Obvious Flogs

A tugboat at the Port of Valdez

2006-03-24T16:37:00.000-05:00

This is an experiment in using Picasa to upload photos to Blogger. Not too shabby!
This is a tugboat at the Port of Valdez. It is used to push the giant oil tankers out to sea and escort them out of Alaskan waters.

Income Taxes

2006-03-09T12:32:00.001-05:00

I did my income taxes online last night, with good results. A bit frustrating, though.

The IRS has eleminated Telefile, meaning that those without Internet access are back to pencil-and-paper. Talk about the digital divide! This stuff isn't easy, either, so sitting down at the library to plow through your taxes isn't much of an option. Basically, the only option for those on the wrong side of the broadband gap is to go to the mall and pay somebody to do it.

But not me, baby! I'm IT Fluent! I have broadband and an $1800 computer in my house! Step one is solved.

Over at You'll find a list of companies that offer to electronically file your taxes for you. I only recognized a couple of the names. Who are these people? Why should I trust them to do my taxes? Is the IRS really vouching for their standards?

Well, no. The government makes no promises that these programs will do jack. All they say is that they will accept a return filed by them... and that if you want to file electronically, you are REQUIRED to use them.

To be eligible for a free electronic filing, you have to be lower-middle class or below. Great, so those least-likely to have broadband Internet are required to do their taxes online now.

I went with H&R Block, even though they are in trouble with the law for their weird debit-card return idea (which they push at you online, bigtime, but I said "no".) Actually, the program worked quite well! It found a big credit that I knew about but wasn't sure it would have spotted-- in fact, it was something that I would have missed out on if I'd been doing Telefile!

Still, my preference would be for a unified system coming from the IRS. I mean, they are responsible for the legal code, it would be nice if they could be responsible for the computer code, too. The accounting companies lobby against this idea non-stop, however, so it'll never happen. I mean, I want to trust the government. I don't think I would trust AAATaxcutterOnline! or what-have-you. There's also that liability issue, I suppose. If the IRS were to develop an online system, then they would be liable for it's quality. This way, if there's a big problem, I have to take my beef up with H&R Block, not the government (remember the disclaimer?)

In all, I'm happy with the results, and despite having to give my information to a big corporation, where I'll be sold out to data miners and spammers and put on the H&R Block spam e-mail list forever. I mean, is that such a small price to pay for getting a big-ass refund via direct deposit?

-dave-

Fluencey Mileston #10: Wikipedia

2005-12-15T21:44:00.000-05:00

If there is any one thing I will take away from this course, it is probably a newfound respect for Wikipedia. It could be called nothing less than a "fluency milestone" when Piotr pulled up the entry for my parents' hometown, Talkeetna, and found a simple skelleton of a page. I suggested that it include information about the town's famous Moose Dropping Festival. A few moments later and it was there. I had influenced the content of an encyclopedia--no, I had changed the contents of an encyclopedia.

Emboldened by this, I went out on a limb and corrected a typo in another article!

Then, impressed by Wikipedia's information, I cited the corrected article in my paper. I was just looking for some basic almanac-type information, and it did jibe with my recollection of the topic, so I used it.

I'm on a roll! Do I dare to add something else about Talkeetna to the entry? I mean, just on the off chance that someone else should one day want to read it? Well, I added a little more info, just naming the other two annual festivals in the town. The article now reads:

"Home to the annual Moose Dropping Festival[1] as well as the Mountain Mother and Wilderness Woman contests."

I couldn't get the outside links to work right. I have a lot still to learn about Wiki.

I couldn't agree more with Damien: it's the convergence of blogs, wikis and podcasts (video or audio) that have the real potential to change Democracy. Jason says the borderless world doesn't look quite so silly anymore, and I have to agree totally with him. Sal and I are on the same exact page when it comes to FIT. And Joohyun exploration of the future of intellectual property rights was a view of the future that is certain to come true. Such a fascinating class!

So, here's my final offer, for anyone who bothers to read the flog after you are being graded on them: What is the best way to advance Dr. Snyder's goal of IT Fluency? Is it through legislative action, at the state or city level? In that case, we should form a political action network and start pushing for it. Is it active effort that makes the difference? In that case, we should form a non-profit fluency-training organization and take our show to the other side of the digital divide.

I vote for Alaska.

In the summer.

-David Totten.

Fluency Milestone #9: Blogging

2005-12-15T07:45:00.000-05:00

Givin our class discussions of blogging as a way to bring about a Habermassian deliberative democracy revolution, etc, I thought I should blog about how much I've actually learned about blogging.

I had one of the first blogs on the Internet!

In 1998, I took my copy of Front Page and used it to create a proto-blog (the theme was a seashore, with little crabs and starfish for bullet-points-- so dorky!) about Alaska news. My counter almost never moved. I was a working journalist at the time, but it was strange how I felt immediately able to register my opinions on this blog, when I could not on the radio. There was no Blogger, no community, certainly no Google (just, AltaVista, DEC's amazing search engine they designed to run on their blazing-fast Alpha PCs... until they were bought and dismantled).

The high point of my early blogging was the day I got an angry e-mail from a Green Party politico complaining that I had referred to him (and others) as "fringe candidates." He must have been ego surfing (searching for his own name) or something. At the time, he had just dropped out of the race for governor after winning the primary. He had only run because nobody else would and the party was about to lose it's official recognition. After the primary, he convinced another Green activist to run in his place (thus making a joke of the entire concept of a "primary") and he dropped out to finish building his house. Other candidates were equally wacked-out (is there a Wikipedia article on Theressa Obermeyer yet, Piotr?). Rather than appologize, I took a shot at him for his house building. A couple months later, I got sick of updating something nobody read and killed it.

A couple years later, a friend of mine, Dave Harbour, a well-connected oil-and-gas insider, set up the first useful blog I'd seen. He was trying to generate interest in building a natural gas pipeline to bring Alaska's North Slope gas resources to market. He created something like Drudge-for-gas. He dilligently collected news reports from around the world about anything at all connected to North Slope Gas. He also had fact sheets and phone list resources for backers of the idea to use. The idea eventually built up steam (due to skyrocketting gas prices) until at last the Governor, Legislature and the oil companies had agreed to build a gas project. Nobody would suggest that Dave's blog made the project happen, but I think he did succeed in keeping the idea alive in people's minds, and it's more than a coincidence that the people who did get to work on the pipeline were all readers of his blog. The project is hitting some bad snarls right now, and it's not certain it will still happen. Dave gave up his blog in 2003 when he was appointed to the state regulatory board that oversees utilities (including both the Internet and gas pipelines!)

Which brings me to this modern age. I had given up blogging completely until this class. It struck me as vain and boring ("...and then I got my hair cut. It's so cute now!") I'm still not completely convinced that anybody would actually read anything I would post here. But my opinion has changed somewhat.

First, there's Blogger. This site makes it much easier to deal with the blogs. If I'd had these tools in 1998, I probably would have kept blogging even past the election (one of the most extraordinary in US history). The fact that everyone now uses Google to search and find increases the liklihood of someone actually finding my page, unlike in the old days when people didn't even know how to search. And, in the context of a class, I now see that this is the perfect method for interacting with classmates about class ideas and lessons.

So, IT Fluency? Yes. Here's the proof: in future classes, I am going to blog my assignments and tell my instructors (and classmates) that they can find them online.

Fluency Milestone #8: Networking

2005-12-14T23:09:00.000-05:00

The "postcard analogy" is probably the most clear explaination for TCP/IP I have ever seen. Writing one sentence on each postcard until an entire novel had been composed, then sending the postcards out one at a time to a publisher across the world... Each card takes a different route to its destination, but the publisher can begin to assemble them as soon as they start coming in. If one postcard is lost in the mail, the publisher can ask for a replacement. To imagine that this is happenning millions upon millions of times as I surf the web, is staggering.

I do remember my first encounter with a TCP connection... over my 14.4K modem in 1994. I had just traded in my 10-year-old Apple ][e for 133mhz Dell with a Pentium inside and a 1 gigabyte hard drive. It had 16mb of RAM! It was quite impressive next to my old 128Kb Apple. I first used my modem to connect to the University of Alaska's ISP using Lynx, a text-only browser (yes, it's still around--and compatible with Windows XP!) Then, my roommate, a computer science major, decided it was time for me to start using TCP/IP... After an hour of messing with the settings, I opened Netscape and saw the World Wide Web as Vint Cerf had imagined it. There was ESPN and Yahoo and AltaVista (the precursor to Google). It took forever for that picture of Tony Gwynn to show up on my screen, but there was the whole World Wide Web in all it's glory. Heady days.

And, by the way, I was right: Vint Cerf, inventor of IP and evangelist of the packet concept, was fond of wearing a T-shirt reading "IP on Everything".

Fluency Milestone #7: Bits & Bytes

2005-12-14T22:01:00.000-05:00

There are so many interesting (or, "nagging" as Snyder says on pg.240) questions answered in this chapter.

Why is "byte" spelled with a "y"? It turns out that the man who coined it, a project manager at IBM, named Werner Buchholz, wanted to minimize typos from people typing in "bit." He was working on the Stretch project at IBM at the time. He also was at IBM a few years earlier when he was instrumental in the development of the IBM 701, the company's first commercially available electronic computer (complete with internally addressed memmory--sooooooo long punch cards!)

The chapter also reveals mysteries such as why everything in a computer is a factor of eight, how ASCII works, and why computer programmers can balance their checkbooks in hexidecimal.

One of my earliest encounters with a computer was a NEC owned by my best friend's dad (he was a software engineer at NEC in San Diego). It had 9" disk drives, a small green screen, and the ability to do all sorts of things--provided you could tell it in hexidecimal.

"No open toed shoes in the computer lab" was the sign over the door.

Fluency Milestone #6: Algorithms

2005-12-13T21:56:00.000-05:00

Rather than discuss Snyder's take on algorithms, or the fascinating guest we talked to in our class, I am going to talk about a a new magazine article that explains how the concept of an algorithm can be used in unusual ways.

The Article is from the December issue of Wired. It profiles the efforts of mathematician Dan Rockmore to develop an algorithm-based system to determine if a particular painting was painted by a great master or a great faker.

First, he takes a digital photo of a Rembrandt with a 20-megapixel camera. A computer analyzes the pixes, coding each one as a number between 0 and 255. Eventually, the software statistcally summarizes 72 pieces of data about each square of the picture.

The part I thought was interesting was that once all of this data has been sifted, he can assign a set of coordinates on a 3D graph to the painting. A Rembrandt can be reduced to three numbers. The shocking thing is that it seems to work. Paintings by the same artist will cluster together, while paintings by imitators and pupils are everywhere else.

If he can get his algorithm to work, he could destroy dozens of fortunes, as works by old masters are suddenly cast in doubt.

Here's the article:

Fluency Milestone #5 Lessig & Creative Commons

2005-12-13T21:50:00.000-05:00

My short composition “The Digital Citizen” includes samples from The Wired CD, including a little bit from Le Tigré’s song “Fake French” and another sample from “Now Get Busy” by The Beastie Boys.

The sampling was made legal because The Beastie Boys and Le Tigré agreed to publish their songs under the Creative Commons copyright scheme. This system lets creators of content set a lower level of copyright protection than the traditional “All Rights Reserved” defined in statute.

Why would musicians want less copyright protection? In this case, they want to encourage DJs and other musicians to steal parts of their work through sampling. The musicians in Le Tigré feel that they stand to benefit by allowing parts of their work to be incorporated into new works. The additional exposure they would gain has some value to them. So, rather than force musicians to hire a lawyer and ask for expressed permission to borrow a few seconds of “Fake French”, they have deliberately chosen to give blanket permission for sampling under the Creative Commons (CC) format. The Beastie Boys have chosen a somewhat more restrictive license, requiring that any derivative work created from “Now Get Busy” be used for non-commercial works. I have mixed samples from these two licenses in my song, so the more restrictive will apply and I won’t be able to make money off “The Digital Citizen”. Too bad.

It’s useful to think of these as licenses, not copyrights. Nothing in CC can take the place of a copyright, which is established in federal statute. In the United States, the copyright for a creative work is established at the moment it is created and does not require the work to be published or registered with the government. The copyright gives the creator the exclusive right to control the work, for a limited time. An artist can sell or give away his work under whatever terms he decides until the copyright expires, after which the work enters the public domain. CC can be thought of as a way for an artist to set blanket conditions for how the work can be used under his existing copyright protection.

The CC website makes choosing permissions as easy as ordering from a menu. Options have expanded to include many different kinds of licensing, from “public domain,” which essentially gives up all claim on the content, to licenses that are nearly as restrictive as a traditional copyright. There are specific licenses for wiki content, for sampling, and for developing nations, among others.

The “developing nations” license lets artists reach new audiences by encouraging the distribution of content without permission. As the CC website states:

The Developing Nations license allows, for the first time, any copyright holder in the world to participate first-hand in reforming global information policy. The fact is that most of the world's population is simply priced out of developed nations' publishing output. To authors, that means an untapped readership. To economists, it means "deadweight loss." To human rights advocates and educators, it is a tragedy. The Developing Nations license is designed to address all three concerns.

This is something of a gamble for the artist, of course, but by allowing the content to be published without permission in developing countries, it could possibly remove the edge held by illegal content pirates.

“The Digital Citizen” is licensed for non-commercial use, under attribution (to Le Tigré, Beastie Boys and David Totten) with sampling permitted. It is legal to download, copy and distribute it without seeking further legal permission.

If you can get past the sad fact that it’s mostly a collection of annoying noises, of course.

-david totten.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons NonCommericial Sampling Plus 1.0 License.

Community Wi-Fi update

2005-11-23T14:33:00.000-05:00

This might be a sign that the folks who stand to gain from community Wi-Fi may be outrunning those who stand to lose by having free Internet access in public spaces provided by local government. An article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (a fantastic paper) says that Cisco has designed a Wi-Fi access point that is specifically designed to work with community projects. The gear is designed to go on rooftops and does not need to be configured.

So, Google and HP/Cisco on the one hand, and Verizon/Comcast on the other. Assuming the public can keep any more silly legislation from being passed by the telecoms, I predict the hardware & software makers will clobber the access providers.

Verizon does not own the Internet. They are not entitled to a monopoly on access... only the right to provide one possible access route.

Here's the article in the P-I

Meantime, Macedonia, a country with strong connections to GSPIA and Pitt, is rolling out a community Wi-Fi project that will cover more than 1,000 square miles-- talk about a hotspot!

And, down in Texas, a situation similar to Philadelphia's sad affair is playing out in Houston. Like in Philly, Houston mayor Bill White has promissed not to back down, insisting that squabbling telecoms SBC and TimeWarner(AOL) "no good reason to fight it." Unlike Mayor Street in Philly, Mayor White plans to use only private funds to operate the network. He's casting about for a corporate sponsor and has had quite a bit of interest, he says. His goal is not to provide Internet access to the whole city, but to use the network to subsidize access for the poor and to get free services for government agencies.

Check it out in the Houston Chronicle

But, in our nation's capital, legislation is being considered that could throw the whole debate into a tizzy. Quoting from the Chronicle article:

Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Dallas, a former SBC employee, has introduced a measure that would forbid city governments from competing in the broadband business.

A bill sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., supports such direct competition.

Both measures have been referred to committees.

More than a dozen states have considered their own measures to combat municipal WiFi. A measure introduced in Texas that would have banned government-run WiFi here was killed earlier this year.

Viva la WI-FI Revolution!

Fluency Milestone #4: GUI

2005-11-08T13:34:00.000-05:00

In Chapert 2, Snyder lays out some of the basics of using a graphical user interface (GUI), like WindowsXP or Mac OSX. He tries to get across the difficult concept that a GUI is a set of metaphors. When someone who has never used a computer before (with low fluency) first looks at a Windows desktop, that person must first try to decipher the metaphor.
A "Desktop" was chosen by Xerox's PARC team because they were office workers. It fit their world-view. They saw file cabinets filled with files, and desks cluttered with tools and papers. The file-cabinet metaphor is even older... CP/M (created by Gary Kildall in 1973), the precursor to Microsoft DOS, also used files in folders (directories).

Aside: Bill Gates and Paul Allen purchased a variation of CP/M from Seattle programmer Tim Patterson in 1980 for less than $100,000. They renamed it MS-DOS and licensed it to IBM and became the richest men in the world. Patterson still owns a software development company and likes to drive race cars in rallies. He seems somewhat philosophical about things. I, for one, hope that Bill Gates remembers the Patterson family generously in his will.

But would other metaphors work better with non-office workers? At this point, I think, the GUI desktop has become the metaphor. The pointing arrow, the MS-Word documents (a piece of paper with a "W" on it means that I've typed something), the minimize/maximize/restore/close buttons... they no longer refer to real-world objects, but to themselves.
But what really happens when you click on a button? That's something that blew me away once I figured it out. I was teaching myself MS Access database programming. I looked carefully at what happened when I created a command button for a form and it suddenly hit me: the computer was watching for "events" and then executing commands that I had programmed. "On click" meant that the computer was just waiting there for me to click the mouse while the pointer was within the set of co-ordinates that corresponded to the picture of the button. I had told the database to run a macro when that happened. Suddenly, I knew that every other part of the Windows GUI was just a more complicated version of what I had just created.
This week, while helping a group of classmates with their database, I took the time out to explain this idea to them. I'm hoping that this may have been a "fluency milestone" for Ron and Emily.

RANT! Verizon!

2005-11-06T16:45:00.000-05:00

Have you noticed Verizon's new ad campaign? They're promoting their cell phone-based Internet service.

"Wi-fi only works in limited locations... Verizon works anywhere."

Rather an ironic statement, isn't it? I mean, considering how hard Verizon has campaigned against community Wi-Fi projects. Verizon and Comcast successfully lobbied the Pennsylvania legislature into passing a law outlawing any publicly organized Wi-Fi, in essense. Governor Rendell signed the bill after Comcast promised to build a new headquarters building in Center City, Philadelphia. That law was written, passed and signed to prevent a Philadelphia plan to spread Wi-Fi over public parks.

In other words, maybe Wi-Fi only works in limited locations because Verizon uses its corporate power to keep it in limited locations. Meantime, their service costs $60/month.

It kind of reminds me of Lessig's discussion of RCA's repression of FM technology. This issue could be one of the biggest threats to the development of the Internet: traditional businesses that are so slow to respond that they feel the need to surpress new technologies to keep their old business models alive. John Dvorak from PC Magazine suggests that the music industry may aim its guns at Apple's iTunes in an effort to protect the record stores.

Have a listen to a discussion of this top on this week's On the Media.

Fluency Milestone #3: searching & finding

2005-10-24T14:47:00.000-04:00

This is a question I posted on the bullitin board, but I'm writing it here as well, in the context of a "Fluency Milestone," since it relates so closely to Snyder's chapter about searching & finding.
In the October 17, 2005, New Yorker, there's an article about a map thief. His name is Forbes Smiley III, and he's charged with stealing three maps from the rare book collection at Yale. He could also be charged in federal court with a fourth theft, but at the time the article was written, that hadn't happened.
Smiley knows maps. He knows exactly what he's looking for and where the maps can be found: usually in very old books. Often, the owners of the books don't know that a map on one page of the book could be worth more than the book together. The article mentions one rare book dealer who sold a book to Smiley, then learned that before buying it, Smiley had already agreed to sell three maps out of the book--for many times the value of the book. The seller was heart-sick to realize that his rare and precious book had been cut apart for the value of its individual pages.
Smiley was allegedly able to commit these crimes over the course of years, for one simple reason: people don't really know what's inside a book. He knew that a book in the "history of tobacco" collection at the New York Public Library would have a priceless map of Virginia, but did the collection's librarians?
In class, we heard from an expert at searching for documents about FUTON bias, or "FUll Text On Net," where researchers only use documents they can find online. The fact is that not every piece of information is available on the Internet, yet, and for the information that is available offline, we still can't find what it is.
The problem is that most ways of searching for books in a library only tell you what's on the outside of the book. You can find the title, the author, the subject... maybe a quick synopsis. But what about the mention on the inside of your great-great-grandfather being listed on a casualty report from the Second Battle of Bull Run? How would I ever be able to find out that he is listed in this book? If he was listed in a table, that might be part of the index, but what if he was mentioned in passing in the prose? That might not be indexed.
Enter Google Print... an experiment to index the world's printed knowledge. If you search this site for your ancestor's name, Google will give you a list of books with his name in it. You can see a page of the book-- or maybe just a couple sentences-- around the keyword you wanted. If you want to buy the book online, there are links (which nets Google a tidy profit) and also links to library systems to put the book on reserve.
If Google Print lives up to this promise, it's going to totally change the way we find printed information. I belive it's going to be a boon to publishers and writers (who will have to set aside their paranoia about copyright infringement in favor of the tremendous marketing advantage-- unlike their musician collegues) as well as for libraries. With new ways of search the insides of books, libraries will be more important than ever. Many more people will realize what's in the books in libraries and will go there to get at it.

Nugget: The Broadband Divide

2005-10-19T23:42:00.000-04:00

Sorry to immediately top my big essay with a "digital governance nugget," but I'd like to direct everyone to this article from Salon about broadband. They ask: why is it that Americans pay through the nose for crappy 1.5meg connections and call it "broadband" while the rest of the developed world is screaming along at 30megs? Salon's answer is: Bush Administration telecom policy, which is something I belive Dr. Shulman mentioned in our 2nd meeting.

Fair warning, Salon is not one of those freebee websites... I'm a subscriber because I believe in their independant journalism (and also in Tom Tomorrow cartoons) but you can read the article without paying by getting a free "day pass"... you just have to watch a streamed TV commercial... streamed at your paltry 500k connection, probably.

Here's the direct link to the story:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2005/10/18/broadband/index.html

-dave-

Global Governance and Electronic Democracy: Review & Comment

2005-10-19T23:12:00.000-04:00

Dr. Oren Perez from Israel’s Tel Aviv University, in his paper Global Governance and Electronic Democracy, offers the striking argument that voting is undemocratic, and that the Internet offers the potential for more democratic ways for people to decide major issues. He gives one small suggestion of one way this might work. His plan is not very detailed, and could use more thought but it is worth discussing. His contention that voting is not a workable method for deciding issues would find few followers, I think, but it would be easier to see what he means if he could have given more examples.

Perez believes that voting—for many, the very definition of democracy—is undemocratic. Specifically, he says it is an incomplete form of democracy. He argues that voting is a uniform way to gather public opinion, but society is diverse. He says there are two different forms of diversity, or “social pluralism,” each being underserved by the representative democratic system. The first kind of diversity is at the societal level. Perez argues that people hold so many different views—so many of which could be seen as having equal validity—that there is little room to hold a collective conversation. Next, he says that every person has a unique “innate structure….” People react differently to situations. As an example, Perez quotes a psychologist who theorizes that people’s different level of a need for closure makes people react differently when presented with something like the Internet, or a voting booth.

Essentially, Perez is saying that people are so different from each other and use such different process to make decisions that it is unfair to give people only one option for deciding society’s issues.

That’s a tough idea to swallow. For example, this theory that the need for closure can confuse people when presented with the array of hyperlinks on a web page doesn’t give people very much credit for being able to adapt.

He says there is a tension between equality and autonomy: the need to recognize other people as being different is incompatible with the notion of equality, where everyone is given the same chance to express themselves. To Perez’ thinking, equality needs to give ground.

Perez gives an example of a country where some people can only vote if the booths are green, and others if the booths are white. If the two populations are of equal size, the country will arrange—at great expense—to hold the election on separate days or else in separate voting locations. Therefore, he argues, people should be given many different opportunities to deliberate besides the usual single election day and uniform (at least, county-by-county) ballots.

Unfortunately, Perez only gives one real example of how this might work in the real world: a website set up by politicos Dick Morris and Eileen McGann called vote.com. As described by Perez, the site is something of a Habermasian Utopia, where issues are presented, outlined by concise and balanced journalism, debated in a moderated chat room and then voted upon by the users.

My own trip to vote.com was a little less thrilling. “Iraq Votes On A Draft Constitution: Do You Think Iraq Will Become A Stable Democracy?” was the question presented. The two choices are “yes” or “no.” I checked for more information, hoping to find this well of deliberation underneath, but found only the most meager of reporting to frame the issue.

YES!
The vote on Iraq’s draft constitution is a major step that will lead a stable democracy!
NO!
Despite the vote on a draft constitution, Iraq will never become a stable democracy!

Certainly not nearly enough information for me to decide this complex issue involving religious violence, military power, self-determination, oil politics and the future of a great world power. Access to the discussion section requires registration with the site, and I was not impressed enough by their privacy policy to risk my already-spam-clogged e-mail address on the experiment. Morris and McGann promise to send the results of the vote to the appropriate national leaders (President George W. Bush would receive the Iraq vote results), but there is, of course, no guarantee that the leaders will pay attention to the results—unless they already agree with the results.

Perez gives some broader categories of examples of how the Internet might expand deliberative goals. The transparency made possible by the Internet can be meaningful by itself. The Internet could also expand “unidirectional communication” between citizens and the government, as when an agency solicits public comments via e-mail. However, Perez does not give any expanded examples of these ideas.

While the Internet may be able to expand the ways that people debate politics, or even decide issues, He does not give enough specifics to make his case here. I don’t think that people are as different as he does. In fact, I think the real problem with voting in the United States, as shown in 2000 and 2004, have to do with things being too different. States are allowed to set their own rules for voting technology. Most states further delegate this authority to the county level. The Supreme Court used this strange differential of voting techniques as their basis for the ruling in Bush v Gore to stop the recount of the Florida election results in 2000. Political bias at the county level has been charged against Ohio’s election managers in 2004. Many of the problems our democracy has experienced in this new century are due to the fact that elections are a completely different animal every 50 miles. If voters knew what to expect, had confidence in the results, they would be able to handle elections no matter how much their tolerance for closure.

Hacktivism review Pt.1

2005-10-12T21:04:00.000-04:00

Hacktivism and the Future of Democratic Discourse: A Review and Comment

David Totten

Alexandra Samuel’s analysis of the political wing of the hacker subculture shows some possible chinks in the armor of deliberative democracy. Her essay examines three types of political hacking activity: political cracking, performative hacktivism, and political coding. She describes the three techniques and discusses the philosophies of the people who engage in them. Next, Samuel considers the issues of anonymity and free speech raised by hacktivism, and how they relate to the theories of deliberative democracy espoused by Jurgen Habermas, Michael Froomkin and others. Samuel seems suspicious that the hacktivist tactics might not be in alignment with a deliberative democratic system, but she also sees the possibility that hacktivism could level the playing field for access to a “public sphere.” I feel that some of these activities—especially the performative hactivism and the political cracking—are very close to political violence, undertaken by non-government actors—also known as terrorism. The threat of online terrorism poses a fatal threat to an online public sphere, much than to offline democracy.

The political crackers are the outgrowth of the earlier forms of hacking, but directed towards a political agenda. They launch attacks that range from information theft, to disrupting web sites to sabotage. Samuel says the crackers usually adhere to a “hacker ethic” which not only governs their actions like a moral code, but also defines the political aims of their activities. They believe in hands-on access to computers, both hardware and software and in a right to take anything apart to learn how it works. They often use the slogan “information is free” for their tenet that copyrights are invalid and all data of any kind should be freely available to everyone. They mistrust authority and promote decentralization, and they judge each other by their hacking skill, not by age or race or social status. Their attacks are often directed towards those parts of society they see as being contrary to their code (Samuel 127).

Performative hackers are more theatrical. Their goals are to influence public opinion and government policy through high-profile stunts or pranks. The idea comes directly from pre-Internet forms of political protest such as demonstrations. They even refer to one of their activities as a “sit-in,” although instead of blocking access to a building, they aim to shut down access to a web site. These groups claim that their actions create a “level playing field” that moralizes even destructive actions (134).

Samuel focuses on those groups whose targets impede their access to free information under the “hacker ethic,” or the left-wing groups associated with the performative hacktivism methods. While she does recognize that state-sponsored hackers from China may have been responsible for an attack on American websites during the Kosovo conflict of 1998, in response to the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Serbia (124), she does not mention the frightening growth of far-right and Islamist groups that are using the Internet to organize and even attack their enemies. According to a report by the Canadian human rights group Friends of Simon Wiesenthal (www.wiesenthal.com), issued just this week (10/07/05), hate-speech sites on the Internet have increased 25% over 2004. The report says Al Qaeda has been using cybersquatting tactics to keep their websites running and is using hacker tactics to distribute files to operatives.

The other side of this is the cybervigilantes, groups of hackers who have taken it upon themselves to fight the War on Terror over the Internet. As reported online by Newsweek, July 13, 2005, a group called Internet Haganah has made a hobby out of disbanding Islamist websites. They started after the September 11^th, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, and claim to have knocked 718 Islamic extremist sites off the Web, usually by notifying the hosting services or else by posting the offending URL’s on their website (haganah.org.il) and waiting for hacktivist community to launch an attack.

The US Government has not been pleased by their efforts. Some in the intelligence community have argued that by hacking the terrorist sites, these hacktivists are actually making them stronger—teaching them countermeasures.

Political coders focus on creating applications that circumvent laws and policies. One example Samuel cites is the DeCSS project that circumvents the copy protection system built into DVD movies (131).

Hacktivism review Pt.2

2005-10-12T21:02:00.000-04:00

(note: Part one is ABOVE part two)

DeCSS is an excellent example of Lawrence Lessig’s idea of a conflict between “West Coast” and “East Coast” code, as explained to our class by Stu Shulman. While Congress, through the Digital Millennium Act specifically outlawed software that could be used to violate legal copyrights, and courts have consistently upheld the constitutionality of the act and prosecutions of violators, the applications still exist. The program has a life of its own can still can be downloaded from underground or offshore sites and used, illegally, in the US. In some countries, such as Russia, it is actually illegal to prevent someone from making a legal copy, so applications such as DeCSS will have a long life cycle in these places. So, which “code” is actually governing people’s behavior?

Samuel recognizes the conflict in espousing the virtues of free access to information while conducting “denial-of-service” (DoS) attacks designed to shut down websites (134). For security professional Barrett Lyon, profiled in the October 10, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, this is his main motivation for protecting websites from attacks, even some of his less savory clients, such as online gambling and pornography.

“The Internet is all about connecting things, communicating and sharing information, bits, pieces of data,” Lyon told reporter Evan Ratliff. “A denial-of-service attack is the exact opposite of that. It is taking one person’s will and imposing it on a bunch of others.”

For Samuel, this conflict relates to freedom of speech. Does hacktivism allow more freedom of speech or less? And how does that affect the goals of deliberative democrats? She notes that the problem is not really one of freedom to speak, but freedom to be heard. Samuel quotes Michael H. Goldhaber’s “TheAttention Economy and the Net”. While blogs may become ubiquitous, the attention of blog readers will remain finite. Pranksters and vandals have an edge competing for this attention. The more that is at stake, the harder people will fight for that attention, using tactics that range from pranks to terrorism.

Samuel seems more positive about the effects of the anonymity displayed by some hacktivists. She says that some of these groups attempt to maintain anonymity to avoid prosecution for illegal activities while others make little or no effort to hide their identities. However, even the crackers who could be prosecuted if they were discovered usually use a pseudonym, taking responsibility for their acts (137). Samuel suggests that the coders and crackers are going beyond simply creating pseudonyms and instead creating “public voices,” new personae that govern their online actions. This idea of a public voice was discussed in class by Peter Muhlberger, who said that being online could change how a person acts. Muhlberger said that a person actually adopts a new personality under these new conditions. This effect must be multiplied when one adopts a pseudonym to conduct illegal activities.

Can the “public sphere” ever truly be a place where equals debate ideas on equal footing? If the stakes are big enough—say, war and peace or property rights—won’t there always be a fringe that is willing to go to any lengths to ensure a positive outcome? Would hacktivists be willing to go as far as Islamist terrorists for their ends? If they could have stopped the Mexican government from putting down the Zapatista rebellion, would some members of the Electronic Disturbance Theater have been willing to die?

Voting Systems at MSNBC

2005-10-07T11:02:00.000-04:00

This is such a fun little exercise, and a neat way to look at some of the alternative voting systems being tossed around these days... it's called Mockracy and it's on MSNBC.

Essentially, they're looking at cumulative voting, proportional voting and party-line voting systems and giving people a chance to try them out. It starts with the user creating an avatar: you pick a race (blue, purple, yellow, green or orange; also a gender, male/female, and a place to live. Finally, the user picks a political party from a list of twelve, ranging from "lower taxes" to "lower gas prices." Then, the avatar goes into three practice voting booths to try three different ways of voting.

Two political scientists, Rob Richie and Mark Rush, explain the pros-and cons of each system, but it's the actual voting that shows the consequences of the changes. With cumulative voting, voters cast 5 votes, each counting the same. I cast three votes for the low-gas-prices candidate, and one each for "gay rights," "good schools" and "foreign aid for poor countries." The brilliance of the demonstrator is that it displays actual voting results. I didn't look at racial issues, but was surprised to find that no blue people (like me) were elected! How did that happen? We make up 30% of the voting public, but we're not on the council? Still, this was the system I liked the best.

The second plan was proportional voting, also known as "instant run-off." Voters rank their choices, first through fifth. If their first choice isn't elected, their votes go on to the second choice. Candidates who don't have a clear majority at first can run for the second-place votes, and could even get elected.

The third demonstration is for a party-line system. I cast my one vote for a slate of five candidates from the "bring down gas prices" and found that I had been completely shut out of the process. "Defend America" and "Good schools" dominated the council under this election. Urban dwellers were marginalized while the suburban candidates took over the council. One council member was blue, but as the experts pointed out, this was the choice of the party, not me. The party system set the slate. This is a popular system around the world, where party issues are more important than individuals.

Anchorage, Alaska, rejected a switch to an instant run-off system a few years ago. So-called "third parties" brought the proposal, backed by the majority Republican party. It would have had the effect of drawing power away from the second party (the Democrats) and handing it to the two parties on the farther right and left, Alaskan Independence and Green. So, Democrats would be marginalized, Republicans would get support from the AIP, and the far-left Greens would be dismissed as representing too little of the public. Anchorage voters decided they liked a direct election better.

Of these three options, I like the cumulative voting best. It let me give some power to the outside issues that I cared about, but also let me weight my vote for the candidate I liked best. Still, all three of these eliminate geographical districts, so I don't have an individual representative and they also allow for candidates who don't have the support of the majority to gain significant power. I also worry that these three systems would encourage fragmentation of candidates along ideological lines. For example, while I support lower gas prices, I would have preferred to find a candidate who was, say, 70% with me on gas prices and at least 50% with me on schools, foreign aid and minority rights. Our current system forces every candidate to address every issue and take a stand on each one. I can weight which is more important: pro-choice, but anti-tax? Anti-gay but pro-development? It's up to me to decide which of these are the most important, and up to the candidates to live up to their promises.

Who is Harriet Miers? And who owns her blog?

2005-10-04T20:54:00.000-04:00

I was chatting tonight with my friend Rene, a journalist in Phoenix, AZ. She pointed me to the spoof site http://harrietmiers.blogspot.com/, which is hillarious, by the way. Then she pointed out another site: http://justicemiers.com, which is a little weird. The biographical info on the site seems legit, however it was presented in such a haphazard way that it gave the impression it might be a disinformation campaign: a subversive attempt to pass off fake information as real to embarass the real supporters of Harriet Miers' candidacy for the Supreme Court of the United States.
I tried to use some of the tools suggested by Snyder in Chapter 3, Searching for Truth. I went to internic and typed in justicemiers.com. Here's the result:
Domain Name: JUSTICEMIERS.COM
Registrar: OMNIS NETWORK, LLC
Whois Server: whois.omnis.com
Referral URL: http://domains.omnis.com
Name Server: NS1.MESSAGE101.COM
Name Server: NS2.MESSAGE101.COM
Status: ACTIVE
Updated Date: 02-oct-2005
Creation Date: 29-sep-2005
Expiration Date: 29-sep-2006

Next, Snyder suggests going to the "whois" server cited in the listing: whois.omnis.com, however the operation timed out, so I was not able to get any more info that way. However, Omnis Network, LLC is obviously a legit operation of some kind... I took that name to Google.
Google gave me a site with "review" of Omnis, that was in fact nothing more than a self promotion page by Omnis, a web hosting service. According to their promotional pages, Omnis handles the domain name aquisition as well as all the hosting for websites, so it would be a good assumption that the owners of justicemiers.com probably paid Omnis to handle the hard work while they set up the page. Omnis is the official "owner" of the domain name, and the real owners' names are hidden from view.
Any other thoughts as to find out who the real owners are? I mean, aside from going to their donate page and calling the phone number for Progress for America, but that won't really tell me about the website, will it? Just about Progress for America. Perhaps if I ask nicely, somebody will confirm for me that they own the site. I'll try it out.
As to the gag-blog (again, I stress this brilliant satire,) the internic approach is useless since the domain is actually blogspot.com, and harrietmiers is the folder on the blogspot server where the site's pages reside (as Snyder points out.) I'm going to need another approach to ferrett this information out. Suggestions?

Fluency Milestone #2: HTML and markups

2005-09-23T12:39:00.000-04:00

Reading Snyder's chapter on HTML really annoyed me at first, but in the days since I read it, it's actually had me thinking about things more than I had expected.

I was bugged by the redundancy of the information. I learned this much about HTML in 1995 in a journalism class at the University of Alaska Anchorage on publication design. The class was taught by Dr. Larry Pearson, a former copy editor at the Anchorage Daily News who was one of the first people I ever met to become obsessed with the Internet. He was responsible for converting the newspaper from a manual layout process to QuarkXPress (he did it overnight; editors found Macs on their desks with no warning when they arrived one day.) I remember working with the tags, fighting with uncooperative tables with invisible borders, trying to maneuver page elements around. It seemed so impossible when compared to the desktop publishing tools of the day, like Quark or Page Maker or Microsoft Publisher. Why did I have to use these abstract codes to order my page? Why couldn't I use the mouse? Wasn't this a Macintosh, after all?

But, the fact that I had to learn that much at least about the markup language did give me a sort of fluency that Snyder would be proud of. For example, when I was able to get MS Publisher to act like a WYSIWYG web publisher, I went and looked at the code it generated and was able to see that it had accomplished this trick by dropping layers upon layers of borderless tables over the page. Something did click for me when I realized that the markup tags used by HTML are based on the same idea of the markup tags I used to see on ancient WordPerfect machines back in the early 1980s. There is a clear progression of the technology, almost like the evolution of an organism, where new developments build on old ones--even though starting over from scratch might have been more efficient.

The later developments in web page design addressed all the shortcomings of HTML except ease-of-use. Computer programmers solved the issues of page layout, interaction with databases and running small programs with the tool they like best: introducing more code and more languages. Cascading Style Sheets, XML and Java are tools that are far out of the reach of the average computer user who might have been able to understand the basic concept of mark-up tags.

So, here's the fluency question for Lawrence Snyder: can the computer-using public ever hope to become fluent in Java Script, Visual Basic or XML? Or is the existence of these tools enough to put real web publishing out of reach for everyone but the technologists?

Tooksook Bay

2005-09-21T16:45:00.000-04:00

The Yupik village of Tooksook Bay is going broadband!

They were actually one of the first Alaska Native villages to get online (there's a Washington Post article about them somewhere, from 1995.) They've been very creative about trying to use this new resource to boost their economy.

The village sits on the Yukon River. Their main economy is subsistance-based: chum salmon from the river for making jerkey and dogfood, moose and carribou during the appropriate seasons for meat. But the Internet has given them a new market for their more durable itmes. They are peddling their arts and crafts to customers all over the world bringing cash into the village for expanding local services. The 'net also lets them bring distance education and telemedicine to the village.

Now, however, they have broadband. How is this possible in a place that barely has running water? It's actually a good demonstration of how broadband is spreading to rural Alaska.

Anchorage-based telecom GCI is adding the broadband service one village at a time. A satellite transceiver in the village connects to GCI's bird, bringing the high-speed service into the village. Each house connects to the village hub through a small radio antenna, so there are no wires for GCI to service.

The company hopes to bring this wireless Internet service to every village in the state. Where the market forces aren't enough, Senator Stevens has been generous enough to provide some funding.

It's a great example of shrinking the digital divide. Here's a village of Yupik Eskimos that's online.

See? Sen. Stevens' money isn't all pork.

Migration

2005-09-15T18:02:00.000-04:00

Due to Yahoo360's membership requirments, I've moved my Flog to Blogger.

Fluencey Mileston #1: Encription & Privacy

2005-09-10T13:47:00.000-04:00

Snyder's discussion of Privacy & Encryption was quite an eye-opener. I had heard terms like "128-bit encryption" before, but I didn't know what that really meant. Snyder does a good job of explaining the math behind encryption without getting stuck in formulae. As I read, I realized that I had heard that the factoring of large numbers was part of how data was encrypted, but I never had the slightest idea how that was useful.
As I understand it, however, the weakest part of the encryption scheme is still the same problem as every other code ever invented: somebody must have the key. Encryption seems designed to foil some data-bandits but he doesn't answer how hard it is to obtain the key. The system is not based on a "one-time pad," where the keys are destroyed after each use, but that couldn't happen here, could it? I just wonder if Amazon.com can get a key, why can't a bad guy?
Inspired by the discussion of math and encryption, I went and rented the movie Sneakers, where Robert Redford plays an ex-hacker who steals the ultimate de-cipher machine. It's been about five years since I've watched it and it really struck me how much of the plot has become real hot-button issues: cyberterrorism, identity theft, biometrics (and its limits), dumpster-diving, and whether government agencies should have the authority to snoop on encrypted Internet data for law enforcement purposes. The movie takes that one step farther, as the government agency desperate to obtain the de-cipher is the NSA, and they want it for illegal spying on other government agencies. Ah, if only that were the limits of the government's wishes.