Monday, April 24, 2006

Quote of Note: Joshua Micah Marshall "Think of [the Internet] like Cable TV. Anybody can start a cable channel. But if you can't get on TimeWarner Cable here in Manhattan, for me you might as well not even exist. The Internet could work like that. It could have been that way. And it could still become that way. That's what this new debate is about. Find out more about it. And see what you can do to make your voice heard." Joshua Micah Marshall in TalkingPointsMemo today. Link  Technorati Tags: Cableco , Cellcos , F2C , Internet , NetworkNeutrality , Telco [isen.blog] 8:34:54 PM    comment []

Microsoft Vista's Endless Security Warnings. Paul Thurrott has posted an excellent essay on the problems with Windows Vista. Most interesting to me is how they implement UAP (User Account Protection) . . . . The problem with lots of warning dialog boxes is that they don't provide security. Users stop reading them. They think of them as annoyances, as an extra click required to get a feature to work. Clicking through gets embedded into muscle memory, and when it actually matters the user won't even realize it. Jeff Atwood says the same thing . . . . So does Rick Strahl . . . . These dialog boxes are not security for the user, they're CYA security from the user. When some piece of malware trashes your system, Microsoft can say: "You gave the program permission to do that; it's not our fault." Warning dialog boxes are only effective if the user has the ability to make intelligent decisions about the warnings. If the user cannot do that, they're just annoyances. And they're annoyances that don't improve security. [Schneier on Security] 8:34:14 PM    comment []

Google in China: Shades of good and evil. Clive Thompson's excellent New York Times magazine piece on Google and China plays out variations on Google's famous "Don't be evil" principle inspired by the company's new accommodation with Chinese censorship. Censorship is surely a form of evil; but is it all right to compromise a little bit with said evil if one is doing so on behalf of a greater good? Google's famous mission statement is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"; is it okay to fulfill a lot of that mission by betraying a little of it? These themes, Thompson rightly points out, echo the arguments in the 1980s between the anti-apartheid movement, which argued for boycott, and the "constructive engagement" position of companies that said they were able to do good by doing business in South Africa. But today's U.S. economy is far more deeply entangled with China than 1980s America was with South Africa. Few today would argue for an economic boycott of China; where would we get our goods? It's a historical irony that the record national debt run up by today's conservative Republican hegemony -- heirs to the red-baiters of yore -- can only be underwritten by the heirs of Mao in the People's Republic of China. So boycott is off the table; maybe engagement is better than nothing. I'm not wholly convinced, and I don't think Thompson is, either. But his piece lays out the nuances in a useful and thought-provoking way. Most interesting, to me, is this observation about Chinese blogger Zhao Jing:   The Internet brought Zhao a certain amount of political influence, yet he seemed less excited about the way his blog might transform the government and more excited about the way it had transformed his sense of himself. Several young Chinese told me the same thing. If the Internet is bringing a revolution to China, it is experienced mostly as one of self-actualization: empowerment in a thousand tiny, everyday ways. I think that observation applies not only in China, but everywhere, and certainly here, in the U.S., where so many observers in the media continue to misunderstand the importance of blogging. Most journalists with successful careers have completely internalized the sort of "empowerment" Zhao experienced when he started blogging. Not only do they take it for granted, they take it as a professional right, and they have a hard time understanding what it might mean for non-journalists to experience. They simply can't accept that a blogger's musings might have significance for him/herself, and reach an audience of 12, or 120, and never engage a vast audience, and that might still feel like a success. A China full of people -- not all billion, maybe only hundreds or tens of millions, but lots, anyway -- experiencing that sense of "self-actualization" might be a nation that grew less and less satisfied with a censoring regime and increasingly interested in changing it. That doesn't get Google off the hook, exactly, since Google isn't facilitating self-publishing in China -- the Google-owned Blogger doesn't operate inside China the way MSN Spaces does. But it's another sign that absolutist, black-and-white rhetoric is too limited for this arena. Google might well be betraying its "Don't be evil" slogan; but the slogan might also be too simple-minded for the complexities of the global stage. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 8:34:09 PM    comment []

Colorado Institute of Technology Folds After 6 Years, by Karin Fischer, CHE (subscription required). The Colorado Institute of Technology, founded just six years ago with the ambition of rivaling powerhouses like Caltech and MIT, will close its doors at the end of this month, a casualty of a diminished high-tech job market. The institute, which relied on public support and private donations, did not have the funds to continue its programs through the end of this year, said J. Bruce Donaldson, the institute's interim president and chief executive officer. "It was apparent that ongoing support was not going to be sufficient to see the organization through," Mr. Donaldson said on Friday. "We were going to exhaust our cash." The institute's Board of Trustees voted for closure in March and announced its decision on the institute's Web site. . . . With the implosion of the dot-coms, the institute's traditional sources of private support dried up, forcing officials to look for new sponsors, Mr. Donaldson said. Its focus also shifted to include job training, homeland security, and public policy. More than 10,000 students have completed courses and programs underwritten by the institute. 7:26:18 AM    comment []