Archive for August, 2004

Jerry Kang (UCLA, now visiting at Georgetown) has written about Pervasive Computing, and it does seem that sensors will likely be everywhere once their cost is sufficiently low.

Do we want to demand, through standards bodies or otherwise, that all sensors declare their presence?  I have never been convinced that requiring privacy statements to be posted on web sites was good policy.  Nor do I think that whois requirements (or labeling requirements generally for bits) are good ideas. 

But for some reason I initially feel differently about making sensors visible.  I don't feel the need to dictate what fields of information they must display or ensure that they have a kill function..  I just would like to know when they're around.

But.

Would making sensors visible dampen innovation in sensors?  Would it make the world less interesting or complex? Would we start wishing that we didn't know about sensors, because their maddening “I'm over here!” beeping was driving us wild?

Human beings are remarkably resilient.  The longterm message may be:  Get over it.  The world is watching you, but with any luck is too busy to care.  Individuals are just not that interesting. 

Let's assume we tried to create an Amnesty International-like organization for online life.  (Yes, EFF does this.  I'm a huge fan of EFF.)  What would the principles of this global organization be?  I tried to draft a list this afternoon:

Online Principles

1. Human beings are naturally inclined towards trust and collaboration. Policies of intermediaries or governments that frustrate trust and collaboration should be viewed with suspicion.

2. The world is a complex and diverse place. Conflicting values can coexist online. Policies of intermediaries or governments that attempt to impose unitary values — and, in particular, that attempt to build such values into low levels of the protocol stack — should be viewed with suspicion.

3. Any group or government that attempts to impose its values online on another group or government should be viewed with suspicion.

4. As much as possible, decisions about what should happen online should be implemented at the edge of the network.

5. As much as possible, decisions about what individuals should be able to do online should be made by those individuals themselves.

6. Netizens want to widen their contacts with people who are distant from them in time and space. Policies of intermediaries or governments that frustrate this contact should be viewed with suspicion.

7. Any machine or device should be allowed to connect to the internet as long as it respects basic protocols. Policies of intermediaries or governments that frustrate this connection should be viewed with suspicion.

8. Online access should not be conditioned on provision of government-mandated identifying information.

9. Individuals should have a choice of modes of online access available to them, at reasonable prices. One of those choices must allow individuals to host content themselves.

10. Individuals who subscribe to these principles should be ready to act collectively when necessary.

Here are the deliverables this AI-like set of affiliates could have:  people could brand themselves as netizens (suggest another word if you don't like that one); smart-mob-like protests could be organized against initiatives that seemed to run counter to these principles; and ISPs that didn't measure up could be boycotted. 

More deliverables would be good, but I need suggestions.  Creative Commons had something to offer — licensing terms.  This new group would be a loose union of citizens of the internet, and wouldn't have a license to offer.  What else could this group of people offer to the world?  How do you instantiate online freedom?

Michael Binder of Canada had a good line on Friday [paraphrasing]:  “I've heard about e-government, e-rulemaking, e-commerce — I say E-nough!”

I'm at a conference that has a single, shared, dialup connection supporting all of our wireless work.  Life has slowed down.  E-nertia!

Rob Pegoraro has a good follow-up column today in the Post.  He's making the right point:  the content industry wants control.  “Copy protection” as a term doesn't really capture what they want, and sounds benign.  This industry can't control the internet (yet), but they want to make sure that all the devices that connect to the internet are unable to transmit marked files online or connect to anything other than similarly compliant devices.

There's no reason these marked files, by the way, will be limited to digital broadcast content.  Once machines are configured to respect the flag (and all the kneecaps have been broken in the FCC's ad hoc interim procedure), any marked content, received by any compliant machine (including PCs), won't go online.  Could be public domain data that's marked.  Could be anything at all.  Doesn't matter where it came from.  This is quite a step.

And it's all about control.  E-nough!