Archive for June, 2008

Two days ago I was with a friend who enjoys watching Fox News. Where I get angry at the inanity and ignorance of the programming, he laughs at the foolish topics discussed. To me, the cycle of misinformation is dangerous and needs to be addressed. Whatever the cause, insidious or innocent, this election has been marred by numerous rumours, particularly concerning Barack Obama.

As these memes gain traction online, sensationalist television news gives both creedence and additional adherents to the rumors. In turn, the speculation survives. To cloud important political decisions with innuedo, rumor and outright lies is dangerous and needs to be fought.

What, then, are the solutions? Barack Obama’s campaign thinks the answer consists of presenting verifiable truth. Their site, Fight the Smears, disproves many of the more popular myths including Obama’s “secret Muslim childhood.” It also allows supporters to email their contacts with the truth and claims to identify three political operatives who are to blame. In effect, it is a social Snopes for the campaign.

This is imperfect at best. My gut tells me that those who believe the emails they receive about Obama’s lack of patriotism will not use or trust Obama’s site. Perhaps third-party sites like Snopes could serve to convince others of their impartial truths, but it still lacks the saliency of political smears which are more likely to be forwarded than the bland truths. A real solution would have to slightly raise the cost of forwarding misinformation and lower the cost of checking the truth. Fight the Smears serves to lower the cost of fact-checking. A Firefox plugin which contextually searched for misinformation on a page could do similarly. How could we raise the costs of spreading disinformation? Some sort of karma system could rank sites but would it be biased or gamed?

What do you think would be the best way to fight disinformation?

Update: Louis Gray has noticed a similar trend populating Twitter. Some insightful thoughts in the post and comments.

Last week, the House of Representatives voted to pass a “compromise” bill which updated FISA; in it, it granted retroactive immunity to the telecommunications firms which are facing lawsuits alleging civil liberties violations from their work with the NSA in wiretapping Americans. This deal, which effectively removes the Judiciary from the legal process, had been rejected earlier this year by the same Congressional body. Even though the EFF and others have shown that this bill is not a compromise, for some reasons Congress supported it now.

What gives?

Well, it turns out the telcos do.

MAPLight, one of many organizations working to shed light on the influence of money in politics, has analyzed the political contributions of ATT, Sprint and Verizon over the past couple months and found that the 94 Democrats who changed their position received an average of $8,359 from the telco PACs. More of their findings are here, including the fact that 88% of flip-flopping Democrats received telco money.

The effect of money in DC is abysmal. It is a procedural cancer which retards the political system. I’m ashamed to say that my representative, Judy Biggert, is a proud supporter of George Bush’s policies and has voted with him 80% of the time, including on this issue. As election season approaches, I was hopeful that the Democratic candidate, Scott Harper, would be able to unseat her and bring some measure of change to DC.

However, at a recent house party, when I asked Mr. Harper about accepting money, he sorely dissapointed me. Although I was impressed with much of what he had to say, Mr. Harper flippantly dismissed the malignant effects of money in politics. He spoke proudly of accepting money from unions and had sought environmental contributions, too. I fully appreciate the difficulty of raising money in a Congressional race, but was disheartened to hear him laud contributions from those he supports.

Mr. Harper or Mrs. Biggert could easily support the unions or telcos without accepting their money. They could meet with lobbyists and executives to learn about issues with which they have little experience. However, when money changes hands, political thought is biased. Both attorneys and lobbyists seek to influence a supposedly impartial decision-maker, but we would never allow an attorney to legally pay a judge. Why should lobbyists?

The Change Congress movement is Larry Lessig‘s new project to end the economy of influence in DC. They are asking candidates to 1) not accept lobbyists/PAC money, 2) vote to end earmarks, 3) support increased transparency and 4) support public financing. Lessig elaborates on the goal in this video.

I sincerely hope the effort is successful so that politicians like Mrs. Biggert and Mr. Harper can represent their constituencies without the bias which is endemic to today’s political system. No longer can we afford the change that $8,000 brings about.

Many large firms have their employees sign non-compete agreements which prohibit them from taking their knowledge and working for a competing firm within a certain time frame (often one year). They are often enforced rigorously as companies are fearful that they will lose important internal know-how to competitors. In fact, Microsoft recently sued Google after they hired a prominent executive, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee.

Mike Masnick over at TechDirt has provided some important synthesis of research on the topic and concluded that non-competes are burdensome limitations on human capital which stifle innovation. In Silicon Valley, non-compete agreements are frowned upon and often not enforced. In Massachusetts, on the other hand, they are popular and limit the ability of would-be entrepreneurs from leaving big firms to pursue a new idea. An increasing number of people are beginning to identify the absence of non-competes as an essential reason Silicon Valley has been so innovative.

Now, Harvard’s Berkman Center has jumped into the foray. At a recent panel discussion, they examined the disadvantages of non-compete agreements. Coverage by PC World and Bijan Sabet provides insight into the ideas which were freely exchanged.

Yesterday marked the release of Firefox 3 and to raise awareness, the Mozilla Foundation tried to oversee the most downloads of a software program in one day. To this end, they have a cool map showing the number of downloads from different countries. The map interests me because it demonstrates, graphically, the disparities in information and communication technologies around the world. Assuming Firefox is equally desirable across the globe, this map shows the inability for many in countries to learn about and download the open source browser. This is a useful demonstration of the different nature of communication technologies around the world – in Africa and much of Central Asia and South America, not only are there fewer Internet users, there are less PC owners who can make use of downloaded software.

A useful comparison is found in the map below which represents national gross domestic products (though the coloring is the opposite of Firefox’s – red is poor). As you might expect, the poorer countries align with those who downloaded fewer versions of Firefox.

Two of my favorite stories from the underbelly of international affairs are those of Viktor Bout and the 2005 coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea. In recent months, they have both seen important updates to their continuing saga.

Viktor Bout is a Russian arms dealer who has risen to pseudo-prominence through his shady deals with nefarious organizations the world over. His international dealings have placed him in close contact with groups like FARC and the Taliban and, in turn, on the wanted lists of many nations. Even though international law enforcement have been seeking him for years, he has reportedly enjoyed the protection of the Russian state and lived openly in Moscow. However, he was recently arrested in Thailand following the capture of an internal FARC computer which tied him to their guerrilla warfare.

Similarly to Bout, much of what is known about the coup in Equatorial Guinea is based upon fleeting (mis)information. I learned about the event in Adam Roberts’s compelling account, The Wonga Coup. Equatorial Guinea is a tiny, bifurcated former Spanish colony in west Africa whose oil-rich stature has brought it foreign investments. The ruthless President Obiang has been in power since the late 1970s when a bloody coup toppled his uncle. It seems fitting, then, that in 2005 a group of outsiders tried to take control of Equitorial Guinea to exploit their oil reserves. Famed British mercenary Simon Mann and the son of Margaret Thatcher, Mark, were involved in the planning and financing of the operation. The only problem? On the night of the planned coup, 65 of the mercenaries were arrested purchasing arms in Zimbabwe. Since then, they have been held in African jails awaiting trials which, for Mann, started yesterday. The prosecution is seeking 30 years for his alleged role in the debacle.

Together, these two real-life tales provide plenty of intrigue. Many words have been spilled trying to uncover the illegal dealings of these men, but in the coming months, as trials take place, we will surely learn more.

[Images courtesy of Men's Vogue and Google Maps]

Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton has a winding argument in the New York Review of Books about the role of research libraries in the age of the Google. In it, he takes the reader on a fantastic, if slightly discontinuous, contrarian view of the nature of information and news.

Information systems, he contends, have been reinvented repeatedly throughout history and each iteration tends to shape the era in unique ways. Pages, instead of scrolls, allowed concise limitations on information. Paper and movable press revolutionized the scale of printing and the spread of ideas. Search engines have decreased the time and cost of research. Professor Darnton’s claim, though, is that “every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable.”

A former journalist, Darnton says, “I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary sources for knowing what really happened. I think newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events themselves.” To him, information is constantly in flux and biased in any one snapshot of it.

This isn’t detrimental, though. People tend to be able to learn to sort out truth from fiction. During the Revolutionary War, false reports from the battlefields were discounted before national policy enacted. In Soviet Russia, state-controlled media was known to be biased and untrustworthy. With this weight of history, it is difficult to see the current explosion of information in the form of online publications as dangerous. Blogs may spread disinformation at times, but newspapers, radio and TV are no better.

After making this point, Darnton takes a look at Google Book Search and, though a supporter of the program, provides 8 points for caution. Though it is important to have a healthy debate about the future of books and information, I think many of Darnton’s points are premature or over-hyped worries. Darnton’s 8 points and my thoughts follow:

1. Google cannot possibly scan every book in existence. The ignored books today could be valuable in the future, and if Google Book Search is the sole source of research, they will be effectively invisible.
   However, by Darnton’s own admission, libraries, even the best, cannot contain every book. “Contrary to what one might expect, there is little redundancy in the holdings of the five libraries: 60 percent of the books being digitized by Google exist in only one of them.” So in our current system of geographically dispersed research libraries, it is very difficult to see the books Google might miss.
2. Google’s index is missing specialized collections which have valuable books. They, too, might be invisible in a Google-centric future.
   This is true… for now. While it is a real concern that Google might not have the financial incentive to scan every rare book, they have shown no sign of stopping their mission to “organize all the world’s information.”
3. Even if Google can get the permission of publishers to display segments of previously published, copyrighted books, they have to scan all future books, as well. Even during this Internet age, more books are published every year in the USA (nearly 300,000 in 2006).
   This assumes Google will not prevail in court (which seems highly probable). But even if they do settle, why would the publishers who are suing them not allow future books? If they see value in publishing current books, why not future ones?
4. High-tech companies rise and fall quickly. If Google is lost, and it very well could happen, there goes the digitized books.
   This is a very important point. After Microsoft shuttered their scanning effort last month, it became apparent that the digitized version could disappear in bankruptcy or new business plans for Google. How about a “Free Our Books” campaign to put public domain books in the digital commons?
5. Google will make mistakes in the scans.
   So? The number of errors are infinitesimally small (in my experience). Besides, this isn’t anything new: books have printing errors, typos and, when I visited the Library of Congress, I saw that many precious books have certain pages stolen by collectors.
6. The digital copies may not last. Just like old movies which have been lost to time, Google’s index may suffer failure and degradation. “The best preservation system ever invented was the old-fashioned, pre-modern book.”
   What about fire? It sure doesn’t go nicely with paper. Anyways, Googe’s engineers (who he critiques in the next point) are experts at protecting digital data and providing redundant systems.
7. Google’s algorithm is a secret and they will have the ability to shape research through what is displayed at the top of results. Even further, their algorithms might not be best suited to books; after all, they are great engineers, not bibliographers.
   This is important and strikes at a larger question: do we want to decisions of one company to so grandly shape research in the future? With Google having such large market shares of the search markets, “the best answer” is increasingly decided by one firm.
8. There is real value in the touch and smell of a book. The size conveys something that is also lost on a computer screen.
   I agree. I love books and still voraciously consume dead-tree information.

Finally, although it isn’t explicitly one of Darnton’s points, he spends considerable time expounding on the unstable nature of information. Diderot’s Encyclopedia was published in myriad different forms, frustrating buyers and sellers (and no doubt researchers). Isn’t Google better suited to deal with this than a research library? No matter how many stacks Harvard has, they cannot contain as many books as Google’s hard drives. Google can scan all the copies of Diderot’s Encyclopedia (and they are working on it) and make them accessible from any computer. Harvard can, at most, have a couple copies. And with this in mind, Darnton’s conclusion seems a little hazy:

“Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms… I also say: long live Google, but don’t count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.”

I say, reinvent the library. Find business models to make use of the mass of scanned books. Find ways to scan even the oldest, most brittle books. Find ways to organize, link and elucidate books formerly consigned to disparate individual locations due to their physicality.

[Photo: Flickr]

The WSJ reports a surge of outside interest in the African telecommunications firms. With a population of nearly 1 billion people and a mobile phone penetration below 30%, the potentials for growth are astounding. Many non-African players are recognizing this including American hedge funds, British telecom giant Vodafone and Indian investors. Notably absent are American carriers including Verizon who today announced the purchase of Alltel to become America’s largest mobile-phone company.

In a way, I’m happy that AT&T et al. are not getting involved in Africa. They have shown a failure to innovate in the USA and using their billions to buy a stake in a quickly evolving market would likely lead to stagnation. I hope that the new players, regardless of location, recognize the need for investment to build out the networks and technologies in Africa.

One of the questions I’ve been kicking around since getting back from Berkman@10 has been one raised by Jonathan Zittrain’s book, The Future of the Internet. As I noted back when I reviewed it, JZ’s premise is that increasingly, vendors are selling locked-down, sterile devices to willing consumers who are fearful of the negative effects of generativity – spam, spyware, viruses.

In parallel with this shift towards sterility has been a push-back by those with the technical skills to hack their devices for additional functionality. With Linux or Wikipedia, the user is encouraged to hack, edit and create. With the iPhone or TiVo, the opposite is true and we are expected to accept what Steve Jobs or another executive decides. This has not been accepted happily by all and many are unlocking their iPhones or other sterile devices.

This “forced generativity” might seem like a protection against sterility – no device can be fully locked down and users are bound to open them incrementally. When I asked JZ this during a Washington Post discussion, his answer pointed out an important qualification: this forced generativity is increasingly contingent upon avoiding centrally controlled updates which can re-sterilize freed iPhones or TiVos.

Zittrain also laments that not everyone has the technical skill to force generativity, saying “I don’t want a world where only the hackers get Get Out of Jail Free cards, and where everyone else risks serious crossfire to break out of a sterile platform.” I think this is an important point, but not necessarily the entire truth. Of course, technically-inclined folks are more likely to be able to avoid sterility, but aren’t they the people who can take advantage of generativity in the first place? Hackers are the ones adding to Linux and using the neutral Internet to create new web services.

However, anecdotal evidence would suggest that more than just hackers force sterility. For example, Jan Chipchase (NYT profile), a cultural anthropologist who studies the use of mobile phones in the developing world, has written about “cultures of repair.” If you travel around the developing world (and to a lesser extent, richer nations), you will encounter a massive industry dedicated to mobile phone augmentation. Chipchase writes, “Aside from the scale of what’s on sale there is a thriving market for device repair services ranging from swapping out components to re-soldering circuit boards to reflashing phones in a language of your choice , naturally.” These are not just repairs; at times they come very close to doing what American hackers do with the iPhone – they add functionality and opportunity. And it isn’t just the technically minded, its the poorest of the poor:

“The informal repair services that are offered are quite simply driven by necessity – highly price sensitive customers cannot afford to go through more expensive official customer care centers and even if they could their phones are unlikely to be covered by warrantee – having been bought through grey market channels, been sent as gifts from friends and relatives abroad, or were locally bought used, second or third+ ownership.”

What is happening is a broad effort to force generativity upon an industry which is woefully sterile. The warrantees, contracts, networks and devices of the mobile telecommunications sector reek of sterility. People, and not just hackers, are pushing back.

Perhaps the real conclusion from this small quibble is that people do want and are capable of utilizing generativity. Efforts to control too much will be rejected or augmented.

Occasionally my dad will come home with a pile of eclectic publications I’ve never seen before (or since he last did this), and I will stack them with the rest of my planned reading. A couple of days ago he gave me, among others, the Summer 2008 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review which could very well turn out to be my newest subscription.

One article which spurred a bunch of thoughts was entitled “Less is More” and available here behind a registration wall (when will publishers learn?). In it, the authors point out what major actors in the development field often fail to remember: necessity is the mother of all invention.

Lissa Valikangas and Michael Gibbert see scarcity not as a barrier which must be overcome through massive amounts of aid. Instead, it induces creative innovations which very well may become marketable designs. As development economist William Easterly is famous for extolling: billions of dollars of aid have been spent and the poor nations supposedly helped have seen little progress or, in certain cases, reversals of fortune. In fact, external aid can severely distort markets and even cause “Dutch Disease,” the term economists use to describe the negative effects of resource exploitation.

What Valikangas and Gibbert propose is a refocusing of aid to “build on local tinkering that already exists and supply the often minimal extra resources needed to scale them up.” To them, resource constraints present an opportunity to foster innovation.

Similarly, Amy Smith of MIT proposes cheap technological fixes to the problems of the developing world. Technology, understood in this way, is more similar to the Greek origin of “craft.” It is not computers or large scale networks. Smith designs simple tools that ease daily concerns. In her interview at the New Yorker conference, she shows off rough metal objects which significantly reduce the time and effort needed to make charcoal or shell corn. The extra time or product can be used for other activities previously off-limits to the inhabitants of a resource poor area.

In times of grand thinking, it is often the most simple ideas which really reduce the burden of living on less than a dollar per day. Understanding these burdens requires a intimate knowledge of the developing world, one that comes from outside the classroom and beyond books. So what are you waiting for?

Though I don’t often read it, as my recent post shows, I occasionally stumble upon a great piece of journalism in Rolling Stone. Naomi Klein’s recent piece about Chinese surveillance is one of those. In it, she confronts the massive, systematic effort by the Chinese government to maintain stability through the surveillance of its country.

Like most of the facts that come out of China, the scale is staggering. The megacities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou have become the test cases for centralized governmental networks of cameras which are often camouflaged as street lights and installed in the tens of thousands on streets, in Internet cafes and even Tibetan monasteries. The $4.1 billion Chinese market for surveillance cameras is growing rapidly as the government seeks ways to sustain its “command-and-control capitalism” which produces enormous wealth disparity and social upheaval: in 2005 alone, the government reported 87,000 large-scale protests.

“With its militant protests and mobile population, China confronts a fundamental challenge. How can it maintain a system based on two dramatically unequal categories of people: the winners, who get the condos and cars, and the losers, who do the heavy labor and are denied those benefits? More urgently, how can it do this when information technology threatens to link the losers together into a movement so large it could easily overwhelm the country’s elites?”

It turns out that the government is becoming adept at using the same technologies as dissidents to monitor and punish those who threaten their regime. Even while cell phone cameras and text messages shed some light on the March 2008 protests in Tibet, police were using the same systems to capture images of protesters and spread government messages. Further, footage of particularly violent dissidents were spliced together and aired on state-controlled media.

The issue then, becomes “freedom after speech.” Entrepreneurial Chinese, increasingly aided by American biometric firms like L-1 are utilizing facial recognition advances to mine government databases for those captured by “internal security.” One business man who is competing for lucrative government contracts says that 95% of government use is “regular security,” but admits he receives interest from the secret police who come looking to identify grainy images of protesters.

Klein’s article takes special interest in American firms who see the massive Chinese market for surveillance technologies as a potential pot of gold. Although laws passed after the Tienanmen Square massacre ban the sale of crime control devices or technology to the Chinese, Klein finds that L-1 has been able to use intermediary companies in China to raise their profile there. There have been recent hearings concerning technology giants such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco but it seems these lesser-known biometric firms are receiving little scrutiny due to their ties with American government agencies.

This is, however, a two way street and Klein notes that the American government is observing Chinese techniques as they continue to tighten security in the name of counter-terrorism.

What emerges from the article is a frightening picture of a future where Big Brothers in disparate countries share information and techniques in a spiral towards increasingly perfect enforceability of law and order.