Archive for February, 2005

Jared Diamond has written a chatty book (“Collapse:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”) that suggests that metainformational depth (he doesn't use those words, but others might) is important for the success of atoms as well as informational things. 

Diamond uses five parameters as bases for comparative analysis of vanished societies:  (1) damage that people inadvertently inflict on their environment; (2) climate change (not just global warming, but all kinds of variances); (3) hostile neighbors; (4) decreased support from friendly neighbors; (5) responses/governance mechanisms adopted in response to all of this.  I'm fresh from chapters on Easter Island, Mayans, Pitcairn Island, Anasazi, Vikings, and Norse Greenland. 

I once spent an hour listening to someone talk me through his snapshots of Easter Island statues.  The pictures were hypnotic and the statues seemed to me to be completely mysterious — full of a message I didn't understand.  Now, because of Diamond's book, I know that the reason all those eyeless Easter Island statues are lying toppled is that

1) they ran out of wood to build machines/tracks to hoist the statues up on their pedestals (eyes were separately prepared, by the way)

2) when they ran out of wood, they started to starve

3) warring tribes ran around knocking down everyone's statues

And they started carving statues in the first place because there was no other way to show off around there.  Had they been less isolated, perhaps they could have come up with other tricks and avoided the destructive deforestation.

Meanwhile, clever New Guineans survive, even though isolated, by being very thoughtful about how they use their land, and very curious and experimental.  One day some New Guinean brings home a little seedling that looks interesting, and presto! deforestation halted.

It looks as if Diamond's thesis is going to be that failure to see clearly where you are (and what you're doing to your surroundings) can lead to extinction.  (What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree on the island think to himself as the tree fell?)  We need to be better at making good group decisions, by doing things like “thinking skeptically, allowing discussions to be freewheeling, having subgroups meet separately, and having leaders occasionally leave the room.” [paraphrasing slightly, p. 439]

In other words, you need wisdom to deal with dirt, and trees, and mines.  Although I don't think that ruins of NYC skyscrapers will someday be viewed with the same sense of puzzled awe that is triggered by the Easter Island statues, I'm all for better group decisionmaking.  And for curious experimentation.

Say you're trying to explain to a group of smart law enforcement-sympathetic people why innovation is a great thing. 

Some messages work:  “you don't want one industry (Hollywood) controlling what another (high-tech) can do — this is all about money, and Hollywood wants high-tech to bear their costs.”  They nod.

Some messages don't:  “through the internet, law enforcement is getting access to more information than you ever thought possible.”  They shake their heads.  Nope.  Not a persuasive message. 

The question comes back:  “What's the benefit of P2P to law enforcement?”  Why should we support something that seems to be a place for child porn, spyware, and copyright infringement?

What's in it for us?

If you have any answers, let me know.

It's good news that the 9th Circuit has granted [pdf] en banc review of the Yahoo! decision.

A little review.  Back in November 2001, the federal district court in the Northern District of California decided [pdf] that enforcement of a French order (requiring Yahoo! to block access by French citizens to particular material) was violative of the First Amendmentl.  “A United States court constitutionally could not make such an order,” the court said.

The Ninth Circuit then said that US courts didn't have jurisdiction over the French plaintiff in the original French case.  Translated:  “Yahoo!, you have to wait until the French plaintiff actually comes here to the US to enforce the order they obtained in France.  Until they do that, we can't say anything about the constitutionality of the order.” 

But the problem with that standard is that it has the effect of enforcing an unconstitutional order.  Here's why:  If Yahoo! (or another online publisher) has to operate in fear of foreign courts suddenly ordering them to block particular things, and can't ask a local court to clear the air (“that order can't possibly work here — it's unconstitutional”), they'll prudently take down the risky material entirely.  It just won't be worth it to run the risk that daily damages will continue to mount up while the online site waits for the foreign judgment to arrive on its local shores.  CDT and others filed [pdf] an amicus brief making this point (much more elegantly) before the 9th Circuit, and asking for the entire panel of 9th Circuit judges to reconsider this very important case.

It's very good that the 9th Circuit is taking this on.  The only rational rule that will keep the internet ticking along is to make sure that sovereigns only get to boss around those sites over which they have legitimate power.  (Because the French plaintiff took several acts in the US directed towards Yahoo!, the US courts have legitimate power to issue an order about the constitutionality of the judgment.)

France shouldn't be able to use the threat of an unenforceable judgment to silence a company over which it has no legitimate control (that doesn't “touch down” in France in some significant, intentional way).  Similarly, the US shouldn't be able to use the threat of unenforceable judgments to silence offshore companies over which it has no legitimate sway (like, say, gambling sites).  Bravo to Yahoo! for pushing forward with this case — it's important for all shapes, sizes, and persuasions of online sites.

I heard a fascinating presentation tonight by Benjamin Reeve about the impoverished nature of our understanding of information.  It was an important talk. 

The thesis (I'm waiting for the PDF of the manuscript so that I can post a link here) is that Shannon's understanding of information is not helpful — that information is really differences that “make a difference” by causing a system to change its state.  Informational things have different qualities than physical things (you can't run an algorithm against a hill).  Most fundamentally, information is not conserved.  Information, instead, amplifies.  But amplification, just for its own sake, isn't an unmixed good.  Instead, what we should be interested in (and design for) is metainformational depth — quality information about information.

The most important thing we can do is ”make things deep” — build for better information.  Maybe that means tagging data and having it report back to us about how it's doing.  At any rate, for any amount of amplification we create, we need to create MORE metainformational depth.

Stay tuned — this was a terrific talk, and when I have some links I'll send them along.  If we get better at handling information, we can get better at building society. 

EFF released today a new tool for system adminstrators to use:  Logfinder. 

Many sysadmins may not know what they're logging.  All kinds of automatic information gathering goes on, day after day, night after night, that isn't necessary in any operational sense and creates a honey pot for subpoena activity.  Why gather information you don't need?  Logfinder, conceived by Ben Laurie (once an expert in the Yahoo! case) and written by Seth Schoen, makes it possible to dig around and figure out what it is your system is automatically recording — and consciously decide not to record it.

Just as Edward Tufte urges us to get rid of “chart junk” when showing information, Schoen and EFF are urging sysadmins  to get rid of “log junk” when running systems.

Elegant.

Thanks to Shari Motro for reminding me about “chart junk”

You haven't heard of the deliberative bus stop?  You're not aware of “civic fairs” in virtual worlds?  You're not sure whether or why we should care about groups? ”Group” sounds like “mob” to your ears? 

Beth Noveck of New York Law School (where she directs the Institute for Information Law and Policy and the Democracy Design Workshop) is here to tell you how technology is enhancing the role of groups online, how legal frameworks could support the legitimacy of groups (and encourage deference to their decisions), and how we can harness the energy of groups to achieve democratic goals.

Prof. Noveck's draft is here [word doc].  Her email address is on the first page of the paper. I have it on good authority that she's interested in reactions and comments. 

Groups matter!  Prof. Noveck's article is a major contribution to thinking about the intersection between online life and law, and YOU, the group(s) out there, can help make it even better.   

I lurked in a chatroom today that was devoted to discussing wikinews and blogging. It sounds as if bloggers would like to get feeds for wikinews stories.  

[A wiki seems to be a great way to run a class.  Take a look at this wiki from the Auburn University College of Architecture, Design and Construction.  Mundane:  have students sign up for office hours on a wiki.]

Back to the news — I like the idea of wikinews, but the entries I flipped through so far (very limited sample) seemed to suffer from the disease that afflicts sitcoms:  anything written by committee is worse than it needs to be.  The flat, affectless tone of the wikinews stories isn't appealing, and several seemed to be based on reporting done by mainstream sources.  On the other hand, wikinews is just starting, and may provide a good place for independent reporting to be found.

I'd love it if wikis could be visual as well as textual.  Why can't we see furious editing of a page as a pulse? 

The Times had a fine graphic today showing how many times particular words had shown up in the President's various State of the Union Addresses.  There was a huge circle for Social Security (many mentions!) for the speech the other night, and this textual analysis by Todd Purdum:

Reprising the themes of his second Inaugural Address last month, Mr. Bush cast his proposal for personal investment accounts for Social Security in sweeping terms, as part of the “guiding ideal of liberty for all” that has led to the first round of elections in Iraq. But if the goal of “ending tyranny” that he announced at his inauguration two weeks ago is “the concentrated work of generations,” his latest proposal is also only a first step, its ultimate fate in doubt.

By now, no one should be surprised at Mr. Bush's penchant for thinking big, or speaking grandly. . . .

Here's why the President's approach to social security has something to do with complex systems:

1.  For any given system, complexity is conserved across various scales, and there is always a tradeoff between scale and complexity.  So governments can't provide tailor-made governance at a fine scale for individuals, but they can act effectively at large scales — moving mountains and armies.  Governments are like large Navy vessels.  They do best when they have a simple, large-scale environment to deal with.

2.  Only variety can defeat variety.  So only Special Forces sorts of operations can effectively deal with terrorists.

3.  But large-scale effectiveness can defeat variety.  A platoon of tanks can easily roll over a forest.  A monopolist of gigantic scale can take over a marketplace, even a wildly complex one.  This is possible only if the large-scale actor (the tank, the monopolist) doesn't really care about the complexities and interdependencies of the system it is flattening.

4.  The Administration does not appear to be worrying about the possible fallout (nonlinear! unpredictable!) of completely changing the social security system.  It is confident that it has a Good Idea here, and it is bound and determined to push it through, no matter what.  In a sense, the Administration is like a tank planning to flatten a forest.  The sensitivities and needs of the forest are of no concern to to this armored vehicle — it merely wants to get the job done and move on.

The Administration must not care about the complexities and interdependencies of the system it plans to flatten.

The National Conference of State Legislatures has a terrific roundup of current state spyware bills.  After spending some time wandering the virtual state halls, my head is spinning.  Many, many state bills have been introduced in the last couple of weeks.

Most importantly for spyware legislation afficionados, Utah is trying again [pdf].  You rmember Utah.  They passed a bill that was declared violative of the dormant Commerce Clause back in June 2004.  The new 2005 bill has the following slender support from legislative counsel: 

Based on a limited legal review, this legislation has not been determined to have a high probability of being held unconstitutional.

I'm sure that makes everyone in the Utah legislature feel reassured.

Back to the substance, though.  The new Utah draft says that it is illegal to display a pop-up ad “by means of spyware” in response to a specific trademark or URL.  Spyware is defined broadly to mean software that collects information about a site at the time a user is looking at the site.  (The software will be living in a computer in Utah, acc. to the draft bill, so as to avoid any possible commerce clause issues.  Yup.)

This is para-trademark.  We know that mere prompting of ads (or search results) in response to keyword use of a trademark does not create consumer confusion.  But apparently if you do this using “spyware,” you're sunk.  At least in Utah.

For reasons I've given before, I don't think this legislative approach makes sense.  This Utah bill is an example of the cure perhaps being worse than the disease — the scope of the magic power of a trademark is being extended by a non-trademark piece of legislation.  And, of course, it won't work. 

I'm going to write a book about What Ben Franklin Would Do Online.  In the case of spyware, he wouldn't recommend legislation – he'd create a volunteer spyware brigade.

[And if he did recommend legislation, he'd get a stronger vote of confidence from his lawyer than the Utah bill commanded.]

There's so much cyber-news that I'm overwhelmed and resorting to wordplay. 

(The Federalist Society and the MPAA are co-sponsoring a “conference” in New Orleans in March; PFF is getting a lot of funding to work on the new Telecom Act; Section 230 protects bulletin board operators, even when they “tone down” postings.)

Word for today:  dynamics.  I heard it again last Friday when I listened to academic commentary about a paper comparing intellectual property to property — a questioner said something like, “Your paper doesn't capture the dynamics of this relationship.”  The questioner was looking for the complex interdependencies and adaptive changes that have happened/will happen with intellectual property language.  Or he/she was looking for something livelier.  Whatever it was, the questioner wasn't getting it from the paper.

Last night I said it to myself (silently) because one of the people I was playing string quartets with actually had dynamic range.  Yes, it has to be said, sometimes amateur chamber groups is ALL LOUD ALL THE TIME, sort of like 1010 News.  But if you can actually play softly it can make a tremendous difference to the emotional impact of the music.  Without dynamics it's just not that interesting.  

So — notice the dynamics.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.  Boy, those guys over at the MPAA are really skilled.