Knowledge Democracy

I purchase items online all the time, but I've never bought anything from Amazon. In my opinion, they collect too much information about their customers and use it in unethical ways. This CNet article notes even more intrusive data collection by the online giant.

Amazon is going to start using information on client purchases to recommend gifts, and tries to guess age, gender, and their birthdate. The article notes that this may violate child privacy protection laws in cases where Amazon is trying to guess that information for your children.

One of the things I don't like about Amazon is that the company is relentless in trying to get you to buy more stuff, masked in the guise of being "helpful." It's as if we aren't able to make up our own minds about what we might want or need--we now need giant marketing databases to help us make decisions.

I still maintain that my local independent bookstore is a better deal than Amazon. I can call them on the phone and place an order for a book, start to finish, in under a minute; they usually give 20% off special orders; they don't charge shipping; and the book usually arrives in 3-4 days. And I'm supporting jobs in my local community.

CNet has an article about the future of newspapers. It says that some papers, like the New York Times, have more people reading the paper online than on paper. But the papers are mad because they are giving away the content for free. They want to start charging for online subscriptions (note that a few papers, like the Wall Street Journal, have been doing this for years).

The papers have it wrong in several ways. In the first place, it's ads that cover most of the cost of newspapers, not subscriptions. An online edition has essentially zero distribution costs, compared to the massive expense required to print news on paper and distribute those paper copies. With the boom in online advertising, it seems like better ad management might actually make online newspapers profitable. But you'd have to let go of the idea that "real" news is better on paper.

The other problem most papers have is that their capacity to generate original news is extremely limited. Many mid-size local papers simply fill their pages with AP reprints, and sprinkle in a few local articles along the way. I'd like to see a paper embrace the blogging model, where you simply turn reporters loose with a well-designed blog framework. If you did so, you could fire most of the editors, who have a limited function in an online edition. The original purpose of editors was to decide what "fit," literally, in the paper. You don't need editors in the same way because you don't have limits in online publishing. Editors could still fill a vital function by keeping reporters focused and by identifying important stories, but my guess is most mid-size city papers could get by with just a couple of editors--and could cut costs substantially.

But I think some papers would rather go out of business first. Blogging is a tool, not a medium, and it's a tool that would work well for newspapers

The FBI wants to increase the cost of Voice over IP. The VoIP news article has a set of excellent questions that someone ought to be asking the FBI as they seek to extend existing wiretap requirements to VoIP companies. Not only will it increase the cost of commercial VoIP software by requiring those firms to install wiretap backdoors in their systems, the whole exercise is absurd. Here's why.

• As VoIP News asks, why would criminals use a commercial VoIP offering that was known to have a wiretap backdoor when they could just as easily use their own secure VoIP software. Dozens of VoIP software products are completely free and can be downloaded and installed easily.
• Some VoIP providers are located outside the U.S., beyond the jurisdiction of the FBI. Why would anyone use a higher-priced U.S. service if a less expensive offshore service with equivalent voice quality is available? Why would international drug rings ever use U.S. services if the FBI has their finger in them? One effect of FBI regulation will be to drive the entire VoIP business out of the United States.
• Wiretapping only the VoIP data streams of suspected criminals is, well, just dumb. If I were trying to investigate criminal behavior, I'd want to capture their entire data stream. And the FBI can do this now, just by going to the criminal's ISP with a court order and getting the ISP to re-transmit to the FBI every data packet coming from the criminal. This is trivial to do, does not require expensive new software, and is much more likely to provide useful information, since you'd also see email, Web sites, chat, IRC, and any other communications, along with VoIP conversations.

So what's really going on? Occam's Razor may be useful here (the simplest explanation is probably the correct one). Recall that this is the same FBI that just spend $170 million of our tax dollars on a "Virtual Case File" system that does not work. In other words, the FBI has neither good in-house technology advice nor do they seem capable of buying it. Like many other Federal government agencies, when the FBI wants technology, they run to the beltway bandits--the big consulting firms that inhabit the D.C. area, who have a built in conflict of interest when asked by those same agencies to both design and build systems.

A North Carolina paper has jumped feet first into blogging the news, with 11 news feeds written by reporters and staffers on the paper. The Greenboro News and Record thinks that the paper has no choice but to do this. I agree, as I wrote recently about this issue.

I've always thought the Web has great potential for newspapers, but they have to begin to see their role for what it really is--editing and writing, not printing black marks on paper. The Web is pure writing, and it frees newspapers to do that really well. Combined with the growing viability of advertising on the Web, newspapers can have a future.

But the most interesting thing in the article was that a newspaper is blogging. From the article:

Night cops reporter Eric Townsend, a 26-year-old who also contributes to a blog about traffic, said he's happy to post to the blog, but he thinks declining newspaper readership among the young is more a symptom of a decline in civic engagement than anything else. "Young people don't have a sense of involvement, a sense of community," he said. "It doesn't matter how many 'young' stories we do. I don't think blogs are the answer either."

What I see in under 30 people is an unhealthy attachment to their devices--their cellphones, their music players, their Gameboys--that keeps them tuned out and turned off from the world around them. Next time you walk down a town street, look at how many young people have on earphones--earphones that are blocking out the real world in favor of a world that they can manipulate.

Is this phenomenon important? It's too early to tell. But I do notice, as do many of my colleagues, the absence of young people at town meetings convened to talk about the future of the community. The ones that do show up are bright and engaged, and have typically have a lot to contribute.

The Internet continues to create earthquakes across the entire spectrum of society as established ways of doing things crumble under the unprecedented publishing capabilites of Internet-enabled information tools.

Elected officials, who have enjoyed a close relationship with mainstream media over the decades, are becoming increasing irrational over blogs. While the media has often had an adversarial relationship with elected leaders of one stripe or another, those elected leaders, the media, and political parties all have tended to play by a set of well-understood rules (I'm generalizing here--there are obvious exceptions).

But blogs have changed all that. Bloggers, publishing their own commentary for a worldwide audience (albeit often a small one), don't have to play by traditional rules. The blogosphere is creating an entirely new set of rules, and some politicians don't like it.

San Francisco leaders have introduced city legislation that would require bloggers to register with the city if they write about politics and candidates. What on earth are they thinking? Do they really think they can stifle criticism of city leaders and policies with this kind of heavy-handed approach?

To illustrate just how absurd this is, a transnational fight over publishing is brewing. Excerpts from a secret government hearing in Canada that allegedly is investigating fraud on the part of government officials has been published on a U.S. Web site, and Canadian leaders are seething because they can't do anything about it.

It's not at all clear who, if anyone, has committed a crime. The ban forbids publication. So the Canadian that passed the documents on may not have broken the law, and the American blog is not subject to Canadian law at all.

Ethics and the lack of them certainly play a role here, but it's always been difficult to legislate moral or ethical behavior.

USA Today has an excellent article that summarizes the current debate moving through the courts about the future of cable television and the future of video programming generally. As usual, the FCC has muddied the waters here, with statements and policy decisions that seem to favor both sides of the argument.

The North Dakota legislature has done the right thing by making the data stored in vehicle black boxes solely the property of the vehicle owner.

Police, insurance companies, and some lawmakers in other areas have wanted unrestricted access to the boxes, without needing a search warrant or the permission of the owner. The boxes typically store the last several minutes of vehicle data, including speed, braking, and acceleration. It can be damning evidence in the case of an accident, and some insurance companies have tried to make unrestricted access a condition for getting insurance.

In other words, the insurance companies want to use the data in the boxes to incriminate the owners (and thereby potentially avoid paying insurance claims). You'd think the issue is clear enough--we are not required to incriminate ourselves. But as technology often does, it opens up new ways to doing things, both for good and bad. The North Dakota legislature is to be commended for getting this one right, straight out of the gate.

Google's founders are fond of their corporate slogan, "Do nothing evil," but the lady doth protest too much, to borrow an old phrase.

I've written about Google's Gmail service, in which the company happily stores every email you have ever sent or received, mainly so they can snoop through your mail and figure out what ads to show you (e.g. correspond with a friend about an upcoming hiking trip, and you'll start seeing ads for outdoor gear).

Now Google has started storing all your search requests, for exactly the same reason--so they can build a profile on you and display more and better ads to you the next time you visit. Of course, they wrap this in a lot of blather about what a fine service it is--in case you want to go back and see what you searched for.

Uh huh. I've often thought, "Gee, I wish Google stored the phrase "camping equipment" so I could navigate through several Google pages plastered with ads to find that search phrase again instead of JUST TYPING IT OVER AGAIN."

The problem with these Google services is that you lose control of your own data. Once Google starts storing that stuff, it's really no longer yours, and it de facto becomes available to others--not just Google, but law enforcement, disgruntled employers and employees who may want to sue you, hackers, and of course, everyone at Google and by extension, every advertiser in the world.

These services are good for Google, but they aren't good for users. I can easily store a lifetime of mail on a $150 hard drive, so this argument that Google is doing something special for me is a weak one.

Amazon is the same way. I've never purchased anything from Amazon because they freely use your purchase information to build dossiers about what you buy that they share with advertisers. It's none of their business, and I believe both Google and Amazon are abusing the relationship they have with their customers.

I still get books cheaper and faster from my local independent bookstore, and I get better search results from Snap, which returns many fewer and more relevant hits than Google.

Wired reports that a San Francisco AM radio station is going to an all-podcast format. The station is inviting people to create their own content and send it to the station, which will screen it and then make it available for download.

Wired's cover story in its print magazine was about the sea change in radio being brought about by MP3 players, and the only surprise is that a station has gone over to the other side this quickly. You don't need an iPod to listen--any MP3 player will do--but Apple's software (iTunes) makes it quick and easy. iTunes is available for both Windows and the Mac, and all iPods work with both Macs and Windows.

The Register reports on a new law enacted in Holland that can charitably only be described as "stupid." In a misguided effort to prop up the ailing music industry, the Netherlands has decided to impose a per megabyte tax on all hard drive-based music players, with the proceeds going to the music industry.

This means, according to the article, that the 60 gigabyte model of the iPod would have a tax of $235! According to the Register, Germany also has a tax on computer hard drives, and as they get bigger, the hard drive tax could exceed the base cost of the computer (that is, the tax will be several thousand dollars).

There are so many things wrong with this approach that it is hard to know where to begin. In the first place, the Holland law assumes that all music stored on portable music players is stolen, when in fact only a very small percentage is. So music lovers have to pay royalties twice--once when they buy the music, and again when they buy the music player. It's a windfall for the music industry, since only a small part of royalties actually go to the artist. It forces the music player retailers to become tax collectors, which is always a bad idea. And it will simply drive the purchase of music players out of the country. Holland is an easy drive from a half dozen other countries, and it's barely an afternoon trip to take the train to France, pick up an iPod, and go home.

The music industry does not have a "right" to make money. As markets and technologies change, businesses have to change too. This business of using laws to protect monopolies hurts communities and whole countries, as innovation and new products are simply driven elsewhere. It's a global economy, and Dutch lawmakers are naive in extreme to believe this law will work. It will only hurt the country's economic development as businesses see their customers go elsewhere, and not just for iPods. While they are across the border, they are likely to shop for other items as well.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the New York Times is considering a new approach to providing access to its news articles. Currently, you can view any article less than a week old. After that, you have to pay an absurd $2.95 to see the article.

Under the new scheme, you would pay $50/year to get access to any article in the past 365 days. They are apparently also considering an alternate scheme that would give you full access to the whole NYT archive.

With newspaper circulation in free fall, the Times is only one of numerous papers that must be trying to figure out what to do. While "the Internet" is often blamed for the general decline in newspaper circulation, I think the problem is more basic. I travel a lot, and try to read local papers wherever I go. What I see is a general lack of innovation, creativity, and news. I see this as the ClearChannel problem (ClearChannel owns 1000+ radion stations in the U.S.). As large chains have bought out more and more papers, those papers look more and more alike. Bean counters at the corporate level cut local staffs and budgets, force papers to use more syndicated content, and the result is dull newspapers with all the same (word for word) stories you can find on the Internet.

Newspapers don't look that different than they did one hundred years ago--the big innovation of the last twenty years is color pictures. I'm actually bullish on the future of newspapers; we still need someone to edit the news for us. In fact, I would argue that the role of newspapers--editing the news and providing quality control--is more important now with so many alternate sources available to us. Who has time to check dozens of Web sites daily? Papers condense many news sources and help us sort out the important issues. Newspapers and TV news will never again be primary sources of information, but I see the editorial function as still very relevant.

In a great victory for the rest of us, a Federal appellate court told the FCC to quit mucking with television receivers and to stop meddling in areas for which the Commission has no authorization. If that sounds harsh, it's mild compared to what the judge actually said:

You're out there in the whole world, regulating. Are washing machines next?" asked Judge Harry Edwards. Quipped Judge David Sentelle: "You can't regulate washing machines. You can't rule the world."

Back in 2003, the FCC had declared that all television tuners and receivers sold in the U.S. after July 1st, 2005, had to respect the "broadcast flag," which is a gimmick dreamed up by Hollywood (the Motion Picture Association) to control content unfairly and to force everyone in the country to eventually buy a new TV, among other problems. The broadcast flag, a digital code that would be included on every television broadcast, would tell VCRs, Tivo-type devices, computers, and anything else capable of recording video that the material could NOT be recorded, or if it could, under very limited circumstances.

The FCC rules flew in the face of decades of court rulings that generally said consumers had the right to make recordings for their own use and certain other uses (in libraries, as one example). The "fair use" doctrine has consistently been supported and extended by the courts, even for related technologies like photocopying.

The court ruling will keep some manufacturers from having to drop whole product lines because the cost to add the complicated broadcast flag circuitry was prohibitive.

I'm not the only one concerned about Google's policy of storing everything you and I do on their servers--forever. This New Zealand article also expresses concerns about the way Google keeps tabs on everything we do.

Google hides behind the polite fiction that keeping everything is a "service" they perform for us, but we don't get access to the data. The "service" they perform is to mine our searches, our email, and the newsgroups we browse and use them to sell advertising space.

One might argue that in fact, Google's ads pay for all the free services Google provides. Fair enough, and as a business, Google does provide useful tools and is making money with the strategy. The rub comes in when you look at how long Google retains personal data--forever. That repository, subject to government subpoenas, becomes a convenient way for the government and others to snoop in our affairs long after the fact.

Twenty years out of college, involved in a civil lawsuit, would you want the opposing side to enter into evidence all the Web sites and searches you performed in college, where the opposing side uses the data to establish that you have certain character faults, as evidenced by what you looked at twenty years ago.

The data itself may be innocuous, but it can and will be used in ways that will damage people's reputations and may cause harm. To protect yourself, it's a good idea to open up the cookies window in your browser every two or three months and delete most if not all of the cookies--especially the Google cookies and any URL with 'ad' in the domain name.

It's hard to believe, but Microsoft's mainland China Web site scolds you if you type the words "freedom" or "democracy," or the phrase "human rights." The U.S. software company hosts a large Web site that provides free blogs to Chinese users, and software on the site monitors everything that is typed in. Offending words and phrases cause a window to pop up with a warning that the posting may be deleted if the user does not remove the "offending" words.

Microsoft says it has to adapt to local customs, but cooperating with a repressive government that prohibits free speech of any kind is a bit of stretch.

Google apparently plans to take on PayPal, which is owned by eBay. PayPal is the only online payment system that has been successful, despite dozens of schemes, some of which were very well-funded. PayPal has been successful in part because it is relatively simple--it bypasses credit cards completely and debits or credits your checking account. It is fast and simple, and the online reporting of transactions is excellent. It's about the same cost as credit cards; the company charges 2.9% of each transaction (the person or company receiving the funds pays).

Despite Google's grandiose slogan, "Do nothing evil," the company has hewn a pretty straight path to try to capture every possible kind of online interaction, to the extent that it makes Microsoft look like a minor league player. One difference between the two companies is that Google seems to be trying harder to deliver quality with version 1 of new services, whereas Microsoft's strategy was to throw something fairly buggy out there and get users to pay for quality control by releasing frequent "upgrades."

Google's relentless quest to remember everything you have ever done online (my main objection to the company) seems likely to spill over into this new payment system, where Google will maintain a dossier of every purchase you have ever made--a nongovernmental entity with more information about you than the government. They'll link purchase information to the emails you have sent via their free GMail service. They'll tie purchases to Google searches you have made. Ads will show up based on maps you have looked at on their Map service.

Google is making a fortune customizing ads, but they are amassing too much information about us.

Telus, the Canadian phone and ISP giant, has been blocking access to a Telus employee-sponsored Web site. Telus is in negotiations with their employee union, and no Telus customer using the company's Internet access services can view the Web site.

Telus claims that the site is publishing company confidential information and encouraging people to clog support lines with bogus service complaints.

But if those two claims are true, the company could pursue legal remedies. If the company can prove to a judge that confidential information is on the site (which should be trivially easy), a court order could force the shutdown of the site--legally.

There is much conversation in the blogger world about the latest Technorati announcement that the blog-tracking service monitors 14 million blogs, or about double the number tracked at the beginning of the year.

Technorati has a built in incentive to promote the growth of blogs, since they are trying to build traffic to their site. What is more revealing is that only about half of the blogs have been updated in the past three months, and only 13% are updated more than once a week. So the "real" number of active blogs is something under 2 million, which is a more realistic figure.

While the 20th century telecom dinosaurs are fighting it out in places like Texas for 20th century legal rights to 20th century content distribution, the 'net is quietly solving the problem.

An Open Source effort (FOSS is becoming the accepted acronym--Free and Open Source Software) is building the 21st century video distribution system, called DTV. Participatory Culture is putting together a seamless, easy to use, end to end video distribution and viewing system that is completely free, requires no franchise fees, and can deliver any quality of video, up to and including HD TV. The software is currently in beta release, but the interface for the Mac version is excellent and easy to use. It supports downloading for later viewing, so you don't have to watch at any particular time. In other words, it is a personal Tivo-style system, but with a much wider range of material from many more sources.

While the music industry plays the fiddle as their 20th century distribution model burns down, some bands are not waiting around. A band called Sexohol from Los Angeles has come up with some pretty interesting ideas.

If you go to their Web site, you can buy an Apple iPod Shuffle for just $10 more than what Apple charges. It comes pre-loaded with an album of songs from the band that you can load right into iTunes (Mac and Windows) or into other digital music systems.

Want to hear what the band sounds like before buying? You can download a free Dashboard widget for Macs that streams one of the band songs right onto your computer. This is especially clever because the widget (just a small piece of software) allows the band to distribute a "click to play" version of their song without actually distributing the song itself (because it is streamed from a server).

RUPRI (the Rural Policy Research Institute) has an editorial that hits the nail on the head with respect to the challenges emerging from the cable/telephone duopoly that is tying up broadband markets in the United States.

We need clear policies at the local, state, and national level that preserve the right of communities, organizations, and individuals to use broadband for public and private purposes, without third party control.

We also need to preserve the right of communities to build and operate their ow

In a disturbing development, Yahoo! provided information to the communist Chinese government that was used to convict and imprison a journalist.

The Chinese government was angry because the journalist had merely expressed views about restrictions on the press in China that the government disliked.

This is so egregiously wrong that little needs to be said, other than it is clear that Yahoo! has absolutely no sense of right or wrong, and has decided that there is nothing more important than making money. Yahoo! cannot operate in China without the permission of the communist government, and so the company has decided to deal with the devil.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is considering a move away from Microsoft Office and toward Open Source products like Open Office.

Microsoft's proprietary XML formats that are being used in current and future versions of Office to store Word and Excel documents, among others, are licensed to users. What this means, basically, is that you have the right to open and use your own Word documents only as long as Microsoft allows you to.

The state government of Massachusetts is worried, and rightly so, that public documents may become inaccessible either legally (if in the future the state does not continue to renew MS software licenses) or may become incompatible and therefore unreadable because MS has changed document formats.

The tech world is abuzz with the announcement by Google that they are:

1) Rolling out a national fiber backbone

2) Offering Google Secure Access WiFi services

Throw a rock and you'll hit someone with an opinion, but on SlashDot, which usually has pretty sharp insight into these things, the consensus is as follows:

1) Google's network initiatives will allow it to know even more about its customers, making advertising on Google even more valuable (and it is the advertising that is paying the bills).

2) The phone companies are in deep trouble. Google just rolled out GoogleTalk, a voice application that could quickly become full-fledged VoIP, and you needs lot of bandwidth to handle lots of phone calls. Hence the national fiber backbone. Google will be able to quickly build a large customer base and throw all the hardware resources needed at it to keep service quality high. Look for college students to start dropping cellphone service first.

3) But how do you replace cellphones with fiber? Well, you need a WiFi and/or WiMax wireless network to do so. Which Google has started testing. Just like Sprint and MCI did in the early days of competitive long distance, Google will cherry pick key markets and grab big gobs of customers--think college campuses and college towns, downtown metro areas, etc.

4) Google will also use its massive network to continually provide new and improved Web applications to piggyback on its email, mapping, and newsgroup services. Eventually, Google will rollout a net-centric desktop OS replacement for free, killing Windows.

Who loses? From a community perspective, rural communities are not likely to see free or low cost Google services anytime soon, because the markets are not big enough.

As I have written before, I am very cautious about Google and any other "free" service providers (e.g. Yahoo!, MSN, etc.). You give your privacy away, and lose ownership of your own data. Yahoo! just handed over emails to the Chinese government that resulted in a ten year jail sentence for someone who was writing about freedom in China (or the lack of it).

We need to be very cautious about any company that offers "free" services and exposes us to privacy and free speech problems.

Google is coming under increasing fire for its controversial book scanning project. The company is scanning hundreds of thousands of books from several major university libraries, with the intention of making the searchable and viewable on the Web. Each viewed page will, of course, have Google ads.

Why would prestigious universities like Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford agree to participate in such a bald assault on copyrights? Most likely, Google is giving these libraries a big chunk of money.

Google's feeble excuse is that authors who don't want to participate can opt out. The company is abusing copyright law, which says the copyright owner is responsible for enforcing copyright. But what Google is doing is ethically odious, and the law was never intended to give projects like this free rain to trample copyright.

In a perfect example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, a Federal campaign reform law has created confusion about whether or not it applies to blogs, which are normally written by just one or perhaps a handful of people.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) officials don't even agree on what is correct. Some commissioners think bloggers and Internet campaigning generally are exempt, and others disagree.

Strictly interpreted, any time a blogger discussed politics, it would potentially generate paperwork and FEC reports, and taking political ads on a blog site would trigger more reporting.

Since bloggers generally don't make a full time living from their blogs, and most do it as a no-income or low-income sideline, any reporting requirements at all would force them to avoid any discussion of politics, abridging their right to free speech.