Slashdot Mirror
Regulation by Architecture
Erasei writes: "With all of the goverments around the world trying harder and harder to regulate what their citizens do on the net, this
article has some interesting ideas. While the text was written in 1998, points like the one made here are still interesting: The extent to which the surveillance capacity of cyberspace is limited, and where permitted made controllable by user choice, is perhaps the single key issue in the regulation of cyberspace." This is a very insightful article, despite its age (I'd read it before, but it bears repeating). This article, and Lessig's work generally, puts the lie to the myth that the internet cannot be regulated. Coincidentally, there's an article on this same subject in the NYTimes today. Discusses how the structure of online sites affects the discussion that occurs there. Good reading.
By the way I have here a news item which mentions of technology that promises to establish national borders on the Net. Well that could be one way of cyber-control.
There are many different issues that involve the term 'regulation', and the decision as to whether it is a good idea or not is going to depend on the specific issue.
Is it a good idea to regulate the distribution of child pornography on the internet? For this the answer is universally yes.
Is it a good idea to regulate the distribution of Mein Kampf? At least in the US it violates our 1st amendment, but in other countries it would be a violation to not regulate it.
It's a very complex issue, and just saying 'no regulation at all' won't get you far. I think this was one of Lessig's points last year.
Actually that's one of the more insightful posts I've seen on slashdot in a long time.
But I think what was most interesting was the Microsoft comment at the bottom. This must be some sort of proof by example.
One could also call it karma whoring. You didn't think the rest of your article carried any weight, so you threw in a anti-Microsoft attack hoping that the polarized community of slashdot would see that and go "Ohhhh, he's insightful!" and mod you up.
Reality is beginning to creep in on cyberspace. How can we be surprized about this.
Cyberspace is concensual. Not democratic, not authoritarian but concensual. It exists but it is a direct reflection of its virtual inhabitant.
Face it. Pogo was right: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Both utopia (a paradox is ever there was one,) and distopia (the same paradox in reverse,) will find limited existence there.
Bet on limited chaos but be aware that history courses are litanies of faded civilizations and vanished ones.
The same medium is being used to transmit porn and Taliban edicts against wome showing themselves in public (at all!)
Its just that the absurdity of the cacophony is becoming hard to avoid. Its all based on an economy of scarcety.
For the entire realm of data (or even information, and perhaps knowledge,) having essentially infinite bandwidth, a cpu cycle being so cheap as to be essentially unmeasurable and storage capacity doubling even faster than Moore's Law flies in the face of that ethos. We are creatures of information.
God (yet another paradox,) is telling people through his annointed and illuminated emmisaries, to love one and other but to kill those people in the neighboring valley because they're different (they're too tall, short, pale, tanned, hairy, short, don't or do wear hats,) and therefore evil.
RIAA and MPAA, who produce no content what-so-ever, are in control of the transmission and therefore the production of music and motion pictures. But don't ask them to carry a tune because they'll charge you for the privilege of proving they're tone-deaf and unimaginative.
Terrorism isn't as effective as dentistry at scaring the crap out of people.
And Leibnitz can now be generalized to: "The power of < whatever > belongs to those who own one."
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
That wasn't a mistake, that was exactly what the US government wanted. Even though the blatantly unconstitutional export restrictions are now mostly gone, they achieved their primary goal of preventing encryption from becoming standard in Internet communications. Because of the desire of our government to easily spy on its citizens, the Internet is substantially less secure than it should be.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Imagin a society where the governing officials were just teenaged idiots whose only job was to admin a few Linux boxes runing perl and mysql. The people submit propositions to the LegaslatureSlashCode, and those that get mod'd up are passed as law. Certain "privilledged" citizens who've been respected by their peers (and had laws mod'd up) get bonus points. All citizens meta-moderate the law moderation in order to curb out the unwanted moderators. We would call this society... FUDland.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Dave Farber was pushing for this in the late 1980s. Didn't happen. And it should have.
From the New York Times article:
On other sites, a group of regular users rank the value of contributions, and the rankings then determines their place on the "bulletin board." How well that works, however, is an open question. When Mr. Sunstein tried to intervene in a discussion of his own book on a techie Web site called slashdot.org, his contribution was given a very low ranking. "I think maybe they didn't believe I was the author of the book," he said.
I looked up this posting. His post number was something like 171/178. Funny that the guy wrote a book about this kinda stuff, but doesn't have the first clue about getting modded up: POST EARLY!!!
We should ask, who is the real constituency of freedom, and how do we, if we are members of that group, preserve the good name of freedom from being co-opted by essentially fascist forces selling the idea that true freedom is just the freedom to be entertained by their media (Berlusconi, the richest man in Italy, owns television networks and a soccer team), while burning their oil (Bush's biggest contributor has been Enron) and eating their GM food?
First, we should recognize who the real constituency is. For example, trades which require personal freedom in order to be performed well produce more than their share of true advocates - music, visual arts, some varieties of programming, and even once-upon-a-time cattle ranching (which is why Bush baby poses as a rancher) - "don't fence me in." And we should add to this group the other staple of the frontier, the dance hall woman/sex worker.
Now, it's not hard to see that, even in our most sophisticated cities, it's easy for politicians to get a significant section of the population worked up about the danger of all these libertine sorts, trying to lure their children into museums and libraries and other places of idleness, off the assembly line of birth-school-marriage-work-death. And it's not too hard to find examples of, for instance, artists with destroyed lives attributable to their flirtation with serious freedoms - their sometimes desparate hunger for degrees of freedom and inspiration which can be fleeting and evasive.
To prevent freedom, it's technologies - particularly the psychotropic - are severely restricted. Back when radio was briefly free, in the late 60's, the broad public fears of such technologies were eased by the great and obvious beauty of the musics produced by artists whose minds were made freer by, and whose work celebrated, these means. Hoping for a revival of free and inspired musics seems polyannish at this point, after even mp3.com has gone down in cynical grovelling.
It's easy to see how Brand and Barlow, producers of the 60s psychotropic culture, fastened on the liberatory potential of computers and networking. And how programmers, being for the most part young, dependent on their creativity, and with one unfortunate exception without real power, appreciated what freedom could do for them.
But where do we go now? The fascists, having co-opted "freedom" to their ideology, can't easily disown the positive valuation of the term - if we can but wrest its meaning back it can be a powerful trojan. But how do we define freedom with such care that the concept doesn't seem to sanction a corrupt mobster like Berlusconi or Gates??
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
While the example of King Canute trying to order the tides to stop is an example of the overwhelming power of nature, perhaps this example is not entirely appropriate. Certainly the conclusions are not shared.
Humans as a force of nature have a certain capacity to muck up nature. Easy examples are areas where humans have lived for a while.
Evidence now suggests that Iceland was well forested when first discovered. The same applies to Easter Island. Both are devoid of trees now. In the Middle East we have from classical literature and the Bible mentions of the Trees of Lebanon, specimens of which are said to have been used for some of the pillars in the temple of King Solomon. Obviously, the region used to be well forested, and now it is not. (Isreal has a long term reforestation program in place). Similarly, the deserts of Iraq all used to be well forested, rich in plant and animal life. The removal of trees changed the climate. We now have a desert. I wonder how much of the Sahara desert is based purely on climate change, and how much climate change was human caused. The Sahara, too, was forested 10 to 15 thousand years ago.
In the Middle East, part of this was a certain type of political warfare. One of old religions there worshipped the trees, among other things. One of their competitors did not, and took to things like building homes out of wood. This went hand in hand with certain like the introduction of goats, etc.
so the point of this is that people in their short sightedness do things that are destructive to the things the like and want to preserve. Part of the problem here is the quantity of people who move in, so that by the time things are figured out, it is too late. If they figure it out at all.
Looking at the example in the NY Times article:
On the conservative Web site "FreeRepublic.com," the discussion began by referring relatively mildly to Mr. Sunstein's book about the political consequences of the Internet as "thinly veiled liberal." But as the discussion picked up steam, the rhetoric of the respondents, who insisted that they had not and would not read the book itself, became more heated. Eventually, they were referring to Mr. Sunstein as "a nazi" and a "pointy headed socialist windbag."
The discussion illustrated the phenomenon that Mr. Sunstein and various social scientists have called "group polarization" in which like-minded people in an isolated group reinforce one another's views, which then harden into more extreme positions. Even one of his critics on the site acknowledged the shift. "Amazingly enough," he wrote, "it looks like Sunstein has polarized this group into unanimous agreement about him." An expletive followed.
We see this in many places, even in Slashdot, where people familiar with technologies, philosophies, and even religions not condoned by the group are harrased and punished by the virulent commentary and conduct of some members. The alternate views are surpressed, even if there may be some benifit from them if you actually looked at them.
This isolates the communities and makes them easier to handle by outside interests. It isolates the slashdot community.
Philosophies are operating systems for the mind. It pays to understand the design principles of these operating systems in detail, and how they work and go together.
Coming back to our example of King Canute, the internet might not be like the ocean. To some extant, it may be like islands of territories that we are creating ourselves with our activities. It may be a universe built up of the activities of all of its participants. This universe, even though it is still growing at a large rate, is limited in thew technical sense. It may be large, but it is limited. You can control sections of it, even large sections of it. The game for some is to control the most important sections of it.
Thus we have MS usurping the jargon of calling the Internet the Net with their .NET. They are positioning themselves to control what they feel is the most important sector of the net, and marginalize the rest. Other interests are doing the same such as China, France, etc. each being polarized from the rest of the world.
The future of the Net (not the .NET) is difficult to predict indeed.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
MicroSlothed has continued to chug out slow, crappy, bug-ridden products that never quite get finished ever since -- a text-based operating system that was almost right by version 6.11, then abandoned; a 16-bit windowing system that was almost finished at 3.11; a 32-over-16 system that was almost finished at 98 SE; and a secure corporate system that was almost useful by 4.0, now also abandoned. The jury is still out on 2000 but I'm not holding my breath; this zebra's stripes are engraved.
So why is BillG one of the 1.5 richest people in the world? Because he got in the game early. First post, not best post.
Meatspace moderation isn't measured in karma, it's measured in dollars -- and it isn't capped.
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[from the NY times article] So, since the Net is an open architecture that anyone can tap into, those who attain power within that structure will use that power to attain more power until they control everything. Sort of like what happens in meatspace.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
While laws and treaties like the DMCA and WCT are attempting to make the protection of digital work stronger, there's no real evidence that this approach actually works. For every instance of a copyrighted document or "circumvention device" removed under the provisions of the DMCA, dozens of copies spring up. Perhaps eventually these laws may be used to their full potential, to truly wipe a document off the net, but it's very unlikely that things could ever get to that point-- no court could be that effective without the creation of a police state. It's more likely that these laws will become something like the prohibition laws-- not really achieving their purpose, but having a lot of unintended consequences.
In that case, it's hard to accept his argument that intellectual property law really "protects property interests in digital artifacts" better than non-digital artifacts. The new laws are more comprehensive (probably too much so), but only because they're fighting a much tougher-- even unwinnable-- battle. What we're seeing are the opening salvos in that battle; it's certainly way too early for people to be calling winners and losers. In fact, I wonder if this guy has even thought about what it would be like to live in a world where either side has "won".
I don't think the issue here is whether or not the net CAN be regulated.. If the governments/companies put enough money towards anything, anything can be accomplished. Regulating the net is just a matter of money. However I think that the real question should be this: should the net be regulated? Personally, I think that it should not. I could get into a very long debate about that one, but I'll save it for now.
If God gave us curiosity