ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Ed Vulliamy, writing for the Guardian, reports that Swiss whistleblower Rudolf Elmer will provide offshore bank account details on 2,000 individuals and corporations to WikiLeaks. Shortly after the WikiLeaks handoff Elmer will return to Switzerland to face trial for stealing the information from Julius Baer bank. Elmer was formerly the bank’s chief operating officer. “Once you become part of senior management, and gain international experience, as I did, then you are part of the inner circle—and things become much clearer,” Elmer tells Vulliamy. “You are part of the plot. You know what the real products and service are, and why they are so expensive. It should be no surprise that the main product is secrecy ... Crimes are committed and lies spread in order to protect this secrecy.”

Censorship

Ryan Singel, writing for Wired, has an excellent analysis of how Twitter dealt with the court order demanding it turn over information about people connected to WikiLeaks. “Twitter beta-tested a spine,” Singel writes, challenging other technology companies take note and come up with their own version. The court order, issued by a magistrate judge in Alexandria, Virginia included a gag order that prevented Twitter from disclosing the order. Instead of simply complying with the court order and going about its business, Twitter took the time and trouble to challenge the secret gag order in court in order to be able to inform the targets of the existence of the court order so the targets could initiate challenges, if they so wished. Twitter didn’t challenge the validity of the order demanding access to the information; rather, the microblogging service challenged the secrecy of the order. The US government issues more than 50,000 of these secret court orders, known as national security letters, each year. “It’s a perfect example of how the government can use its broad powers to silence people,” Nicholas Merrill, the first person to challenge the use of national security letters, told Noam Cohen writing for the New York Times. Some technology companies have a policy whereby they notify targets of investigations before complying with subpoenas. When such a court order is accompanied by a secret gag order, target notification is impossible. As Singel writes, Twitter “briefly carried the torch for its users during that crucial period when, because of the gag order, its users couldn’t carry it themselves.” Twitter’s action becomes all the more important in light of many companies bowing to the current popular political whim of trying desperately to ignore the First Amendment. Singel points to Bank of America, MasterCard, PayPal, and VISA all banning donations and Amazon denying hosting services to WikiLeaks. E.B. Boyd, writing for Fast Company, has a really good profile of Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel who’s likely behind Twitter’s move.

ESRD

Kimberly-Clark is most widely known for its consumer paper products like Kleenex and diapers. But the company has a fairly large footprint in healthcare products. As a result, the company has recently focused on helping solve the problem of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), and has launched “Not on My Watch,” a website of information about eliminating HAIs.

Robin Fields, the investigative reporter responsible for the most excellent series of dialysis articles for ProPublica will host a conference call on Thursday, 20 January 2011, 3PM Eastern on the dialysis clinic data ProPublica recently published. Fields will provide a walkthrough on using the data for reporting, research, policy analysis, and consumption.

Internet

The New York Times has released an updated version of its WinerLinks code, something it’s now calling Emphasis. WinerLinks are basically paragraph-level permalinks. Emphasis adds the ability to highlight text to the mix. The Emphasis update offers a cleaner syntax and auto-generated anchor links and highlighting.

Law

A US federal court of appeals has ruled that independent advocacy journalists don’t enjoy the same protections as corporate media journalists. Dave Itzkoff, writing for the New York Times, reports that the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan ruled that an independent filmmaker, Joe Berlinger, would have to provide footage from his 2009 documentary to Chevron and “cannot invoke a journalist’s privilege in refusing to do so because his work does not constitute an act of independent reporting.” Berlinger’s film, Crude, documents the lawsuit brought by Ecuadoreans alleging that a Texaco oil field, now owned by Chevron, polluted their water supply. Chevron demanded the footage because it claims the film footage reveals an “improper collaboration between the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Ecuadorean lawsuit and an expert appointed by the Ecuadorean court as a neutral party.”

One of WiliLeaks founder Julian Assange’s attorneys claims that Assange could face the death penalty if he’s extradited to Sweden if Sweden, in turn, extradites him to the US, according to Kim Zetter, writing for Wired. The attorney, Mark Stephens, argues that extraditing Assange could be a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights should the US subject Assange to the extraordinary rendition for which the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is known. Historically, the CIA has conducted (and continues to conduct) these extraordinary renditions whereby a suspected terrorist is kidnapped and transported to a country where they can be tortured in secret prisons. A federal grand jury in Virginia is reported to be investigating just what charges can be brought against Assange with regard to his publication of classified documents obtained from a source.

Privacy

In the first half of last year, Google received more than 4,200 requests from US law enforcement agencies for information about its users. Miguel Helft and Claire Cain Miller, writing for the New York Times, report Verizon told the US Congress in 2007 that it receives about 90,000 similar requests each year and note that Facebook told Newsweek in 2009 that it received 10-20 subpoenas for user information every day. Unfortunately, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA)—the law governing online privacy—was enacted in 1986, eons ago in internet years. The ECPA fails to protect electronic communications—including email, for example—at the same level as print communications. The law affords “more protection to letters in a file cabinet than email on a server,” as Helft and Miller write. Law enforcement agencies argue that even fewer protections should be afforded electronic communications. Helft and Miller note that last year the US Justice Department argued in a court that “cellphone users had given up the expectation of privacy about their location by voluntarily giving that information to carriers.” The Justice Department also argued in a Colorado federal court that it should enjoy warrantless access to email. New regulations are planned by the Obama administration to make internet wiretaps much easier to conduct. Privacy advocates argue that online information should enjoy the same protections as information stored in an individual’s home and that search warrants, approved by a judge, not a simple subpoena from a prosecutor should be required to obtain information about an individual’s online information. As the law is currently written, in most cases law enforcement agencies do not need a warrant to obtain email messages more than six months old while a telephone wiretap usually requires a search warrant issued by a judge. Except when it doesn’t under George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program continued by the Obama administration.

Publishing

Lewis Dvorkin has written up a surprisingly open and candid assessment of Forbes’ content strategy and editorial planning process. It’s valuable for anyone who’s publishing on the web. One of the most interesting aspects of what Forbes is trying to do going forward is exploring the value of a web-first approach. Dvorkin cites a series of online articles on computer security by Andy Greenberg leading to a magazine cover package including an interview with Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. Dvorkin also outlines his New Newsroom concept, “a new kind of circular news process that takes in content; prepares content for syndication and web distribution; analyzes audience usage, reaction, and navigational behavior in real-time; evaluates the data and shares the learnings with editors and the content creators themselves; and ultimately guides the recruitment of new contributors and editorial coverage and programming strategies,” he writes.

Sustainability

Keith Bradsher, writing for the New York Times, reports on the third-largest US manufacturer of solar panels—Devens, Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar—moving its manufacturing operations to China. After receiving at least US$43 million from Massachusetts, the company couldn’t keep up with falling prices for the solar panels. According to Bradsher, solar panel prices have dropped by two-thirds in the last three years. Evergreen Solar and Massachusetts politicians blame the US federal government for not providing financial help the way China does. The result is that as the US currently depends on the Middle East for petroleum, the course is set for the US to become dependent on China for solar and wind power. Bradsher reports Evergreen began selling its solar panels for US$3.39 per watt in 2008, and cut costs in order to deliver solar panels for US$2 per watt by 2010. Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturers were selling the panels for US$1 per watt. Evergreen Solar also bemoans that while a US$21 million grant from Massachusetts covered five percent of its factory in Devens, the company had to borrow the rest, and banks were “reluctant” to provide loans that China offered easily and at less than half the interest rate. While direct subsidies probably aren’t efficient, the US federal government could increase market demand for solar energy while simultaneously driving down costs if it took a tack similar as it did with recycled paper. Simply mandate that federal government offices will use solar power.

Technology

Apple’s iOS 4.3 was released to developers this week adding, most notably, mobile hotspot capabilities to all compatible devices, not just Verizon’s forthcoming iPhone. Unfortunately, this capability will likely be carrier-dependent. Third-party AirPlay support is also improved and four- and five-finger multitouch gesturing has been added. iOS 4.3 will likely support only the iPad, iPhone 4 and 3GS, and third- and fourth-generation iPod Touches.

Denon and Marantz have both released US$50 firmware upgrades that provide AirPlay music streaming capability on their network-enabled audio components. Apple’s AirPlay lets you stream music from your Macintosh or iOS device over Wi-Fi to compatible components. While it’s disappointing that the companies are charging for the firmware upgrades, it’s not unexpected. I only wish my Denon equipment supported the upgrade. Both the Denon AVR-4311CI and the Marantz SR7005 get my highest recommendation, with the nod going to the Denon (but I’m biased: My first high-end audio equipment was Marantz; my last was Denon).

William J. Broad, John Markoff, and David E. Sanger, writing for the New York Times, have reported an exhaustive investigation into the American-Israeli Stuxnet computer worm project as a means to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.

User experience

I’ve been practicing user experience design for the web for more than 10 years and non-web user experience for much longer than that, so I have some biases. At the top of the list is that I firmly believe that search engine optimization (SEO) is an almost total scam. The way to accomplish search engine optimization is by writing effective, compelling content. That said, I have deep abiding respect for ethical SEO practitioners who recognize the need for effective, compelling, readable content. And I fully recognize that there are scam-based user experience practitioners that are just as bad and unethical as the worst of the SEO scammers.  Lee Odden, one of the leading SEO proponents, takes exception to those of us with “inherent biases” against SEO as anything close to resembling validity, claiming we—universally—lack “holistic perspectives.” I’m old, crotchety, and have a pretty thick skin, so I tend to let crap like this flow by without comment. Not so Kristina Halvorson who has a well-articulated and well-reasoned response to Odden’s nonsense. Nonetheless, this seems to be a false dichotomy, and the real conflict—if there really is legitimate friction—may be between generalization and specialization.

Craig Mod has written a superb overview of approaching publishing on tablet devices like Apple’s iPad. How should the device be approached? “Do we embrace the physicality of the device—a spineless page with a central axis of symmetry?” Mod asks. “Or do we embrace the device’s virtual physicality—an invisible spine defined by every edge of the device, signaling the potential of additional content just a swipe away?” Mod notes the current approach to editorial design on these devices centers on what Ted Nelson called the tyranny of the page. Publishers “attempt to transpose a type of print design built around physical cues to a screen lacking those same cues,” Mod writes. “They treat the boundaries of the iPad screen like the edges of a printed sheet of paper—sometimes awkwardly forcing content into columns which aren’t optimized for the canvas.” Mod arrives at the obvious conclusion: We should be building our publications with HTML. After all, the popular ePub format used by both Google Books and Apple’s iBooks is nothing more than a package of XHTML files in an XML wrapper and zipped into a single file. And, as Mod notes, the ePub3 specification is “a convergence of HTML5, CSS3, and ePub. Meaning, all the amazing HTML5 and CSS3 based layouts and work we’re doing should, in theory, be available to us within ePub readers in the next few years.” Mod proposes his Bibliotype framework as a good starting point for publishing long-format content on tablets.