The Nerfherder

StockTwits and the "Wishdom of Crowds"...

2012-01-31T10:37:00.002-05:00

Here are some new fun phrases to whip out at your next cocktail party... "the crowdsource investing movement", "the facebook of finance", and "news dissemination in a social finance world".

All have been used to describe StockTwits, a website that aggregates Twitter messages about individual stocks and displays them on a single organized screen.

A fuller description as written by SmartMoney Magazine...

Various parts stock-market news feed, rebel community and investor kvetch-fest, Lindzon's free service essentially plucks out Twitter messages focused on individual stocks and other investments and streams them across its home page (or the user's Twitter feed) as though it were a stock ticker. But here, instead of mere price updates, the ticker ticks off snippets of gossip, prediction and raw information, all of it coming from StockTwits members -- many of whom, in turn, are shrouded in anonymity.

For a quick example, take a look at the StockTwits page for Google (ticker: $GOOG). You'll get the idea.

What's particularly interesting is that this entire business - a website with over 150,000 regularly posting members - is essentially little more than a content filter for Twitter. Again, all StockTwits posts are actually Twitter posts, just harnessed in one place.

But here's where things get problematic. Four in 10 StockTwits users self-identify as novices, and this often makes financial regulators wary. As Dyan Machan's article points out, "online investing communities, say experts, are ideal environments for market manipulators to engage in schemes like 'pumping and dumping': repeatedly hyping a stock to lure in gullible investors, then selling the moment the price rises".

StockTwits says it addresses that problem by 1) banning discussion on ultralow-priced "penny stocks", 2) kicking off anyone peddling products or posting repeated messages on the same stock or other tweets that don't "offer members value", and 3) maintaining three paid, full-time editors who troll for tweets that violate the rules or spirit of the site and award star ratings to certain "helpful" members. Above all, as its passionate members will quickly tell you, the community of StockTwitters keeps a vigilant watch on itself - akin to the Wikipedia model of self-regulation.

But I see other problems besides just the pumping-and-dumping threat. How about with the business model itself?

StockTwits has been proud to highlight the fact that, unlike most social-networking companies, it doesn't try to earn revenues through advertising, nor does it offer a paid, premium version of its product. Instead, StockTwits plans to make its money by offering an Investor Relations package to the companies profiled on the website - the StockTwits IR Suite - will give an investor relations team access to the company’s page on StockTwits and to a dashboard that lets those companies push their updates directly to Twitter and Facebook, and then measure the results.

One has to wonder, then, is StockTwits just a promotional, marketing tool for publicly-traded companies? Furthermore, add in the fact that StockTwits makes it a practice to share revenue with bloggers. You don't have to be a conspiracy-theorist to see potential conflicts of interest here.

All of this belies the point that the website is really a lot of fun! It's just that when you have this confluence of money, information, and anonymity, everybody just really needs to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism and to pay close attention to who's writing what.

How States Are Using Online Cloud-Based Voting Systems...

2012-01-29T14:22:00.001-05:00

For the past decade there has been a gradual, but hesitant, move towards Internet voting in elections. During this 2012 presidential primary season, several states including Virginia, Florida, and California have enabled such online balloting for U.S. citizens living overseas.

If you were making a pros and cons list of Internet voting, it generally looks something like this... Internet voting is great because it makes voting more accessible, but not-so-great because it can lead to electoral fraud. There are other issues that arise as well, such as the importance of a paper trail, aiding voter intent, and requiring transparency in the software's code. But the discussion usually hinges foremost on the conflict between these two core values of increasing accessibility and preventing fraud.

How does the current system work in those states? According to Information Week, an application named LiveBallot - based on Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure - ensures the ballots are from legitimate voters by having people use unique identifying information to access their ballots online. Once received, the signature on the ballot is matched with registration records to further verify identity.

The system allows voters registered to vote in primaries who live overseas to have access to ballots 45 days before the election. It also helps solve previous problems with absentee ballots, where often voters did not receive their ballots in time to vote or where their ballots didn't arrive back in the U.S. in time to be counted in the election results.

To get a sense of some opinions on this matter, check out this Slashdot thread. Theories abound from the conspiracy-minded, as to be expected, but there are also some genuinely thoughtful questions being asked about, for example, why such an application needs to be cloud-based at all.

Will it matter? In Virginia, Florida, and California we'll see soon enough. Granted, this is just for the primaries, not the general election, and the number of registered primary voters living overseas who will participate is considerably small relative to those states' populations. For now, this is really just an alternative to absentee ballots. Nevertheless, it's worth following how the states fulfill their role as policy laboratories, experimenting with new ideas. Let's see what works and what doesn't before anything goes national.

The SOPA/PIPA Blackout: How Much Does Cyberactivism Really Matter?

2012-01-18T10:04:00.000-05:00

In case you haven't noticed, thousands of websites today are voluntarily shutting down as a show of protest against two bills before Congress - the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

As described here before, both bills seek to protect copyrights on the Web by taking draconian measures that would severely curb free speech and enable the federal government to shut down any website even suspected of contributing toward copyright infringement, without a court order or due process. Both are the product of the music and movie industries' heavy lobbying muscle.

Thus today's Internet blackout. But not wanting to just rehash links to explanatory videos or online petitions which are proliferating all over the Web, I'd like to just highlight an observation about cyberactivism more generally. See, bloggers and cyberactivists have been ringing the warning bell over SOPA and PIPA for many months now, basically to no avail. It wasn't until a small handful of large websites like Google and Wikipedia made an effort today to highlight the dangers of the proposed legislation that any real meaningful awareness has been raised among the public. As I've argued many times before, despite what you might hear about the democratization of the Web and how it levels the playing field by empowering the little guy, the truth is that a small number of large and powerful actors are still more significant in affecting political change than are the large numbers of the mass public.

Even online, the grassroots be damned, at least until they get large institutional support.

The Bloggess Confession: The Most Commented Blog Post Ever?

2012-01-13T16:19:00.000-05:00

Two weeks ago, The Bloggess - one of the most popular bloggers in existence - posted a confession of "self-harm" that has caught absolute wildfire in cyberspace. As of this writing, the post has 2480 direct comments, 4963 tweets, and 4630 Facebook "shares". These numbers do not even include indirect comments on external social media sites like Reddit or Digg.

The crux of her post...

I self-harm. I don’t do it all the time and it’s not enough to put me into an institution or threaten my well-being, but it’s enough to make it frightening to live in my body sometimes. I’m far from suicidal. I do it to self-sooth, because the physical pain distracts me from the mental pain. It’s one of those things that’s impossible to explain to people who don’t understand impulse control disorder. Honestly, I find it hard to understand it to myself and I’m working my ass off to fix it now before my daughter is old enough to see the things I don’t want her to see. It is one of the hardest things I have ever done.

The response was immediate and remains ongoing. Readers posted thousands of comments, almost completely positive and supportive, sharing their own stories of self-destructive behavior. On Twitter, a new hashtag was created, #travelingreddress, where people could show support for a project that The Bloggess created last year seeking to empower women.

All of this is a feel-good social media story, but I'm particularly curious about that astronomical number of comments directly on her site - 2480 for a single post. As any blogger can tell you, that is so ridiculously above the norm of even the most highly successful posts that I spent the better part of this morning trying to determine if it may, indeed, be the single most commented-on blog post ever.

What did I uncover? Only how frustrating it is to get that kind of information. Why does no one keep meaningful statistics about social media? To support this point, The Nerfherder once did a blog post almost three years ago on the top-earning blogs in cyberspace, and it remains one of the most-visited posts to this day, despite being outdated.

Here's a challenge to any amateur researchers out there... how could one go about collecting such statistics? There are some inherent difficulties, but it's pretty clear that there has to be a market for this information for which a simple Google search doesn't provide an answer. Any ideas?

Is Internet Access a Human Right?

2012-01-11T10:51:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, Vint Cerf caused some waves by writing an op-ed in the New York Times exploring the question of whether Internet access should be considered a human right. Yes, it is THAT Vint Cerf, generally recognized as one of the founders of the Internet itself. He concludes that it should not be considered a human right, and that we should be careful not to mistake actual human rights like free speech and free assembly, which the Internet certainly helps facilitate, as being on the same level as the enabling technology. The Internet is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Truer words have never been spoken. In the stated context of the Arab Spring protests, people put their lives at risk to protest authoritarian governments and totalitarian dictators and corrupt regimes; not restricted access to Twitter. This isn't to say that restricted Internet access isn't part of the equation - it is - but it's only a symptom of the larger problem, and not the problem itself. We shouldn't lose sight of the forest through the trees.

Perhaps this doesn't seem controversial, but if you read comment threads like this one on Reddit you'll see some strong disagreement. The most valid point made by a dissenter is that Cerf's analogy with the horse is false where he claims that, in traditional terms, owning a horse is not a human right, but making a living is. However, the more apt issue in a contemporary Internet context is whether the government could take away one's right to obtain a horse. In other words, framing the question "Is Internet access a human right?" may lead to a far different answer than framing the same question as "Should the government be able to restrict people's access to information and communication with others?".

Is Internet access a human right? No. But should governments be able to restrict people's access to information and ability to communicate with others whenever they choose? No. Maybe some folks believe these two positions run in conflict with each other, but my reading of Cerf's piece leads me to believe that they do, in fact, support each other. Governments should not be able to restrict people's access to communicative technologies, not because access to those technologies is a human right, but rather because doing so would infringe upon the actual human rights of free speech and free assembly. Those are the big picture rights that Internet access only serves.

People often get carried away with a belief in technology. Heck, Cerf himself currently holds the title at Google of "Chief Internet Evangelist". But it's vital to remember that technology is just a tool to be used in pursuit of other ends. Let's inject a little bit of perspective here.

Social Media and Presidential Politics: 2012

2012-01-03T15:35:00.001-05:00

Our inaugural post for this upcoming election year has to, inevitably, focus on today's Iowa caucuses.

Four years ago, The Nerfherder began a series of posts examining to what extent online social media could be a meaningful predictor of electoral outcomes. The results showed that it was, in fact, pretty poor at doing so. Read this post from just after 2008's Super Tuesday for primaries and caucuses and see just where things stood. In retrospect, it's quite fascinating.

We're going to research this question again over the next 10 months and see if we get the same results. But, oh my, how the cyber-times have changed since 2008. In that election cycle, we used as our metrics MySpace friends, Digg friends, Facebook fans, and Technorati blog posts. Isn't that quaint?

Obviously, some updating is in order. This time around we're going to keep track of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Twitter mentions, and occasionally even sprinkle in some Google+ fans.

So here we go. On this day of the Iowa caucuses, here's how things currently stand in online social media among the Republican presidential candidates...

Facebook fans:

Mitt Romney	1,259,515
Ron Paul	672,483
Michelle Bachmann	460,336
Newt Gingrich	223,558
Rick Perry	179,966
Rick Santorum	40,895
Jon Huntsman	30,622

Twitter followers:

Newt Gingrich	1,386,258
Mitt Romney	224,598
Ron Paul	151,899
Michele Bachmann	127,312
Rick Perry	112,272
Rick Santorum	57,520
Jon Huntsman	67,168

Twitter mentions in the past week:

Ron Paul	276,948
Mitt Romney	67,597
Rick Santorum	57,183
Newt Gingrich	46,087
Rick Perry	41,695
Michele Bachmann	16,798
Jon Huntsman	7,166

Digital Shoplifting and Amazon's Price Check App...

2011-12-19T13:18:00.000-05:00

I'm a bit puzzled over the latest firestorm with Amazon. At issue is the company's release of a Price Check app for smartphones. The app is yet another price-comparison shopping tool out of dozens already out there, but what's generating buzz is that Amazon is publicly encouraging users to go into physical bricks-and-mortar stores and scan barcodes by offering an extra 5 percent off purchases, up to $5, so that users can see if Amazon offers the same product at a cheaper price.

What's the big deal? Well, none other than the Wall Street Journal has labeled this "Information-Age Shoplifting". The New York Times joined the chorus as well, pointing that although Amazon's campaign was geared more against Wal-Mart and Best Buy, it incited a monster backlash from small independent bookstores.

Apparently, many prominent authors (who, by the way, earn considerable income from Amazon sales) were also dismayed by the app, describing it as "scorched-earth capitalism" that would turn users into "Droid-packing spies" and would ultimately "further devalue, as a cultural and human necessity, the book itself".

Great material. That's why they're writers.

But am I missing something here? This is just a price-comparison tool, and there are so many out there, and they've been around for so many years, what's the issue? Is it simply that Amazon is (gasp!) offering an incentive for people to actually use their software? That hardly seems worth all the commotion.

I'm a big proponent of small, local, independent retailers. But the role they play in fostering real-life communities and culture is not mortally threatened by this one schmucky app; it's under threat by a myriad of forces occurring over a several-decades-long time span. And, yes, I realize that Amazon isn't exactly a countervailing force in that movement. But this is not doomsday.

The U.S. Copyright Office Legalizes Hacking (again)...

2011-12-05T21:26:00.000-05:00

Despite what intellectual property owners would have the public believe, hacking encrypted digital products is not always illegal. In fact, every three years the U.S. Copyright Office creates new exemptions from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) so that people can, legally, circumvent such encryption on various media products.

This is how, just last year, it became legal to "jailbreak" smart phones so that iPhone users could install apps that Apple didn't approve.

Up on the list this time around... creating an exemption which would make it legal to hack or jailbreak 1) gaming consoles like the XBox, 2) tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire, and 3) decryption software like Handbrake that enable people to make copies of DVDs.

You can imagine that the intellectual property owners fight these exemptions tooth-and-nail. But what's surprising is that, rather than harming their businesses, these exemptions often actually enhance them by exposing more people to their products, allowing the companies to generate greater derivative revenue. For example, as Wired describes...

Apple cried foul prior to the Copyright Office granting the mobile phone exemption, saying the loophole would ruin its business model. Jailbreaking allows phone owners to run any apps on their phone they want, even if they’re neither approved by Apple nor sold in iTunes.

Following Apple's 2009 claim, however, more than 18 billion apps have been downloaded from Apple. In 2009, there were 1 billion app downloads.

This is an issue that raises emotional passions. Many people, no doubt, find it inconceivable that such exemptions to the law, effectively enabling mass piracy, are ever granted. Meanwhile, plenty of others find it equally ridiculous that it's against the law in the first place to be prohibited from "opening the hood and tweaking the engine" of products which they already own and legally purchased.

But whenever you have two sides opposed in such stark contrast to each others' positions, an arbiter is necessary to find the middle ground - and in this case that arbiter is the U.S. Copyright Office (whose bureaucrats can hardly be mistaken for a bunch of anarchist hackers). Thus, this holiday season, when it becomes officially legal to hack iPads and XBoxes and Kindles and movie DVDs, just remember... this is the way the process is supposed to work.

The 'Occupy Flash' Campaign...

2011-11-28T08:00:00.001-05:00

Looking for some nonsensical news today? Try the emergence of an "Occupy Flash" movement. Adobe Flash, that is. The group's goal is to get the software firm to abandon Flash altogether - not just for the mobile web, as Adobe already did two weeks ago - and instead push Web developers to HTML5.

To most readers, this needs a bit of explanatory context. See, critics have knocked Flash for several years now as making the Web less functional. Sites that use it as a design tool, while very nice-looking with all the bells-and-whistles, then cannot be properly displayed on computers or devices without the magical Flash plugin. It created a situation where much of the Web was basically inaccessible for people who didn't want to download the sometimes-buggy software. And to cyber-ideologues, that flies in the face of the "Open Web" concept.

But what's really behind the "Occupy Flash" campaign is a nerd-based devotion to promoting HTML5 - an open language developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). HTML5 handles multimedia in some similar ways as Flash, but because it's not a proprietary corporate-owned software product, the push is on for its widespread adoption.

Ummmm... some problems with the "Occupy Flash" movement...

First of all, there are still some things that Flash can do that HTML5 cannot, and as long as this is the case, Web developers will probably still want to occasionally make use of it. And if they want to, they should be able to.

Second, why is there a need for Adobe to suddenly just stop distributing Flash altogether? If what critics say is true, then why not just let Flash die off gradually on its own? It's happened before. Remember "RealPlayer"? There's no need to be so heavy-handed.

Third, users also have a capability to "flashblock-by-default". As long as that's the case, it seems like a decent compromise solution.

In the end, the massive push by HTML5 supporters (of which I actually consider myself one) comes across here as rather maniacal and definitely unnecessary. "Occupy Flash", really? Just let better open technology run its course. The writing's on the wall anyway.

Dot-BIT and Alternative Domain Name Systems...

2011-11-21T21:00:00.000-05:00

There is only one scarce commodity on the Internet - domain names. The one-and-only official Domain Name (DNS) System is run by an organization called ICANN and they are responsible for maintaining the Internet's basic functionality. After all, imagine the chaos that would ensue if there were a thousand different websites that all used the domain name "www.google.com". ICANN makes sure that doesn't happen.

The ways in which ICANN makes decisions about the DNS system are very political and creates winners and losers. But the losers never had any recourse. There is only one DNS system run by ICANN and the buck stops with them.

But does it have to be that way? Can new top-level domains (TLDs) be created outside of ICANN's control?

Why not?

The prevailing wisdom for years has been that opening up domain name adminstration to mutiple organizations would lead to that aforementioned chaos. However, there is a growing hacktivist trend to circumvent the existing DNS system.

On a technical level, this is accomplished through the use of proxies. The most well-known example is Tor, a software suite that creates a virtual anonymizing network, also called a "DarkNet". As this Ars Technica article explains, there is now another...

Called Dot-BIT, the effort currently uses proxies, cryptography, and a small collection of DNS servers to create a section of the Internet's domain address space where domains can be provisioned, moved, and traded anonymously.

So far, over 4,000 domains have been registered within Dot-BIT's .bit virtual top level domain (TLD). Those domains are visible only to people who use a proxy service that draws address information from the project's distributed database, or to those using one of the project's two public DNS servers...

Dot-BIT is derived from a peer-to-peer network technology called Namecoin, derived from the Bitcoin digital currency technology. Just as with Bitcoin, the system is driven by cryptographic tokens, called namecoins. To buy an address in that space, you either have to "mine" namecoins by providing compute time (running client software that uses the computer's CPU or graphics processing unit) to handle the processing of transactions within the network, or buy them through an exchange with cash or Bitcoins. All of those approaches essentially provide support to the Namecoin distributed name system's infrastructure.

You can also get an initial payout of free namecoins from a "faucet" site designed to help bootstrap the network. The cost of entry is pretty low: currently, registering a new domain costs about 1.6 namecoins, which can be had for about five cents.

Your registration isn't associated with your name, address, and phone number—instead, it's linked to your cryptographic identity, preserving anonymity. Once you've registered a domain, you can assign it by sending out a JSON-formatted update request, mapping the domain to a DNS or providing IP addresses and host names to be distributed through Dot-BIT's proxies and public DNS servers. That information is then spread across all of the network's peer systems.

Simple, right?

Personally, I don't see Dot-BIT as being a meaningful tool for evading censorship. The existing DNS system remains, what Marcus Franda has called, a "single controlling point" on the Internet, and as such, websites with Dot-BIT domains can still be shut down from the primary root servers.

But what's really interesting is the mere possibility of an alternative domain name system. It seems so absurd, and such an anomaly, that the democratizing force of the global Internet is still controlled, essentially, by one organization with monopoly power and no public oversight. Eventually, as hacktivist groups keep trying to develop alternative domain name systems, ICANN will inevitably be faced with a choice - to reform their processes or be circumvented.

Can the Police Install GPS Tracking Devices on People's Cars Without a Warrant?

2011-11-16T19:47:00.001-05:00

A case was argued before the Supreme Court last week - U.S. v. Antoine Jones - which strikes at the heart of the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, specifically the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.

In 2005, D.C. police, working with the FBI, installed a GPS tracking device on Jones' car without a warrant. Eventually, acting on information they had gathered, the police then did obtain a search warrant and found a huge stash of cocaine, firearms and cash.

Jones' lawyers argue that, under the Fourth Amendment, a warrant is necessary before installing GPS tracking devices on citizens' cars.

On the other side, the police argue that it's not necessary because the authorities could have tracked the suspect's car under existing law simply by assigning enough police officers to follow him. Justice Kennedy told the defendant's lawyer: "What you're saying is that the police have to use the most inefficient methods." As L. Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal points out, to put it another way, "wouldn't most Americans think it unreasonable to lock law enforcement into earlier generations of technology when criminals use the latest technology?"

This case highlights the evolving nature of privacy rights in the context of rapidly changing technology. Most of us instinctively cringe at the thought of GPS devices being installed on our cars whenever authorities might feel like it, but then again most of us already opt for GPS tracking devices in our cars voluntarily. And the police make a good point: How different is it, really, than just having a squad car follow a suspect around?

They're both reasonable arguments, which is why, in the end, it all comes down to defining social norms. It's those norms that the justices must ultimately ascertain in order to define what constitutes "reasonable".

Crovitz is right that, culturally, Americans are more and more frequently choosing to give up their privacy in exhange for technological benefits - whether it be Facebook, Foursquare, always-on smartphones, etc. - and to a large extent this is, indeed, the norm these days.

However, I'd like to make a counterpoint... the social norm here is more nuanced than simply, "people don't care about privacy". I would argue that there is still a cultural expectation against technology in many cases. For example, this is why in baseball there remains no instant replay for calling balls and strikes, or why many municipalities still don't issue traffic tickets completely based on cameras. Somehow, even though it's technologically possible, people nevertheless don't quite think it "seems fair". The public finds it undesirable. There is a social norm that electronic surveillance can still go too far, and that's particularly true when it comes to the authorities as opposed to private websites that allow you to opt-out. Of course, there is no opt-out from the police.

This isn't to argue that GPS tracking devices shouldn't be used at all on suspects; only that public law enforcement, in order to avoid a dangerous slippery-slope, ought to still get a warrant first.

When Hackers Battle Mexican Drug Cartels...

2011-11-09T20:40:00.000-05:00

The hacker group Anonymous is highly controversial. At times they have been a force for good - for instance, when they assisted Iranians protesting their authoritarian government. Other times they've been a force for the not-so-good - like when they launched cyberattacks against a wide array of legitimate businesses that opposed Wikileaks last year.

Suddenly, the cyber-world of hackers is clashing head-on with its real-world counterpart. According to InfoWorld, the Zeta Mexican Drug Cartel recently kidnapped a member of Anonymous for making critical statements about them. The Zeta Cartel is known to have murdered and dumped the bodies of dozens of people on the side of one Veracruz highway.

Members of Anonymous responded by posting this YouTube video threatening to publicize the names of all Zeta collaborators unless the Anonymous member was freed - claiming they could identify journalists, police officers, and even taxi drivers.

What happened then?

Zeta has not shied away from targeting its online critics. In September the crime group hung two people from an overpass with a nearby sign warning bloggers and "online snitches" to beware, according to Wired. Later the same month, the decapitated body of another social media reporter was found with a similar warning.

Worried about the impact on both misidentified people and Anonymous followers, other supporters of the Anonymous movement worked to dismantle the operation over the weekend. In effect, the group canceled the attack, according to online news site Milenio.

So Anonymous is retreating. Wow. The hacker group that has reveled in its anarchic role in cyberspace has apparently met its match... that match being "reality". Keyboards versus shotguns is quite the wake-up call.

It's one thing for indivuals to try and wreak digital havoc from the safety of their living rooms, anonymously, with little concern for the consequences. Usually there are none. However, take those same individuals, remove them from their safe confines, and make them accountable for their actions, and it's a whole different ballgame.

To be clear, in no way, shape, or form should the Zeta cartel's actions be even remotely condoned or justified. They are, in fact, despicable, and downright frightening. It's just interesting to observe - as someone who's been following the misadventures of Anonymous for several years - how these folks aren't nearly as brazen when their actions might reap consequences back upon themselves.

The PROTECT IP Act: Why Can't They Get Copyright Right?

2011-11-02T21:10:00.000-04:00

The history of the copyright issue on the Internet basically boils down to the music and movie industries trying to permanently shut down any website that contributes to copyright infringement, while the courts have repeatedly held them in check saying that doing so would be a violation of the First Amendment and, in effect, an institutional form of censorship.

And here we go again...

The PROTECT-IP Act (also known as the E-PARASITES Act) is the latest bill that lobbyists for the music and movie industries are pushing through Congress. The bill seeks to protect the interests of copyright holders by forcing ISPs to block access to any site deemed by those industries to be "contributing towards infringement". No one quite knows what this means, and it can be interpreted quite broadly. The icing on the cake... such sites can be shut down with no adversarial hearing. That's right; if this bill passes, websites can now be shut down without any involvement or ruling from the courts.

The problems are the usual suspects. First, the vague language used to define "contributing towards copyright infringement" is overly broad and can be applied to almost any website. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and YouTube could all theoretically be shut down based on this language if, even once, someone posts anything deemed by the industries to be "contributory".

Second, the prescribed solution of forcing ISPs to prohibit access to such websites preemptively without going through the courts amounts to censorship without due process, and has to make any American who supports free speech and free press recoil. Could you imagine if the same standard was held to newspapers? Where the New York Times could be shut down - the entire newspaper SHUT DOWN(!!!) - because Hollywood claimed it once - once(!!!) - violated copyright with a specific movie review? And where it would be shut down without a court reviewing the case?

Mike Masnick from Techdirt offers a scathing critique of the bill where he points out...

And while defenders of this bill will insist it's only designed to target truly infringing sites, let's just recall a small list of sites and technologies the industry has insisted were all about infringement in the past: the player piano, the radio, the television, the photocopier, the phonograph, cable tv, the vcr, the mp3 player, the DVR, online video hosting sites like YouTube and more.

Here's the thing. The problem of online copyright infringment is real and many people are at least somewhat sympathetic. However, by the music and movie industries reacting, over and over again, with such ridiculous Draconian solutions, they lose any credibility - and that filters in to the public's perception of the problem as well. If, for once, these industries would stop trying to create an Internet blacklist and censor half the Web, and instead formulate something - anything - even slightly reasonable, people might not be so quick to brush them off as out-of-touch lunatics.

The PROTECT-IP Act is a travesty.

The Donation Blockade Threatening WikiLeaks...

2011-10-24T18:45:00.000-04:00

Last year when Wikileaks published thousands of classified State Department documents, many large financial companies like Visa and Mastercard decided to no longer allow payments to be made to the Wikileaks website. As described in The Nerfherder at the time, hacktivist groups then responded by launching denial-of-service attacks against those financial companies. These attacks lasted for a few weeks, but mostly subsided once the story dropped out of the headlines and all returned to normal.

But a funny thing happened. Almost a full year later, the "donation blockade" implemented by Visa, Mastercard, eBay, Western Union, PayPal, and others is actually having a serious effect. Ars Technica is reporting that the donation blockade is proving so effective that the very existence of Wikileaks is currently under threat. Payment transactions from those financial service companies constitute 95% of WikiLeaks' revenue, and the site claims to need $3.5 million over the next 12 months just in order to maintain its current level of service.

Servers, after all, cost money.

It's an interesting dilemma worth noting. In an increasingly cash-less age of ubiquitous digital transactions, how would most organizations function if suddenly and completely cut off from all credit cards, PayPal, and various other type-your-number-and-click payment services? My guess is most businesses, and for that matter most individuals, would probably face a near-existential financial threat within a few short months.

The majority of Wikileaks supporters, right now, don't even know how to make a donation even if they want to.

Whether this donation blockade does ultimately succeed in shutting down Wikileaks, or even if it just cripples it, there's an important lesson here that's playing out before our very eyes... to anyone who believes the internet has democratized power, this case is just one more example of how institutions still matter, and how only a small handful of them can, at any time or for any reason of their choosing, exert their will over others.

Even though Wikileaks garnered all the headlines a year ago for being a new kind of transformative force, these financial companies may indeed have the last laugh.

App Store Constitutionalism...

2011-10-17T23:49:00.009-04:00

For anyone looking for a truly thoughtful read today, check out Timothy B. Lee's article in Ars Technica, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the App Store".

There is an ongoing problem with App Stores; the problem being that app stores like Apple's and Google's implement unprecedented controls over the types of software that people can use, and this has the effect of greatly limiting our freedom. These app stores have been characterized as "walled gardens", which stands in contrast to the open and free World Wide Web. Much has already been written about it in books like Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It or popular blogs like Cory Doctorow's on Boing Boing, not to mention here in The Nerfherder repeatedly.

To review, here are just some of the ways in which Apple strictly controls what software can run on the iPhone...

Apple doesn't allow apps that "duplicate existing functionality" of the iPhone, for instance. At various times in the past, that has meant restrictions on podcasting apps, alternative browsers, and e-mail clients. Apple may also reject apps if they "duplicate apps already in the App Store" or "are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value."

Apple has also imposed a number of important technical restrictions. At one time, Apple accepted only native C-based apps, rejecting apps that were produced with the help of cross-platform development tools like Flash. Apple relaxed that restriction last year, but it still prohibits apps from downloading executable code.

Apple imposes restrictions to bolster its business model and those of its partners. For example, Apple has tried to force all in-app content purchases to pass through Apple's payment infrastructure, allowing Apple to take a 30 percent cut. (Apple has also been criticized in the past for restricting charitable donations from within iPhone apps.) Apple has also reportedly blocked bandwidth-heavy apps that offer VoIP, streaming video, and tethering in order to conserve AT&T's bandwidth.

Apple imposes a wide variety of purely content-based restrictions. Last year, Apple had to eat crow after cartoonist Mark Fiore won a Pulitzer prize. Apple had rejected an app featuring Fiore's work because it "ridiculed public figures" in violation of the iPhone developer guidelines. Apps that "encourage excessive consumption of alcohol or illegal substances" are also out. In June, Apple announced it would start rejecting DUI checkpoint apps.

Sexual content has emerged as another flashpoint. The app store rules have prohibited pornographic apps, including apps that "contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic." Apple has apparently interpreted this restriction broadly. For example, the gay dating app Grindr blames Apple for the service's rule that public Grindr profiles must be G-rated.

So the big question is how can individuals retain their digital freedoms while still living in the contemporary App Store world?

Lee argues that what's needed "are mechanisms for users to delegate authority over their devices to third parties while holding those parties accountable for their decisions". In other words, most of us are inevitably willing to give up some of our freedoms in exchange for ever-more helpful devices - and that's OK, so long as the makers of those devices and their software can be held accountable.

How can such companies be held accountable? This is, after all, capitalism, so all that's required is true market competition and for users to have a real capability to switch providers.

But often today, meaningful competition is lacking and switching costs are too high.

Lee draws an analogy to four principles of constitutional government that can be usefully applied to app stores....

Federalism -

The right of exit is a powerful check against over-reaching regulators. In the world of nation-states, citizens flee repressive regimes for freer ones. In the world of technology, users and developers switch from one platform to another to find the one that best meets their needs. Of course, in both cases, exit can be expensive. Most of us have friends, family, jobs, and other ties holding us to the nation of our birth. Similarly, network effects and human capital keep us tied to existing platforms. If the developer gets his iPhone app rejected by Apple, it's expensive to re-write it for Android.

The American founders developed a novel solution to this problem: multiple semi-sovereign entities within the same nation. If I don't like the policies of the government here in Pennsylvania, I can move to one of the 49 other American states without giving up the benefits of American citizenship. These "laboratories of democracy" compete with each other to serve their citizens.

Google's decision to make Android open source has created a similar dynamic. Amazon has run its own app store for Android since March, and in September the company jumped into the hardware game with the Kindle Fire. Barnes & Noble also sells Android devices and has an app store of its own.

So within the Android "nation" are sovereign "states" like Google, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. Users and developers who find Google's app store rules not to their liking can flee to the Amazon app store without incurring the high costs of moving to a completely new platform. This is a key selling point for app developers, because it means that developers aren't too dependent on any one company to sell their apps. And it gives each Android vendor a stronger incentive to treat their customers and developers well, since they can easily leave for another Android-based platform.

Judicial Independence -

The United States, like most free countries, has a judiciary that's charged with applying the law in an impartial fashion. Judges' impartiality is guaranteed by giving them structural and financial independence from the other branches of government. Many private firms use this strategy as well. For example, reputable news organizations avoid conflicts of interest between their news coverage and advertisers by creating separate business and editorial departments.

Companies that run app stores would be well-served by a similar strategy. Users and developers are entitled to expect that app reviewers will act in the interests of users, rather than using the power to reject apps as a weapon against competitors. While "strategic" app rejections might seem like good business in the short term, the long-term result will be to tarnish the platform's reputation among both users and developers.

To guard against this temptation, employees who run the company's app store could report to a different senior executive than the ones that run other parts of the company. And that executive should be explicitly told to put the interests of users ahead of the short-term interests of the rest of the company. This would give users, and especially developers, more confidence to invest in the long-term health of the platform.

Indeed, Google already has a model for this strategy: its own search engine division. The people who run the search engine are part of a completely separate management hierarchy from the people who sell search ads, and it's expected that the search division will sometimes make decisions that are contrary to the interests of major advertisers. That might be bad for Google's bottom line in the short run, but it's proven a good move in the long run, because it promotes search quality and fosters user trust.

Transparency -

One of the most common complaints of iOS developers is the lack of transparency in app review decisions. Apple provides developers with a partial list of "guidelines" for iOS developers, but there are apparently undisclosed criteria, and it's not always clear why one app is approved while another is rejected.

Moreover, if the published guidelines are ambiguous or silent on a particular point, it can be hard to get a straight answer about what the rules are. This creates uncertainty that discourages developers from creating new apps.

One way to help alleviate this uncertainty would be for Apple to create a publicly available database of past decisions, along with the rationale behind rejections. Then a developer could look for apps similar to his own to see what issues the developers of those apps encountered during the review process.

Stare Decisis -

This is the legal principle that courts should respect the precedents set by earlier judicial decisions. In America's common law legal system, much of the law exists not as formally enacted statutes, but as the accumulation of precedents. The principle of stare decisis promotes predictability and fairness in the legal system. By committing themselves to following past precedents in future cases, courts ensure that all similarly situated parties are treated alike, and they make it possible for citizens to predict how the courts will rule even on subjects that Congress hasn't explicitly litigated about.

Adopting a stare decisis principle for app stores would have similar benefits. The arbitrary and unpredictable nature of Apple's app store review process has been a frequent complaint. Adopting a formal policy of following past precedents when making future decisions would do a lot to allay those fears.

Moreover, when transparency and stare decisis are combined, they become a clever way to crowdsource the effort required to render consistent decisions. When lawyers are arguing a case in court, they do legal research to find examples of similar cases that reached an outcome favorable to the lawyer's clients. This makes the judge's job easier, since the relevant precedents are placed at his fingertips. Similarly, Apple could encourage app developers to include with their application examples of past apps with similar functionality, and to explain how the app under review is consistent with those past decisions.

Of course, stare decisis isn't an absolute principle. Congress can and does enact new statutes that overrule past precedents. Similarly, Apple may change its mind and overrule past decisions. But it should do so by explicitly issuing a new policy, and in close cases it should "grandfather" already approved apps and features. And the default should be to treat past decisions as binding.

These are all interesting talking points and the analogy to constitutional principles may, indeed, be a workable one. However, what strikes me as lacking is the Big Picture. Lee's approach here is to try and improve the business model of the app stores, but the problem isn't the business model, it's what the "walled gardens" of the app stores actually threaten - an end to the free and open World Wide Web; the Web where anyone can develop pages, sites, software, and technology; the Web that doesn't need prior corporate approval before something can be shared; the Web of innovation; the Web where free speech, free expression, and free assembly flourish.

THAT is what's at stake, and the app stores, particularly Apple's, threaten the open Web's very existence. Lee proposes ways of making the app stores work better; to be more consumer-friendly. That's all well and good, but it would be nice if we the people, especially in this context of individual freedoms, weren't only thought of only as consumers.

For once.

Following the 'Occupy Wall Street' Protests Online...

2011-10-13T20:58:00.001-04:00

Regardless of whether you support or oppose what's happening, here are just some quick links and info for following the "Occupy Wall Street" protests on the Web...

The Official Website
WeArethe99Percent Blog on Tumblr - a running list of blog posts, photographs, tweets, likes, and more.
Meetup.com - over 1500 meetups across the country, as of the time of this writing.
@OccupyWallStNYC - one of the movement's main Twitter accounts, with 50,000 followers and growing. For a more general look at the ongoing Twitter discussion related to the movement, view these updated search results.
Occupy Wall St. Facebook Page - over 188,000 "likes", and growing.
YouTube - Over 14,000 search results come up related to "occupy wall street". One popular channel is TheOther99Percent and this single video of female protesters being penned in and maced by police has over one million views.
Trendrr - While people in New York are still dominating the conversation on Twitter, an analysis of Twitter data shows that almost half of the posts were made in other parts of the country, namely, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington D.C.

A Taxonomy of Internet Privacy Problems...

2011-10-12T19:45:00.004-04:00

Too often, people lump together very different problems like posting embarassing photos on Facebook and a hacker breaking into a database and stealing Social Security numbers, all under the umbrella term of "Internet privacy". Obviously, these are vastly different problems, and policies designed to address them would (and should) require vastly different solutions.

Daniel Solove, in his book Understanding Privacy, puts forth a taxonomy of Internet privacy problems to draw out the many different types of problems out there.

His four principle categories include:

Information Collection - what information is being gathered and through what means is it occurring.
Information Processing - how it is stored, combined, manipulated, searched, and used.
Information Dissemination - how it is released or transferred to others.
Invasion - impingements directly on the individual.

This taxonomy is pretty straightforward, and it ought to be helpful to anyone trying to make sense out of the myriad of "Internet privacy problems" thrown around in the headlines. Most people's knee-jerk reaction of "Hey, that's an invasion of my privacy!" isn't really an adequate analysis for scholars, not to mention policymakers. Solove's taxonomy, by drawing distinctions among privacy problems, helps clarify the issue and bring meaning and context to the news headlines we often come across.

Perhaps what's even more interesting, however, is his examination of why privacy should even be considered a good thing. Sure, privacy is a core value that we all instinctively cherish, but what happens when it comes into conflict with other core values like free speech or security? Even though his taxonomy is interpretively helpful, Solove's greater contribution, in my opinion, is his argument that the value of privacy should be determined on the basis of its importance to society, NOT in terms of individual rights. Privacy's value in a particular context "depends upon the social importance of the activities that it facilitates".

To try and conceive of privacy not in terms of individual rights but in a more collectivist sense might be a little counterintuitive, but it's an interesting logical exercise. I just wonder what the ramifications might be if we conceived of other individual rights - like free speech, free assembly, free religion, etc. - in similar non-individualistic terms.

Fighting Hate Speech Online...

2011-10-05T12:32:00.001-04:00

Hate speech proliferates everywhere on the Web. No one denies this. The question is, what can be done about it?

In the most recent issue of Policy & Internet, Raphael Cohen-Almagor takes an applied ethics approach to the problem in his article "Fighting Hate and Bigotry on the Internet". After studying dozens of hate sites and conducting interviews with over 50 leading Internet scholars, security experts, and human rights activists, he formulates the following strategy for countering hate speech online...

Speech vs. Speech: tackling net hate with more communication, more openness, and exposing the problem in the free marketplace of ideas.
Education: entailing activity at both primary and high school levels.
Hate Watch: Names of hate sites should be published to have a continually updated list of them in order to alert people about the sites and have them properly labeled by search engines and ISPs.
Citizens' Initiatives to Combat Hate: to educate people, provide funds or other assistance to help the victims of hate crimes, and assist in fighting hate groups.
Internet Users' Initiatives to Combat Hate: Facebook forums, forums that call upon ISPs to adopt a code of responsible conduct, including anti-hate provisions, etc.
Content Filters: both client- and server-side filtering, monitoring, and auditing tools.
Blocking Programs at Work and School: Governments at all levels employ between 30 and 60 percent of the workforce and public schools attract an even higher percentage of the school age population. It should be a matter of government policy that no employees or students be able to access hate sites unless this access is related to their work.
Responsibility of ISPs: ISPs are often reluctant to block service to those who violate their terms of service (TOS) agreements because it eats into their profit margins, however they commonly deny service or remove material from their servers in the event of copyright violations. They ought to start taking hate speech at least as seriously as copyright.
Link to a CyberTipline: What ISPs and hosting companies could certainly do is provide a uniform channel for user complaints, like a CyberTipline, and link to it from a prominent place on their website.
Omit or Label Hate Websites in Search Engines
Label, Name, and Shame ISPs and web-hosting services that refuse to cooperate
Seek out Global Cooperation

Cohen-Almagor is right to try and balance the benefits of free expression, on the one hand, and the benefits of social responsibility, on the other. However, here is the controversial point... At the conclusion of his paper, he provides a detailed list of hate websites, complete with URLs. Certainly, publishing this list serves his stated desire to bring such sites to the public's attention. However, many critics will argue that publishing this list, and others like it, by bringing it to the public's attention, actually serves just as much as a marketing tool for these hate sites, which might otherwise go unnoticed by those fringe elements who might actually support them, as it does to raise public opinion to counter them.

Should the list of hate sites be promulgated? Would spreading it around as much as possible to everyone do more good or harm? What are your thoughts?

The TweetWar Between NATO and Taliban Forces...

2011-09-19T21:48:00.000-04:00

Every once in a while the Internet proves to be a valuable forum for conversations between enemies to take place when they otherwise might not. Charles Cameron from SmartMobs, in particular, has, in the past, highlighted a few instances of this in a security/terrorism context. But what happened last week wasn't constructive; it was a case where both sides simply brought their fight to the Web. And it was quite fascinating to observe.

The Guardian first reported on the TweetWar that occured last week between NATO and Taliban forces just after the Kabul embassy attack. Basically, a Taliban spokesperson (@abalkhi) and the public affairs office of NATO’s ISAF (@ISAFmedia) engaged in a direct and public conversation on Twitter where both sides hurled repeated digs at each other, arguing who was truly at fault (from their perspective) for civilian deaths, and which media sources could be trusted.

Leo Shane III storified it as follows...

There isn't necessarily a large significant point to be made here. It's just amazing how, when these dialogues between real-space enemies take place in cyberspace, we all get to be a fly on the wall.

Is a Country Really a Country If It's Not on Google Maps?

2011-09-12T21:11:00.003-04:00

On July 9th, after decades of violent conflict, South Sudan gained its independence and became an autonomous nation-state. It has since been formally recognized by the United Nations and the entire international community.

So why is it still not recognized on the world maps of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and National Geographic? And perhaps more importantly, what role do these online cartographers now play in actually establishing default political borders in disputed regions?

Not only has this Google-mapping raised some eyebrows in the case of South Sudan, but in Libya as well. As RWW reports, during the recent popular uprising and overthrow of Moammar Ghaddafi, Google Maps restored the name of "Martyr's Square" in Tripoli - renamed "Green Square" by Gaddafi's regime - almost immediately after rebel forces retook Libya's capital from the dictator.

Perhaps it's a bit of a stretch to attach any level of significance to these developments - and not too much should be read into the fact that Google and its mapping cohorts seem to update politicized names and borders almost immediately in some cases while dragging their feet for months in others. Then again, with millions of users around the globe using these mapping services as primary tools, one could argue that they do, in fact, play a significant role in shaping public perception.

Out of curiousity, I went to examine the Google Map demarcating the borders between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Contrast that with these maps presented today in the New York Times by David Markovsky as possible negotiated borders in a peace settlement, AND contrast those with maps like this one which you still see today in the Arab world depicting the West Bank as remaining a part of Jordan, pre-1967, and the stark differences remind us of just how powerful maps can be in developing default geographic assumptions.

To complicate matters further, Google Maps performs many of its "updates" by using something called Google Map Maker. It's basically a Wikipedia-style system where, rather than the company itself maintaining their maps, ordinary users submit the updates - and this is especially prevalent overseas in small-market places like South Sudan. The increased reliance on this often-unreliable system is what's referred to as "The Deputization of the Crowd" (a play on the famous "Wisdom of the Crowd" phrase). In the meantime, since apparently nobody has yet submitted an updated map of South Sudan, the new nation remains in digital limbo - formally recognized in real-space, just not in cyberspace. Activists have resorted to an online petition to persuade Google to finally recognize South Sudan for what it is - an independent nation with soverign borders.

So where does all this leave us? Maps are important in shaping public perception, and mapmakers especially so. It's too far-fetched to suggest that Google Maps has any sort of meaningful impact on the resolution of political disputes, however, we also shouldn't completely underestimate the powerful influence that the mapmakers wield either.

Twitter Research at APSA...

2011-09-07T21:44:00.000-04:00

A dominant trend at the American Political Science Association (APSA) Conference in Seattle last week was the number of research studies currently being performed on the role of Twitter in politics. Of course Twitter is significant, it was just interesting how many political science studies are now focused on it (just as Facebook was an equally dominant focus of research a few years ago).

Without breaking down the numerous panels and presentations in detail, I thought it might at least be worth noting a few of the statistics that caught my eye...

Republicans are dramatically adopting and using Twitter more than Democrats.
Congressmen's freshman-level status and age DO matter in terms of Twitter use, however education levels and how affluent their constituencies are DO NOT matter.
The political party in the minority uses Twitter more (both in the U.S. and in Great Britain).
During the 2010 campaign, 76% of "political tweets" promoted a candidate versus 34% of TV ads; 18% of tweets attacked a candidate versus 37% of TV ads; Only 4% of tweets contrasted two candidates versus 24% of TV ads.
The most "elite" or "influential" politicians on Twitter (as measured by algorithm):
1. Sarah Palin
2. Anthony Weiner
3. Newt Gingrich
4. Marco Rubio
5. Gabrielle Giffords
6. Nancy Pelosi
7. Arnold Schwarzenegger
Who is following the politicians on Twitter? Average age 36; Race 88% white; 94% of them voted in the 2010 election; "Off-the-charts" in terms of political knowledge.

And just two quick WOW stats that are non-Twitter-related...

One in every 500 people in the U.S. is a "political blogger".
In 2010, 22% of Internet users used Social Media for political purposes.

There's an awful lot more in the pipeline...

Blogging in the Classroom: Results of an Experiment...

2011-08-30T11:26:00.001-04:00

For years now, academics have touted the potential of blogs as a learning tool. They can foster discussion and dialogue among students and, as a low-stakes form of writing, may also help improve writing skills and develop a stronger understanding of the course content.

The only problem... no one knows if they actually work.

As an educator, I've grown increasingly frustrated with the complete lack of quantitative data on the subject. There does not exist any research study on the value of blogs on the classroom, only hypothesizing and conjecture.

This summer I sought out to address this. Here are the details of my experiment... Teaching three sections of "U.S. Government & Politics", each with approximately 35 students, I assigned one of the three main blogging methods to each section as a required part of the curriculum.

Method #1 - There is one class blog. The instructor writes the posts, and the students are required to leave comments on those posts.
Method #2 - There is one class blog. The students are required to write at least one original post, and also to leave comments on other student's posts.
Method #3 - There is no class blog, but instead each student creates and maintains their own blog. Students are required to write original posts on their own blog as well as leave comments on their classmates' blogs.

I'm currently in the process of analyzing the quantitative data that resulted from implementing each method in each class section. What I'm interested in discovering is to what extent blogging affected, or did not affect, students' 1) formal writing assignment grades and 2) grades on exams, which focus on course content.

Here's a preview of the results. First of all, Method #3 was a complete waste of time and I strongly urge other instructors to never even consider it. The topics of the students' blog posts were all over the place, directionless, and, consequently, the comment-based discussion, never got off the ground. Many students spent more time playing with the blog's graphic design than on the content itself.

On the other hand, Method #1 was fabulous, and this is what I'll be implementing again in my classrooms in the future. Since only the instructor was writing the posts, those posts were able to stay on topic and focus on themes covered in class. Students' comments, as a result, also largely stayed on topic, and several students expressed how the activity clarified ideas for them in writing their formal term paper. Many also seemed to enjoy having a venue to express their opinions on political issues to an audience, despite occurring within the limits of academic guidelines.

Finally, Method #2 came out somewhere in the middle. Having the one class blog translated into the students staying focused on the content of the blog assignment, rather than being distracted with design and maintenance, and that's a positive thing. However, similar to Method #3, the freedom to write original posts led to students often veering quite a bit off topic (at least from my instructor's perspective). While I wasn't thrilled at that development, the bright trade-off was that students were far more active in leaving comments on each other's posts, often going far beyond the minimum requirements of the assignment. This terrific bottom-up discussion and dialogue took on a life of its own which, while it may not have always been ideal as far as the course material, is nevertheless one of blogging's principle characteristics and, in that sense, was still quite worthy.

In conclusion, to any instructors out there, my experiment doing a comparative analysis of all three methods of blogging in the classroom leads me to recommend, whole-heartedly, Method #1. Actual quantitative data to follow shortly...

The Future of Reputation: Solove's Middle-of-the-Road Approach...

2011-08-17T23:11:00.000-04:00

In the scholarship on Internet privacy, a new subfield has emerged which focuses on Reputation. In an age of digital social-networking, our reputations - and the means by which they're shaped - are significantly transformed. Information about ourselves that was once "scattered, forgettable, and localized" is now becoming "permanent and searchable". Whatever social transgressions we might have, or whatever gossip about us circulates, - whether true or not, - in the past these would have eventually been forgotten and our lives would move on. However, today with Google archiving everything about us forever, and making it all easily searchable, these permanent "digital rap sheets" follow us and impede our ability later in life to be who we want to be. As one blog commentator wrote, "Right or wrong, the Internet is a cruel historian".

Think of what teenagers and college students post on Facebook. Is it fair that a Digital Scarlet Letter comprised of embarassing gossip, which may or may not be accurate, follow them for the rest of their lives? How can privacy law play a role in determining fairness?

The principle book on the subject is The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet by Daniel J. Solove. It explores the online reputation dilemma in-depth citing numerous examples and teases out the complexity of how a reasonable expectation of privacy can be preserved even at a time when so many people voluntarily share revealing details about themselves in public cyber spaces.

Solove then takes a legal approach in proposing what ought to be done about the problem - sort of. He takes issue with privacy law as it currently exists being too binary - meaning that the law generally holds that once something is exposed to the public, it can no longer be considered private. While insisting that the law definitely has an important role to play, it works best, he says, when it can hover as a threat in the background but still allow most problems to be worked out informally - through mediation and binding arbitration. Specifically, the law can act as a credible threat yet also keep lawsuits in check by, first, limiting damages, and second, by requiring that plaintiffs must exhaust all informal, or "alternative dispute resolution", mechanisms before a case would go to court. By doing so, "the law should cast a wider net, yet have a less painful bite". He labels this a "middle-of-the-road" approach that takes into consideration a more "nuanced" view of privacy.

Now bring this back to reality and think of Facebook. Certainly, it's far too simplistic for the law to only recognize that if you're in public then you have no privacy. Solove is absolutely right in pointing out how inadequate that statement is in a modern Facebook context. Privacy can no longer be thought of as binary, but as "a complicated set of norms, expectations, and desires". Indeed, we should expand the law's recognition of privacy so that it covers more situations.

But here's where Solove loses me. After giving detailed reasons for why the law should be reformed and recommendations for how to do it, he then says that the law really isn't the primary solution at all. Social norms are. He supports Lior Strahilevitz' claim that "information should be considered private if it remains within a confined group - even if that group is rather large". Information should not be taken beyond the social circle in which it was originally shared. He goes on to say that "we all have pretty good intuitions about how gossip travels" and it is this key intuition that's at the heart of social norms on the issue.

Does anyone else see a major problem in defining privacy based on confined social circles? Don't many, if not all, of our social circles often overlap?

Relying on "intuition" weakens Solove's argument considerably. If the law truly is a "puny instrument" compared to norms, then why stake out a legal approach in the first place? Only at the very end of the book does he explore norm-based solutions, and they're pretty hokie, at that, citing things like better education, changing the opt-out defaults on websites, and bloggers adhering to a voluntary code of ethics.

His legal argument is the better one, and I would've been more satisfied if he had just left it at that. There was no need to hedge his bet.

That said, The Future of Reputation is still perhaps the single best canonical book exploring the subject of online reputation, and it's definitely worth reading. My only criticism is that, despite making an awful lot of terrific thought-provoking statements, in the end I'm left a bit confused, scratching my head over what it is that he's actually suggesting.

Do We Need a Social Media Kill-Switch in the Wake of the London Riots?

2011-08-16T12:53:00.000-04:00

Following the recent riots in London and surrounding cities, the British government is now considering whether it should seek to ban people from using social networks and other communications technologies during future times of crisis.

In a statement to the House of Commons, Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged: "we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality".

Is there truly a need for a social media kill-switch?

It is certainly true that different social media outlets played a very prominent role in turning the original clash into a much larger and more widespread riot. Blackberry Messenger and Twitter, in particular, are receiving the lion's share of the blame, even helping criminals to plan some of their activities.

However, Tony Hallett has posted some first-hand perspective that proves an insightful counterpoint. Hallett lives in Colliers Wood, one of the neighborhoods ravaged by the rioting and looting, and despite having to personally deal with the aftermath in his hometown, he nevertheless argues that giving the government a social media kill-switch would do far more harm than good.

At the weekend, there was a community meeting. There was a lot of confusion, anger and words of support from all there - ordinary residents as much as police, fire service, local councillors, business leaders and our local MP, who has called Colliers Wood home most of her life. But one thing most agreed on was that keeping the community informed about what's going on, not letting those living alone feel helpless or misinformed, is critical. While not everyone is online - and there are clearly ways to keep that minority in the loop - online should be key.

As much as social media may have exacerbated the rioting while it was taking place, it has also played a very positive role during the aftermath - both in organizing a post-riot clean-up and helping police to identify the criminals involved. Couple this with Hallett's testimony of how, even during the riots, social media helped to keep the sense of community somewhat intact and may have even prevented a complete and total breakdown of civil society (think Hurricane Katrina), and you at least have a very reasonable argument suggesting that the positives outweigh the negatives. At least that's the way a lot of the people experiencing this event first-hand see it.

To suggest that governments need a social media kill-switch to maintain law and order is quite an overreach. Besides, if the public is aware that their governments will investigate Blackberry and Twitter communications after-the-fact, then rioters and looters would be pretty stupid to ever use them for organizing their criminal endeavors in the first place.

The Internet Sales Tax War...

2011-08-12T13:43:00.001-04:00

On July 1st, a new law went into effect in California imposing a sales tax on Internet purchases. From online retailers like Amazon.com, we've grown accustomed to not having to pay any sales taxes, but after years of budget deficits and governments increasingly desperate for new sources of revenue, is the time now ripe for an Internet sales tax to be imposed?

Lots of states apparently think so and are attempting to do just that. However, the question is whether states can force out-of-state merchants to collect sales tax on purchases by in-state residents.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that the answer was "No" - that states cannot force retailers without an in-state presence, or "nexus", to collect sales tax. As The Economist notes, the Court's justification was that America has over 8,000 different sales tax jurisdictions that are "constantly changing their rules and are not even aligned with zip codes". Requiring online retailers to collect a different sales tax rate for each purchase depending on where that customer lives would be an enormous burden and would chill interstate commerce with disastrous consequences.

The problem is especially acute with Amazon and California. A large amount of Amazon's business stems from its local "affiliates" - entrepreneurs who link to Amazon from their own websites and earn a commission. California is arguing that if Amazon has any affiliates residing within its borders, that constitutes a "nexus" and therefore all of Amazon is taxable.

In response, when other states like New York, Colorado, and North Carolina have used this argument in the past, Amazon simply cut its links with in-state affiliates. Rather than having to deal with the 8,000-strong jurisdictional headache, Amazon's preference is to simply stop conducting its affiliate business in that state entirely. As a result, Rhode Island has actually confirmed that it has raised absolutely no new money whatsoever from its sales tax efforts.

Nobody is the winner in this game - not the online retailers, not the state governments, and certainly not the consumers. If (and it's a big If) Internet sales taxes are now viewed as necessary and are going to be imposed, what's needed is federal legislation that would standardize America's many different sales tax regimes. Only through this method - by alleviating the collection burden on businesses and by actually generating more revenue for the states - might such as sales tax work.

Frustration with the Commerce Department's Cybersecurity Green Paper...

2011-08-09T13:09:00.000-04:00

Cybersecurity remains one of the most important national issues that the public has no interest in whatsoever. Despite academics and industry professionals pleading their ever-growing concerns, and despite media outlets like CNN devoting entire hour-long specials to the issue, the public remains extremely apathetic.

Until recently, cybersecurity policy was handled by two main players - The Department of Defense focuses on cyberwarfare and military operations while the Department of Homeland Security focuses on protecting the "critical infrastructure" of the Internet that would be vital during emergencies; for example, the banking and telecommunications sectors.

The Commerce Department is now weighing in as well. They have released a Green Paper titled "Cybersecurity, Innovation and the Internet Economy". Its focus is on the "Non-Critical Infrastructure" sector - which it will now call the "Internet and Information Innovation Sector" - which basically refers to private ISPs, website operators, and software and service providers.

So what's the big deal? Is this just yet another bureaucratic classification that adds more complexity to an already highly complex issue?

Because the paper emanates from the Commerce Department, its assumptions are quite clear. First, it claims to be guided by the fundamental principle of trust. Trust is vitally necessary in order for consumers to participate actively in the cyber-economy, thus it shouldn't be surprising to see it listed as the first priority in a Commerce Department security wishlist.

The second principle is "a commitment to multi-stakeholder policymaking as a tool for adapting to the dynamically changing nature of the Internet". This is extremely similar to the approach used by the Homeland Security Department and is of great interest to policy geeks. But another way of phrasing it is that the government openly admits it can't do much to protect the Internet's decentralized private assets, so it will rely on the many businesses involved to design and adopt completely voluntary measures. In other words, "multi-stakeholder" means that the government isn't going to take care of it.

What else? The paper's actual recommendations for enhancing cybersecurity include four objectives: 1) Enhancing Internet privacy, 2) Improving cybersecurity, 3) Protecting intellectual property, and 4) Ensuring the global free flow of information. Certainly, these are all worthy goals, however, again it shouldn't be surprising that the Commerce Department is conflating the interests of the business community with national security interests. One just has to wonder, though, how preventing a teenager from downloading a Beatles Album off BitTorrent somehow protects the nation from a cyberterrorist attack?

I don't mean to come across as overly harsh or critical. An official paper calling for cybersecurity policy being extended into the "non-critical" sectors of cyberspace is actually long overdue, and the Commerce Department should be commended for taking the initiative and recognizing that, in the face of a massive cyberattack, there are indeed many things worthy of protecting besides just the websites of Verizon and Bank of America.

The frustration among professionals is just that the Commerce Department's approach, which is exactly the same as Homeland Security's approach, relies completely on voluntary opt-in measures being adopted by literally millions of private Internet companies - and there's not a person alive who believes that's ever going to happen. Meanwhile, the average individual, whose information is what's most vulnerable to a cyberattack, is completely helpless in the absence of any regulation.

The Green Paper states...

Our approach recognizes a key role for government in convening stakeholders and leading the way to policy solutions that protect the public interest as well as private profits, but pure government prescription is a prescription for failure.

As a general principle, I actually agree. But since when did we stop seeking government solutions to issues of national security?

Google+ and the Facebook Natural Monopoly: Is Market Competition the Key to Internet Privacy?

2011-08-02T17:04:00.001-04:00

One of my students, whose husband apparently works for Google, recently asked if I thought Google+ was going to succeed in giving Facebook a run for its money.

I had to reply no. Facebook is quickly becoming what economists refer to as a "natural monopoly" - meaning that, as users build Friend Lists hundreds of people long and upload thousands of photos and other types of content, they become more firmly entrenched in the service. Facebook has a powerful inertia that makes it ever-less likely for users to switch to a competitor. For these reasons - entrenched users and higher switching costs - it's going to be nearly impossible for Google+ to gain any meaningful traction.

But if Facebook is, or is on its way toward becoming, a natural monopoly, what are the implications for privacy?

Ruben Rodrigues examines this question in "Privacy on Social Networks: Norms, Markets, and Natural Monopoly" (a chapter in The Offensive Internet by Saul Levmore and Martha C. Nussbaum).

His argument is based on the assumption that market competition is the key to securing privacy rights.

He then asserts that the best way to ensure competition is, first, to apply existing anti-trust laws to bar anti-competitive conduct. This hardly seems controversial.

Second, he says, the next best way to ensure competition is by keeping switching costs low by requiring that data be highly portable and interoperable. In practical terms, this means requiring Facebook to share your login information with 3rd parties so that competitors can more easily transfer your Facebook account to a different service without you losing your contacts, photos, and other information. The logic is that by making it easier for people to leave Facebook and go to another service, the market will stay competitive and services will continue competing for users on privacy grounds.

This strikes me as a very counter-intuitive claim. Would sharing my login information with 3rd parties really help enhance my privacy?

Rodrigues seems to be suggesting that each of us ought to purposely further damage our privacy in order to somehow protect it in a larger theoretical context. Forgive me for being a little bit skeptical. The thought of making my login information accessible to even more parties, for my own good, instinctively makes me cringe. And I doubt I'm alone.

Instead, I adhere to the notion purported by Lior Strahilevitz in "A Social Networks Theory of Privacy" - that "just because someone has consented to disclosing information to a set group of people does not mean the individual has consented to broader, public disclosure".

Ultimately, Rodrigues makes a strong case for how market competition is key to securing privacy rights, but puts forth an overly academic (read: impractical) argument in suggesting recommendations for how that competition is to be accomplished.

Would people's privacy be better protected if both Google+ and Facebook were strong players in the space? Perhaps. But requiring Facebook to provide all of its user data to any- and all-comers? Yikes!

What the Murdoch Phone Hacking Scandal Highlights About Privacy Rights...

2011-07-27T17:14:00.003-04:00

Following up on my previous examination of Internet privacy, L. Gordon Crovitz just wrote in the Wall Street Journal how the Murdoch phone hacking scandal, being such a clear violation of privacy, really serves to highlight just how ambiguous privacy is in other areas.

In the phone hacking case, there was little outrage when celebrities and royalty had their voicemail compromised, perhaps because these people have chosen to live public lives. But when the hacking reached private people, such as the family of Milly Dowler, the young murder victim in Britain — with messages erased that gave false hope to the parents that the girl might still be alive — everyone was outraged.

It's certainly true that society has different expectations of privacy rights for individuals who choose to lead public lives versus those who wish to remain private. The problem is that, in the Age of Facebook, everyone chooses to lead public lives to some extent.

How do we reconcile this? Approaches that only seek to strengthen privacy seem to miss the big picture - they're certainly part of the equation, but they fail to account for the larger complexities of the issue. In other words, to use Crovitz' analogy, if all we focus on is how it should be illegal for the media to reveal the guest list at a prominent socialite's dinner party, we're in denial about the fact that the hostess of the party will probably blog about it in advance and that the guests will likely send Twitter updates while it's under way.

Focusing on that reality is the real challenge in the contemporary Internet privacy debate. And Crovitz has it exactly right...

The modern expectation of privacy is not that people will always want to remain anonymous. Instead, they expect to have a choice about how they both control and share information about themselves. Privacy should be about individual choice, not based on a predetermined definition of either confidentiality or transparency.

Thus, when we talk about enhancing "Internet privacy rights", what we should focus on is not how to protect, protect, protect at all costs. Rather, enhancing privacy rights actually means enhancing the choices that individuals have in deciding what information they want to share and with whom they want to share it with.

More options - and more easily understandable options - for the average social media user. Sounds like progress to me.

Do Free Markets Make It Worse? The Case of New TLDs...

2011-07-26T08:02:00.003-04:00

A big thanks to my friend Jon for sharing with me this great blog post by "A Smart Bear".

That famous institution of Internet governance, ICANN, is at it again. They recently announced that they will start selling new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) for $185,000 each. This means that in the near future not only will there be websites ending with .COM, .NET, .EDU, .ORG, etc., but also basically anything else that can be dreamed up. For example, instead of http://www.robdomanski.com, I can register the domain name http://www.rob.domanski.

Of course I can only do so if I'm willing to pony up that hefty $185,000 fee, in contrast to the usual $35/year.

Jason from "A Smart Bear" argues that this is the "dark side of free market capitalism". He's absolutely right in pointing out that ICANN's statement about how these new TLDs will somehow spur innovation is completely bogus, and it's one which I've never understood. As he so glibly puts it, "There is zero innovation in making the URLs be dumbass.canon instead of dumbass.canon.com.

However, he seems to take a great leap in suggesting that it's actually harmful. He first makes the charge that ICANN is more interested in making money than innovation - which would be reasonable except that ICANN is a not-for-profit institution (an awfully inconvenient fact that leaves me scratching my head).

He also says that the new TLDs are harmful because "Today when you want to tell someone a domain you say "asmartbear.com," and people understand they're supposed to key that into the little field at the top of a browser window. But if my TLD is just "asmartbear," what do I say?

I agree that that's problematic, but it's only a problem for those companies dumb enough to purchase one of these new TLDs in the first place. What harm is there to the rest of us? People will still understand that "asmartbear.com" refers to a website just as they do now.

Finally, he goes on to describe how free markets make things worse...

Here's where the free-market folks pipe up to argue this is the way it should be. Because: Even if you admit that it’s a useless product, preying on the ignorance and fear of big brands, if ICANN can legally do it, and if those brands want to spend that money, then that’s exactly what they should do... If it's a poor product at an unreasonable price, the market will correct. The market is efficient and wise.

I guess I'm one of those "free-market folks" he's referring to because, even though I happen to think the new TLDs are pretty dumb and useless, I see no harm in them either. If people and businesses have more options to choose from, how is that a bad thing? And really, who am I to decide?

His comment describing the free-market folks' argument actually nails it on the head. I would only take issue with how he says "the market is efficient and wise". It's not. Free markets are a mess and are filled with lousy decisions, and that's what makes them work. If a business wants to spend $185,000 on a confusing TLD for their domain name branding, let them. It should be their mistake to make - so long as there are no new mandatory rules or regulations being applied to the rest of us.

Any item is worth what it's purchaser will pay for it.

Diaspora: The New Not-Facebook Facebook...

2011-07-14T13:35:00.003-04:00

Just a quick post to introduce everyone to Diaspora - a free, open-source and distributed social network - that is intended to be a more privacy-aware alternative to Facebook.

You can check out a great review of it here in New York Magazine.

Some of the main selling points... The project is supposed to be "less an imitation of Facebook than an escape route from it — a path to freedom for those who had come to fear the dark side of the social network".

Also, because it's open-source, users actually own their data and, if they wish, they can even run their own servers. There is no corporate data-mining and no "whiplash privacy protocols".

The underlying idea is terrific - especially the fact that users actually get to own their information, photos, videos, etc. (and, yes, on Facebook, the company owns the legal property rights to your photos, not you).

However, open-source privacy-focused alternatives to overwhelmingly popular websites often don't make much of a dent in terms of market share. Does anyone remember how OpenSocial was going to replace Facebook two years ago or how DuckDuckGo was going to challenge Google?

Diaspora sounds full of promise, but forgive me for being a bit skeptical at this stage. Nevertheless, everyone should make that judgment for themselves.

When Free Speech Trumps Privacy Rights Online...

2011-07-10T20:25:00.000-04:00

In preparation for a conference panel that I'll be on in September, this is the first of a few notes and comments related to the state of Internet Privacy today.

First, let's be clear about the arguments for why harm from speech on the Internet is potentially greater than harm from speech in other media: 1) the potential audience is much larger, 2) the speech remains indefinitely discoverable in countless data archives, and 3) that information can be easily located through common search engines.

The textbook example of a contemporary online privacy case involves Facebook tagging. Millions of Facebook users post photos and tag other individuals who are pictured in them. The person doing the tagging does not need the consent of the person being tagged, and once it is done, the photo will show up on the Facebook walls of not only those two individuals involved, but also all of their friends in the network. Once an embarrassing photo is posted of someone, not only can't it be removed by the person being embarrassed (un-tagging themselves being their only recourse), but all of his or her friends will be instantly notified about its existence.

Most people find this disconcerting. However, an argument for why the law should NOT prohibit such privacy invasions is presented by Geoffrey R. Stone in "Privacy, the First Amendment, and the Internet" (a chapter in the book, "The Offensive Internet", edited by Saul Levmore and Martha C. Nussbaum).

Stone asks, under what circumstances, if any, may the government penalize an individual for communicating "private" information about another person?

Warren and Brandeis famously established the "right to privacy" tort in a law review article in 1890, but the Supreme Court has never directly squared this tort with the First Amendment. Case law suggests that the government may only be able to regulate speech, in this privacy context, if it is deemed "low-value speech" - on par with false statements of fact, threats, fighting words, express incitement of unlawful conduct, and obscenity.

The central argument for treating online privacy invasions as "low-value speech" is that it is said to be "non-newsworthy" and therefore does not meaningfully contribute to the sort of public discourse that the First Amendment was intended to promote.

But defining what is "non-newsworthy" is obviously problematic. Is a nude photo of Sarah Palin non-newsworthy? How about a Facebook status revealing that someone is gay (when it is, in fact, a true statement)? How about a post revealing that a particular woman has had an abortion? Is that non-newsworthy? What if that same woman was running for student-body president?

The problem, clearly, is that what is an invasion of privacy for some is newsworthy for others. And the intent of the First Amendment has always been to prevent the government from restricting speech by default when that is unclear.

So here's a summary of the situation... the government can only penalize an individual for communicating "private" information about another person if it is deemed "low-value speech"; and an invasion of privacy online can only be considered "low-value speech" if it can be proved to be "non-newsworthy"; and this is a term so subjective, vague, and open-ended that it is beyond anything the Court has ever upheld in its First Amendment jurisprudence.

Therefore, Stone says that this is the reason why, legally and constitutionally speaking, the Court does (and is right to) consider free speech to trump privacy rights online.

It's a logical argument, but it strikes me as more of a legalistic explanation than something that might be remotely helpful in addressing the problem. The Facebook victim in our example above won't find much comfort in hearing, "Sorry, your case does not meet the thresholds of non-newsworthiness and low-value speech".

What's even more frustrating is how Stone concludes that the law "can no longer effectively deal with non-newsworthy invasions of privacy... the combination of the First Amendment and social and technological change has, for all practical purposes, gobbled [the tort of privacy] up completely. To argue otherwise is simply to tilt at windmills". He then finishes by saying that our only hope is that "the much greater visibility of human foibles in the modern era will likely lead people to learn how to put the mistakes of others in their larger context".

Geez, how depressing is that? His legal explanations answered why the Courts have had a hard time thus far in addressing online privacy violations, but to suggest that the law simply can't deal with the problem at all, and we should just cross our fingers and hope that people will eventually develop some perspective and learn to place embarrassing Facebook photos in their proper context is, well, pretty defeatist.

Hopefully, in the coming weeks, as I explore the scholarship on this issue in greater detail, I can come up with a few constructive ideas that are a little less apocalyptic.

Going Green With Set-Top Boxes...

2011-07-05T10:25:00.002-04:00

For years the E.P.A. has run a voluntary program that many of us are familiar with... certifying with an "Energy Star" different products that meet a high energy-efficiency standard. But this voluntary program, while popular, may not be enough, and the federal government may soon weigh in on the issue.

The Energy Department just chimed in that it might start issuing energy conservation requirements for cable boxes, digital recorders like TiVo, and other common household media devices.

A study by the National Resources Defense Council found that in 2010, the 160 million set-top boxes around the country consumed about 27 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, roughly the annual output of nine coal-fired power plants, costing consumers $3 billion. Some boxes can consume more power than a good-size refrigerator...

The boxes eat up so much power because they typically run almost around the clock; as much as two-thirds of their consumption comes during times when they are idle. When asked why, one manufacturing company said nobody ever asked them to use less power.

Is this a common-sense measure to make America more energy efficient, or is it an overreach of regulatory authority by the federal government?

While the pundits argue that question, allow me to simply say that, for individuals looking to greatly reduce their monthly electric bill, one super-easy related measure that almost nobody does is to hook up your cable box, TV, video game console, and other similar media devices to a power outlet strip (instead of directly to the wall outlet). Just by turning off the outlet strip when you leave the house or go to bed for the night, you can easily save $20 - $50 per month just by increasing your efficiency and without sacraficing anything.

It's a no-brainer.

Dangers of the IMF Cyberattack...

2011-06-16T10:58:00.002-04:00

Over the weekend, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was the victim of a serious cyberattack. Experts are now claiming that the attack was so sophisticated and narrowly targeted that it must have been launched, not by a rogue group of hackers, but by the government of a nation-state.

Most people aren't very familiar with the IMF, so here's why this matters... The IMF manages financial crises around the world and is the repository of highly confidential information about the fiscal condition of many nations. As described in the New York Times, "because the fund has been at the center of economic bailout programs for Portugal, Greece and Ireland — and possesses sensitive data on other countries that may be on the brink of crisis — its database contains potentially market-moving information".

One official called it "political dynamite".

Experts are saying that the intruders' goal had been to install software that would give a nation-state a "digital insider presence" on the IMF network. "Such a presence could yield a trove of non-public economic data used by the fund to promote exchange rate stability, support balanced international trade and provide resources to remedy members' balance-of-payments crises".

At a time when the global financial markets swing wildly anytime news breaks about Greece or other countries' possible default on its debts, such information could wreak havoc on the stability of the Western World.

It's an anarchist's dream.

Right now, Leon Panetta is testifying before Congress and has to answer what he would do as Defense Secretary to prevent future catastrophic cyberattacks - the frequency of which, by militant nation-states, is increasingly on the rise. Any plan must include strategies of both 1) prevention and 2) response.

No one with any credibility in the field believes that cyberattacks can be 100% prevented. Nevertheless, efforts must be made as best as they can, and, at the very least, the effects of a mass cyberattack must be mitigated.

As a final point, officials have thus far been extremely secretive about what type of damage was actually done. Sometimes, particularly as it affects global markets, that uncertainty stokes the flames even worse.

How the Internet Affects the Give-and-Take Between Candidates and Reporters...

2011-05-25T11:51:00.003-04:00

In media studies, political campaigns are often viewed as strategic contests between candidates and reporters - candidates seek the free publicity while reporters seek to maintain their autonomy and not simply echo stump speeches. How will the Internet affect this dynamic in 2012?

This is the question tackled in a new article by Shanto Iyengar, "The Media Game - New Moves, Old Strategies" (The Forum: Vol. 9: Iss. 1, Article 1). Iyengar highlights how political candidates have held the advantage over reporters since the 1980s, developing intricate strategies to use or evade the media to their benefit, while reporters have been slower to adapt to new media technologies in order to protect their independence.

Iyengar suggests that the Internet has only strengthened the candidates' hand.

Although candidates can do little to persuade reporters to cover their speeches at length, they are in position today to accomplish an end-run: information technology provides them with a means of bypassing the media and reaching voters directly. At trivial cost, candidates can deposit their speeches, press releases, campaign ads, testimonials, and anything else they consider relevant on their websites (Druckman et al. 2009). As bandwidth has become more plentiful and video-compression technology more advanced, the content of these websites features a rich array of multi-media presentations designed to attract and hold the user’s attention.

The advent of video sharing technology and the rapid growth in the reach of social networking sites thus opened up vast new possibilities for direct candidate to voter communication. Moreover, new media platforms often provide the campaigns with precise data concerning the background and interests of their users, making it possible for the candidates to “target” pre-defined groups of voters with messages designed to resonate with their interests and policy preferences. As technology has diffused and more Americans spend significant amounts of time online, the audience for online news gradually approaches the audience for television news.

None of this is new or revealing information. However, its import, taken collectively, has serious consequences when viewed through a journalistic lens. Candidates can now bypass the media completely and communicate directly to voters. Reporters who have traditionally acted as filters for the public, deciding what was important and what was not, are now relegating to an even lesser role. They've become the obsolete middle-man.

Or so the argument goes. Skeptics might point out that the Internet's myriad of proliferating voices are precisely why those filters are more crucial now than ever before, and reporters' original purpose of seeing through the political spin to maintain independence and autonomy is certainly as valid today as it was at any other time in history.

Perhaps Iyengar's most interesting contribution, then, is in this concluding point... Rather than waiting for news organizations to report on the policies they care about, technology enables voters to examine candidates' positions on all issues whenever they feel like it. Paying attention to the issues - instead of the media circus that too often centers around the more entertaining facets of the campaign like the "horse race", the advertising, the strategy, and scandalous behavior - means that voters could potentially become more issue-oriented. And that's a good thing.

Ironically, the role of the Internet in the upcoming 2012 elections might be to exacerbate the growing divide between, what are increasingly, two very distinct electorates in American politics... those who seek to wade through all the spin and muck to actually vote on the substantive issues, versus those who are eager to get caught up in it.

The Latest Obama Cybersecurity Plan Looks Awfully Familiar...

2011-05-23T11:30:00.003-04:00

In case you missed it, the Obama Administration just unveiled its new cybersecurity plan for the nation. Many in the technology industry are showering it with praise, but is that praise warranted?

Nope.

It's not necessarily that the Obama plan is bad or misguided, it's just that it's not a significant departure from previous incarnations of U.S. national cybersecurity policy.

What supporters are rallying around is the plan's call for a new cybersecurity coordinator who will answer directly to the president, the designation of cybersecurity as a "key management initiative", the development of better metrics for improvement, and investments in education and R & D.

All of which sounds great; and all of which has been done before. Ever since the Bush Administration's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace policy document in 2003, there have been several new cybersecurity coordinator positions created within the Executive Branch, metrics have been implemented, and there have been repeated calls for more education and R & D.

Above all, both the Bush and Obama plans focus on voluntary public-private partnerships as their core ideological tenet.

The "Action Plan":

Appoint a cybersecurity policy official responsible for coordinating the Nation’s cybersecurity policies and activities; establish a strong NSC directorate, under the direction of the cybersecurity policy official dual-hatted to the NSC and the NEC, to coordinate interagency development of cybersecurity-related strategy and policy.

Prepare for the President’s approval an updated national strategy to secure the information and communications infrastructure. This strategy should include continued evaluation of CNCI activities and, where appropriate, build on its successes.

Designate cybersecurity as one of the President’s key management priorities and establish performance metrics.

Designate a privacy and civil liberties official to the NSC cybersecurity directorate.

Convene appropriate interagency mechanisms to conduct interagency-cleared legal analyses of priority cybersecurity-related issues identified during the policy-development process and formulate coherent unified policy guidance that clarifies roles, responsibilities, and the application of agency authorities for cybersecurity-related activities across the Federal government.

Initiate a national public awareness and education campaign to promote cybersecurity.

Develop U.S. Government positions for an international cybersecurity policy framework and strengthen our international partnerships to create initiatives that address the full range of activities, policies, and opportunities associated with cybersecurity.

Prepare a cybersecurity incident response plan; initiate a dialog to enhance public-private partnerships with an eye toward streamlining, aligning, and providing resources to optimize their contribution and engagement

In collaboration with other EOP entities, develop a framework for research and development strategies that focus on game-changing technologies that have the potential to enhance the security, reliability, resilience, and trustworthiness of digital infrastructure; provide the research community access to event data to facilitate developing tools, testing theories, and identifying workable solutions.

Build a cybersecurity-based identity management vision and strategy that addresses privacy and civil liberties interests, leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies for the Nation.

Sure, there are a few subtle changes in this new Obama plan. The fact that the new cybersecurity coordinator position will be part of both the National Security Agency (NSA) and National Economic Council (NEC) is symbolically significant. But overall, these changes are mostly bureaucratic in nature. The main philosophical driving force behind the policy looks awfully familiar.

There is a reason for that. The vast majority of the Internet is comprised of privately owned and operated computer networks. This means that the vast majority of cybersecurity defense must take place in the private sector, and that the federal government is extremely limited in its capacity to affect meaningful change.

What the federal government should be held directly responsible for is 1) protecting the Internet's physical infrastructure (the actual wires and cables connecting networks and devices) within U.S. territorial borders and 2) safeguarding the digital information within its purview (like military intelligence and Social Security data) from outside intrusion.

Those two things ought to be the federal government's primary cybersecurity focus because those are the two things which it actually has some control over. Everything else in this discussion - like encouraging voluntary public-private partnerships, education, R & D, public awareness campaigns, initiating a national "dialogue", etc. - sounds nice and warm and fuzzy, and is definitely needed, but will inevitably produce rather limited results.

Microsoft's Desperate Acquisition of Skype...

2011-05-11T10:10:00.003-04:00

When news broke yesterday that Microsoft is acquiring Skype for $8.5 billion, the business and technology communities were all abuzz. It's certainly gigantic news in the industry, but how much will it really matter?

The prevailing wisdom, not to mention Microsoft's great hope, is that the acquisition will "increase the accessibility of real-time video and voice communications, bringing benefits to both consumers and enterprise users and generating significant new business and revenue opportunities".

In plain English, they're hoping that Skype will finally give Microsoft a real foothold in telecommunications - something that they've been pursuing for the last decade but that has thus far evaded them.

My money's betting that their desired foothold will remain elusive. From a consumer perspective, it'll be a nice additional feature to be able to use Skype in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook or with XBox, but how much will that ultimately transform the telecom landscape, really? What Microsoft needs in order to gain that ever-precious foothold is to finally develop a mobile operating system that seriously rivals Android and the iPhone. Acquiring Skype is not a realistic substitute for that.

Meanwhile, the rumors circulating last week about Skype potentially being acquired by either Facebook or Google appear to have been leaked in order to drive up the price Microsoft would have to pay. Either that or else the rumors were legitimate and Microsoft swooped in at the last minute fully doubling what the others were offering. In either case, the end result is that Microsoft may have overpaid by several billion dollars.

That's too bad. For the average consumer, Skype would have made the most sense being integrated with Facebook, whose IM feature - which has unbelievably heavy usage - could have gotten a major jolt in one fell swoop.

When it's all said and done, Microsoft has indeed bought itself a pretty great stand-alone asset - even if its revenues are somewhat lacking. The only problem is that acquiring Skype probably won't accomplish the main goal that Microsoft is acquiring it for.

Twitter Prohibits Research on Osama Bin Laden Tweets...

2011-05-05T11:51:00.004-04:00

Here's a quick news story that should be tossed into the "ridiculous" category.

Academic researchers are constantly data mining social media websites to collect information. This can be extremely useful in analyzing trends and other metrics.

So after the news broke on Sunday night that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, some researchers thought it might be valuable to analyze the thousands of tweets referring to the story. I was personally emailed a link to an archive of such tweets in XML format to be used in conjuction with DiscoverText software.

The datafiles were samples taken from live feed Twitter imports starting shortly after the announcement that Osama bin Laden’s death.

Twitter searches for "bin laden" (647,585 documents, 505 MB)
Twitter searches for "osama" (586,665 documents, 451 MB)

This was all for research purposes, however Twitter quickly shut down the project citing their Terms of Service (TOS) Agreement.

I was notified of the shut-down in a follow-up email that reiterated...

To be clear: we were giving the data away, not selling it. Also, it was not scraped of Twitter. Rather, it was gathered using a Twitter-authorized account and an API that lets us fetch 1500 items at a time. It is a shame that the now 2 million tweets cannot, for example, be sampled and coded using a crowd source model.

Stuart Shulman is exactly right - this is prime historical data and there is no conceivable reason why Twitter would need to prohibit the aggregation of such data for non-commercial research purposes.

Someone over there needs to implement a little common sense.

Fascinated by policy and law? Learn more at law degrees online.

How Code Restrains Programmers...

2011-05-04T11:59:00.003-04:00

When it comes to understanding power and authority in cyberspace, there is one guiding principle - "code is law".

At a fundamental level, code grants computer programmers the ability to shape the virtual environments in which the average user interacts. Code empowers these programmers to design the rules of behavior - rules which can either constrain or enable different types of behavior. As opposed to laws in real-space, these policies created by code are not simply a matter of establishing a law and enforcing it by creating penalties for people who break the law; rather, it is an altogether different type of law, one in which the environment itself is created to deny the user even a capability to act in defiance.

Not only is it through code that programmers have such significant governing power insofar as they shape their virtual environments in this way, but code also dictates the actions of those very same programmers and places constraints on them. In other words, even programmers, with all their powers in the Digital Age, must still adhere to sets of rules that have previously been established. Someone else has authority over them, and that too is an authority derived from code.

The first constraint that acts over programmers is language. While it may be something of blasphemy within certain circles of the programming community to make this assertion, it nevertheless holds true. A C++ or .NET programmer may believe he can write code to do whatever he wants on a technical level, however that is only true within the confines of what Microsoft decided C++ as a language would allow. The designs of all computer programming languages are the result of explicit decision-making processes, often by formal institutions, and those decisions ultimately have consequences on the resulting decisions of those who implement them. In other words, the capabilities and limitations of programming languages act as inherent checks on the behavior of programmers.

This principle also raises the second constraint on programmers – the computing platform. Many programmers might reluctantly concede to the above assertion, but they will then undoubtedly point to development technologies that are not controlled by private commercial firms. For example, a web programmer might argue that if he contributes to the development of a non-proprietary open-source language like PHP, Perl, or Python, then language becomes less of a restriction because he can have a hand in shaping it. However, the programming language is not the only constraint on the programmer. Even if one created an entire programming language from scratch, the behavior of the programmer would still be determined by the platform on which the resulting software would be used. The code behind such platforms, whether an operating system like Microsoft Windows, non-OS-dependent platforms like Sun’s Java, or various “application programming interfaces” like the Google API, also either constrains or enables the behavior of programmers. In other words, a programmer’s code, no matter how independent, must still be written within the confines of rules established by the platform if it wants to achieve a reasonable level of operability.

Most soon-to-graduate computer science students are, by now, familiar with how code empowers them to create the rules for different environments. They should just also bear in mind how code simultaneously restrains them as well.

Passion for IT? Consider taking an IT online course.

How a Government Shutdown Would Affect the IT Industry...

2011-04-08T21:43:00.003-04:00

The government shutting down not only affects things like military benefits and social security checks being mailed out to seniors. The technology world will feel some significant fallout as well.

Mashable has put together the following list of ways in which the IT industry would be affected by the government shutdown...

Hold That IPO! - The Securities and Exchange Commission announced on Thursday that it would not process any company filings in the case of a government shutdown, Reuters reports.

That means that IPO filings would be put on hold. A prolonged shutdown (unlikely, but possible) could affect companies late in the IPO process, like Zipcar, as well as companies that have filed but haven’t set terms yet, like LinkedIn.

Government Websites Go Dark? - A memo that Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew wrote to the heads of executive departments and agencies asked them to make determinations of whether their websites were essential or not, The Hill reports.

According to this memo, public access to government information doesn’t fall under this category. Websites necessary for operation like the IRS website for filing taxes, however, will remain open.

A Victory For Telemarketers And Spammers - According to a statement that the Federal Trade Commission posted on Friday, the Do Not Call Registry and Spam Database will not be available to law enforcement organizations in the case of a furlough.

Google And Microsoft Wait For Paychecks - It’s not just government employees who might find themselves without a paycheck should the government shut down. Hundreds of thousands of business who have contracts with the government might also be affected. Those companies include mid-size IT firms and giants like Google, which beat Microsoft out to be the provider of choice for the first federal agency to use either company’s cloud-based services. (Microsoft still holds a vast number of government contracts for its Office suite.)

Government BlackBerrys Get Switched Off - Some furloughed employees would either turn in their BlackBerrys or be banned from using them. CNNMoney reports that employees deemed “essential” will be permitted to continue checking essential emails on their BlackBerrys. Which begs the question of how these employees will know which emails are essential without reading them first.

None of this is exactly going to paralyze the digital world. It'll cause some inconvenience, sure, but all those 0's and 1's will, for the most part, keep doing their thing. It does, however, make for some interesting trivia.

Defining the Public Interest: The Communications Act of 1934 and Its Effect on the Net Neutrality Debate...

2011-04-05T11:00:00.002-04:00

Some final summary notes on a paper I will be presenting at a conference at Hofstra University this Friday...

Much of the debate over Net Neutrality today is centered on principles established all the way back in 1934. The landmark Communications Act, designed to regulate the allocation of radio frequencies, is currently being used to determine how to regulate (or not regulate) the wireless internet spectrum as well.

The Communications Act of 1934 established that use of the wireless spectrum would be determined based on who could best serve "the public interest, convenience, or necessity". The FRC (soon-to-be the FCC) interpreted that phrase by defining the "public interest" as anything that would bring about "the best possible broadcasting reception conditions". This was an engineering interpretation made principally by engineers. The consequence of defining the "public interest" in these terms was that only the most highly capitalized parties - namely large corporations - were granted broadcasting licenses because only they could acquire and regularly maintain the best technical equipment.

Fast forward to today and the Net Neutrality debate. The issue of whether or not to enforce Net Neutrality rules regulating the wireless spectrum is again being decided based on engineering priciples - specifically those favoring technical efficiency - at the expense of, critics argue, political values.

Central to the Net Neutrality debate is whether to classify ISPs as "common carriers" or "information service providers". This vital regulatory distinction also finds its origins in the Communications Act of 1934. If the FCC decides to classify ISPs as common carriers, then that opens the door to greater regulatory authority and the ability to enforce Net Neutrality rules. On the other hand, if ISPs remain classified only as information service providers, and not common carriers, then the FCC will remain more limited in its regulatory capabilities and Net Neutrality regulations will become far less likely.

The cheat sheet... Classifying as "common carriers" = Yes Net Neutrality; Classifying as "information service providers" = No Net Neutrality.

It's this classification which is paramount, and it has yet to be fully determined. What's at stake is nothing less than a complete reformulation of what the Internet itself will look like, and how it will evolve, in coming decades.

The architecture of the Internet both enables and constrains certain forms of political behavior, and therefore that architecture and the policies which sustain it must be viewed as inherently political. When the Net Neutrality debate is framed in the path dependent context of telecom regulation that began in 1934, history proves a useful guide in predicting the consequences. When private interests conflate the distinction between what are technical engineering decisions versus those that are inherently political, what results is a system dominated by large corporate firms with the highest levels of capitalization. This was the systemic path which began in 1934. Only time will tell if history is bound to repeat itself.

How to Get Around the NYTimes Paywall...

2011-03-31T09:44:00.003-04:00

Earlier this week, the New York Times launched a new paywall to try and raise some additional revenue. The basics of the plan are as follows... if you subscribe to any home delivery package of the printed newspaper then the digital subscription is free. Otherwise, each person can only view 20 articles per month unless they pony up between $15 to $35 per month, depending on how many different digital devices they own.

How The Times believes that this will increase revenue is beyond me. Paywalls at other newspaper and magazine websites have demonstrated, time and time again, that any additional revenue gains are completely offset by the reduction in people actually visiting the website and reading articles.

After all, why would somebody pay $35/month when they can read rival newspapers online for free? I know it's the New York Times - the journalistic gold standard - but are YOU willing to shell out that kind of money for access considering how many free alternatives are available on the Web? For most of you, probably not. And a smaller readership translates into less advertising revenue, which happens to be the bulk of their online income stream.

Not to fret. Gizmodo just updated a fantastic list of loopholes and ways to get around the paywall so that you can read infinite NYTimes articles to your heart's content.

Google - If there's ever an NYT article you're blocked from, you can just copy and paste the headline into Google for free and easy access. Even if you hit your unspecified daily limit on Google, you can then head on over to Bing or Yahoo.
Twitter - There are already hundreds of Twitter accounts providing direct links to NYT content. Pick and choose your favorites, or for the full firehose of every single NYT article just follow @freeUnnamedNews.
Chrome extension - If you use Chrome as your web browser, download the "New York Times Paywall Smasher" to automate the process.
Greasemonkey for Firefox - Install this userscript to automate the process if you use the Firefox web browser.
"NYTClean" bookmarklet - Just drag it to your bookmarklet bar, and click it every time NYTimes.com asks you to become a subscriber. You'll be redirected to a free version of the page with no fuss.

Paywalls remain one of the dumbest business strategies for media companies to pursue. It has never worked successfully thus far, and there's no reason to think it will this time around either. If there's any newspaper worth paying to read it's the New York Times, yet one nevertheless has to remain skeptical until proven otherwise. More than anything, the paywall comes across like an act of corporate desperation.

Facebook Removes Page Promoting "Third Palestinian Intifada"...

2011-03-30T11:55:00.002-04:00

Every few months Facebook draws scrutiny again for controversial content posted by its users. This time, a Facebook group was formed called the "Third Palestinian Intifada". The page, which had attracted more than 340,000 fans, called for Palestinians to take to the streets after Friday prayers on May 15th against Israel's Jewish population. The page explicitly said, "Judgment Day will be brought upon us only once the Muslims have killed all of the Jews".

Regardless of your politics, such statements clearly violate Facebook's Terms of Service agreement, which expressly forbids any direct calls to violence.

And yet, despite complaints by users and opposing Facebook groups being formed, which undeniably must have brought ample awareness of the issue to the company's employees, the page lingered on and was able to gather more fans.

It wasn't until formal institutional groups like the Anti-Defamation League got involved, and Israeli Minister Yuli Edelstein wrote a direct letter to Mark Zuckerberg, that Facebook finally decided to remove the Third Intifada page.

As a spokesman finally explained...

We continue to believe that people on Facebook should be able to express their opinions, and we don’t typically take down content that speaks out against countries, religions, political entities, or ideas... [however] the social network would continue to take down pages that issue "direct calls for violence or expressions of hate."

It's not really surprising anymore to see this type of material posted on social networking sites. Most people just accept it as an inevitable consequence of the digital world we live in. But what is still discouraging is how Facebook always seems to drag its feet when it comes to removing such content.

Why should it take large institutions getting involved to generate any action?

Rejecting Google Books...

2011-03-24T14:59:00.003-04:00

It's been the central issue since the World Wide Web's inception, and it's at the forefront again... how to strike the right balance between ownership and access.

On Tuesday, a federal judge rejected the settlement between Google and a group of authors and publishers regarding "Google Books". In 2005, Google launched the project in order to scan and digitize the world's libraries and make the content searchable, only to have the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sue them for copyright infringement. Ultimately, they came to an agreement whereby Google would sell access to its database and take 37% of the profits, while the authors and publishers would receive the remaining 63%.

This sounded great in theory, however Judge Denny Chin rejected the agreement for good reasons. First, as this New York Times editorial argues, one company should not have monopoly access to our "common cultural heritage". Basically, because the agreement only sets the terms for Google, and not rivals like Amazon or Microsoft, it would grant Google de facto exclusive rights and legal protections that would be denied to its competitors. Second, the Authors Guild, which has about 8,000 members, does not represent many writers. If any decided they wanted to make their works available under different conditions, or even make their works available free of charge, unfortunately this agreement would have set the terms for them as well. Third, "orphan books" - meaning copyrighted books whose rightsholders cannot be found or identified (yes, this happens frequently) - would automatically fall under Google's sole domain, granting the company, again, the exclusive right to digitize and sell access to those books without being subject to copyright infringement lawsuits. Judge Chin made a specific point to highlight the serious anti-trust concerns this would raise.

There are two competing values in play here. On the one hand, universal access to knowledge is a social good - it empowers individuals and helps level the proverbial playing field. On the other hand, authors and copyright owners ought to be able to make decisions (within reasonable limits) regarding the fate of their works. Most people would agree on both of these core values of free societies. The problem is that, in this case, these values are in conflict with one another.

It's ironic. Here is Google, leading the way in terms of providing society with greater access to literary knowledge, yet, by doing so, they are simultaneously becoming the greatest perceived threat to that same access.

For what it's worth, I agree completely with the Times editorial. Google's dream of making all the books in the world available to everyone should absolutely be pursued... just not by Google. Rather, instead of our common cultural heritage being controlled exclusively by one corporation, we should build a digital public library.

Call this the "non-commercial option". A national digital public library could be funded through a coalition of foundations and by voluntary donations. The library would respect copyright, of course, and only include those works which are in the public domain and those whose authors grant permission to make them available. Indeed, most other countries in the industrialized world are already doing this.

It is possible to strike the right balance between ownership and access. If successful, we all benefit.

Why Technical Standards are at the Heart of the AT&T/ T-Mobile Merger (and why you should care)...

2011-03-22T11:37:00.004-04:00

Yesterday the stock market was given a boost on the news that AT&T will buy T-Mobile for $39 billion. Immediately, anti-trust concerns were raised regarding what would become the nation's largest wireless carrier, and it's still hard to gauge whether or not the Justice Department will challenge the merger. Additionally, many critics are arguing the ways in which the deal would negatively affect consumers.

However, what no one seems to be writing about is why the deal was pursued in the first place. Of course, AT&T expects some economic benefits, but the reason why it makes that expectation is a harmonization of technical standards.

Without delving too far into geekspeak, let me explain it this way... AT&T was only willing to seriously consider this deal because both it and T-Mobile already use the same technologies: GSM, HSPA+ and LTE. Because both companies use those same technologies, or technical standards, it will be a far easier process to merge both of their existing wireless infrastructures.

As a point of contrast, T-Mobile was considering a similar deal with Sprint, but that deal made far less sense. Because T-Mobile and Sprint use different technical standards, the cost involved in such a merger would have been exponentially more expensive.

As Sascha Segan writes in PCMag...

AT&T is ahead of T-Mobile on building LTE. T-Mobile is far ahead of AT&T on building HSPA+, a intermediate 4G technology that fits right between the carriers' existing 3G networks and LTE. Together, they could have a smooth and powerful nationwide network. AT&T's press release for the merger backs this up. The combined carrier will be able to build out much more LTE than AT&T could alone, by combining AT&T's 700 Mhz spectrum with T-Mobile's AWS spectrum.

I realize that most people's eyes start to gloss over when reading about technical standards. But at least be aware that they are arguably just as important as explicit public policies when it comes to regulating telecommunications. You see, each technical standard has its own set of rules for determining what can and cannot happen over its networks. As scholars like Lawrence Lessig have argued, in its ability to set those rules of behavior, code is a powerful (and perhaps the most powerful) regulator for what occurs over digital networks.

So as the national media and blogosphere pundits write incessantly about the anti-trust issues and the economic consequences of this merger, keep in mind that yesterday's announcement wasn't the beginning of the timeline at all. The ball actually got rolling years ago when each of those companies chose which technical standards they would use, and yesterday's announcement was simply consequence of those decisions.

Resources Matter: Interest Group Activism on the Web...

2011-03-15T12:33:00.002-04:00

For over a decade, prognosticators have argued that the Internet will create a more level playing field in politics. The thinking goes that large, well-established interest groups will see their power reduced as issue movements become democratized on the Web. The need for large formal institutions will whither away as online advocacy campaigns, with minimal barriers to entry, supplant many of the traditional organizing roles of entrenched actors.

But is this truly the case? Has the Internet allowed small or poorly funded groups to compete equally with well-resourced organizations?

This is the primary question raised by Melissa K. Merry in a recent JITP article titled, "Interest Group Activism on the Web: The Case of Environmental Organizations".

And, apparently, the answer is no.

Merry's data illustrates that well-established and well-resourced interest group institutions, like the Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund, have wider reach and, ostensibly, a greater impact than smaller organizations. They have more comprehensive websites that make use of a greater number of Web technologies, and they take better advantage of the cost efficiencies made possible by the Internet. Furthermore, they receive far greater amounts of Web traffic as well as inbound links. Finally, membership organizations are more likely than non-membership organizations to successfully fundraise and issue action alerts.

These are significant findings, to be sure. However, I feel obligated to raise the usual constructive criticisms, namely, that the data presented only examines large- versus small-sized organizations, and doesn't shed much light onto what some see as the greater phenomenon when it comes to online political mobilization... the use of social networks in creating ad-hoc, on-the-fly campaigns that coalesce around single issues for very brief periods of time.

Still, Merry's research is immensely valuable in the extent to which it debunks some of the conventional wisdom regarding interest group politics in the Digital Age. Indeed, hers is a point that continues to resonate time and again across the political spectrum... simply having a website isn't enough.

Resources still matter.

Is Groupon Really Being Mentioned Alongside Google and Facebook?

2011-03-08T07:45:00.006-05:00

There have been a host of articles recently feeding into the hype-machine behind Groupon. Analysts on CNBC have mentioned the site in the same breath as Google and Facebook when discussing "the giants of the internet sector". The question... is this warranted?

It actually might be, depending on how you frame the question.

Groupon isn't generating anywhere near the revenue amount of, say, Google. So in that sense, today, Groupon doesn't belong in the conversation. However, Groupon is indeed mirroring the growth of companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay in their first two years of existence. So in the context of early growth, Groupon actually might belong.

Consider some comparative data on revenues and valuations...

Facebook - Recently valued at $50 billion. Revenue rocketed to as high as $2 billion in 2010, its sixth full year.
Twitter - Recently valued at $3.7 billion, and just closed a $200 million round of financing.
Groupon - Revenue in 2010 rose more than 22 times to $760 million in its second full year since its daily deals site launched, up from $33 million in 2009. Also, just raised an additional $950 million in financing after rejecting a $6 billion buyout offer from Google.
Zynga - The maker of online social games like FarmVille scored revenue of $850 million in its third full year in 2010, more than triple the year before.

As the Wall Street Journal highlighted, if we compare all of this with the software industry, less than one-third of the nation’s top software companies reached $50 million in annual sales in six years or less – and the fastest to $50 million, Novell, took three years. Microsoft crossed the $50 million barrier in eight years; Oracle, 10 years.

Groupon is indeed a trendy pick at the moment based on those early growth figures, and only time will tell whether or not it has real staying power. To my eyes, it's surely not yet deserving of Google or Facebook comparisons, and ought to be more reasonably compared to other speculative trendy internet picks like FourSquare.

What do you think? Are these valuations justified or has another internet bubble emerged?

Domain Names as Expressions of Nationalism...

2011-03-03T09:55:00.002-05:00

Not many outside of the tech community give much thought to domain name administration, but those inside of it realize that domain names are the only scarce commodity on the entire Internet. That's why they're not only valuable, but tremendously important.

To catch everyone up to speed, ICANN is the non-profit institution which controls the entire domain name system. National governments have become increasingly angered over how little authority they have in ICANN's decision-making processes, leading to something of an international revolt and calls to vest authority with the U.N. instead. It's power politics at the highest levels.

Whoever would have thought that such a fuss would be made over the fate of top-level domain suffixes like .xxx, .gay, .health, .movie, .web, or dozens of others?

A recent CNET article headline read, "U.S. Seeks Veto Powers over New Domain Names", and my knee-jerk reaction was to fear the overreaching controls of Big Government. However, when actually reading the article, I became convinced of the Commerce Department's reasoning... If more authoritarian and less liberal governments adopt technical measures to prevent their citizens from connecting to .gay and .xxx websites, and dozens of nations surely will, that will lead to a more fragmented Internet, undermining the goal of universal resolvability (i.e., a single global Internet that facilitates the free flow of goods and services and freedom of expression).

In other words, granting governments more power might actually lead to more freedom of expression, not less. Talk about counter-intuitive.

And to anyone who wonders why this matters, consider a recent Policy & Internet journal article by Irina Shklovski and David M. Struthers titled, "Of States and Borders on the Internet: The Role of Domain Name Extensions in Expressions of Nationalism Online in Kazakhstan". The authors argue that, because of country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs), people are aware of national boundary traversals as they navigate the Internet, and their surfing behaviors are influenced as a result.

To put it plainly, there is a difference between a .il (Israel) versus .ir (Iran) website in the perception of readers.

The space of the Internet is often described as easy to traverse with no regard for national borders. Yet few have considered what such easy border crossings on the Internet might mean to the ordinary people actually doing the traversing. Our qualitative study of regular Internet users in Kazakhstan shows that the naming of a state-controlled space on the Internet, through the use of country code top-level domain names (ccTLDs), does in fact matter to the average user. People are aware of national boundary traversals as they navigate the Internet. Respondents in our study identified their activity on the Internet as happening within or outside the space of the state to which they felt allegiance and belonging. National borders are demarcated on the Internet through naming via ccTLDs and can result in individual expressions of various types of nationalism online. We find that ccTLDs are not just symbolic markers but have real meaning and their importance increases in locations where notions of statehood are in flux.

The idea that domain names can inspire a sense of nationalism in the average Web surfer is truly significant. In a cyber space where online identity formation seems to never quite fit traditional molds, national identity and national pride being a real factor should open the eyes of some sociologists.

It makes sense, yet it's still surprising.

The Best Online Financial Tools, 2011...

2011-03-02T09:59:00.002-05:00

It's tax season and everyone seems to be reformulating their personal finance strategies this time of year. Because I get asked incessantly for some link recommendations on this subject, here are a few quick favorite online resources to help with managing your personal finances (and, no, sadly, I do not get a commission)...

Mint.com - The most popular site by far, it's a one-stop shop for tracking your spending, budget, and assets. It can also send you alerts about overdue bills and help you set financial goals.
BillShrink - Suggests money-saving alternatives to your current providers (think cell phone, credit cards, etc.).
SmartyPig - This site is designed to help you meet savings goals. Specify what you're saving for and get above-average interest rates; then cash-out at any time without a penalty.
Ebates - If you shop at any of the "Ebates shopping partners" then you can get between 1 to 35 percent cash back on your purchases.

Is an 'Internet Kill Switch' Feasible in the U.S.?

2011-02-24T09:30:00.003-05:00

With the myriad of recent uprisings in the Middle East, those foreign governments have been attempting to stem the tide of revolution by cutting off internet access for millions of its citizens. Hypothetically, if it ever wanted to, could the U.S. government have a reasonable capability to implement a similar "internet kill switch"?

The short answer is no, although it might try.

Currently, there is legislation in the works sponsored by Senator Susan Collins, titled the "Cyber Security and American Competitiveness Act of 2011", which would authorize the president to shut down the nation's critical digital infrastructure in the event of a cybersecurity emergency. This bill would not condone the complete shutdown or censorship of the internet for citizens, as those foreign despots have done, however many critics are nevertheless concerned about the opportunities for abuse.

But would the type of complete shutdown that critics fear even be possible on a technical level?

Security Week posted a terrific article citing three main reasons why it would NOT be possible...

"In order to control, direct, or limit routing, which is essentially what would be required, the government would have to have visibility and a solid understanding of all Internet assets and their routing commands. When considering the global Internet, you must have the ability to view it, map it, and track it from multiple perspectives and vantage points". Quite simply, this is not the case.
The U.S. operates on a completely different scale than those Middle Eastern countries in terms of both ownership and governance of its cyber assets. The same rules of control do not apply.
"An effective surgical response requires sensing and validating the cyber-emergency from multiple sources, sharing the appropriate notice and responsibility with critical infrastructure partners and relevant agencies, and managing a distributed means to synchronize, execute, and monitor the shut down activity". Granted, U.S. national cybersecurity policy has a bare-bones system of coordination in place to react to emergencies, however most experts agree that it isn't quite yet up to the monumental challenges for which it is tasked.

The internet is a decentralized collection of privately owned and operated networks, and as such the U.S. government is extremely limited in its control over all of its component assets. This isn't always the case with despotic regimes overseas, which maintain stricter controls on ISPs, if not outright ownership in the form of state-controlled monopolies. So the lesson here is not to draw any conclusions about how, if the president of Libya can flip an internet kill switch for its citizens, then the same possibility exists here at home too. It doesn't. It's like comparing apples and oranges.

Cybercheating Rate Tops 61% Among Undergraduate Students...

2011-02-09T11:53:00.002-05:00

In the spirit of beginning a new semester, take a look at this research study conducted by Neil Selwyn. It finds that 61.9% of undergraduate students engage in "cybercheating". Furthermore, the most active cheaters are those in the sciences, and particularly those with higher levels of proficiency in computer technology.

Cybercheating is defined as any cheating that is enabled by the internet – so cybercheating can occur in any course, and is not unique to online courses.

As anyone who teaches undergrad courses will attest, cybercheating and all forms of online plagiarism, for that matter, run rampant. The study confirms this with the following findings...

50% of students admitted to cybercheating at some point while they were in college.
Another 30-40% of students admitted to copying text from the internet into their own work without citing the source. 10-20% did so for large sections of their assignments (i.e. more than a sentence here and there).
About 25% of graduate students engage in these same behaviors.

What is particularly interesting is the breakdown by field of study...

Engineering and technology (72%)
Computer sciences and mathematical sciences (71%)
Social studies (64%)
Business and administrative studies (63%)
Law (62%)
Creative arts and design (61%)
Architecture, Building and Planning (60%)
Medicine (58%)
Natural sciences (57%)
Humanities (46%)

It appears that the more expertise one has in computer technology, the more likely they are to use it to their perceived benefit. That's hardly a shocking statement, and in my personal experience teaching Computer Science courses, this resonates as decidedly accurate.

However, what's perhaps most fascinating is that the digital culture in which these students have been raised - downloading copyrighted music on LimeWire, movies on BitTorrent, etc. - has created a certain psychology of permissibility. One 19-year-old engineering student is quoted as saying...

As more and more people are using the Internet illegally, I feel that the chances of being caught or the consequences of my actions are almost insignificant. So I feel no pressure in doing what ever everybody else is doing/using the Internet for.

Neo-academic Richard Landers is completely right in describing this as "purposeful deception, and not much regret over it".

Well, before any aspiring students get any bright ideas, let me assure you that while tech-savvy undergrads may feel inclined to give cybercheating a try, those of us tech-savvy instructors (who, by the way, may have spent numerous years in graduate school researching the ins-and-outs of said technologies) are even more likely to use digital tactics to detect and prevent it. And, in case you're unaware, almost every university these days buys licenses for different software tools that detect online plagiarism, enabling even the least tech-savvy instructors to prevent cybercheating.

Bottom line, the fact that 61.9% of undergraduate students are cybercheating isn't all that shocking. But, make no mistake, it's not allowed, and if you're caught, you will undoubtedly pay the consequences. Bottom line... don't be an idiot.

Have I scared you adequately enough yet?

Etsy Removes Rape Congratulations Cards...

2011-01-25T09:02:00.004-05:00

Everyone's favorite online e-tailer for handmade crafts items, Etsy, is finally backing off a shameful policy. If you're in love with the site, be prepared to have your bubble burst.

Just before Christmas, word started spreading that Etsy was selling "Rape Congratulations" cards. What was worse, when horrified customers complained about it, the website refused to remove the cards arguing that "different people may find some content to be offensive, harmful, inaccurate or deceptive" - the inference, of course, being that other, less overly-sensitive, people will NOT find it offensive, therefore it should remain for sale.

As for the details of the card itself...

"Congratulations. You Got Bad Touched."

That's the message printed on cards for sale on Etsy... The description reads "Get creeped on, get raped? Know someone that has? Then this card is for them." The cards currently sell for $2.50 each and are made by a person using the name "youstupidbitch"...

So, what exactly are you getting for your two-and-a-half dollars? An offensive card featuring a drawing of a naked sexual assault victim curled up on the floor of a shower stall "printed on heavy duty white cardstock" complete with "red accents and matching envelope".

You be the judge. Does an image of "a naked sexual assault victim curled up on the floor of a shower stall" cross the line for you?

The good news is that Etsy did finally decide to remove the cards. Too bad all it took was a petition with over 17,000 signatures and negative publicity on CNN.

Etsy's previous policy had "prohibited disparaging or promoting hate against people based on race or religion," but these policies had "never covered gender, people with disabilities, or sexual orientation". Now, to their credit, they do.

But forget, for a moment, questions about what's strictly legal and what's not. Wouldn't common sense dictate that selling "Rape Congratulations" cards is probably a pretty bad idea? Indeed, shouldn't someone at Etsy have stood up and raised the moral imperative involved?

The Value of 'Clicktivism' and Online Political Mobilization...

2011-01-24T08:25:00.002-05:00

We've all received them, but how effective are they, really? Mass email action alerts - those spammy emails asking us to essentially copy & paste an already-written statement on some political issue that will be sent to our Congressman - is often criticized as having little to no effect. With scorn, these mass email action alerts are sometimes referred to as "slacktivism" or "clicktivism" because of the minuscule amount of effort that's needed to participate in advocacy campaigns.

However, the effectiveness of clicktivism is certainly debatable. On the one hand, it certainly "dumbs-down" the message enough for policymakers to easily disregard its seriousness. On the other hand, that same dumbing-down process definitely engages more citizens into being politically active who probably would not have been otherwise, and that's a very healthy thing for democracy.

One recent paper by David Karpf from Rutgers University takes up the argument that clicktivism is, indeed, a positive development. In this month's Policy & Internet Journal, he has written an article titled, "Online Political Mobilization from the Advocacy Group's Perspective: Looking Beyond Clicktivism". In it, Karpf argues that 1) mass emails are the functional equivalent of the photocopied and faxed petitions and postcards of "offline" activism, and thus only represent a difference-of-degree; and 2) such low-quality, high-volume actions are only a single tactic in the strategic repertoire of advocacy groups, thus reducing cause for concern about their limited effect in isolation.

Both of these points resonate as true, yet they still fail to make a convincing case that clicktivism is, ultimately, effective.

Another paper by Stuart Shulman of UMass-Amherst takes up the opposing argument. In "The Case Against Mass E-mails: Perverse Incentives and Low Quality Public Participation in U.S. Federal Rulemaking", he argues that it's a fallacy to suggest that online public participation will somehow become a harbinger of a more deliberative and democratic era. After analyzing one mass email campaign directed towards influencing the EPA, he found that only a tiny portion of the public comments sent constituted potentially relevant new information for the EPA to consider. Instead, the vast majority of the public comments were either exact duplicates of a two-sentence form letter, or they were variants of a small number of broad claims about the inadequacy of a proposed rule.

Think of it in these completely anecdotal, unscientific terms. If you were a member of Congress, which would be more likely to influence your decision on a given issue - an individual who comes to your office and makes an intelligent, well-reasoned case with a number of supporting points, or 150 emails sent from anonymous accounts where nearly every single message was copy-and-pasted, word-for-word, and identical?

Interest groups, in this day and age, are going to continue using clicktivism as a major component in their advocacy strategies, and there are clearly legitimate political, economic, and organizational reasons for doing so. But Shulman is right. There is a danger that these gains may come at the expense of a more substantial role for citizens who wish to use digital technology to bring about public engagement in more comprehensive and effective ways.

Adhocratic Governance on Wikipedia...

2010-12-26T11:20:00.002-05:00

"Governance", as any good dissertation adviser will tell you, is a term often misused, meaning different things to different people. My research defines it through a policymaking lens - Governance is the ability to both constrain and enable behavior by creating policies that produce intentional effects at a systemic level.

Along this line of thought, Piotr Konieczny recently published an article in the Journal of Information Technology and Politics where he argues that Wikipedia is ruled by "adhocratic governance".

"Adhocracy" is based on the idea of doing something "ad-hoc", meaning in an improvised, on-the-fly sort of way. For instance, some people believe that the internet is governed in an ad-hoc manner, simply dealing with problems as they arise. I, of course, argue that this is ridiculous and that there are unquestionably various institutions and policies in place that create a formal system of authority. Regardless, according to previous scholars like Mintzberg, "adhocracy" is a system superior to bureaucracy and one that will even eventually replace it. It is "any form of organization that cuts across normal bureaucratic lines to capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results". The five features of adhocracies are...

They operate in a complex and dynamic environment and are highly innovative.
Innovations require highly trained and motivated experts.
The experts may be formally allocated to different divisions but usually work in informal, multidisciplinary teams.
Coordination and communication rely on semiformal structures, while more formalized structures and managerial practices are rare.
Parts of the organization are highly decentralized.

Wikipedia certainly fits this description, but only to an extent - which is where I would take issue with some of Konieczny's claims.

Most people are aware that anybody can publish and edit posts on Wikipedia; in fact, that is its defining characteristic. However, what people are less aware of is the organizational structure behind the WikiMedia Foundation - the website's non-profit parent organization.

As the article highlights, even though the website uses an open-source model of knowledge creation, the organization's power structure is far less democratic. Jimmy Wales is the project's co-founder and, in his revered celebrity status, holds a certain level of "charismatic authority". There is also the Board of Trustees which holds the ultimate legal authority to make decisions and even amend the WikiMedia bylaws themselves. Some members of the Board are elected; some are appointed. Then there is the primary dispute resolution mechanism - the Arbitration Committee - a body that has the power to review editors' complaints against one another, ban editors from the site, and impose other restrictions. "Ordinary editors" of Wikipedia only function below the authority of these institutions in the structural hierarchy.

To put this clearly, and despite public perception, Jimmy Wales and the Board of Trustees are "not officially responsible to the community, and they can legally overrule and change community decision".

Furthermore, there is a two-tier class system among the editors themselves. There are "regular editors" who are respected and recognized above the level of an "ordinary editor". There are also thousands of "esteemed editors" who hold electable positions and are recognized with various titles, including "administrators". Such positions often grant access to special tools, such as the ability to delete a page or to protect it from editing by others, or to block other specific editors.

So what does all of this mean? In short, Konieczny is correct in asserting that "there is evident disparity of power between the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia's editors", and, for that matter, even more disparity of power among the editors themselves. This would seem to contradict the "adhocratic" characterization which values a flat hierarchy, decentralization, little managerial control, and ad-hoc creation of informal multidisciplinary teams. Konieczny attempts to defend it by saying that, although the Board of Trustees has, in theory, ultimate legal authority, it almost never exercises it. That's a true statement, but not sufficient enough of a defense to maintain an argument that adhocratic governance rules in this particular case. The legal distinctions definitely do matter, and more so than Konieczny wants to admit.

Re-Framing the Net Neutrality Debate...

2010-12-22T08:13:00.004-05:00

Net Neutrality is the single most important issue affecting people's day-to-day lives that no one has ever heard of or understands. It is also a debate that is grossly misframed by the media.

Let's clear a few things up...

Net Neutrality is how the internet already is and has been since its creation. The internet is "neutral" because, when you're surfing, all websites are considered equal - meaning that you pay a monthly subscription fee to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) in order to surf the entire Web; you do not have to pay different fees in order to access different websites. Everything is accessible.

The political debate over Net Neutrality consists of one side - the ISPs and giant telecoms - who want to get rid of Net Neutrality so that they can charge fees for accessing different types of sites, or block them altogether. For example, ISPs like Cablevision or Verizon would charge a fee anytime people wanted to visit a website with video, which uses more bandwidth than plain text, while others like Comcast would totally block entire types of software, like Bittorrent, because of similar bandwidth concerns (which they have already tried to do in the past). These companies argue that it's their network, - they spent billions to actually build the wires and cables making up the infrastructure, so they own it and can manage it as they please, - so why not?

On the other side of the debate are small website owners who want to keep the internet neutral and a level playing field. They don't want to have to choose between paying a large fee in order to make their site accessible or else making their site text-only. That would put small business owners and new startup companies at a tremendous competitive disadvantage. The F.C.C. is actually on the pro- Net Neutrality side, arguing that the neutral internet has been such a great incubator for business startups and innovation that it should remain so.

The political issue is about whether or not the government should actually guarantee that the internet remain neutral through legislation.

First of all, despite what you might hear, this isn't a battle between The People versus The Man. It's between one group of companies versus another group of companies (giant telecoms vs. websites).

Second, it also isn't a battle between big-government regulators versus free-market capitalists. It's entirely a free-market capitalist question, and it's focused exclusively on the supply-side of the equation. What's at issue is simply which industry to favor over another (and a "no decision" to regulate is still a decision, favoring one industry over another). Either the government regulates the telecoms and creates a deregulated environment for startup websites, or the government deregulates the telecoms and creates a regulated environment for websites. It's a Catch-22. Regulations will result from either policy course.

Third, and as a result, it makes no sense for the issue to split along party lines of Republican versus Democrats. Any cable news pundits who try to frame it as such have no clue what the issue is actually about. Likewise, the overwhelming majority of politicians have no understanding whatsoever about the technical issues involved, and are simply taking their cues from the lobbyists of the giant telecoms (small website operators don't have the same organized lobbying clout). Take it from me as someone who's been researching the nuances of Net Neutrality for years - if politicians actually understood the issue, many Republicans would be all about creating a DEREGULATED environment for new website startups to innovate and flourish.

So here we are with the F.C.C. about to release its newest set of rules trying to protect Net Neutrality. They're on the right side of the debate, however, their suggested guidelines are seriously flawed. First of all, they want to guarantee neutrality on wired internet connections, but expressly want to let ISPs skirt around Net Neutrality through wireless connections. They need to get a little more consistent. Second, it's questionable whether their guidelines even strive for neutrality at all. They've included two gigantic loopholes that can easily be exploited: 1) they ban any "unreasonable discrimination" of websites, but "unreasonable" can be defined lots of different ways; 2) the rules do not explicitly forbid "paid prioritization," which would allow a company to pay for faster transmission of data. Isn't that what this entire debate is really about?

It seems to me that the F.C.C.'s latest Net Neutrality rules are just like others they've attempted in the past - hollow and merely symbolic. They're trying to establish which is the right side in the debate, but not actually generating a policy that will have much meaningful effect in reaching the larger objective.

When Hacktivists Become Anarchists...

2010-12-13T14:00:00.002-05:00

The Wikileaks story just won't go away.

In case you haven't been paying attention, Phase I involved somebody leaking 250,000 classified U.S. State Department documents and posting them to the Wikileaks website.

Phase II was the U.S. government's response - attempting to shut down Wikileaks by launching a cyberattack against the site itself.

Phase III was the response of private American companies like Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal - making it impossible for people to contribute money to Wikileaks through their services.

Phase IV was where things really got interesting - groups of hackers began rallying to Wikileaks defense. Citing freedom of the press and the more nebulous cause of "internet freedom", these hackers retaliated by launching cyberattacks to shut down the websites of Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, etc.

Now we're experiencing Phase V - the public demonizing of all hacktivist groups.

It's extremely important that all of you readers keep a few ideas clear as you filter through all of the various news stories...

First, there is a crucial difference between A) the individual who actually leaked the classified documents versus B) the website where those documents were simply posted. The individual unquestionably committed an illegal act, however, the website - Wikileaks - was simply a forum. Technically, the website didn't even break the law, and many are wondering why it is, exactly, that the New York Times is able to publish the classified content on its front-page without anyone raising an eyebrow while Wikileaks is demonized for doing the same thing. The only fact everyone agrees on is that the individual who leaked the documents committed a crime. Everything else is argumentative.

Second, there is also a crucial distinction between Wikileaks and the group of hackers behind the recent cyberattacks. As the lawyer for Julian Assange - the website's founder - has said repeatedly, neither Wikileaks nor Assange have given any instruction, nor have any affiliation, with the group of hackers known as "Anonymous". What's now occurring in the media is "a deliberate attempt to conflate hacking organizations with WikiLeaks, which is not a hacking organization. It is a news organization and a publisher". Make whatever judgment you want about the Wikileaks website; just remember that the website and this group hackers are two different things.

Third, not all hacktivists are part of this one hacker-group named "Anonymous". Hacktivism, as explained in The Nerfherder on many occasions, is any form of political activism accomplished through computer hacking. Sometimes hacktivists are very noble in their intent like when they assist dissidents in Iran and China evade their authoritarian governments' internet censors. Other times they might simply try little hacking tricks to improve their favorite political candidate's Google ranking. There is nothing wrong, illegal, or immoral about hacktivism, in and of itself. On the contrary, it is often a force for good.

This is why all of you readers should be wary about demonizing all hacktivists because of the actions of this one particular group. "Anonymous" is most famous for its edit war with the Church of Scientology a few years ago. I took a look at how I had described "Anonymous" back then, nearly three years ago, to see how my judgment might have held up to scrutiny. What do you think?

"Anonymous" is using despicable tactics that only label themselves to the rest of the world as anarchic cowards. Protests in support of a cause are one thing, but committing illicit acts that can only be characterized as juvenile in nature give observers the impression that these are not political activists fighting for free speech, but rather a group of maniacs who are using their computer hacking skills to disruptive ends while they sit back in the comfort of their homes ANONYMOUSLY to ensure there will be no repercussions, probably laughing at the havoc they're wreaking.

What these wannabe hacktivists need to understand is that such tactics are completely counter-productive. By undermining their credibility, they do more to harm their cause than to help it. Also, there is this little problem of hypocrisy with a group that claims to be fighting for free speech by taking down websites that profess a different point of view from their own.

That description still seems spot-on. Go Nerfherder.

Senate Panel Approves Website Shut-Down Bill (COICA)...

2010-12-08T13:13:00.002-05:00

There is a new bill just passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). The main purpose of this bill is to "allow the government to seek court orders to shut down websites offering materials believed to infringe copyright".

Some details...

S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) proposes to target websites that distribute infringing materials by having the Attorney General shut down their domain names (if their registrars or registries are US-based), or by telling US-based ISPs and other online providers not to connect users to accused websites that have foreign-based domain names.

The intent of this bill sounds reasonable enough. Copyright infringement is an obvious problem in cyberspace and the music and movie industries have been trying for years to clamp down on piracy.

However, upon closer examination, there are a number of serious problems with the way COICA tries to tackle online piracy. The advocacy group, Public Knowledge, outlines these points well...

First, blocking access to allegedly infringing sites and effectively requiring service providers to deny their customers true, accurate information about site locations, effectively authorizes prior restraints on speech, the most disfavored form of speech regulation under our Constitution.

Second, COICA defines a number of key terms broadly enough to potentially reach many legitimate and beneficial services. This leads inevitably to a situation where very valid and legal websites are inadvertently shut down for no reason whatsoever.

Third, by specifically making it possible to shut down websites "that link to infringing sites", COICA is opening a major can of worms. Technically, Google, Yahoo, and all of the major search engines link to infringing sites - not to mention newspapers, blogs, Facebook posts, etc. that provide commentary, - meaning that an unbelievable amount of mindless litigation would be a secondary consequence.

Fourth, COICA would lead to major technical problems for the Internet as a whole. It would create conflicts between DNS servers by requiring the operators of certain domain name servers to blacklist certain DNS requests, making the entire system unstable. If you want to totally geek out: "These conflicts could simply drive adoption of third-party DNS servers, shifting users away from large existing providers and to various services whose business practices may be less consumer-friendly, incorporating methods like unscrupulous redirects or typosquatting. Conflicts among different DNS providers could also fuel adoption of client-side systems, increasing traffic to and burden on root nameservers."

Bottom line, from the perspective of having an Internet that functions reliably, it would not be good.

Thus far, COICA has only been approved of by one Senate committee; it still has a very long way to go before the entire Senate and House would vote to pass it, let alone, then, obtain a Presidential signature. In truth, it has virtually no chance of passing into law anytime soon. Nevertheless, the fact that this Senate panel voted 19-0 in favor of the bill is simultaneously 1) quite frightening, and 2) little more than a symbolic gesture to the lobbying influence of the music and movie industries.

"I Just Need A Programmer"...

2010-12-07T13:42:00.002-05:00

As the semester winds down and my programming students set forth to blaze a trail in the world of technology, there's one thing that they can definitely expect... It's inevitable that people will start coming to them excited with new business ideas claiming, "I just need a programmer".

Professor Eugene Wallingford wrote a terrific post about this phenomenon...

As head of the Department of Computer Science at my university, I often receive e-mail and phone calls from people with The Next Great Idea. The phone calls can be quite entertaining! The caller is an eager entrepreneur, drunk on their idea to revolutionize the web, to replace Google, to top Facebook, or to change the face of business as we know it. Sometimes the caller is a person out in the community; other times the caller is a university student in our entrepreneurship program, often a business major. The young callers project an enthusiasm that is almost infectious. They want to change the world, and they want me to help them!

They just need a programmer.

Someone has to take their idea and turn it into PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS, Java, and Javascript. The entrepreneur knows just what he or she needs. Would I please find a CS major or two to join the project and do that?

Most of these projects never find CS students to work on them. There are lots of reasons. Students are busy with classes and life. Most CS students have jobs they like. Those jobs pay hard cash, if not a lot of it, which is more attractive to most students than the promise of uncertain wealth in the future. The idea does not excite other people as much as the entrepreneur, who created the idea and is on fire with its possibilities.

It's so true. There has always been a disconnect between the "idea people" and the computer programmers. As a result, the expectations of both parties are often grossly unaligned. I've personally been hired for some projects where the client thought I'd need 6 months to finish, when it actually only took a few days; and conversely, I've also had other projects where the client thought something would be a small, simple task that would only take a few days, when in reality they needed an entire team of software enginners working full-time over many months to reverse-engineer all of Google.

Case in point... I get new ideas for iPod apps emailed to me by friends practically every week. "Come on", they say, "Here's a great idea for an app, and if you just program it, then we'll split the money".

My reaction is usually to cringe - even when the idea is a good one. The reason: Most likely I'm going to invest weeks and/or months of my life programming this thing, and be lucky to earn over $100. At that point my friend would likely throw their hands up and respond, "Well, at least we tried", never fully understanding how time-consuming the effort was on my part.

This isn't hypothetical. Based on past experiences, I typically don't even come close to earning the equivalent of minimum wage, when breaking down revenues by programming hours invested. And it's not because my friend is a sheister; it's because our expectations are out-of-whack. He thinks his idea is what's crucial to the endeavor; I think it's my programming that's drives the whole thing.

The truth is we're both right. And both wrong.

Professor Wallingford is right to argue that "the value of a product comes from the combination of having an idea and executing the idea". In other words, both are necessary, and people tend to overestimate their own worth based on whether they are the "idea guy" or the "execution guy" (a.k.a. - the computer programmer), but they do so at their own peril. The truly successful enterprises recognize the equal value of both elements.

It would be great if more "idea people" actually put in the effort to learn how to program and execute their ideas themselves. That would definitely show their seriousness and commitment to the project to whomever else they might later approach. If I could endow my students with one piece of advice, it would be to look for those folks.

Netflix's Survival Depends on Net Neutrality...

2010-12-03T10:16:00.002-05:00

Netflix has been on fire lately, and a main reason why is its online streaming video service (which, in full disclosure, I absolutely love).

Thus, it came as quite a shock to many people earlier this week when the New York Times reported how Netflix was almost shut down. Comcast, one of the nation's largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs), decided to charge a new fee for companies that stream video at high bandwidth levels. This new fee puts online video companies like Netflix at a competitive disadvantage versus subscription-based Cable Television providers like Comcast.

To make this clear, the problem is that, since Comcast controls people's internet access and also makes the bulk of its money providing Cable TV service, it is in a position to limit how well online video is going to work, thereby privileging its own service at the expense of its rivals.

The F.C.C. is now investigating whether or not this is a fair business practice. Meanwhile, a petition has been circulating to "Stop Comcast from Blocking Netflix" that quickly was signed by over 100,000 people and will soon be submitted to the F.C.C. Chairman.

This story is why technologists have been screaming for years about the urgent need for Net Neutrality. ISPs like Comcast shouldn't have the power to determine which websites will work better than others, and which websites people will have access to at all. Let the marketplace decide! The cyberspace we all know and love has been defined from the beginning as a place where anybody could launch a website with almost no barriers to entry in the marketplace, and it would either succeed or fail depending on the merits of the site. That's Net Neutrality.

Comcast and other large ISPs have recently become more brazen in trying to shape our online experiences. They have tried to prohibit certain protocols, like BitTorrent, from being used by their customers - despite many such protocols having valid and legal uses. Now they want to charge an enormous fee to online video services like Netflix so that their core Cable TV business will be artificially cheaper. If they succeed, not only will the Netflix's of the world be crippled, but any wannabe new startup company will be run out of business by exorbitant fees before they ever launch. Google and Facebook never would have had a chance in their early days in such an environment.

Net Neutrality is the way things have been in the past, and that state of being has fostered tremendous innovation and free enterprise. Because companies like Comcast are trying to alter the playing field, erecting "internet toll-booths" to privilege some sites over others, there has arisen an actual need for legislation that guarantees Net Neutrality. That's a shame, but it's their own greed that's driving the F.C.C., hopefully, in that direction.

Wikileaks vs. The United States (again)...

2010-11-30T08:16:00.005-05:00

For anyone who doubts the complexity of cybersecurity, both as a technical and political problem, just look at what's been happening with Wikileaks over the past 48 hours.

In a nutshell, on Sunday, somebody leaked about 250,000 classified documents from within the U.S. State Department and posted them on Wikileaks. The website is designed to be a safe haven for "whistle-blowers" and its stated purpose is to expose corruption in both the government and the private sector, but it's certainly come under scrutiny in the past for, among other things, publishing a list of U.S. nuclear sites.

This new round of leaked documents exposes the secretive world of global diplomacy. Sensitive conversations by government officials that were thought to be private can now be read by any 7th-grader with internet access. Some of the revelations include how the king of Saudi Arabia is urging the U.S. to bomb Iran, how Turkey is being aggressive and wants to expand its sphere of influence in a "neo-Ottoman Empire", and how U.S. diplomats overseas are also acting as spies, engaging in active espionage.

Reactions to the leaked documents are, literally and figuratively, all over the map. U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman said that Wikileaks is endangering the lives of thousands of Americans, but didn't go so far as Representative Peter King who suggested that Wikileaks be officially designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Meanwhile, the State Department has been scurrying to defend its diplomats citing emphatically that they are not spies. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan immediately wrote an essay that was published in a leading Pakistani newspaper to apologize for any disparaging statements made about their country and their leadership. The Arabist notes that the incident "might reverberate much more strongly in the Arab world, where press freedom and government transparency are extremely limited". And, in perhaps the most interesting reaction, President Ahmadinejad of Iran actually criticized the Wikileaks disclosure as being "invalid" and called it nothing but "a plot" conceived of by the American government to conduct "psychological warfare" against Iran.

So that's the story - minus one more plot twist. Apparently, minutes before Wikileaks posted the classified documents, when the word got out of what was about to happen, a cyberattack was launched against the site, in an attempt to completely shut Wikileaks down. Care to take a guess who might have been behind it?

A few questions need to be raised...

1) Is cybersecurity a technical problem, or a political one? Increasingly, it's both - a lesson that policymakers deny at their own peril.

2) Why doesn't the government shut down Wikileaks? Because it's the internet, stupid! The website itself is hosted on a server overseas where the U.S. has no jurisdiction, and the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, is an Australian citizen who, since the site was created in 2006, has lived in many countries and is "constantly on the move". The goverment launched their cyberattack against the site because they are well aware that shutting down Wikileaks through traditional legal channels would be uber-complicated and take several years.

3) Did Wikileaks actually break the law? This is the most fascinating question of this case because the answer is NO. The anonymous individual who actually leaked the classified documents broke the law, but Wikileaks, which played no role other than hosting the materials, was simply a forum. In a free press society there is no "prior restraint", and indeed the U.S. has a long history of classified material being published in newspapers. Remember the Pentagon Papers? Because, at the very least, it's not clear that Wikileaks actually broke the law, the question about what the government should do to stop the site is that much more complicated.

4) To what extent is Wikileaks, and other sites like it, a serious problem? From the American perspective, two different cultural values are at odds with each other... freedom of the press vs. national security. Benjamin Franklin famously said, "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both". Then again, Abraham Lincoln added, "The Constitution is not a death sentence". We can debate this conflict of values in academia all we want, but at some point we have to recognize when something is, indeed, a true threat to our security. Is Wikileaks there yet? Ultimately, it's still just a problem, not yet a threat. However, whenever classified State Department documents are stolen, then shared publicly with the world, endangering the lives of some officials, and certainly doing damage to our reputation and foreign policy efforts abroad... let's just say that that, in and of itself, is definitely not a good thing.

This story is far from over.

Check the Facts: China Hijacks 0.015% of Internet Traffic...

2010-11-24T11:26:00.002-05:00

A friend called me up on the phone last week all excited with a breaking story. He told me that China had apparently hijacked 15% of all internet traffic, and that it was all over the news.

Well, he was right. Not about the 15%, but about the 15% number being reported in the news - which, by the way, was totally wrong. The actual amount of internet traffic that was hijacked was 0.015%.

The erroneous number originated from National Defense Magazine which was quoting a researcher from McAfee’s security team. It has since been refuted by Craig Labovitz at Arbor Networks who focuses more on internet traffic flows and less on "security hype".

A few quick lessons from this tale... First, we should all be careful of regurgitating news that warrants some skepticism. Most knowledgable people could never possibly believe that 15% of all internet traffic was suddenly hijacked. It's not technically possible. At the very least, make an effort not to be part of the echo chamber.

Second, companies have agendas. This may seem like a lesson taught in Capitalism 101, but private companies want to make money, and it's not unheard of for them to drum up some business by exaggerating the reasons why people need to buy their services. Here you have a digital security firm, McAfee, arguing that people should purchase their products because the internet is insecure, then grossly mis-stating how insecure it actually is. This shouldn't be so shocking; It's still not ok.

Unfortunately, the clamor over the misreported facts is obscuring the piece of news that actually does matter... that China did, in fact, briefly hijack a small percentage of the world's internet traffic. Bloggers and pundits can disapprove of McAfee all they want, but let's try and keep our eyes on the ball.

The Double-Edged Sword that is Stuxnet...

2010-11-22T11:09:00.005-05:00

Two months ago, a computer worm named Stuxnet infected tens of thousands of machines in Iran, and specifically targeted the centrifuges of suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. Most experts agreed that this worm was far too sophsticated to have been created by individual hackers, and therefore must have been state-sponsored. The U.S. and Israel immediately became suspects, although both governments denied any role in the cyberattack.

The Nerfherder argued that launching a cyberwar against one's enemies could be accomplished without fear of any meaningful reprisal. That being the case, we also questioned whether doing so wouldn't be actually be smart policy in order to attain desired political outcomes.

However, Stuxnet is fast becoming a double-edged sword. Reports surfaced all last week how the worm is now posing a significant threat to vital American industries.

A senior government official warned Wednesday that attackers can use information made public about the Stuxnet worm to develop variations targeting other industries, affecting the production of everything from chemicals to baby formula.

"This code can automatically enter a system, steal the formula for the product you are manufacturing, alter the ingredients being mixed in your product and indicate to the operator and your antivirus software that everything is functioning as expected," said Sean McGurk, acting director of Homeland Security's national cybersecurity operations center.

Stuxnet specifically targets businesses that use Windows operating software and a control system designed by Siemens AG. That combination, said McGurk, is used in many critical sectors, from automobile assembly to mixing products such as chemicals.

The threat is frightening federal agencies to such a degree that a new bill was unveiled last Wednesday by House Homeland Security chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) that would actually grant the Department of Homeland Security authority over private sector networks deemed critical to national security.

That would be an extreme reaction. However, what is all-too-real at the moment is how a computer worm that, perhaps, was created by the U.S. government to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program, is now being redirected back at us.

And therein lies a principle lesson of cyberwarfare (and a caveat to our previously stated argument)... It doesn't seem like such a great idea anymore once you are the victim being targeted.

10 Amazing Google Side Projects You Never Heard Of...

2010-11-19T10:36:00.004-05:00

Everyone and their mother knows that Google has a stranglehold on the internet search market. But by no means is that where this technological giant leaves off.

Thanks to Samantha Rhodes for emailing me this list. These ten Google side projects could potentially revolutionize everything from your morning commute to evening television, or they might go nowhere except to the annals of "very cool" stuff that never materialized.

Will pre- and post-Google be the way technology is referred to in the future?

Google Cars
The world of traffic jams and fender benders just might be coming to an end. With this amazing technological breakthrough, Google announced that it has developed cars that can drive themselves. Over 140,000 miles of road in California have been automatically driven in traffic by Google over the last months. Those with safety concerns have to be impressed by the vehicle’s instant reaction time and 360-degree awareness, which both reduce the instance of accidents and reduce traffic by being able to drive a fleet of cars as one. With successful test runs already completed, it might not be long before people are actually encouraged to surf Google and “drive” at the same time.

Google Goggles
That isn’t a typo, Google actually offers a feature named Goggles. Once again revolutionizing the world of search engines, this feature actually allows people to use pictures to search the web. The app available for smart phones allows you to take a photo, search for it, and get results instantly. It can even recognize text, translate into different languages, and even bring up contact information. Be sure to click on the video to see both the limitations and amazing results this app can bring.

Google Instant
If you haven’t noticed by now, typing in words into the Google homepage brings up results instantly as you type. This allows browsers to see results instantly, correct spelling errors as they type, and avoid that lengthy process of hitting the Enter button. Predictions are still available, with the most relevant or popular ones still popping up as you type and can be easily selected. Those who don’t enjoy the change can turn off Google Instant by visiting the Preferences page.

Google TV
In a collaborative effort with Sony, Google has now invaded the world of television. Their internet TV software brings Hulu, Twitter, Netflix, YouTube, and Pandora direct to the television. With models starting at $599 for a 24 inch, they offer several USB and HDMI ports, and even Wi-Fi capabilities for each set. Best of all, there is no extra cost for those who already have existing cable or satellite services to enjoy Google TV.

Google Top Box
If your brain or your wallet isn’t ready for Google TV, there is hope. Both cheaper and working with many existing televisions, the set top box features many of the advantages of the television. Those who are wary of purchasing new tech as it hits the shelves will be able to wait a while and then choose between the television or top box.

Google Wind
Sure we have the tech, but do we have the technology to power it? Google is making that possible in a greener way. They recently announced that they will invest in an enormous new project to build offshore wind farms off the mid-Atlantic coast that could bring energy to as many as 1.9 million households. Named the Atlantic Wind Connection, it would produce 6,000 megawatts of wind turbine capacity.

Google Innovation
Ever wish your boss wouldn’t care if you spent five minutes checking your Facebook account? Then apply for a job at Google. Its employees are granted a generous 20 percent in “innovation time.” In it, employees are allowed to spend a fifth of their day, or over one and a half hours in a regular work day, researching or exploring items outside their normal duties. While there are skeptics who believe this is a ruse, the idea has generated enough buzz to be considered seriously by any employer.

Google Webmaster
Although the original Webmaster has been around for a while, there have been recent developments. In the pat, it allowed certain users to get data about crawling, indexing, and search traffic. However, new parameter handling features have become available to everyone and are explained in further detail by Search Engine Land.

Google Social
Although social media may be dominated by Facebook, Twitter, and the like, Google has not given up that piece of the pie just yet. With the addition of social planning start up Plannr, Google Me is one step closer to bringing itself into competition.

Google Earth
Although this feature has been around for a while, the things it discovers have not ceased to cause headlines. Expanding every day, images can be seen as far away as Antarctica. There are even grisly reports that Google Earth has captured images that any other site or media outlet could never before. On the other end, Google Earth can even help lead to scientific discoveries such as meteor craters.

How to Fight Online Tracking Programs...

2010-11-12T10:53:00.002-05:00

The New York Times has just posted a great list of tools that people ought to consider using to protect themselves from online tracking.

Yes, whatever you do online is somehow being tracked, and it doesn't make you a conspiracy-theorist to say so. It's a matter of fact. The websites you visit keep records of how much time you spend on a site, which pages you visit, what site you came from beforehand, what site you went to afterwards, and about a thousand other bits of information that are then used for marketing purposes.

People often conjure up images of Big Brother, but it's not the government who's tracking you online... it's the advertising industry. They do so by implanting cookies (specialized files that are saved onto your hard drive), as well as "supercookies" like Flash and document object management (or DOM) cookies, which can hold more information. Another method used is the deployment of "Web bugs" or "beacons", which let sites record statistics like what ads attracted you to the site and whether you bought something.

Most people are at least somewhat aware that they should delete their cookies once-in-a-while. But supercookies and web bugs actually are NOT deleted when you clear out regular cookies through your browser. Here are some quick summary links from the NY Times article on a few steps you can take to fight the online trackers...

Remove standard cookies. Here are instructions for doing so on all four major browsers.
To remove Flash cookies, visit Adobe’s online Flash Player settings page at bit.ly/cw2roU, click on the “Website Storage Settings” panel and remove all or some of the files. Block or restrict future third-party Flash cookies by going to the “Global Storage Settings” panel.
Download some privacy-oriented plug-ins for your browser. Most of these not only allow you to manage cookies, supercookies, and web bugs, but they also let you see who is trying to follow your online movements and helps you decline targeted ads from different ad networks. Such plug-ins include BetterPrivacy, Taco, Ghostery, and CCleaner.
Slow down the marketers by spreading your searches among several engines. Also consider using different companies for search and Web-based e-mail.
Use a search engine that does not track users’ activity. Scroogle.org lets you search with Google without being tracked or seeing ads. Startpage runs simultaneous searches on multiple engines anonymously.
Mask your IP address. Try anonymizing software like Tor or OpenVPN.

Hopefully, you'll find this list pretty helpful. If one thing's for sure it's that the online marketers aren't disappearing anytime soon. Taking a few simple steps goes a long way towards protecting yourself.

Free Speech on Facebook as an Employee Right...

2010-11-10T13:24:00.002-05:00

Anyone reasonable person knows better than to publicly insult their employer on Facebook. Nevermind what's legal; we don't do it out of fear of the consequences.

Well, one gutsy individual named Dawnmarie Souza, an emergency medical technician, did exactly that to her employer, American Medical Response of Connecticut. She apparently used "impolite language to insult her supervisor" through posting public comments on Facebook.

Then, in a not-so-shocking turn of events, she was fired.

But here's where this story becomes newsworthy. A court case is being brought by a U.S. federal agency, the National Labor Relations Board, on Ms. Souza's behalf. They assert that according to the National Labor Relations Act, "social media activity concerning workplace environments, including personnel, constitute protected speech under the provisions of the First Amendment".

Maybe you buy into that argument, or maybe you don't. However, what's interesting is that it's not one zany individual, nor is it some quirky ideological organization, that's making the case against the workplace firing. It's the United States Government!

To be fair, American Medical Response of Connecticut claims that the Facebook posts were only one factor in Ms. Souza's termination, and that there were other reasons. Now, many people's first instinctive thought might be how most states have "at will" employment - meaning that employers can fire anyone without explaining it and without allowing for free speech rights. However, the argument being made in this case isn't directly focused on employment, but instead is actually centered on "working conditions".

So is restricting an employee's ability to freely comment on social media sites a form of poor workplace conditions? Does it really fall into the same category as the old sweatshops of the early industrial era?

The National Labor Relations Board apparently thinks it does.

The NLRB seems to be overreaching a bit here, but the federal courts will ultimately make the final determination. Regardless of the outcome, it's pretty fair to say that at a time when people's privacy and free speech rights online are rapidly eroding, the very existence of this suit is something just shy of, to use RWW's description, "miraculous".

Still, don't drink the kool-aid just yet. If you read into this development as a total green light to publicly criticize your employer, be prepared to deal with the consequences.

Internet Politics 2010...

2010-11-04T16:49:00.002-04:00

With this week's Congressional elections behind us, what can we learn from them in terms of gauging the current state of internet politics?

Live-blogging for the New York Times, David Carr sparks the debate...

The Future of Politics Looked a Lot Like the Past.

No matter what screen you watched this election on, it looked like you were staring at the future. CNN looked like the set for the next Tron movie, ABC News Now was a Twitter steam rendered for broadcast, and at NBC, Chuck Todd spoke next to a small White House that was actually a digital mirage that he whisked away with a swipe of his hand.

But if you stared into the soul of the new machine, you could see the gears grinding and smell the burned oil rising out of the process. President Obama, the first social media president, swept into office on small money raised virally and activated his base with mice moving in unison. But this time around, it was old-line, cold hard cash, combined with an even more ancient mechanism, a kind of primal fear, that drove the process. The people were angry and frightened, and they were in the mood to get some heads rolling. And they came with the force of a battering ram, not an incoming flutter of e-mail. People are worried in a way that doesn’t come through on Facebook updates or Twitter posts.

Does the 2010 election cycle repudiate many of the so-called "lessons" of 2008? For example, whatever happened to the new-age wisdom of the importance of social media presence? Or how about the need to foster viral marketing of candidates? What about the transformative effect that online campaign fundraising was supposed to have?

There are so many factors to consider before jumping to conclusions, that it would be folly to do so. Foremost, 2008 was a presidential election year - bringing with it far more popular attention (not to mention actual voters) - as compared to 2010 being a midterm election with far less fanfare (of course, this depends on who you're talking about, but let's just say that I doubt the politics of Rep. Steve Rothman of New Jersey's 9th Congressional District were lighting up too many office watercooler conversations). Comparing 2008 and 2010 is like comparing apples and oranges, for many reasons.

That said, what the 2010 election DOES illustrate is that, internet or not, midterm election outcomes are still more about political parties than they are about specific candidates. As my previous blog post highlighted, just because one candidate is more popular online than another ultimately means very little as far as results go.

This is an important point because all of those aforementioned internet-centric questions revolve around the efficacy of individual candidates. A successful email campaign for one aspiring member of Congress doesn't mean a hill of beans when voters are voting for or against an entire political party. Since this time around political parties mattered more than the candidates, all of those internet tools - designed to enhance the standing of the individual - are rendered far less meaningful.

Likewise, when 2012 rolls around, and the individual candidate matters more again, expect their online campaigning to return to relevance.

This is why we shouldn't necessarily read too many overgeneralized lessons about internet politics from this most recent election cycle. All 2010 has accomplished in that regard is to increase our data set, or our sample size. The old differences between midterm and presidential election campaigns persist, so now let us start analyzing how internet politics affects each of these types independently.

Weak Link Between Election Polls and Online Social-Networking...

2010-10-28T11:51:00.004-04:00

One of the most overhyped and overrated political tools is online social-networking sites.

Both the media and internet zealots love to make statements like, "The internet is changing the face of American politics", or they give political cycles monikers like, "2008 was the YouTube Election; 2010 is the Facebook Election".

Don't buy into the hype.

Statistically speaking, there is only a very weak correlation between a candidate's popularity on social-networking sites and how they do in the polls. Some current examples...

Delaware Senate Race

Christine O'Donnell (R) Chris Coons (D)
# Facebook Fans 25,809 9,523
Real-World Polls 40% 57%
California Senate Race

Barbara Boxer (D) Carly Fiorina (R)
# Facebook Fans 39,141 18,300
Real-World Polls 51% 46%
Indiana Senate Race

Dan Coats (R) Brad Ellsworth (D)
# Facebook Fans 4,422 8,553
Real-World Polls 57% 40%
West Virginia Senate Race

Joe Manchin (D) John Raese (R)
# Facebook Fans 5,580 3,873
Real-World Polls 49% 49%

If all you saw were these statistics, you're only conclusion would be... Nothing. You can't draw any conclusions about the correlation between social-network popularity and election polls because, strictly going by the numbers, there isn't any.

Sure, if we expand our sample we would likely find that, overall, those candidates with more Facebook Fans tend to perform better in the polls as well. But that's weak at best. The truth is that even when that correlation is present, it's more a reflection of popular sentiment than it is a cause.

Cracking the Facebook News Feed...

2010-10-21T10:30:00.002-04:00

On Facebook, not all people are created equal.

We're all familiar with the Facebook News Feed - the starter page that's visible when we first login, filled with recent status updates of our friends. Well, have you ever wondered why some people's statuses appear on the "Top News" feed, while others do not? Furthermore, would you be surprised to learn that the "Most Recent" feed - which we assume displays all of our friends' recent statuses in reverse chronological order - actually does not?

Facebook controls both news feeds with an algorithm. This algorithm is designed to highlight for the user only certain status updates, and not all of them - those that Facebook thinks will keep you interacting with the site longer.

So how exactly does this algorithm work? Thomas Weber of The Daily Beast conducted a fascinating experiment to test what factors are involved in making some users' statuses show up in people's news feeds, while not in others. I recommend reading the entire article, but here is a summary of his findings... [the experiment is based on a new user, Phil, creating an account and trying to get noticed in his friends' feeds] ...

Facebook is biased against newcomers - Poor Phil spent his first week shouting his updates, posted several times a day, yet most of his ready-made "friends" never noticed a peep on their news feeds.
Facebook's Catch-22 - To get exposure on Facebook, you need friends to interact with your updates in certain ways. But you aren't likely to have friends interacting with your updates if you don't have exposure in the first place. (The secret: Try to get a few friends to click like crazy on your items.)
It's not the amount of activity you have, but the type - Facebook has a reason to do this: If users saw all of the posts for all of their friends, they might be overwhelmed (or bored) and tune out—a disaster for Facebook, which needs eyeballs to earn revenue. But in doing so, Facebook's ranking system makes judgments about items it thinks you'll be interested in.
"Most Recent" news is censored too - Think that viewing your "Most Recent" feed will display all updates from all your friends? WRONG. If you've never tinkered with the "Edit Options" button on your Most Recent feed, this underscores why you should check it out—there's a little-used setting that caps the number of friends shown in the feed.
Stalking your friends won't get you noticed - Maybe you've fretted about it while poring over photos of an old flame or estranged friend on Facebook — or maybe you've diligently worked to get on someone's radar by clicking all over their page. Do Facebook's mysterious algorithms factor your stealthy interest in another person into that person's news feed? Answer: Absolutely not.
Having friends who stalk you WILL help your popularity - Stalking does work in the other direction, we found. After Phil spent days posting updates in vain, with most of our volunteers seeing none of them, we tasked a handful of friends to start showing more interest in Phil. Even though he wasn't showing up in their feeds, they sought out his Facebook page repeatedly, clicking on links he had posted and viewing his photos. This was the point at which Phil finally began to break through. It took a few days of constant clicking, but not only did the friends doing the stalking begin to see Phil in their Top News feeds — others who weren't stalking began noticing him as well.
Links trump Status Updates - We're sure you consider all of your musings fascinating — but Facebook doesn't. For those who were seeing updates from Phil, links appeared more frequently than status updates — presumably because links are more effective at driving "user engagement," which translates into people spending more time on Facebook.
Photos and Videos trump Links - Same principle applies here as in the last point, but photos and video are even more likely to appear in friends' news feeds than links.
The Power of Comments - If items you post attract comments from a few friends, it clearly raises your visibility overall.
Facebook Really is Like High School - After weeks of testing and trying everything from having Phil post videos to getting some of his friends to flood him with comments, by the end of our experiment, a few of our volunteers had still literally never seen Phil appear in their feeds, either Top News or Most Recent. These were the "popular kids" — users of Facebook with 600 or more friends. (Conversely, those with only 100 to 200 friends were among the first to spot Phil.) So the key, as you build your coterie of friends, is making sure to include some without huge networks. They'll see more of your feeds, interact in Facebook-approved ways, and up your visibility with all.

So the next time you post something to Facebook, be aware that not all of your friends will see it. Conversely, when you're reading through your news feed, also realize that some of your friends may have posted something that you're not seeing.

I bet you thought this was all so simple :-)

The iPhone's Closed Process: Deja Vu All Over Again...

2010-10-19T09:25:00.002-04:00

It's time for yet another Nerfherder iPhone rant. I've blasted Apple several times in the past for how they run their App Store and how they treat developers. But now I have a new ally backing up my narrative... the New York Times.

If you want a smartphone powered by Google’s Android software, you could get Motorola’s Droid 2 or its cousin, the Droid X. Then there is the Droid Incredible from HTC, the Fascinate from Samsung and the Ally from LG.

That’s just on Verizon Wireless. An additional 20 or so phones running Android are available in the United States, and there are about 90 worldwide.

But if your preference is an Apple-powered phone, you can buy — an iPhone.

That very short list explains in part why, for all its success in the phone business, Apple suddenly has a real fight on its hands.

Americans now are buying more Android phones than iPhones. If that trend continues, analysts say that in little more than a year, Android will have erased the iPhone’s once enormous lead in the high end of the smartphone market.

But this is not the first time Apple has found itself in this kind of fight, where its flagship product is under siege from a loose alliance of rivals selling dozens of competing gadgets.

In the early 1980s, the Macintosh faced an onslaught of competition from an army of PC makers whose products ran Microsoft software. The fight did not end well for Apple. In a few years, Microsoft all but sidelined Apple, and the company almost went out of business.

Can Apple, which insists on tight control of its devices, win in an intensely competitive market against rivals that are openly licensing their software to scores of companies? It faces that challenge not only in phones, but also in the market for tablet computers, where the iPad is about to take on a similar set of rivals.

Apple’s PC-versus-Mac battle almost put it out of business. Is it creating a similar one in the smartphone field?

The major issue under discussion here is something I've been writing about for two years already... Apple's closed processes. Now, I'm not completely delusional - I recognize the iPhone's enormous popularity and certainly don't believe Apple is even close to going out of business. However, the Times article is 100% correct in asserting that the the very same closed process that gave the iPhone such a huge early success is inevitably going to lead to its eventual demise.

The reason... It's the developers, stupid! As good as the iPhone is, its success over the long-term depends upon the all-important apps that drive it. But Apple has been so controlling in its app process, that developers like myself have either been driven away or are sitting on the edge of our seats just waiting for a commercially viable alternative platform. And now we have Android, which is soooooooo much friendlier to developers.

In sticking to their hardline closed culture, Apple has created a situation where there are now millions of developers innovating for Android, whereas a handful of employees still have to approve of innovations for iPhones. That's obviously unsustainable. Furthermore, computer science departments at universities have begun teaching classes in Android development at a much greater pace than for iPhones - again because Android makes it so much easier by eliminating an unbelievable number of layers of bureaucratic red tape. Thus, the second generation of app programmers will be trained on Android from the outset.

Let's all sing together in unison the advantages of an open approach. Mitchell Kapor is absolutely right... "Having a tightly controlled ecosystem, which is what Apple has, is a large short-term advantage and a large long-term disadvantage".

Talk to app developers and you know that the wheels are already in motion. The writing is on the wall. The question is not whether Apple's closed process can sustain its success beyond the short-term. It can't. The only question is, how long is the short-term?

Is Linux Dead?

2010-10-18T12:23:00.002-04:00

When Facebook blew up in popularity a few years ago, this blog asked the question, "Is MySpace Dead?". Now, we're forced again to ponder another once-beloved and often-hyped technology and ask, "Is Linux Dead?".

PCWorld's Robert Strohmeyer wrote an article yesterday that's lighting up the discussion boards in the open-source community. He argues that yes, indeed, desktop Linux is dead. As much as open-source advocates would hate to admit it, he makes a pretty convincing argument.

The argument goes like this...

It kills me to say this: The dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead. Despite phenomenal security and stability — and amazing strides in usability, performance, and compatibility — Linux simply isn't catching on with desktop users. And if there ever was a chance for desktop Linux to succeed, that ship has long since sunk. ... Ultimately, Linux is doomed on the desktop because of a critical lack of content. And that lack of content owes its existence to two key factors: the fragmentation of the Linux platform, and the fierce ideology of the open-source community at large.

Ouch. Strohmeyer goes on to say that the reasons for its failure are NOT what critics often cite - that it's "too geeky" - but rather a lack of, specifically, online multimedia content and compatibility.

Something of a Linux enthusiast myself, I would have to say that there is some truth to that statement, but it's also overblown. Most of my multimedia files run fine on my Ubuntu distribution the majority of the time, however, I admit, when quirky things happen, - for instance, when I want to watch Hulu, - I often go straight to my Windows machine instead.

Also admittedly, the lack of total multimedia compatibility is probably the main reason why I maintain my Linux desktop as my secondary computer to fiddle around with, while I continue using my Windows computer as the primary machine for when I actually need to get serious work done.

There is still hope for Linux in the form of HTML 5 (which makes streaming multimedia a more open process), but in the meantime all trends indicate that the desktop itself is becoming irrelevant as cloud computing takes over the world. Ironically, if Linux does manage to pull through it will only be because of "the sheer irrelevance of the operating system itself".

To be clear, this discussion is strictly about the demise of Linux for the Desktop. In other areas, Linux is still quite strong. For instance, it's totally entrenched on mobile devices, underpinning everything from Android and LG phones to Web-enabled HDTVs and set-top boxes like Roku, Google TV, and Boxee. For this reason, one CEO is quoted as saying that Linux proponents should instead focus on pushing aggressively for open Web platforms.

But nevertheless, having failed to acquire more than 1% market share in the operating system universe, it's becoming increasingly clear that despite being a fantastic free, open-source product, Linux is never going to quite catch on. To those of us who actually use it, that's a shame (and let's remember that there is a reason why it has such a hardcore loyal following). But 1% is pretty irrelevant in the overall scheme of things. Perhaps that's how Linux deserves to be treated.

Heck, even MySpace has more that 1% market share, and they were pronounced dead long ago.

Blog Action Day 2010: Water

2010-10-15T13:13:00.004-04:00

In keeping with an annual tradition, today is "Blog Action Day" in cyberspace. Everyone with a blog is encouraged to write a post on a specific cause in the hope that if thousands of people post on the same humanitarian topic then it will be an agent for social change; or at least garner some mainstream media attention towards the issue.

In previous years, the topic has ranged from the environment, to poverty, to climate change. This year's cause is WATER.

Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us.

Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of diseases and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Children are especially vulnerable, as their bodies aren't strong enough to fight diarrhea, dysentery and other illnesses. The UN predicts that one tenth of the global disease burden can be prevented simply by improving water supply and sanitation.

But, water moves beyond just a human rights issue. It’s an environmental issue, an animal welfare issue, a sustainability issue. Water is a global issue, deserving a global conversation.

Some unbelievable stats...

Every week, nearly 38,000 children under the age of 5 die from unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions.
Today, 40% of America’s rivers and 46% of America’s lakes are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life.
Today, 2.5 billion people lack access to toilets, but many more have access to a cell phone.

As of this writing, there have already been approximately 38 million readers of 5,000 blogs in 137 countries that have been invloved in Blog Action Day today. You can also view an ongoing list of posts on Twitter. Considering many of us bloggers consider our sites labors of love, and aren't really in it for the money, why not write a quick post to support the cause? And if you're not a blogger, why not consider signing the petition below?

This is cyberactivism at its best.

Change.org|Start Petition

The Social Media Popularity Paradox...

2010-10-13T10:33:00.002-04:00

Social media websites, like Digg and Reddit, rely on users to generate their content. It's something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they don't need to hire a team of journalists to cover news stories; people submit stories to them and vote on which are the most newsworthy. On the other hand, the more stories someone submits, the more influential they get on the site, and, over time, those power users can skew the results.

In August, Digg wanted to re-balance the system and changed how its website functioned in order to mitigate the influence of its power users and give some power back to The People. Naturally, those power users would get upset, but the thinking was that, by making the site more accessible to new users, Digg would net more traffic and wind up with more users overall.

They were wrong. Digg did indeed tick off their loyal core supporters, but no significant number of new users signed up. This led to Digg's CEO apologizing for the changes and rolling back many of them.

Now, GigaOm asks the pressing question... "Can Digg Apologize Its Way Back to Popularity?"

It's likely that the true Digg power users will remain loyal to the site because online influence isn't easily acquired and certainly isn't easily tossed aside, disgruntled as they may be. It's also likely that many Digg users have permanently moved on and now frequent different social media pastures.

The moral of the story is summarized in the GigaOm piece...

The upheaval at Digg shows just how difficult it is for a social network to change the way it functions on a fundamental level. Many of the changes were clearly designed to blunt the power of hard-core users and make the service more appealing to a broader range of users, but the revolt made it obvious that the changes had seriously alienated some of the site’s loyal fan base. This kind of strategy only works, however, if enough new users arrive to justify the loss of that traditional fan base.

For all social media websites that rely on user-generated content, the paradox is this... In order to become popular, you need to develop a strong group of loyal followers; however, in trying to raise your ceiling and gain in popularity even more, it is that same group of loyal followers that will restrain your growth and hold you back.

Much Still To Do on Obama's Cybersecurity Plan...

2010-10-08T10:44:00.003-04:00

Brushing up on some notes before a cybersecurity-related meeting today, I thought it would be useful to go back and review President Obama's original plan to protect the nation's critical cyber-assets. As "Layer 8" reports, 22 out of the 24 proposals have yet to be implemented.

To be clear, this is the policy that is supposed to protect us from cyberattacks by Iran, China, Al-Qaeda, etc. Shortly after coming to office, President Obama released his Cyber Policy Review which was his intended plan to enhance the nation's cybersecurity infrastructure. It sought to extend the policies created in the Bush-era National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace by, for example, requiring the US to build a cybersecurity-based identity management plan and strategy that addresses privacy and civil liberties, leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies while maintaining net neutrality principles.

However, it's quite striking how nearly all of the 24 proposals are only bureaucratic in nature, hardly addressing technical challenges at all. As Layer 8 scathingly points out, "the overarching strategy to protect US assets from cyber attack remains pretty much just a paper plan".

So to refresh everyone in the Administration's memory, here is the list of all 24 proposals that the President put forth last year...

Appoint a cybersecurity policy official responsible for coordinating the Nation's cybersecurity policies and activities;

Establish a strong National Security Council directorate, under the direction of the cybersecurity policy official dual-hatted to the NSC and the National Economic Council to coordinate interagency development of cybersecurity-related strategy and policy.

Update the 2003 National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace to secure the information and communications infrastructure. This strategy should include continued evaluation of Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative activities and, where appropriate, build on its successes.

Designate cybersecurity as one of the President's key management priorities and establish performance metrics.

Designate a privacy and civil liberties official to the NSC cybersecurity directorate.

Convene appropriate interagency mechanisms to conduct interagency-cleared legal analyses of priority cybersecurity-related issues identified during the policy-development process and formulate coherent unified policy guidance that clarifies roles, responsibilities, and the application of agency authorities for cybersecurity-related activities across the federal government.

Initiate a national public awareness and education campaign to promote cybersecurity.

Develop US government positions for an international cybersecurity policy framework and strengthen our international partnerships to create initiatives that address the full range of activities, policies, and opportunities associated with cybersecurity.

Prepare a cybersecurity incident response plan; initiate a dialog to enhance public- private partnerships with an eye toward streamlining, aligning, and providing resources to optimize their contribution and engagement.

In collaboration with other Executive Office of the President entities, develop a framework for research and development strategies that focuses on game-changing technologies that have the potential to enhance the security, reliability, resilience, and trustworthiness of digital infrastructure; provide the research community access to event data to facilitate developing tools, testing theories, and identifying workable solutions.

Build a cybersecurity-based identity management vision and strategy that addresses privacy and civil liberties interests, leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies for the Nation.

Improve the process for resolution of interagency disagreements regarding interpretations of law and application of policy and authorities for cyber operations.

Use the OMB program assessment framework to ensure departments and agencies use performance-based budgeting in pursuing cybersecurity goals.

Expand support for key education programs and research and development to ensure the Nation's continued ability to compete in the information age economy.

Develop a strategy to expand and train the workforce, including attracting and retaining cybersecurity expertise in the federal government.

Determine the most efficient and effective mechanism to obtain strategic warning, maintain situational awareness, and inform incident response capabilities.

Develop a set of threat scenarios and metrics that can be used for risk management decisions, recovery planning, and prioritization of research and development.

Develop a process between the government and the private sector to assist in preventing, detecting, and responding to cyber incidents.

Develop mechanisms for cybersecurity-related information sharing that address concerns about privacy and proprietary information and make information sharing mutually beneficial.

Develop solutions for emergency communications capabilities during a time of natural disaster, crisis, or conflict while ensuring network neutrality.

Expand sharing of information about network incidents and vulnerabilities with key allies and seek bilateral and multilateral arrangements that will improve economic and security interests while protecting civil liberties and privacy rights.

Encourage collaboration between academic and industrial laboratories to develop migration paths and incentives for the rapid adoption of research and technology development innovations.

Use the infrastructure objectives and the research and development framework to define goals for national and international standards bodies. Implement, for high-value activities (like the Smart Grid), an opt-in array of interoperable identity management systems to build trust for online transactions and to enhance privacy.

Refine government procurement strategies and improve the market incentives for secure and resilient hardware and software products, new security innovation, and secure managed services.

Questions About Cyber-Surveillance in Everyday Life...

2010-10-06T12:21:00.002-04:00

Recently, I was invited to an international workshop that's taking place in Toronto this upcoming May. It focuses on the issue of cyber-surveillance which has become widely prevalent, not necessarily only on behalf of governments, but by businesses, websites, and other entities as well.

It's the questions surrounding the issue which I find so interesting...

Digitally mediated surveillance (DMS) is an increasingly prevalent, but still largely invisible, aspect of daily life. As we work, play and negotiate public and private spaces, on-line and off, we produce a growing stream of personal digital data of interest to unseen others. CCTV cameras hosted by private and public actors survey and record our movements in public space, as well as in the workplace. Corporate interests track our behaviour as we navigate both social and transactional cyberspaces, data mining our digital doubles and packaging users as commodities for sale to the highest bidder. Governments continue to collect personal information on-line with unclear guidelines for retention and use, while law enforcement increasingly use internet technology to monitor not only criminals but activists and political dissidents as well, with worrisome implications for democracy...

We regularly hear about ‘cyber-surveillance’, ‘cyber-security’, and ‘cyber-threats’. What constitutes cyber-surveillance, and what are the empirical and theoretical difficulties in establishing a practical understanding of cyber-surveillance? Is the enterprise of developing a definition useful, or condemned to analytic confusion?

What are the motives and strategies of key DMS actors (e.g. surveillance equipment/systems/ strategy/”solutions” providers; police/law enforcement/security agencies; data aggregation brokers; digital infrastructure providers); oversight/regulatory/data protection agencies; civil society organizations, and user/citizens?

What are the relationships among key DMS actors (e.g. between social networking site providers)? Between marketers (e.g. Facebook and DoubleClick)? Between digital infrastructure providers and law enforcement (e.g. lawful access)?

What business models are enterprises pursuing that promote DMS in a variety of areas, including social networking, location tracking, ID’d transactions etc. What can we expect of DMS in the coming years? What new risks and opportunities are likely?

What do people know about the DMS practices and risks they are exposed to in everyday life? What are people’s attitudes to these practices and risks?

What are the politics of DMS; who is active? What are their primary interests, what are the possible lines of contention and prospective alliances? What are the promising intervention points and alliances that can promote a more democratically accountable surveillance?

What is the relationship between DMS and privacy? Are privacy policies legitimating DMS? Is a re-evaluation of traditional information privacy principles required in light of new and emergent online practices, such as social networking and others?

Do deep packet inspection and other surveillance techniques and practices of internet service providers (ISP) threaten personal privacy?

How do new technical configurations promote surveillance and challenge privacy? For example, do cloud computing applications pose a greater threat to personal privacy than the client/server model? How do mobile devices and geo-location promote surveillance of individuals?

How do the multiple jurisdictions of internet data storage and exchange affect the application of national/international data protection laws?

What is the role of advocacy/activist movements in challenging cyber-surveillance?

When Cyberbullying Misses the Point...

2010-10-04T12:41:00.002-04:00

Last week, a Rutgers student named Tyler Clementi committed suicide after his roommate filmed him allegedly having homosexual relations, then posted the video on the internet. The media quickly classified the story as a case of cyberbullying.

Cyberbullying is a serious issue and has been prominent on the national agenda ever since the Megan Meier case a few years ago. But as the media frames this as a cyberbullying story highlighting the need for greater regulations on internet behavior, it's possible that they've got it wrong. This is a case of a hate crime being committed; and if it is prosecuted as such, then it changes the conversation dramatically.

For instance, one Time article emphasizes a lack of cyber-education as the root cause of the incident...

Maybe we are where we are because we've had no teachers. No one has instructed us how to use the Internet. We've learned on our own, pointing and clicking, blogging and tweeting. There are no rules of the cyber-road. In a lawless Facebook-Twitter-chat-room culture with scant etiquette and 24/7 saturation, it can be hard to know where to draw the line.

A good point, to be sure. However, it does a great injustice to suggest that a simple lack of cyber-manners or etiquette led to the Clementi incident. Extreme homophobia was to be blame, and the internet was merely the transmission vehicle.

Because of the "cyberbullying" label, Clementi's roommate, Dharun Ravi, and Ravi's friend, Molly Wei, are only being charged with invasion of privacy. That's a proper charge for many cyberbullying cases. However, if the situation is assessed more soberly, it would be absurd to deny the role that homophobia played in this incident. And in legal terms, there is a monster difference between charging someone with "invasion of privacy" versus charging them with "hate crimes".

Cyberbullying is an extremely serious problem that has to be addressed, both through social norms as well as the legal system. However, in this Clementi case, let's not ignore the large elephant in the room. To frame what happened as a simple invasion of privacy is akin to labelling someone spray-painting a swastika on a synagogue as simple vandalism.

It's not untrue, but it misses the real point.

Why TechCrunch Was Acquired by AOL...

2010-09-29T12:28:00.002-04:00

Yesterday it was announced that the popular technology blog, TechCrunch, was being acquired by AOL for a reported $25 million.

A few observations...

First of all, if TechCrunch, which receives about 3.8 million hits per month, and turns a profit of $3.5 million annually, can be valued at $25 million, then that's a pretty good barometer to use for valuing websites in general, and blogs more specifically. After some detailed calculations, I have determined that The Nerfherder is not quite there yet :-)

Second, it's almost surprising to hear that AOL is still alive. What have you heard about them in the past five years, really? Their latest plan to stay in business is through acquiring media companies, like TechCrunch and Engadget, hoping to turn a profit through advertising. Even if you're not skeptical about their chances for success in that enterprise, you have to admit that they joined the ranks of the irrelevant quite a while ago.

Third, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch's founder, illicits a mixed emotional response here. On the one hand, you've got to give the guy credit for starting up a website from scratch and cashing it in for $25 million within only a few short years. He's living the dream. On the other hand, his public statement about how he sold TechCrunch simply because AOL has top engineering talent and that he wanted to be focused on writing, and not be distracted by the engineering challenges of maintaining a website, is so phoney-baloney that you have to roll your eyes a bit. Is anyone in their right mind really expected to believe that nonsense?

I have a sneaking suspicion the $25 million played a bigger role in his decision-making process than his statement leads us to believe, and that he didn't sell TechCrunch to AOL simply for engineering help, or for The Greater Cause.

But good for him, nonetheless.

Cyberwarfare Against Iran as Smart Policy...

2010-09-26T11:53:00.003-04:00

When nations launch bombs or send in armies to attack other nations, we call it a war. When nations launch a cyberattack against other nations, you would presume that we would call that an act of war as well. But that is decidedly not the case.

And governments may be using that to their advantage.

Last week, news reports surfaced that Iran is under cyberattack. The most sophisticated computer worm ever (according to some experts), named Stuxnet, has already infected industrial plants across Iran, possibly including the famous Natanz nuclear facility, which has long been suspected of enriching uranium for nuclear weapons.

Stuxnet, which was first publicly identified several months ago, is aimed solely at industrial equipment made by Siemens that controls oil pipelines, electric utilities, nuclear facilities and other large industrial sites.

Given the sophistication of the worm and its aim at specific industrial systems, many experts believe it is most probably the work of a state, rather than independent hackers.

Iranian officials are, of course, playing down the threat - despite one claim of at least 30,000 computers being infected.

It's extraordinarily difficult to identify the origins of computer worms. But who are we kidding, right? The instinctive reaction is to assume that American, Israeli, or European governments are behind this cyberattack. Naturally, they have all denied such involvement, and there is no proof linking them to it.

But setting aside conspiracy theories for the moment, there is an interesting question raised by the Stuxnet case... Can governments really launch a cyberwar against their enemies without fear of reprisal? If so, wouldn't that be a smart thing to prescribe in order to attain desired political outcomes?

Already, there is a history of cyberwarfare between national governments where the reprisals were little more than verbal condemnations. Prominent examples include the cyberattacks launched by China against the U.S. and Russia against Estonia.

Again, it needs to be reiterated that these are not cases of individual hackers causing mischief. These are overt acts perpetrated by national governments against other national governments. That's the defining characteristic which makes it true cyberwarfare. If governments are hesitant to carry out certain political objectives for fear of a military response - like having bombs dropped on them - then perhaps launching direct, targeted cyberattacks to carry out those same political objectives is actually smart policy. Particularly when there are no clear consequences.

If Stuxnet can set back the Iranian nuclear weapons program by a few years, just as air strikes might have - but without the political or military fallout, then that sounds like awfully smart policy to me.

The Rise of Apps Culture...

2010-09-22T12:27:00.008-04:00

The gold rush is on! Ask any computer programmer today where they see immediate entrepreneurial opportunity, and the answer is almost certainly... "in apps". That's where all of the energy in the industry currently resides.

A new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project illustrates the growing market for apps. A few stats worth noting...

82% of American adults have cell phones, and 23% now live in a household that has a cell phone but no landline phone.
Among those with cell phones, 43% have cell phones with apps, but only two-thirds of those who have apps actually use them.
NOTE: This is a recurring theme in the report. There is still a gap between people having apps versus people actually using apps.
29% of cell phone users have downloaded an app to their phone, while 38% have purchased a phone with preloaded apps.
One in ten adult cell phone users (10%) had downloaded an app in the past week; 20% of cell phone users under age 30 download apps this frequently.
One in eight adult cell phone users (13%) has paid to download an app.
Among cell phone users with apps, the average adult has 18 apps on his or her phone.

Furthermore, apps continue to rank low on the list of non-voice cell phone activities...

Take a picture	76%
Text messages	72%
Access the internet	38%
Games	34%
Email	34%
Record a video	34%
Play music	33%
Instant message	30%
APPS	29%

So we can see that, not only is the market for apps growing rapidly (this segment of the industry basically did not exist two years ago), but the market still has plenty of room for future growth. It clearly remains in - that phrase which entrepreneurs so cherish - its "embryonic stage".

How Much is a Tweet Worth?

2010-09-21T09:34:00.002-04:00

The folks at Twitter are still trying to figure out, years later, how exactly to make some money off of their website's phenomenal success. Meanwhile, celebrities on Twitter are cleaning up.

TwitChange is a celebrity auction where Twitter users can bid to get three things: be followed by their favorite celebrity on Twitter, retweeted, or mentioned by them in a "special" tweet.

All of the proceeds go to the charity, aHomeInHaiti.org.

What's most fascinating about this auction is that, for the first time, we can gauge how much a tweet is worth. Some of the celebrities participating are also among the most followed Twitter users, so it helps set a type of max ceiling on tweet values.

For example, take a look for yourself at the auction list. As of this writing, you can see that people are willing to pay nearly $5000 for Jessica Alba to mention them in a tweet. Also, somehow, Dana White (from Ultimate Fighting Championship fame) will tweet about you for a staggering $15,000!

One can only imagine Eva Longoria getting all upset and wondering why her tweets are worth so much less.

The Web Is Dead... Really?

2010-08-31T08:07:00.009-04:00

The cover story for Wired Magazine this month, proclaiming that "The Web Is Dead", is clearly designed to be provocative. It's also true.

Here's why. If you actually read the argument, you'll understand that what the authors mean is, not that the internet is dead, but that the free and open Web - in the collectivist utopian sense - is dead. This is an important distinction. Even though they often get conflated, the internet and the Web are two different things. The internet refers to the network; the Web refers to one application on that network where we browse publicly accessible pages and documents. The authors argue that the network isn't going anywhere (in fact, they say it's become as crucial to modern life as electricity). It's the open Web that is fading into twilight.

Granted, this is a bit of exaggeration. Nobody in their right mind believes that Google is suddenly going the way of the dinosaurs anytime soon. However, Chris Anderson's point is that the Web we grew accustomed to in the 90s has gradually been replaced. And, importantly, it's been us who have voluntarily chosen to replace it...

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).

To support this argument, the following chart on internet traffic is provided showing how less and less internet traffic is devoted to Web surfing...

The main point to take away from all of this is that we, as information and media consumers, have gradually chosen to shift our preferences away from elements of the open Web and towards the so-called "walled gardens" of the internet - iPhone apps, Facebook, Skype, Netflix, XBox, etc. These are all examples of utilities that are delivered over the internet, but which are not publicly accessible unless you either pay for them or at least agree to what are often stringent terms of service.

These walled gardens are described by scholar Jonathan Zittrain as being a dangerous thing. They lead to "a loss of open standards and services that are 'generative' - [meaning that they] allow people to find new uses for them. The prospect of tethered appliances and software as service permits major regulatory intrusions to be implemented as minor technical adjustments to code or requests to service providers."

Basically, it means the Everyman can no longer tinker with what's out there - and that is the most fundamental defining characteristic of the early Web. As the trend towards proprietary walled gardens continues, it is a value that is increasingly lost.

The reaction to the article in cyberspace has been, predictably, a passionate one. Prominent blogs like Boing Boing question the aforementioned graph on internet traffic, TechCrunch predicts that people will inevitably become "overwhelmed" by apps and return to the browser (yet doesn't explain how or why), and Gawker highlights several hypocrisies of the article, such as how Wired published the cover story first to the Web, not through its iPad app, apparently because the editors still believe "it pays better to deliver that news via a dying medium".

While so many digerati are outraged, feel defensive, and are, quite possibly, in denial about the "Web is Dead" argument, that doesn't necessarily make it untrue. It seems foolish to deny the power of apps in the current internet environment, and it doesn't seem like that's going to change anytime soon. Most likely, the power of apps will only increase over time, rather than diminish, particularly as smartphones become ever more ubiquitous. To be sure, HTML pages, browsers, and blogs aren't disappearing off the face of the earth; they are also clearly here to stay, but they also now have to share the internet with their walled brethren who are usually backed by companies with significant resources.

The open Web may not be completely dead. But in an app-driven world, it's not nearly as far-fetched an argument as its critics would wish it to be.

Comparing Liberation Technology: Haystack vs. Tor...

2010-08-24T11:58:00.002-04:00

There is a burgeoning market for hacktivist software that helps internet users evade surveillance. At the top of the list for many years now has been Tor, which enables people to surf the Web while masking their IP address, therefore making it extremely difficult for the authorities to identify them.

Tor now has a new rival. Haystack is a soon-to-be-released software program, still in beta, which also seeks to protect users' privacy, and is specifically aimed at providing unfiltered internet access to the people of Iran. Their stated hope is that, by enhancing Iranians' capacities for free expression and uncensored access to information, they will be encouraging "peaceful opposition" to the regime.

Hacktivist software like this is typically well-intentioned, but a few observations are warranted...

First of all, Haystack is not an ordinary proxy system. "It employs a sophisticated mathematical formula to hide users' real Internet traffic inside a continuous stream of innocuous-looking requests. In addition to providing anonymity, Haystack uses strong cryptography, ensuring that even if users' traffic is detected, it cannot be read."

Second, Haystack is different than Tor. Tor focuses on using onion routing to ensure that a user's communications cannot be traced back to him or her, and only focuses on evading filters as a secondary goal. Tor also uses standard SSL protocols which make it easy to block, especially during periods when the authorities are willing to intercept all encrypted traffic. Haystack, on the other hand, gives primary attention to encryption that will help users evade filters. In fact, to a computer, a user using Haystack appears to be engaging in normal, unencrypted web browsing, which raises far fewer suspicions. Also, unlike Tor, Haystack has no public list of servers, which makes it exceptionally difficult for the authorities to discover which machines to block.

Third, Haystack is NOT open source. This might come as a surprise to some, but Haystack's counter-argument is that...

Although we sincerely wish we could release Haystack under a free software license, revealing the source code at this time would only aide the authorities in blocking Haystack. In the future, however, we would like to find a way to reconcile our Free Software ideals with the necessity of frustrating the efforts of those who would block Haystack.

This seems somewhat counter-intuitive to those of us familiar with open source software. In fact, the Haystack group themselves go on to say that "it would take centuries for all the world's computers to decipher one of our users' browsing sessions even with full access to the Haystack source code."

Regardless, it's a positive development to see that the much-beloved Tor is starting to see some viable competition. These aren't commercial products, so rather, what we're talking about is competition in the marketplace for non-profit activist software. But just as in the commercial marketplace, the more competition, the better the product and the greater the innovation.

Agenda-Setting in the Digital Age: The Case of Proposition 8...

2010-08-22T22:28:00.003-04:00

The question as to how issues make it onto the national political agenda, and why others do not, is one that academics have been theorizing about for years. To what extent does the media shape public opinion and mobilize popular support for specific issues? Traditional media certainly plays an important role in shaping political agendas, but how is social media on the internet now altering that dynamic?

This can go in several directions. Either 1) traditional news outlets remain the primary catalyst, leading the way for online social media to follow; 2) the reverse is true and online social media is leading the way for traditional new outlets to follow; or 3) "communication is a process" and they mutually influence each other in highly complex arrangements.

Somewhat predictably, a recent academic paper argues for the third option of complexity. Titled, "Agenda Setting in a Digital Age: Tracking Attention to California Proposition 8 in Social Media, Online News and Conventional News" (Sayre, Ben; Bode, Leticia; Shah, Dhavan; Wilcox, Dave; and Shah, Chirag), in the Policy & Internet journal, the authors conducted a case study using the Proposition 8 issue in California to see whether traditional news outlets led the way, or whether online social media - specifically, YouTube - acted as the primary catalyst for subsequent coverage.

What they found was a direct correlation that showed traditional newspapers in California clearly leading both YouTube and Google News coverage of the issue. In other words, newspapers would first report on it, then online media would react. This is an important result in its own right, however, complicating the data is the significance of timing. As the authors responsibly acknowledge, traditional news outlets clearly led the way before the November 2008 election, but afterwards, and especially during the period surrounding the 2009 California Supreme Court decision, YouTube videos were clearly a much better predictor of both newspapers and Google news coverage.

What does this mean? Basically, since the number of YouTube videos actually increased in the aftermath of the election, while the newspapers' attention to the issue faded, the authors conclude that YouTube was being used as a platform for people to register opinions that they felt were not being represented in the mainstream. Indeed, it was opponents of Proposition 8 who accounted for nearly all of the activity on YouTube following the election. The lesson of social media in the Prop 8 case, then, is that people strongly identify with, and become more active in expressing, a minority position when that cause’s prospects take a turn for the worse.

Thus, traditional news outlets continue to be the primary catalyst for agenda-setting, while online social media serves better as a protest platform; or venue for expressing contrarian perspectives.

Agenda-setting is important because it not only dictates how readers learn about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. Online social media is clearly a part of this modern equation, but it hasn't usurped the influence of traditional news outlets just yet.

The BlackBerry Ban and the "Right of Free Use"...

2010-08-13T14:26:00.003-04:00

Two weeks ago, when the United Arab Emirates declared that they would be banning all BlackBerries in their country unless the device's maker, Research In Motion (RIM), would grant that foreign government access to encrypted e-mails sent and received by BlackBerry users, an uproar rightfully ensued. The UAE, soon followed by Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and India, all argued that they needed to be able to monitor people's messages in the interests of national security.

RIM ought to be applauded for holding strong and maintaining even some semblance of user privacy rights.

As Hillary Clinton and the U.S. State Department immediately made clear, BlackBerry bans violate a "right of free use". Furthermore, such bans would only be a first step in a process that would erode privacy everywhere. As CNN reported, if the UAE ban holds up, you can expect even more foreign governments to feel emboldened and quickly follow suit.

Now, to be certain, the issue is more complex than many reactionaries in cyberspace are giving it credit. There are legitimate security concerns for which BlackBerry encryption has become an obstacle. As Richard Falkenrath, a former U.S. deputy homeland security advisor, wrote in an op-ed, among American law enforcement investigators and intelligence officers, the Emirates’ decision met with approval, admiration and perhaps even a touch of envy. The men and women who make a living hunting terrorists, smugglers, and human traffickers rely on exactly this type of electronic surveillance to keep the rest of us safe.

In fact, in the United States, telecommunications providers are generally required to provide a mechanism for such access by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and related regulations issued by the FCC. As a general principle, information-service providers here must provide a means for federal agencies, usually the F.B.I., "to view the ostensibly private data of their subscribers when lawfully ordered to do so".

However, the problem with the current BlackBerry ban is that it's highly questionable, to put it lightly, whether hunting terrorists is the main objective for the countries involved. While it shouldn't entirely be dismissed, it's far more likely that, say, the government of China is interested in using BlackBerry monitoring to crack down on its citizens' free speech rights than it is in fighting Bin Laden. And even when intentions are genuine, putting such an insecure architecture in place makes it ripe for future abuse.

In other words, there would be no putting the genie back in bottle. And the trust level for the authoritarian governments in question is hardly inspiring.

This is the battle that's defining our time. National governments are struggling to retain control in an increasingly borderless internet-enabled world, and privacy is frequently in conflict with security. RIM has thus far acted nobly in defiance of the BlackBerry ban, just as Google similarly held out against China a few months ago, but ultimately this battle is still in its early stage, and the end-result will be nothing less than a re-determination of what the internet itself will be.

Is the Net Neutrality Plan by Google and Verizon For Real?

2010-08-10T06:00:00.004-04:00

Last week, in response to this NYTimes article which claimed that Google and Verizon had struck a back-room deal whereby Google would pay millions to have its content delivered faster over Verizon's network relative to other websites, effectively killing the principle of net neutrality, an incredible amount of mud-slinging and blog-flaming ensued.

Now, news reports indicate that this back-room deal may not have taken place at all; or at least not in the way in which it was originally portrayed. Alan Davidson, Google director of public policy, and Tom Tauke, Verizon executive vice president of public affairs, policy, and communications, have posted a joint statement on Google's Public Policy Blog that aims to clear up any confusion about the two companies' recent discussions.

In it, they lay out the policy framework that they've submitted to the FCC which, on its surface, appears to support net neutrality principles for landline internet service, though carves out exceptions for wireless broadband. This public statement of support for net neutrality is encouraging, but the surprising extent to which Verizon was willing to go almost breeds skepticism.

Read it for yourself here.

Meanwhile, as maniacal bloggers continue to rant and rave on the subject, a more sober collection of viewpoints can be found on the NYTimes website, where established leading scholars have shared their more serious reflections.

Different sides of the debate are presented, which is always a good thing, especially in an issue area where most people are largely uneducated about the nuances. The point-of-view that resonates most is that of Colombia professor Tim Wu who notes that firms like Verizon and Google have such power that, if they were to strike a deal that effectively killed net neutrality, they would then be able to decide what firms succeed or fail -- by making sites load faster or slower, or end up on page 10 of search results.

"The greatest danger of the fast lane is that it completely changes competition on the net. The advantage goes not to the firm that's actually the best, but the one that makes the best deal with AT&T, Verizon, or Comcast. Had there been a 2-tier Internet in 1995, likely, Barnes and Noble would have destroyed Amazon, Microsoft Search would have beaten out Google, Skype would have never gotten started -- the list goes on and on. We'd all be the losers."

If the joint policy framework that Google and Verizon submitted to the FCC is genuine, both in content as well as intent, then that would be a strong showing of support for net neutrality indeed. If it's a smokescreen, then it's business innovation and consumers who will ultimately suffer the repercussions. Either way, one thing is certain... without legislation that officially protects net neutrality, it's only a matter of time before some back-room deal does emerge.

Bot Politics: The Domination, Subversion, and Negotiation of Code in Wikipedia

2010-08-08T18:31:00.002-04:00

Catching up on some videos from this year's Wikipedia Research Conference, the most interesting piece was presented by Stuart Geiger titled, "Bot Politics: The Domination, Subversion, and Negotiation of Code in Wikipedia".

The summary...

Recent research in the field of critical software studies has placed much attention on Wikipedia's software infrastructure, focusing on fully-automated bots, semi-automated tools, and other technological actors essential to Wikipedia's normal operation. This research trajectory has clearly demonstrated that such systems have significant sociocultural consequences for Wikipedia. However, this paper gives an alternative view by showing how these software agents are contested and negotiated. Specifically, I analyze the case of a bot created to enforce what was thought to be a near-universal norm: users should sign their comments in discussion spaces. However, this auto-signature bot was subverted by Wikipedian editors, and the ensuing conflict was only resolved by the creation of new standards that were at once social and technical limits on the behavior of humans and non-humans. Complicating the social and technological determinism's prevalent in software studies, this case illustrates that Wikipedia must be analyzed from a hybridized, sociotechnical perspective.

Geiger's main point is something that I have conducted much research on myself... that the creation of software code is inherently political. It can enable or limit certain types of behaviors, and thus the battle over what type of code will be written must inevitably involve decisions over political ideologies and architectures of control.

Overall, a great presentation.

A few other personal favorites from the conference:

Scott Kildall - Wikipedia Art: Citation as Performative Act
Patrick Lichty - Social Media, Cultural Scaffolds, and Molecular Hegemonies. Musings on Anarchic Media, WIKIs, and De-territorialized Art
Maja van der Velden - When Knowledges Meet: Database Design and the Performance of Knowledge

A full list of presentations can be found here.

Why Information Is Not Free: The Myth of Frictionless Capitalism...

2010-07-30T12:10:00.003-04:00

Information is the lifeblood of markets - knowing what is available, where it's available, and who wants it are crucial. Internet talking-heads have long insisted that, in the Digital Age, information wants to be free. But is this really the case?

In his book, Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets, John McMillan argues that, in fact, it is not case.

When we think of internet economics from a consumer-driven perspective, we think of comparison shopping. The search costs involved in finding the best price for a specific item have been greatly reduced by people's new ability to simply Google that item and see, within a matter of seconds, which seller is offering it at the lowest price. It's not rocket science to see how the balance of bargaining power has shifted to consumers.

And from the sellers' perspective, using information to match demand and serve the demand also creates positive economic externalities. This is what Bill Gates has referred to as "friction-free capitalism".

This all sounds logical in theory, however the results haven't always panned out as expected.

While it's true that the ease of comparison shopping on the internet has brought a perceptible lowering of prices, as economic theory predicts, it has failed to eliminate the dispersion of prices. What this means is that the same book might cost $19.99 on Amazon, but &16.99 on Barnes & Noble.com, and $12.99 on Books.com. In fact, if you perform a comparison shop on almost any item, it's striking how different prices on the same item remain despite the sellers' knowledge that many consumers comparison shop so easily on the Web. According to one study, the typical price dispersion was 37% for books and 25% for CDs. For books, there is actually more price variation among internet retailers than among bricks-and-mortar retailers.

Thus, the ready availability of "free" price information has not driven prices of identical items into alignment. This is something of a puzzle. McMillan says this can possibly be explained by 1) the laziness of shoppers to search for the lowest price, 2) the reliability of the seller, and 3) trust in the proprietor's judgment. Basically, the shopper is not simply buying a book, but a package of services of which the book itself is only a part. "Apparently, homogeneous items often are not actually homogeneous: it matters where you buy them".

This hardly paints a picture of frictionless capitalism. There are still clear search and transaction costs involved in the functioning of even the most modern digital markets, and that's a point worth remembering to those who tend to oversimplify E-business models.

What Stewart Brand once said still holds true... "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. [It] wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient".

How the Internet Fails to Redress Participatory Inequality in American Politics...

2010-07-23T01:41:00.002-04:00

Since its inception people have touted the internet's potential as a democratizing force; that it would transcend issues like geography, income, and education levels, ultimately empowering more Americans to participate actively in politics.

Has it lived up to its promise?

This is the question asked in the article, "Weapon of the Strong? Participatory Inequality and the Internet" co-authored by Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady, and published in the journal, Perspectives on Politics (vol. 8 no. 2).

In short, the answer is "No". The authors' extensive research study uncovered that, when it comes to political participation, the internet has failed to ameliorate the inequalities that have existed offline for decades. As any freshman student of Politics 101 learns, those who are disadvantaged are less likely to be politically active, and thus far the internet has failed to disrupt the pattern of association between that socio-economic disadvantage and the lack of political activity.

Even when only that subset of the population with internet access is considered, participatory acts such as contributing to candidates, contacting officials, signing a political petition, or communicating with political groups are as stratified socio-economically when done on the web as when done offline.

The are three reasons why people don't become active in politics: They can't; they don't want to; and nobody asked. The internet is certainly capable of lowering each of these barriers, however, rather than raising the level of political activity, it has instead simply "repackaged" it. The authors conclude that "instead of citizens undertaking political action that they ordinarily would not, people who would have participated anyway might simply be taking their activity online".

A convincing amount of data is presented in support of these conclusions (even if the multitude of charts and graphs require strenuous effort to decipher), and most potential criticisms of the research methodology, like the outdated 2008 time frame, is openly addressed and acknowledged by the authors themselves.

These results are certainly disappointing, but perhaps the most important finding is that, while the internet has failed to transcend the socio-economic inequalities of political participation, it has actually shown a real potential to mitigate a different participatory deficit - the youth. It's common knowledge that younger citizens, particularly those just joining the electorate, are notorious for being less politically engaged (especially when it comes to voting). The internet has indeed demonstrated a transformative shift among America's online youth as they are less underrepresented than they are offline. In fact, they dominate blogs and politically relevant uses of social-networking sites, and are more likely than their elders to receive and send requests for political activity by email.

So if the internet has virtually no effect on the political participation gap among socio-economic groups, but is showing some potentially significant effects on the political habits of youth voters, the original question remains unanswered...

To what extent is it a truly democratizing force?

ASCAP and the Copyright Bill of Rights for Songwriters and Composers...

2010-07-21T13:40:00.003-04:00

One of the reasons why the digital copyright debate rages on is its often-overlooked complexity and the fact that there are no clear solutions. Both the copyright and copyleft have valid arguments, and to dismiss that haphazardly is to fuel fire to the extremists on both sides, ultimately hindering any efforts at badly needed legal reform.

Several days ago I had a long and thoughtful discussion with an employee of ASCAP - the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. Their primary task is to defend strong copyright protection and collect royalties for artists.

ASCAP created a Bill of Rights for Songwriters and Composers a while ago. Taking the point-of-view of the artist, it lays out, what any serious observer would have to admit are, in most cases, very reasonable principles...

We have the right to be compensated for the use of our creative works, and share in the revenues that they generate.

We have the right to license our works and control the ways in which they are used.

We have the right to withhold permission for uses of our works on artistic, economic or philosophical grounds.

We have the right to protect our creative works to the fullest extent of the law from all forms of piracy, theft and unauthorized use, which deprive us of our right to earn a living based on our creativity.

We have the right to choose when and where our creative works may be used for free.

We have the right to develop, document and distribute our works through new media channels - while retaining the right to a share in all associated profits.

We have the right to choose the organizations we want to represent us and to join our voices together to protect our rights and negotiate for the value of our music.

We have the right to earn compensation from all types of "performances," including direct, live renditions as well as indirect recordings, broadcasts, digital streams and more.

We have the right to decline participation in business models that require us to relinquish all or part of our creative rights - or which do not respect our right to be compensated for our work.

We have the right to advocate for strong laws protecting our creative works, and demand that our government vigorously uphold and protect our rights.

Artists definitely deserve their just compensation. The problem is that hardly anyone disagrees with that point. Even the most staunchest advocates of the copyleft movement, including Lawrence Lessig himself, believe that the interests of artists need to be served - they simply seek to preserve the balance between those interests and the public domain.

In other words, where ASCAP goes wrong is not in the principles they lay out in their Bill of Rights; it's in their extreme and sometimes overly harsh attempts to protect copyrights at all costs.

For example, in the past, ASCAP has come under heavy scrutiny for threatening to sue the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts of America for not paying licensing fees when they sang copyrighted songs in summer camps. Also, ASCAP has pursued a strategy of cracking down by demanding royalty fees from any club that holds an open mic night (even if most of the songs performed are originals), and has even sued a Manhattan pub for playing Bruce Springsteen songs over its jukebox.

Thus, the same reasonable observer who can see the validity in the Artists' Bill of Rights can also see the perversity of ASCAP's tactics in sometimes trying to implement it.

All of which reinforces the urgent need for copyright REFORM. As I've said before in this space, to frame the issue in black-and-white as being between artists versus pirates is a gross oversimplification. Sure, there are extremists on both sides, and suing the Girl Scouts for singing "Happy Birthday" is just as ridiculous as those on the copyleft who try to justify straight-up piracy. But where this debate is actually occurring in serious circles is how to reform copyright laws in order to preserve artists' rights while simultaneously maintaining a healthy public domain.

Any ultimate solution will have to follow that path.

How Congress Communicates on the Internet...

2010-07-20T11:55:00.002-04:00

Much has been written in recent years about how internet technologies are changing the ways in which members of Congress engage the public. However, what's been less frequently discussed is how such innovations have spurred Congress to alter the way it operates as an institution.

In a study by Colleen J. Shogun of the Congressional Research Service, and published in April's Political Science & Politics Journal (Vol. 43, No. 2), some statistical light is shed on this topic...

In 1997, the last year without widespread email use in Congress, the House and Senate received a total of 30.5 million pieces of postal mail. By 2007, the combined total of emails and postal mail communications received was 491.6 million. That's over a 1500% increase in 10 years.
As far as how members of Congress communicate with each other, use of the exclusive "Dear Colleague" system, which enables members to send communications to other members about proposed legislation, committee action, briefings, chamber procedural issues, etc., has gone from 5,000 messages sent in 2003 to over 17,000 in 2009. That's a 240% increase in 6 years.
As members have quickly adopted Twitter as a favorite medium, a relatively small study of member tweets found that, in the summer of 2009, out of 1187 tweets, 69.8% originates from House Republicans, while only 14% came from House Democrats, and the remainder from members of the Senate.
- Not only did more House Republicans use Twitter than their Democratic counterparts, they also tweeted more frequently.
- Furthermore, out of those same tweets, 46.9% either provided links to other websites or or called attention to media activities of the member, such as being on a television show. 25% described an official action the member had taken on the floor or in committee, and 12.4% described the members position on an issue. Only 1.4% were direct replies to other tweets.

It's difficult to read too much into these numbers - the largest obstacle being that the statistics aren't current enough. Year-old studies may be fine for most policy research, but not for internet usage metrics (as any webmaster will tell you).

Nevertheless, the author lists a few possible ramifications of this dramatic increase in direct member-constituent dialogue: 1) that the trustee model of representation might wither, 2) that the "iron triangle" model of policymaking might need to develop into a four-sided structure to incorporate direct input from the public (meaning, interest groups could see their influence weaken), and 3) that congressional staff responsibilities may have to shift in order to handle the higher volume of constituent communications.

These points can all be debated, however, what seems to be indisputable in study after study is how internet technologies truly have altered some of our oldest and most fundamental institutions. But let's not go completely ga-ga just yet. After all, Congress still has standing bans on laptops, Blackberries, and cellphones on its different chamber floors.

The Internet-Versus-Books Debate...

2010-07-09T12:54:00.002-04:00

In a very thought-provoking piece today in the New York Times, David Brooks argues that while the internet is good at helping people become more knowledgeable and well-informed, books are still better at making people more "cultivated".

What does this mean? Well, he begins by citing a number of research studies highlighting that 1) children reading books leads to significant educational gains, and 2) broadband internet access is not necessarily good for kids and may actually be harmful to their academic performance.

If this is the basis for his argument then it's not hard to question those assumptions and cast doubt on everything that follows. For starters, internet access and book ownership are hardly ever mutually exclusive - usually kids with broadband read books too. Having both would seem to render any conclusions about one or the other rather murky.

Second, as Brooks himself responsibly points out, there is also contrarian evidence that suggests that playing computer games and performing Internet searches actually improves a person’s ability to process information and focus attention.

Look, I'm not one of the zealots who believes the internet is a panacea for all educational shortcomings, and certainly don't deny its ability to reduce attention spans. But it's still an enormous leap to say that having internet access is actually harmful to academic performance. After all, does anyone really believe that their children would be more empowered for school and improve their chances of going to college by getting rid of all the computers in their home?

Where Brooks makes a more valid point is in his assessment of what it means to be "cultivated" and how to get there. He begins by reviewing the differences in approach that are involved in the internet-versus-books debate...

What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.

A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.

A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference... Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation...

And in a terrific description of the benefits of reading in general, he goes on to say...

The literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.

Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.

It’s better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.

This is a potentially fabulous way of looking at the current dynamic. However, caution should, as always, be exercised here as well. Lost in this entire discussion is the importance of WHAT people are reading online.

And, yes, that matters.

YouTube and the 2008 Elections...

2010-07-07T05:30:00.000-04:00

Here are a quick set of links to some favorite articles in this month's Journal of Information Technology and Politics - a journal that I am active in contributing towards, and all centered around a common theme... YouTube and the 2008 Elections.

Note: Not all of the articles are publicly accessible. For those that aren't, you'll need to login through an academic account or library.

“Yes We Can”: How Online Viewership, Blog Discussion, Campaign Statements, and Mainstream Media Coverage Produced a Viral Video Phenomenon
- by Kevin Wallsten
Congressional Candidates' Use of YouTube in 2008: Its Frequency and Rationale
- by Girish J. “Jeff” Gulati; Christine B. Williams
Macaca Moments Reconsidered: Electoral Panopticon or Netroots Mobilization?
- by David Karpf
Online Video “Friends” Social Networking: Overlapping Online Public Spheres in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election
- by Scott P. Robertsonab; Ravi K. Vatrapuc; Richard Medina
The Obamachine: Technopolitics 2.0
- by Cheris A. Carpenter

Some of this research data is fascinating, as not all of it supports widespread beliefs about the relationship between politics and the internet. But for those of you non-academics with only a passing interest on the subject, if nothing else, this list is a strong indication of the many directions in which this burgeoning research field is heading.

Social Network Users' Bill of Rights...

2010-07-06T12:50:00.002-04:00

One of the goals of the recent ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy was to collectively draft a Bill of Rights for online social-network users. They successfully did so, but to what effect?

The goals of this Bill of Rights were rather murky from the outset. As stated on the ACM blog before the conference took place...

A bill of rights sends a message to sites about what their users expect. With enough momentum, it can give user-focused commercial open-source projects an opportunity to distinguish themselves by adopting the rights — and highlight the sites who aren’t willing to. It’s also a way of providing input in the ongoing debates about legislation and regulation. And just as importantly, the discussions around a bill of rights are a great opportunity for education and debate about what kind of online society we want to create.

It's obviously well-intentioned; also, a little hokey.

Take a look for yourself at the final draft of the Social Network Users' Bill of Rights which was ultimately passed by conference attendees.

Of the 14 articles, 13 of them were approved by a unanimous vote. Unanimous! In a technology community defined by the fierce independence of its individuals, this is nothing short of extraordinary - and should have been the first indication that any real substantive issues had failed to be addressed in a meaningful way.

Additionally, the plan is to now present this document to the major social-networking companies. It doesn't take a Facebook power-user to recognize that those companies might have a wee bit of a problem with articles like #9 on Data Portability (which would make it easier for people to switch their profiles to a different social-networking website).

Also, article #12's "Right to Self-Define", which would guarantee people's rights to create more than one identity and use pseudonyms, seems like a recipe for disaster. Not only would that exacerbate problems like online sexual predators, but would greatly hamper law enforcement as well. And really, who even wants this? Reverting back to the early MySpace and Friendster days is hardly high on users' agendas. If anything, this may have been one arena where social-networking sites have actually been getting it right. Ah, irony.

Most of the remainder of the Bill of Rights, again, is well-intentioned and has its heart in the right place. But it's little more than a vague set of general principles. How anyone can think this document will produce meaningful effects is beyond me.

Google Adds SSL Encrypted Search...

2010-06-02T09:08:00.002-04:00

Online privacy and security advocates have been quite busy lately going after Facebook, but Google is trying to throw them a bone and pre-empt any future and inevitable complaints about the search giant.

As the Official Google Blog reports, the company is now offering a service where users can search the internet using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. Basically, this common form of security (you recognize it by sites that begin with https://) encrypts the information sent between your computer and their service. All communications, like your search terms and search results pages, are protected from the prying eyes of third parties on your network.

The new encrypted site, https://www.google.com, isn't foolproof, however, and, to Google's credit, they make that very clear...

Today’s release comes with a “beta” label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience. What won’t change is that you will still get the same great search results.

A few notes to remember: Google will still maintain search data to improve your search quality and to provide better service. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google — it only hides that data from third parties who seek it. And clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode.

This is clearly a step in the right direction, but for those who are truly concerned about online privacy, the caveat about how Google will still maintain all of your search data only adds fuel to the fire that much more needs to be done. It's a great question for the Digital Age... Who do you fear more - the rogue hacker or the giant corporations who know everything about you?

How to Geotag Your Digital Photos for Flickr, Google Earth, etc...

2010-05-30T08:03:00.000-04:00

On a recent overseas voyage, I was struck by a new technology that has apparently become commonplace... integrated GPS devices on digital cameras.

The idea is simple. New medium- and high- end digital cameras allow you to add-on a small GPS attachment that locks directly onto the camera itself. Its purpose is to tag all of your photos with the exact location in which they were taken, and that data can then be played around with on a myriad of websites and through programmable APIs.

It's a fabulous innovation for digital photography geeks. And there's still more. You don't even necessarily have to buy a GPS device for your camera. While that's still the most convenient way to "geotag" your photos, you can also use some online tools to do it for you after the fact.

For instance, take a look at this map of geotagged photos - created just for the purposes of demonstration, and in under 10 minutes. You can click on a location and see the pictures from that particular place.

How can you do this? The easiest way is to actually buy the GPS attachment. Check out this product list of reviews. Most cost between $75 - $125.

The other (and free) method of geotagging is to upload your photos to Flickr. I recommend this terrific step-by-step tutorial by MAKE magazine, which is a little outdated but still very helpful for newbies. It also explains how you can integrate your geotagged photos with Google Earth.

Once you're pictures have been uploaded, Flickr makes the rest super-easy by including a link for each photo labeled, "Add to My Map". Just click it, find your location, and you're done. For Google Earth, there is the additional step of having to include tags for latitude and longitude coordinates.

Geotagging might become additionally valuable looking forward as developers can engineer even more useful apps by programming with the relatively open APIs of Flickr, Google, and other websites. If you're a big photography buff, you probably stopped reading this post after the first paragraph because it's such "old news". But some of us - myself included - hadn't yet been clued in.

Does MG Siegler Write About Anything Except the iPhone?

2010-05-25T10:58:00.016-04:00

The following article was written by an anonymous contributor and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Nerfherder.

Does TechCrunch's MG Siegler Write About Anything Except the iPhone? The answer is yes - he also writes about Google, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. But not a ton else. As of yesterday, May 24, MG Siegler had written just over 500 articles in 2010 for TechCrunch. Of that bunch, approximately 65% of his articles had some mention of Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook and/or Foursquare (or some derivative of these companies) in the title. Here's the breakdown:

Surprisingly, at least to me, Google edges out Apple (iPhone, iPad, etc.). I could have sworn the dude wrote more about the iPhone than anything else, so it turns out this investigation was not all done in vain - I learned something new.

Probably the second stand-out point is the disproportionate attention paid to Foursquare, a startup who is building a mobile location-based social network. Sure Foursquare only occupies 7% of MG's mind share, but the company is only one-year old. Its significance in the tech world pales in comparison to the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook and even Twitter. In his own words, MG Siegler is giving Foursquare a "big, wet kiss".

Numbers aside, here are some of my personal favorites served up by MG in 2010. He has a special knack unlike any other for smashing buzz terms into a title for the purposes of link-baiting:

In fact today's article entitled To Top Off A Busy Day, Yahoo Acquires Foursquare — Well, The Asian Foursquare makes me chuckle. The article is about Yahoo's acquisition of Koprol, not Foursquare. But who cares? It's all about linkage.

I'll close out on one other favorite where MG wrote about Bloom Energy the day after a piece ran on CBS' 60 Minutes. The article garnered nearly 150 comments (and counting). Is MG an expert on green technology? Of course not, but his timing was impeccable. Web surfers were eager to read more about Bloom Energy on Monday morning, slamming the search engines for content only to end up at TechCrunch - the site with the latest and greatest article with information pertaining to Bloom. And MG made sure to mention "Google" in the article's title. Well done sir!

MakerBot Homebrew 3D Printer Products

2010-05-19T10:41:00.003-04:00

About a year ago I had the pleasure of turning on the head Nerfherder on to the insanely cool world of 3D printers.

3D printers are one of the big "signs of the future" and they have the potential to completely alter the traditional production process for hard goods of all shapes and sizes.

One of the cooler 3D printer options available for home-use is the MakerBot, a DIY 3D printer that can get you in the game for around $1000.

A recent contest held by Make: Online resulted in some sweet designs, like these stereoscopic viewers:

(this is a guest post from David Title)

Mass Appeal vs. Cult Appeal :: Jay Leno vs. Team CoCo

2010-05-18T06:00:00.001-04:00

Internet analysts and Web entrepreneurs have been arguing over this for quite some time. Is it better to have huge amounts of traffic or a significantly smaller, but more loyal, number of followers? Or, to put it another way, when it comes to your audience, is it better to have quantity or quality?

A lot of my readers, immersed in online social-networks and contributing to websites based on user-generated content, might assume that quality is the answer. The digerati wisdom suggests that 50 very loyal followers are more valuable than 5000 daily random page hits. But actual website owners and blog authors who obsess over their analytics each night and rely on Google Ads to make their money might sometimes disagree.

The late-night TV wars bear these arguments out as well. James Poniewozik writes in Time Magazine this week that Jay Leno represents "the last of the big-tent comics, dedicated to the principle of something for everybody". Meanwhile, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Conan O'Brien and his "Team CoCo" have now come to embody the niche-media model, where success is measured by the intensity level of your followers, not the absolute number of them.

Conan and TBS are betting it is better to have a smaller group of fans who care intensely about what you do than a bigger number who care just enough to not change the channel. It doesn't apply only to comedians. More people watch Brian Williams every night than Glenn Beck; that doesn't make Williams more influential.

Indeed, it is certainly possible that the right cult audience can generate an outsize influence. But in the debate over mass appeal vs. cult appeal, let us remember that while the loyal cult audience is a highly romanticized notion, it rarely translates into greater monetization. We'd all rather celebrate the local microbrewery that doesn't water down its taste to the lowest common denominator, but nevertheless it's still Budweiser that rakes in the big bucks.

Ham Radio Versus ChatRoulette

2010-05-17T11:39:00.002-04:00

There has been an endless stream of commentary about the explosion of popularity for ChatRoulette - a service which allows you to make brief, random connections with strangers all over the world. At first, it seemed likesomething wholly unique to this age of the internet but then I had a flash of recognition - ChatRoulette is really just a modern-day equivalent to amateur, or "ham" radio.

In the dark days before the internet shined its bright light into all of our lives, my cousin was an avid ham radio user.

Here is how Wikipedia describes "ham radio" -

Amateur radio, often called ham radio, is both a hobby and a service in which participants, called "hams," use various types of radio communications equipment to communicate with other radio amateurs for public services, recreation and self-training

In the early-1980's, when my cousin was in his teens I would watch in awe as he would send and receive morse code with people around the world. He had just passed his big license test - yes, you had to be licensed and prove your morse code ability - and had made up his own postcards which he would trade with other hams. Before long he had advanced to the level of actual voice communications and to this day I remember the call-sign since he would broadcast it in that special phonetic code - "Kilowatt Alpha Two Indigo Tango Sierra" or KA2-ITS.

All night he would sit at his massive rig and try to reach further and further around the globe, tweaking the dial to cut through the white noise and sonic glitches. Sometimes, if the sun-spots were just right he could reach all the was to Australia and beyond. Strange voices would crackle out of a tiny speaker (or over headphones if it was late) and call-signs would be exchanged. These conversations rarely lasted longer than a couple of minutes - it was all about making new contacts, seeing how far you could reach.

Sure, ChatRoulette has upped the ante with images (and appearance of male genitalia) but in many ways, the impulses driving users are not so different from what drove my cousin and his fellow hams.

The biggest difference, in fact, was that the bar for entry was much higher for hams - you needed special, often expensive, equipment and you needed to be fluent in morse code. This kept out the casual user and made for a more intense sense of community.

Ham radio persists even today and while ChatRoulette can offer you a 1-in-a-1,000,000 chance to see a topless girl, nothing can beat the mystical enchantment of a strange voice reaching out over the radio waves.

(this is a guest post from David Title)

The Political Habits of Blog Readers...

2010-05-12T12:08:00.002-04:00

With the ascendency of cable news and the internet as political forums over the past 15 years, the buzz-phrase, "echo chamber", has become a familiar description of how people gravitate towards TV shows and websites that accord with their existing political beliefs. The thinking has been that liberals frequent liberal media outlets, and conservatives follow those that are conservative, as a means of reinforcing their positions, ultimately leading to people becoming more firmly entrenched in their views, and also, consequently, more polarized.

But is this characterization of political echo chambers accurate?

There is plenty of research in support of it. Most recently, in an article by Eric Lawrence, John Sides, and Henry Farrell titled, "Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics", in the Perspectives on Politics academic journal, new data is presented that demonstrates the following...

Blog readers do, indeed, gravitate towards blogs that accord with their own political beliefs.
Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ideological spectrum.
Those who read left-wing blogs and those who read right-wing blogs are ideologically far apart.
Blog readers are more polarized than either non-blog-readers or consumers of various television news programs, and roughly as polarized as U.S. senators.
Blog readers also participate more in politics than non-blog-readers.
Readers of both left- and right-wing blogs and readers of exclusively left-wing blogs participate at similar levels, and both participate more than readers of exclusively right-wing blogs.

It's this type of data that has led pundits like David Brooks of the New York Times to wonder if, instead of a public square, we could end up with a collection of information cocoons, and others like Cass Sunstein to question whether the internet is really a blessing for democracy at all.

However, another recent study contradicts those findings, and with it, the conventional wisdom. Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, both of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, published a recent study on ideological segregation and found that, yes, a person who visited only Fox News would have more overlap with conservatives than 99 percent of internet news users, and a person who only went to The New York Times’s site would have more liberal overlap than 95 percent of users. But the core finding is that most internet users do not stay within their communities. Most people spend a lot of time on a few giant sites with politically integrated audiences, like Yahoo News.

Even when they leave these integrated sites, they often go into areas where most visitors are not like themselves. People who spend a lot of time on Glenn Beck’s Web site are more likely to visit The New York Times’s Web site than average Internet users. People who spend time on the most liberal sites are more likely to go to foxnews.com than average Internet users. Even white supremacists and neo-Nazis travel far and wide across the Web.

It is so easy to click over to another site that people travel widely. And they’re not even following links most of the time; they have their own traveling patterns.

Gentzkow and Shapiro found that the Internet is actually more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face association — like meeting people at work, at church or through community groups. You’re more likely to overlap with political opponents online than in your own neighborhood.

This study suggests that Internet users are a bunch of ideological Jack Kerouacs. They’re not burrowing down into comforting nests. They’re cruising far and wide looking for adventure, information, combat and arousal. This does not mean they are not polarized. Looking at a site says nothing about how you process it or the character of attention you bring to it. It could be people spend a lot of time at their home sites and then go off on forays looking for things to hate. But it probably does mean they are not insecure and they are not sheltered...

If there is increased polarization (and there is), it’s probably not the Internet that’s causing it.

Blog readers as "ideological Jack Kerouacs"?! That fabulous line is nothing short of a complete re-characterization of this entire political dynamic.

I suppose the thing to take away from all of this, besides just a few interesting talking points for cocktail parties, is that the jury is still out. The truth is that there is indeed a "paucity" of research on political blogs, and a primary task for academics will be to understand the causal impact of reading them. But certainly, we should at least question our basic assumptions on this topic.

Justifying Limitations on Copyright...

2010-04-30T05:00:00.000-04:00

In this ongoing digital debate, there are those who believe that the idea of copyright is sacrosanct, and that copyrighted material can never be used without the author's permission. Of course, those individuals are completely clueless about actual copyright law, which expressly allows the fair use of such material for a range of purposes including commentary, criticism, satire, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship.

One problem that Fair Use advocates always run into is how to quantify the value of such unauthorized uses of copyrighted works with a positive social value. After all, when the movie and music industries cite statistics on exactly how much money is lost to digital piracy, it would be nice to have some quantitative data to counter them.

Well, according to a new study by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, and reported on the Google Public Policy Blog, $4.7 trillion is the amount of revenue generated in the U.S. by the “fair use economy” -- industries that rely on fair use and other limitations on copyright. They account for 1/6th of U.S. GDP, one out of eight jobs, and $281 billion in exports.

Copyright law not only provides artists with certain protections, but also includes important limitations that promote innovation and legitimate re-use of information.

For example, without limits on copyright, search engines would not exist. Indexing the Web would be illegal, because that requires creating a copy of websites first.

The importance of well-designed copyright goes much further, though. iPods, Tivos, and any other digital media device that is capable of making copies depends on balanced copyright.

This is what is meant by calling for "copyright reform". It is not, in any way, a call for the abolition of creators' rights, but rather is a call for legislation that ensures that fair use remains possible. Digital technologies have been used in recent years both to enable individuals to pirate copyrighted works and to empower corporations to restrict the fair use "copying" of those works as well. Reform involves re-balancing the two, and having the law recognize a new equilibrium appropriate for the 21st-century.

Jon Stewart Rips Into Apple...

2010-04-29T15:07:00.002-04:00

Fast-forward to 5:25. When even the Daily Show is blasting Apple for acting like a tyrannical Big Brother, you know that this is no longer an issue where only lunatics are taking up the cause.

Best lines...

“You guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes. What the f**k is going on?”

“Apple you guys were the rebels man, the underdogs. People believed in you. But now, are you becoming The Man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man!”

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

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Tea Party

	Christine O'Donnell (R)	Chris Coons (D)
# Facebook Fans	25,809	9,523
Real-World Polls	40%	57%

	Barbara Boxer (D)	Carly Fiorina (R)
# Facebook Fans	39,141	18,300
Real-World Polls	51%	46%

	Dan Coats (R)	Brad Ellsworth (D)
# Facebook Fans	4,422	8,553
Real-World Polls	57%	40%

	Joe Manchin (D)	John Raese (R)
# Facebook Fans	5,580	3,873
Real-World Polls	49%	49%