Saturday, May 06, 2000

ICANN is a nonprofit corporation that was chartered by the U.S. Commerce Department to oversee a select set of Internet technical management functions previously managed by the federal government.

That all sounds fairly bureaucratic and benign, but there's more - and it has watchdogs like the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and the Markle Foundation really worked up. To understand their suspicion, it's necessary to know a bit about what's called the "root server," and the critical role ICANN plays in overseeing it. " 9:30 AM

Thursday, May 04, 2000

Well, no, blogger, you’re not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it’s true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it’s also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization."

redux [02.06.00]
The New York Review of Books The Panic of Influence
"This story is the most brilliant dissection I have seen of what Christopher Lasch once called "the banality of pseudo-self-awareness." And there is probably no writer whose work makes a stronger case, twenty years after Lasch wrote the book on it, that we still inhabit a culture of narcissism. Does Wallace's work represent an unusually trenchant critique of that culture or one of its most florid and exotic symptoms? Of course, there can only be one answer: it's both."

And those 117.5 million pounds are just the tip of the iceberg. The U.S. Department of Commerce reports 2,500 chip, circuit, and monitor plants in operation in the United States that year; only 406 reported their toxic output to the EPA.

Behind the well-paid geeks in cubicles and the sharp-dressed entrepreneurs is an industry that consumes as many resources, uses as many lethal chemicals, and generates as much toxic waste as some of the worst culprits of the pre-Internet age. And both industry workers and the people who live near the plants are feeling the effects: the toxins damage aquatic life in the bay, poison drinking water, and, increasing evidence suggests, kill high-tech industry workers.

While the federal government, local agencies, and hundreds of thousands of Bay Area residents and company workers are dealing with the computer industry's mess here in America, the same (or worse) problems are spreading worldwide. As jobs on the digital assembly line become ubiquitous in the developing world and the entire globe gets wired, the same companies that despoiled the valley are busy opening plants in such countries as Mexico, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Taiwan, and India – countries not renowned for strong labor or environmental laws."

Wired Valley of the Uninsured
"A grassroots organization in Silicon Valley found that 30 percent of people surveyed in one of the wealthiest places in the country do not have health insurance.

And it's not only blue-collar families who lack health insurance. The uninsured include low-skilled laborers as well as workers hired on a contract basis at high-tech companies, said Matt Hammer, executive director of PACT.

Hammer said it's high time for the state to step in to provide some security for those being left in the dust of the dramatic changes that Silicon Valley businesses are kicking up.

"My sense is that we all as a society and community need to participate in providing this basic human need to people," he said. "

Tuesday, May 02, 2000

""Whenever I'm listening to music, I'm using my MP3 player," said Aaron Silverman, a Yale sophomore. "Even at parties, people hook up computers to big speakers. It's unfair to have this music out there, yet at the same time it's very convenient. It's a little hypocritical, I have to admit. It's a moral dilemma every time I download a song.""

Infoworld Napster sends a message to music industry: 'Your customers aren't happy'
"The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway. There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers. And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt. "

News.com Metallica fingers 335,435 Napster users
"The heavy metal band, which is suing music-swapping company Napster for what the musicians say are massive copyright violations, says it has identified more than 335,000 individuals who were allegedly sharing the band's songs online in violation of copyright laws."

"Attorneys for Metallica say they hired NetPD, an online consulting firm, to monitor the Napster service this past weekend. The firm came up with more than 335,000 individual users who had made the band's content available online, the lawyers said."

News.com Rapper Chuck D throws weight behind Napster
"Rapper Chuck D, who has long been one of the industry's most outspoken proponents of MP3 music, said today that he is hosting a song-writing contest on his Rapstation.com Web site, aimed at highlighting how Napster can help musicians. "We want to draw attention to the positive aspects that Napster has to offer artists," Chuck D said in a statement. "They need to realize that they can benefit infinitely from what it has to offer.""

Monday, May 01, 2000

This article offers a disruptive antidote to the hierarchical, closed, supply-system, explicit, knowledge-driven, "We Know What You Want" data mine world where many customers feel powerless. This is a world well beyond 1999's "Net Worth" and 2000's "The Cluetrain Manifesto". Infomediaries are not just trustworthy agents which sit between the vendor and the customer, and markets are not just conversations. In this new world, communities sense needs, desires, and wishes for the future and create new data markets - to which organizations must respond or die! We are closing in on the "tipping point" where COMsumers take complete control of their destiny by collectively owning their personal information assets."

redux [04.12.00]
The Standard The Age of Access
"Think of waking up one day only to find that every aspect of your existence has become a purchased affair, that life itself has become the ultimate shopping experience.

The capitalist journey, which began with the commodification of material goods and places, is ending with the commodification of human time and duration. E-commerce and networked ways of doing business are giving rise to the "Age of Access," a new economic era as different from industrial capitalism as the latter was from the merchantilist era that preceded it."

Sunday, April 30, 2000

"We are trained in this country to think of all concealment as a form of hypocrisy. But perhaps we are about to learn how much may be lost in a culture of transparency -- the capacity for creativity and eccentricity, for the development of self and soul, for understanding, friendship and even love. There is nothing inevitable about the erosion of privacy in cyberspace, just as there is nothing inevitable about its reconstruction. We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. What we need now is the will."

The Sunday Times MI5 builds new centre to read e-mails on the net
"MI5 is building a new £25m e-mail surveillance centre that will have the power to monitor all e-mails and internet messages sent and received in Britain. The government is to require internet service providers, such as Freeserve and AOL, to have "hardwire" links to the new computer facility so that messages can be traced across the internet.

The security service and the police will still need Home Office permission to search for e-mails and internet traffic, but they can apply for general warrants that would enable them to intercept communications for a company or an organisation.

The new computer centre, codenamed GTAC - government technical assistance centre - which will be up and running by the end of the year inside MI5's London headquarters, has provoked concern among civil liberties groups. "With this facility, the government can track every website that a person visits, without a warrant, giving rise to a culture of suspicion by association," said Caspar Bowden, director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research."

Salon Twilight of the crypto-geeks
"Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cultlike following among the technologically minded and author of the classic "Snowcrash," has given an over-long, hugely digressive -- and brilliant -- speech. After many, many turns and a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets around to saying that the best defense for one's privacy and personal integrity turns out to be not cryptography but, what do you know, "social structures." He is not explicit about the exact nature of these structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every sort of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties. The slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social trust. The circles widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a trusted space.

Stephenson is making a point about code: Without a sociopolitical context, cryptography is not going to protect you. He singles out PGP for criticism, saying that relying on the encryption scheme is like trying to protect your house with a fence consisting of a single, very tall picket. A slide shows the lone picket rising into the sky, a bird considering it with bulging eyes."

Feed Daily
"PRIVACY'S a funny thing. The word itself never appears in the Constitution, or in the Bill of Rights, or in the Declaration of Independence, and still most Americans believe that, like their other freedoms, the right to privacy is inalienable. And there's something to that belief. Judge Brandeis made the first attempt to codify personal privacy rights in 1890, when he famously wrote that people have "the right to enjoy life – the right to be let alone," and juries, journalists, private citizens, and public figures have been wrangling over that notion of privacy the right to be let alone ever since. With Wednesday's release of a videotape documenting the horrors at Columbine High School, the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department has, probably unwittingly, reinvigorated this long-running debate."