Sen. Byron Dorgan in a 2 min video explains why he’s co-sponsoring a bi-partisan Net neutrality bill. (Via SaveTheInternet.com) [Tags: net_neutrality byron_dorgan ]

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Micah Sifry has a very helpful post about how to find political blogs near you (where “near” refers to geographical not judgmental proximity). Lots of good links in it.

(By the way, the title of this post is false.) [Tags: politics placeblogs micah_sifry ]

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danah notes:

Many teens are content (if not happy) to start over with most of their accounts in most places. Forgot your IM password? Sign up again. Forgot your email address? Create a new one. Forgot your login? Time for a change.

This is so fascinating. Us middle-aging bloggers who think blogs are about building selves in the new public are apparently not speaking for anyone other than us middle-aging bloggers. Maybe Web presence for the young’uns has little to do with building selves or maybe the nature of that public self is so different from the corporeal one the middle-agers have imported from the real world, or maybe something else entirely is going on. And maybe—although I think this is less likely—when the young’uns age to the middle, they’ll feel about their Web selves the way us current middle-agers do.

Damn, this is an interesting world. [Tags: danah_boyd self web everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Good luck for 2007



Bill K has posted this obscene photo of beans as way of wishing us all a “happy, healthy and high-fibre 2007.” It’s almost enough to get me back eating meat.

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Jon has a podcast interview of Paul English, my old friend and erstwhile partner, about treating customers with the dignity we deserve. Paul is endlessly inventive and good-hearted, as well as being wicked smart.

(Don’t forget to see the video my daughter’s production company did for Paul’s GetHuman.com site. Leah is now a senior at Emerson College. And, yes, that middle aged man in it does look suspiciously like me.) [Tags: paul_english customer_relations marketing business jon_udell leah_weinberger videos podcast ]

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Wikia (another Jimmy Wales enterprise) has announced that if you have open software you want to run, to provide an app that produces open contents, it’ll be your server for free. OpenServing will provide free hosting, free bandwidth and free CPU time…and you get to keep 100% of any ad revenues you raise. It seems to be focused on apps that create content (e.g., blogs), but I believe it’s open to other apps as well.

Cool! [Tags: openserving wikia wikipedia jimmy_ wales open_soiurce]

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Christina Olsen is giving a Tuesday lunch talk at the Berkman Center. She says that StopBadware.org is “neighborhood watch for the Internet,” finding sites you want to avoid. It’s based theoretically on Jonathan Zittrain‘s work on generativity. JZ favors open PCs and and open network, but the openness also means that bad actors can create badware that may create a backlash and a demand to lock down PCs or put gatekeepers in place. To avoid that, StopBadware.org addresses the badware problem. [[Disclosure: I’m an advisor to SiteAdvisor.com].

StopBadware has a set of guidelines that defines badware as an application that acts deceptively or irreversibly (e.g., an app that installs sw you don’t want and/or provides no way to uninstall it), or that “engages in potentially objectionable behavior” without first requiring the user to opt in with the full facts presented to her.

StopBadware creates reports based on data from its partners. There’s also a community that provides data. They are aiming at having a distributed app that draws on the “wisdom of the crowd.”

Google filters its search results and sends people to StopBadware.org for more info about dicy sites that turn up in search results.

In 2006, StopBadware developed 24 in-depths reports and 414 quick reports on badware hosting sites. They received 2,658 badware story submissions from the community. There are 618 people in the discussion group. in 2007, StopBadware wants to do 2 in-depth reports per week, and organize the community to generate more quick reports. They also want to bulid the tech community around the badware issue.

More specifically, StopBadware is hoping to:

Implement XML-based reports…more details, more semantics. “Continue the development of automated crawling and malware detection of submitted applications.”

Increase automation throughout the process. It should be easier to submit suspected badware and easier to appeal. More partnerships.

Localize reports for non-English speakers. Integrate with Firefox

The “wisdom of the crowds” app draws on the experience of the user community. It involves a downloadable piece of software that looks to see if a user’s website contains badware.

Christine raises to this group what the principles should be for the appeals process, and what are the criteria for being “happy” with a user experience.

Q: (a cowboy) People get more frustrated when computers work as they should then when they work as they shouldn’t. The subjective experience is much more powerful than the objective one.

Ethanz responds that the people who are likely to download the distributed app are a self-selected, technical group. (Someone jokes, “Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to put the app on people’s desktops without them knowing…maybe if they just are downloading a Jessica Simpson screensaver…”)

A very interesting conversation follows, but I stopped typing… [Tags: stopbadware badware viruses malware berkman]

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About twenty people are at this session, evenly split by gender. Sentiment in the room is definitely pro Net neutrality, although we probably don’t all agree about what exactly it is. Many in the room are activists on the issue, from the political side more than the technical side. Nancy Scola, the moderator, is interested in how the issue of Net neutrality might be used to energize progressives. I think everyone agrees that we’re not good enough at explaining that the issue is. [I’m paraphrasing and taking notes. I’m missing much and undoubtedly getting things wrong. Sorry.]

Noel from New York says it’s a civil rights issue. “We’ve moved into a digital age.” When we entered the industrial age, everyone got access to the benefits, from indoor plumbing to an expanded range of travel. We need to give everyone the benefits of the digital age, he say6s.

Someone from the DNC says that the civil rights framing is too abstract. When the telcos claim Net neutrality is a form of government regulation, the Hill gets that.

(I say that the response to the carriers’ claim that Net neutrality is the government regulating the Internet should be: “No. It’s about the government regulating you.”)

There’s discussion, kicked off by Matt Stoller‘s comment, about the need to provide Internet as a common good, rather than relying on private industry to provide it. Not everyone thinks this is a practical political approach. Many think that it’s important to see Net neutrality within a broader context.

Steve says that maybe we should make the claim that there’s a right to information. “You can’t have a democracy if you can’t find out what’s going on.”

A woman whose name tag I can’t see says that Democrats ought to have as a core belief that “you don’t outsource public goods.” (Nice phrase. She works on the Hill.)

Corinna says that it ought to be explained to Congress as being about the American dream, i.e., about what’s possible.

Matt says it’s fundamentally about morality.

Julie says that the right way to frame it is to say that something you have is about to be taken from you, rather than saying that we want something we don’t currently have. [Nice point.]

[Tags: rootscamp rootscampdc net_neutrality politics]

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asphalt

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purple flowers 2

Originally uploaded by dweinberger.

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