Wednesday, October 20, 2004

wendyg, my co-conspirator from the CFP2004 weblog: The empires strike back (10/15/04) -- decentralized sites, distributed law enforcement. (also here) "You have no sovereignty where we gather," wrote John Perry Barlow grandly in 1996, in protest against the Telecommunications Reform Act and its subsection, the Communications Indecency Act. Censorship and intellectual property laws, he wrote, "will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media." Maybe it's time to change that into, "Governments perceive the Internet as damage, and gang up on it." The story behind the week-long seizure of two hard drives, or servers, that hosted some 20 of the anarchist news collective Indymedia's 50 sites worldwide seems to be a case in point, although to be fair, no one knows yet exactly on which nation's head the dust will eventually settle. The facts of the case as far as they were known on Wednesday were pretty uncertain. The one thing that seemed clear to all concerned was that at least two, maybe three or four, nations were involved. The servers were hosted in London by the UK incorporated subsidiary of a Texas company and hosted sites from such diverse locations as the UK, Brazil, Poland, Ambazonia, and Western Massachusetts, as well as a streaming radio server. US law enforcement, acting under a request from a foreign government, applied to a US court to issue a subpoena, which was in turn presented to the London subsidiary, which pulled the servers. We say servers, but no one even really knows whether they were the tower boxes that spring to mind when you hear the word. They may simply be rack-mounted hard drives, and as one spokesman pointed out, they may not even have been removed. They could simply have been taken offline and the contents copied and transmitted electronically to…somewhere.  . . . . . . . Either way, one curious point in all this is that IndyMedia appeared far more decentralized than it was. . . . . But the fact is that Ross Anderson's Eternity Server aside, both data and people must have a physical location somewhere. And as long as governments can find out where that is, they will find ways to act, if they can. Gus Hosein, a Fellow in information systems at the LSE, says of the early fantasy that the Net would help us all escape government regulation, "I think that they were being legally ignorant. Since the early 1980s, US law says that if a company does business with the US it must respond to US lawful access regardless of where the world the data is and without regard to national law." 10:38:11 PM    comment []

Microsoft scales back Passport ambitions. Microsoft is recasting ambitions for its .Net Passport identification system, saying the service now will be limited to its own online offerings and those of close partners. Microsoft no longer sees Passport as a single sign-on system for the Web at large, a spokeswoman said. [InfoWorld: Top News] But, of course, the companion strategy to Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, has long been Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. This is just a variant way to leverage ownership of the OS. 10:28:02 PM    comment []

Charles Ives: Today's Birthday Boy. Its exactly 130 years since Charles Ives was born, and his music sounds just as fresh and newly minted as if he had composed it yesterday. Make a $100 pledge today and the Leon Fleisher CD Two Hands is our gift to you. [WNYC New York Public Radio] 4:11:40 PM    comment []

the 10 Major Trends Emerging in the Internet's First Decade of Public Use [Center for the Digital Future]. the 10 Major Trends Emerging in the Internet's First Decade of Public Use [Center for the Digital Future] (via Clippings.reblog) "Year Four of the Digital Future Project (formerly the UCLA Internet Report) provides a broad year-to-year exploration of the influence of the Internet on Americans. The project examines the behavior and views of a national sample of 2,000 Internet users and non-users, as well as comparisons between new users (less than one year of experience) and very experienced users (in Year Four, seven or more years of experience)." [unmediated] 4:11:17 PM    comment []

JOURNALISTS NOT SATISFIED WITH THEIR PERFORMANCE IN THE CAMPAIGN With Election Day just two weeks away, there are signs that journalists themselves are not happy with campaign coverage. A new survey of members of a national journalism organization finds that nearly three quarters of journalists give the press a C, D or F grade for its campaign coverage so far. In the survey, conducted by the Committee of Concerned Journalists of its members, only 3% give the press an A grade, while another 27% give the news media a B. At the same time, 42% give the coverage a C and 27% say D or F. What are the particular concerns these journalists have? By large majorities they feel the news media has become sidetracked by trivial issues, has been too reactive and has focused too much on the inside baseball that doesn't really matter to voters, according to the survey. They give particularly low grades to television, be it local, cable or network, and much higher grades to newspapers and online coverage. [SOURCE: Journalism.org] (thanks, Kevin!) 10:44:33 AM    comment []

Jon Stewart 'Crossfire' Feud Ignites Net Frenzy. When comedian Jon Stewart blasted the hosts of CNN's "Crossfire" on the cable TV program, he ignited a frenzy of online activity. By By CNET News.com. [The New York Times > Technology] Backstory and backstory, along with more backstory, further backstory, this additional backstory, this supplementary backstory, and this more-than-auxiliary backstory. 6:54:56 AM    comment []

Top Colleges, Rated by Those Who Chose Them. A group of economists has compiled a new college ratings system that is based on where America's best and brightest decide to go to school. By By ERIC DASH. [The New York Times > Education] "What you are getting in all these other systems is sort of an expert analysis of polling data," said Andrew Metrick, one of the study's four authors and a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "This provides a market-based view." Instead of measuring statistics like admissions rates or having college administrators rate their peers, the researchers analyzed the college choices of more than 3,200 high-achieving high school seniors from the class of 2000. By asking those students where they enrolled when they were accepted by several different colleges, the economists compiled a won-loss record for each college as if it was a competitor in a chess tournament. The researchers then generated a preference ranking for more than 100 colleges, employing the same scoring system used for chess masters.  . . . "If one is a lemming, this would be a great way of picking a college," said Burke Rogers, a veteran college counselor at St. George's, a private boarding school in Newport, R.I. The study, he added, seemed to encourage conformist thinking and the myth of a best college, not a best-fitting one, that high school guidance counselors work hard to dispel. The researchers conceded that sometimes student preferences might not accurately value an individual college. "If students are all wrong, then the ranking is reflecting students' wrongheaded ideas," Ms. Hoxby said. But by and large, the authors said, their ranking gives students and colleges useful information.  . . . The degree of Harvard's dominance was staggering. From their analysis, the researchers predict that a student who gets into both Harvard and Princeton is three times as likely to go to Harvard. That same student, on average, is more than eight times as likely to prefer Harvard to Brown, which ranked No. 7 on the list. M.I.T. and Cal Tech, the researchers said, have Harvard-like appeal but mainly among engineers and scientists; they added that the same holds true for Brigham Young University, which has strong Mormon ties, among Utah residents.  . . . But even if they do have a better method, Bruce Poch, the dean of admissions at Pomona College, asks, "What does this tell kids?" "This is where someone's announcements of preferences poisons the well of independent thinking," he continued. "It's like buying a car. Do you buy a Toyota because it is the No. 1 selling car? It doesn't mean it is a match for you."   The Preference Ranking of U.S. Colleges and Universities (ssrn.com (abstract only -- this might download, though)) 6:49:04 AM    comment []

Digital Agenda: Homeland security--A global assault on anonymity. Cutting-edge data mining and other intelligence tools could redefine privacy as we know it. A News.com special report. [CNET News.com] 6:43:03 AM    comment []

Pharms Take Root in South Africa. Researchers have taken to genetically modifying plants to produce medicine for the developing world, but not everyone is keen on the idea. Megan Lindow reports from Cape Town, South Africa. [Wired News] 6:38:33 AM    comment []