Friday, September 13, 2002

The Economist Patently problematic

"INTELLECTUAL-PROPERTY rights (IPR), which embrace patents, copyright, trademarks and trade secrets, were once considered an esoteric, and slightly dull, bit of commercial law."

"John Barton, a law professor at Stanford University, wants to see both rich and poor countries start thinking of IPR more as a development tool, and for them to reconsider the notion that strongly protecting the rights of inventors is automatically good for all. For the past year, Dr Barton has chaired the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, a body of lawyers, academics, a bio-ethicist and an industry executive convened by Britain's Department for International Development to look at how IPR can work to the benefit of the world's poor countries."

BBC Intellectual property rights 'harm poor'

"Developed countries often proceed on the assumption that what is good for them is likely to be good for developing countries.

"But, in the case of developing countries, more and stronger protection is not necessarily better. They should not be encouraged or coerced into adopting stronger IP rights without regard to the impact this has on their development and poor people."

Thursday, September 12, 2002

MIT Technology Review Data Extinction

""Once you begin to understand what's going on at a more technical level," says Smith, "you realize that what's lost could be catastrophic." We can count on paper documents to last 500 years or longer, barring fire, flood or acts of God. But digital things, be they documents, photographs or video, are all created in a language meant for a specific piece of hardware; and neither computer languages nor machines age well. The amount of material at risk is exploding: the volume of business-related e-mail is expected to rise from 2.6 trillion messages per year in 2001 to 5.9 trillion by 2005, according to IDC, an information technology analysis firm. Maybe most of those messages deserve to be rendered unreadable, but critical documents and correspondence from government and private institutions are in just as much danger of digital obsolescence as spam."

redux [07.11.02]
Shift The Digital Dark Age

"Y2K, another problem brought about entirely by lack of forethought (plus a healthy dose of denial), has not served as a wake up call. Product development decisions continue to revolve around annual earnings. Technology uptake continues to be driven by novelty and the quest for cool. Even in the Open Source world, development is more about cloning commercial products than designing software to last a millennium.

Two hundred years from now, how will historians assess the early twenty-first century? They won't, because scarcely anything will be left to assess. That's right: Welcome, my friends, to the digital dark age."

redux [04.09.01]
Wired News Is U.S. History Becoming History?

"The workings of government in the first decades of the information era have been poorly recorded, archiving experts say. Years of valuable public records may have already been lost, creating a gap in the country's historical record."

""We know less about information in the information age," said Patrice McDermott, a records management analyst with government watchdog agency OMB Watch. "It's not just government, corporations have to deal with this too."

Records management experts say the problem started around 1985, when U.S. government agencies began using e-mail and word-processing programs as they changed the way they conducted business. But they did it without a system for preserving electronic files."

redux [07.08.00]
CNN Company aims to preserve Web history

"The Internet provides a unique glimpse into the lives of ordinary people, much like newspapers of old, but little is being done to preserve Web pages for future historians. One non-profit company is trying to change that.

"We have a shadow of the world that we're able to capture and make available to the future," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive."

BBC Tiny disk to record posterity

"New ways of storing information in a way that can be understood thousands of years from now have been discussed at a conference in the United States.

Scientists, librarians, technologists, anthropologists and others, with the backing of the Long Now Foundation, are considering the best way to ensure that the culture and heritage of the 21st Century are not forgotten."

Council on Library and Information Sources Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation

"There is as yet no viable long-term strategy to ensure that digital information will be readable in the future. Digital documents are vulnerable to loss via the decay and obsolescence of the media on which they are stored, and they become inaccessible and unreadable when the software needed to interpret them, or the hardware on which that software runs, becomes obsolete and is lost. Preserving digital documents may require substantial new investments, since the scope of this problem extends beyond the traditional library domain, affecting such things as government records, environmental and scientific baseline data, documentation of toxic waste disposal, medical records, corporate data, and electronic-commerce transactions."

redux [07.07.00]
The New York Times Saving The Nation's Digital Legacy
[requires 'free' registration]

"The Library of Congress is charged with collecting the creative work of the American people. This has come to include such varied output as the papers of Thomas Jefferson and the Wright brothers, the original compositions of Leonard Bernstein and the video archives of the Martha Graham Dance Company.

But now the nation's creativity extends to Web sites, electronic journals and magazines, and CD-ROM's of every sort. And the library is lagging in collecting and archiving that digital material, according to a report released yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences. Unless its administrators act swiftly, the report says, the library risks diminishing in relevance."

Wednesday, September 11, 2002

Tuesday, September 10, 2002

Reason Online Bin Fadin': Why forgetting September 11 is good for America

"An almost wicked thought for the anniversary of 9/11: Has there ever been a more un-American mantra than "We shall never forget"?"

"I hope not. As bad as 9/11 was, it does not seem desirable that this terrible event should so radically change the ideals of a unique people. In many ways, America is about forgetting the past, or at least it used to be. From the Japan to Germany to Vietnam to former slaves and slave owners: the grudges slowly fade away, making America vastly different than so many other strife ridden clans and nations. This is a lesson we forget (or remember) at our peril."

Salon The selling of 9/11

"Maybe it's the ease with which we took in the spectacle of Sept. 11 and then cast it out again that haunts us. After weeks of watching TV and reading the paper and feeling sick to our stomachs, when we thought we'd never get over it, life suddenly returned to normal. Purchasing these little trinkets might be our way of pledging that we won't forget this event like we forget everything else on the pop-cultural conveyor belt.

"But in some ways, buying stuff means we'll forget even faster. In America, pledging to remember is just another step on the road to forgetting. We buy new games and plan trips and put together photo albums and take vacations and shoot video and save ticket stubs, just to file it all away and move on to the next style, the next technology, the next car, couch, dress, job, the next distraction."

"Five basketball seasons, 53 movies, seven hair colors, two gym memberships, four long distance carriers, three girlfriends and two e-mail addresses from now, we'll be scrapping those commemorative plates at a yard sale. In America today, those who can't remember the past for more than two seconds without getting interrupted by their cellphones may be condemned to repeat it."

redux [03.03.02]
Bad Subjects Social Fear and the Commodification of Terrorism

"Yet if economic fear is a persuasive mode of social coercion, it can also function as a mode of consumption. Preventative consumption is a fear response that seeks to avoid the consequences of unpreparedness or inaction. Consumption itself becomes a defense against fears, rational or irrational. Since September 11, the spectre of Islamic terrorism has generated a market for products that can locate themselves within this conceptual framework of preventative consumption. A product's precise relation to the political phenomenon is irrelevant. Rather, marketability in the fear market relies on associative links. Risk, ever-present in the economic calculus, suddenly has an attributable face. Preventative consumption takes those social risks caused by foreign, alien hatreds, and reduces them into the manageable features of known products."

Social Science Research Council The Political Psychology of Competing Narratives: September 11 and Beyond

"Narratives meet a number of different needs people have. They are especially relevant in times of high uncertainty and high stress. Just at the moments when people are most disoriented, such as the period following September 11, we struggle to make sense of events, and shared narratives which are reinforced within groups help people find reassurance and to cope with high anxiety. Groups with divergent beliefs and experiences construct different narratives of the same event. However, it is crucial to understand that narratives are not made from whole cloth but are grounded in selectively remembered and interpreted experiences and projections from them."

"Within communities, high social stress and anxiety produce pressures towards conformity once a narrative emerges, although as new events unfold there can be questioning and conflict around, and change in, a narrative. Political leaders intuitively know that building consensus using the key elements in a narrative is crucial in mustering support for their actions, which they present as "naturally" following from shared understandings."

NPR: All Things Considered Historical Hindsight

"NPR's Robert Smith looks at how other momentous events have -- and haven't -- been remembered through history, and speaks with historians about how one year later, Sept. 11 is in some ways a story without an ending. (5:00)"

Monday, September 09, 2002

SFGate Surveillance Society Don't look now, but you may find you're being watched

"These days, if you feel like somebody's watching you, you might be right.

One year after the Sept. 11 attacks, security experts and privacy advocates say there has been a surge in the number of video cameras installed around the country. The electronic eyes keep an unwavering gaze on everything from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Washington Monument."

redux [03.11.02]
Wired News Spying: The American Way of Life?

"In the six months since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans may not have exactly embraced a surveillance society, but they appear to have grown to accept portions of it. A Zogby poll conducted last December says that 80 percent of respondents favored video monitoring on public places such as street corners.

Especially in the dark days after the Pentagon was hit, the White House targeted, the Capitol anthraxed, and the World Trade Center leveled, that public reaction was predictable. In national emergencies, the uneasy relationship between freedom and order edges toward greater restrictions on individual liberty."

redux [02.25.02]
NPR: Morning Edition The Video Surveillance Debate

"It hangs over Times Square, looking more like a street lamp than what it really is: a police video surveillance camera that can swivel 360 degrees and zoom in close enough to read a Broadway ticket in a scalper's hand 50 feet away.

As Jad Abumrad reports for Morning Edition, the camera and thousands of others like it in New York City and millions across the country are at the center of an escalating debate: is the use of such devices to combat crime and terrorism worth the loss of privacy and other guaranteed constitutional freedoms?"

redux [11.14.01]
MSNBC Warming to Big Brother

"Khalid al-Midhar was on an INS "watch list" -- and being hunted by the FBI -- when he boarded American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11. A simple computer link between federal agencies could have stopped al-Midhar's suicide mission cold. Frustrated investigators and a nervous American public are wondering why such an intelligent network of police data isn't already in place. But a project to create that kind of gigantic database is now being built -- it's called Golden Shield, and it's been designed by the Chinese Communist Party's police agency to control Chinese citizens."

"Two months ago, even the thought of such a project in the U.S. would likely have elicited immediate outrage. Even today, as just described, Golden Shield might not sound very palatable."

But piece by piece, a skittish American public seems willing to go along with many of Golden Shield's tactics."

redux [10.12.01]
The New York Times Magazine A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
[requires 'free' registration]

"Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity. But in fact, over the past decade, this precise state of affairs has materialized, not in the United States but in the United Kingdom. At the beginning of September, as it happened, I was in Britain, observing what now looks like a glimpse of the American future."

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""