ARTS & FARCES internet

The Minnesota Daily, the University of Minnesota student newspaper, was slow on the uptake of the controversy surrounding the University of Minnesota’s censorship of Troubled Waters: A Mississippi River Story, a documentary on the river and agriculture, pollution, how midwest runoff created a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, and sustainable solutions. Karen Himle, the University’s vice president for university relations, canceled the premiere of the film and its airing on Twin Cities Public Television (TPT). Himle is married to John Himle, president of Himle Horner, a public relations firm that represents the Minnesota Agri-Growth Council, and owns a corn and soybean farm in Nebraska.

In a 20 September 2010 story, Jessica Van Berkel and Taryn Wobbema got Himle to go on the record, something no other journalist in town has managed to accomplish. Van Berkel and Wobbema report Himele as saying “her concern began when she saw a commercial sign for Organic Valley’s dairy farm.” So, Himle’s concerns are clearly of an editorial nature, not scientific validity as University spokesperson Dan Wolter originally claimed.

Organic Valley is a farmer-owned co-op based in Wisconsin. With more than 1,600 farmer-owners, it’s hard to throw a rock in Wisconsin farm country without hitting an Organic Valley sign. “Typically, in an institutional documentary you wouldn’t see a commercial interest,” Himle told Van Berkel and Wobbema. The Daily reporters also cite Greg Cuomo and Abel Ponce de Leon, both College of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS) associate deans as saying the film was “lopsided” (Ponce de Leon) and “‘dramatized’ the relationship between farming and river pollution and ‘vilified’ agriculture without a strong understanding of how it works” (Cuomo). CFANS Dean Al Levine told Minnesota Public Radio on 17 September that the film “vilifies agriculture.” So, at least the CFANS deans are reading from the same script.

Van Berkel and Wobbema quote Levine as denying any outside influence in canceling the release of the film: “No one to my knowledge heard from anyone in big ag about this at all.”

Business

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that I’d ever sign up to willfully receive advertising. But I recently signed up for Groupon, one of the fastest growing companies in the history of the internet. Here’s the deal: You give them your email address and, optionally, a list of offers you’re interested in receiving. Every morning you receive an email with the day’s offer and usually a side offer. The offers are usually on the order of buy a US$50 store credit for US$25. The problem is that some of the merchants that offer Groupons haven’t done the proper research or haven’t properly honed their offer. As a result, Glenn Kelman, writing for Redfin, recounts the experience of Portland’s Posie’s Cafe. Posie’s sold customers a US$13 credit for US$6—not a bad deal. But Groupon tried to keep the entire US$6—Groupon and Posie’s later negotiated a 50/50 split. Wild success for Groupon; not so much for Posie’s. As a result, the Posie’s had trouble making the rent and payroll. As Kelman advises, business owners have to think like shopkeepers not web entrepreneurs, “focusing on happy, profitable customers rather than growth at any cost: If you don’t make money on the first widget, stop making widgets.”

From the why does a dog lick it’s balls category comes Intel charging US$50 for a scratch-and-sniff card with a digital rights management (DRM) key to unlock features that already exist in the computer you just bought. Because they can.

President Obama has proposed extending the George W. Bush-era tax cuts for most, but wants to eliminate the cuts for the top two percent of those who have income. Predictably, the conservatives warn that the sky is falling. “It’s a body blow to the small-business community,” Gover Norquist tells David Kocieniewski, reporting for the New York Times. Sounds good, Grover, except Kocieniewski reports the US “Internal Revenue Service statistics indicate that only three percent of small businesses would be subject to the higher tax, and many studies of previous tax increases suggest that it would have minimal impact on hiring.”

Cryptography

The master key to the High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) digital rights management system that prevents the copying of data sent over DisplayPot, DVI, and HDMI interfaces has allegedly been leaked. The master key is a 40x40 matrix of 56-bit numbers from which Digital Content Protection—the HDCP licensee—generates the private keys used in all HDCP devices. HDCP, developed by Intel, supports key revocation, but if all of the keys generated from the master key were revoked, nothing would work. Digital Content Protection could, of course, generate a new master key and re-distributing private keys. Any new master key would be incompatible with all existing HDCP devices that aren’t software or firmware upgradeable.

In a stunning investigative piece, Molly Priesmeyer, writing for the Twin Cities Daily Planet, exposes a possible conflict of interest at the University of Minnesota. The University has canceled the premiere and public television airing of Troubled Waters: A Mississippi River Story, a documentary on the river and agriculture, pollution, how midwest runoff created a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, and sustainable solutions. The University claims lack of scientific review as the reason, but Priesmeyer cites Shanai Matteson, the film’s assistant producer and community program specialist at the University’s Bell Museum, as saying “the film was also reviewed by as many as 12 prominent university scientists, including Jon Foley and David Tilman (both from the of U of M’s Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior department); Robert Diaz, a professor of marine science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and an expert on “dead zone” issues in the Gulf of Mexico; Eugene Turner, a zoologist at Louisiana State University who has done extensive research on wetland pollution and coastal erosion; and Nancy Rabalias, another LSU professor whose research has dealt extensively with pollution issues in the Gulf of Mexico.”

In an update, Priesmeyer tracks down a lead provided by an anonymous source and finds that the University’s vice president of University relations, Karen Himle, is married to John Himle, the co-founder and principal of Himle Horner, the public relations firm that represents big agriculture in the state. As a side note, the Horner in Himle Horner is Tom Horner, current Minnesota Independence Party gubernatorial candidate. The film’s executive producer, Barbara Coffin, who’s also coordinator of public programs at the Bell, was informed of the cancelation by a letter from Karen Himle’s University unit. Coffin told Priesmeyer that the University unit was also responsible for canceling the public television airing. The University presumably owns the rights to the film, so TPT is harmless and without recourse in this issue.

John Himle was executive director of the Minnesota Agri-Growth Council, the state’s biggest promoter of industrialized agriculture and corporate farms, from 1978-82. The Agri-Growth Council fights vigorously and notoriously against local-control agriculture in the state.

Brian DeVore, writing for the Minnesota Environmental Partnership’s Looncommons, notes, “McPhee [the film’s director] and the others involved with the film project were very aware of how controversial the dead zone issue is. Just as there is a small, vocal group of global climate change deniers out there, business and political forces within the agribusiness community claim there is no connection between Midwestern farms and dead oysters in the Gulf. This, despite an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence to the contrary.” [Link in original.]

Business

Some things never change: Microsoft is back to its evil self, helping the Russians stifle dissent by seizing computers under the guise of confiscating pirated Microsoft software. Clifford J. Levy, writing for the New York Times, reports, “Across Russia, the security services have carried out dozens of similar raids against outspoken advocacy groups or opposition newspapers in recent years. Security officials say the inquiries reflect their concern about software piracy, which is rampant in Russia. Yet they rarely if ever carry out raids against advocacy groups or news organizations that back the government.”

ESRD

With more than 350,000 people in the US on dialysis, at an estimated cost of about US$75,000 each per year, dialysis is a painfully expensive proposition, absorbing about six percent of the Medicare budget. The costs associated with in-center dialysis could take a steep plunge if implantable artificial kidneys work as expected. A prototype of the first implantable artificial kidney has been unveiled by the University of California San Francisco. If successful, the device could allow current dialysis patients to lead lives closer to the norm. Elizabeth Armstrong Moore, writing for cnet, reports the development team “hopes to apply silicon fabrication technology with specially engineered compartments for live kidney cells so that the model will be roughly the size of a coffee cup. It will include thousands of microscopic filters and a bioreactor to act as the metabolic and water-balancing control center that is lost when a kidney fails.” The team has established the feasibility of the device in animal testing and plans clinical trials in five to seven years.

Intellectual property

Michael Geist has followed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations closer than anyone else on the planet. Geist’s latest update is an analysis of the latest version of the draft agreement, (.pdf; 221KB) first leaked by KEI. The member countries are close to agreement on the internet enforcement chapter, according to Geist. This chapter is especially contentious because of the US’s attempt to globalize the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) including extensions like “three strikes and you’re out.” Geist writes, “In the face of opposition, the US has dropped its demands on secondary liability [internet service provider liability] but is still holding out hope of establishing digital lock rules that go beyond the WIPO Internet treaties and were even rejected by its own courts.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) have brought a federal lawsuit (.pdf; 868KB) against an Obama administration policy allowing suspicionless search and seizure of electronic devices—laptops, smart phones, digital cameras, etc.—by US border officials. The lawsuit claims the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) policy permitting border agents to search, copy, and confiscate electronic devices is unconstitutional.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the NACDL, the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), and Pascal Abidor, a 26-year-old Islamic Studies PhD student with dual French-American citizenship whose laptop was searched and confiscated at the Canadian border.

Abidor was travelling from Montreal to New York on Amtrack when he was questioned, handcuffed, taken off the train, and kept in a holding cell before being released without charge several hours later. His laptop, the password for which he was forced to enter, was confiscated and when it was returned 11 days later, there was evidence that his personal files had been searched.

“As an American, I’ve always been taught that the Constitution protects me against unreasonable searches and seizures. But having my laptop searched and then confiscated for no reason at all made me question how much privacy we actually have,” said Abidor in an ACLU media release. “This has had an extreme chilling effect on my work, studies and private life –- now I will have to go to untenable lengths to assure that my academic sources remain confidential and my personal dignity is maintained when I travel.”