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September 22 is One Web Day. I’ll quote from the web site to explain it:

OneWebDay is an Earth Day for the internet. The idea behind OneWebDay is to focus attention on a key internet value (this year, online participation in democracy), focus attention on local internet concerns (connectivity, censorship, individual skills), and create a global constituency that cares about protecting and defending the internet.  So, think of OneWebDay as an environmental movement for the Internet ecosystem. It’s a platform for people to educate and activate others about issues that are important for the Internet’s future.

Lots more information on the site, and suggestions of things to think about and to do.

Now here’s a curious example of web-enabled science that would have been impossible a decade ago. A group of German scientists has discovered that cows tend to orient themselves toward the North or South pole. So do other animals. They figured this out by looking at hundreds of herds in Google Earth images. No explanation offered of how or why they do it.

Nor is there any mention in the summary of whether the cows opted in to this study or even were given a chance to opt out.

On page 190 of Blown to Bits, we tell the story of how government control of encryption became largely a moot issue. In 1991, Joe Biden, as chair of the Judiciary Committee, introduced two bills, the Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act and the Violent Crime Control Act. Both included language stating that the government should have the right to get the keys to all your encrypted communications:

It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law.

It was this language, as we explain, that cause Phil Zimmermann’s PGP encryption software to appear on several publicly accessible servers. The encryption genie has yet to be put back into the bottle.

Obama is generally presumed to be more sensitive to civil liberties than McCain. Not sure it really matters, but Biden has been among the staunchest friends of the FBI’s investigatory powers. It’s anything but clear that the two of them would agree on, say, the most important characteristics of Supreme Court nominees.

Declan McCullagh has a thorough analysis of Biden’s technology record here.

Ben Stein, writing in the Sunday New York Times, bemoans the loss of contact with the “real world” that accompanies our greatly expanded capacity for digital communication.

What he is really saying is that too many bits are reaching us. In the old days (that is, five years ago or so), the paucity of sensors and the weakness of communications technologies meant that we had to think harder about the limited data we received. And sometimes even process non-digital data, such as the sunlight reaching our eyes.

Now we have digital sensors galore and the technology to funnel megabytes per second to us from all over the world. Our processing capability is now consumed with just keeping up with the inputs and outputs. Not enough time is left over to think deeply about what is going on, the way we used to do when we read books.

The line of reasoning is not wholly original, but it’s not wholly wrong either. Look back at my August 18 post about the paradoxes of improved communications technologies.

Personal data on all 84,000 prisoners serving time in England and Wales has gone missing. New York Times story here.

On a memory stick. A flash drive. A thumb drive. Those little things that you can put on a keychain to carry your documents when you don’t want to lug your computer.

The government is embarrassed, because this sort of thing has happened before in the U.K. We discuss at some length the case of some disks that went missing and still haven’t been accounted for, disks containing data on virtually every child in the country. That rocked Tony Blair’s government, and this breach may be rocking Gordon Brown’s.

The details are interesting. The government knows about encryption. When it engaged the services of a private consultant, it delivered the data to the consultant in encrypted form. The consultant apparently decrypted it to work on it, and put it on a flash drive.¬†Don’t know what happened next; maybe someone took the stick with him and it fell out of his pocket.

According to the New York Times, “officials said that appeared to be a breach of government rules.”

This reminds me of what General Turgidson tells the president in Dr. Strangelove. “That’s right, sir, you are the only person authorized to do so. And although I, uh, hate to judge before all the facts are in, it’s beginning to look like, uh, General Ripper exceeded his authority.”

This case (and the others listed in the NYT story) illustrates how hard it is to control bits when they are handed around. Strict protocols are especially hard to enforce across organizational boundaries.

Google has launched its “New Gears Geolocation API.” This is a set of developer tools making it easy to build applications that utilize location information reported by your cell phone to bring up content that depends on where you are — without your having to key in your location manually. Here’s an example Google cites of how useful this can be:

One of the most popular travel sites in the Europe, lastminute.com, has now location-enabled their new mobile restaurant finder to help you find restaurants near you without requiring you to type in where you are. If you’re in the UK, just go to fonefood at¬†m.lastminute.com, click the “Find your location” link on the home page, select the type of restaurant you want, and lastminute.com will automatically work out which neighbourhood and city you are in and find matching restaurants.

We discussed something similar in our Providence Journal opinion piece of a week ago — a facility that would steer you to stores near you that had in stock a product you wanted to buy. It’s coming!

There’s an interview with Ken and Harry on the “Let’s Talk Computers” show, which is aimed at a general audience. Our show (officially dated August 23, 2008) is a friendly conversation, mostly about privacy issues.

Also there’s a well researched NPR program on cloud computing in which Harry is quoted. Laura Sydell, who did the research and interviewing, is a terrific radio journalist.

A story by Emily Steel in today’s Wall Street Journal, “The Ad Changes with the Shopper in Front of It,” reports that retail stores are increasingly moving to in-store advertising. The declining prices of flatscreen displays explains part of the surge. But of course with a digital advertising screen, the ads can change depending on local conditions. Proctor and Gamble is playing with some interesting ideas (my paraphrases):

• * Put RFID tags on shampoo bottles. Then when a customer picks up a bottle from the shelf, flash at her some suggestions about matching conditioners.

That one is pretty weak, actually. But the next one is not.

• * Put a camera at the screen to watch who is standing in front of it. Suggest different hair care products depending on the customer’s appearance. Can’t you just see it? “Hah! She’s graying. Let’s make sure she knows that even a computer notices, and pitch some hair coloring.”

It’s inevitable that these things will be tried. Will they work? Probably, creepy as they seem at first.

And of course a camera at the check-out could match faces and track what people actually buy, as correlated with what they looked at and what advertising they saw …

The Federal Communications Commission has issued its decision in the matter of Comcast’s violations of network neutrality, finding Comcast to have violated federal policy. The full opinion (and the opinions of individual commissioners) is posted on the FCC site (Microsoft Word document here). We cut and paste a few paragraphs below (omitting footnotes). Comcast’s response will apparently be just to slow down all traffic to its heaviest users during times of peak traffic — rather than peeking inside the packets to decide whom to delay or block.

The record leaves no doubt that Comcast’s network management practices discriminate among applications and protocols rather than treating all equally. To reiterate: Comcast has deployed equipment across its networks that monitors its customers’ TCP connections using deep packet inspection to determine how many connections are peer-to-peer uploads. When Comcast judges that there are too many peer-to-peer uploads in a given area, Comcast’s equipment terminates some of those connections by sending RST packets. In other words, Comcast determines how it will route some connections based not on their destinations but on their contents; in laymen’s terms, Comcast opens its customers’ mail because it wants to deliver mail not based on the address or type of stamp on the envelope but on the type of letter contained therein. Furthermore, Comcast’s interruption of customers’ uploads by definition interferes with Internet users’ downloads since “any end-point that is uploading has a corresponding end-point that is downloading.” Also, because Comcast’s method, sending RST packets to both sides of a TCP connection, is the same method computers connected via TCP use to communicate with each other, a customer has no way of knowing when Comcast (rather than its peer) terminates a connection.

but invasive and outright discriminatory. Comcast admits that it interferes with about ten percent of uploading peer-to-peer TCP connections, and independent evidence shows that Comcast’s interference may be even more prevalent. In a test of over a thousand networks over the course of more than a million machine-hours, Vuze found that the peer-to-peer TCP connections of Comcast customers were interrupted more consistently and more persistently than those of any other provider’s customers. Similarly, independent evidence suggests that Comcast may have interfered with forty if not seventy-five percent of all such connections in certain communities. Comcast also admits that even in its own tests, twenty percent of such terminated connections cannot successfully restart an uploading peer-to-peer connection within a minute. These statistics have real world consequences: We know, for example, that Comcast’s conduct disconnected Adam Lynn, who uses peer-to-peer applications to watch movie trailers. We know that Comcast’s conduct slowed Jeffrey Pearlman’s connection “to a crawl” when he was using peer-to-peer protocols to update his copy of the World of Warcraft game. We know that David Gerisch and Dean Fox had to wait hours if not days to download open-source software over their peer-to-peer clients. And we know that Comcast’s conduct entirely prevented Robert Topolski from distributing a “rare cache of Tin-Pan-Alley-era ‘Wax Cylinder’ recordings and other related musical memorabilia” over the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. These actual examples of interference confirm the observation that “[i]t is easy to imagine scenarios where content is unavailable for periods much longer than minutes.”

43. On its face, Comcast’s interference with peer-to-peer protocols appears to contravene the federal policy of “promot[ing] the continued development of the Internet” because that interference impedes consumers from “run[ning] applications . . . of their choice,” rather than those favored by Comcast, and that interference limits consumers’ ability “to access the lawful Internet content of their choice,” including the video programming made available by vendors like Vuze. Comcast’s selective interference also appears to discourage the “development of technologies” — such as peer-to-peer technologies — that “maximize user control over what information is received by individuals . . . who use the Internet” because that interference (again) impedes consumers from “run[ning] applications . . . of their choice,” rather than those favored by Comcast. Thus, Free Press has made a prima facie case that Comcast’s practices do impede Internet content and applications, and Comcast must show that its network management practices are reasonable.

44. Comcast tries to avoid this result by arguing that it only delays peer-to-peer applications, and that the Internet Policy Statement, properly read, prohibits the blocking of user applications and content, but not mere delays. We do not agree with Comcast’s characterization and instead find that the company has engaged in blocking. As one expert explains: “It is never correct to say that Comcast has delayed P2P packets or P2P sessions, because the P2P traffic will never flow again unless the end system initiates a new session to the same device, even though it now believes that device is unable to continue a transfer. The argument that terminating a P2P session is only delaying because a device may attempt to initiate a new session some time later is absurd. By this incorrect argument, there is no such thing as call blocking; there is only delaying.” Indeed, under Comcast’s logic virtually any instance of blocking could be recharacterized as a form of delay. We are likewise unpersuaded by Comcast’s argument that terminating peer-to-peer connections does not equate to blocking access to content because Internet users may upload such content from other sources — whether or not blocking content was Comcast’s intent, Comcast’s actions certainly had that effect in some circumstances. In any event, the semantic dispute of “delaying vs. blocking” is not outcome determinative here. Regardless of what one calls it, the evidence reviewed above shows that Comcast selectively targeted and terminated the upload connections of its customers’ peer-to-peer applications and that this conduct significantly impeded consumers’ ability to access the content and use the applications of their choice. These facts are the relevant ones here, and we thus find Comcast’s verbal gymnastics both unpersuasive and beside the point.

…

As previously reported by the New York Times and noted in this blog (The Google Cache Strikes Again), two of the medal-winning Chinese female gymnasts are only 14 years old, according to rosters posted on Chinese web sites at the time of earlier competitions. (They have since been furnished with passports showing them now to be the minimum Olympic eligibility age of 16.) The NYT found a copy of the roster cached at Google (see pp. 124-126 of Blown to Bits for an explanation of how this works).

Now blogger Stryde Hax has found traces of incriminating rosters at the Chinese search engine Baidu — the one controlled by Chinese authorities. Links to the two cached copies are here and here — though I don’t expect they will stay visible for long, now that they are being publicized. You need to read Chinese to pick out the gymnasts’ names.

As we say in the book, search is power. And bits don’t go away.

The whole concept of truth is being shaken by developments like this. Will the IOC be able to continue to accept the word of Chinese authorities that those new passports have the girls’ real birthdates and those old records are wrong for some reason?

We’ve devoted a lot of attention on this blog to Net Neutrality — the principle that Internet Service Providers should, like telephone companies, be barred from picking and choosing what service to provide to whom on the basis of the content of the information being delivered. There is another important information policy issue at stake now, and there is an opportunity for members of the public to weigh in on it directly.

“White space” is a part of the radio spectrum not being used by any broadcaster or other party licensed by the government to use it. As we explain in Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits — it’s really the main lesson of that chapter — the government “owns” the entire spectrum and historically has given exclusive licenses to the choicest parts of it to broadcast radio and television stations. Some years ago, a few white spaces were made available for unlicensed use — over the objections of the incumbent broadcasters, who raised alarms about the risk of interference with their broadcasts but, not coincidentally, had nothing to gain from allowing any competing uses of the spectrum. From that small deregulation, the now-ubiquitous wireless Internet devices emerged.

With the switchover to digital television, vastly greater portions of the spectrum are being opened up for possible reassignment to unlicensed uses. Once again, the broadcast industry is mongering fear about degraded television reception. Public interest groups — and certain private companies, Google in particular — are strongly lobbying for deregulation of these white spaces.

You can get a good sense of the issues from reading the last chapter of Blown to Bits. We urge you to support the move toward freeing up the white spaces by signing the (click on it) Free the Airwaves petition. Every vote counts!