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The New York Times reports on a web site where you can rate prostitutes on a 0 to 10 scale, like ratemyprofessors.com for rating college professors. The man who started the prostitute-rating site said he did so because “There was no way to hold people accountable for their actions.” Some prostitutes¬†are reportedly worried about what will happen to their business if the site closes down. The rankings have gotten so important that one “escort service” threatened antitrust action when it was excluded, claiming that being listed was “essential to effectively compete in the upscale escort services market.”

Who knew? A lot of people, apparently; the site gets up to a million hits a month.

The official book launch is this Wednesday, June 18, at the Harvard Coop in Harvard Square, at 7pm. Ken and I will be there, and we’ll have the whole ground floor. It will be informal and friendly. Come and join the conversation. (Hal, alas, will be on the west coast.)

NB: Amazon says the book will not be available until July 15, but that is false. They will start to turn up in bookstores this week, and Amazon should be shipping very soon.

Two dozen leading Internet researchers met last week at a workshop hosted by Google in Mountain View to discuss the growing crisis in network measurement.

The crisis is this: despite the critical importance of the Internet infrastructure, no one really knows how well the Net is working and how well it will hold up under increasing use. The measurement data that would help network researchers analyze network performance isn’t being collected ‚Äî perhaps it can’t be.

As a consumer, you can tell when your cable TV channels are on the fritz, or when your cell phone reception is poor. But when your Web response is sluggish or you can’t connect to a favorite site, you’re pretty much in the dark. It might be that the site you’re trying to connect to is down or overloaded, but it might also be a loose connection in your house, or a problem with your computer’s settings, or a program bug.

It might also be that your Internet service provider is intentionally slowing down your connection for various applications, a practice known as traffic shaping or, more pejoratively, as data discrimination. University network services and some other ISPs often do this to slow down response on peer-to-peer sharing for music or video files. Or an ISP might actively disrupt the flow of packets by injecting spurious reset commands into TCP streams, one of the techniques used in the “Great Firewall of China” to block connections to politically undesirable sites. And not only China. In 2007 rumors circulated around the Net that Comcast was actively interfering with peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic. Comcast denied it, but measurements performed last October by the Associated Press revealed that Comcast was in fact disrupting those connections.

For the average person, there’s almost no information available on which to base informed decisions about the service provided by an ISP. The factors affecting performance and too complex, and the data is simply unavailable.

And the situation isn’t much better for top network experts. Even for the Internet’s core, there are no good public sources of performance data; indeed, measurement data is often kept secret, since it’s considered to be valuable proprietary information by service providers. Researchers simply don’t know, for example, which segments of the Internet are particularly vulnerable to congestion, or what fraction of Internet traffic is due to viruses and spam.

The experts in Mountain View last week, many of whom conduct their own measurement experiments, discussed ways of sharing data and methods for getting better results. They also considered creating tools that non-experts could use to get information on the performance of Internet connections. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides links to some tools at
http://www.eff.org/testyourisp, but these are limited and hard to use, and the results are difficult to interpret.

There were ideas for improving testing, but privacy is a real quandary: effective testing requires combining measurements from multiple sources. A public database of detailed network performance measurements would be a boon to research, but the same database could be mined for details about who was using the Internet when, and for what. The dilemma is like the privacy tradeoffs for epidemiological studies, between the needs of public-health experts and the desire to preserve privacy of individual medical records.

For such critical infrastructure as the Internet, the ignorance of consumers and experts alike is troubling and potentially dangerous. In the words of K Claffy of the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA):

While the core of the Internet continues its relentless evolution, scientific measurement and modeling of its systemic characteristics has largely stalled. What little measurement is occurring reveals some disturbing realities about the ability of the Internet’s architecture to serve society’s needs and expectations.

I have a piece in the Boston Globe this morning about social networks and other threats to privacy. It’s the most e-mailed.

I didn’t pick or get consulted on the title; that’s generally the rule for these opinion pieces. I’m a bit sorry that it comes out as picking on Facebook, which is merely the most successful and probably no worse on privacy matters than many other sites. As a title for this piece about the privacy wars, I might have chosen instead Pogo’s classic wisdom, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have reported on the agreement reached between the Attorney General of New York (Andrew Cuomo) and several Internet Service Providers (Verizon, Sprint, and Times Warner Cable) to limit the dissemination of child pornography. I had planned to blog this as soon as I read the story in the Times, because it seemed to me an important development. Then I hesitated, because after reading that story, I couldn’t figure out what was really going on. The Post’s story is clearer, but you need to dig deeper, for example into Susan Crawford’s blog, to get the details.

As a step toward controlling child pornography, the agreement appears to accomplish very little. The ISPs have already been taking down child pornography when it is reported to them, and have been sharing information and cooperating with law enforcement. (Child pornography is illegal. First Amendment protections don’t apply, because of the harm done to children while producing it.) The ISPs will be checking for duplicates of known child-pornography images, using a “hash value” of the photos (a digital fingerprint that can be easily checked). This is an attempt to block the same images from turning up in new places. It’s not likely to be very effective for very long; it’s easy to disguise the images so they have different hash values. The mice always win such cat and mouse games. If the tests for what constitutes a “match” are made looser, legal material is going to be blocked at the same time.

The agreement does give the Attorney General a political victory, at no apparent cost. How many state AGs get front page coverage of their actions in the nation’s two major dailies, with barely a word of criticism? And what’s the downside? No one defends child pornography. No one. It’s hard to think of another law for which there is such unequivocal support as there is for the anti-child-pornography statutes.

My guess is that it took two seconds for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to get on the phone to Cuomo asking for equal protection. Unauthorized downloads of copyrighted music and movies are also illegal. Most of us don’t feel quite the same revulsion about Madonna downloads as we do about child rapes, but the recording and movie industries have tried in the past to create just such analogies. The MPAA president once told Congress that video recording was to his industry “as¬†the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.‚Äù

If ISP’s can be coerced into “agreeing” to make sure you don’t get illegal photos, they can be coerced into “agreeing” to watch for you illegally downloading songs. The New York AG’s announcement is precedent-setting. Watch closely for what happens next. There will be much “if you’re not doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about,” and when it turns out that legal material is being blocked and innocent parties are being prosecuted, a good dose of “we’re never going to accomplish anything about this terrible problem if we don’t at least try.”

(P.S. Today’s TImes story on the First Amendment in the context of the global Internet is much better than its coverage of the child pornography agreement. This issue is¬†also¬†discussed in “Blown to Bits.”)

Postscript added at 5pm. The easiest and surest way for ISPs to comply with this agreement is to drop some or all of the Usenet newsgroups, even though less than 1% have ever been found to have any child pornography on them. It seems that some of the ISPs are planning to do exactly that. Thus does voluntary self-censorship again, carving out huge areas of legally protected material as the cheapest way to satisfy agreements with the state to screen out a tiny amount of illegal material. 

One of the reasons that we wrote “Blown to Bits” was because we realized that so much of what goes on is connected to the changes digital technology has brought, and we wanted everyone to understand the implications.¬† Not a day goes by when we don’t see more bits stories.

Like today.¬† A witness¬†alleged that the driver of an MBTA trolley that crashed was talking on her cell phone at the time.¬†Thanks to the fact that cell phone service is now all “bits” that allegation is gone. Recent news stories reported that the cell phone records show no phone, text, or Internet activity at the time.

“We were able to recover the driver’s cell phone at the scene. We issued legal process to access records of her phone calls and text messages as well as her Internet usage on the phone, and engaged in forensic analysis,” Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone said in a statement.

We should all be aware that every single thing that we do with our handy little phones is tracked and stored.  It may take a warrant to retrieve those data, but they are there for the asking.

That wasn’t the only bits story today.¬† The front page of USA Today reported that visitors to the Olympics are at risk of being hacked by the Chinese government.¬† That story won’t be news to anyone who has read Blown to Bits – we talk at some length about how digital communications can be monitored and analyzed, about how search results vary from country to country, and, most importantly, how digital censorship can be a powerful tool for molding the thinking of a nation.

The Celtics (sadly!) lost to LA last night.  How, you might ask, is that one a bits story?  Answer РKobe. whose 36 points made the difference, was cleared of charges to some degree because the cellphone text messages of his accuser were all stored, and subsequently retrieved.  You may have thought those message went away after you sent them.  Not so.

As my hero, Ron Popeil likes to say, “wait, there’s more.”¬† According to the Washington Post, the Red Cross was fined because six units of blood were improperly washed.¬† That’s six units out of literally millions.¬† Imagine finding that needle in a haystack if the records weren’t all bits.

The list has no end.  We are living in a bits world, with endless possibilities and perils.

Vontu, Tablus, Code Green, PacketSure, — these are all players in the world of “data security,” of making sure that valuable, confidential, protected, secure data doesn’t leak out. It’s a noble calling. After all, we don’t want our private information leaking everywhere, and corporations, for sure, don’t want theirs sneaking out the back door either.

Here’s what they do. They listen to everything passing through the company network. Often, they sit in a place on the network where information heads out the digital door to the Internet. They are “configurable.” That means that, like much of the software we use, the administrator can set up rules. “If Susan Black sends an email that includes the word ‘Prada’ or ‘Tiffany’ then …” Oh wait, that isn’t exactly the kind of rule you would expect for data security. My point exactly.

The tools that guard against data leaks are nothing more or less than digital wiretaps. The marketing term is “content inspection agents.” I love marketing-speak. The folks in marketing could have just named them “eavesdroppers.” Unlike the wiretaps of old, they don’t require a human listener. They have digital listeners; software that can be configured to detect whatever the administrator might think is suspicious, and then take appropriate action. That action might be as severe as blocking the transmission, or as aparently benign as keeping a copy for administrative review. The tools can look at every form of network traffic, because they operate at the deepest level, inspecting all the bits as they pass by.

Like so many innovations in our digital world, things developed for one purpose can be directed, or mis-directed to another. So it is with these tools. Guarding against data leaks is like protecting the homeland from terrorists. No one would ever argue against it. The question is, which of our assumptions about personal privacy are being sacrificed along the way. Our observation is that, for the most part, we don’t care. The more we know about the world of bits, the more we will come to accept that Big Brother is watching and listening, and we will just have to accept that new reality.

Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times reviews an 80-minute multimedia play about the discovery of spread-spectrum technology, now the basis of much wireless communication, by actress Hedy Lamarr and the avant-garde composer George Antheil. This is the strangest story of technological discovery I have ever heard. Blown to Bits just scratches the surface, but does give the basic outline. Lamarr, familiar with torpedo warfare because her first husband was an Austrian munitions maker, teamed up with Antheil to design a jam-proof torpedo in Hollywood. The control signal would be broadcast at a sequence of frequencies, and the control station and the torpedo would contain synchronized player piano mechanisms with identical scrolls, which would in essence encrypt the signaling sequence. Antheil’s contribution was the idea of using player piano mechanisms, with which he was familiar because he scored his masterpiece, Ballet M?©canique, for 16 player pianos. If you don’t believe me, here’s the patent (Lamarr was using her second husband’s name).

The play, now on stage in a Manhattan theater, includes a complete performance of the Ballet M?©canique. And the review includes a charming and ironic detail: This performance is the first in which the piece sounds as Antheil intended it. He could never figure out how to get 16 player pianos properly synchronized, so earlier performances substituted other instruments.

This site claims to have inside information from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that they are planning to go to the Cable TV model for the Web — basic service buys access to a list of web sites they stipulate, but if you want to wander off that territory, you’d have to pay them extra. $19.95 to get to Google, say, but $29.95 if you want access the New York Times web site (for which the New York Times itself charges nothing). That would be the end of the Internet as we know it, where anyone can put information up on a site and anyone else, for nothing more than their base ISP connection fee, can go see it.

“Net neutrality” is an important basic principle. I like to think of Internet connectivity as the US thought about rural electrification in the last century — something that might not be cost-efficient for private providers in the short run, but would yield enormous social and economic benefits to the US in the long run. If this report is true, imagine a world in which the electric company might supply you with electricity so you could run stoves and refrigerators on its approved list, but would charge you extra if you plugged in an appliance not approved by the electric company itself.

This is a complicated topic, but the fundamental problem is that there are not enough competing suppliers of Internet services. A quarter of the US still has only dialup; half has two suppliers, usually cable and telephone DSL; and a quarter has only one. The percentage of US households that have more than two choices for broadband connectivity is negligible. Under such conditions, the suppliers can contemplate tiered pricing schemes, which make absolutely no sense in terms of resources required — it costs no more to deliver packets from a billion different sources than from only one.

On June 4, the Center for Democracy and Technology published The Internet in Transition: A Platform to Keep the Internet Open, Innovative and Free. This 25-page report summarizes CDT’s recommendation on Internet policy for the next Administration and Congress.

Readers of Blown to Bits will find the issues here familiar: preserving free speech while protecting children online; strengthening consumer privacy and restoring protections again government surveillance; using the power of the Internet to promote freedom and democracy on a global scale; protecting innovation by resisting attempts to undercut the Internet’s open architecture; and capitalizing upon the Internet as a force to encourage open government.

In the words of the report:

In recent years, policymakers seem to have forgotten what makes the Internet special. Increasingly, policy proposals treat the Internet as a problem to be solved rather than a valuable resource that must be supported. Debates over objectionable content online, protecting intellectual property, preventing terrorism, or restructuring telecommunications policy seem to have lost sight of the Internet’s history and its architecture.

This version of the report is a first draft. CDT and has launched a web site for readers to comments and suggest additional policy initiatives for incorporation into later versions of the report.

There are many detailed proposals and links to other CDT policy reviews. This is a great reference to Internet policy, and well worth reading and commenting on, regardless of where you stand on the issues.

The site is at http://www.cdt.org/election2008/ and the report itself is available at http://cdt.org/election2008/election2008.pdf.