conflux
The Boston Globe
Monsieur, do you Yahoo?"Sick of the American legal system? Take a break with me, and marvel at the curious workings of French law.
By now you've heard that a French judge, Jean-Jacques Gomez, has said that Yahoo must devise a way to prevent citizens of France from visiting parts of the Yahoo site that contain anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi materials.
American justice always provides a surfeit of goofy court rulings, so we scarcely need to import fresh nonsense from Paris. But rather than rail against the injustice of the Gomez decision, let's focus on a more practical question: Can it be enforced? Can an Internet company block access to citizens of a particular country, while leaving the rest of us free to surf wherever we wish?"
""[These] kinds of decisions, rulings, can be interpreted as the beginning of an ID card on the Web, possibly to identify people wherever they are and to create a new kind of identification on the Internet. And that is something that can be very disturbing in the long run.
"Even now, there is a cultural shock between Europeans and Americans on freedom of speech. In France we do have rules, regulations and laws that prevent such kind of content to be distributed on the Internet.
"[Freedom of speech] is important to American people, I understand it. At one time, I thought we could have a kind of collision between those two rules. We are deeply rooted in France on those issues. And what we say about Americans, about religion and content, about World War II, the Holocaust, the Shoah [is that] they don't know what it's like to be invaded on their ground, so to prevent some kind of content to be distributed, they don't have the same view."
10:16 PM
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NPR: Morning Edition
Cell Phone Rally"NPR's Eric Weiner reports on the latest in the effort to unseat Philippine president Joseph Estrada. Filipinos send 30 million cell phone "text messages" daily- more than anywhere else in the world. Activists are using the technology to organize rallies and respond instantly to the latest corruption charges. (5:19)"
redux [07.07.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Muslim insurgents battling Philippine troops in the south have a new weapon. When the shelling and gunfire let up, they send a barrage of scathing insults to Manila's forces by cell phone.
"There is a text war among the MILF and our forces," said Brig. Gen. Eliseo Rio Jr., referring to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the larger of two rebel groups fighting for an independent state. "Our soldiers are texting insults to the MILF. And the MILF are sending the insults back." ."
"Sending e-mail on mobile phones, has also taken off in richer parts of the world: Europe, especially in Scandinavia, and in Japan and other East Asian countries, particularly among teen-agers. But in the Philippines, where incomes are far lower, it is even more popular. And it has spawned an entire subculture, complete with its own vocabulary, etiquette and tactical uses. It has become particularly popular here, in large part because text messaging is cheap while traditional telephone service is spotty and Internet access by computer is expensive."
"From South Asia to South America, one hears tales of isolated rural poverty yielding to connected economic development, courtesy of Internet connections. Poor families in India and subsidence-level villages in Africa may get online with used 386s and marginal connections – the Net reaches parts of the Congo via shortwave radio – but once online, they are connected to information about clean water and health, to global markets and income.
Indeed, from my experience, it is clear that in many instances poor people are adopting the Internet because they are poor. Computers and the Net are enabling the world's less affluent to plug into global communication for less cost than conventional telephony or even postal service. In some places, the Net is the only means for communication."
redux [07.09.00]
"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]
"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."
8:15 PM
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Salon
The Art of Innovation"A whiz kid might make a technological breakthrough and create a corporation to exploit it. But even a new-economy corporation can't last long without what old-economy corporations depended on: a reliable, skilled workforce, which takes time to assemble; effective distribution systems, which take trial and error to perfect; and customer loyalty, which is earned only gradually. It was this kind of environment that nurtured old-economy innovators.
One whiz kid's invention, followed by a second whiz kid's innovation, followed by a third, is merely a recipe for a stock bubble. Technological innovation will continue to come from youth, but for corporations to thrive, they need gradual innovations, not just revolutionary ones.
Take, for example, the case of Paul Cézanne."
redux [11.07.00]
"Jennifer Brown, the executive vice president of e-business at Fidelity Investments, has a serious problem with innovation in her group. There's too much of it.
"We have more good ideas than we can handle," she confesses. "We have so many good ideas here--truly innovative ideas--that sometimes our people get a little frustrated that we can't act on most of them.""
"At times like this, a cold economic reality kicks in: The more innovations there are, the less valuable any given innovation is likely to be.
"Another thing that makes cashing in on innovation so difficult is that, as any good intellectual property lawyer will complain, the very digital technologies that make it faster, easier, and cheaper for innovators to innovate also make it faster, easier, and cheaper for imitators to imitate. In the e-world, today's innovation is tomorrow's imitation is next month's commodity. The Net is a fabulous medium for "fast followers"--firms such as Microsoft and AOL, which do a fabulous job of spotting an innovation trend and leveraging resources to make it their own."
"In fact, being first seldom proves to be a sustainable advantage and usually proves to be a liability. VisiCalc, for example, was the first major personal-computer spreadsheet. Where is VisiCalc today? Do you know anyone who uses it? And what of the company that pioneered it? Gone; it doesn't even exist. VisiCalc eventually lost out to Lotus 1-2-3, which itself lost out to Excel. Lotus then went into a tailspin and was saved only by selling out to IBM."
"The pattern of the second (or third or fourth) market entrant's prevailing over the early trailblazers shows up throughout the entire history of technological and economic change.
"We can already see the fundamental laws of management and commerce reasserting themselves. Consider America Online, clearly a new-economy star that got there by being better, not first. As Kara Swisher describes in her book aol.com, AOL lagged far behind CompuServe and Prodigy, and as late as 1992 had only 200,000 members compared with Prodigy's nearly 2 million. AOL beat out the early leaders not because it had the ultimate solution, but precisely because it knew that it didn't. So long as AOL continues the process of nonstop improvement and evolution -- step-by-step improvement in the eyes of the customer -- it will likely remain strong."
"This chapter summarizes the history of the disk drive industry in all its complexity. Some readers will be interested in it for the sake of history itself. But the value of understanding this history is that out of its complexity emerge a few stunningly simple and consistent factors that have repeatedly determined the success and failure of the industry's best firms. Simply put, when the best firms succeeded, they did so because they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. But, paradoxically, when the best firms subsequently failed, it was for the same reasons--they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.
The history of the disk drive industry provides a framework for understanding when "keeping close to your customers" is good advice--and when it is not."
7:49 PM
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The Third Culture
GOLDSMITH VS. ZIMMERMAN"I count nine bits of chad on the carpet after all the ballots are run. The chad may just have fallen innocently out of the innards of the machine, it may have fallen out of any number of punch positions which had nothing to do with the city council race, or one or more bits might have fallen out of the Zimmerman-Goldsmith positions. Who knows? The seconds tick by, and I am acutely conscious at this instant that language and reality sometimes coincide: in the punched card universe a "bit" really is a bit, and Gregory Bateson's definition of information as "any difference that makes a difference" is true indeed, as we await the count of how many bits of difference between card and not-card have just passed through the Cardamation machine."
"For your entertainment, here is a piece by George Dyson. It shows the way to deal equitably with the situation in Florida. It was written three years ago and it is being published this week in the Bellingham Herald and in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung. You might consider it an addendum to Danny Hillis's piece in the news-letter about "How Democracy Works". It describes a real case verifying Hillis's theory of democracy. Implications for biology, engineering, and physics are enormous."
"Many people believe that democracy works by giving voters a chance to elect a candidate whose views match their own. Actually, this isn't true. In a perfectly functioning democracy, both candidates will appear equally imperfect, elections' voter turnout will often be low, and all elections will end in near ties. The illustrations below show why this is true. They also show why a two-party system is better than a many-party system. Voters are more likely to like their choice of candidates in a many-party system, but they are less likely to like the winner of the election. "
9:01 PM
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Wired News
Ask a Librarian, Not Jeeves""The public focus has swiveled to the Internet and away from libraries," said Donna Dinberg of the National Library of Canada. While interest in the library help desk is declining, free commercial Web help services such as Ask Jeeves, Webhelp.com and Yahoo are thriving.
With all these commercial online reference services, will librarians become obsolete? Dinberg wants to shift the info-power back to her domain.
"We know that libraries can provide authoritative information, both online and offline," she said. "And we feel that the only thing stopping us is the fact that patrons aren't coming to the library much anymore."
A new project is attempting to make the library an even more vital research source than ever before. The Library of Congress and its partner libraries are launching a pilot project to bring librarians' expertise to the Internet by forming a global reference desk that is available 24 hours, seven days a week."
"In five years I hope they will be able to return answers, not just documents. Some companies have tried to do that today but they do not work very well, which is why Google still returns documents. In the future, Google will be your interface to all the world's knowledge - not just web pages. "
redux [06.29.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Five ears ago, search engines seemed like the Web's salvation. Today, they need some saviors of their own."
"It is not just the vastness of the Web that is causing problems. Consider the way people search: Typical users enter single keywords, cross their fingers and hit the search buttons. And when they are faced with lists of 1,000 results, they usually click on the first few options instead of refining their searches by adding keywords or trying new terms.
The confluence of technological limitations and simple searching methods means that only two kinds of online searchers are well served: those looking for very popular terms and those who are using uncommon words to hunt for specific things. But the majority of searchers, whose requests fall somewhere between, are finding searching as frustrating as ever.
To cope, many search engines have concluded that simply indexing more pages is not the answer. Instead, they have decided to rely on the one resource that was once considered a cop-out: human judgment. Search engines have become more like cyborgs, part human, part machine."redux [06.15.00]
"Intelligent software agents promise to traverse and organize information spaces for us, alert us, remind us, call for a refrigerator repair-person, communicate with each other ... to fundamentally alter how we accomplish many of our daily tasks. These red-hot and revolutionary software critters have a lot to learn from their closest human peers: librarians. As I read and think about how intelligent systems reason, search, classify, and filter information, I'm struck repeatedly with how librarians do exactly these same tasks. Both act as information mediators for the end user: both negotiate information spaces and retrieve information relevant to a particular user or goal. Librarians have been efficiently accomplishing many of the tasks at which the artificial intelligence community is now working to make software agents competent. Therefore, the development of software agents can be informed by a look at how human information agents do their work.
This paper will examine the characteristics of agency, the work of librarians as information mediators, the differences between human and software agents, the possible tasks for software agents in libraries, and speculate on the future of human and software agency."
[requires 'free' registration]
"When Carrie Larkworthy, a student at Harvard University, is faced with a research project, getting a book out of the library is the last thing on her mind. Instead she sits in her dormitory room and logs onto the Web, starting with Harvard's online system for searching and retrieving journal articles. "I hate the library, so I try to avoid it," Ms. Larkworthy said. "It's such a big facility that you have to search through.""
""...But new efforts are afoot to change that. Several companies are racing to put the full texts of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, old and new, on the Web."
"These electronic library projects are not attempts to compete with the budding electronic book industry, which offers books for downloading to handheld devices and is focused on popular fiction, like Stephen King's recent Web-only novella, "Riding the Bullet," and on other newly published trade books. The library projects have very little to do with the debate over the promise or pitfalls of gadgets that let people read novels electronically from the comfort of their beds.
In fact, the new effort to build an electronic library is not about reading at all. It is about the power of electronic searching."
To partially answer the questions raised in the title of this paper -- "Who is going to mine digital library resources? And how?" -- today’s end-users are not capable of mining today’s digital libraries, let alone the more comprehensive digital libraries of the foreseeable future."
"Today’s attention to database creation and better search engines fails to address a critical consumer need. Better digital libraries and more powerful search engines will not get quality materials into the hands of the end-user. Developers of digital libraries must work with content experts to develop an array of information products that help users identify and understand the available resources."
11:17 AM
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The New York Times: Opinion
The Thanksgiving Call[requires 'free' registration]
"The phone rings — the call is from one of the missing siblings — and still the first thing to talk about is how clear the connection is or how to slip your words into the slapback echo if the call is coming from way overseas. The phone is handed from person to person, or perhaps everyone takes a turn at the extension in the one room of the house where you can hear yourself think. Some hang back, because there has always been a little coolness with the person on the other end of the line, and others would talk all afternoon if the turkey weren't coming to the table just this minute. The last person to talk does a quick check to make sure everyone has had a chance to say hello and then hangs up, feeling almost guilty, as if what was merely absence had somehow turned into exile. The holiday is not complete until all the calls have come in, until everyone who could not be there knows just how the day is being kept.
And for the person on the other end? The day is being kept there too, and perhaps in a way as sustaining, as filling, as it is at home."
"Another year has come and gone, and if it's anything like the ones that preceded it, we'll remember it mostly for the bland loss, arbitrary misery, and chronic regret that served as its main ingredients and the squandered opportunities, failures of nerve, inexplicable oversights, wanton double- crossings, and blind impotent rage that seasoned it. To express our gratitude for such bounty, we offer these Thanksgiving Day e-cards. Save us a leg."
"Let's be honest. The traditional Thanksgiving is a 96-hour nightmare. Overcrowded highways with their jack-knifed tractor-trailers. Sales-engorged department stores with their greedy, grasping shoppers. Bulkhead-bursting airplanes teeming with palsy-eyed passengers who reek of freshly belched Yorkshire pudding.
So this Thanksgiving, let's start a new tradition. Let's all stay home and stay online.
All 96 hours. Everybody. Forget the malls, the airports, and your bloody neurotic sister-in-law and her bloody Cheetoh-bloated kids."
10:16 AM
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The New York Times Magazine
This Campus Is Being Simulated[requires 'free' registration]
"The internet will have a very different effect on the most prestigious institutions from the one it will have on those in the middle and lower echelons. The Harvards and the Williamses are in no danger of virtualization, because both their communal life and their intellectual life are integral to their natures. They will be the brand names coveted by students at the less grand institutions, not to mention by lifelong learners. And they will, if they wish, earn lots and lots of money, which in turn could permit them, as Herb Allen and Mark Taylor suggest, to lower tuition and thus reach out to a wider, or at least different, audience. Or perhaps all that money will encourage them to behave like the market actors they will have become. Once a university permits itself to be subsumed into its brand name, it becomes, as Charles Nesson puts it, "a production house for making knowledge products.""
"Columbia is not alone in its Internet ambitions. The nation's elite universities, long secure in their centuries-old reputations, face a rapidly changing world in which any school, from the University of South Alabama to UC Berkeley, can put its courses online and court a global market for continuing education. Fearing that they will be left behind, Ivy League administrators are becoming dealmakers, and buzz phrases like "leveraging brands" and "tapping intellectual capital" echo from the Stanford Quad to Harvard Square.:
"Thanks in part to the Net's ability to distribute courses to students anywhere at any time, learning is becoming another commodity, part of the $740 billion "education industry" that has attracted keen interest on Wall Street."
redux [09.20.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"When Fredric D. Price, the president of a nutritional-supplements company, sought a partner to create an online information company, NutritionU.com, he approached a Columbia University professor, Dr. Richard J. Deckelbaum.
He hit pay dirt.
Some academics might have run the other way, concerned about the motives and standards in the emerging commercial market for cyber education. But Dr. Deckelbaum, director of Columbia's Institute of Human Nutrition, viewed the Internet as a way to reach a wider population.
Columbia was interested, too. The venture fit neatly into its strategy to turn more of its intellectual capital -- the knowledge, research and teaching of its professors -- into financial capital."
redux [05.09.00]
"For decades, Stanford University has served as an intellectual incubator to students and faculty who have gone on to found such Silicon Valley icons as Hewlett-Packard (HWP) , Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Yahoo. Now Stanford has hatched a startup of its own."
"On Tuesday, the university launched its first for-profit venture, an Internet medical company called e-Skolar. The startup will market an online information service for physicians called Stanford Skolar, M.D."
""We've gotten some income from our associations [with Stanford-inspired companies] but it's minimal to the value created." Determined to profit from its intellectual property, Stanford formed e-Skolar, taking a majority ownership stake."
"A growing consensus holds that new information technologies foretell the end of higher education as we have known it. I suspect this is true. Its truth, however, is not that the technologies are positively revolutionizing education. Rather, what we are watching is more like the end -- the final perfection and dead-end extreme -- of the old regime's shortcomings."
"All this worries a growing contingent of educators, who fear the corporation's "crushing solicitude". (The phrase is William F. Buckley's which he applied many years ago to the ministrations of centralized government.) I share this fear, but it seems to me that the more fundamental issue often goes unnoted: our changing notions about what education is make it inevitable that business and industry should step into the picture aggressively. If you want efficient delivery of effective facts and procedures, then business -- already attuned to such computationally rigorous training -- will far outperform the university.
In other words, having increasingly accepted their role as training grounds for business -- which is what the information-transfer model of education implies -- universities are now finding that business is better situated to train its own employees than schools are. At best the universities will simply hire themselves out to corporations.
11:02 PM
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Business 2.0
PCs are the Dark Matter of the Internet"At a conservative estimate, the world's Internet-connected PCs host an aggregate 10 billion MHz of processing power and 10,000 terabytes of storage. And this calculation assumes 100 million PCs among the Net's 300 million users, with an average chip speed of only 100MHz and an average hard drive of 100MB. These numbers continue to climb–today, sub-$2,000 PCs have an order of magnitude more processing power and two orders of magnitude more storage than this assumed average.
This is the fuel powering the current revolution–the latent capabilities of PC hardware represent a huge, untapped resource. No matter how it ultimately gets labeled (and peer-to-peer seems likely to stick), the thing that software like the Gnutella file-sharing system and the Popular Power distributed computing network have in common is an ability to harness this dark matter, the otherwise underused hardware at the edges of the Net."
"Some have placed the arrival of P2P on the same scale as the Mosaic browser. Do you believe this technology breaks new ground?
I don't think the concept of peer-to-peer is new. It is an end-to-end architecture. We haven't even begun to understand or imagine the possibilities. This is the next great thing for the Internet. What has changed is the latent power of the PC and powerful networks being fully realized. Napster is a first, rough cut of this model as it makes implicit the intent of an end-to-end network. The potential cycles that were unavailable can now be deployed for any task. "
"Whenever something new seems to be happening on the internet, there is a push to define it, and as with the "horseless" carriage or the "compact" disc, new technologies are often labelled according to some simple difference from what came before -- horsedrawn carriages, non-compact records.
Calling this new class of applications peer-to-peer emphasizes their difference from the dominant client/server model. However, like the horselessness of the carriage or the compactness of the disc, the "peeriness" of P2P is more a label than a definition.
As we've learned from the history of the internet, adoption is a better predictor of software longevity than perfection is, and as the P2P movement matures, users will not adopt applications that embrace decentralization for decentralization's sake. Instead, they will adopt those applications which use just enough decentralization, in just the right way, to create novel functions or improve existing ones."
"Without any history on its shoulders, the array of custom applications that make up the nebulous "P2P" cateogry are free to break out from the fustiness of email and browsing applications. They can change the rules and do things "properly," given the chance.
Want proper metadata about files? Read it from the filesystem or make the user add the data in before they can go on. Want secure communications? Don't offer any insecure methods. Want decent file permission management? Bind file-sharing into a user's contact list.
By changing the rules of engagement, P2P applications are able to embrace the more sophisticated requirements of today's multi-layered online user base. When critical mass is reached, as we've seen with Napster and instant messaging, then the extra granularity and control pays off.
However, it still seems that many P2P-type applications struggle to prove as compelling as the Web. Broken as the web may be, it has the advantage of a low technical level of entry, an implicit openness, and limitless flexibility. New P2P technologies hide both the mechanics and often the data from their users. The Web won't go away, but it must change."
"Freenet - one of the Big Three of P2P (the others, of course, are Napster and Gnutella) - has mostly been written about, even by founder Ian Clarke, as a censorship-proof network, where no one knows where a specific piece of information exists. Even the owners of Freenet nodes don't know what content exists on their computers. But Freenet is much more than an anonymity system: Clarke has built into it the seeds of a radically new Internet."
"In Freenet, as Clarke explains in this interview, a request for information not only delivers the information to the requesting node, but also replicates the document on the nodes closest to the requestor. This has two effects: information moves closer to people who want it and the more popular information is, the more copies of it exist. Unlike the Web, the more popular content is, the more - not less - available it is."
9:47 PM
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The Standard
The New Encyclopedia Salesmen"In 1978 Douglas Adams wrote a hit radio play for the BBC called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Its title came from a gadget described in the story as "a sort of electronic book" that "tells you everything you need to know about anything." In today's techspeak it would be called a wireless PDA. The handy electronic guide was updated on the fly by a team of spacefaring researchers and had "supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom."
Adams hopes to bring this fantasy to life with his company, H2g2, which is turning WAP phones into real-world "Hitchhiker's" guides. H2g2 is part of a new breed of Internet encyclopedias that are trying to amass a repository of all-encompassing knowledge by using volunteers."
"The philosophy of the open-source movement is spreading within the industry. Now, a maker of a Web-based encyclopedia wants to apply its principles to share knowledge in general."
""Eventually we're going to out-Britannica Britannica," he says. "By that, I mean we'll do all the things that they do, only we'll do them better and in more depth."
"What we see here is that increasing the value of the database by adding more information is a natural by-product of using the tool for your own benefit. No altruistic sharing motives need be present, especially since sharing is the default. It isn't even like the old song about "leaving a cup with water by the pump to let the next person have something to prime it with" (I'll have to use Napster to find that song...) where it just takes a little bit of effort, so why not be nice to the next person like the last one was to you."
"As Kevin Werbach wrote:"What made Napster a threat to the record labels was its remarkable growth. That growth resulted from two things: Napster's user experience and its focus on music...What makes Napster different is that it's drop-dead simple to use. Its interface isn't pretty, but it achieves that magic resonance with user expectations that marks the most revolutionary software developments.""I would add that in using that simple, desirable UI, you also are adding to the value of the database without any extra work. I believe that you can help predict the success of a particular UI used to build a shared database based on how much normal, selfish use adds to the database."
10:38 PM
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Wired News
Carnivore Can Read Everything"The FBI's controversial e-mail surveillance tool, known as Carnivore, can retrieve all communications that go through an Internet service, far more than FBI officials have said it does, according to a Bureau documents and a recent FBI test."
""That really contradicts the explanation that the FBI has provided as to the purpose of the system and how it works," said David Sobel, general counsel for the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. "We've been led to believe that the purpose of Carnivore is to filter and pinpoint the particular communications that the FBI is authorized to obtain. If that's true, then why are they testing the system's ability to store and archive everything?"
""It's like a car," explained FBI spokesman Steve Barry. "We revved it up to its full parameters without the filter on, which we should, just to see how well it works." Barry called EPIC's questions of the FBI's intentions "really off-base."
"The test showed that we could grab data without the filter, but we can't do it in the real world," Barry said. "That would be illegal.""
redux [10.16.00]
"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 regulating a booming private sector."redux [04.30.00]
"No person's liberty is safe in the last week of Congress ? traditionally a time when civil liberties invasions such as wire-tapping, gun prohibition, and the like are snuck through into legislation. These are the final frantic hours of the session, and there is no opportunity for public opposition."
"The bill allows the government to obtain any kind of document it wants, without first getting a search warrant or a subpoena from a court. Section 3(b) allows the attorney general or her subordinate, rather than a court, to issue subpoenas. These documents include any written or electronic document possessed by an individual ? or possessed by a third party (such as bank records, credit card records, telephone records, school records, or an Internet Service Provider's customer records).
In other words, the bill guts the Fourth Amendment requirement that private documents should be searched only after a court issues a warrant based on probable cause.
Even worse, section 3(g) of the bill allows these document seizures to be conducted secretly, so that the individual might never be told that his bank records, Internet records, or other documents have been searched by the government. The section allows the attorney general's subpoena a "provider of electronic communication service" to receive the secrecy privileges that are currently allowed only for wiretaps (these include that the government can delay or postpone forever telling a person that he has been searched). "
"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."
[requires 'free' registration]
"A liberal state should respect the distinction between public and private speech because it recognizes that the ability to expose in some contexts aspects of our identity that we conceal in other contexts is indispensable to freedom, friendship, even love. Friendship and romantic love can't be achieved without intimacy, and intimacy, in turn, depends upon the selective and voluntary disclosure of personal information that we don't share with everyone else. Moreover...privacy is also necessary for the development of human individuality. Any writer will understand the importance of reflective solitude in refining arguments and making unexpected connections: in an odd but widely shared experience, many of us seem to have our best ideas when we are in the shower. Indeed, studies of creativity show that it's during periods of daydreaming and seclusion that the most creative thought takes place, as individuals allow ideas and impressions to run freely through their minds without fear that their untested thoughts will be exposed and taken out of context. ""We are trained in this country to think of all concealment as a form of hypocrisy. But perhaps we are about to learn how much may be lost in a culture of transparency -- the capacity for creativity and eccentricity, for the development of self and soul, for understanding, friendship and even love. There is nothing inevitable about the erosion of privacy in cyberspace, just as there is nothing inevitable about its reconstruction. We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. What we need now is the will."
"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. "
8:38 PM
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The Register
SMS messages cause Reebok riots"A mobile marketing firm caused mayhem in the Lakeside shoping centre, Thurrock, when it sent out a text message offering a free pair of Reebok trainers to whoever turned up at a new shop with their phone.
The store manager was a little overwhelmed when over 50 people turned up within four minutes, the Financial Times reported. A Reebok top nob said the company wasn't going to make a habit of such giveaways although he didn't mention how many pairs were dished out - was it just the one? Seems a bit stingy if it was. And did anyone buy anything while they were there?
Anyway, the company behind it, ZagMe, has had 2000 shoppers sign up for the service in the first four days - trampling on its more conservative estimates - so it might well be on to something."
redux [10.31.00]
"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."redux [06.17.00]
"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."
Infoworld Oh the horror, the horror: The new world of wireless commerce runs amok
"Stop and ask yourself: "Just because we're developing the capability of purchasing via mobile systems, does that really mean people are going to develop a sudden and inexplicable Pavlovian desire to buy all the time?" Do we really expect the world to be gripped by the same fever that drives the Home Shopping Network? My bank account just happens to be a few orders of magnitude smaller than Bill Gates', so I actually don't want to spend money all the time."
"M-commerce -- no, make that successful m-commerce -- will not be about purchases. M-commerce will be about providing information which facilitates a purchase. Don't think commerce, think communication. There's a Grand Canyon-sized gap between those two ideas. It's the difference between offering a gadget for sale via handheld and giving access to information about that gadget -- the reviews, who's put it on their Christmas list, etc. -- and the ability to make a note to one's self: "Check this out, I might want it.""
9:01 PM
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MSNBC
Wired living"Networking took on a whole new meaning in New York on Wednesday."
"MICROSOFT CORP. unveiled the Microsoft Home in New York, a networked apartment complete with shipping appliances. The apartment is meant to demonstrate how networked products will fit into the life of a consumer in the coming years.
"Separately, Gateway Inc. is pushing at Comdex/Fall ’00 in Las Vegas a similar habitat for consumers in the form of a new division, called the Gateway Connected Home, which is dedicated to making the Internet more accessible for the family through the use of home networking and Internet appliances.
"Both homes emphasize a home network and appliances that plug in to access the Internet and the features of all the appliances within the network. Both home networks and Internet appliances were initially well received by reviewers, but consumer interest was tepid. But with PC sales growth slowing, manufacturers are looking for alternative revenue streams to buoy the books."
redux [10.21.00]
"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]
"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."redux [06.15.00]
"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."
""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?"
""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]
[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."
11:01 PM
0 comments
Forbes
Control Geeks"DION LIM SITS IN THE LIVING room of his posh apartment high above downtown San Francisco, comfy in black slippers and calmly talking about his new business while holding hands with his wife. They are a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Last month Lim and wife, Amy, both 32, released Bannerama, free software that wipes out banner ads on Web sites and replaces them with content of the user's choosing - tidbits on foreign languages and trivia and, eventually, wine, cooking and golf. "People already use the natural blocking software in their brains by ignoring banners," he says. "We want to give the user the power to do what he wants with that space.""
"If this stuff catches on, Web sites have a lot to lose. Online ads will bring in $5.3 billion in total revenue this year, Jupiter says, and could triple in five years. Advertisers may be miffed, but they are somewhat helpless. They have no way of knowing whether an ad was blocked, because the offending software resides not on a Web server but on a user's own hard drive."
"Faced with lackluster results for existing online ad formats, Internet companies are hoping to kick-start the industry with a new generation of bigger, bolder--and controversial--advertising.
Online advertising has long been ephemeral, changing almost as rapidly as the Internet itself. But with the decline of many Web companies, several online giants are seeking to attract nontraditional advertisers by offering more sophisticated formats that go well beyond the banner ad, the workhorse of online ads.
"This industry is doing everything they can to demonstrate to traditional advertisers that the static banner will not meet their needs and will not be what they put their budgets against long term," said Allie Shaw, a vice president of marketing for Unicast, which is creating new online ad formats.
"We want to be able to replace what is a plummeting banner price and performance with an ad unit that advertisers build by and measure the same way they do other media such as TV," Shaw added. "
"In a surprise concession, the Internet Advertising Bureau today acknowledged the banner ad is dead, but expressed confidence that its latest innovation, "Sponsorship Rectangles," will spread quickly and reignite online advertising.
According to the IAB, the Sponsorship Rectangle is a radically new marketing concept that allows companies to "sponsor" individual Web pages by placing special "company messages" in a 468x60-pixel rectangle atop each page. These messages can be used to promote a product, company, or event, and can even be "animated" to draw attention to the sponsor.
"Basically, we told our member ad agencies to throw out the banner ad concept and start from scratch," explained IAB spokesman Tim Turpin. "I think it's fair they rose to the challenge just as you would expect.""
10:53 PM
0 comments
News.Com
Are you afraid of the Internet?"Americans are deeply concerned about their personal information leaking out on the most public arena--the Internet--a study scheduled for release Monday shows.
In telephone interviews with 1,008 adults, Gallup Poll News Service found that more than half of those polled worried about online privacy.
Particularly troublesome for 60 percent of the respondents were large online databases such as telephone directories, legal documents and property tax information.
About 40 percent said they were also concerned about corporate Web sites gathering marketing information by tracking a consumer's every online move.
Additionally, 63 percent were bothered about software that allows the government to tap into personal emails."
redux [09.14.00]
"Nearly all Internet users say they are concerned about privacy online, but despite those fears nearly two-thirds of Web surfers have transmitted such highly personal information as a credit card number, according to a study released Wednesday.
The study, published by the Andersen Consulting Institute for Strategic Change and the Owen School of Business at Vanderbilt University, said 95 percent of consumers have significant concerns about their privacy online."
"But the researchers said they were surprised to find how often Internet users' actual behavior conflicted with those fears, calling it a "a hidden willingness to provide information online."
redux [09.02.00]
"Some big computer out there knows all about Joan Schram. Its massive memory has stored the birth dates of family members and friends, the fact that she drives a Ford Explorer, and the names and birth dates of her American shorthair cat and rare Brazilian fila dog.
And she's thrilled about it.
Schram gave out the information herself, answering screen after screen of personal questions from LifeMinders Inc., a Herndon-based company that collects such data from consumers and e-mails them information in return – reminders of important dates, tips on when it's time to treat the cat for ticks, and news and advertising targeted to their interests.
But like many Americans, the Kennedy Center employee also says she's uncomfortable with the thought that when she goes online, other Internet companies could be monitoring her wanderings and gathering the same kind of personal information that she freely gave over to LifeMinders. If somebody else knew about her Explorer, she says, "I'd be a little disconcerted."
It's one of the more puzzling conundrums of online life. While companies that capitalize on the Internet's powerful potential to invade privacy are denounced as villains of the information age, millions of people type out highly personal data and send it off to Web sites they've barely heard of, with no strong legal protection against misuse of the information."
"As Internet-based commerce becomes commonplace, it is important that we examine the systems used for these financial transactions. Underlying each system is a set of assumptions, particularly about trust and risk. To evaluate systems, and thus to determine one's own risks, requires an understanding of the dimensions of trust: security, privacy, and reliability.
In this book Jean Camp focuses on two major yet frequently overlooked issues in the design of Internet commerce systems--trust and risk. Trust and risk are closely linked. The level of risk can be determined by looking at who trusts whom in Internet commerce transactions. Who will pay, in terms of money and data, if trust is misplaced? When the inevitable early failures occur, who will be at risk? Who is "liable" when there is a trusted third party? Why is it necessary to trust this party? What exactly is this party trusted to do? To answer such questions requires an understanding of security, record-keeping, privacy, and reliability.
The author's goal is twofold: first, to provide information on trust and risk to businesses that are developing electronic commerce systems; and second, to help consumers understand the risks in using the Internet for purchases and show them how to protect themselves. Rather than propose a single model of an Internet commerce system, the author provides the information and insights needed by merchants and consumers as they develop the Internet for commerce."
8:53 PM
0 comments
The Standard
Looking for Meaning in All the Wrong Places"Throughout mankind's long and mostly wretched history, people have derived a powerful sense of meaning and fulfillment from simply prevailing in the day-to-day struggle against necessity. They worked hard to make sure their families were fed and had a roof over their heads. There was a monotony to this existence, but the battle for dignity and against deprivation also provided a seriousness to life, a sense of victory over the elements, an unquestionable moral depth.
For many of us today, the struggle for existence is effectively over. We have become members of the Overclass, the first mass affluent class in history."
""There are few ways in which a man is so innocently occupied than in getting money." Adam Smith famously argued that through the "invisible hand "of competition and the market, human greed and avarice could be harnessed to increase the material welfare of the whole society.
In short, under the new regime, greed ceased to be the vice it had been for more than a thousand years. It became a virtue."
redux [06.11.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"What Marx had hoped would occur because of a new dawn in human economic relations has been made possible instead by a new form of human technology. Once we enter the Web, we become like medieval peasants entering their village commons; almost everything is shared. The only difference is that, unlike the Middle Ages, our modern ability to duplicate everything instantly means that property isn't even "shared." It's possessed simultaneously by everyone. By turning physical property into endlessly duplicable e-property, the ancient human problem of "mine-thine" has been essentially solved. There was once the parable of the loaves and the fishes; there is now the parable of copy and paste. For the first time since Plato first dreamed of it in "The Republic," communism is actually feasible."
"The Web does something else only dreamed of by Marx. It goes further than any previous innovation in alleviating the problem identified by Marx as "bourgeois alienation." For many, market democracy still means that people are being valued for their capacity to generate wealth, not their intrinsic human dignity. For many more, it means jobs they long to leave on Friday afternoon for brief glimpses of pleasure on the weekend. For more still, class and money are never left behind. Wherever they go, their clothes, accent and credit rating subtly keep them in their place.
But on the Internet, a simple screen name will get you almost anywhere free. Suddenly, motives other than the profit motive begin to come into play."
"Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods. We can observe gift cultures in action among aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant food. We can also observe them in certain strata of our own society, especially in show business and among the very wealthy.
Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.
Thus the Kwakiutl chieftain's potlach party. Thus the multi-millionaire's elaborate and usually public acts of philanthropy. And thus the hacker's long hours of effort to produce high-quality open-source code.
For examined in this way, it is quite clear that the society of open-source hackers is in fact a gift culture."
"Richard Barbrook is causing trouble again. In his latest manifesto, "Cybercommunism," Barbrook argues that all those free-software hackers blissfully giving away their code on the Internet are actually "superseding capitalism" and "successfully constructing the utopian future in the present." Just as Karl Marx predicted.
OK -- maybe Marx did not exactly foresee the rise of the high-tech gift economy, but it's kind of fun to imagine that he might have. The key nugget of "Cybercommunism" is the idea that members of a privileged community -- hackers who can afford to give away the fruit of some their labors -- are constructing a new form of exchange that is transcending the soon-to-be hopelessly outmoded free market.
And it's not just free-software hackers who are engaged in this new economy -- it's all of us who participate in the Net."
"Or, in other words, capitalism's own success has led to the rise of a class of people (free-software hackers) and an infrastructure (the Internet) that together are carrying out and facilitating the successful subversion of capitalism. Who cares if the Soviet Union failed? Capitalism itself may be its own worst enemy."
4:11 PM
0 comments
First Monday
Essence of Distributed Work: The Case of the Linux Kernel"This paper provides a historical account of how the Linux operating system kernel was developed from three different perspectives. Each focuses on different critical factors in its success at the individual, group, and community levels. The technical and management decisions of Linus Torvalds the individual were critical in laying the groundwork for a collaborative software development project that has lasted almost a decade. The contributions of volunteer programmers distributed worldwide enabled the development of an operating system on the par with proprietary operating systems. The Linux electronic community was the organizing structure that coordinated the efforts of the individual programmers. The paper concludes by summarizing the factors important in the successful distributed development of the Linux kernel, and the implications for organizationally managed distributed work arrangements."
redux [04.20.00]
[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