conflux
The Economist
Consultant, heal thyself
"IT IS as if a neutron bomb has hit the consulting industry. Pay a visit to your local management-consulting shop, and you will find that the building is intact but many of the people are gone. See the rows of empty desks, once filled with eager young MBAs. Read plaintive postings on www.vault.com, a yuppie website devoted to the rants and raves of the downturn. Listen to consultants, poor things, complain about having to work for nothing.
The past 12 months have been an annus horribilis for strategy consultants--the sort that advise top bosses on the bigger issues facing their firms."
redux [11.06.00]
""Tell me what you do," [CBS correspondent Bob] Simon insisted, "in English."
"We provide services to companies to help them win," [Razorfish cofounder Jeff] Dachis offered.
"So do trucking firms!" Simon snapped. Dachis seemed taken aback - the trucking remark was really uncalled for.
"What is it you do?" Simon pressed.
"Our talent is to do a certain thing, whereas the trucking firm..."
"Yes, but what is - what is it you do?"
"We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them," Dachis said. It was his best shot.
"That's still very vague," Simon said cheerily. He looked as if he might high-five his cameraman. A pause of several aeons ensued - too much for even the scientist. Kanarick stepped in to summarize the professional services sector in a way that Bob Simon, and perhaps the rest of America, might understand: "Business strategy," he said."
8:21 AM 0 comments
News.Com
Defending the use of open source
"A new report reveals just how much the U.S. Department of Defense depends on open-source software and recommends steps to ensure that open source is recognized and accepted."
"The report published Monday found that what it calls free and open-source software (FOSS) "plays a more critical role in the (Defense Department) than has been generally recognized." The report also noted that if open source were banned, the department's security would plummet and costs would rise sharply."
redux [07.31.02]
"The experience of Sun and others is that open source provides ideal development and business models for today's Net Effect economy. It's not about free stuff; it's about enfranchising every user and development community member. Today's software innovations need this model more than ever before. With an open foundation, companies can gain their just compensation for their innovations "above the line," but the subtle lock-in offered by our traditional understanding of "standards" is largely avoided.
Most importantly, open source is not just about code; it is about community. You don't make a project open source just with a license. It takes the costly and time-consuming birthing of a community of code, a trusted gatekeeper function and a series of symbiotic commercial enterprises to make true open source. 21st century open source is not free."
redux [07.31.02]
""The way a lot of people see it is we were doing open-source before [VA Linux] and we've continued doing open source after VA Linux for the exact same reason: because we love to do it," Jennings says. "It was nice to get paid for it, but getting paid was always viewed as kind of a perk."
That many ex-VA Linux employees still get to hack for pay is probably the top reason so few complain when it comes to the former company. As the old high-tech saying goes, it's the pioneers who usually end up with the most arrows in their backs."
redux [05.17.02]
"A lot has changed for Linux in the past two years. True, the basic tenets of the rebellious open-source software-development movement popularized by coder Linus Torvalds remain largely intact. Loosely organized collectives, often from competing companies, collaborate to build software products that no one owns, with source code that anyone can view and alter. Any changes in the code are held by the community at large.
While such idealism worked fine in academia and among uber-geeks, it wasn't immune to market economics as the movement matured."
redux [12.09.01]
"The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this trend undermines cultural arguments about "hacker ethics" and "post-scarcity" gift economies. It suggests that classical economic theory offers a more succinct explanation for the peculiar international distribution of open source development: hacking rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost. This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them."
redux [11.21.00]
"The ideological purity of the open-source software business is being diluted by a new era of pragmatism as start-ups adjust to the economic slump."
"Where is our business model if everyone else can copy it?" asked Holger Dyroff, former CEO and now director of sales for Linux software seller SuSE. "The question is where we can make money now. Nobody cared about profitability two years ago."
"The new thinking often involves a proprietary product that has been built on top of an open-source foundation--a situation that could be considered the best, or worst, of both worlds."
"How to make money with the GPL. How to promote and spread free software. How open source's experience advantage with developers gives companies a competitive edge. Sleepycat President and CEO Michael Olson shows us what happens when free software meets intelligent business strategy."
"This paper analyzes the evolving economic substrate of the open-source phenomenon. We first explode some prevalent myths about the funding of program development and the price structure of software. We present a game-theory analysis of the stability of open-source cooperation. We present nine models for sustainable funding of open-source development; two non-profit, seven for-profit. We continue to develop a qualitative theory of when it is economically rational to be closed. We then examine some novel additional mechanisms the market is now inventing to fund for-profit open-source development, including the reinvention of the patronage system and task markets. We conclude with some tentative predictions of the future."
9:19 PM 0 comments
MSNBC
Worries of a cyber war
"Politically motivated hack attacks are rising "sharply," London-based computer security firm mi2g said Tuesday, citing in particular the rise of what it called "Islamic interest hacking groups." And while political hacks account for just a fraction of all hacking activity, security experts worry that may soon change."
"October, mi2g said, has already qualified as the worst month for overt digital attacks since its records began in 1995, with an estimated 16,559 attacks carried out on systems and Web sites."
redux [09.18.02]
"CSIS analyst Arnaud de Borchgrave, a former editor-in-chief of the Washington Times and United Press International, warned that a "cyberattack" was just around the corner.
"It is later than we think. The next generation of transnational terrorists understands that a hand on a mouse can be more lethal than a finger on the trigger," said de Borchgrave, who co-authored a report that concluded: "Cyberattacks now arise whenever disputes occur anywhere in the world...Can cyberterrorism and cyberwar be far behind?""
redux [08.14.02]
"THE FIRST THOUGHT that comes to my mind when people mention cyberwar is: What kind of attack are they really talking about? We've seen Web page defacements traded between Palestinian and Israeli cyberactivists. The Yaha worm, thought to have originated in India, recently caused a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the Pakistani government's main Web site. In the grand scheme of things, however these are relatively minor inconveniences compared with a major military ground or air attack."
"No one has ever made it clear to me exactly what a cyberwar would entail--and I'm betting I'm not the only one who's confused here. "
"A mock cyberwar enacted by faculty of the US Naval War College and analysts from Gartner does not appear to have fulfilled the Clancyesque predictions of mass devastation envisioned by the leading security paranoiacs of the Clinton and Bush Administrations.
The exercise, named "Digital Pearl Harbor," apparently in tribute to US CyberSecurity Czar and Chief Alarmist Richard Clarke, brought together a team of experts in several areas related to critical infrastructure for a three-day hackfest."
redux [07.23.02]
"Years after orders from the White House to beef up the security of the nation's most important computer systems, the government is having trouble identifying which organizations should be involved and how they should be coordinated, according to a new report."
"Even organizations already involved are slowly discovering the scope of the problems from an increasingly interconnected world."
redux [10.04.01]
"Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better."
[requires 'free' registration]
""People aren't going to be killing us with computers," Mr. Hunker said, "but our life may be hell because of computer attacks."
The likeliest use of the technology, he said, would be to complicate matters further after a real-world attack, a tactic he describes with the military phrase "force multiplier." That could involve planting false information on the Web to create a panic or taking down crucial computers in the financial or communications sectors."
redux [08.19.01]
""Taiwan has one of the world's largest computer software and hardware manufacturing bases," said D.K. Matai, managing director of the British-based Mi2. "The computer software programmers in Taiwan are world class. Our view is that getting involved in any kind of conflict with Taiwan, given the kind of intellectual capacity the country has, may prove detrimental."
The Chinese government has been quite open about its future strategic military objective. In paper appearing in the spring issue of China Military Science journal, a member of the Chinese Committee of Science, Technology and Industry of the System Engineering Institute, wrote: "We are in the midst of a new technology in which electronic information technology is the central technology. The technology provides unprecedented applications for the development of new weaponry...Military battles during the 21st century will unfold around the use of information for military and political goals.""
redux [09.06.00]
"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 [01.04.01]
"Scenes of street violence are played out day after day in Palestinian towns across Gaza and the West Bank. But another modern-day arena for battle between the Palestinians and the Israelis is growing ever more heated, so much so that the Internet war waged by computer-savvy political activists is being dubbed an "e-Jihad.""
redux [03.22.00]
"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."
"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."
11:01 PM 0 comments
WSJ.Com
How
Internet Time's Fifteen Minutes Of Fame Ran Out
"Internet Time, along with cousins like Web Time and Warp Speed, became handy phrases to throw into book titles and PowerPoint presentations as proof of savvy topicality. Into newspaper articles, too; The Wall Street Journal mentioned the idea four times in 1996 but 43 times in 2000.
This morning, though, will mark only the second time the phrase has been used in these pages all year. Internet Time's time was short indeed."
redux [06.01.01]
"However, being first-or even one of the first-doesn't necessarily confer an overwhelming advantage. Just consider the early personal computer pioneers, such as Atari. Where are they now? Even the recent history of the Internet abounds in counterexamples to the thesis of first-mover advantage. Look at the market for Internet search engines. Five years ago, AltaVista achieved a technical breakthrough that propelled it to dominant status on the world's desktops. Today, AltaVista is a distant also-ran."
The main reason the first-mover advantage is much less potent than is commonly claimed is that Internet time, the dominant theme of the dot-com bubble, is false. Yes, product development cycles have become noticeably shorter. This is true not just in software, but also in such old-economy products as cars. But consumers do not operate on Internet time. Novel technologies do not diffuse notably more rapidly than they did in the days before dot coms strode the earth."
redux [10.25.01]
"Everybody thinks that it's the market pioneers who have the best name recognition, the highest market share, and the most enduring market leadership....Right?"
"Our discoveries may surprise the business community. After exposing the limitations of prior studies that extolled the success of pioneers, we find that pioneers mostly fail, have low market share, and are rarely enduring market leaders. In addition, we found that the current trend of staking everything on getting there first all-too-often leads companies to embrace a disastrous strategy of rushing to market with incomplete, inferior, and flawed products."
7:27 PM 0 comments
Prospect
Good books
"For the next decade or two, the paperback book will continue to be one of the most cost-effective, portable storage devices ever invented. Upmarket hardback non-fiction is increasingly pleasing to the eye and touch and the market for these titles is also likely to remain immune to the challenge of e-books. Nevertheless, the e-book will develop a growing following-a US report claims that 180,000 electronic titles were published there in 2001-and will sit alongside other forms, such as the audio book and the bound copy as it gradually becomes established. As with all technologies, there will be generational differences. The over 35s may still retain an attachment to wads of printed paper, but for younger generations, this affection may be more fickle.
When the shift towards electronic books gets underway, the news for publishing companies is likely to be mixed."
redux [08.26.02]
"E-book technology needs some improvement before students will be willing to use e-books instead of textbooks, according to a report on a study conducted at Ball State University.
The researchers hoped to find out how using e-books compared with using textbooks, and how e-book use affected students' learning. Although the researchers started with the assumption that e-books would be just as easy to use as textbooks, they soon found that students had various complaints about the performance of the e-book devices. But students who used e-books did just as well on quizzes as those who used printed texts."
redux [07.08.02]
"There are those in the industry who continue to emote about the e-book and praise its capabilities, but the plain old reading public -- on the beaches, in the coffee shops, at the Metro stations -- just aren't buying into e-books. You don't see a horde of people devouring Huck Finn on a handheld or "Ulysses" on a laptop.
"So much about e-books was about simulating paper on the screen," says Mark Bernstein. "It's like vinyl siding. People rarely like simulations as much as they like the real thing.""
"Yes, of course paper is a good technology for providing word-based information. But that is to confuse the delivery mechanism for a book with what is being delivered. A book is a wonderful artifact, to be sure, and I have more than 5000 of them in my house. But what does a book contain? Stories, ideas, facts, interpretations, the voices of people long dead or from a faraway land. A book is a user interface to the world of the mind. As Edwin Schlossberg once said, "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think." Or imagine. Or find out what they need to know.
The eBook that simply mimics the print book on screen is a transitional form, just like the early "moving pictures" that simply pointed a camera at actors on a stage."
"Can someone please explain to me when it was decided that ebooks would completely replace printed books? Why is it so difficult for the media (let alone publishers) to view them as a complementary instead? (That's a rhetorical question.
Here's a novel idea - let's think of ebooks the same way we think of audiobooks. No one believes that audiobooks will replace printed material and as a result, the format carries far less pressure for market penetration and sales figures. In fact, this is one area where libraries are recognized as a valuable market. So let's all agree here and now to apply these same principles to ebooks, both text and audio. Growing sales figures and markets are a good thing. Not everyone will choose to use them, and that's okay. And libraries are a valuable market for ebooks, a fact publishers and manufacturers should acknowledge."
redux [01.22.02]
"How primitive is the current system? Later this century, kids will be amazed to learn how we used to distribute books. Think about it. We grow entire forests, chop them down, flatten them out, spread ink on them, turn them into bricks of wood pulp, which we then drive around the country on trucks. Our children won't be amazed because we were primitive--they'll be amazed that we were so rich. Current-day book publishing is a tremendously wasteful way of moving information around: while paper is a terrific display mechanism, it's a terrible transport device. Publishers take huge risks when they print and ship large quantities of books--and that's why gatekeepers like Oprah so utterly control the fate of books and authors."
"While consumers have been quick to buy MP3 players for online audio--not much different, really, than a Walkman that plays cassettes--there's simply nothing in our retail genes that drives us to buy "book players." So the e-book may have to sneak in disguised as something else."
redux [08.28.01]
[requires 'free' registration]
"A year later, however, the main advantage of electronic books appears to be that they gather no dust. Almost no one is buying. Publishers and online bookstores say only the very few best-selling electronic editions have sold more than a thousand copies, and most sell far fewer. Only a handful have generated enough revenue to cover the few hundred dollars it costs to convert their texts to digital formats."
"Consumers appear confused, Mr. Arland said, because the devices are neither computers nor hand-held organizers, nor do they connect to the Internet. The appliances download electronic books over phone lines directly from a central server.
The device has been the kind of purchase people imagined someone else might enjoy."
redux [08.12.00]
"The publishing industry has gotten very excited about electronic books lately. Random House, Time Warner and just about every other publishing giant has put out a flurry of announcements outlining grand plans for digital distribution.
Adding to the hype, Microsoft last week released its Microsoft Reader 1.5 software for the PC, and Barnesandnoble.com released 2,000 e-book titles, while promising to release 150 more each week.
Ignore all this stuff. E-book technology is just not ready. It's too hard to read on the screen."
redux [03.09.00]
"Even when electronic books gain the same reading speed as print, they will still be a bad idea. Electronic text should not mimic the old medium and its linear ways. Page turning remains a bad interface, even when it can be done more conveniently than by clicking the mouse on a "next page" button. It is an insufficient goal to make computerized text as fast as print: we need to improve on the past, not simply match it.
The basic problem is that the book is too strong a metaphor: it tends to lead designers and writers astray. Electronic text should be based on interaction, hypertext linking, navigation, search, and connections to online services and continuous updates. These new-media capabilities allow for much more powerful user experiences than a linear flow of text. Linear text may have ruled the world since the Egyptians learned to produce arbitrarily long scrolls of papyrus, but it's time to end this tradition. Nobody has time to read long reports any more: information must be dynamic and under direct control of the reader, not the author."
"We report on a laboratory study that compares reading from paper to reading on-line. Critical differences have to do with the major advantages paper offers in supporting annotation while reading, quick navigation, and flexibility of spatial layout. These, in turn, allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing. We discuss the design implications of these findings for the development of better reading technologies."
redux [03.28.00]
"The news that Stephen King would release a story exclusively in digital form and exclusively via the Web rode the media mountain like an intermediate skier on a black-diamond trail -- tentatively at first, then with a little more confidence and, finally, hurtling out of control, crashing into unexpected territory. The trade press gave its imprimatur, and within a few days the story spread like a virus over Web and wire. Television and radio chugged behind.
For those who've watched digital content come into its own, the frenzy was nothing short of remarkable."
"...[Publisher Simon & Schuster] seems to be proclaiming something more insidious with the publication of "Riding the Bullet": that not only can it drag us kicking and screaming into the next era of digital entertainment but that, as a traditional content provider, it can control how and when that will happen. For the consumer, it seemed to say, cyberspace offers much that is new -- speed, efficiency, lower costs. But it also reminded us that, for the moment, Old Media and traditional entertainment still rule."
10:04 PM 0 comments
Wired News
Implantable Chip, On Sale Now
"The maker of an implantable human ID chip has launched a national campaign to promote the device, offering $50 discounts to the first 100,000 people who register to get embedded with the microchip.
Applied Digital Solutions has coined the tagline "Get Chipped" to market its product, VeriChip."
"The company plans to develop a prototype for an implantable GPS ID chip by the end of the year."
redux [08.16.02]
"HILLARY CLINTON is supposed to have said of her husband that he was a "hard dog to keep on the porch". She is not alone. All over the world, dogs, husbands, children and even inanimate objects are liable to stray from the home--whether willingly or otherwise. Now, though, the technology exists to keep track of them."
"The angel is intended to look after old people who have become forgetful and young children who have become too adventurous, as well as dogs who are too interested in the bitch next door."
redux [02.26.02]
"A Florida technology company is poised to ask the government for permission to market a computer ID chip that could be embedded beneath a person's skin. For airports, nuclear power plants and other high-security facilities, the immediate benefits would be a closer-to-foolproof security system. But privacy advocates warn that the chip could lead to encroachments on civil liberties.
THE IMPLANT TECHNOLOGY is another case of science fiction evolving into fact. Those who have long advanced the idea of implant chips say it could someday mean no more easy-to-counterfeit ID cards, no more reliance on dozing security guards."
redux [02.06.02]
""Derek stood up and said, 'I want to be the first kid to be implanted with the chip,'" Leslie Jacobs said. "For the next few days all he did was talk about the VeriChip.""
"ADS chief technology officer Keith Bolton said he was a bit wary about the family's motives at first, but the Jacobses quickly convinced him they'd be perfect subjects. Since the VeriChip was announced in December, the company has been bombarded with queries from people interested in the device, Bolton said.
"Right now we have over 2,000 kids who have e-mailed, wanting to have the chip implanted," he said. "They think it's cool.""
redux [12.04.00]
"Applied Digital Solutions is launching a new line of products under the "Digital Angel" name that allow the monitoring of a person's whereabouts and vital statistics."
"Although the devices may evoke images of George Orwell's Big Brother, the company says the products could be used to keep track of pets, small children or adults with health concerns such as Alzheimer's disease."
redux [09.07.00]
"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]
"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."
redux [07.17.00]
"Forget the pager number and don't bother calling.
One company is making it easier for folks to "track" anyone, by allowing them to pull up a map of the person's location on a personal digital assistant (PDA) or computer.
"Cell-Loc isn't the only company to come out with location-sensitive devices. After all, the industry is expected to bring in a whopping $3.9 billion by 2004, according to the Strategis Group.
The same Strategis study showed that people didn't mind being tracked down for emergency situations like roadside assistance."
redux [05.25.00]
"It could be getting harder to hide from the boss.
After allegations that some city employees are loafing on the job, Denver officials said Monday they want to spend $1.5 million to track city vehicles with the military's Global Positioning System satellites."
"One labor expert said it might be counterproductive for an employer to try to scrutinize its workers so closely."
redux [04.11.00]
"Johnny: "Mom! Grandma's missing again!"
Mom: "Don't worry, dear, the satellite will find her.""
"According to Reuters, a Japanese company has come up with a new way to track down grandmas, grandpas and anyone else who forgets where he or she is supposed to be, by using a satellite-based global positioning system and cellular technology."
7:53 PM 0 comments
News.Com
Google
excluding controversial sites
"Google confirmed on Wednesday that the sites had been removed from listings available at Google.fr and Google.de. The removed sites continue to appear in listings on the main Google.com site."
""To avoid legal liability, we remove sites from Google.de search results pages that may conflict with German law," said Google spokesman Nate Tyler. He indicated that each site that was delisted came after a specific complaint from a foreign government."
redux [09.26.02]
"An Internet libel jurisdiction case currently awaiting a decision in Australia's highest court represents another front in the battle being waged to determine which laws should apply on the Internet.
At issue in the Dow Jones v. Gutnick case is how publication is defined in cyberspace: Whether material is published when it is uploaded onto computer servers, or when it is downloaded by readers. The distinction is important because it helps determine which country or state's libel laws should apply tothe published material."
redux [05.29.02]
"Certainly, conflicts over jurisdiction have been around for centuries, but the Internet introduces a new set of questions about how to apply cross-border laws. In the physical world, the ground rules are relatively well established, bolstered by years of international treaties, case law and agreements between specific nations that dictate how such laws are applied and enforced."
"But the Web changes the dynamics. When you put up a Web site, virtually anyone can stop by and shop. And often, sites aren't selling items but are merely posting speech that some might find objectionable."
redux [01.04.02]
"FOR MUCH of its life, the Internet has been seen as a great democratizing force, a place where nobody needs know who or where you are. But that notion has begun to shift in recent months, as governments and private businesses increasingly try to draw boundaries around what used to be a borderless Internet to deal with legal, commercial and terrorism concerns.
"It used to be that a person sitting in one place could get or send information anywhere in the world," said Jack Goldsmith, a professor of international law at the University of Chicago. "But now the Internet is starting to act more like real space with all its limitations.".""
redux [08.18.01]
"On the face of it, the Internet appears to make geography obsolete. But the reality is rather more complicated. If you want a high-speed digital-subscriber line (DSL) connection, for example, geographical proximity to a telephone exchange is vital, because DSL only works over relatively short distances. Similarly, go to retrieve a large software update from an online file library, and you will probably be presented with a choice of countries from which to download it; choosing a nearby country will usually result in a faster transfer. And while running an e-business from a mountain-top sounds great, it is impractical without a fast connection or a reliable source of electricity. The supposedly seamless Internet is, in other words, constrained by the realities of geography. According to Martin Dodge of University College London, who is an expert on Internet geography, "the idea that the Internet liberates you from geography is a myth"."
redux [04.02.01]
""All politics is local," the late Massachusetts congressman Tip O'Neill once quipped. It turns out that the old saw is also true of e-commerce.
Cruise by a Nordstrom in Seattle on a misty spring day and the beige mannequins might be wearing yellow raincoats and duck boots. Three thousand miles away in Boca Raton, the Nordstrom window might showcase dolls dressed in floral-pattern bikinis and sunglasses. But at Nordstrom.com you get the same sell whether you log on from soggy Seattle or sunny Boca.
That's because, in our rush to get online, we've forgotten that some of the rules of real-world selling still apply on the Web. Geography matters -- online and off."
[requires 'free' registration]
"But for auction sites, gambling sites and others, geography is becoming increasingly important, because they must treat people from different locations differently, as is the case with the French government's barring the sale of Nazi-related items to its citizens.
Online advertising companies, too, are increasingly desperate to use geographic targeting tools to reinforce their clients' faith in Internet marketing. In short, for a growing number of companies, this will be the year when the borderless Internet economy becomes an outmoded concept.
"Our customers told us over the past six months or so that it was an absolute requirement that we have geo-targeting," said Mark Joseph, chief technology officer for MediaPlex, an advertising company based in San Francisco."
redux [10.07.00]
"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.
8:41 PM 0 comments
USA Today
Music industry spins falsehood
"On the first day I posted downloadable music, my merchandise sales tripled, and they have stayed that way ever since. I'm not about to become a zillionaire as a result, but I am making more money. At a time when radio playlists are tighter and any kind of exposure is hard to come by, 365,000 copies of my work now will be heard. Even if only 3% of those people come to concerts or buy my CDs, I've gained about 10,000 new fans this year.
That's how artists become successful: exposure. Without exposure, no one comes to shows, and no one buys CDs. After 37 years as a recording artist, when people write to tell me that they came to my concert because they downloaded a song and got curious, I am thrilled."
redux [06.14.02]
"Traditional music pirates, who burned and sold bootlegs long before the days of Napster, continue to cost the music industry billions of dollars every year.
But the same technologies that pirates use to steal -- -- file sharing, CD-burning and computers -- are driving legitimate sales by consumers, according to research from market research company Ipsos-Reid."
redux [05.06.02]
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"Disputing the position held by the major record companies, a report issued on Friday found that people who use file-sharing networks to obtain music at no charge over the Internet are more likely to have increased their spending on music than are average online music fans."
""File-sharing is a net positive technology" in spurring sales, said Aram Sinnreich, author of the Jupiter report, explaining that people who download music online often are, in effect, sampling it. "It gets people enthusiastic about new and catalog music.""
redux [04.24.02]
"Contrary to charges that Internet song-swapping is killing the music industry, new Jupiter Media Metrix research contends that experienced online song-swappers are more likely to buy new albums than average music fans, not less."
redux [04.17.02]
""Our data show that the dominance of a few music superstars is decreasing, and their hold on music sales is slipping," said Sudip Bhattacharjee of the University of Connecticut's School of Business. "This is definitely good news for up-and-coming artists and groups, who now have a better chance at chart success because of (new) technologies" such as programs that allow users to download songs for free from the Internet."
""Superstars just don't have the sustaining power they used to," said Gopal, who headed the research team. "They get knocked off by new artists who get sampled over the Internet.""
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"The record industry's legal victory over Napster last year has neither stopped the trading of free music online nor halted a slide in music sales."
"Underscoring the industry's woes, a survey released today by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, an international record industry trade group, found that revenue from global music sales fell 5 percent in 2001, to $33.7 billion."
redux [03.18.02]
"Everyone with a computer I know uses them, rips them from their CDs, and shares them with others. Napster (and later on, Kazaa) built massive worldwide networks based on the sharing of these files, spreading terabytes of files to millions of users. And yet, you can't walk into a store anywhere in America and buy a physical form of media embedded with mp3s."
"Given the ubiquity of mp3s among consumers, the continued rise in popularity of the format despite anything that's been put in place to stop them, and the millions of dollars being spent on mp3 encoding/decoding software and hardware, I no longer think the RIAA operates solely on fear. At this point, they're simply running on stupidity."
redux [12.18.01]
"Indeed, the pointless attempt to control copyrighted data every step of the way from musician's voice to listener's ear is the biggest roadblock to success for online music. Just as HBO doesn't try to stop you from taping its movies, so music sellers need to let go and trust their customers. Remove the incentives for people to steal, rather than imposing more technology that treats customers as would-be shoplifters. Even former BMG head Strauss Zelnick, who says he has no problem throwing big-time bootleggers in jail, agrees the industry's challenge is to come up with an attractive alternative to Aimster and its ilk. "We need to give consumers a service they want, at a price they're willing to pay," he told me in an interview this summer. "People don't like to think of themselves as criminals." But ironically, the more anti-theft hurdles crammed into the legal products, the more attractive the pirate alternatives become."
redux [07.21.00]
"Jupiter said it surveyed more than 2,200 online music fans about whether the money they spent on music purchases had increased, decreased or remained the same since they began visiting music destinations on the Web. People between the ages of 18 to 24 who spend less than $20 on music within a three-month period indicated that they were likely to remain at a constant purchasing level despite online music use. All other groups said they had increased spending as a result of online music use, Jupiter reported."
redux [05.02.00]
""The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway.
There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers.
And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt."
7:44 PM 0 comments
First Monday
The Internet in India and China
"We also examine determinants of Internet diffusion. We find that the Chinese Internet has benefited from economic and trade reform begun in the late 1980s, a strong government commitment to the Internet, complementary human and capital resources, etc. The two nations have very different governments and policies, leading to differing approaches to the introduction of telecommunication competition and infrastructure development. China has pursued a strategy of competition among government-owned organizations while India has set policy via recommendations of publicly visible task forces. It remains to be seen whether India's relatively transparent and market driven approach to Internet policy (and access) will prove effective in the long run.
India and China have approximately 40 percent of the world population, and most of their inhabitants live in rural villages that lack basic telephone service. If the Internet is to succeed in raising the level of human development and curtailing migration to teeming urban centers, it must succeed in India and China. What we learn there may enable us to provide communication and information to the world's 1.5 million unconnected villages."
redux [08.22.02]
"Basic concepts of proper sourcing, balance, accuracy and fairness are the most essential lessons that need to be learned here. But with a bit of luck -- or, as they say in Afghanistan, "insha'Allah" (by the will of God) -- Bakhtar's Web site will soon be up and running. In any case, it will very likely be the first Web site hosted from within Afghanistan, thus finally bringing some light to an information blackout and connecting a country that has for too long been separated from the rest of the world -- and with disastrous results.
The dirt track of Afghan online publishing is ready to merge with the world's information super-highway."
redux [07.27.02]
"For seven centuries, Colletta had endured attack, famine, plague, and earthquake. The only force it couldn't repel was the economic progress of the 20th century. But Florenzo's departure was not the end of life in Colletta. Today, along the village's cobbled streets, Kieran, an Irish tax adviser, greets Olly, a Norwegian architect, with a hearty Buon giorno. Marco, a university professor from Torino, has an espresso with cafe owner Vincenzo before returning to his laptop to email his publisher. In Colletta, everything old is new again.
Built on a rugged spur some 1,000 feet above sea level, the 13th-century village is about to complete a remarkable renaissance. Colletta has been restored as a haven for mobile knowledge workers who want to live in medieval Italy but also want to remain connected to the rest of the world. No urban congestion, no suburban sprawl. Just a view of the maritime Alps that hasn't changed in more than a thousand years -- plus a lightning-fast Internet connection."
redux [04.11.02]
"At a gala recently at the opulent Russian Tea Room in New York City, serene looking Tibetan monks rubbed elbows with suited clients of a Silicon Valley company that boasts about having survived the tech bust. This is a story about an unlikely marriage between philanthropy and capitalism, and how it could very well help preserve the culture of the people of Tibet.
SCATTERED across Northern India, Nepal and Bhutan are 32 settlement camps, home to more than 122,000 Tibetan exiles displaced from their native land by Chinese troops, who invaded the country 50 years ago. Just last month, action was begun in earnest to install a computer in each of these settlements, and to wire each for Internet access."
redux [10.22.01]
"I have seen that even a small village like mine can benefit a lot from the internet.
We can use it to generate money for the village, to provide quality education for our children, to provide information about our culture to children all over the world, and to invite volunteers to come to our village.
If everything goes well, I plan to build a college in my village and provide computer courses to the students. This will open a door for us to produce computer programmers in the village, and produce software for the big firms around the world."
redux [09.13.01]
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"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.
Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites."
"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.
"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."
redux [04.23.00]
"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."
redux [08.07.00]
"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."
10:43 PM 0 comments
The New York Times Magazine
The Class Wars, Part 1: For Richer
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"For the America I grew up in -- the America of the 1950's and 1960's -- was a middle-class society, both in reality and in feel. The vast income and wealth inequalities of the Gilded Age had disappeared. Yes, of course, there was the poverty of the underclass -- but the conventional wisdom of the time viewed that as a social rather than an economic problem. Yes, of course, some wealthy businessmen and heirs to large fortunes lived far better than the average American. But they weren't rich the way the robber barons who built the mansions had been rich, and there weren't that many of them. The days when plutocrats were a force to be reckoned with in American society, economically or politically, seemed long past."
"But that was long ago. The middle-class America of my youth was another country."
2:41 PM 0 comments
Forbes
The Psychology Of Success
"Nor, says Shaver, do the entrepreneurs seem to be devil-may-care risk takers. Only a subtle difference in the way they appreciate risk emerged. The entrepreneurs are worse at coming up with reasons they might fail. "Being able to generate more unpleasant possibilities might be making non-entrepreneurs more afraid," Shaver says, but we don't know that.
So far there is one other big difference between those who go into business for themselves and those who don't, Shaver says. Entrepreneurs don't care what other people think about them. "They really don't care as much," Shaver says. "They're just happy to go ahead and do what they're doing."
Statistically speaking, then, Simplot and Gates would seem to have two things in common: They have trouble imagining failure, and they don't care what you think."
redux [08.30.02]
"At any given time, about 7.8 million or 6.2% of American workers moonlight at a second job in addition to a primary job, according to a 1997 report by the U.S. Census Bureau. Given that more than one-fourth are self-employed in their secondary occupation, according to the Census study, Dr. Buchanan has around 2 million moonlighters for company.
Self-employed moonlighters are doing more than picking up a few extra dollars and, like Dr. Buchanan, having a good time in their after-hours occupations. They're increasing the likelihood that their ventures will succeed, according to Ron Mitchell, a business professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Most businesses fail because the owners run out of cash before mastering the skills necessary to generate self-sustaining profits, Dr. Mitchell says. The small-business incubators that many universities operate increase survival rates, in part, by sheltering and protecting young enterprises during the learning period of no or low profits, he says."