Smart Isenberg, Selectively Dumb Bush

David Isenberg's latest SMART letter (#81) is out, and it's another good 'un. The bulk of the issue talks about his recent trip to Middle Earth, um, New Zealand, a place that may be small enough to be smart enough to do the Right Thing about telecommunications. Unfortunately, he hasn't yet posted it on his website.

David includes a quotation from Mark Crispin Miller:

"[U.S. President George W. Bush] has no trouble speaking off the cuff when he's speaking punitively, when he's talking about violence, when he's talking about revenge. When he struts and thumps his chest, his syntax and grammar are fine. It's only when he leaps into the wild blue yonder of compassion, or idealism, or altruism, that he makes these hilarious mistakes."

Mark Crispin Miller author of The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder, quoted in "Bush Anything But Moronic," by Murray Whyte, Toronto Star, November 28, 2002.

Denise on Creative Commons

Denise at Bag 'n' Baggage describes her thought process in using a Creative Commons license. It's a helpful discussion by a bloggin' lawyer. She also answers reader's questions.

The Creative Commons has its own useful blog.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

Eric disagrees with my comments about why digital ID schemes need to be driven from the bottom up based on the real needs of the market. I'm just not sure he's disagreeing with what I'm actually saying.

I'm saying that I'm wary of digID schemes driven from the top down because they are not addressing the real needs of the market; those needs are already being addressed in a thousand different ways. Somehow this comes across as elitist in Eric's re-statement of it. Or maybe he's just teasing me. Anyway, the substance of Eric's reply is that, in caps, "IT'S ALREADY HERE." The Big Boys are already aggregating and blacklisting.

Eric's been doing us all a service by pointing this out. We should do what we can (i.e., precious little) to fight the Big Boys' plans. But rushing to support another top-down scheme, albeit one that is far better and far more focused on the rights of the individual, isn't necessarily the right way to counteract the predatory ID schemes already coming at us. Here are two reasons why not: First, if there's no market demand for such a system - and there isn't - it won't work. Second, even if there were, that wouldn't stop the anti-market Big Boys from imposing their will on us.

So, I can't get too het up about supporting a humane digital ID scheme that will bring with it -- necessarily, according to Bryan -- a DRM scenario that, IMO, is as close to a nightmare as we can dream.

Bottom-up DigID

Tig's Corner says what I've been trying to say about DigID: "... unless there are applications which use digital id, why will I want to use them?" Right on. We've got a bunch of digital id capabilities already, each solving some real problem such as: How can I trust that you've sent me money for the thing I sold you at eBay? How can I be sure that you have the right to change the way my daily email newsletter from Slate is delivered? How can I be sure that your company isn't a Nigerian scam? To each of these questions of authority and authorization, we have developed good enough answers. Imposing a top-down, infrastructure-wide solution - even one where we get to control our IDs, which is (as everyone in the thread agrees) an absolute requirement - will fail because there is no market demand for it. It will be over-engineered and will bring with it the known tendencies towards abuse in favor of benefits that the market hasn't asked for.

Keep Free Software Free

By Jay Sulzberger, of NY's Free Computing organization, forwarded by Seth Johnson:

Tuesday 31 December 2002: Deadline for Comments on W3C Patents Policy

In the past two years the Free Software Movement has moved W3C, the Official Standards Body of the World Wide Web, from a proposed patent policy, which would have, in future, denied us our present right to full and free use of free software to build the Web, to a policy intended to guarantee that free software may be used without fear of patent encumbrances. This move is an important victory for us. But the present proposed policy on patents has a bug that is worth fixing. The mechanism of the bug is non-obvious, except to people who have studied the GPL and certain other free software licenses. It is a bug that, if the proposal is made an official standard, would allow for patent encumbrances to be laid on certain free software in circumstances where today no encumbrance is allowed.

Here is what the Free Software Foundation says on its front page about this bug:

The W3C "Royalty-Free" patent policy proposal does not protect the rights of the Free Software community to full participation in the implementation and extension of web standards. Please read more on this issue and send a comment to the W3C.

Part of the effort that moved the W3C to its present position was a furious outpouring of comments in opposition to the original proposal of the Englobulators:

http://www.w3.org/2001/ppwg http://www.w3.org/2001/10/patent-response
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment/2001Oct/thread.html

The fix needed right now is a small fix. But the W3C must again be reminded with what jealous vigor we guard our right to build our Web the way we have built it down to this day, using free software.

The bug appears in Item 3 of Section 3, titled "W3C Royalty-Free (RF) Licensing Requirements", of the present proposal:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-patent-policy-20021114

This Item allows for a supposedly free grant to use a patent to be so restricted that a piece of Web infrastructure software might be encumbered if used for some non-Web use. Since the GPL does not allow such encumbrancing, GPL-ed Web software re-purposed for non-Web use could not be legally freely redistributed.

Please read the Free Software Foundation's page on this bug:

http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/w3c-patent.html

The text of the page is below.

Here is the official Last Call for Comments:

http://www.w3.org/2002/12/patent-policy-lastcall-info.html

If you write a comment in your own words, for repair of the bug, it will help.

Jay Sulzberger
Corresponding Secretary LXNY
LXNY is New York's Free Computing Organization.

Sad Perl

As I've been messing around with perl a little this morning, trying to learn it more systematically, I've been feeling gravity tugging on my eyes and hearing the morning quiet more acutely than usual.

It took me a few minutes to realize why a programming language is making me sad. I'm mourning Daniel Pearl.

An AI challenge

I just read a letter to the editor that listed as benefits of casino gambling what were actually disadvantages. It took me two sentences to suspect it was sarcastic and three to confirm it. In fact, the writer had to get all blatant about it: "Upticks in crime, problem gambling, and other harmful social consequences are things we all need." A subtler writer would have left the pejoratives out. We still would have recognized it as sarcasm if the claims were outrageous enough.

Here's my point: Sarcasm has to be a tough one for AI.

Ironically, Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program that responded as if it were a Rogerian psychologist was taken seriously by a surprising number of people although Weizenbaum intended its content to be a parody. (You can play it online here.)

Searching Kafka

This is how it happens. Pettiness is the most subversive enemy of freedom.

Wireless Manifesto

There's a manifesto proclaiming a "wireless commons" that has me just puzzled enough that I haven't signed it. It proclaims the virtues of wireless connectivity (using unlicensed spectrum, not Open Spectrum), and then commits the signatories to some type of support in the wireless build-out:

Becoming a part of the commons means being more than a consumer. By signing your name below, you become an active participant in a network that is far more than the sum of its users. You will strive to solve the social, political and technical challenges we face. You will provide the resources your community consumes by co-operating with total strangers to build the network that we all dream of.

I don't think I can live up to that demand, for I am primarily a bandwidth consumer; I do have have a wifi transmitter that my neighbors could use. Does that mean I can sign?

Anyway, a "wireless commons" is a phrase worth floating.

Mitch on Digital ID

Mitch Ratcliffe comments on the email thread about digital ID. Among other points:

... the basic problem with your debate [is] that it assumes the policy will be arrived at by companies bargaining with one another and, finally, once the dance of the giants is finished, offered to customers as a fait accompli. ... People own their identities and should continue to own them as they migrate into electronic environments

I don't think any of us disagree with Mitch that individuals should own their identity. I take that for granted. My concern has been more with: (1) The imposition of ID schemes top-down rather than continuing to grow bottom-up solutions to actual problems, and (2) What we would gain and lose with a strong digID system in place. The first concern sounds like it maps to Mitch's imperative ("Thou Shalt Own Thy Identity") but need not: it's conceptually possible to impose a top-down identity scheme that enables us to own our identities. It's just politically less likely since the people doing the imposing have an interest in taking custody of our IDs for us. How thoughtful of them.

Digital ID Thread

In response to Eric's musings, Doc, Bryan, AKMA, Kevin and I have been engaged in an email thread. With their permission, I've bundled together the messages, with some very minor cleanup (e.g., removing signoffs, etc.). You can read the loosely-raveled thread here.

The Daypop Effect

Much as I love DayPop, I can see that I'm contributing to its inaccuracy. If I see a link that's in the DayPop Top 40, I won't blog it unless I have something particular to say about it for I figure it's being blogged all over the place anyway.Thus, according to the Law of Inconspicuous Fame ("True fame extinguishes mentions"), height and persistence on the Top 40 tends to defeat itself.

Try out the Technorati Sidebar. Plunk in an URL and it will show you all the blogs that refer to it. (Well, all the blogs that Technorati tracks: 18,178 of 'em at last count.)

Imperfecting Life

On page one of the Boston Globe this morning is the announcement that a crackhead religious group claims to have cloned a human, perfectly and flawlessly reproducing someone's DNA. On page 9 of the Living/Arts section is an article by Randy Lewis that first appeared in the LA Times that says that Eminem, Toby Keith and the Transplants all have added analog-sounding crackles and pops to their CDs so that they'll sound as good as the old vinyl LPs.

For millennia, the distinction between human beings and God was that we're imperfect. In the age of digital machines, increasingly that's the line between being human and being technology.

Q: How many human institutions exist to deal with our imperfections?
A: All of them.
Each is informed by the fact that not only are the participants imperfect, but the system itself is fallible. No wonder we flounder with our own perfect inventions.

More from Eric

Eric paints a plausible scenario of what the Net will look like once strong digital IDs are in place, and then he scares the crap out of us by pointing to Verisign's new "consumer authentication system," currently being tested by eBay, that checks "50 best of breed data sources (personal, credit, demographic and black list information) to cross verify and risk rank consumers."

Blacklist???? Whose? How you get on? How do you get off? So, now Verisign's automated credit check will evaluate whether you have the standing to buy cotton doilies from eBay based on blacklists that come from unspecified somewheres. Anyone who's dealt with Verisign's ability to handle exceptions when it comes to domain names knows that Kafka was being optimistic.

This by itself should count as an argument against instituting "strong" digital IDs.

DigID and DRM

Lord bless Bryan Field-Elliot over at NetMeme. Bryan is a founder of PingID,

a member-owned, technology-neutral network that is facilitating the business framework necessary for the accelerated deployment of federated identity services.

He's also a straightforward guy. In response to Doc's call for "full-power" digital IDs in order to give power back to "consumers," Bryan writes:

There's an important relationship here with DRM (Digital Rights Management), which I think has been danced around quite enough, and should be brought into the spotlight. The relationship is, quite simply, that "Strong Identity" (what Doc calls "full power") is synomymous with Digital Rights Management. You can't have one without the other.

Why not? Bryan explains:

In both cases, one party (individual, or content megaconglomerate) produces digital content (personal info, or a $100mln movie), and makes it available for consumption by other parties, but only with some assurance that the information won't be copied or applied in undesired ways. The two problem patterns, and their range of solutions, appear pretty much identical to me.

...by the nature of information (which "wants to be free", it's said), we can never have Doc's "full power" identity infrastructure without some enforcement teeth.

As far as I can see, only hardware enforcement, or legal enforcement, will provide such a bite, and in both cases, likely to be circumventable by the sufficiently determined.

It's good to see the relationship of DRM and digID made explicit. Too often those pushing for digID avoid acknowleding the relationship.

So, let's get yet more clear about the relationship of DRM and digID. Bryan is not saying (I assume) that the two can't be distinguished the way you can't separate "automobile" from "car" or "wet" from "liquid water." Rather, he says, "you can't have one without the other."

And here I disagree. We could have digIDs that are used solely for enabling us prove we're the one that sent an email, to enable online voting, and to prove that we are the holder of the credit cards we use to buy stuff online. And, as Bryan acknowledges, we can have DRM without digID; DRM just wouldn't "have teeth."

But it all depends on what you mean by teeth. Bryan says he accepts "legal enforcement" as a type of tooth. You don't need digIDs to crack down on pirates who are taping movies on their first day of release and posting the files on the Net or to arrest the pirates who are mass producing bootleg CDs. You can even crack down on Kazaa "super nodes" or students at the Naval Academy who are downloading MP3s. You only need digIDs if you want to make it technologically nigh impossible to do what you want with the content you've downloaded. You only need digIDs if you want your ownership rights to be regulated at the bit level by the people from whom you've bought the content. You only need digIDs if your idea of DRM is CPPSROSE: "Content Providers' Post-Sale Rigid and One-Sided Enforcement." For more reasonable digital rights management we don't need digIDs.

So, it's good to surface the fact that when many people talk about digital IDs, they're often really talking about DRM. But, IMO we need to be damn sure not to define DRM solely as the right of content providers to prevent us from using the content we've bought in the ways we see fit within the bounds of law.

Now Bryan, who understands this stuff 100x better than I, can set me straight...

Bryan's posted a response. Here's what he says (from an email to me):

I think we disagree mostly because I didn't make clear enough in my original post, the difference between using DigID to "prove who you are" (what we do today), vs. using DigID to "control others' use of your personal info" (which we don't have today, and which Doc has variously named "Strong Identity" or "Sovereign Identity"). I believe, your response to me assumes I'm comparing the former to DRM, when actually I'm comparing the latter to DRM.

In his blog, Bryan says: "In classic security terms, we're talking about taking authentication as a given, and moving up the chain to a flexible authorization system for access to personal information." DRM gives the vendor the ability to authorize our use of the goods we buy, so I can see that formally digID and DRM are the same. Thanks for the clarification, Bryan (and did I get it right?).

Adapation Review

I've reviewed Adapation, the Charlie Kaufman comedy, over at Blogcritics.

(There's one howlingly incoherent sentence in the third paragraph where apparently I pressed the "Insert Gibberish" key instead of the "Delete" key. And since I'm temporarily locked out of the site, I can't fix it. Sorry.)

University of Phonyx

The University of Phoenix spams me about once a day. For example:

We are closer to you than you might think. Go to http://oz.valueclick.com/r/hs0243102/a0070077/0 to check the location nearest you. University of Phoenix is the nation’s largest private university.

—————————

You are receiving this email because you have opted-in to receive email from publisher: swelldeals. To unsubscribe, click below:http://u2.%host%/?z=95-2047662-ByRumS

Ah, yes, the mark of a truly excellent institute of higher education is that it gets its spam list from swelldeals.com. (No, I never "opted-in.") Well, that's what happens when you hire carney folk to administer your college.

The Net and Continuity Campaigns for ... Oops, Gotta Go Retch

Cory Treffiletti in Online Spin writes about the possibility that the Internet has become a mature enough medium that it can provide "continuity" with a company's mainstream broadcast campaign:

Maybe the Internet has actually become the best medium for running a continuity campaign, to sustain the message conveyed in Television and is clearly the second most important medium in conveying a message to the consumer?

After noting that 134M people in the US are online, he writes:

Given that the prices for Interactive media are so low, and that online ad spending has surpassed out-of-home and is quickly catching up on radio regardless of the cost cutting, it stands to reason that marketers are realizing this medium is indeed a great opportunity for reaching a mass audience effectively and generating a response.

You can't argue with that! Well, except maybe to say: Noooooooo! Online marketing is almost always like handing out business cards at a wedding.

Will someone just send Treffiletti a copy of Gonzo Marketing already?

I Am Not and Never Have Been a Hippie (Except 1968-1976 and weekends through the early '00s)

Eric's posted more in his on-line writing project. It's damn fun watching his essay evolve.

And now for my daily quibble with it. He writes that in our previous blog entries Akma and I point toward the inefficiency of the Net not being a bad thing." He replies: "I don't think it is either, from the humanities perspective." So let me be clearer: I am not presenting a hippie point of view when I say that the Net's inefficiency at the packet level is the source of its strength. It has nothing to do with "bits just wanna be free, man." It has everything to do with measurable, quantifiable decisions about how to build a network that is robust and insanely scalable. So don't go tarring me with that hippie brush, man. Now, where'd I put my bong?

And how does this apply to economics? I don't know nothing about economics, nevertheless the point I was trying to make was that the Internet's greatest economic strength - and its strength in building markets - has been in ventures that are bottom-up, do the job well enough, and are highly specific to a problem. Many of the attempts to impose digital IDs fail all three criteria.

I agree with that old hippie, Akma:

But this returns me to my perpetual refrain that we need a new business model, not a new way of enforcing the old. RIAA and Hollywood might like to use DigID to ensure that one and only one person has the right to listen to my copy of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—but if DigID is going to function as a weapon for enforcing the perpetuation of an obsolescent business model, than we’re much better off without it. Kevin knows this, and is touting Mediagora

And while I doth protest too much about not being a hippie, here's a comment from Aaron Kinney's year-end round-up of TV for Salon (for-pay edition).

... reminded us that television is the best medium for disseminating propaganda, as it served as the premiere for the Bush administration's ad campaign claiming that anyone who purchases marijuana may be financing terrorists. I humbly submit that, rather than shifting blame for mass killing and a national security fiasco onto recreational pot smokers, the administration should maybe shut the fuck up and think about tracking down Osama bin Laden.

Don't bogart that cultural revolution, muh friend.

More to and fro Norlin

Eric is continuing his experiment in thinking out loud. He's refined his original argument about the Net's effect on the economy. It's too rich a chunk to chew all at once, so I'll just nibble at it. (Even though I'm about to disagree with him, this isn't a "He's Wrong!" sort of disagreement but an attempt to understand better by pushing back a bit.)

Eric begins by saying that the Internet is inefficient when it comes to managing reputations. Maybe, but so what? The Net's strength is its inefficiency. A more efficient network would queue bits in order of importance, pre-compute routings, etc. So long as the bits are getting there, who cares if it's the most efficient route? I worry that strong digital ID systems over-build in the name of efficiency and completeness.

The fact is that the Net has actually done an impressive job of building reputation management systems where they're needed: eBay, Amazon, epinions all do a good enough job of it. Home pages and weblogs are another sort of reputation system. So, if there's a market waiting to happen if only we had a reputation system, then why hasn't someone already built one on the edge of the Net?

And the same goes for digital IDs themselves. If the need is that great, then why hasn't it been solved? (I don't mean this in a neener-neener way. I mean it as a real question.) Yes, we need strong digital IDs to enabling online voting. But I can already buy anything I want online by using my credit card. I have passwords at a zillion sites and a little password note pad that reminds me of what they are. My fear is that by trying to build systematic ID systems that don't spring from particular applications, we'll over-engineer a solution to a problem that doesn't need that much solving.

And since over-solving this problem would benefit powers that would recentralize the network, there are additional reasons to aim for inefficient, minimal digital IDs.

Also, Eric makes a passing reference to an idea that sounds fascinating: "... property rights exist (at some economic level) to simplify the exchange." He credits this to Frank Field. I hope Eric expands on it.

Doc is waxing wise in his response to Eric, although I think that in Doc's terms I don't want identity services to be "Net native." I want them on the edge. I suspect Doc does, too, and we're disagreeing only verbally.

Nova Matrullo

A hearty virtual hug to Tom and Wendy, and a gentle embrace for Sawyer James. Congratulations!

Impenetrable Interview with Me

I wax incomprehensible in an interview at the SXSW site. Jon Lebkowsky asked good questions. I drove down the road into thickets every time.

I'll be keynoting the SXSW Interactive conference in March. I'll be using PowerPoints because, as is well known, PowerPoint prevents presentations from wandering into the deep end of the pool. That's why we use 'em.

See you in Austin?

Free History of Telecom

Bruce Kushnick's book, "The Unauthorized Bio of the Baby Bells," is available as a free download via the Teletruth organization. I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Why, it even has an introduction by the redoubtable Bob Metcalfe!

The Closed Source of Open Source

Today's Boston Globe has a history of the Open Source movement by Laurence Schorsch that's quite positive, citing it as a threat "peering over the horizon ... that just might topple Microsoft." Appropriately, it begins with Richard Stallman's contribution. Yet, although Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond are interviewed, local-boy Stallman isn't. The second to last paragraph explains why:

(Stallman declined to be interviewed for this article unless we promised to call the operating system "GNU/Linux" instead of the more common "Linux.")

Every time Stallman interrupts a conversation to insist that people change the way they speak, the damage he does to the social values GNU was created to support are mitigated only by the impression that he's nuts.

Language: The ultimate open source project.

Norlin on Norlin

Eric gives a fast, breezy, and fascinating story of his life so far. and then responds to AKMA. Great framing of the current controversy Eric started by publishing the rough draft of his thoughts. Also, Eric makes the important point that as companies increasingly require us to have an in-house ID, we're getting used to the notion of having one out on the big bad Web.

I do take exception to his saying that I'm among those insisting that digital ID can't capture my soul, man. I've instead been insisting that the only thing "digital identity" has in common with "personal identity" is the use of the word "identity." The problems I have with digital ID have to do with its importance (Eric thinks it's the linchpin to the new economy), who will own it, and how easy it will be to abuse.

Two Towers, Much Fun

= saw "The Two Towers" yesterday with eight 12-year-olds who didn't get up once in the 3 hours to go to the bathroom.

What more could you want in this type of movie? Adventure, bravery, characters with inner struggles, lots of story line, astounding scenery, amazing graphics...

Well, now that you mention it: Since I don't care about fidelity to the source, I wish the movie were less sexist. And does it say anywhere in the books that the human characters are all white?

POMO Programming

Dethe has found a very funny ... well, here's the relevant excerpt from the email he sent me:

...there's a wonderful paper on Postmodern Programming. The authors presented this at OOPSLA last month, and it was one of the highlights of the conference for me. My favorite part is when they define the essence of the PoMo programming language: Languages get defined by the problems they solve. The first exercise for many programmers is to compute the first thousand prime numbers. Here's their solution:

http://www.google.com/search?q=first%20thousand%20primes

I thought you'd enjoy that, seeing as how it combines PoMo, Google, and a wickedly funny smack on the head in one go.

My friend Paul English, when asked if he knows someone's phone number, has been known to reply: "Yes. It's 411."

Prediction Marketing

Scott Kirsner's always readworthy column in the Boston Globe (here today, gone tomorrow) has a table with predictions by seven leading Boston tech analyst companies. I'm assuming that these predictions were volunteered by the analysts and thus should be counted as marketing tools.

Note: I have no predictions of my own to offer at this time. I wouldn't dare.

AKMA's ID

Akma, who is one of the funniest serious writers around, jumps into the Norlin Fray. He intuits, correctly in my view, that what's motivating Eric more than anything is his interest in digital IDs.

Akma ably worries about one side of digital IDs: our persistent reputation on the Internet. What happens, he wonders, when we systematize that? What do we gain and what do we lose? The other side of digital ID, however, is the one that authenticates me in my online transaction. There's little existential about such an ID. It's really just a way of assuring that the money that's about to transfer in fact comes from my real world wallet. Akma sees (or assumes?) a connection between these two:

If DigID is designed for users first, and only subsequently for commercial interests, then users won’t mind (much) sharing DigID with commerce. If DigID is designed for commerce first and thrust upon users, users will resist and evade.

I assume that these two IDs can be kept apart. But I wonder if I'm right.

Blogthread: These are the additional links Akma captures in the current Norlin blogthread: Doc Searls, Mitch Ratcliffe, Kevin Marks and me.

If it weren't for the possessive, I could have had an all-caps title for this blog entry. Damn!

Greater Democracy

I'm participating in a group blog about what the government of a connected people might look like. It's at GreaterDemocracy.org. For example, the latest entry is from Jon Lebkowsky:

Langdon Winner explores how the technological complexity of our infrastructures has made the U.S. (et al.) vulnerable to attack, and how, having seen a demonstration of that vulnerability in 9/11, we have hardened social and political systems and accepted a sacrifice of fundamental rights and freedoms that would have been unthinkable before the terrorist attack. Winner suggests better ways to deal with the perceived vulnerability. [Link]

Other members of the blog team include Jock Gill, Peter Kaminski and David Reed.

Adina blogs about why she's been blogging about politics more than she expected to:

My personal feelings about these issues come from the fact that my dad is a holocaust refugee...[O]ne of the questions that I had about approaching adulthood was -- if the place that I lived started sliding toward totalitarianism, would I be one of the people who spoke up, or would I be one of the people who kept silent until life became unbearable.

When the government rounds up immigrants on excuses of incorrect paperwork, and is able to detain them indefinitely without evidence or trial...

Every political decision says something about who we are but also about who we are becoming. And that's what's truly scary.

History of Copyright

Seth Johnson, in an email, points to a fascinating paper by David Walker called "Heirs of the Enlightenment: Copyright During the French Revolution and Information Revolution In Historical Perspective." From the introduction:

During the Enlightenment, two conflicting viewpoints on the nature of authorship, creativity, and copyright emerged. One view, proposed by the French thinker Denis Diderot, advanced the notion that literary works are unique creations of the individual mind, and thus should be protected as the most sacred form of property. The other view, advanced by the Marquis de Condorcet, saw literary works as the expression of ideas that already exist in nature, and thus belong to all and should be made available to all for the common good. Both viewpoints had a profound influence on the changing legal status of intellectual property during the French Revolution. Even more, this paper will argue that these two conflicting viewpoints, both of which were firmly grounded in Enlightenment thought, still continue to have an influence into the present, and the tension between the two continues to be played out in the arena of copyright in the United States in the year 2000.

Kevin Marks on Eric's Argument

Kevin's got some smart stuff to say about Eric's argument about the Net's economic value. Kevin even manages to explain what I put so fumblingly.

Kevin points to a NY Times article that concludes:

The same economic forces that lead to premium and discount sellers in the offline world are at work in the online world. But the differences in transaction costs make the price differences both more extreme and easier to observe,

This suggests that the Net is both commoditizing some businesses and leaving room for added-value providers.

Locke's Psychic 2:1 Stock Split

RageBoy now has two — count 'em, two! — blogs. His new one is at the Corante site and sounds a lot like the RB of Gonzo Marketing and Cluetrain, a voice I've missed. Here's a taste:

...We're making up stuff and feeding it to each other. Lies and fictions and contrafactual fabrications of the worst sort. Or the best sort. We think we're hiding behind all these random words we sling around. Then we're horrified to realize we've betrayed ourselves. Our masks have given us away.

Scary. And beautiful....

Meanwhile, over at his first blog, RB's monkey-boy is still pulling up the maenad's skirts, diddling with the guy's hammers, and engaging in various forms of satyre. It is what you might call a shadow site.

New issue of JOHO

I Love Ruairi Vol. I

Michael O'Connor Clarke writes tenderly about the new baby in his life. Congratulations to Michael and Leona.

Woohoo!

Norlin on the Internet as Economic Drain

Some Big Thinking in admirable rough draft form is goin' on over at Norlin's place. He's working through an argument that's important if right.

Point #6 is crucial: The Internet is economically destructive because it's hard to make money when so much stuff is entering the commons.

Eric gets there via a pivot point (#3) that he notes he needs to clarify: the lack of scarcity on the Net drives things towards the public domain. That seems intuitively right. But the question is: what on the Net is in such abundance that it drives goods thusly? It's not the abundance of goods but the abundance of access to goods: you don't need a lot of capital to create and/or distribute digital stuff. (BTW, in such an environment, what is the remaining virtue of capitalism?)

Then Eric raises a fascinating idea (#7): "Digital identity is a (somewhat subconscious attempt) to solve the lack of scarcity." How? "[Y]ou're able to rebuild some of the channels and points of distribution." That is, if you can be put in jail for getting a copy of Eminem's latest via Kazaa, then the recording industry can re-establish its chokehold. (My loaded language isn't Eric's.)

Why does Eric see "the lack of scarcity" as a problem to be "solved" (#7)? Because it drives down prices and thus drives businesses into the dirt. But there are at least two types of business here. There are those whose value has been nullified by the ease with which digits can be manufactured and distributed; there's no good economic reason to prop them up (sez I). Then, there are companies that provide real value in a digital world that may not be able to make enough money to survive if their products become free. In the first category is the recording industry. In the second are recording artists and newspapers. I don't know how the second category will survive, but I'd rather let the market innovate than impose artificial scarcity. We're still at the beginning of this journey. I hope and believe that the solution will not be to re-centralize control and introduce artificial chokepoints. That's not what drives an economy of abundance.

So, I don't yet agree with Eric when he says "the internet is *truly* economically destructive..." (#6). Destructive of what? Businesses that no longer provide value, sure. But even if bsinesses that do provide value make less money (assuming they make enough to survive, which I admit is still at issue) then we also have to factor in the enrichment those creative goods provide to you, me and everyone else in the market. Overall, the Internet could turn out to be tremendously economically constructive.

(Eric, thank you for having the guts to post your ideas in rough form so that we can all chew on them.)

PEETA

Ruth Lipman sends us to a site that she knows will raise the blood temperature of those of us who believe in animal rights. It's quite graphic so I urge you to shield the monitor from young and impressionable minds.

(BTW, I prefer to eat them head first.)

Guides and Misguides

Jonathan Peterson writes in response my request for some travel tips:

Check out virtualtourist, I used them a lot 2 years ago when we went to France. Very bloglike community with a lot of english content.

The navigation can be a bit confusing, as it mixes individual with commercial content. The best stuff is in people's travelogues, off the beaten path and restaurant reviews.

It's especially great when you get a local who has spent some time talking about their city

I'm amazed at how much more content there is than last time I looked. Viva la camera digita'l!

Yes, I'm a fan of VirtualTourist also.

Meanwhile, David Forrester of Molecular points to an article in NTK:

It's always good to see a thriving new community springing up in Usenet's barren wasteland - especially ones with interests as specific as those of "Richard Craft", "Kevin Steward", "Kyran Goring", "Danny Farrell", "Sean Rogers", "Mike Harding", "Oliver Hammond", "James Goodman", "Cameron Ellis" et al. Take it from us, these guys have a *lot* in common: they all post from a Mailbox Internet account, they all have Hotmail addresses, and the products they just can't help recommending to each other include student info-hub thesite.org, the musical output of Elvis Costello and Afroman, plus the Activision games Wreckless, Rally Fusion and Minority Report. All of which, any idiot with a search engine can see, are clients of new media marketing agency DIGITAL OUTLOOK, who define guerrilla marketing as "participating within a variety of carefully targeted online communities [...] and initiating 'unofficial' discussions about our clients' offering". They've yet to confirm or deny whether these individuals are Digital Outlook employees (or their aliases), and whether they have any kind of code of practice on the use of false identities for promotional purposes. Or maybe the company intranet was down, thus forcing the staff to communicate with each other via alt.internet.providers.uk.free? ...

The only good news is that bastards like these do eventually get found out. But the technique undoubtedly still "works" in some instances since more people will be fooled than angered.

See you in Hell.

Peer Speed

John Husband in an email points to an article in the NY Times yesterday:

New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online

A group of prominent scientists is challenging the leading scientific journals with the creation of two peer-reviewed online journals this week....

The way the Web has broken the lock between perfection and eternality is quite remarkable. We can go public with work in progress and not have to wait for the Wite-out to dry on our masterpiece before we acknowledge its existence.

And all of this is made possible through the magic of metadata: so long as we know that it's a draft, we're willing to make allowances and read it for what it is. (And the great virtue of blogs is that they're understood to be perpetual rough drafts.)

So, let's get syllogistical. Metadata allows for imperfection. Imperfection hastens time. Haste leaves little time to erect defenses. Therefore, metadata lets us be who we are. QED.

Paying for Archives

Scott Kirsner (columnist at the Boston Globe and contributing editor to Wired and FastCompany...the type of guy freelancers like me envy) responds in an email to my explanation of why I urge people to subscribe to Salon but bash the Globe for tucking their online articles away in a for-pay archive. He writes:

In my mind, if you want an organization to survive - whether it is a for-profit one like Salon or the Globe or a non-profit like the American Heart Association - it makes sense to financially support it.

The reason the Globe has been existent since 1872, supporting public discourse etc, is that it has figured out how to reliably make money over that period.

When we started the Web site in 1995, there was no government agency giving us a grant to put the Globe's material online, for free. One of the things that subsidizes the cost of putting the content online with no cost to readers - even if only for a few days - is the archives.

I promise you that it is not "almost free" to run vast databases of stories, with credit card verification, etc. (And to pay the technicians to make sure that the servers remain up and available.) You're right that the actual cost of delivering each story is probably not $2.95, but that cost does subsidize a lot of stuff that goes on line for free, even if only temporarily.

An interesting question to ask is what will happen to newspapers that perennially lose money on their Web operations. I don't think it would be such a wild prediction to say that they would either shut them down, or, if they didn't, see the losses from their Web operation begin to hurt the print operation - forcing them to fire reporters, editors, photographers, etc.

Given all the statistics about declines in newspaper readership by young people, the high cost of printing and delivering the things, and the revenue threat from online job sites, I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that newspapers like the Globe are institutions that will survive forever and ever regardless of whether their businesses are run intelligently.

I suspect I won't change your opinion on this, but just thought I would write and contribute to the conversation...

I know I'm never going to win an argument with Scott because he fights dirty by being right. Nevertheless...

Three principles here conflict for me. First, I believe in people making money on the Web. Second, newspapers have a special obligation to make their information widely available because that is good for our democracy. Third, if you make my web site look bad, your sites' servers should be terminally infected with head lice. So, how does the Globe policy stack up to these three Prime Directives? (Yeah, I know you can't really have three prime directives...)

First, the Globe should take in money on the Web. And it does. It runs ads. It markets itself. It lets people buy tickets from season ticket holders. Great! Do these defray the cost of the Web site? Scott's message implies not.

So, should the Globe now do whatever it has to in order to break even on the Web? Of course not. It wouldn't run a porn-for-pay service. The Second Principle (oh lordy, now I'm even capitalizing myself) suggests that the paper has a social responsibility to keep its content available to the citizenry. Having to pay to re-read the paper makes our democracy just a little bit worse. The Globe should make money using the well-known SOW technique: Some Other Way.

Third, putting up a link and then taking it down breaks the Web.

So, let's be positive. What would I suggest the Globe do in order to satisfy these contradictory principles? It's obvious: I dunno.

Or, possibly: Charge for complete online access to today's newspaper, but keep access to previous issues free. And have Scott become the editor of an online magazine called "The Boston Globe Presents THE HUB" that has added-value content you can't get anywhere else, including some kickass weblogs by Globe reporters. Like Salon. Yeah, easy for me to say. But I can't pretend to give the Globe a business plan; I don't know enough about their business. All I can do as a reader and citizen is thank them for the good they do and gripe if their values don't align with mine. And that's what I'm doing.

I understand that newspapers are in trouble. But of all the ways to subsidize their operations, putting a turnstile in front of the archives is among the worst.

And, I know I am a kook for believing this, but these problems are only temporary. As soon as $300 ebook hardware with high enough resolution becomes a standard part of every school kid's equipment, newspapers will start to jettison the mass distribution of their print versions. It's only a few years away. At that point, I will be delighted to subscribe to The Globe Online at the current print price. Without the cost of printing and delivering a forest of paper every day, I sincerely hope The Globe will be richer than Croesus.

I love the Globe. I read its inky pages every day. Long may they crinkle! And if I thought that the only way for the Globe to stay online was to charge $3.00 to read an article in their archive, I'd shut up about it. But we're looking at a balancing act and IMO the Globe has underestimated the importance of keeping our recent past present to us.

It is with only a trace of irony that I point out that Scott's columns, including the recent one on weblogs that started this back-and-forth, are archived for free at digitalmass.com, a boston.com site.

Getting Past our Missile Shield

I have come upon certain information about a hidden weakness of the 10-missile defense shield President Bush has decided to erect to protect our country. Although some may call me unpatriotic or even a traitor for telling our potential enemies how to defeat the shield, I prefer to think of myself as a whistle-blower.

So, here is the one can't-fail way to exploit the hidden weakness of our missle shield: Fire 11 missiles.

Cometa's Tale

Jane Black deconstructs the Cometa story for Businessweek. Cometa made a splash last week by announcing that AT&T, Intel and IBM had joined to provide nationwide wifi access. On a closer reading of the press materials (first suggested by Peter Kaminski), it turns out that the Big Three have very little skin in this game. Further, it's not clear that the game is about putting up 20,000 hotspots; it could just be an announcement that Cometa is available if you're a telco or an ISP looking to outsource your WiFi construction project. (Jane's take is more detailed and fact-based than mine.)

Jane also draws an interesting parallel to ZapMail, FedEx's plan to put them new-fangled fax machines in their offices so that they could fax business's documents. That way individual businesses wouldn't have to buy the expensive contraptions. But this centralized approach failed as prices dropped and every business installed its own. In the same way, centralized provisioning of WiFi may (should!) give way to the bottom-up installation of neighborhood networks. (

Do I sense Clay Shirky's hand in the inclusion of the ZapMail story? I know it's something he's interested in.)

Dehyphenated WiFi

I'm annoying Dewayne Hendricks — cited in Jane's article — by refusing to spell WiFi as "Wi-Fi," which is the official spelling. I figure I'm already too stiff in my spelling because I capitalilze the interior "F." Hell, I think it really ought to be spelled "wifi."

I also spell "e-mail" as "email."

Suppose I compromise by agreeing to put the hyphens I save into "co-operation" and "margin-of-error." Win-win!

Centralizing the Servers

Craig Allen writes in an email:

This may be common knowledge, but I learned from a brief article in Doctor Dobb's Journal (ya gotta pay on the web, I get the print edition free, how weird is that?) that way back when the Internet was being designed, AT&T somehow forced the design to rely on a relatively small number of central routers rather than a more distributed, decentralized approach. As a result, the net is more vulnerable to various kinds of Denial of Service attacks, various unplanned disasters, and (I'm not sure if this is an assumption on my part or the article said it) less throughput. AT&T's reason was that otherwise it would be too competitive with the phone network (most of which they owned at the time).

(Craig notes that he's summarizing from memory and thus may be off in some of the details.)

News to me. Sounds plausible. But everything sounds plausible to me.

Schneier's Favorite Color is Gray

Kevin Marks writes "Bruce Schneier gets it" and appends this quotation to prove it:

This is law, not technology, so there are all sorts of shades of gray to this issue. The interests at stake in the original attack, the nature of the property, liberty or personal safety taken away by the counterattack, the risk of being wrong, and the availability and effectiveness of other measures are all factors that go into the assessment of whether something is morally or legally right. The RIAA bill is at one extreme because copyright is a limited property interest, and there is a great risk of wrongful deprivation of use of the computer, and of the user's privacy and security. A strikeback that disables a dangerous Internet worm is less extreme. Clearly this is something that the courts will have to sort out.

It's important that we brand the RIAA position as extremist. It's also important that we recognize that software will never be able to make the Fair Use judgments that humans do. Leeway is crucial.

Kevin writes: "His 'Secrets and Lies' book is good on this too." I haven't read it, but in my experience Kevin has yet to be wrong in a recommendation.

Lott's Racist Association

From Slate's daily roundup of the news, by Eric Umansky:

The LAT's [Los Angeles Times] Lott coverage had a nice bit of newspaper-speak. It mentions that he promised to reconsider his ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, "a group attacked as segregationist." A group attacked as segregationist? Any semi-conscious person would conclude so. (See for yourself: http://www.cofcc.org/page12.htm )

Lott has given speeches to the group over the years and has met with their leaders. According to the Washington Post:

In his speech [to the group], Lott, according to the newsletter, called the Citizen Informer, warns against the forces supporting government spending: 'We need more meetings like this across the nation' to offset these liberal pressures. 'The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let's take it in the right direction and our children will be the beneficiaries'" (Thomas B. Edsall, The Washington Post, December 16, 1998).

Here are some excerpts from the page Umansky points to :

To a large extent, soft conservatives and so-called "neo-conservatives" have embraced the legacy of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Nowadays, the average "conservative" policy maker thinks and acts like a bleeding heart liberal from 1963. ...

The C of CC recognizes that European Christian heritage is essential for the survival of our standard of living and way of life. There is no acceptable substitute for the civilization that has evolved through the Greeks, Romans, Celts, and Anglo-Saxons.

Some "gems" from elsewhere on their site:

The burden of slavery will probably never be lifted from the white man. And yet, the real shame of slavery is that Africans were ever brought to America in the first place. No system of labor was ever more costly or cumbersome...

Rather than doling out government checks from welfare offices, an African Slave Reparation and Repatriation Fund should be created to undo the wrong that was done 400 years ago. Countries like Gambia, Senegal, and Liberia would receive a fixed bounty for every slave descendant who migrates to Africa ...

---

Lott may never have meant, as happily charged in the press, that we would have been better off with a segregationist President, but I wish he had. It is true, and it is time someone says so.

---

The Sixth Law of God is a book that will stun even fundamentalist Christians! Pastor V. S. Harrell has researched the oldest available Greek Septuagint texts to prove that the Commandment against adultery is a law against race mixing!

Lott will be gone within a week. Having rejected segregation, the Republicans will turn with minty-fresh breath to the task of preserving the nation's concentration of wealth.

Treat Yourself

Go take a look at Gary and Fiona's gorgeous newborn, the very picture of possibility.

(On a completely different note, if Gary's site greets you with the wrong name in the upper right, try clicking on the "If you're not so-and-so" link. Really.)

Gary Boone's New Blog

Gary Boone starts off his new weblog with a thoughtful essay on the relationship of trains and the Internet, and a link to an "impossible" puzzle from Simon Coggins. (Actually, since I don't understand the solution that's provided, it remains to me truly impossible.)

Welcome to Blogland, Gary.

Adina Reviews "Small Pieces"

Adina reviews my book "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," filtering it through her interest in Talmudic interpretation. As you know by now, Adina is way smart and an incisive reader.

There are two points where I'd either object or ask a question (or, better, passive-aggressively object by asking a question). First, she takes "authenticity" in a way that I don't quite get and don't think I intended. She seems to think I mean by it something having to do with the purity of one's roots when in fact I use it as something like taking ownership for who one is.

Second, she is put off by the book's romanticism. I can see why. And it is certainly a reasonable objection to "The Cluetrain Manifesto." But I'm bothered by this because I intended "Small Pieces" not as a barbaric yawp in favor of individualism, yada yada, but as a way of talking about our weird representationalist self-understanding, i.e., our belief that experience is something in our own minds.

Anyway, her review is more interesting and helpful than my self-obsessed nitpicking is letting on. Thank you, Adina.

Boston Globe: The Link Maker ... and Breaker

I'm pleased as Hubert Humphrey's punch to be included in the list of Boston bloggers mentioned by Scott Kirsner in today's Boston Globe, along with Dan Bricklin, John Robb, Ray Kurzweil, Jeremy Allaire, Ray Ozzie, and Bob Frankston. That's some heady company!

At the risk of being churlish, I do feel the need to address Scott's poking me about why I urge people to subscribe to Salon but knock the Globe for "asking users to pay for access to Globe articles once they are moved into the site's archives." Is it because my "instinct is usually to side with the underdog," as Scott guesses?

Well, sure, there's that. But also...

1. Salon needs the support. While its editor Scott Rosenberg says its finances are not nearly as shaky as some have assumed, nothing is certain in this crazy hill of beans, and we need some high-quality online magazines to succeed.

2. Newspapers have a special role. They are the bedrock of public information. They try for comprehensive coverage and they aim for a type of objectivity that lets our beliefs have some shared footing. Locking up that information makes our society stupider. (Yes, yes, I know objectivity is so pre-POMO, etc.)

3. It costs the Globe as close to nothing as humans can count for me to search their archives and look at an article. The pricing is thus unrelated to costs. Paying 5 times the price of an entire printed copy of the newspaper is waaaay too much.

4. The most important social role of a publication like a newspaper is to enable conversations. We want an informed citizenry so that we can get past "Hey, how's it goin'?" when we talk with one another. That's crucial to how we make social decisions and to how we come to be a community in the first place. But kicking off a conversation in public and then going to sulk in your room is just plain rude. Salon, on the other hand, makes it clear from the beginning: if you want to talk, pay your $29/year.

5. Of all the links in this blog entry, there's only one I can guarantee will be broken in a week: the link to Scott's article.

In a fit of irony, the Globe's archives seem to be down this morning.

While I'm in an appending mood: "404! Page gap! 404!" is a palindrome.

Quality of Service

[This is a draft of a column that will run in DarwinMag on Wednesday, probably.]

Who could object to quality?

Actually, you do. You object to quality every time you buy a worse-but-cheaper brand, order from the top of the wine list instead of the bottom, or reject the "pro" version of some over-featured piece of software.

And you also object to quality of service every time you get righteously annoyed at the way the waiters fawn over the well-dressed couple while barely remembering to clean up your spilled root beer. And, most important, you object to quality of service when you're waiting on line and some perceived VIPs are served ahead of you because their quality of service degrades your quality of service.

That's at the heart of the current debate over Quality of Service (QoS) as the Internet begins to subsume other networks. In fact, David Isenberg (who saw a draft of this column) expands the analog: "Maybe you're pissed that they got in with no delay while you have to wait (delay). Maybe you're pissed because they can count on getting in right away, while you never know how long you might have to wait (jitter). And maybe you never get in, thanks to those VIP a**holes filling up the place (lost packets)." One person's Quality of Service can be another person's Degradation of Service.

That's what could be. As it stands, the Internet treats all bits alike. When a packet arrives at a router, it gets sent along regardless of what type of data it encodes. In fact, there's no way to tell what type of data it's carrying. Medical X-Ray Bits are moved just as quickly as Pamela Anderson Bits. And it doesn't matter what order the packets arrive in: if the packets encoding Pam's eyes show up after the ones encoding her painted toenails (assuming that it's a photo of her vertical and rightside up), they will be put into the right order by the machine receiving them.

But many of the companies who are using the Internet as a transport for telephone calls say that their bits are different. If you're reciting the Pledge of Allegiance over the phone (soon to be a requirement, by the way), if the "to the flag" " bits arrive after the "under God," your message will be unintelligible. Therefore, telephone bits deserve special treatment. Or so the argument goes.

Some very serious people disagree. Their arguments are of three types.

First, QoS is impractical. There are indeed bits in IP packets designed to indicate "type of service," but no one uses them. There's not even agreement how to interpret them, much less how to rank them. More important, the Internet routers would have to be set to act on thost bits which would require a massive retooling of the Net's "operating system."

Second, QoS is the wrong solution. According to this line of thought, QoS is only required if there's a scarcity of bits available. It'd be far better to solve the QoS issue by opening up the sluices of connectivity: light up the "dark" (unused) fiber, open up the spectrum for public access, install more powerful routers, get with the IPv6 program. With sufficient bits and sufficient throughput, voice packets will arrive in time without having to always arrive first.

Third. QoS violates the principle of the Internet's architecture. The Net has succeeded precisely because it does nothing but move bits from A to B. This is the " End-to-End" theory described by Saltzer, Reed and Clark and the "Stupid Network" as described by Isenberg. Part of the simplicity that keeps the Internet humming is the fact that it treats all bits alike. Further, the fact that the Internet is not optimized for any particular applications means that it is optimized for innovation; "tune" the Internet for the VIP du jour and you will de-tune it for other applications. Let the telphone guys and gals change the way the Net works so that it's better for voice and then tomorrow change it so that it works better for broadcasting TV shows, and soon the other types of bits we care about will have trouble getting through the line at the check-out counter.

So, even though in theory, we could provide QoS in the short term and open up connectivity in the longer term, doing so would mean obfuscating the true strength of the Internet: It's no Strom Thurmond when it comes to bits.

Resources

Glenn Fleishman just published a helpful weblog entry on the topic.

Lawrence Lessig just posted a terrific article to Dave Farber's mailing list, as did Karl Auerbach and Bob Frankston.

David Isenberg's newsletter in 1999 ran a clear explanation of the issues. The article is based in part on research by Andrew Odlyzko; there's a long interview with Odlyzko here.

This column resulted from my participating in (well, auditing) an email thread among Glenn Fleishman, Bob Frankston and David Reed. Obviously, they are not responsible for my stupidity, carelessness and poor personal hygiene.

Total Information Abuse

From Cryptome comes a write-up of an article in the SF Weekly that's successfully scary about what it means to have your personal info aggregated:

The SF Weekly's column by Matt Smith in the Dec 3 issue points out that there may be some information that John M. and Linda Poindexter of 10 Barrington Fare, Rockville, MD, 20850, may be missing in their pursuit of total information awareness. He suggests that people with information to offer should phone +1 301 424 6613 to speak with that corrupt official and his wife. Neighbors Thomas E. Maxwell, 67, at 8 Barringon Fare (+1 301 251 1326), James F. Galvin, 56, at 12 (+1 301 424 0089), and Sherrill V. Stant (nee Knight) at 6, may also lack some information that would be valuable to them in making decisions — decisions that could affect the basic civil rights of every American.

Cometa DeHyped

Jane Black deconstructs the Cometa story for BusinessWeek. (Cometa is the semi-sorta alliance among Intel, IBM and AT&T to wifi America. Which would be true if wifi were the same as hot air.)

Lessig on Openness

Excellent column by Lawrence Lessig on keeping the Net open.

Space Flame

Ever wonder what a flame would look like if there were no gravity? Me neither.

Virus Map

Want to see the Top Ten Viruses on your continent? Rob points us to this map.

Now how about a map of the Top Ten Viruses on my desktop?

Hardware Is Solid but Bodies Are Fluid

Adina, knowing my views on the importance of leeway, sent me mail to point to where she blogs a quote from Siva Vaidhyanathan in a slashdot interview:

I think the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is misnamed. I don't consider it a copyright act. I consider it an anti-copyright act. Copyright is a fluid, open, democratic set of protocols. Conflicts are anticipated by Congress and mediated by courts. The DMCA wipes out the sense of balance, anticipation, and mediation, and installs a technocratic regime. In other words, code tells you whether you can use a piece of material. Under copyright, you could use a piece of material and face the consequences. The DMCA replaces the copyright system with cold, hard technology.

It takes human judgment out of the system and drains the fluidity out of what was a humanely designed and evolved system.

Ah, leeway. What can't it do?

The Rural Open Spectrum Project

The FCC has announced it's considering using unlicensed spectrum to provide connectivity in rural areas. This would include Wifi as well as other technologies that may arise. While this sounds promising and enlightened, some of the people I trust on this topic (AKA the evil slave masters who mold my mind) tell me that shoe-horning connectivity into unlicensed bands is the wrong way to go. Rather, Open Spectrum would not only deliver more bits — as many bits as anyone could want — but would open up the ether for the sort of end-to-end computing that enabled the Internet to flourish.

WiFi, after all, operates on two unlicensed "channels" (2.4gH for 802.11b and 5.7gH for the newly-introduced 802.11a). Why restrict access to a single frequency or two? In the old days (= now) it was assumed that signals had to operate within discrete bands because otherwise they would "interfere" with one another. But new technology obviates that model. (In fact, it turns out that even the metaphors are seriously off.) Modern devices can negotiate their frequencies as they go, like cars switching lanes, which maximizes the throughput of a highway. And Ultra-Wide Band can pack an enormous amount of information in short bursts that cut across all frequencies. Current law — permitting only those with FCC-granted licenses to use particular frequencies — is based on bad science and worse technology.

So, open the spectrum and you get: more bits than anyone can eat anywhere you get radio reception. You also give everyone with a connection many of the capabilities of the national broadcasters, which is a scary thought but only if you're a broadcaster.

Spectrum without permission. What a concept.

(I have a white paper on open spectrum here. And my evil mind molders are Jock Gill, David Reed and Dewayne Hendricks. Don't blame them for what I get wrong, though; they haven't read this blog entry, for example.)

Report from Another Planet

From the online free version of the improbable Annals of Improbable Research comes an improbable journal entry recounting the day Oliver Sacks visited a guy who made a literal table of periodic elements. It includes videos of a self-induced sodium explosion and of liquid nitrogen turning eggs, cream and sugar into ice cream. Also, there's a snippy argument over who has the larger lump of tungsten.

I'm at a loss.

Rosenberg on Supernova

Scott Rosenberg sums up the meaning and import of the Supernova conference and uses it to wax wise on the larger trends.

Nice eye, as they say at the Little League games.

Myles Weissleder has posted photos from Supernova. Collect them all!

Google Ranking 2

Bryan Field-Elliot blogs a response to my puzzlement about Google's page ranking. Interesting nitty-gritty info.

It's well-known that Google prefers data other than what's in the meta tags to decide on Page Rank, but I'm still surprised that the meta tags aren't indexed at all.

Digital Division

Glenn Fleishman has an article in the NY Times today (registration required) that includes a map of the hotspots in NYC. Unsurprisingly, it maps to the racial and economic divisions of the city: "92 percent of network nodes were below 96th Street."

Glenn mentioned this article in the hallways at Supernova a couple of days ago. Bob Frankston's reaction (and I hope I represent it fairly) was that the problem is really one of educating people about the benefits of getting connected: all but the very poorest in NYC have televisions, and if you can afford a TV you could have afforded a connected PC.

It does seem that connectedness would spread further down the economic pyramid if its benefits were clearer. But I think very few people, except for the upper reaches of geekdom, view TV and Internet as competitive technologies. Having a TV is close to a requirement for participating in our culture. As long as it's an Either/Or, the digital divide in NYC will be real.

Google Puzzle

Mark Dionne emails me an interesting puzzle he's discovered:

I just determined that Google does NOT index according to HTML "meta name="keywords"" markup. I have a word in that markup in a page of mine that does not appear in the body of the page. If I hit the page with a search and then add the word, the page is no longer found.

In other words, let's say I have a page about cats that puts "Siamese" into the meta tag for keywords but doesn't otherwise contain the word "Siamese." If the page contains the phrase "Cats love rubber baby bumpers," a search on that phrase pulls up the page, but a search on "Cats love rubber baby bumpers" Siamese" does not.

Do we have any confirming evidence that Mark hasn't simply run into an anomaly? Does Google discard keywords because they are often used to torque the system? Is this yet another argument against relying on humans explicitly tagging content? Is this a death knell for the Semantic Web? Will Ashley discover that Grayson is not only her lover but is also her transsexual twin sister? Tune in for "As the Web Spins"...

Light Sleep Means Light Blogging

Red-eye last night back from Supernova. Glenn Fleishman gave me a ride to the airport, but after that I was plunged into the pleasure-deprivation mindset of the airlines. No food, no pillows, no blankets and "attendants" who become brusque and defensive if you ask for the same even if you use a tone as falsely pleasant as their own.

Yeah, I'm grumpy.

Thank goodness for Dramamine (or its brandless equivalent). A pharmacist once recommended it to me as an over-the-counter soporific. It works for me and leaves not much of a hangover. Except for the grumpiness.

Supernova: Wrap Up

Kevin is summing up. He's asking us what we haven't addressed enough.

His answer is that we haven't talked enough about government and about digital identity. Here are some of our answers: [I didn't get everyone's name because the ideas were pumped out rapidly.]

Marc: The mechanisms for hooking together decentralized stuff. (This is more techie than I'd care about.)

The economic reasons for decentralization

Doc: Categorizing infrastructure, e.g., commons vs commercial infrastructure.

Dave Sifry: Business models for edge stuff

Organzational and legal models

SIP, IM and super directories

Grid computing

Gary Bolles: Inside the firewall where decentralization looks bad

Fair Use and DRM

Consumer electronics and non-PC computing

Phil Wolff: In the next Supernova, which will be in DC, we should focus on explaining this stuff to policy makers.

Excellent conference. Now I get to ride to the airport with Glenn Fleishman.

Conference at My Place

I seem to have suggested that some conference be held at my house and AKMA has decided that it'd be a swell idea.

I am so fried from the Supernova Conference (which my body is currently attending) that this is immensely unappealing to me. But, I don't want to go back on my offer. So, sure, let's have a conference at my house.

Unfortunately, I'll be out of town that day.

Supernova: Rethinking Telcom

I zoned out for the first 30 minutes of this panel. Some distuurbing email came in that I wanted to deal with. And I'm pretty much at my limit for sitting still and listening to smart people. Will someone please turn on "Friends" or "Buffy"? Thanks.

Fortunately, I was able to turn to Doc's weblog where he's entering something like a smart transcript. So, I'm listening to the panel while reading the blogging about it...

No wonder my head hurts.

Supernova: David Isenberg

David Isenberg is talking about what's happening in the world of telecommunications. He's just back (two nights ago) from several weeks in Japan, Australian and New Zealand so he's full of wide-eyed news of a world where broadband flows like milk and is as sweet as honey. Now he's talking about a vanilla 802.11b system that provides better quality sound than "real" telephones.

"What HTTP did for documents, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) will do for communications."

"The best network is a stupid network." That is, the best network provides nothing but connection. The services are provided by applications running on the network. (David and I wrote about this at The Paradox of the Best Network. All content came from David.) "Each of us in 2-3 years can have the bandwidth of a telephone company for a few thousand bucks. But the telephone companies believe in scarcity and are forcing it on us."

The End to End principle, which is basically the same as The Stupid Network, says that you should keep the network simple because that preserves your options for innovating on its edges. Phone companies like to add value to their networks, for competitive reasons, which makes their networks smart. That's fine for telephone calls, but the Internet is not specifically for phone calls or for anything else.

The Internet, says David, makes telephony just another application. This is a problem for the business model of the telephone company, for the telcos know about stringing wires and optimizing telephone switches (an expense) and make money selling the application for monthly revenues. In a stupid network, the application provides revenue. But, asks David, where's the business model for the physical layer of the Internet? In short, who builds and runs the new network? Not the telephone companies because it's too foreign from their business model. The cable companies are unlikely because they don't want to enable the wholesale generation and sharing of entertainment that competes with the entertainment they're selling. Municipalities? Sometimes. Utilities? Maybe. New companies? Customers?

There are, he notes, important political implications and obstacles. But he's out of time.

Smart presentation on the virtues of stupid networks. But, then, I'm partial to David. I've learned a lot from him. (His newsletter is free and always excellent.)

Supernova: Google

Kevin is interviewing Sergey Brin.

Google Groups (the Usenet search capability) came about because an engineer at Google, Michael Schmidt, dreamed of it. Same for the Google API: An engineer there was enthusiastic about doing it. Cool.

What's the business model for the API? There isn't one. Right now you're limited to 1000 hits a day, and maybe someday they'll charge. But they did it because it was interesting and fun. His example of an API-based app is a plagiarism checker.

Marc: Will Google support XML structures so we can get better searches. E.g., searching for images.

Sergey: Rather than making humans write better, we should work on having computers understand better what humans are writing for one another.

Dave: Do you envision Google ever becoming decentralized? A Google for the desktop?

Sergey: I'd like to be able to search my desktop from anywhere. But we haven't written client software. Our technical competency is running large server farms.

Sergey just did a show of hands to discover that Google is indexing the blogs from most people in the room but isn't updating as frequently as we'd like. (We are a spoiled bunch of puppies!)

[I went to lunch before posting this and somehow lost most of it. Odd. Fortunately, you have another 28 blogs covering this to choose from.]

I asked if Google has considered optimizing itself to support its use as a DNS extender (in Dan Gillmor's sense: since bobsmith.com is owned by only one Bob Smith, I'll use Google when I want to find my old pal Bob Smith). Sergey didn't really answer this question, though, preferring to answer something about the difficulty of handling complex searches.

Cory gots to ask the last question: Do you Google guys ever think about the way the world is reshaping itself around Google? ...Good to end on a question that's actually a thank you.

Supernova: Weblogs

This should be great. The panel is Meg Hourihan, Dave Winer and Nick Denton. (In fact, it was really good. But because it was conversational, the following account is fragmentary.)

Dave is blogging the panel as he's on it. Call it Escherblogging.

Dave says he did XML-RPC and Soap to enable people to write to the Web as easily as they write with their word processor. Weblogs and Web services are all about the human needs they serve. (Write on, Dave!)

Nick sees weblogs as a way to produce media more cheaply. "Weblogs are one way to produce media properties that distribute the editorial processs..."

Meg cares about weblogs because it enables people to connect.

Meg defines a blog as something that's updated daily, presented in reverse chronological order, time-stamped, etc. But wouldn't that make the AP headlines page a blog? I ask if blogging is not just a technology but also a tone of voice — a new type of rhetoric, one that's distributed over the Web.

Meg on whether rightwing yahoos are going to take over weblogging: "It's not like talk radio. There's unlimited bandwidth. Anyone can have a weblog."

What percentage of people online will have a weblog? Dave: Everyone.

Nick: Ten times as many people writing in public than in the world of print. And that's a big deal.

Dave: In 10 years, every member of Congress will have a weblog.

Mitch Ratcliffe: There's no point in arguing in what is or is not called a weblog. What matters is that more and more people are communicating in their own voice.

Cory:"Blogging allows people to write who couldn't write before... It's not the usual suspects." What makes it easier is the informality of blogs as well as the ese of use of the technology. For example, EFF set up a blog so they could get past the barrier of having to have every pronouncement be official and thus have to go through all the official poicies and controls.

Final question: What do you want from blogs in the next few years?

Meg: Push. She wants to have the content come to her.

Dave: What does the audience want? Doc: Search. Me: Blogthreads. Marc Cantor: We're doing a "topic server" that will enable blog threads.

Nick: Go to one page and see the buzziest items of the hour, recommended by my social network.

Supernova: From Web Services to Distributed Infrastructure

What a title! Are we already getting past Web services? Our panelists are: Christian Gheorghe, Graham Glass, Dick Hardt.

The audience is surprisingly unreceptive to the panel. Many apparently feel that Web services are either over-hyped and/or the existing success of Web services is being ignored. I.e., the wrong aspects are being hyped. Web services aren't a panacea but are already a part of the development landscape, used in un-hypey, step-by-step ways.

Says Alex Sherstinsky of FaceTime Communications: "It is happening within the enterprise but not on the Internet-wide scale."

Dave Winer makes a plea for doing the simple thing: Create Web services that open up your app, and publish the info them. Ignore the complications of UDDI and WSDL. (Here's an interview of Dave by Dan.)

The final question raise: Will Web services enable a Hypercard economy where power users write the equivalent of macros to pull information together?

Dream Question

I woke up this morning feeling a pressing need to write to Ernie the Attorney. Sure, that's how I usually wake up, but this morning it was different. I had a semi-vivid dream in which I was waiting in line for some event and the people ahead of me were inhaling the fumes from some burning herb — not grass, but clearly an intoxicant of some sort. So, when it was my turn, I took a deep draught. At that moment, a police officer who had been watching arrested us all. But, I thought, I'd be able to get off because — and this is the question for Ernie — the cop had allowed the dope to move down the line in order to be able to catch more of us at it. That means he knowingly allowed an illegal event to proceed, and that's the way I'd wriggle off the hook.

Ernie, what's your legal judgment? And, Dr. Freud, what do you make of this?

Supernova: Dan Gillmor

Clay Shirky's plane was cancelled so Dan Gillmor is filling in. Dan is talking about "We Media," the idea that journalism is becoming a conversation, or, he suggests, perhaps more like a seminar in which the journalist is the "sherpa guide." Says Dan: "My readers know more than I do." Maybe you have to be a journalist to appreciate how radical that statement is.

He points to the fact that increasingly the full transcripts of interviews are now being posted by the interviewees — e.g., Donald Rumsfeld — as a way of providing context for comments that the journalist might have misrepresented.

Of all the tools Dan sees emerging, "Blogging is the coolest." He cites Doc, Ernie the Attorney and Glenn Fleishman's 802.11 blog as examples of "passionate semi-amateur" journalist blogs. "The next time there's a major event in Tokyo...before the professional press is able to scramble their photographers to the scene, there will be 500 photos on the web." Then, Dan says, "journalists will sit up and say 'Holy shit!'".

He ends with a plea for activism against the Congressional/Hollywood attack on the Net.

In sum, he says that in ten years "I may know as much from what other people [bloggers] are finding than as what the editors of the NY Times tell me."

The great thing about Dan is that he so joyfully embraces technologies that most other journalists view as a threat.

I asked a badly-put question about what will happen when electronic book hardware is commonplace. How will this affect the line between journalism and blogging? Dan answered that he doesn't think that that will have much effect. But I think it will, for it will deprive traditional journalism of the advantage that gives it so much value: the capital to put ink to paper millions of times a day. Without that, the New York Times is just a brand, and brands can be relatively easily eroded in a reputation-based economy. I think.

Supernova: Dinner

Blogging own's Dave Winer arranged for an open-invitation party last night at Jing-Jing's spicy Chinese restaurant last night. As more and more people arrived, the staff built out the table configuration, resulting in a maze of squares each with happy geeks ingesting excellent food and talking up a storm. A couple of hours later, we rolled out onto the sidewalks of Palo Alto. Ah, the pleasures of F2F.

This morning I had breakfast with The Doc. Not only was it fun to catch up with him, I got to eat all the carbs he refused.

Supernova: Broadband Media Distribution

Cory Doctorow is reminding us that "content creators" have always sued new technologies, starting with those music pirates, the piano roll manufacturers. Now it's the Broadcast Flag initiative that will put a bit into digital TV signals and require all devices touching them to honor that bit. He gives a terrific talk — seated and calm — that asks why Internet hardware is on the verge of being told that it must be made secure against misuse. Crowbar manufacturers are not given the same demand, he says. And, he asks, why has the technical community not stood up and said that we do not want less regulation, we want no regulation.

Sean Ryan of Listen whose website says the site "gives you unlimited access to the largest legal collection of digital music in the world." $10/month. He describes the service: they do burns and streams but not downloads because the industry doesn't like downloads. (I can't find figure out how to see the actual CDs they have available.)

Morgan Guenther, CEO of Tivo, is speaking. (Have I ever mentioned how much I love our TiVo?) They're focused on execution (they'll make a profit this quarter for the first time), transition (licensing and OEMing their technology), and innovation (moving programs from your downstairs set to your upstairs set, file-served television). "We've taken an industry-inclusive approach from Day One."

Sean: "We play the middle game" with regard to compromising with The Industry.

Dan Gillmor: Is there any evidence that the recording industry will compromise on anything?

Sean: Sure. A couple of years ago they wouldn't let us do any online music distribution. As Cory has said, there's always compromises...

Cory: Actually, there weren't compromises, there were victories.

Audience member: I teach film and I'm not allowed to rip a scene from a DVD to use in a class to talk about it. Fair use says I should be able to.

Morgan: We could let you create your own "channel," e.g. an animal channel or sports channel. But you can't do it because it's illegal.

From this I draw the following conclusions: 1. You don't compromise your rights. 2. I would follow Cory Doctorow anywhere.

Supernova: Collaboration

I chaired this panel with John Hagel (noted author), John Parkinson (Cap Gemini) and Narry Singh (CommerceOne). It can't blog about it now, however, because the next panel is starting up...

Supernova: Mitch Kapor

Mitch is talking about his current project: an open source Outlook/Exchange Server replacement (to put it crudely). He's interested in this because it plays into his anti-authoritarian, decentralized instincts, one of which resulted (with John Perry Barlow) in the EFF.org.

Is "Chandler" really about more than email and calendars? Yes, (Mitch says) if you get lots of users, you get lots of leverage. "That's why we're going to lead with the application piece." The clients they're building will help determine the requirements for the platform. "People could build the equivalent of a finder or a file manager fairly readily."

Cool feature: You'll be able to manage your attachments independent of the messages. Hallelujah!

Michael Jackson Repair Kit

Jonathan Peterson passes along this link reluctantly, fearing he's feeding my unhealthy obsession with Michael Jackson's face. Yes, yes he is.

Supernova: Jeremy Allaire and Panel

Jeremy Allaire is streaming himself in from Newton, MA where his wife just had a baby. It's a jerky talking head, a bit Max Headroom-y. Why do these streams still suck? It's a problem with the economy, not the technology.

Anyway, he says he's an optimist. He points to rich clients that bring more of the action to the end-user edge. By "rich client" he apparently means Flash 6 which is produced by Macromedia, the company for which he works. Of course, that was the moment at which static - which Bob Frankston recognized as "analog static" - made his presentation un-hearable.

Next Jeremy was going to talk about Web services. Instead, the panel has ascended the dais: Karl Jacob, CEO of Cloudmark, a distributed anti-spam product.; Mike Helfrich of Groove; Doc Searls.

Karl (Cloudmark): For the past ten years, we've had to interact with the Net the way the site or browser wanted. Now the power is moving to the edge where we users actually live.

Mike (Groove): He really likes the words "decentralization" and "rich client" because that's what Groove's about. He says we need more "flocking" and "swarming" behavior. And decentralized architectures enable apps to build themselves to adapt to the ways individuals want to work. Now Mike gets to the Security Spin: We need decentralized decisions because we wouldn't want our "war fighters" to be unable to communicate. (Barely perceptible Freudian slip: "We're very happy about where we are in the Mi...market."

Doc: The supernova metaphor is a good one because we're blowing up things to make a new world. The new world is all ends. The middle makers make nothing. What's critical about the Net is that no one owns it, everyone can use it, and everyone can improve it. Finally, Doc says that we're short some important services (identity, directory, IM) on the Interent and it's up to the geeks among us to build them.

Doc says that you give away the underlying protocols and services and charge for proprietary stuff built on top of it. Jeremy says that Macromedia gives away their client and document all the APIs and file formats.

Marc Cantor says we need to move away from HTML. Why? Because it doesn't have absolute positioning and it ignores time. We need rich media platforms. (I'm assuming that "move away" means "still support." The importance of the simplicity of HTML can't be over-emphasized.)

Mitch Ratcliffe says that technology won't change us unless and until it recognizes the existing social fabric and behaviors. (Save it for my panel in 2 hours, Mitch! :)

Karl got asked what was surprising to him working with spam. First, he says, 99% of people agree about what is spam. Second, "these communities are remarkably good at self-regulating."

Karl adds a ratings system(like eBay's) to the needed services that Doc has mentioned.

Mike says that Ray Ozzie's first inspiration for Groove was watching his children play a massively multiplayer online game.

Doc offers some closing thoughts about infrastructure. One type is the infrastructure of the Net itself; Vincent Cerf said "The history of the Internet is the history of its protocols." Flash isn't a Net protocol and doesn't make the Net bigger and richer.

Supernova: IBM

Rod Smith from IBM is making a very different case than Lewin did. He's arguing for open standards. (How refreshing!) Of course, he's arguing for the open standards that IBM favors.

Supernova: Microsoft

I was going to blog Daniel Lewin's talk about .Net but Doc's done such a great job that I've got nothing to say.

Some fire as Marc Cantor and Dave Winer double-teamed Lewin asking that Microsoft "be a leader" and make their .Net schemas and API's open. Lewin replied that you're free to buy a Microsoft server. Not really an answer.

Dan Gillmor comments

He says Microsoft will have to earn trust. Given the record, that seems unlikely, but I also doubt it. Microsoft has so much power that it doesn't need to care anymore whether people trust it.

Yup, that's the issue. You don't need trust if - just to take a random example - when a user loads the industry standard, monopolistic OS, she is given a message that strongly implies that if she doesn't sign up for Passport, she won't be able to get onto the Internet.

Supernova Bloggers

Doc is blogging the conference here. Dave Winer is blogging it here. Cory Doctorow is blogging it here. Dan Gillmor is blogging it here. I am blogging it here.

Supernova: Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold, author of the excellent Smart Mobs, says his theme will be: Every time power decentralizes, there's an opportunity for innovation. How might the new decentralization give rise to new forms of collective action?

He points to Seti@home, the growth of cell phone messaging in Scandinavia and Japan, and the Web itself as examples of what happens when centralized control is loosened.

Markets, says Howard, are a form of collective action. eBay, he says, is a market that really shouldn't exist because of the "prisoner's dilemma." But eBay's reputation system has enabled it to work.

Cory Doctorow: We've been good at initiating decentralized actions but not at sustaining them. We have yet to slashdot Congress. How do we organize ourselves in a sustainable way? Howard says he doesn't know. (Fair enough.) Kevin responds that when there was a move at the FCC to allow the phone companies to levy a modem tax. Kevin sent out a notice with an email address to respond to, and got 350,000 messages.

Cory: Yes, but there were 50M Napster users and 50M voted for Bush, and no one stepped forward to say "What are you doing to my Napster?" That is, we haven't been able to organize.

Killer quote on requiring people to fill out forms to learn about them: "Only geeks change their preferences."

Adina Levina offers the following in the discussion of this blog entry:

on the prisoner's dilemma

social science researchers, axelrod and onward have shown that the prisoner's dilemma works differently when people play the game over and over again.

when people can earn a reputation, they tend to behave more cooperatively themselves, and are more likely to act, even against their immediate-self-interest, to punish non-cooperators

see Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation

also a good article last spring I think on SciAm -- will maybe hunt down a link

Open the Spectrum

A white paper on Open Spectrum I wrote with a lot of help from Jock Gill, David Reed and Dewayne Hendricks, is now posted on the Web. Here's how it begins:

We are not in the age of Information. We are not in the age of the Internet.

We are in the Age of Connection.

Being connected is at the heart of our democracy and our economy. The more and better those connections, the stronger are our government, businesses, science, culture, education…

Until now, our connectedness has depended on centralized control points that have been the gatekeepers of our economic and political networks. To speak to everyone, you had to be one of the few with access to a broadcast networks. To sell to everyone, you had to be one of the few with access to a global distribution channel. To achieve office, you had to be one of the few with access to corporate coffers and national media.

But we are on the verge of being able to connect to anyone and everyone, whenever and however we want. No gatekeepers. Ubiquitous connection. Connectedness that’s always there and always on.

This isn’t about getting more TV channels. Change the way we’re connected and you’ve changed everything, from the economy to governance. This is how fundamental transformation occurs.

Supernova Opener

I'm at the Supernova Conference, a get-together put together by Kevin Werbach, ex-FCC guy, ex-Release 1.0 editor, new father. I'm sitting next to Peter Kaminski who's next to Glenn Fleishman who's next to Bob Frankston. In the next row ahead of me is David Isenberg and Doc Searls. So, it's already a worthwhile conference.

Kevin has made sure this place is wified out the wazoo, including putting power strips under every table. Woohoo! And the conference has its own blog. And a group blog.

Kevin is giving his welcome. The question is what more we can do with the decentralized coming together that is the Internet. How can we "take it up a notch"?

Farewell

Philip Berrigan has died at 79. He spent eleven years in jail.

Rest in peace.

Big Slice

Researchers at the Information Technology Center of Tokyo University have calculated the value of pi to 1.24 trillion places.

And we're know they got it right because ... ?

Morose Travel

Today is a travel day, which means I'm depressed. I'm looking forward to being at Kevin Werbach's Supernova Conference, from which I'll be blogging, but as usual I'm unhappy about the prospect of leaving home. Couldn't they have had the consideration to hold the conference in my house?

Since I'll get to the hotel tonight around 4:30am east coast time (1:30 AM local time), expect me to be a bit crabby tomorrow. In fact, I'm feeling preemptively crabby right now.

Cometa Semiotics

A comment by Peter Kaminski (from a mailing list I'm on) about the announcement of Cometa, supposedly a joint venture by Intel, IBM and AT&T that will provide Wifi service in 50 cities:

To me it looks even simpler than that, a couple guys trying to make a small deal look big. Why else would they call Intel Capital "Intel", and IBM Global Services "IBM"? Why are there no quotes from ATT, Intel and IBM in the release? Why don't they post the size of the deal, instead of the scope of their goals? Why is their entire physical contact info "866-266-3823"? Why is Steve Harris, VP Corporate Affairs, listed as the sole press contact on the copy of the release on att.com? Etc.

Peter is wise in the way of press releases.

Fairness and Inaccuracy

Regina Campbell, the teacher who initially reviewed the MCAS test with Jennifer Mueller, has chimed in on the discussion page of my blog about it. Regina says that Jennifer solved it purely by looking at patterns, not with a "dinner party" story, despite the Boston Globe's explanation. Regina's first-hand account is worth reading.

On the other hand, Jonathan Peterson points out that I ought to have points deducted from my reading comprehension score: even with the acceptance of her answer on that question, Jennifer was still two points shy of passing the test. Well, they ought to make an exception. Oh, that's right, standardized, quantified tests don't allow exceptions. (Yeah, yeah, there's talk of granting some type of near-miss diplomas...)

Three to Look At

I have to run off for a college interview — no, my daughter's — so this will be fast. But here are three sites worth a look.

1. J.D. Lasica points out that John Hiler has launched a blog site that serves as aguide to NYC. My family has just booked a frequent flyer trip to Venice and Florence in March and I'd love to find similar sites for those cities. (In English, of course, because sono un idiot americano.)

2. Michael O'Connor Clarke points us to a hyperbolic tree of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I'm not quite sure what's going on (how appropriate!) but it is rather wonderful.

3. Someone could do Honeywell a favor by telling them that it's time to rescan the manual for the Chronotherm III model T8600. The PDF looks like it was scanned from a fax.

By the way, if you want to see a thermostat UI that looks like even I might be able to master it, take a look at the Lux (a Consumer Reports Best Buy) documentation. In fact Lux has a little "interactive demo" that shows you how to program it.

GNU Radio

Jock Gill points us to GNU Radio, and, in particular, to Eric Blossom's work. (He's been slashdotted here.) GNU Radio is a software-defined radio. Unlike regular radios that are hard-wired about what they do with the information they receive, software-defined radio can do anything it's programmed to do... including simultaneously receiving two broadcast FM stations from a single input. (Say wha'?)

In fact, the GNU Radio — which may be your computer with a little hardware added — doesn't have to assume the inputs are sounds at all. Although I'm only following this topic by the skin of my teeth, it seems to me that this is where the real promise lies.

(As with all GNU Brand^TM; products, GNU Radio is a public and free software project.)

Erasing Derrida

AKMA recounts his decision not to engage Derrida in conversation. It's towards the end of his amusing-frustrated recounting of how hard it is to do simple computer things sometimes.

Web Hallucinations

In a comment in the discussion of my blogging about never being done, Dylan Tweney writes:

I watched "A Beautiful Mind" recently and was struck how much John Nash's schizophrenia was like my online life: ethereal voices constantly impinging on my attention, demanding responses, distracting me from the work (and people) at hand. Only in my case it's email messages, not hallucinations.

Too true.

(The entire discussion is well-worth reading. Lots of great comments.)

The Rest of December

Steve MacLaughlin is taking the rest of the month off and recommends we do the same.

Playing the Movies

Andrew Leonard in Salon writes about a topic I was going to blog today anyway: how damn good video games are compared to movies.

I've been playing No One Lives Forever 2 which is, more or less, a James Bond movie set in the late '60s. It "stars" (i.e., you play as) Cate Archer, as cool as James Coburn and as appealing as Diana Rigg. I've jumped in fright more times during the game than in any James Bond flick. It's also funnier. And the graphics kick ass: fighting ninjas in the middle of a tornado in a trailer park was something.

As far as I'm concerned, we're already at the cross-over point between movies and video games as a popular entertainment. And we can't be far away from video games developing at least some of the emotional impact of more serious films.

Kissinger Interview

Stephen Talbot writes an astonishing piece about an interview he conducted with Henry Kissinger. (It's in Salon's for-subscribers section. Pay 'em the money already!)

Here's the jaw-dropping ending:

As we packed up our gear, I asked Kissinger one last question. Something I really wanted to know. "What if the United States had allowed Vietnam to go communist after World War II?"

"Wouldn't have mattered very much," Kissinger muttered. Lights off. No camera recording what he was saying. "If the Vietnam domino had fallen then, no great loss."

Talbot writes vividly about this disgraceful, banal man.

The Unfairness of Accuracy

Ladies and Gentlemen, we now have the greatest example ever of why quantified, standardized tests should not be used as the way of certifying students' achievements. A novelist couldn't have come up with a better one.

In Massachusetts, we've introduced the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) that all students must pass in order to get a high school diploma. Fail the MCAS, no diploma.

So, along comes Jennifer Mueller, a senior at the Whitman-Hanson Regional High School in (Go Panthers!) who took the MCAS last spring and got a score of 218, two points short of passing. So, she looked over the results and thought there was one particular answer marked wrong that she was convinced she'd gotten right. So, she took it up with the State Department of Education and convinced them that her answer was acceptable. So, the Department upgraded her and everyone with the same answer. As a result, 557 students who had failed, now passed.

You can read the question in question at the Boston Globe site for the next couple of days before the article gets moved to the Ash Heap of Broken Links. It represents the numbers from 0-10 in binary by showing each as a set of 4 circles, either white or black. Then it gives a multiple choice answer asking you to find the set of 4 circles that express 11.

Jennifer Mueller looked at the sets of white and black circles in row after row and observed a social pattern: The first white circle has dinner alone. Then the second white circle has dinner alone. Then they have dinner together. Then a third white circle has dinner alone. Then the three of them have dinner together. That pattern holds: a white circle has to have dinner alone before it can have dinner with the rest. Jennifer used this to correctly predict the next in the sequence. Unfortunately, the next line in her pattern expresses the number 12 in computer language, not the number 11. The pattern she found is indeed there. Her answer is right. And she deserves credit for it.

Jennifer's discovery hits all the bases. She came up with a pattern that took a particular type of brilliance to see. Furthermore, to make this a textbook example, the pattern she came up with depended on her thinking about things in terms of pictures, not numbers. And she thought this through in terms of sociality — those dots were having dinner together. Where's that type of intelligence being measured and valued?

The biggest point is that 500 students who yesterday were not worthy of a high school diploma today are worthy, without anything about them changing. I understand that these tests are standardized and quantified in order to make them fair, but here's a case where accuracy actually works against fairness. A score of 220 passes, 218 fails: because it's so precise, who passes and fails is arbitrary. It has to be, because being educated doesn't have a sharp edge: "Yes you are, no you're not, and here's the dividing line." It doesn't work that way, no matter how much comfort we get from thinking that tests can sort us into two piles. "Accurate and unfair." It's not a junction we're comfortable with, but it's there. Fairness is all about our ability to make exceptions, to look at context, to dwell on what the numbers don't say...Just like Jennifer Mueller, who almost failed because she is so much smarter than the test she took.

Yes, It's a Scam

Sharon Hill got the same fax as I did. I almost fell for it. Sharon, in a comment on my blog entry about it, writes:

I just got this same fax this morning. In doing a keyword search for the company - no site, of course - I found this site and your comments.

I called them and was told Mr. Moore was not yet in the office but Eddie, who answered the phone, could help me.

I asked Eddie what it cost to be an Advisory Board member. He said he could certainly give me info that would 'lead up' to that point. I told him, no, I didn't need the info I just needed to know how much it cost.

This Eddie, clearly not a very clever or articulate con man, said "they don't usually like me to give that information over the phone." I said "Im sure they don't. I am on a web site where people are discussing this scam. I will let them know that indeed it is a scam."

And I hung up.

Thank you.

Neverending

While writing an email to AKMA, I realized why I'm not as happy as I should be given the externalities of my life: I'm never done with anything.

I used to be. I'd work on something and then it would be complete. I'd mount the stuffed head on my wall and move on. Now everything is a goddamn thread. At best, things peter out. They may even end. But they're never done, the type of done where you close the door behind you and it hear it click shut.

It's probably just me.

Beheading the News

Joe Mahoney is going cold turkey. He's not going to read the first page of the newspaper for a week:

I read the newspaper every morning. Two of them often. By the time I finish the front section I have a kind of brain sickness. I feel like God just before the flood...

God speed, Joe.

Millennial Cluelessness

The Most Clueless comments of the young millennium come from Rev. Robert V. Meffan as reported in today's Boston Globe. (You can read them today here and here. The Globe will soon lock them in its Vault of Public Ignorance.)

Rev. Meffan had sex with teen-age girls entering a nunnery because "I felt that by having this little bit of intimacy with them that this is what it would be like with Christ."

This wonderful man doesn't even bear any grudges against the young women whose trust he violated: "They were wonderful girls. I have no hatred toward them, no animosity toward them or anything like that. To me they were just wonderful, wonderful young people."

And I thought that I was at the point in this outrage where no further revelation could get me to yell "Holy shit!" while reading the morning paper. I should have known better.

Hacking Everquest

According to an article at the BBC site (pointed out by Greg "L-Man" Cavanagh), if you want to hack the online game, Everquest, all you have to do is get a Linux box, network it to your PC, and set up some special packet sniffing software called ShowEQ that decrypts the hidden information about where the monsters and other characters are. It's just that simple! (I myself prefer the single-player Quake technique of typing tilde to pull down the console and then entering the phrase, lemme think, oh yeah, "god" to make yourself invulnerable.)

According to the article:

The fact that ShowEQ sits on a separate computer has made it impossible to detect. Sony has tried to stop it in other ways by improving the encryption used to make the packets of data unreadable.

However, it took only a week for the ShowEQ programmers to get round this improved encryption.

The programmers found that the new encryption was easier to break than the old one and meant that ShowEQ worked faster than before.

This is very cool. Unless, of course, you're one of the players who doesn't have a spare Linux box sitting around on her network.

Get your war on

The new Get Your War On is out and climbing the DayPop Top 40, as it should. After all, how can you not love a strip that begins:

"Well, at least Timmy had a good ten years without having to know who Henry Kissinger was. There's something so precious about a young child's first encounter with Henry Kissinger..."

Will someone please give David Rees a Pulitzer? Or better: contribute to Landmine.org to which he donates his royalties.

Remembering Cairo

It must have been in the early '90s that I got briefed by Microsoft about their next-generation operating system, code-named "Cairo." It was going to be a complete re-write. It had to be, because it was going to be "object-oriented." Between what Microsoft told me (as the marketing guy for a "strategic partner") and what my desire-fueled imagination assumed, I thought we were heading for an OS that at last got rid of files.

Just in case you've been using Windows so long that you've forgotten just how bad an idea files are, consider:

Things that should be treated as separate objects but are instead smushed within a single file:

Email messages

Attachments to email messages

A file in a zip file

Things that should be one object but are instead a mere set of files:

A web page with its associated graphics and CSS file

A word processing file and its backups and previous versions

Files rely on user-editable names and extensions to indicate how they are to be associated. Bad idea. They should instead be like the tracks and sectors on your hard disk: something you never have to think about.

So, whatever happened to Cairo?

Google to the rescue: In March of this year, Steve Ballmer announced Microsoft is returning to the Cairo idea.

(If in carpentry, the idea is to measure twice and cut once, in weblogging I guess it should be: Google twice and write once.)

Online Ads to Increase

According to Masha Geller's daily send:

According to eMarketer projections, 2003 spending will rise slightly to $6.70 billion, up from $6.38 billion this year. The expected bounce-back is due to a combination of factors, researchers say, including traditional marketers devoting larger slices of their ad budgets to online advertising as well as a general easing of the economic recession. By 2005, online ad expenditures will hit $8.10 billion...

I guess I should be happy about this.

The Anti West Wing

Joe Conason previews an article about to be published in Esquire about how policy decisions are made in the Karl Rove White House. Here's a summary of Conason's summary: You know how on The West Wing everyone knows everything about every policy issue? Good. Now imagine the opposite.

And here's the source of much of the information apologizing, but not recanting.

Halley's Girlism

Say what you want about Halley's comments on "girlism," they sure hit the mark in describing our 17-year-old daughter: She assumes the truths of feminism but is totally into being a girl.

From Betty Friedan to Buffy the Vampire Slayer...

For what others are saying about "girlism," you can jump into a blogthread here where you'll find Shelley Powers, Mike Golby and Jeneane "NY Times" Sessum engaged in a discussion of Halley's original post ... a discussion as difficult as its topic deserves.

Recommended Reading

Adina Levin writes, in an email:

Have you ever read Sources of Power by Gary Klein? The book is badly named; it is not a neomachiavellian business manual; it's fascinating social science research on how people (really) make decisions, in contrast to how we think people make decisions, influenced by our mental models of people as computers.

Spoiler: people make and share decisions with stories

Blog summary here.

Sounds fascinating.

What Not to Ask Jesus

"What would Jesus drive?"?? While I like to see the religiously-motivated jump in on the right side of the environment debate (and can someone remind me why we have to debate this at all), this phrase smacks of the Offensiveness of Marketing we've come to take for granted. So...

Top Ten Questions Not to Ask Jesus:

1. How many clowns would have to come out of the car before Jesus would say "How the heck do they do that?"

2. Can we assume that Jesus' favorite Beatle is the one that dies last?

3. If Jesus were still a carpenter, would He measure twice and cut once or just go ahead and cut?

4, How long could Jesus stay married to JLo?

5. If Jesus were dieting, would he cheat on his birthday?

6. Who would be Jesus' favorite post-WWII US president (besides Jimmy Carter, of course)?

7. If Jesus were gay — not that He is, of course. I'm just asking if — which of the N'Sync guys would He find the hottest?

8. If Jesus and Superman fought, who would win?

9. What would Jesus choose as His PIN?

10. Mac or Linux?

Tom Waddell

I was spinning the dial yesterday and came across "And the Band Played On" about halfway through. I'd liked the book (by Randy Shilts) so I watched it. It was, not surprisingly, heavier-handed than the book, but it was good enough that I thought that I'd like my daughter to see it, not because she's insensitive to AIDS but because it's an arresting presentation of the ways in which science gets entangled in politics and egos.

I wasn't prepared for the looong coda to the movie, though, in which they show images of well-known people who have died of AIDS, candelit marches, the AIDS quilt, etc., all over a song that may have been sung by Elton John. One of the celebrity AIDS victims, on screen for maybe 3 seconds, was Tom Waddell. That's when I began weeping.

Tom was a friend of my family as I was growing up. He was as close to perfect as we get made: a doctor and humanitarian, an activist, a good-hearted friend, a father, handsome as a movie star, and an athlete. Not just an athlete. An Olympian: he came in 6th in the Decathalon in Mexico City in 1968. And he did it with just a couple of months of training. He then founded the Gay Games (originally called the Gay Olympics).

Tom was graceful beyond any reckoning. Here's a quintessential Tom the Athlete story. My brother taught him how to water ski. Of course Tom got up on his first try. He went around the lake once but instead of dropping off in front of our dock, he dropped a ski and slalomed. We bipeds are not supposed to be able to do that first time out.

Tom died of AIDS in 1987.

AKMA blogged well the other day about remembering AIDS.

Rawls, Fairness and Luck

The Boston Globe ran a succinct appreciation of John Rawls' thinking about fairness yesterday. You might want to read it before The Globe withdraws it from public discussion by locking in its for-pay archive.

Am I on Vacation...