E-commerce Times Tangled Up in Wireless E-Commerce
"The marketing ploy for those new wireless tracking devices we've heard so much about might go something like this:

"Say, Mr. Consumer, let's say you're walking down the street in a strange part of the city and you happen to pass by Ray's Pizzeria, one of many such fine eating establishments in the world. Your head is lost in a swirl of ledger sheets and profit margins -- fine businessman that you are, Mr. Consumer -- and of course you don't notice what a great opportunity you're passing by."

"But your phone does! It starts to beep and ring, and produces a 50 percent off coupon for a large pizza, heavy on the cheese, light on the anchovies and garlic because -- wink wink -- your phone also knows you're scheduled for a big date later on down at the Happy Valley bar and grill. For which, by the way, we have directions, in case you need them.

"How would you like that, Mr. Consumer?""

"If wireless is the ongoing revolution, then wireless tracking is the next-next thing. Technically, it's called location tracking, and the technology can be built into almost anything. That's the good news and the bad news."

MSNBC The digital guardian angel
"Imagine walking by a Starbucks in an unfamiliar city. Your cell phone rings, and a coupon for coffee pops up on its screen, good only at that location.

HOW DID YOUR PHONE know you were even near that particular Starbucks? What else does it know about you? Enter location tracking, coming to a mobile device near you. Features that one day can pinpoint your whereabouts to within the length of a football field raise enormous privacy concerns, but they also offer enormous benefits.

The challenge will be determining where to draw the line.

Consider a technology unveiled Monday. Called Digital Angel, a microchip worn close to the body promises to record a person’s biological parameters and send distress signals during medical emergencies.

But misused, these types of capabilities could amount to virtual stalking."

The Register Human chip implants not going skin deep
"Applied Digital Solutions, the US outfit behind a chip which can be stuck inside a human body, will unveil its device in the Big Apple next week.

The Digital Angel demonstration will show "the first-ever working prototype that combines bio-sensors and Web-enabled wireless telecommunications linked to Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite technology", according to the company blurb on the invite."

"[Digital Angel CTO Keith] Bolton said the chip would not, after all, be placed under the skin. Although this was part of the original patent, ADS abandoned the idea after it found it would probably take years to get approval for the idea from the Federal Drug Administration (FDA).

redux [09.07.00]
Salon Put that silicon where the sun don't shine
"Worry no more, doting parents! Whether it's your little pumpkin's first day walking home from school by herself or the millionth time you've lost her at the mall, the BabysitterTM will track your sweetpea's location from a jelly bean-sized microchip implant, discretely tucked under her collarbone. You'll be able to chart her every move. What better way to give her independence, and put your mind at ease?

Also available: The Constant CompanionTM lets you keep a watchful eye on grandma or grandpa, even when you can't be by their side; The Invisible BodyguardTM offers freedom from fear so you can enjoy the fauna and foliage when eco-tourism takes you to kidnapping hot spots around the globe. Coming soon: The INS Border PatrollerTM; the Maximum Security GuardTM; the Personal Private EyeTM; the Micro-ManagerTM."

redux [09.03.00]
SiliconValley.Com: Dan Gillmor Electronic leash would undermine our values
"WHAT can grease the slippery slope toward tyranny, and erode trust within families? Sometimes, it's as simple as parents' love for their children.

A colleague and friend says he'd gladly implant a location-tracking chip in his newborn daughter, to protect her from kidnapping and other threats. He says he wouldn't misuse such surveillance power. I'm sure he means it. I'm sure other parents would say, and believe, the same things.

This location-tracking product does not exist -- yet. Such is the race of technology, however, that it undoubtedly will exist soon enough. By then, I hope my colleague and others in his situation think hard about the consequences if they get what they want."

The Standard Location, Location, Location
"Six weeks ago in this space, I asked for the best proof of something that "everyone knows" will be true of the Internet Age but that somehow hasn't come true yet. That is the idea that as communications becomes better, faster and cheaper, physical location will matter less and less."

"Contestant Ed Rigdon wrote, "I think the hypothesis is false. Like the early e-tail idea of stores without inventory that still deliver great service at low prices, this 'irrelevance of location' idea ignores the critical role of social context in giving value to information and in facilitating cooperation and risk-taking. ... I know people who work remotely, but they will remain the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, these people pay a substantial price, in terms of what they are missing, in order to gain the benefits of their remote location."

redux [10.07.00]
Internet Geography Project: Putting place back in cyberspace Overview
"This project arose in response to one of the great myths or the Internet age, i.e. the coming of cyberspace heralds the end physical constraints which will eventually lead to the death of cities. In fact, the exact opposite is occurring. The largest concentrations of Internet users and producers are located in urban areas and many of the most innovative firms in the Internet space are housed in downtowns. There should be nothing surprising about this since, cities have always been the primary source of innovation and will continue to play this role in the future.

Although the power of the Internet does opens up new possibilities for long-range collaboration and even new spaces of interaction within cyberspace it also exhibits much of the traditional unevenness that has characterized urban and economic development throughout history. The fact that information can be easily and widely distributed is often mistaken for an indication that the production of this information is also diffused. In fact, there is a much more complicated dynamic involving the connection of specific places to global networks resulting in a system of production that is both place-rooted and networked at the same time.

One of the greatest challenges facing any research project involving the Internet is finding reliable and practical indicators to support ones theories. In particular, assigning geographical locations to what takes place on the "spaceless" Internet is especially difficult. With this specific problem in mind, the Domain Name research project is an attempt to map the physical geography of one indicator of the Internet, i.e. domain names such as nokia.fi or nytimes.com."

The Standard Invisible Cities
"Cities have no place in the new economy – at least, that is, according to the literature of the new economy. Alvin Toffler coined the term "electronic cottage" in the '70s to describe the successor to centralized urban structure, and in the '80s John Naisbitt cheerily waved good-bye to the "abandoned cities" of industrial America. A chorus arose in the '90s to agree: Nicholas Negroponte said that high tech "will remove the limitations of geography," George Gilder called cities "leftover baggage from the industrial era" and William Knoke described our "age of Everything-Everywhere" as a "placeless society" in a "spaceless world."

Meanwhile, reality is headed in a different direction. If you want a good job as a programmer, new-media player or biotech researcher, you have a choice of living in perhaps a dozen big cities. Moreover, the most innovative firms tend to locate in highly concentrated urban districts such as Cambridge, Mass., Manhattan's Silicon Alley or the Loop in Chicago. Yet the techie prophets' forecasts of urban decline remain pervasive; there is a disconnect between reality and the popular folklore."

redux [10.09.00]
First Monday The Social Life of Information
"For years pundits have predicted that information technology will obliterate the need for everything from travel to supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself. They have heralded the coming of the virtual office, digital butlers, electronic libraries, and virtual universities. Beaten down by info-glut and exasperated by computer systems with software crashes, viruses, and unintelligible error messages, individual users tend to wax less enthusiastic about technological predictions. Amid the hype and the never-narrowing gap between promise and performance, they find it hard to get a vision of the true potential of the digital revolution.

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in their book The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000) help us see through frenetic visions of the future to the real forces for change in society. Arguing elegantly for the important role that human sociability plays in the world of bits, this book, and the chapters published here in First Monday, gives us an optimistic look beyond the simplicities of information and individuals. The authors show how a better understanding of the contribution that communities, organizations, and institutions make to learning, knowledge, and judgement can lead to the richest possible use of technology in our work and everyday lives."

Salon Unsafe in any state
"Does voting for a third party contribute to "building a movement"? Claims of this sort are always made by charismatic figures. The results are never -- never -- delivered. The claim amounts to feel-good rhetoric to rationalize a heady campaign. Tomorrow never comes. It is a parochial fantasy.

Nader's claim that he's not the spoiler is bad faith. Perhaps he knows it, perhaps not. But there is a deeper force at work. What is at work in the Naderite camp, what lies behind the fantasy that the masses hanker for radical change, is a purist approach to politics. There are Nader supporters -- as well as Democrats of the left like Michigan's John Conyers -- who have urged Nader to drop his campaign in the states where he might throw the race to Gore. He's refused. He shows no inclination to deal. (Neither, unfortunately, does Gore.) But deal-making is how politics happens.

At bottom, Nader's all-or-nothing gambit is not politics, it is moral fundamentalism -- as if by venting one's anger, one were free to remake the world by willing it so, despite all those recalcitrant people who happen to live here."

NewsWatch Lights, Cameras - Reporters!
""I’ve been going to the Nader press conferences every week, and usually they’re pretty small affairs – about four reporters show up – but this is the biggest press conference since his nomination in Denver," said Recio, who has been covering all the third party candidates for the The Fort Worth Star Telegram in Texas, a Knight Ridder paper. "

"Now, of course, everything’s about to change. But perhaps it's not so much that the national media has woken up to giving Nader’s campaign its due, as that the Democratic party has suddenly found Nader a factor in the race. With Al Gore being unable to pull ahead of his Republican rival, the Green party votes now have a "spoiler" effect. The Democratic party has just launched, in the words of Wednesday’s The New York Times "aggressive campaigns" to dissuade voters in key battleground states from voting for Nader. On Tuesday evening, Senator Paul Wellstone argued with Jim Hightower on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer bout the Nader threat.

Suddenly the media want to know what Nader thinks he’s up to, how he feels about possibly playing a spoiler and whom he’d prefer to see as president."

MediaChannel.Org Sideshow Politics
"What to do about dispirited campaigns featuring candidates whose golden strategy is alternately to sloganize and muffle themselves, who, moreover, have to push against the grain even to get most citizens to pay attention to a race that is neither glamorous nor apparently urgent, at a time when there are fifty other channels to click to? The trouble goes far beyond the shallowness of debates, as it goes beyond the dirty dance of demagogues and blustery pundits. The core of the problem is intertwined, self-reinforcing: the diminished position of politics in a culture presided over by venal, wildly irresponsible entertainment organizations.

First, a bit of social query. Where are substantial candidates with the brains to recognize social needs, the political judgment to govern, and the talent to connect with the living human beings of this democracy?"

The New York Times Magazine The Age of the Mediathon
[requires 'free' registration]
""You read Walter Cronkite's book -- I thought he summed it up best," Simpson continued. "When he was doing the news at the beginning of his career, the news division was a source of prestige for the network. They left him alone. But by the late 70's, they saw you could make money on news. Once they saw you could make money, the promotion people took over -- he'd see promos that had nothing to do with whatever he was reporting. Once the news became a source of profit, everything changed. Who can have the most far-out story? Who can have the most provocative promo?"

Wired News Is Tech a Partner, Pet or Master?
"Determining what it means to be human has never been easy, and recent advances in artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and genetic engineering haven't helped.

"The definition of what it means to be human is going to become even more slippery over the next 20 years," said Harvey Ardman, co-chair of this year's Camden Technology Conference."

"Joy and others argue that many tech enthusiasts have avoided asking some vital questions. One of the key questions, Ardman said, is whether these tools are "partners, pets or superiors?"

"We'll be looking at what changes we're going to be asked to make or explore in this new age," Ardman said. In many ways, it will be an exercise in cultural anthropology."

redux [09.88.00]
Wired Congratulations, It's A Bot!
""When kids play, they create an entire world that's alive, and it never objects to them. A kid's imagination is a completely open architecture, and there are no bounds to what a toy can do," he explains.

"That's the future of toys. Technology's role is to become transparent. If you give the cues of autonomy, the imagination fills in the blanks, because that's what it's meant to do."

As processing power and sensors improve, the difference between simulated autonomy and actual autonomy will blur. Already it's difficult to relate to these new technological creatures without imputing to them the sorts of feelings we routinely discover in, say, our pets. And when you throw in realistic human behavior, not to mention silky skin, things become rather surreal.

"These are not toys anymore," says Chung as the screwy signal scrambles his face again. "These are way beyond toys."

"So what are they?" I ask. For once, Chung pauses. "They are the next iteration of our attempt to re-create life.""

redux [05.25.00]
The New York Times What Do You Mean, 'It's Just Like a Real Dog'?
[requires 'free' registration]
"What do children think about what it means to be alive? And at what ages can children distinguish mechanical objects from real animals or people? Research into these questions is still in its earliest stages. There was a flurry of interest in children's reactions when Tamagotchis, virtual pets from Japan, first appeared a few years ago and then started dying on their young owners. But the topic is attracting more attention now as seemingly intelligent toys and other robots appear on the market in increasing variety and numbers. "

"Again and again... researchers have asked the children: ''Is it alive? Is it like a real pet? Does it know you?''

"Strikingly," Ms. Audley said, "often the answer they settled on was, 'It's not alive in a human or animal kind of way, but in a Furby kind of way.' "

redux [04.21.00]
The Third Culture A new kind of object: From Rorschach to Relationship
"I have studied the effects of computational objects on human developmental psychology for over twenty years, documenting the ways that computation and its metaphors have influenced our thinking about such matters as how the mind works, what it means to be intelligent, and what is special about being human. Now, I believe that a new kind of computational object — the relational artifact — is provoking striking new changes in the narrative of human development, especially in the way people think about life, and about what kind of relationships it is appropriate to have with a machine. Relational artifacts are computational objects designed to recognize and respond to the affective states of human beings–and indeed, to present themselves as having "affective" states of their own. They include children's playthings (such as Furbies and Tamagotchis), digital dolls that double as health monitoring systems for the homebound elderly (Matsushita's forthcoming Tama), sentient robots whose knowledge and personalities change through their interactions with humans, as well as software that responds to its users’ emotional states and responds with "emotional states" of their own."

"By accepting a new category of relationship, with entities that they recognize as "sort-of-alive", or "alive in a different, but legitimate way," today's children will redefine the scope and shape of the playing field for social relations in the future."

George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System
"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."

Center for Strategic and International Studies Reinventing Diplomacy in the Information Age
"The world is changing fundamentally. Images and information respect neither time nor borders. Hierarchy is giving way to networking. Openness is crowding out secrecy and exclusivity. Ideas and capital move swiftly and unimpeded across a global network of governments, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations. In this world of instantaneous information, traditional diplomacy struggles to sustain its relevance."

"The prime mover of change is information technology. When Gutenberg shattered the old order by mechanizing printing five centuries ago, the democratization of literacy and knowledge irresistibly followed. As the millennium ends, the microchip is again revolutionizing information gathering and transmission and will bring even more profound changes in the next century. The critical elements are the international networks created by computers and electronic connectivity. Exponential growth in computing power and plummeting international telecommunications costs are having profound consequences for finance, business, education, medicine, civil society, and government. Nations once connected by foreign ministries and traders are now linked through millions of individuals by fiber optics, satellite, wireless, and cable in a complex network without central control. The Internet, with 100 million users today, will reach one billion people by 2005 and will be available to half the world's population by 2010. The network will become the central nervous system of international relations."

redux [10.10.00]
MediaChannel.Org A Tower Aflame: Media, Metaphor and Revolution
"When the Moscow television tower burst into flames at the end of August, the fire blacked out 10 million TV screens and made news all over the world. And so did President Vladimir Putin's sinister comment: The fire at the Ostankino tower is a metaphor for the state of the nation.

Metaphors, symbols and sayings are mighty mind-setters. They captivate our minds and focus our attention to one main point, effectively excluding others. Putin used the burning of the Ostankino television tower, once hailed as a symbol of Soviet supremacy, as a metaphor for the desperate economic need of Russia. The global media played along with this tune, once again showcasing images of Russia's decay. But there is another largely untold story to be extracted from Putin's metaphor: TV towers are more than symbols — indeed they are very concrete centers of mind control, distributing the flow of information and entertainment. "

"Who chose the crumbling Berlin Wall as the icon and metaphor for the breakdown of communism and the end of the Cold War? Wouldn't a TV tower in flames be more accurate? It wasn't about the free flow of capital. It was about the free flow of information."

Media In Transition What is Information? The Flow of Bits and the Control of Chaos
"Information science operates with a binary logic of reflection which results in multiple paths, but these paths are always circumscribed by laws of combination (Deleuze, & Guattari, 1987). In this manner the fragmented space and time of information flows is reordered and directed toward specific objectives. But the objectives of information processing within the capitalist dynamic are not end points-- they are aimed at an accumulation of knowledge that is always an impetus for further accumulation, for multiplying the flow, opening out into every horizon. But this flow is at the same time stored up in a central memory which traces the exact paths of this flow, connecting geographic spaces and matching up the temporal locations of dispersed market centers. This central memory system functions through command trees, centered systems and hierarchical structures that attempt to fix possible pathways of the network and thus to limit the possible variations immanent in the network. The definitions of information formulated within information science and information economics derive from and serve this modeling of the system. As we have seen, information defined as nonsemantic discrete bits flowing across space and then directed and stored substantiates information as the object of control. Thus, the enemy of the information scientists and economists is heterogeneity, disorganization, noise, chaos. They want an uninterrupted flow, but at the same time a destruction of the unnecessary. This encloses or territorializes information; it becomes a part of capitalism’s mapping of space and time. But what we have found is that information’s function is precisely to disorganize, interrupt, to remain itself and at the same time to disperse. Information may, in fact, be a keyword connecting the phenomenon we have examined, but not as an element, nor as a content, but as a heterogeneous remapping of space and time. If the information society is to be our society, let it be disorganized."

redux [03.24.00]
Civilization Magazine Supercivilization and its Discontents
"A profound shift of geopolitical power lies ahead, one that will dominate the century to come--and it has hardly been noticed, let alone analyzed. This massive change will trigger turbulence around the globe, with a high potential for violence. To prevent or mitigate such effects, we need to understand the framework of geopolitical power as it takes shape in the 21st century. Think of it as a master conflict of supercivilizations.

A civilization is an entire, all-encompassing way of life; a supercivilization might be described as a way of life that is shared widely across cultures, languages, religions, ethnic groups, and states. And while many civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history, there have, so far, been only two supercivilizations.

Today a new supercivilization is pushing, elbowing, swaggering --some would say bullying--its way onto the world stage, threatening both the agrarian and industrial supercivilizations.

This third supercivilization will soon give billions of people the power to communicate with one another, whether to buy and sell goods, create art, organize political protests, invent new religions and ideologies, engage in terrorism, learn how to make biological or chemical weapons, or create or alter life-forms.

How should the fast-emerging knowledge-based supercivilization of tomorrow interface with the lifeways of yesterday? How might we minimize the conflicts that face us? This question, still largely unasked, will find its way onto the screen of every world leader--indeed, every alert human being--in the decades to come. The answer will determine just how much turbulence and bloodshed the world experiences in the century ahead as we make the transition from a bisected to a trisected geopolitical system on the planet."

USA Today Study suggests Net does not create isolation
"Concerns the Internet revolution has dehumanized America may be unfounded.

Nearly two-thirds of all Americans have ventured online, and the majority of them deny the Internet creates social isolation, according to a study released Wednesday by the University of California in Los Angeles.

For instance, more than 75% said they do not feel as if they're being ignored by relatives and friends as a result of chat-room activity. In fact, the majority of Internet users said e-mail, Web sites and chat rooms have a ''modestly positive impact'' on their abilities to make new friends and communicate more with family."

redux [10.18.00]
Powazek.Com on weblogs, the press, and changing the world
"I think all this hooey is simply public self-expression. And it's a good thing. If it makes you happy to call it a blog, go for it. You could call it a desk for all I care. Just keep doing it. I believe, now more that ever, that all this self-expression is going to change the world.

Haven't you noticed? It already has. How many people do you know who you've never met? Or, how many people have you met online? How much has being online changed your perceptions and ideas? Where do you go when you need to connect with other people? How much of your time is spent conversing with people who aren't in the same room with you? Where do you get your music? Your fun? Your ideas? Your ... faith?

Now think about life before you got online. See the difference?

Put simply, expressing yourself online is a gift to the web, because it lets strangers see the world through your eyes, if only for a moment. And if we all did that a little more, I think the world would be a more tolerant place."

redux [02.21.00]
Alertbox Does the Internet Make Us Lonely?
"In assessing the impact of the Internet, the question is not whether it replaces (fully or partly) some other forms of communication and social contact. Because the Internet adds its own new forms of communication and social contact. For example, people may well attend fewer meetings and events outside the house and yet feel connected to a community of others who "meet" on a much more regular basis online.

The question is whether the new lifestyle is enjoyable and whether it nourishes humans or causes them damage. There is certainly a risk that some people get overly caught up in chat rooms and role playing, but a different kind of study is needed to assess this problem."

Wired News Study: Humans Do Many Things
"An obscure university study, but a study nonetheless, reveals that Americans who have dogs spend the time with their dogs instead of said time watching TV, visiting with friends, sleeping, going to movies, surfing the Internet, and doing nothing.

They walk their dogs, play with them, train them, speak gibberish to them, comparison-shop for dog food, and read up on them to the point that it detracts from actually interacting with other human beings, obscure researchers have concluded."

USA Today No need to fear: Nanotechnology is near
"What might these things do? They will probably be sent into human bodies to find cancer, then make and deliver cancer-fighting drugs on the spot. They might be the atomic-scale chips and memory of next-generation computers thousands of times more powerful than those that run on silicon technology. They could be molded into the material of tires — millions of tiny pressure gauges and pumps capable of knowing the air pressure inside and keeping the tire inflated. ''It's hard to think of an industry that isn't likely to be disrupted by nanotechnology,'' says David Bishop of Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, based here.

Nanotech also might destroy the world."

post-gazette.com Future technology sure to be fantastic, but will it improve life?
"Within the next 50 years, technologists will be able to build tiny robots small enough to navigate the body's circulatory system. Billions of these robots could infiltrate the brain, taking up positions that allow them to interact with individual brain cells.

The result, says artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil, will be "total immersion virtual reality," a system in which an individual can be mentally transported to another world, or another body, where he can experience imaginary adventures with every sense.

Fantastic, yes. But will this and other types of computer-aided technology make life and society better in the next 50 years?"

redux [10.13.00]
NetFuture THE TROUBLE WITH UBIQUITOUS TECHNOLOGY PUSHERS (PART 3)
"If we do not pay attention to the difference between the computational abstraction and the human reality in the simple cases, nothing will require our attention to those differences in the "higher" cases.

Further, the more you automate, the more you tend to reduce the affected contexts to the terms of your automation, so that the next "higher" activity looks more and more like an automatic one that should be handed over to a machine. When, finally, the supervisor is supervising only machines, there's no reason for the supervisor himself not to become a machine.

So the idea that automation relieves us from grunt work in order to concentrate on higher things looks rather like the opposite of the truth. Automation tends continually to reduce the higher work to mechanical and computational terms. At least, it does this when we lose sight of the full reality of the work, reconceiving it as if its entire significance lay in the few decontextualized structural features we can analogize in a machine. (In a machine-driven world, we are always pressured toward this reconceptualization.) But if, on the other hand, we do not lose sight of the full reality of the work, then the "lower-level" stuff may look just as much worth doing ourselves as the "higher" -- in which case we have to ask, "What, really, is the rationale for automating it?""

redux [08.28.00]
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. "

The New York Times Wall Street Meets Pornography
[requires 'free' registration]
"Spurred by changes in technology that make pornography easier to order into the home than pizza, and court decisions that offer broad legal protection, the business of selling sexual desire through images has become a $10 billion annual industry in the United States, according to Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass., and the industry's own Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Whatever the phenomenon may say about the nature of American society, the financial rewards are so great that some of the biggest distributors of explicit sex on film and online include the country's most recognizable corporate names."

The New York Review of Books The Coming Revolution
"The widespread literacy resulting from the European invention of movable type half a millennium ago humbled priests and tyrants, revived classical learning, spawned the Enlightenment, and inspired the modern world with all its wonders and woes. Yet the abrupt death of Gutenberg's epochal technology midway through the final decade of the twentieth century was ignored as the world welcomed with great expectations its exponentially more powerful electronic successor.

New technologies change everything in their path, topple kings and empires, create new gods, new goods, and new ways of living in the world. They do not erase the past or change human nature, but they do replace previous forms of production. Like the technology of movable type from which the modern publishing business arose, many traditional publishing functions related to this abandoned technology are irrelevant to an electronic future. "

Salon The e-book wars
"The controversy over the IeBAF awards and the birth of its grass-roots alternative (which Rose hopes will become the "Sundance of e-books") highlight some pressing issues for e-publishing -- issues that have so far gotten lost in either idealism about the freedom it may give authors and independent publishers or eagerness on the part of the established book industry to stake its claim in a new medium. Will e-books offer a way for writers who've been snubbed by the big houses to find success marketing their books directly to readers? Or will e-publishing simply present the same books and authors currently found in bookstores, only in a different, less tangible form? Will mainstream publishers' newfound interest in the e-publishing scene bring a higher standard of literary quality and professionalism to a community that until now was amateur in the best and worst senses of the word? Is a small bastion of independence being stamped out, or are e-book readers finally going to get content they find truly enticing?"

The Standard Home on the Web
"Home networking is nothing new. Homes are already thoroughly wired for lighting, security, phones and more. The Internet home will connect all of the in-home networks, then connect each with any number of outside networks. For the fridge to talk to the computer, at least two networks – the home electrical network into which the fridge is plugged, and the telephone, firewire or wireless network into which the computer is connected – need some way of interfacing. And if the fridge needs to send you e-mail at work, it needs some way to communicate outside the home network.

But the obvious question is, do consumers want all this interconnectivity? Will we ever really need our fridge to e-mail us that our milk is past its prime?”

"After IBM ran a series of ads in which a dishwasher repairman shows up at a home because the dishwasher contacted him for service, Parks Associates held focus groups to gauge reaction to the commercial. "Consumers absolutely hated that," says Scherf. "People want more control of their lives, not less; they want to be the one to make the call, not the dishwasher."

redux [06.27.00]
News.Com Keep it simple, Handspring co-founder urges
"As founder of both Palm and Handspring, which makes a PDA (personal digital assistant) based on Palm's operating system, Hawkins referred to his own misconceptions of the device market, as well as to industry-wide missteps, many of which were driven by misreading consumer needs and interests, he said.

"It's not so easy to do," he said. "People get swept up in conventional thinking, which is often wrong."

Hawkins pointed to the idea that computers should adapt to people intelligently as an example of such misguided thinking. Rather than expecting so-called smart devices, designers should create practical tools that people will want to learn to use, like the keyboard, he said."

ZDNet Smart Homes, Dumb Ideas
"I've been getting a lot of press releases lately from newcomers to the computing scene who expect to make a killing when the "smart home" comes into its own. This pipe dream has been floating around the business for years and always reemerges during boom times when people are rich and can't seem to figure out what to do with their disposable income. There's nothing like wasting your money on a smart home.

The idea sounds reasonable on the surface: Create an energy-saving home that monitors itself and make everything networked and coordinated. But the basic idea always expands into something silly."

OReilly.Com Dialog with an Internet Toaster
""Why haven't you given me any new scripts to run for the past two months?" whined my toaster.

I was so surprised I almost dropped my Wheaties on the floor. It didn't bother me that the toaster spoke out of turn; I had installed the adaptive interface as a lark when I got the thing six months ago. What threw me was simply how many months had passed since I became bored with writing scripts to rotate English muffins or adjust the top-brown feature to the thickness of the cheese.

"Hardware problems," I said to gain time. Jeez, what was the world coming to--how could I let my own toaster make me feel guilty?"

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 [04.13.00]
The New York Times A Chip in Every Pot
[requires 'free' registration]
"Russell Robertson was grappling with an unusual assignment.

As an industrial designer, his mission was to figure out how kitchen appliances will be designed when, as he put it, "the fridge talks to the coffee pot."

His eyes twinkled as he spoke, but he was not kidding about the basic concept. In fact, while the idea may have once sounded ridiculous, predictions of the advent of such devices are now becoming almost clichéd."

"But predicting whether a technology will be adopted is critical for companies that want to succeed, or even survive, in the marketplace. The ones that can figure out what will be deemed useful, superfluous or downright ridiculous will win. And today, as tiny, wireless computer systems are being perfected and the Internet is allowing the distribution of data in seconds, dozens of appliance manufacturers are betting that some sort of pervasive-computing devices will come to be considered as necessary as a telephone. The trick, for them, is to figure out which ones."

""But one of the main reasons that companies with new products stumble, Professor Utterback said, "is that they fail to appreciate or investigate the marketplace." Many companies simply ask, "What can we do with the technology?" And once they determine what they can do, he said, they assume that people will want it."

MSNBC Hezbollah Web site gets attacked
"Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrilla group said Friday its Web site server crashed earlier this month after being targeted by millions of hits and hostile e-mails from Israel and the United States."

"“We have names of 8,521 servers mainly in these two countries that have been hitting our Web site regularly and sending us simultaneously tens of thousands of hostile e-mails, some of them carrying viruses to sabotage our server,” Ali Ayoub, the group’s Web master, told Reuters.

“This is a well known method used to kill Web sites. This is Israeli technological warfare.”

redux [09.06.00]
First Monday "Internet & Society" in Armenia and Azerbaijan? Web Games and a Chronicle of an Infowar
"In 1996 in the days when the norms of Web behaviour were still fluid (and how-to books on 'netiquette' were still being written), I found it somewhat intriguing to check the log files of the EASST Review, the Web site of an academic journal that I administer. I would examine the log files to see who or what was hitting and linking to the site. From the "traces" - the DNS information and the referral logs - I could deduce on a couple of occasions who was searching the Web for themselves and had visited the site. Back in those summer days (I only found time to do it in August), it was amusing to send some scientists a congratulatory message, saying that we were glad they found themselves on the EASST Review site, with the hope that they would return again soon. We dubbed the practice 'academic humor'.

In 2000 it is now not so funny to play those Web games, and worse ones, certainly in Armenia and Azerbaijan. While I was in Yerevan, Armenia at the "Internet & Society" conference organized by the Armenian Information Technology Foundation, and sponsored by the United Nations Development Program, the Open Society Institute and the Council of Europe, I learned how far Web games have gone, and how seriously they are taken. Armenia and Azerbaijan, I understood, have been engaged in an 'infowar'. Having read analyses of this coming peril [1], I took it upon myself in the aftermath of the conference to find out just what that is in practice, and draw up some implications for "Internet & Society in Armenia and Azerbaijan.""

Rand Corporation In Athena's Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age
"The thesis of this think piece is that the information revolution will cause shifts both in how societies may come into conflict, and how their armed forces may wage war. We offer a distinction between what we call "netwar" -- societal-level ideational conflicts waged in part through internetted modes of communication -- and "cyberwar" at the military level. These terms are admittedly novel, and better ones may yet be devised. But for now they illuminate a useful distinction and identify the breadth of ways in which the information revolution may alter the nature of conflict short of war, as well as the context and the conduct of warfare.

While both netwar and cyberwar revolve around information and communications matters, at a deeper level they are forms of war about "knowledge" -- about who knows what, when, where, and why, and about how secure a society or military is regarding its knowledge of itself and its adversaries."

redux [03.22.00]
CNN Kashmir conflict continues to escalate -- online
"A group of Pakistani hackers has used the conflict in Kashmir as a reason to deface almost 600 Web sites in India and take control of several Indian government and private computer systems, according to the group."

"Unlike the majority of Web vandals, the MOS members say they secretly take control of a server, then deface the site only when they "have no more use" for the data or the server itself.

"The servers we control range from harmless mail and Web services to 'heavy duty' government servers," says the MOS representative. "The data is only being categorically archived for later use if deemed necessary."

The Christian Science Monitor Wars of the future... today
“Take the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade several weeks ago. Rage spread across China and hackers from the mainland attacked the Web sites of the US Departments of Energy and the Interior, and the National Park Service. A subsequent attack brought down the White House Web site for three days. The attacks generated headlines across the country.

What the news media didn't report was that the US government had known for a long time that someone had been in its computer systems - they just didn't know who. Then, in a fit of anger, the Chinese hackers caused some real damage - and gave away the hidden "location" of several "backdoors" they had built in US government networks."

"The US Government Accounting Office estimates 120 groups or countries have or are developing information-warfare systems. According to a report issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 23 nations have cyber-targeted the US."

The Economist Byte counters
"ALREADY drowning in too much information? At least you can now find out precisely how much you are missing: about two exabytes. (An exabyte is roughly a billion times a billion bytes, or the quivalent of about 20 billion copies of The Economist). This is the estimated amount of unique information the world is currently producing each year. At least, it is the figure calculated by a group of researchers at the School for Information Systems and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian.

Estimating the world’s information output appears a rather superfluous undertaking. But soon, the authors of the study point out, it will be technologically possible for an average person to obtain access to virtually all recorded information."

UCB: School of Information Management and Systems How Much Information
"Printed material of all kinds makes up less than .003 percent of the total storage of information. This doesn't imply that print is insignificant. Quite the contrary: it simply means that the written word is an extremely efficient way to convey information.

The second striking fact is the ``democratization of data.'' A vast amount of unique information is created and stored by individuals. Original documents created by office workers are more than 80% of all original paper documents, while photographs and X-rays together are 99% of all original film documents. Camcorder tapes are also a significant fraction of total magnetic tape storage of unique content, with digital tapes being used primarily for backup copies of material on magnetic drives.

As for hard drives, roughly 55% of the total are installed in single-user desktop computers. Of course, much of the content on individual user's hard drives is not unique, which accounts for the large difference between the upper and lower bounds for magnetic storage. However, as more and more image data moves onto hard drives, we expect to see the amount of digital content produced by individuals stored on hard drives increase dramatically.

This democratization of data is quite remarkable. A century ago the average person could only create and access a small amount of information. Now, ordinary people not only have access to huge amounts of data, but are also able to create gigabytes of data themselves and, potentially, publish it to the world via the Internet, if they choose to do so.

The third interesting finding is the "dominance of digital" content. Not only is digital information production the largest in total, it is also the most rapidly growing. While unique content on print and film are hardly growing at all, optical and digital magnetic storage shipments are doubling each year. Even today, most textual information is "born digital,'' and within a few years this will be true for images as well. Digital information is inexpensive to copy and distribute, is searchable, and is malleable. Thus the trend towards democratization of data---especially in digital form---is likely to continue."

USA Today Society grappling with info overload
"This is an important milestone, says David Shenk, author of Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. "It's a sea change in how human beings deal with one another. It's no longer a question of access to information, but the challenge of weeding through to find what you need.""

""We have to be a lot more attentive to how well information is designed," Lyman says. "Until now, we've thought of information in the context of the medium it's stored in. Now we'll start to think of the medium in the context of how it's used.""

IBM Systems Journal It's not just information
"When people think about computers, they often think about information. They talk about information technology, the information age, the information superhighway. They discuss how computers enable people to send, access, and manipulate information in many new ways.

Similarly, when people think about education and learning, they often think about information. They discuss what information people need to know to be literate in today's society, and they discuss new ways for teachers to teach (and for students to learn) that information. Not surprisingly, they expect that new information technologies will open new opportunities for teaching and learning.

But this focus on information is limiting and distorting. If we want to take full advantage of new computational technologies, and if we want to help people become better thinkers and learners, we need to move beyond these information-centric views of computing and learning. "

"Simply “broadcasting” ideas, in an information-centric way, will not work. For new ideas to spread and thrive, they must build upon ideas and practices that already exist in the local culture. As a result, new ideas are likely to take hold in different ways in different places. Finding ways to support and nurture that process is our biggest challenge for the future."

MarketingComputers.Com Michael's marketing heuristic
"Twenty things I learned about marketing computers over the past 20 years; truisms that have become my dogmas. And, as we know, every dogma has its day.

o Schrage's Law of Networks: The surest way to add value to a network is to connect it to another network. New relationships between networks mean new relationships between people. Enabling new relationships between people is the killer app.

o Oracle, AOL,Yahoo!, eBay, Microsoft, Schwab, Napster all succeed because giving people the media and means to create their own content is ultimately a better business than selling people content. Steve Case's best-ever line was about how AOL succeeds by selling its audience to itself."

powazek.com on weblogs, the press, and changing the world
"I think all this hooey is simply public self-expression. And it's a good thing. If it makes you happy to call it a blog, go for it. You could call it a desk for all I care. Just keep doing it. I believe, now more that ever, that all this self-expression is going to change the world.

Haven't you noticed? It already has. How many people do you know who you've never met? Or, how many people have you met online? How much has being online changed your perceptions and ideas? Where do you go when you need to connect with other people? How much of your time is spent conversing with people who aren't in the same room with you? Where do you get your music? Your fun? Your ideas? Your ... faith?

Now think about life before you got online. See the difference?

Put simply, expressing yourself online is a gift to the web, because it lets strangers see the world through your eyes, if only for a moment. And if we all did that a little more, I think the world would be a more tolerant place."

redux [02.04.00]
The Guardian Online Why content isn't king
"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."

"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."

The Cluetrain Manifesto - Thesis #1: Markets are conversations.

US Department of Economics: Economics and Statistics Administration Falling through the Net: Towards Digital Inclusion
"The Internet is becoming an increasingly vital tool in our information society. More Americans are going online to conduct such day-to-day activities as education, business transactions, personal correspondence, research and information-gathering, and job searches. Each year, being digitally connected becomes ever more critical to economic and educational advancement and community participation"

"In this report we measure the extenct of digital inclusion by looking at households and individuals that have a computer and an internet connection. We measure the digital divide, as we have before, by looking at the differences in the shares of each group that is digitally connected. For the first time, we also provide data on high-speed access to the internet, as well as access to the internet and computers by people with disabilities." "Internet access is no longer a luxury item, but a resource used by many. Overall the findings in this report show that there has been tremendous progress in just 20 months, but much work remains to be done. Computer ownership and Internet access rates are rapidly rising nationwide and for almost all groups. Nonetheless, there are still sectors of Americans that are not digitally connected."

redux [09.05.00]
MSNBC Wiring rural America
"Thanks to a few visionaries, this small town in Kentucky’s countryside had a half-decade head start on almost every other rural community in America.

Back in 1994, Glasgow had hard-wired, high-speed Internet access — 50 times the dialup speed most of us have even now. It was cutting-edge online power. It could make things like videoconferencing commonplace. It could encourage workers to telecommute or let students take classes from home. And it could be a sign of savvy, drawing digital industry to a town that touted itself on welcome signs as “www.glasgow-ky.com.”

But little of that happened.

Farming — tobacco, dairy and cattle — remains central to the local economy, along with manufacturing. Glasgow, pop. 14,062, produces auto parts galore, among other products. There has been no high-tech economic boom.

And that troubles the visionaries."

Sustainable Development Dimensions The first mile of connectivity: Advancing telecommunications for rural development through participatory communication
"AS DEVELOPMENT THINKING has shifted towards sustainability and participation, there have been remarkable and rapid developments in computing and communication technologies which offer exciting possibilities for rural communities to move into the information age. For this to happen there needs to be a concerted, multisectoral approach to information technology with a focus on rural populations as communicators and contributors to information and knowledge, rather than passive consumers. There also needs to be a move from looking at technology and asking, "What can we do with this?" to looking at people's needs and asking, "Which technology might help here?"

Critical and analytical work on the introduction of information technologies has to be drawn largely from reports of urban projects. In most countries this is where the introduction and use of information technology takes place. However, if we are to consider pushing the use of information technologies out to the rural areas there are lessons to be learned from these projects, and also from the introduction of technologies (e.g., video, radio, drama, print media) used to support communication in rural development. "

redux [08.07.00]
The New York Times It Takes the Internet to Raise a Cambodian Village
[requires 'free' registration]
"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.""

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."

redux [04.23.00]
The New York Times When Villages Go Global: How a Byte of Knowledge Can Be Dangerous, Too
[requires 'free' registration]
"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."

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 [05.14.00]
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."

Wired News Dems: 'Big Browser' Is Watching
"Who, or what presents the greatest threat to the privacy rights of Americans?

Citing a trend from "Big Brother to Big Browser," a surrogate for Democratic candidate Al Gore on Monday argued at a Bush-Gore privacy debate that it was the private sector that constituted the greatest threat."

"Stephen Goldsmith, former Indianapolis mayor and current Bush domestic policy advisor, did not argue with the concept of a privacy bill of rights, but instead cited the booming economy as proof that consumers have been overwhelmingly helped in the long run by technologies that allow corporations to collect information on their customers.

Goldsmith cited Carnivore, the controversial FBI email surveillance program, as proof that big government still has the potential to abuse its power, especially when