net.wars

One of the things about living in a foreign country is this: every so often the actual England I live in collides unexpectedly with the fictional England I grew up with. Fictional England had small, friendly villages with murders in them. It had lowering, thick fogs and grim, fantastical crimes solvable by observation and thought. It had mathematical puzzles before breakfast in a chess game. The England I live in has Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's vehement support for spiritualism, traffic jams, overcrowding, and four million people who read The Sun.

This week, at the GikIII Workshop, in a break between Internet futures, I wandered out onto a quadrangle of grass so brilliantly and perfectly green that it could have been an animated background in a virtual world. Overlooking it were beautiful, stolid, very old buildings. It had a sign: Balliol College. I was standing on the quad where, "One never failed to find Wimsey of Balliol planted in the center of the quad and laying down the law with exquisite insolence to somebody." I know now that many real people came out of Balliol (three kings, three British prime ministers, Aldous Huxley, Robertson Davies, Richard Dawkins, and Graham Greene) and that those old buildings date to 1263. Impressive. But much more startling to be standing in a place I first read about at 12 in a Dorothy Sayers novel. It's as if I spent my teenaged years fighting alongside Angel avatars and then met David Boreanaz.

Organised jointly by Ian Brown at the Oxford Internet Institute and the University of Edinburgh's Script-ed folks, GikIII (prounounced "geeky") is a small, quirky gathering that studies serious issues by approaching them with a screw loose. For example: could we control intelligent agents with the legal structure the Ancient Romans used for slaves (Andrew Katz)? How sentient is a robot sex toy? Should it be legal to marry one? And if my sexbot rapes someone, are we talking lawsuit, deactivation, or prison sentence (Fernando Barrio)? Are RoadRunner cartoons all patent applications for devices thought up by Wile E. Coyote (Caroline Wilson)? Why is The Hound of the Baskervilles a metaphor for cloud computing (Miranda Mowbray)?

It's one of the characteristics of modern life that although questions like these sound as practically irrelevant as "how many angels, infinitely large, can fit on the head of a pin, infinitely small?", which may (or may not) have been debated here seven and a half centuries ago, they matter. Understanding the issues they raise matters in trying to prepare for the net.wars of the future.

In fact, Sherlock Holmes's pursuit of the beast is metaphorical; Mowbray was pointing out the miasma of legal issues for cloud computing. So far, two very different legal directions seem likely as models: the increasingly restrictive EULAs common to the software industry, and the service-level agreements common to network outsourcing. What happens if the cloud computing company you buy from doesn't pay its subcontractors and your data gets locked up in a legal battle between them? The terms and conditions in effect for Salesforce.com warn that the service has 30 days to hand back your data if you terminate, a long time in business. Mowbray suggests that the most likely outcome is EULAs for the masses and SLAs at greater expense for those willing to pay for them.

On social networks, of course, there are only EULAs, and the question is whether interoperability is a good thing or not. If the data people put on social networks ("shouldn't there be a separate disability category for stupid people?" someone asked) can be easily transferred from service to service, won't that make malicious gossip even more global and permanent? A lot of the issues Judith Rauhofer raised in discussing the impact of global gossip are not new to Facebook: we have a generation of 35-year-olds coping with the globally searchable history of their youthful indiscretions on Usenet. (And WELL users saw the newly appointed CEO of a large tech company delete every posting he made in his younger, more drug-addled 1980s.) The most likely solution to that particular problem is time. People arrested as protesters and marijuana smokers in the 1960s can be bank presidents now; in a few years the work force will be full of people with Facebook/MySpace/Bebo misdeeds and no one will care except as something laugh at drunkenly late out in the pub.

But what Lilian Edwards wants to know is this: if we have or can gradually create the technology to make "every ad a wanted ad" - well, why not? Should we stop it? Online marketing is at £2.5 billion a year according to Ofcom, and a quarter of the UK's children spend 22 hours a week playing computer games, where there is no regulation of industry ads and where Web 2.0 is funded entirely by advertising. When TV and the Internet roll together, when in-game is in-TV and your social network merges with megamedia, and MTV is fully immersive, every detail can be personalized product placement. If I grew up five years from now, my fictional Balliol might feature Angel driving across the quad in a Nissan Prairie past a billboard advertising airline tickets.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The first time I saw James Randi he was hauling a load of fresh chicken guts out of a guy's stomach.

Of course, in my eagerness to make it sound like a good story I've jazzed that up a bit. The chicken guts were real and the guy's stomach was real (he was an innocent audience member who'd been recruited for the purpose of demonstration), but the pull-outage was clever sleight-of-hand. The year was 1982 and the occasion was a lecture demonstration at Cornell University. The point was demonstrating how "psychic surgeons" achieve their effects.

The next time I'll see James Randi is on April 19, when he's giving a talk at Conway Hall, in London. I don't think chicken guts will be involved, though a number of other prominent skeptics will also be speaking and you just never know.

It was Randi's ability to demonstrate plausible explanations for the apparently inexplicable that blew me away on that particular day. A lot of people like to claim that skeptics are closed-minded, but in fact it seems to me that the key to skepticism is tolerance of uncertainty and patience. A skeptic sitting in an empty house and hearing inexplicable creaking thinks, "I wonder what that is." A believer thinks, "Must be a ghost." Randi never claimed to be able to explain everything, but he went a long way toward showing me that things that friends thought must be inexplicable might still have natural explanations if you had the patience to wait to find out what they were and the right kind of mind to. A lie goes round the world while the truth is still putting its boots on; it takes seconds to claim something's paranormal but years of research to find out the truth.

One of the sad things about science these days is that so many disciplines require so much expensive equipment and funding that it's hard for an amateur to make much of a contribution. There are, to be sure, exceptions: some friends on Crete were successful in finding the nests of griffin vultures and did a lot of work keeping count, and anyone can look for fossils and hope to fill in a gap in the record. But few can afford their own radio telescope, particle collider, or climate modelling supercomputer. Randi showed that amateurs with a particular bent - a knowledge of stage magic and deception - were more effective at assessing paranormal claims than many scientists.

None of this would qualify Randi as a subject for net.wars except that recently he's been the subject of Usenet spam. Most people who do not participate in Usenet are under the impression that all newsgroups drowned under email levels of spam long ago. But in fact until the last month, when the Chinese apparently discovered Usenet, spam levels have been negligible for quite a few years now. Once Web boards, blogs, and social networks got going Usenet became even more of a minority pastime than it was in its heyday. Spamming Usenet doesn't cost much, but why bother when the audience is relatively tiny?

But people who want to boast that they've bested James Randi apparently want to lump themselves in with ads for cheap knockoffs of Nike shoes, Breitling watches, and Prada handbags. And so a version of this message began popping up randomly. It is, of course, all over the Net by now, and there's not a lot anyone can do other than debunk it and hope someone notices.
To deal with the most trivial bit, the bit that asks if James Randi is "even a real name". Well, it's not the name Randi was born with, although it's a modification of his first and middle names. But he's been using it consistently for something over 50 years, and it is his legal name. So it's real enough for all intents and purposes.

The million-dollar challenge was a relative newcomer that had its origins in a similar $10,000 challenge that Randi had going for more than 30 years. The increased money made the challenge a much juicier story, of course. But as this rational game theoryish analysis of the challenge makes clear, the challenge was only ever likely to attract the deluded. As I understand it, the mailbag got ridiculous in both size and content. There's plenty of evidence for that; the apparent basis of the claim that Randi was beaten is impenetrable. It is true, though, that until the beginning of this year the challenge rules stated that the prize would continue to be offered until it was awarded, including after Randi's death. Now, it ends March 6, 2010. (Get your claim in now!)

The end of the challenge is the end of an era for skeptics. For years, if any paranormal claimant was particularly insistent that he could dowse for oil or read minds we could say, "If you're so psychic, why ain't you taking Randi's challenge?" Now, my god - we're going to have to think of new stuff to say.

Meantime, come watch Randi in person and find out about the kinds of tests he's been doing all these years.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently the US Congress is now being scripted by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. In a twist of perfect irony, the House of Representatives has decided to hold its first closed session in 25 years to debate - surveillance.

But it's obvious why they want closed doors: they want to talk about the AT&T case. To recap: AT&T is being sued for its complicity in the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance of US citizens after its technician Mark Klein blew the whistle by taking documents to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which a couple of weeks ago gave him a Pioneer Award for his trouble).

Bush has, of course, resisted any effort to peer into the innards of his surveillance program by claiming it's all a state secret, and that's part of the point of this Congressional move: the Democrats have fielded a bill that would give the whole program some more oversight and, significantly, reject the idea of giving telecommunications companies - that is, AT&T - immunity from prosecution for breaking the law by participating in warrantless wiretapping. 'Snot fair that they should deprive us of the fun of watching the horse-trading. It can't, surely, be that they think we'll be upset by watching them slag each other off. In an election year?

But it's been a week for irony, as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has had his sex life exposed when he dumped his girlfriendand been accused of - let's call it sloppiness - in his expense accounts. Worse, he stands accused of trading favorable page edits for cash. There's always been a strong element of Schadenpedia around, but the edit-for-cash thing really goes to the heart of what Wikipedia is supposed to be about.

I suspect that nonetheless Wikipedia will survive it: if the foundation has the sense it seems to have, it will display zero tolerance. But the incident has raised valid questions about how Wikipedia can possibly sustain itself financially going forward. The site is big and has enviable masses of traffic; but it sells no advertising, choosing instead to live on hand-outs and the work of volunteers. The idea, I suppose, is that accepting advertising might taint the site's neutral viewpoint, but donations can do the same thing if they're not properly walled off: just ask the US Congress. It seems to me that an automated advertising system they did not control would be, if anything, safer. And then maybe they could pay some of those volunteers, even though it would be a pity to lose some of the site's best entertainment.

With respect to advertising, it's worth noting that Phorm, which we is under increasing pressure. Earlier this week, we had an opportunity to talk to Kent Ertegrul, CEO of Phorm, who continues to maintain that Phorm's system, because it does not store data, is more protective of privacy than today's cookie-driven Web. This may in fact be true.

Less certain is Ertegrul's belief that the system does not contravene the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which lays down rules about interception. Ertegrul has some support from a informal letter from the Home Office whose reasoning seems to be that if users have consented and have been told how they can opt out, it's legal. Well, we'll see; there's a lot of debate going on about this claim and it will be interesting to hear the Information Commissioner's view. If the Home Office's interpretation is correct, it could open a lot of scope for abusive behavior that could be imposed upon users simply by adding it to the terms of service to which they theoretically consent when they sign up, and a UK equivalent of AT&T wanting to assist the government with wholesale warrantless wiretapping would have only to add it to the terms of service.

The real problem is that no one really knows how Phorm's system works. Phorm doesn't retain your IP address, but the ad servers surely have to know it when they're sending you ads. If you opt out but can still opt back in (as Ertegrul said you can), doesn't that mean you still have a cookie on your system and that your data is still passed to Phorm's system, which discards it instead of sending you ads? If that's the case, doesn't that mean you can not opt out of having your data shared? If that isn't how it works, then how does it work? I thought I understood it after talking to Ertegrul, I really did - and then someone asked me to explain how Phorm's cookie's usefulness persisted between sessions, and I wasn't sure any more. I think the Open Rights Group: Phorm should publish details of how its system works for experts to scrutinize. Until Phorm does that the misinformation Ertegrul is so upset about will continue. (More disclosure: I am on ORG's Advisory Council.

But maybe the Home Office is on to something. Bush could solve his whole problem by getting everyone to give consent to being surveilled at the moment they take US citizenship. Surely a newborn baby's footprint is sufficient agreement?

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 4:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is a certain kind of mentality that is actually proud of not understanding computers, as if there were something honorable about saying grandly, "Oh, I leave all that to my children."

Outside of computing, only television gets so many people boasting of their ignorance. Do we boast how few books we read? Do we trumpet our ignorance of other practical skills, like balancing a cheque book, cooking, or choosing wine? When someone suggests we get dressed in the morning do we say proudly, "I don't know how"?

There is so much insanity coming out of the British government on the Internet/computing front at the moment that the only possible conclusion is that the government is made up entirely of people who are engaged in a sort of reverse pissing contest with each other: I can compute less than you can, and see? here's a really dumb proposal to prove it.

How else can we explain yesterday's news that the government is determined to proceed with Contactpoint even though the report it commissioned and paid for from Deloitte warns that the risk of storing the personal details of every British child under 16 can only be managed, not eliminated? Lately, it seems that there's news of a major data breach every week. But the present government is like a batch of 20-year-olds who think that mortality can't happen to them.

Or today's news that the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport has launched its proposals for "Creative Britain", and among them is a very clear diktat to ISPs: deal with file-sharing voluntarily or we'll make you do it. By April 2009. This bit of extortion nestles in the middle of a bunch of other stuff about educating schoolchildren about the value of intellectual property. Dare we say: if there were one thing you could possibly do to ensure that kids sneer at IP, it would be to teach them about it in school.

The proposals are vague in the extreme about what kind of regulation the DCMS would accept as sufficient. Despite the leaks of last week, culture secretary Andy Burnham has told the Financial Times that the "three strikes" idea was never in the paper. As outlined by Open Rights Group executive director Becky Hogge in New Statesman, "three strikes" would mean that all Internet users would be tracked by IP address and warned by letter if they are caught uploading copyrighted content. After three letters, they would be disconnected. As Hogge says (disclosure: I am on the ORG advisory board), the punishment will fall equally on innocent bystanders who happen to share the same house. Worse, it turns ISPs into a squad of private police for a historically rapacious industry.

Charles Arthur, writing in yesterday's Guardian, presented the British Phonographic Institute's case about why the three strikes idea isn't necessarily completely awful: it's better than being sued. (These are our choices?) ISPs, of course, hate the idea: this is an industry with nanoscale margins. Who bears the liability if someone is disconnected and starts to complain? What if they sue?

We'll say it again: if the entertainment industries really want to stop file-sharing, they need to negotiate changed business models and create a legitimate market. Many people would be willing to pay a reasonable price to download TV shows and music if they could get in return reliable, fast, advertising-free, DRM-free downloads at or soon after the time of the initial release. The longer the present situation continues the more entrenched the habit of unauthorized file-sharing will become and the harder it will be to divert people to the legitimate market that eventually must be established.

But the key damning bit in Arthur's article (disclosure: he is my editor at the paper) is the BPI's admission that they cannot actually say that ending file-sharing would make sales grow. The best the BPI spokesman could come up with is, "It would send out the message that copyright is to be respected, that creative industries are to be respected and paid for."

Actually, what would really do that is a more balanced copyright law. Right now, the law is so far from what most people expect it to be - or rationally think it should be - that it is breeding contempt for itself. And it is about to get worse: term extension is back on the agenda. The 2006 Gowers Review recommended against it, but on February 14, Irish EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy (previously: champion of software patents) has announced his intention to propose extending performers' copyright in sound recordings from the current 50-year term to 95 years. The plan seems to go something like this: whisk it past the Commission in the next two months. Then the French presidency starts and whee! new law! The UK can then say its hands are tied.

That change makes no difference to British ISPs, however, who are now under the gun to come up with some scheme to keep the government from clomping all over them. Or to the kids who are going to be tracked from cradle to alcopop by unique identity number. Maybe the first target of the government computing literacy programs should be...the government.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you log onto ebay.com (not .co.uk or eBay's other international sites) next week you may find gaping holes: a number of sellers have pledged to boycott from February 18 to 25 to protest changes eBay is making in listing fees, commissions, some payment requirements, and, probably most contentious, the feedback system. The short version: sellers will no longer be able to leave feedback for buyers, and eBay will require sellers who are new or have low feedback ratings to use Paypal as a payment option and also give their listings less exposure in searches. There will also be penalties for overcharging for postage and handling (a sneaky way of making up for low prices).

Whether these changes are good changes or bad, eBay's feedback system has been broken for a long time, as Jim Griffith comments. The essence of a reputation-based system is holding buyers and sellers accountable for bad behavior. But no one dares leave negative feedback any more for fear of retaliation.

Sellers have reacted angrily to the announced change and some are threatening a strike in which they pull all their items from sale from February 18 to 25. Logically, however, what good do buyer ratings do? The system is inherently unbalanced: buyers choose their sellers but sellers can't discriminate among buyers.

Sellers can't, for example, use the buyer ratings to ring-fence sales. If a buyer fails to pay or rips off a seller by instigating a chargeback after the item has been delivered, the seller's only recourse is through eBay's trust and fraud department. eBay's argument that the change should result in a more accurate reputation system is probably justified.

If it doesn't feel fairly balanced, that's emotion, not logic, based on nostalgia for the early days, when eBay was a democratic site where all users were amateurs who both bought and sold. eBay now is full of businesses and professional sellers, and what the feedback changes make explicit is that over time eBay has become a class system.

Professional sellers (everyone from substantial businesses who also run their own ecommerce sites and probably list on Amazon Marketplace and Google Checkout as well) are in a different league from the casual seller who maybe wants to get rid of that old DVD player and doesn't see why it shouldn't be for a bit of cash. If online discussion forums are 90 percent lurkers and 10 percent posters, it wouldn't be surprising if eBay's user community was 90 percent buyers and 10 percent sellers. I'm a good example: I've sold two items on eBay, but bought dozens, some of them repeat business with the same crafts people and some one-off purchases. For casual sellers, I do look at sellers' feedback - largely to eliminate obvious frauds. (I had to stop buying DVDs on eBay at all - the site is overrun with Asian counterfeits). For the professional sellers, however, the more important reputation information lies in recommendations outside of eBay from people interested in the same sorts of things I am.

There are people the changes will hurt, but the big sellers probably won't be among them.; do enough volume successfully and a few negative reviews won't hurt you that much. Individuals won't be able to benefit from an established reputation as a reliable buyer when they sell items. Small sellers will have no way of defending themselves publicly if an unreasonable buyer chooses to trash them. (If the buyer doesn't pay at all, of course, sellers can still work to get the user barred from the service.)

Do eBay sellers have, as some are insisting, a real choice? Some, yes, even though the received wisdom for a long time has been in online auctions size of the user base is everything. Some craftspeople have been migrating to Etsy, which is becoming an interesting place to browse. The big sellers generally already sell through multiple channels. People selling off used DVDs, books, and other media would probably do better listing on Amazon Marketplace, where their items will show up, presumably favorably priced, in the same listing with new copies. It's the flea market crowd - the people selling off old tires, strange collectibles, and odd bits of clothing - for whom the size of eBay's audience is indispensable. That is very much eBay's roots, but who wants to move back in with their parents?

Online communities - including commercial ones, like eBay - all tend to exhibit the same social characteristics. One such is the rule that users hate change. Especially, they hate specific changes that threaten to remove one or more freedoms they're used to. eBay's new CEO is right to say it would be more surprising if people didn't protest, given the community's passionate nature. But plenty of online communities have had userbases just as passionate - and did not survive their own arrogance once technology changes created other options. In this battle, eBay's true opponent is Google.

It is Google, now, whose product search puts eBay listings alongside many others, and where people are increasingly likely to start looking for unfamiliar items. And it will be Google that wins if sellers leave eBay en masse, because that's how we will find them in their new homes.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I see that the war between Scientology and the Net, first spotted in about 1994, has erupted again. Same issues, slightly different people, similar behavior.

Then (1993-1996): a bunch of Scientology critics collided with a bunch of Scientology adherents in the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology. The critics, besides posting criticism, began posting chunks of the documents that were normally only revealed to Scientologists after they'd been through many (expensive) levels of Scientology training. For an explanation of what the documents are, see here.

The Church of Scientology reacted as documented in the first-referenced article back there (even now, often the one thing I've written that people remember). The newsgroup got flooded with hundreds of messages containing copied and pasted chunks of pro-Scientology material. There was a "Cancelbunny" that began cancelling the critics' messages. Real people got their real homes raided and their real hard drives confiscated. The anonymous mail server in Finland, used for posting some of the secret documents, was raided and, when its owner, Julf Helsingius, realized he couldn't really promise anonymity in the face of the law, shut down. Keith Henson, an engineer and fringe science adventurer (cryonics, space colonization, rocket building), was sued by the CoS for copyright infringement after he openly posted some of the secret documents. He lost in court, declared bankruptcy, picketed Scientology offices, was sentenced to jail, fled to Canada, ordered to present himself for extradition, fled back to the US, and finally spent sic months in jail.

1998: Usenet stopped being the most important forum for Net discussions probably sometime around 1998. At which point, flooding the Web seems to have become the strategy: give every Scientologist E-Z software for building their own site, and watch the numbers grow. "Web spam", a.r.s. called it; that was a time when sheer numbers might still influence what came top of search engine listings.

Early 2000s: The fight moved to where the most important gatekeepers were: search engines. The first note of the battle over spam links, Digital Millennium Copyright Act removal notices, and Google's behavior dates to 1998. A 2002 sampling shows pretty much the same pattern as the Usenet era, without the real-life drama, as does this 2001 article.

Now: this week, I see that an Internet group calling itself "Anonymous" have been launching DDoS attacks on Scientology Web sites, taking them intermittently offline. It's good to see that longstanding a.r.s. Scientology critics like Jeff Jacobsen think this tactic is wrong. Because it is, and not just because DDoS attacks are illegal.

Scientology's online critics have always skated a fine line between good and bad forms of protest. There was, for example, a possibly legitimate argument for posting the secret documents, even if they were copyrighted. Most copyright laws make exceptions for quotations for criticism and parody; critics could also reasonably argue that given the amount Scientologists pay for their access to these documents they ought to have the right to get some idea of what kind of teachings they were actually going to be paying for. After all, most religions – in which category Scientology places itself – publish their beliefs openly. Where would we be in Marriott hotels at night without our free copies of the Bible and the Book of Mormon? It's only businesses – in which category Scientology does not place itself willingly – that claim the inner workings of the products they sell are trade secrets.

There was, therefore, an defensible case that the critics who reacted to copyright threats by publishing the documents as widely and as often as possible were acting in the public interest. You may disagree with it, but it is a legitimate argument to say that people deserve to see what they're buying. A supposed church that counters that argument by claiming that publication will cause it financial hardship could find itself on shaky moral, if not legal, ground.

There is no such case to be made for DDoS attacks. If a site's owner is doing something illegal, report them to the police, counter their bad speech with more speech, or counter their bad technology by documenting it and creating better technology. The Web and search engine wars were carried out in just that way: documenting the influx of thousands of near-identical pro-Scientology Web sites and presenting the evidence to both the search engines themselves and the Web at large was exactly the right way to convince people that something questionable was going on. And the results of the changes search engines made have been long-lasting (in Internet terms). Type "Scientology" into Google today, and you get a set of hits that seem fairly representative of all points of view: top hit CoS's own site, next two hits Wikipedia's entries, third hit one of the best-known critics, Operation Clambake.

Operation Clambake's owner, Andreas Heldal-Lund, has also, I'm glad to see, come out against the DDoS operation. As he says, it's hypocritical to defend your own activities on the grounds of freedom of speech and then deny it to other people. Freedom of speech means freedom for speech you disagree with.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On the Net, John Perry Barlow observed long ago, everything is local and everything is global, but nothing is national. It's one of those pat summations that sometimes is actually right. The EU, in the interests of competing successfully with the very large market that is the US, wants to harmonize the national laws that apply to content online.

They have a point. Today's market practices were created while the intangible products of human ingenuity still had to be fixed in a physical medium. It was logical for the publishers and distributors of said media to carve up the world into national territories. But today anyone trying to, say, put a song in an online store, or create a legal TV download service has to deal with a thicket of national collection societies and licensing authorities.

Where there's a problem there's a consultation document, and so there is in this case: the EU is giving us until February 29 (leap year!) to tell them what we think (PDF).

The biggest flaw in the consultation document is that the authors (who needed a good copy editor) seem to have bought wholesale the 2005 thinking of rightsholders (whom they call "right holders"). Fully a third of the consultation is on digital rights management: should it be interoperable, should there be a dispute resolution process, should SMEs have non-discriminatory access to these systems, should EULAs be easier to read?

Well, sure. But the consultation seems to assume that DRM is a) desirable and b) an endemic practice. We have long argued that it's not desirable; DRM is profoundly anti-consumer. Meanwhile, the industry is clearly fulfilling Naxos founder Klaus Heymann's April 2007 prophecy that DRM would be gone from online music within two years. DRM is far less of an issue now than it was in 2006, when the original consultation was launched. In fact, though, these questions seem to have been written less to aid consumers than to limit the monopoly power of iTunes.

That said, DRM will continue to be embedded in some hardware devices, most especially in the form of HDCP, a form of copy protection being built, invisibly to consumers until it gets in their way, into TV sets and other home video equipment. Unfortunately, because the consultation is focused on "Creative Content Online", such broader uses of DRM aren't included.

However, because of this and because some live streaming services similarly use DRM to prevent consumers from keeping copies of their broadcasts (and probably more will in future as Internet broadcasting becomes more widespread), public interest limitations on how DRM can be used seem like a wise idea. The problem with both DRM and EULAs is that the user has no ability to negotiate terms. The consultation leaves out an important consumer consideration: what should happen to content a consumer pays for and downloads that's protected with DRM if the service that sold it closes down? So far, subscribers lose it all; this is clea

The questions regarding multi-territory licensing are far more complicated, and I suspect answers to those depend largely on whether you're someone trying to clear rights for reuse, someone trying to protect your control over your latest blockbuster's markets, or someone trying to make a living as a creative person. The first of those clearly wants to buy one license rather than dozens. The second wants to sell dozens of licenses rather than one (unless it's for a really BIG sum of money). The third, who is probably part of the "Long Tail" mentioned in the question, may be very suspicious of any regime that turns everything he created before 2005 into "back catalogue works" that are subject to a single multi-territory license. Science fiction authors, for example, have long made significant parts of their income by selling their out-of-print back titles for reprint. An old shot in a photographer's long tail may be of no value for 30 years – until suddenly the subject emerges as a Presidential candidate. Any regime that is adopted must be flexible enough to recognize that copyrighted works have values that fluctuate unpredictably over time.

The final set of question has to do with the law and piracy. Should we all follow France's lead and require ISPs to throw users offline if they're caught file-sharing more than three times? We have said all along that the best antidote to unauthorized copying is to make it easy for people to engage in authorized copying. If you knew, for example, that you could reliably watch the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory (if there ever is one) 24 hours after the US broadcast, would you bother chasing around torrent sites looking for a download that might or might not be complete? Technically, it's nonsense to think that ISPs can reliably distinguish an unauthorized download of copyrighted material from an authorized one; filtering cannot be the answer, no matter how much AT&T wants to kill itself trying. We would also remind the EU of the famed comment of another Old Netizen, John Gilmore: "The Internet perceives censorship as damage, and routes around it."

But of course no consultation can address the real problem, which isn't how to protect copyright online: it's how to encourage creators.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 3:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

April: Month when DRM on music began to fall.

235: Number of patents Microsoft claimed it owns that Linux violates.

8,000: Number of "diggs" a Big Spring, teenager's detention letter got while hordes of angry Firefox defenders from all over the world phoned and emailed his school. The letter had been doctored to make it look as though he was given detention for using Firefox.

24: Number of days from the time Facebook announced Beacon, the advertising partnership that publishes users' purchases at 44 partner sites to their friends lists to the time it announced it had modified the program to allow users to opt out. Facebook planned to expand Beacon to allow users to publish their eBay listings to their friends network.

9: Number of days later that Coca-Cola, Overstock.com, and Travelocity were reported to have pulled out of the program.

7: Number of additional days it took Facebook to allow users to turn off the program entirely, amid speculation that Blockbusters involvement with Beacon may have contravened the US Video Privacy Protection Act, passed after a newspaper disclosed Robert Bork's video rental records when he was a Supreme Court nominee.

1: female winner of the Alan Turing award – Frances Allen.

6: Percentage of BCS Fellows who are female.

5: Upper bound of the percentage of music on the average iPod that was bought on iTunes.

8: Number of times digital preservation can be more expensive than paper (PDF, see p4).

17 per second: the rate at which Amazon.com sold Wiis.

74: Days it took Apple to sell 1 million iPhones. We still don't get it.

£100: Likely cost of the ID card to individuals if/when it is launched in 2009. Exactly as predicted in 2002.

29,000: Number of identified sex offenders whose profiles were deleted by MySpace.

$12 million: amount SCO spent in 2006 on its licensing program, whose revenues were $116,000.

$30 million: SCO's estimated liability to Novell et al after an August court judgment went against it.

September 27: Date on which Darl McBride, CEO of SCO, announced SCO was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection: "Other companies such as Delta Airlines, Texaco, Dow Corning, K-Mart, United Airlines, Toys R’ Us, Macy’s Department Stores and others have emerged from Chapter 11 protection after restructuring themselves for success. We intend to do the same."

December 27: Date SCO was officially delisted from the NASDAQ.

$3.1 billion: Cost of Google's takeover of DoubleClick, which received FTC approval last week. The merger will mean not only that Google gets a huge, new database of individuals' surfing habits but that two of the biggest ad platforms will now belong to the same company.

140,000: Votes discarded by electronic counting machines in Scotland during the May evoting trial. Reports attribute the problem to ballot design. But the key problem was the lack of comeback for voters whose ballots are marked spoiled by machines with no human oversight.

August 2: Date the UK Electoral Commission recommended against pursuing electronic voting any further until security can be improved. The bad news: the government seems unlikely to take this or any other sane advice.

September 29: Date on which Linden Labs advised EU users that VAT is being applied to Second Life bills, including premium registration, land ownership, and maintenance fees. Paying taxes? Sounds like my first life.

25 million: number of UK households whose personal details were contained in two CDs "lost in the post" on the way to the General Audit Office.

3 million: number of UK driving test candidates whose details have been lost on a hard disk in the US, now believed to be touring Iowa.

$1 billion: Amount the FBI has allocated for building a biometric database, to include iris scans, facial images, and other physical characteristics. "Bigger. Faster. Better." Have they learned nothing from Facebook, Google, and MySpace? The bigger the database, the greater the number of connections, the more of it is garbage.

September 4: Date of dissolution of MUSE, the company set up to commercialize the early MUD virtual gaming world. The big beneficiary of that effort: CompuServe. And the original CEO, who went mad, stole the money, and shot himself.

$1.43 billion: the amount eBay overpaid for Skype in 2005.

October 5: Date on which the Bragg v. Linden Labs lawsuit was settled, with terms remaining confidential. This was the court action that lawyers were watching eagerly to see what precedents it might set for the legal status of virtual property. Bragg's Second Life account has been reinstated, and the SL Terms of Service have been amended after a judge's decision in the case found them invalid.

Unclear: which will cost more, the Galileo constellation of global navigation satellites being built by the EU, or the UK national ID card.

Happy New Year!

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Admittedly you have to be not really paying enough attention to do this, but in the last couple of weeks I've discovered torrent spam. Here's how it works: you download a file you think is something you want, and discovered it's been RAR-compressed. When you uncompress the file, you get a second RAR file that requires a password and a Readme file. The Readme advises you that to get the password you need to go to a Web site and enter an email address – any email address. I'm not quite demented enough to do this, even with the venerable black-hole address nobody@nowhere.com. Who knows what evils might be lurking on that Web site?

This is the more or less harmless kind. Other stories say that there are more dangerous types of torrent spam, where to play the file you are required to download a new video player that is typically infected with malware.

For once, this seems not to be an RIAA/MPAA initiative. It's just spam, reflecting the reality that any time anything on the Net gets sufficiently popular someone tries to turn it into a vehicle for unwanted crap. And you know they know it's unwanted, because otherwise they wouldn't be trying so hard to trick you into reading it. At one time – oh, say, a year ago – a lawyers' mailing list agreed that at the threshold of around 10,000 readers you have to turn off or moderate comments because the comment spam got too heavy. Page rank can do it, too: the pelicancrossing.net site that hosts one version of this column gets something like 1,000 comment spams a week – and hardly any real ones. (Moveable Type, which powers that blog, does have anti-spam settings, which trap most, but not all, of the junk. Unfortunately, the price is that for some reason it rejects all comments I make myself, which means that people who do comment don't get responses from me. Despite a lot of trawling through settings, I have yet to find a solution to this.)

Appropriately diligent research shows that torrent spam isn't new; it was first reported in 2004, and by 2005 there were efforts to create a reporting service. That service now has very little traffic in its forums, and that makes it hard to tell from its stats whether this is a growing problem. Despite the egocentric desire to see it as one – hey, I noticed it! It must be big! – it's probably just a footnote to the great tide of spam that washes over us in so many other ways. A modest amount of attention paid to checking the torrent you're downloading defeats it.

Still, it's arguably yet another reason why the *AAs should have fought back by creating their own cheap, reliable, widely available services. They may pick up some short-term advantage by being able to campaign semi-truthfully on the idea that using P2P to download copyrighted material is risky. But long-term the educational task they'll face in trying to explain to ordinary consumers why we should trust that their systems are safer will be a bigger disadvantage.

On the wider Internet, of course, spam continues to be a relentless flood. Google broke ranks this week to claim that the amount of spam reaching its network is declining. I find it hard to believe this. It's certainly true that spam does move on if a particular technology goes out of favor – the areas of Usenet I frequent are now almost completely spam-free though not, unfortunately, devoid of single-idea-obsessed idiots with a trigger-finger on the abusive adjectives.

But if email spam does start to die because too many people have moved their real communications to IM, Skype, Facebook, and other newer, more carefully gated media it seems unlikely that any one service provider will be singled out. Given that the single biggest reason email spam is popular is that it costs next to nothing to send, I really can't see botnet designers sitting around their labs going, "Oh, listen, this time let's not bother sending anything to gmail addresses; they just bounce it." If there's one thing we know about spammers it's that they don't care about targeting. I find Facebook, LinkedIn, and the other social network platforms painfully irritating to use for communications compared to email; but for a lot of people they work as an elaborate form of white-listing.

But others do not. "I'm more likely to have Facebook open these days than Outlook," one such correspondent wrote just this morning when I suggested taking it to email.

The longer-term prospects, though, are for much more "legitimate" marketing email. Spamhaus has a really interesting article up about a recent flood of sales messages it's received from one of the lifetime menaces on its ROKSO list advertising cheap home delivery of the New York Times. That same article talks about the many ways email addresses find their way onto marketing lists: sharing with third-party companies and database-matching being the most significant. Then, also this week, Adobe and Yahoo! announced that we can have – oh, joy! – ads in PDFs downloaded dynamically while we try to read.

Doesn't anyone get it? The difference between marketing and spam is user choice. Take that away, and it's all just spam.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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"It's like 1994," Richard Bartle, the longest-serving virtual world creator, said this week. We were at the Virtual Worlds Forum. Sure enough: most of the panels were about how businesses could make money! in virtual worlds! Substitute Web! and Bartle was right.

"Virtual worlds are poised to revolutionize today's Web ecommerce," one speaker said enthusiastically. "They will restore to ecommerce the social and recreational aspect of shopping, the central element in the real world, which was stripped away when retailers went online."

There's gold in them thar cartoon hills.

But which hills? Second Life is, to be sure, the virtual world du jour, and it provides the most obviously exploitable platform for businesses. But in 1994 so did CompuServe. It was only three years later – ten years ago last month – that it had shrunk sufficiently for AOL to buy it as revenge. In turn, AOL is itself shrinking – its subscription revenues for the quarter ending June 30, 2007 were half those in the same quarter in 2006.

If there is one thing we know about Internet communities it's that they keep reforming in new technologies, often with many of the same people. Today's kids bop from world to world in groups, every few months. The people I've known on CIX or the WELL turn up on IRC, LiveJournal, Facebook, and IM. Sometimes you flee, as Corey Bridges said of social networks, because your friends list has become "crufted" up with people you don't like. You take your real friends somewhere else until mutatis mutandem. In the older text-based conferencing systems, same pattern: public conferences filled with too many annoying people joined sent old-timers to gated communities like mailing lists or closed conferences. And so it goes.

In a post pointed at by the VWF blog Metaversed's Nick Wilson defines social virtual worlds and concludes that there are only eight of them – the rest are not yet available to the general public, children's worlds, or simply development platforms. "The virtual worlds space," he concludes, "is not as large as many people think."

Probably anyone who's tried to come to grips with Second Life, number one on Wilson's list, without the benefit of friends to go there with knows that. Many parts of SL are resoundingly empty much of the time, and it seems inarguable that most of SL's millions of registered users try it out a few times and then leave their avatars as records in the database. Nonetheless, companies keep experimenting and find the results valuable. A batch of Italian IBMers even used the world to stage a strike last month. Naturally it crashed IBM's SL Business Center: the 1,850 strikers were spread around seven IBM locations, but you can only put about 50 avatars on an island before server lag starts to get you. Strikes: the original denial-of-service attacks.

But questioning whether there's a whole lot of there there is a nice reminder that in another sense, it's 1999. Perfect World, a Chinese virtual world, went public at the end of July, and is currently valued at $1.6 billion. It is, of course, losing money. Meanwhile Microsoft has invested $240 million of the change rattling around the back of its sofas in Facebook to become its exclusive "advertising partner", giving that company an overall value of $515 billion. That should do nicely to ensure that Google or Yahoo! doesn't buy it outright, anyway. Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace only two years ago for $580 million – which sounds like a steal by comparison if it weren't for the fact that Murdoch has made many online plays and they've all so far been wrong.

Two big issues seem to be dominating discussions about "the virtual world space". One: how to make money. Two: how and whether to make world interoperable, so when you get tired of one you can pick up your avatar and reputation and take them somewhere new. It was in discussing this latter point that Bridges made the comment noted above: after a while in a particular world shedding that world's character might be the one thing you really want to do. In real life, wherever you go, there you are. Freely exploring your possible selves is what Richard Bartle had in mind when he wrote the first MUD.

The first of those is, of course, the pesky thing only a venture capitalist or a journalist would ask. So far, in general game worlds make their money on subscriptions, and social worlds make their money selling non-existent items like land and maintenance fees thereupon (actually, says Linden Labs, "server resources"). But Asia seems already to be moving toward free play with the real money coming from in-game item sales: 80 million Koreans are buying products in and from Cyworld.

But the two questions are related. If your avatar only functions in a single world, the argument goes, that makes virtual worlds closed environments like the ones CompuServe and AOL failed with. That is of course true – but only after someone comes up with an open platform everyone can use. Unlike the Internet at large, though, it's hard to see who would benefit enough from building one to actually do it.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 2:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Do you have a Facebook page?" one of my friends asked last week. Suppressing the desire to say, "Why? You never talk to me anyway," I simply said: "No." I have a Web site, a personal blog, all the journalism I do; I participate in at least six online communities, two IRC channels, and have email and four IM clients open on my desktop at all times. When people say "Facebook", "LinkedIn", or "MySpace" I sound like a little kid being forced to wear a sweater: "Do I have to…?" I mean, what percentage of my computer needs to belong to other people?

Besides, all these social networks really miss the point. They want you to say who your friends are, for a very small value of the word "friend". Hey, guys, these aren't friends; these are people I happen to know. They're only friends in the sense that if you meet someone in Kyrzgystan that you once worked with 15 years ago in London that you couldn't stand you fall upon them with glad cries of delight just because they aren't a stranger who can't speak English and are unarmed.

Starting with seven AIM buddies Facebook could find, the system started throwing up the names of people it thought I might know. And yes, some of those names are definitely familiar. So I added a few of them, randomly chosen. Two minutes later, an IM: "Did you ask to be my friend on Facebook?" The only sane person.

Then the system offers me "friends of friends".

This is not what I need: more tenuous connections to people to whom I'll have something to say once every five years. And that's why these social networks are wrong. You shouldn't be able to specify friends. You should be able to specify *enemies*. And the specification should be public. Keep your friends close – and your enemies closer.

Calling these things "social networks" makes them sound much grander and more grown-up than they really are. What they are is high school. With cliques and mysteriously popular people who are total jerks and mysteriously unpopular people to whom everyone is mean who are really nice and honorable. (Well, my school was never like that, or maybe I was too disconnected to notice, but all the TV writers seem to have gone to schools that were. I was unpopular, and there was no mystery about it: I was raised by wolves.) High school relationships are all about knowing who is enemies with whom. You can recover if, by mistake, you say something disparaging about someone to their best friend. You can't recover if you tell your friend's best friend's secret to that best friend's sworn enemy.

Your only chance there is that the enemy will pick you up as a friend; the rest are lost to you. My enemy's enemy is my friend: now there's a powerful basis for a friendship. And on a properly constructed social network, that prospective friend would be clearly visible to you.

But under the saccharine rule of Facebook, my friend's friend isn't my enemy (which would be useful to know). In a lot of cases it's someone I've never met. And given that half the people labeled as "friends" aren't really friends at all (you know who you are not), it's probably someone I wouldn't even like if I did meet them.

Plus, some of the people who I really do know best don't want to be public about it (well, would you?), so I can't tag them as friends, because then other people will see them in my list and might start asking questions. How helpful is that? Why isn't there a "secret friends" option? Have the people who run Facebook never heard of adultery?

I also have two "friends" who are just people I clicked on by mistake and sent the request before I realized. And they accepted? Is this like negative feedback on eBay, where you don't dare say anything bad about a delinquent seller because they might retaliate by trashing your hard-earned 100 percent positive reputation? Or are they "But he was my friend on Facebook for years, and he seemed like such a nice, normal guy – I can't believe it" people?

But, you know, I'm socially gregarious. Pleasant to a fault. Sweet. Kind. Gentle. Good. The kind of person anyone would want to have in their inbook. Or inbox. Whatever. Like Bugs Bunny. As long as they didn't actually know me in high school, I don't see why they shouldn't pretend to be my friend. It does seem to me curious, though, that so many of the digerati are not more embarrassed to admit they have a Facebook page. I mean, it's pathetic, all this trying to look cool and keep up with the teenagers. Clearly, anyone who would openly claim as a friend someone on Facebook is someone I do not want to admit to knowing. Groucho would never friend me on Facebook.

And the actual friend who asked me to join? Fuhgeddaboudit. He's got a common name and a habit of not specifying any details. He could be any of about 200 people. Should I friend them all, just to see?

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 2:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I seem to have spent the summer dodging in and out of science fiction novels featuring four general topics: energy, security, virtual worlds, and what someone at the last conference called "GRAIN" technologies (genetic engineering, robotics, AI, and nanotechnology). So the summer started with doom and gloom and got progressively more optimistic. Along the way, I have mysteriously lost a lot of hats. The phenomena may not be related.

I lost the first hat in June, a Toyota Motor Racing hat (someone else's joke; don't ask) while I was reading the first of many very gloomy books about the end of the world as we know it. Of course, TEOTWAWKI has been oft-predicted, and there is, as Damian Thompson, the Telegraph's former religious correspondent, commented when I was writing about Y2K – a "wonderful and gleeful attention to detail" in these grand warnings. Y2K was a perfect example: a timetable posted to comp.software.year-2000 had the financial system collapsing around April 1999 and the cities starting to burn in October…

Energy books can be logically divided into three categories. One, apocalyptics: fossil fuels are going to run out (and sooner than you think), the world will continue to heat up, billions will die, and the few of us who survive will return to hunting, gathering, and dying young. Two, deniers: fossil fuels aren't going to run out, don't be silly, and we can tackle global warming by cleaning them up a bit. Here. Have some clean coal. Three, optimists: fossil fuels are running out, but technology will help us solve both that and global warming. Have some clean coal and a side order of photovoltaic panels.

I tend, when not wracked with guilt for having read 15 books and written 30,000 words on the energy/climate crisis and then spent the rest of the summer flying approximately 33,000 miles, toward optimism. People can change – and faster than you think. Ten years ago, you'd have been laughed off the British isles for suggesting that in 2007 everyone would be drinking bottled water. Given the will, ten years from now everyone could have a solar collector on their roof.

The difficulty is that at least two of those takes on the future of energy encourage greater consumption. If we're all going to die anyway and the planet is going inevitably to revert to the Stone Age, why not enjoy it while we still can? All kinds of travel will become hideously expensive and difficult; go now! If, on the other hand, you believe that there isn't a problem, well, why change anything? The one group who might be inclined toward caution and saving energy is the optimists – technology may be able to save us, but we need time to create create and deploy it. The more careful we are now, the longer we'll have to do that.

Unfortunately, that's cautious optimism. While technology companies, who have to foot the huge bills for their energy consumption, are frantically trying to go green for the soundest of business reasons, individual technologists don't seem to me to have the same outlook. At Black Hat and Defcon, for example (lost hats number two and three: a red Canada hat and a black Black Hat hat), among all the many security risks that were presented, no one talked about energy as a problem. I mean, yes, we have all those off-site backups. But you can take out a border control system as easily with an electrical power outage as you can by swiping an infected RFID passport across a reader to corrupt the database. What happens if all the lights go out, we can't get them back on again, and everything was online?

Reading all those energy books changes the lens through which you view technical developments somewhat. Singapore's virtual worlds are a case in point (lost hat: a navy-and-tan Las Vegas job): everyone is talking about what kinds of laws should apply to selling magic swords or buying virtual property, and all the time in the back of your mind is the blog posting that calculated that the average Second Life avatar consumes as much energy as the average Brazilian. And emits as much carbon as driving an SUV for 2,000 miles. Bear in mind that most SL avatars aren't figured up that often, and the suggestion that we could curb energy consumption by having virtual conferences instead of physical ones seems less realistic. (Though we could, at least, avoid airport security.) In this, as in so much else, the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge seems to have gotten there first: his book Marooned in Real Time looks at the plight of a bunch of post-Singularity augmented humans knowing their technology is going to run out.

It was left to the most science fictional of the conferences, last week's Center for Responsible Nanotechnology conference (my overview is here) to talk about energy. In wildly optimistic terms: technology will not only save us but make us all rich as well.

This was the one time all summer I didn't lose any hats (red Swiss everyone thought was Red Cross, and a turquoise Arizona I bought just in case). If you can keep your hat while all around you everyone is losing theirs…

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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Our old non-friend Comcast has been under fire again, this time for turning off Internet access to users it deems to have used too much bandwidth. The kicker? Comcast won't tell those users how much is too much.

Of course, neither bandwidth caps nor secrecy over what constitutes heavy usage is anything new, at least in Britain. ntl brought in a 1Gb per day bandwidth cap as long ago as 2003. BT began capping users in 2004. And Virgin Media, which now owns ntl and apparently every other cable company in the UK, is doing it, too.

As for the secrecy, a few years ago when "unlimited" music download services were the big thing, it wasn't uncommon to hear heavy users complain that they'd been blocked for downloading so much that the service owner concluded they were sharing the account. (Or, maybe hoarding music to play later, I don't know.) That was frustrating enough, but the bigger complaint was that they could never find out how much was too much. They would, they said, play by the rules – if only someone would tell them what those rules were.

This is the game Comcast is now playing. It is actually disconnecting exceptionally heavy users – and then refusing to tell them what usage is safe. Internet service, as provided by Franz Kafka. The problem is that in a fair number of areas of the US consumers have no alternative if they want broadband. Comcast owns the cable market, and DSL provision is patchy. The UK is slightly better off: Virgin Media now owns the cable market, but DSL is widespread, and it's not only sold by BT directly but also by smaller third parties under a variety of arrangements with BT's wholesale department.

I am surprised to find I have some – not a lot, but some – sympathy with Comcast here. I do see that publishing the cap might lead to the entire industry competing on how much you can download a month – which might in turn lead to everyone posting the "unlimited" tag again and having to stick with it. On the other hand, as this Slashdot comment says, subscribers don't have any reliable way of seeing how much they actually are downloading. There is no way to compare your records with the company's equivalent to balancing your check book. But at least you can change banks if the bank keeps making mistakes or your account is being hacked. As already noted, this isn't so much of an option for Comcast subscribers.

This type of issue is resurfacing in the UK as a network neutrality dispute with the advent of the BBC's iPlayer. Several large ISPs want the BBC to pay for bandwidth costs, perhaps especially because its design makes it prospectively a bandwidth hog. It's an outrageous claim when you consider that both consumers and the BBC already pay for their bandwidth.

Except…we don't, quite. The fact is that the economics of ISPs have barely changed since they were all losing money a decade ago. In the early days of the UK online industry, when the men were men, the women were (mostly) men, and Demon was the top-dog ISP, ISPs could afford to offer unlimited use of their dial-up connections for one very simple reason. They knew that the phone bills would throw users offline: British users paid by the minute for local calls in those days. ISPs could, therefore, budget their modem racks and leased lines based on the realistic assessment that most of their users would be offline at any given time.

Cut to today. Sure, users are online all the time with broadband. But most of them go out to work (or, if they're businesses, go home at night), and heavy round-the-clock usage is rare. ISPs know this, and budget accordingly. Pipes from BT are expensive, and their size is, logically, enough, specified based on average use. There isn't a single ISP whose service wouldn't fall over if all its users saturated all their bandwidth 24/7. And at today's market rates, there isn't a single ISP who could afford to provide a service that wouldn't fall over under that level of usage. If an entire nation switches even a sizable minority of its viewing habits to the iPlayer ISPs could legitimately have a problem. Today's bandwidth hogs are a tiny percentage of Internet users, easily controlled. Tomorrow's could be all of us. Well, all of us and the FBI.

Still, there really has to be a middle ground. The best seems to be the ideas in the Slashdot posting linked about: subscribers should be able to monitor the usage on their accounts. Certainly, there are advantages to both sides in having flexible rules rather than rigid ones. But the ultimate sanction really can't be to cut subscribers off for a year, especially if they have no choice of supplier. If that's how Comcast wants to behave, it could at least support plans for municipal wireless. Let the burden of the most prolific users of the Internet, like those of health care, fall on the public purse. Why not?

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

Posted by at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Virtual worlds have been with us for a long time. Depending who you listen to, they began in 1979, or 1982, or it may have been the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave. We'll go with the University of Essex MUD, on the grounds that its co-writer Richard Bartle can trace its direct influence on today's worlds.

At State of Play this week, it was clear that just as the issues surrounding the Internet in general have changed very little since about 1988, neither have the issues surrounding virtual worlds.

True, the stakes are higher now and, as Professor Yee Fen Lim noted, when real money starts to be involved people become protective.

Level 70 warrior accounts on World of Warcraft go for as little as $10 (though your level number cannot disguise your complete newbieness), but the unique magic sword you won in a quest may go for much more. The best-known pending case is Bragg versus Second Life over virtual property the world's owners confiscated when they realized that Bragg was taking advantage of a loophole in their system to buy "land" at exceptionally cheap prices. Lim had an interesting take on the Bragg case: as a legal concept, she argued, property is right of control, even though Linden Labs itself defines its virtual property as rental of a processor. As computer science that's fine, but it's not law. Otherwise, she said, "Property is mere illusion."

Ultimately, the issues all come down to this: who owns the user experience? In subscription gaming worlds, the owners tend to keep very tight control of everything – they claim ownership in all intellectual property in the world, limit users' ability to create their own content, and block the sale of cheats as much as possible. In a free-form world like Second Life which may host games but is itself a platform rather than a game, users are much freer to do what they want but the EULAs or Terms of Service may be just as unfair.

Ultimately, no matter what the agreement says, today's privately owned virtual worlds all function under the same reality: the game gods can pull the plug at any time. They own and control the servers. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and all that. Until someone implements open source world software on a P2P platform, this will always be the way. Linden Labs says, for what it's worth, that its long-term intention is to open-source its platform so that anyone may set up a world. This, too, has been done before, with The Palace.

One consequence of this is that there is no such thing as virtual privacy, a topic that everyone is aware of but no one's talking about. The piecemeal nature of the Net means that your friend's IRC channel doesn't know anything about your Web use, and Amazon.com doesn't track what you do on eBay. But virtual worlds log everything. If you buy a new shirt at a shop and then fly to a distant island to have sex with it, all that is logged. (Just try to ensure the shirt doesn't look like a child's shirt and you don't get into litigation over who owns the island…)

There are, as scholars say, legitimate reasons. Logging everything that happens is important in helping game developers pinpoint the source of crashes and eliminate bugs. Logs help settle disputes over who did what to whose magic sword. And in a court case, they may be important evidence (although how you can ensure that the logs haven't been adjusted to suit the virtual world provider, who is usually one of the parties to the litigation, I don't know).

As long as you think of virtual worlds as games, maybe this isn't that big a problem. After all, no one is forced to spend half their waking hours killing enough monsters in World of Warcraft to join a guild for a six-hour quest.

But something like Second Life aspires to be a lot more than that. The world is adding voice communication, which will be interesting: if you have to use your real voice, the relative anonymity conferred by the synthetic world are gone. Quite apart from bandwidth demands (lag is the bane of every SLer's existence), exploring what virtual life is like in the opposite gender isn't going to work. They're going to need voice synthesizers.

Much of the law in this area is coming out of Asia, where massively multi-player online games took off so early with such ferocity that, according to Judge Unggi Yoon, in a recent case a member of a losing team in one such game ran to the café where the winning team was playing and physically battered one of its members. Yoon, who explained some of the new laws, is an experienced online gamer, all the way back to playing Ultima Online in middle school. In his country, a law has recently come into force taxing virtual world transactions (it works like a VAT threshold – under $100 a month you don't owe anything). For Westerners, who are used to the idea that we make laws and export them rather than the other way around, this is quite a reality shift.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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Some designs are just annoying – the Blue Screen of Death, say, once you get over the initial fright of seeing it, Somewhere on the planet there may be someone who sees the screen and can read the gibberish in the few seconds before the screen goes black and the computer restarts and say, "Ah, yes, it's the shedelepp in the specklediff" (non-words courtesy of the late humorist Jean Kerr).

Other designs are just dangerous: the laptop power adaptors that burst into flames, for example.
The really insidious ones are the ones that scare you half to death and make you scurry around in panicked circles ministering to them. Here is one such. The iGo Juice is in many ways an admirable product. It will power just about any laptop in just about any circumstance. It has two flaws: it relies on a bolt-together design using proprietary cables and plugs that you can't get anywhere but from iGo, and some of those cables and plugs are rather small and come apart rather too easily.

Which is all to explain how I managed to unpack the laptop in my hotel room on the evening I arrived in Singapore to discover that the little tiny plug that hooks the whole thing to the laptop was missing, presumably still hiding in my airplane seat. I may be more frightened of being in a foreign city with no laptop power more than almost anything that's actually likely to happen to me.

First idea: call airline, ask them to look for the plug. Airlines do find things sometimes; I'm fairly sure that if I were able to search the plane myself I *would* find it. However, it's a small plug, and it's nearly the same color as many of the furnishings…clearly a Plan B was needed.

It has to be possible to find a laptop adaptor that works in Singapore, right? It's southeast Asia. Electronics country. This is where geeks come for fun.

The hotel said, "Funan." I had already read about it online: a giant electronics shopping mall. It's within walking distance, which is near-miraculous. But it will be closing soon, probably in the next hour. I set out promptly in the wrong direction, map in hand.

There are several reasons why you can't actually walk very fast in Singapore. For one thing, downtown Singapore is filled with malls, overpasses, and other diversions that all work to slow you down. You have to go around, up, through, or over them. Second of all, and this is a hard thing for a native New Yorker, jaywalking is illegal – and they are said to enforce that law. (In fact, at one particularly crowded crossing there were police officers making sure.) Third of all, and I think this was just coincidental, it was incredibly crowded. Almost everyone was going the other way because there was going to be a huge firework display.

Funan, when I eventually got there after half an hour of walking (past, among other things, a giant Chinese pagoda) is six stories of electronics stores, all at various stages of closing for the night. The first one had a universal adaptor for S$170 that didn't have a plug that fit. It recommended a second store I couldn't find, and a third that was closed. A fourth store said no. The fifth had a list of adaptors it sold outside, and my specification was on it – but it was out of stock. And then a miracle happened. A guy materialized with another universal adaptor that came with more plugs. And one of them fit. And when we plugged it all in the laptop actually confirmed it was getting power. For S$49.

Of course, every design has its pluses and minuses. iGo's idea seems to have been to protect pins and cables so securely that they wouldn't break, a common problem with adaptors. The cables are braided or heavily insulated, and all the pins in all the plugs are encased in plastic to protect them. It's a nice design except for the losing parts problem.

I don't think the designers understand how important that really is – it makes their design so fragile if you're on the road somewhere. I feel sure that their design is a response to years of frustration with the more common type of adaptor, whose cable emerges from the power brick with a molded plastic surround that wears out under the strains of folding and unfolding the cord. But by fixing that perennial problem they created a new one: a design that at any given time is only one tiny proprietary part away from total failure.

Of course, the truly obsessive travel with not only backup power supplies but second laptops. And I suppose my Plan C would have been something like that: buy a new laptop, which of course would come with its own power adaptor. These days, when laptops all use commodity parts, you can just swap in the old one's hard drive and let the BIOS figure it out. It seems disproportionate, but anything has to be better than the black void of no communications, nothing to work on, and no entertainment. Because these days, when you travel, your laptop is all those things.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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This has been the week for reminders that the border between real life and cyberspace is a permeable blood-brain barrier.

On Wednesday, Linden Labs announced that it was banning gambling in Second Life. The resentment expressed by some of SL residents is understandable but naive. We're not at the beginning of the online world any more; Second Life is going through the same reformation to take account of national laws as Usenet and the Web did before it.

Second, this week MySpace deleted the profiles of 29,000 American users identified as sex offenders. That sounds like a lot, but it's a tiny percentage of MySpace's 180 million profiles. None of them, be it noted, are Canadian.

There's no question that gambling in Second Life spills over into the real world. Linden dollars, the currency used in-world, have active exchange rates, like any other currency, currently running about L$270 to the US dollar. (When I was writing about a virtual technology show, one of my interviewees was horrified that my avatar didn't have any distinctive clothing; she was and is dressed in the free outfit you are issued when you join. He insisted on giving me L$1,000 to take her shopping. I solemnly reported the incident to my commissioning editor, who felt this wasn't sufficiently corrupt to worry about: US$3.75! In-world, however, that could buy her several cars.) Therefore: the fact that the wagering takes place online in a simulated casino with pretty animated decorations changes nothing. There is no meaningful difference between craps on an island in Second Life and poker on an official Web-based betting site. If both sites offer betting on real-life sporting events, there's even less difference.

But the Web site will, these days, have gone through considerable time and money to set up its business. Gaming, even outside the US, is quite difficult to get into: licenses are hard to get, and without one banks won't touch you. Compared to that, the $3,800 and 12 to 14 hours a day Brighton's Anthony Smith told Information Week he'd invested in building his SL Casino World is risibly small. You have to conclude that there are only two possibilities. Either Smith knew nothing about the gaming business - if he did, he know that the US has repeatedly cracked down on online gambling over the last ten years and that ultimately US companies will be forced to decide to live within US law. He'd also have known how hard and how expensive it is to set up an online gambling operation even in Europe. Or, he did know all those things and thought he'd found a loophole he could exploit to avoid all the red tape and regulation and build a gaming business on the cheap.

I have no personal interest in gaming; risking real money on the chance draw of a card or throw of dice seems to me a ridiculous waste of the time it took to earn it. But any time you have a service that involves real money, whether that service is selling an experience (gaming), a service, or a retail product, when the money you handle reaches a certain amount governments are going to be interested. Not only that, but people want them involved; people want protection from rip-off artists.

The MySpace decision, however, is completely different. Child abuse is, rightly, illegal everywhere. Child pornography is, more controversially, illegal just about