Ged Carroll

Search results for: “google”

  • Internet freedom

    A couple of stories related to internet freedom that came to my attention this morning.

    Internet freedom in China

    First off today’s New York Times magazine has an indepth feature about the challenges that China presents to Internet companies seeking a Chinese audience. Google’s China Problem (and China’s Google Problem) by Clive Thompson is balanced and well written. There are some interesting aspects to it:

    • The censorship is open rather than furtive
    • It involves self-censorship as a key element in it’s execution
    • Chinese people interviewed do not view freedom of speech as an absolute binary state (you’re free or you’re not) but as a continuum and are prepared to make trade-offs; so Google’s ‘Do the least evil’ approach makes more sense
    • The role of chat and forums in Chinese internet usage is far higher than we’re used to
    • The assumption that the US readership of the article enjoy ‘absolute’ freedom of speech and a resulting internet freedom

    The last point brings me on to the text of a speech given by US attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales at National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. 

    US threat to internet freedom

    Vigilant civil rights activists have noticed a number of items in the speech which would extend the government powers of censorship and surveillance well beyond child pornography with the implication being that in future US legislation freedom of speech and internet freedom may not be the absolute that it once was.

    Lauren Weinstein of pressure group People for Internet Responsibility made the following post to the Interesting People email list:

    In a speech a few days ago, Attorney General Gonzales announced DoJ plans to send Congress new legislation to control “pornography” and (apparently) ultimately to require activity log and other data retention by Internet Services (in follow-up interviews, Google and other search engines have been specifically discussed). Gonzales is pitching this legislation using child abuse as the hook. That is, he is arguing for tools to use against child abuse and child pornography — certainly a “third rail” issue these days where virtually everyone will support enforcement efforts. However, it’s also clear that the DoJ seems to have no intention of limiting such tools *only* to child-related areas. The legislation itself is currently titled: “Child Pornography and Obscenity Prevention Amendments of 2006”

    A transcript of the Attorney General’s speech is here:
    http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=64319     Note this key quote: “This legislation will help ensure that communications providers report the presence of child pornography on their systems by strengthening criminal penalties for failing to report it. It will also prevent people from inadvertently stumbling across pornographic images on the Internet.” Requiring the reporting of child pornography on systems (when it is known to exist) is something that few people would argue against, obviously.

    But let’s examine the second sentence again: “It will also prevent people from inadvertently stumbling across pornographic images on the Internet.” This seems to be addressing the entire broad category of non-child “pornography” (which of course can be defined in any number of ways in different locales and contexts), and suggests a requirement (here we go again!) for proactive ratings/controls (presumably ID or credit

    card based for “offensive” materials) for all (U.S.) Web sites. So this isn’t just about children, it’s likely about broader government controls over many U.S.-based Internet entities (of course, Gonzales doesn’t effectively address the issue of Web sites outside the country). Gonzales goes a lot further in another quote:

    “The investigation and prosecution of child predators depends critically on the availability of evidence that is often in the hands of Internet service providers. This evidence will be available for us to use only if the providers retain the records for a reasonable amount of time. Unfortunately, the failure of some Internet service providers to keep records has hampered our ability to conduct investigations in this area. As a result, I have asked the appropriate experts at the Department to examine this issue and provide me with proposed recommendations. And I am going to reach out personally to the CEOs of the leading service providers and to other industry leaders to solicit their input and assistance. Record retention by Internet service providers consistent with the legitimate privacy rights of Americans, is an issue that must be addressed.”

    Again, we see that protecting children — the goal that we all support — is being used as the raison d’etre to likely later propose broad data retention requirements on all manner of Internet services. Ironically, this is occurring shortly after calls for mandated data *destruction* legislation that arose in the wake of the DoJ vs. Google records battle (where I strongly supported Google’s stance).cted that this sequence would occur — though it is happening even faster than I expected. Record retention is a particularly risky area. DoJ might be expected to argue (as Gonzales implies) that such records would only be demanded in cases involving children.

    That’s today’s line. But in a general records retention environment, you cannot a priori retain only the records related to child abusers whom you don’t already know about — you must retain *everyone’s* records. While the criteria for records access might be child abuse today, does anyone seriously believe that calls for access to user log data will not massively expand over time, to the extent that such data is available? Of course it will. If the data exists, all manner of ostensibly laudable reasons for government digging through users’ Internet activities will be forthcoming. And that will create a wholly different kind of Internet, where ultimately our every action on the Net may be subject to retroactive inspection. The term “slippery slope” is definitely applicable.

    We need to see the specifics of legislation before detailed comments will be possible. But the handwriting is on the wall, and it does not bode well for either Internet users or Internet-related services.

    More related content here.

  • Inflection Point

    Over at his weekly column for PBS, Bob Cringely has written about four developments that he feels will have a major impact on the way that technology will develop over time, creating an inflection point in their respective spaces.

    The inflection point

    Yahoo!’s new music service is seen by Cringely as a statement of intent to push forward music by subscription and defeat all current players. Indeed, its 6.99 USD subcription rate hand an immediate effect on Wall Street, adversely affecting the share prices of Apple, Napster and Real Networks.

    Microsoft’s forthcoming XBox 360 was seen as a statement of intent against some of its closest PC partners (Dell, HP etc) by providing a home computing device that can surf the web, pick up mail, do VoIP, potentially provide a platform for video on demand and play games. Given that the margins are so tight in the PC industry anyway and Dell is the only one that consistently makes money selling Windows PCs this could proved to be very interesting.

    Cringely, returned to an area of previous speculation on Apple providing a film by download model similar to the iTMS model.

    Finally he speculated that Google’s Web Accelerator was an audious land grab that would shake the industry to its foundations creating an inflection point. Speeding up web pages would mean that every ISP and web page creator would be a content provider or customer for Google. That the service would turn PCs into thin-clients lengthening the useful life of the home PC and reducing sales. Further that it would be a staggering tour-de-force of technology. What surprised me about the Google part of his article is that Cringely thought an improvement of only double what consumers have now would be enough to shift the balance of power. In his book Accidential Empires and similar works by other authors, a 10x factor is usually required to differentate the killer products from the ‘better mouse traps’. I guess time will tell.

  • Folksonomy


    I wouldn’t have thought about tagging for community sense using the idea of the folksonomy if it wasn’t for my friend Uri. Uri introduced me to the ‘For Immediate Release‘ blog. The blog and podcasts focus on both PR and new communications technologies like podcasting and blogging. One thing of interest that came up was the concept of folksonomy, particularly with regards to web content. Folksonomy as a word is derived from taxonomy – where an item is strictly categorised into one area, think of a real book library where books are sorted by subject area and then sub-categories.

    Intranet designers are keen to sort items into clearly defined areas and this is often forced on e-tailers who purchase an off-the-peg online shop – I remember hearing stories of a famous UK online retailer where customers could not find how to buy their mobile phones online, the reason being is that the company had set up its online venture in a rush not to lose ground to the pure play dot.coms and went with an off-the-shelf US e-tail solution that categorised the product only as wireless phones.

    Folksonomy is about community-based classification, relying on the similar kind of goodwill that has made Wikipedia such a force.

    A key example that Hobson & Holtz discussed in their For Immediate Release podcast and blog on March 17, was photo repository Flickr and community bookmark site De.licio.us, both of which use their communities to classify content. This cluster of classifications resembles the lexemes that linguists talk about that associate words with meanings. This attachment of meaning from a user point of view could be the key to true contextual searching.

    At the end of the day Google is more like a savant, trying to use blind mathematics and processing power to compensate for its inability to establish meaning.

    Imagine going to the supermarket and asking the assistant for an item, they run down the corridor and run back with their arms full of different stuff. They empty the stuff into your trolley and say to you ‘Your item is in there’. If you are lucky, the item is at the top of the pile, it you aren’t you may sort through it all and find you don’t have it anyway. You complain to the manager and he dismisses you with ‘Its your own fault, you asked in the wrong way’. The analogy is actually what web search engines are like today, Google is just a fool shop assistant that can hold a lot more stuff.

    Yahoo! had previously tried to provide that context through a directory approach. This organised websites along a taxonomy approach. Categories had other categories nested in them, for example

    Arts >Literature­ >World Literature­ >British >Renaissanc­e >Drama

    This approach would be very familiar to librarians who would be used to every book having a categorisation. But sites can fit into multiple classifications and the average consumer has to know exactly the right classification.

    Efforts to make a ‘semantic web’ seem to have have gone nowhere. Hence efforts put behind the idea of a folksonomy. More related content here.

  • .mac upgrade

    After the devastation that occurred in Florida by hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne signs of a long running typhoon struck in Cupertino, California. The effects of the typhoon centred on the marketing department of Apple Computer and its data centre. Following on from the launch of GMail earlier this year, Apple has upped the capacity of my email account almost tenfold to 125MB for mail and an additional 125MB for online storage.I am one of the original paying customers for .mac services so it is no coincidence that this improvement has occurred in the two weeks running up to the annual subscription payment on my account. Whichever way you look at it, the improvement is welcome and is the most important of a raft of tweaks that Apple has implemented. The alias email address is what I use to give Renaissance Chambara its own contact details.

    Here is the text from Apple announcing the changes:

    Dear .Mac Member,

    We’re excited to announce that your .Mac membership now comes with 250 MB of combined .Mac Mail and iDisk storage. And, in another move designed to make life easier as traffic grows heavier and files grow larger, we’ve increased the maximum email message size to 10 MB.

    If you haven’t tried them yet, be sure to check out two additional enhancements recently added to .Mac Mail. There’s a new online spell checker with a customizable dictionary available when you use your .Mac Mail account through a browser. And you can now use aliases as email addresses either for fun or as protection when you need to provide an email address but aren’t entirely comfortable with the requester. If your concerns turn out to be justified, you can then simply remove the alias and create a new one the next time you face a similar situation.

    We value your membership and hope you enjoy these enhancements to your .Mac service.

    Sincerely,

    The .Mac Team Respect to the Sarasota Herald Tribune for the hurricane facts that I have linked to in this entry.

  • Microsoft Longhorn

    Microsoft Longhorn – As you may have seen over the past few days parts of the American media seem to think that the launch of Microsoft’s new operating system is turning into a bigger disaster than the war against terror. They’re wrong for two reasons:

    – The war against terror is majorly messed up because of poor leadership which has betrayed the countless men and women who have been serving their countries selflessly

    – Even in the unlikely event of Microsoft going bankrupt in the morning and the business and associated ‘intellectual’ properties disappearing into a puff of smoke (I sooo wish it were true), there are numerous viable alternatives from pirate Windows software (nice price, shame about the code), GNU/Linux, various flavours of Unix (Solaris, Openware, Mac OS X, netBSD, FreeBSD etc)

    Let’s put Microsoft Longhorn into perspective:

    – Whine number one – its late, duh show me an IT project that isn’t late, or over budget. Ever heard the one about the sales man who walks into a client, promises them the earth and then gives the programming team three weeks to build it and is then surprised when it doesn’t deliver. Microsoft is bigger than everyone else so does things like this on a bigger scale.

    – Whine number two – it won’t do what you promise, you’ve cut out all the good bits. Ok, I’m going to let you into an IT industry dirty secret, marketing people lie. They believe what they tell you when they have told you it, but they lie. I know they lie, because I’ve taken their lies and written them in an easy to understand format for journalists to write about. Journalists propagate those lies because they provide content that readers pretend to glance over whilst really checking out the job adverts and feeling aggrieved at the money they are paid. The content is a trojan horse to get those job adverts into their workplace because there are too many more interesting things to do in their own time. Everyone benefits from the ecosystem

    – Whine number three – its an omen of doom, Trey (William Gates III to those of us who know him well) has taken his eye off the ball and Monkey Boy Balmer has royally fcuked up, this would not have happened with Bill in charge. This one needs to be broken down into sections.

    First of all, Steve Balmer has done a good job fighting against the rabid autistic children that make up most of his employees, bringing it successfully through a shedload of antitrust lawsuits and helping put a more sympathetic government in the White House.

    Remember, Bill Gates’ video testimony helped with the finding of fact against the company in the first place and condemned Microsoft in the court of public opinion.

    Secondly, when Gates was in the hot seat the company made some shocking errors:

    • Microsoft Bob – don’t know about it? That’s because it bombed
    • The Road Ahead (first edition) – ghost writers had to tear this apart and rewrite it replacing up to 30 per cent of the content, Gates had dismissed the Internet and missed the boat. They spent hundreds of millions before they caught back up
    • Cairo – during the development of Windows’95, Microsoft spent a lot of money developing some wicked cool technologies that improved searching for data on a computer amongst other things. Cairo was designed to unify the DOS and NT based products on one state-of-the-art platform (this unification happened much later with Windows XP). Along the way a lot of cool stuff got culled, the market got an inferior product which sold despite being launched with a Rolling Stones live performance of ‘Start me up’. Windows’95 went on to be a technological wasteland and an unprecendented commerical success. Cairo still makes Microsoft Longhorn look good

    Thirdly it takes more than Microsoft Longhorn, a few penguins and unruly autistic children to take down the house of Microsoft. Why? Because thousands of IT people want to follow each other like lemmings rather than looking at alternatives that may provide their business with competitive advantage? The real compelling reason why Microsoft should not be scared of Microsoft Longhorn – politico-economics. Below is a quote taken from the I, Cringely column of August 14, 2003:

    Why aren’t Apple Macintosh computers more popular in large mainstream organizations? Whatever the gigahertz numbers say, Macintoshes are comparable in performance to Windows or Linux machines. Whatever the conventional wisdom or the Microsoft marketing message, Macs aren’t dramatically more expensive to buy and on a Total Cost of Ownership basis they are probably cheaper. Nobody would argue that Macs are harder to use. Clearly, they are easier to use, especially on a network. So what’s the problem? Why do Macs seem to exist only in media outfits? Apple is clearly wondering the same thing because the company recently surveyed owners of their xServe 1U boxes asking what Apple could do to make them more attractive? For those who own xServes, they are darned attractive — small, powerful, energy-efficient, easy to configure and manage, and offering dramatic savings for applications like streaming. Yet, Apple appears to be having a terrible time selling the things.

    I used to think it came down to nerd ego. Macs were easy to use, so they didn’t get the respect of nerds who measured their testosterone levels by how fluently they could navigate a command line interface. Now, I think differently. Now, I think Macs threaten the livelihood of IT staff. If you recommend purchasing a computer that requires only half the support of the machine it is replacing, aren’t you putting your job in danger? Exactly.

    Ideally, the IT department ought to recommend the best computer for the job, but more often than not, they recommend the best computer for the IT department’s job.

    Now another question: Why are Linux computers gaining in popularity with large organizations while Macs, which are based after all on BSD Unix, aren’t? While there is certainly a lot to be said for Linux in competition with various flavors of Windows (Linux is faster, more memory-efficient, more secure, has more sources of supply, supports many more simultaneous users per box in a server environment, and is clearly cheaper to buy), the advantage over Macintosh computers is less clear.

    Again, it comes down to the IT Department Full Employment Act. Adopting Linux allows organizations to increase their IT efficiency without requiring the IT department to increase it’s efficiency. It takes just as many nerds to support 100 Linux boxes as 100 Windows boxes, yet Linux boxes are cheaper and can support more users. The organization is better off while the IT department is unscathed and unchallenged.

    I am not claiming that every organization should throw out its PCs and replace them with Macs, but the numbers are pretty clear, and the fact that more Macs don’t make it into server racks has to be based on something, and I think that something is CIO self-interest.

    Macs reduce IT head count while Linux probably increases IT head count, simple as that.

    I didn’t come up with this very smart idea, it came from a reader. That same reader made the point that every part of an organization ought to be concerned with improving the bottom line, which is to say with being more productive. Yet IT typically doesn’t work that way.

    All you aspiring ‘Neutron’ Jack Welch’s out there, you have an ideal target to squeeze for efficiency get liquidating staff and taking technological change out of the hands of the IT director (better still fire his ass and buy the mortgage on his property for peanuts). Before you ask, outsourcing just ships the problem out of the country but not out of your life.

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