ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 Nickel and Dimed surveyed the poor in the best of times. In a column for the Guardian, 10 years later she doubts she’d be able to repeat her “experiment” of trying to make ends meet by working unskilled jobs at US$6-US$7 per hour because she wouldn’t be able to find a job. Overcrowding apartments, food auctions and urban hunting, and reduced use of prescriptions and healthcare services are how the working poor are dealing 10 years on. Ehrenreich questions why food stamp use is up by about 30 percent and welfare reform is up by only about 6 percent since the recession began and finds, “There is a right to food stamps. You go to the office and, if you meet the statutory definition of need, they help you. For welfare, the street-level bureaucrats can, pretty much at their own discretion, just say no.” Poverty, Ehrenreich observes, has been criminalized in the US.

Censorship

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Francisco shut down cellular telephone service Thursday night in four downtown stations to subvert a protest over a shooting by a BART police officer. Transit system officials “shut down power to the nodes and alerted the cell carriers,” reports Elinor Mills, writing for CNET, citing James Allison, BART’s deputy chief communications officer. Allison goes on to tell Mills that the action was taken to “ensure the safety of everyone on the platform.” Really? By blocking 911 calls? Mills reports that BART first asked the carriers to suspend service but then decided to cut power itself. As for the telecommunications carriers? AT&T and T-Mobile had no comment for Mills. Sprint and Verizon didn’t respond or said they were looking into the matter. BART and, perhaps, the carriers have placed themselves squarely in the shoes of Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt currently facing trial. Mubarak ordered cellular service shut down in Tahrir Square in response to peaceful, democratic protests this spring. Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right and what BART (and possibly the carriers) did in cutting power to the nodes constitutes prior restraint of the First Amendment rights of every citizen in the stations.

Media

Richard Saul Wurman launched the Technology, Entertainment, and Design Conference (TED) in 1984, selling most of the rights to Chris Anderson in 2002. Warren Berger, writing for Fast Company‘s Co.Design, reports that Wurman is back with the WWW Conference, an attempt to reinvision the business conference yet again; this time with public one-on-one conversations. Between two humans. No speeches; no slide shows. Conversation. Wurman describes the endeavor as “like a dinner party with a hundred of the world’s greatest minds having a conversation, two at a time,” and aims to launch it in the fall of 2012. The conversations will be held in front of a small, invitation-only audience with the experience captured in a commercial app.

Privacy

Following the lead so badly provided by Facebook, LinkedIn has decided it can play the schlock game as well as anyone on the web. The professional networking site has set a default for all of its users allowing their names and photographs to be used for third-party advertising. And of course LinkedIn did this quietly, in the dead of night, hoping no one would notice. Steve Woodruff, writing for Connection Agent, noticed. Woodruff provides the simple steps necessary to turn it off: Settings > Account > Manage Social Advertising > LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising.

After 11 months, the US Department of Justice finally complied with Christopher Soghoian’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the department’s use of emergency surveillance of internet communications. “Law enforcement agencies within the Department of Justice sought and obtained communications content for 91 accounts, Soghoian reports on Slight Paranoia. “This number is a significant increase over previous years: 17 accounts in 2008 (.pdf), 9 accounts in 2007 (.pdf), and 17 accounts in 2006 (.pdf). A significant increase indeed; 400 percent worth.

Publishing

The Agens Berman litigation group has filed a class-action antitrust lawsuit (.pdf; 3MB) in the US District Court for northern California alleging that HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, and Apple conspired to increase ebook prices and force Amazon to abandon the discounting strategy it began in 2007. Before you roll your eyes, consider that there may well be clear evidence of price fixing. First, Apple and the publishers negotiated an “agency model” agreement whereby Apple, instead of purchasing titles for resale, acted as an agent for the publishers, taking a percentage of each sale, with the publishers setting prices. Then, the publishers granted Apple “most favored nation” status, agreeing not to sell books to any other online reseller at lower prices. Finally, the publishers, starting with Macmillan’s strong-arming, forced Amazon into the agency model. The price for ebook titles Amazon began selling in 2007 for US$9.99—when it purchased titles from publishers and determined its own selling price—has increased as much as 50 percent to US$15 in some cases. As Matthew Lasar, writing for Ars Technica, reports that when the Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg asked Steve Jobs at the iPad unveiling why anyone would buy a book on the iPad for US$14.99 when they could purchase it from Amazon for US$9.99, Jobs’s response was “That won’t be the case.” The Agens Berman lawsuit notes that without an illegal conspiracy, Jobs would have no way of predicting future ebook prices so precisely.

Sustainability

Still eating non-organic? Well, according to Ariel Schwartz, writing for Fast Company, non-organic chicken is a public health issue. Schwartz cites a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) study finding that “organic poultry farms have lower levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.” Even more important, conventional farms that switch to organic methods see immediate drops in drug-resistant enterococcus.

User experience

Jonathan Kahn’s “Web governance: Becoming an agent of change” for A List Apart is a must-read for anyone working in any of the user experience disciplines. Like it or not your organization’s website has become the most important way for you to reach your customers and constituents. And denial isn’t a viable strategy any longer. Neither is the wild west approach user experience professionals have enjoyed for the last 15 years.