Howard Greenstein has cogent reflections on DRM (including on my 3 Precepts).

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Eric Norlin has blogged an interview with the technical director for Palladium in which Eric asks whether Palladium will be available to platforms other than Windows. Without this, despite whatever the Microsoft engineers say, Palladium is a Windows lock-in strategem: “Wanna listen to that CD? The record company has jiggered it so that it can only be heard on a Windows Palladium machine.”

The technical director says some of the right things. But, there’s no mention of Microsoft going Open Source with Palladium, and MS hasn’t decided if it will license the software to anyone else. But why should licensing even be an issue unless MS were looking for some advantage to being the supplier of the software that enables entertainment producers to sell their wares securely? Further, the technical director is the technical director. And like geeks everywhere, he just naturally is sympathetic to the forces of openness. But technical directors don’t make marketing decisions at Microsoft. I’ve been suckered by Microsoft in this regard before.

So, thank you, Eric, for getting this on record. Truly. You’re doing important work. The tech dir’s response is reasonable and gives some reason for encouragement. And flaming would be an unhelpful response. But I still don’t trust what I’m hearing from Microsoft about how they’re going to establish an environment that benefits me as a user as much as it benefits Hollywood and Microsoft.

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Kevin Marks, Eric and others and engaged in a really useful colloquoy at Kevin’s MediAgora. They’re conducting a civil, constructive and incisive dialogue about the very nature of DRM.

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We went to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMOCA) in North Adams yesterday. It’s a really interesting space in a lovely place. Last year there the main exhibition had to do with games, and it was, well, fun. Not moving or even particuarlyly enlightening, but fun. This year it focuses on Viennese art and it’s not moving, not particularly enlightening and not fun.

It is absolutely the case that I don’t know enough about contemporary art to be able to understand what I was looking at. But here’s my new dictum for myself: When viewing an artwork adds nothing to the verbal explanation of it, skip viewing it.

E.g., the video screen that over the course of half an hour cycles through every visible shade of green? Skip it!

E.g., the purposefully dull paintings hung on a plain white cube that’s a statement about the importance of context? Skip it!

E.g., the ten minute video of a guy digging a hole in the forest? Skip it!

We did, however, get a cute windup toy and a bottle of artsy Bloody Mary mix.

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The better the vacation, the worse the bandwidth. It’s a law.

Huge disruption in your schedule of daily activities.

Hourly encounter with non-human species.

The rest of the world, which isn’t on vacation, doesn’t stop sending you email.

Stephen King and Tom Clancy: ridiculous plots, stupid characters, a cliche a minute.

Bugs think they own your ass.

It’s someone else’s toilet.

If your real house hasn’t burned to the ground by now, it’s probably either been looted or infested with silverfish.

No matter how much you use, calamine lotion doesn’t work … and it tastes damn funny.

When you get back, people have no sympathy for what you’ve been through.

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I was happy to see Doc talking with the Head Lemur about shifting the “Right to Listen” tactics:

We both sense the need to get the whole Independent Thing happening in a major way. Fighting politicians on their own turf is an icky necessity, but a far more enjoyable one will be getting independent artists, venues and media together. Let the MPAA and the RIAA protect the old star maker machinery. We’ve got better work to do.

If artists want to distribute their stuff locked up so tightly that I can’t sample it, share it, play it on every device in my house and quote it in my blog, then they should go ahead. And I hope we’ll band together in not buying their stuff.

Let the market decide.

In fact, here are my Three Rules of DRM. Each rule supercedes the previous one.

1. Companies that want to sell us works of creativity can do so with whatever enforceable licensing agreement they want.

2. Fair use isn’t just protected but is expanded in the face of the new reality.

3. The basic architecture of our computing and networking environment — which maximizes openness, connection and innovation — isn’t degraded.

Unfortunately, I don’t know if these three are mutually consistent.

[The traditional way the Problem of Evil - the fact that bad things happen in a world created by a perfect God - is formulated is: God is all-powerful, God is all-knowing, God is good: pick any two.]

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You really ought to read Eric Norlin’s coverage of the Microsoft Palladium Press conference. Unfortunately, with a 19.2 dialup connection on a line being shared by three families, I’ve been doing no browsing and didn’t keep up with Norlin’s (or anyone’s) blog until he sent email saying that he’s had enough abuse from mean-spirited assholes and is packing it in for a while. That’s a shame not only for the noble reason — Eric’s an important commentator and guide — but because I don’t understand Palladium and Digital IDs well enough and was counting on Eric to explain them to me.

Also informative and full of pepper: Gillmor on the latest bad news from Washington.

And Doc has posted his presentation to OSCon.

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Ryze.com promises to be your online business networking network and it might be a great service, but I didn’t get past the privacy policy. It begins well and then gets worse and worse:

Ryze Ltd. and Aereal Inc. share your concerns about personal privacy. Through the Ryze Web site, application and service, and through other contact with Ryze Ltd. and Aereal Inc. as a company, Ryze Ltd., Aereal Inc. and affiliates may collect personal information and data including, but not limited to, application and web site usage data, viewing data, file transfer and e-mail data, and personal contact information such as e-mail addresses, mailing addresses and phone numbers. Additionally, Ryze Ltd. and Aereal Inc.’s applications and web sites may use technological facilities for tagging and tracking including, but not limited to, Web cookies, login usernames and other technologies to track and correlate data. Ryze Ltd. and Aereal Inc. own and reserve all rights and all usage and distribution rights to any data it collects. Ryze Ltd. and Aereal Inc. may share user data with parties including, but not limited to, business partners, affiliates, customers and licensees.

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Bob Treitman (of the lovely SoftPro book mini-chain) forwards a stunt contest from Gregory FCA, a Philadelphia PR and investor relations firm. We are to rewrite the annual report of our favorite disgraced corporation in the voice of an author of our choosing.

I doubt haikus count, but then I’m not really entering, am I?

Harken! The bush moves
unaware of its motion.
Crows do its thinking.

Dubya sells his stock
for far more than it is worth.
Saudis rub their hands.

White water almost drowned
one president. This one swims
in barrels of oil.

Run, Osama, run!
You are a dead man…after
the next election.

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Tom Poe asks “Will you still want to buy a computer in 2004″ and, after looking at how restricted their use will be and how much privacy you’ll be giving up, answers no.

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I went to Pop!Tech a couple of years ago and had an excellent time. It brings together social-minded, humanistic technologists (generalizing rather broadly) for a couple of days of presentations in the lovely Opera House in the lovely Camden, Maine. I’m going again this year as a participant, not a speaker. There are still some seats available.

I’ll blog from it, of course, but I think a semi-official blogsite is being created for it by other blogging attendees. And so blogs, inevitably, become topic- and event-based as well as based around individuals.

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Because I am in a rural area where the corn is high and the bandwidth is low, I am pointing you to this site without actually having been there myself.

I heard from Steven Akstakalnis in response to the Miami Herald op-ed I wrote with W. David Stephenson about the suckitude of the Homeland Defense web site. Steven’s group (company?) administers the National Homeland Security Knowledgebase. According to this msg to me, it sounds great. There’s a free “knowledgebase” of information about “homeland security” that Steven claims is the largest anywhere. There’s a free “Terror Alert Mailing List” of warnings. There’s a free weekly newsletter.

If this site turns out to be an online casino, an offer to lengthen your penis, or ads for cameras that will let you spy on your neighbor’s hot 18-yr-old, you only have yourself to blame for following a recommendation from a guy who told you he hasn’t visited the site himself…

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The new issue of InformationWeek’s cover story is on blogging in the workplace. I haven’t had time to do naught but thumb through it. but it looks promising and cites Dan and Doc and Dave, so how bad can it be? (I did happen to notice, ahem, that they quote me also.)

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I’m about to head off for about two weeks to the land where the air is sweet and the Internet connections suck. Dial-up makes blogging as slow and difficult as the word onomatopoetically suggests. So, I’ll still be blogging but probably won’t be as responsive as I’d like to be.

Damn rural life!

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I just published a new issue of my newsletter:

href="http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-jul24-02.html#dreyfus">Dreyfus on the Internet: Hubert Dreyfus, philosopher, has a monograph about the Net that is profound and off the mark. Bluetooth Pro and Con: How do you want to go wireless? There’s no simple answer yet. Sham compromises: We’re losing the Digital Rights Management battle Keeping Telcos Simple, Stupid: How do you explain the telco mess? Pocketful of Standards: A bluffer’s guide. Blogger Dead Pool: Who will be the first journalist fired for what s/he says in his/her blog? The Anals of Marketing: Stupid, stupid marketing. Walking the Walk: Automated integration: Boring but helpful. Cool Tool: Multi renamer. What I’m Playing: Jedi Outcast. Internetcetera: News on the Net and off. Eighth First Name Award: Google searching for first names. Links: You suggest ‘em, I run ‘em. Email: You write ‘em, I run ‘em. Bogus contest: Tomorrow’s Moral Monsters

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Dan Gillmor and Doc are blogging from Open Source Conference where Larry Lessig and Richard Stallman have given keynotes:

Ask a venture capitalist how much he’s willing to invest in new technology Hilary Rosen or Jack Valenti won’t sign off on. The answer is zero, says Lessig.

We’re watching our freedom evaporating.

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Jeff Chapman points out an article and discussion at Geek.com about the Cyber Security Enhancement Act that passed the House of Reps on July 17 on a vote of 385-3, the lopsided majority just about ensuring that it was a vote based on expediency backed by ignorance. According to the article:

Before the Patriot Act passed, law enforcement needed probable cause and had to go through slow legal channels to get ISP information. After the passing of the Patriot Act, law enforcement could get ISP information more quickly if agents believed that it could be used to stop a dangerous situation. Now, under CSEA, law enforcement or any government entity (not specifically law enforcement agencies) can get subscriber information if agents/representatives of that group think it relates to a threat to national security

So any government agency could tap the Net without probable cause. No possibility of abuse there, eh? Why’d we need that stupid ol’ Constitution anyway when we can trust all those government agencies not to abuse their powers?

There’s more at Geek.com and at slashdot.

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David Isenberg’s new SMARTLetter has his must-read analysis of the “utter crisis” in telecommunications, as FCC Chair Michael “Son of” Powell calls it. Isenberg puts it in perspective. For example:

Let’s not call the current overcapacity situation a “bandwidth glut.” Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. The scarcity folks — the telephone companies (and others) whose business is based on the fact that communications capacity is scarce, therefore expensive — are controlling this “glut” dialog. Nobody talks about a glut of clean air or a glut of traffic-jam-free roads. No — to an end user it is great to have a lot of cheap >network capacity.

and

Everybody believes that fiber to the home is the end game of the Communications Revolution. It is not expensive, about US$600 to $3000 per home with today’s technology (and less in the future, and less with economies of massive scale). But just as Qwest’s 1997 transcontinental fiber build-out fatally maimed domestic long-distance (including Qwest itself), fiber to the home would kill the Incumbent Local Exchange Companies.

Therefore, fiber to the home is not coming until the Incumbent Local Exchange Companies become considerably weaker.

and

ATM and SONET are not the only technologies that are becoming obsolete even as they’re being deployed. There’s DSL and MMDS and 3G and WAP and a whole lot more. Technology marches on. And it is not as if Telecom executives made the wrong decisions — mostly they made the best decisions they could at the time.

The debt movie is playing at the Global Crossing theatre and the WorldCom playhouse — but soon it will be playing at a telephone company near you. Verizon and SBC and BellSouth will not be immune …

and

So if you hear that somebody is going to “enhance” the Internet — to make it more efficient, to Pay the Musicians, to Protect the Children, to thwart hackers, to enhance Homeland Security, to find Osama, or whatever — this is almost certainly propaganda from the powerful businesses that are threatened by the Internet. Remember that the Internet became the success it is today — and the threat that it is to existing telcos — because it is a Stupid Network, an end-to-end network.

This is the most coherent, understandable explanation I’ve read of what’s goin’ on technologically and economically.

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For a shorter, lighter-hearted expression of the Hermeneutical Dilemma, read Marek’s digital rendition of Hamlet.

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AKMA has responded to my response to his thread on “differential hermeneutics.” (He’s also responded to email from Tom M.)

On the key question of whether there’s something special about Scripture, we’re not yet in agreement. And we may never be, thus providing an example of Differential Hermeneutics in Action. AKMA, and post-Modernism in general, wants to untie reading (= interpreting) from the meanings “behind” a text. In particular, the “right” interpretation is not the one that reconstitutes in the reader the author’s original intention. There are lots of good reasons for recognizing this rupture between what we understand and what the author meant, and when it comes to scriptural interpretation the reasons include the terrifying result of believing that you have the right interpretation; armed with a belief that I know what God meant, I may feel justified in wreaking destruction on those who disagree.

And yet, if there is such a thing as revelation (and I am required here to note that I don’t think that there is), doesn’t it have to mean that God is telling us something in a way that we can understand? And if revelation tells us something that we can understand, then isn’t it telling us what God thinks and feels — God’s intentions? I don’t see how you can exclude the possibility of understanding what God had in mind and still think there’s revelation. [1]

So, here I am about to engage in the hermeneutic act of trying to figure out what AKMA has in mind. I think AKMA thinks that if we say that a hermeneutics of revelation tries to get at what’s in God’s mind, it has to be an “integral hermeneutics” that assumes only one interpretation is right, thus leading to intolerance. But that doesn’t necessarily follow. Suppose we say that revelation expresses God’s meaning in a way that humans can understand but God’s meaning surpasses our simple understanding and overwhelms languagw. So, we are forced to engage our understanding together, through discussion and disagreement. Further, to speak in a way that humans can understand means to speak in way that can be reappropriated by each generation with its differences in culture and language; that’s why scripture has survived the ages.

Why do I insist on this to AKMA? Because we share ethical/political aims. We want to be inclusive, not intolerant. We want a way of sincerely embracing people who also trying to understand God from widely divergent starting points. We don’t want to slap people down and shut them up simply because they understand God differently. AKMA writes:

We’ll rely on people we trust, we’ll look back on what the ancients have taught us, we’ll try to help one another along, and we’ll try humbly to accept correction when people whom we respect suggest that we’ve got something important wrong.

What this doesn’t allow us is a stick with which to beat the annoying people who persist in promulgating erroneous interpretations; we can’t say, “That’s just not what it means!” (not in an absolute way). In response to mistaken interpretations, a differential hermeneutic would advise that we make as plain and persuasive a case for our interpretation as we possibly can, and let willful or foolish interpreters do their best.

If that’s all DH did, then every tolerant person would agree to it. But DH says more than this. (It has to, for otherwise DH is nothing but tolerance.) It says that we cannot read the author’s intentions:

Differential hermeneuts will, however, allow that different people will imagine [my emphasis] different authors, and there’ll be no way to pin a really real intention to a really real author and make from that a really final interpretation.

Granting the impossibility of knowing the real, final interpretation of the author’s intentions especially when it comes to God, there’s got to be more to interpreting than imagining, especially when it comes to scripture. If revelation is God speaking in a way that we can hear (and, by the way, can not hear or mis-hear), then there has to be more than what I as the reader bring to the party. That does not mean that there is a unitary meaning or a meaning that we foolish mortals can be confident enough is right that we can stop listening to others.

Earlier, AKMA explains the result that’s driving his line of thought, I believe:

I’m not reluctant to ascribe authorship of Scripture (in some sense) to God, but I refuse to exclude people who disagree with me on this from my account of hermeneutics.

… <big snip>

…”the Bible” already constitutes an interpretive decision that includes some people and excludes others; ascribing its authorship to God narrows the body of agreeable interpreters even further. And (as a differential hermeneutician) … I have to account for those people’s interpretations, too.

But I think AKMA doesn’t have to exclude non-believers from his account of hermeneutics; he just has to exclude them from people he thinks are capable of understanding what revelation says. How can you believe that revelation is God talking to us in a way that we can understand — which to me simply means believing in revelation — without excluding atheists from the body of “agreeable interpreters”? When I say that scripture was written by barbaric humans (stone the witches, kill the homosexuals) and has less revelatory power these days than Updike’s Rabbit series, AKMA ought to stop paying attention to what I say God meant by the book of Job [2]. You may still want to listen to me when I discourse about the history of Canaan or about Paul’s word usage patterns, but I have announced that I am not engaged in trying to hear what God is saying through scripture. You can still “account” for my interpretation — DH explains why people have different interpretations and gives us a way to try to find value in them. You just won’t count it for much. You will, however, keep in mind that all interpretation is situational and fallible, so you won’t tie me to a stake and gather bundles of wood to show me the error of my thinking.

Let me sum up (sorry for the length). AKMA writes:

I just don’t believe texts have “meaning” in any way that escapes our attributing meaning to them.

“Attribute” puts the bulk of the burden of interpreting on the reader; “imagine” puts all of the burden there. If we take “attribute” to mean “involves us” or “depends on us but not just on us,” then we get what I think is a clearer picture. Every act of understanding is situated in a specific person, language, culture, and history. But if understanding revelation consists of nothing but me throwing meaning at a text, then there is nothing left of revelation. It is indistinguishable from me reading the words formed in my bowl of alphabet soup. If, on the other hand, revelation is God speaking to us in a way that we can understand, it doesn’t mean that there is a unitary meaning and that those who don’t get it are simply wrong. The advantage of differential hermeneutics is that we can say that the differences among those who are trying to hear the word of God engender the conversation that is the way to hear what God is trying to say.

So let me do my own rephrasing of AKMA’s differential hermeneutics as I would apply it to scriptural interpretation: The way we humans can try to hear the word of God is by talking with one another. We aren’t arguing about who does a better job of inventing meanings for a text that is incapable of speaking for its author. We’re arguing about words written by God to speak to us — a voice we can hear, a voice that is there, although we can only hear it together and can only understand it imperfectly. Our conversation is aimed at hearing God’s intentions more clearly. If hearing His intentions is impossible, then revelation doesn’t speak and our conversation is mere chatter.

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Two notes:

1. What I think is true of interpreting revelation I actually think is true of all acts of interpretation. I don’t think we are as cut off from the author’s intentions as AKMA seems to believe.

2. Perhaps we should leave room for atheist scriptural interpreters who preface every remark with, “Now, if there were a God, we can see in this passage that He would have meant…” and then proceed to explicate God’s word without believing it’s God’s. I’m sure there are examples of such. These people are worth reading. But they are only worth reading if the text they’re explicating is worth explicating, and it only has accidental and incidental value if the text isn’t God speaking in a way that we can understand.

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Mark Feldman points us to a collection of children’s art maintained by PaPa iNk, a non-profit he heads. Some beauty, not just cuteness.

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Gary Nexcerpt Stock passes along a fasinating article by Christopher Caldwell in the NY Press about the sweetheart deals that made W a rich man. But the most tantalizing bit is at the end where Caldwell speculates about what the WS Journal last week called “interesting Saudi connections on the finance side” with regard to who bought who bought W’s Harken shares. Caldwell suggests “the ex-president’s ne’er-do-well son appears to have been used by the Harken board as ‘Arab bait’.”

This story is only going to get bigger.

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AKMA continues his deeply important blogging about what he calls “integral” vs. “differential” hermeneutics. (It begins here, goes here with a response to Tom Matrullo, continues here with a response to my email, and goes here.)

I hesitate to try to characterize briefly the difference between the two hermeneutics, but I’m gonna anyway. Hermeneutics, usually explained as the study of interpretation, is actually the study of how we make sense of things, where “things” includes texts and the world. Integral hermeneutics thinks that to understand X is to see the simple, unambiguous, single meaning behind X; it is fundamentalism and literalism applied beyond the realm of scripture. Differential hermeneutics not only notices that there are many ways of understanding X but thinks that the best way to proceed is to pay attention to the differences among those interpretations. AKMA sides with the differentialists. (AKMA, if I got this wrong, set me straight!)

When AKMA first blogged about this, on July 10, it took me a while to muster a response, which I sent to him privately. I like his distinction and I also side with the differentialists. I wrote to AKMA with two aims. First, I wanted to know what he thought about what DH (differential hermeneutics) means for revelation. Is revelation a special type of truth-giving? If so, what does that do hermeneutics? Second, I suggested that AKMA still gave the sense (or was I merely projecting it?) that DH implies a failure: Too bad we can’t get at a unitary meaning, so we’ll have to settle for DH. Judaism, on the other hand, has taken DH for the past couple of thousand years anyway as quite positive. Judaism’s interpretations - that is, the Rabbi’s interpretations - are grounded by a text that’s taken to be revealed but not susceptible to a fundamenalist, literal reading; by a tradition that preserves the losing arguments; by a tradition of how to conduct an argument; and by an embedding of interpretation into practice since the resolution of arguments over interpretation determine how daily life will be conducted.

AKMA responded to my comments with his customary brilliance and gracefulness. Here’s one salient passage:

Differential hermeneutics, however, can locate revelation not in the text by itself, such that we’re left to assay the content of an unambiguous revelation that we can’t get at. Instead, differential hermeneutics can locate revelation in the shared practice of interpreting the Bible under the social, liturgical, communal, ethical conditions of participating in life under the Law, or under the Cross.

I’m not entirely comfortable with that, although I think there may be no practical difference in our positions. (As if I’m entitled to have a position in this conversation! Got to have standing before you can have a position.) I’m in the odd position of saying that I don’t think AKMA is giving enough weight to the scriptural text. His view of DH finds all of interpretation’s value in the play of differing interpretations and none in the meaning behind the text or the text itself. (Am I getting you wrong, AKMA?) So, we interpret revealed scripture and a restaurant menu differently because people encounter them “under different conditions, with a different stake in what they’re interpreting, and different goals in taking on the interpretation…” Notice that the difference is not that one text was written by God and the other by a person working in a restaurant.

But isn’t something crucial and real lost if you can’t acknowledge that difference? And if you’ll momentarily grant an atheistic Jew the standing to ask this: Why does AKMA seemingly shy away from saying scripture is special because it’s revealed? Is he worried that this puts us back into the game of thinking that there is a single, integral meaning behind the text, which in turn means that only one position is right and that we are justified in being intolerant of those who get the meaning wrong?

But you can believe that scripture is special without becoming an integral hermeneuticist. Suppose, for example, one were to believe that:

1. God is the author of scripture.
2. Scripture in some way stands for God’s beliefs and intentions.
3. The meaning of scripture overwhelms our mortal understanding.
4. Human understanding is always situated in a time, culture, community of practice, and language. Human understanding is only possible within such a situation.
5. Scripture is designed to maintain its meaning through multiple human situations, as human history unfolds.
6. Scripture needs a differential hermeneutics — a tradition of argument and discussion and the “proactive” preservation of differences.

Then you would be able to maintain that revelation reveals God’s truth without resorting to the simplistic integral hermeneutics that has led our species down such dark alleys. And, I believe, that that position sketches the Jewish stance towards scripture, although my belief here is strictly second-hand.

I very much like AKMA’s comments in his most recent blog about “performative criteria” — i.e., “testing truth-claims by living them out.” A right interpretation isn’t one that corresponds to the concealed meaning but one that enables you to live well. This is in response to Happy Tutor’s blogging about post-Modernism as a way of avoiding responsibility. The Happy Toot writes:

Postmodernism is to be resisted not because it is false, nor because it can be refuted (you can’t refute an ideology), but because the moral type it produces is detestable.

My initial complain about post-Modernism agrees with this. POMO produces academics who use it destructively to position themselves as the smartest person in the room, showing why everyone else is still stuck in “the old metaphysics.” But POMO also captures a great truth, one that is liberating and is increasingly required for humans to continue inhabiting the planet. AKMA is a fearless partisan of the liberating force of POMO, and bless him for it.

What’s missing, I believe, is a sense of the joy of being situated. Yes, we are “stuck” in a culture and a history and that inevitably colors our view of the world. And, yes, there is no escaping being situated to achieve a superior view, free of cultural bias and prejudice, that can identify the One Truth. But if we stop there, we are left with the POMO the Tutor abhors. The other side of this coin, however, is that being situated is a joy and would be a blessing if there were a God. Further, within a situation we have ways of discussing and conversing that give some views more standing than others. (That’s why DH is important.) Further further, if there were revelation, it would provide a basic text that orients the conversation. Further further further, as Toot points out, practice and practicalities drive the important conversations, whether it’s soldiers arguing over tactics or Jews arguing over whether telephone wires count as demarcating a bounded community (i.e., whether they count as an erev). POMO untied from situation — and from the life of practice that constitutes a situation — does indeed suffer from the tyrannical relativism both the Tutor and AKMA abhor.

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By the way, AKMA is using BlogAmp, a plugin to WinAmp that automatically generates a bloggable list of the tunes you’ve been playing in WinAmp. (I’d consider using it but I don’t use WinAmp.)

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David Farnham is keeping a blog about his service in Afghanistan. He writes: “One of these days I’ll get back to my life as a web architect, but for now I’m trying to get online and post whenever I can. Have a look.” In fact, yesterday’s post reads:

This is the last post I will be able to make for several weeks. After a month of waiting for a mission I have been assigned to a team and will be in-country for awhile. Despite the constraints and requirements, we are managing to do some good work down there and I look forward to playing a part. The danger is real, but I am confident in my abilities and encouraged by the ineptitude that has been displayed by our enemy so far.

At David’s home page (which is no longer up to date) you can read about his participation in the Army’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) School.

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British eDemocracy

The British government has posted a site with ideas for how to use the Internet to make democracy work better.

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Open Recording Studio

Tom Poe is in the front of the pack creating a free recording studio to encourage the distribution of alternatively-business-modelled music.

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Complexity Digested

The Complexity Digest is a good resource for finding what’s being written about complexity.

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Matt Oristano points us to a remarkable report that would read better as a premise for a cheesy scifi movie than as a serious statement from the National Science Foundation and Commerce Department. It’s called Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance. Says Matt:

It includes lots of helpful government recommendations for enhancing our brains with nanotechnology, according to standards that presumably the government would set. It’s quite amazing.

He especially commends to our attention a section on “memetic engineering” “where they propose to engineer our culture in a Darwinian mold as well.”

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Kevin Marks pulls a great quote from the Recovering Marek:

[Jack Valenti's] notion is of a zero-sum copyright, as if there were finite amount of ideas in the world where one has to come up with one and then build a fortress around it so no one else can use it to extend it or derive from it.

And don’t forget Kevin’s MediAgora, a plan to build a market capable of dealing in digital works of the mind.

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(By the way, did you like the way I snuck “Right to Listen advocates” into my blog entry on the sham Commerce Dept. DRM meeting? Think it might catch on as an alternative to “content thieves,” “pirates,” “baked college students too cheap to pay for CDs,” “anti-American, anti-Disney destroyers of civilization,” etc.? Just a thought.)

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Grant Gross, in an email, updates his excellent coverage of the Commerce Department’s Digital Rights Management meeting, which I blogged a couple of hours ago:

During this workshop, the Commerce Department was just not interested in hearing from the public. So to get the point across that the public wasn’t represented, the Free Software/Linux/fair use crowd almost had to shout and wave their hands.

Those tactics actually may have worked. Sources tell me that the Commerce Department is now asking around for suggestions on consumer advocates to include in a future workshop.

As for the EFF, Robin Gross tells me today that they’ve been invited to comment in writing, and the EFF is doing so.

Here’s what I *think* happened: The Commerce Department just didn’t comprehend that consumers might want to be part of this discussion about how to implement DRM. Groups like EFF just didn’t fit the focus of this meeting, so Commerce set up this workshop with the goal of getting the IT people and the Hollywood people talking again, but made no provisions for the public to participate.

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David Isenberg recommends Grant Gross’s coverage at Newsforge of the Commerce Department’s Digital Rights Management meeting last Wednesday. This meeting is intended to help forge a compromise for protecting copyrighted works but the deck was entirely stacked against customers/users and Right to Listen advocates. Says Isenberg: “Reading his article seemed almost like being there . . . an excellent piece.” Yup.

Read it and become enraged. And engaged.

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One of the attendees — Alexandra Davis — at the book reading I did last night posted a thoughtful blog entry on it. Although Alexandra liked the event overall, my answer to the question she asked disappointed her, and I can see why. She writes:

I asked what one could do if she say, received a rape threat in a chatroom or someone somehow obtained her personal information, and posted her phone number and address on the web. I expressed my frustration over the strong possibility that people who would do things like that, hack, threaten people, and invade privacy, were most likely complete losers in person, but because they had this one skill, a skill I’m probably smart enough to learn had I the means, I had to be afraid of them. I then asked if he had covered accountability for one’s actions online at all in his book. Though he said that the dark side of the internet and accountability for one’s actions online were important topics, he hadn’t gone into them in his book. Perhaps they’re supposed to be implicit in his assertions about the humanity of the internet, but I was still disappointed and became skeptical…

Alexandra’s recounting is accurate and fair. But her question is one of many important ones for which I have and will have no answer worth listening to. Accountability is a hugely important issue, and a really tough one that involves everything from psychology to philosophy to digital IDs. Sorry, Alexandra. I wish I did have an answer.

FWIW, I don’t go into the dark side of the Net in Small Pieces because it is a partisan book — there are enough nay-sayers — that tries to get at the roots of the (positive) excitement about the Web. There are lots of things worth discussing that aren’t in the book.

Alexandra’s weblog overall is one of the frankest I’ve seen, and also one of the most reflective. Strong stuff.

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I have to prepare for a Book Event at the Brookline Booksmith tonight at 7 (you’re all invited) so I’ve been bad about blogging today. A couple of tidbits…

Gotta love Gary Turner’s sleazeball scandal rag parodies…

And speaking of Gary, Frank Paynter has a long interview with him that, as always, gives a great sense of the Person Behind the Blog.

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Dave Curley writes about the Citizen Corps TIPS rat-out-your-neighbors page:

As pointed out by Rob Morse in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, clicking on the Join Now! link generates one of those “there’s a problem with the sercurity certificate” errors.

The Law of Irony continues its uninterrupted reign.

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Gary Unblinking Stock points us to a complement to Steve Himmer’s now-famous RATS page by. It’s a public service reminder of who exactly needs to be turned in.

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Good article, that not so incidentally says nice things about my book, by Charles Leadbeater in The New Statesman. Charlie is the author of The Weightless Society and is an advisor to Tony “Anthony” Blair.

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So, we’re going to be allowed to print our own US postage stamps on our own printers. Why not let us create our own designs as well? After all, the paper is watermarked. Here are the first ones I’d do:

 
 

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Madeleine Begun Kane, Humor Columnist, gently informs me that I’ve been scooped with regard to my Google Top Ten First-Name award:

I enjoyed your comments about Google’s first name top 10 and thought you might be amused by my piece on a similar subject written 3 or 4 years ago back when Madeleine Albright was Secretary of State:

Surfing for Madeleines

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Meanwhile, Mark Dionne would strip me of my award for minor, perceived technical breaches. He writes:

I checked Google for “David” and on the first page I get:JOHO the Blog
… W. David Stephenson, with whom I wrote an op-ed for the Miami Herald about why the Homeland Security page sucks, has two followups: …
www.hyperorg.com/blogger/ - 72k - 15 Jul 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

It would seem that David Stephenson gets the award, not you! And it’s number 9, not number 8.

First, it’s only #9 if you count the sub-page hit for The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. I choose not to.

Second: No freaking way! The link is to my blog, not W. David Stephenson’s. It’s not even a link to the particular blog entry that makes the now-obvious mistake of mentioning W. David Stephenson: it links to this blog’s home page. So, if W. Stinking David Stephenson wants to make up an award for himself that says “Mentioned on a Google Top Ten First-Name Page,” he can. Otherwise, the prize is mine mine mine mine and not you nor a platoon of embittered loser Davids can take it away from me. And if you try, I’ll just change the rules again. Bwahahahaha.

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The always-provocative Arnold Kling suggests in an email that we take a look at the Semant-o-Matic site that uses latent semantic indexing to search blogs. The current site is an open source test bed, indexing only 11 blog sites, but the idea is provocative. Here’s how I understand it, from the site’s readable and informative explanation of searching and LSI.

When you click on the “Find more like this one” button on a search site (= “Similar pages” at Google), the site does an analysis of the word usage pattern on that page and runs a query to find other pages with similar patterns. LSI does this not when a user presses the button but as it’s indexing the page so that it always knows other pages that are similar to the first one. So, when you do a LSI search for, say “French Impressionism,” it finds not only pages that contain that phrase but also pages that are similar to ones that contain that phrase. Thus, an LSI search might turn up a page that talks about 19th Century painters concerned with the play of light in paintings of haystacks even if it never uses the phrase “French Impressionism.” (Of course, it may also turn up a page about Haystack Calhoun, the old professional wrestler. playing with the lights in the arena.)

One of the very cool things about this approach — whether pre-computed or done on the fly — is that it lets a computer find two pages that are about the same thing simply by analyzing the way words are arrayed on the page, without making amighttempt to understand what those words mean.