Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "The elections held in The Netherlands on Wednesday have shaken the country. Almost 10 million votes were cast, and statistics show that a full half of those who voted used a popular web-based voter guide. This guide is operated by the independent institute for the public and politics. Advice is given to the visitor upon answering a number of multiple choice questions on some common political topics. Statistically, a number of people ended up scoring in support of populist parties both on the far left and far right. No bias was reported to exist in the test itself. However, these parties have ended up with an unforeseen amount of power as a result of the election. The voter participation was high, and the web-based advisories may have motivated people with little interest in politics to cast a vote anyway. Can politics be simplified to a ten minute test?"

7Prime writes "Clear Channel Communications Inc., the nations largest radio, billboard, and entertainment outlet, announced their intention this morning to sell the company to a consortium of private-equity firms for over $26 billion. In addition, Clear Channel's TV division, as well as its smallest 448 radio stations would be sold out of the company and will be looking for potential buyers." From the article: "The buyers, led by Bain Capital Partners and Thomas H. Lee Partners, also are bidding for Tribune Co., which owns several newspapers and television stations. That process is ongoing. If Bain and Lee purchase Tribune, they may be forced to sell certain newspapers and television stations to comply with Federal Communications Commission regulations that prohibit one company from owning a newspaper and radio or television station in the same city. The buyers paid $37.60 per share for Clear Channel, the highest price the stock has seen since mid-2004, and a 25 percent premium on the stock's average price in October. The purchase price includes the assumption of about $8 billion in debt."

An anonymous reader writes "A new study that pitted the anti-phishing technology in Firefox 2.0 against that of IE7 generated some interesting results. From the Washingtonpost.com story: 'Firefox blocked 243 phishing sites that IE7 overlooked, while IE7 locked 117 sites that Firefox did not.' Microsoft responded by pointing to its own supposed comparison study that put it in front of Mozilla and others in phish fighting, but the story notes: '3Sharp, the company that authored the Microsoft study, clearly state on their site that their goal in creating 3Sharp was "to use the robustness, flexibility, and sheer native capabilities of the Microsoft communication and collaboration technologies to enhance the business of our customers."'"

prostoalex writes "Michael J. Copps of the FCC has published a column in the Washington Post describing the United States' Internet disconnect as far as broadband: 'The United States is 15th in the world in broadband penetration, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). When the ITU measured a broader digital opportunity index (considering price and other factors) we were 21st — right after Estonia. Asian and European customers get home connections of 25 to 100 megabits per second (fast enough to stream high-definition video). Here, we pay almost twice as much for connections that are one-twentieth the speed.' To be fair in comparison, USA is 2nd in the world as far as number of broadband lines installed."

An anonymous reader writes to let us know about the roundup of a phishing gang by the FBI and authorities in Poland and Romania. 18 arrests were made in what the FBI calls "Operation Cardkeeper." The gang has allegedly been selling stolen identities and information on credit cards and bank accounts since at least 2004. To remind us what a drop in the bucket such international operations are, the article says: "The Anti-Phishing Working Group, an industry consortium, said more than 10,000 phishing Web sites were active on the Internet in August, about double the number of sites in January."

OriginalArlen writes to tell us about some compelling global warming coverage in the Washington Post. First there is an article about a study indicating that melting Arctic ice is threatening polar bears with extinction. The article quotes an environmentalist: "This study is the smoking gun. Skeptics, polluting industries and President Bush can't run away from this one." And the polar melting is opening new shipping lanes. The second article details a trip late in October through the Northwest Passage by a Canadian icebreaker. Never before in history could this trip have been accomplished so late in the year; ice would have choked off the passage. Estimates of when the passage might be navigable by commercial shipping range from 2020 to the end of the century. The indigeneous people are not looking forward to this development.

OriginalArlen writes to tell us about some compelling global warming coverage in the Washington Post. First there is an article about a study indicating that melting Arctic ice is threatening polar bears with extinction. The article quotes an environmentalist: "This study is the smoking gun. Skeptics, polluting industries and President Bush can't run away from this one." And the polar melting is opening new shipping lanes. The second article details a trip late in October through the Northwest Passage by a Canadian icebreaker. Never before in history could this trip have been accomplished so late in the year; ice would have choked off the passage. Estimates of when the passage might be navigable by commercial shipping range from 2020 to the end of the century. The indigeneous people are not looking forward to this development.

An anonymous reader writes, "Netcraft has discovered that the social networking site MySpace appears to have been compromised by phishers who have presented a spoof login form on the main site. This modified login form submits the victim's username and password to a remote server hosted in France." From the article: "The hackers have engineered a fake login form on MySpace's own web site. Netcraft has notified MySpace of the issue, although it currently remains live. Because the fraudulent login page is hosted on MySpace's own servers and does not exhibit any signs of external content, such as cross-site scripting or open redirects, it is convincing and even security-conscious users are at risk of becoming victims. The attack is launched from a profile page, where the username is login_home_index_html, and uses specially-crafted HTML in order to hide the genuine MySpace content from the page and instead display its own login form." This Washington Post story from a few months back explains what's in it for the phishers.

Via GamePolitics, a Washington Post article about the political landscape surrounding game ratings. Author Mike Musgrove touches on Jack Thompson, Senator Brownback, and interviews ESRB ratings board chair Patricia Vance. From the article: Vance, the head of the ratings board, says the group has conducted surveys showing that there is an 83 percent awareness of the game industry's ratings system among consumers. By comparison, the movie ratings system has about 90 percent awareness, she said. Vance said the video game industry is a target largely because it still suffers from a perception that games are for kids, even though the age of today's average gamer is over 30. 'I think a lot of people who propose this sort of legislation have never purchased a game or don't play them,' she said."

opencity writes "The Washington Post reports on the two Diebold source disks that were anonymously sent to a Maryland election official this past week. Further investigation has lead individuals involved to believe the disks came from a security check demanded by the Maryland legislature sometime in 2003." From the article: "Critics of electronic voting said the most recent incident in Maryland casts doubt on Lamone's claim that Maryland has the nation's most secure voting system. "There now may be numerous copies of the Diebold software floating around in unauthorized hands," said Linda Schade, co-founder of TrueVoteMD, which has pressed for a system that provides a verifiable paper record of each vote."

ScribeCity writes "The Washington Post has a provocative piece about online experiments at identifying experts. One wonders when someone will come up with a truly effective formula for measuring human intelligence — or take a stab at doing so — that exploits all the stuff people are publishing online." From the article: "This wisdom of the crowd could be outsmarted by what Michael Arrington, editor of the TechCrunch blog, recently dubbed the 'wisdom of the few.' Sites like PicksPal rely on input from the masses chiefly as a venue for auditioning prospective experts, on the theory that these virtuosos could provide even more accurate information and predictions than the crowd. 'If you figure out which ones did the best and get rid of the ones who have no idea, you'd do even better. Distill it down to the people who really know,' Arrington said."

phantomlord writes "The FDA is currently set to allow beef and milk from cloned animals onto the market. Further, the products will likely not be branded as such and there is no way to know if we're currently consuming products from cloned animals." From the article: "Farmers and companies that have been growing cloned barnyard animals from single cells in anticipation of a lucrative market say cloning will bring consumers a level of consistency and quality impossible to attain with conventional breeding, making perfectly marbled beef and reliably lean and tasty pork the norm on grocery shelves. But groups opposed to the new technology, including a coalition of powerful food companies concerned that the public will reject Dolly-the-Lamb chops and clonal cream in their coffee, have not given up."

An anonymous reader writes "Bowing to pressure from European antitrust regulators and rival security vendors, Microsoft has agreed to modify Windows Vista to better accommodate third-party security software makers. In a press conference Friday, Microsoft said it would configure Vista to let third-party anti-virus and other security software makers bypass 'PatchGuard,' a feature in 64-bit versions of Windows Vista designed to bar access to the Windows kernel. Microsoft said it would create an API to let third-party vendors access the kernel and to disable the Windows Security Center so that users would not be prompted by multiple alerts about operating system security. In addition, Redmond said it would modify the welcome screen presented to Vista users to include links to other security software other than Microsoft's own OneCare suite. From the article: 'It looks like Microsoft was really testing the waters here, sort of pushing the limits of antitrust and decided they probably couldn't cross that line just yet.'"

Will Rodger writes, "Citizens Against Government Waste has said some highly critical things about open source software in the past. They've also pounced on supporters of the OpenDocument Format along the way. Alas, it seems their close ties to Jack Abramoff have drawn the (unfavorable) attention of Senate staff."

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft today released ten patches to fix at least 26 separate security holes, including a whopping 16 flaws in Microsoft Office and its constituent apps. According to Washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog, this is the most number of patches ever released by Redmond outside of a Windows service pack. Also of note, six of today's updates apply to fully patched Windows XP systems, and two of the flaws are actually present in Windows Vista."

The Washington Post has up an article looking at a burgeoning venue for political expression: gaming. Between 'The Quest for Bush', Counter-Strike mods, and more serious titles with a political slant, the political arena is quickly claiming gamers for their own. It's not just politics either; there are some excellent titles being released that attempt some truly insightful social commentary. From the article: "'UnderAsh,' released by Afkar Media in 2002, views the first intifada from the eyes of Ahmad, a Palestinian teenager resisting the Israeli occupation. Last year a sequel was released. A teaser to 'UnderSiege,' which tells the stories of five Palestinian families during the second intifada, shows a Palestinian teenager being shot on the street; an Israeli soldier appears to pound him with a concrete block seconds later. 'Our games are not propaganda,' Kasmiya says. 'Our games are a reflection of our history -- past or present. The fact is, most movies, most TV shows, most video games put Muslims in a bad light, so we have to try to tell our side of the story.'" Commentary from GamePolitics is also available.

An anonymous reader writes, "Microsoft plans to push out Internet Explorer 7 as a 'high priority update' when it ships security patches tomorrow, according to Washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog. That means anyone who has Windows configured to download and install patches automagically from Redmond will be greeted with IE7 next time they boot up their machines. In related news, it appears IE's worldwide market share actually increased a couple of points since July, despite a number of high profile zero-day attacks this year." The article notes that the IE7 "containment wall" protected mode will not be available on XP, but only to those who purchase Vista.

Update: 10/09 21:26 GMT by kd : An anonymous reader points to this Microsoft blog posting where it is revealed that the article linked above is incorrect. IE7 will not be pushed tomorrow.

eldavojohn writes "The developers of software for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative are redefining security for the personal PC. Since the laptops have the potential of communicating with any other laptop, the developers have a unique opportunity to implement both virus protection on the kernel, master boot record and also the way in which the laptops deal with security and 'code-sharing.' The developers are currently seeking outside counsel from security experts and if you're worried about these security schemes posing only problems to the children, 'these security measures can be turned off by the PCs' owners. To protect against that leading to disaster, the laptops will automatically back up their data up on a server whenever the machines get in wireless range of the children's school. If a child loses data, the files can be restored by bringing the laptop within wireless range of the server.'"

cultrhetor writes "John Harris of the Washington Post has noticed that the three largest recent political controversies have stemmed from work done by digital inhabitants. In the article, New Media a Weapon in the New World of Politics, he notes the connections between the recent scandals involving Mark Foley, George Allen, and Bill Clinton were representative of the new, web-driven age of American politics." From the article: "Each originally percolated in the world of new media — Web sites and news outlets that did not exist a generation ago — before charging into the traditional world of newspapers and television networks. In each case, the accusations quickly pivoted into a debate about the motivations and alleged biases of the accusers. Cumulatively, the stories highlight a new brand of politics in which nearly any revelation in the news becomes a weapon or shield in the daily partisan wars, and the aim of candidates and their operatives is not so much to win an argument as to brand opponents as fundamentally unfit."

jeffsenter writes, "The Washington Post has the story: 'NASA scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered what they believe are 16 new planets deep in the Milky Way, leading them to conclude there are probably billions of planets spread throughout the galaxy.' What sets these potential planets apart is they are in the central bulge of the Milky Way where most stars are located. More planets in the galaxy means more chances for life." The 16 are planet candidates at this point, until verified by spectroscopic measurement of their parent stars' wobbles, which probably can't be done until the James Webb Space Telescope files in 2013.

snuffin writes to tell us the Washington Post is reporting that Microsoft announced stepped up anti-piracy measures being implemented in their latest operating system, Vista. From the article: "If a legitimate copy is not bought within 30 days, the system will curtail functionality much further by restricting users to just the Web browser for an hour at a time, said Thomas Lindeman, Microsoft senior product manager." Ars Technica also has coverage available on this new development.

We posted Jay Rosen's Call for Questions on September 25. Here are his answers, into which he's obviously put plenty of time and thought. This is a "must read" for anyone interested in the growing "citizen journalism" movement either as a writer/editor or as an audience member -- and please note that Rosen and many others say, over and over, that one of the major shifts in the news media, especially online, is that there is no longer any need to be one or the other instead of both.

1) Where do you see newspapers' role in this?
by Stick_Fig

First off, my credentials: I'm the former employee of an experimental newspaper, Bluffton Today, located in Bluffton, South Carolina. It's an exciting place, let me tell you. The focus has been on reverse publishing but at the same time tempering blogs with traditional journalism. The staff still writes articles; they still edit heavily. They use the web only to the degree where it doesn't dip into libel and slander and builds on its strengths. My question to you is, do you think Bluffton is on the right track? It felt like, in the 15 months I was there, they definitely were, but I'm a biased party. I left thinking, "If only newspapers did more of this..." I know what I'm betting the farm on in my career, and it isn't tired, boring, traditional journalism. It isn't the straight and narrow of blogs, either. Rather, I feel that it's important to look at both sides and find how they can work together, because God knows there's some 60-year-old editor somewhere who won't look at Bluffton as anything more than a gimmick. I'm gonna be that guy in the newsroom fighting the good fight to get more untraditional voices into the the paper in more places than the editorial page.

Rosen:

Bluffton Today (Bluffton, SC is near Hilton Head Island) did several things that were important to try in 2005. They said the editorial engine would be the online edition; it would "produce" the printed paper. This is the opposite of how newspapers did things for the first ten years of their Web lives. They just re-purposed the content from the print edition, and called that an "online newspaper."

By reversing what's primary in production you change head sets in the newsroom because a professional newsroom engineers everything--including the talents of its employees--around the production ordeal. The "daily miracle" it was once called, because making the newspaper required such a fantastic act of just-in-time coordination. Many things had to be routinized for the miracle to occur. (Including ideas about journalism and the user's place in it.)

Steve Yelvington of Morris Digital Works, who worked on the Bluffton Today site, called it an "inversion" because content would flow from the Web to print rather than vice versa. The editorial engine should be the more interactive one, in which more of the community can participate. The goal was a virtuous circle. "Community conversation feeds professional journalism. Journalism feeds conversation. And around, and around." I think there is something to that idea.

How well it works is for people in Bluffton to address. I like that Bluffton Today tried to go Lessig on the news industry. It ditched the read only platform and re-built on read/write. Yelvington said at the launch: "Everyone gets a blog. Not just staffers, but everyone in the community. LeMonde (France) and the Mail and Guardian (South Africa) are doing this, too." Giving everyone a blog may be an obvious idea. But it's a different track. "Everyone gets a photo gallery. Everyone can contribute events to a shared public community calendar...." The site was built on Drupal technology. It had free classifieds. It was different.

If the experience of doing Bluffton Today has tempered some of that initial boldness, that's as it should be. I'm not surprised that the staff still writes articles; they still edit heavily. A web-to-print, highly-interactive, low barrier to entry, read-write, everyone-contributes newspaper is still a daily production headache. Articles, photos, headlines, and ads have to come together. Unedited, the site would have almost no value, although it can have unedited parts with high value.

"It isn't tired, boring, traditional journalism. It isn't the straight and narrow of blogs, either. It's important to look at both sides..." I agree with that, Stick. My new adventure, NewAssignment.Net, is a hybrid site for that reason. (Pros and amateurs collaborate on reporting projects.) In January of 2005 I wrote Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over for the same reason.

Bluffton today was a first wave attempt at innovation. Today initiatives like that face some second wave facts. Bringing capacity online does not itself create activity, so if you're counting on user activity, you better come with more than nifty new capacity. Create more writers and suddenly you may need more editors. "The conversation feeds journalism, journalism feeds the conversation" is a powerful idea, but we are several steps away from knowing how it works to create a live, intelligent filter in the newsroom.

There's just a long way to go. But yeah, you were on the right track working for those guys. Deeply so.

2) How to Get More Respect
by NewYorkCountryLawyer
I am convinced that online media have made a huge contribution to getting out the truth when the corporate media are seeking to suppress the truth. While there are a growing number of people aware of this phenomenon, reports in the 'blogosphere' just do not get the same respect and currency received by reports in the 'major' or 'corporate' media. What do we, as a community, need to do to enhance the respect internet journalists receive in the world at large?

Rosen:

Well, "suppressing" the truth is not how I see the failures of modern journalism, or of our current press. I think it's bigger than that.

Bob Woodward, who is in the news this week, is at the top of the reporting game, an industry unto himself. In two books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack, he failed to tell the truth about the Bush White House because his methods were not up to the obstacle they met: an administration that had broken through all the reality checks normally placed on a president and his closest aides. One by one these measures came under abnormal stress. The policy-making process used by presidents got subverted. The normal channels for sounding out opinion were just disowned. The intelligence community came under extreme stress when asked to supply facts for a decision already made.

A Congress controlled by the same party was expected to go along, which meant accepting the president's definition of reality. Oversight got evacuated. The normal tensions with the press were driven deeper: keep them back, keep them out, tell them nothing, tear them down. If someone does break a story from inside you immediately punish and isolate anyone who spoke to the reporter. You make them disown their words. You make them repent.

This is the story Woodward missed because he got inside it, so to speak. Ron Suskind, one of the few in Washington who did not miss that story, called it "the retreat from empiricism." To me, it's the big narrative yet to come out about the Bush White House. Attack Without a Plan was too crazy to be credible to Woodward. So he wrote Plan of Attack instead. I haven't read his new book yet, just the reviews and excerpts. But from early accounts, State of Denial is his attempt to get back the ground he lost, despite having the best access.

Woodward didn't "suppress" the story. Rather, he couldn't imagine it. Those are the kinds of failures that interest me. Sometimes things are suppressed. Often, the truth eludes professional journalism because no one thought to look for it. I welcome your question, What do we, as a community, need to do to enhance the respect internet journalists receive in the world at large? My first answer is: we have to look for it.

You know how, when you've really mastered something and there's a news account of it, the news story will invariable get several (basic) things wrong? Eliminate the several things and respect will rise. If you want to inform the world of something, grok it before you rock it is a good simple rule.

Correct ourselves early and often. Correct the reporting in the major media, early and often. Fact check your own ass first, then your neighbor's. We should major in transparency; the "major" media will take a minor in that. Diversity of outlook in the reporters ultimately improves the reporting. The blogosphere has advantages there, especially as it does more reporting.

I think we have to accept that Big Media, which isn't going anywhere, is society's default legitimacy-distribution machine. But that doesn't mean it works well. The machine itself can lose legitimacy without exactly falling apart. If you're an upstart publisher of news and you suck at it, Big Media will try to ignore you. If you're an upstart publisher of news and you're really good at it, Big Media will try to ignore you. Then when you assume the shape of a writes-itself story--first bloggers to go to the political conventions!--Big Media will over-cover you, spreading a small bit of understanding over lots and lots of stories. Six months later it's time to debunk the trend they missed, then over-hyped and finally misdescribed. It's not personal. It's protective. It's also cheaper than figuring out what's going on.

We can win a lot of points for Net journalism just by being the opposite of that.

3) What about mob-rule journalism?
by Chas

What sort of safeguards are in place to do fact-checking and prevent false/obviously slanted mob-rule style reports from being propagated as fact?

Rosen:

People hear phrases like "an experiment in open source reporting" and they see it immediately: What's open to the wisdom of the crowd is vulnerable to the actions of the mob. Wanting to be helpful, the volunteer may slant reports without realizing it. Through the portals marked "citizen," the paid operative can also go. How do you prevent all of that?

To me this is a puzzle with many pieces. It won't have one solution; it will take many overlapping systems working together. I can't tell you--yet--how we're going to build a fact-checking and verification system into NewAssignment.Net. But I can tell you that the site will fail without one, so we'll have to try to figure it out, with help from a lot of people. To simply pass along unchecked reports received from strangers over the Net would be fantastically dumb. To discount the possibility of people trying to game the system would be dumb, too; the more successful the site is, the more probable the gaming is. Not to mention spam, duplication, all kinds of junk.

What sort of safeguards are in place? Here are my answers so far. You tell me what is missing or cracked in this foundation:

One: The editors are full time on it. Assignments flow through editors several times before they are published by NewAssignment.Net. That's the pro-am way. It's an editor's job not to be gamed, not to publish bum facts. Everything that goes out has the editor's name on it. It's not an answer to everything--this reliance on "good editors"--but it's a proven system, a simple one, and a start.

Two: Users Self-Police. I'm not sure "community" is the right word for the eventual users of New Assignment. People use that term too loosely, in my opinion. But if NewAssignment.Net develops a base of active, loyal and intelligent users, it's not unreasonable that they can help police the site, especially if they understand that verifiying information and preventing fraud are basic to everything we're trying to do. And so a second answer, after editors, is a culture among users: catch errors, catch mistakes, catch fraud and manipulation. A mob mentality has to be met by something stronger; if you attract the right kind of users, that can happen. It would be foolish to think it will just because you're counting on it.

Three: Given enough eyeballs, all facts can be checked. I think there is every chance of developing a special subgroup of users who are effective fact checkers of the larger base of contributors, including new and casual contributors. One thing we are definitely going to do is see whether retired journalists and ex-journalists will volunteer to work with other natural born sticklers and operate our fact-checking system, which not only has to work, but eventually be better than industry standard. I don't know yet what that system will look like, or how systematic it will be. One of my advisers is interested in this puzzle and working on some ideas, assisted by a professional fact checker who emailed me offering to help. That's how we are going to solve this. Social scientists call it "muddling through."

Four: The site itself has to make verification easy. I mean in the way it is built and meant to operate. For example, editors have to be able to sort the raw from the initially verified from the double checked. This is one of the challenges for the developers of the New Assignment site, which will be Chapter Three. It's a new partnership--here's an about page for them--formed by Zack Rosen, who is my nephew, one of the originators of Dean Space and the co-founder of CivicSpace on the Drupal platform; and Josh Koenig, a co-founder of DeanSpace who started Music for America, a non-profit. They are both Drupal developers, active in that community. The third partner is Matt Cheney, who is trained as a librarian and worked as a researcher at National Center for SuperComputing Applications.

They're going to build the site with open source tools. Josh Koenig has a post up about the New Assignment project. It promises an Open Practice model: "posting tutorials, video screen casts, interviews, and write ups as our own work progresses and as we research others." Verification and fact-checking have to become open practices themselves. The developers understand that.

Five: The one percent rule.. Experience suggests a small slice of users will do most of the volunteer work. According to the one percent rule in social media, which is more of a tendency than a law, "if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will 'interact' with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it." This bears on the verification puzzle because we're not talking about "checking" vast hordes of people. If regular contributors provide most of the contributions, their reputations for reliability can accumulate at the site. In a well-designed system that will happen.

Six: How have others solved the problem? You tell me: has creating a reliable system of volunteer contributors ever been faced before on the Web? Did it prove unsolvable? I would expect NewAssignment.Net to look at prior cases first and find the key lessons.

4) Money
by truthsearch

Do you believe that as money flows into civic journalism that it'll change the equation? Obviously there are some people who's primary goal is to become famous and/or make money through more open journalism. Will the large community of contributors flush out those with less altruistic intentions? I guess I'm really asking will civic journalism be self-correcting as it gets bigger? Or is there a way it may become just as corrupted as much of the current mainstream professional journalism?

Rosen:

I doubt there's any incorruptible system, just different kinds of pressures, with greater and lesser freedoms for the journalists involved. We can certainly hope for a self-correcting system, but it's not likely to happen on its own.

There's nothing wrong with seeking recognition for great work. People who want to be become famous or make a salary through the more open forms in Net journalism aren't the enemy. Not at all. But they are going to have to work with users under conditions that build trust and permit collaboration. It's hard for me to see how the bad actors will succeed at that, but I am not discounting it, either.

Here's a site called Sportingo. It says it's a "new type of sports media company," which is "focused on telling the story from the fans' perspective." Users can write articles, which will be "professionally edited." They can rate and comment on articles written by peers.

Sportingo will own all the content published on the site. There are no plans to pay contributors. The company is for-profit. Tal Rozow, the marketing manager, told me that that "Sportingo authors aiming for a professional writing career will be able to benefit from having by-lines appearing on our website." He said he's confident that a strong network of independent sports writers will emerge at the site, and maybe that will happen. But I'm not sure it's a system designed to build trust among all the players involved.

Everyone I have consulted about open source projects of any kind has stressed one thing over and over: the importance of understanding what would motivate people to contribute to the gift economy of the project. You have to get that right, they say. Ultimately I believe a non-profit foundation is a more secure one. If there are profits and they are extracted by the owners, not distributed to co-creators; that's a problem. If there are profits and they go into doing more and better journalism, that's different.

5) What's wrong with other extant examples?
by crush

I'm assuming that you evaluated and rejected some of the other high-profile citizen journalism outfits that predate the founding of your own project. Off my head I can think of:

* The Indymedia network is one of the longest standing examples of an attempt to have a large citizen journalist network.

* The Pacifica Network (especially the Democracy Now show)

* The New Standard

What was it that you found lacking in the above and why did you decide to start a new project instead of reforming and adapting one of the above? Do you think that your decision to accept corporate sponsorship (which is rejected by the Pacifica Network) will see your organization's focus inevitably drift toward the anodyne ineffectiveness of e.g. NPR?

(And of course, how could I forget WikiNews?)

Rosen:

There's nothing "wrong" with these prior examples. I admire them all. I was especially pleased to see that the New Standard met its do-or-die fundraising goal last week. That site is an experiment with reader-supported, totally independent, strenuously-factual reporting. High standards of verification are meant to prevail. I think the New Standard has a lot in common with professional journalism, except it rejects the political economy of commercial news media entirely. It's run as a collective among those who do the work. I am thrilled that it will remain around, because we need to try lots of solutions to how to fund serious reporting. Just as I'm thrilled that Independent Media Center and its collectives around the world keep humming. I agree with Chris Anderson that what blogging begat--citizen journalism--Indy Media begat, too.

I didn't "evaluate and reject" the New Standard, Indy Media, Pacifica and Wiki News. Nor is it my place to decide they need fixing. They don't. The people who founded those organizations deserve a lot of credit for creating something new and daring-- and genuinely alternative. They inspired me. So did lots of others. (New West, for example, or Witness.org.) NewAssignment.Net is really about a single proposition: that if journalists and networks of users can report stuff together that neither could easily do alone, the public sphere will benefit and the site will build trust. I think there's room for that.

My decision to accept $100,000 from Reuters means we'll have an editor who can test the possibilities in networked journalism, as Jeff Jarvis calls it. My job is to make sure that Reuters has no influence on that person. The company has said it will have no editorial control, and no claim on the content. I agree: it won't. I think we can persuade users that it works as advertised. But people are free to draw their own conclusions about what the gift means, and I'm sure they will.

6) Plagiarism and Ethics?
by goombah99

Lately there's been a few incidents of Plagiarism in the news, not to mention some wholesale ethical breaches of faked stories (e.g. Blair at the NY times and "a million Little pieces"). But the thing is, the reason those are news is that they are both exceptional and something that is specifically drummed in to any professional journalist not to do. Indeed, breaking this taboo is probably even more of a sin to the the fellow journalists than to the general public because of this entrenched ethic.

Yet we know that on college campuses, where we can measure the phenomenon, plagiarism is comparatively rampant. So evidently the common man cannot restrain himself.

It seems to me this is a serious issue for any new journalism form with a low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonymity for the author. How does this ethos get enforced in such a realm?

A related question is the ethical division of commentary and news. We know that's become a problem in the media for some outlets where management has a thumb on the content. But the traditional news organs, especially newspapers, still refrain for the most part. Indeed, the NY times just went so far as to remove the typeset justification from any article that contained any sort of analysis or opinion, reserving the justified typesetting for only traditional factual journalism stories so the difference is apparent to the reader from the start. How do we reinforce that ethos in the untrained journalist?

Rosen:

When people plagiarize they do it for a particular self-interested reason: to meet a deadline, get an unwanted task out of the way, get their full time salary with limited work. These motivations will probably be rarer in the New Assignment model. Why volunteer for a project only to cheat at it?

"The common man cannot restrain himself." Sorry, I don't trust that kind of language. Beyond that making stuff up is not a way to develop a base of users on the Web; people aren't that dumb! You speak of a "low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonymity for the author." But for most users the higher the anonymity factor for the author, the higher the barrier of trust.

What some people can't seem to get over is that other people can say any damn thing they want on the Internet! How can you trust any of it? is their natural reaction to all open systems. Closed systems--and professional journalism is one--develop trust in one way. Open systems have to do it a much different way. Expecting one to look like the other is unreasonable.

We aren't going to learn much about this puzzle by asking how the "common man" can be trained to imitate his betters in the news media. I refer you to sociologist Raymond Williams, who once said, "There are no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses." It is these ways of seeing that are retrograde. But they show up in the most surprising places.

7) Scale
by FuturePastNow

First, I'll admit that I haven't read much about citizen journalism other than Jeff Jarvis' [buzzmachine.com], but as a non-blogger thinking of getting in to it, I was wondering:

Much of the discussion seems to be about getting out from under the control of "gatekeepers" like publishers and media owners. Yet, while the internet is less concerned with money, it has its own form of currency: popularity, in the form of the link.

Doesn't this just turn the highest-traffic sites into new gatekeepers? Especially as the number of blogs increases, the gap between "rich" and "poor" expands?

I suppose what I'm really asking is, it's hard enough to get noticed today- how will someone just starting out get noticed ten years from now?

Rosen:

Ten years from now? Jeez, I have no idea what the world of media access will be like then. But anyone who is just starting out in self-publishing should consult Clay Shirky's Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, so as not to become prematurely disillusioned by discovering its truths later on.

Certainly there are new gatekeepers. (Slashdot itself is one. But does it work the same way the old system did?) Traffic-wise, there's still rich and poor. (But is this list as static as that one?) Hierarchies have not gone away. (And who said they would?) Inequality has not disappeared. (But did you really think it could?)

You still have to fight to be noticed, good work can still go unnoticed. Life online is not entirely fair, or completely different. There's a new attention economy to replace the old. The sooner we reconcile ourselves to these common sense conclusions, the easier it will be to see what is actually different today.

Here are some things that stand out for me: Amateurs have joined professionals and they own a part of "the press." An audience that was once connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other is now connected both ways. The cost for like-minded people to locate each other and collaborate has fallen dramatically. The tools of media production have been widely distributed, and broad distribution of content is no longer impossible for small, upstart producers. For professionals, they're not required to affiliate with Big Media in order to operate as a journalist, though most will. They can be stand alones and independents. The people formerly known as the audience (as I call them) are now a productive force to be reckoned with, and Big Media has just started that reckoning. The Net has new ways of distributing attention, which have taken their place alongside the old.

Still, there's a long way to go before we can say that our media system has been made more democratic, responsive and responsible.

8) What impact would this have on national elections?
by StressGuy

The Electoral process seems to be more of a "marketing contest" and marketing takes bags and bags of money. There's commercial time, signs, billboards, radio, etc. Let's face it, a commercial is, at most 90 seconds to tell me why I should vote for you - hardly enough time. So, all we see are glittering generalities or, all to often, "don't vote for the other guy" spots.

If "Citizen Journalism" takes off, do you see this as a way that candidates without the massive financial resources normally required to sustain a traditional campaign could actually compete? Could this make the "third party candidates" a credible threat? Could this actually serve to "level the playing field"?

Rosen:

We should be cautious here. I think the most we can say is that a system that was almost entirely closed and self-sustaining--in which a handful of people raised the money, took the polls, handled the candidates, made the ads, narrated the campaign and talked about the candidates on TV--has been disrupted. The people who ran it are not as confident as they once were in their ability to manage things and get the outcomes they want. Their party has been crashed, but it's not "over." Nor is it "ours."
It's possible that insurgent candidacies--not backed by current players in the system--will have an easier time of it in the years ahead, just as insurgent news providers have more of an opening now. That's as far as I would go on the leveled field.

9) Dilution of Protection
by ObsessiveMathsFreak

How long before corporations and wealthy individuals start employing goons, lawyers and wiretaps, a la HP, to threaten and intimidate citizen journalists with no real legal recourse? If faced with this, should a citizen journalist just back off and let the guilty win? How can the protections now enjoyed by the fourth estate be extended to citizen journalism without diluting them?

Rosen:

As a matter of law and public policy, I think "fourth estate" protections should focus on significant acts of journalism, not people in pre-fab categories or the kind of organization that surrounds the giver of news. All those who are engaged in the act of informing a broader public of what's going on deserve to be under the First Amendment umbrella that protects the press. The press itself is composed of amateur and professional wings.

But that's no answer to goons with lawyers who threaten to sue. Citizen journalists are definitely vulnerable there, which makes you realize why we have big media organizations in the first place. We have to be more creative. Robert Cox, head of the Media Bloggers Association (I am a founding member of the group) has shown that "an orchestrated campaign by bloggers to defend a fellow blogger in what appears to be a frivolous lawsuit" can work. That's encouraging but not a complete answer, either. Legal intimidation will happen, and I'm sure there will be times when the bad guys will win.

10) Blogging
by From A Far Away Land

When asking a primary source for information, I find that telling them I'm doing so to create a report on my blog tends to make them clam up, or continue to be unwilling to provide information that ought to be publicly available. What technique or phrases should I use to convince the interviewee that I both have a legitimate use for their information, and the right to obtain it?

Rosen:

Sometimes you have a right to obtain information from a primary source. Sometimes it's not a matter of your rights but their decision to recognize you and cooperate. If search costs are high for making an informed decision about whether to trust a blogger who shows up with questions, sources will seek to reduce costs by using reputation and even stereotype (bloggers: ugh) as proxies.

I don't think there's a proper technique or a magic phrase that will solve this problem. There's only one solution I can see. Send the guy the URL for the "about" section of your site. That page ought to persuade potential sources that legitimate use will be made of their information. It should tell them what you are up to, and why. The site itself, the reporting and commentary there, is the best reason any source has to cooperate. Ah, but how do you convince them to take the time and look?

There's at least one way. Break a story so that the source's world is talking about it and next time around the source will speak to you-- and go to your About page. I asked Dean Wright of Reuters what the biggest obstacle for NewAssignment.Net will be when it launches. "The same one that the more minor players in the mainstream media have: getting your calls returned," he said. "Then when you complete a project and publish, you may find that other media outlets are reluctant to pick up your stories." The only answer to that is "do some compelling projects that cannot be ignored."

NewAssignment.Net will try to take that advice. It will do stories developed by users into assignments that are given to journalists. It could also do stories developed by journalists and divided into parts for users to assign themselves. (Mechanical Turk meets the Center for Public Integrity.) I hope it will do stories where teams of users and journalists figure out the division of labor together.

Sometimes the network will be the knowledge producer, the journalist the enabler. Other times the journalist will be the producer, and the network the enabler. Pro-am journalism is not inherently better than am-pro. Amateur users could in some cases do it all themselves, with editors watching and giving the green light in stages. Different combinations beg to be tried. It's unwise to say in advance that we know how it will work, or that it can't.

We posted Jay Rosen's Call for Questions on September 25. Here are his answers, into which he's obviously put plenty of time and thought. This is a "must read" for anyone interested in the growing "citizen journalism" movement either as a writer/editor or as an audience member -- and please note that Rosen and many others say, over and over, that one of the major shifts in the news media, especially online, is that there is no longer any need to be one or the other instead of both.

1) Where do you see newspapers' role in this?
by Stick_Fig

First off, my credentials: I'm the former employee of an experimental newspaper, Bluffton Today, located in Bluffton, South Carolina. It's an exciting place, let me tell you. The focus has been on reverse publishing but at the same time tempering blogs with traditional journalism. The staff still writes articles; they still edit heavily. They use the web only to the degree where it doesn't dip into libel and slander and builds on its strengths. My question to you is, do you think Bluffton is on the right track? It felt like, in the 15 months I was there, they definitely were, but I'm a biased party. I left thinking, "If only newspapers did more of this..." I know what I'm betting the farm on in my career, and it isn't tired, boring, traditional journalism. It isn't the straight and narrow of blogs, either. Rather, I feel that it's important to look at both sides and find how they can work together, because God knows there's some 60-year-old editor somewhere who won't look at Bluffton as anything more than a gimmick. I'm gonna be that guy in the newsroom fighting the good fight to get more untraditional voices into the the paper in more places than the editorial page.

Rosen:

Bluffton Today (Bluffton, SC is near Hilton Head Island) did several things that were important to try in 2005. They said the editorial engine would be the online edition; it would "produce" the printed paper. This is the opposite of how newspapers did things for the first ten years of their Web lives. They just re-purposed the content from the print edition, and called that an "online newspaper."

By reversing what's primary in production you change head sets in the newsroom because a professional newsroom engineers everything--including the talents of its employees--around the production ordeal. The "daily miracle" it was once called, because making the newspaper required such a fantastic act of just-in-time coordination. Many things had to be routinized for the miracle to occur. (Including ideas about journalism and the user's place in it.)

Steve Yelvington of Morris Digital Works, who worked on the Bluffton Today site, called it an "inversion" because content would flow from the Web to print rather than vice versa. The editorial engine should be the more interactive one, in which more of the community can participate. The goal was a virtuous circle. "Community conversation feeds professional journalism. Journalism feeds conversation. And around, and around." I think there is something to that idea.

How well it works is for people in Bluffton to address. I like that Bluffton Today tried to go Lessig on the news industry. It ditched the read only platform and re-built on read/write. Yelvington said at the launch: "Everyone gets a blog. Not just staffers, but everyone in the community. LeMonde (France) and the Mail and Guardian (South Africa) are doing this, too." Giving everyone a blog may be an obvious idea. But it's a different track. "Everyone gets a photo gallery. Everyone can contribute events to a shared public community calendar...." The site was built on Drupal technology. It had free classifieds. It was different.

If the experience of doing Bluffton Today has tempered some of that initial boldness, that's as it should be. I'm not surprised that the staff still writes articles; they still edit heavily. A web-to-print, highly-interactive, low barrier to entry, read-write, everyone-contributes newspaper is still a daily production headache. Articles, photos, headlines, and ads have to come together. Unedited, the site would have almost no value, although it can have unedited parts with high value.

"It isn't tired, boring, traditional journalism. It isn't the straight and narrow of blogs, either. It's important to look at both sides..." I agree with that, Stick. My new adventure, NewAssignment.Net, is a hybrid site for that reason. (Pros and amateurs collaborate on reporting projects.) In January of 2005 I wrote Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over for the same reason.

Bluffton today was a first wave attempt at innovation. Today initiatives like that face some second wave facts. Bringing capacity online does not itself create activity, so if you're counting on user activity, you better come with more than nifty new capacity. Create more writers and suddenly you may need more editors. "The conversation feeds journalism, journalism feeds the conversation" is a powerful idea, but we are several steps away from knowing how it works to create a live, intelligent filter in the newsroom.

There's just a long way to go. But yeah, you were on the right track working for those guys. Deeply so.

2) How to Get More Respect
by NewYorkCountryLawyer
I am convinced that online media have made a huge contribution to getting out the truth when the corporate media are seeking to suppress the truth. While there are a growing number of people aware of this phenomenon, reports in the 'blogosphere' just do not get the same respect and currency received by reports in the 'major' or 'corporate' media. What do we, as a community, need to do to enhance the respect internet journalists receive in the world at large?

Rosen:

Well, "suppressing" the truth is not how I see the failures of modern journalism, or of our current press. I think it's bigger than that.

Bob Woodward, who is in the news this week, is at the top of the reporting game, an industry unto himself. In two books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack, he failed to tell the truth about the Bush White House because his methods were not up to the obstacle they met: an administration that had broken through all the reality checks normally placed on a president and his closest aides. One by one these measures came under abnormal stress. The policy-making process used by presidents got subverted. The normal channels for sounding out opinion were just disowned. The intelligence community came under extreme stress when asked to supply facts for a decision already made.

A Congress controlled by the same party was expected to go along, which meant accepting the president's definition of reality. Oversight got evacuated. The normal tensions with the press were driven deeper: keep them back, keep them out, tell them nothing, tear them down. If someone does break a story from inside you immediately punish and isolate anyone who spoke to the reporter. You make them disown their words. You make them repent.

This is the story Woodward missed because he got inside it, so to speak. Ron Suskind, one of the few in Washington who did not miss that story, called it "the retreat from empiricism." To me, it's the big narrative yet to come out about the Bush White House. Attack Without a Plan was too crazy to be credible to Woodward. So he wrote Plan of Attack instead. I haven't read his new book yet, just the reviews and excerpts. But from early accounts, State of Denial is his attempt to get back the ground he lost, despite having the best access.

Woodward didn't "suppress" the story. Rather, he couldn't imagine it. Those are the kinds of failures that interest me. Sometimes things are suppressed. Often, the truth eludes professional journalism because no one thought to look for it. I welcome your question, What do we, as a community, need to do to enhance the respect internet journalists receive in the world at large? My first answer is: we have to look for it.

You know how, when you've really mastered something and there's a news account of it, the news story will invariable get several (basic) things wrong? Eliminate the several things and respect will rise. If you want to inform the world of something, grok it before you rock it is a good simple rule.

Correct ourselves early and often. Correct the reporting in the major media, early and often. Fact check your own ass first, then your neighbor's. We should major in transparency; the "major" media will take a minor in that. Diversity of outlook in the reporters ultimately improves the reporting. The blogosphere has advantages there, especially as it does more reporting.

I think we have to accept that Big Media, which isn't going anywhere, is society's default legitimacy-distribution machine. But that doesn't mean it works well. The machine itself can lose legitimacy without exactly falling apart. If you're an upstart publisher of news and you suck at it, Big Media will try to ignore you. If you're an upstart publisher of news and you're really good at it, Big Media will try to ignore you. Then when you assume the shape of a writes-itself story--first bloggers to go to the political conventions!--Big Media will over-cover you, spreading a small bit of understanding over lots and lots of stories. Six months later it's time to debunk the trend they missed, then over-hyped and finally misdescribed. It's not personal. It's protective. It's also cheaper than figuring out what's going on.

We can win a lot of points for Net journalism just by being the opposite of that.

3) What about mob-rule journalism?
by Chas

What sort of safeguards are in place to do fact-checking and prevent false/obviously slanted mob-rule style reports from being propagated as fact?

Rosen:

People hear phrases like "an experiment in open source reporting" and they see it immediately: What's open to the wisdom of the crowd is vulnerable to the actions of the mob. Wanting to be helpful, the volunteer may slant reports without realizing it. Through the portals marked "citizen," the paid operative can also go. How do you prevent all of that?

To me this is a puzzle with many pieces. It won't have one solution; it will take many overlapping systems working together. I can't tell you--yet--how we're going to build a fact-checking and verification system into NewAssignment.Net. But I can tell you that the site will fail without one, so we'll have to try to figure it out, with help from a lot of people. To simply pass along unchecked reports received from strangers over the Net would be fantastically dumb. To discount the possibility of people trying to game the system would be dumb, too; the more successful the site is, the more probable the gaming is. Not to mention spam, duplication, all kinds of junk.

What sort of safeguards are in place? Here are my answers so far. You tell me what is missing or cracked in this foundation:

One: The editors are full time on it. Assignments flow through editors several times before they are published by NewAssignment.Net. That's the pro-am way. It's an editor's job not to be gamed, not to publish bum facts. Everything that goes out has the editor's name on it. It's not an answer to everything--this reliance on "good editors"--but it's a proven system, a simple one, and a start.

Two: Users Self-Police. I'm not sure "community" is the right word for the eventual users of New Assignment. People use that term too loosely, in my opinion. But if NewAssignment.Net develops a base of active, loyal and intelligent users, it's not unreasonable that they can help police the site, especially if they understand that verifiying information and preventing fraud are basic to everything we're trying to do. And so a second answer, after editors, is a culture among users: catch errors, catch mistakes, catch fraud and manipulation. A mob mentality has to be met by something stronger; if you attract the right kind of users, that can happen. It would be foolish to think it will just because you're counting on it.

Three: Given enough eyeballs, all facts can be checked. I think there is every chance of developing a special subgroup of users who are effective fact checkers of the larger base of contributors, including new and casual contributors. One thing we are definitely going to do is see whether retired journalists and ex-journalists will volunteer to work with other natural born sticklers and operate our fact-checking system, which not only has to work, but eventually be better than industry standard. I don't know yet what that system will look like, or how systematic it will be. One of my advisers is interested in this puzzle and working on some ideas, assisted by a professional fact checker who emailed me offering to help. That's how we are going to solve this. Social scientists call it "muddling through."

Four: The site itself has to make verification easy. I mean in the way it is built and meant to operate. For example, editors have to be able to sort the raw from the initially verified from the double checked. This is one of the challenges for the developers of the New Assignment site, which will be Chapter Three. It's a new partnership--here's an about page for them--formed by Zack Rosen, who is my nephew, one of the originators of Dean Space and the co-founder of CivicSpace on the Drupal platform; and Josh Koenig, a co-founder of DeanSpace who started Music for America, a non-profit. They are both Drupal developers, active in that community. The third partner is Matt Cheney, who is trained as a librarian and worked as a researcher at National Center for SuperComputing Applications.

They're going to build the site with open source tools. Josh Koenig has a post up about the New Assignment project. It promises an Open Practice model: "posting tutorials, video screen casts, interviews, and write ups as our own work progresses and as we research others." Verification and fact-checking have to become open practices themselves. The developers understand that.

Five: The one percent rule.. Experience suggests a small slice of users will do most of the volunteer work. According to the one percent rule in social media, which is more of a tendency than a law, "if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will 'interact' with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it." This bears on the verification puzzle because we're not talking about "checking" vast hordes of people. If regular contributors provide most of the contributions, their reputations for reliability can accumulate at the site. In a well-designed system that will happen.

Six: How have others solved the problem? You tell me: has creating a reliable system of volunteer contributors ever been faced before on the Web? Did it prove unsolvable? I would expect NewAssignment.Net to look at prior cases first and find the key lessons.

4) Money
by truthsearch

Do you believe that as money flows into civic journalism that it'll change the equation? Obviously there are some people who's primary goal is to become famous and/or make money through more open journalism. Will the large community of contributors flush out those with less altruistic intentions? I guess I'm really asking will civic journalism be self-correcting as it gets bigger? Or is there a way it may become just as corrupted as much of the current mainstream professional journalism?

Rosen:

I doubt there's any incorruptible system, just different kinds of pressures, with greater and lesser freedoms for the journalists involved. We can certainly hope for a self-correcting system, but it's not likely to happen on its own.

There's nothing wrong with seeking recognition for great work. People who want to be become famous or make a salary through the more open forms in Net journalism aren't the enemy. Not at all. But they are going to have to work with users under conditions that build trust and permit collaboration. It's hard for me to see how the bad actors will succeed at that, but I am not discounting it, either.

Here's a site called Sportingo. It says it's a "new type of sports media company," which is "focused on telling the story from the fans' perspective." Users can write articles, which will be "professionally edited." They can rate and comment on articles written by peers.

Sportingo will own all the content published on the site. There are no plans to pay contributors. The company is for-profit. Tal Rozow, the marketing manager, told me that that "Sportingo authors aiming for a professional writing career will be able to benefit from having by-lines appearing on our website." He said he's confident that a strong network of independent sports writers will emerge at the site, and maybe that will happen. But I'm not sure it's a system designed to build trust among all the players involved.

Everyone I have consulted about open source projects of any kind has stressed one thing over and over: the importance of understanding what would motivate people to contribute to the gift economy of the project. You have to get that right, they say. Ultimately I believe a non-profit foundation is a more secure one. If there are profits and they are extracted by the owners, not distributed to co-creators; that's a problem. If there are profits and they go into doing more and better journalism, that's different.

5) What's wrong with other extant examples?
by crush

I'm assuming that you evaluated and rejected some of the other high-profile citizen journalism outfits that predate the founding of your own project. Off my head I can think of:

* The Indymedia network is one of the longest standing examples of an attempt to have a large citizen journalist network.

* The Pacifica Network (especially the Democracy Now show)

* The New Standard

What was it that you found lacking in the above and why did you decide to start a new project instead of reforming and adapting one of the above? Do you think that your decision to accept corporate sponsorship (which is rejected by the Pacifica Network) will see your organization's focus inevitably drift toward the anodyne ineffectiveness of e.g. NPR?

(And of course, how could I forget WikiNews?)

Rosen:

There's nothing "wrong" with these prior examples. I admire them all. I was especially pleased to see that the New Standard met its do-or-die fundraising goal last week. That site is an experiment with reader-supported, totally independent, strenuously-factual reporting. High standards of verification are meant to prevail. I think the New Standard has a lot in common with professional journalism, except it rejects the political economy of commercial news media entirely. It's run as a collective among those who do the work. I am thrilled that it will remain around, because we need to try lots of solutions to how to fund serious reporting. Just as I'm thrilled that Independent Media Center and its collectives around the world keep humming. I agree with Chris Anderson that what blogging begat--citizen journalism--Indy Media begat, too.

I didn't "evaluate and reject" the New Standard, Indy Media, Pacifica and Wiki News. Nor is it my place to decide they need fixing. They don't. The people who founded those organizations deserve a lot of credit for creating something new and daring-- and genuinely alternative. They inspired me. So did lots of others. (New West, for example, or Witness.org.) NewAssignment.Net is really about a single proposition: that if journalists and networks of users can report stuff together that neither could easily do alone, the public sphere will benefit and the site will build trust. I think there's room for that.

My decision to accept $100,000 from Reuters means we'll have an editor who can test the possibilities in networked journalism, as Jeff Jarvis calls it. My job is to make sure that Reuters has no influence on that person. The company has said it will have no editorial control, and no claim on the content. I agree: it won't. I think we can persuade users that it works as advertised. But people are free to draw their own conclusions about what the gift means, and I'm sure they will.

6) Plagiarism and Ethics?
by goombah99

Lately there's been a few incidents of Plagiarism in the news, not to mention some wholesale ethical breaches of faked stories (e.g. Blair at the NY times and "a million Little pieces"). But the thing is, the reason those are news is that they are both exceptional and something that is specifically drummed in to any professional journalist not to do. Indeed, breaking this taboo is probably even more of a sin to the the fellow journalists than to the general public because of this entrenched ethic.

Yet we know that on college campuses, where we can measure the phenomenon, plagiarism is comparatively rampant. So evidently the common man cannot restrain himself.

It seems to me this is a serious issue for any new journalism form with a low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonymity for the author. How does this ethos get enforced in such a realm?

A related question is the ethical division of commentary and news. We know that's become a problem in the media for some outlets where management has a thumb on the content. But the traditional news organs, especially newspapers, still refrain for the most part. Indeed, the NY times just went so far as to remove the typeset justification from any article that contained any sort of analysis or opinion, reserving the justified typesetting for only traditional factual journalism stories so the difference is apparent to the reader from the start. How do we reinforce that ethos in the untrained journalist?

Rosen:

When people plagiarize they do it for a particular self-interested reason: to meet a deadline, get an unwanted task out of the way, get their full time salary with limited work. These motivations will probably be rarer in the New Assignment model. Why volunteer for a project only to cheat at it?

"The common man cannot restrain himself." Sorry, I don't trust that kind of language. Beyond that making stuff up is not a way to develop a base of users on the Web; people aren't that dumb! You speak of a "low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonymity for the author." But for most users the higher the anonymity factor for the author, the higher the barrier of trust.

What some people can't seem to get over is that other people can say any damn thing they want on the Internet! How can you trust any of it? is their natural reaction to all open systems. Closed systems--and professional journalism is one--develop trust in one way. Open systems have to do it a much different way. Expecting one to look like the other is unreasonable.

We aren't going to learn much about this puzzle by asking how the "common man" can be trained to imitate his betters in the news media. I refer you to sociologist Raymond Williams, who once said, "There are no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses." It is these ways of seeing that are retrograde. But they show up in the most surprising places.

7) Scale
by FuturePastNow

First, I'll admit that I haven't read much about citizen journalism other than Jeff Jarvis' [buzzmachine.com], but as a non-blogger thinking of getting in to it, I was wondering:

Much of the discussion seems to be about getting out from under the control of "gatekeepers" like publishers and media owners. Yet, while the internet is less concerned with money, it has its own form of currency: popularity, in the form of the link.

Doesn't this just turn the highest-traffic sites into new gatekeepers? Especially as the number of blogs increases, the gap between "rich" and "poor" expands?

I suppose what I'm really asking is, it's hard enough to get noticed today- how will someone just starting out get noticed ten years from now?

Rosen:

Ten years from now? Jeez, I have no idea what the world of media access will be like then. But anyone who is just starting out in self-publishing should consult Clay Shirky's Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, so as not to become prematurely disillusioned by discovering its truths later on.

Certainly there are new gatekeepers. (Slashdot itself is one. But does it work the same way the old system did?) Traffic-wise, there's still rich and poor. (But is this list as static as that one?) Hierarchies have not gone away. (And who said they would?) Inequality has not disappeared. (But did you really think it could?)

You still have to fight to be noticed, good work can still go unnoticed. Life online is not entirely fair, or completely different. There's a new attention economy to replace the old. The sooner we reconcile ourselves to these common sense conclusions, the easier it will be to see what is actually different today.

Here are some things that stand out for me: Amateurs have joined professionals and they own a part of "the press." An audience that was once connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other is now connected both ways. The cost for like-minded people to locate each other and collaborate has fallen dramatically. The tools of media production have been widely distributed, and broad distribution of content is no longer impossible for small, upstart producers. For professionals, they're not required to affiliate with Big Media in order to operate as a journalist, though most will. They can be stand alones and independents. The people formerly known as the audience (as I call them) are now a productive force to be reckoned with, and Big Media has just started that reckoning. The Net has new ways of distributing attention, which have taken their place alongside the old.

Still, there's a long way to go before we can say that our media system has been made more democratic, responsive and responsible.

8) What impact would this have on national elections?
by StressGuy

The Electoral process seems to be more of a "marketing contest" and marketing takes bags and bags of money. There's commercial time, signs, billboards, radio, etc. Let's face it, a commercial is, at most 90 seconds to tell me why I should vote for you - hardly enough time. So, all we see are glittering generalities or, all to often, "don't vote for the other guy" spots.

If "Citizen Journalism" takes off, do you see this as a way that candidates without the massive financial resources normally required to sustain a traditional campaign could actually compete? Could this make the "third party candidates" a credible threat? Could this actually serve to "level the playing field"?

Rosen:

We should be cautious here. I think the most we can say is that a system that was almost entirely closed and self-sustaining--in which a handful of people raised the money, took the polls, handled the candidates, made the ads, narrated the campaign and talked about the candidates on TV--has been disrupted. The people who ran it are not as confident as they once were in their ability to manage things and get the outcomes they want. Their party has been crashed, but it's not "over." Nor is it "ours."
It's possible that insurgent candidacies--not backed by current players in the system--will have an easier time of it in the years ahead, just as insurgent news providers have more of an opening now. That's as far as I would go on the leveled field.

9) Dilution of Protection
by ObsessiveMathsFreak

How long before corporations and wealthy individuals start employing goons, lawyers and wiretaps, a la HP, to threaten and intimidate citizen journalists with no real legal recourse? If faced with this, should a citizen journalist just back off and let the guilty win? How can the protections now enjoyed by the fourth estate be extended to citizen journalism without diluting them?

Rosen:

As a matter of law and public policy, I think "fourth estate" protections should focus on significant acts of journalism, not people in pre-fab categories or the kind of organization that surrounds the giver of news. All those who are engaged in the act of informing a broader public of what's going on deserve to be under the First Amendment umbrella that protects the press. The press itself is composed of amateur and professional wings.

But that's no answer to goons with lawyers who threaten to sue. Citizen journalists are definitely vulnerable there, which makes you realize why we have big media organizations in the first place. We have to be more creative. Robert Cox, head of the Media Bloggers Association (I am a founding member of the group) has shown that "an orchestrated campaign by bloggers to defend a fellow blogger in what appears to be a frivolous lawsuit" can work. That's encouraging but not a complete answer, either. Legal intimidation will happen, and I'm sure there will be times when the bad guys will win.

10) Blogging
by From A Far Away Land

When asking a primary source for information, I find that telling them I'm doing so to create a report on my blog tends to make them clam up, or continue to be unwilling to provide information that ought to be publicly available. What technique or phrases should I use to convince the interviewee that I both have a legitimate use for their information, and the right to obtain it?

Rosen:

Sometimes you have a right to obtain information from a primary source. Sometimes it's not a matter of your rights but their decision to recognize you and cooperate. If search costs are high for making an informed decision about whether to trust a blogger who shows up with questions, sources will seek to reduce costs by using reputation and even stereotype (bloggers: ugh) as proxies.

I don't think there's a proper technique or a magic phrase that will solve this problem. There's only one solution I can see. Send the guy the URL for the "about" section of your site. That page ought to persuade potential sources that legitimate use will be made of their information. It should tell them what you are up to, and why. The site itself, the reporting and commentary there, is the best reason any source has to cooperate. Ah, but how do you convince them to take the time and look?

There's at least one way. Break a story so that the source's world is talking about it and next time around the source will speak to you-- and go to your About page. I asked Dean Wright of Reuters what the biggest obstacle for NewAssignment.Net will be when it launches. "The same one that the more minor players in the mainstream media have: getting your calls returned," he said. "Then when you complete a project and publish, you may find that other media outlets are reluctant to pick up your stories." The only answer to that is "do some compelling projects that cannot be ignored."

NewAssignment.Net will try to take that advice. It will do stories developed by users into assignments that are given to journalists. It could also do stories developed by journalists and divided into parts for users to assign themselves. (Mechanical Turk meets the Center for Public Integrity.) I hope it will do stories where teams of users and journalists figure out the division of labor together.

Sometimes the network will be the knowledge producer, the journalist the enabler. Other times the journalist will be the producer, and the network the enabler. Pro-am journalism is not inherently better than am-pro. Amateur users could in some cases do it all themselves, with editors watching and giving the green light in stages. Different combinations beg to be tried. It's unwise to say in advance that we know how it will work, or that it can't.

Zaatxe writes, "Today is election day in Brazil. About 125 million people are expected to vote for president, governor, congressman (for both state and federal levels) and senator. The Washington Post has some interesting details about the electronic voting machines used in Brazil. From the article: 'Elections in Brazil used to be a monumental challenge, with millions of paper ballots to count by hand, many of them delivered by canoe and horseback from remote Amazon villages. Fraud was widespread, and it often took a week or more to determine the winners. Latin America's largest country eliminated many of these hassles by switching to electronic voting a decade ago, long before the United States and other countries... Some computer programmers who have closely examined Brazil's system say... confidence is misguided... Some Brazilians are lobbying... to switch from Windows CE to an open-source operating system for the voting machines, since Microsoft Corp., citing trade secrecy, won't allow independent audits to make sure malicious programmers haven't inserted commands to "flip" votes from one candidate to another.'" Read more below.

As a Brazilian voter, it was a shock for me to see that the voting machines here are made by Diebold. But what makes me confident in the system can also be found in the article: "Given the choice of picking a system where wholesale rigging is easy, versus one where it's impossible, why has Brazil gone with the system where it's easy? Brazil did build in some safeguards during its transition to electronic voting — protections that still don't exist in the US. While the code behind Microsoft's operating system remains secret, independent auditors must approve of the overlying voting software before it is inserted into the nation's 430,000 machines. The software remains open to inspections for three months before election day. And hours before the polls open, randomly chosen voting machines are tested 'to verify that the software inside does what it is supposed to do.'"

gettin-bored noted a nice article running in very high priority on the Washington Post, right up there on page 17 of the print edition, where it's revealed that the CIA Director warned Rice about Bin Laden two months before 9/11. And strangely, the meeting was never mentioned during all the 9/11 commission reports making you really question what exactly they were actually hearing that was more important than the CIA director telling the National Security Advisor that Bin Laden was going to attack Americans.

rkcallaghan writes "The Washington Post is reporting that the House passed a measure that makes it illegal for banks in the US to handle online gambling transactions." There's still no such move in the Senate, but it's a step towards banning online gambling nonetheless. Since this bill isn't expected to affect the usual, legal ways of gambling domestically, one wonders if such legislation would be sought after, were online gambling to be headquartered here in the states, rather than overseas.

ColinPL writes to mention a Washington Post article about a new study backed by Hollywood on intellectual piracy. The study, which they're presenting to lawmakers today, claims that piracy has a ripple effect on the economy. According to the study, lost revenues may have as much as three times the impact previously imagined. From the article: "Lawmakers and federal agencies such as the Justice and State departments have helped Hollywood battle physical piracy -- specifically, counterfeit DVDs. But now the stakes are especially high for entertainment companies as they sell more of their products online in the form of digital songs, movies and other intellectual property. Internet piracy may be tougher for lawmakers to conceptualize, entertainment companies fear."

wiredog writes, "The Washington Post writes about real-time credit-card theft from small merchants (registration required). An accompanying Security Fix blog commentary from Brian Krebs describes '...10 hours of lurking I did on a variety of underground chat and Web channels frequented by identity and credit card thieves. From that research, Security Fix confirmed recent data breaches at four online merchants that were unaware that hackers had broken into their databases until we contacted them.' Lesson: Don't buy online from the cheapest retailers. Guess where they are cutting costs to be the cheapest?" The article and blog commentary also cast doubt on the efficacy of online "hacker testing" services.

wiredog writes, "The Washington Post writes about real-time credit-card theft from small merchants (registration required). An accompanying Security Fix blog commentary from Brian Krebs describes '...10 hours of lurking I did on a variety of underground chat and Web channels frequented by identity and credit card thieves. From that research, Security Fix confirmed recent data breaches at four online merchants that were unaware that hackers had broken into their databases until we contacted them.' Lesson: Don't buy online from the cheapest retailers. Guess where they are cutting costs to be the cheapest?" The article and blog commentary also cast doubt on the efficacy of online "hacker testing" services.

People ranging from Doc Searls to J.D. Lasica to Dan Gillmor to Craig Newmark have talked about how "citizen journalism" is supplanting and/or augmenting professional reporting. (FYI: One of the groundbreaking moments in "citizen journalism" happened right here on Slashdot.) This week's interviewee, NYU professor Jay Rosen, is not only a long-time proponent of civic journalism, but has now started NewAssignment.net with seed money from Craig Newmark, a $10,000 grant from the Sunlight Foundation and, last week, $100,000 from Reuters. Jay Rosen is obviously not just an academic or theoretician, but is actually doing things, which means he can answer almost any question you may have about citizen (or civic) journalism. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.

Here are some links to articles you may want to read before you post your question(s), if only to avoid duplication:

Web Users Open the Gates
By Jay Rosen
washingtonpost.com
Monday, June 19, 2006

'Blogosphere' spurs government oversight
By Richard Wolf
usatoday.com
September 11, 2006

Open Source Journalism
By Richard Poynder
poynder.blogspot.com
March 28, 2006

Who killed the newspaper?
The Economist
August 24, 2006

AMATEUR HOUR -Journalism without journalists.
by Nicholas Lemann
The New Yorker
July 31, 2006

U.S. Government Should be Focus of Investigative Reports
by Mark Glaser
PBS.org/mediashift
September 7, 2006

david.emery writes "In an article in the Washington Post entitled If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP, post technology columnist Rob Pegoraro points out the 5 year legacy of Windows XP. The article starts 'Windows XP is turning five years old, but will anybody want to celebrate the occasion?' This is (IMHO) a very well-reasoned critique of WinXP, although it does fail to credit XP as being markedly better than its predecessors." More from the article: "Consider stability, the single biggest selling point of XP. The operating system was meant to stop individual programs from crashing the system, and it succeeded. It takes an especially malignant program to send my copy of XP to a 'blue screen of death.' But that's not the only way XP can crash. Drivers, the software that lets XP communicate with hardware components, can still lock up the system. If you've seen an XP laptop fail to wake up from standby, you can probably blame it on buggy drivers."

StupidSexyFlanders writes "The Washington Post ran a story about students protesting their school's use of anti-plagiarism site Turnitin.com, which checks papers they've written against a database of 22 million other papers. From the article: "Members of the new Committee for Students' Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin's automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights." Statistically speaking, it's likely that a sizable percentage of these students download copyrighted material from the Internet. Do you think any of them are concerned about IP rights then?"

crystalattice writes "Apparently Maryland election officials never have computer problems. That's why they're fighting so hard to keep their Diebold e-voting machines. Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher received nothing but bad attitudes, dodges, and excuses when he attempted to discuss the issue with the state elections administration and Diebold." From the article: "I asked the state's elections administrator, Linda Lamone, whether Maryland wasn't just a bit too quick to adopt electronic voting. Doesn't the computer at your desk ever freeze up on you? 'No,' she replied. Never? 'No.' But surely people in your office have had that experience? 'No.' (Maybe we've found the solution to Maryland's voting problem: Everybody head on down to Linda Lamone's office, where the machines work 100 percent of the time.)"

Mark writes "The Washington Post, reporting on Hewlett-Packard's Chairman Patricia Dunn and alleged spying on other HP board members, has obtained e-mails that implicate the CEO, Mark Hurd, who approved an elaborate 'sting' operation on a CNet reporter." From the article: HP's leak investigation involved planting false documents, following HP board members and journalists, watching their homes, and obtaining calling records for hundreds of phone numbers belonging to HP directors, journalists and their spouses, according to a consultant's report and the e-mails."

supabeast! writes, "Fed up with all the problems in the state's electronic voting system, Maryland Governor Robert Erlich wants the state to scrap the entire system and return to paper ballots. He's threatened to call a special session of the legislature to change the law to allow paper ballots. What makes this particularly interesting is that Erlich is a Republican — the party often maligned for exploiting flaws in electronic systems — and his attempts to clean up Maryland's voting problems are being opposed by Democrats, the party that is usually complaining about electronic voting!"

An anonymous reader writes "18-year-old David Banh of Annandale, VA recently graduated from the University of Virginia with a double major in Physics and Mathematics, and an education paid for almost entirely by scholarships. What's truly amazing is that he did it in one year, bringing in 72 Advanced Placement credits, then taking 23 credits his fall semester, 37 credits his spring semester and 3 credits in the summer. His brief undergraduate career didn't leave him much time to explore college, so he's now working on his master's degree. He says he may eventually pursue law school as a part-time student in hopes of becoming a patent lawyer."

An anonymous reader writes "Greg Garcia, a lobbyist for the high-tech industry, has been appointed to fill the new assistant secretary post for cyber security and telecommunications at the Department of Homeland Security. Garcia, a VP with the Information Technology Association of America, will try to resuscitate DHS's flagging efforts to formulate a response plan should the nation's key digital assets come under concerted attack or crumble due to some catastrophic failure. DHS is a little late in filling this post: Congress created it 14 months ago after getting fed up with the agency's lack of progress on cyber issues."

breun writes "The U.S. has asked foreign governments to consider the effects of interfering with popular new technologies, pointing to recent scrutiny of Apple's iTunes Music Store as an example of bad judgment. The U.S. Justice Department's antitrust chief Thomas Barnett cited recent foreign proposals to impose restrictions on Apple's iTunes service as an example of strict regulation which could discourage innovation and hurt consumers." From the Washington Post article: "In prepared remarks, Barnett said the scrutiny of Apple 'provides a useful illustration of how an attack on intellectual property rights can threaten dynamic innovation.' Barnett said Apple should be applauded for creating a legal, profitable and easy-to-use system for downloading music and other entertainment via the Internet."

An anonymous reader writes, "Voting machines are wreaking havoc in Maryland elections today. From the article: 'Election Day in Montgomery County and parts of Prince George's opened in chaos and frustration this morning, as a series of problems and missteps left thousands of citizens unable to vote or forced to cast provisional ballots... Montgomery County's Board of Elections held an emergency meeting and agreed to petition the Circuit Court to extend voting times until 9 p.m.' It's simply shameful."

Much talk yesterday in Austin centered around Rob Pardo's keynote, but there were several other events you might be interested in. Dell Chairman Michael Dell talked about that company's gaming plans in a 'fireside' chat. Movie producer Jon Landau spoke on the role of gaming in the entertainment industry. Gamasutra has several pieces from smaller talks, with titles like The Death of Cinematics, New Models for Game Stories, and Writing for Digital Actors. Finally, Raph Koster offers an ultimatum to the games business: evolve or die. From that article: "The end result, according to Koster, is the current hit-driven state of the game industry, which focus on the top 20 percent of games. 'The particular adaptation that we've made to this is to not bother making or stocking or selling the other 80 percent,' Koster said. 'So when you walk into your friendly neighborhood GameStop, you won't find the game that is 21 on the charts. Because of limited shelf space, they just don't want it around. It's just not worth having it compared to game number 20 twice, or better yet, The Sims and all of its expansions.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A Virginia appeals court has upheld the first felony conviction under a state anti-spam law. In the process, the court also suggested that spam recipients might be able to sue spammers for money damages. According to the court, taxing a person's servers with unwanted e-mails is a form of trespass, little different than intruding on their land or making unwanted use of their private property. Perhaps because of this decision, spammers will soon find themselves on the receiving end of a million dollar class action suit."

Edu writes to mention a Washington Post article about Google's olive branch to the Brazilian courts. Despite previously refusing to reveal search information to the U.S. government, the company has announced they'll be releasing information on hate groups to the Brazilian courts. The move is intended to allow the Brazilian government to identify users associated with homophobic and racist groups. From the article: "Orkut pulls objectionable words and pictures from user sites, but Google stores content it feels could be useful in a lawsuit. Orkut is especially popular in Brazil, which accounts for 75 percent of its 17 million users. Legal and privacy experts said that Google had no choice but to comply with the court order. 'From the law enforcement perspective, if the records are in the possession of the business, the business can be compelled to produce them,' said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center."

fightmaster writes "A Lockheed Martin engineer with concerns about the safety and security flaws in a fleet of refurbished Coast Guard patrol boats turned to YouTube in order to publicize concerns he felt were being ignored by his employer and the government. From the article: 'The 41-year-old Lockheed Martin engineer had complained to his bosses. He had told his story to government investigators. He had called congressmen. But when no one seemed to be stepping up to correct what he saw as critical security flaws in a fleet of refurbished Coast Guard patrol boats, De Kort did just about the only thing left he could think of to get action: He made a video and posted it on YouTube.com.'"

prostoalex writes "With the proliferation of social news sites relying on users to submit and vote for content, quite a few of newcomers to the industry face the need to pay top submitters or hire people away from other social news sites, the Washington Post reports. The phenomenon has also led to the appearance of the surfing jobs, where people are paid mostly to surf the Web and find out new links." From the article: "The system depends on a steady stream of contributors like Spring. Last month, Netscape said it would be the first to pay the most active contributors -- $1,000 a month to post at least 150 stories during that time to its newly redesigned Web site. The job qualifications are rather fuzzy, but an executive said active 'navigators' or 'social bookmarkers' provide a valuable service because they keep the site's content varied and fresh."

Davemania writes "Washington Post reports that the FBI's attempt to modernize their department has once again failed. The 170 million dollar Virtual case File system, the agency's second attempt to go paperless is reported to be useless. The finger seems to be pointing at the FBI leadership, greedy contractors and bad software management." From the article: "It appeared to work beautifully. Until Azmi, now the FBI's technology chief, asked about the error rate. Software problem reports, or SPRs, numbered in the hundreds, Azmi recalled in an interview. The problems were multiplying as engineers continued to run tests. Scores of basic functions had yet to be analyzed. 'A month before delivery, you don't have SPRs,' Azmi said. 'You're making things pretty. . . . You're changing colors.'"

Read on for some of the most interesting comments from yesterday's stories on NASA's lost moon-walk tapes, the reported foiling of a large-scale terror attack planned against the U.S. to have been staged from the U.K., and the Department of Homeland Security's sudden warning to patch Windows with the latest security updates, in today's Backslash summary of those conversations. Reader ShootThemLater arrived at Heathrow airport "just as news was breaking" of the arrests of 21 people alleged to have been preparing a massive, multi-staged attack on the U.S. using binary explosives on planes flying from the U.K., and provides a first-hand account of his experience:

It was a tough decision to part with my laptop, PDA and mobile but I decided to take my chances. It only really then dawned on me the extent to which I depend on these items when I was waiting for hours to clear security ... While I could have found a public pay phone, all my phone numbers are stored in my mobile & PDA and I actually remember very few of them. I could speak to people, after somehow getting their numbers, but they could not call me back. All the usual channels that are normally available to me to get information about a delay were unavailable to me - no web access or even SMS messages to friends with access. You just have to stand in a queue like a sheep.

[...]

As has been reported, items allowed were limited to wallets/travel documents and baby/health-specific products. However, many of us brought books and papers with us also. Interestingly, Duty Free shops were open airside - although I didn't see if any electronics shops were. The focus this morning was really on what can be brought from landside to airside and they didn't seem to have thought about what you buy airside so much (although I would speculate that electronic items bought airside do not pose such a threat in that terrorists would use pre-modified devices to detonate explosives). The search at security was a remove shoes, belts etc. job - rather like being in the US :)

"First, congratulations to the Security Services for foiling this plot," writes reader ettlz, before raising a few relevant questions:

Did they need to detain someone for 90 days without trial to prevent this disaster? Would ID cards have helped?

And how long before I can travel with my notebook onto an aeroplane again, as we all know a cargo hold is no place for a lithium ion battery?

Null537 asks

Is anyone else more angry about the hassle this causes, than anything else? Terrorists spread terror, so they've hit their mark. By being foiled the plot does an amazing amount of damage on its own, spreading FUD.

I don't feel any safer by having my liquids/toenail clippers/pocket vibe/ipod/laptop taken away from me, when there are plenty of other ways to kill/be killed that airlines have no control over. I am more angry at terrorists for making American privacy close(er) to extinction than anything else. With a "war" on "terror" there are going to be casualties, my water consumption/music listening/laptop using/game playing/phone usage habits shouldn't be at the top of the list.

Why does the scapegoat have to be the common citizen?

Reader v1 left one of hundreds of comments on the missing original recordings of the first moon walk, which NASA would like to recover and safely archive before their inevitable deterioration past the point of rescue.

It would not surprise me if these tapes have been in some very rich person's "personal museum" for the last several years, the result of a quiet and large payoff to someone that had access to the archives. Things like this don't just "disappear," they "grow legs."

Ninwa questions the significance of the claim made in the linked article that "The only known equipment on which the original analogue tapes can be decoded is at a Goddard centre set to close in October, raising fears that even if they are found before they deteriorate, copying them may be impossible.":

Is the article honestly trying to suggest that NASA couldn't reverse engineer a format and design a player for it if the original player was lost? I personally find that a little hard to believe. It just sounds like a convenience excuse to create a "give-up searching" date. In my opinion these tapes are very important to our country's history. It's almost shameful to me to think they could have lost them so easily.

According to reader Detritus, "The format isn't a big mystery, it's IRIG 106 if anyone cares" -- but that's not the problem, he says:

The problem is that as part of the continuing budget crunch at NASA, made worse by the need to scrounge money from the existing budget for new tasks like a Shuttle replacement and going to Mars, many activities and facilities are being cut or eliminated. The lab that can handle these old tapes, the Data Evaluation Lab at Goddard, has lost its funding. That means that it will be closed at the end of this fiscal year. The equipment goes into storage or is surplused. The people have to find other jobs or be laid off or retire.

Building a recorder from scratch would be insanely expensive. These recorders cost anywhere from $50-100K when they were new and being manufactured in quantity.

It's easy to say that "they" should keep and maintain the hardware, catalog and store the tapes in climate controlled warehouses, and do all the other things needed to preserve the data for future generations. That doesn't pay the bills. Just storing a tape can cost a dollar or more a year. That doesn't sound too bad until you realize that a single spacecraft can easily generate tens of thousands of tapes. Another problem is that at $100-200 for a new reel of tape, there has always been a large incentive to recycle and reuse tapes for current missions.

Reader Aufero has no trouble believing that if NASA did have to reverse engineer the format, it would run into more than a bit of bureaucratic barbed wire:

If NASA did it, it would require five years, fifteen administrators, and fifty million dollars. The quarterly funding reviews alone (much less the reviews of the reviews) would take up more time than the project, and the funding would be proxmired halfway through to pay for a bridge to an island owned by a friend of some congressman. If they ever find the tapes they should hand them over to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which would probably have them transferred to more durable media in six months at a cost of $30,000.

The problem of preservation sure isn't one confined to NASA, though: reader drDugan writes with an insightful comment on long-term storage of historically important but voluminous data:

I was recently at a meeting in Bethesda at the NIH and heard Don Lindberg, the director of the national library of medicine talk about long term information storage.

After going through all the normal stuff about media degrading and backups, etc -- he made a really interesting point: The only way to really ensure REALLY LONG storage - like tens of thousands of years is to keep having people accessing information. The point he made is that all the storage technology will continue to evolve, and it's only the information we stop accessing that will fall into danger of getting lost.

I thought it was a good point.

Why on earth do we not have access to the original data from the Moon landings? If we did, lots of people would have a copy around. Silly secretive state.

On the announcement that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had issued a strongly worded recommendation that Windows users update their computers with the latest security patches from Microsoft, tholomyes writes that the suggestion is a good one:

This update is as important as it gets. There are vulnerabilities in every major MS program which allow remote code execution, which means that as soon as the exploit is discovered, it can take advantage of holes all over your system.

Affected programs and services:

• MS Server Services (TCP 139 and 445)
• DNS servers
• Internet Explorer
• Outlook Express
• Microsoft Management Console
• HTML Help
• Visual Basic
• Microsoft Office
• Windows kernel

I'm not too surprised that they're trying to push awareness of this patch. It was the lack of patching several weeks beforehand that allowed Code Red to do as much damage as it did.

Many comments suggested that the Department of Homeland Security's motives for issuing its urgent suggestion to patch systems were less than admirable, if not not downright conspiratorial; in response to by ExE122's suggestion that "monitoring 10 million computers to find out what porn sites people like to visit isn't [a government priority]," Shaper_pmp offered a level-headed reason not to discount such suspicions:

How about monitoring 10 million phone calls?

And with a handy backdoor installed monitoring computers would be even easier to automate.

I'm not saying they have, merely that your pooh-poohing of the whole idea is a bit baseless when they've already been caught doing essentially the same thing in a different medium.

[...] The only way this makes sense to me is if you're saying conspiracy theories shouldn't attract tinfoil hat accusations any more... because everyone knows they're watching you, lying to you and breaking the law all the damn time?

Reader twofidyKidd outlines the tension that makes it hard to decide between tempting conspiracies and comforting trust:

The real problem is that our cynicism makes viewing realistic possibilities hard to imagine, and our tools [of] logical deduction sort of seem to fail. Occam's razor can't be used in a situation like this because time has proved over and again that the interests of people at the government level aren't always in the interest of people at the constituency level. This is one of those times that we (the Slashdot conflux) would like to imagine that someone (like Lawrence Lessig or Brad Templeton) has finally said something to an official that he finally understood and as a result has taken this action, but since we often have a hard time getting our own management to listen to the good ideas we put forth, we're hesitant to believe such a thing has happened. In fact, given the recent history of our government, we're much more inclined to consider a sinister purpose. The DHS press release has many of the "hidden agenda" trappings, like specifically indicating which patch to apply, as well as the call of immediacy. ...

Just to put things in perspective; right now, Britons are unloading all liquids and gels into trash cans prior to boarding U.S.-bound planes, while we're wondering if the U.S. government is acting in our best interest by adamantly suggesting we patch our Windows computers.

Many thanks to the readers (especially those quoted above) whose comments went into each of these conversations.

Dan East writes "Scientists in England have gathered definitive evidence that a kind of cancer in dogs, known as Sticker's sarcoma, is contagious. It is spread by tumor cells getting passed from dog to dog through sex or from animals biting or licking each other. Robin Weiss and his colleagues did genetic studies on the tumor cells from 40 dogs with Sticker's sarcoma, collected from five continents, which showed that all the tumor cells are clones of each other. The parent cell probably arose in a domesticated dog of Asian origin — perhaps a husky — hundreds of years ago, and perhaps more than 1,000 years ago. A similarly transmissible cancer has recently been discovered spreading through populations of Tasmanian devils."

espo812 writes "A story from Washingtonpost.com says, 'The Senate has ratified a treaty under which the United States will join more than 40 other countries, mainly from Europe, in fighting crimes committed via the Internet.' Ars Technica says it's the 'World's Worst Internet Law.'" From the Ars story: "According to the EFF, 'The treaty requires that the U.S. government help enforce other countries' 'cybercrime' laws--even if the act being prosecuted is not illegal in the United States. That means that countries that have laws limiting free speech on the Net could oblige the F.B.I. to uncover the identities of anonymous U.S. critics, or monitor their communications on behalf of foreign governments. American ISPs would be obliged to obey other jurisdictions' requests to log their users' behavior without due process, or compensation.;"

Kadin2048 writes "As reported by Ars Technica and the Washington Post, two hackers have found an exploitable vulnerability in the wireless drivers used by Apple's MacBook. Machines are vulnerable if they have wireless enabled and are set to connect to any available wireless network, fairly close to their default state, and the exploit allows an attacker to gain "total access" -— apparently a remote root. Although the demo, performed via video at the BlackHat conference, takes aim at what one of the hackers calls the "Mac userbase aura of smugness on security," Windows users shouldn't get too smug themselves: according to the Post article, "the two have found at least two similar flaws in device drivers for wireless cards either designed for or embedded in machines running the Windows OS." Ultimately, it may be the attacks against embedded devices which are the most threatening, since those devices are the hardest to upgrade. Currently there have not been any reports of this vulnerability 'in the wild.'" According to this story at ITwire.com, they were able to exploit Linux and Windows machines, too. (Thanks to Josh Fink.)

WilliamSChips writes "The United States military has announced that they are shutting down the facility at Cheyenne Mountain, home to the high-tech NORAD which tracks every object in the sky. NORAD's operations will be moved to the nearby Peterson Air Force base. The mountain facility is being placed on standby in case they need it again." From the article: "The Cheyenne Mountain center, at the eastern foot of the Rockies near the base of Pikes Peak, was constructed underground in the mid-1960s. Fearing nuclear attacks at the time, the United States built sites such as the Cheyenne Mountain complex. The Navy prepared a floating White House aboard the communications cruiser USS Northampton, in case the president needed to be evacuated from U.S. soil. Another protective bunker was created near White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., for members of Congress."