Since Christmas never changes (and a good thing too!) I’m reposting my Christmas Eve post from my blog last year. I did plan more work on it, but haven’t done any (story of my life). Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, and a happy New Year to everyone (at least everyone who uses the Gregorian calendar).
From the category archives:
Internet
I’m just about to knock off for Christmas[1], but I have to get ready for a conference at Queensland Uni of Technology early in the New Year where Larry Lessig will be the main speaker. I’m giving a very short presentation, and struggling to improve my understanding of all this, in particular the relationship between the technology of the Internet and notions of social capital. I haven’t come up with anything earthshattering, but I have had some thoughts on which I’d welcome comments.
Via “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/16/005256&tid=126&tid=193, news that the FCC has “voted to allow”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=2&u=/ap/20041215/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/fcc_air_travelers wireless internet on flights, something that’s been available outside the U.S. here and there (e.g., on Lufthansa, I think). On the upside, this is one amenity that they’ll have a hard time restricting to first and business class. But the realm of Court Cases You Will Hear About Soon on the Volokh Conspiracy now includes the one about the guy who started browsing pornographic sites a couple of hours into the flight. My prediction is that the first offenders will be in business or first class, where they’ll think they have enough room to chance it.
It’s interesting to see how Web sites may alter their presence this evening to deal with their anticipated traffic. Earlier today when I visited Zogby International they still had all sorts of graphics on their front page. Now they just show their predictions on a text-only page. I’d be curious to hear if people have come across other sites that have altered their homepage content in anticipation of unusually large traffic tonight that they are not otherwise prepared to handle.
“BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/10/27/president_bushs_webs.html is telling us that George W. Bush’s election site is blocking requests from non-US IP addresses. This seems pretty weird – there could be some reasonable explanation (preventing some kind of DoS attack???), but according to BoingBoing the Bush campaign’s media people aren’t telling. Does anyone have any idea what is going on?
Update: “Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/10/georgebushcom_not_viewable_from_uk.html links to a “story”:http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=19301 suggesting that georgewbush.com suffered a DoS attack on Tuesday.
Update2: “Joi Ito”:http://joi.ito.com/archives/2004/10/27/wwwgeorgewbushcom.html suggests that the site has been timing out if you tried to reach it from Japan or elsewhere since August. Curioser and curioser …
Here is another tidbit in the CBS memo saga, but with a different twist: a case of mistaken identity.
My name is Robert Strong, and I am indeed a college professor. I am not, however, the Robert Strong who spoke to CBS. I never met Killian, I never lived in Texas, and I never served in that state’s Air National Guard. But on the Internet none of this matters.
Ever since the 60 Minutes broadcast, I have been getting angry e-mails from Bush supporters who are sure that I am a key player in a vast left-wing conspiracy bent on diminishing the president’s not extraordinary record of military service.
How did I become the enemy du jour of all those spiteful Republicans? I guess it has something to do with Google. Last week, if you typed the words Professor Robert Strong in the popular search engine, a webpage that happens to be about me appeared at the top of the list. For those who have been filling my e-mail inbox with vicious vitriol, that was apparently evidence enough. CBS says that its Bush-bashing documents have been authenticated by Strong; Google tells everyone on the Internet that I am Professor Strong. That’s it. I am guilty as Googled.
At first, I found all of this a bit funny. Here I was in the midst of my 15 minutes of fame, and it was just a case of mistaken identity. But the more e-mails I read, the less amused I became. The meat they contain is more raw and distasteful than any spam I have ever encountered.
Read the full article for more. (Access to the article does require registration, I’m afraid.)
Timberite and internet expert Eszter Hargittai is quoted in this interesting Washington Post article about improving access to the internet in low-income, urban communities. People are setting up Wi-Fi accounts which can be shared by a number of families. Cool stuff.
Ahead of next week’s federal election in Canada, Michael Geist has a revealing piece in today’s Toronto Star that compares the positions on Internet/technology issues of the main Canadian parties. The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa and Digital Copyright Canada surveyed the Liberals, NDP, Conservatives and Greens on their views on IP protection, file-sharing, open source, identity cards and use of Internet materials in education. The results are not what a classic right-left divide might predict.
It turns out that not “one”:http://www.schussman.com/article/771/gadget-mail but two of my students now have “Gmail”:http://gmail.google.com/ accounts and I — I, what sits on their dissertation committees! I what gives them papers to grade! — do not. Appalling. I am investigating whether I can become a co-author on both of their Gmail accounts despite having done nothing to get one of my own. There’s a lot of precedent for that kind of thing.
*Update*: Well, that didn’t take long. Two readers generously emailed with invitations: “Alex Halavais”:http://alex.halavais.net/news/ was first, so I took up his offer. Thanks very much, Alex and “Brad”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/. For my next trick I will publicly sulk about not having enough $50 bills.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has revamped its Web site making it easier than ever before to find interesting and timely reports about people’s Internet uses. They have organized the site by topic so you can jump directly to reports of particular interest. They usually do not go beyond binary analyses when writing up the findings, but it’s a helpful first cut at the material. Moreover, they are making some of their data available for secondary analysis so others can jump in and see what the deeper stories are. There are few data sets that are publicly available with this type of information so the Project has been doing a real service to this research community for quite a while. The Pew Project is run by a group of great folks, do hop on over and check out their work! (Check here for some additional data sources on the topic.)
I resisted temptation for a while, but have finally launched into a project on blogs with two graduate students in our Media, Technology and Society PhD program, Jason Gallo and Sean Zehnder. We are focusing on political blogs in particular. This raises a whole set of methodological questions. A big one has to do with sampling. We have decided that we would not focus on a random sample of blogs, not only because that is just about impossible to achieve, but more importantly because that is not our focus. We are interested in the most widely read political blogs. (Yes, there remains the question as to what counts as a political blog in the first place, that is just one of the many questions we are grappling with.)
One way of finding prominent political blogs (or prominent blogs of any type) is to look through the links of prominent blogs we already know about. However, since linking is one of the questions we are interested in, it seems problematic to rely only on that method to find blogs relevant for our study. The same concern applies to using Technorati as a method for finding prominent political blogs. Another idea is to run searches on certain political topics and “blog” or “weblog” and see what we find. Of course, in such cases we are left wondering how widely read the particular blogs are, especially if they do not have comments turned on (and in any case, number of comments is a very limited measure of how widely read a blog may be). Other methods we have thought of is to look at directory listings (such as Yahoo!’s) of political blogs for ones we may have missed using the other methods.
So to sum up: What other approaches should we be using to identify political blogs? What methods do people recommend for identifying “top” political blogs?Also, if people know of political blogs that don’t seem to get mentioned here much, please feel free to post away. I realize this method of collecting information mirrors many of the shortcomings mentioned above, but hopefully by using all these approaches, we can get a reasonable sample (or dare I say population) of the most widely read political blogs. Thanks!
Just a quick note to the fairly large proportion of our readers who also run weblogs. The photographs of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and tortured are important historical documents, but the faces of those being victimised are not particularly important details. Nothing important is lost by linking to a version of the photographs in which the victims’ anonymity is preserved rather than one in which they are clearly identifiable. While some of the torture victims were extremely nasty people, many weren’t (apparently, many of them had been picked up simply by mistake), and in any case it is not good form to condemn the practice of humiliating prisoners while simultaneously disseminating pictures which increase the humiliation.
The genie is out of the bottle, obviously (thanks to quite scandalous insensitivity on the part of the world’s newspaper), but we can at least show willing ourselves. This will be doubly important, obviously, if and when the currently “secret” (and apparently much more distressing for the victims) photographs become public.
Update: When I rather loftily said above that “nothing is lost by linking to version of the photographs in which the victims’ anonymity is preserved”, I assumed that I’d be able to find such versions pretty easily, but apparently not. I’ve tried all sorts of search terms, but can’t find a single instance of publication of the photos in which anyone bothered to blur the faces. Christ. Did literally nobody stop to think about this last week? Last time I take a holiday.
There has been much hype about how the Internet and especially search engines (need I name the one in particular?;) are giving everyone everywhere access to anything and everything. I’ve already commented previously about why this simplifies matters (even beyond controlling for mere access issues), but let’s limit our discussion to people who are quite skilled at online information-seeking. What remains – or may increasingly become – hard to access?
Here are some examples. I’d be curious in what other instances people have encountered or perhaps expect to encounter roadblocks at some point.
For Ph.D. students, it’s not too late to apply to Webshop ’04
where graduate students interested in the intersection of technology and human behavior meet with leading experts for [a week] of seminars, discussion, and social activities that promote the production of high quality research.
The WebShop is committed to promoting scientific research and collegiality between young scholars to understand the transformative effect—both positive and negative—that the Internet has on human behavior and how the emerging persistent behaviors enable and constrain activities, understanding, knowledge, and culture.
Students get help with travel expenses and room & board is covered by the program. It’s a great opportunity!
The “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60804-2004Apr8.html reports on the interesting – but problematic – approach of Virginia to prosecuting spammers. Authorities in Virginia have arrested three suspected spammers from North Carolina. Their basis for asserting jurisdiction: that the spammers ‘went through’ servers in Virginia in order to disseminate spam.
bq. Although all of the suspects are from North Carolina, Cantrell said, “they went through a server in Virginia, and as long as they go through Virginia then we can prosecute them under our Virginia statutes.” Northern Virginia is a major hub for Internet traffic, and because of that Virginia has an opportunity to snag many more “spammers,” Cantrell said.
It’s not clear from the newspaper article how close the spammers’ relationship is with the server in Virginia – whether this is a server that they themselves used intentionally, or merely a server that their mail passed through en route to its final destination. But it certainly sounds as though Virginian authorities are asserting a general right to prosecute spammers (and jail them for up to twenty years), on the basis that their emails pass through Virginia at some point in their travels. Since roughly “50% of world Internet traffic”:http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsArticle.jsp?type=internetNews&locale=en_US&storyID=4778933 passes through Virginia, that’s a very far-reaching jurisdictional claim indeed. Of course, it’s nice to see spammers getting walloped with serious penalties (although 20 years of jail time would be a bit much). But it’s not at all clear to me that Virginia state authorities should appoint themselves arbiters of the world’s Internet traffic, with extraterritorial reach. If nothing else, it’s likely to lead to competing claims for jurisdiction from other authorities, in the US and elsewhere, and an incredible mess for individuals and firms trying to determine their legal liabilities. As Michael Geist “observes”:http://www.law.berkeley.edu/journals/btlj/articles/vol16/geist/geist.pdf, jurisdiction on the Internet is murky enough as it is. It looks as though it’s about to get a whole lot murkier.