Techdirt. Stories filed under "internet"

PSA To Parents: Step 1 After Your Child Is Shot Is Not Checking WebMD

Timothy Geigner — Fri, 10 May 2013 06:16:46 PDT

There's been some hand-wringing in the past about online services like Wikipedia and WebMD and how patients and families use them to do self-diagnosis. Much of this seemed to be drummed up media attention, since you have to imagine the vast majority of medical patients are intelligent enough to listen to the advice of their doctors, Chicago Bulls players notwithstanding. Every once in a while, however, you'll get a story of someone who decided to trust information found online over medical personnel, typically regarding minor medical issues.

Even more rarely, you find a real treasure in the form of someone lacking so much in common sense that you have to wonder how they manage to get out of bed in the morning. For example, I'm not yet a parent, but I'm pretty sure that if my child suffered from lead poisoning caused by someone wielding a freaking pistol, my first reaction would be to take my child to the hospital. Not so if you're this mother in Texas, apparently, since she decided to hop on the old interwebz to see what WebMD advised for gunshot wounds.

Despite the shooting taking place around 6:30 PM on Tuesday, it wasn't until 2 AM on Wednesday that the boy's mother finally brought him to Mainland Medical Center for treatment. She had apparently spent the previous hours looking up "gunshot wound" on WebMD.

And that brings to mind the two obvious questions. First, why isn't there an entry for "gunshot wound" on WebMD that simply reads, "Go to the damned hospital, you moron!"? And second, exactly how much searching is required on WebMD before you come to that conclusion anyway? One hour? Two? Three? This mother-of-the-year candidate has to account for seven and a half hours! One assumes she spent at least four of those looking for the "any" key on her computer, right?

Fortunately, investigators are now saying they may charge the mother with a felony being-stupid or some such thing. Here's hoping they get that child out of her house and into a safer environment, like the tiger pit at their nearest zoo.

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Deftones Guitarist: People Who Download Our Music Are Fans, They're Welcome To Do So

Mike Masnick — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:30:42 PDT

Note: I started writing this post up prior to the unfortunate news that longterm Deftones bassist Chi Cheng passed away, after spending much of the past four years in a coma following a car accident. Sad news.

One of the points we've tried to make over and over again is that people who are downloading unauthorized copies of music, movies and other content are often huge fans, or have the potential to be huge fans. So it never made sense to us that some content creators treat them like criminals. Every so often, we see someone say something silly like "I don't want fans like that." People say that, but they almost certainly don't mean it, because it would likely mean the loss of a huge percentage of their biggest fans. As we've seen over the years, plenty of enlightened content creators recognize the basic situation and have happily embraced it. We can add Deftones guitarist Stephen Carpenter to that list as he explains eloquently why he's happy about people downloading his music.

"I say hallelujah to them. I say it for only one reason, the truth is people who download your music are your fans, or people who are potentially going to become your fans," he said. "And if you're going to be upset that someone is interested, or becoming interested in your stuff, then what's the point? What are you doing?"

He continued: "If it's all about money then certainly you're going to be offended. But if your intent is to enjoy what you're doing and have others enjoying it, then it should be a no brainer. I welcome all people to download the music. They won't be the first, they won’t be the last, and for anyone to fight that ... it's futile."

He later says he "can't be offended by someone enjoying" his music. He notes that he's watched the internet and downloading from the beginning and he hasn't felt he needed to change at all.

The discussion is from a half hour interview with Loud Guitars. The full interview (about half an hour) is fun to watch, with a lot of discussion on having a positive attitude on all sorts of things, from life to the internet to the music industry to just making music. He also talks about how great the internet is beyond just the downloading issue. He talks about how things like YouTube can help make great musicians famous and kickstart a career and how awesome that is (in fact, he has a "hobby" of searching YouTube for great guitarists to inspire himself to push himself further). Once again, a nice counter-point to those who have been arguing that YouTube is somehow harming artists or that fans should be treated like criminals.

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Police Search For Mugger For 3 Weeks, Internet Finds Him In An Hour

Timothy Geigner — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:46:00 PDT

We've discussed before the ways law enforcement groups use social media. Frankly, the general theme tends to be that they aren't very good at internetting. Whether it's mocking invasive vaginal searches or catfishing music fans with well-tread tropes, it seems the wider internet plays the web game better than the LEOs. All the while, you occasionally will hear someone in law enforcement decrying how awful the internet is and even sometimes attempting to shut down certain sites. Yet, despite being so under-appreciated, the wider internet sure does love to show how good they are at catching suspected criminals.

That capability was on full display in the case of a mugging in New York City, where police had been searching for a suspect for three weeks before "deputizing" the internet, which identified him in an hour. Within an hour of Gawker posting the video of the crime on the site, a helpful commenter linked to a Facebook page that appeared to show the suspect wearing the same clothes in photos taken mere hours prior to the crime.

The link led to the Facebook page of 21-year-old Aidan Folan, who had photos of him taken hours before the robbery. According to Gawker, the photos revealed the same sweatshirt the mugger wore in the video — with large fraternity letters on front. Commenters on the New York's Daily Intelligencer site, which also posted the video, also linked back to Folan.

Folan has since been arrested and charged with robbery and assault.

Internet 1, stupid frat boy crimes 0. But the larger point is that, far from the crime-inducing cesspool claimed by some LEOs, the internet is a tool they should be using. Many LEOs recognize that, utilizing social media to put together suspect timelines, but the aggregate of the public internet is also a tool to catch violent criminals.

Social media acts as a timeline of people's lives — accounts of their activities. And now they are playing significant roles in helping to solve crimes — most notably exposing the Steubenville rape case back in January.

It's worth noting that there's a difference between having the public help law enforcement find suspects and LEOs keeping watch over social media. The lesson here is that the it's not all or nothing with law enforcement and the internet. You can get the help you need without invading the public's lives.

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French Politician Wants To Limit How Cheaply Companies Can Sell Goods Online Compared to Physical Shop Prices

Glyn Moody — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 05:45:18 PDT

A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about a store that was trying to charge customers $5 for "just looking", because it felt that many people were merely inspecting goods there before then buying them online. Guillaume Champeau points us to a French politician who is also worried about the same problem, and has proposed modifying the law governing commerce to deal with it (original in French). Here's the politician's explanation in the preamble of why it is needed:

Currently, regardless of the margin necessary for commercial activity the prices charged by distributors in town centers are often much higher than the prices charged by suppliers on their online sites.

This leads local shops to become mere showcases for products, products that consumers prefer afterwards to buy online at lower prices.

Equally, this decay of urban centers affects other sectors, such as hotels and catering.

Also, the proposal submitted to you aims to prevent suppliers from selling online at a price lower than the price at which they sell to distributors. The prices of products sold online may thus remain lower [than in physical shops], but in a reasonable and acceptable way.

The key problem with this idea is that it won't work. Even if the law were passed, people would just buy from online stores outside France, where prices will still be lower, because they would be unaffected by the new French legislation. Nor can that be stopped, because one of the impulses behind the European Union is to encourage precisely this kind of competition among companies located in different countries in order to bring about lower prices across Europe for the consumer's benefit.

The real solution, as Mike noted in the previous case, is for physical stores to become more attractive, not for governments to pass yet more clueless and ineffectual laws trying to diminish the power of the Internet.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

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Damaging The Internet Is Not Acceptable Collateral Damage In The Copyright Wars

Mike Masnick — Tue, 2 Apr 2013 05:56:11 PDT

Cory Doctorow has a fantastic opinion piece over in the Guardian in which he talks about how unfortunate it is that people seem to think that it's okay to damage the internet in any and all attempts to stop copyright infringement. The whole thing is absolutely worth reading, so here are a few snippets should whet your appetite.

The internet is important, but the copyright wars treat it as a triviality: like cable TV 2.0; like the second coming of the telephone; like the world's greatest pornography distribution system. Laws such as the Digital Economy Act provide for disconnecting whole families from the internet without due process because someone in the vicinity is accused of watching TV the wrong way. That would be bad enough, if the internet were merely a conduit for delivering entertainment products. But the internet is a lifeline for families, and giving some offshore entertainment companies the right to take it away because they suspect you of doing them wrong is like giving Brita the power to turn off your family's water if they think you've been abusing your filter; like giving KitchenAid the power to take away your home's mains power if they think you've been using your mixer in an unapproved way.

And, of course, like me, Cory makes his money by producing content. But we realize that the internet is much more important to us than stopping any kind of infringement of our content.

Look, I'm in the industry. It's my bread and butter. If you buy my lovely, CC-licensed books, I make money, and that will make me happy. As a matter of fact, my latest UK edition is Pirate Cinema, a young adult science fiction novel about this very subject that won high accolades when it came out in the US last autumn. But I'm not just a writer: I'm also a citizen, and a father and a son. I want to live in a free society more than I want to go on earning my improbable living in the arts. And if the cost of "saving" my industry is the freedom and openness of the internet, then hell, I guess I'll have to resign from the 0.0000000000000000001 percent club.

Thankfully, I don't think it has to be. The point is that when we allow the problem to be framed as "How to we get artists paid?" we end up with solutions to my problems, the problems of the 0.0000000000000000001 percent, and we leave behind the problems of the whole wide world.

The key point he's making there: the vast, vast, vast majority of folks who try to make a living making content will fail. The problem, today, is that many are blaming those failures -- which would have happened in almost any other era as well -- as if it's a problem from the internet. We have this blind spot for all of those failures. When people talk about how much musicians make or how many musicians are employed today, they leave out the parts about all the people who tried under the old system and were unable to make it. When you add those back in, the picture looks very, very different. And all of the amazing things that the internet is enabling is actually making it easier for many to create, to promote, to distribute and to monetize their content than ever before. By a long shot. But much of the "copyright wars" are not really about all that. It's about protecting the old gatekeepers who kept most comers out of the system altogether.

And, for various reasons, politicians often fall for their story.

Anti-piracy campaigns emphasise the risk to society if people get the idea that it's OK to take without asking ("You wouldn't steal a car...") but the risk I worry about is that governments will get the idea that regulatory collateral damage to the internet is an acceptable price for achieving "important" policy goals. How else to explain the government's careless inclusion of small-scale bloggers and friends with their own Facebook groups in the scope of the Leveson press regulation? How else to explain Teresa May's determination, in the draft communications bill, to spy on everything we do on the internet?

These policy disasters spring from a common error: the assumption that incidental damage to the internet is an acceptable price in the service of your own goals. The only way that makes sense is if you radically discount the value of the internet – hence all the establishment sympathy for contrarian writers who want to tell us all that the internet makes us stupid, or played no role in the Arab spring, or cheapens discourse. Any time you hear someone rubbishing the internet, have a good look around for the some way that person would benefit if the internet was selectively broken in their favour.

There's much, more where that came from. Highly recommended.

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Law Professor Eric Goldman: The CFAA Is A Failed Experiment; It's Time To Gut It

Mike Masnick — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 07:47:24 PDT

We've been talking a lot about CFAA reform lately, but law professor Eric Goldman is taking it a step further. He's written a fantastic piece for Forbes that explains why the whole concept underlying the CFAA is a failure and should be almost entirely done away with. The key part is the theory underlying the CFAA is an attempt to apply the age-old concept of "trespass to chattels" online, in the theory that the online world can be considered not unlike the offline world. Except... it's not so simple. Not at all.

Stretching the ancient doctrine of trespass to chattels to apply to Internet activities has been an experiment in law-making. Unfortunately, I think the experiment has failed completely. The CFAA and state computer crime laws initially were designed to restrict hackers from breaching computer security—a sensible objective that, as I discuss below, should be preserved. The expansion of these laws to cover all sending or receiving of data from an Internet-connected server hasn’t worked...

He goes on to point out that there have been massive unintended consequences of trying to apply an offline concept to a very different online world, and to also note that other existing laws can already handle many, if not potentially all, of the scenarios that people normally fear concerning malicious computer hacking.

Indeed, because legal doctrines already overlap so extensively, we almost never see an online trespass to chattels claim asserted on a standalone basis. Instead, an online trespass to chattels claim is usually just one of numerous legal violations asserted against the defendant. These doctrinal overlaps mean we usually don’t need online trespass to chattels either to supplement the more squarely applicable claims or to act as a “gap-filler” to plug the rare and narrow holes left by the other legal doctrines.

And thus, his recommendation is basically to gut the CFAA almost entirely:

1) Repeal most provisions of the CFAA (that don't relate to government-run computers) and preempt all analogous state laws, including state computer crime laws and common law trespass to chattels as applied online. Note: without dealing with analogous state laws, reforming the CFAA is an incomplete solution.

2) Retain only the (A) restrictions on criminal hacking, which I would define as the defeat of electronic security measures for the goal of fraud or data destruction (and some of these efforts are already covered by other laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act), and (B) restrictions on denial-of-service attacks, which I would define as the sending of data or requests to a server with the intent of overloading its capacity.

3) Eliminate all civil claims for this conduct, so that only the federal government can enforce violations.

4) Specify that any textual attempts to restrict server usage fail unless the terms are presented in a properly formed contract (usually, a mandatory click-through agreement).

It's difficult to argue with these suggestions, which is probably why most of Congress will likely instead ignore them.

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Internet Under Attack: World's Largest DDoS Attack Almost Broke The Internet

Mike Masnick — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:02:00 PDT

Update: Gizmodo is calling bullshit on these claims. They're likely correct that this attack was not a "threat" to the overall internet, but I also believe that Gizmodo is underplaying the potential problems from open resolvers.

We've known for a while that there are a number of people out there who really dislike Spamhaus, one of the more well known providers of a blacklist of spam IP addresses. For what it's worth, there are times when it feels like Spamhaus may go overboard in declaring an IP or range of IP addresses as spammers. And, to some extent, because of that, it seems like some who use the Spamhaus list rely on it a bit too strongly. That said, Spamhaus is doing important work in helping to stop the internet from being overrun with spam, and that's a good thing. But sometimes those who it pisses off aren't particularly nice people. Last week, Spamhaus added hosting company Cyberbunker to its spamlist. Someone didn't like that very much, and thus began a very big DDoS attack using open DNS recursors. Spamhaus went to Cloudflare, who was able to mitigate the worst of the attack.

But... that just lead to round two, in which whoever was behind the DDoS went much, much bigger attacking a bunch of the providers who provide Cloudflare with its bandwidth. Basically, it was massive firepower directed at some key points on the internet. And it was a pretty big deal. Cloudflare's blog post stays away from getting too expressive about the whole thing, but just the fact that they note the attack came close to "breaking" the internet should get you to wake up.

Tier 1 networks don't buy bandwidth from anyone, so the majority of the weight of the attack ended up being carried by them. While we don't have direct visibility into the traffic loads they saw, we have been told by one major Tier 1 provider that they saw more than 300Gbps of attack traffic related to this attack. That would make this attack one of the largest ever reported.

The challenge with attacks at this scale is they risk overwhelming the systems that link together the Internet itself. The largest routers that you can buy have, at most, 100Gbps ports. It is possible to bond more than one of these ports together to create capacity that is greater than 100Gbps however, at some point, there are limits to how much these routers can handle. If that limit is exceeded then the network becomes congested and slows down.

Over the last few days, as these attacks have increased, we've seen congestion across several major Tier 1s, primarily in Europe where most of the attacks were concentrated, that would have affected hundreds of millions of people even as they surfed sites unrelated to Spamhaus or CloudFlare. If the Internet felt a bit more sluggish for you over the last few days in Europe, this may be part of the reason why.

The attackers say they're protesting Spamhaus acting as the internet's police:

Questioned about the attacks, Sven Olaf Kamphuis, an Internet activist who said he was a spokesman for the attackers, said in an online message that, "We are aware that this is one of the largest DDoS attacks the world had publicly seen." Mr. Kamphuis said Cyberbunker was retaliating against Spamhaus for "abusing their influence."

"Nobody ever deputized Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the Internet," Mr. Kamphuis said. "They worked themselves into that position by pretending to fight spam."

Of course, all of this has exposed clearly a big vulnerability in the setup of the internet, and suggest that slowing down the internet on a large scale is entirely possible. But it's also made security folks that much more aware of how urgent it is to fix the a key vulnerability that made this possible: the fact that there are so many open DNS resolvers out there, that can be used to launch massive DDoS attacks. Because of that, security folks are rushing around to see if they can convince people to close as many of the approximately 21.7 million open resolvers out there:

While lists of open recursors have been passed around on network security lists for the last few years, on Monday the full extent of the problem was, for the first time, made public. The Open Resolver Project made available the full list of the 21.7 million open resolvers online in an effort to shut them down.

We'd debated doing the same thing ourselves for some time but worried about the collateral damage of what would happen if such a list fell into the hands of the bad guys. The last five days have made clear that the bad guys have the list of open resolvers and they are getting increasingly brazen in the attacks they are willing to launch. We are in full support of the Open Resolver Project and believe it is incumbent on all network providers to work with their customers to close any open resolvers running on their networks.

Basically, over the last week or so, there's been a war going on, concerning parts of the core of the internet, and while it might not have impacted you yet (or, maybe it did), it's likely that the next round will be even bigger. In the meantime, the race is on to shut down open resolvers to try to keep the internet working, and hopefully to cut down on the power of such attacks.

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HBO Admits That Perhaps Cable-Free Access Might Possibly Make Sense One Day, Maybe

Leigh Beadon — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 05:55:00 PDT

Slowly but surely, HBO seems to be softening on that whole "internet" thing that everyone keeps asking them to look into. We recently noted that they've acknowledged the need to make shows like Game of Thrones more widely available online for the international market, and now Reuters reports rumblings of corollary realization: offering HBO Go as a standalone service without a cable package might be a good idea. Or at least it's crossed their minds.

"Right now we have the right model," [HBO Chief Executive Richard] Plepler told Reuters on Wednesday evening at the Season 3 premiere of HBO's hit TV show "Game of Thrones." "Maybe HBO GO, with our broadband partners, could evolve."

...

Plepler said late Wednesday that HBO GO could be packaged with a monthly Internet service, in partnership with broadband providers, reducing the cost.

Customers could pay $50 a month for their broadband Internet and an extra $10 or $15 for HBO to be packaged in with that service, for a total of $60 or $65 per month, Plepler explained.

"We would have to make the math work," he added.

The folks at HBO seem intent on letting the world know that they know these demands exist—they're not stupid or blind, they just happen to be making a lot of money with things the way they are, thank you very much. But while there's often a lot of sense to the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it mentality, the record and film industries serve as illustrative examples of why it may not be a great approach for content companies faced with new technologies. It's easier to experiment when you've got money, and HBO could be using these successful times to start piloting and ultimately launching an online-only service that is superior to the competition, both legitimate and otherwise. If they wait until the growing cable-cutter movement actually necessitates the shift, they could end up like those other industries—dragging their heels until someone else steps in to do the hard work (iTunes, Netflix), or offering ersatz late-to-the-game products of their own (Ultraviolet, Hulu).

Still, it's good to know that it's occurred to them. As for the idea of bundling it with ISP subscriptions, while it makes less sense than offering something to everyone who wants it, it's actually not a bad first step for a company that relies so heavily on partnerships with cable providers (who also happen to be ISPs). However, depending on how such a plan was implemented, it could raise a lot of issues around net neutrality, and could lead to a bundling problem that's just as bad as exists now with cable—especially if it's successful at first, and the providers try to pile on with all kinds of other content subscriptions. Since HBO is obviously going to take its sweet time with any online-only strategy, hopefully it at least realizes that solving the cord-cutting problem is a better goal than renewing and postponing it.

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One Step Closer To Sales Taxes On All Internet Purchases

Mike Masnick — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:08:00 PDT

On Friday, Congress came one step closer to imposing a federal "internet sales tax" on any internet purchases by agreeing to amendment that more or less indicates strong support for a more comprehensive internet sales tax down the road. This kind of tax has been pushed for years mainly by two key constituents: (1) big box offline retailers who think that the online guys are only beating them because they don't have to charge a sales tax for out of state purchases (2) local state governments who think they're being ripped off by not being able to collect such taxes. There are still some hurdles in the way, but it's becoming clear that this kind of tax is inevitable. The amendment passed 75 to 24, so it's got plenty of support. Max Baucus, who heads the Senate Finance Committee which could kill such a bill if it had less support, has already noted that his state, Montana, has no sales tax at all, and he's a bit ticked off that Montana residents may need to start paying sales tax online. Still, as the article above notes, Baucus's ability to block the bill via the Finance Committee is limited due to the size of the support among other Senators. I've yet to see a compelling argument for why such a tax makes sense -- other than random state governments insisting they need the money -- but at this point it seems almost inevitable that it's going to happen.

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Facebook Backs Away Quietly From Its CISPA Support

Mike Masnick — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:08:57 PDT

Many in the internet community were disappointed a year ago when Facebook came out in favor of CISPA. Facebook made its case publicly, agreeing that there were some privacy and civil liberties concerns with the bill, but that on the whole the bill was good. Of course, more cynical people might point out that since the general immunity provisions of CISPA would protect Facebook from liability in sharing info with the government, that of course they'd like it. However, it appears that Facebook is reconsidering that position, perhaps aware of how much public opposition there is to CISPA. Facebook is no longer listed as a CISPA supporter, though it also has not come out directly against the bill. Instead, it issued a statement that says basically nothing:

We are encouraged by the continued attention of Congress to this important issue and we look forward to working with both the House and the Senate to find a legislative balance that promotes government sharing of cyberthreat information with the private sector while also ensuring the privacy of our users.

Still, it's encouraging that a company, like Facebook, which really does rely on the support of their userbase, appears to at least recognize that something like CISPA might not be good for its users. In fact, this seems similar to when Microsoft backed away from its CISPA support last year as well. The article linked above notes that Microsoft still feels the same way, citing the concerns about user privacy with the current draft of CISPA.

So, who is supporting CISPA? The telcos are still there, not surprisingly, as well as mostly infrastructure providers, rather than any company that has a bunch of its own internet users. So, you see IBM, Intel and Juniper Networks. But there is not a single real "internet" company in the bunch any more. Perhaps that should be a loud hint for CISPA's sponsors that the bill is not a good thing for the internet world.

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Disappointing: Tim Berners-Lee Defends DRM In HTML 5

Mike Masnick — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:57:13 PDT

We recently wrote about the truly stupid idea of building DRM into HTML5. At SXSW this week, web inventor Tim Berners-Lee was asked about this, and he surprisingly defended the decision, claiming that it was necessary to get companies to use HTML5:

During a post-talk Q&A, he defended proposals to add support for "digital rights management" usage restrictions to HTML5 as necessary to get more content on the open Web: "If we don't put the hooks for the use of DRM in, people will just go back to using Flash," he claimed.

Berners-Lee is so good on so many issues (most of his talk seemed to be about the importance of openness) that this response really stands out as not fitting with his general view of the world. Cory Doctorow has responded eloquently to TBL, explaining why he should be against the DRM proposal.

What's more, DRM is wholly ineffective at preventing copying. I suspect Berners-Lee knows this. When geeks downplay fears over DRM, they often say things like: "Well, I can get around it, and anyway, they'll come to their senses soon enough, since it doesn't work, right?" Whenever Berners-Lee tells the story of the Web's inception, he stresses that he was able to invent the Web without getting any permission. He uses this as a parable to explain the importance of an open and neutral Internet. But what he fails to understand is that DRM's entire purpose is to require permission to innovate.

For limiting copying is only the superficial reason for adding DRM to a technology. DRM fails completely at preventing copying, but it is brilliant at preventing innovation. That's because DRM is backstopped by anti-circumvention laws like the notorious US Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) and the EU Copyright Directive of 2002 (EUCD), both of which make it a crime to compromise DRM, even if you're not breaking any other laws. Effectively, this means that you have to get permission from a DRM licensing authority to add any features, since all new features require removing DRM, and the DRM license terms prohibit adding any features not in the original agreement, and omitting any of the mandatory restrictions featured in that agreement.

Doctorow makes two other key points in this: (1) that the W3C (the standards setting body for HTML5) has an enormous role in keeping the web free and open -- and imposing DRM is abusing the trust it has built up and will backfire badly and (2) that the big content players who insist they "need" DRM are bluffing.

As the leading standards-setting body for the Web, the W3C has an enormous, sacred and significant trust. The future of the Web is the future of the world, because everything we do today involves the net and everything we'll do tomorrow will require it. Now it proposes to sell out that trust, on the grounds that Big Content will lock up its "content" in Flash if it doesn't get a veto over Web-innovation. That threat is a familiar one: the big studios promised to boycott US digital TV unless it got mandatory DRM. The US courts denied them this boon, and yet, digital TV continues (if only Ofcom and the BBC had heeded this example before they sold Britain out to the US studios on our own high-def digital TV standards).

Flash is already an also-ran. As Berners-Lee himself will tell you, the presence of open platforms where innovation requires no permission is the best way to entice the world to your door. The open Web creates and supplies so much value that everyone has come to it – leaving behind the controlled, Flash-like environs of AOL and other failed systems. The big studios need the Web more than the Web needs big studios.

The Big Content guys have been seeking to remake the web in their image (i.e., "TV") for over a decade now, still believing that they're the main reason people get online. They're not. There's room for them within the ecosystem, but professional broadcast-quality content is just a part of the system, not the whole thing. If the world moves to HTML5 without DRM, the content guys will whine about it... and then follow. Especially as the more knowledgeable and forward-looking content creators jump in and succeed.

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Federal Judge Alex Kozinski Talks About Using Tor To Surf Silk Road & The Armory For Drugs, Weapons And Hitmen

Mike Masnick — Fri, 1 Mar 2013 11:50:00 PST

While I don't always agree with him (who do I always agree with?), like many folks who follow legal issues, Judge Alex Kozinski, the chief judge of the court of appeals for the 9th circuit, is one of my favorite judges. Known almost as much for his ability to entertain as for his clear, well-written (and frequently funny) judicial rulings, one thing that's always been clear is that, unlike some judges, Kozinski is both down to earth and really inquisitive when it comes to understanding how things really work, rather than just accepting common wisdom. Last night, Judge Kozinski gave a lecture at Santa Clara University on "The Two Faces of Anonymity." As I expected, it was entertaining and insightful, with a few Kozinski-esque surprises thrown in.

By far the most entertaining part of the evening was Kozinski sharing (with screenshots) his experience exploring the "hidden web." He claims that when he told his children about the topic of the talk, they told him he needed to explore the hidden web. So, "with some trepidation," he downloaded Tor and dove in, starting out at Silk Road, which still remains the most well known hidden website out there. As we've noted in the past, for all the excitement and press attention Silk Road has received for being a totally anonymous online marketplace used mainly for buying and selling drugs and other illicit goods, it still is a fairly small business. Still, Judge Kozinski detailed his exploration of the market, including checking out various drugs (including many he'd never heard of before). He also looked into the ability to buy forged documents and lots of counterfeit software. From there, he moved over to Silk Road spin-off, The Armory, to see what weapons they had for sale, including 6lbs of C4 explosives. Of course, this is the point that we realize that Kozinski's claims of just having done this recently are probably a fabrication, given that The Armory shut down last summer. It's possible he didn't actually do any of this, but got screenshots from elsewhere online, but there's just something amusing in thinking about Judge Kozinski sitting at home surfing through these sites. He showed a few sites for hiring hitmen, and joked that two of them had such similar language and pricing that he was tempted to report them to the FTC for likely collusion.

He marveled at how much like regular online stores these sites were -- including things like seller ratings -- and compared it to his experiences with eBay. Of course, he also noted that it's entirely possible the whole thing is a front by the feds to track these kinds of things, but if so, he was impressed with the level of detail.

While much of this was entertaining, the point (I think!) was to highlight all of the kinds of things that anonymity enables -- but it wasn't in a necessarily negative or judgmental way (even if he's suggested his concerns in the past). Instead, it was more of a realist approach to what's happening out there and how there are interesting challenges presented concerning both anonymity and privacy -- which he notes are related but not the same thing. To show the difference, he discussed your neighbors across the way, where they may not be anonymous to you, but what they do in their bedroom is kept private from you. Yet, take a random couple in Times Square on New Years Eve doing the same thing -- and they may be "anonymous," but not private at all.

While he did express some concerns about where all this leads, including a dig at anonymous comments online, his biggest concern appeared to be about government abuse thanks to technology. He spent a fair bit of time on the NSA's infamous spy center in Utah, which is supposedly storing a ridiculous amount of information on us all. He pointed out that having that much information in the hands of government is dangerous, and suggested it's likely to be abused. As an example, he pointed to the story from all the way back in 2001 when he and other federal judges discovered that the feds were monitoring their internet usage, something the judges had never been told about.

He explained that the software had been put on the computers to protect the judiciary intranet from being attacked by hackers from China or whatever, but most of the time they weren't doing anything at all, so it wasn't long before the scope began to creep, and someone realized that, hey, if that monitoring software is on those computers, it could also be used to spy on what sites judges were surfing. The judges only found out about it when a judge was called out for his inappropriate surfing habits.

While he didn't say anything explicitly about it, it seems like this should be a pretty clear warning to folks who are supporting laws like CISPA. When you increase information sharing to the government for one purpose, you can almost guarantee that there will be scope creep over time. Someone will point out that "hey, we're already doing this for security, so why not for spying on people...."

Similarly, Kozinski is worried about how all this number crunching and data collection by governments means that people are going to be "targeted" for heightened scrutiny based on some algorithms, even if their activity is perfectly legal. He even noted that he's assuming that his own decision to download Tor and check out Silk Road and other sites probably means that he set off some alarms and may be in for heightened scrutiny. When asked about that later during the Q&A, he admitted that it might just be his own paranoia, but he wouldn't be surprised if it was true.

When asked about how to push back on all this government surveillance, he said that everyone keeps pointing to the courts, and saying that it's their responsibility to limit the government's powers, but suggested that the courts are limited, because it's not clear that anonymity and privacy are really Constitutional issues. Or, he said, if there is a basis for them in the Constitution, it's fairly weak, and could easily be overcome by "other concerns." Personally, I think that he downplayed both the First Amendment's protection of anonymity as confirmed by the Supreme Court, as well as the 4th Amendment's (too often ignored) protection of privacy. Still, he seemed to think that this was really an issue where it was up to Congress to prevent abuses. That's kind of depressing if you remember Congress' recent "debate" and subsequent rubberstamping of the FISA Amendments Act, giving the NSA much more power to spy on Americans with little oversight.

One other bit of useful info: he seemed fairly convinced by Justice Sotomayor's statements on the 3rd party doctrine in the US v. Jones case about GPS tracking. If you don't recall, the 3rd party doctrine basically says that you don't have privacy rights in information that you've left in the control of a third party. That's obviously quite problematic in an age of cloud computing, where all your data is probably in the hands of third parties. The government has been relying on this fact to access all sorts of data with little oversight for quite some time. It's good to see Kozinski hint at the idea that the 3rd party doctrine just isn't reasonable any more in the information era.

There were plenty of other tidbits, but basically it was an interesting discussion of privacy and anonymity, with a strong focus in how the government is collecting way too much information on us all these days. There was also some brief talk of how much information companies are collecting too -- including his apparent uncomfortableness with things like Google Maps' Street View and Satellite View (he joked about how you can see him sunbathing nude if you can find his house). But, for the most part, he seemed to think that this was an area where the government was doing a better job keeping companies somewhat in check.

Oh yeah, and one other amusing tidbit: in talking about how easy it is to track us all due to our mobile phones, he asked how many people had smartphones (or, more specifically, "phones with email on them") and noted that when he talks to lawyers, they all do. He noted that lawyers always had their email near them to respond to clients quickly, because otherwise you get fired, but this cool tool "given to you by work" just shackles you while also denting your privacy. And then he claimed that when work gives him a smartphone, he gets it without a sim and then sells the device on eBay. Maybe he should try selling it on Silk Road next time...

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Film Distributor Convinced Oscar Nominees To Take Down Their Own Short Films, Because No Real Film Would Be Online

Mike Masnick — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 09:44:00 PST

While the Oscars already happened this past weekend, we missed this one bit of insanity in the lead up. Apparently, Carter Pilcher, CEO of distributor Shorts International, made the rounds last week telling all of the nominees for "best animated short film" that they needed to take their films down from any online site. Why? Because, apparently, online stuff is too lowbrow, and no serious filmmaker would ever promote their films online. From the letter:

The fact that all the films were put online is perplexing as Academy voters have other and better means of viewing the films, including through the Academy-provided DVDs of all the Live Action and Animated short film nominees sent to all voting members. Making the films available online creates no competitive advantage.

Unlike Webbies or Ani's, the Academy Award is designed to award excellence in the making of motion pictures that receive a cinematic release, not an online release. Since 2006, we have built theater audiences significantly and created widespread interest in the films themselves and their place in the movie theater. This release of the films on the Internet threatens to destroy 8 years of audience growth and the notion that these film gems are indeed movies--no feature length film would consider a free online release as a marketing tool!

First off, that last statement is pure hogwash. A large and growing number of feature length films have been released online for free as a marketing tool. There's a whole company called Vodo.net that has helped filmmakers do that. All the way back in 2008, we wrote about director Wayne Wang (who has directed movies like The Joy Luck Club, Smoke and Maid in Manhattan) releasing his latest feature length film... free and online. Another success story involved a relatively unknown indie filmmaker who got his film on Hulu (for free), where it became the most watched thing on Hulu for a while. And, of course, Nina Paley famously released Sita Sings the Blues for free online. The idea that no maker of a feature length film would ever use the internet to release it for free is simply untrue.

And, in many ways, it seems even dumber to remove these short animated films from the internet. As many people have noted, obscurity is a much bigger threat to most content creators than anything else, and one way to guarantee further obscurity is to make sure your work cannot be found or seen easily. Somehow, I doubt that any of these animated short filmmakers are seeing that much money from whatever limited theatrical release Pilcher is able to give them. And yet, by taking their works offline, they may be missing out on building a much bigger and more loyal fanbase, which can help support future projects (Kickstarter, anyone?). The idea that no real filmmaker would promote their films online is something that comes from the viewpoint of an obsolete industry, not someone who is looking out for today's filmmakers' best interests.

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Illinois Politician Seeks To Outlaw Anonymous Comments (But Allow Anonymous Gun Ownership)

Mike Masnick — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 11:57:47 PST

Last year, we wrote about a ridiculous and obviously First Amendment-infringing attempt by some thin-skinned NY politicians to pass a law that would effectively ban anonymous comments online. The mechanism would be that a website would have to remove any comments, upon request, unless the commenter agreed to reveal their name, and connect the comment to their name and home address. As we noted, the Supreme Court has been pretty clear that protecting anonymous speech is a key part of the First Amendment:

Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.

It would appear that Illinois State Senator Ira I. Silverstein needs a refresher course on this basic concept, as he's recently introduced an almost identical bill to the New York one. Seriously. The wording is about as close to identical as you could imagine. Here's the Illinois wording.

Creates the Internet Posting Removal Act. Provides that a web site administrator shall, upon request, remove any posted comments posted by an anonymous poster unless the anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name, and home address are accurate.

Here's the widely mocked NY wording:

A WEB SITE ADMINISTRATOR UPON REQUEST SHALL REMOVE ANY COMMENTS POSTED ON HIS OR HER WEB SITE BY AN ANONYMOUS POSTER UNLESS SUCH ANONYMOUS POSTER AGREES TO ATTACH HIS OR HER NAME TO THE POST AND CONFIRMS THAT HIS OR HER IP ADDRESS, LEGAL NAME, AND HOME ADDRESS ARE ACCURATE. ALL WEB SITE ADMINISTRATORS SHALL HAVE A CONTACT NUMBER OR E-MAIL ADDRESS POSTED FOR SUCH REMOVAL REQUESTS, CLEARLY VISIBLE IN ANY SECTIONS WHERE COMMENTS ARE POSTED.

It kind of makes me wonder who is going around giving state politicians this language.

Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis notes the ultimate irony that the very same Ira I. Silverstein, just days after introducing that bill to effectively ban internet anonymity, proposed another bill to keep gun owner info anonymous, amending the freedom of information act to exempt firearms ownership data from being available to the public.

Whatever you might believe about anonymous comments and/or gun ownership, it's difficult to put both of these laws together and not see some sort of extreme hypocrisy.

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'Offensive Lyric' Prompts Epic Records To Attempt The Impossible: 'Erase' The Track From The Web

Tim Cushing — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 11:36:28 PST

The general rule of thumb is: once something's on the internet, it's there for good. But this simple fact eludes a great many people, many of whom demand the internet erase all the bad stuff or they'll sue/pass legislation. But you simply can't do it. There are millions of people interacting with everything everyday, and there are millions of places to hide stuff someone else wants to have disappear.

The latest entity to believe it has a shot at bending the internet to its will is Epic Records, which is now making efforts to 'erase' a remix of Future's "Karate Chop" from the web. Why? Well, apparently an "unauthorized" mix leaked into the public ear with a particularly offensive Lil Wayne lyric attached. (I hear you asking: "In terms of Lil Wayne, how does one define "particularly offensive?" Well, read on.)

Lil Wayne caused controversy with a lyric on Future's"Karate Chop" remix where he raps, “Beat that pussy up like Emmett Till," eliciting a fiery response from Till's family.

If the name Emmett Till doesn't ring a bell and you're wondering why anyone would care, here's a bit of Till's bio which, tragically, has a whole lot more to say about his death than his life.

Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African-American boy who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was fromChicago, Illinois, visiting his relatives in the Mississippi Delta region when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store. Several nights later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam arrived at Till's great-uncle's house where they took Till, transported him to a barn, beat him and gouged out one of his eyes, before shooting him through the head and disposing of his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighting it with a 70-pound (32 kg) cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.

His murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury and admitted to the crime several months later, protected by the "double jeopardy" shield.

Understandably, Till's family isn't happy with Wayne's choice of sexual metaphor, and with Rev. Jesse Jackson weighing in on the issue, Epic is feeling a little heat. So, its heart is in the right place and the offer to rid the web of the offending remix is noble, but there's no way it will ever accomplish that.

"We regret the unauthorized remix version of Future's 'Karate Chop,' which was leaked online and contained hurtful lyrics," the statement said. "Out of respect for the legacy of Emmett Till and his family and the support of the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. ... we are going through great efforts to take down the unauthorized version."

Great effort will no doubt be made, but I can imagine there's going to be some collateral damage. We've already observed (several times) that many companies who attempt mass takedowns often remove legitimate content, up to and including their own offerings. Going into panic mode only exacerbates the problem.

Not only that, but is there any real reason to make this version nonexistent? I understand that many, many people will find Wayne's lyric incredibly offensive (because it is), but does erasing it from the web really serve any purpose? The information is already out there, in the form of posts like the one at HipHopDX. Killing off the remix, even assuming it were possible, changes nothing. The lack of aural evidence won't erase the written evidence. An official statement from Epic disowning this version should be all that's needed.

Let the "unauthorized" remix stay live. Bring this story to the front. This isn't anyone's problem but Lil Wayne's. He wrote it. He said it. He can live with it. No one needs to be tilting windmills on his behalf or on the behalf of those offended, and in the process, potentially taking non-offensive (OK -- less offensive) legitimate content offline.

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Will The ITU's Increasing Focus On Control And Surveillance Split The Internet?

Glyn Moody — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 05:33:32 PST

Techdirt covered the WCIT circus in Dubai in some depth last year, since important issues were at stake. As many feared, after a moment of farce, it became clear that a serious schism in the ITU was opening up -- between those who wanted the Internet largely left alone to carry on much as before, with the possibly naïve hope that it might act as a vehicle of freedom, and those who wanted it regulated more closely, certain it could become an even better instrument of control.

Although WCIT is over, the ITU journey continues, and a fascinating post by Anthony Rutkowski on the CircleID Web site gives us a glimpse of where exactly it's heading -- and it doesn't look good. The ITU's "Internet/cloud" Study Group 13 is convening soon, and as Rutkowski points out, the provenance of the contributions submitted to this meeting reflect what is happening to the organization: 70% of them are from China or Korea.

Almost everyone has fled the organization except for a few established participants from China and Korea and their partners. Pretty much all of industry together with the G55 nations [who refused to sign the WCIT treaty] have left.

Just as telling is the subject-matter: The contributions predominantly deal with the mechanics of pervasive surveillance and content control. This includes DPI mechanisms and use cases, filtering of content to local networks, control of individual user mobile phones, controls on peer-to-peer services, extensive regulatory controls on cloud computing facilities, and Big Data Analytics for extracting every nuance about individual users from real-time communications and stored data.
As Rutkowski rightly notes, given this continuing descent into police-state territory, there are now two paths for the ITU. The first is to pull back from the brink, and to return to a consensus-based approach that allows the G55 nations to participate in the development of basic Internet standards -- not those predominantly designed for surveillance.

Alternatively, the G89 nations who did sign the WCIT treaty may decide it is more important for their sections of the Internet to be firmly under their control than for there to be a single, unified set of Internet standards for the world. The schism would be formalized, with a more open G55 Internet linking up as best it could with the more closed G89 network. That would be a tragedy for humanity, but on the basis of the WCIT conference and the developments since then, it's certainly not something that can be ruled out.

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Fake Kickstarter Game Raises Worries About The Platform, But Should It?

Timothy Geigner — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 03:34:32 PST

As Kickstarter continues to mature as a viable platform for funding creative projects, there are still audible whispers expressing concern over fraud and scams on the site. Leigh previously noted one such case, in which the internet community outted a fake game's funding attempt, detailing how that community was responsible for getting the project removed from Kickstarter entirely. At the same time, he discussed how fraud can be found in the more traditional arenas, as can failures. But Kickstarter stories like this seem to garner, what is in my estimation, an undue amount of fear over frauds and scams.

So I expect more of the same as we learn of another case of a Kickstarter project claiming false affiliations and making promises it couldn't hope to keep. Dirty Bird Sports, as the group was called, claimed that it was raising funds to put out an NCAA football game for the PS3 and Xbox 360, and claimed to have the backing of several well-known names in the football world, all of which turned out to be false.

Boasting a backing from well-known Atlanta Falcons running back Jamal Anderson, the project claimed that it was hoping to create a competitor to EA's NCAA Football game and only needed the relatively paltry sum of $500,000 to develop a PS3 and Xbox 360 title.

However, many of the 3D models and assets compiled by the group, calling itself "Dirty Bird Sports", were found to have been lifted from sites selling other artists work, a roundup of which can be seen at Kotaku.

While some might freak out over this, that last bit is what's most interesting to me, and is the proper evidence for pushing back against those claiming the sky is falling. Once again, a vibrant internet community has assisted in outing the liars and scammers, proactively preventing any actual financial harm from occurring. While that same community may not end up with a 100% success rate in stopping such cases, I see these instances as an indication of the maturing of the platform and a direct result of the growth of interest in Kickstarter as a whole. As with any other aspect of crowdsourcing, the benefits rise as the size of the crowd increases. That the internet community is so successful in warning the rest of us of these dangers should be taken as a selling point of Kickstarter, not some scary boogeyman.

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Russia Uses New Internet Censorship Bill To Silence Prominent Reporters Who Criticized The Government

Mike Masnick — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 03:37:53 PST

Last summer, Russia passed an internet blacklist bill which required ISPs to censor certain sites. At the time, of course, Russian officials insisted it would be used to "protect the children" from "harmful information," including child porn, suicide instructions, and pro-drug propaganda. They insisted it would not go beyond that. Of course, within weeks, a popular blogging site, LiveJournal, was censored, followed by the Russian equivalent of Wikipedia.

And now they're targeting journalists as well. Access is reporting that added to the blacklist has been a site used by prominent free speech / civil liberties reporters in Russia who have been critical of the government. The government claims (of course) that they put the site on the blacklist due to "child pornography elements," but Access points out that rather than just removing such content, they've blocked access to the entire site, which is notable given the usage by critical reporters.

At least two prominent journalists host their blogs on LJRossia.org: Andrei Malgin, a journalist who has been very critical of the government and hosts a mirror site at LJR, and Vladimir Pribylovsky, who has been targeted for publishing a large database of government misdeeds and for disclosing official documents that expose corruption.

Once you've set up tools that enable censorship, you know they'll eventually be used for censorship.

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Another Terrible Idea From Russia: Using Whitelists To Control Access To The Internet

Glyn Moody — Thu, 7 Feb 2013 07:43:36 PST

Techdirt has been reporting on a steady stream of bad tech ideas coming out of Russia, including content monitoring, banning children from using WiFi, anti-piracy laws requiring takedowns in 24 hours and -- of course -- site blocking. But such blacklists are too permissive for some Russians: over on Google+, Peter Lemenkov pointed out that one region is now introducing whitelists (original in Russian):

In February the Safe Internet League is starting an experimental access to the "clean Internet" in one of Russia's regions. Users in the test region will only be able to access pages and sites that have been checked by the League's experts.

It's hard to know what's worst about this approach. Maybe the idea that there is such a thing as a "clean Internet", or that self-appointed experts have the right to decide what is clean and what isn't. Or perhaps just the belief that it is possible to create a whitelist that isn't utterly useless. According to the report above, the League hopes to have a million "resources" available to users at launch; meanwhile, in the real world, Google says it indexes 30 trillion Web pages....

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Harper's Magazine Publisher Shakes Verbal Fist At Google; Romanticizes Own Profession; Quotes Teletubbies

Tim Cushing — Wed, 6 Feb 2013 09:33:00 PST

John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper's, is at it again. Last year, MacArthur bravely stood up against "the internet," attacking it for a whole laundry list of evils, including copying and distributing the works of others (often at no cost), dumbing down the level of discourse, and generally not being the Respected Print Business.

Now, he's back and he's narrowed his focus to one company: Google. After spending a moment cheering on French ISP Free for its short-lived ad-blocking internet service (to better choke off arch-nemesis Google's ad revenue), MacArthur gets down to brass tacks: namely, how awesome his mag is and how much he fails to understand what Google actually is... or does.

As publisher of a magazine that specializes in substantive, complex, and occasionally lengthy journalism and literature, and that also lives off advertising, I’ve long objected to Google’s systematic campaign to steal everything that isn’t welded to the floor by copyright — while playing nice with its idiotic slogan “Don’t be evil.”

"Long objected" apparently means whipping up a once-a-year rant aimed vaguely at "The Internet" and filled with self-serving blasts of journalistic piety and rheumy-eyed nostalgia. Google (and its "smaller rivals") provide "logistical support" to pirates and "repackage" the output of hard-working, life-risking journalists, according to MacArthur, having apparently mistaken search engine results for a web scraper's "blog." These people Google "steals" from are gods among men -- from the "humblest newspaper reporter" to the "most erudite essayist." Oddly, he fails to mention the "most intrepid voicemail hacker" or the "most thorough plagiarist" or the "most accurate gun permit cartographer."

Even if he had included a few lowlights, somehow they would have been Google's fault. Because Google makes the world worse.

This for-profit theft is committed in the pious guise of universal access to “free information,” as if Google were just a bigger version of your neighborhood public library. Acceptance of such a fairy tale lets parasitic search engines assert that they are “web neutral,” just disinterested parties whose glorious mission is to educate and uplift.

This might be your problem, Jack. You're expecting Google to "educate and uplift" and it's more interested in indexing the web in order to give you relevant search results. Google's search engine is a tool and you're expecting it to be the teacher from "Dead Poet's Society." Relevance is more important to people who are looking for something than some utopian ideal that "educates and uplifts."

Yes. It's all very annoying and unhinged and bordering on trolling, but MacArthur really outdoes himself with this paragraph, one that indicates his biggest frustration with Google might be that he seems to have no idea how to use it effectively.

This is nonsense, of course. Google’s bias for search results that list its own products above those of its competitors is now well-known, but equally damaging, and less remarked, is the bias that elevates websites with free content over ones that ask readers to pay at least something for the difficult labor of writing, editing, photographing, drawing, and painting and thinking coherently. Try finding Harper’s Magazine when you Google “magazines that publish essays” or “magazines that publish short stories” — it isn’t easy.

I'd really, really, really like to see MacArthur produce a little evidence to back up his claim that Google gives priority to "free content" sites over those with paywalls. Just a hint, paywallers: if you lock it up, it's no longer searchable. There's your problem. If Google can't crawl it, it won't appear. Just something to consider. And I really love the tossed off "thinking coherently." Because people giving away their work for free are idiots, apparently.

And, yeah, just try to find any major magazine using those ridiculous search terms. (Here's a beautiful rebuttal.)

You know how I get all my news? I Google for "world wide web sites about what happened in real life in the recent past"
— Alexis C. Madrigal (@alexismadrigal) January 18, 2013

If I was looking to submit an essay somewhere, I might use something like those terms, only phrased much less stupidly. There are several ways to find Harper's, but getting it to the front page involves typing in the magazine's name. And if I already know that, what do I need with a search engine?

One other way many people discover quality long-form writing is through aggregators like Longreads, The Essayist or The Browser. From that point, they move on to the magazines themselves. These filters, curated by humans, do what search engines and meandering anti-Google rants can't: connect quality journalism and essays with readers. Quality aggregation (and effective search engines) save these readers the most precious of commodities -- time.

From this point, MacArthur's post devolves into infantile name-calling using infantile terms while trying to make the point that the internet (being Google) is turning us into babies who just want free stuff while making billionaires out of Google's executives. Here's a mercifully brief sample:

It’s no coincidence that Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Yelp sound like toddler gibberish from the Teletubbies. Whenever I hear these silly corporate names invoked with sanctimonious awe, I imagine Dipsy, Laa-Laa, Po, and Tinky-Winky singing their hit single “Teletubbies say ‘Eh-oh’ ” as they shake the change out of some two-year-old’s pocket.

If unchecked, where will this all lead, according to The Last Honest Essayist?

This unending assault of babble potentially could lead to revolutionary conditions in which the new writer-teacher proletariat rises up to overthrow the Internet oligarchy and the politicians and government agencies who protect it.

I think MacArthur greatly overestimates the size of this theoretical revolutionary force. And be sure to note that he's conveniently pulled teachers into the ranks in order to boost his already-monumental self image. Journalists, writers, teachers: the last hope for humanity in the face of Big Search.

It's not so much that MacArthur clearly doesn't understand what he's attacking. This happens several times a day all across the internet. It's that his masturbatorial (like an "editorial," only more self-serving) rant projects an egomaniacal picture of the Publisher/Writer/Journalist as the Savior of Culture. This picture (usually a self portrait) has been painted many times before with a variety of ever-broadening brushes. Creation = good. Aggregation = bad. Google = evil. The arguments never get any better or smarter and do little else but expose the authors as short-sighted pessimists ineptly guarding swiftly vanishing turf.

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Richard Marx And How Not To Act In The Internet Era

Timothy Geigner — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 13:42:00 PST

A year ago, Mike presented at Midem, discussing how being more open, honest and awesome to the public and to your fans is a recipe for musical success in the internet era. It sounds like an easy concept, but it's one that few do really well. It means connecting with your fans and your public, engaging them positively, responding honestly to inquiries, and generally putting the ego aside and embracing a certain amount of humility.

Or, alternatively, you could go the Richard Marx route, which basically means acting like a self-important psychopath. That's what Edward McClelland at Salon discovered when he did a piece that made a joking reference about Marx.

As I wrote in a story last week on the Morning News, Marx – the Chicago-born singer best known for the 1980s soft-rock hits “Hold On to the Nights” and “Right Here Waiting” – demanded a sit-down with me after I called him “shameless” in a blog post for a local TV station’s news site.

“Would you say that to my face?” he emailed me. “Let’s find out. I’ll meet you anywhere in the city, any time. I don’t travel again until the end of the week. Let’s hash this out like men.”

Now, if you think it's a bit on the crazy side for 1980's ballad singers to go rushing around Chicago to meet up with people who said not nice things on the internet, you're not alone. Even stranger, it would appear that monitoring the interwebz and local papers for critics to respond to is something of a habit for Marx. He referred to one radio producer as a "coward", "jerk" and "douchebag" after he failed to show up for a radio appearance. The producer criticizing him for this qualified as a "pussy move" with Marx. He also was quite public in being upset at WGN-TV for not giving him more air time and told them essentially to go elsewhere if they needed a musical artist for their show in the future. These are but a few examples and, in the age of the internet where these stories will never die, they represent the best way to torpedo any possible chance an artist might have at a career in the future. Then there was his email exchange with a writer for Chicagoist, which was memorialized in a YouTube video:

There's just no reason to behave like this in any case, nevermind in an era where the harm done is multiplied and then refuses to disappear.

Now, in case you should think that my labeling Marx as "crazy" is unfair, take a look at a few samples from the email he sent to McClelland and dared him to post online.

-First, your editor, who’s not named but whose identity I can easily find, is a liar. I’ve never tipped less than 20% in my adult life, and you’re more than invited to call any establishments you think I may patronize to check it out.

-Second, to assume you can crawl inside my head and know what my motivation is for writing a song is arrogance reserved for the likes of Hitler and Stalin.

-The big question is why I give a shit about people like you or the things you write. Even my wife and some friends ask me why I don’t just let certain things go. Here’s my explanation. The internet, Twitter and blogs particularly, are a Utopian breeding ground for cowards. A place for small, frustrated people to spew vile, bitter shit without fearing true retribution. Today, you became the poster-boy for Chickenshit-itis. And for you, as well as anyone else who thinks this is as simple as me being “thin-skinned,” let me make a clear distinction, again…and for the last time: Mock or belittle my music all day long? Go for it. You’re entitled to your opinion. But disparage or call into question my character, and I’ll demand you answer for it.

I have to admit that last one is my favorite. Sadly, it is about being thin-skinned when you feel the need to drive your car from the suburbs into Chicago to meet face to face with some guy you don't know who said something you don't like on the internet -- especially when that "something you don't like" is the barely offensive claim that you are "shameless." More importantly, it shines a light on a psyche that is so desperate for attention and praise that it demands action from those he does not know. I can't take Marx up on his offer to critique his music because, frankly, I've never heard it. Nor have I heard of him prior to this piece coming out.

And that's really the point. For the sake of longevity, acting childish can do amazing things to your career and future opportunities. And I mean amazing the same way that Chernobyl was amazing. While the consequences in the internet era for being awesome are significant, so is the opposite true.

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Infographic: Celebrating Internet Freedom Day & The Anniversary Of The SOPA/PIPA Protests

Leigh Beadon — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 05:13:04 PST

It's January 18th, 2013, and that's a day worthy of note: the one year anniversary of the widespread protests against SOPA and PIPA. Not only did the massive reaction from the internet community succeed in stopping these dangerous bills that would have curtailed free speech and innovation online, the protests sent shockwaves through the world of politics. In a true manifestation of democracy, the combined voice of the people overruled the lobbyists and backroom dealers who, only weeks before, were smugly assured of the new law's passage.

To celebrate that victory, a bunch of groups involved in the ongoing fight for internet freedom have come together to declare Internet Freedom Day on January 18th. Here at Techdirt, we're marking the occasion with an infographic looking back at the day the internet community became a political force to be reckoned with:

Embed This:

<a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130117/15210821719/infographic-celebrating-internet-freedom-day-anniversary-sopapipa-protests.shtml"></a>

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CBS Sports Writer Feels It's OK To Issue 'Stealth' Corrections Because It's Just 'The Internet'

Tim Cushing — Wed, 9 Jan 2013 05:33:45 PST

It appears that there are still some writers out there who moved from print to an online presence while never having learned to properly "internet." Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com is one of them. Writing up his baseball Hall of Fame ballot, Heyman botched a few facts about Jack Morris in his push for the pitcher's inclusion, as Craig Calcaterra at NBC Sports pointed out:

Jon Heyman put up his Hall of Fame column this afternoon. For years he has pushed hard for Jack Morris for the Hall. He has long overstated Morris’ merits in my view, but it’s gotten to the point now where he’s simply making crap up:
He was thought good enough to be the ace on teams that had Bert Blyleven and Dave Stewart, and to receive Cy Young votes in seven seasons. I can’t allow his vast accomplishments to be re-evaluated downward by a new emphasis on different numbers.
Jack Morris and Bert Blyleven were never teammates. Jack Morris played one season with Dave Stewart. In that one season — 1993 — Morris was 7-12 with a 6.19 ERA. It’s possible that Heyman is calling Morris the “ace” of that 1993 Jays team because he got the Opening Day start, but he didn’t distinguish himself at all that year, he was out of the rotation by early September and was left off the postseason roster. Some ace.

Poynter followed up on the aftermath of this error, noting that Heyman's reaction to being called out in his fiction was to fix the mistake in the article without calling attention to the correction anywhere on the offending page. When called out on this 'stealth' correction, Jon Heyman responded with his least factual statement yet.

@thitchner not a simple mistake like that on the internet. I have never seen corrections listed below an internet story.
— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) January 8, 2013

I'm not sure which parts of the internet Heyman is familiar with, but examining this statement (and its off-hand dismissal of the internet as a place beneath common courtesy or respect), I would hazard a guess that Heyman hasn't ventured much further than the pages run by CBS Sports. Andrew Beaujon points out that CBS Sports has failed to issue timely corrections on its website before, most notably its premature announcement that Penn State Joe Paterno had died -- a "scoop" it borrowed without attribution from a Penn State student website.

The "internet" that I'm familiar with is full of corrections. Updated posts happen all the time. Tom Hitchner helpfully pointed out a couple of recent corrections to Heyman -- one at the New York Times and one at Slate. Here at Techdirt, we update posts whenever clarification or correction is needed, as well as when new information flows in.

Everyone who realizes that the instantaneous give-and-take the internet provides requires this sort of transparency -- from the lowliest hobby blogger to the writer who's at least two or three sizes too small for the platform he's been given -- lists their corrections, or at the very least runs visible strikethrough. Apparently, Jon Heyman feels the internet is too insignificant to deserve honesty. If this is the attitude he's chosen to project, he doesn't deserve many readers.

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Move Over 'TacoCopter': Here Comes The 'Internet Of Drones'

Glyn Moody — Tue, 8 Jan 2013 00:00:00 PST

As we know, the Internet works by breaking digital information up into IP packets which are then routed independently over the network, and then re-assembled at their destination. Anything made up of 0s and 1s can be sent anywhere with an Internet connection in this way, but that isn't much good for physical objects.

It's true that we are fast approaching the day when we will be able to use a 3D scanner to send a digital file representing an object across the Internet so that it can then be printed at the destination. But that only works for simple, fungible items like cups or replacement parts, and is useless if you want to deliver a particular, personal item rather than just a generic copy.

To do that, we need an Internet of drones:

A short distance drone delivery service built on an open protocol. Think short haul logistics.

It's a system that will explode in a way that is very similar to the way the Internet grew up -- where connections were bought by individuals and installed one modem and IP address at a time, and where the early providers are local geeks with shelves full of modems and an expensive T-1 lines.

It's an approach that uses "uncontrolled airspace" and incremental purchases of cheap, standards compliant pads/drones to roll itself out (very similar to the way the Internet was able to piggy back on the old telephone system).

As a result of this open approach and decentralization, it's something that could grow VERY fast.

If you're still unsure how this would work in practice, the post by John Robb quoted above goes on to spell out the details for a simple example. The bottom line for returning a forgotten smartphone to its owner 30 miles away: Costs? Probably less than $0.25 per 10 mi. or so. So, about $0.75 in this instance. Time? An hour or so.
Of course, this is just a generalization of an idea we discussed back in March of last year, the so-called "TacoCopter", but taken to the next level, modelled on the Internet's IP packets. As we pointed out then, it's a great idea with lots of practical problems, mostly regulatory ones. Arguably the far greater potential of the Internet of drones concept makes the argument for loosening up those restrictions to permit innovation in this area even more compelling.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

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ITU Boss In Denial: Claims Success, Misrepresents Final Treaty, As US, UK, Canada And Many More Refuse To Sign

Mike Masnick — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 06:42:26 PST

The ITU's World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) is now over... and it played out almost exactly as many had predicted. After going back on explicit promises that the treaty would (a) not be about the internet and (b) would only be completed by consensus, rather than by majority vote -- the US lived up to its promise not to support such a treaty by officially stating that it would not sign. A number of other countries quickly followed suit including: the UK, Canada, Denmark, Australia, Norway, Costa Rica, Serbia, Greece, Finland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Sweden, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Qatar (though some apparently said they could not sign because they first had to consult with their own governments -- so it's possible that some of these may change their mind, but many viewed such statements as a more diplomatic way of refusing to sign).

The US, on the other hand, was explicit in refusing to sign:

"It's with a heavy heart and a sense of missed opportunities that the US must communicate that it's not able to sign the agreement in the current form," said US Ambassador to WCIT Terry Kramer. "The Internet has given the world unimaginable economic and social benefit during these past 24 years. All without UN regulation. We candidly cannot support an ITU Treaty that is inconsistent with the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance," Kramer added.

The US delegation also laid out the specific reasons why it refused to sign, and they're the same issues we've been talking about all along: (1) the attempt to expand the definition of the types of entities covered by the treaty from the big telcos to just about everyone running network (2) the explicit inclusion of internet and internet governance in the treaty (3) the claim of a mandate over cybersecurity and (4) the official regulation of spam. That last one hasn't received as much attention, but the US found the rules put forth for dealing with spam going way too far, and putting in place rules that would violate the First Amendment.

Of course, with so many countries bailing out, the ITU's promise that this would all be about consensus look positively laughable in retrospect. But, perhaps even more laughable is the response from ITU boss Hamadoun Toure whose claims read like those of a bureaucrat in complete denial. First he claimed complete "surprise" that the US and other countries walked away:

I couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t sign it. I especially was surprised by the reasons that were put in place. I had made it clear from the opening that [Internet and content were not a part of the discussion]. I invited ICANN to show that we want to build bridges. The telecoms society and internet society need to work together. I made an appeal to please help us build bridges. The fighting will not help the consumer that we are trying to reach here.

He kept going on and on insisting that the internet and internet governance were not a part of the agreement, even though they are. Of course, he then effectively admits that part of the goal is to be the key player in the internet

I have been saying in the run up to this conference that this conference is not about governing the Internet. I repeat that the conference did NOT include provisions on the Internet in the treaty text. Annexed to the treaty is a non-binding Resolution which aims at fostering the development and growth of the internet – a task that ITU has contributed significantly to since the beginning of the Internet era, and a task that is central to the ITU’s mandate to connect the world, a world that today still has two thirds of its population without Internet access.

So it's not about the internet, but the internet is central to the ITU's mandate. Of course, this claim is also a lie. The ITU's mandate does not cover the internet, but telecom infrastructure. One of the more nefarious moves by Toure and the ITU in this whole process was to continually blur the lines between telecom infrastructure and the internet, as if they were one and the same.

The word “Internet” was repeated throughout this conference and I believe this is simply a recognition of the current reality – the two worlds of telecommunications and Internet are inextricably linked. I demonstrated that from the very beginning by inviting my friend Fadi Chehadé, the CEO of ICANN, to address our conference at the beginning.

So... again, he's saying two different things. First, he claims that the treaty has nothing to do with the internet, and then insists that telecommunications and the internet are "inextricably linked," which explains why the treaty pretty clearly would impact internet governance -- which is why so many nations are refusing to sign.

Finally, there's this bit of self-aggrandizing bullshit:

History will show that this conference has achieved something extremely important. It has succeeded in bringing unprecedented public attention to the different and important perspectives that govern global communications. There is not one single world view but several, and these views need to be accommodated and engaged.

WCIT has shown us this truth and we have worked hard together to find a way that is acceptable to all. Let WCIT be the beginning of this dialogue. As our two worlds increasingly converge so must we increasingly converse and find a common way.

To be honest, this feels like a speech that was written before the events of the past two weeks, perhaps at that secret meeting to plan its media strategy. To sit there and claim that WCIT was about finding a way "acceptable to all" and one in which the focus was on "finding a common way" is especially laughable, given how the whole thing concluded. History may very well show that something extremely important was achieved, but it may just be that the achievement was demonstrating clearly what a charade the ITU is, and making it clear that it is not the right organization to have anything to do with internet issues. The ITU has been shown, once again, to be an out-of-date, out-of-touch, obsolete organization searching for relevance.

The simple fact is that the world does not need an ITU to "enable" the internet. The internet was built and expanded rapidly through other means, driven by demand and what it enabled people to do. The current system is not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but it has been working, and shifting to a model driven by international bureaucrats was never in the cards.

The internet does not need the ITU. The ITU needed the internet to remain relevant. The internet, however, does not work that way, and any attempt to move it into such a system of bureaucratic oversight was doomed from the start.

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