Archive for January, 2009

Posted this on Techdirt today, but probably of interest to you, too.

Speaking to the Guardian, [OLPC founder] Negroponte says, “The XO-1 was really designed as if we were Apple. The XO-2 will be designed as if we were Google – we’ll want people to copy it. We’ll make the constituent parts available. We’ll try and get it out there using the exact opposite approach that we did with the XO-1.” Open hardware is an exciting new arena for innovative designs and, by embracing it, OLPC will create a new opportunity for entrepreneurs to create the best laptop for the developing world (or even the developed world). Also, instead of picking an established manufacturer from East Asia, open sourced hardware specifications will allow the developing world’s emergent technology industries to compete, strengthening the communities OLPC seeks to assist.

Read the whole post here.

(Update: Wayan Vota (who knows a whole lot more about this than I do) thinks this may just be hype)

My friend Ben pointed me to a post about how privacy in today’s world is alive and strong, and while I agree with the main sentiment, I think the post is ultimately misguided.

The argument, basically, is that people historically did not have a lot of privacy; the small communities into which we were born, where everyone knew everything, did not leave space for privacy. In fact, the much heralded “death of privacy” brought about by digital networks is really just a return to the traditional state of affairs. Laurent, the blogger in question, adds to this by saying that we are actually better off than our ancestors because:

“If you can’t control the conversation improve it! Become the one stop source of info about yourself. Have a profile, more active than any other profile for all matters related to you. This way your content will always beat others’ content, and you get your control back. Then it’s up to you to not being photographed while drunk at that Spring break party. But that was a good ideas (not being photographed) well before Facebook right?

Now that you are back in the driver seat, you have your privacy back. Just of a different kind. You have built a space that could be called “publicy”, or “the plausible me”. It is a credible space where people expect to see information about you. Whatever credible information you say in there will be taken as true by the world.” [Emphasis pre-existing.]

It’s a seductive argument, right? “Stop complaining, and start doing something!” And he’s right, but only if he had stopped there.

Instead, he encourages people to actively mislead people on their public profiles to “build [their] private” self. However, the rise of ubiquitous sensors and citizen reporting will make your efforts futile, and as soon as your credibility is shot, your public profile you spent so much time building will be useless. In fact, it might be useless already, because we live in a world of gatekeepers, there is no guarantee that your active profile will out-rank those photos from Spring Break.

And finally, he ignores a whole class of people who need to be private – dissidents, journalists, etc. It is very simplistic to think that an individual can successfully lie about their activities when digital networks are becoming so pervasive. Although in the past we could tell our small community that we were doing something else, today, GPS, CCTV, RFID and a bunch of other acronyms make your activities known to a wide range of third parties who can suck all the data up and store it for far longer than the memory of a tight-knit community. And best of all? Today, you cannot leave the tight-knit community which is the world.

This fall, a wide ranging group of academics, activists and businesses announced the Global Network Initiative – a set of principles and governance mechanisms for ICT corporations operating in authoritarian states. As readers of this blog know, this is just the type of thing I’m interested in, and I jumped on the opportunity to write a term paper about the topic.

So, for my Science and Technology in the Global Arena course I wrote a paper about the role of American Internet companies operating in China. A lot has been written on the subject, of course, but I think the paper adds to the field by arguing that these companies could do much more beyond the Global Network Initiative (which is still laudatory). It is embedded below and a PDF is available here. Let me know what you think.

Freedom Fighters: The Role of Internet Corporations in Promoting Digital Freedoms

I found out via @whiteafrican that in response to November’s terror attacks in Mumbai, Indian police are starting to walk around the city searching for insecure WiFi connections and require the owner to secure them. This is being done because terrorists used random WiFi hotspots to send emails prior to a couple of recent attacks.

Presumably, this is to make investigating terrorism easier – police won’t have to waste time interviewing unwitting WiFi owners, but in reality it strikes me as a waste of resources. Locating hotspots, identifying their owners and enforcing proper security are all likely to be time consuming (and futile) exercises. Terrorists will still be able to get online, whether by hacking WPA, finding an open connection or using an Internet cafe. And besides, wouldn’t you want the additional evidence made possible by the warning emails (such as IP, email account, etc.)?

As security guru Bruce Schneier endlessly points out, security is a trade-off. In this case, it seems that the Indian police are making a bad trade.

Michael Lewis and David Einhorn have a terrific couple of articles in the New York Times today. They cogently trace the structural causes of our current financial crisis and recommend a number of obvious fixes.

The critique which most resonated with me was the focus on short-term profits that leads to risky behavior and long-term failure. For example, starting three years ago, a private investor named Harry Markopolos repeatedly tried to sound the alarm about the Madoff Ponzi scheme, writing and speaking with S.E.C. regulators who did nothing to stop the enormous fraud. The reason no one stopped Madoff and the reason we are in this crisis is because all involved have misaligned interests.

OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest.

The tyranny of the short-term manifests in credit rating agencies who make money off the firms they are supposed to rate honestly. It shows up in the S.E.C. where regulators seek good relationships with financial institutions in order to receive higher paying jobs in the private sector. It’s on display with bank executives who will be forced out if they don’t make short-term profits.

This is something about which I’ve worried for a while: how do we imbue our market-driven firms with long-term thinking? Quarterly earnings reports, expected to be better than 3 months before, seem like a good idea for shareholder accountability, but it also forces firms to make short-term decisions that may harm their long-term interests.

Lewis and Einhorn are dumbstruck that 18 months into this situation, next to nothing has been done to solve these structural problems. Although they have their disagreements with how Treasury Secretary Paulson is managing the problems (they advocate letting the banks fail), the more important, long-term problems haven’t been addressed.

Their solutions are:

1. Stop making regulatory decisions with long-term consequences in fear of their short-term effects
2. End the official status of the rating agencies – either privatize the rating or do it publicly
3. Regulate financial innovations like credit default swaps (see Bookstaber’s book for their danger)
4. Place capital requirements on banks or break up banks into parts that are small enough to fail
5. Don’t allow S.E.C. officials to work on Wall Street, but encourage the flow in the opposite direction

I’m glad sensible, structural proposals are being put forth and hope Obama and the incoming Congress heed them.

In Tim Wu’s new review of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, the Columbia Law professor spends considerable time explaining how the economics of media have historically led to a consolidation that many would see as anathema to the diverse marketplace of ideas that we want. His discussion is well worth a read, but what I thought was most important from the piece was his mention of the many threats to the generative Internet:

“But I must part company with Zittrain over his main and more somber argument: that security crises will form the driving narrative of the Internet’s future. I do not doubt that there will be never-ending security problems and reactions. But the question is not whether cybersecurity will matter, but whether it will matter most. Zittrain’s security saga does not look to me like a full account of the future. He is leaving out many of the external forces that will change the Internet. One is the power of government, which, especially overseas, has begun reshaping the network to fit its obsessions. Another is the combined forces of language and culture, which are driving a once-global Internet into something more like a series of national ones: a Japanese Internet, a Spanish Internet, and so on.

But most important, the real story may lie in the power of industry structure and the long trend toward centralized control in the media industries. Over the last decade, the Internet has become interwoven with media and communications industries collectively worth trillions, with economics all of their own. Unlike Zittrain, I think that industry dynamics, more than a demand for safe appliances, will determine the future of this strange and extraordinary medium.”

A Typology of Threats to the ‘Net

So which threat is the most disconcerting? He points to four:

1. Zittrain‘s security-driven adoption of sterile devices,
2. Wu‘s economic-driven centralization,
3. Zuckerman‘s culture- and language-driven splintered Internet, or
4. Barlow‘s government intervention

Personally, I’m inclined to think a splintered net is the most troublesome because it destroys the forum for international conversation and deliberation we wanted the Internet to become. But what macro trend concerns you?

When I was younger, I had very clear political ambitions. I wanted to climb the D.C. ladder.

That is, until I realized that some of my political convictions were strongly against the politically correct positions high-powered politicians were expected to have. In middle school I was writing my Senators condemning China over its Tibet policies. More recently, my digital history is strewn with strongly worded denouncements of powerful interests like the big content industries. All of this is not even touching on the realities of friendships played out online – jokes that may strike third parties as off-color or unprofessional.

The reality of having lived a strongly opinionated and Internet-heavy life is that I have a history of content which could easily be dug up by opposition staffers after a would-be appointment. Luckily for me, for the most part I don’t think my skeletons will ever be worthwhile to dig up. But plenty of my generation’s closets will be searched. What to make of the coming storm?

The Economist jumps into this fascinating question with a very smart article discussing the future of politics and reputation. Astutely noting, “who has a closet without a skeleton?,” the article uses Obama’s intensive vetting process as a harbinger of things to come.

But I don’t think that covering up people’s unsavory pasts is likely to be sustainable. Instead, I think we are moving towards a society of disclosure and acceptance – Obama never had to confront breaking news that he tried cocaine because he disclosed it well before he was a Presidential candidate. Not everyone can have best-selling books, though.

Instead, I think the next forty years will be a roller coaster where my generation’s past will sink many a rising star. Only the most adept will be able to avoid the career-stunting attention paid to their youthful indiscretion, but, in the end, we’ll (hopefully) have a society more accepting of the human, in failure and success. We’ll turn the media spotlight on ourselves and recognize that we’ve all done things we’re not proud of and that it doesn’t mean we are unqualified for public office.

The Economist reaches much the same conclusion. Although it seems that, “Only the very blandest, most media-savvy and controlled people, who have never uttered a controversial sentence in their lives, will be deemed fit to hold public office…” another possibility is that “Perhaps, when dirt on almost everybody becomes readily available, politics will lose its hypocritical, moralistic tone… That could make people realise that politicians, too, are only human, and make them more forgiving of minor transgressions.”

What do you think? Are we destined for blandness or acceptance?