I just published the latest – and possibly last? – issue of my newsletter:

10 Comments »

You know how Doc corrects people who talk about “consumers”? “As Jerry Michalski says,” Doc objects, “consumers are gullets who live only to gulp products and crap cash.”

I feel the same way about the word “medium” when applied to the Net.

A medium’s job is to deliver a message. It does its job well if that message is delivered intact. But that’s not how media actually work because we are not passive containers. Rather, in the process of understanding something, we let it affect us. It shapes us, and we shape it. We absorb it into the context of our lives. The more completely we absorb it, the “wronger” we get it from the point of view of, say, the marketer who wants us to take it exactly as he put it.

This is never so true as with works of art and creativity, which is why it’s in the artist’s interest to lose creative (but not necessarily economic) control of her work quickly and thoroughly. Unfortunately, the idea that works are content moving through a medium has led us to think that appropriation and reuse is an insult to the artist, and possibly a violation of copyright, when it is in fact a sign that the work is working on us. We honor it by making it our own.

The Internet is a medium only at the bit level. At the human level, it is a conversation that, because of the persistence and linkedness of pages, has elements of a world. It could only be a medium if we absolutely didn’t care about it.

17 Comments »

It’s heartening that Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” puts morality at the heart of Google’s mission. It’s a lot better guideline than “Ruthlessly enrich ourselves” or “Crimp the air supply of our competitors.” I personally would like to see “Make the world better” become an explicit part of every company’s charter, just as a reminder.

But, “Don’t be evil” only poses as a principle. It’s not a principle because it can’t be applied to a situation. It can’t be used to guide action. Does not demoting an anti-semitic site’s rank constitute doing evil or not doing evil? Saying “Don’t be evil” just doesn’t help us decide.

A more dangerous — because more subtle — faux principle is the Libertarian one that says “The goernment that governs least governs best.” It looks like it can be brought in to settle a discussion’s hash. But it turns out to be totally unhelpful. Everyone agrees that governmental bloat is a bad thing. The real question is: What constitutes bloat and what constitutes “least”? When a Libertarian invokes the “Least Governement” principle to explain why she doesn’t want the government to inspect children’s toys, the response is: Yes, but is this a case of least-ness? After all, Libertarians aren’t anarchists. They believe in some level of government regulation. As we argue about toy inspections or seat belt laws or inheritance taxes, we will have to argue the specifics of each case: Are these regulations necessary and desirable? The “Least Governement” principle doesn’t help us at all. It is a faux principle.

At least Google’s faux principle tells the company to be alert to the moral dimension, even though the principle can’t help with the answers. And it’s phrased so succinctly that it won’t fool anyone into thinking that it could actually direct action; Google’s expression seems to have a little distance, a little irony, a little self-awareness. That’s good because, while it reminds us that businesses are moral entities, we shouldn’t think that not doing evil is as easy as it sounds.

[See Josh McHugh's Wired article on Good and Evil at Google.]

7 Comments »

The Jewish Journal points out that a search for “Jew” at Google puts a site for Jew haters at the number one position.

It sure seems to me that’s Google been gamed by anti-Semites. At least, I hope that’s the explanation since the alternative is pretty grim.

I admit that this is a tough – and interesting – case, but I’d like to see Google move the site down since Google’s aim is to provide us with good information. And, sure, I’d say the same thing if the first hit for “Catholic,” “Black,” “Arab,” or “Mel Gibson” were hate sites. But, the Jewish Journal article reports that David Krane, Google’s director of communications, says: ‘Google merely reflects what is on the Web and does its best to algorithmically rank pages. Unless [a Web page] violates a country or local law, we don’t make any tweaks,’ he said.”

Google’s motto is “Do no evil.” That works fine so long as the issues are easy and the group discussing them is homogeneous. So, if hate groups game Google and people are led to a site designed to fuel hatred, does “preserving the sanctity of our algorithms” count as doing evil?

37 Comments »

Andre Durand of PingID says that there are three tiers of ID:

Tier 1: Personal identity: Me. Myself. Possibly I.
Tier 2: Corporate identity: An ID issued to let me into their space
Tier 3: My marketing identity: The buckets companies sort us into for marketing purposes, e.g., a Platinum Frequent Flyer.

We have lots of IDs. “Identity inflation.” Most of our identities are T2. Andre himself has over 100 identities. He’s given up on keeping track. The trajectory isn’t sustainable. Already we generally only have a few passwords. The idea behind federation is that identity in one domain should be transferable across domains. E.g., if I have an account at Company A and click through to Company B, my identity automatically gets transferred, with permission. I could have one place for my address book, I could make it my address authority and it would transfer data to other domains and apps.

There are three protocols: SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), Liberty Alliance, WS Federation (IBM and Microsoft).

Nikolaj Nyholm has a problem with federation. People here are thinking about a perfectly engineered, IT world. Federation is part of the equation but not the way it looks today. The way it stands, if federation were in place, if you put a new SMTP on the Net, it wouldn’t be able to send email to anyone.

Dick (Panelist): The web of trust won’t extend very far. It’ll work if it’s United talking to Hertz, but not more widely…

Eric Norlin: Liberty Alliance sits between authentication servers.

Dave Sifry: It’s software we run on our sites that says that we trust, say, LinkedIn, etc. From a business perspective, it means that there’s some subset of these companies that agree to trust one another’s authentication systems and will use the same middleware to accomplish this.

Andre: Why can’t I use the protocols to link to my social connections? We should be talking about this.

Nikolaj: I have no sense of “home” in the Liberty Alliance…

Ted: Nikolaj is right. The nerve Microsoft hit with Passport was: Who’s going to control my ID?

Andre: Here’s one possible outcome of federation. In large enterprises, they have created ways to handle the redundant ID’s in multiple directories. They create a virtual directory. Now, if you add up all the account info with all the companies you interact with, that’s your useful digital ID today. Suppose I had a dashboard running on my PC, like the enterprise’s virtual directory. It’s likely a p2p client will exist on my PC or cellphone that gives me control. I don’t have to move all the information onto my own computer.

Doc (moderator): Do the protocols for enabling that exist today?

Andrew: Yes, I think they do. I’m describing an application layer on top of the protocols.

Steve Pelletier (Sun): The consumer vision is great, although it’s early. But the world is full of ID systems that will never merge. You need something that enables all those identity repositories to be integrated if only for business reasons. And you need protocols to extend this to customers. That’s what federation does: cross repositories and cross schemas.

Doc: I hate the word “consumer.” I’m a customer.

AOL guy: Before we can do federated ID for social networks, the social networks have to figure out what their business model is.

Isabel Walcott (The Research Board): We’ve discussed ID federation with F100 companies. The way I see it, this is about access control. Companies haven’t figured it out. If social networks could solve this problem, it could go into the corporations. There is no “god” at these big companies saying who can have access to this or that part of the DB. It happens on a peer-to-peer basis: Someone’s boss says which field or part of the DB you have access to. How do you manage access control at the object level? It has to be in some sort of p2p fashion.

Someone: There are legacy solutions that won’t be displaced. You have to layer on top of them, like PingID.

Jeremy: It’s not just the pain of sign-on. It’s also the pain of registering for a new service. A few cases: Company B allows customers of Company A to become registered customers, dynamically, moving my profile. The social networks could be a home base for relevant attributes about me. A federation of those in which my attributes could be relied upon by other online services would be appealing to me. I.e., I can dynamically become a cars.com user using my social network ID and profile. You could do that now with the existing standards.

Nikolaj: Today we have an ID where we can reach other: email. But it has no other attributes. You can’t authenticate itself. Or, your credit card uniquely identifies you. You can even use it to exchange info through a proxy like PayPal. And that’s what we’re looking for.

Someone: Do we have a schema for the info that we think is useful? No, we don’t. The metadata around my demographics and psychographics. Will people create a common tool across social networks so I have a single user experience?

Andre: Jeremy’s comment may have uncovered a business model. If the social networks glommed onto these protocols and built a service for users that allowed them to store the info…

Brian Dear: How about FOAF?

Nikolaj: There’s no layer of authentication.

Jeremy: It’s an attribute.

Someone: We may not want to connect social networks. E.g., one’s for business and the other is personal.

Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn: I’d only do federation if I had a business case justifying it.

1 Comment »

This idea that arose from a meeting at the Aspen Institute is apparently starting to take off. In this “birds of a feather” meeting, Lori Fena (Aspen Institute) says that the Accountable Net addresses problems like security and spam. The solution is to build accountability into the applications. E.g., an identity system and reputation system would let you know who’s sending you a msg and what that person’s reputation is. With regard to security, if there were identity and reputation attached to a packet, you could decide which packets to trust. [Ack! Scary!] It has to come with transparency and user choice as well. Communities can make their own rules. (The other forum leader, Tara Lemmey (Markle Foundation) talks about a federal security project.)

Government agencies don’t trust other government agencies, someone says. The CIA wants to be sure that the data it shares with another agency is treated with the same level of security.

Q: What does an “authenticated user” mean? It seems to imply that a user only has one identity. Digital certificates never took off because you couldn’t link them to other attributes of the person such as bank account.

A: (Jon Callas) There are identities, not identity. I have at least four as I sit here: the PGP employee, the home-owner, etc. Authenticated means authenticated to another agency.

A: (Tara) You have soft identifiers like name and social security number. You have hard identifiers like biometrics. You have your wake, which is all the place you’ve been. And you have your creative output. All of these are part of identity.

Q: How can this be kept ahead of the people who would develope evil tools (evil from a privacy point of view)?

[Lori cites John Walker's Digital Imprimatur]

Q: (Me) Where can I find out more about this proposal that scares the daylights out of me? I don’t want to talk about it here because that’s not the point of this meeting.

A: There may be regional forums.

Someone in the group says that we’re moving to a decentralized system where everyone gets to make his own decision. [But what will happen in a world in which large interests can make demands of us?]

Q: (Keith Teare) We’re moving into an assumption of distrust. We shouldn’t. I prefer to assume good and deal with evil rather than building big systems to prevent evil.

A: (John Patrick) Maybe working with academia would be a good way to bridge the theoretical and the practical. Maybe we should break it down into bite-sized prototypes.

Lori: Almost a research agenda that breaks it down into the key ideas.

Tara: We are already building an alpha for the national security components.

John Patrick: Authentication would be a real good place to start.

Elliot Noss (Tucows) says we could focus on the large mail server folks and get a win there.

Jon Callas: SPF [Sender Policy Framework] is an accountability system because it says that if mail came from this set of servers, it’s from me, and if it didn’t it’s not.

Someone: Accountable for what? What are you doing to define that? Are you putting together a priority list of what are the behaviors that our society is defining as unacceptable on the Net?

Lori: It’s accountable to one another within groups and applications. We don’t want to be the central authority. We want to move our principles for rule-making and enforcement; we don’t want to say that you should make the following rules.

Someone: In a perfect world, we’d all have perfect authentication, identity, etc. [Not in my perfect world.] Can’t be done centrally. It should be driven to the edges.

Bob: The free market won’t do this. Databases didn’t talk with one another until the federal government said it wouldn’t buy your DB unless it supported the spec. [More terrifying. It should be decentralized but accomplished through government intervention?]

Michael Miller: What about in societies where you can’t express yourself?

Lori: Maybe we should have checklists for people designing applications. E.g., “Have you thought about how your product can maintain anonymity in societies where there isn’t free speech?”

Tara: Many of these systems are being designed for or by the government. They will be influential.

[I remain nervous about this initiative. The intentions are good, of course; two of its leaders are former heads of the EFF, a great credential. Esther is enthusiastic about it. Damn fine reputation system. But I have deep doubts about how well its voluntary nature will be maintained. The large entities that are highly motivated to support it — government, corporations — will require that we participate. We won't be able to say no without walling ourselves off from much of the Net. Social networks, not social fences! On the other hand, this meeting assumed we already know what the Accountable Net is, which I don't. I can't even tell if it's a lobbying effort or an attempt to come up with standards/protocols. So I am, once again, speaking out my ass. I am undoubtedly wrong about it and look forward to understanding it.]

Whitepaper

2 Comments »

From the Daily Mislead. I cannot warrantee its accuracy.

BUSH ALLOWS GAYS TO BE FIRED FOR BEING GAY

Despite President Bush’s pledge that homosexuals “ought to have the same rights” (1) as all other people, his Administration this week ruled that homosexuals can now be fired from the federal workforce because of their sexual orientation.

More at Loose Democracy

5 Comments »

ESRI is the leader in GIS systems. Their stuff takes geographic data and manipulates it. First, it creates electronic maps to look at (and zoom in on, put various layers onto, etc.). But, that’s just one thing that a GIS system can do with geographic data. I covered ESRI for the issue of Esther’s Release 1.0 I wrote a couple of months ago, and I was very impressed not only with their technology but with their public mindedness. I’m also convinced that GIS is going to be big news over the next 2 years.

Geography and GIS provide a framework for language and knowledge, Jack says. GIS is an enterprise system that organizes workflows. Geography is essential to colalboration.

He shows a very cool animation, flying in to Honolulu from space, and then distinguishing it from a virtual reality app by toggling on shading that shows cell phone coverage. Then he flies into Greece and then to Everest. Too cool. [What a way to explore the world! It's the atlas I want!]

GIS is a formal information system, he says. It’s a generic platform. Whole bunches of apps are being built using it. GIS is evolving from a digital abstraction to a becoming a “nervous system” for our globe. [I like "The Semantic Earth," the title of my Release 1.0 article. Yes, I'm patting my own back.]

5 Comments »

I shared a cab ride to PC Forum with Adam Berrey of OnFolio, and then yesterday I got a demo. It looks very useful. It lets you save and organizes ages and snippets of pages.

You know how many bookmarks I have on my bookmarks list? About five. I can’t tell you why, but I just don’t find it an hospitable environment for saving pages and scraps. OnFolio looks like it might do it. The foldering is easy, it saves bunches of metadata, and it wraps entire pages into .mhs files that contain all the images. It also looks like it’ll make it easy to share folders, although I personally don’t have much interest in that.

I’ve tried other such products. The closest any came to meeting my idiosyncratic needs was one from AskSam. Eventually, however, my file got corrupt, or the product upgraded and I didn’t, and I lost all my research. I neglected to ask Adam, however, what the story is with export.

24 Comments »

Hank Barry (former CEO of Napster) moderates. He cites a Pew study that says 44% of Net users say they’ve contributed something to the Net. 140M camera phones in 2004. 115 photo-sharing services. DeviantArt has 4M works of art posted. And there’s growing resistance to ISP offerings that restrict uploading.

Shane Robison (HP [Home of computers armed with DRM to lock you out]) says that his customers want to produce their own content.

Rob Glaser (RealNetworks [Talk about your bad defaults! Real is close to deceptive when it walks you through its install program]) points out that not everyone wants to create their own music, although they do want to post their photos. And they want to package up playlists, etc.

Lisa Gansky (Kodak’s O-Photo) says 0-Photo has a billion images, a third of which are printed. [Yikes!] The demographic skews to women. George Eastman realized that he had to market to women. When digital cameras first came in, the men bought them and downloaded the image, holding them hostage on their hard disks. O-Photo eases the sharing. The “soccer moms” tend to print more than the younger demographic. Kodak Mobile is a subscription service for cellphone cameras. That gives us a sort of “streaming intimacy.”

Q: Why can’t I get my IPaq and IPod to work together?

A: (Rob) Because Steve Jobs, for reasons known only to him, won’t license the FairPlay DRM manager that IPod uses. Either of two things will happen: Apple will return to its historic single-digit share, or the market will be slowed because they’ll say, “What, I bought an IPod and I can only shop in one store?? What is this, the Soviet Union?” (Applause.)

Shane: We’re working with Apple on this. It’ll get straightened out.

Q: [Steven Levy] Now we have tools that give people quasi-professional ways to create media. Are we going to make media for one another, or is it more of an American Idol sort of thing where people make media in order to filter up?

(Rob): Those aren’t mutually exclusive.

Q: This revolution has been around the corner for years. But there’s a way to push it forward. There will be an explosion in grassroots video when people can be seen by others on the TVs in living rooms.

Shane: When everyone has access to broadband, the TV can become an interface.

Rob: It has to do with the shortage of narrative-form story-telling skills. There’s a dearth of creative talent. [How do we know that?]

Shane: We have to make big content owners comfortable with using our environment. We’re making progress. There’s a fine line between giving them the kind of protection they need to distribute their property and giving consumers they need. You’ll see some announcements soon showing we’re making progress with the content companies. [Be afraid.]

[So, here's a complaint about these sessions. They are too top-heavy with industry bigwigs. I know that's the draw of PCForum, and where else will you get the heads of Yahoo, AOL and Google on the same panel? But why wasn't there anyone on this panel who is doing end-user creation? I'm suit saturated! Nevertheless, this was an interesting panel.]

3 Comments »