A small legalistic pamphlet from Verizon arrived today telling me that I have 45 days to opt out of “agreeing” to let Verizon share Customer Proprietary Network Information, i.e., “information created by virtue of your relationship with Verizon Wireless,” including “services purchased (including specific calls you make and receive,” billing info, technical info and location info. They promise to only share this with “affiliates, agents and parent companies.” It will definitely not be shared with “unrelated third parties” … unless, perhaps that third party pays Verizon to become an affiliate, whatever the heck “affiliate ” means.

To opt out you can call 1-800-333-9956. Or you can follow the instructions in the mailing to go to verizonwireless.com and log into My Verizon where you will find no mention, no button, no link and no help. Ah, but you forgot to check your Messages. There you will indeed find a link to CPNI. The link is marked “Not available.” Dead end.

You could then call Verizon’s excellent telephone support. (Nope, I’m not being sarcastic.) They won’t be able to find the opt out button either. But during the 8 minutes the rep puts you on hold, you’ll be amused to hear one of their continuous bits of self-promotion tell you that Verizon never shares your personal information. Oh, what a wry sense of humor Verizon has!

When you escalate the call, you will finally be told to click on the My Profile tab in My Verizon, then click on Phone Controls, and there you will conveniently find the link. It’s just that simple!

The whole thing sucks :( [Tags: verizon marketing privacy fcc ]

[March 10:] Verizon responds in its blog. GigaOm responds more broadly to that response. And I still say that the if you’re going to make the mistake of opting us in to sharing private info, then you have an ethical obligation to make it damn clear to us that you’re doing so, and making it a damn site easier for us to opt out.

[March 11:] Al Gidari, Jr. of Perkins Cole is giving a talk at the Berkman Center about the privacy of mobile-based info. I asked him about CPNI. Here are my notes on what he said:

The kerfuffle was an example of bad journalism. The article expressed it badly. The info you are opted in to giving can be used only within the family of companies for marketing purposes. For sharing outside, it requires explicit opt-in. And CPNI has a higher standard for location info, which does not get shared. An “affiliate” is an entity you own or control. Verizon is incorporated in separate states, so they’re trying to share the info among that family of corporations.

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John Palfrey and Adam Thierer discuss and debate whether the Communications Decency Act needs to be altered to make those who host content more liable than they are now. JP believes they should be.

I’m on the road and haven’t had time to read the debate. As a kneejerk liberal, I start out sympathetic to Adam’s point of view. But I have enough (= total) respect for JP to be quite open to being convinced…

[Tags: cda john_palfrey adam_thierer digital_rights ]

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Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, and John Palfrey have released a careful report they wrote in 2007 about the tools and techniques for circumventing filtering of sites. Although some of the particular evaluations of tools are out of date now, the general explanations and evaluations are still trenchant. From the announcement of the report’s publication:

The authors find that all of the tools use the same basic mechanisms of proxying and encryption but that they differ in their models of hosting proxies. Some tools use proxies that are centrally hosted, others use proxies that are peer hosted, and others use re-routing methods that use a combination of the two. The authors find that, in general, the tools work in the sense that they allow users to access pages that are otherwise blocked by filtering countries but that performance of the tools is generally poor and that many tools have significant, unreported security vulnerabilities. Responses from developers of the tools in question are included in the report.

[Tags: berkman circumvention filtering digital_rights ]

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Rebecca MacKinnon isgiving a Berkman talk on the Chinese Internet. [Note: Live-blogging, hence full of errors and omissions and typos and misspellings and inadequate paraphrases.] [For a better report, see Ethan Zuckerman‘s]

She begins by pointing to Lao Tze’s saying that directly grasping something is often the worst way of controlling it. Then she shows a video of Chinese kids lipsyncing to the Backstreet Boys. They’re now famous in China as the “Back Dorm Boys.” The Chinese government has lost control of the culture, she says. Novelists and artists are routing around the control structure. For 66% of Chinese young people, the Web is the primary source of video entertainment. Most of it is found through social networking.

Premier Wen Jiabao gave a two hour chat online with Netizens. Questions came in from the Web, moderated by a journalist. It showed a human side of the Chinese leaders. “This is being greeted by many in China with euphoria.” The Premier said that he spends 30-60 mins on line everyday and considers it an important way to hear what people are thinking. There’s an egov site, including chat rooms and forums, as well as providing online services.

The National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference meets for two weeks every year, primarily to rubber stamp decisions. The Premier gives a live press conference once a year. Now he’s on the Web responding to questions directly. The meeting has a site (run by a Chinese newspaper) where people can comment, make suggestions, etc. Someone posted that the one child policy should be ended, with a lively open discussion among Chinese citizens.

So, asks Rebecca, is this “Chinese cyber-glasnost”? Chinese government Web sites are celebrating this as “Internet democracy.” But …

… Blogger Wang Xiaofeng blogged yesterday that people are getting too emotional about this. “Without a proper political structure, all Premiere Wen can do is interact with people on an emotional level…” He posted that yesterday. Today is blog is “closed temporarily.” He was told to close his blog. Other blogs talking about this have to insert spaces between words that otherwise would trigger inspection.

Dissidents are still in jail, Rebecca says. Bloggers, opposition party folks, lawyers… Yongnian Zheng talks about “authoritarian deliberation.” (His book: Technological Empowerment). Authoritarian regimes allow different degrees of deliberation. China is more deliberative because of the Internet, says Rebecca, but institutionally it hasn’t changed.

Our common Western paradigm makes it hard for us to understand Chinese Internet control, Rebecca says. We tend to think of it like the Great Wall: A barrier blocks people from accessing outside information. It is, as Lokman Tsui calls it, the “Iron Curtain 2.0.” Internet filtering is only one small part of censorship in China. It only affects sites hosted outside of China. For those hosted inside, the “Net nanny” metaphor is more accurate: A paternalistic state that protects people from themselves and maintains order. Google China does not show gory photos when you search for “Tianamen Massacre.” Baidu, the largest search service in China, returns zero results. If you try to post a post that contains trigger words, it goes into a moderation queue from which it never emerges. Eight out of 15 blog hosting services removed “objectionable” political content. The censoring is done by the hosting companies.

We could also use the metaphor of hydroelectric engineering. Most of the Chinese leaders have engineering backgrounds. When the storm comes, you put up the dam, then you let water out. New technique: The official news agencies quickly break stories that are bad news for the government (e.g., riots in Weng’an county in 7/08), and then they censor the unofficial versions. The official version “flooded” the Web.

People routed around this censorship. Youc ouldn’t talk about Weng’an, but you can talk about pushups, because the official story behind a murder was that a man was doing pushups on the bridge. Bloggers used pushups as a way of talking about the forbidden content. Or:” the government used “Harmonious Society” as a slogan. People had started using “harmonized” to mean “censored,” but then “harmonized” got censored, so people started using “rivercrab,” which is very close to “harmonious.” Then people started posting rivercrabs wearing three watches because that’s close to another slogan.

Another example. There was an anti-porn crackdown in January. Political discussions were removed along with smut. So, a video showed up, a happy children’s chorus about alpaca sheep, because “alpaca sheep” and “fuck your mother” are very similar; it’s a protest against censorship. It went viral. Now it’s spawned academic research.

“This is why keyword censorship is bound to fail. There’s so much discussion on the Web right now about rivercrabs and alpaca sheep.”

Cybernationalism is big in China, i.e., people on the Net who are very proud of their nation. There’s an anti-CNN site created by Chinese journalism students, to critique CNN’s errors in coverage. People resent foreigners criticizing their Internet. There are now Red Guard-like cyber-vigilantes. There are also paid informants on the Web. Cyber-police. Cyber-bonapartism, i.e., a strong centralized state using democratic means to make people feel more involved? Cyber-confucianism? Cyber-ocracy? She points to Isaac Mao who says we can’t have free speech until we have thinking, and thus he talks about “share-ism.”

Ultimately, we should be talking about off line institutions. Fair mechanisms, transparency, legal protection of free speech. Until you have that, Rebecca says, nothing much changes.

What does this mean for the global Internet? David Post, in Jefferson’s Moose, talks about the balance between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians (free speech vs. control). This debates rages in China now. The debate is “hampered by censorship and complicated by nationalism.” How do we support that debate, Rebecca asks. Between governments and citizens there’s now global layer of Web and IT services. How do we use this layer, in China and globally? Authoritarian governments may not be moved to democracy and freedom. If we don’t talk about this, we might all end up in the middle.

Q: This echoes the traditional Chinese leadership pattern of going out among the people. And different people in China use the Internet for different purposes. Elites vs, working class, etc.
A: Yes. The Net right now is an echo chamber for elites. If you want to know what the peasantry are thinking, the Internet is not the way to find out. But if you want know about the people who might be future leaders, the Internet is a good tool.

Q: Are there country-to-country discussion forums? And are they using The Onion Router?
A: Some do. Not a critical mass. And there are good-hearted attempts to “save” the Chinese. It’d be better not to be so paternalistic.

Q: Why don’t controversial bloggers post on hosts outside their country?
A: Because their audience would be too small. One guy I know posts the same posts to ten blogs and hope that not all of them are taken down. And the problem with circumvention tools is that you have to know what you want to know. It can be hard to know how much censorship there is if you’re within the system.

Q: Do the Chinese people want to be free? Russians tell you that freedom leads to conflict and misery.
A: What is freedom? There isn’t consensus in China about how much freedom vs. control. But how can you get consensus if you can’t have an uncensored debate about it? [Tags: berkman china filtering rebecca_mackinnon ]

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Peter Suber gave a terrific talk last week, hosted by the Berkman Center. Afterwards, I sat down with him for a podcast on the politics around open access.

[Tags: peter_suber open_access podcasts knowledge libraries journals publishing ]

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Peter Suber, Research Prof. of Philosophy at Earlham College, a visiting fellow at Yale Law’s Information Society Project, and blogger of open access news, is giving a full-house lecture at Harvard, sponsored by the Berkman Center. [Note: I’m live blogging, making mistakes, leaving things out, paraphrasing ineptly, etc. POSTED WITHOUT PROOFING or even with a basic re-reading. Speed over accuracy. Welcome to the Web :(]

Peter says he’s going to assume that we know what open access is, etc. But he does want to define Green Open Access (= open access through a repository) and Gold OA (= OA through a journal). There’s also Gratis OA (free of charge but may be licensing restrictions) and Libre OA (free of charge and free of licensing restrictions).

Peter says he doesn’t know the future of OA. He likes Alan Kaye’s comment that the future is easier to make than predict. He’s going to talk about 12 cross-over points in OA, in rough order of when they might occur:

1. For-pay journals allow green OA. About 63% of these journals already do this.

2. OA books:: When there are more gratis OA books online than in the average university library. We crossed this a couple of years ago. “The permission problem is harder than digitization.” The next cross over point here is getting more libre OA books online, which we are quite a distance from.

3. Funder policies: “When most publicly-funded research is subject to OA mandates.” This seems to be spreading, Peter says. Today, 32 public funders and more than 3 private funders have OA mandates.

4. Green OA deposits: “When most new peer-reviewed manuscripts are self-archived when accepted for publication.” In particle physics, this happens routinely. If 20% of researchers publish 80% of the articles, we could reach cross-over fairly quickly in some fields.

5. Author understanding: “When most publishing researchers have an accurate understanding of OA.” This is happening, but notvery quickly.

6. University repositories: “When most universities have institutional repositories,” individually or as part of a consortium. This is happening slowly. In the absence of a universal repository, every university ought to have one. Universities will get to this point more slowly than funders because they move more slowly than funders. And we ought to ask why. Aren’t universities interests in line with OA?

Libre gold OA: “When most OA journals are libre OA.” Most OA journals are still merely gratis, but curb copying to drive traffic to their site. This crossover could happen overnight if the journals understood the issues. They’d lose a little traffic, but nothing else. There are grounds for optimism: Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association is an assoc of OA journal publishers and it requires libre gold OA. The SPARC Europe program sets standards for what a good OA journal is, and it recommends CreativeCommons attribution licenses. These two orgs are helpful because there’s no topdown org defining OA, so we rely on bottom up orgs like these two to set the standards.

8. Journal backfiles: “When most TA journals have OA backfiles.” This is expensive to do. Google will do it, but Google’s terms are difficult: They don’t give the journal a copy of the digital files. (Libraries do get copies of the files of the books they let Google scan.) The OCA focuses on public domain literature. “Once digitized, the benefits of increased visibility and citations should outweigh the trickle of revenue.” Journals make most of their money from new issues, so having greater presence should help. In physics, almost 100% of articles are available OA but the publishers can’t see any dip in subscriptions.

9. Author addenda: “When most new research is covered by author addenda” (i.e., additions that grant OA permission, tacked onto standard publisher-author contracts). Now there are few adopters. It’d be good to standardize these. The cross over will come when universities or funders require it. If enough journals allow green OA, that’d make addenda unnecessary.

10. University policies: “When most university research is subject to university-level OA mandates.” Today, 27 universities and 4 depts have these mandates. It’d help to have the largest/most productive universities move on this first.

11. OA journals: “When most peer-reviewed journals are OA.” “I don’t expect this for a long time.” Now 15% are OA. Progress is slow, but there is progress. High prestige journals are likely to hold out for a long time.

Libre green OA: “When most green OA is libre OA.” Today, only a small fraction is libre OA because most OA repositories depend on permission from publishers. UKPMC Funders Group demands green libre. We will reach the cross-over “when it’s safe.” Harvard has taken the lead on this, Peter says, and it will spread as another large university takes this step, then another one … “It becomes self-fulfilling leadership.”

Q: Are we stuck with the Sonny Bono copyright extension act?
A: Yes. All copyright reform in the past few decades have been in the wrong direction. And it’s very hard to roll back copyright terms. The only silver lining is that when we have a consenting partner, we can bypass copyright via contract. The problem is that they’re not the default.

Q: Under libre OA, how are our scholarly attributions protected?
A: It’s a range. One end is public domain, which does not preserve attribution. But all the CreativeCommons licenses preserve attribution. Most scholars don’t want public domain; they want CC-attribution.”Creative Commons attribution license provides everything a scholar could want.”

Q: [me] Conyers!
A: The Conyers bill would tell agencies not to require OA for works they fund. [I’ve put this badly.] The OA advocates are fighting it, but the agencies affected are not yet. I think Conyers is serious about it. I think he introduced it early because we don’t have a Sect’y of Health and Human Services or of NIH. Conyers may be fighting a turf battle. [Paraphrasing!] “He’s motivated primarily to protect the jurisdiction of his committee.” Peter thinks it won’t pass, but it might be introduced into another bill. “We’d like to spread the NIH policy to the rest of the government.”

Q: Is the economic downturn accelerating the adoption of OA?
A: The NIH just got $10B in the stimulus, which means there will be more and more OA articles. NSF also, but not as much because NSF requires OA for reports generated by those they fund [may not have gotten this right]. But, Peter thinks the downturn strengthens the case for OA. Libraries are going to be canceling subscriptions. And the Stimulus’ emphasis on green research will be more valuable if it’s OA. Open access to research amplifies its value.

Q: [jpalfrey] You’ve noticed there’s no OSF equivalent for OA. But I’d argue that the people in this room — librarians — are your OA OSF. What do you say to these librarians to advance our common cause?
A: Librarians are among the most important allies in the OA movement. But put all the allies together and you still don’t have OSF. Libraries should be sending letters against the Conyers bill. When you negotiate subscriptions you should negotiate the right to pur articles from your authors into an OA repository. Libraries are the only buyers of peer-reviewed journals. When you’re the only buyer, you can dictate your terms, subject to anti-trust. Obama says that we have the right to demand transformation from the banks we’re saving. Librarians can do the same thing for journals. Journals are not serving all of our interests and are acting against other interests. Use your bargaining power. Get the right of self-archive, and, when the time is right, get the right of libre self-archive. Network with one another when you launch repositories. And, btw, every school with an enlightened OA policy had librarians in the head of the charge.

Q: Can you give an example of an archive that works?
A: Universities that have mandatory language still have to supplement the language with incentives and education. As you go from unmandated to mandated, it goes from 15% toward 100%. (15% is the average for voluntary, spontaneous archives.) It works best in the Dutch universities that let the “cream” of the article rise to the top. Every week they feature good work in public. This gets academics to archive their work without a mandate.

Q: Might universities work with publishers collaboratively to create new business models?
A: Publishers differ in their attitudes toward OA. Some are experimenting in good faith. Some, in bad faith. Some who do OA are actively lobbying for the Conyers bill. Librarians understand the scholarly landscape better than publishers and could educate publishers. Society publishers [i.e., societies that publish] could be told that they’re threatened not by OA but by the “big deal” that brings in academic journals.

Q: Is Springer’s taking over of BioMed Central a good thing?
A: Yes. BMC is for-profit. BMC was the world’s largest OA publisher. Now Springer is. Springer says that OA http://arubatourism.com/assets/blog/index.php?=buy-viagra-through-paypal/ is a sustainable part of their bsiness. My reading is that Springer is preparing for an OA future. [Tags: berkman open_access libraries digital_rights education everything_is_miscellaneous publishing scholarship conyers copyright copyleft ]

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The Berkman Center has launched Herdict.org, a site that lets you report sites you can’t reach, aggregating reports from every other Herdict user, to paint a picture of the openness of the Net.

You can join here. (And see Eszter Hargittai‘s better explanation of it. We’re both using as the title of our posts an aptly-named URL — amIblockedornot.org — that takes you to a page accessibility test at Herdict.)

[Tags: herdict filtering censorship net_neutrality ]

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The Financial Times yesterday ran a terrific op-ed by James Boyle, explaining the ridiculousness of the Conyers bill “that would eviscerate public access to taxpayer funded research.” The op-ed is written in Jamie’s light-hearted-yet-penetrating style, and should be read simply for that reason — preeminent legal scholars of copyright are not supposed to be entertaining.

Then, at the end, he adds an argument that I think is crucial because it addresses the Internet’s effect on knowledge and authority:

Think about the Internet. You know it is full of idiocy, mistake, vituperation and lies. Yet search engines routinely extract useful information for you out of this chaos. How do they do it? In part, by relying on the network of links that users generate. If 50 copyright professors link to a particular copyright site, then it is probably pretty reliable.

Where are those links for the scientific literature? Citations are one kind of link; the hyperlink is simply a footnote that actually takes you to the desired reference. But where is the dense web of links generated by working scientists in many disciplines, using semantic web technology and simple cross reference electronically to tie together literature, datasets and experimental results into a real World Wide Web for science? The answer is, we cannot create such a web until scientific articles come out from behind the publishers’ firewalls….

[Tags: copyright copyleft conyers james_boyle knowledge everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Mark Gibbs reports on a, oh, let’s say over-zealous New Zealand copyright law:

This insanity, found in Sections 92A and C of New Zealand’s Copyright Amendment Act 2008 establishes – and I am not making this up – a guilt upon accusation principle!

Yep, you read that right. This means that anyone accused of “copyright infringement” will get his Internet connection cut off; and treated as guilty until proven innocent.

And if that weren’t enough, this crazy legislation defines anyone providing Internet access as an ISP and makes them responsible for monitoring and cutting off Internet access for anyone who uses their services and is accused of copyright violations. Thus libraries, schools, coffee shops, cafes – anyone offering any kind of Internet access – will be considered ISPs and become responsible and potentially liable.

Yikes. That is some extra nasty legislation.

[Minutes later] GlobalVoices reports:

A large swatch of New Zealand’s political blogosphere shut down its websites for a half-day on Monday, February 23 in protest of a copyright law that could have required internet service providers from disconnecting users who download pirated materials like movies or music.

…

The protest appeared to work as Prime Minister John Key announced he will stall the proposal for one month as he looks to forge a compromise with ISPs and copyright holders. If a solution cannot be found, Section 92 will be scrapped.

Be sure to read the entire GlobalVoices article, though. It explains how the boycott happened, points to similarly scary legislation elsewhere, and, of course, aggregates what the NZ blogosphere has been saying about this.

[Tags: new_zealand copyright copyleft conchords hobbits ]

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The Italian Interior Minister — the one who will be deciding which posts “defend” criminal activity and thus require ISPs to block the post’s host — is setting up a task force to hack Skype so the government can eavesdrop on its citizens.

Among his many virtues, I think it’s safe to say that Roberto Maroni is totally free of a sense of irony.

(I base this on a Google translation of an article sent to me by my friend Gianluca.)

[Tags: italy digital_rights rights skype hacking ]

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