Luke Duncan

Hey, Torontonians, Ann Arborites, and New Yorkers!

I'll be giving a free talk at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto called "Can creativity and freedom peacefully co-exist in the Internet age?" on Sept 14 at 7PM, where I'll be reprising my SIGGRAPH talk from August.

On Sept 15, I'll be in Ann Arbor, MI for the Penny Stamps Lecture Series, doing a panel called "On Futurology: Optimism And Failure" with Mark Stevenson and James King.

I head to New York next. First I'll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 18, appearing on a 1200h panel called "Genres Crashers" with Jewell Parker Rhodes, Kelly Link and Stephanie Anderson.

Finally, I'm keynoting the O'Reilly Strata conference on September 20 at 1330h, with a talk called "Designing For Human Sensors, Not Human Barcodes."

Hope to see you there!

Kurt from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "A judge the the Northern District of Texas writes a blistering opinion, sanctioning Evan Stone, attorney for porn studio Mick Haig Productions, $10,000 for improperly issuing subpoenas to ISPs without court permission in order to obtain the identities of alleged p2p file sharers. The Court had appointed EFF and Public Citizen to represent the alleged file sharers."

Gotta love copyright trollery that causes a judge to use the term "Staggering Chutzpah" in his official communications from the bench.

To summarize the staggering chutzpah involved in this case: Stone asked the Court to authorize sending subpoenas to the ISPs. The Court said “not yet.” Stone sent the subpoenas anyway. The Court appointed [EFF and Public Citizen] to argue whether Stone could send the subpoenas. Stone argued that the Court should allow him to – even though he had already done so – and eventually dismissed the case ostensibly because the Court was taking too long to make a decision. All the while, Stone was receiving identifying information and communicating with some Does, likely about settlement. The Court rarely has encountered a more textbook example of conduct deserving of sanctions.

kruhft writes "It seems that Cleverbot, the chatbot so ready to admit that it was a unicorn during a discussion with itself, has passed the Turing test. This past Sunday, the 1334 votes from a Turing test held at the Techniche festival in Guwahati, India were released. They revealed that Cleverbot was voted to be human 59.3% of the time. Real humans did only slightly better and were assumed to be humans 63.3% of the time." As the Wikipedia link above points out, though, there's no single, simple "Turing Test," per se — many systems have successfully convinced humans over the years. Perhaps Cleverbot would consent to taking part in a Slashdot interview, to be extra-convincing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Caroline Chen / The Snitch:
Anonymous Hacks BART Police Website, Releases Personal Information of 100 Officers  —  Hacker group Anonymous tweeted this morning that they had hacked into the BART Police Officer's Association website, releasing the addresses, email addresses, and passwords of 102 BART police officers.

Continue reading Telex anti-censorship system promises to leap over firewalls without getting burned

Telex anti-censorship system promises to leap over firewalls without getting burned originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Aug 2011 15:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Eve Batey / SF Appeal:
BART Defends Decision To Cut Off Cell Service After Civil Rights, FCC Concerns Raised  —  After rumors of a possible protest intended to disrupt service reached BART officials yesterday, they pursued a number of strategies to ensure that didn't happen.  One of those strategies …

An anonymous reader writes "Last week Slashdot had the story that the web had turned 20 years old. Of course, patents also last 20 years, which has resulted in some asking what would have happened if Tim Berners-Lee had patented the web? Thankfully, he didn't (and wouldn't). But we'd be living in a very different (and probably less interesting) world if he had."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has accused Microsoft in court of revealing its proprietary source code.

That's some rich irony given that the court case involves Android -- an open-source operating system that Google touts as being free to modify and use.

As PaidContent reports, Google made the claim in an International Trade Court case between Microsoft and Motorola. Microsoft has repeatedly claimed that Android infringes upon some of its patents, and is suing Motorola in hopes of extracting licensing fees for every Android device that Motorola sells.

In the court case, Microsoft got some "highly confidential source code" from Google through a subpoena. It then turned this source code over to an expert witness -- a move that Google says violates the judge's orders.

The source code may not be for Android itself. But the claim is still pretty ironic given how often Google paints itself as the defender of openness against big closed companies.

Just last week, Google's chief lawyer accused Microsoft (and Apple) of buying up patents as part of a "hostile, organized campaign against Android."

Maybe so. But it's long been time for Google to stop pretending that it's got some kind of pure agenda with Android.

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See Also:

• The Feds Are Looking At How Google Favors Its Own Services In Android
• THE APPLE INVESTOR: Apple Devices Set To Dominate Through 2011
• Nokia Explains How It Will Defy The Odds And Win In North America

Al-Jazeera Still Reserves the Right to Sell You Out, But At Least It Has Your Back
Before the revisions, the Transparency Unit noted it could "share personally identifiable information in response to a law enforcement agency's request, or where we believe it is necessary." The terms provided no explanation about how Al-Jazeera determined when to disclose information or who made that decision. The TOU now explains Al-Jazeera "may disclose personally identifiable information about you to third parties in limited circumstance[s], including: (1) with your consent; or (2) when we have a good faith belief it is required by law, such as pursuant to a subpoena or other judicial or administrative order."

We’re also glad to see Al-Jazeera making an effort to be transparent about when users’ data is sought by the government and promising to fight for users' rights in court. AJTU promises that if "required by law to disclose the information that you have submitted, we will attempt to provide you with notice (unless we are prohibited) that a request for your information has been made in order to give you an opportunity to object to the disclosure." And AJTU claims it "will independently object to requests for access to information about users of our site that we believe to be improper."

Soon after the riots subsided, it became clear that BlackBerry Messenger played an instrumental role in how the rioters organized themselves. UK authorities also believe that Twitter and Facebook played a role as well. In a statement to parliament on Thursday morning, Cameron said:

“Mr. Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organized via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good, but it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

Looking to prevent future catastrophes that could be stirred by social media, the government will reach out directly to the social media services believed to help catalyze the riots to discuss options for moving forward.

Cameron told the press after his statement that Home Secretary Theresa May will hold meetings with Facebook, Twitter and Research In Motion within weeks to discuss their responsibilities in the prevention of future incidents, The Guardian reported.

Banning individuals from social media seems like a difficult task, and the first question to answer is whether it is possible and feasible. Beyond that, is it legal to ban suspects who haven’t committed a crime?

What do you think? Should the UK government be allowed to ban individuals from social media if they are thought to be planning criminal activities? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Steve Punter

More About: facebook, london riots, parliament, RIM, social media, twitter, uk

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oxide7 writes "A new, low cost semiconductor-based gene sequencing machine has been developed and may unlock the door to advanced medicines and life itself. A team led by Jonathan Rothberg of Ion Torrent in Guilford, Conn is working on a system which uses semiconductors to decode DNA, dramatically reducing costs and taking them closer to being able to reach the goal of a $1000 human genome test. The current optical based system costs around $49000 and is already on the market and being used in over 40 countries."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

suraj.sun writes with this quote from an article at Techdirt: "A woman, who called Verizon to try to find out about the $4.19 she was being charged for six local calls, was told by Verizon reps that the only way it would provide her an itemized bill was to get a lawyer and have the lawyer get a subpoena to force Verizon to disclose the information. Instead, the woman went to court (by herself) and a judge told Verizon (.docx) to hand over the itemized bill info. 'It is a basic matter of fair business practice that a consumer should be able to contact a utility about a charge on a bill and learn what the charge is for and learn that the charge was correctly applied. The only verification that Verizon's witness could offer that a charge like [the customer's] $4.19 measured use charge was accurate and billed correctly was her faith in the accuracy of Verizon's computer system. The only way that Verizon would offer any information about a past charge in response to a consumer inquiry was to require that customer to hire a lawyer and subpoena their own usage information. By no reasonable standard could this be considered reasonable customer service."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MIT's recent Civic Media Conference and the latest batch of Knight News Challenge winners made one reality crystal clear: as a new era of technology-fueled transparency, innovation and open government dawns, it won't depend on any single CIO or federal program. It will be driven by a distributed community of media, nonprofits, academics and civic advocates focused on better outcomes, more informed communities and the new news, whatever form it is delivered in.

The themes that unite this class of Knight News Challenge winners were data journalism and platforms for civic connections. Each theme draws from central realities of the information ecosystems of today. Newsrooms and citizens are confronted by unprecedented amounts of data and an expanded number of news sources, including a social web populated by our friends, family and colleagues. Newsrooms, the traditional hosts for information gathering and dissemination, are now part of a flattened environment for news, where news breaks first on social networks, is curated by a combination of professionals and amateurs, and then analyzed and synthesized into contextualized journalism.

Data journalism and data tools

In an age of information abundance, journalists and citizens alike all need better tools, whether we're curating the samizdat of the 21st century in the Middle East, like Andy Carvin, processing a late night data dump, or looking for the best way to visualize water quality to a nation of consumers. As we grapple with the consumption challenges presented by this deluge of data, new publishing platforms are also empowering us to gather, refine, analyze and share data ourselves, turning it into information.

In this future of media, as Mathew Ingram wrote at GigaOm, big data meets journalism, in the same way that startups see data as an innovation engine, or civic developers see data as the fuel for applications. "The media industry is (hopefully) starting to understand that data can be useful for its purposes as well," Ingram wrote. He continued:

... data and the tools to manipulate it are the modern equivalent of the microfiche libraries and envelopes full of newspaper clippings that used to make up the research arm of most media outlets. They are just tools, but as some of the winners of the Knight News Challenge have already shown, these new tools can produce information that might never have been found before through traditional means.

The Poynter Institute took note of the attention paid to data by the Knight Foundation as well. As Steve Myers reported, the Knight News Challenge gave $1.5 million to projects that filter and examine data. The winners that relate to data journalism include:

• Overview, which is a tool to help journalists find stories in large amounts of data by cleaning, visualizing and interactively exploring large document and data sets. Associated Press data journalist Jonathan Stray called Overview the "Drupal of data visualization.
• ScraperWiki, a favorite tool of civic coders at Code for America and elsewhere, enables anyone to collect, store and publish public data. With the Knight funding, the next version of ScraperWiki will be even more powerful.
• OpenBlock Rural will use the OpenBlock platform to partner with local governments and community newspapers to collect and publish data in North Carolina, including crime, real estate, school ratings and restaurant inspections.
• The PANDA Project will try to make research easier in the newsroom with a set of open source, web-based tools oriented at making it easier for journalists to use and analyze data.

I talked more with the AP's Jonathan Stray about data journalism and Overview at the MIT Civic Media in the video below. For an even deeper dive into his thinking on what journalists need in the age of big data, read his thoughts on "the editorial search engine."

The newsroom stack

With these investments in the future of journalism, more seeds have been planted to add to a "newsroom stack," to borrow a technical term familiar to Radar readers, combining a series of technologies for use in a given enterprise.

"I like the thought of it," said Brian Boyer, the project manager for PANDA, in an interview at the MIT Media Lab. "The newsroom stack could add up to the kit of tools that you ought to be using in your day to day reporting."

Boyer described how the flow of data might move from a spreadsheet (as a .CSV file) to Google Refine (for tidying, clustering, adding columns) to PANDA and then on to Overview or Fusion Tables or Many Eyes, for visualization. This is about "small pieces, loosely joined," he said. "I would rather build one really good small piece than one big project that does everything."

PANDA and Overview are squarely oriented at bread-and-butter issues for newsrooms in the age of big data. "It's a pain to search across datasets, but we also have this general newsroom content management issue, said Boyer. "The data stuck on your hard drive is sad data. Knowledge management isn't a sexy problem to solve, but it's a real business problem. People could be doing better reporting if they knew what was available. Data should be visible internally."

Boyer thinks the trends toward big data in media are pretty clear, and that he and other hacker journalists can help their colleagues to not only understand it but to thrive. "There's a lot more of it, with government releasing its stuff more rapidly," he said. "The city of Chicago is dropping two datasets a week right now. We're going for increased efficiency, to help people work faster and write better stories. Every major news org in the country is hiring a news app developer right now. Or two. For smaller news organizations, it really works for them. Their data apps account for the majority of their traffic."

Bridging the data divide

There's some caution merited here. Big data is not a panacea to all things, in media or otherwise. Greg Borenstein explored some of these issues in his post on big data and cybernetics earlier this month. Short version: humans still matter in building human relationships and making sense of what matters, however good our personalized relevance engines for news become. Proponents of open data have to consider a complementary concern: digital literacy.

As Jesse Lichtenstein asserted "open data along isn't enough," following the thread of danah boyd's "transparency is not enough talk at the 2010 Gov 2.0 Expo. Open data can empower the empowered.

To make open government data sing, infomediaries need to have time and resources. If we're going to hope that citizens will draw their own conclusions from showing public data in real-time, we'll need to educate them to be able to be critical thinkers. As Andy Carvin tweeted during the MIT Civic Media conference, "you need to be sure those people have high levels of digital literacy and media literacy." There's a data divide that has to be considered here, as Nick Clark Judd pointed out over at techPresident.

It looks like those concerns were at least partially factored into the judges' decision on other Knight News Challenge winners. Spending Stories, from the Open Knowledge Foundation, is designed to add context to news stories based upon government data by connecting stories to the data used. Poderapedia will try to bring more transparency to Chile using data visualizations that draw upon a database of of editorial and crowdsourced data. The State Decoded will try to make the law more user-friendly. The project has notable open government DNA: Waldo Jaquith's work on OpenVirginia was aimed at providing an API for the Commonwealth.

There were citizen science and transparency projects alongside all of those data plays too, including:

• Public Laboratory, a tool kit and online community for grassroots data gathering and research that builds upon the success of Grassroots Mapping.
• NextDrop, a project to provide mobile access to information about water availability to residents of a city in India.

Given the recent story here at Radar on citizen science and crowdsourced radiation data, there's good reason to watch both of these projects evolve. And given research from the Pew Internet and Life Project on the role of the Internet as a platform for collective action, the effect of connecting like-minded citizens to one another through efforts like the Tiziano Project may prove far reaching.

Photo: NYTimes: 365/360 - 1984 (in color) by blprnt_van, on Flickr

Related:

• The growing importance of data journalism


• Before you interrogate data, you must tame it


• 4 free data tools for journalists (and snoops)


• Data science democratized


• What is data science?

societyofrobots writes "In the run up to the July 3rd election in Thailand, use of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are banned for campaigning and other election related purposes. Offenders face a maximum six months in prison and a 10,000 baht ($330) fine. The ban includes sending short telephone texts and forwarding emails. 'There will be a unit of more than 100 officers to monitor this,' said police spokesman Prawut Thavornsiri of the social media ban. 'If we can track the origin of (an online message) right away, we will block the site and make an arrest. But if the sites are registered overseas and we can't check the origin, we'll first block it and ask the IP (Internet Protocol) providers for further investigation,' Prawut said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

thecarchik writes "The future of driving, in major cities at least, is looking more and more likely to be done by high-tech computers rather than actual people, at least if the latest breakthroughs in self-driving vehicle technology mean anything. Internet search engine giant Google has logged some 140,000 miles with its self-driving Toyota Prius fleet and Audi has had similar success with its run of autonomous cars. Now, Volkswagen has presented its Temporary Auto Pilot technology. Monitored by a driver, the technology can allow a car to drive semi-automatically at speeds of up to 80 mph on highways."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this (non-embeddable, natch) video interview from the World Copyright Summit on June 8, Francis Gurry, the Director General of WIPO, the UN agency that creates and oversees global copyright policy, laments the current state of WIPO, saying that the copyright agenda there:

"... tends to be a negative one. It tends to be looking at the exceptions, the limitations, and the other ways of not having intellectual property. I'm very keen to see us coming back with a positive agenda for intellectual property."

Several of the public interest groups at WIPO have objected in writing and asked for clarification:

In response to requests from Member States, exceptions and limitations have been placed on the agenda of SCCR. As a result, a very useful series of studies for the visually impaired, libraries and education has been published, followed by surveys of exceptions and limitations in Member States. We welcomed these studies and were happy to advise in their preparation upon WIPO's request. In our view WIPO, as the core UN agency for copyright, has a responsibility and a crucial role to be the neutral field for all stakeholders, respecting decisions made by Member States while setting the work agenda, and providing support with technical expertise for achieving Member State objectives. Your statement suggests a bias against balance and in favour of more protection; and your use of "us," given the audience you were addressing, could imply that the WIPO Secretariat is aligning itself with a specific set of rights holder interests. In this context, the library community and the World Blind Union would like to express its concern that the message to be taken from your remarks must be that copyright exceptions are negative for the welfare of copyright rather than being a positive and beneficial tool to sustain learning, support the exchange of scholarly information and promote creativity.

Meanwhile, WIPO continues to stumble forward with more Internet regulation proposals, including a proposal to make ISPs and domain registrars adjudicate and police trademark claims, "three strikes" Internet disconnection rules, and generally increased liability for "intermediaries" such as hosting companies, YouTube, WordPress, and ISPs, which would encourage them to censor and surveil their users.

WIPO is uniquely unqualified to regulate the Internet. Gossip has it that 'a Director-level staffer recently asked a group of Internet intermediaries the question "What does Web 2.0 mean?"'

(Thanks, Secret Informant!)

Today's advice comes from Microsoft CEO Bill Gates' interview with the Daily Mail:

"Legacy is a stupid thing! I don’t want a legacy. If people look and see that childhood deaths dropped from nine million a year to four million because of our investment, then wow! I liken what I’m doing now to my old job."

"I worked with a lot of smart people; some things went well, some didn’t go so well. But when you see how what we did ended up empowering people, it’s a very cool thing."

Gates also said he was OK with being a geek if it meant studying a 400-page book on vaccines in order to challenge others to learn more.

"I’m a geek. I plead guilty. Gladly."

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See Also:

• INSTANT MBA: Be Your Weird Self And Forget What Others Think
• INSTANT MBA: Resumes Should Be Read Upside Down
• INSTANT MBA: When Your Competitor Does Well, So Do You

A cryptology instruction book, 202 years old. A photograph, from 1919. These are just some of the items that, if you had seen them, would have irreparably damaged U.S. national security.