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It was reported last week (see the Crimson story, for example) that the amount for which Facebook settled the litigation brought against it by the Winklevosses, two of Mark Zuckerberg’s contemporaries at Harvard, was $65M. That number was supposed to be secret, but Facebook’s former lawyers released it by accident. How?

Turns out, exactly the same way the details of the Calipari report, discussed at the beginning of Chapter 3, became public. The law firm “redacted” the number from a document it then made public, but it did the redaction simply by placing a white bar over it in the PDF file. The actually $65M number was still in the file.

You can do it yourself — it takes only a few seconds — try it, it’s fun! Click on this link to download and open the PDF of the court transcript as redacted and released. Go to the bottom of page 22, where there is some white space preceded by the word “[REDACTED].” Select the white space (it runs from the last part of one line to the first part of the next) and copy it — as though you were just copying a bunch of spaces. Now paste it into any word processor — bingo, like magic, the words “$65 MILLION” appear. They were there all along, covered by the white redaction bar — probably just “highlighting” applied using Adobe Acrobat or some similar tool, with the highlighter color changed to white.

In Blown to Bits we give two other examples of this mistake, in addition to the Calipari report. You would think that law firms would understand this by now! There are easy ways to avoid it. Oh dear — if it was some poor unsupervised paralegal or staffperson who did it, I feel sorry for him or her. But really, there can be no excuse for the firm.

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!

I’ve been waiting until I read something intelligent about it before commenting further on the widely publicized story that 90,000 registered sex offenders had been removed from Myspace, mentioned last week on this blog. The Connecticut Attorney General took this big number as proof of what he’s been claiming all along, that social networking sites are a new form of danger to children and need to be regulated and controlled to keep bad people away from unsuspecting, innocent children. The AG’s enthusiasm for trumpeting this statistic is part of a vicious and anti-scientific campaign to discredit the Internet Safety Technical Task Force report (see here and here and here for my earlier comments about this task force and its report). He doesn’t like the facts, so responds by denying them and then erecting a distracting sideshow.

Now danah boyd has done the math and made a few other important observations too. On the math front first: given the number of Myspace members, the density of sex offenders on Myspace is not high; in fact, it’s significantly lower than it is in the general public.

An observation that will surely excite an “even one is too many” response from Blumenthal and his fellow AGs, as though every registered sex offender is pedophile with a record of raping children. Hardly; you can wind up on the sex offender registry for all kinds of reasons, including plea deals in he-said-she-said rape cases involving two college students. (See Chapter 7 of Excellence Without a Soul for the long, sad story of one such case.)

But the most important observation is that mental model of danger is all wrong. It would do far more good to focus on vulnerable children and their Internet behavior than to try to purge the Internet of possible predators. There is a pretty good profile of what kinds of kids get into trouble, and it’s not the sexually innocent 11-year-old children of vigilant parents in suburban America. It’s older and sexually aware kids, kids with troubles, often family troubles, kids who crave affection and attention and explore liaisons in search of something that’s missing in their lives. The sad thing about the AGs’ ranting about Myspace pedophiles is that it distracts attention from the place where child endangerment could actually be addressed — with the children.

Myspace is described as having purged 90,000 registered sex offenders from its site. (Apparently there are 700,000 registered sex offenders nationally.) This has stirred up the controversy surrounding the recent report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, which documented that sexual predation, while a real problem, does not generally fit the pattern of an adult stranger pedophile vs. an innocent child. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut AG, who dismissed the ISTTF report when it was issued, blasted that the MySpace purge “provides compelling proof that social networking sites remain rife with sexual predators.”

For a more nuanced and candid discussion of the ISTTF report, watch the video of the presentation at the Berkman Center yesterday by danah boyd, John Palfrey, Dean Sacco, and Laura DeBonis, who worked on the report. The Q+A with a sympathetic child safety advocate is quite interesting. For whatever reason, American society wants to identify the child safety problem with the scary stuff that is shown on Dateline; it’s actually much closer to home.

How far is it fair to go to put the spotlight on those opposing you by making public information about them readily accessible? Supporters of gay marriange in California have taken public information — the addresses of those supporters of the gay marriage ban who gave more than $100 — and put it on an easy-to-access map. You can look at the map and see who in your neighborhood gave money to help get the ban passed. Or, who in my neighborhood.

The use of the Internet for public shaming — or is it intimidation? — is not new. The Nuremberg Files was the most troubling example of the genre — listing the addresses of doctors who performed abortions, and graying out their names if they were murdered. The site also listed where their children went to school.

The gay marriage advocates haven’t gone that far, but they have gone far enough to cause some real discomfort. The New York Times reports that to fight back, an attempt will be made to change the law so that the addresses of donors of as little as $100 are no longer public information.

Who has the better of the free speech argument here — those who feel intimidated, and hence feel their speech is being chilled; or those who just want to publish on the Web in a convenient form information that has long been considered public anyway?

I am quoted in Men’s Health magazine on how men can buff up their social networking profiles to become more successful at picking up women.

As Hal pointed out to me privately, this makes me an heir to the tradition of George Antheil, for reasons explained in Chapter 8 of Blown to Bits.

Bella English has a good piece in the Globe today about JuicyCampus, the gossip site for all manner of cruel and mean-spirited postings about college students. She’s got the story pretty much right — what JuicyCampus is doing is appalling and, under CDA section 230, legal. An interesting detail she notes is that two states’ Attorneys General are investigating JuicyCampus for not enforcing its own rules against fraud. In the aftermath of the Lori Drew conviction, such charges may not be over-reaching.

As the article notes, there are mechanisms for at least trying to identify who posts a message if it’s truly defamatory (which requires showing actual damage, not mere cruelty). It’s onerous to bring a libel charge (thanks to the First Amendment), but I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t been attempted — the article, at least, mentions the possibility but not any actual cases where it’s been done. (Though JuicyCampus has turned over IP addresses in other cases where violent crimes seemed to be in the offing.)

Since Obama’s victory, an interesting debate has been going on about whether he really tapped the collective energies of Internet users in a collaborative way, or whether the Internet that was just a tool he used to conduct a very effective but fundamentally top-down campaign. There was a conference at the Berkman Center to discuss this and related questions; Yochai Benkler is eloquent in this video taking exception to the way Marshall Ganz had described Obama’s use of the Internet as an organizing tool. Some succinct essays surrounding these issues appear on the Berkman Center site here.

There’s an interesting short article in the Takoma (WA) News Tribune today entitled “Is Obama’s Web-based political revolution real or an illusion?” (It came to my attention because my wife, Marlyn McGrath, was quoted on the subject of how long it takes to read a college application — a number the reporter thought relevant since Obama has received 300,000 online applications for jobs in his administration. Also quoted is Professor Lillian Lee of Cornell, a Harvard PhD who used to be a teaching assistant for me — Lillian notes that the popularity metric used by the change.gov site for allowing certain posts to move up in the list is actually not awfully democratic in practice.)

Obama is trying lots of things, and that’s great. He probably could have been elected without the Internet, though it surely did him no harm to have collected millions of cell phone numbers on the promise that you’d be texted in the middle of the night about his VP pick, and a free “Go! Go! Go! Obama!” ring tone. Figuring out what actually works will take longer.

In a development that bears a family resemblance to the deal Google cut with the book publishing industry, Myspace has reached an agreement with one big part of the entertainment industry. Its users will be allowed to continue posting video clips from the Colbert Report and other TV shows without anyone getting hassled with DMCA takedown demands.

When the user posts a video, third-party software will identify it automatically, and place a visual tag on the clip, at the bottom of the screen. Advertising will be posted and the viewer will be given the opportunity to buy the whole episode. The revenue from the advertising and episode purchases will be split up among Viacom, Myspace, and the company that makes the software that identifies the videos. Everybody makes a little money (except, of course, the people who are doing the posting and the people who are doing the viewing!).

This deal is narrow — it affects only MySpace and Viacom. Google’s deal is broader — it is a deal with the group that represents publishers and authors — but the court hasn’t approved it yet. And of course, it covers only Google, not anyone else who might like to create a book search service. Do these deals show the outline of a more encompassing, public solution to the problems with DMCA and the Internet?

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.