ARTS & FARCES internet

Censorship

James Glanz and John Markoff, writing for the New York Times, report the Obama administration is supporting an effort to “deploy ‘shadow’ internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.” One of the projects, funded by a US$2 million US State Department grant to the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, is an internet-in-a-suitcase system to provide a wide-area wireless mesh network with internet connectivity. A worthy undertaking, indeed, so long as the systems are available to anyone who needs them, not just those the US chooses to support.

Cryptography

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was hacked and suffered what an unnamed “senior official” told David E. Sanger and John Markoff, writing for the New York Times, was “a very major breach.” Apparently the breach was bad enough that Sanger and Markoff report the World Bank severed their direct link to the IMF. The IMF oversees the global financial system with the intent of stabilizing exchange rates between developed nations and loaning money for “economic development” to developing states, the latter almost always problematic. As Joseph Stiglitz said best, “When the IMF arrives in a country, they are interested in only one thing. How do we make sure the banks and financial institutions are paid?... It is the IMF that keeps the [financial] speculators in business. They’re not interested in development, or what helps a country to get out of poverty.” The IMF databases are a potentially lucrative target for financial speculators as they contain sensitive information on bailouts around the globe. Sanger and Markoff report the IMF “declined to say where they believe the attack originated.”

ESRD

Jane Brody’s column in the New York Times this week touches on an important subject but fails to adequately address it. Paying for end-of-life healthcare should matter to all of us. Inordinate amounts of money are wasted extending life at the end. More importantly, these expenditures rarely do anything at all to improve the patient’s quality of life. US politicians are slowly coming around to realizing this and passing legislation like New York’s Palliative Care Information Act. The Medical Society of the State of New York, representing doctors, medical residents, and medical students, oppose the legislation that took effect last February. The law requires doctors to provide information and counseling about palliative care and end-of-life treatment options. Patients, of course, can refuse to discuss the issues, at their option; but the medical professionals are required to bring it up. Brody cites Yashar Hirshaut as writing, “the new law is going to have a direct negative effect on too many cancer patients,” and relaying his negative experience explaining the law’s requirements to a patient (the patient asked if they were trying to kill her). Well, Yashar, your job as a physician isn’t to explain the law’s requirements. Rather it’s to inform your patient of her options.

Internet

The Sunlight Foundation has released Inbox Influence, a set of tools that tracks the political contributions of the individuals and organizations cited in the email you receive. Careful with that axe, Eugene! Inbox Influence sends the cleartext of your email and header information to its servers to process your query.

One hundred Mbps internet service costs about US$200 per month in most areas of the US. I’m embarrassed to say I pay US$104 per month for 4Mbps/768Kbps DSL and a /28 static IP block. Nate Anderson, writing for Ars Technica, reports that Sonic.net has begun to offer 1Gbps fiber connectivity for US$70 per month but wonders if that price point is sustainable. Sonic.net is running a pilot program in Sebastopol, CA—to about 700 homes—to find out. Sonic.net chief executive, Dane Jasper, tells Anderson, “The natural model when you have a simple duopoly capturing the majority of the market is segmentation: Maximize ARPU [average revenue per user] by artificially limiting service in order to drive additional monthly spending. But fundamentally this is the wrong model for a service provider like us, and we have looked to Europe for inspiration…. I believe that removing the artificial limits on speed, and including home phone with the product are both very exciting.” The question that should be asked, as pointed out by one of the commenters, is whether the business model of the incumbent telecommunications and cable duopoly is sustainable.

Media

The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s shield law does not protect authors of internet comments. Shield laws generally allow journalists to protect the identities of confidential sources. In this case, “... the law only applies if the journalists are writing for publication in traditional media—like newspapers, magazines, radio, or television—or other similar ‘electronic means of disseminating news,’” writes Wendy Davis for Online Media Daily. Davis quotes from the judges’ 46-page opinion (.pdf; 106KB): “We ... do not believe that the legislature intended to provide an absolute privilege in defamation cases to people who post comments on message boards. The popularity of the internet has resulted in millions of bloggers who have no connection to traditional media. Any of them, as well as anyone with a Facebook account, could try to assert the privilege.” The New Jersey Supremes rejected any required norms of institutional journalism suggested by the state appellate court. “Maintaining particular credentials or adhering to professional standards of journalism—like disclosing conflicts of interest or note taking—is also not required by the shield law,” the judges wrote. Thank goodness for small favors, because the rest of the ruling is severely misguided. The basis of the decision appears to be solely the medium or “form” itself, as the judges wrote, “In essence, message boards are little more than forums for conversation.” Wait. What? Are internet comments not an “electronic means of disseminating news?” The ruling goes on to mention that individual bloggers could assert the shield privilege if they were attached to institutional media or behaved “similarly” to institutional media.

Dan Gillmor, writing for the Guardian, maintains that Andrew Breitbart being correct about US Representative Anthony Weiner tweeting lewd images to women who were not his wife only raises his credibility to zero. How can that happen? Because Breitbart’s previous credibility had been less than zero. Gillmor’s latest book, Mediactive, includes a credibility scale chart that explains negative credibility. Credibility, according to Gillmor, has to be earned. Accuracy, thoroughness, fairness, and context all play a part.

Privacy

After being charged with illegally retaining classified documents under the Espionage Act, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake has agreed to plead guilty to exceeding authorized access to a computer, a misdemeanor. Ellen Nakashima, writing for the Washington Post, reports that Drake will face a year’s probation after facing 35 years if he’d been convicted under the Espionage Act. Nakashima reports Drake rejected two offers from US government prosecutors after repeatedly saying he would “never plea bargain with the truth.” This could be a major setback for the Obama administration’s penchant for prosecuting leakers.

Publishing

As first reported by Jordan Golson, writing for MacRumors, Apple has quietly reversed its policy requiring iOS content apps to sell in-app subscriptions at the same or lower price than that offered outside the app. At the same time, Apple removed the requirement that subscriptions must be offered in-app. Apps can offer access to non-app content for purchase outside of the Apple walled garden, but cannot use a “buy” button to connect the user directly to an external ecommerce system.

Google announced this week it is indexing attribution of individual content creators on the web to each specific author. Previously, the search engine attributed authorship to the websites on which an author’s work was published. What this means with regard to search results ranking remains to be seen, but Google is clearly recognizing the value of content authors in addition to publishers. In his announcement, Othar Hansson writes, “We know that great content comes from great authors, and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.” Google’s authorship markup uses the HTML5 rel attribute in a straightforward manner.

Spirituality

Jim Gilliam is a political activist using the internet to mend a broken system. He spoke this week at Personal Democracy Forum 2011 on the internet as religion, how we connect to God. Highly recommended.

Technology

Apple’s OS X Lion, available next month, is adopting traits from iOS including more multitouch gestures and full-screen apps. It will be available only though the App Store for US$30 and will install in place. Richard Austin provides instructions for making a Lion boot disc. Lion Server will be available in the App Store in July as well for US$50. The updated server software includes a new web-based Profile Manager for user management, push notification, and WebDAV-based file sharing with iOS devices.

Apple also announced iOS 5, coming in the fall of 2011, which is gaining some traits from OS X (more complex email, PC-free synching and updating).

The trifecta from Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference is its third attempt at cloud computing, iCloud, scheduled for a fall 2011 release. Rather than following the Google and Microsoft model of putting applications in the cloud, Apple is taking the path of using the cloud as a hub to provide storage and synchronization of content between devices. This is especially important for iOS devices, as they don’t have a user-facing file system. In true Apple fashion, iCloud’s synching is automatic and “just works.” The first five gigabytes of iCloud storage will be free and music, books, and apps purchased in the iTunes App Store will not count against that capacity.

Part of Apple’s iCloud is something called iTunes Match (scroll down). For US$25 per year, it works by iTunes scanning your music collection and adding any non-iTunes Store purchased music to your iCloud library. For music iTunes recognizes, the files are upgraded to Apple’s 256Kb AAC format.

User experience

Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design has been published by A Book Apart. Accordingly, an excerpt of the third chapter, “Fluid Images” has been published on A List Apart. The article explores adding constraints to images within a web page, allowing modern browsers to work their resizing magic.

Jared Spool has been one of the more visible user experience practitioners in the field for more than 20 years. He’s written an excellent explanation of why he’s never been able to convince an executive to invest in user experience. As a result, his outfit only takes on projects from which they can guarantee results. Spool’s success always comes from projects in which the client already understood the value of what Spool and his team provided.