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You wrote both "weaponize" and "weapon eyes", and you made some reference to "skateboarders" that I couldn't puzzle apart. What's going on here? Is your device set to "wreck a nice beach"?

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Q: What will be the take-away of the report?
A: It won’t be liked by industry lobbyists because it departs from the theft narrative that has defined the debate. It’s written from the perspective of the developing economies, where the reasons and conditions for piracy are just not part of the piracy of debate. You never hear about problems of pricing, for example. Our goal is to encourage developing cvountries to ssert more control over their IP policies and enforcement in order to enrich their own culture.

Here is a liveblogged capture of that discussion: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2010/02/02/berkman-piracy-in-developing-countries

Is not an overloaded server (or router, or any other stop along the way) a "clog"?

Only in the same sense in which the Grand Canyon is a "ditch".

I still don't see how he was ever that far off.

Young people just made fun of him because he was old, basically, and he didn't have a technical understanding of the internet (then again, most who think they do are wrong on most of what they think they know).

No, because use used his misunderstanding in an attempt to end network neutrality. He actually argued that the reason his "internet" got delayed was because non-email traffic for which "content providers" weren't getting paid, had somehow deprioritized his email, and that if only Google had to pay royalties to his telco-lobby bankrollers (as opposed to, say, transit/peering that they already pay), his emails would go through faster.

The fact that the Internet really is just series of tubes (a stupid network) is a feature, not a bug. Stevens argued the other way around: he wanted an Internet made of "smart" connections, where there are no MP3s or videos clogging the tubes other than from the telco/cableco's ringtone/pay-per-view services.

His speech was along the lines of alleging his local network outage could only be prevented if all that user-generated-but-nobody-pays-royalties traffic (P2P, Youtube videos, etc) could be removed and replaced with content-provider-generated/subsidized content. That's bullshit. Your 8MB DSL link is going to be just as saturated if everyone in your house is watching the "AT&T's Funniest Home Videos Channel In HD!", or if everyone's watching Youtube videos. (And conversely, the presence of a billion botnets and spammers still doesn't stop Youtube from coming through, because Google pays its ISPs for peering/transit, and built up enough fiber to actually provide its viewers with all those bits. Only thing is, AT&T, having not built up enough fiber to host something like Youtube, wants a cut of every viewing, especially when it's trying to rebrand itself as a content provider.)

We didn't make fun of him because he was stupid. We made fun of him because he was wrong.

No because our fool politicians granted Comcast a monopoly.

Because our laws are written by corporate interests, not the people.

...which is the inevitable result of "private funding of campaigns"

See Change Congress and Lectures by Lawrence Lessig on Institutional Corruption for more information. Hour Version Half-Hour Version

Against Transparency an article by Lawrence Lessig indicates why increased transparency is probably not enough to make a difference on it's own. A number of people have responded to Lessig's article. Someone was kind enough to provide a walkthrough of the article too.

Seems like they have a spider looking for names of artists or properties they represent auto-DMCAing Youtube on any dictionary search matches. Apparently Viacom has an artist named Leon Redbone. Anyway, they chose poorly in this case, as the video poster is a former Berkman Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

John Palfrey, the director of the Berkman Center, weighs in with several relevant blog posts.

Looks like Viacom has succeeded in bringing attention from legal academic circles to the DMCA takedown process. This will probably be a good thing in the long run, it will just air out more problems with the DMCA and clarify the need for more protections from malicious use of this tool.

Depends how network neutrality is defined.

If network neutrality means that every single IP packet ought to be processed equally then it is a big hindrance to innovation because basically, we will never see the emergence of differenciated QoS on the net. The later is deseperatly needed to support interactive video services such as the ones we are developping. This is basically Kahn's point.

Internet has been designed to be a dumb but very robust network (rememeber the Rise of the Stupid Network) as opposed to telephone network, more complicated and offering services at the network level rather than on terminals themselves. Kahn's view (and I share it) is that Internet may need to provide smarter services such as several class of transport and a real bandwidth management.

For instance the current media transport standard which is Real Time Protocol is the best we can get but comparted to an ATM virtual circuit, it is pretty depressing.

Some people would like to make a compromise and define network Neutrality as uniform handling of services across ISPs. But then this would require to define:

• How are e-mail services handled
• How are web services handled
• How are real time services handled

This way too much regulation for ISPs and anglosaxons :).

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/images/mjackson.jp g

This is why not.

Folksonomies (the first meme of 2005?) is attributed by Wikipedia to Thomas Vander Wa.

Adam Mathes has a thesis on Folksonomies which examines user-generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services - Del.icio.us and Flickr - designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification.

IFTF's Future Now makes a point about problems with folksonomies: no synonym control ( "mac" and "macintosh" on Del.icio.us); no hierarchy and content types; and only simple one-word tags. Are these features or bugs? Consensuss says 'feature'. Andrew Ducker has a suggestion for synonyms and a modest proposal

Joho the Blog notices a discussion about what to call it in Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging?,
John Battelle links into Taggle and "federated tagging".

I wonder if a Google Suggest like system might reduce 'lazy tagging' ,and maybe synonym control when the federation appears.

New: In Beyond Laser Tag and Telephone Tag, JC Francois wonders if "2005 will be the year of tagging".

Will Folksonomies lead to the nirvana of the Semantic Web, or at least Semantic web light? (see : ftrain.com August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web)

Tag, you're still it!"

This is basically wrong - I will try and explain, or at least give some examples...

"...In VoIP, the burden is already being paid for by the backbone ISPs who provide overseas network connections over their fat pipes."

Wrong - you pay for the network which you are running VoIP on. No Telco or ISP pays for you, because if they did they would be out of business.

The real difference between VoIP and POTS is the charging model:

> POTS is distance based

> VoIP is not distance based (VoIP is a free service, supported by an underlying packet switching network which is not distance charged).

This difference is the core of the paradigm shift that is taking place.

"A general rise in prices charged to ISPs will find their way down to the end subscriber and all those pennies saved using VoIP vanish in a puff of logic"

Rubbish - for loads of reasons, including...

Telcos are regulated, and exist in a competitive market - they cannot just hike the price of bandwidth to cover the loss in POTS revenue.

A large cost of POTS is having to individually price each call a customer makes, then invoice them, collect the money, provide call centres, provision switches ...etc.

Broadband (which is driving VoIP) is a significantly simpler model, for example one fixed recurrent charge every month (and no complex infrastructure).

What is far more likely to happen is that the Telcos will either change voluntarily, or be brought out and forced to change, or go bust, be brought up at a yard sale, and change.

"Add to this that once consumer groups figure out that the burden of *your* high VoIP usage is borne by *all* subscribers, they will start demanding tiered service and your delightfully cheap long distance calls will suddenly be just as expensive as they were on the old POTS program"

This doesnt actually make any sense - A consumer group that lobbies for higher prices for everyone?

VoIP, at the most simple level, is not even detectable by the telco. They supply a broadband connection to you. What you do with it is up to you. Take a long hard look at Skype and their business model (www.Skype.com).

Also - what does it matter for you how much I am using VoIP, if you are paying a fixed monthly fee for your broadband?

I shall stop going on about this as I should be working. Here are some interesting articles which might help...

"Rise of the stupid network" by David Isenberg

http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html

"Customer-owned Networks" by Clay Shirky

http://shirky.com/writings/zapmail.html

The bottom line... that's what people who don't want accountability always focus on. Not on the numbers that got you to the bottom line. People who want accountability want to know how you GOT that bottom line.

Regarding Kerry and his service, I'll stick with McCain's opinion- Kerry served honorably and no dirty trick is going to change that. There are some sick people out there. He volunteered for combat, I don't particularly care about the shiny objects bestowed upon him after the fact. But tell me, do you think the people who give out medals are that stupid?

Bush's administration lied about certainty and specificity. Bush's State of the Union address identified specific quantities of specific substances, and Rumsfeld announced their location. You don't do those sort of things when you're not sure. All the others were emboldened by the administration's confidence in those findings, and rightly so; you'd expect the executive branch to have the best access to intelligence. When people raised doubts they were told "trust us, we know what we're doing". Well, Fool me once, shame on you, as they say.

And I defy you to come up with any methodology by which you can show that more civilians would be dead if Saddam were still in power than as a result of the war. As a conservative estimate over 11,000 civilians have been killed directly as a result of this war. So far we only know about 5000 or so from Saddam's reign, and it seems that many of these were from the insurgency after the first Gulf War that the US encouraged but failed to support. Furthermore, it's not clear at all that Allawi is going to be any better. You may recall that this is why we didn't take out Saddam the first time- it was judged that Saddam was a known quantity, and humbled at that- it was not clear that we could easily do better. This alone does not show that the war wasn't justified, but it does show that your thinking is very lazy.

As for the bombing strategy, duh you use different tactics in different places and if they aren't useful then you evaluate your chances of success and the cost of the conflict in the specific case. 900+ American soldiers dead and over 10,000 Iraqis dead so Allawi can demonstrate even faster Due Process than Texas under Bush.

Why do you want to talk about Michael Moore so badly? Quit trying to change the subject.

Here's a recap of our discussion of Bush's AWOL:

Me: Bush was AWOL, here's the facts that prove it.
You: That site is partisan.
Me: That doesn't change the facts it contains.
You: MICHAEL MOORE MICHAEL MOORE!
Me: WTF?

Can't believe I'm wasting my time on you. In a sense you win- there goes 15 minutes I'll never get back and no one who cares will ever read this.

This is an interesting post?

The authors are relatively well-known, and even if you didn't know them, Google and 2 clicks will show you directly to their biograpies.

Personally, I thought most of the points were fairly obvious, but the article'd be very thought-provoking for my friends who aren't as used to thinking about "the Internet" as some sort of entity.

"How does the old saying go?

Well, let's ask the President of the United States.

"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again." [video available here]

Thanks Mr. President!

Some years ago, I interviewed at what became WebTV, before launch. My concern with the service was that the client box they were selling into the customers' homes was too stupid - even if you added encryption to the system, the service provider could still snoop on everything each customer was doing because the transactions were happening on the back end (similar to using an X terminal to talk to a traditional multi-user UNIX system; even if you encrypt the link between the UNIX system and your X display, the UNIX system admins can still see all).

When I raised this concern during my interviews, I was told by the CEO, "I understand your concern, so come join us, and work with us inside to set up appropriate privacy policies!"

I viewed that response as a co-opting strategy (such policies can always be changed later, and I wouldn't have had the power to stop it), so I declined to work there, alas, giving up a chunk of the subsequent half-billion dollar buyout by Microsoft. Oooops.

I am happier with the more typical ISP, wherein if I use appropriate encryption technology on my full-blown, general purpose computer, all they can do is traffic analysis. I would be happier still if everyone on the Internet were using IP security in transport mode, but at least the possibility of that is still there (well, NATs aside). The WebTV system design didn't even permit that possibility.

So, the ethical question is: if you believe that a system you're building is structurally unable to protect customer privacy (i.e. as a matter of design), do you still work on it?

Also: beware "intelligent networks." Stupid networks are much better for your privacy, and your independence from your service providers.

Because THEY will be the ones, the corporations, the government and the DOD, who control our indentities. Any digital identity should exist to empower the individual to become a better, more informed customer, not a manipulated consumer.

I highly recommend you read Doc Searles and David Wienbergers views on this to see why any implementation of DigID that is corporate centered rather than individual centered is PURE EVIL, and will be used for all sorts of nefarois things, from total erasure of shopping anonymonity, total profiling, and even BLACKLISTING. This is bad stuff, pure and simple.

Planet P Blog

Young children are fantastically good at learning languages by example, but often not good at predicate logic or deductive reasoning, which takes a lot of training. (As an aside, the book Reading Reflex applies this insight to teaching reading - instead of teaching deductive rules parrot fashion, it groups different representations of the same sound and gets the children to work through them until they derive an unconscious model that way).

The best 'programming' exercise with small children is the 'I am a robot' game. You play their robot slave, and do what you are told, but very literally, and in small stages, with 'error messages' returned in a robot voice. Just getting you to walk from the sofa to the bedroom can take ages and they love it. They naturally want to be the simple-minded robot too (just make sure they don't get too attached to it, or they may end up working in telephone support).

I've seen a huge amount of 'educational' software - I used to work in the CD-ROM business, and I buy up remaindered CD's from Marshalls for my 2 boys and watch how they use them. Most of them are dross, with the same few ideas (Pelmanism, missing words etc.) recycled with a different character or brand attached. Some have genuine insight, and I can see them learning to reason using them. Here are a selection:

Logical Journey of the Zoombinis is a wonderful introduction to deductive logic through a compelling game. It was designed with this in mind and my boys have been playing this since they were 3, and are still enjoying it now at 5 and 7 (as do I).

The Pajama Sam series of adventures from Humongous are good at teaching the global/local focus, but one that is great fun and teaches valuable debugging skills is Pajama Sam's SockWorks which features a long series of machines that have socks in them that you have to get into the right coloured baskets. As you can also build your own puzzles, the idea of solvable and unsolvable problems naturally comes up.

Zap! is another great game that teaches by stealth. You have to help 3 wisecracking cartoon charcters to fix their electrical, optical and audio-visual gadgets to get their show on the road. It manages to include a compelte circuit simulator, an optical workbench simulator and sound environment simulator, and still be lots of fun for Kindergarten children.

To teach programming concepts without writing textual code, Cocoa is perfect (if you have a Mac). It is a tool that enables you to create 2d video games by drawing the characters and defining what happens when they encounter each other by example. Andrew has made about 65 games with this, some original, some homages to TV programs or his brother's films.

Finally, if you want a comprehensible textual language, use Runtime Revolution, whose language Transcript is based on the old Apple HyperCard language, and as such has completely human-readable programs. This is what I plan to get Andrew into next.
(republished from my blog, May 12th 2002)

As I invented the scoring scheme that helped this craze take off a couple of months ago(multiply the number of hits for each individual word), I would like to point out that it is a game, and not going to affect anyone's search results, as when you post the found GoogleWhack, all you are doing is making that odd combination one unit more popular.
My 'Pocket GoogleWhacker' tool is still available though (yes, there is a Linux version, but I haven't tested it as I don't have a Linux box). Also note that the highest scoring googlewhack by this method often use 'linux' as one fo the search terms

The biggest advantage of end-to-end networks (also called stupid networks) is their extreme scalability. You can set up a tiny little TCP/IP network at home; it works. We have the TCP/IP Internet; it works. Anything that requires central "intellegence" (read: control) will collapse, sooner or later, as the network expands. Doesn't matter if it is caused by a simple overload, a DoS attack, a terrorist bomb, or a court order. Hit the central server and it goes down.

The problem is that folks are trying to put services (like voice) that need realtime delivery onto a network that wasn't designed for it. In a straight IP based network, each router only needs resources for the packets that it is currently handling. As soon as a packet gets sent, the router's interest in it ends. A packet can (theoretically!) take any route at all through the network, and it's the endpoint's responsibility to put everything back together.

Anything else requires additional resources for each connection going through the router. For a backbone router, this is a *lot* of connections. It also means that each connection is "nailed" to a single route through the network. Lose a router and you not only lose the packets that it is storing at the time, but all the connections that it is handling. There are ways of handling this, of course, but the solutions are expensive, in terms of both hardware and bandwidth.

In my somewhat cynical opinion, what the providers want to do is take the simple "flat rate" model that the Internet is built on and turn it into what Scott Adams calls a "confusopoly", where the customer is never sure what services she is getting or what they're supposed to cost.

Combine this with the Government's desire (all governments) to monitor and control all communications, and you have the recipe for a real mess.


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I realize that Bruce needs to structure some sort of narrative around his article, but this "third wave" of "semantic hacking" is hardly new.

The attack on Internet Wire was just an insider abusing the system. It's been going on for quite a while, and shame on Internet Wire for having lax enough security than an ex-employee could abuse the system. Social Engineering has also been a common practice for years: call the helpdesk from the CEO's phone and demand that your password be reset. Easy stuff, old practices. In fact, social engineering, manipulation of the press, and misleading the public are practices that predate the internet by a few thousand years:

"What of this again, that these people are experts in flattery, and will commend the talk of an illiterate, or the beauty of a deformed, friend, and compare the scraggy neck of some weakling to the brawny throat of Hercules when holding up Antaeus[12] high above the earth; or go into ecstasies over a squeaky voice not more melodious than that of a cock when he pecks his spouse the hen? We, no doubt, can praise the same things that they do; but what they say is believed."
- Juvenal's Satires

What's new is that the interconnectedness of the internet community is allowing these practices to migrate to the internet in powerful ways. At least one person believes that this is cause for deep optimism:

"All the bad things we hear about the Web are true. There really are people online who'd like to lure our children into shadows. There really are hucksters who'll steal not only your money but your identity. There really are people who'll take pictures of you in a public bathroom and publish the pictures to the world. Every human vice
we can imagine finds its way onto the Web, which seems to spur the world's most lurid imaginations even further. But the reason for this should be a cause for optimism."

You can check the article out yourself for more, but I agree with the premise. The internet continuing to mirror the "real" world is generally a good thing, and the "forces of good" can harness those powers as well as the "forces of evil".

Noam Chomsky has worried quite a bit about the power of centralized press.

"Chomsky's central belief is that propaganda plays the same role in a democracy as violence plays in a dictatorship.
In the United States, therefore, you need to be less afraid of the National Guard and more afraid of the manipulation of information by governmental, corporate and academic sources. According to Chomsky, the elites who control and benefit from the American political system preserve that system by marginalizing alternative political views, selectively reporting on the consequences of United States foreign policy, and creating political apathy among the general populace by encouraging them to watch professional sports and TV sitcoms rather than actively participate in the political process."

Bruce Schneier should be less worried about manipulation of public news outlets, stock prices, and the economy by hackers, and more worried about the manipulation of public opinion by corporations and governments. Hackers, by showing people how easy it is to have their opinions manipulated, actually serve a positive purpose. I'm not saying I endorse the Internet Wire hack, real people lost money and that's not good. But, creative hacks, the "jam the WTO" movement in Seattle, cool sites like The Onion and Adbusters are all great ways to wake up an uninterested, uninvolved public.

- Twid