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July 21, 2002
British eDemocracy
The British government has posted a site with ideas for how to use the Internet to make democracy work better.
Open Recording Studio
Tom Poe is in the front of the pack creating a free recording studio to encourage the distribution of alternatively-business-modelled music.
Complexity Digested
The Complexity Digest is a good resource for finding what’s being written about complexity.
July 20, 2002
Matt Oristano points us to a remarkable report that would read better as a premise for a cheesy scifi movie than as a serious statement from the National Science Foundation and Commerce Department. It’s called Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance. Says Matt:
It includes lots of helpful government recommendations for enhancing our brains with nanotechnology, according to standards that presumably the government would set. It’s quite amazing.
He especially commends to our attention a section on “memetic engineering” “where they propose to engineer our culture in a Darwinian mold as well.”
July 19, 2002
Kevin Marks pulls a great quote from the Recovering Marek:
[Jack Valenti’s] notion is of a zero-sum copyright, as if there were finite amount of ideas in the world where one has to come up with one and then build a fortress around it so no one else can use it to extend it or derive from it.
And don’t forget Kevin’s MediAgora, a plan to build a market capable of dealing in digital works of the mind.
(By the way, did you like the way I snuck “Right to Listen advocates” into my blog entry on the sham Commerce Dept. DRM meeting? Think it might catch on as an alternative to “content thieves,” “pirates,” “baked college students too cheap to pay for CDs,” “anti-American, anti-Disney destroyers of civilization,” etc.? Just a thought.)
Grant Gross, in an email, updates his excellent coverage of the Commerce Department’s Digital Rights Management meeting, which I blogged a couple of hours ago:
During this workshop, the Commerce Department was just not interested in hearing from the public. So to get the point across that the public wasn’t represented, the Free Software/Linux/fair use crowd almost had to shout and wave their hands.
Those tactics actually may have worked. Sources tell me that the Commerce Department is now asking around for suggestions on consumer advocates to include in a future workshop.
As for the EFF, Robin Gross tells me today that they’ve been invited to comment in writing, and the EFF is doing so.
Here’s what I *think* happened: The Commerce Department just didn’t comprehend that consumers might want to be part of this discussion about how to implement DRM. Groups like EFF just didn’t fit the focus of this meeting, so Commerce set up this workshop with the goal of getting the IT people and the Hollywood people talking again, but made no provisions for the public to participate.
David Isenberg recommends Grant Gross’s coverage at Newsforge of the Commerce Department’s Digital Rights Management meeting last Wednesday. This meeting is intended to help forge a compromise for protecting copyrighted works but the deck was entirely stacked against customers/users and Right to Listen advocates. Says Isenberg: “Reading his article seemed almost like being there . . . an excellent piece.” Yup.
Read it and become enraged. And engaged.
One of the attendees — Alexandra Davis — at the book reading I did last night posted a thoughtful blog entry on it. Although Alexandra liked the event overall, my answer to the question she asked disappointed her, and I can see why. She writes:
I asked what one could do if she say, received a rape threat in a chatroom or someone somehow obtained her personal information, and posted her phone number and address on the web. I expressed my frustration over the strong possibility that people who would do things like that, hack, threaten people, and invade privacy, were most likely complete losers in person, but because they had this one skill, a skill I’m probably smart enough to learn had I the means, I had to be afraid of them. I then asked if he had covered accountability for one’s actions online at all in his book. Though he said that the dark side of the internet and accountability for one’s actions online were important topics, he hadn’t gone into them in his book. Perhaps they’re supposed to be implicit in his assertions about the humanity of the internet, but I was still disappointed and became skeptical…
Alexandra’s recounting is accurate and fair. But her question is one of many important ones for which I have and will have no answer worth listening to. Accountability is a hugely important issue, and a really tough one that involves everything from psychology to philosophy to digital IDs. Sorry, Alexandra. I wish I did have an answer.
FWIW, I don’t go into the dark side of the Net in Small Pieces because it is a partisan book — there are enough nay-sayers — that tries to get at the roots of the (positive) excitement about the Web. There are lots of things worth discussing that aren’t in the book.
Alexandra’s weblog overall is one of the frankest I’ve seen, and also one of the most reflective. Strong stuff.
July 18, 2002
I have to prepare for a Book Event at the Brookline Booksmith tonight at 7 (you’re all invited) so I’ve been bad about blogging today. A couple of tidbits…
Gotta love Gary Turner‘s sleazeball scandal rag parodies…
And speaking of Gary, Frank Paynter has a long interview with him that, as always, gives a great sense of the Person Behind the Blog.
Dave Curley writes about the Citizen Corps TIPS rat-out-your-neighbors page:
As pointed out by Rob Morse in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, clicking on the Join Now! link generates one of those “there’s a problem with the sercurity certificate” errors.
The Law of Irony continues its uninterrupted reign.
Gary Unblinking Stock points us to a complement to Steve Himmer’s now-famous RATS page by. It’s a public service reminder of who exactly needs to be turned in.
Good article, that not so incidentally says nice things about my book, by Charles Leadbeater in The New Statesman. Charlie is the author of The Weightless Society and is an advisor to Tony “Anthony” Blair.
July 17, 2002
So, we’re going to be allowed to print our own US postage stamps on our own printers. Why not let us create our own designs as well? After all, the paper is watermarked. Here are the first ones I’d do:
Madeleine Begun Kane, Humor Columnist, gently informs me that I’ve been scooped with regard to my Google Top Ten First-Name award:
I enjoyed your comments about Google’s first name top 10 and thought you might be amused by my piece on a similar subject written 3 or 4 years ago back when Madeleine Albright was Secretary of State:
Meanwhile, Mark Dionne would strip me of my award for minor, perceived technical breaches. He writes:
I checked Google for “David” and on the first page I get:JOHO the Blog
… W. David Stephenson, with whom I wrote an op-ed for the Miami Herald about why the Homeland Security page sucks, has two followups: …
www.hyperorg.com/blogger/ – 72k – 15 Jul 2002 – Cached – Similar pagesIt would seem that David Stephenson gets the award, not you! And it’s number 9, not number 8.
First, it’s only #9 if you count the sub-page hit for The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. I choose not to.
Second: No freaking way! The link is to my blog, not W. David Stephenson‘s. It’s not even a link to the particular blog entry that makes the now-obvious mistake of mentioning W. David Stephenson: it links to this blog’s home page. So, if W. Stinking David Stephenson wants to make up an award for himself that says “Mentioned on a Google Top Ten First-Name Page,” he can. Otherwise, the prize is mine mine mine mine and not you nor a platoon of embittered loser Davids can take it away from me. And if you try, I’ll just change the rules again. Bwahahahaha.
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