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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.

Wikipedia articles now turn up at the top of many Internet searches. They have assumed an astonishing degree of authority in only a few years. And deservedly: They are, in general, remarkably accurate. In an article appearing in Technology Review, Simson Garfinkel argues that the standards and protocols Wikipedia uses are redefining the very notion of truth. As Garfinkel explains,

On Wikipedia, objective truth isn’t all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication–ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. “The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth,” states Wikipedia’s official policy on the subject.

“Verifiability” means that the information appeared in some other publication. Other principles are “Neutral Point of View” — editing an entry about yourself is a no-no, for example — and “no original research.”

These principles work beautifully given the fact that anyone can edit entries. Vandalism and errors generally get corrected extremely quickly.

But the three principles don’t work perfectly, and Garfinkel gives a couple of thought-provoking examples where they fail dramatically, because information has gained currency through repetition and only the principals are in a position to explain why it is false.

A fascinating piece, and, like everything Garfinkel writes, very well-argued.

November will mark 20 years since the word “Internet” broke into public discourse, with the release by Robert Tappan Morris of a “worm” that brought down many computers. Ten years later, the Web was in a state of exponential growth, and was already being exploited heavily for commercial and educational uses. At Harvard, by 1998 we had finished bringing high-speed connections to all our buildings.

This story about Abilene Christian University in Texas is a sign of things to come. Having discovered that the vast majority of students were bringing laptops to campus with them, they decided to equip every student with an iPhone or an iPod Touch. (Both have WiFi, and so can be used as Web browsers, email platforms, etc. Most students are picking the iPhone.) The university has passed on the Apple applications software and developed its own, presumably so it can switch to the Google phone or other open devices in the future.

In a piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I talked about the lessons to be drawn from the aftermath of a six-year-old bankruptcy story about United Airlines carelessly posted on a Bloomberg site, comparing it to wacky Internet rumors about the presidential candidates:

With human judgment so eclipsed by responses to atomized, instant data, can there be much doubt that intentional manipulations—of the markets, and of the electorate—should be expected?

Yesterday an anonymous citizen journalist posted to a CNN site that Steve Jobs had been rushed to a hospital after a heart attack, and Apple’s stock dropped 5.4%. The SEC is investigating.

Of course there are morals here. That citizen journalism, the exploitation of millions of eyes and ears through the wonder of Internet connectivity, is a wonderful evolution of journalism, except when it isn’t because any damn fool can say anything and there’s no validation or fact-checking. That instantaneity, much as we love it, sometimes has a big pricetag. And maybe that it’s worth asking whether the law protecting CNN in this case (it bears no responsibility for the anonymous poster’s falsehood) may be a little too generous.

But mostly what I’m thinking is that it didn’t take long for one of my predictions to come true. The other one, about the opportunity to manipulate the election by spreading a last-minute rumor, wouldn’t be timely quite yet. But I’ll bet there are people thinking about how to pull it off.

I am sitting in the meeting of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at the Harvard Law School, in Pound Hall. Meetings go on the rest of today and through noon tomorrow, and are free and open to the public. There are two separate issues: How can you tell if someone claiming to be a child (when registering for a Myspace account, for example) really is a child (rather than a child predator, for example). And how can you tell if someone claiming to be an adult really is an adult (rather than a 13-year-old boy, for example, trying to look at dirty pictures).

I find the level of interest and investment in these questions quite remarkable, in the absence of data showing that child predation is on the increase or that the number of young adolescents trying to satisfy their curiosity can be decreased. The session was kicked off with remarks from the Attorneys General of both Massachusetts and Connecticut.

And there is almost no acknowledgment of the social costs of heavy identity verification technologies — for example that children who want to learn whether it’s really true that you can’t get pregnant the first time, as they’ve been told by their social peers, will be discouraged from finding the truth on the Internet if their parents don’t want them to get it. It’s neither practical nor (I think) lawful to keep older children away from information they want to get, but that seems to be the way the world is moving. The AG of Connecticut put a grand challenge to the group: “If we can put a man on the moon, we can find a way to make the Internet safe.” Sure — if you don’t mind restricting the free flow of lawful information between willing speakers and willing listeners.

A lot to think about here.

Wikipedia is a marvel. In spite of the fact that anyone can edit it and all editing is pseudonymous, it works. For a lot of math theorems, for example, the resource is fantastic for quick lookup. If you’ve never used it, try it for whatever interests you and judge for yourself. If the entry is imperfect, just fix it. You can see the result instantly.

Wikipedia is very inclusive since anyone can start an entry. But there are standards for inclusion; if you try to make an entry for your dog, it will get deleted, unless your dog is famous for some reason.

So, storage being cheap, someone started Deletionpedia, an inventory of all the entries that have been deleted from Wikipedia. It’s kind of interesting, I guess.

And then someone created a Wikipedia page about it.

Which was deleted. Go figure. It was restored, and a debate is raging among Wikipedians about the right and justice of all this. The page is still up for now, but that link may die at any moment.

Hal, Ken, and I wrote an opinion piece called Campaigning for Our Digital Future, raising some “bits” issues that the next president should think about. It was published recently in the Providence Journal.

United Airlines is the company whose stock lost most of its value — a billion dollars, give or take a few — when Bloomberg News posted a headline of an old article stating that UAL had declared bankruptcy. UAL had indeed declared bankruptcy, but that was six years ago. The misleading headline triggered a sell-off that nearly wiped out the entire value of the company’s stock in a few minutes. Hal blogged this a few days ago.

People lost a lot of money because of this mistake. Who’s responsible, and is anyone liable?

Google returned the old article in response to a query for “bankruptcy 2008.” Not clear why that happened, but I’ve been noticing some old articles turning up in response to Google Alerts the past few days. Maybe they are doing some re-indexing. Whatever — it’s hard to hold Google responsible for what happened later, and you certainly couldn’t consider them liable. They make no promises about their search results. Bloomberg and the service that fed the article to Bloomberg misused the information that came back from Google.

It feels like Bloomberg should be on the hook. They posted the headline without checking its accuracy, as would have been trivially easy to do. But they aren’t liable, because of the provisions of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the Good Samaritan Clause. As we explain in detail in Chapter 7, this clause says:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

This law was meant to encourage Web site operators to make their sites child-friendly without running the risks a print publisher would incur if they missed something obscene or slanderous. But it’s a blanket get-out-of-jail-free card for businesses like Bloomberg, which post things others have reported.

So the folks who lost that billion dollars can’t collect from Bloomberg. Ironically, Hal described what happened in slightly incorrect language, saying that the selloff happened because of “Bloomberg News Wire printing a one-line note.” Not printing actually, but posting online. If Bloomberg had actually printed it on paper, CDA Section 230 would not apply, and Bloomberg might be in big, big trouble!

Thanks to a poster from the Volokh Conspiracy for pointing this out.

The Washington Post reports that there are competing web sites for women who want to track their menstrual cycles online: mymonthlycycles.com and mon.thly.info. Also Bedpost for tracking your sex life, and many other tools for recording and analyzing the ordinary moments and extraordinary moments of your daily life.

Personally, no matter what the sites’ privacy policies say, there are some data I wouldn’t put in “the cloud”!

Google has released a new web browser, called Chrome. I haven’t tried it yet (at the moment only the Windows version has been released). David Pogue has a rundown in the New York Times. It sounds great.

In the spirit of watching what your bits are doing, I thought I’d note one interesting clause in the Chrome Terms of Service (the legal prose to which you have to agree before you can download the software):

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.

Perhaps there are similar clauses in the agreement you have to click before you can use Internet Explorer; I don’t know. But my non-lawyerly reading of that says: If you use our browser to upload to Picasa the cute picture you took¬†of your roommate¬†at the party¬†with a jug in each hand, we can use that photo in our national advertising campaign. Not privacy-friendly, and I’m surprised that Google thinks it’s necessary to assert such a sweeping right to use your text and images for commercial purposes without asking your permission at the time.

Thanks to Ina Fried of CNET for pointing this out.