Blown To Bits

Archive for the ‘The Internet and the Web’ Category

The FTC Decides to Regulate Bloggers

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 by Harry Lewis
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We have a very well-intentioned initiative from the Federal Trade Commission to require people who blog about a product reveal if they have a financial interest in the product’s success. No phony “product reviews,” for example, written by people who are being paid by the manufacturer.

This is a classic case of that with which the road to hell is paved. The FTC is attempting to translate conventions used in TV and print into a very different medium. There are so many edge cases to consider. What about a 14 year old blogger raving about a skateboard her daddy brought home from the company where he works? What about a book reviewer who reviews a book he was given to review (as reviewers invariably are)? What about just mentioning that you are drinking a Coke when your brother-in-law works for the Coca-Cola company? What about tweets–do you have to include your disclosure in the 140 word limit (the FTC commissioner apparently thinks that might be possible).

And the big question: Is this really a role we want for government?

Many good blog posts on this. I recommend Dan Gillmor’s, and those to which he points. Dan proposes that the FTC just doesn’t understand the Web.

Senate Moves to Give President Control Over the Internet

Friday, August 28th, 2009 by Harry Lewis

Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia has introduced legislation that would give the President the authority to declare a “cybersecurity emergency” and take control of certain private, non-governmental networks during such an emergency. The bill is full of vague language and describes powers that can be exercised without any judicial or other review, if necessary for U.S. “national defense and security.”

There are all kinds of problems here, as the Declan McCullagh report enumerates. First, the government has shown itself not be be very good at cybersecurity. For another, the Obama administration invoked national security as the reason not to share a draft intellectual property treaty with the public. (See Say It Ain’t So, Barak, March 14, 2009.) By that standard, the government could take over the Internet on a whim or a scare.

This legislation is seriously flawed.

Net Neutrality Showdown

Monday, August 17th, 2009 by Harry Lewis

More than a year ago, the FCC ordered Comcast to stop using its tactics for slowing peer-to-peer movie downloads. Customers hogging bandwidth by using BitTorrent, for example, would suddenly find their bit delivery slowed to a standstill. Comcast was inserting forged packets in the communication between the customer and the download site–packets essentially saying “something’s wrong, please start over.” Customers had no way of knowing what the problem was, but naturally assumed that it was either with them or with the site at the other edge of the network, not with the ISP they had hired to deliver bit packets to them.

The FCC ordered Comcast to cut it out, noting the anti-competitive implications of Comcast’s techniques–customers unable to get their movies from where they were trying to get them might buy them from Comcast instead. The problem to which the FCC responded is exactly the same as the 19th century problem of telegraphy, when Western Union cut an exclusive deal with one of the “wire services” so that the information carrier would restrict the content delivered to the customer.

Comcast complied with the FCC order, but expressed skepticism that the FCC really had the authority it claimed. The other shoe has finally dropped: Comcast is taking the FCC to court for exceeding its regulatory authority. Arstechnica has a good write-up: FCC enforcing imaginary laws in P2P ruling, says Comcast.

However the court finds (and it will probably take some time finding anything), Congress should act. There seems a reasonable likelihood that FCC authority, vested in it long before the Internet was invented, can’t be stretched to give it veto power over deep packet inspection. Obama ran on a platform favoring Net Neutrality; time for him to get Congress to work.

The Orwellian Kindle

Friday, July 17th, 2009 by Harry Lewis

I love my Kindle. I love being able to go to China for a week and not having to judge which books to bring by their weight. I love that I can make the type the size I want, not the size the publisher decided to use to keep the page count down.  I love being able to buy on impulse (at least where there is Whispernet coverage, which is most definitely not everywhere). I love that I can dump 50 student papers on the damn thing and not have to carry a ream of paper around with me. I love that I can read immaterial bits, rather than heavy atoms.

I’ve never loved the fact that I can’t lend a book to my wife after I’ve gotten through reading it, though. And while I know that I’m kind of renting the books rather than buying them, so far that’s been OK. In fact it’s been great — when I accidentally deleted a book from my Kindle, I could get it back for free. Can’t do that with my copy of The Greening of America that is lost somewhere in my basement. Owning it does me no good.

Comes now an amazing ironic demonstration that the bits on my Kindle really aren’t mine. They are just on loan to me, with a big tether attached. Amazon accidentally sold some books to Kindle users that it didn’t actually have rights to. When if figured out its boo-boo, it took the books back, without asking. The buyers had their accounts credited, and whoosh, the books were gone. So much for the appearance of buying and owning.

The irony is that¬†the books were Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. If Orwell had thought of it, I am confident he would have done something with that image of tethered books always in jeopardy of being yanked from your hands without your knowledge or consent, and its reminder that if all your reading material is on your Kindle, then the complete profile of what you read is in the hands of Big Brother Amazon.

Added 7/18:

Randal Picker blogs this item as well (which is also featured in the NY Times). Picker concentrates on the fact that ultimately Amazon was simply withdrawing an illegally provided document, and his moral is about how copyright should be enforced.¬†Fair ’nuff. He notes the irony, and I note the illegality, so we’re not disagreeing, except perhaps about what the most important take-away lesson is. For me it’s not about copyright; it’s about making the public aware of the control possibilities when creative works are transformed from physical to digital objects. ¬†A born-again Jeff Bezos unhappy about the portrayal of Jesus in some novel, or a federal executive backed up by a judicial decision that some book is obscene, could, technically, easily take it away from everyone who thought they had bought it. A PATRIOT-Act inspired investigator wondering who is reading terrorist literature could get the answer from Amazon; in the digital world there is no walking into Revolution Books and paying cash. Which of these technical possibilities would actually be legal is another question, of course — and which, legal or not, might happen without anyone checking first is another question still.

Getting Around the Censors

Friday, May 1st, 2009 by Harry Lewis

John Markoff of the New York Times has an excellent article about software that is being used in oppressive regimes to enable access to web sites that are blocked or censored by government officials. Interestingly, the Falun Gong followers are the leaders; they have multiple servers supporting their workarounds. For a time they were letting Iranians use the same servers, until the Iranians overwhelmed the capacity of the servers. Rather than allowing the service degradation to make the software unusable, it’s been restricted to use by Chinese.

Best wishes, Chris Soghoian

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 by Harry Lewis

Chris Soghoian is a smart, relentless privacy advocate and activist. I’ve cited him half a dozen times in this blog (use the search box). He has done a lot of dirty work for print media as well. He’s a grad student at Indiana and a Fellow at the Berkman Center, where I have gotten to know him. He’s a guy you definitely want on your side in an argument. For example, he just took on the recording and movie industries in an FTC hearing about the loss that consumers can suffer if their cloud music or movie supplier goes out of business and takes the bits down with them.

A few weeks ago he pointed out that the decision of the Obama administration to use YouTube had privacy consequences — there was a risk that Google could track who was watching presidential addresses, for example. The first post on this subject was called¬†Why Obama should ditch YouTube, and several others followed. Both the White House and Google were apparently furious, but the White House changed its practices shortly afterwards.

Now CNet, the online news service that sponsored Chris’s blog, has fired him. No explanation, but it’s almost surely because he annoyed some powerful institutions. Here is Chris’s own comments on this, and here is a comment by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

This is not good. We’ve lost an important voice. Even more, the case raises big worries about the independence of the new media. Chris’s stuff is edgy, and it’s no surprise that his exploits irritate people. But what did CNet think it was getting when it published a blog entitled “Surveillance State”? And on this story at least, the denouncements that followed were denials of things that Chris’s stories never said. I am not aware that he was caught making any mistakes. So please imagine the Washington Post firing Woodward and Bernstein after they started printing embarrassing stuff about the Watergate burglary.

I wish him well. We’ll be hearing from him again, I’m sure. And on the bright side, maybe he’ll finish his PhD now. But I wish he were still up on a visible site making trouble in his informed, funny way.

Google, Tweaked

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 by Harry Lewis

Google’s search engine isn’t perfect because it can’t read minds. In a sidebar in Chapter 4 we note that a search for “spears” returns few results that aren’t about Britney or her little sister — anyone looking for weapons was pretty much out of luck when we tried it. Google tended to give the results that most people want most of the time, and that is far more likely to be Britney than a pointed pole.

In recent weeks — I first noted it a month or so ago — Google’s search results seem to be less monotonous and the results pages have started to include some phrases at the bottom pointing to less common interpretations of the search phrase. (See¬†Google tinkers with ‘special sauce’ for searches.) So the top page of results for “spears” now leads with Spears Manufacturing (a maker of PVC piping) and includes a link to the Wikipedia page for the pointy kind of spears. And the links across the bottom of the page offer you searches for “spears weapons,” “greek spears,” and also “spears flash,” “spears underwear,” and “spears no underwear,” all apparently common searches for a particular subcategory of Britney material. Not sure if these links are intentionally to subsets rather than alternatives to the tyrrany-of-the-majority favorite.

In other Google news, StreetView has been rolled out in England, to much greater interest than I remember it exciting in the US. Reaction on privacy grounds has been strong (e.g. Who allowed Google to put my big knickers online?), as has voyeurism (e.g. Google Streetview Captures British People Drunkenly Vomiting). The Times (London) notes archly that the head of Google UK lives on a gated lane inaccessible to the Google Streetview camera ….

In Search of Jefferson’s Moose

Thursday, February 19th, 2009 by Harry Lewis

I picked up this book because I couldn’t resist the title. (Book titles are a really hard problem.) The subtitle is “Notes on the Nature of Cyberspace.” I liked it and recommend it, but it’s an odd tome, not for everyone.

The key sentence is the first line of the Epilogue. “Though my editor pressed me mercilessly to do so, I never could figure out whether this was a book about Jefferson or a book about cyberspace.” The author, David Post, is a law professor. The book is an entertaining and thoughtful discussion of the intellectual struggles at the founding of the American republic, and how they parallel dilemmas about the nature of the Internet. It’s all personalized around Jefferson, and some of his contemporaries, Hamilton in particular. The first half of the book is just about Jefferson and events of the 18th century; the second half is about the Internet. Though it’s full of fascinating stories, it’s written in the form of a series of law review articles, that is, with many pages more than half footnotes, which are very much worth reading. It wound up taking me much longer to read than the page count or informal writing style would have led me to expect.

Here is the metaphor of the title. Jefferson had an enormous moose stuffed and sent to Paris in pieces, where it was reassembled to the general amazement of the local population. It was a new, American thing that was unimaginable to people of the old world. Like Wikipedia from cyberspace, perhaps.

All of the issues about freedom and control about which Jonathan Zittrain writes so compellingly are set here in the context of larger themes of American history. Plus there is a lot about Jefferson I didn’t know. Excellent and admirable, — if peculiar!

NSF’s Internet Porn

Thursday, January 29th, 2009 by Harry Lewis

An NSF internal report revealed that some NSF workers (including at least one high official) were using their NSF computers and Internet connections to view pornography and participate in pornographic chat rooms. Senator Grassley of Iowa, the same Senator Grassley who put the bogus Rimm report on Internet pornography on the cover of Time magazine a decade ago (p. 239 of Blown to Bits), wants answers from NSF. He is threatening to hold up NSF’s #3 billion share of the stimulus money until the Foundation cleans up its act.

Now this story is a good giggle about human stupidity (OK, male stupidity, I expect) and workings of bureaucracies. You do have to wonder, right off the bat, if NSF is being singled out just because it’s the only agency that actually conducted an internal audit of how its systems are being used. (Have they done that in Health and Human Services, for example?)

But there are a couple of more serious questions this raises. The first is whether Senator Grassley’s problem is the agency’s inefficiency or morals. If the report had said that time was being lost to eBay, or to reading stories about US tariffs on Roquefort cheese, would he have been equally upset? Because there is every reason to think that in offices all over the country, government and corporate, people are spending lots of time doing non-work stuff on the Internet. Given the recession, wouldn’t this be the logical time to try to get full value out of every employee?

And then there is the reminder that this stuff can be tracked. Every web site you visit can be recorded, and employers can monitor, analyze, restrict, and punish what we do on the Internet.

For many of us, the Internet has shattered the barriers between work time and home time; it’s as easy to do knowledge work from home as from the office. A certain amount of bleeding in the other direction is inevitable. Where are the limits of control over employee’s actions? I’m willing to go with the good Senator in condemning someone spending 20% of his office time viewing porn, but the workplace needs some reasonable standards, other than “you can’t do anything personal from your office,” or the surveillance and retaliation is going to be capricious and unpredictable.

Political Warfare Via Public Exposure

Monday, January 19th, 2009 by Harry Lewis

How far is it fair to go to put the spotlight on those opposing you by making public information about them readily accessible? Supporters of gay marriange in California have taken public information — the addresses of those supporters of the gay marriage ban who gave more than $100 — and put it on an easy-to-access map. You can look at the map and see who in your neighborhood gave money to help get the ban passed. Or, who in my neighborhood.

The use of the Internet for public shaming — or is it intimidation? — is not new. The Nuremberg Files was the most troubling example of the genre — listing the addresses of doctors who performed abortions, and graying out their names if they were murdered. The site also listed where their children went to school.

The gay marriage advocates haven’t gone that far, but they have gone far enough to cause some real discomfort. The New York Times reports that to fight back, an attempt will be made to change the law so that the addresses of donors of as little as $100 are no longer public information.

Who has the better of the free speech argument here — those who feel intimidated, and hence feel their speech is being chilled; or those who just want to publish on the Web in a convenient form information that has long been considered public anyway?