Wired News Wireless Phone Hack Attack?
"During a routine software check, a Norwegian company recently discovered what might be the first hacker attack on mobile phones and other personal digital assistants.

Norway-based WAP service developer Web2WAP was testing its software on Nokia phones with the short messaging service (SMS) when it realized that suspicious code was being sent to the phones and causing them "to freeze.""

""This is the beginning of a whole new era, now that we're moving more from the wired to wireless," [Dan Takata, a virus specialist] said. "Right now (these attacks) are not destructive, but in the not too distant future we will see malicious attacks on mobile phones and Palm devices.""

MSNBC A new era for computer viruses?
"Will catching a computer virus one day be just like catching a cold? What if merely sitting next to the wrong person on the bus could not only give you sniffles, but could erase all your morning appointments or drain your cell phone’s power? For years, computer security experts have engaged in such whimsical hypotheticals. But the recently discovered Palm Pilot virus suggests that a frightening new era of computer viruses — one where they spread more like biological viruses — has begun."

redux [06.06.00]
Fox News Next-Gen Cell Phones Could Be Targets for Viruses
"As next-generation communication devices become smarter and more PC-like in functionality, they may also become the target of virus writers who will unleash a new breed of malicious payloads."

"While today's devices aren't at too great a risk for viruses, next-generation cell phones will be more susceptible because of the two things cell phone users want the most: programmability and Internet access."

BBC Ericsson unveils Bluetooth
"Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson has unveiled its first mobile phone using the Bluetooth wireless technology.

The Bluetooth technology provides wireless connections between the phone and other electronic devices such as computers."

"The new phone will be WAP-enabled, allowing the user to hook up to the net with their phone, sending and receiving data at high speed."

Crypto-Gram Computer Security: Will We Ever Learn?
"If we've learned anything from the past couple of years, it's that computer security flaws are inevitable. Systems break, vulnerabilities are reported in the press, and still many people put their faith in the next product, or the next upgrade, or the next patch. "This time it's secure," they say. So far, it hasn't been. "

"No one is paying attention because no one has to.

Computer security products, like software in general, have a very odd product quality model. It's unlike an automobile, a skyscraper, or a box of fried chicken. If you buy a product, and get harmed because of a manufacturer's defect, you can sue...and you'll win. Car-makers can't get away with building cars that explode on impact; chicken shops can't get away with selling buckets of fried chicken with the odd rat mixed in. It just wouldn't do for building contractors to say thing like, "Whoops. There goes another one. Sorry. But just wait for Skyscraper 1.1; it'll be 100% collapse-free!"

Software is different. It is sold without any claims whatsoever. Your accounts receivable database can crash, taking your company down with it, and you have no claim against the software company. Your word processor can accidentally corrupt your files and you have no recourse. Your firewall can turn out to be completely ineffectual -- hardly better than having nothing at all -- and yet it's your fault. Microsoft fielded Hotmail with a bug that allowed anyone to read the accounts of 40 or so million subscribers, password or no password, and never bothered to apologize. "

Salon Flameproof racism
"Are blacks programmed by their genes to be promiscuous? Can we read any morality off our genes at all? Is religion pernicious nonsense? The field of evolutionary psychology attempts to illuminate such inquiries into human nature with the insights of modern Darwinism. It raises questions that have a prickly, intense and scary quality. To get inside them is like putting on a hair shirt with explosives strapped to it. Even in sober academic journals, the discussion can rapidly become a screaming match. On the Internet, home of the flame, any attempt at a reasonable discussion seems completely futile."

"Given the volatility of online debate, the existence, then, of the Evolutionary Psychology mailing list seems like a miracle. All these unspeakable things and more are debated there, yet it is actually possible to learn new things -- and the arguments, however ruthless, are always polite."

The Edge Getting Human Nature Right
"The 'implication' that seems to worry people most of all is so-called 'genetic determinism'. It's the notion that, if human nature was shaped by evolution, then it's fixed and so we're simply stuck with it — there's nothing we can do about it. We can never change the world to be the way we want, we can never institute fairer societies; policy-making and politics are pointless.

Now, that's a complete misunderstanding. It doesn't distinguish between human nature — our evolved psychology — and the behavior that results from it. Certainly, human nature is fixed. It's universal and unchanging — common to every baby that's born, down through the history of our species. But human behavior — which is generated by that nature — is endlessly variable and diverse. After all, fixed rules can give rise to an inexhaustible range of outcomes. Natural selection equipped us with the fixed rules — the rules that constitute our human nature. And it designed those rules to generate behavior that's sensitive to the environment. So, the answer to 'genetic determinism' is simple. If you want to change behavior, just change the environment. And, of course, to know which changes would be appropriate and effective, you have to know those Darwinian rules. You need only to understand human nature, not to change it."

Science as Culture SOCIOBIOLOGY SANITIZED: THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND GENIC SELECTIONISM DEBATES
"In the late 1970s I attended meetings at which sociobiologists E. O. Wilson and David Barash, critic Stephen J. Gould, and others were on a panel. Standing blocked by the crowd in the hall outside the doorway to the packed hall I was unable hear the speakers. I spied a little door near the stage, and figured that if I could get to that door, I could get next to the stage and the front row. I sneaked through the hotel kitchen and found the door. Just as I opened it I was passed by a number of African American students who ran up on stage and poured water on Wilson's head. Wilson responded by saying to the audience that he felt like he had been speared by an aborigine. The crowd applauded the martyred Wilson (on crutches at the time--from a skiing accident) and some in the front row muttered epithets at the disrupters and at me, who appeared to have held the door for the demonstrators. The water pitcher story has been repeated scores of times in journalistic accounts, but none of these mention Wilson's racially tinged response. Two decades later the debate concerning the genetic determination of human behavior has been reanimated in the general intellectual and middle-brow media with a somewhat more restrained tone. The study of evolutionary accounts of human behavior is now called "evolutionary psychology" to avoid some of the justifiably bad connotations that were associated with sociobiology. During the last few years the linguist Steve Pinker, (1997) philosopher Daniel Dennett, (1995) New Republic editor and science popularizer Robert Wright,(1994) and science writer Matt Ridley (1994, 1997) have produced feisty, polemical expositions of evolutionary psychology for a broad audience. Stephen J. Gould has returned to the breach to criticize evolutionary psychology, but several writers considered to be on the left have defended sociobiological approaches and criticized postmodern rejection of biologism.

The core theories of evolutionary psychology are the same as those of sociobiology. Several of the commonly made distinctions between evolutionary psychology and sociobiology turn out not to distinguish the two. So what has changed and what is new?"

MSNBC Napster heralds new business model
"Napster’s place in history may extend far beyond the e-commerce world."

"AT THE heart of the controversy is a clash that goes far beyond the music industry. What we’re witnessing is the beginning of an epoch struggle between two great economic systems. On one side of the divide lies the old market-based economy made up of sellers and buyers. On the other side lies the new network-based economy made up of servers and clients. In markets, the parties exchange property. In networks, the parties share access to services and experiences."

"By the mid decades of the 21st century — markets — the hallmark of conventional capitalism, will have largely disappeared, replaced by a new kind of economic system based on network relationships, 24/7 contractual arrangements and access rights."

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."

The Standard From Selling Goods to Commodifying Relationships
"Instead of thinking of products as fixed items with set features and a one-time sales value, companies now think of them as "platforms" for all sorts of upgrades and value-added services. In the Age of Access services and upgrades are what count. The platform is merely the vessel to which these services are added.

In a sense, the product becomes more of a cost of doing business than an item in itself. The idea is to use the platform as a beachhead, as a way of establishing a physical presence in the customer's home or place of business. That presence allows the vendor to begin an ongoing "relationship" with the customer."

Salon GM's e-mobile magnate
"On a weekly basis, there are over a half a billion hours of eyeball time that customers spend in their vehicles. I used to live in the Bay Area and I'm well aware of the traffic patterns there; some days you might be stuck for a couple hours. If you can make your time in the vehicle more efficient by conducting activities and services over the Web, all of a sudden your life can be more efficient. That's really our goal."

redux [08.21.00]
Inside Human Nature 1, New Paradigm 0: On Gnutella, There Are Plenty of Files but not Enough Sharing
"Napster and other file-exchange services love to tout the virtues of sharing. But a digital world where most people are selfish and don't share files isn't just impolite, it could threaten the future viability of such peer-to-peer networks.

Raising profound issues, two researchers at the prominent Xerox Palo Alto Research Center published a paper on Gnutella last week. Their main discovery: 70 percent of users don't share any files and 76 percent share less than 10. According to research scientists Eytan Adar and Bernardo Huberman, this can lead to system blockages as the relatively few sharers are overwhelmed by file requests from freeloaders. With a few downloaders hogging the available bandwidth, it effectively blocks the majority of users from accessing the tiny pool of file providers.

More importantly, the study implies that copyright interests may have an easier time than suspected chasing down pirates."

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center: Internet Ecologies Area Free Riding on Gnutella
"An extensive analysis of user traffic on Gnutella shows a significant amount of free riding in the system. By sampling messages on the Gnutella network over a 24-hour period, we established that 70% of Gnutella users share no files, and 90% of the users answer no queries. Furthermore, we found out that free riding is distributed evenly between domains, so that no one group contributes significantly more than others, and that peers that volunteer to share files are not necessarily those who have desirable ones. We argue that free riding leads to degradation of the system performance and adds vulnerability to the system. If this trend continues copyright issues might become moot compared to the possible collapse of such systems."

MIT Technology Review Not by Reason Alone
"In a recent Wired magazine article, Bill Joy argued that the consequences of research on robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology may lead to “knowledge-enabled mass destruction...hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.” His medicine: “relinquishment...by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.” I don’t buy it.

What troubles me with this argument is the arrogant notion that human logic can anticipate the effects of intended or unintended acts, and the more arrogant notion that human reasoning can determine the course of the universe."

"I suggest we broaden our perspective to the fullness of our humanity, which besides reason includes feelings and beliefs. Sometimes, as we drive the car of scientific and technological progress, we’ll veer because our reason says so. At other times we’ll follow our feelings, or we’ll be guided by faith. Most of the time, we’ll steer with all three of these human forces guiding us in concert, as they have guided human actions for thousands of years. As we do so, we should stay vigilant, ready to stop, when danger is imminent, using our full humanity to make that determination. If we do so, our turning point will be very different from where it may seem today, based on early rational assessments...that have failed us so often. Let us have faith in ourselves, our fellow human beings and our universe. And let’s keep in mind that our car is not the only moving thing out there."

redux [06.01.00]
Reason Joy, to the World
"... Joy is worried, really worried–20,000 words and five months of writing worried–that 21st-century technologies threaten to make human beings extinct. The threats are intelligent robots, nanotechnology (the ability to build things on the atomic level), and genetic engineering. All of them, he acknowledges, offer wonderful advantages, but they are, in his view, simply too dangerous to develop. We should stop investigating these ideas, he argues, before they become uncontrollable realities."

"Bill Joy is a lot smarter than I’ll ever be. But he is also incredibly foolish, in the parochial, reality-dodging way that geniuses sometimes are. And he is willing to sacrifice an awful lot of other people’s lives and liberty to his fantasies of power and control.

If—then statements are a staple of computer programming. Here’s one to consider: "If we could agree, as were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous–then we might understand what we can and should relinquish." (Emphasis added.) How, exactly, does a species of more than six billion intelligent individuals, with their own plans and purposes, agree on anything? Joy imagines the world as a small, technological elite and assumes away the problems of politics. He and his friends will just get together and agree on what to do."

redux [03.12.00]
Wired Magazine Why the future doesn't need us.
"Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials.

In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence. "

strategy + business Pattie Maes and Her Agents Provocateur
"For a leading researcher at one of the United States' top universities, Pattie Maes is surprisingly uninterested in the technological underpinnings of her own work. That's not to say that her basic research in artificial intelligence (AI) isn't impressive. The 38-year-old associate professor at the Massachusetts engineered major breakthroughs in software agents, programs that are changing the face of Internet shopping and are on the verge of turning retailing on its head. But to Dr. Maes (pronounced "Mahs"), it's not the technology but its effect that is important. She is the prototype of the New Economy scholar/entrepreneur: a scientist in academia committed to seeing her ideas become commercial successes."

""I realized that computers could augment people," Dr. Maes says. "That's what all of my research is really about. Our lives are so busy and there are so many choices to make, so many opportunities to keep track of, and so much accessible information; we end up feeling overwhelmed. If we could make computers smarter and better serve people, we'd be on to something. I think of this as intelligence augmentation — IA rather than AI."

The New York Times In Online Auctions of the Future, It'll Be Bot vs. Bot vs. Bot
[requires 'free' registration]
"THEY are called shopbots, buybots, pricebots or just plain bots -- the "bot" is short for robot. The name is playful, but the reality is all business because shopbots are meant to roam the Web all by themselves one day, efficiently buying and selling goods and services for people and companies."

"Right now, bots that simply go out and fetch price lists from the Web do not make intelligent decisions about matching a buyer's needs with a combination of offerings.

"That will change," Mr. Bryan said.

"And businesses need to be prepared.""

First Monday Intelligent Agents, Markets and Competition: Consumers' Interests and Functionality of Destination Sites
"Intelligent agents are first and foremost tools which can be applied in numerous and different ways. However, Intelligent agents, in the true sense of attributed functions such as autonomy and pro-activity, do not yet exist. There are agent-like applications like Web crawlers and search engines which sometimes include collaborative filtering; in spite of these advances a software entity that combines all of these functions into an intelligent agent has yet to be developed. Still, it is only a matter of time when intelligent agents will play a decisive role in the electronic marketplace and therefore in competition. This paper explores the boundaries of what might happen in markets when intelligent agents are introduced and used by market participants. It discusses existing commercial agent-like applications and treats models on how different functions of agents could affect different market stages. Two types of markets - travel and bookselling - are examined, focusing on consumers' interests and the functionality of destination sites."

Nature: Web Matters Is There an Intelligent Agent in Your Future?
"The vision of such intelligent agents is quite compelling and many people now believe they will be necessary if we are ever to tame the increasing complexities caused by the accelerating and virtually uncontrolled growth of the World Wide Web."

"The most basic need in interacting with an agent is a language in which to communicate. While it is possible to 'fake' these semantics (with the program reacting appropriately to keywords, for example), an agent that is truly useful must have a lot of knowledge about the problem being solved. If the travel agent doesn't know about geography (Where is the Caribbean?), transportation (What airlines go there?), lodging (Is that a good hotel?), economics (Can I afford to stay there?), etc. then we cannot easily communicate our needs. If the internet agent doesn't understand the area in which it must work (molecular biology, particle physics, etc.), it is not able to find appropriate resources any better than current keyword based approaches."

British Telecommunications Laboratories A Perspective on Software Agents Research
[note: this is an archived html version residing on the umbc agentweb server. the original zipped, postscript document can be found at BT Laboratories' Intelligent Systems Research (ISR) Group's publications page ]
"This paper sets out, ambitiously, to present a brief reappraisal of software agents research. Evidently, software agent technology has promised much. However some five years after the word ‘agent’ came into vogue in the popular computing press, it is perhaps time the efforts in this fledgling area are thoroughly evaluated with a view to refocusing future efforts. We do not pretend to have done this in this paper – but we hope we have sown the first seeds towards a thorough first 5-year report of the software agents area. The paper contains some strong views not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community."

The New York Times Whose Intellectual Property Is It, Anyway? The Open Source War
[requires 'free' registration]
"There's a war going on. It isn't between ethnic groups, provinces, religions or nations. It is between nimble people who want to think for themselves and big dinosaurs of corporations that want to keep the upstarts penned up and docile."

"On one side are the big conglomerates that sell gadgets, music, toys, movies, text, cars and tools to the world. They're discovering that intellectual property laws covering trademarks, patents and copyrights can be potent tools to block criticism and keep consumers on a very short leash. All it takes is a SWAT team of well-financed lawyers to stomp out opposition.

On the other side are the folks who think that they actually own what they purchase. They may be car buffs who want to rebore their engine blocks, musicians who want to make copies of tunes to play in their cars or computer owners who want to fix nasty bugs. They all want to get at the guts of the technology because that's where the power is."

"The open-source war is not going to be easy for society.

The intellectual property laws do help protect creators and their innovations, and corporations instinctively grab as much power as they can get. But if the strength of these laws grows and the teams of lawyers that enforce them become more powerful, society will become much poorer."

redux [08.09.00]
The Observer How Dr Dre sings out for the Big Six
"Dre v Napster is the musical sideshow of the bigger war over ownership of intellectual property, ranging from ditties to DNA. In my last column, I described how the Clinton administration blocked South Africa's purchasing of low-cost drugs to stem the spread of Aids. To protect the right of Glaxo-Wellcome to embargo cross-border sales of AZT which don't meet the company's terms, Clinton threatened South Africa with trade sanctions under the World Trade Organisation's Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (Trips).

Today I can report that one nation has finally displayed the huevos to stand up to America's bully-boy enforcement of WTO dictat: the US."

"But then, hypocrisy is the oxygen of the new imperial order of thought ownership. Every genteel landlord of fenced-in intellectual real estate began life as a thief. Under WTO and US law today, how many products built on the ideas of others could never have made it to market? As Isaac Newton would say now: 'If I see further than others, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants too dumb to patent their discoveries'."

redux [07.13.00]
Business 2.0 Semantics of the New Economy
"The struggle over monetizing the digital economy is now a war, if we follow the rhetoric of its leaders. The battle over music and movies is inspiring Charlton Heston-like images, most recently from Edgar Bronfman, head of Universal Studios (whose last widely distributed quote came years ago when he declared the Internet the "CB radio of the ’90s"), in a speech at Real Conference 2000 in May. "

""I am warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose," Bronfman said. "I have moved these lawyers…not to attack the Internet and its culture, but for its benefit and to protect it."

Bronfman justified his fight as defense of his "intellectual property rights," and those of creators everywhere. "You own a home. You own a car. They’re yours–they belong to you. Well, your ideas belong to you, too. And ‘intellectual property’ is property, period." In pursuit of pirates, he said, "we must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide."

"The semantics of the issues intrigue me, and came to my attention through Richard Stallman, who suggests that terminology is a foundation for our ideas, and that words such as consumer, protection, piracy, and intellectual property reinforce faulty premises."

redux [04.20.00]
The New York Times Open-Source Software Arouses Researchers' Curiosity
[requires 'free' registration]
"WHEN technology stocks took their sharp tumble last week, many companies appeared to lose one of their most important assets -- the ability to lure talented employees with options. To attract and hold the best, you have to offer the chance to strike it rich.

Or do you? What are we to think when the best of the best -- the elite programmers that industry wisdom deems 100 times more productive than the typical competent coder -- donate their precious time to develop software anyone can use without charge? That is the puzzle the open-source movement, most famous for the Linux operating system, presents to economists."

"While its development looks like a marketplace, open-source software itself is a classic public good. You can use it without contributing to its maintenance and without paying a cent to all those programmers who created and improved it.

Hence the economic puzzle. As Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School and Jean Tirole of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ask in a recent paper: "Why should thousands of top-notch programmers contribute freely to the provision of a public good?"

Salon Finland -- The Open Source Society
"Why Finland? In the 21st century, there's hardly a nation in the world that doesn't want to be a role model for the information society. What made Finland so special? Was it an accident of history, the luck of the draw, or some more complex intersection of cultural evolution and the activist will of an entire people? More to the point, was it possible that the deep structure of Finnish civilization encourages an open-source way of life?"

redux [03.04.00]
The Washington Monthly Reboot! How Linux and open-source development could change the way we get things done
"Imagine a scale with all the advantages of a proprietary model on the left and all the advantages of an open-source model on the right. Pretend everybody who wants to solve a problem or build a project has a scale like this. If it tips to the left, the proprietary model is chosen; if it tips to the right, the open model is chosen. Now, as connectivity increases with the Internet, and computer power increases exponentially, more and more weight accumulates on the right. Every time computer power increases, another household gets wired, or a new simulator is built online, a little more weight is added to the right. Having the example of Linux to learn from adds some more weight to the right; the next successful open-source project will add even more.

"Perhaps the next boom in open source will come from the law; perhaps from drug X; perhaps it will be something entirely different. Although it's difficult to tell, it is quite likely that the scale is going to tip for some projects and that there will be serious efforts at open-source development in the next decade. Moreover, it's quite likely some of these projects will work."

EE Times Free 32-bit processor core hits the Net
"A loose-knit organization called OpenCores is offering a free 32-bit processor intellectual-property (IP) core in a move that could undermine such commercial IP licensors as ARM and MIPS."

"...analysts say the offering, and others like it, may eventually alter the semiconductor IP landscape as radically as Linux"

Jim Tully, EDA analyst with Gartner Group's Dataquest subsidiary in Egham, England, said, "Who's to say that this couldn't evolve into something the industry could use? Before Linux came along, who would have said that [the Linux phenomenon] could happen?" Tully said, "People will be paranoid about [OpenRISC's] background, its provenance, its quality. On the face of it no one would want to look at it, but no doubt people will download free cores and try them out in low-risk situations. If OpenRISC works, it could migrate up."

redux [04.15.00]
MIT Technology Review Freedom—Or Copyright?
"Once upon a time, in the age of the printing press, an industrial regulation was established for the business of writing and publishing. It was called copyright. Copyright’s purpose was to encourage the publication of a diversity of written works. Copyright’s method was to make publishers get permission from authors to reprint recent writings.

Ordinary readers had little reason to disapprove, since copyright restricted only publication, not the things a reader could do. If it raised the price of a book a small amount, that was only money. Copyright provided a public benefit, as intended, with little burden on the public. It did its job well—back then.

Then a new way of distributing information came about: computers and networks. The advantage of digital information technology is that it facilitates copying and manipulating information, including software, musical recordings and books. Networks offered the possibility of unlimited access to all sorts of data—an information utopia.

But one obstacle stood in the way: copyright. Readers who made use of their computers to share copyright infringers. The world had changed, and what was once an industrial regulation on publishers had become a restriction on the public it was meant to serve."

redux [05.16.00]
Suck Pirate Flags
"Intellectual property rights seem a quaint notion these days — the antiquated, Elizabethan remains of the Old Economy with all the here-and-now applicability of lace collars. Intellectual property is a fairy tale, told by dot-commers to make their interns laugh, like stories of stockholders who expect a profit and journalists who check their sources. The idea of owning what you create has become a sad little joke."

"The near-universal disregard with which intellectual property is treated leaves anyone with even the slightest interest in their own rights thinking that the population of the Internet consists almost entirely of beady-eyed, slack-jawed warezd00dz. But moralizing never got anybody anywhere, save nailed to a tree. And since piracy is going to continue no matter what the courts or copyright-holders do, Metallica and the AP and anybody else with complaints about the state of intellectual property rights on the Web is going to have to do some hard thinking fast.

"First one with a business plan wins."

redux [07.27.00]
Free Software Advocacy Against intellectual property
"The original rationale for copyrights and patents was to foster artistic and practical creative work by giving a short-term monopoly over certain uses of the work. This monopoly was granted to an individual or corporation by government. The government's power to grant a monopoly is corrupting. The biggest owners of intellectual property have sought to expand it well beyond any sensible rationale."

"This chapter outlines the case against intellectual property. I begin by mentioning some of the problems arising from ownership of information. Then I turn to weaknesses in its standard justifications. Next is an overview of problems with the so-called "marketplace of ideas," which has important links with intellectual property. Finally, I outline some alternatives to intellectual property and some possible strategies for moving towards them. "

"Intellectual property is supported by many powerful groups: the most powerful governments and the largest corporations. The mass media seem fully behind intellectual property, partly because media monopolies would be undercut if information were more freely copied and partly because the most influential journalists depend on syndication rights for their stories."

"Another problem in developing strategies is that it makes little sense to challenge intellectual property in isolation. If we simply imagine intellectual property being abolished but the rest of the economic system unchanged, then many objections can be made. Challenging intellectual property must involve the development of methods to support creative individuals."

AlterNet.Org Internet Boosting Energy Efficiency
"The emerging new economy created by the Internet is producing more than just a business revolution -- it is also generating enormous environmental benefits. The Internet can turn buildings into websites, and replace warehouses with supply-chain software. It can turn paper and CDs into electrons, and replace trucks with fiberoptic cable. This means significant energy savings, and perhaps a very different type of economic growth than we have seen in the past."

"There's already evidence of a sudden shift in the American energy diet. While the nation's economy grew by more than 9 percent in 1997 and 1998, energy demand stayed almost flat in spite of very low energy prices, marking a major departure from recent historical patterns.

Part of this trend can be attributed to the growth of information technology and e-commerce. For example, for each book sold, the online retailer Amazon.com uses just one-sixteenth the energy to operate its buildings that a traditional bookseller uses. Internet shopping also uses less energy to get a package to your house. Shipping a 10-pound package by overnight air -- the most energy-intensive delivery mode -- uses 40 percent less fuel than the average roundtrip drive to the mall. Ground shipping by truck uses just one-tenth the energy of a trip by car to the store."

The Economist What the Internet cannot do
"A whole industry of cybergurus has enthralled audiences (and made a fine living) with exuberant claims that the Internet will prevent wars, reduce pollution, and combat various forms of inequality. However, although the Internet is still young enough to inspire idealism, it has also been around long enough to test whether the prophets can be right."

"But might it reduce energy consumption and pollution? The Centre for Energy and Climate Solutions (CECS), a Washington think-tank, has advanced just such a case, based largely on energy consumption figures for 1997 and 1998. While the American economy grew by 9% over those two years, energy demand was almost unchanged—because, the CECS ventures, the Internet “can turn paper and CDs into electrons, and replace trucks with fibre-optic cable.” No wonder one enthusiastic newspaper headline begged, “Shop online—save the earth.”

"Sadly, earth-saving is harder than that."

redux [08.04.00]
The Standard Not Enough Juice
"Want something to take your mind off the frustrations of startup finance? Here's one possibility: Maybe the whole digital economy will be laid low by an unreliable electric-power system.

I exaggerate, but just a little. The underlying idea of the Internet Economy is that its participants have evolved past the limits of the old, material world. Let car-factory managers worry about quality inspections on that next ton of steel. Net managers can create value out of the lightest and purest ingredients imaginable: talent, bandwidth, new data-organization schemes and radical business efficiencies. That's why it's always startling when the new economy bumps into the old."

redux [07.23.00]
The Standard When Data Checks In
"When it opened in 1928, the former R.R. Donnelley & Sons' Lakeside Press plant on the near South Side of Chicago embodied the splendor and sweat of the old economy."

"Now, the building is on the verge of becoming a bellwether for the new economy."

"Across the country, real estate investors are turning obsolete manufacturing plants and warehouses – as well as derelict office buildings and failed retail centers – into so-called telecom or carrier hotels. Instead of packing the buildings with crates, lathes or die casters, companies this time around jam them with racks of switches, routers and generators. Once brick-and-mortar icons of heavy industry, the structures are being rehabbed to house the backbone of the Internet Economy."

"These structures were built to house heavy machinery, so they usually feature floors that can support more than 125 pounds per square foot; high ceilings that provide clearance and ventilation for telecom-equipment racks; and space for generators to take over in case of power outages. The Lakeside Technology Center, for instance, has more than 80 generators and stores 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel to run them."

"Generally, upgrades require bringing in huge power supplies – the Lakeside Center could use up to 96 million megawatts – as well as state-of-the-art heating and air conditioning systems."

redux [07.05.00]
The New York Times Digital Economy's Demand for Steady Power Strains Utilities
[requires 'free' registration]
"Read-Rite's milling machine is indicative of a long-running, but accelerating problem: the nation's electrical power supply system is not up to the task of meeting the digital economy's needs. While the utility industry has historically prided itself on delivering fairly stable power 99.9 percent of the time, today's computerized economy is demanding even fewer interruptions and a much steadier current.

That is because electricity is more than just energy for computers -- it is the medium they use to do their job. Rapid, minute changes in voltage represent the ones and zeros that make up digital information.

Those patterns are ultimately translated into a human voice during a phone call, a calculation during a banking transaction, a dose of radiation during cancer therapy or a photo of a new baby e-mailed to scattered relatives. Any disruption in the power supply that compromises the processor's ability to manage those voltages can lead to lost data or system crashes."

USA Today Internet saps California's power grid
"As California's tech-savvy businesses and households plug into an increasingly wired economy, the state's power system is sputtering like a frayed electrical cord."

"Computers consume about 13% of the nation's power, according to EPRI Corp., a Palo Alto research and development group that studies the utility industry.

The Internet's borderless community also is taxing U.S. power suppliers because about 80% of online traffic comes through this country.

To handle all the Internet action, businesses are turning entire offices into warehouses for the powerful computer servers and peripheral equipment needed to navigate networks. These so-called ''server farms'' consume 10 to 12 times more power than the traditional office building filled with human workers. "

Salon Are British bobbies reading your e-mail?
"Americans are used to thinking of Britain as the source from which most of the principles of our democracy flow, a country for which these principles are so innate it doesn't even need a written Constitution. The reality is increasingly different.

Compare and contrast. On July 14, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that the FBI was using an Internet wiretapping system known as Carnivore to intercept and access e-mail. By July 24, FBI assistant director Donald Kerr was explaining Carnivore to Congress. By Aug. 15, a federal appeals court had ruled, in response to a suit from the Electronic Privacy Information Center and others, that law enforcement officers must get a Fourth Amendment search warrant before they can have access to "packets from which call information has not been stripped." The ruling, it seems, makes Carnivore illegal. In Britain, on the other hand, on July 28 the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIP) became law, requiring all Internet service providers to install and maintain interception equipment for the benefit of law enforcement. Yes, agents will have to get a warrant. But that warrant will be issued by the politician at the head of the Home Office (Britain's equivalent to the Justice Department), not by a judge. "

redux [07.19.00]
The New York Times British Authorities May Get Wide Power to Decode E-Mail
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"As the Clinton administration formally enters the debate about law enforcement surveillance in cyberspace, the British government is about to enact a law that would give the authorities here broad powers to intercept and decode e-mail messages and other communications between companies, organizations and individuals.

The measure, which goes further than the American plan unveiled on Monday in Washington, would make Britain the only Western democracy where the government could require anyone using the Internet to turn over the keys to decoding e-mails messages and other data."

redux [07.11.00]
MSNBC FBI’s system to covertly search e-mail raises privacy, legal issues
"The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is using a superfast system called Carnivore to covertly search e-mails for messages from criminal suspects."

"Word of the Carnivore system has disturbed many in the Internet industry because, when deployed, it must be hooked directly into Internet service providers’ computer networks. That would give the government, at leasttheoretically, the ability to eavesdrop on all customers’ digital communications, from e-mail to online banking and Web surfing.

The system also troubles some Internet service providers, who are loath to see outside software plugged into their systems. In many cases, the FBI keeps the secret Carnivore computer system in a locked cage on theprovider’s premises, with agents making daily visits to retrieve the data captured from the provider’s network. But legal challenges to the use of Carnivore are few, and judges’ rulings remain sealed because of the secretive nature of the investigations."

Dan Gillmor Draconian cyber-surveillance near in Britain
"BRITAIN'S Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has been talking up the Internet and technology, vowing to bring the United Kingdom firmly into the emerging digital economy and culture. Yet despite real progress toward this worthy goal, Blair's Labor government is undermining its promise with proposals for pervasive, intrusive cyber-surveillance -- quite possibly the most Draconian in the Western world.

The legislation is called the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill, or RIP, and its passage in Parliament may be imminent. Growing recognition of the bill's potentially disastrous impact has triggered some second thoughts. But the government is pressing ahead, and foes of the legislation say their chances of heading it off remain, at best, 50-50."

"Internet service providers don't like the bill. Some, but not all, would be required to install equipment allowing the government to tap communications in something close to real time. The government hasn't explained very well why a criminal with even half a brain would use such an ISP instead of a provider that wasn't part of the surveillance network.

One ISP told the Independent newspaper that it was exploring a move offshore if the bill passes. Its clients include unions and activist non-governmental organizations that have a rational concern of unbridled government power."

Salon Can a labeling system protect your privacy?
"P3P, the new Internet privacy protocol unveiled last month by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has been both lauded as the answer to everyone's privacy worries and castigated as a Trojan horse that will divert public attention from real problems. The truth is, it's neither. It's merely a potentially nifty tool that might help ensure privacy in cyberspace -- if the government gets its act together.

"But P3P isn't technology, it's politics. The Clinton administration and companies such as Microsoft are all set to use P3P as the latest excuse to promote their campaign of "industry self-regulation" and delay meaningful legislation on Internet privacy."

"Ultimately, though, Americans shouldn't be put in the position of having to decide whether or not they want to give up their privacy in order to partake in the pleasure of viewing pages on the Internet: We should have base-level privacy protections in law. We do this in other areas, such as food, drugs and the environment. Likewise, there should be certain privacy guarantees that are fundamental to our society; privacy guarantees such as the right to see information that a company has collected on you and the right to have erroneous information expunged.

P3P can't create these rights and it can't enforce them. But P3P will make it easier to cut through the legalese and tell the difference between Web sites that are truly committed to protecting privacy and those that are information sharks -- provided, of course, that both kinds of Web sites post P3P policies that are comprehensive and accurate. And, of course, there's a fat chance of that happening without meaningful legislation."

MSNBC Global digital divide could hamper growth
"Many developing countries will remain on the losing side of the “digital divide” unless they establish the necessary framework for high-tech growth, a report released Tuesday found."

"For high-tech companies looking to wire developing countries, there are “great possibilities to make money and move the world along in the right direction,” he said.

"But Internet access may seem like an impossibility to the 42 percent of the world’s adult population that has never even used a telephone, said Carlos Primo Braga, manager of the World Bank’s information-technology development programme."

redux [08.07.00]
First Monday Negotiating the Global and the Local: How Thai Culture Co-opts the Internet
"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."

The New York Times It Takes the Internet to Raise a Cambodian Village
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"Overlooked in last month's Group of 8 discussions about the challenge of a growing "digital divide" between the information rich and the data deprived was the work of Bernard Krisher, a 69-year-old former journalist who is trying to bring the Internet to one of the poorest regions in Asia."

"Though the effort is on a small scale, Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist who is also engaged in the effort to aid Cambodian villages, said the project demonstrated that the global impact of the Internet could ultimately serve to reverse the disparity between urban wealth and rural poverty.

"The Net will reverse urbanization," said Mr. Negroponte, director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory. "The past 150 years of development have been one of urbanization. To be rural has meant to be poor. The Net could bring some of the same opportunities to the rural world and maybe even turn being rural into being rich.""

redux [07.09.00]
Washinton Post Poor in Latin America Embrace Net's Promise
"Until a brilliantly sunny day when the Internet reached this Ashaninka Indian village in central Peru, tribal leader Oswaldo Rosas could think of few benefits modern life had brought his people.

Poverty and disease had debased and decimated them since British missionaries brought the first link to the outside world 81 years ago. As recently as the early 1990s, communist guerrillas had forced some Ashaninka into slavery. Even after the Peruvian army defeated the insurgents, life in this thatched hut settlement with no electricity or running water remained a grueling struggle.

It still is, but as the incongruent buzz of a computer fired up in Rosas's hut--now doubling as a tribal cybercafe--the somber 30-year-old leader could not repress a smile. "This," he said, pointing to the machine, "is the first real chance they have ever given my people.""

""Calep, 15, who hovered by the humming unit covered with a brightly hued Indian blanket here in Marankiari Bajo, would agree. His village computer, he said, has brought "the hope that I won't be poor for the rest of my life."

Calep wants to be a computer programmer. He is not naive enough to think one computer will be his ticket out of poverty. But he is not cynical enough to rule it out.

"I've never gone very far from my village, but I've [chatted] with kids [on the Internet] in places like Canada," he said. "Now I think anything is possible.""

redux [04.23.00]
The New York Times When Villages Go Global: How a Byte of Knowledge Can Be Dangerous, Too
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"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.

Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites. "

"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.

"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."

Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

LATimes Napster Forcing Music Industry to Change Its Money-Making Tune
"Napster Inc., the Internet service that helps individuals trade music files, encourages stealing by making it too easy. For that, it is likely to be shut down by the U.S. courts, despite a recent reprieve. It will probably reemerge as a copyright-friendly service operating with licenses from copyright holders. Napster is already doing what the music industry itself should be doing--making music enjoyable and easy to find.

Meanwhile, the music industry encourages stealing by making people feel justified in doing so. For that, the industry in its present form will also be shut down--not by the courts, but by the laws of economics and the market.

The technology of the Internet has fundamentally changed the economics of the music business. One rule: Being greedy is not illegal, but it doesn’t pay in the long run. That’s the real lesson the Napster case will teach the music industry. Yes, it’s wrong to steal, and yes, the music companies have legally binding copyrights. But the reality is that it’s not good business to annoy both your customers and your suppliers--especially if you’re an intermediary whose added value is questionable."

redux [05.02.00]
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."

redux [07.31.00]
TechWeb Napster An Indicator Of Online Culture Change
""A culture change is coming," said Esther Dyson, chairman, EDventure Holdings, author, and board chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers the international organization charged with technical administration of the Internet."

"The rise of peer-to-peer technology is going to change how companies do business and how consumers are perceived, she said. "It's a whole new attitude," Dyson said. It will also be a challenge to harmonize it with existing copyright law and business models, she said."

"The vision behind peer-to-peer technology, content, and applications is more idealistic than commercial models. "People become the producers rather than just consumers. It's run by the people and for the people. It gives users world economies of scale. It used to be you'd have to be part of an institution to have that," Dyson said."

redux [05.22.00]
Washington Post e-power to the people
"Both the beauty and danger of Gnutella are that it is a more sophisticated version of Napster, the infamous and popular program that college students have been using to swap music files over the Web. Napster's developers have recently been hit with a flurry of copyright-infringement lawsuits. But unlike users of Napster, Gnutella aficionados can trade files without going through a storage center, making it impossible to shut down the system without unplugging every computer on the network and difficult to control by laws because there's no central authority."

"Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape Communications and a former chief technology officer for AOL, compares Gnutella to a benevolent virus, a "revolutionary" program that spreads the power of publishing from an elite set of corporations to anyone who has a computer."

Inside Human Nature 1, New Paradigm 0: On Gnutella, There Are Plenty of Files but not Enough Sharing
"Napster and other file-exchange services love to tout the virtues of sharing. But a digital world where most people are selfish and don't share files isn't just impolite, it could threaten the future viability of such peer-to-peer networks.

Raising profound issues, two researchers at the prominent Xerox Palo Alto Research Center published a paper on Gnutella last week. Their main discovery: 70 percent of users don't share any files and 76 percent share less than 10. According to research scientists Eytan Adar and Bernardo Huberman, this can lead to system blockages as the relatively few sharers are overwhelmed by file requests from freeloaders. With a few downloaders hogging the available bandwidth, it effectively blocks the majority of users from accessing the tiny pool of file providers.

More importantly, the study implies that copyright interests may have an easier time than suspected chasing down pirates."

The New York Times More Taking Than Giving on the Web
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"Software programs like Napster and Gnutella have achieved a reputation for fostering a communal spirit of sharing among millions of music-loving computer users.

The reality may be more selfish.

Two scientists at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center have surveyed the behavior of anonymous music downloaders on the Internet and have found that, rather than demonstrating a "from each, to each" ethos, most Internet users are only taking files and not giving any back to their electronic community."

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center: Internet Ecologies Area Free Riding on Gnutella
"An extensive analysis of user traffic on Gnutella shows a significant amount of free riding in the system. By sampling messages on the Gnutella network over a 24-hour period, we established that 70% of Gnutella users share no files, and 90% of the users answer no queries. Furthermore, we found out that free riding is distributed evenly between domains, so that no one group contributes significantly more than others, and that peers that volunteer to share files are not necessarily those who have desirable ones. We argue that free riding leads to degradation of the system performance and adds vulnerability to the system. If this trend continues copyright issues might become moot compared to the possible collapse of such systems."

NPR: Talk of the Nation Failure
"Guests:
Jason Zasky

- Editor and CEO of Failure Magazine

Nicholas Hall

- Founder, Startupfailures.com, a support site for those going through startup failures

Dr. Stephen Goldbart

- Clinical Psychologist
- Co-founder of the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute

Dan O'Brien

- Former decathelete, failed to qualify for 1992 Olympics

There's no getting around the fact that the word 'failure' has a negative connotation. But despite a culture that celebrates acheiving material success at a young age, failure is becoming hip-- at least in some circles. Three quarters of the dot-com startups burning up the stock exchange fail in 3-5 years, but young entrepeneurs plug on until they find that successful venture. And until they get there, they wear their failures as a badge of honor, a measure of how cutting edge they are. Join Juan Williams and guests for a look at the meaning of failure in the year 2000."

redux [07.17.00]
NPR : All Things Considered Failure
"A new magazine arrives on-line today, after a few false starts. Failure magazine is, as its title implies, about failure: battles lost, sports blunders, products that didn't catch on. The fact that someone would even come up with an idea for such a magazine suggests that, in an age when dot-coms come and go like buses, the very notion of failure may not have the stigma it once did when Willie Loman first walked the boards."

redux [06.03.00]
The New York Times Magazine I'm a Loser
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"If you go back to the early 1800's, to be a failure meant basically one thing: to go bankrupt in business. Today if we say I feel like such a failure, we think generally of someone who's a loser, somebody who has so me defect in his personality. The meaning of failure has fundamentally changed from being a crisis you pass through to being more of an identity. My understanding of the failure ethic in Silicon Valley is that the profits of success are so enormous that the risk of failing is worth it."

MSNBC Tracking your every move
"A Boston technology firm is surreptitiously tracking computer users across the Internet on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, a practice that demonstrates the limits of a recent agreement to protect the privacy of Web surfers."

"Pharmatrak officials say the information they collect about browsing habits enables participating drug companies to compare and improve their Web sites. They don’t collect names and don’t intend to, they say.

But they claim they can predict whether visitors are consumers, physicians, journalists or government officials, based on where they come from and what they access.

And the company’s Web site also suggests that it has plans to identify people. “In the future, we may develop products and services which collect data that, when used in conjunction with the tracking database, could enable a direct identification of certain individual visitors,” it says, adding that they would never take advantage of such information."

redux [07.02.00]
Online Journalism Review The Final Days of Privacy
"The recent admission by the White House drug office that it routinely dropped "cookies" onto the hard drives of those who accessed its Web site would have seemed, in more innocent times, like a friendly gesture. It's difficult to think of cookies as menacing. But in the brave new world of the Internet, where privacy has been sacrificed on the altar of a technologically fueled avarice, the cookies being referred to are more accurately thought of as creepy crawlers--small text files inserted surreptitiously into your computer to stalk your every movement on the Internet."

"In this case, the spying was done by a government agency, but it's a practice common to the way business--including the Los Angeles Times Web site--is conducted on the Internet. DoubleClick, the private company that did the Drug Enforcement Administration's snooping, routinely gathers such data for business use and already has profiles of the vital statistics, habits and tastes of 100 million Americans."

"The goal of the snooper industry is to use any means--cookies are one, Web bugs invisible to the naked eye embedded in the graphics of Web pages you visit are another--to pierce that shell of privacy that humans erect for their basic sense of security. Widespread paranoia can be expected to be the norm when the books you buy, the songs you hear, the medical advice you seek, your religious, political and social beliefs and financial holdings become the stuff of common currency available to all who snoop, whether for profit or pursuits more perverse."

redux [07.18.00]
ComputerUser Medical Privacy Concerns Heightened by Genome Mapping By Brian Krebs, Newsbytes
"Privacy advocates, still reeling from last year's passage of legislation that allows banks and insurance companies to share personal information, are bracing against a new threat to the confidentiality of medical and financial information: The Human Genome Project.

"Latanya Sweeney, professor of computer science and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, said currently more than 40 US states have laws requiring hospitals to make available to insurance companies and researchers certain information about each visit they receive, including the diagnosis, birth date, ethnicity, gender and Zip code of all patients discharged.

While state regulations say such categories are sufficiently anonymous to conceal the identity of patients, Sweeney said companies can and do match such information with personally identifiable data, using just a few publicly available resources."

""It may surprise some to know that 87 percent of the US population is uniquely identifiable today by just their birthday, gender and zip code," Sweeney said."

"Sweeney said the stakes become much higher when genetic information comes into play. For instance, she said, gender can usually be identified using just the base of a person's DNA sequence. Using a larger chunk of DNA information, researchers can infer particular diseases by catalogued and known sequence patterns. Link those sequences to publicly available hospital data, and you have an undeniably complete picture of an individual's most private information, Sweeney said."

redux [01.31.00]
The Christian Science Monitor "Database Nation" -- Big Business, not Big Brother, greatest danger to privacy
"While issues of privacy have been far more debated in this day and age then environmental concerns were in Carson's era (for instance, polls consistently show that the public does care very much about privacy, both online and off), Garfinkel's work is the first time a writer has decisively and persuasively marshaled all the information together to show how our right to privacy is under constant attack, often by people who claim to have our best interests at heart. "

redux [04.30.00]
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."

Computers Freedom & Privacy Conference 2000 Audio Transcripts: Neal Stephenson Dinner Speach

Feed You, Inc.
"STANDING AT THE FRONT of the large, fluorescent-lit high school cafeteria that serves as the Learning Annex's main classroom, wearing black jeans and chunky silver pinky ring, Rick Haskins looks very much the auteur. The cafeteria could be a practice room and we, the thirty-odd audience members, his cast, assembled for a first read-through of our script. Indeed, the women seated on plastic chairs around me -- aging bohemian beauty queens, with wildly frizzing hair and kohl-rimmed eyes -- gaze at Haskins with the mixture of fear and devotion grateful actresses might lavish on their directors, an adoration more typically bestowed on Hollywood stars and leaders of religious cults.

Yet Haskins earns his keep as a director of consumers, not actors: He's a marketing executive. Recently, he's reinvented himself as a self-styled "personal branding guru.""

The New York Times Magazine Me, My Brand and I
[requires 'free' registration]
"There is something, I think, about the Internet -- with its microtargeted discussion groups and virtual celebrities who are famous to 15 people -- that ramps up the possibilities of personal hype. The padded résumé is probably as old as the résumé itself, but with one's own Web site, it is easy to showcase not just your padded resume but also complimentary blurbs from friends and colleagues, thoughtful sound bites, photographs of you with friends, etc. These little self-marketing monuments exist now by the thousands. Two years ago, it was rare for a serious author to have such a site, but now even New Yorker writers have them, successfully creating viral marketing campaigns that were not possible in, say, J.D. Salinger's time. Of course, the strategy isn't limited to published authors. I recently stumbled across a Web site that advised chat-room denizens on how to establish their personal on-screen brand. For starters: "Develop a catch phrase."

It is all part of the "Brand Called You," a sort of life-as-company philosophy articulated by the management guru Tom Peters -- and long since swallowed whole by the career-advice wing of the business press."

BrandYou.Com The Brand Called You
"That cross-trainer you're wearing -- one look at the distinctive swoosh on the side tells everyone who's got you branded. That coffee travel mug you're carrying -- ah, you're a Starbucks woman! Your T-shirt with the distinctive Champion "C" on the sleeve, the blue jeans with the prominent Levi's rivets, the watch with the hey-this-certifies-I-made-it icon on the face, your fountain pen with the maker's symbol crafted into the end ...

You're branded, branded, branded, branded.

It's time for me -- and you -- to take a lesson from the big brands, a lesson that's true for anyone who's interested in what it takes to stand out and prosper in the new world of work.

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You."

The New York Times Wireless Web (With Strings Attached)
[requires 'free' registration]
"BY now, it's almost a consensus among Internet pundits that the future of the Web rests in the hands -- or, perhaps more appropriately, the palms -- of those who make wireless Internet devices and software. Why would consumers want to be shackled to a desktop computer, the thinking goes, when they could roam freely with a hand-held device that gives them everything they need?"

The Standard Deconstructing the Web
"The Web is disintegrating into bits. When the dust settles, what's important for a successful long-term strategy is not Web site design but the flexibility of your information architecture."

"New Internet devices and applications are different not only because they are designed to do different things, but also because the mindset of the person who uses them influences the kind of interaction that makes sense. You cannot shove a Web page onto a cell phone's tiny screen. Even if you could, it wouldn't make sense from the user's point of view. The information I want delivered to my cell phone is different from what I want on my home computer. Web pages are designed for sedentary, reflective use. The phone is for urgent, short communications."

UIDesign A WAP On The Knuckles
"The knives are out for WAP technology. Following the huge hype of the last 12 months, it's becoming apparent that it just isn't delivering. Naturally, the naysayers have now become the "told-you-so-ers". However, the disappointment of WAP technology needs some more careful analysis. The industry deserves a good wrap on the knuckles. Much of what has happened was avoidable. Will the lessons be learned?"

"The biggest single mistake was to take the view that an internet enabled phone is a general purpose device. It was an easy mistake to make. A computer with web browser was a general purpose device. You can use it to surf any web site. A phone is also a general purpose device. You can use it to call any number. However, when you put the two together, the combination is limited. To be completely general purpose it would need to have a keyboard, a full size screen and a phone transceiver built in together. It would need to be both a computer and a phone, i.e. a laptop with a phone built in. Current WAP Phones are still phones, but they are NOT computers in the sense of a PC. This was the first mistake - marketing the device as if it was a computer.

A WAP Phone is an "invisible computer" or it ought to be. A WAP Phone thought of as an invisible computer, becomes an information appliance. Furthermore, each different form factor of WAP Phone is a different information appliance. The whole industry failed to realize this. Information appliances should be designed for a specific purpose or a limited set of purposes. In other words, with current technology, the "walled garden" approach was correct providing what was inside the garden made sense for the specific information appliance, as a single product.

redux [06.15.00]
Fast Company Design Vision
""We know how to do amazing things," [Thackara] says, "and we're filling the world with amazing devices. But we cannot answer the most important question: What is this stuff really for?""

"The time has also come, he says, to shift some of the focus of innovation away from work and toward everyday life. The early users of digital devices are almost always business users, so product designers have a natural inclination to create and design products with the workplace in mind. But that tendency can make for bad design, especially when those products migrate beyond business. People put up with technical difficulties in their work lives that they would never tolerate in their personal lives. So forget "personal" computing, Thackara says, and embrace "social" computing. "As computing migrates from ugly boxes on our desks to something that suffuses everything around us, a new relationship will emerge between what's real and what's virtual, what's mental and what's material. There are few limits to the number of services that we could develop if we simply took an aspect of daily life and looked for ways to make it better.""

redux [02.03.00]
NetFuture The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers (Part 2)
"In part 1 of this series I voiced my first complaint against the ubiquitous technology pushers: by letting their work develop out of a one-sided preoccupation with the technological milieu rather than immersion in the meaningful contexts affected by their inventions, they inflict technological "answers" upon us without any serious reference to the supposed problems."

"The subtitle of this series of articles is "Why We'd Be Better Off without the MIT Media Lab". Let me broaden that here. What we'd be better off without is every organization that pushes purely technological "solutions" as if they were what could make us better off.”

Silicon Valley News Forget the hype, e-books still hard on the eyes
"The publishing industry has gotten very excited about electronic books lately. Random House, Time Warner and just about every other publishing giant has put out a flurry of announcements outlining grand plans for digital distribution.

Adding to the hype, Microsoft last week released its Microsoft Reader 1.5 software for the PC, and Barnesandnoble.com released 2,000 e-book titles, while promising to release 150 more each week.

Ignore all this stuff. E-book technology is just not ready. It's too hard to read on the screen."

redux [03.09.00]
Alertbox Electronic Books - A Bad Idea
"Even when electronic books gain the same reading speed as print, they will still be a bad idea. Electronic text should not mimic the old medium and its linear ways. Page turning remains a bad interface, even when it can be done more conveniently than by clicking the mouse on a "next page" button. It is an insufficient goal to make computerized text as fast as print: we need to improve on the past, not simply match it.

The basic problem is that the book is too strong a metaphor: it tends to lead designers and writers astray. Electronic text should be based on interaction, hypertext linking, navigation, search, and connections to online services and continuous updates. These new-media capabilities allow for much more powerful user experiences than a linear flow of text. Linear text may have ruled the world since the Egyptians learned to produce arbitrarily long scrolls of papyrus, but it's time to end this tradition. Nobody has time to read long reports any more: information must be dynamic and under direct control of the reader, not the author."

Xerox Researc