Category Archives: Digital reflections

NY Times on a self-made child pornographer

Incredible reporting in Kurt Eichenwald’s story about a boy who started his own live porn site on the web, with excellent side stories on the analysis of the customers’ credit cards, child pornography as a growing business, how the story came to be (including what can only be described as a rescue operation for the protagonist), and how it was documented.

Although the story is rather simple, and nobody should be surprised that this goes on, I was very impressed by this reportage – not only did the reporter take considerable personal risk, but The NY Times had to thread very carefully to avoid doing anything untoward.

The story poses problems for a number of online companies, such as Amazon.com (who enable transactions through their online wishlists) and creditcard handlers such as Neova.net. Messages boards and webcam manufacturers could also get scrutinized – I suppose we will see all kinds of calls for filtering software and identification of individuals before they sign up for common electronic commerce sites.

I like the fact that the articles don’t discuss how this traffic should be stopped, and mercifully does not blame the technology for child pornography. They let the story speak for itself – for instance, the journalist documents how vital the credit card operation is to a porn site, which shuts down within hours of losing its credit card agreement.

Once again, technology is neutral in itself, but not in its uses. We want wish lists at Amazon, we want easy payment through Paypal, we want eBay as a channel to market for our few transactions. When it becomes easy to transmit content and set up a payment structure, it becomes easier to satisfy all kinds of demands – also the unsavory ones. Somehow we as a society need to figure this one – an operational way to stop illegal online activity – out without discarding the baby with the bathwater. I for one don’t know how, though I suspect it would involve using normative rather than instrumental initiatives – for instance, exposing the customers, making a trip to a child porn website as dangerous as pursuing that kind of activity would be in the physical world.

Those who help themselves….

Message from a Concours colleague who works from home (name withheld to protect him from the telco union…):

FYI – I’m back online. My connection is precarious, at best, but that’s because I rigged it myself. I talked to BellSouth twice, and they said that they may not be able to fix it until the 19th of December, which seemed unfathomable to me. After a little investigation, it appears that a truck pulled through the wire in my alley, yanking the connection out of the box attached to the house. I managed to untangle the wire from a tree and then used nail clippers (guess it helped to watch so much MacGyver when I was a kid) to strip the wires so I could re-connect. Anyhow, I’m up and running. Hope BellSouth won’t mind my meddling. 

Nail clippers. Good for him – if he had had fiber to the home, he would have to reach for the vanity mirror…

YABHTU

Eric Mack is writing about how the term he coined, YABHTU (Yet Another Blissfully Happy Tablet User)  becoming a term (a YANTUTAO – Yet Another Nerdy Term Unknown To Any Others – I suppose.) His commenters, and the general market direction, despite the Scobleizer’s hard work, seems to not have taken Tablets to their heart, though.

I for one am a not infrequent Tablet user (not sure if the blissfully happy label would stick, though.) I use my Toshiba tablet both for making quick pen drawings when verbal description doesn’t work and where doing a proper vector drawing just isn’t worth the bother. I use it for presentations, to draw ink circles and lines on Powerpoint slides and to make drawings in lieu of a proper whiteboard. And I use it to take notes in situations when typing wouldn’t be appropriate (as when I was listening to a talk by Elie Wiesel last week). The Tablet feature is a very useful tool, but not something I use every day. It adds a very much appreciated layer of functionality.

For a while I was irritated that tableting didn’t integrate well into many programs, but since I don’t use the text recognition program anyway and I write much slower long-hand than I touch-type, the tablet is the thing. I think Tablet functionality is destined to become a niche functionality, offered on high-end PCs. It might disappear altogether, though, in which case I would have to get a Wacom tablet board, since direct on-screen drawing is hard to retrofit on a laptop.

I do hope Microsoft and the laptop vendors have some staying power on this one. I like this feature, and it would be sad to see such an enabler of effortless expression disappear.

The flat and the unflattened

image Friedman, T. L. (2005). The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century . New York, Farrar, Strauss Giroux. (link is updated to version 3.0)

I have long used chapters from Tom Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree in my classes to explain the impact of information technology and globalized capital markets on the world economy. Friedman’s ability to find entertaining and highly relevant examples, and his gift for creative labels (in that book he coined two: The electronic herd to denote the legions of day-traders and other small traders who represent the volatile private capital countries now must attract, rather than the much more stable large bank loans of yore; and the golden straight-jacket, how politicians are forced to refrain from cronyism, populism and personal enrichment in order to attract and maintain the good will of the electronic herd. In Lexus, Friedman showed how politicians are becoming CEOs of their countries, managing them to compete in a global economy that cares less about color and location than education and infrastructure. I was eagerly looking forward to his next book on globalization, and, to judge from the response, so has many others.

That being said, my feelings are mixed on this one. Don’t misunderstand me – everyone, from politicians to business leaders to students – should read this book, but perhaps less for the first 10 chapters, where Friedman describes how the world is going “flat” (that is, small and interconnected) than for the latter part of the book, starting with chapter 11, “The Unflat World”, where he dives into the difficulties of globalization and the dangers of holding it up. While the first 10 chapters are interesting because Friedman writes extremely lively and documents relevant, if well known cases with clarity and wit, it is in the latter part of the book, where Friedman shows why he is the New York Times leading foreign affairs journalist and not their technology or business writer. In that part, the book starts to shine and really deserve the accolades heaped on it.

His key message is very similar to the closing passages of Landes’ The Wealth and Poverty of Nations , (indeed, the whole book can be taken as a popularization of Landes with more imminent examples, with a an seasoning of Theodore Dalrymple and Ernst Luttwak, but writen up more in the style of BusinessWeek than The Economist. If that is what it takes to get people to read about and understand globalization, I’m all for it.

That being said, the weakest chapter of the book is the one about business – aside from the brilliant example of Aramex, a Jordanian rapid delivery company, most of the advice there is trite to business researchers and, I suspect, not exactly news to the common reader. Friedman’s saving grace is that he can and does travel, has an incredibly knack not only for picking the relevant examples (most of the companies mentioned, such as UPS, eBay, Wal-Mart, are overused in many other contexts but appear fresh here) but for writing them up in a style that makes them interesting. The best example by far is Dell Computer, where he simply traces (or, rather, gets Dell to trace for him) in minute but fascinating detail how the computer he wrote most of the book on came to be – showing that if China and Taiwan cannot agree politically, they are pretty good at supplying parts and know-how to each other and to the world.

Friedman has a great gift for the poignant expression (On the need to not shut the world out for fear of terrorism: “Leave the cave-dwelling to Osama.”) but sometimes veers over towards the saccarine (On the India-Pakistan sabre rattling in 2002 and how big companies lobbied to get India to stand down: “The [India-Pakistani 2000] cease-fire was brought to us not by General Powell but by General Electric. We bring good things to life.”)

His suggestion that the United States embark on a “man on the moon” project aimed at making the country energy-independent in ten years is nothing short of brilliant – it addresses a serious problem, is doable, would further research towards a great goal, and help the American and the world economy no end. And it would lessen the world’s dependence on oil and thereby reduce the danger of future fallouts over access to energy. Go for it. It’s a no-brainer.

Friedman also answers his critics, cheerfully admitting that he is a technological determinist – “guilty as charged” – but not a historical one. And his analysis of how the anti-globalization movement – which he thinks is extremely important  – has been shanghaied by anti-Americanism and geriatric leftist ideology is both cooly rational but also heartfelt: Friedman is honest and world-wise enough to know that globalization, to be a beneficial evolution, needs a fact-based and rational opposition – focused on how we globalize rather than whether we are. Too many critics of globalization see it in terms of conspiracy theories – it is an evolution enabled by freedom of information, capital and to a certain extent people, and attempts to put the djinnie back in the bottle are not likely to be successful, to put it mildly. (Incidentally, Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which I am halfway through at the moment, provides a much better foundation for this opposition than Naomi Klein’s populistic but theoretically incoherent No Logo.) As Friedman says it: “What the world doesn’t need is the anti-globalization movement to go away. We just need it to grow up. […] You don’t help the world’s poor by dressing up in a turtle outfit and throwing a stone through a McDonald’s window. You help them by getting them the tools and instutions to help themselves. […] Just ask any Indian villager.”

His best writing – and underlying anger – comes out when writing about the people for whom globalization is not as much a negative influence as a distant mirage. They constitute half the world’s population, they will get restless unless as soon as they see what they can get, and if that isn’t good enough reason to start thinking about how to use globalization beneficially rather than try to stop it from happening, I don’t know what is.

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Possible error: On page 268, Friedman refers to a study of “leading universities” creating 4000 companies with 1.1m jobs and $232b in revenues, refers to the “Task Force on the future of American Innovation” On page 244, however, the same figures are repeated, but instead of “leading universities” it is MIT, and the reference is to a study by BankBoston.

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Notes after the jump, taken as I read through the book, offered here, caveat emptor, typos and all:

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Sony’s sinking DRM

Bruce Schneier sums up the Sony DRM saga in his Wired column, stressing the somewhat complacent role the virus protection companies have played.

Now, the next twist in the saga makes the whole thing even more bizarre: It seems that Sony got some of their code for the rootkit from open source, in particular from Jon Johansen ("DVD-Jon"). If this holds true, and Sony’s use is a violation of the open source license, then we can have the deeply ironic situation that DVD-Jon can sue a music company for intellectual property violation.

Talk about turning the tables…

Ultra-thin client computing for the masses

Ndiyo! classroom setup

The ultra-thin client from Newnham Research and Ndiyo! is a really good idea, the solution to classroom computing everywhere. With WiFi and a couple of USB ports, this could allow you to set up workstations everywhere. A stable setup with what technological complexity there is confined to the server.

Best of all: No annoying fan or noisy harddisk.

(via Nicholas Carr.) 

PRX – public radio exchange

Just back from a "networking event" at Harvard Startups with the rather ambitious title  "Entrepreneurship, Disruptive Technologies and the Future of Public Media: How Participatory Digital Culture is Driving New Business Models and Changing Media As We Know It." I had expected a serious presentation, and it turned out to be a stand-up-and-shout in a hallway.

But the speaker, Jake Shapiro, turned out to be interesting. He is Executive Director of the Public Radio Exchange, an exchange for public radio programming. Public Radio is, according to Bill Bryson, the most underfunded enterprise in the USA – but it is what I listen to whenever I can.  PRX is essentially a storage house for radio programs that are created by independent producers (often local radio stations) and is made available for other radio stations to access and broadcast. PRX handles licensing and provides an infrastructure for storage and distribution.

Jake turned out to have a background as a musician with an Internet bent – with the band Two Ton Shoe. He told of how he personally had experienced the Long Tail, when a record producer called them and wanted to license their music for sale – in Korea. They went there and were rock stars for a week, with sold-out concerts and radio performances.

Public broadcasting has an interesting role in the "dot-org" bubble, as Jake referred to the current enthusiasm for distibuted content creation and distribution. Freed from commercials and thin on money, it both needs to and can innovate with new models for distribution.

I’ll see, eventually – the network in the office I am writing this from apparently does not like RealAudio streams, so I wasn’t able to check out the radio programs. But it just may happen that I decide to produce a little broadcast myself one day, and this could be a great place to post it. Eventually.

Google towards the online office

Apparently, Eric Schmidt turned up at a Sun news event, and the yahoos that somehow have passed themselves off as business technology journalists interpret this as Google declaring war on Microsoft, teaming up to offer competing office soutions. I don’t know. To me, this sounds more like Scott McNealy trying to get on the Google bandwagon that anything else. I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating – and as someone who loves Google products (Google Desktop saves my bacon at least twice a week) and who has hauled his computing environment around with him since 1985 (with the bad back to show for it) I would like nothing better than to move everything online.

 But there are some things that need to be worked out first. Gmail is great, but I don’t use it because I have 4 gigs – not 2.8 – stacks of old mail around – and need the integration to my desktop environment. Openoffice is great, but still requires installation on a local processor. I would like that delivered online – and it seems that with interfaces such as Wikiwyg we might see that happening. But there is a tremendous amount of add-on software such as Endnote, Acrobat, templates and stuff that needs to 1) work and 2) have a migration process in place before we can talk about a replacement for Office.

In the meantime, I will use FolderShare to keep things synchronized, jump on anything that Google offers, trusting and hoping that they will keep on innovating rather than get embroiled in battles and wars they don’t need to fight.

And there is hope in a younger generation – my elder daughter uses her PalmPilot to take notes, storing them online PeanutButterWiki. The others (one grade school, one high school) use MSN and other online tools, and effortlessly move their schoolwork back and forth between school and home using an the school’s LMS. Word and Excel are to them just things that turn up – and having something similar online, especially something that could recognize you from client to client, would be a gradual change, not a wholesale replacement, for them. They just might be the overserved audience a disruptive technology like an online office needs.

UPDATE: Robert Scoble makes a useful distinction: He likes web apps for occasional work, and client apps when he needs to use them a lot. At this point in the technology evolution, he is onto something. I remember when WordPerfect came with a mainframe version. Wonderful standardization logic, cumbersome interface. The bridging, of course, lies in applets downloaded with anticipation of use, or based on prior usage patterns. Imagine logging into an airport lounge computer and it instantly beginning to download the functionality you use the most, gradually and seamlessly moving you from web to local interface….

Good enough computing

The Economist has an article on Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 computer for the poor. The machines’ specs are not bad at all.
I often teach the Dell case in my technology and strategy classes. One of the questions I ask students is “what could kill Dell” – and one of the answers might be that people start thinking computers are good enough, thus demanding fewer updates and less (mas) customization. To a certain extent we are already seeing that – when a student asks me nowadays what computer to buy, I will answer that, for study purposes, any laptop will do. I especially liked the mesh network piece – imagine what this will do for spreading news and learning.
But the OLPC technology can literally change how we think about computing, yet again. The price point is just ridiculous – at $100, I would like to sprinkle a few of these around the house, as email stations, library catalogue, inventory keepers, shopping list creators and TV program selector. With information stored centrally on a server and mesh networking to connect, information – one’s own or someone elses – could be literally at our fingertips.
Not to mention that you could stop worrying about losing the laptop when travelling – at that price, you could take one on trips and lose it (or give it away to someone needy) when no longer needed.

Rollable screen coming

Engadget shows a display that, with some extensions and better contrast just may be the newspaper of the future – or book for that matter.

Time for a Googleizer?

Everybody is speculating about Google at present, with Sidebar and especially GoogleTalk “pushing the competition towards interoperability” as Bob Cringely phrases it.
I like Google – how can you not, as an academic, like a company that has mission of “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.” This is something that a Ph.D. (and that is what they are hiring) can sign up for.
One interesting aspect of Google is that with $6.5b in the bank (assuming their recent drive succeeds) and an economic model with little marketing cost, relatively falling cost of production and a lot of developers who may not all be in it for the money, could actually do this, even if the ad market should tank.
The current stream of innovations from Google are partially driven off network externalities – you need a gmail account to do most things, your online behavior is monitored off that, the results are sold to advertisers, and as long as Google behaves (in the sense that they do not do things that are directly detrimental to their customers’ web experience or gross violations of privacy) they have a nice little business model. (Incidentally, their recent change to having redirecting links rather than letting you copy the clean link directly from the search results may be one instance where the company has sacrifized customer usefulness for improved tracking capability.) Each little piece further entangles us in their net, but since they are useful, we don’t mind and hardly notice.
Google seem to have understood that forcing vertical integration on their customers is counterproductive – hence most of their offerings allow you to swap out pieces for your personal preferences. For instance, you can install a plugin in your browser that gets rid of sponsored links in Google searches and the Adsense ads when you look at other pages. That is not a problem for Google, since very few people bother to install them. If Microsoft should install Google adblockers by default in the next update of Internet Explorer, on the other hand, it would be seen as the conspiracy of the Illuminati by the Slashdot crowd. Which it would be, in a sense. Unless you could turn off ads by other ad engines as well, including MSN.
Another interesting long-term challenge lies in the increased importance of the PageRank algorithm (and whatever permutations and adjustments since) as a driver of economic rent – at some point, Google’s dominant position as status ranker on the web might attract regulators and advocates for open source alike, demanding to know the details of what determines life and death in the Google search hierarchy. In a sense, Google might be Hoovered – their name so synonymous with an activity (net search) that they lose their ownership of their brand. If not in the literal sense, at least in terms of freedom to go whereever they want, also in time of economic need.
As for now, I am waiting to see Microsoft’s reaction to the danger that “Windows is slowly becoming a bunch of device drivers to run Google apps on,” to quote one enthusiast. It better lie in the realms of openness and innovation – or Microsoft could really become another IBM for a few years.
So far, Google does not seem to need a Googleizer the way Microsoft needed Scobleizer. But the demand is building, and a critical or at least unscripted voice from the inside and some statement of long-term direction would be nice now.
Assuming there is anyone in there, of course.

Lensless data projector

The NEC WT610 projector might be just the ticket for the home theatre – or perhaps meeting rooms, coffee areas and other places where heads and lights could get in the way of decent projection. I am sure the price and the size of the thing will go down after a while as well.

What I do wonder, looking into the future a bit, is whether this technology could be embedded in a laptop computer or something similar and become the screen – imagine a laptop smaller than the screen currently defining the clamshell format, which could project an image onto almost anything. Also, could this technology, given the good brightness characteristics, be used to increase resolution so that we could have really large and well defined displays projected onto office walls rather than using LCDs?

Really portable computing

IBM has developed a portable computing environment to fit in a USB key (I assume in the Windows world), and Black Dog has created a USB key Linux server. And Synergy is a tool to manage two computers from one keyboard.
These things, especially if the content is semi-accessible through, say, an Ericsson P910 and a wireless keyboard, could turn out to be the new paradigm. The best portable computer may turn out to be no portable computer.
Jacking into the grid, indeed.

Brad Ideas

Brad Templeton, founder of ClariNet, chairman of EFF and one of the very early innovators on the net, has a great blog called Brad Ideas where he puts his ideas – at a clip of about one per day, that is pretty impressive.
Enjoyable read, though I disagree with his explanation of why Microsoft got so dominant.

Rightsizing copyright

iPodding judgeI have been on holiday and missed my weekly Economist, so this may already have been wall-to-wall blogged. Anyway, in its editorial comments on June 30, the magazine takes a strong stand against extending copyright protection:

In America, the length of copyright protection has increased enormously over the past century, from around 28 years to as much as 95 years. The same trend can be seen in other countries. In June Britain signalled that it may extend its copyright term from 50 years to around 90 years.
This makes no sense. Copyright was originally intended to encourage publication by granting publishers a temporary monopoly on works so they could earn a return on their investment. But the internet and new digital technologies have made the publication and distribution of works much easier and cheaper. Publishers should therefore need fewer, not more, property rights to protect their investment. Technology has tipped the balance in favour of the public domain.
A first, useful step would be a drastic reduction of copyright back to its original terms — 14 years, renewable once. This should provide media firms plenty of chance to earn profits, and consumers plenty of opportunity to rip, mix, burn their back catalogues without breaking the law. The Supreme Court has somewhat reluctantly clipped the wings of copyright pirates; it is time for Congress to do the same to the copyright incumbents.

Right on. And this from a magazine that knows economics, makes a comfortable living off intellectual property and makes quite few of its articles available for free.

Etiquette for a connected world

I didn’t get to go to Reboot this year – had an administrative responsibility I literally could not get out of (you can get out of most things as an academic, but there are exceptions). I will go there next year, since I am sick and tired of regular academic conferences and would love to go to something where I would get ideas and be entertained, by someone out to change the world and not just prove that A influences B once you have removed every C, D, and E. This presentation is an example of what I missed.

Metaphor overload

The Bloglines plumber
Neal Stephenson has written (here) about the almost obsessive need for metaphors we seem to have when it comes to technology.
Now, I read RSS feeds via Bloglines, and think the service excellent – fast, intuitive, and user-friendly within the limitations of the HTML asynch protocol (which, among other things, blanks out the list of unread blog entries, then retrieves them, ensuring that if something goes wrong in the download you cannot redo the command).
But whenever Bloglines is down, this image of a plumber comes up. And this is where metaphor overload comes in – what kind of system do they really have down there in the system basement, anyway?

Musical move to the middle

Dennis Kennedy has a good article on fair use of music in Corante’s Between Lawyers blog. This is an article that a lot of the people on the inside of the the debate probably has moved beyond a long time ago (I think I have seen something from EFF, or at least from EFN, the Norwegian sister organization) on what rights should be legalized (time-shifting and such), rather than what technologies should be protected.
Anyway, I liked the tenor of the article, the focus on uses rather than technology, and the attempt to find a balance I have been wondering about the LP-to-net conversion question myself, incidentally – I have a caseful of old LPs sitting around, does that give me any kind of justification for downloading the music there (Deep Purple, yeah) from a file-sharing network, since converting directly is impractical?
At a recent debate on this, Jon Bing, an IP and technology law professor made the rather sensational statement that “you cannot go down to very specific examples when considering laws” (the discussion was about the market for DRM-breaking software for legal use, when making it would be illegal). I would disagree – it is precisely in these detailed discussions that laws are tested. And the LP-to-iPod issue is precisely one of those questions, where the rule of “previously bought” crashes into the rule of “downloaded illegal copy”.
And wouldn’t it be nice if we moved this discussion towards the middle, rather than continuing the shouting between the record company tech dinosaurs and the everything-should-be-free fanatics?

Why DRM is a bad idea for books

My colleague, respected academic Bård Kuvaas, told me about his problems with an Adobe eBook he had purchased at Amazon UK. The book, Psychological Management of Individual Performance costs £94 ($172, about NOK1100). He downloaded it, things worked fine, until he decided to upgrade his Adobe Acrobat from the reader software to the full, commercial Adobe Reader/Writer. Now he can no longer access his eBook, and has so far not gotten any help from Adobe, from Wiley (the publisher) or from Amazon.
I think this little case illustrates the problem with DRM technology: BÃ¥rd is in many respects the ideal eBook customer – a serious scientist willing to shell out serious money for copyrighted information that he needs. And when he decides to upgrade to a better version of the reader software, he loses access to the product he has purchased. (And just so you know – BÃ¥rd is not an IT specialist, but proficient enough to purchase eBooks and install new software from a network. And yes, he has sought help from the school’s very competent IT department, which can’t figure this one out either.)
I especially like his very low-key conclusion:

If copyright issues regarding ebooks are so complicated that honest customers cannot access their books, I don’t think ebooks will have any success among scholars or students in Norway.

My thoughts exactly.
Update: The issue, for this specific instance, has been resolved – after reading about this on Boingboing, a representative from Wiley has contacted Dr. Kuvaas, and a new eBook has been sent from Amazon. (The underlying problem – software that makes products hard to use – is still there.)

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Simson says – labels!

Simson Garfinkel has a fundamentally good idea – mandatory labeling of software – over in TechReview. He wants a “Pure Software Act” that forces companies to label software as to what it does to your computer, much like food companies are forced to declare what their products are made of. Excellent idea – provided you can get precise and useful in the definitions in just what constitutes behavior that has to be labeled. Perhaps having an independent labeling committee – or how about making labeling something done collaboratively by the customers?
Anyway – here are the symbols he proposes:
Simson's software symbols