Jeff Jarvis has suggested tagging people (following up on all the talk about new Technorati tags). I'm all for it. (Of course, we do this in social situations all the time. But it's good to cast light on the idea.)
Tagging of objects (or people) allows the social level of the protocol stack to emerge. It's not just about applications — it's about people, groups, and metainformation. Tagging doesn't diminish people, particularly if we have tags that you can write to as well as read.
The NANOG list today was the virtual equivalent of a nearby nocturnal car alarm: “panix.com has been hijacked!” (whoo-WEE, whoo-WEE); “those jerks at VeriSign!” (duhhhhh-WHEEP, duhhhh-WHEEP); “no one's home at Melbourne IT!” (HANK, HANK, HANK, HANK).
Finally, on Monday morning in Australia, the always-competent and helpful Bruce Tonkin calmly fixed the situation. So the rest of us can get some sleep now.
But as we nod off in the quietness, let's consider just exactly what happened here. A savvy NY ISP had its domain name hijacked and moved from Dotster to Melbourne. Somehow this happened without either Dotster or Melbourne getting any official notifications. As a result, email directed to panix.com domains was redirected to Canada. VeriSign said that the registrars in question would have to get involved in order for the situation to be reversed. Melbourne IT was closed and seemed to have no emergency contact information.
This was a very bad day for panix.com. And, I think, a bad day for Melbourne IT (but thank goodness for Bruce).
Panix.com should have had its names locked down so that changing their nameserver information required a login to the the registrar. (Panix said they did do this, but somehow this status was changed by someone — maybe the hijacker.) Melbourne IT should have been reachable.
Some on the NANOG list have suggested that ISPs should cooperate to point to the right information without waiting for registrars/registries to tell them what to do. This is, of course, the secret to the DNS: ICANN isn't in charge; the ISPs are. If they decided not to point to whatever ICANN denominates as “authoritative” information, no one could say Boo to them. It's up to the ISPs what to do.
On the other hand, I think the real lesson here is that customer service (24/7, someone answering the phone and dealing with nocturnal virtual car alarms) is everything. It is, in fact, law.
This may seem like an overstatement to you. But look at it this way: how often do you see a cop on the streets online, walking by and noticing that something's amiss? You don't. You're online anyway, because the law of customer service is taking care of you. Most things get resolved without the involvement of any central authority, whether it's ICANN, the FTC, the FCC, or a federal judge.
I hope that panix users are feeling confident in panix today — they should, because panix did everything humanly possible to fix this situation. And peaceful acclamation to all customer service people out there. You're the law and we believe in you.
It seemed important to re-read the Sony decision today. Taking another close look at that case reminds me how careful the Court was to extend the boundaries of copyright liability only to include (as secondarily liable) those who were doing everything but the actual infringing.
So, for example, someone who produced a script, sold the resulting motion picture to others, and then expected that it would be commercially exhibited (with the exhibition and the reproduction the infringing acts) is seen as someone who has done everything possible other than the final, implementing act of infringement.
And someone who is in an ongoing relationship with the direct infringer and is knowingly facilitating the infringement (again, “doing everything but”) is a contributory infringer. Such an actor falls within the very tight circle drawn just outside direct liability.
I don't think the Sony Court would have created an “inducement” standard. They would have gone to Congress rather than make something like that up. The Court at that point was very nervous about expanding the statutory monopoly of copyright.
I also re-read the Grokster 9th Circuit opinion again today, and it's hard to see how the 9th Circuit misread Sony. Reasonable minds could certainly differ on this point, I am sure.
I know that twenty years have passed, but I think this statement from the Sony Court may still be right:
It may well be that Congress will take a fresh look at this new technology, just as it so often has examined other innovations in the past. But it is not our job to apply laws that have not yet been written. Applying the copyright statute, as it now reads, to the facts as they have been developed in this case, the judgment of the Court of Appeals must be [affirmed].
This is an important case, this Grokster situation, and the problem may be that Grokster is an unsympathetic “client” for many people. But this often happens in important cases — we're stuck with actors who we don't altogether like. The principles here are very similar to those in central First Amendment cases. What kind of speech (or innovation) should be filtered out? Who gets to march in what parade? Who gets to decide what filters are appropriate?
It seems as if we need to be just as careful as the Sony Court, and just as mindful of the importance of the internet as the CDA Court. None of this is easy.
Recently, the World Trade Organization challenged US decisions to declare online gambling by US citizens illegal, claiming that these restrictions violate trade promises that the US has made. James Thayer has published a very clear overview of the issues here.
The US interprets the 1961 Wire Communications Act, written to address betting on sports over the telephone, to cover online gambling, and some site operators in the US have been prosecuted under this interpretation. Antigua made the argument to the WTO that the US was providing half of the world's customers for online gambling services, despite the illegality of this activity under US law. Antigua wants to help by providing gambling and betting services to the United States, but argues that the US has condemned such services as illegal.
Under an exception to the WTO's General Agreement on Trade and Services, members are permitted to adopt measures that are “necessary to protect public morals” even if they do not meet “market access” or “national treatment” standards of GATS, and the US has argued that its position with respect to gambling fits within this exception. So far, the WTO has dismissed this “public morals” argument, perhaps because online gambling is so easily available in the US.
Could it be that the global reputation of the US as a trade partner will be affected by this? DOJ takes the position that it should be able to govern information flows (like gambling) online. Gambling is unquestionably going on.
US citizens like gambling.
I went to a fine concert this evening that ended up with everyone (two fiddles, one banjo, one guitar, one mandolin, drummer, and a simian cellist) standing in a row at the front of the stage playing away. Plenty of eyebrow cues were going around, and when the simian cellist didn't have enough to say the mandolin guy picked right up. The crowd loved it.
Kenosis is a way to distribute BitTorrent distribution, so if one tracker fails the next will pick right up. As far as I can tell from the description, it provides a secure, distributed, and stable platform for p2p BitTorrent anonymous filetrading. Nodes in its network communicate how “close” they are to each other. No more centralized tracking. Plus the comments reveal that the authors want to make a lot of progress on distributed trust — so you'll be confident in your downloads.
I bet the crowd will love it.
I moved from a ThinkPad (corporate issue) to a Toshiba in December 2002. When that Toshiba crashed to the floor as I was moving out of Washington, DC in May 2003, I got a ThinkPad of my own. Now that ThinkPad T40 is dying — terrible power issues, caused (I think) by the delicacy of the power cord connection.
So it's time for yet another ThinkPad, this time a T41, which I've had for a while but haven't really used. I've been laboriously moving email files over, and running into lots of memorable messages. It's not quite as rich as looking over snapshots, and it's less emotionally intense than reading old letters, but it has a certain impact. So I'm on hiatus as a blogger as I move into this new machine.
This really should be easier. I know, I know, if I had a Mac….
Businessweek has a lengthy and interesting article about how The New York Times is doing. Answer: they're in a bit of a trough at the moment. I admire the Times for believing that “quality journalism pays in the long run.” I think they're right.
I also think Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor are right that blogs and citizen journalism are important and transformative. I think the Times will figure out its relationship to the online world eventually, and it will be a more interesting one than exists right now.
I'd pay for the Times online. Dan Gillmor asks: would you pay?
Raise your hand if you would like to be at CES. You could be strolling those aisles right now, looking at sixy gajillion new gadgets. Although I understand blogging isn't permitted by the CES organizers (and apparently wireless access isn't encouraged either, according to the Post's Rob Pegoraro), somehow Engadget has managed to have someone there.
But strolling/scrolling through the Engadget entries, I'm not as enthusiastic as I thought I might be. More and different openings to bits. More and different and faster ways to combine those bits. Surely we're just waiting for the Interface that will disappear, just as the net has disappeared. You're not “on the internet” any longer, you're just “online.” Or just reading, or whatever. These boxes don't look fun from a distance.
What did get my attention was the Alter Ego mirror. It's not at CES. It's a gadget that reacts to a person. It shows that person an image of themselves, and learns from the expression of its subject. Then it frowns unexpectedly, like a frightening doppelganger or a menacing bus driver. Now that's fun.
Part of today's complex festivities included a presentation about networked reactions to drugs.
It was chilling. (Speaking of chilling, don't get me started on medical errors. Did you know that there are between 50,000 and 200,000 deaths per year in the US that are caused by straight-out avoidable errors? Wrong drug, wrong leg cut off, wrong treatment. If there are that many deaths, just imagine how many mistakes are made that don't lead to death.)
The problem with administering medications is that 70%-90% of proteins communicate with one another. So if you do something that you think is inhibiting X protein, you may also (in some downstream reaction) be cheering up Y protein, and thus causing the exact opposite effect of what you wanted in the first place. This is the Vioxx story.
There are lots of levels of this, from simple double-edged sword effects — like the conflicting downstream effects – to feedback loops/synergistic effects in which there are two or more stable states in which two drugs can coexist. If you want to drive the system to one of those states (to make the patient well), you may have to find a third drug that will get you there.
Or you could try to map incredibly complicated genomic interactions with drugs to figure out how to control the fate of various cells. Sure — 13,000 genes, 32 drugs — just draw the picture. With some funding assistance.
These are all very brave and optimistic efforts to figure out what a highly-connected network does when medications are added in. The lesson I took away was this:
We really don't know whether any particular drug will fix any particular problem, or whether it will instead/also cause a different problem down the road.
Whenever we try to manipulate a complex system, we're shooting bullets in the dark.
Mary Ann Allison of the Allison Group coined “gecyberschaft.” Here's her idea: sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies described village society before the Industrial Revolution (gemeinschaft) and urban society afterwards (gesellschaft). Allison doesn't see these as oppositional systems, but rather as stages in evolution — and she thinks we're at a big punctuation point prompted by the information revolution. The new society is gecyberschaft.
So if your unit of community in gemeinschaft was the village, it became “friends and family” in gesellschaft, and it's now your “primary attention group.” You pay attention to that group (or groups, I'd hope she'd say) and to “groups of purpose” — groups neither bound to a place nor to a particular bureaucracy.
In gemeinschaft, your status was ascribed (based on birth); in gesellschaft, it was achieved; and now, in gecyberschaft, it's assessed. Very interesting stuff.
Other interesting nuggets from today's virtuousic series of presentations by Yaneer Bar-Yam: creativity requires some separation (differences, strength of weak ties), not complete connection. So membranes are particularly important in complex systems. They are always properties of the collective, and beautiful examples of emergent behavior.
Thermostats are profound entities. They seek a goal — and the whole notion of goal-seeking doesn't fit with linear ideas. And they're only as complex as they need to be. They worry about their one task (regulating temperature) and don't concern themselves with their complete environment (humidity, open doors). So they're successful in a complex systems sense as well as profound.
And a good thing too.
