Thursday, February 09, 2006

Essay: "Welcome to the Internet. Community participation is both its strongest and weakest point. And those who say I'm a consistent supporter of the medium miss that I am as frequently its victim." [Scripting News] 8:15:33 PM    comment []

Two Benton Headlines: A PLUG FOR THE UNPLUGGED $100 LAPTOP COMPUTER FOR DEVELOPING NATIONS [SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Prof Hal R. Varian] [Commentary] How could $100 laptops be used to fuel local economies in developing countries? A laptop could serve as a cash register, an ATM machine, a way to record and preserve contracts and other legal documents, and it can help people become literate. DEAR VIEWER, PICK YOUR NEWS. YOURS TRULY, CBS [SOURCE: The Christian Science Monitor, AUTHOR: Jim Sullivan] In another indicator of how far TV news has traveled from the days of Walter Cronkite, CBS Friday night unveils "You Choose, Steve Hartman Reports" on the "CBS Evening News with Bob Schieffer.'' Last Friday, viewers were given three story choices: Do-It-Yourself Funerals, The Jerk-o-Meter, and The Smallest Town in America. Viewers had until Monday at 2 p.m. to vote; the winner will air Friday night. (They'll get three more stories to vote on during the broadcast.) 11:05:05 AM    comment []

Author speaks on war-torn Bosnia. Webster students and faculty heard excerpts from author Aleksandar Hemon's critically acclaimed novel "Nowhere Man" Feb. 2, as part of Webster's Visiting Writers Series. [The Journal] 7:18:49 AM    comment []

Reclusive Sly Stone surprises Grammys. sporting a huge mohawk, we wandered off after a couple minutes   [Waxy.org Links] 7:08:31 AM    comment []

Total Information Awareness 2.0. The Christian Science Monitor has the details on what looks to be the son of the much-feared Total Information Awareness program ... [Pajamas Media] 7:08:05 AM    comment []

Genie out of the bottle in China. This IHT article looks at the Chinese governments attempts to censor the Internet,by "closing down blogger sites,filtering Web sites and e-mails alike for banned words,and even tightening controls on short messages sent by mobile phone".It says that "last year,China ranked 159th out of 167 countries in a survey of press freedom,according to Reporters Without Borders,the Paris-based international rights group.Accurately enough,rankings like this show China to be a country with a striking lack of freedom.What they fail to reflect is the rapid change afoot here, more and more of which is escaping the government's control.A case in point is the Chinese government's recent effort to rein in bloggers who tread too often into sensitive territory,criticizing state policy or detailing official corruption.In December,the government ordered Microsoft,whose MSN service hosts blogs here,to shut down the site of Michael Anti,one of the most popular bloggers in China.Although Anti,who is also an employee of The New York Times's Beijing bureau,had his site closed,any Chinese Web surfer can still find scores of other online commentators who are equally provocative, and more are coming online all the time.Microsoft alone hosts an estimated 3.3 million blogs in China.Add to that the 10 million or so other blogs hosted by other Internet service providers,and one gets a flavor for just how much of a censor's nightmare China has become.What is more, not a single blog existed in the country a little more than three years ago, and thousands upon thousands are being born every day,some by people who have been banned and merely change their name or switch providers.New technologies,like pod casts,and others that are being invented and popularized here all the time are making things even harder to control."The Internet is open technology,based on packet switching and open systems,and it is totally different from traditional media,like radio or TV or newspapers,"said Guo Liang,an Internet expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences."At first, people might have thought it would be as easy to control as traditional media,but now they realize that's not the case.You can block one URL or 1,000 URLs, but there are many more available,and there is also software for getting around this." Letter from Shanghai:Genie of free speech dodges China's censors [Smart Mobs] 7:07:52 AM    comment []

How Yahoo/AOL's email tax will hurt free speech. AOL/Yahoo's plan to tax email will be a disaster for free speech. Last week I blogged about AOL and Yahoo's plan to employ Goodmail's email-taxing service, which charges mail-senders a quarter of a cent every time they want to send guaranteed email to their customers. EFF's legal director Cindy Cohn, a legendary free-speech litigator (Cindy argued the Bernstein case that legalized crypto in America) has written a great essay for EFF's Deep Links about the reasons that this will fail to solve spam, and punish free speech: Email being basically free isn't a bug. It's a feature that has driven the digital revolution. It allows groups to scale up from a dozen friends to a hundred people who love knitting to half-a-million concerned citizens without a major bankroll. Email readers and senders will both lose, because the incentives for Yahoo, AOL, and Goodmail are all wrong. Their service is only valuable if it "saves" you from their spam filters. In turn, they have an incentive to treat more of your email as spam, and thereby "encouraging" people to sign up. Even email senders who just want to reach Dad@aol.com may eventually be in trouble. Once a pay-to-speak system like this gets going, it will be increasing difficult for people who don't pay to get their mail through. The system has no way to distinguish between ordinary mail and bulk mail, spam and non-spam, personal and commercial mail. It just gives preference to people who pay. Link [Boing Boing] 7:07:51 AM    comment []

Iraq Utilities Are Falling Short of Prewar Performance [New York Times: International News] 7:07:43 AM    comment []

Another in the series of posts in which Dave P discusses doing what you love, what you're good at, and what is needed, with a review of the consequences of lacking any one of the three and personal reflections on his own journey so far: Dave Pursues His Passion. [How to Save the World] 7:07:32 AM    comment []

Panel Explores Standard Tests for Colleges. The panel is examining whether the tests would prove that students are learning and allow easier comparisons on quality. By KAREN W. ARENSON. [NYT > Education] 7:07:22 AM    comment []

Advanced Placement: Threat or Menace?. Kevin Drum reports receiving an email from a professor of physics denouncing the Advanced Placement test in Physics: It is the very apotheosis of "a mile wide and an inch deep." They cover everything in the mighty Giancoli tome that sits unread on my bookshelf, all 1500 pages of it. They have seen not only Newtonian mechanics but also optics, sound, electromagnetic theory, Maxwell's equations, special relativity, quantum mechanics and even AC circuits. They don't understand any of it, but they've seen it all. They come into my class thinking, by and large, that objects move due to the force of their motion and cease moving when that force has all been used up; that tables do not prevent things from falling by exerting a force but by simply being in the way, blocking the natural motion; that when a tossed coin reaches the top of its flight, the force of gravity and the force of its motion are balanced; that opposite charges are attracted magnetically; and I could rant on for a while. Kevin asks: Anyway, this makes me curious. I have lots of readers who teach at the high school and college level and I'm wondering what they think about this. Are AP tests (and AP classes) all they're cracked up to be? Or are there lots of you who grit your teeth but secretly agree with my correspondent? And is this just a physics thing, or do history and lit teachers have the same complaint? The comments are remarkably civil for Calpundit Monthly, but I'm going to respond here anyway (after the cut). [Uncertain Principles] 7:07:11 AM    comment []

Some Observations on the Philosophy Job Market... (Leiter). ...from a young philosopher serving on his first search committee.  His post has comments open, so it might be interesting to hear whether others concur with his remarks.  (A lot [not all] of what he says strikes me as right on the money.) [Leiter Reports: A Group Blog (Jan. 23-May 31 2006)] 7:06:17 AM    comment []

Fascinating solution to the hard problem of naming stuff online. Marc Steigler's fascinating new paper "An Introduction to Petname Systems" tries to explain a system for making secure, memorable, and global identifiers for use on the Internet. Our present inability to do this has led to phishing, abusive trademark practices on domain names, censorship, and the centralization of power and vulnerability for the world's network infrastructure. Steilger's concept of "petnames" is simple, powerful and compelling: Zooko's Triangle [Zooko] argues that names cannot be global, secure, and memorable, all at the same time. Domain names are an example: they are global, and memorable, but as the rapid rise of phishing demonstrates, they are not secure. Though no single name can have all three properties, the petname system does indeed embody all three properties. Informal experiments with petname-like systems suggest that petnames can be both intuitive and effective. Experimental implementations already exist for simple extensions to existing browsers that could alleviate (possibly dramatically) the problems with phishing. As phishers gain sophistication, it seems compelling to experiment with petname systems as part of the solution. Link (via Schneier) [Boing Boing] 7:06:07 AM    comment []

So, looks like the administration's PR campaign is working: Iran greatest threat, most Americans think. According to a new Pew Center for the People and the Press poll. As recently as October, Iraq, China, and North Korea ranked as the most threatening countries. [Pajamas Media] 7:05:43 AM    comment []

Data transfer via snail is faster than ADSL and pigeons. KinnerNet, co-founded by former ICQ chairman Yossi Vardi, is an Israeli geek camp-out modeled after Tim O'Reilly's amazing Foo Camp. At the recent KinnerNet 2005, Vardi and his pals Shimon Schocken and Ami Ben-Basat demonstrated that snails can be faster at data delivery than both ADSL and pigeons, a method tested last year. From the description on Ami's blog (photo by Herbert Bishko): The system called SNAP (SNAil-based data transfer Protocol), uses biological carriers, and, for the first time, taking advantages of the unique merits of the wheel for data transfer... System architecture: the system is constructed of a back end - a carriage, Ben-Hur movie style, which is made of a yoke made of light Balsa, and outfitted with two huge wheels - 2 DVD wheels, 4.7 Giga each. The front end, to which the carriage is harnessed consist of a Giant snail (Achatina fulica), known also as Giant African Snail (Africans are known as the world fastest runners ). These giant snail are of the GastroPod family (G-pod. We will reserve this name for transfer of music, and the name: G-mail for transfer of emails by snails SMTP –snail mobile transfer protocol ) Packets transport: Data is transported in 2 packets in parallel, 4.7 Giga each packet. Results: Calculations that were conducted after the experiment, explicitly proved that in spite of the relatively, very slow, speed of the biological carriers, the Snap system succeeded in transferring data faster than any other conventional technologies, existing today. Link(Thanks, Paul Saffo!) [Boing Boing] 7:05:31 AM    comment []