from Paul Smalera:
What real Internet censorship looks like
Lately Internet users in the U.S. have been worried about censorship, copyright legalities and data privacy. Between Twitter’s new censorship policy, the global protests over SOPA/PIPA and ACTA and the outrage over Apple’s iOS allowing apps like Path to access the address book without prior approval, these fears have certainly seemed warranted. But we should also remember that Internet users around the world face far more insidious limitations and intrusions on their Internet usage -- practices, in fact, that would horrify the average American.
Sadly, most of the rest of the world has come to accept censorship as a necessary evil. Although I recently argued that Twitter’s censorship policy at least had the benefit of transparency, it’s still an unfortunate cost of doing global business for a company born and bred with the freedoms of the United States, and founded by tech pioneers whose opportunities and creativity stem directly from our Constitution. Yet by the standards of dictatorial regimes, Internet users in countries like China, Syria and Iran should consider themselves lucky if Twitter’s relatively modest censorship program actually keeps those countries’ governments from shutting down the service. As we are seeing around the world, chances are, unfortunately, it won’t.
Consider the freedoms -- or lack thereof -- Internet users have in Iran. Since this past week, some 30 million Iranian users have been without Internet service thanks to that country’s blocking of the SSL protocol, right at the time of its parliamentary elections. SSL is what turns “http” -- the basic way we access the Web -- into “https”, which Gmail, your bank, your credit card company and thousands of other services use to secure data. SSL provides data encryption so that only each end point -- your browser and the Web server you’re logging into -- can decrypt and access the data contained therein.
By blocking SSL, Iran has crippled Tor, a program that enables Internet users to anonymize not just their content but their physical location as well. Tor is a very common workaround for users in totalitarian regimes to access Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and other services. It’s hard to come up with an apt analogy for Iran’s unprecedented blockage -- it’s not just that the letters you send are read by the Post Office and photocopied for their records, it’s that the Post Roads themselves have been closed off, so you can’t even send a letter in the first place. That’s the net effect of blocking SSL in Iran.
The hacking group Anonymous has brought down all kinds of websites in protest, mostly over copyright, in the U.S. and Europe. I don’t advocate their targeting any country’s servers for retribution, but where is the outrage or public demonstration or media attention over the denials of Iranians’ basic freedoms to communicate, via the Internet?
Unfortunately, it’s still too easy for Internet companies and even the Internet’s founding fathers to dismiss the importance of the tools they created in fostering free and open public dialogue, especially in places like Iran. Recently, legendary engineer and Google Vice-President Vint Cerf published a New York Times op-ed entitled “Internet Access is Not a Human Right,” where he wrote: “Internet access is always just a tool for obtaining something else more important.” How wrong he is. Cerf’s line of thinking eviscerates the Internet -- the wonder of the modern world he helped build. Cerf argues that humans have the right to “lead healthy, meaningful lives,” including having “freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.” Yet, we live in the 21st century: It’s hard to see how, among people whose economies are developed enough to afford them communication devices, Cerf would excuse governments that curtail their citizens’ freedom and right to use the ultimate communications tool -- the global network of the Internet. In fact, in underdeveloped parts of the world, the cost to have a cell phone that connects to the Web can be quite affordable.
I’m not arguing semantics here -- if our society excludes the Internet from the fundamental rights of human communication, we also excuse totalitarian regimes like Iran’s from any repercussions when it comes to blocking that avenue of human contact. It’s a dangerous compromise to make in a world that only gets more digital with each passing day. And it also conveniently excuses the free world from having to do much of anything about it. We wouldn’t forgive Iran if it threw 30 million citizens into solitary confinement -- so why would we ignore it when the Iranian government effectively cuts the entire population off from the outside world, to stifle their voices during a critical electoral cycle?
Capitalism is evolving, but into what?
This is an excerpt from Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Abroad Will Change Business Everywhere, published this month by Harvard Business Review Press.
Like any “ism,” capitalism is a social construct; capitalism is only a term for what capitalists tend to believe and do. Beyond a few fundamentals—that it puts faith in markets as the best way to allocate resources, that it depends on private ownership of property, that it features mechanisms for accumulating capital to fund endeavors larger than individuals can undertake alone—very little about it is set in stone. This is why we often hear phrases suggesting different styles of capitalism: “capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” for example, or “Northern European social capitalism.” No surprise, then, that capitalism is subject to change.
And what’s behind that change? Again, at the theoretical level, it’s easy to surmise. Like any adaptive system, capitalism is nested in an environment, so any substantial change in that environment alters what it takes to thrive. It’s the same basic phenomenon as in nature: when the insect population of the Galapagos moves on to new flowers with a different shape, the beaks of the finches evolve in turn.
That the environment of global commerce is undergoing major change is no secret. Advancing technology, for one thing, constantly reinvents the context in which commerce operates. Demographics, too, have an effect, as the generations raised with new technological capabilities begin to fill positions of power. Most strikingly, the very geography of capitalism is shifting. With each passing year, emerging economies account for a larger proportion of global GDP; from 2004 to 2009, they accounted for almost all of the world’s GDP growth. Patterns of consumption are being upended as global standards of living rise; India’s middle class is now bigger than the entire U.S. population. Americans and others in the developed world have long fretted about job losses and other social implications of this huge and ongoing shift. But the impact of emerging economies will go beyond what anyone is talking about. It isn’t simply that capitalism will increasingly happen elsewhere. It’s that, taking root in different soil, capitalism itself will grow into something new.
Capitalism doesn’t evolve only in theory. The most cursory review of economic history shows how much it has changed in practice. The rules shift constantly. For example, when Great Britain was the epicenter of industrial capitalism, it was understood that a business founder who borrowed capital and then went belly-up should be shipped off to debtor’s prison—or worse, Texas (before air-conditioning). But U.S. capitalists more disposed to second chances later rewrote those rules, creating bankruptcy laws that encouraged entrepreneurial risk taking. The system morphed again with the introduction of limited liability, which allowed firms to shoulder the risk of large-scale manufacturing and, in doing so, gave rise to monopolies (an eventuality no one had worried about before). Even rock-solid assumptions—such as the assumption that currencies must be backed by precious metals—have been tossed aside as trade marches on. These are only a few, top-of-mind examples of ideas that cropped up locally, took hold, and changed capitalism globally.
At a more fundamental level, when production shifted from agriculture to industrial production, the theories of economics changed profoundly, because financial capital gradually overtook land in importance. As information—inherently not a scarce resource—becomes the most productive resource, economics will change again.
We’re convinced therefore that we’re on firm ground with our thesis: capitalism evolves, and even now it is evolving into something new. The question is, Into what?
Copernicus was standing on shoulders of Aristarchus of Samos, whose seminal on work heliocentrism work he noted. It seems Richard Morley needs a decent education.
Morley to Chris, “In order to see the solar system as it is, Copernicus had to be standing on the sun.”
from Paul Smalera:
Twitter’s censorship is a gray box of shame, but not for Twitter
Twitter’s announcement this week that it was going to enable country-specific censorship of posts is arousing fury around the Internet. Commentators, activists, protesters and netizens have said it’s “very bad news” and claim to be “#outraged”. Bianca Jagger, for one, asked how to go about boycotting Twitter, on Twitter, according to the New York Times. (Step one might be... well, never mind.) The critics have settled on #TwitterBlackout: all day on Saturday the 28th, they promised to not tweet, as a show of protest and solidarity with those who might be censored.
Here’s the thing: Like Twitter itself, it’s time for the Internet, and its chirping classes, to grow up. Twitter’s policy and its transparency pledge with the censorship watchdog Chilling Effects is the most thoughtful, honest and realistic policy to come out of a technology company in a long time. Even an unsympathetic reading of the new censorship policy bears that out.
To understand why, let’s unpack the policy a bit: First, Twitter has strongly implied it will not remove content under this policy. If that doesn’t sound like a crucial distinction from outright censorship, it is. Taking the new policy with existing ones, the only time Twitter says it will ever remove a tweet altogether is in response to a DMCA request. The DMCA may have its own flaws, but it is a form of censorship that lives separately from the process Twitter has outlined in this recent announcement. Where the DMCA process demands a deletion of copyright-infringing content, Twitter’s censorship policy promises no such takedown: it promises instead only to withhold censored content from the country where the content has been censored. Nothing else.
To be sure, that’s censorship of a kind, but compared to the industry censorship even Americans have long lived with -- take the Motion Picture Association of America, which still censors films based on dubious standards of taste and morality -- it’s positively enlightened. And it never permanently destroys or pre-empts content, the way the MPAA does.
Further, for a country to censor content, it has to make a “valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity” to Twitter, which will then decide what to do with the request. Twitter will also make an effort to notify users whose content is censored about what happened and why, and even give them a method to challenge the request. According to Twitter’s post, a record of the action will also be filed to the Chilling Effects website. The end result of a successful request is that the tweet or user in question is replaced by a gray box that notifies other readers inside the censoring country that the Tweet has been censored:
disagree with your reasoning if the end result of a successful censorship request is (quote) “that the tweet or user in question is replaced by a gray box that notifies other readers inside the censoring country that the Tweet has been censored…. it’s instead a bright signal to a country’s online citizens that their government is limiting their free speech.”
condoms for tweets and safe social intercourse
timid walter mitty comes to mind … ‘bright signals’ and all
@ iq160 – finding alternatives to restrictive laws are the jouissance of internetting
Stopping the Stop Online Piracy Act
Now that Congress has hit pause on its controversial Stop Online Piracy Act and nearly every argument about the merits and failings of the piece of copyright legislation has been made, it’s a good time to ask: what, in 2012, will it take to actually stop a bill like this?
Because despite the delay, the situation still isn’t looking so hot for those looking to bring down SOPA. Amendments to tone down the bill’s more disliked points have been routinely defeated in the House Judiciary Committee by numbers sufficient to pass the bill to the full House floor.
But, at this point in the process, numbers aren’t everything. In the wake of the Arab Spring, talk of censoring technology hits the ears differently. More important is that in SOPA’s short two-month life, opposition to it has catalyzed online and off. But to succeed, its opponents will have to both boost the volume of their public alarm and convince Congress that, in an Internet-soaked 2012, questioning SOPA needn’t be politically fatal.
Washington isn’t the land of Luddites it once was. Members of Congress, of course, love their smartphones; Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are political staples. (Twitter says just over 85 percent of representatives in each chamber are on the service.) But the challenge for SOPA’s opponents has been to demonstrate that the power and joys of Facebook and, say, SOPA’s questionable domain-name filtering policy are two parts of the same webby whole.
We’re seeing that understanding catalyze amazingly quickly—at least among web users. Starting with a small band of early objectors, resistance to SOPA has been spreading out, gathering steam, and popping up in all sorts of places. There’s been a tsunami of Twitter traffic against the bill, much of it tagged with the #SOPA hashtag. That chatter has driven blog posts, given journalists fodder, and provided constant commentary on Congress’s often convoluted and confusing proceedings.
And, notably, the bill has prodded the entrepreneurs who run some of the Internet’s best-known sites into creative acts of protest. The blogging site Tumblr mock-censored itself. The file-sharing site Scribd posted a SOPA button that, when clicked, disappeared documents. Wikipedia is considering a temporary block on access to its millions of entries. Beyond that, heaps of calls have been made to Congress, engineers have written letters, and SOPA-doubting editorials have been penned by such newspapers as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Ronald Reagan engineered operation Plagiarized Indigantion to get rid of people hacking the Department of Defense and pentagon and he did a great job of it, ten years after his death it still serves globally.
Electronic medical records after Google Health’s failure
By Vineeta Vijayaraghavan and Clayton Christensen The opinions expressed are their own.
It may seem that the viability of electronic health records looks dismal after the failure of Google Health, yet in integrated health systems around the country they have been implemented and utilized by patients. In Google’s failure we must see an opportunity to address the fragmentation of our healthcare system and take notice of those health systems that are offering innovative services that help provide better care at a lower cost.
Earlier this month, Google announced that it was closing down Google Health, its foray into personal health records, because it failed to find “a way to translate limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people.” Based on 30 years of research, we are firm believers that technology will enable disruptive innovations in healthcare – the types of innovations that will dramatically lower costs, increase quality and improve access to millions. But Google Health was doomed from the start. The obstacle standing in the way of its success was the massive fragmentation of our healthcare system, and its closure signifies the urgent need to integrate healthcare.
Google thinks big. With Google Health, it would have loved to solve the fundamental problems facing consumers – making it easier to schedule appointments and communicate with doctors, allowing patients to manage medications remotely, or even helping them avoid the doctor’s office entirely. Accomplishing these goals would have almost certainly inspired consumers to embrace electronic health records. But to do so, Google needed a fragmented maze of insurers, hospitals and medical groups to also share their data, requiring them to clear complex regulatory and privacy issues to complete the onerous process of bringing their own information online. These organizations do not have the right incentives in place to invest in such an effort, and so Google Health failed.
There is only one way to speed up the process of getting robust health records online, and that is integration. Over the last year, we closely studied seven integrated health delivery systems – which typically contain a medical group, an insurer and a hospital – and found that electronic health records are immensely popular with consumers enrolled in the systems because they solved their most urgent problems.
At one well-known system, HealthPartners in Minnesota, patients can access their online records to schedule an appointment and have all their files automatically available to a new specialist the patient might never have seen before. At Group Health Cooperative in Washington, when patients go in for a blood test, test results have often been emailed to them and added to their electronic health record before they even arrive home.
Even the Medicare population served by some Group Health physicians has embraced electronic health records, contrary to expectations. In fact, some physicians have seen a 50 percent drop in in-patient visits by Medicare patients while retaining the same satisfaction ratings and outcomes. If replicated widely, that result has astounding implications for lowering the cost of care across our healthcare system.
Vineeta,
There are, of course, a bazillion different reasons why a given idea might or might not work in practice, with much of that most immediately having to do with the skill (or not) of the entrepreneur bringing it to market.
In that regard, rather than become fixated on the idea that “the reason’ for failure is due to the fragmented condition of our health care system, one must take the perspective that Google Health failed because it did not take the fragmented condition of the health care system into account – and while there’s only a subtle difference in those words, the difference in meaning is anything but.
Said another way then, the responsibility to develop a business proposition which drives critical stakeholders towards adoption lies with the entrepreneur and not the other way around. Clearly that did not take place for this initiative and as such, the project (in its current form and under this particular sponsorship) died a predictable and poductive death. That isn’t to say that a universal medical ID won’t ever come into existence, it only means that that it’s not going to come about in this particular form at this particular moment.
On what remains in the discussion, I’d challenge the assertion that integrated health systems are necessarily ‘better’ than modular systems. Whereas integrated systems can be configured for optimal overall cost at a given point in time, such efficiencies can be developed in a manner which detract from other stakeholder priorities – and since existing integrated health care systems have not come to dominate the health care industry despite having had a longstanding opportunity to do so, I’d suspect that such may be the case here.
So while it could be that we’re all being held hostage by one or another monopolistic element within the existing system, you and I both know that once an appropriate disruptive innovation becomes deployed AND adopted, elements such as these will fail and fall by the wayside of their own weight – and the next era of healthcare management methodology will take its place.
On that basis – what has transpired is just another of the failures needed to guide providers towards convergence on a method or means that will actually work well enough for a enough people such that it has the opportunity to become improved and eventually assume the dominant role in the way health care is managed and maintained. Until that time, we can (and should) surmise and experiment, but only the market can dictate which approaches will be sufficient to initiate the eventual (and inevitable) departure from the incumbent system.
Google’s greatest skill – and challenge
By Jeff Jarvis Jarvis is the author of “What Would Google Do?” and teaches at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His next book, “Public Parts”, will be published later this year.
The miracle of Google was that it could accomplish anything—let alone become the fastest growing company in the history of the world and the greatest disruptive force in business and society today—while being run by a committee, a junta, a council of the gods.
In management, as in every other arena of business, technology, and media, Google broke every rule and made new ones.
It should not be a shock that Eric Schmidt has stepped aside as CEO and made room for Larry Page. Schmidt was the prince regent who ruled until the boy king could take the throne while training him to do so. We knew that this would happen. We just forgot that it would.
When I interviewed Schmidt a few weeks ago and asked about pressure over privacy, China, and lobbying, he said, “This is not the No. 1 crisis at Google.” What is? “Growth,” he said, “just growth.”
Scale is Google’s greatest skill and greatest challenge. It scaled search (vs. quaint Yahoo, which thought it could catalogue this web thing). It scaled advertising (vs. the media companies that today don’t know how to grow, only shrink). It is scaling mobile (by giving away Android). It has tried to scale innovation (with its 20 percent rule)—but that’s the toughest.
Initially we thought these guys were God — Now we know they are God.
from MediaFile:
Should you trust Facebook with your email?
- Michael Fertik is the CEO and Founder of ReputationDefender, the online privacy and reputation company. The views expressed are his own. -
Facebook already knows a massive amount about you. They know your age, what you look like, what you like, what you do for fun, where you go, what you eat, whom you know, whom you know well, whom you sleep with, who your best friends and family are, and, again, how old they are, what they like, and so on.
On top of that, Facebook has a well-known history of privacy breaches or at least snafus. Publicly they seem committed to the notion that privacy is dead. Their CEO and Founder has said as much.
Never mind that this view is not shared by the public, which is hungry for privacy in the digital age. And never mind that the “death of privacy” would serve exactly the interests of a digital media company. It seems that it may be an honestly held belief among top leadership of Facebook that privacy is and should be dead.
Now, Facebook is expanding its reach even further. It will be rolling out a unified, cross-platform messaging system that will combine features of email, SMS, and chat. The company will offer users @facebook.com email addresses. At first blush, there’s nothing altogether new about the development from a technical standpoint. Unified messaging has been a goal since the advent of disunified messaging—more or less since SMS, IM, and chat became comparably popular and used in parallel.
But a Facebook-based unified messaging system may offer different appeal and new risks, and not just because it can instantaneously distribute its feature set to its 500 million-plus user base.
It is impossible for a digital media company to care deeply about privacy. You are the only asset they have to sell. The promise of advertising in the Internet age is that the platform can connect a brand with the individual person most likely to buy. The only way that happens is through the collection and use of huge amounts of data about each of us, followed by the sale of access to the data or the person they describe.
from The Great Debate UK:
Growth of mobile commerce taps touch Web users
As the mobile phone industry puts more emphasis on marketing hand-held smartphones, consumers are finding ways to dodge restrictive model-compatible applications by using Web-based programs.
Unlike single-device applications, mobile touch websites run on most mobile browsers freeing users from reliance on a specific operating system.
A recent study by Taptu suggests that the mobile touch web will play an important role in expanding mobile commerce.
The economics of software development and publishing favours Web-friendly applications, the study says, although some experts argue that certain applications benefit from being platform-specific.
The 2007 iPhone touchscreen led to an initial wave of more than 148,000 mobile-touch applications, and now there is a second wave of content for touchscreen devices derived from the Web, designed with "finger-friendly layouts" and lightweight fast-loading pages, the report says, estimating that there are more than 326,000 mobile touch websites.
CEO Steve Ives explained the findings of the study to Reuters from Taptu's Clerkenwell office in this video clip:
from The Great Debate UK:
Are publication bans outdated in the Internet era?
The debate over freedom of expression and the impact of social networking on democratic rights in the courts is in focus in Canada after a Facebook group became the centre of controversy when it may have violated a publication ban.
The group, which has more than 7,000 members, was set up to commemorate the murder of a 2-year-old boy in Oshawa, Ontario.
The breach of a publication ban could lead to a mistrial, a fine and even jail time. Violating a ban could taint the opinions of witnesses or jurors, and the news media must wait to report information protected under a publication ban until after the trial is over.
The ban on the case of the Oshawa toddler was lifted by the court, but it raised questions over whether court-ordered publication bans are feasible in the Internet era.
With the popularity of such global social networking groups as Facebook and Twitter, can the courts control the pre-trial spread of information? What are the implications for fair trials?
"The Internet really has posed quite a problem in the sense of trying to keep things in check," argues Toronto-based criminal lawyer Enzo Rondinelli.
It’s going to be difficult to eliminate pre-trial publicity as a whole, but there are other powers that the courts can use to stem the dangers associated with pre-trial publicity, he told Reuters at his office.
from The Great Debate UK:
The end of .com, the beginning of .yourbrand
-Joe White is chief operating officer at Gandi, an Internet domain name registration firm. The opinions expressed are his own.-
Despite the importance of domain names for companies and the extraordinary amount of money many have paid for them, the vast majority of businesses are unprepared for imminent changes to the Internet.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international body that oversees the structure of the internet, is liberalising the market for domain name extensions – the .com or .net part of a web address – from the beginning of 2010. This means that anyone, in theory, can apply to operate an extension. So alongside .com, .net, and .org, we will see .whateveryoulike.
Historically, companies have considered their domain to be a critical part of their brand identity. Some domains have been sold for millions of dollars – sex.com was reportedly sold for $14 million – and multinational companies often register up to 20,000 different variations of their brand to try and stop opportunists exploiting it. However, despite this historic investment and interest, the vast majority (two thirds) of businesses are unprepared for imminent changes, according to some research we did a little while ago in conjunction with the Future Laboratory.
This is interesting given that there are real opportunities for companies. It will mean companies can readdress the way they communicate with customers, partners, or investors. We’ve already seen a shift in consumer behaviour where the high-street and virtual world have blended. The growth in blogging and social networking means people have also shifted their identity online. The liberalisation of top level domain names will help to blend the activities of both businesses and consumers with the potential to create a personalised brand experience.
Toyota, for example, could create the .toyota domain and register europe.toyota and usa.toyota, and set up sites for individual brands (highlander.toyota) and use targeted domains for different markets such as customers and suppliers (suppliers.toyota, dealers.toyota, buying.toyota). Or, Nike could create a personalised brand experience using yourname.nike, with training programmes, suggested products, networking pages which could link with sponsored athletes and so on. In addition, some companies could do one-off marketing campaigns or initiatives to support individual product launches. For example, Tastyhamburgersandhealthysalads.mcdonalds or Doveforrealwomen.unilever.
Indicators suggest that consumers will embrace this change. As part of the same research, we interviewed 1,000 consumers and one in five (19 per cent) said an extension such as .nike or .microsoft would be memorable. Considering only 24 per cent think .com is memorable, this shows the future potential for branded top-level domains.
Well I think it would go a long way to resolving the issues of us running out of domain names anytime soon as well as protecting users from phishing websites. One thing that will need to be done is to price these new domain extensions so that people can register these instead of just large corporations.
76% of people can’t remember .com? That’s sad.
The example of Iran is well taken in this article, but I would like to add one: I lived and taught in Zhuhai, China, from August 2007 to July 2009. As an expatriate, I didn’t seem to have my computer monitored and censored very much, but my students at United International College surely did.
We take our freedoms for granted. I don’t any more. I know what it is like to live in a country where “freedom of expression” is a sham. We shouldn’t let that happen here, which doesn’t mean condoning criminal activities on the net, but it does mean a conscious guarding of freedom of speech.