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That’s the “verdict of ¬†the herd.” Herdict accumulates input from people all around the world about what parts of the web they can and cannot reach. It’s a beautifully engineered site, but requires broad participation to be useful Put a the link on your toolbar so you can report anything funny. The aggregation of a million funny observations will be profile of global information freedom and information imprisonment.

This cute Youtube video explains it all in two minutes.

Congratulations to Jonathan Zittrain and the team he led at Berkman to bring this project to fruition.

I’ve been sloppy about keeping the Events page up to date. I’ve gone back and included all the events that have already occurred, as well as those yet to happen, including:

1. May 13, 2009, 12:45PM, The University of Hong Kong
2. May 6, 2009, Harvard Club of New Jersey (Maplewood)
3. March 4, 2009, Harvard Club of Princeton, New Jersey
4. February 28, 2009, Harvard Club of Maryland, Baltimore (Harry)
5. February 26, 2009, Safari Books Online, Webcast

Events are listed in reverse chronological order, with upcoming events in boldface, so the last boldface entry is the next thing that is going to happen. Make sense?

The Safari Books Online Webcast will be participatory. Ken, Hal, and I will be talking about Blown to Bits issues, and you will have the opportunity to ask questions or make comments . Follow the link to sign up.

I was on this TV show this morning. I actually stayed on long after the telecast ended, as Amy Goodman used the book as a freebie for their fundraising campaign. You can view the video here.

On pages 73-77 of Blown to Bits, we go through three cases in which editors electronically redacted documents to remove sensitive information, not realizing that the way they were doing the redaction changed only the way the document appeared on the screen. The internal representation of the document still included the redacted text, which a simple cut and paste operation disclosed.

Not the most fascinating part of the book, I’ll bet. In fact, I’ll bet some of you skipped over it fairly quickly.

These were serious mistakes with big consequences. I hadn’t heard any recent reports of similar failures.

But the underlying problem hasn’t gone away. The electronic “document” metaphor is too convincing. It’s easy for a editor to infer that what is happening on the screen is what is really happening to the computer file.

A few days ago, it was disclosed that the value put on Facebook at the time the settlement with ConnectU was a lot less than it might have been, had the value been based on Microsoft’s subsequent purchase of a percentage of Facebook. How do we know? The imputed value (and ConnectU’s settlement) were inadvertently revealed by Facebook’s lawyers. Revealed how? Here is the account offered by SiliconValley.com:

Large portions of that hearing are redacted in a transcript of the June hearing, but The Associated Press was able to read the blacked-out portions by copying from an electronic version of the document and pasting the results into another document.

How embarrassing. Moral: read Chapter 3. And remember it!

Added 2/13:¬†Here is the actual PDF. Go to page 22. At the bottom is some whited out text preceded by the word “REDACTED”. Select the white space on the screen (you can do this with any PDF reader) and copy it, then paste it into your usual wordprocessor. Like magic, the $65 million dollar figure appears!

A friend passed along this brief article from IEEE Spectrum. Among its interesting claims:

For today’s premium cars, “the cost of software and electronics can reach 35 to 40 percent of the cost of a car,” states [German professor Manfred] Broy, with software development contributing about 13 to 15 percent of that cost. He says that if it costs US $10 a line for developed software—a cost he says is low—for a premium car, its software alone represents about a billion dollars’ worth of investment.

Of all the staff hours in the entire program to build the [GMC Yukon] Two-Mode Hybrid transmission…some 70 percent…were devoted to developing the control software.

Google Earth is out with a new version that extends an extraordinary tool. The new version maps the bottom of the oceans as well as land masses; allows you to move in time as well as in space, watching changes in the landscape over the years; and tour Mars as well as earth. Google’s announcement here, and the New York Times story here.

Barak Obama was the object of a google-bombing — searches for “cheerful achievement” got you links to Obama. And Obama inherited from George Bush some of the White-House-directed search results for “miserable failure.”

We talk about Google bombs in Blown to Bits (p. 150). Some conservative sources are suggesting political explanations for the fact that Google moved more quickly against these bombs than it did when the object was Bush. That seems a pretty silly idea — Google would have much better ways to create partisan slant than this. I imagine Google is simply very reluctant to interfere with the natural search results, and it took several years to develop algorithms that could reliably distinguish Google bombs from legitimate shifts in the ranks of pages. They would surely like the whole search engine to operate as an automaton exactly so they could not be accused manipulating results for partisan purposes. But getting algorithms to do things about which human beings might make different judgments is a tricky business.

Most people still think of Facebook as connecting friends, or perhaps “friends” in the technical sense that’s rather less committed than real friendship. It’s possible that Mark Zuckerberg anticipated that proceeding from that foundation, Facebook would become the worldwide phenomenon that it has. But could he possibly have imagined that it would be a major vehicle for political organizing in countries where unauthorized political organizing is banned?

In Egypt, as the New York Times reports, you can’t assemble more than 5 people without a government permit. And yet there are many Facebook groups for political factions, both liberal and radically Islamist. These groups are used to organize flesh-and-blood protests, as well as for the exchange of news and ideas. It’s exactly what the government doesn’t want to happen, and what it long was able to control through laws outlawing political assembly. But it can’t block Facebook — the site is part of the daily, non-political life of too many people. So it has become an important political platform — every bit as much as the printing press was in the 18th century in the US and France.

(Nice neologism by the Times of London.)

President Obama is going to have a handheld, but it won’t actually be a Blackberry. It will be special military equipment, capable of entering a super-secure mode in which it can communicate only with identical equipment (presumably in the hands of military and intelligence personnel).

The Times story, as well as some others, state that it won’t be possible to forward presidential emails. I don’t know what that means. If Sasha gets an email on her home computer from her daddy, what would prevent her from taking a screen shot, or cutting and pasting the body of the message? It’s possible to restrict the President’s computer so that its functionality is limited, by I just don’t know how you could stop the recipient of one of his emails from using ordinary office software to manipulate it.

I’ll be speaking Thursday night, January 22, at Back Pages Books in Waltham, at 7:30. Do come — it’s a friendly local bookstore and you’ll enjoy the conversation.