine his defense lawyers being able to find jurors with the intellect or the ethics to stand up for the First Amendment. Naturally, I would imagine that a conviction will be overturned on appeal - but only after he spends a significant amount of time in jail awaiting that happy day.

And in the meantime, your Constitution will sit in that jail cell with him.

Anyone who is inclined to lack sympathy for Mr. Greaves should set that aside. I don't ask you to care about Mr. Greaves. I ask you to care about your constitution. I ask you to realize what his happening in this case.

This is the same foul pig who locked up Chris Wilson for publishing photos sent to him by U.S. troops in Iraq. This is the same backward jurisdiction where a guy who said "shit" because he was going to jail got 179 days for that transgression. This is where a guy who took photos of consenting adults, at their request, for their own personal use, was pursued relentlessly for obscenity charges. This jurisdiction saw a 15 year old arrested for farting. Another kid was arrested for taking photos of a traffic light. Before all that, when an adult entertainment performer called the cops because she was being stalked, she wound being charged with obscenity.

Just like censorship minded swine from Anthony Comstock to Katherine MacKinnon, Grady Judd is obsessed with the power that comes from wielding the censor's cane.

If we let him get away with it, we all lose something precious.

David Weinberger: Effect of DDoS on human rights

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:59:29 +0000

Ethan Zuckerman has an excellent post about the new Berkman report on the use of Distributed Denial of Service attacks to silence human rights groups

Here’s an abbreviation of Ethan’s summary of the “take-aways”:

DDoS is a pretty common form of attack against human rights and independent media sites, and the volume of attacks does not appear to be slowing.

DDoS doesn’t usually affect independent media and human rights organizations in isolation.

Attacks don’t need massive amounts of bandwidth to adversely affect sites.

For many organizations, DDoS can be a crippling attack, making sites inaccessible for long periods of time..

We see no silver bullets for the independent media and human rights community.

David Weinberger: Support Creative Commons

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:51:59 +0000

Creative Commons is good for the ecology. It makes it easier for creators to let people use their work without having to worry about a copyright goon squad showing up with truncheons…all within the copyright framework. CC needs some money. Now would be an extraordinarily good time to donate, what with the tax clock clicking both in the CC offices and in yours.

Joseph Reagle: Wikipedia 10K redux: Top 20 contributors

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 18:57:52 +0000

Here are the folks who appear to be the top 20 contributors to Wikipedia's first 10,000 edits. ('Josh Grosse' was combined with 'JoshuaGrosse', as well as 'Larry_Sanger' with 'LarrySanger'. The Internet addresses could also be one of the named people.)


      1724   TimShell
      1099   LarrySanger
      1035   JoshuaGrosse
       562   JimboWales
       434   WojPob
       387   dhcp058.246.lvcm.com
       359   Dick Beldin
       338   RoseParks
       332   cobrand.bomis.com
       293   fw-us-hou-8.bmc.com
       218   AyeSpy
       189   office.bomis.com
       156   Andy Jewell
       140   Gareth Owen
       138   LinusTolke
       125   BryceHarrington
       107   SoniC
       106   Malcolm Farmer
       101   OprgaG
        82   dt010n5e.san.rr.com

Dan Gillmor - Mediactive: Nook Edition Available

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:50:11 +0000

The Mediactive book is now available on the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader. You can also get Nook apps for iPhone, iPad, Android and other platforms.

Ethan Zuckerman: New Berkman Paper on DDoS – silencing speech is easy, protecting it is hard

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:32:44 +0000

Colleagues at the Berkman Center and I are releasing a report today titled “Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites“. Hal Roberts, John Palfrey and I have been working on the paper and the research behind it for much of the last year, with great contributions from Jillian York and Ryan McGrady. It’s the sort of in-depth, detailed work we do at Berkman that we generally expect to be of interest to the folks who funded the research and to a small group of people whose work focuses on protecting human rights and independent media sites from DDoS attack.

And then Wikileaks came under sustained DDoS attack, and the topic of DDoS as a form of censorship started receiving international media attention. As Anonymous activists have started using DDoS to call attention to PayPal, PostFinance, Visa and MasterCard’s decisions to cut off Wikileaks as a customer, DDoS has become the subject of a great deal of media attention and reader interest.

Google Trends search for “DDoS”, 12/21/2010. Interest in DDoS recently peaked at about 3.5x average search volume for the term.

The bulk of our report, and nearly all our research, was conducted before Wikileaks’ release of US diplomatic cables, and the organizations we interviewed and surveyed generally receive much less international media attention than Wikileaks has received in the past month. When an organization like Viet Tan – a leading Vietnamese pro-democracy organization – suffers denial of service attacks, it’s rarely discussed outside the digital activist community. The focus of our research was on the effect of DDoS on organizations like Viet Tan, and the suggestions we offer to organizations, network administrators and the broader activist community were designed primarily for the benefit of organizations that receive much less attention and internet traffic than Wikileaks is currently experiencing.

For those organizations, the report offers the following observations:
- DDoS is a pretty common form of attack against human rights and independent media sites, and the volume of attacks does not appear to be slowing. The technique has been applied to a very wide range of targets and appears to have no strong ties to any particular set of political principles.
- DDoS doesn’t usually affect independent media and human rights organizations in isolation. These sites come under various forms of attack, and fending off DDoS is only one of the defensive actions site administrators need to take.
- Attacks don’t need massive amounts of bandwidth to adversely affect sites – we see evidence that very small attacks focused on vulnerabilities in technical architectures can disable some sites. In some cases, a single attacker can be effective in disabling a site, without the assistance of botnets or other volunteers.
- For many organizations, DDoS can be a crippling attack, making sites inaccessible for long periods of time. This is a function of inexperienced and overwhelmed system administrators, unhelpful ISPs, and isolation from the technical community that works together to fend off DDoS.
- We see no silver bullets for the independent media and human rights community. Our recommendations cover a variety of technical steps that can reduce the impact of attacks. Ultimately, we end up recommending building new social institutions that make it easier for targeted sites to seek help from the technical community and from large DDoS resistant hosting providers.

We delayed the release of our report so we could think through the implications of the DDoS attacks on Wikileaks and the group’s move to Amazon’s cloud architecture. Amazon’s decision to remove Wikileaks from their servers – under intense pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman – was deeply disturbing to me personally, and complicated one of the major suggestions we offer in the report. One of our core arguments is that organizations near the “core” of the internet – Tier 1 internet service providers and internet hyperpowers like Amazon and Google – are better positioned to fend off DDoS attacks than organizations near the edge of the network, like smaller ISPs and administrators of individual sites. The difference is a major one – Arbor Networks conducts an annual survey of core network administrators, and a large percentage report fending off most DDoS attacks within an hour. Our research shows that DDoS attacks on independent media and human rights sites can knock targets offline for weeks or longer.

Because these attacks can be so devastating, we recommend that organizations consider moving some or all of their sites onto shared core infrastructure, just as Wikileaks did in response to two large DDoS attacks in late November. Amazon’s disturbing (again, my characterization, not necessarily that of my co-authors) decision to stop providing services to Wikileaks suggests that our advice might need to be rethought.

On reflection, I don’t think that’s the lesson to take from Amazon’s actions. Instead, the lesson is actually a much more disturbing one: the ability of virtually anyone to speak freely online can be constrained by the corporate decisionmaking of internet intermediaries, including internet service providers, web hosting providers and social network operators. I wrote about the emerging threat of intermediary censorship in a chapter in Access Controlled, the new book edited by the key researchers behind the Open Net Initiative, and Jillian York, one of the authors on this paper, has written an important paper on the topic. We expect organizations like Amazon, Facebook, Bluehost and others cited as examples of intermediary censors in the aforementioned papers to protect their users’ rights of speech up to the point when they’re required by law not to. Unfortunately that’s not always what happens… and seldom does bad behavior by a service provider receive the sort of attention paid to Amazon’s actions towards Wikileaks.

Amazon’s actions are an important signal about their corporate attitudes towards free speech and their willingness to selectively enforce their terms of service under pressure. But they should also be a wake-up call about a basic architectural issue – the ability for anyone to speak online and reach an audience is mediated by commercial entities whose terms of service generally give a great deal of discretion to the content host and few protections for the end user. Other organizations may have a better track record of respecting speech, but are less effective at defending against DDoS, as they’re often farther from the core, which as we document in this paper, cuts them out of some of the key technical and social systems that help in defending against attack. As I described in my presentation at the Open Video Conference this October, this leads to a Hobson’s choice for activists who are frequently DDoS’d: they end up moving to core platforms to achieve DDoS resistance, even if they’re uncomfortable with giving that organization a potential veto over their content.

There’s been a lively debate about Anonymous’s actions in using DDoS as public protest against organizations like PayPal and Amazon. (That Anonymous wasn’t able to meaningfully affect Amazon with a DDoS attack helps support our case for core platforms and DDoS resistance.) Deanna Zandt makes an eloquent case for DDoS as a form of civil disobedience, suggesting that it’s a way to impact a corporation for a period of time without causing lasting damage. I disagree with her on at least two points – I think the anonymous nature of the group’s attacks is a major distinction between their actions and conventional civil disobedience, and I disagree with her assertion that there are no lasting damages from DDoS, as there are effects in terms of increased provisioning of infrastructure and increased cost. But I think this debate masks a much less tractable and more important debate: how do we defend the right to political and activist speech atop private networks?

One response to that debate is to attack companies that fail to protect online speech, as Operation Payback is doing. Temporarily silencing them via DDoS is one easy, crude way to make the point that the wider internet community expects the private companies that provide space for public, political discussion to protect the right to speech. A more thorough response would start mapping the companies that have a track record of protecting speech and those who’ve demonstrated less sensitivity to these issues, allowing users to make better decisions about who to work with and who to avoid. We may need cooperation between civil society groups and web service providers to establish a better set of procedures that allow discussion of free speech issues when content is removed for Terms of Service violations – at minimum, companies need an appeals process to allow people who believe content was unfairly removed to challenge the decision. It’s possible that there’s a legislative response to this challenge – one target could be section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which exempts web service providers from liability as publishers. Perhaps such limitations of liability should only apply to companies that have a set of procedures designed to protect politically sensitive content from being unduly silenced.

None of these suggestions is particularly easy to implement… it’s much easier to download Low Orbit Ion Cannon and attempt to silence an online voice you disagree with. The ultimate conclusion of our paper is that silencing someone via DDOS – an activist, a newspaper or a corporation – is pretty easy to do. Protecting the ability to speak online? That’s the tough challenge.

Harry Lewis: Prayers and exams (for close Harvard watchers only)

noreply@blogger.com (Harry Lewis) — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:31:00 +0000

Speaking of things that have been done the same way at Harvard for a long time …

Harvard has had morning prayer services six days a week every day since the founding. There can't be many institutions with a record like that.

The service is now held from 8:45-9:00am, and consists of a 5-minute homily by a member of the community, a hymn sung by the congregation, some choral music by a trained student choir, and a prayer or two. I speak there once or twice a year as it's one of the few places where it is easy to speak on moral subjects. The venue has the advantage that homilies are so short you don't need to be fair to the other side of whatever argument you decide to make, and at the same time no one else is given the opportunity to respond. My talks are collected here.

Historically academic activities have been timed to avoid conflicts with the service, even though attendance is now typically no more than a couple dozen people, many of them not students. Classes officially begin at 5 minutes after the hour, morning exams began at 9:15, and so on.

When responsibility for proctoring final exams was shifted from the administration to the faculty last year, the time of morning exams was shifted to 9:00. That would require anyone who wanted to go to Morning Prayers to be a few minutes late to their exam. I doubt this could have happened twenty years ago without some protest; today wonder if anybody even noticed.

I was thinking not only because my own exam is taking place right now, but because the Reverend Professor Peter Gomes, already planning to retire at the end of next year from his post as Minister in the Memorial Church, has been hospitalized following a stroke. What will be the role of the Minister and the Church in Harvard's future?

Current Berkman People and Projects

David Weinberger: Fillibusters need to be the exception, not the rule

Ethan Zuckerman: links for 2011-01-03

Dan Gillmor - Salon: Goldman Sachs' Facebook ploy

Ethan Zuckerman: Games that help us wander

Joseph Reagle: Students, over-sharing, and compassion

Dan Gillmor - Mediactive: Review: “A Welcome Injection of Sanity”

Harry Lewis: Watching You

David Weinberger: The year in open access

David Weinberger: How to talk like an American

Jonathan Zittrain: Apple approves then pulls unofficial Wikileaks app

David Weinberger: Global voices at Global Voices

Clay Shirky: Half-formed thought on Wikileaks & Global Action

Harry Lewis: The Winklevosses vs. Facebook

David Weinberger: Happy new year, libraries!

Miriam Meckel: Endlich egal

Dan Gillmor - Mediactive: PR Educator Calls Mediactive Top Book of the Year

David Weinberger: No category of digital content has attracted payments from more than 33% of American Net users

Harry Lewis: Neat Tech Products

David Weinberger: Ronnie Simonsen, RIP

Harry Lewis: Is Wikileaks Like the Pentagon Papers?

Dan Gillmor - Salon: Tablets will be everywhere in 2011

Dan Gillmor - Salon: Samsung's tablet: No serious regrets

Harry Lewis: Too Much Anonymity Department

Ethan Zuckerman: links for 2010-12-28

David Weinberger: [2b2k] Citizen scientists

Harry Lewis: Phony "Conservatism" and Internet Neutrality

David Weinberger: [2b2k] Understanding as the deepest driver

OpenNet Initiative: Will Britain's Pornography Filtering Lead to Internet Censorship?

Harry Lewis: Can Grades Be Controlled in a "Fair" Way?

David Weinberger: Kodacroak: The end of Kodachrome

David Weinberger: Foucault reads W

Ethan Zuckerman: links for 2010-12-24

Citizen Media Law Project: Social Media Policies: Fed Labor Law Problem?

Ethan Zuckerman: links for 2010-12-23

Harry Lewis: Railroads and the Internet

Citizen Media Law Project: Introducing Guest Blogger Andrew Mirsky

Ethan Zuckerman: Wikileaks, analysis and speculative fiction

David Weinberger: Seasons greetings from space and the future

Dan Gillmor - Mediactive: Kind Words from TechPresident’s Micah Sifry

Harry Lewis: Harry's Hong Kong Adventure

Ethan Zuckerman: Foot fetishes and internet norms

Ethan Zuckerman: links for 2010-12-22

Berkman Center front page: Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

Harry Lewis: Déja vu all over again

PRX: PRX Bumps into the Holidays

Dan Gillmor - Salon: The FCC's weak new "open Internet" rules

David Weinberger: [berkman] Jim Lucchese on open music platforms

Harry Lewis: Net Neutrality at Last?

Harry Lewis: Will Harvard Bring Back ROTC?

Berkman Center front page: Application Developers and the Future of Music

About Jim

Links

Charlie Nesson: twittering and blogging

David Weinberger: FCC Fail — Providing incentives for scarcity

Harry Lewis: Here comes the MPAA

Citizen Media Law Project: First Amendment Alert! Author arrested for writing a book

David Weinberger: Effect of DDoS on human rights

David Weinberger: Support Creative Commons

Joseph Reagle: Wikipedia 10K redux: Top 20 contributors

Dan Gillmor - Mediactive: Nook Edition Available

Ethan Zuckerman: New Berkman Paper on DDoS – silencing speech is easy, protecting it is hard

Harry Lewis: Prayers and exams (for close Harvard watchers only)