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January 18, 2012 

Let’s Talk More About SOPA

I’ve posted about SOPA and PIPA before. It’s a pretty big deal, mostly due to the rather wide berth it gives rights-holders in censoring and redefining the flow of information on the web. This needs to be stopped, and the only way we can do that is by letting our elected representatives understand where we stand on the subject. Below, you will find a sample letter (and, in fact, the letter I sent to my congressmen).

But, keep in mind there is another evil. The rights-holders who are pushing this legislation and some new ICANN rules (about which you can read more on Adam Curry’s Blog) are really the target of our ire. While our elected officials should certainly not be pushed around by corporate lobbyists, we must also understand that they pay those lobbyists with the dollars we spend on their entertainment. We, as a people, have fought Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Medical, and now we need to add Big Entertainment to the fight.

We need tell them that it is NOT okay to push for a decrease in our freedoms. It is NOT okay for them to dictate national and international policy for the internet. What they’re trying to do is NOT okay. And we shouldn’t stand for it. Just keep that in mind as you consider SOPA, PIPA, and any other legislation proposing to do the same.

Sample Letter:

—-
To whom it may concern:

Currently, under your watch, two bills are being considered which will be detrimental to the free Internet as we know it. One in your purview, one in the other half of congress. The bills are SOPA and the Protect IP Act. These bills mean to allow corporate and governmental censorship across the globe, based on the flimsiest of accusations and without judicial review. They must not be passed.

Understand, my objection lies not in the purported reason for the bills. Online theft and piracy have grown to ridiculous proportions, and the rights holders have a right to justice. I do not have a problem with that. However, many acts of atrocity have been leveled against mankind under the name of truth, of justice. And while SOPA and PIPA are no genocide or ethnic cleansing, they do pose a significant threat to the future of innovation, of the Internet, which the UN has declared a basic human right. How can you reasonably assert that the destruction of a global commodity, which enables global communication and cooperation to an extent unheard of before, is a fair and just way of dealing with an effective minority of misfits and misanthropes?

First, for such a law to be reasonable, it must learn from the mistakes of the DMCA. These bills do not. Under their provisions, there still exists no judicial review, the accused still stands guilty and punished before being sentenced, and that goes against our most sacred law: The US Constitution. Secondly, these bills give wide and far-reaching punitive powers to rights-holders, which can affect websites far outside of the (expansive) jurisdiction of the United States. The method outlined in these bills would change the backbone infrastructure of the entire internet: DNS records. These records are what tell your computer where a website is located. They translate that “google.com” into an IP address which is how computers tell other computers where they are. A bit oversimplified, but good enough. By altering these records, you threaten stability and efficiency of a global communications medium, which has enabled people world-wide to protest cruel and oppressive governments. Is endangering that means of communication worth the few dollars in sales you would protect for Warner Brothers?

Further, the method outlined is largely ineffective. While you may block access to a website by its name when you change the DNS records, that website is still entirely functional and reachable by its IP address anyway. So what good have you done, other than to make ever so slightly more difficult, but still entirely possible to navigate to an infringing website? All the while, opening up the internet to gross exploitation of these bills for corporations to shut down (even if temporarily) rivals and competitors. This isn’t justice for anyone; it’s a business strategy for media companies.

This country was founded by a group of people with a radical sense of individualism. Granted, many of the people wanting freedom from British rule had business interests in mind, and we cannot forget that, but they also believed in those rights for everyone else, including their competitors. These two bills, and their sponsors, are a shameful mark on the face of our country’s history, showing blatantly and obviously that we are now willing to kowtow to corporate money and interests, rather than being vigilant to protect the interests of the people. And in this case, the interests of the world itself.

You walk a dangerous precipice. This is a watershed moment for our future: do we uphold freedom and protect the greatest means of global community ever invented, or do we protect private interests and trust funds, the world and the internet be damned? We voted for you. We dislike SOPA and PIPA. We trust you do make the right choice and vote against SOPA and PIPA as they stand.

Thank you for your time.

—-

January 12, 2012 

Let’s Talk About . . . SOPA

Stop Sopa, from Joystiq Image from Joystiq

SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sister bill PIPA, or the Protect Intellectual Property Act, are two of the latest in the corporate war on piracy. At least ostensibly. Point of fact, the wording of the laws are so incredibly invasive, their constitutionality should really called into question by our congressmen, much as the DMCA’s should have been. I wrote a paper about the DMCA, and a lot of my research kept taking me back to the EFF and their work to brief congress on the ill effects of such ridiculously unbalanced law. (If on the off chance anyone wants to read it, let me know. I’ll dig it up and post a PDF.)

A quick history of Copyright Legislation

The DMCA was a piece of protective legislation that applied extremely lateral judicial powers to the whims of the copyright holders. At the time, the major culprits were the RIAA and the MPAA, though the RIAA was considered the worse of the two. What the DMCA allowed the RIAA to do was request–and receive–subpoenas without having a name or really any information more identifying than an IP address. What’s worse, is there was no judicial oversight on the issuance of these subpoeans. All it took, to simplify, was filling out a form. No judge ever saw the documents, or approved the subpoena. Crazy, right?

These nameless subpoenas were served to ISPs across the nation demanding the names and addresses of the users to whom those IPs belonged. Verizon took exception to this, and refused, so the RIAA sued. A federal court ruled Verizon must comply, but it was appealed and a federal appeals court ruled against the RIAA.

SOPA and PIPA

Fast-forward to last year, when SOPA and PIPA were introduced. These two bills offer rights-holders similar widely lateral judicial leeway, but it extends so much further now. Instead of merely demanding a user, the media companies can hold hostage a website which had a user post a link to another site that has something copyrighted on it. What’s worse, the rights holders can request damages from the website with the offending user, as if the website itself were responsible! The law is so broad, and provides such unilateral judiciary power to bodies well outside the scope of judiciary authority, and all it takes a complaint form, and out go the lights. It nearly seems guilty until proven innocent.

Think about the real world repercussions of such a law. Facebook has something like 800 million active users. If 1 of those 800 million people, even one who lives outside of the USA, post a screenshot from the latest Warner Brothers film, Facebook could be blacklisted because it aided copyright infringement. Youtube has around 350 or 400 million active users. If ONE person posts a clip from the latest episode of Family Guy, Fox could pull the plug on Youtube. If Google crawls and indexes a link to a fan’s painstaking transcription of the latest Nickleback album, it just takes a complaint. And you’ve lost Google.

This is pure madness. There are no real checks and balances in place, seemingly no real recourse for the targeted site. No “innocent until proven guilty.” Just any vaguely related post by any user about anything copyrighted can land a site and its owners in hot water. It’s a piece of legislation that will breed paranoia, fear, and corporate censorship of the Internet, which has been a relatively unbridled mode of free speech for decades.

Where will it leave us?

Would you want to live on an Internet where you’ve got to mind your Ps and Qs because you don’t know if big brother is watching? What if big brother were watching, and what if big brother weren’t even your government. It was corporate fat cats, waiting in the wings to censor anyone who dares talk about the product they’re trying so hard to sell? Wait a tic. Doesn’t that seem a little backward? You’re going to censor out your own product from the system by which you are likely to get the most exposure? It just makes bad business sense. Frankly, the idea is utterly terrifying to me. While I’m not typically an overly-paranoid conspiracy theory kind of guy, but the sheer invasiveness of this legislation tickles my privacy bone all kinds of wrong.

Many of you have your own websites. What happens if you have a commenter post a link to a youtube video–assuming Youtube still exists–of a copyrighted song as a response to your funny picture of a weasel? Well, if SOPA passes, YOU could be responsible. Wouldn’t that make you think twice about keeping that blog? Because you can’t control your users, and you can’t probably police everything they might post. (Well, I can. 0-4 comments per post would be pretty easy, especially since half of those are me.) This legislation would destroy the open–free–Internet as we know it.

If you don’t believe me, go take a look at the big websites around. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and a number of others I’m sure are considering a blackout for a day in protest of SOPA. Think about that. These are websites with MILLIONS of page hits a day, generating BILLIONS of dollars in ad revenues. And they feel so strongly about this legislation they’re willing to give it all up just to prove they’re serious.

Think about it. Do you want an Internet without Google? Without Reddit? Without Wikipedia? Without Youtube? Do you want an internet–an international community–which runs in fear of AMERICAN corporate interpretations of fair use? It’s a trick question, of course. You could want it all you like, but it would never exist. How could it? Corporate webmasters would be so neutered, they would just shutter their sites and move on to other ventures. Site like twitter, which were so instrumental in the OWS protests, not to mention any number of the foreign protests, could never exist. Too many users to police, too few dollars, too much risk.

What now?

We’re on the precipice of a real world-changing piece of legislation. While I wish it were something more akin to a national ban on fossil fuels, or nationalized health care, it’s an all-out assault on our first amendment rights. No. We do not have the right to thievery. We do not have a right to share anything and everything ever created. The corporations have their right to make money, too. But not at the expense of civil liberties. Not at the expense of an international tool, one considered by the UN to be a basic human need now.

Do what you can. Write your congressmen and women. Write your mom. Write your aunt. Tell them they’re at risk of losing their farmville. Whatever it takes, but do SOMETHING. We’re standing at a precipice. Don’t stand idly by while we step off it.

December 31, 2010 

Apple iPad Review

For Christmas, I was given an Apple iPad. It’s a pretty nifty device, and I must say that it has changed the way I will access information from now on. With its super easy interface, myriad specific apps, and full browser support (minus flash, but more on that later), I can accomplish 95% of my daily computing needs on it. I know the device is about a year old, but if you’re on the fence about it, sometimes hearing a review from someone you actually know can be helpful.

First and foremost, it makes web browsing a dream. I can do it from the comfort of my recliner,
and every page is plenty big, and I have found few pages that do not render correctly in Safari.

Secondly, apps like Flipboard make reading blogs super I easy. Google reader, twitter, facebook, and others are all conveniently restructured into a newspaper format, making tons of information available at a glance. But that’s just one app. CNN has a fantastic app, as do The Weather Channel, Reuters, and many others.

Third, it makes me feel like I’m finally living in the future. Capacitive touch–the same technology in the ipod and iPhone–is just incredibly responsive. It’s accurate and fast, and that makes the idevices feel so much better than the touch screens of the past. No more tapping around a button hoping to hit the sweet spot. No more tapping and waiting for it to register. I have been extremely impressed by the touch in the iPhones, and after playing with the iPad more, I’m just even more impressed. All that, and I know this is a year-old device.

Fourth, the screen is just beautiful. It’s plenty large enough for watching video, and the video if gives is clear and bright. It doesn’t have much trouble with blacks, either, which is nice. Even with the brightness set at its lowest setting, the colors aren’t muted, and they don’t succumb to the grey blurring that many screens do when the brightness is lowered.

Not to sound like too much of a fanboy, the device definite has its issues. The onscreen keyboard is pretty unwieldy. If you are doing any significant typing, it gets cumbersome very quickly. The touch keyboard that works so well on the iPhone sort of falls apart on the iPad. I’m currently writing this post on the iPad, but I have a bluetooth keyboard attached, which really makes the experience quite enjoyable, but I would never try to write this much on the iPad itself. So, here’s how I have my stuff setup for heavy typing:

Also, the lack of flash is definitely a downer, but I must say that many sites out there are starting to adopt html5 and non-flashed based video playback. So, as that trend continues to roll forward, the lack of flash will ultimately be moot, but I have found on a couple of occasions, I would like to have it so I could watch that neat video of kittens wrestling or something.

The battery life is impressive, but by no means earth-shattering. Under normal use, I can get about 8 hours from it, which is pretty standard fare for netbooks, so I shouldn’t be too surprised But a quick charge while I’m sleeping, and it’s ready to go for another couple of days. So no real complaints about that, yet.

All in all, if you are at all considering the purchase, I don’t think you will be disappointed. Bear in mind, a new one will likely be coming out in the next 4-5 months, so you may want to wait for that, but even if you buy now, it will be a device you will be able to get your money’s worth from. I know I will.

December 23, 2010 

Narrative Based Search

Narrative based Search: When we are searching for information from our peers in meatspace, we often find ourselves without the proper jargon or terminology necessary to accurately and concisely ask another person for a specific piece of information. In such situations, we then use a narrative to get the idea across, and the other person can then process the narrative and, using context and related ideas, give us the information we are looking for. Why can’t search on the web be this way?

Searching the web requires that either you know the name of what you’re looking for, or someone looked for it the same way you created your narrative, it using the same words. This is problematic for a number of different use cases. Say you saw a movie, but you have no idea what it was called. Or who was in it. This often happens with old movies, at least for me. So I want to find out more about it, but, uh oh. I’d have to go to Reddit or Yahoo Answers or something similar and give my narrative of the film, hoping someone else has seen it.

Crowdsourcing answers is kind of a fad these days, but it seems to me like with the vast analysis Google has done on the web, and with the massive databases it has amassed with its keyword searches over the years, I have to imagine that they should be able to cross-reference this information to allow for narrative search.

I expect it would work something like this: the user types their narrative. Using keywords in the narrative, a script categorizes the narrative based on hundreds of thousands of tags generated by users. With some noise reduction and some false positive refinement, this could create an extremely accurate categorization with relatively little resources. The categorization tags could then be hashed. That hash could then search the current “keyword” web, and as the results come back, they could be indexed like the original narrative was. The results are then ordered by how close the result hashes are to the hash of the original narrative.

People use natural language to find information. It’s easier, and it makes more sense. If we want to open up the web more than ever, we need to let people find information the same way they think it. And that’s in narrative format.

I’m not a programmer. I’m not a database expert. And I’m certainly not a web search expert. But given how willing people are to freely tag and give information, the database could be easily built, and constantly optimized as people report on the accuracy of their searches and add more tags, resulting in more accurate hashes.

Please post any questions, or if you have any suggestions on how to make this a reality, please hit up the comments. I’d love to see it happen.

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