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Tennessee State University and Hampton University, two historically black institutions, are blocking students’ access to JuicyCampus.com, the leading site for vicious, anonymous gossip about (the sex lives of) college students. The administrators who made the decision cite the Virginia Tech tragedy. One said, “We need to be more thoughtful, and we really need to be more careful in targeting and attacking each other.”

I understand the impulse, but limiting what speech reaches a college campus is not a good idea. The arguments are hard to sustain. The administrator goes on to say, “¬†JuicyCampus gossip blog does not fit with the legacy, spirit, and reputation of Tennessee State University.” Surely true — so will he remove from the libraries works that do not meet that standard? Or filter students’ email to make sure their communications are fitting?

Of course, a blog is not exactly a book and not exactly an email, but can we define the ways in which it’s different that would justify a different standard?

We keep saying that the digital explosion has good and bad sides. For every meatspace tradition that dies because physicality isn’t what it used to be, a dozen digital innovations are born. But this morning, I’m going to grieve an irreplaceable loss.

The Out-Of-Town News Stand in Harvard Square is closing.

I remember how astonishing it was in 1964 when I arrived at Harvard from Wellesley, Massachusetts — hardly the ends of the earth — and found I could buy French newspapers and magazines (it was the only modern language I could read) and newspapers from a hundred cities across the U.S. It was like Widener Library except that when you came back a few days later, it was all different.

When the huge renovation of the public transportation system took place in the 1980s, the old T station, through which you used to emerge into Harvard Square, became the new home of the newsstand.

The digital explosion has killed the business. Newspapers are shrinking in general as news moves online. But the market for foreign newspapers — days or weeks old by the time they have arrive — has all but disappeared.

I might have hoped the place could stay open selling mostly pornography, but that’s moved online too.

I should have seen it coming a few weeks ago when I bought a Christian Science Monitor there. It’s not a paper I usually purchased, but that day’s edition carried a column of mine. It was a newspaper without news, such a small tabloid that it was folded twice and still seemed thin. I felt sorry for it, as I would feel sorry for a victim of famine. And now the Christian Science Monitor is no more as a paper publication (it will continue on the Web).

No Out Of Town News? I should be happy for all the opportunities there will be in its place, but this one is hard to take.

Last night a team consisting of myself, Siva Vaidhyanathan (of UVa, author of Copyrights and Copyrwrongs and The Anarchist in the Library), and Randy Picker (of Chicago Law School) debated a team of Esther Dyson (author of Release 2.0), Jeff Jarvis (author of the forthcoming What Would Google Do?), and Jim Harper¬†(director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute). It was fun for everyone, I think. I could have argued either side, but I was recruited for the affirmative. I focused my argument strictly on Google cooperating with the Chinese government by producing a censored version of its search engine, which I rather too dramatically also referred to as an “instrument of thought control” and likened to a “brainwashing serum” that no responsible American pharma company would make for a foreign government. It was an Oxford-style debate; I took it as my job to sway the crowd and win the argument, without lying but perhaps by exaggerating if the other side would let me get away with it. I think several of the other participants took it rather more as an actual religious war.

In the pre-debate poll, the voting was very much against the motion; when the poll was repeated, it was a dead tie, 47%-47%, with 6% undecided. By the debate rules — winner whoever changes the most minds — our team won. Fitting, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Harvard’s great comeback 29-29 win over Yale in football!

The debate is in the Intelligence Squared series. A bouquet to the sponsors and staff of the series; it’s a great thing to do. Last night’s will be up on Youtube by the end of the week and in an NPR one-hour edited version shortly thereafter.

There is a very positive review of Blown to Bits on the site of the Progress and Freedom Foundation (crossposted to the Technology Liberation Front).

One detail of which the reviewer was not aware — he wonders why the book is not available for download since we are so critical of copyright law, and the answer is that it will be, under a Creative Commons license, a year after its original publication date (that is, by mid-June 2009).

In a new low for abuse of copyright, Toyota has demanded that a site providing desktop backgrounds remove all images that contain a Toyota, Scion, or Lexus, even in a photography whose copyright is properly held by a third party. The site asked Toyota to identify which images in particular needed to be removed, and Toyota responded that if they had to go to the trouble of identifying what they were objecting to, they would have to be paid for their work.

What’s interesting about this case is what is being used is not the DMCA, but the threat of DMCA. To issue a DMCA takedown, Toyota would have to be specific. The company is apparently claiming that no one can use a photo in which one of their cars appears without infringing their copyright on the design of the car. Extraordinary (and stupid — don’t they want the free publicity of Toyota cars on desktops?).

Also, Professor Charles Nesson has been getting great publicity for his attempt to have the DMCA ruled unconstitutional, essentially because it is a criminal statute dressed up in civil garb. The penalties are extraordinarily high, and none of the protections available to criminal defendants are accorded to those the recording industry comes after. That is why so few cases make it to trial, and the industry can continue its attacks unabated by any risk of losing a case.

Anyone who wants to work in the new administration has to fill out a questionnaire with 63 extremely intrusive questions. Obama is doing everything he can to avoid surprises, like the Clinton nominees with their under-the-counter nanny payments. But many of the questions are questions only being asked because of the digital explosion and the resulting permanence of detailed information. Here are a couple of my favorite queries (emphasis mine):

Writings: Please list and, if readily available, provide a copy of each book, article, column or publication (including but not limited to any posts or comments on blogs or other websites) you have authored, individually or with others. Please list all aliases or “handles” you have used to communicate on the Internet.

Electronic communications: If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.

That is, “Of course, your potentially embarrassing private emails may not disqualify you, not at all. But please tell us about them. And thank you for these details! We always wondered who ‘hilarysux2008’ was, glad to know.”

NYT story here.

Seems to me there are three possibilities here. Either people are not going to work in the administration because of these disclosure requirements. Or the ones who do will be adventureless people who have never taken a risk or had much fun.

Or they will be liars.

Whatever it is, in 10 years, I’m betting, the balance will be struck in a different place.

Chris Soghoian has a fascinating article about filtering of search engine results in Argentina. This is different from what we write about that happens in China, where the lens is distorted. In Argentina, if you search for certain people using Yahoo!, you get back nothing at all. And it’s not because of official government policy; it’s because of private litigation. Someone simply goes to court and asks the judge to make them disappear, the judge enjoins the search engine company, and disappear they do. Google responds differently than Yahoo!, and there are many easy workarounds for those who experiment, but it seems to be a great leap forward in treating search engines just as a manipulable tool, not a public utility.

Blogging will be spotty this week as I am traveling. I’m giving two book talks en route, thanks to local Harvard Clubs — Wednesday in Greensboro, NC and Thursday in Chapel Hill.

Next Wednesday, November 19, I will be speaking at the Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, NY — a public event organized by the Harvard Club of Eastern New York.

In a blog post entitled “Windows 7 knows where you are,” Ina Fried goes through the location-tracking capabilities of Microsoft’s next-generation operating system. It will have API’s — hooks for application programmers to grab onto — that will return device’s spatial location, whether revealed through a GPS, triangulation of cell phone towers, or other technologies. That will make it easy to write location-sensitive search engines, for example — so that if you search for “pizza,” you get links, sponsored or not, to pizza parlors near where you actually are, rather than to the world’s most popular pizza chain.

Of course, there are huge privacy issues here — might Microsoft, or the search engine, keep tab on your movements, for analysis or marketing purposes having nothing to do with your searches? Microsoft acknowledges the problem, and has built in some switches the user can turn off. But it sounds to me like the convenience of good searches and the entertainment value of letting your friends know when you are near them will lead most young people, at a minimum, to leave all the switches on all the time. And the controls that are supplied aren’t exactly what you’d probably want — you might like to leave the location-tracking on for an app that gives driving directions, but off for a social networking app. Can’t be done — it’s all or nothing — due to intrinsic limitations of Windows.

Microsoft does give a range of control options, such as turning off location services by default, as well as the ability to limit such services only to specific users or only to applications, as opposed to services that run in the background. However, the operating system doesn’t allow users the option of letting only certain applications access your location. So, for example, if you turn it on for a mapping program, any other Windows application running could also access that information.

The reason, Microsoft officials say, is that Windows doesn’t have a reliable means of determining that an application is what it says it is, so any attempt to limit the location to a specific application would be easily spoofable ‚Ķ.

As we’ve written before (here and here), geolocation is the new cultural frontier.

The change.gov site lays out the science and technology agenda of the new administration. Sounds good for the most part, but let me parse it.

1. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality. Excellent, especially as the very first bullet.
2. Obama will encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media. Ugh. The right way to do this is to re-engineer spectrum use so the value of a broadcast station declines precipitously, and no one gets excluded. Somehow I’ll bet that isn’t what he has in mind, and we will have some kind of set-aside or affirmative action for minority ownership.
3. Protect Our Children While Preserving the First Amendment. Fine to say, but there is a certain point beyond which these really are inconsistent objectives. There is too much lip service paid to the dangers to children here; there isn’t really any evidence that children are any more endangered in the Internet era than they ever were. So this bullet is favoring motherhood; no one could be opposed to either. The devil will be in the details.
4. Barack Obama will strengthen privacy protections for the digital age. Again, a fine idea, but what does it mean? Will the feds still be able to seize and hold my laptop at the border without any suspicion that I’ve done anything wrong?
5. Open Up Government to its Citizens. This bullet really goes right at Bush’s obfuscations. The promise of transparency is very welcome. It will require a major cultural change in the executive branch, but change is what we were promised!
6. Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Though I worry about symbolic gestures, on balance, I think this is a good idea — depending on who it is. (I hereby declare my availability.)
7. Obama and Biden believe we can get true broadband to every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation’s wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives. Exactly right.
8. Barack Obama and Joe Biden support a trade policy that ensures our goods and services are treated fairly in foreign markets. Again, a bit of motherhood here, but that sounds protectionist to me, and anti-free-trade. But we shall see.
9. Invest in the Sciences. Thank goodness. If there is one thing I hope for from Obama, it is a return of rational judgment after too many years of politically motivated decisions.
10. Invest in University-Based Research. How could I be against that? But seriously, I hope for the sort of enlightened investments in fundamental research that gave us the Internet.
11. Protect American Intellectual Property Abroad: The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that in 2005, more than nine of every 10 DVDs sold in China were illegal copies. The U.S. Trade Representative said 80 percent of all counterfeit products seized at U.S. borders still come from China. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will work to ensure intellectual property is protected in foreign markets, and promote greater cooperation on international standards that allow our technologies to compete everywhere. Any bullet that starts by quoting the MPAA is bad news. This is the same group that persuaded Congress that if the copyright on Mickey Mouse were not extended from 70 to 90 years, Disney would just fold up its tents and not make any more movies, because it couldn’t see the point if people would start making a profit on their creativity 71 years from now. Knowing that Biden has a bad history with technology regulation, I fear that “international standards” will be crippling hardware fixes, broadcast flags, etc., that will make digital devices less generative. Here is one where the explicit mention of Biden’s name makes me worry that Obama has been hanging around with the wrong people.
12. Protect American Intellectual Property at Home: Intellectual property is to the digital age what physical goods were to the industrial age. Barack Obama believes we need to update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated. Actually, “fairness” is not the point. “Intellectual property” has many properties that make the metaphorical comparison with physical property very imperfect. The limited monopoly is not meant to be “fair” to creators, just to give them an economic incentive to create. “To promote the progress of science and the useful arts,” as the Constitution says, not “to be fair to inventors and artists.” I see this as another special-pleading by the entertainment industries.
13. Restore Scientific Integrity to the White House. Amen, and good for them for coming right out and saying that they don’t plan to consult with church leaders on every scientific question.

The rest looks fine too. I am very hopeful.