conflux
Cellular-News
Legal
plans to force handset recycling
"California's District Assembly member, Fran Pavley has introduced legislation requiring cell phone retailers to take back obsolete cell phones at no cost to the consumer and to provide for their recycling.
"Almost 45,000 cell phones are thrown away every day in California Ð either into a drawer somewhere or worse, into the trash," said Pavley. "Their circuit boards contain myriad toxins such as arsenic, lead and mercury, many of which are Persistent Bioaccumulative Toxin (PBTs), and have the potential to be released into the air and groundwater when burned in incinerators or disposed of in landfills. That's a serious threat to human health and our environment and we need to provide a real alternative.""
redux [01.01.04]
"Entrepreneurs and environmental groups are getting ready for a surge of old computers, cell phones and other electronic devices that could be recycled or reused.
A recent tax law and new recycling requirements are expected to increase the supply of gadgets that can be given new life.
The tax break gives businesses an added 50 percent "bonus deduction" from a company's profit for equipment purchased between last May 5 and the end of next year. The deduction, in a law signed by President Bush, is on top of the 30 percent first-year write-off that many businesses take on new equipment."
redux [11.25.03]
"The long-awaited arrival of local number portability hits Monday, meaning for the first time, anyone who wants to change their service can keep their phone number -- long cited by consumers as the biggest pain with switching companies. Typically, when people change providers, they upgrade their phones, which relegates old phones to the dusty back of a junk drawer, or worse, the landfill.
There are a lot of phones to recycle. A 2002 study by the environmental group Inform, Inc., showed by 2005, there will be 130 million phones discarded annually."
redux [09.27.03]
"Californians, it's time to clean out the basements, garages and closets: The state will soon provide a safe place to ditch ancient computers and televisions."
"The [Electronic Waste Recycling Act of 2003] charges retailers and manufacturers a small fee, ranging from $6 to $10 depending on the product, to fund a statewide recycling infrastructure. The money, collected at the point of purchase, will be distributed to local governments and electronic waste recyclers to set up collection points and drop-off sites where consumers can unload their useless machines."
redux [07.07.03]
"Most people viewing the carcass of an abandoned motherboard would see a useless collection of plastic shards and mangled wires.
Hewlett-Packard's Chris Altobell sees silver and gold.
Altobell is the marketing manager of HP's Product Recycling Solutions unit in Roseville, Calif., which processes 3 million pounds of used computer machinery each month, transforming giant corporate printers and cast-off 386 consumer machines into materials that can be spun into precious metals and plastic containers."
[requires 'free' registration]
"Responding to concerns from both customers and environmental advocates, Dell Computer announced yesterday that it would no longer rely on prisons to supply workers for its computer recycling program.
Dell, the world's largest seller of PC's, said it had canceled its contract with Unicor, a branch of the Federal Bureau of Prisons that employs prisoners for electronics recycling and other industries."
redux [06.27.03]
[requires 'free' registration]
"The nation's two largest personal computer makers, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, handle recycling of the waste from computer products in remarkably different ways, according to a report by environmentalists released today.
The report was prepared by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a group that also focuses on health issues, and the Computer Take Back Campaign. It commended Hewlett-Packard for using "state of the art" practices in partnership with an expanding commercial recycling industry, while criticizing Dell for using low-cost prison labor in association with Unicor, an industrial prison system within the Justice Department."
redux [06.04.03]
"Every year, 1.5 million old, but working, computers are buried in landfill sites. Now, an impending EU directive could mean these discarded machines, and many others, enjoy a more useful life.
The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (Weee) Directive makes electronics firms responsible for what happens to the gadgets and devices they produce once people have done with them."
redux [02.25.03]
"This is the end of the road for the toxic end-product of the computer age.
In towns such as this one on China's south-eastern coast, vast quantities of obsolete electronics shipped in from the United States, Europe and Japan are piled in mountains of waste."
"The real costs are being borne by the people on the receiving end of the 'e-waste'. In towns along China's coast as well as in India and Pakistan, adults and children work for about US$1.20 (S$2.08) a day in unregulated and unsafe conditions."
redux [02.05.03]
"The computer maker is testing a program that gives those who recycle their old computers, monitors, printers or other gear a coupon worth up to $50 for any purchase of $60 or more on HP's online store. Under a program announced nearly two years ago, HP charges anywhere from $17 to $31 to recycle products. The company says the coupon will offset the amount customers must pay for the service, which ensures none of the gear ends up in landfills.
The need for recycling is growing, particularly as nonprofit agencies become less willing to accept older gear, said Renee St. Denis, manager of HP's recycling effort. The problem of what to do with all this aging equipment has become a major issue facing the tech industry."
redux [01.26.03]
"So what are the environmental impacts of producing and using a 32-megabyte DRAM computer chip that weighs a mere 2 grams? The UNU team found that to make every one of the millions manufactured each year requires 32 kg of water, 1.6 kg of fossil fuels, 700 grams of elemental gases (mainly nitrogen), and 72 grams of chemicals (hundreds are used, including lethal arsine gas and corrosive hydrogen fluoride).
To make matters worse, Williams believes his findings are conservative. "We think the real numbers may be twice that," he said, adding that rapid advances in technology aggravate the problem. "The fact that a chip has such a short lifespan, because the technology turns over so quickly, exacerbates the environmental impact.""
redux [01.10.03]
""The leadership continues to be by and large the Japanese companies, and the U.S. companies tend to be far behind," Smith said.
"A lot of (U.S. manufacturers') initiatives are piecemeal and not really designed to address the vast majority of consumer concerns," he added. "There is still an enormous amount of computer waste being exported to China.""
"The report also criticizes Dell's use of federal prison labor to recycle old computers, which it says exposes inmates to toxic chemicals without the same health and safety protections as workers at other facilities."
redux [12.03.02]
"In a shift that will change how toxic electronic waste is recycled in California and possibly nationwide, Hewlett-Packard has said it will support state legislation to require PC manufacturers to bear the cost of computer disposal.
""The combined HP-Compaq company is the single largest manufacturer of PCs in the world. They are the linchpin for producer responsibility,'' said Smith, whose group helped expose the primitive recycling industry in China. ``The fact that they have changed their position vastly improves the likelihood we'll get a very good e-waste bill in the new session.""
redux [11.13.02]
"If we all had to lug around the true environmental weights of the microchips in our iPods, cellphones or laptops, most of those portable gadgets would never make it off their docking stations, much less out the front door.
It takes 3.7 pounds of fossil fuels and other chemicals and 70.5 pounds of water to produce a single two-gram microchip, according to a forthcoming study in the Dec. 15 issue of Environmental Science & Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society."
redux [05.22.02]
"California high-tech manufacturing companies are degrading the environment in developing countries, a new research report confirms.
Case studies done in Taiwan, Malaysia, India, Thailand, and Costa Rica by the California Global Corporate Accountability Project document water pollution and inadquate waste management resulting from component production."
redux [04.06.02]
"Americans will throw out about 10 million old computers this year. About two-thirds of these will be shipped to Asia for dismantling by rural villagers. The computers all contain mercury and lead, and the resulting toxic waste has become a threat to villagers' health and environment.
"A coalition of activists and lawmakers has been working to improve the situation, and in recent weeks they've gotten a signed pledge from electronic manufacturers in the United States to consider a new solution."
"Workers in Silicon Valley's semiconductor plants toil in head-to-toe protective clothing designed to keep impurities from contaminating the microchips. But Mother Jones magazine reports that the growing incidence of health problems among these workers suggests that it is they who need protection. At least 250 workers have filed lawsuits against high-tech companies, charging that the toxic soup of chemicals in production areas has triggered high rates of miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer."
redux [05.04.00]
"Behind the well-paid geeks in cubicles and the sharp-dressed entrepreneurs is an industry that consumes as many resources, uses as many lethal chemicals, and generates as much toxic waste as some of the worst culprits of the pre-Internet age. And both industry workers and the people who live near the plants are feeling the effects: the toxins damage aquatic life in the bay, poison drinking water, and, increasing evidence suggests, kill high-tech industry workers.
While the federal government, local agencies, and hundreds of thousands of Bay Area residents and company workers are dealing with the computer industry's mess here in America, the same (or worse) problems are spreading worldwide."
8:36 PM
0 comments
PC World
Who's Guarding the Internet?
""I wouldn't say that the critical infrastructure is fully protected at this point by a long stretch," Stanco says. While the government can protect its own Web sites and servers, protecting its section of the infrastructure won't make that much difference unless the banks, electrical companies, and other major corporations match the government's efforts, he notes.
"I'm not sure private industry's going to do it by itself," Stanco adds."
redux [11.14.03]
""The goal of terrorism is to change society through the use of force or violence, resulting in fear," he explained. "I want to put this cyberterrorism thing to rest. It's a theory, it's not a fact.""
Even though there were examples of attacks that have physical consequences--such as the case of Vitek Boden, sentenced to two years in prison for releasing up to 1 million liters of sewage into the river and coastal waters of the town of Maroochydore, in Queensland, Australia, in 2001--they could not be described as terrorist acts, Mogull explained. To a large extent, it comes down to motive, he said."
"Verton criticized the IT security community for what he called appeasement, accepting unacceptable levels of risk and focusing on past threats rather than future dangers.
"This is going to be one of the primary battlefields of the future," he said. "We need to have a discussion of cybervulnerabilities today, before the next failure occurs.""
redux [09.03.03]
Nearly half of all Americans surveyed say they are worried that terrorists could launch attacks through the networks connecting home computers and powerful utilities, a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found.
Some industry analysts consider this level of concern a triumph of sorts, signifying that their lobbying efforts and public awareness campaigns have had an effect."
redux [08.17.03]
"The bigger risk is a digital attack. Richard Clarke, former cyberspace security czar in the Bush Administration, thinks an attack on the electricity- generating system is more likely to come from computer hackers than bombers. "The power grid is controlled by software, so the question is, Is there a way you can get into the control system?" Clarke asks. "And, yeah, there is."
A skilled hacker could disable a network of several plants without ever entering a facility by seizing digital controls at the point where computers meet the infrastructure they run."
redux [08.01.03]
""Based on what we knew at the time, the most likely scenario was an attack from cyberspace, not airliners slamming into buildings," said Sachs, in an interview after his keynote."
"While he stops short of saying that Washington's cyber terror obsession was a blunder, Sachs acknowledges that, in hindsight, the effort was misdirected. "We had spent a lot of time preparing for a cyber attack, not a physical attack," says Sachs. "Our priorities had to change a little bit.""
redux [06.20.03]
"The threat of cyberterrorism is causing much alarm these days. We have been told to expect attacks since 9/11; that cyberterrorists would try to cripple our power system, disable air traffic control and emergency services, open dams, or disrupt banking and communications. But so far, nothing's happened. Even during the war in Iraq, which was supposed to increase the risk dramatically, nothing happened. The impending cyberwar was a big dud. Don't congratulate our vigilant security, though; the alarm was caused by a misunderstanding of both the attackers and the attacks."
redux [04.09.03]
"In his first appearance on Capitol Hill since leaving the White House in February, Richard A. Clarke warned lawmakers against the "dangerous" tendency to dismiss the consequences of an attack on the nation's computer networks.
"For many, the cyberthreat is hard to understand: No one has died in a cyberattack, after all. There has never been a smoking ruin for cameras to see," said Clarke, now a security consultant. "It is the kind of thinking that said we never had a major foreign terrorist attack in the United States, so we never would; al Qaeda has just been a nuisance, so it never will be more than that.""
redux [03.14.03]
"The threat posed by cyber-terrorism has been overhyped and the net is unlikely to become a launch pad for terror attacks.
That was the conclusion of a panel of security and technology experts brought together at the CeBIT technology fair to consider the threat posed by net attacks on businesses and consumers."
""The hype is coming from the US Government and I don't know why," [Bruce Schneier] said."
redux [03.04.03]
"How else to explain the credulity with which the Bush administration's National Strategy To Secure Cyberspace was greeted last month? The 76-page document is chock full of what computer-security experts term "FUD"--geek shorthand for spreading bogus "fear, uncertainty, and doubt." Never mind that the hype over alleged "cyberterrorism" has been thoroughly debunked, time and time again. The government's information technology sages still trot out dubious stats in support of a looming "cyberwar," claiming that hostile nations possess legions of computer-savvy shock troops ready to knock out New York's electricity, zap the nation's phone lines, or open up the Hoover Dam.
Yet here we are in 2003, and the cyberterrorism casualty list is still barren. Sure, some Serb hackers slowed down the NATO Web site during the Kosovo conflict, and a couple of Chinese hackers defaced sites in the wake of their country's embassy being bombed. But, honestly, did either incident get you quaking in your Keds?"
redux [02.28.03]
"We can say with some certainty, al Qaeda loves the Internet. When the latter first appeared, it was hailed as an integrator of cultures and a medium for businesses, consumers, and governments to communicate with one another. It appeared to offer unparalleled opportunities for the creation of a "global village." Today the Internet still offers that promise, but it also has proven in some respects to be a digital menace. Its use by al Qaeda is only one example. It also has provided a virtual battlefield for peacetime hostilities between Taiwan and China, Israel and Palestine, Pakistan and India, and China and the United States (during both the war over Kosovo and in the aftermath of the collision between the Navy EP-3 aircraft and Chinese MiG). In times of actual conflict, the Internet was used as a virtual battleground between NATO's coalition forces and elements of the Serbian population. These real tensions from a virtual interface involved not only nation-states but also non-state individuals and groups either aligned with one side or the other, or acting independently."
redux [02.18.02]
"The retirement of Richard Clarke is appropriate to the reality of the war on terror. Years ago, Clarke bet his national security career on the idea that electronic war was going to be real war. He lost, because as al Qaeda and Iraq have shown, real action is still of the blood and guts kind.
In happier times prior to 9/11, Clarke -- as Bill Clinton's counter-terror point man in the National Security Council -- devoted great effort to convincing national movers and shakers that cyberattack was the coming thing. While ostensibly involved in preparations for bioterrorism and trying to sound alarms about Osama bin Laden, Clarke was most often seen in the news predicting ways in which electronic attacks were going to change everything and rewrite the calculus of conflict.
redux [12.20.02]
"To all those Chicken Littles clucking frantically about the imminent threat of a terrorist attack on U.S. computer networks, a new report says: Knock it off."
""The idea that hackers are going to bring the nation to its knees is too far-fetched a scenario to be taken seriously," said Jim Lewis, a 16-year veteran of the State and Commerce Departments."
""Nations are more robust than the early analysts of cyberterrorism and cyberwarfare give them credit for," Lewis wrote in the report. "Infrastructure systems (are) more flexible and responsive in restoring service than the early analysts realized, in part because they have to deal with failure on a routine basis.""
redux [10.29.02]
"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 [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."
8:00 PM
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The Christian Science Monitor
'Nickel and diming' across the Internet
"A September report from the Online Publishers Association termed the growth of micropayments to its members over the past 18 months "dramatic," rising from 2.6 percent of all single- payment revenues in the first quarter of 2002 to 8 percent in the second quarter of 2003. Hoping to cash in on that growth, new companies are offering micropayment systems that they say make tiny transactions easy and secure. One such firm, BitPass in Palo Alto, Calif., expects to process more than 1 million micropayments by year's end.
"It's a matter of getting the timing right," Mr. Frey says of micropayments."
redux [01.14.04]
"Although many e-businesses in other industries have come back from the dot-com brink with stronger models and clearer goals, micropayment specialists have yet to make another splash. Companies like BitPass and Paystone Technologies may have survived the crash, but they have a much lower profile than their now-defunct predecessors.
"Will the concept of micropayments fade into the footnotes of e-commerce history, or will this business model find new success in the future?"
redux [01.08.03]
[requires 'free' registration]
"THE early days of Internet commerce offered many promises, none of them brighter than the chance for people to set up Web sites and sell inexpensive digital goods like songs, articles and photos.
But most of the pioneering companies that devised transaction systems for low-cost online purchases faded away, dogged not only by the giveaway ethos of the Internet but also by cumbersome technology and fees that ate up the profit on items that often sold for less than a dollar.
Times have changed, though, and electronic micropayment systems may yet be born again."
redux [12.02.03]
"An idea that seemingly evaporated along with dot-com mania is back: that the Internet would realize its full grass-roots potential if Web surfers could pay small amounts for tidbits of online content."
""Times have definitely changed," said Ron Rivest, a prominent Massachusetts Institute of Technology encryption researcher who co-founded micropayment provider Peppercoin in 2001. "I think the market is ready.""
redux [11.03.03]
"Apple Computer's online music store has won attention for its stylish ease of use, and deservedly so. Yet one of its most interesting features has drawn little notice -- the ability to buy something online that costs less than a dollar.
The iTunes service is one of the first truly useful examples of digital "micropayments." The notion has been hyped and lampooned, with skeptics having the better case, but new technologies and services may bring this genre of money to a more prominent place in 21st-century commerce."
redux [09.07.03]
"Mental transaction costs create a minimum level of inconvenience that cannot be removed simply by lowering the dollar cost of goods.
Worse, beneath a certain threshold, mental transaction costs actually rise, a phenomenon is especially significant for information goods. It's easy to think a newspaper is worth a dollar, but is each article worth half a penny? Is each word worth a thousandth of a penny? A newspaper, exposed to the logic of micropayments, becomes impossible to value."
Mental transaction costs help explain the general failure of micropayment systems. (See Odlyzko, Shirky, and Szabo for a fuller accounting of the weaknesses of micropayments.) The failure of micropayments in turn helps explain the ubiquity of free content on the Web."
8:39 PM
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Wired News
Net Dissidents Jailed in China
"In its ongoing repression of Internet speech, the Chinese government has sentenced five Falun Gong members to prison for posting an article to a discussion board that accused authorities of mistreating a jailed colleague."
"As China's Internet economy burgeons, so have the government's attempts to battle "subversive" content on home computers and in the country's 110,000 cybercafes. According to some estimates, China employs 30,000 technocrats to police the Internet."
"Iranian authorities have followed official harassment of pro-reformist newspapers with an attack against online news publications, said Reporters Without Borders, which protested at the latest development."
"Weblogs - personal or collective pages in which Internet users make their own comments about the news - are also subjected to censorship by the conservatives."
"As Friday's parliamentary elections approached, however, there was a distinct tone of worry that conservatives expected to regain control of parliament would step up pressure to censor the Internet.
"It will be the end of the blog era in Iran," said a Tehran-based blogger who operates pinkfloydish.com, the name indicative of her love of Western music."
redux [02.20.03]
"It's easy to assume that the Internet is a friend of democracy and a facilitator of the free flow of ideas. Ronald Reagan once said, "The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip." Shanthi Kalathil wasn't so convinced. She and fellow researcher Taylor Boas studied the effect of the Internet on eight authoritarian regimes, and what they found challenges conventional wisdom. Kalathil joins guest host Lynn Neary to discuss their findings."
redux [01.25.03]
"IF THE internet will force difficult changes on democracies by handing power to individual citizens, it seems reasonable to believe that it will have a devastating impact on dictatorships. But it is not impossible that instead of undermining repressive regimes, the internet could become the most effective tool of social control that autocratic rulers have ever wielded."
"As more human interactions are conducted and recorded electronically, as the ability to analyse databases grows and as video and other offline surveillance technologies become cheaper and more effective, it will become ever easier for authoritarian governments to set up systems of widespread surveillance. George Orwell's Big Brother of "1984" might yet become a reality, a few decades later than he expected."
redux [01.09.03]
"In today's networked, globalized world, many presume that the Internet will pose a grave threat to authoritarian regimes. Such has been the power of this conventional wisdom that it remains for the most part unchallenged, and largely unexamined.
A new book, Open Networks, Closed Regimes, offers the most comprehensive and thought-provoking work on this subject to date. Authors Shanthi Kalathil and Taylor C. Boas trace Internet use in eight authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries: China, Cuba, Singapore, Vietnam, Burma, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. They discover that authoritarian governments, far from fearing the information age, have chosen to direct Internet development in ways that bolster the state. At the same time, many regimes are struggling to cope with the potent challenges posed by new technologies. The authors encourage policy makers in the U.S. and other industrialized democracies to promote specific Internet-based initiatives that foster political liberalization, rather than perpetuating the myth of the Internet as an unstoppable "virus of freedom.""
redux [06.06.02]
""Without the internet the story may still have got out," said Mr Zheng. "With so many people killed it would have been hard to keep it a secret for ever, but it would have been much more difficult."
The internet is changing China in subtle but profound ways. Information is now being spread and exchanged in ways unthinkable just a few years ago.
The Chinese state's once total control on information has been broken and hard as it may try it has little hope of regaining that control."
redux [04.16.02]
"A decade or so ago, it was all clear: the Internet was believed to be such a revolutionary new medium, so inherently empowering and democratizing, that old authoritarian regimes would crumble before it. What we've learned in the intervening years is that the Internet does not inevitably lead to democracy any more than it inevitably leads to great wealth.
The idea that the Internet itself is a threat to authoritarian regimes was a bit of delusional post-Cold War optimism."
redux [03.21.02]
"Mao once said, "Political power grows from the barrel of a gun." The entrepreneurs in China Dawn seem to want to change the last phrase to "ISP access."
But their enthusiasm betrays a streak of naivete. As Tiananmen so amply demonstrated, in China today, political power still grows from the barrel of a gun. And the prediction that the rise of the Internet will liberate Chinese from authoritarian rule is far from certain."
"One notable loophole in the content watch list are weblogs. Weblogs are content websites maintained by ordinary users that can act as introspective online diaries, soapboxes to rant opinions, and a vehicle guide the horde of Internet users to swarm to other obscure links to be found on the net. They are easy to update, cheap to maintain, and difficult to block because so many new ones appear each day. They utilize a client relationship with a server and can be updated with a simple browser."
The bureaucrats and censors in China who block and monitor websites will be hard pressed to try and control the future flow of weblogs both in and out of China due to the number and diversity of this new information platform. Having met actual Internet content censors from China, they are decent people but come from a different time and different place in terms of technology. They don't really get it yet since weblogs remain a concept difficult for them to understand for now."
redux [08.08.01]
"It is widely believed that the Internet poses an insurmountable threat to authoritarian rule. But political science scholarship has provided little support for this conventional wisdom, and a number of case studies from around the world show that authoritarian regimes are finding ways to control and counter the political impact of Internet use. While the long-term political impact of the Internet remains an open question, we argue that these strategies for control may continue to be viable in the short to medium term."
"In this paper we illustrate how two authoritarian regimes, China and Cuba, are maintainng control over the Internet's political impact through different combinations of reactive and proactive strategies. These cases illustrate that, contrary to assumptions, different types of authoritarian regimes may be able to control and profit from the Internet. Examining the experiences of these two countries may help to shed light on other authoritarian regimes' strategies for Internet development, as well as help to develop generalizable conclusions about the impact of the Internet on authoritarian rule."
redux [10.26.00]
"The world is changing fundamentally. Images and information respect neither time nor borders. Hierarchy is giving way to networking. Openness is crowding out secrecy and exclusivity. Ideas and capital move swiftly and unimpeded across a global network of governments, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations. In this world of instantaneous information, traditional diplomacy struggles to sustain its relevance."
"Nations once connected by foreign ministries and traders are now linked through millions of individuals by fiber optics, satellite, wireless, and cable in a complex network without central control. The Internet, with 100 million users today, will reach one billion people by 2005 and will be available to half the world's population by 2010. The network will become the central nervous system of international relations."
redux [10.10.00]
"Metaphors, symbols and sayings are mighty mind-setters. They captivate our minds and focus our attention to one main point, effectively excluding others. Putin used the burning of the Ostankino television tower, once hailed as a symbol of Soviet supremacy, as a metaphor for the desperate economic need of Russia. The global media played along with this tune, once again showcasing images of Russia's decay. But there is another largely untold story to be extracted from Putin's metaphor: TV towers are more than symbols - indeed they are very concrete centers of mind control, distributing the flow of information and entertainment."
"Who chose the crumbling Berlin Wall as the icon and metaphor for the breakdown of communism and the end of the Cold War? Wouldn't a TV tower in flames be more accurate? It wasn't about the free flow of capital. It was about the free flow of information."
8:50 PM
0 comments
USA Today
Internet phone fees spark FCC debate
"AT&T cannot avoid paying hefty fees to local phone companies to connect long-distance calls by carrying big chunks of the calls on the Internet, the Federal Communications Commission is soon expected to rule.
The decision is sparking a debate at the FCC about regulation of Internet phone calls. It eventually could spell higher fees for new retail Internet phone services, such as those offered by Vonage and cable companies, and for their customers."
"The Federal Communications Commission, in a split decision, approved a request from voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider Pulver.com to be immune from the hefty stack of government rules, taxes and requirements that applied to 20th-century telephone networks."
"Other applications covered by the decision include Skype and instant-messaging programs from Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online. But the ruling appears to leave in limbo VoIP services from Vonage Holdings, cable giants and others that allow calls to be placed from a computer over a broadband connection to any phone number in the world, and vice versa."
redux [01.23.04]
"The top U.S. telecom regulator said Thursday that he has no intention of setting rules for Internet telephony, which he said could have a dramatic impact on voice communications."
""It's probably the most significant paradigm shift in the entire history of modern communications, since the invention of the telephone," Michael Powell, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, told journalists at the World Economic Forum."
redux [01.12.04]
"U.S. Sen. John Sununu said he's preparing legislation to keep broadband telephone service providers from being "smothered by state and federal regulators."
The New Hampshire Republican described the proposed law at the Consumer Electronics Show as a "clear, pre-emptive remedy" that directs state utility regulators to take a hands-off regulatory stance on what's called voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)."
"The California Public Utilities Commission will now take its time to decide whether to regulate Internet telephone service providers, according to a commissioner."
"Because of California's size, some industry insiders believe that the state's tactical shift could have an effect on New York and the handful of other states that are now weighing up the regulatory future of what are known as voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service providers."
[requires 'free' registration]
"But Mr. Davidson is more than an adventuresome consumer. As a member of the Florida Public Service Commission, he is a regulator who is eager to see Internet telephone service spread because he predicts it can make the nation's phone services less expensive and richer in features.
That is why Mr. Davidson wants the federal and state governments to let Internet-based phone service blossom, free from regulation, taxes and surcharges. Like a growing number of officials who advocate minimal oversight of the service - including Michael K. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission - Mr. Davidson says Internet telephone service should be treated just like other unregulated Internet services, including e-mail messaging and Web surfing."
redux [12.01.03]
"When the FCC examines VoIP in landmark hearings Monday, the battle lines in the debate will be sharply drawn between the country's two sunny states -- California and Florida. California wants to regulate VoIP, Florida doesn't.
Each state is sending a public regulatory commissioner to argue its respective merits."
redux [11.13.03]
"When IBM talks, Corporate America listens. So Big Blue created quite a stir on Nov. 7 when a top exec told a tech conference in Atlanta that it hopes to move 80% of its 300,000 employees to voice-over-IP phone systems by 2008."
"[The] IBM announcement signifies that the end may be far nearer than previously thought for the legacy copper-wire phone networks that have built fortunes for the Baby Bells such as Verizon (VZ ) and SBC (SBC ) as well as AT&T (T ) and Sprint (FON ). When the largest tech company on the planet announces it no longer needs the phone company to manage its calls, you can bet the communications landscape has fundamentally changed."
"The agency has waived the usual public comment period, which is often the first step before making such a ruling, Hundt said. Though the hearing is scheduled for Dec. 1, Powell wrote that the agency planned to issue a Notice of Public Rule Making (NPRM) "shortly after the hearing," in an effort to gather comments from the public.
Hundt said that language indicates that the agency had already made up its mind about what rules it plans to issue, and that the December hearing would be little more than a formality.
"I ran this agency," Hundt said. "I know you should be suspicious.""
"Time Warner plans to begin selling Internet phone service in California next year and will cooperate with regulators by seeking a telephone operator's license in the state, if necessary."
""We don't think it's a good idea to regulate VoIP right now. We want a debate and full airing," said Peter Casciato, an attorney representing Time Warner Cable, who attended the hearing. "(But) we want to be a very good corporate citizen.""
redux [10.19.03]
"But not only does VoIP challenge the business structure of large telecommunications carriers, it also threatens to turn the regulatory structures that govern the industry on their head. That's because VoIP calls are carried over a structure that does not track geographic origins and destinations - the central basis for regulations that govern and set rates for calls placed over traditional networks.
"It's no surprise that regulators smell blood and see a lot of money on the table," said a representative of one VoIP company that did not want to be identified. "What we don't need is the regulators coming down and quashing us just as this is getting started. It's similar to taxing the Internet. Let us get our legs under us.""
"Since the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, regulators have sought to draw a strict division between voice networks and data networks. But with the rise of VoIP, that distinction is rapidly collapsing.
"It's a mess," said Kevin Werbach, founder of consulting firm Supernova Group and former FCC counsel for new technology. "The distinction between information and telecommunications services is in the 1996 act, but it assumes they are completely distinct...Today, all networks are digital and can provide many services in many different ways. (Regulators) are trying to come to an end result within a flawed legal framework.""
redux [10.08.03]
"Internet phone providers have won the first round in a clash with state regulators, providing needed momentum for the upstart industry.
In ruling from the bench late Tuesday, Minneapolis federal Judge Michael J. Davis permanently barred Minnesota from applying traditional telephone rules to Vonage, a pioneer in technology that lets consumers bypass the traditional phone network by making voice calls over a broadband connection."
redux [10.01.03]
"There is no risk of everyone swooping out and buying VoIP phones and eliminating the plain old telephone service (POTS) overnight. However, in the next five years there is going to be some serious worry at the traditional phone companies about how they will make money."
"The local phone companies, or incumbent local exchange carriers, will do whatever they can to slow the growth of VoIP, but the fact that the phone traffic is on the Internet will make VoIP impossible to stop. Vonage, for example, isn't a phone company at all in the eyes of the Federal Communications Commission."
"The race is on among the states to regulate voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) service, or at least consider the regulation of VoIP.
Even though fewer than 150,000 American consumers use IP telephony over phone, cable or other wires, lawmakers and policymakers in up to 11 states--Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Illinois, Texas, Alabama, Colorado and Virginia--are now mulling over some type of regulatory conditions, rules or restrictions on the service. And the list seems to be getting longer almost every week"
"The Golden State is the largest state to decide that voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers are subject to the same rules and regulations as all other telephone service providers."
"Because of its size and national stature, California's decision to bring VoIP providers into the regulatory fold could have enormous sway on the dozens of other state's now investigating a similar step."
"Vonage, a Voice over Internet Protocol provider, has begun charging customers a $1.50 per month "regulatory recovery" fee.
"The fees were announced just as a growing number of states are clamoring for VoIP providers to pay taxes or fees to fund staple services such as 911 connections."
"Q: What kind of VoIP regulations do you see as necessary? Should VoIP providers be treated just like Verizon Communications or other carriers?
A: We'll probably initiate something to look at it this fall. But let me emphasize that we're going to look at it. That doesn't say what we're going to do about it. We only know that it's a growing issue. Basically, the advanced platforms permit divorcing services and applications from the infrastructure. That's very different from the ancient telephone models, when the application was the same as the distribution."
"This whole deal reminds me of some work I did for a UK advertising company years ago. I got to have lunch with the MD and Creative Director, who had just done market research for a cigarette lighter company on who their competition was. Was it Ronson, the low-end player? Or Dupont or Dunhill, the high-end players? Turns out that it actually was Parker Pen. The company learned that they were in the gift market.
My take is that telephone companies still think that other phone companies are their competition, and that the rules and givens of phone company competition will work in their favor. But actually they are actually in connection. And with increasingly wrong numbers."
redux [08.25.03]
"A cheap, Internet-based alternative to traditional telephone service is facing a sudden regulatory backlash that could slow adoption of the fast-growing technology, raise prices and put financially shaky start-ups out of business.
Two weeks ago, Minnesota drew first blood. It ordered so-called VoIP (voice over IP) provider Vonage Holdings to file for a telephone operator's license. Many see the move, the first attempt by a state public utilities commission to regulate an Internet telephony provider, as the beginning of a new regulatory framework for Internet telephone operators in the state."
redux [12.16.02]
[requires 'free' registration]
"After all, telecommunications and technology companies lost $7.6 billion in global market value from March 2000 to September 2002, as the industry was gripped by stunning collapses, financial scandals and an effort to absorb excess capacity on globe-spanning communications systems.
But alongside the industry's search for its direction after such turmoil are trends that threaten to destabilize global telecommunications further in 2003. These trends could be described as the start of a cannibalization of established services by disruptive new technologies."
redux [08.07.02]
"Of course The Economist is not alone in this fundamental error but "Crash" story is a useful foil for addressing this misunderstanding.
It is a tragic misunderstanding since the woes of the Telecom industry are seen as representing the state of the economy rather than the collapsing of a facade of a Potemkin industry. In 1900's there was a real telecommunications industry just like in the 1800's when there was a thriving business in transporting ice from frozen lakes to warmer climes. Just as refrigeration put an end to the need for buying ice, the Internet has put an end to the need to buy telecommunications services from others. We just need commodity connectivity."
redux [02.08.02]
"Despite the darkened outlook, new communications capabilities are within reach that will make the current Internet look like tin cans and string. The technical know-how exists. Radically simplified technologies can blast bits a million times faster than the current network at a millionth of the cost. These are sitting in laboratories undeveloped, in warehouses undeployed, and in the field underutilized.
It's not even that the communications revolution has been derailed by inept or self-aggrandizing behavior by incumbent telephone companies and their government regulators. Something more fundamental is at work."
8:00 PM
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Editor & Publisher
'NY Times' Fails to Acknowledge Its Role in WMD Hype
"The New York Times offered a sharp editorial Tuesday critiquing the indisputable role of the White House in distorting the intelligence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and in stampeding Congressional and public opinion by spinning worst-case scenarios -- "inflating them drastically" -- to justify an immediate invasion last March to repel an alleged imminent threat to the United States. Indeed, the logical implication of the editorial might well have been to charge senior officials -- in particular the vice president -- with an impeachable offense.
However, strangely missing from the paper of record was any indictment of the national press, starting with the Times, for its obvious role in gravely misleading the institutions of government and the public when hyping the WMD threat."
redux [02.09.04]
"Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you all before the war? Why didn't we learn more about these deceptions and concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change--when, in short, it might have made a difference? Some maintain that the many analysts who've spoken out since the end of the war were mute before it. But that's not true. Beginning in the summer of 2002, the "intelligence community" was rent by bitter disputes over how Bush officials were using the data on Iraq. Many journalists knew about this, yet few chose to write about it."
redux [01.28.04]
"In the wake of the latest revelations from weapons inspector David Kay, many of the largest U.S. newspapers are belatedly pressing the Bush administration for an explanation of how it could have gotten the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so wrong in the march to war last year. A growing number are raising the possibility that Bush and his team may have "cooked" the intelligence to support their case for war.
An E&P survey of the top 20 newspapers by circulation found that as of Wednesday, 13 had run editorials on Kay's resignation as chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq last Friday, and his statement that no WMDs exist in Iraq, and likely did not exist in Iraq during the U.S. run-up to war."
redux [07.11.03]
"On this second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, there is much to think about, especially in New York City under pure blue skies so cruelly reminiscent of that day. One of many things for the press to think about today is a simple fact: more than two-thirds of all Americans, two years after the tragedy, continue to think that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attack, despite the fact that no credible evidence has surfaced which links him to the crime (and even his indirect al Qaeda associations are unproven or marginal at best)."
Now, how much can we blame the media for this woeful misinformation?"
"A number of public-opinion experts agreed that the public automatically blamed Iraq, just as they would have blamed Libya if a similar attack had occurred in the 1980s. There is good evidence for this: On Sept. 13, 2001, a Time/CNN poll found that 78 percent suspected Hussein's involvement -- even though the administration had not made a connection. The belief remained consistent even as evidence to the contrary emerged.
"You can say Bush should be faulted for not correcting every single misapprehension, but that's something different than saying they set out deliberately to deceive," said Duke University political scientist Peter D. Feaver. "Since the facts are all over the place, Americans revert to a judgment: Hussein is a bad guy who would do stuff to us if he could.""
redux [05.30.03]
"Shortly before American military forces invaded Iraq, a troubled Ellen Goodman raised a singularly important question about the Bush administration's propaganda campaign for war -- "How we got from there to here ."
There , according to Goodman, was innocent 9/11 victimhood at the hands of religious fanatics; here , was bullying superpower bent on destroying a secular dictator. I assumed that someone as astute as Goodman would reveal at least part of the answer -- that the American media provided free transportation to get the White House from there to here. But nowhere in her nationally syndicated column did she state the obvious -- that the success of "Bush's PR War" (the headline on the piece) was largely dependent on a compliant press that uncritically repeated almost every fraudulent administration claim about the threat posed to America by Saddam Hussein."
redux [05.14.03]
"Before arriving in Doha, I had spent hours watching CNN back home, and I was sadly reminded of the network's steady decline in recent years. Paula Zahn looked and talked like a cheerleader for the US forces; Aaron Brown kept reaching for the profound remark without ever finding it; Wolf Blitzer politely interviewed Washington's high and mighty, seldom asking a pointed question. None of them, however, appeared on the broadcasts I saw in Doha. Instead, there were Jim Clancy, a tough-minded veteran American correspondent, Michael Holmes, a soft-spoken Australian, and Becky Anderson, a sharp and inquisitive British anchor. This was CNN International, the edition broadcast to the world at large, and it was far more serious and informed than the American version.
The difference was not accidental."
"Behind the president were seated a small group of about 40 Iraqi Americans, some Shiites and some Chaldean. The audience was not seen, but the impression was created that it was an enthusiastic crowd representative of Michigan's 400,000 plus Arab Americans.
Cameras never focused on the audience, no one saw that the room was only one-third full - an estimated crowd of 300. The fact that the group was personally invited by the White House and was carefully screened to include Republicans and supporters of the president was not reported. Instead, the impression was created that the president was giving a victory message full of optimism and hope to his Arab American supporters. That was what the White House wanted to convey, and that was the story the media allowed them to uncritically convey."
7:37 PM
0 comments
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Infodiet: How Libraries Can Offer an Appetizing Alternative
to Google
"Google has become the symbol of competition to the academic library. In 2003 a torrent of articles in the popular press sang the praises of Google while heralding the demise of libraries or, worse, ignoring libraries and librarians -- the original search engines. Such articles make academic librarians wince, especially with the usual quotes from students along the lines of, "Oh, our campus has a library? I didn't know that, but now that you mention it, why would I go there?"
Academic librarians are stymied by their inability to get students to use the libraries' high-quality subscription databases. We find ourselves having to choose between succumbing to the lure of Google-ized database interfaces and vehemently resisting them."
redux [02.05.04]
[requires 'free' registration]
""When Google doesn't work, most people don't have a plan B," said Joe Janes, an associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington in Seattle, who is teaching a course on Google this quarter. "Librarians have lots of plan B's. We know when to go to a book, when to call someone, even when to go to Google."
While librarians often use search engines themselves, some say that the public has become too reliant on Web searches, which may not be the appropriate way to find what they need."
redux [04.18.01]
"DESPITE the best efforts of programmers, there are still many things that computers just cannot do. Examples include distinguishing between suspicious and legitimate behaviour on a corporate network, or sorting junk e-mail from genuinely important messages, or providing detailed answers to particular questions. For these tasks, which require judgment, expertise and experience that cannot be easily captured in software, some firms have adopted the unusual tactic of using people as part of their network infrastructure. Such "cyborg" companies use computers as levers for the mind, to make the most of precious human expertise."
redux [06.29.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"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."
"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."
redux [06.15.00]
"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."
8:54 PM
0 comments
The Washington Post
Free Trade, Fairly Managed
[requires 'free' registration]
"The problem here is not that free trade doesn't work, but that it needs to be more fairly managed. That was true when it was just manufacturing jobs that were being lost. It's even more true now, considering the number of service jobs that are suddenly at risk -- 14 million by one estimate -- and the ease and speed with which the work can be transferred overseas.
So here's Task No. 1: Find a way for us and every other country to impose a 1 percent tariff on all imports -- goods as well as services. The United States could use its $15 billion a year for wage insurance, health care and college tuition grants for dislocated workers in all sectors. That's the simplest, fairest way for the winners from trade to compensate the losers, at a modest cost to economic growth. Anything less -- including the joke of a program put forward by the Bush White House -- is lip service."
redux [02.10.04]
"Diana Farrell, director, McKinsey Global Institute, said, "People in the US are looking at it as a job issue. They are not economists and therefore, they don't necessarily see the whole picture. What's going to happen is that offshoring is actually going to benefit US businesses even more than India." She said it was a profoundly new way of doing things and would change the structure of organisations. Offshore was about global wealth creation and integrating economies, she explained, adding that it would create more high-value jobs in the US than people could imagine today.
Based on the research that the McKinsey institute had carried out, Ms Farrell said conservatively, for every dollar invested in the offshore space, $0.58 was directly saved."
[requires 'free' registration]
"MANY American computer programmers complain that they're losing their jobs to lower-paid workers in India. The trend toward foreign "outsourcing" has become a political flashpoint.
But the trend is less frightening and more promising than you'd think from either the angry talk from unemployed programmers or the scary estimates from consulting firms, argues Catherine L. Mann, an economist at the Institute for International Economics in Washington."
redux [01.27.04]
"Aparna Jairam isn't trying to steal your job. That's what she tells me, and I believe her. But if Jairam does end up taking it - and, let's face facts, she could do your $70,000-a-year job for the wages of a Taco Bell counter jockey - she won't lose any sleep over your plight. When I ask what her advice is for a beleaguered American programmer afraid of being pulled under by the global tide that she represents, Jairam takes the high road, neither dismissing the concern nor offering soothing happy talk. Instead, she recites a portion of the 2,000-year-old epic poem and Hindu holy book the Bhagavad Gita: "Do what you're supposed to do. And don't worry about the fruits. They'll come on their own."
This is a story about the global economy."
"If your job has been offshored to another country, where someone else will do it for a fraction of your former salary, should you:
(a) Stand outside corporate outsourcing conferences waving a placard that says "WILL CODE FOR FOOD"?
(b) Start a Web movement or e-mail campaign to lobby the government and other shoppers to stop doing business with companies that send jobs overseas?
(c) Hang up your keyboard and learn a new skill, like massage therapy or nursing, that can't be bought and sold over a phone line with the click of a mouse?
Amy Dean has a more radical, if wonkier, idea."
redux [12.31.03]
"After nine months of exposure to the overseas outsourcing market, I'm ready to give an update on the realities of outsourcing for small businesses. This is an emotionally charged issue for a lot of people in the U.S., so let me start by saying up front that the results are mixed. Like a lot of larger businesses, I've discovered a number of hidden risks and costs. While I don't think those issues will end the trend of sending jobs to cheaper labor markets, I do think the wholesale enthusiasm for outsourcing overseas is quickly waning."
redux [12.17.03]
"Chiruvolu has jumped headfirst into the fray. In March 2003, he wrote a column for Venture Capital Journal with the provocative title "Tech Startups Should Be Entirely Built in Asia." But then, in November 2003, after his firm and its start-ups gained more experience in India, he wrote another column that toned down his previous proclamation, headlined "About that India Recommendation ... Ahem ... It's a Lot Tougher Than Expected.""
""I have a lot of nationalistic pride, but it's bogus to say I will only hire Americans. It's hypocrisy." He told Salon why outsourcing is harder than it looks on paper, but becoming essential for new companies that aim to compete in a global marketplace."
redux [11.20.03]
"U.S. companies sending information-technology work overseas merely to cut salary costs may find their savings are either disappointing or short-lived.
The reason is that the unexpected costs of moving IT jobs to India and China, including skyrocketing salaries, are changing the financial equation of offshoring just as U.S. executives are rushing to adopt the practice."
"Nearly 20 percent of companies that farmed out IT work did not achieve any cost reductions, while 9.2 percent experienced an increase in costs, according to a survey by people3, a Gartner company."
""There's an assumption by many companies that they can save a large percentage of their budgets by outsourcing some or all of their IT capabilities, however the true savings are not always as promising as one would expect," Lily Mok, a consultant at people3, said in a statement. "Many companies often neglect to factor in all costs associated with managing the outsourcing engagements, which average 4.5 percent of the total contract value and can be as high as 15 percent.""
"On paper, it looks extremely attractive. A Russian programmer charges 80% less than an American. But when you parse it all out, the total cost of offshoring a given IT job is generally comparable to getting the work done domestically, says Tom Weakland, a partner at management consultancy DiamondCluster. It's just that few companies are aware of these real costs. "Most companies can't accurately measure their productivity and costs prior to and after outsourcing," says Weakland. "Most look just at wages.""
"Another lesson we learned the hard way is that fixed-bid offshore projects tend to misalign the vendor's interests with ours by placing undue emphasis on cost and time line while sacrificing quality and customer focus. Because we care about what the code looks like (this vendor's on-site liaison and account executive admitted to me that they do much better with fixed-bid projects when the customer doesn't inspect their code), we would have been better off using a time and materials arrangement, which would have given us more control over every part of the process."
redux [10.23.03]
"In this way, offshoring, far from being bad for the United States, creates net value for the economy. It directly recaptures 67 cents of every dollar of spending that goes abroad and indirectly might capture an additional 45 to 47 cents--producing a net gain of 12 cents to 14 cents for every dollar of costs moved offshore.
The total possible wealth creation does not, of course, ease the plight of people who lose their jobs or find lower-wage ones."
redux [07.17.03]
"Citing statistics from market research firms such as McKinsey, the body said the United States stands to save over $300 billion over the next six years by shifting some business operations overseas."
""US banks, financial services and insurance companies have saved $6 billion to $8 billion in the past four years owing to IT outsourcing to India," Nasscom claimed. "Helped by these savings, companies have prevented layoffs and instead added 125,000 more jobs.""
7:35 PM
0 comments
Editor & Publisher
Bangladeshi May Be 1st Journo Murdered in '04
"Manik Saha is believed to have been the world's first reporter to be murdered this year. He was just the latest victim of bloodshed that has Bangladeshi journalists on the front lines of violence plaguing their country."
"A dozen journalists have been slain in this South Asian nation over the past decade, and not one case has been solved. Three journalists were murdered in 2002, and more than 120 were attacked, abducted or threatened last year."
redux [01.02.04]
"Thirteen journalists were killed last year covering the war in Iraq, the highest death toll for the media in a single country since 1995, a watchdog group said Friday.
In all, 36 journalists were killed worldwide last year, up from 19 in 2002, the Committee to Protect Journalists said."
"The death toll in Iraq was the highest for a single country since 24 journalists were killed in Algeria eight years ago."
redux [09.22.03]
"Lt. Col. George Krivo, a military spokesman, said an official investigation concluded that "although a regrettable incident," the soldiers "acted within the rules of engagement."
The U.S. Army has never publicly announced those rules, citing security of its soldiers, who face near-daily attack by insurgents opposed to the American military occupation."
redux [08.18.03]
"Dana's driver, however, thought the cameraman, 43, had been deliberately shot outside the U.S.-run jail. Journalists had gathered there after the U.S. Army announced that a mortar attack on Saturday evening had killed at least six Iraqi prisoners and wounded scores.
"There were many journalists around. They knew we were journalists," said Munzer Abbas. "This was not an accident.""
"Reuters quoted Dana's soundman Nael Shyioukhi as saying that prior to the incident both he and Dana had asked for and received permission from U.S. troops in the area to film the prison from a nearby bridge."
"While we recognize the dangers faced by U.S. forces in Iraq, the preliminary accounts of yesterday's shooting raise serious questions about the conduct of U.S. troops and their rules of engagement. From the eyewitness accounts, it appears that Dana was fired on without warning. He was filming in an area where no hostilities were taking place, raising questions about whether U.S. troops acted recklessly in targeting him."
"News organization employees killed since the war on Iraq began on March 20."
"The number of journalists killed for their work fell to its lowest recorded level in 2002, but the number behind bars rose sharply, with China topping the list of countries imprisoning reporters."
"The majority of those killed in 2002 were not covering conflicts but were murdered in direct reprisal for their reporting on sensitive topics, including official crime and corruption in countries like Colombia, the Philippines, Russia and Pakistan."
redux [02.22.02]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Danny Pearl was the 10th journalist to die covering Sept. 11 and its aftermath. His death was a pointless, wanton murder that deprived a family, a newspaper and a profession of a beloved son, brother, husband, and colleague. His child will be nurtured with the family's stories about him, not by the presence of his father's love."
His child should know this: The profession that Danny Pearl chose, the one he pursued with great energy and curiosity, is neither popular nor safe. Last year, 37 journalists died in the line of duty. Another 118 were imprisoned. All told across the globe, more than 600 journalists or their news organizations came under attack -- by beatings, arrests, censorship or harassment -- most often because someone just didn't like what they wrote."
8:41 PM
0 comments
Policy Review
Burgers, Fries, and Lawyers
"While plaintiffs' lawyers vigorously denounce the nutritional content of fast food, they tend to ignore the nutritional content of alternatives. Home cooking, of course, has a nice ring to it, and it is hard to criticize the idea of a traditional meal cooked by mom or dad. But if we put nostalgia aside for a moment, we can see that the typical American meal of 25 years ago might win taste contests but few prizes from today's nutritionists. Meat loaf, fried chicken, butter-whipped potatoes, and a tall glass of whole milk may have kept us warm on a cold winter evening, but such a diet would surely fail a modern test for healthy living. And let's not even discuss a crusty apple pie or bread pudding for dessert. Yesterday's comfort food gives today's dietitians indigestion. It is no surprise, then, that today's fast food derives a smaller percentage of calories from fat than a typical home meal from 1977-78. In fact, even in the 1970s, fast food meals had almost the same fat/calorie ratio as home cooking at that time. By this measure of fat/calories, fast food in the 1970s looked healthier than restaurant cooking, according to usda figures. Therefore, the caricature of fast food restaurants as a devilish place for nutrition makes little historical sense."
redux [11.10.03]
"The food fight over what do about obesity is heating up on both sides of the Atlantic as British official are mulling a ban on some television advertising aimed at children, and U.S. officials are considering whether to classify obesity as a disease as opposed to a condition, which would open the door to insurance coverage paying for treatment."
"Under some of the proposals being floated in the United Kingdom, fast-food giant McDonald's would face a ban on its sponsorship of the England football team, as would Pepsi-Cola, its co-sponsor."
redux [09.02.03]
""Let's say you ate every meal of the year with your child and every meal you delivered a very compelling nutrition message. That's 1,000 exposures for you for every meal of the year," Brownell says. "The problem is the food industry has 10,000 exposures on television alone because the average child sees 10,000 food advertisements every year. They have Madison Avenue doing these wonderful things with animation and cartoon characters and sports heroes, so who's going to win that one?"
He adds, "It's not a fair fight and we've handcuffed parents in raising healthy children.""
"Even fat is the stuff of politics in Washington. And with obesity a growing health problem, lawmakers, lawyers and activists are lining up the way they do for most issues: on two sides."
"The debate has spilled over into public policy, with proposals for a junk-food tax, limits on food advertising, demands for more details on labeling and lawsuits against food manufacturers. Several states are considering limits on sweets sold in schools; Some are debating whether to force chain restaurants to list nutrition information on menus."
"Hear Part II of our series on obesity. We'll look at the politics of food -- what can and should the government be doing in the fight against fat?"
redux [07.02.03]
"So that's not the dinner bell you hear. It's an alarm bell raising Oreo-sized goose bumps for the giant makers of now-unfashionable sugary, fatty and calorie-laden foods. All are now faced with this new reality: As concern about obesity rises, they're within a few cookie crumbs of becoming the next Big Tobacco for trial lawyers.
"You can't stop tobacco from being unhealthy," warns Sam Hirsch, an attorney whose obese clients filed lawsuits against McDonald's. "But you can make food less unhealthy.""
"Kraft Foods announces it will reduce the portion sizes of its snack foods, stop marketing to children in school and reduce fat in some of its foods. The move is aimed at helping the global fight against obesity. Hear Professor Kelly Brownell of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders."
redux [02.21.03]
"Judge Robert Sweet was bluntly dismissive of the original complaint last month brought on behalf of two children from the Bronx.
But he left the door open for potential litigants if it could be proved there are dangers in eating McDonald's food that are not commonly known. He said it could be argued that Chicken McNuggets, instead of being simply chicken fried in a pan, are a "McFrankenstein creation of various elements"."
redux [07.26.02]
"A man sued four leading fast food chains, claiming he became obese and suffered from other serious health problems from eating their fatty cuisine."
""They said '100% beef.' I thought that meant it was good for you," Barber told Newsday. "I thought the food was OK."
"Those people in the advertisements don't really tell you what's in the food," he said. "It's all fat, fat and more fat. Now I'm obese.""
"John Banzhaf likes to pose this challenge to students who enroll in his graduate class on legal activism at George Washington University, in Washington, DC. Think of something that really irritates you or smacks of obvious civil injustice, he tells them. Then think of a way of using the law to right the wrong and seek redress.
In other words, as Professor Banzhaf himself puts it with the freewheeling candor we have come to expect from both heroes and villains in the American legal system, let's sue the bastards."
"Residents of the United States spend more on fast food a year than they do movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and records combined. Americans shelled out more than $110 billion on burgers, fried chicken, and the like in 2000, compared with $6 billion in 1970."
""Fast food is really moving into schools, which is horrible, because eating habits are formed when you're young, so if you get fat then, you've started a lifelong battle," Schlosser said."
""It's important for us to look at this from a public health point-of-view, where we're not so concerned with how overweight an individual is, but how overweight the population is," said Brownell. "Genetics is what permits the problem to occur, but environment is what drives it."
Of particular concern to Brownell is America's passive acceptance of unhealthy food. Americans fail to recognize, for example, the possible damage done by such fast-food icons as Ronald McDonald. "We take Joe Camel off the billboard because it is marketing bad products to our children, but Ronald McDonald is considered cute," said Brownell. "How different are they in their impact, in what they're trying to get kids to do?""
[requires 'free' registration]
"In the opening pages of ''Fast Food Nation,'' Eric Schlosser makes a series of observations about McDonald's. The company operates about 28,000 restaurants around the world. It's the nation's biggest buyer of beef, pork and potatoes, and the world's biggest owner of retail property. The company is one of the country's top toy distributors and its largest private operator of playgrounds. Ninety-six percent of American schoolchildren can identify Ronald McDonald. Roughly one of every eight workers in the United States has done time at the chain. The McDonald's brand is the most famous, and the most heavily promoted, on the planet. ''The Golden Arches,'' Schlosser says, ''are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.'' Of course, McDonald's isn't alone. ''The whole experience of buying fast food,'' he writes, ''has become so routine, so thoroughly unexceptional and mundane, that it is now taken for granted, like brushing your teeth or stopping for a red light.''"
9:02 PM
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Mercury News
Opponents of change a threat to electronic voting
"Fear of change is a universal human emotion, and it often erupts when new technology comes along to alter an established and comfortable way of doing things.
This fear can sway people away from thoughtful consideration of risks and rewards, pushing them into panic reactions where new ideas are weighed down by unfair expectations.
That's happening right now with electronic voting."
"Six electronic voting machines used in two North Carolina counties lost 436 absentee ballot votes in the 2002 general election because of a software problem, raising increasing doubts about the accuracy and integrity of voting equipment in a presidential election year."
""If this happened with one version of the firmware, how can we be sure that it didn't happen with other versions of the firmware?" asked Dill. "How can we be sure that other counties didn't lose votes that they didn't catch?""
"While I sat at his computer, March helped me open a file containing actual results from a March 2002 primary election held in San Luis Obispo County, Calif. -- a file that March says would be accessible to anyone who worked in the county elections office on Election Day. Following March's direction, I changed the vote count with a few clicks. Then, he explained how to alter the "audit log," erasing all evidence that we'd tampered with the results. I saved the file. If it had been a real election, I would have been carrying out an electronic coup. It was a chilling realization."
redux [02.12.04]
"Wolfowitz said the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) could not guarantee voting records would be kept secure, thereby calling into question the integrity of the process.
The Defense Department will continue to investigate other methods of electronic voting, but at this point it is not clear if any effort will be in place by Election Day."
"Brewer said Michigan is using state-of-the art security, many parts of which he would not discuss. The vote tally includes a check to make sure no one voted more than once.
Brewer compared the risks to those of paper absentee ballots: "People have decided over the course of time that accessibility and convenience of voting is worth taking that risk -- not that you let your guard down.""
redux [02.02.04]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Concerned citizens have been warning that new electronic voting technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal elections. Now there is proof. When the State of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting, starting with voter-verified paper trails."
"Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist, but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem almost too bad to be true."
"Poll workers in Alameda County noticed something strange on election night in October. As a computer counted absentee ballots in the recall race, workers were stunned to see a big surge in support for a fringe candidate named John Burton.
Concerned that their new $12.7 million Diebold electronic voting system had developed a glitch, election officials turned to a company representative who happened to be on hand.
Lucky he was there. For an unknown reason, the computerized tally program had begun to award votes for Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to Burton, a socialist from Southern California."
redux [01.26.04]
"Researchers warned last week that an Internet voting system designed for Americans overseas to use in the November presidential election should be scrapped -- because Internet insecurities could compromise the election.
The government dismissed the researchers' findings, saying the report offered false conclusions about the security of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, system. The evaluation was written for the Defense Department by four of 10 computer experts assembled by the Federal Voting Assistance Program."
redux [12.18.03]
"Secretary of State Kevin Shelley said Tuesday that Diebold Elections Systems could lose the right to sell electronic voting machines in California after state auditors found the company distributed software that had not been approved by election officials.
The auditors reported that voters in 17 California counties cast ballots in recent elections using software that had not been certified by the state. And voters in Los Angeles County and two smaller counties voted on machines installed with software that was not approved by the Federal Election Commission."
"Remember all the chads and dimples that made voting for President so chaotic in Florida three years ago? In a well-meaning effort to fix the system before the 2004 elections, many communities--in Florida and in other states--have begun to install direct-recording electronic machines (DRE), which instantly record and tabulate votes; some even use fancy touch-screen technology similar to automated-teller machines in banks. Computer scientists are alarmed, however, by the potential to manipulate the new machines."
redux [12.12.03]
"The role of technology in U.S. elections has become the center of a curious fight in which the forces aren't lining up at all the way you might think. On one side, state and local elections officials, often thought to be technological troglodytes, are the most enthusiastic fans of the latest in computerized voting systems.
On the other is a group of computer scientists and other academics who are deeply suspicious of the technology and believe the best answer is, of all things, paper ballots."
"As for voting itself, I think we have made a horrible decision to solve this problem with technology. While the voting technology we have been considering is flawed, the best answer doesn't have to be some other voting technology that is somehow better. We turn to technology because it supposedly eliminates human error. I suggest that we add humans to the process in order to eliminate technological errors. And we'd save a lot of money in the process.
My model for smart voting is Canada. The Canadians are watching our election problems and laughing their butts off. They think we are crazy, and they are right."
"Electronic-voting machine manufacturers are circling their wagons trying to ease the security concerns raised in the last few months that their machines are susceptible to being hacked and subject to voter fraud.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University analyzed the software that runs on the voting machines of industry leader Diebold. In their report they stated, "We found significant security flaws: voters can trivially cast multiple votes with no built-in traceability, administrative functions can be performed by regular voters, and the threats posed by insiders such as poll workers, software developers, and even janitors, is even greater.""
"Several well-publicized flaws in "e-voting," or electronic voting, systems have not led to improvements, said Harvard University computer professor Rebecca Mercuri."
""Officials are not removed from their posts, fired or sent to trial; vendors are not banned from participation; equipment is not recalled; standards are not rewritten; and elections are not re-held," she said."
"An e-mail found in a collection of files stolen from Diebold Elections Systems' internal database recommends charging Maryland "out the yin-yang" if the state requires Diebold to add paper printouts to the $73 million voting system it purchased."
"Diebold spokesman David Bear would neither dispute nor confirm the accuracy of the "yin-yang" e-mail on Monday, saying it is "at best the internal discussion of one individual and does not reflect the sentiments or the position of the company.""
8:43 PM
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Wired News
Congress Slams CAPPS II
"The U.S. government's controversial airline passenger-screening system remains flawed and behind schedule, according to a congressional report released on Thursday."
"Researchers have had difficulty obtaining passenger data from airlines to test the system, the GAO said in a report. The agency also still must take steps to prevent misuse of that data, the GAO said."
""We believe that these issues, if not resolved, pose major risks to the successful development, implementation and operation of CAPPS II," the report said."
redux [01.18.04]
"Northwest Airlines provided information on millions of passengers for a secret U.S. government air-security project soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, raising more concerns among some privacy advocates about the airlines' use of confidential customer data.
The nation's fourth-largest airline asserted in September that it "did not provide that type of information to anyone." But Northwest acknowledged Friday that by that time, it had already turned over three months of reservation data to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center."
redux [01.13.04]
"The United States is pushing ahead with plans to screen and color-code all passengers flying in the country despite resistance from airlines and privacy groups."
"Under CAPPS II, TSA will obtain the passenger's full name, home address, home telephone number, birth date and some information about that passenger's itinerary."
"A Homeland Security official denied on Monday that a proposed airline security system designed to color-code domestic passengers based on their risk of committing acts of terrorism will be merged with another program that fingerprints and photographs visitors to the United States."
"Hatfield also confirmed that the government is working on a trusted-traveler program, which would allow individuals to sign up for background screening in order to opt out of CAPPS II color-coding."
redux [12.13.03]
"A proposed new airline passenger screening system that would use private databases to identify risky passengers is facing delays amid heightened scrutiny from industry and government agencies."
"The GAO has met with various civil liberties groups that oppose the project, asking questions about the effectiveness and quality of data in the commercial databases to be incorporated in CAPPS II. The agency's investigative tactics have led some opponents of CAPPS II to believe that the resulting report will be harshly critical."
redux [09.23.03]
""This looks and feels like the data Valdez," said Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"Look at how we found out about this, only because one company was foolish enough to speak publicly about it," Tien added. "We should put the brakes on all these data-mining programs, and have a serious national conversation, because travel data is just one example of the many kinds of data every data-mining operation wants to suck in from private businesses.""
[requires 'free' registration]
"Two federal agencies announced today that they had opened investigations into JetBlue Airways in response to the airline's admission that it had provided travel records on more than a million passengers to a Pentagon contractor, violating its own privacy rules.
The moves by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Trade Commission came as JetBlue disclosed that it had hired Deloitte & Touche, the accounting firm, to review the company's privacy policies and determine if they needed to be revamped."
redux [09.18.03]
"JetBlue Airways confirmed on Thursday that in September 2002, it provided 5 million passenger itineraries to a defense contractor for proof-of-concept testing of a Pentagon project unrelated to airline security -- with help from the Transportation Security Administration.
The contractor, Torch Concepts, then augmented that data with Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information, including income level, to develop what looks to be a study of whether passenger-profiling systems such as CAPPS II are feasible."
"Bill Scannell, a privacy advocate who boycotted Delta Airlines earlier this year for its reported participation in testing, said his sources confirm that JetBlue will be replacing Delta Airlines as the "guinea pig for CAPPS II testing."
"JetBlue has no respect for its customers or the constitution of the United States," Scannell said. "JetBlue is clearly code red.""
""People have used irresponsible scare tactics to stop the testing of CAPPS II," [TSA's Turmail] said. "The American people have the right to know whether this system will work. We should have a dialogue based on fact and not innuendo.""
redux [09.09.03]
"In the most aggressive -- and, some say, invasive -- step yet to protect air travelers, the federal government and the airlines will phase in a computer system next year to measure the risk posed by every passenger on every flight in the United States.
The new Transportation Security Administration system seeks to probe deeper into each passenger's identity than is currently possible, comparing personal information against criminal records and intelligence information. Passengers will be assigned a color code -- green, yellow or red -- based in part on their city of departure, destination, traveling companions and date of ticket purchase."
redux [04.16.03]
"The former privacy officer of Internet advertising giant DoubleClick will be the Department of Homeland Security's first privacy czar, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced today."
"The "Total Information Awareness" program would have created a database of consumer financial transactions combined with other publicly available data. Congress said it will suspend funding for the Defense Department project unless the administration can demonstrate that it will not violate constitutional privacy rights. The White House's report is due next month."
"Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge on Wednesday told a congressional panel that the government will not implement a pilot version of a controversial program for screening airline passengers until a privacy expert examines it.
"It is my intention to have this be [examined] by the privacy officer," Ridge said, responding to a question by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., on why CAPPS appeared scheduled to be implemented before a privacy officer has been named."
redux [03.17.03]
"Federal officials commission a new air-passenger screening system to identify people linked to terrorism. The Transportation Security Administration says commercial databases will be used to check the authenticity of passengers' names. Privacy advocates worry about the extent of the data search. NPR's John McChesney reports."
redux [06.06.02]
"Let me emphasize again: Without some privacy, we couldn't stay human. But we'll be better equipped to defend a core of essential privacy if our overall civilization is open enough to let us catch the Peeping Toms and power abusers.
Better, more intrusive technology is going to limit our [ability to stay anonymous]. In 5 or 10 years, you'll have eyeglasses that scan any face on the street, look it up on the Internet, and provide captions as you walk by. This will be a return to the village of our ancestors, where they recognized everyone they saw. No one will be a total stranger."
redux [06.28.00]
"It's unlikely that in the future everyone will choose total online anonymity. But the new privacy technologies have implications that go beyond the short-term questions of law enforcement and marketing.
"The real dimension here isn't the choice between privacy and disclosure," says Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. "The real story is the impact it has on our sense of identity. The fact that we can selectively disclose things on the Internet is changing the nature of social interactions. If you can change your persona at will in cyberspace, that begins affecting what you think of your own identity and who you think you are.""
redux [04.30.00]
[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."
"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."
redux [02.15.01]
"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.""
7:55 PM
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Wired News
Trippi: Net Politics Here to Stay
"Forgive the hundreds of thousands of people who gave Howard Dean more than $40 million in contributions last year. They might have thought they were trying to elect a president, but they were wrong, according to Dean's former campaign manager, Joe Trippi.
Instead, he said, all that money was used to beta test a new, online revolution in American politics."
"The broadcast style has failed the American people, Trippi says, because it crowds out serious debate about serious issues, focusing instead on entertainment.
Yet as the Dean campaign's fast fade demonstrates, broadcast is still the dominant medium in politics. The endless replays of Dean's Iowa concession speech became late-night entertainment, not news."
redux [02.01.04]
"We are observing the emergence of a modern political synergy; a rapid integration of the old and the new, with a consolidation of the best from both. A new form of political campaigning that will combine the technology- based virtual networks with the local and highly interpersonal networks of traditional politics. It is this critical refinement that promises to distinguish new generations of online campaigning.
It is a marriage that looks to surpass the parts that have created it, an innovation that is revolutionizing the very nature of American politics -- a collaboration that could critically refine the political art of winning."
"In September, 2002, right about the moment Howard Dean was deciding to run, the nonpareil media critic Jon Katz was writing prophetically on the New York University web page: "The flight of the young has become central for our understanding of what journalism is or needs to be. The young drive our new information culture. They invented and understand new forms of media--especially the Net the the Web... They understand, too, the extraordinary power and meaning of interactivity, and how it is redefining narrative and story-telling... But journalism doesn't get it, and has resisted the idea fiercely. Newspapers, newsmagazines and TV networks haven't radically changed form or content in half a century, despite their aging audiences, and growing competition from new media sources. They are allergic to interactivity. Increasingly, it appears they are incapable of it."
Katz forecast it all. "
redux [01.19.04]
""There's no question that young people, probably more than any other subset of voters, want to be listened to, not talked to," Cornfield said. "They want to have someone connect their perception of the issues on a local scale to those on a national or global scale."
The survey suggests that the Internet is most effective for candidates pursuing young people who are already interested in politics or passionate about certain key issues."
redux [01.10.04]
"Howard Dean, for example, has risen from obscurity to national recognition on the back of his Web-based grassroots fund-raising approach, and campaign supporters of all types have learned to use a social-networking site, Meetup.com, to arrange political gatherings. Meanwhile, candidates posting messages on campaign Web sites seems to have replaced kissing babies as a ritual.
These are encouraging developments because they share a grassroots, bottom-up approach to electing a president. But something crucial is missing because so far, electronic populism is still largely about getting out the vote. The candidates have excelled at using the Web to organize supporters and raise money in new ways, but the more tantalizing possibility--that ordinary people might collectively help shape the substance of what their candidate stands for--remains a dream."
redux [12.06.00]
"While the Internet may not have played the transformational role in the election of the U.S. President in 2000 that some predicted, this new medium of political communications suggested what an Internet-driven transformation in political communications might look like. After setting the stage by discussing the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) by Sen. John McCain in the primary campaign, the researchers evaluate the Web sites of four major candidates for President of the United States over the course of the general election. Additionally, this article serves as a digital archive of Web pages caught at what many believe is the nascent stage of what might come to be the dominant medium for political communications in the decades to come."
"This year's election could turn out to be the same watershed for assessments of the Internet's political impact that March 28 was for the Internet's economic role. That is, in politics as in business, the spread of high-speed, low-cost networked communications will be a profoundly important long-term source of change. But the most surprising lesson of this election year is how many things the Internet did not affect, and how many old rules still apply."
"In the long run, the Internet will surely change politics as much as it changes business. In the Internet world, the current cliche is that trying to estimate the network's ultimate implications is like trying to foresee today's overcrowded airline system while watching the Wright brothers' first flight in 1903. Still, how little difference the Internet has made in this year's politics is surprising."
redux [11.01.00]
"The first books about role of the Internet in political life were too ecstatic. More recent efforts at sober second thought, including Davis' The Web of Politics, Kamarck and Nye's Democracy.com and Wilhelm's Democracy in a Digital Age are too somber.
Wilhelm's Democracy in a Digital Age has the most thorough and sensible review of contemporary thought on the social construction of technology and the technological construction of society. He groups authors and pundits as neofuturists, dystopians, and technorealists, but also saunters by Derrida, Heidegger, and Habermas. He offers a concise grouping of the ways public communication may be facilitated or inhibited by conducting politics online. First, public communication will be affected by the skills and resources people bring to the process of engagement. Second, it will be affected by the distribution of computing resources across familiar categories of social inequality - race, gender and class. Third, people will have to commit to a deliberative process that involves subjecting one's opinions to public scrutiny and validation. Finally, the technical design of software applications, network architecture and hardware devices will affect the quality and quantity of political engagement online. His conclusion, in line with his peers, is that political communication online is unraveling the democratic character of the public sphere. Barriers to entry into the digitally-mediated public sphere are high, the online public does not represent or reflect the American public, the speed of the networked democracy undermines the useful slow pace of democratic decision making, and the public sphere itself is giving way to market pressures, pay-per-use services and privately owned media environments. However, barriers to entry are actually dropping because of market pressures, the online public is becoming demographically representative, and speeding up the deliberative process may weaken the political power of social elites."
"It is easy to romanticize the past of democracy as Athenian debates in front of an involved citizenry, and to believe that its return by electronic means is nigh. A quick look in the rear-view mirror at radio and then TV is sobering. Here, too, the new media were heralded as harbingers of a new and improved political dialogue. But the reality of those media has been one of cacophony, fragmentation, increasing cost, and declining value of "hard" information.
The Internet makes it easier to gather and assemble information, to deliberate and to express oneself, and to organize and coordinate action. The Internet can mobilize hard-to-reach groups, and it has unleashed much energy and creativity. Obviously there will be some shining success stories. But it would be naive to cling to the image of the early Internet -- nonprofit, cooperative, and free -- and ignore that it is becoming a commercial medium, like commercial broadcasting that replaced amateur ham radio. If anything, the Internet will lead to less stability, more fragmentation, less ability to fashion consensus, more interest-group pluralism. High-capacity computers connected to high-speed networks are no remedies for flaws in a political system. There is no quick techno- fix.
The Internet does not create a Jeffersonian democracy. It will not revive Tocqueville's Jacksonian America. It is not Lincoln-Douglas. It is not Athens, nor Appenzell. It is less of a democracy than those low-tech places. But, of course, none of these places really existed either, except as a goal, a concept, an inspiration. And in that sense, the hopes vested in the Internet are a new link in a chain of hope. Maybe naive, but certainly ennobling."
7:58 PM
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Economic Times
Outsourcing to add 22 mn US jobs
"Diana Farrell, director, McKinsey Global Institute, said, "People in the US are looking at it as a job issue. They are not economists and therefore, they don't necessarily see the whole picture. What's going to happen is that offshoring is actually going to benefit US businesses even more than India." She said it was a profoundly new way of doing things and would change the structure of organisations. Offshore was about global wealth creation and integrating economies, she explained, adding that it would create more high-value jobs in the US than people could imagine today.
Based on the research that the McKinsey institute had carried out, Ms Farrell said conservatively, for every dollar invested in the offshore space, $0.58 was directly saved."
[requires 'free' registration]
"MANY American computer programmers complain that they're losing their jobs to lower-paid workers in India. The trend toward foreign "outsourcing" has become a political flashpoint.
But the trend is less frightening and more promising than you'd think from either the angry talk from unemployed programmers or the scary estimates from consulting firms, argues Catherine L. Mann, an economist at the Institute for International Economics in Washington."
redux [01.27.04]
"Aparna Jairam isn't trying to steal your job. That's what she tells me, and I believe her. But if Jairam does end up taking it - and, let's face facts, she could do your $70,000-a-year job for the wages of a Taco Bell counter jockey - she won't lose any sleep over your plight. When I ask what her advice is for a beleaguered American programmer afraid of being pulled under by the global tide that she represents, Jairam takes the high road, neither dismissing the concern nor offering soothing happy talk. Instead, she recites a portion of the 2,000-year-old epic poem and Hindu holy book the Bhagavad Gita: "Do what you're supposed to do. And don't worry about the fruits. They'll come on their own."
This is a story about the global economy."
"If your job has been offshored to another country, where someone else will do it for a fraction of your former salary, should you:
(a) Stand outside corporate outsourcing conferences waving a placard that says "WILL CODE FOR FOOD"?
(b) Start a Web movement or e-mail campaign to lobby the government and other shoppers to stop doing business with companies that send jobs overseas?
(c) Hang up your keyboard and learn a new skill, like massage therapy or nursing, that can't be bought and sold over a phone line with the click of a mouse?
Amy Dean has a more radical, if wonkier, idea."
redux [12.31.03]
"After nine months of exposure to the overseas outsourcing market, I'm ready to give an update on the realities of outsourcing for small businesses. This is an emotionally charged issue for a lot of people in the U.S., so let me start by saying up front that the results are mixed. Like a lot of larger businesses, I've discovered a number of hidden risks and costs. While I don't think those issues will end the trend of sending jobs to cheaper labor markets, I do think the wholesale enthusiasm for outsourcing overseas is quickly waning."
redux [12.17.03]
"Chiruvolu has jumped headfirst into the fray. In March 2003, he wrote a column for Venture Capital Journal with the provocative title "Tech Startups Should Be Entirely Built in Asia." But then, in November 2003, after his firm and its start-ups gained more experience in India, he wrote another column that toned down his previous proclamation, headlined "About that India Recommendation ... Ahem ... It's a Lot Tougher Than Expected.""
""I have a lot of nationalistic pride, but it's bogus to say I will only hire Americans. It's hypocrisy." He told Salon why outsourcing is harder than it looks on paper, but becoming essential for new companies that aim to compete in a global marketplace."
redux [11.20.03]
"U.S. companies sending information-technology work overseas merely to cut salary costs may find their savings are either disappointing or short-lived.
The reason is that the unexpected costs of moving IT jobs to India and China, including skyrocketing salaries, are changing the financial equation of offshoring just as U.S. executives are rushing to adopt the practice."
"Nearly 20 percent of companies that farmed out IT work did not achieve any cost reductions, while 9.2 percent experienced an increase in costs, according to a survey by people3, a Gartner company."
""There's an assumption by many companies that they can save a large percentage of their budgets by outsourcing some or all of their IT capabilities, however the true savings are not always as promising as one would expect," Lily Mok, a consultant at people3, said in a statement. "Many companies often neglect to factor in all costs associated with managing the outsourcing engagements, which average 4.5 percent of the total contract value and can be as high as 15 percent.""
"On paper, it looks extremely attractive. A Russian programmer charges 80% less than an American. But when you parse it all out, the total cost of offshoring a given IT job is generally comparable to getting the work done domestically, says Tom Weakland, a partner at management consultancy DiamondCluster. It's just that few companies are aware of these real costs. "Most companies can't accurately measure their productivity and costs prior to and after outsourcing," says Weakland. "Most look just at wages.""
"Another lesson we learned the hard way is that fixed-bid offshore projects tend to misalign the vendor's interests with ours by placing undue emphasis on cost and time line while sacrificing quality and customer focus. Because we care about what the code looks like (this vendor's on-site liaison and account executive admitted to me that they do much better with fixed-bid projects when the customer doesn't inspect their code), we would have been better off using a time and materials arrangement, which would have given us more control over every part of the process."
redux [10.23.03]
"In this way, offshoring, far from being bad for the United States, creates net value for the economy. It directly recaptures 67 cents of every dollar of spending that goes abroad and indirectly might capture an additional 45 to 47 cents--producing a net gain of 12 cents to 14 cents for every dollar of costs moved offshore.
The total possible wealth creation does not, of course, ease the plight of people who lose their jobs or find lower-wage ones."
redux [07.17.03]
"Citing statistics from market research firms such as McKinsey, the body said the United States stands to save over $300 billion over the next six years by shifting some business operations overseas."
""US banks, financial services and insurance companies have saved $6 billion to $8 billion in the past four years owing to IT outsourcing to India," Nasscom claimed. "Helped by these savings, companies have prevented layoffs and instead added 125,000 more jobs.""
6:53 PM
0 comments
The New York Review of Books
Now They Tell
Us
"Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you all before the war? Why didn't we learn more about these deceptions and concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change--when, in short, it might have made a difference? Some maintain that the many analysts who've spoken out since the end of the war were mute before it. But that's not true. Beginning in the summer of 2002, the "intelligence community" was rent by bitter disputes over how Bush officials were using the data on Iraq. Many journalists knew about this, yet few chose to write about it."
redux [01.28.04]
"In the wake of the latest revelations from weapons inspector David Kay, many of the largest U.S. newspapers are belatedly pressing the Bush administration for an explanation of how it could have gotten the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so wrong in the march to war last year. A growing number are raising the possibility that Bush and his team may have "cooked" the intelligence to support their case for war.
An E&P survey of the top 20 newspapers by circulation found that as of Wednesday, 13 had run editorials on Kay's resignation as chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq last Friday, and his statement that no WMDs exist in Iraq, and likely did not exist in Iraq during the U.S. run-up to war."
redux [07.11.03]
"On this second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, there is much to think about, especially in New York City under pure blue skies so cruelly reminiscent of that day. One of many things for the press to think about today is a simple fact: more than two-thirds of all Americans, two years after the tragedy, continue to think that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attack, despite the fact that no credible evidence has surfaced which links him to the crime (and even his indirect al Qaeda associations are unproven or marginal at best)."
Now, how much can we blame the media for this woeful misinformation?"
"A number of public-opinion experts agreed that the public automatically blamed Iraq, just as they would have blamed Libya if a similar attack had occurred in the 1980s. There is good evidence for this: On Sept. 13, 2001, a Time/CNN poll found that 78 percent suspected Hussein's involvement -- even though the administration had not made a connection. The belief remained consistent even as evidence to the contrary emerged.
"You can say Bush should be faulted for not correcting every single misapprehension, but that's something different than saying they set out deliberately to deceive," said Duke University political scientist Peter D. Feaver. "Since the facts are all over the place, Americans revert to a judgment: Hussein is a bad guy who would do stuff to us if he could.""
redux [05.30.03]
"Shortly before American military forces invaded Iraq, a troubled Ellen Goodman raised a singularly important question about the Bush administration's propaganda campaign for war -- "How we got from there to here ."
There , according to Goodman, was innocent 9/11 victimhood at the hands of religious fanatics; here , was bullying superpower bent on destroying a secular dictator. I assumed that someone as astute as Goodman would reveal at least part of the answer -- that the American media provided free transportation to get the White House from there to here. But nowhere in her nationally syndicated column did she state the obvious -- that the success of "Bush's PR War" (the headline on the piece) was largely dependent on a compliant press that uncritically repeated almost every fraudulent administration claim about the threat posed to America by Saddam Hussein."
redux [05.14.03]
"Before arriving in Doha, I had spent hours watching CNN back home, and I was sadly reminded of the network's steady decline in recent years. Paula Zahn looked and talked like a cheerleader for the US forces; Aaron Brown kept reaching for the profound remark without ever finding it; Wolf Blitzer politely interviewed Washington's high and mighty, seldom asking a pointed question. None of them, however, appeared on the broadcasts I saw in Doha. Instead, there were Jim Clancy, a tough-minded veteran American correspondent, Michael Holmes, a soft-spoken Australian, and Becky Anderson, a sharp and inquisitive British anchor. This was CNN International, the edition broadcast to the world at large, and it was far more serious and informed than the American version.
The difference was not accidental."
"Behind the president were seated a small group of about 40 Iraqi Americans, some Shiites and some Chaldean. The audience was not seen, but the impression was created that it was an enthusiastic crowd representative of Michigan's 400,000 plus Arab Americans.
Cameras never focused on the audience, no one saw that the room was only one-third full - an estimated crowd of 300. The fact that the group was personally invited by the White House and was carefully screened to include Republicans and supporters of the president was not reported. Instead, the impression was created that the president was giving a victory message full of optimism and hope to his Arab American supporters. That was what the White House wanted to convey, and that was the story the media allowed them to uncritically convey."
7:32 PM
0 comments
BBC
Blaming the dark side of gaming
"If a gene can dictate that your eyesight will be bad, can another dictate a propensity for violence? Or can certain experiences make you violent?
As a consumer of games that are regularly deemed bad influences, I have to wonder. Can they nurture violence in oneself? Or were the killers whose activities have been linked to games already psychopaths before they ever played the games?"
redux [01.29.04]
"Disputes in Florida, California, Washington state and Congress pit parents and lawmakers who say the games may prompt some teens to commit violence against merchants and civil libertarians who say no link exists and that such entertainment is a constitutionally protected form of free speech."
""Fresh ground in law will be made, one way or the other," says William Mayton, law professor at Emory University in Atlanta."
redux [12.20.03]
[requires 'free' registration]
""It's as if you just read the music industry through the hard-rock guys," he says. "And you say it's all about bad words, crazy music and that's it. And someone says, What about Mozart? What about Elvis Presley? Oh, we don't know. No image. It's not an easy sell. So we don't talk about it. I think the mass-market perception of video games, for the most part, is 'Wow, those games are too violent, look at Doom, look at G.T.A. 3.' But that represents only about 10 percent of the market. Out of the 60 million Playstation 2's out there today, no game on the planet has sold more than six million. If the video-game business was really just about G.T.A., or just about Doom, if that was really representing what people want to play, why would it be only 10 percent of the install base? That's the whole thing -- people express themselves in what they choose to play.""
redux [11.05.03]
""Game entertainment is not a classic media experience. It has a potency that offers a new psychological experience," Kline said, adding he could imagine violent experiences in games to spill over in real life.
Other scientists, who like Chee have carried out scientific surveys, said heavy games players were in fact sociable and not the pathological loners they are often made out to be."
redux [08.14.03]
"For Henry Jenkins, a professor of media studies at MIT, the video game Grand Theft Auto III is a bit like Birth of a Nation , the 1915 film that cineastes praise for helping create the basic grammar of the movies and simultaneously damn for celebrating the Ku Klux Klan.
"In terms of what it does for games as a medium, Grand Theft Auto III is an enormous step forward," says Jenkins. "It represents a totally different model of how games can tell stories and what you can do in a gamespace. It happens to be yoked with some sophomoric images of violence that a lot of us wish weren't there.""
redux [04.25.03]
"The fact is, when kids play videogames they can experience a much more powerful form of learning than when they're in the classroom. Learning isn't about memorizing isolated facts. It's about connecting and manipulating them. Doubt it? Just ask anyone who's beaten Legend of Zelda or solved Morrowind .
The phenomenon of the videogame as an agent of mental training is largely unstudied; more often, games are denigrated for being violent or they're just plain ignored. They shouldn't be. Young gamers today aren't training to be gun-toting carjackers. They're learning how to learn."
redux [01.16.01]
"In a culture of couch potatoes where TV quiz shows pass for brain teasers and how-to books "for dummies" fly off the shelves, it can be hard to reconcile the notion that the human species is smarter than ever.
But if IQ tests are any measure -- and even critics say they have some value -- then there is evidence people are making mental gains. For the past two decades, researchers have collected information showing that IQs around the world rose steadily over the past century.
The rise has been too swift for genetics or evolution to explain. And researchers cannot precisely say what's driving the phenomenon. But many suspect that the very same TV-watching, video-game-playing cultural trappings we blame for "dumbing us down" may also be partly responsible for raising our IQs."
redux [07.23.02]
""The news will stimulate little change, but should be mentioned anyway. A seventeen-year study of 707 individuals, published in Science magazine (March 29, 2002), concluded that
"There was a significant association between the amount of time spent watching television during adolescence and early adulthood and the likelihood of subsequent aggressive acts against others.""Anderson and Bushman also point out that the weight of the evidence from all the available studies is not trivial. The effects "are larger than the effects of calcium intake on bone mass or of lead exposure on IQ in children". Moreover, "recent work demonstrates similar-sized effects of violent video games on aggression"."
9:29 PM
0 comments
CNN
Pentagon halts Internet voting system
"Wolfowitz said the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) could not guarantee voting records would be kept secure, thereby calling into question the integrity of the process.
The Defense Department will continue to investigate other methods of electronic voting, but at this point it is not clear if any effort will be in place by Election Day."
"Brewer said Michigan is using state-of-the art security, many parts of which he would not discuss. The vote tally includes a check to make sure no one voted more than once.
Brewer compared the risks to those of paper absentee ballots: "People have decided over the course of time that accessibility and convenience of voting is worth taking that risk -- not that you let your guard down.""
redux [02.02.04]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Concerned citizens have been warning that new electronic voting technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal elections. Now there is proof. When the State of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting, starting with voter-verified paper trails."
"Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist, but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem almost too bad to be true."
"Poll workers in Alameda County noticed something strange on election night in October. As a computer counted absentee ballots in the recall race, workers were stunned to see a big surge in support for a fringe candidate named John Burton.
Concerned that their new $12.7 million Diebold electronic voting system had developed a glitch, election officials turned to a company representative who happened to be on hand.
Lucky he was there. For an unknown reason, the computerized tally program had begun to award votes for Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to Burton, a socialist from Southern California."
redux [01.26.04]
"Researchers warned last week that an Internet voting system designed for Americans overseas to use in the November presidential election should be scrapped -- because Internet insecurities could compromise the election.
The government dismissed the researchers' findings, saying the report offered false conclusions about the security of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, system. The evaluation was written for the Defense Department by four of 10 computer experts assembled by the Federal Voting Assistance Program."
redux [12.18.03]
"Secretary of State Kevin Shelley said Tuesday that Diebold Elections Systems could lose the right to sell electronic voting machines in California after state auditors found the company distributed software that had not been approved by election officials.
The auditors reported that voters in 17 California counties cast ballots in recent elections using software that had not been certified by the state. And voters in Los Angeles County and two smaller counties voted on machines installed with software that was not approved by the Federal Election Commission."
"Remember all the chads and dimples that made voting for President so chaotic in Florida three years ago? In a well-meaning effort to fix the system before the 2004 elections, many communities--in Florida and in other states--have begun to install direct-recording electronic machines (DRE), which instantly record and tabulate votes; some even use fancy touch-screen technology similar to automated-teller machines in banks. Computer scientists are alarmed, however, by the potential to manipulate the new machines."
redux [12.12.03]
"The role of technology in U.S. elections has become the center of a curious fight in which the forces aren't lining up at all the way you might think. On one side, state and local elections officials, often thought to be technological troglodytes, are the most enthusiastic fans of the latest in computerized voting systems.
On the other is a group of computer scientists and other academics who are deeply suspicious of the technology and believe the best answer is, of all things, paper ballots."
"As for voting itself, I think we have made a horrible decision to solve this problem with technology. While the voting technology we have been considering is flawed, the best answer doesn't have to be some other voting technology that is somehow better. We turn to technology because it supposedly eliminates human error. I suggest that we add humans to the process in order to eliminate technological errors. And we'd save a lot of money in the process.
My model for smart voting is Canada. The Canadians are watching our election problems and laughing their butts off. They think we are crazy, and they are right."
"Electronic-voting machine manufacturers are circling their wagons trying to ease the security concerns raised in the last few months that their machines are susceptible to being hacked and subject to voter fraud.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University analyzed the software that runs on the voting machines of industry leader Diebold. In their report they stated, "We found significant security flaws: voters can trivially cast multiple votes with no built-in traceability, administrative functions can be performed by regular voters, and the threats posed by insiders such as poll workers, software developers, and even janitors, is even greater.""
"Several well-publicized flaws in "e-voting," or electronic voting, systems have not led to improvements, said Harvard University computer professor Rebecca Mercuri."
""Officials are not removed from their posts, fired or sent to trial; vendors are not banned from participation; equipment is not recalled; standards are not rewritten; and elections are not re-held," she said."
"An e-mail found in a collection of files stolen from Diebold Elections Systems' internal database recommends charging Maryland "out the yin-yang" if the state requires Diebold to add paper printouts to the $73 million voting system it purchased."
"Diebold spokesman David Bear would neither dispute nor confirm the accuracy of the "yin-yang" e-mail on Monday, saying it is "at best the internal discussion of one individual and does not reflect the sentiments or the position of the company.""
7:29 PM
0 comments
The New York Times
When a Search Engine Isn't Enough, Call a Librarian
[requires 'free' registration]
""When Google doesn't work, most people don't have a plan B," said Joe Janes, an associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington in Seattle, who is teaching a course on Google this quarter. "Librarians have lots of plan B's. We know when to go to a book, when to call someone, even when to go to Google."
While librarians often use search engines themselves, some say that the public has become too reliant on Web searches, which may not be the appropriate way to find what they need."
redux [04.18.01]
"DESPITE the best efforts of programmers, there are still many things that computers just cannot do. Examples include distinguishing between suspicious and legitimate behaviour on a corporate network, or sorting junk e-mail from genuinely important messages, or providing detailed answers to particular questions. For these tasks, which require judgment, expertise and experience that cannot be easily captured in software, some firms have adopted the unusual tactic of using people as part of their network infrastructure. Such "cyborg" companies use computers as levers for the mind, to make the most of precious human expertise."
redux [06.29.00]
[requires 'free' registration]
"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."
"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."
redux [06.15.00]
"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."
6:36 PM
0 comments
CNN
TiVo: Jackson stunt most replayed moment ever
"TiVo said it used its technology to measure audience behavior among 20,000 users during the Super Bowl. The exercise revealed a 180 percent spike in viewership at the time of the -- as Timberlake refers to it -- "wardrobe malfunction.""
"This marks the third year that TiVo has released details of its second-by-second review of how Super Bowl viewers used their TiVo units. Not only did users pause and replay the infamous portion of the halftime show more than any moment during the game, but they also did the same for some commercials."
redux [11.26.02]
"Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it."
redux [02.01.02]
"For purposes of in-house research, TiVo will do an analysis of 10,000 TiVo-enabled households on Super Bowl Sunday to measure exactly how they use DVR technology and the frequency with which digital set-box features such as rewind, pause, and slow motion are used during programming."
"Representatives for TiVo will issue the results of their analysis on Feb. 4 for consumers, advertisers, and networks to better understand what this segment of TiVo subscribers liked and disliked about Super Bowl programming, and how, if at all, the use of DVR technology is changing the way America watches television."
redux [12.12.01]
"Microsoft announced on Tuesday it will be using Predictive Networks' technology to track the viewing habits of people who use Microsoft TV interactive television products."
""I don't want my TV taking notes on what I'm watching. I don't want my kid's game console tracking what he's playing. I don't want my CD player collecting data on my music collection," said Kelley Consco, who was shopping for holiday gifts at Radio Shack. "It's just too creepy.""
redux [06.25.01]
"Are you watching your television set or is it watching you? The same technologies that are threatening privacy on the Internet - including consumer data collection, profiling and targeted advertising - are now being adopted by the U.S. television industry, according a report to be released Tuesday."
"To advertisers, the development of a technology that combines the Web's interactivity with television?s element of dedicated spectatorship is a dream come true for they will now have access to a new breed of couch potato, one that both enjoys the warm glow of the tube and craves the personal touch of the Internet, the report finds."
redux [09.11.00]
"Even if you've always wanted to be a Nielsen family, ensuring that your television watching habits help shape programming, would you really want a company to know each and every time you flip to "Felicity?"
TiVo's CEO Mike Ramsay wants to use that information to sell targeted advertising and aggregate data to the networks about TV viewing habits. Sure, you'll get some benefits when you buy TiVo's set-top box ($399), and sign up for the monthly service ($10) -- like the chance to search for programs you want, save up to 30 hours of programming and even fast-forward through the commercials. But don't forget: While you're watching your favorite programs, the TiVo is watching you, recording every channel click and timing how long you spend watching "Family Feud" and noting every Pampers ad you skip."
[requires 'free' registration]
"The TiVo and Replay boxes represent the greatest leap of all. They accumulate, in atomic detail, a record of who watched what and when they watched it. Put the box in all 102 million American homes, and you get a pointillist portrait of the entire American television audience. And that raises the second and more disturbing question to which the TV industry must respond: what do you do when you actually know who is watching and why? Already, TiVo and Replay know what each of their users does every second, though both companies make a point of saying that they don't actually dig into the data to find out who did what, that they only use it in the aggregate. Whatever. They know."
"Personal information has become the new currency of online commerce. Decentralized Internet protocols have made computing resources increasingly pervasive, empowering individuals with an unprecedented amount of control. One result is that very few Internet consumers actually pay for network content, instead offering up personal information as they go. Content providers then collect, buy, and sell this information. To bring the Internet economy into its next stage of development, complementary software and legal architectures must be created in which personal information is regarded as a commercial property right, and accorded corresponding monetary value."
8:26 PM
0 comments
NPR: All Things Considered
Georgia Wrestles Evolution Question
"NPR's Ari Shapiro in Atlanta reports that Georgia is considering whether its public school science instruction would drop any mention of evolution. Instead students would hear the term "biological changes over time." That's brought a torrent of criticism that the plan would offer an inferior education that would cost the state economically."
redux [04.15.03]
"As prescient observers of the events north of Atlanta last year realised, these aren't the old wars of science versus religion. The new assaults on the conventional wisdom frame themselves, without exception, as scientific theories, no less deserving of a hearing than any other. Proponents of [ Intelligent Design ] - using a strategy previously unheard of among anti-Darwinists - grant almost all the premises of evolution (the idea that species develop; that the world wasn't necessarily created in seven days) in order to better attack it.
"It's not that I don't think Darwinian evolution can't explain anything," says Professor Michael Behe of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, the movement's foremost academic advocate, when asked how he accounts for the very visible evolution of, say, viruses. "It's just that I don't think it can explain everything. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example, is one of the things it can explain.""
"Treadway said he had reservations about the approach to the theory of evolution in the three texts. He said he does not want people to believe he is against evolution, but wants it to be taught as a theory along with creationism.
"With the overwhelming references to evolution, I don't feel comfortable with (adopting these texts),'' Treadway said."
"Kent Hovind, a creation scientist from Pensacola, Fla. is coming to the Polymer Science building room 101 April 3 from 6 to 9 p.m. to speak about creation, evolution, and dinosaurs. There might be a debate, but probably not. I mean, who would want to defend the idea that we came from a rock? After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session.
This is not religion versus science. They must both be accepted by faith. Although they are both only theories, one is right and the other is wrong. While you must decide for yourself which view is correct, you should first learn what the creationist worldview is, before passing judgment."
redux [06.27.02]
"When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural selection 143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution's truth beyond reasonable doubt. Today that battle has been won everywhere--except in the public imagination.
Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy."
redux [04.13.02]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Before we get to the scientific arguments of the neo-creos, a word should be said about their motivation. Just what do they have against Darwinism? Unlike the old-fashioned creationists, they are not especially worried about evolution conflicting with a literal reading of Genesis. Then why can't they join with the mainstream religions, which have made their peace with Darwinism? In 1996, for example, Pope John Paul II said that the theory of evolution had been ''proved true'' and asserted its consistency with Roman Catholic doctrine. Stephen Jay Gould, though agnostic himself, salutes the wisdom of this papal pronouncement, arguing that science and religion are ''nonoverlapping magisteria.'' But the neo-creos aren't buying this. They think that belief in Darwinism and belief in God are fundamentally incompatible. Here, ironically, they are in agreement with their more radical Darwinian opponents. Both extremes concur that evolution is, in the words of Phillip Johnson, ''a purposeless and undirected process that produced mankind accidentally'' and, as such, must be at odds with the idea of a purposeful Creator."
redux [09.23.01]
"Intelligent design awkwardly embraces two clashing deities - one a glutton for praise and a dispenser of wrath, absolution, and grace, the other a curiously inept cobbler of species that need to be periodically revised and that keep getting snuffed out by the very conditions he provided for them. Why, we must wonder, would the shaper of the universe have frittered away thirteen billion years, turning out quadrillions of useless stars, before getting around to the one thing he really cared about, seeing to it that a minuscule minority of earthling vertebrates are washed clean of sin and guaranteed an eternal place in his company? And should the God of love and mercy be given credit for the anopheles mosquito, the schistosomiasis parasite, anthrax, smallpox, bubonic plague...? By purporting to detect the divine signature on every molecule while nevertheless conceding that natural selection does account for variations, the champions of intelligent design have made a conceptual mess that leaves the ancient dilemmas of theodicy harder than ever to resolve."
redux [02.05.00]
Steven Pinker: "Warm rooms are a goal of thermostats, thermostats a goal of people, people a goal of their genes. Darwin, and then Dawkins, made it scientifically respectable to talk about genes as having goals, because natural selection makes them act as if they do. But natural selection itself, being a product not of a teleological process but of the physics and mathematics of replicating systems, has no right to have a goal in the way that genes or people or thermostats do."
Robert Wright: " A system can be entirely mechanical, complying with the laws of physics and mathematics, yet be teleological, designed to realize a purpose. In fact, that seems to be true of all teleological systems I know of, including genes and people and thermostats."
redux [09.05.01]
"The one thing we've learned from the last three decades of research is that science is socially and culturally embedded and thus biased. Still, it's the best system we have for understanding causality in all realms, in all fields. So despite the fact that it's loaded with biases, there is a real world out there that we can know and the best way to know it is through science. The reason for that is because there's at least a method, an attempt to corroborate one's own subjective perceptions. There's a way to find out if you and I are seeing the same colors when we see red. There's actually a way to test these things, or at least try to get at them. That's what separates science from everything else."
redux [09.13.00]
"Kuhn wrote: "The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community." Fuller has confidence in the intelligent good sense of ordinary folks and properly calls for "the right to be wrong." But do statements such as "the universe is light-years wide," "the earth is billions of years old," "all life is related by common descent," "organisms are composed of cells that contain double-helix DNA," and so on really have no greater claim on "reality" than the Genesis stories of creationists or the popular consolations of astrology? If the answer is no, as Fuller comes dangerously close to asserting, then most scientists would throw in the towel and get jobs flipping burgers.
Fuller underestimates the highly evolved "fitness" of the methodologies, sociologies and conceptual paradigms of normal science. The deprofessionalization of science and the establishment of a citizen marketplace of ideas are not likely to happen without the sociopolitical equivalent of an asteroid impact, and no such potential upheaval looms on our intellectual radar screens. Certainly, science studies lacks the weight to do it."
8:29 PM
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The New York Times: Editorial/Op-Ed
How to Hack an Election
[requires 'free' registration]
"Concerned citizens have been warning that new electronic voting technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal elections. Now there is proof. When the State of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting, starting with voter-verified paper trails."
"Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist, but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem almost too bad to be true."
"Poll workers in Alameda County noticed something strange on election night in October. As a computer counted absentee ballots in the recall race, workers were stunned to see a big surge in support for a fringe candidate named John Burton.
Concerned that their new $12.7 million Diebold electronic voting system had developed a glitch, election officials turned to a company representative who happened to be on hand.
Lucky he was there. For an unknown reason, the computerized tally program had begun to award votes for Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to Burton, a socialist from Southern California."
redux [01.26.04]
"Researchers warned last week that an Internet voting system designed for Americans overseas to use in the November presidential election should be scrapped -- because Internet insecurities could compromise the election.
The government dismissed the researchers' findings, saying the report offered false conclusions about the security of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, system. The evaluation was written for the Defense Department by four of 10 computer experts assembled by the Federal Voting Assistance Program."
redux [12.18.03]
"Secretary of State Kevin Shelley said Tuesday that Diebold Elections Systems could lose the right to sell electronic voting machines in California after state auditors found the company distributed software that had not been approved by election officials.
The auditors reported that voters in 17 California counties cast ballots in recent elections using software that had not been certified by the state. And voters in Los Angeles County and two smaller counties voted on machines installed with software that was not approved by the Federal Election Commission."
"Remember all the chads and dimples that made voting for President so chaotic in Florida three years ago? In a well-meaning effort to fix the system before the 2004 elections, many communities--in Florida and in other states--have begun to install direct-recording electronic machines (DRE), which instantly record and tabulate votes; some even use fancy touch-screen technology similar to automated-teller machines in banks. Computer scientists are alarmed, however, by the potential to manipulate the new machines."
redux [12.12.03]
"The role of technology in U.S. elections has become the center of a curious fight in which the forces aren't lining up at all the way you might think. On one side, state and local elections officials, often thought to be technological troglodytes, are the most enthusiastic fans of the latest in computerized voting systems.
On the other is a group of computer scientists and other academics who are deeply suspicious of the technology and believe the best answer is, of all things, paper ballots."
"As for voting itself, I think we have made a horrible decision to solve this problem with technology. While the voting technology we have been considering is flawed, the best answer doesn't have to be some other voting technology that is somehow better. We turn to technology because it supposedly eliminates human error. I suggest that we add humans to the process in order to eliminate technological errors. And we'd save a lot of money in the process.
My model for smart voting is Canada. The Canadians are watching our election problems and laughing their butts off. They think we are crazy, and they are right."
"Electronic-voting machine manufacturers are circling their wagons trying to ease the security concerns raised in the last few months that their machines are susceptible to being hacked and subject to voter fraud.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University analyzed the software that runs on the voting machines of industry leader Diebold. In their report they stated, "We found significant security flaws: voters can trivially cast multiple votes with no built-in traceability, administrative functions can be performed by regular voters, and the threats posed by insiders such as poll workers, software developers, and even janitors, is even greater.""
"Several well-publicized flaws in "e-voting," or electronic voting, systems have not led to improvements, said Harvard University computer professor Rebecca Mercuri."
""Officials are not removed from their posts, fired or sent to trial; vendors are not banned from participation; equipment is not recalled; standards are not rewritten; and elections are not re-held," she said."
"An e-mail found in a collection of files stolen from Diebold Elections Systems' internal database recommends charging Maryland "out the yin-yang" if the state requires Diebold to add paper printouts to the $73 million voting system it purchased."
"Diebold spokesman David Bear would neither dispute nor confirm the accuracy of the "yin-yang" e-mail on Monday, saying it is "at best the internal discussion of one individual and does not reflect the sentiments or the position of the company.""
9:00 PM
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Pittsburgh Post Gazette
The
political is personal -- not Web-based
"We are observing the emergence of a modern political synergy; a rapid integration of the old and the new, with a consolidation of the best from both. A new form of political campaigning that will combine the technology- based virtual networks with the local and highly interpersonal networks of traditional politics. It is this critical refinement that promises to distinguish new generations of online campaigning.
It is a marriage that looks to surpass the parts that have created it, an innovation that is revolutionizing the very nature of American politics -- a collaboration that could critically refine the political art of winning."
"In September, 2002, right about the moment Howard Dean was deciding to run, the nonpareil media critic Jon Katz was writing prophetically on the New York University web page: "The flight of the young has become central for our understanding of what journalism is or needs to be. The young drive our new information culture. They invented and understand new forms of media--especially the Net the the Web... They understand, too, the extraordinary power and meaning of interactivity, and how it is redefining narrative and story-telling... But journalism doesn't get it, and has resisted the idea fiercely. Newspapers, newsmagazines and TV networks haven't radically changed form or content in half a century, despite their aging audiences, and growing competition from new media sources. They are allergic to interactivity. Increasingly, it appears they are incapable of it."
Katz forecast it all. "
redux [01.19.04]
""There's no question that young people, probably more than any other subset of voters, want to be listened to, not talked to," Cornfield said. "They want to have someone connect their perception of the issues on a local scale to those on a national or global scale."
The survey suggests that the Internet is most effective for candidates pursuing young people who are already interested in politics or passionate about certain key issues."
redux [01.10.04]
"Howard Dean, for example, has risen from obscurity to national recognition on the back of his Web-based grassroots fund-raising approach, and campaign supporters of all types have learned to use a social-networking site, Meetup.com, to arrange political gatherings. Meanwhile, candidates posting messages on campaign Web sites seems to have replaced kissing babies as a ritual.
These are encouraging developments because they share a grassroots, bottom-up approach to electing a president. But something crucial is missing because so far, electronic populism is still largely about getting out the vote. The candidates have excelled at using the Web to organize supporters and raise money in new ways, but the more tantalizing possibility--that ordinary people might collectively help shape the substance of what their candidate stands for--remains a dream."
redux [12.06.00]
"While the Internet may not have played the transformational role in the election of the U.S. President in 2000 that some predicted, this new medium of political communications suggested what an Internet-driven transformation in political communications might look like. After setting the stage by discussing the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) by Sen. John McCain in the primary campaign, the researchers evaluate the Web sites of four major candidates for President of the United States over the course of the general election. Additionally, this article serves as a digital archive of Web pages caught at what many believe is the nascent stage of what might come to be the dominant medium for political communications in the decades to come."
"This year's election could turn out to be the same watershed for assessments of the Internet's political impact that March 28 was for the Internet's economic role. That is, in politics as in business, the spread of high-speed, low-cost networked communications will be a profoundly important long-term source of change. But the most surprising lesson of this election year is how many things the Internet did not affect, and how many old rules still apply."
"In the long run, the Internet will surely change politics as much as it changes business. In the Internet world, the current cliche is that trying to estimate the network's ultimate implications is like trying to foresee today's overcrowded airline system while watching the Wright brothers' first flight in 1903. Still, how little difference the Internet has made in this year's politics is surprising."
redux [11.01.00]
"The first books about role of the Internet in political life were too ecstatic. More recent efforts at sober second thought, including Davis' The Web of Politics, Kamarck and Nye's Democracy.com and Wilhelm's Democracy in a Digital Age are too somber.
Wilhelm's Democracy in a Digital Age has the most thorough and sensible review of contemporary thought on the social construction of technology and the technological construction of society. He groups authors and pundits as neofuturists, dystopians, and technorealists, but also saunters by Derrida, Heidegger, and Habermas. He offers a concise grouping of the ways public communication may be facilitated or inhibited by conducting politics online. First, public communication will be affected by the skills and resources people bring to the process of engagement. Second, it will be affected by the distribution of computing resources across familiar categories of social inequality - race, gender and class. Third, people will have to commit to a deliberative process that involves subjecting one's opinions to public scrutiny and validation. Finally, the technical design of software applications, network architecture and hardware devices will affect the quality and quantity of political engagement online. His conclusion, in line with his peers, is that political communication online is unraveling the democratic character of the public sphere. Barriers to entry into the digitally-mediated public sphere are high, the online public does not represent or reflect the American public, the speed of the networked democracy undermines the useful slow pace of democratic decision making, and the public sphere itself is giving way to market pressures, pay-per-use services and privately owned media environments. However, barriers to entry are actually dropping because of market pressures, the online public is becoming demographically representative, and speeding up the deliberative process may weaken the political power of social elites."
"It is easy to romanticize the past of democracy as Athenian debates in front of an involved citizenry, and to believe that its return by electronic means is nigh. A quick look in the rear-view mirror at radio and then TV is sobering. Here, too, the new media were heralded as harbingers of a new and improved political dialogue. But the reality of those media has been one of cacophony, fragmentation, increasing cost, and declining value of "hard" information.
The Internet makes it easier to gather and assemble information, to deliberate and to express oneself, and to organize and coordinate action. The Internet can mobilize hard-to-reach groups, and it has unleashed much energy and creativity. Obviously there will be some shining success stories. But it would be naive to cling to the image of the early Internet -- nonprofit, cooperative, and free -- and ignore that it is becoming a commercial medium, like commercial broadcasting that replaced amateur ham radio. If anything, the Internet will lead to less stability, more fragmentation, less ability to fashion consensus, more interest-group pluralism. High-capacity computers connected to high-speed networks are no remedies for flaws in a political system. There is no quick techno- fix.
The Internet does not create a Jeffersonian democracy. It will not revive Tocqueville's Jacksonian America. It is not Lincoln-Douglas. It is not Athens, nor Appenzell. It is less of a democracy than those low-tech places. But, of course, none of these places really existed either, except as a goal, a concept, an inspiration. And in that sense, the hopes vested in the Internet are a new link in a chain of hope. Maybe naive, but certainly ennobling."
9:48 PM
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[ rhetoric ]
“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"
Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.
...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”
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