ARTS & FARCES internet

The Bush administration—through law enforcement—had made at least 200 and probably close to 600 requests to libraries for information on what citizens are reading since October 2001. So says a new American Library Association (ALA) study that found both formal and informal demands were made of librarians to disclose the reading habits of library patrons.

The ALA used anonymous responses to survey 1,500 public libraries and 4,000 academic libraries, finding 137 formal demands for information since October 2001.

Not surprisingly, according to Eric Lichtblau’s account in the New York Times, “the Bush administration says that while it is important for law enforcement officials to get information from libraries if needed in terrorism investigations, officials have yet to actually use their power under the Patriot Act to demand records from libraries or bookstores.”

One would think that the existence of a subpoena—if not the content of the subpoena—is a matter of public record, and it should be relatively easy to determine whether the Bush administration is telling the truth. That would be wrong: secrecy provisions of the Patriot Act make it a crime for a librarian to acknowledge even receiving a subpoena.

Nonetheless, abuses by the Bush administration are clear according to a source for Lichtblau’s article:

Microsoft has apparently taken the wraps off its “Avalanche” peer-to-peer file-sharing technology (seemingly a clone of BitTorrent) and, in a single sentence ultimately defines why the software giant sucks rocks and continues to take abuse for it:

A Microsoft spokesman, however, said there was to be no network naughtiness with Avalanche: ‘It includes strong security to ensure content providers are uniquely identifiable and to prevent unauthorized parties from offering content for download.’

To be sure, unauthorized parties—that’s you and me, bub—will be prevented from offering content. This is the asymmetric bandwidth business model of the cable and telco monopolies applied to publishing.

BitTorrent works by chunking large files and distributing those chunks across the network peers. As a BitTorrent client downloads the chunks it needs, it uploads the chunks it already has. Because the load is spread across the peers downloading the file, publishers don’t suffer the bandwidth penalties of releasing large media files. This is a Big Deal with things like Linux distributions (legal) and movies (illegal), but it’s going to be a Huge Deal for podcasts and indie music distribution, especially when paired with RSS.

Avalanche, according to the CNET article, works basically the same way as BitTorrent but magically “not all the chunks are needed to complete the file,” even though users end up “downloading more chunks than they need.” Nevertheless, Microsoft claims this is actually more efficient because “the load is spread more evenly.” Right. Embrace and extend 2.0. Now with even more hand-waving.

I’ve been less than enamored with podcasting since its inception. I’m hip to the concept and can’t wait for it to mature, but the current execution sucks rocks. I’m not interested in listening to you babble. If you’ve got something to say, spit it out and move along. If not, hit the stop button. Most podcasts—on either the pro or the am side of things—don’t get this and struggle to fill the silence with useless crap. To be expected, I suppose.

My buddy Mike O’Connor has started doing two podcasts that break this mold and are truly captivating. Mikey’s an old radio geek from the community radio days so I shouldn’t be surprised that the “Community Podcasting” portion of his Sex and Podcasting empire is stellar.

“Virtual Beer” is the other side of Sex and Podcasting and focuses on tech conversations with the Twin Cities digerati. It’s just as good.

Mike’s also got some solid advice on the equipment side of things. Here’s my hint for the day: If you’re serious about podcasting and can’t do anything else, buy a set of real microphones.

How much longer can the Bush administration dodge addressing the Downing Street memo, the document containing minutes of a meeting wherein Bush plots the US invasion of Iraq eight months prior to it happening? My guess is, not much longer at all. We covered this at Utne (top item) the week after Greg Palast broke the story, and it still hasn’t gotten much corporate media play.

But now there’s a new website, The Downing Street Memo, that’s getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere:

The contents of the memo are shocking. The minutes detail how our government did not believe Iraq was a greater threat than other nations; how intelligence was “fixed” to sell the case for war to the American public; and how the Bush Administration’s public assurances of “war as a last resort” were at odds with their privately stated intentions.

No one has disputed the document’s authenticity, and Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) is pressing a citizen’s petition to force Bush to answer five simple questions with regard to the material contained in the Downing Street Memo.

Claiming to be the most comprehensive sustainability study to date, SustainLane has released its sustainability rankings for 25 US cities across 12 categories. No surprises at the top-level overall ratings:

1. San Francisco
2. Portland
3. Berkeley
4. Seattle
5. Santa Monica

But drilling down into the data for the individual cities sheds light in some much-needed corners. Looking at Minneapolis, for example (my hometown, Saint Paul, isn’t on the list) reveals that we’re doing pretty well with water and air quality (both second best in the country), planning, energy/climate policy, and knowledge-base but absolutely horrendous in LEED (Leadership in Environmental & Energy Design) building and zoning.