Category Archives: Current Affairs

The Internet Freeway

Leave it to Larry Lessig to sum up the net neutrality discussion:

Now Congress faces a legislative decision. Will we reinstate net neutrality and keep the Internet free? Or will we let it die at the hands of network owners itching to become content gatekeepers? The implications of permanently losing network neutrality could not be more serious. The current legislation, backed by companies such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, would allow the firms to create different tiers of online service. They would be able to sell access to the express lane to deep-pocketed corporations and relegate everyone else to the digital equivalent of a winding dirt road. Worse still, these gatekeepers would determine who gets premium treatment and who doesn’t.

No Tolls on The Internet, By Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney, Washington Post, Thursday, June 8, 2006; Page A23

It’s that last sentence that is the real rub. We’ve always had different speed connections to the Internet. What could happen now is that telcos could decide who gets which speed and which quality of service based on who they are and what content they are providing, not just on whether they can pay the price.

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EFF v. AT&T

EFF is making some progress in their lawsuit against AT&T for handing over logs to NSA for wiretapping:

AT&T has set up a secret, secure room for the NSA in at least one of the company’s facilities — a room into which AT&T has been diverting its customers’ emails and other Internet communications in bulk — according to evidence in key documents partially unsealed today in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF’s) class-action lawsuit against the telecom giant.

"Now the public can see firsthand the testimony of Mark Klein, a former AT&T employee who was brave enough to step forward and provide evidence of the company’s illegal collaboration with the NSA," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "Today we have released some of the evidence supporting our allegation that AT&T has given the NSA direct access to its fiber-optic network, such that the NSA can read the email of anyone and everyone it chooses — all without a warrant or any court supervision, and in clear violation of the law."

The Klein declaration and EFF’s motion for a preliminary injunction against AT&T’s ongoing illegal surveillance were filed under seal last month. But last week, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker instructed AT&T to work with EFF to narrowly redact the documents and make them available to the public.

Key Portions of Critical Documents Unsealed in AT&T Surveillance Case Technician Describes Secret NSA Room at AT&T Facility, Rebecca Jeschke, EFF, May 25, 2006

For some reason I thought "we" were better than "them" because we had the rule of law. And that without the rule of law it’s hard to have contracts and capitalism, so this sort of law breaking could be considered a risk to business.

-jsq

PS: Seen on  Fergie’s Tech Blog.

Good Intentions Still Need Monitoring

Sometimes it does seem that governments can be the biggest security threat:
The bill aims to speed up the process by which redundant laws are changed and allows them to be amended on ministers’ orders, without parliamentary scrutiny.

The Commons Regulatory Reform Committee said it was “the most constitutionally significant bill” for some years.

“[The bill] provides ministers with a wide and general power that could be used to repeal amend or replace almost any primary legislation”
Andrew Miller MP

It is pressing for the power to monitor all laws amended by ministers, so it can veto any it decides need further parliamentary intervention.

The committee also wants certain laws protected from the changes.

Red tape law ‘must not be abused’ BBC, 6 February 2006

In the U.S. we supposedly have such protections, written into the Constitution and its amendments. Continue reading →

Liberty vs. Tyrrany

Bruce Schneier provides a basic answer to a very common question:

The most common retort against privacy advocates — by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures — is this line: "If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"

The Eternal Value of Privacy By Bruce Schneier, 02:00 AM May, 18, 2006 Wired

After rehearsing a few true yet not deep enough comebacks that people sometimes use, he gets to the heart of the matter:

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you’ll find something to arrest — or just blackmail — with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies — whoever they happen to be at the time.

Not to mention what about when you sometimes speed at night on that empty road, or forget to fasten your seatbelt, or wrote something on the net uncomplimentary about a political candidate that your boss favors, or….

How do you know you haven’t done anything wrong, in somebody’s eyes?

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An Iranian Import from the U.S.

In a story about how the president of Iran couldn’t take a joke and cracked down on SMS:
The clampdown is in line with the authorities’ uncompromising stance on the internet and bloggers. Wary of modern communications as a means of spreading political dissent, Iran is second only to China in the number of websites it filters – using technology made in America.

Heard the one about the president? Robert Tait in Tehran, ndFriday April 14, 2006, The Guardian

I wonder if it’s the same U.S. technology China is using?

-jsq

End of the Blockbuster Era

Previously I’ve mentioned that it’s pointless to http://riskman.typepad.com/perilocity/2006/02/restoration_blo.html game the political system to preserve Hollywood’s profits, when they’re partly based on blockbusters that may go the way of Restoration spectactulars. It turned out George Lucas also thinks the era of blockbusters is over. Maybe Lucas saw the data Chris Anderson has been posting on his blog, and which he summarizes as:
Meanwhile, the fraction of total box office that comes from the blockbusters (top 25 films) has been steadily falling, even as the cost of making those films (expressed here as a percentage of total box office revenue) has been rising:
Maybe Hollywood should get a new business model and stop risking their entire business on a model that no longer works; that would certainly be less risky for the rest of us than forcing us to use crippled computers just for Hollywood’s advantage.

-jsq

Agricultural Monoculture

Frequently I mention that monoculture is not good in computing or networks, using an analogy to monoculture agriculture. I forget to mention that monoculture is still bad in agriculture, and agriculture has gotten even less diverse in recent years. Plus it has developed a security by obscurity mentality:

They allowed me to see everything but the knocker who actually administers the fatal blow. It’s become more difficult since Sept. 11. The food industry has a new argument, which is partly sincere. They’ve recognized that with such a centralized food supply, somebody dropping a vial of bacterium into a vat of hamburger could reach tens of thousands of people. But it has also become an excuse to keep the prying eyes of journalists away from how our food is made, which is unfortunate because we would be better off if we had more transparency in our food system. If there was a right of access to meat slaughterhouses, they wouldn’t be slaughtering 400 beefs an hour, allowing manure to be smeared on carcasses, and going so fast that live animals get cut open. The best we could do for the safety of our food supply, for the beauty of our landscape and for the quality of our water would be to decentralize meat and agriculture.

We are what we eat: Interview with The Omnivore’s Dilemma" author Michael Pollan, by Ira Boudway, Salon, 8 April 2006.

The article goes on to detail how ignorance about the food supply ("I mean, some people would be shocked to learn that you can’t get a steak without killing a cow.") is widespread among everybody from the end-consumer to members of Congress.

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Reed Was Right

Here’s some new evidence that David P. Reed was right:

While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information.

New Trends In Online Traffic, Visits to Sites for Blogging, Local Information and Social Networks Drive Web Growth, By Leslie Walker, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, April 4, 2006; Page D01

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The News in Multiplex

For a while now I’ve been using some relatively new sites that rank links according to their users’ preferences, such as

With these plus more traditional news sources, I never bother watching television news because when I do it seems like every story I already saw online several days before, often in several versions from several points of view (political, geographical, technical, etc.). Besides, TV gives you the news in brief, while the net gives you the news in multiplex.

Kevin Kelly has come up with a name for these things: Consensus Web Filters.

Meanwhile, Joshua Micah Marshall has come up with some datapoints or at least anecdotes about something that has bothered me about such sites for a while. Is the blogosphere derivative of the Mainstream Media (MSM), in that it just points at content that traditional editors and reporters produce, or does it produce significant content on its own?

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Saudi Life Online

The Internet can still be a means for change:
Ebtihal Mubarak is one of several talented female reporters and editors on the Arab News staff. That in itself is a change from my days at the paper more than a decade ago. In recent years the News has doubled its full-time Saudi female staff and put more female reporters out in the field. Mubarak reports on the small but growing movement for greater political and social rights for Saudis. Persecution by extremists is a common theme in her work. As she surfed Saudi Internet forums one day last fall, she came across a posting describing an attack on a liberal journalist in the northern city of Hail. “A journalist’s car had been attacked while he was sleeping,” she said. “A note on his car read: ‘This time it’s your car, next time it will be you.’”

Young and Restless Saudi Arabia’s baby boomers, born after the 1973 oil embargo, are redefining the kingdom’s relationship with the modern world, By Afshin Molavi, Photographs by Kate Brooks, Smithsonian Magazine, April 2006

Being a journalist herself, Mubarak didn’t stop with web surfing. Continue reading →