MSNBC E-signatures law takes effect
"It is pointless for music companies to try to outlaw Napster-like file sharing with expensive lawsuits, according to a report published today by Forrester Research."

"When the federal e-signature law goes into effect Sunday, proponents are hoping it will usher in a new era of clickable contracts, people sailing through airports without lines and establishing brokerage accounts with the push of a button. But don’t expect this utopia anytime soon."

News.Com Digital signatures prepare to wipe away ink
"The law is designed to make consumers and businesses feel more secure about sealing big-ticket deals, such as buying a house, online by making an electronic signature just as binding as one in ink. While that legal guarantee is expected to accelerate the growth of e-commerce, the law may be more of a boon for companies developing e-signature technology than for consumers or businesses, analysts said.

Corporations and government offices have been working to implement a variety of competing e-signature technologies since June, when President Clinton signed the bill into law--doing so first with a ballpoint pen and then using a smart card to mark his digital signature.

While this is an important first step in moving all aspects of business online, analysts say it will take time for the program to gain consumer confidence.

"Most of the digital signature excitement is fluff," said Gartner analyst Joe Pescatore. "We will not see immediate results. Consumers aren't leaping to buy cars or homes online. There is no real public outcry for a need for digital signatures.""

The Standard The Other Side of the Divide
"Walk down any street in East Timor's capitol of Dili and the scene is the same: blackened, roofless buildings and heaps of rubble. Severed telephone lines dangle from exposed walls, charred satellite dishes point skyward, and traffic lights stare blindly at intersections. Only a tiny fraction of the city's 60,000 residents have running water or electricity. Pigs and chickens pick rubbish from drainage ditches while a few children play trampoline on bits of corrugated roofing. Emaciated dogs trail clouds of flies.

The devastation is complete. Little escaped the political violence of last September after a popular vote ended 24 years of brutal military rule by neighboring Indonesia. For weeks afterward, anti-independence militias, Timorese thugs with rumored ties to the Indonesian military, roamed the country furiously burning only scorched earth behind them.

Now East Timor, the world's newest nation, must build an economic, political and physical infrastructure from little more than ashes.

The work has already begun."

redux [08.07.00]
First Monday Negotiating the Global and the Local: How Thai Culture Co-opts the Internet
"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."

The New York Times It Takes the Internet to Raise a Cambodian Village
[requires 'free' registration]
"Overlooked in last month's Group of 8 discussions about the challenge of a growing "digital divide" between the information rich and the data deprived was the work of Bernard Krisher, a 69-year-old former journalist who is trying to bring the Internet to one of the poorest regions in Asia."

"Though the effort is on a small scale, Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist who is also engaged in the effort to aid Cambodian villages, said the project demonstrated that the global impact of the Internet could ultimately serve to reverse the disparity between urban wealth and rural poverty.

"The Net will reverse urbanization," said Mr. Negroponte, director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory. "The past 150 years of development have been one of urbanization. To be rural has meant to be poor. The Net could bring some of the same opportunities to the rural world and maybe even turn being rural into being rich.""

redux [05.14.00]
The New York Times Rising Internet Use Quietly Transforms Way Japanese Live
[requires 'free' registration]
""The use of the Internet here has started more as a social thing that in the end is going to have enormous implications," said Jiro Kokuryo, a professor at Keio University's business school, who specializes in e-commerce and information systems. "It is changing people's point of view and empowering them to challenge traditional ways of doing things."

Groups that have traditionally had little influence here are finding their voices and taking action on the Internet. Farmers like the Kimuras escape the huge, bureaucratic distribution system that has been sucking up their profits. Working mothers are banding together to form business ventures. Small companies are using the Internet to expand business and decrease reliance on a primary corporate customer. These are all revolutionary developments by Japanese standards, and not limited to marginal players."

redux [04.23.00]
The New York Times When Villages Go Global: How a Byte of Knowledge Can Be Dangerous, Too
[requires 'free' registration]
"The prospects seemed bright when the Internet was recently introduced in a remote part of the mountainous Cotopoxi region in Ecuador. Under the guidance of aid workers, Quichua-speaking peasants planned to gather crop information and sell their crafts over the Web.

Soon, though, it was discovered that some of the men were using the computer to visit pornographic sites. "

"Dismayed, the women began to question how the men were treating them, and a debate ensued over the common practice of beating women. Although use of the Internet was later curtailed, its introduction unexpectedly generated discussion on a once taboo topic.

"The changes created by the Internet in rich industrialized nations are well known, affecting everything from how people date to how they work. But less is known about the impact on societies with limited contact with the rest of the world. As such experiments multiply, at least one outcome seems certain: the way people in these communities relate to each other and with the world is likely to be altered forever."

Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture
"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

MSNBC First handheld virus deletes apps
"A new era in computer vulnerability began Friday morning when the first-ever virus for handheld organizers struck. A patch was made available Friday afternoon, but experts warned the virus could continue spreading."

"THE VIRUS WAS REPORTED in the form of a tiny file that rummages through Palm Inc. handheld computing devices, ruining their capabilities and deleting files.

While the virus, called “Phage,” seems not to have spread widely, one virus expert said he expects the destructive file to be shared among virus writers and given even greater capability to disguise itself and spread."

"Hypponen said it is only a matter of time before a similar virus is written for handheld computers, sending malicious programs over wireless Internet connections."

redux [08.31.00]
Wired News Wireless Phone Hack Attack?
"During a routine software check, a Norwegian company recently discovered what might be the first hacker attack on mobile phones and other personal digital assistants.

Norway-based WAP service developer Web2WAP was testing its software on Nokia phones with the short messaging service (SMS) when it realized that suspicious code was being sent to the phones and causing them "to freeze.""

""This is the beginning of a whole new era, now that we're moving more from the wired to wireless," [Dan Takata, a virus specialist] said. "Right now (these attacks) are not destructive, but in the not too distant future we will see malicious attacks on mobile phones and Palm devices.""

MSNBC A new era for computer viruses?
"Will catching a computer virus one day be just like catching a cold? What if merely sitting next to the wrong person on the bus could not only give you sniffles, but could erase all your morning appointments or drain your cell phone’s power? For years, computer security experts have engaged in such whimsical hypotheticals. But the recently discovered Palm Pilot virus suggests that a frightening new era of computer viruses — one where they spread more like biological viruses — has begun."

redux [06.06.00]
Fox News Next-Gen Cell Phones Could Be Targets for Viruses
"As next-generation communication devices become smarter and more PC-like in functionality, they may also become the target of virus writers who will unleash a new breed of malicious payloads."

"While today's devices aren't at too great a risk for viruses, next-generation cell phones will be more susceptible because of the two things cell phone users want the most: programmability and Internet access."

BBC Ericsson unveils Bluetooth
"Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson has unveiled its first mobile phone using the Bluetooth wireless technology.

The Bluetooth technology provides wireless connections between the phone and other electronic devices such as computers."

"The new phone will be WAP-enabled, allowing the user to hook up to the net with their phone, sending and receiving data at high speed."

Crypto-Gram Computer Security: Will We Ever Learn?
"If we've learned anything from the past couple of years, it's that computer security flaws are inevitable. Systems break, vulnerabilities are reported in the press, and still many people put their faith in the next product, or the next upgrade, or the next patch. "This time it's secure," they say. So far, it hasn't been. "

"No one is paying attention because no one has to.

Computer security products, like software in general, have a very odd product quality model. It's unlike an automobile, a skyscraper, or a box of fried chicken. If you buy a product, and get harmed because of a manufacturer's defect, you can sue...and you'll win. Car-makers can't get away with building cars that explode on impact; chicken shops can't get away with selling buckets of fried chicken with the odd rat mixed in. It just wouldn't do for building contractors to say thing like, "Whoops. There goes another one. Sorry. But just wait for Skyscraper 1.1; it'll be 100% collapse-free!"

Software is different. It is sold without any claims whatsoever. Your accounts receivable database can crash, taking your company down with it, and you have no claim against the software company. Your word processor can accidentally corrupt your files and you have no recourse. Your firewall can turn out to be completely ineffectual -- hardly better than having nothing at all -- and yet it's your fault. Microsoft fielded Hotmail with a bug that allowed anyone to read the accounts of 40 or so million subscribers, password or no password, and never bothered to apologize. "

Silicon.Com Lawsuits dubbed 'a waste of time' in online music wars
"It is pointless for music companies to try to outlaw Napster-like file sharing with expensive lawsuits, according to a report published today by Forrester Research."

"The music giants would do better to steal back their markets by offering quality alternatives to pirating software, it claims.

According to Forrester, music publishers stand to lose as much as $3.1bn by 2005 as online music piracy increases. "You have to beat pirates at their own game, otherwise record companies could sustain large losses," said Eric Scheirer, analyst at Forrester and author of the report.

Peter Beverley, vice chairman at Magex, Natwest's Digital Rights Management (DRM) business, added: "The legal process on its own won't solve the piracy problem and nor will digital management technology. Instead you need to offer products that are worth having."

NYPost.Com Music Industry Tries to Make the Most of MP3
"THE land of Napster was action-filled this week when three top-selling bands with huge followings in GenX-ville decided to use the file-sharing program to promote their new albums - in one way or another.

The sands have shifted again.

Earlier this year, artists used Napster to get their point across. In one corner was Lars Urlich of Metallica, which has sued Napster. In another corner is Limp Bizkit, whose tour was sponsored by Napster.

Artists are now turning to the technology itself to show which side of the issue they are on."

TechWeb MP3 Player Sales Rising, To Tune Of $1.25 Billion
"It's probably not what the recording industry had in mind when it took companies like MP3.com to court. Legal proceedings have helped spur consumer awareness of downloading music to the point that sales of digital music players supporting MP3 will soar to $1.25 billion by the end of 2002. That's up from $126 million last year, according to Cahners In-Stat Group, Scottsdale, Ariz. In 1999 there were only five manufacturers shipping the devices; today, there are more than 50."

The New York Times All the World's a Campus
[requires 'free' registration]
"Imitating the companies they study, some of the business schools are spending millions of dollars to set up satellite operations around the globe. The schools' rationale for expansion mimics the goals of international companies as well: they hope to find new sources of revenue, establish a brand name in far-away places and learn lessons about how other markets function."

redux [08.03.00]
The New York Times Columbia Sets Pace in Profiting Off Research
[requires 'free' registration]
"When Fredric D. Price, the president of a nutritional-supplements company, sought a partner to create an online information company, NutritionU.com, he approached a Columbia University professor, Dr. Richard J. Deckelbaum.

He hit pay dirt.

Some academics might have run the other way, concerned about the motives and standards in the emerging commercial market for cyber education. But Dr. Deckelbaum, director of Columbia's Institute of Human Nutrition, viewed the Internet as a way to reach a wider population.

Columbia was interested, too. The venture fit neatly into its strategy to turn more of its intellectual capital -- the knowledge, research and teaching of its professors -- into financial capital."

redux [05.09.00]
The Standard A Brand Called Stanford
"For decades, Stanford University has served as an intellectual incubator to students and faculty who have gone on to found such Silicon Valley icons as Hewlett-Packard (HWP) , Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Yahoo. Now Stanford has hatched a startup of its own."

"On Tuesday, the university launched its first for-profit venture, an Internet medical company called e-Skolar. The startup will market an online information service for physicians called Stanford Skolar, M.D."

""We've gotten some income from our associations [with Stanford-inspired companies] but it's minimal to the value created." Determined to profit from its intellectual property, Stanford formed e-Skolar, taking a majority ownership stake."

Netfuture Who's Killing Higher Education? (or is it suicide?)
"A growing consensus holds that new information technologies foretell the end of higher education as we have known it. I suspect this is true. Its truth, however, is not that the technologies are positively revolutionizing education. Rather, what we are watching is more like the end -- the final perfection and dead-end extreme -- of the old regime's shortcomings."

"All this worries a growing contingent of educators, who fear the corporation's "crushing solicitude". (The phrase is William F. Buckley's which he applied many years ago to the ministrations of centralized government.) I share this fear, but it seems to me that the more fundamental issue often goes unnoted: our changing notions about what education is make it inevitable that business and industry should step into the picture aggressively. If you want efficient delivery of effective facts and procedures, then business -- already attuned to such computationally rigorous training -- will far outperform the university.

In other words, having increasingly accepted their role as training grounds for business -- which is what the information-transfer model of education implies -- universities are now finding that business is better situated to train its own employees than schools are. At best the universities will simply hire themselves out to corporations.

NPR Stanford's Own Internet Company
"NPR's Chris Arnold reports that today Stanford University in California is announcing the launch of its own internet company, e-skolar."

Inside Talking About a Revolution or, What We Learned From a Napster Party
"We have seen the future of digital media and it is even scarier for the traditional media companies than their worst nightmares."

"The experience suggests that the looming combination of high-speed connectivity to American homes, ever-increasing desktop processing power and home data storage capacity plus peer-to-peer file sharing is more incendiary than we ever allowed ourselves to imagine. Because never again will we think of music, or eventually any cultural creation, as produced by a label, network or imprint, packaged, purchased and sitting on a shelf in our homes."

Wired News GPulp Opens Up Web Searches
"The Gnutella Next Generation development team announced on Friday that they are developing a new open source technology for search engines.

The group believes that "gPulp" (general Purpose Location Protocol) will eventually become the standard search tool on every network and computing device. "GPulp will be a ubiquitous, open, free, and powerful tool that lets users find anything –- anything! -- on any network," promised Gnutella Next Generation (Gnutella NG) team manager Sebastien Lambla."

""More and more, the big names of the computer industry, like Intel, recognize that peer-to-peer technology has a huge potential, and that it will change the landscape of the Internet industry. They will be interested in gPulp."

Dan Gillmor Dan Gillmor: P2P furor putting focus on profoundly important issue
"HYPE is a terrible thing to waste. Technology people, like politicians, take this notion famously to heart.

The latest evidence stems from the high-pitched furor surrounding the Napster music phenomenon. Napster is the poster child for what's known as ``peer-to-peer'' networking, or P2P -- Internet-based communication and collaboration that goes far beyond what we've known in the past.

The emergence of P2P in its latest forms also challenges, more convincingly than anything I've seen in a long time, the notion of ``network computing,'' where virtually all of the intelligence and data reside in centralized server computers. Network computing still makes sense in some ways, but it may become one of those technologies that sounded good but was eclipsed by progress before it took hold.

The P2P hype becomes annoying at times, however, especially when people attach the label to unrelated ideas. And it leads skeptics to ask whether we're into yet another craze like the "push technology'' mania that surfaced a few years ago and faded away under scrutiny.

Not this time. The furor over P2P in general, and Napster in particular, is actually useful. It has focused attention on something profoundly important."

redux [08.21.00]
Inside Human Nature 1, New Paradigm 0: On Gnutella, There Are Plenty of Files but not Enough Sharing
"Napster and other file-exchange services love to tout the virtues of sharing. But a digital world where most people are selfish and don't share files isn't just impolite, it could threaten the future viability of such peer-to-peer networks.

Raising profound issues, two researchers at the prominent Xerox Palo Alto Research Center published a paper on Gnutella last week. Their main discovery: 70 percent of users don't share any files and 76 percent share less than 10. According to research scientists Eytan Adar and Bernardo Huberman, this can lead to system blockages as the relatively few sharers are overwhelmed by file requests from freeloaders. With a few downloaders hogging the available bandwidth, it effectively blocks the majority of users from accessing the tiny pool of file providers.

More importantly, the study implies that copyright interests may have an easier time than suspected chasing down pirates."

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center: Internet Ecologies Area Free Riding on Gnutella
"An extensive analysis of user traffic on Gnutella shows a significant amount of free riding in the system. By sampling messages on the Gnutella network over a 24-hour period, we established that 70% of Gnutella users share no files, and 90% of the users answer no queries. Furthermore, we found out that free riding is distributed evenly between domains, so that no one group contributes significantly more than others, and that peers that volunteer to share files are not necessarily those who have desirable ones. We argue that free riding leads to degradation of the system performance and adds vulnerability to the system. If this trend continues copyright issues might become moot compared to the possible collapse of such systems."

Wired News Two Fake Brains Better Than One
"A few weeks ago, computer scientist Chris McKinstry announced a plan to harness the brain power of Internet users to fuel an artificially intelligent thinking machine.

Web surfers flocked to his Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project website, and McKinstry's database of mindpixels -- "one-bit" pieces of knowledge -- swelled so quickly that his system became temporarily overloaded."

"But even though AI laymen took to McKinstry's decentralized, profit-sharing model of artificial intelligence (anyone who enters data gets a share in the company), many in the academic AI community balked at his plans.

Now, it seems that the academy is changing its tune, as no less venerable an institution than MIT's Media Lab has decided to collaborate with McKinstry."

I, Cringely Put On Your Thinking Cap : Chris McKinstry Wants to Build a Brain Accelerator
"Who cares if a computer is capable of thought? It is much more useful to have a computer that APPEARS capable of thought, which is to say a computer that experiences the world as we do. But how do you program a computer with the entire human experience? How do you tell a computer that a little salt is good but too much salt is too much? How do you teach a computer that "Kiss my butt" doesn't literally mean kiss my butt? And how, even if you could teach a computer these ideas, do you teach it all the ideas in between. That's when Chris McKinstry invented the mindpixel, and the Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project.

"All great truths are composed of a multitude of minor truths, and the minor truths are composed of massive numbers of atomic truths," says Chris. The basic facts he hopes to elicit from you and me are the atomic truths, items of binary consensus fact or mindpixels."

The OpenMind Project What is Open Mind Commonsense?
"Computer scientists have been trying to find ways to teach computers all this knowledge for many generations now, but they have not been very successful, mainly because people know so many things of such a diverse variety. No computer knows as much as a five-year old child, because even at that young age the webs of knowledge in our brains are vast and intricate.

We think this problem can be solved -- by harnessing the knowledge of everyone on the internet! We want to make it easy and fun for people to work together to give computers the millions of little pieces of ordinary knowledge that constitute "common sense", all those aspects of the world that we all understand so well we take them for granted. Everyone has common sense, so everyone can participate!

Why do we want to do this? Because teaching computers how to describe and reason about the world, and especially about people and their goals, activities, and interests, will give us exactly the technology we need to take the internet to the next level, beyond its current state as a giant repository of web pages, to a new state where it will be able to think about all the knowledge it contains, in essence, to make it a living entity."

MindPixel The Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project
"GAC (pronounced 'Jack') is a first step toward true artificial consciousness. By talking to GAC in clear and unambigious Mindpixels, you teach it what it is to be human. In doing so, you help create the Mindpixel Corpus, which is the largest database of validated human common sense ever attempted to be collected. When complete in 2010 it will have more than one billion individual facts, entered by over two million individual people. The data entry alone for this project is valued at more than $250 million.

A Mindpixel is a binary statement of consensus fact such as "Water is wet" or "It is difficult to swim with ski pants on". The idea behind this project is to collect as many such statements as possible from the world wide internet community and validate them. The database will then be used to train neural net based systems to mimic a human being when presented with Mindpixels. We hope to have 2 million users registered by the end of 2001 and 1 billion validated Mindpixels by 2010. The means about 30 billion transactions!"

Wired News Dems: 'Big Browser' Is Watching
"Who, or what presents the greatest threat to the privacy rights of Americans?

Citing a trend from "Big Brother to Big Browser," a surrogate for Democratic candidate Al Gore on Monday argued at a Bush-Gore privacy debate that it was the private sector that constituted the greatest threat."

"Stephen Goldsmith, former Indianapolis mayor and current Bush domestic policy advisor, did not argue with the concept of a privacy bill of rights, but instead cited the booming economy as proof that consumers have been overwhelmingly helped in the long run by technologies that allow corporations to collect information on their customers.

Goldsmith cited Carnivore, the controversial FBI email surveillance program, as proof that big government still has the potential to abuse its power, especially when regulating a booming private sector."

National Review Sneaking In the Secret Search
"No person's liberty is safe in the last week of Congress ? traditionally a time when civil liberties invasions such as wire-tapping, gun prohibition, and the like are snuck through into legislation. These are the final frantic hours of the session, and there is no opportunity for public opposition."

"The bill allows the government to obtain any kind of document it wants, without first getting a search warrant or a subpoena from a court. Section 3(b) allows the attorney general or her subordinate, rather than a court, to issue subpoenas. These documents include any written or electronic document possessed by an individual ? or possessed by a third party (such as bank records, credit card records, telephone records, school records, or an Internet Service Provider's customer records).

In other words, the bill guts the Fourth Amendment requirement that private documents should be searched only after a court issues a warrant based on probable cause.

Even worse, section 3(g) of the bill allows these document seizures to be conducted secretly, so that the individual might never be told that his bank records, Internet records, or other documents have been searched by the government. The section allows the attorney general's subpoena a "provider of electronic communication service" to receive the secrecy privileges that are currently allowed only for wiretaps (these include that the government can delay or postpone forever telling a person that he has been searched). "

MSNBC Many have cyber-security qualms
"Four out of five Americans doubt the U.S. government?s ability to maintain computer security and privacy, a poll released Monday showed."

"FORTY-SIX PERCENT of respondents said they were ?very concerned? and 35 percent said they were ?somewhat concerned? that government-held data about them may be misused some day, according to the survey conducted for the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), a trade group.

In another finding that could prove worrisome for electronic commerce, 72 percent said they would not feel safe signing a contract over the Internet using a ?secure digital signature.?"

redux [09.02.00]
The Washington Post 'Opting In': A Privacy Paradox
"Some big computer out there knows all about Joan Schram. Its massive memory has stored the birth dates of family members and friends, the fact that she drives a Ford Explorer, and the names and birth dates of her American shorthair cat and rare Brazilian fila dog.

And she's thrilled about it.

Schram gave out the information herself, answering screen after screen of personal questions from LifeMinders Inc., a Herndon-based company that collects such data from consumers and e-mails them information in return – reminders of important dates, tips on when it's time to treat the cat for ticks, and news and advertising targeted to their interests.

But like many Americans, the Kennedy Center employee also says she's uncomfortable with the thought that when she goes online, other Internet companies could be monitoring her wanderings and gathering the same kind of personal information that she freely gave over to LifeMinders. If somebody else knew about her Explorer, she says, "I'd be a little disconcerted."

It's one of the more puzzling conundrums of online life. While companies that capitalize on the Internet's powerful potential to invade privacy are denounced as villains of the information age, millions of people type out highly personal data and send it off to Web sites they've barely heard of, with no strong legal protection against misuse of the information."

redux [04.30.00]
Salon Twilight of the crypto-geeks
"Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cultlike following among the technologically minded and author of the classic "Snowcrash," has given an over-long, hugely digressive -- and brilliant -- speech. After many, many turns and a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets around to saying that the best defense for one's privacy and personal integrity turns out to be not cryptography but, what do you know, "social structures." He is not explicit about the exact nature of these structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every sort of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties. The slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social trust. The circles widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a trusted space.

Stephenson is making a point about code: Without a sociopolitical context, cryptography is not going to protect you. He singles out PGP for criticism, saying that relying on the encryption scheme is like trying to protect your house with a fence consisting of a single, very tall picket. A slide shows the lone picket rising into the sky, a bird considering it with bulging eyes."

Computers Freedom & Privacy Conference 2000 Audio Transcripts: Neal Stephenson Dinner Speach

Scientific American A New Paradigm for Thomas Kuhn
"Kuhn wrote: "The very existence of science depends upon vesting the power to choose between paradigms in the members of a special kind of community." Fuller has confidence in the intelligent good sense of ordinary folks and properly calls for "the right to be wrong." But do statements such as "the universe is light-years wide," "the earth is billions of years old," "all life is related by common descent," "organisms are composed of cells that contain double-helix DNA," and so on really have no greater claim on "reality" than the Genesis stories of creationists or the popular consolations of astrology? If the answer is no, as Fuller comes dangerously close to asserting, then most scientists would throw in the towel and get jobs flipping burgers.

Fuller underestimates the highly evolved "fitness" of the methodologies, sociologies and conceptual paradigms of normal science. The deprofessionalization of science and the establishment of a citizen marketplace of ideas are not likely to happen without the sociopolitical equivalent of an asteroid impact, and no such potential upheaval looms on our intellectual radar screens. Certainly, science studies lacks the weight to do it."

redux [06.05.00]
The New York Review of Books Sign Language
"The idea that reality itself is brought into being by acts of interpretation is clearly wrong, but there is another thesis—often confused with it—which is not similarly absurd, and to which Eco also assents. This is the thesis that all awareness of the world is mediated by interpretation—that there is no such thing as direct, interpretation-free cognition of reality. We impose categories on the world as we interpret the signs all around us; it is not that the world simply reveals its categories to us. We are always taking one thing to be a sign of another, performing an act of symbolic inference, decoding something.

This process is to be clearly distinguished from merely bringing things under some general category, as when you perceive an apple as red or think of an acquaintance as untrustworthy. It is a virtual truism that all mental representation is "aspectual," in the sense that it cannot represent everything about an object but only some aspects of it; but this is quite different from saying that all mental representation involves interpreting one thing as a sign of another."

"Of course, to be aware of signs, as of anything else, involves classifying the sign in some way, perceiving it as having certain properties: for example, one hears the sound of the word "London" as having a certain auditory quality. But it is a mistake to refer to this mental act as interpretation, since interpretation must always involve interpreting one thing as a sign of another, and not merely seeing an object under a certain aspect. Conflating the latter with the former converts a truism into a highly controversial and (as I have argued) self-defeating theory about how cognition of objects is achieved. The culprit in all this is a loose and ambiguous use of the word "interpretation," probably one of the most misused words in the contemporary humanities."

The ThreePenney Review The Social Construction of What?
"For the point is, to see a lamp is itself an act of interpretation, and this is true of all seeing. Seeing is a matter of classification and recognition. What we see is not a colored patch but a lamp or a house or a table. Admittedly, we sometimes say that we cannot make out what something that we are looking at is. (Is it a haystack or a castle? We cannot be sure, because we cannot determine how far away, and therefore how big, it is.) But this merely goes to confirm the crucial point that all seeing is a matter of “seeing as.” Thus Kuhn’s analogy of the Gestalt switch—“the duck-rabbit shows that two men with the same retinal impression can see different things”—is beside the point. Equally he is surely wrong to suggest that, even hypothetically, one might get behind mental “paradigms” to the “raw data” of experience and construct some neutral observation language, “designed to conform to the retinal imprints that mediate what the scientist sees.” Retinal imprints or images cannot come into the matter; they are no doubt the precondition of seeing, but they play no part in the experience of it. It was Kuhn’s triumph to explain how it is that scientists on one side of a revolutionary paradigm shift cannot, and cannot be expected to, communicate fully with those on the other. But in this, the metaphor of seeing is more of a hindrance to him than a help."

"Feed Yield. Merge. Exit. Freak Out.
"Even the simplest symbol, the most streamlined dot head, becomes inseparable from a distinct historical moment. The modernist impulse towards universality was always dubious. Visual language is nothing more than the wreckage left when concept and technology collide, and those pedestrian signs are a perfect example. No matter how pure your intentions, the tools used to produce icons end up dating them. Go look at one of those school-crossing signs. See what you see. It probably won't be what you remembered, but it'll look a lot like us. "

redux [04.21.00]
George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System
"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."

The Standard Electrical Storm Hits New Economy
"The new-millennium energy crisis in the U.S. can be traced to the effects of deregulation, a lack of new generating capacity in recent years, and an antiquated distribution system – not to mention the unanticipated demands of the Internet Economy. An average office building with a computer on every desk but no significant network facility uses between 4 and 5 watts of electricity per square foot, according to Ed Quiroz, a regulatory analyst at California's Public Utilities Commission. If that building has a server farm and a network operations center, it sucks from 90 watts to 100 watts of energy a square foot or more. Or consider this: According to Mark Mills, an energy researcher with ties to the utilty industry, a Palm handheld device connected wirelessly to the Internet has the appetite of a refrigerator, consuming 1,000 kilowatt hours a year.

But estimates of the Net economy's power requirements vary. The fact is, no one knows for sure how much demand for energy will climb in coming years. Mills and colleague Peter Huber estimate that businesses that rely on digital equipment – personal computers, networking equipment, plants that produce high-tech gear and telecommunications networks – consume 13 percent of U.S. electric power. That figure will rise to between 30 percent and 50 percent of the nation's energy needs by 2020."

redux [08.24.00]
AlterNet.Org Internet Boosting Energy Efficiency
"The emerging new economy created by the Internet is producing more than just a business revolution -- it is also generating enormous environmental benefits. The Internet can turn buildings into websites, and replace warehouses with supply-chain software. It can turn paper and CDs into electrons, and replace trucks with fiberoptic cable. This means significant energy savings, and perhaps a very different type of economic growth than we have seen in the past."

"There's already evidence of a sudden shift in the American energy diet. While the nation's economy grew by more than 9 percent in 1997 and 1998, energy demand stayed almost flat in spite of very low energy prices, marking a major departure from recent historical patterns.

Part of this trend can be attributed to the growth of information technology and e-commerce. For example, for each book sold, the online retailer Amazon.com uses just one-sixteenth the energy to operate its buildings that a traditional bookseller uses. Internet shopping also uses less energy to get a package to your house. Shipping a 10-pound package by overnight air -- the most energy-intensive delivery mode -- uses 40 percent less fuel than the average roundtrip drive to the mall. Ground shipping by truck uses just one-tenth the energy of a trip by car to the store."

The Economist What the Internet cannot do
"A whole industry of cybergurus has enthralled audiences (and made a fine living) with exuberant claims that the Internet will prevent wars, reduce pollution, and combat various forms of inequality. However, although the Internet is still young enough to inspire idealism, it has also been around long enough to test whether the prophets can be right."

"But might it reduce energy consumption and pollution? The Centre for Energy and Climate Solutions (CECS), a Washington think-tank, has advanced just such a case, based largely on energy consumption figures for 1997 and 1998. While the American economy grew by 9% over those two years, energy demand was almost unchanged—because, the CECS ventures, the Internet “can turn paper and CDs into electrons, and replace trucks with fibre-optic cable.” No wonder one enthusiastic newspaper headline begged, “Shop online—save the earth.”

"Sadly, earth-saving is harder than that."

redux [08.04.00]
The Standard Not Enough Juice
"Want something to take your mind off the frustrations of startup finance? Here's one possibility: Maybe the whole digital economy will be laid low by an unreliable electric-power system.

I exaggerate, but just a little. The underlying idea of the Internet Economy is that its participants have evolved past the limits of the old, material world. Let car-factory managers worry about quality inspections on that next ton of steel. Net managers can create value out of the lightest and purest ingredients imaginable: talent, bandwidth, new data-organization schemes and radical business efficiencies. That's why it's always startling when the new economy bumps into the old."

redux [07.23.00]
The Standard When Data Checks In
"When it opened in 1928, the former R.R. Donnelley & Sons' Lakeside Press plant on the near South Side of Chicago embodied the splendor and sweat of the old economy."

"Now, the building is on the verge of becoming a bellwether for the new economy."

"Across the country, real estate investors are turning obsolete manufacturing plants and warehouses – as well as derelict office buildings and failed retail centers – into so-called telecom or carrier hotels. Instead of packing the buildings with crates, lathes or die casters, companies this time around jam them with racks of switches, routers and generators. Once brick-and-mortar icons of heavy industry, the structures are being rehabbed to house the backbone of the Internet Economy."

"These structures were built to house heavy machinery, so they usually feature floors that can support more than 125 pounds per square foot; high ceilings that provide clearance and ventilation for telecom-equipment racks; and space for generators to take over in case of power outages. The Lakeside Technology Center, for instance, has more than 80 generators and stores 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel to run them."

"Generally, upgrades require bringing in huge power supplies – the Lakeside Center could use up to 96 million megawatts – as well as state-of-the-art heating and air conditioning systems."

redux [07.05.00]
The New York Times Digital Economy's Demand for Steady Power Strains Utilities
[requires 'free' registration]
"Read-Rite's milling machine is indicative of a long-running, but accelerating problem: the nation's electrical power supply system is not up to the task of meeting the digital economy's needs. While the utility industry has historically prided itself on delivering fairly stable power 99.9 percent of the time, today's computerized economy is demanding even fewer interruptions and a much steadier current.

That is because electricity is more than just energy for computers -- it is the medium they use to do their job. Rapid, minute changes in voltage represent the ones and zeros that make up digital information.

Those patterns are ultimately translated into a human voice during a phone call, a calculation during a banking transaction, a dose of radiation during cancer therapy or a photo of a new baby e-mailed to scattered relatives. Any disruption in the power supply that compromises the processor's ability to manage those voltages can lead to lost data or system crashes."

USA Today Internet saps California's power grid
"As California's tech-savvy businesses and households plug into an increasingly wired economy, the state's power system is sputtering like a frayed electrical cord."

"Computers consume about 13% of the nation's power, according to EPRI Corp., a Palo Alto research and development group that studies the utility industry.

The Internet's borderless community also is taxing U.S. power suppliers because about 80% of online traffic comes through this country.

To handle all the Internet action, businesses are turning entire offices into warehouses for the powerful computer servers and peripheral equipment needed to navigate networks. These so-called ''server farms'' consume 10 to 12 times more power than the traditional office building filled with human workers. "

Salon When Big Brother knows you watch "Big Brother"
"Even if you've always wanted to be a Nielsen family, ensuring that your television watching habits help shape programming, would you really want a company to know each and every time you flip to "Felicity?"

TiVo's CEO Mike Ramsay wants to use that information to sell targeted advertising and aggregate data to the networks about TV viewing habits. Sure, you'll get some benefits when you buy TiVo's set-top box ($399), and sign up for the monthly service ($10) -- like the chance to search for programs you want, save up to 30 hours of programming and even fast-forward through the commercials. But don't forget: While you're watching your favorite programs, the TiVo is watching you, recording every channel click and timing how long you spend watching "Family Feud" and noting every Pampers ad you skip.

Many people don't seem to mind. In fact, some like the service so much that they're cracking the box open and adding more memory. And Ramsay, a thick-throated Scot and former Silicon Graphics senior vice president, remains convinced that the TiVo will radically change the way advertisers, networks and viewers interact. All this from a glorified VCR?"

The New York Times Magazine Boom Box
[requires 'free' registration]
"The TiVo and Replay boxes represent the greatest leap of all. They accumulate, in atomic detail, a record of who watched what and when they watched it. Put the box in all 102 million American homes, and you get a pointillist portrait of the entire American television audience. And that raises the second and more disturbing question to which the TV industry must respond: what do you do when you actually know who is watching and why? Already, TiVo and Replay know what each of their users does every second, though both companies make a point of saying that they don't actually dig into the data to find out who did what, that they only use it in the aggregate. Whatever. They know. "

First Monday Economics of Personal Information Exchange
"Personal information has become the new currency of online commerce. Decentralized Internet protocols have made computing resources increasingly pervasive, empowering individuals with an unprecedented amount of control. One result is that very few Internet consumers actually pay for network content, instead offering up personal information as they go. Content providers then collect, buy, and sell this information. To bring the Internet economy into its next stage of development, complementary software and legal architectures must be created in which personal information is regarded as a commercial property right, and accorded corresponding monetary value."

redux [04.12.00]
The Standard The Age of Access
"Think of waking up one day only to find that every aspect of your existence has become a purchased affair, that life itself has become the ultimate shopping experience.

The capitalist journey, which began with the commodification of material goods and places, is ending with the commodification of human time and duration. E-commerce and networked ways of doing business are giving rise to the "Age of Access," a new economic era as different from industrial capitalism as the latter was from the merchantilist era that preceded it."

The Standard From Selling Goods to Commodifying Relationships
"Instead of thinking of products as fixed items with set features and a one-time sales value, companies now think of them as "platforms" for all sorts of upgrades and value-added services. In the Age of Access services and upgrades are what count. The platform is merely the vessel to which these services are added.

In a sense, the product becomes more of a cost of doing business than an item in itself. The idea is to use the platform as a beachhead, as a way of establishing a physical presence in the customer's home or place of business. That presence allows the vendor to begin an ongoing "relationship" with the customer."