As I'm writing this, the eye of Hurricane Ike is roughly ten hours from landfall.  The weather here, maybe 60 miles inland, is overcast with mild wind.  Meanwhile, the storm surge has already knocked out power for ten thousand homes along the coast, claims the TV news, humming along in the background as I write this, which brings me to a thought.

Next year, analog TV gets turned off, and it's digital or nothing.  Well, what happens in bad weather?  Analog TV degrades somewhat, but is still watchable.  Digital TV works great until it starts getting uncorrectable errors.  There's a brief period where you see block reconstruction errors and, with even a mild additional amount of error, it's just unwatchable garbage.  According to AntennaWeb, most of the terrestrial broadcast towers are maybe ten miles from my house, but that's ten miles closer to the coast.  However, I get TV from Comcast, my local cable TV provider.  As I've watched the HD feed today, it's been spotty.  Good for a while, unwatchable for a while.  The analog feed, which we also get on a different channel, has been spot on the whole time.

From this, it would appear that Comcast is getting its feed out of the air, and thus has all the same sorts of weather effects that I would have if I bothered to put my own antenna on the roof.  Next year, when the next hurricane is bearing down on the coast, and digital TV is the only TV around, it's an interesting question whether I'll get something useful on my TV during a disaster.  Dear Comcast, Engineering Department: please get a hard line between you and each of the local major TV stations.  Better yet, get two of them, each, and make sure they don't share any telephone poles.

[Sidebar: In my old house, I used DirecTV plus a terrestrial antenna for HD locals, run through a DirecTV-branded HD TiVo.  Now, I'm getting everything from Comcast, over telephone poles, into a (series 3) TiVo-HD.  In any meaningful disaster, the telephone poles are likely to go down, taking out my TV source material. I get power and telephone from the same poles, so to some extent, they make a single point of failure, and thus no meaningful benefit from putting up my own antenna.

Once the storm gets closer, I'll be moving the UPS from my computer to our, umm, shelter-in-place location.  I don't expect I'd want to waste precious UPS battery power running my power-hungry television set.  Instead, I've got an AM/FM portable radio that runs on two AA's.  Hopefully, the amount of useful information on the radio will be better than the man-on-the-street TV newscasters, interviewing fools standing along the ocean, watching the pretty waves breaking.  Hint: you can't "ride through" a storm when the water is ten feet over your head.]

We're going to do a live webcast of our workshop on "The Future of News", which will be held tomorrow and Thursday (May 14-15) in Princeton. Attending the workshop (free registration) gives you access to the speakers and other attendees over lunch and between sessions, but if that isn't practical, the webcast is available.

Here are the links you need:

• Live video streaming
• Live chat facility for remote participants
• To ask the speaker a question, email citp.questions@gmail.com

Sessions are scheduled for 10:45-noon and 1:30-5:00 on Wed., May 14; and 9:30-12:30 and 1:30-3:15 on Thur., May 15.

We've got a great lineup of speakers for our upcoming "Future of News" workshop. It's May 14-15 in Princeton. It's free, and if you register we'll feed you lunch.

Agenda

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Panels

Panel 1: The People Formerly Known as the Audience:

How effectively can users collectively create and filter the stream of news information? How much of journalism can or will be "devolved" from professionals to networks of amateurs? What new challenges do these collective modes of news production create? Could informal flows of information in online social networks challenge the idea of "news" as we know it?

• Dan Gillmor, Director of the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Steve Boriss, Washington University in St. Louis and The Future of News blog
• Reihan Salam, The Atlantic

Panel 2: Economics of News:

How will technology-driven changes in advertising markets reshape the news media landscape? Can traditional, high-cost methods of newsgathering support themselves through other means? To what extent will action-guiding business intelligence and other "private journalism", designed to create information asymmetries among news consumers, supplant or merge with globally accessible news?

• Gordon Crovitz, former publisher, The Wall Street Journal
• Mark Davis, Vice President for Strategy, San Diego Union Tribune
• Eric Alterman, Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

Panel 3: Data Mining, Visualization, and Interactivity:

To what extent will new tools for visualizing and artfully presenting large data sets reduce the need for human intermediaries between facts and news consumers? How can news be presented via simulation and interactive tools? What new kinds of questions can professional journalists ask and answer using digital technologies?

• Matthew Hurst, Microsoft Live Labs. Blogger at Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media
• Kevin Anderson, the Guardian
• David Blei, Princeton Department of Computer Science

Panel 4: The Medium's New Message:

What are the effects of changing news consumption on political behavior? What does a public life populated by social media "producers" look like? How will people cope with the new information glut?

• Clay Shirky, Adjunct Professor at NYU and author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
• Markus Prior, Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
• JD Lasica, writer and consultant, co-founder and editorial director of Ourmedia.com, president of the Social Media Group.

Panelists' bios.

For more information, including (free) registration, see the main workshop page.

We're excited to announce a workshop on "The Future of News", to be held May 14 and 15 in Princeton. It's sponsored by the Center for InfoTech Policy at Princeton.

Confirmed speakers include Kevin Anderson, David Blei, Steve Borriss, Dan Gillmor, Matthew Hurst, Markus Prior, David Robinson, Clay Shirky, Paul Starr, and more to come.

The Internet—whose greatest promise is its ability to distribute and manipulate information—is transforming the news media. What's on offer, how it gets made, and how end users relate to it are all in flux. New tools and services allow people to be better informed and more instantly up to date than ever before, opening the door to an enhanced public life. But the same factors that make these developments possible are also undermining the institutional rationale and economic viability of traditional news outlets, leaving profound uncertainty about how the possibilities will play out.

Our tentative topics for panels are:

• Data mining, visualization, and interactivity: To what extent will new tools for visualizing and artfully presenting large data sets reduce the need for human intermediaries between facts and news consumers? How can news be presented via simulation and interactive tools? What new kinds of questions can professional journalists ask and answer using digital technologies?
• Economics of news: How will technology-driven changes in advertising markets reshape the news media landscape? Can traditional, high-cost methods of newsgathering support themselves through other means? To what extent will action-guiding business intelligence and other "private journalism", designed to create information asymmetries among news consumers, supplant or merge with globally accessible news?
• The people formerly known as the audience: How effectively can users collectively create and filter the stream of news information? How much of journalism can or will be "devolved" from professionals to networks of amateurs? What new challenges do these collective modes of news production create? Could informal flows of information in online social networks challenge the idea of "news" as we know it?
• The medium's new message: What are the effects of changing news consumption on political behavior? What does a public life populated by social media "producers" look like? How will people cope with the new information glut?

Registration: Registration, which is free, carries two benefits: We'll have a nametag waiting for you when you arrive, and — this is the important part — we'll feed you lunch on both days. To register, please contact CITP's program assistant, Laura Cummings-Abdo, at lcumming@princeton.edu. Include your name, affiliation and email address.

The agenda for our workshop on the social and policy implications of "Computing in the Cloud" is now available, along with information about how to register (for free). We have a great lineup of speakers, with panels on "Possession and ownership of data", "Security and risk in the cloud", "Civics in the cloud", and "What's next". The workshop is organized by the Center for InfoTech Policy at Princeton, and sponsored by Microsoft.

Don't miss it!

I'm excited to announce that Princeton's Center for InfoTech Policy is putting on a workshop on the policy and social implications of "Computing in the Cloud" – the trend where companies, rather than users, store and manage an increasing range of personal data.

Examples include Hotmail and Gmail replacing desktop email, YouTube taking over as a personal video platform, and Flickr competing with desktop photo storage solutions. Facebook, Myspace and other social networks have pioneered new kinds of tools that couldn't exist on the desktop, and more new models are sure to emerge.

I'm confident that this trend will reshape tech policy, and will change how people relate to technology. But I don't know what the changes are. By drawing together experts from computer science, industry, government and law, I hope the Center can help those of us at Princeton, and workshop participants from around the country, get a better sense of where things might be headed.

The workshop will be held on the Princeton campus on January 14 and 15, 2008. It will be free and open to the public. We will have a series of panel discussions, interspersed with opportunities for informal exchanges of ideas. We're still putting together the list of panels and panelists, so we haven't yet published a schedule. If you're interested in attending or want to get email updates about the workshop, please email David Robinson (dgr at princeton dot edu).

Here are some of the possible themes for panels we are exploring:

• Possession and ownership of data: In cloud computing, a provider's data center holds information that would more traditionally have been stored on the end user's computer. How does this impact user privacy? To what extent do users "own" this data, and what obligations do the service providers have? What obligations should they have? Does moving the data to the provider's data center improve security or endanger it?
• Collaboration and globalization: Cloud computing systems offer new sharing and collaboration features beyond what was possible before. They make shared creation among far-flung users easier, allow or require data to be stored in many different jurisdictions, and give users access to offerings that may be illegal in the users' home countries. How will local laws, when applied to data centers whose user base is global, affect users practice? Do these services drive forward economic growth — and if so, what effect should that fact have on the policy debate?
• New roles for new intermediaries: Cloud services often involve new
  intermediaries such as Facebook, MySpace, eBay, and Second Life, standing between people who might have interacted more directly before these services emerged. To what extent are these services "communities", as their providers claim? How much control do users feel over these communities? How much control do and should users actually have? How does the centralized nature of these intermediaries affect the efficiency and diversity of online experiences? Can the market protect consumers and competition, or is government oversight needed?
• What's next: What new services might develop, and how will today's services evolve? How well will cloud computing be likely to serve users, companies, investors, government, and the public over the longer run? Which social and policy problems will get worse due to cloud computing, and which will get better?

Hello again, FTT readers. You may remember me as a guest blogger here at FTT, writing about anti-circumvention, the print media's superiority (or lack thereof) to Wikipedia, and a variety of other topics.

I'm happy to report that I've moved to Princeton to join the university's Center for Information Technology Policy as its new associate director. Working with Ed and others here on campus, I'll be helping bring the Center into its own as a leading interdisciplinary venue for research and conversation about the social and political impact of information technology.

Over the next few months, I'll be traveling the country to look at how other institutions approach this area, in order to develop a strategic plan for Princeton's involvement in the field. As a first step toward understanding the world of tech policy, I've been doing a lot of reading lately.

One great source is The Creation of the Media by Princeton's own Paul Starr. It's carefully argued and highly readable, and I've found its content challenging. Conversations in tech policy often seem to stem from the premise that in the interaction between technology and society, the most important causal arrow points from the technologies into the social sphere. "Remix culture", perhaps the leading example at the moment, is a major cultural shift that is argued to stem from inherent properties of digital media, such as the identity between a copy and an original of a digital work.

But Paul argues that politics usually dominates the effects of technology, not the other way around. For example, although cheap printing technologies helped make the early United States one of the most literate countries of its time, Paul argues that America's real advantage was its postal system. Congress not only invested heavily in the postal service, but also gave a special discounted rate to printed material, effectively subsidizing publications of all kinds. As a result much more printed material was mailed in America than in, say, British Columbia at the same time.

One fascinating observation from Paul's book (pages 180-181 in the hardcover edition, for those following along at home) concerns the telegraph. In Britain, the telegraph was nationalized in order to ensure that private network operators didn't take advantage of the natural monopoly that they enjoyed ("natural" since once there was one set of telegraph wires leading to a place, it became hard to justify building a second set).

In the United States, there was a vociferous debate about whether or not to nationalize the telegraph system, which was controlled by Western Union, a private company:

[W]ithin the United States, Western Union continued to dominate the telegraph industry after its triumph in 1866 but faced two constraints that limited its ability to exploit its market power. First, the postal telegraph movement created a political environment that was, to some extent, a functional substitute for government regulation. Britain's nationalization of the telegraph was widely discussed in America. Worried that the US government might follow suit, Western Union's leaders at various times extended service or held rates in check to keep public opposition within manageable levels. (Concern about the postal telegraph movement also led the company to provide members of Congress with free telegraph service — in effect, making the private telegraph a post office for officeholders.) Public opinion was critical in confining Western Union to its core business. In 1866 and again in 1881, the company was on the verge of trying to muscle the Associated Press aside and take over the wire service business itself when it drew back, apparently out of concern that it could lose the battle over nationalization by alienating the most influential newspapers in the country. Western Union did, however, move into the distribution of commercial news and in 1871 acquired majority control of Gold and Stock, a pioneering financial information company that developed the stock ticker.

This situation–a dynamic equilibrium in which a private party polices its own behavior in order to stave off the threat of government intervention–strikes me as closely analogous to the net neutrality debate today. Network operators, although not subject to neutrality requirements, are more reluctant to exercise the options for traffic discrimination that are formally open to them, because they recognize that doing so might lead to regulation.

Let me say right up front that I have not accepted the Jesus Phone as my personal Lord and Savior. The iPhone might turn out to be insanely great. It might become the best-selling mobile phone ever. Or it might not.

Either way, the iPhone's arrival and the attendant frenzy mark the beginning of a new phase in the mobile phone world – a phase based on the radical notion that it's possible to make a pocket-sized device that is a pretty good phone and a pretty good networked computer at the same time.

From a purely technical standpoint, this isn't surprising at all. Phones are basically computers, and we know how to cram a decent computer into a small, low-power package. The engineering isn't trivial but we know it can be done. Apple might have modestly better engineering, and significantly better human-factors design, but what they're doing has been technically possible all along.

Yet somehow it hasn't happened, because the mobile carriers don't want it to happen. They have clung to their walled garden models, offering limited, captive services rather than allowing easy development of Internet applications for mobile devices. An open system would provide more benefit overall, but most of that benefit would accrue to consumers. The carriers would rather get a big share of a small pie, than a small share of a big pie.

In most markets, competition keeps this kind of thing from happening, by forcing producers to account for consumer preferences. You would expect competition to have forced the mobile networks open by now, whether the carriers liked it or not. But this hasn't happened yet. The carriers have managed to keep control by locking customers in to long contracts and erecting barriers to the entry of new devices and applications. The system seemed to be stuck in an unstable equilibrium. All we needed was some kind of shock, to get the ball rolling downhill.

Only a company with marketing muscle, design mojo, and a world-historic Reality Distortion Field could provide the needed bump. Apple decided to try, in the hope of selling zillions of the new, more capable devices. The real significance of the iPhone, whether it succeeds or fails in the market, is that it will trigger the transition to more open networks. Once people see that a pretty good phone can be a pretty good mobile computer, they won't settle for less anymore; and mobile networks will be pried open.

Whether or not the Jesus Phone achieves worldly success, it will succeed in its own way by convincing people that the world can be different.

On Saturday I gave a talk ("Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue: Technology, Politics, and the Fight to Control Digital Media") for a Princeton alumni group in Seattle. The theme of the talk is that the rise of information technology is causing a "great earthquake" in media businesses.

Many people believe that the biggest impact of IT is that it allows easy copying and redistribution of all types of content. To some people, this is the only impact of IT.

But I argue in the talk that the copying issue is only one part of IT's impact, and not necessarily the biggest part. The main impact of IT, I argue, is that computers are universal devices that can perform any operation on digital data (except those operations that are inherently undoable and therefore can't be done by any device).

I stress universality over copying in the talk for two reasons. First, it's a point that most people miss, especially non-techies. Second, it lets me hint at the most important tradeoff in copyright/tech policy, which is how copyright sometimes stands in the way of developing powerful technologies for creating and communicating. Most people are quick to see the advantages of strong copyright in the digital world, but slow to see the price we're paying for it.

This debate – whether IT is primarily a copying machine, or a creative tool – seems to run deeply throughout the online copyright debate. Those who see copying as the main impact of IT don't much mind restricting digital technologies to further their copyright aims. But those who see creativity as the main impact of IT aim to protect the vitality of the IT ecosystem.

I come down on the creative side. I think the biggest long-run effect of IT will be in changing how we communicate and express ourselves. This is not to say that copying doesn't matter – it clearly does – but only that we need to take the creative effects of IT at least as seriously as we take copying.

As I say in the talk, if IT's impact is like an earthquake, file sharing is not the Big One, it's only the first tremor.

(Thanks to Ed Lazowska, whose email exchange with me after the talk triggered this post.)

Yesterday I spoke at a Washington briefing on botnets. The event was hosted by the Senate Science and Technology Caucus, and sponsored by ACM and Microsoft. Along with opening remarks by Senators Pryor and Bennett, there were short briefings by me, Phil Reitinger of Microsoft, and Scott O'Neal of the FBI.

(Botnets are coordinated computer intrusions, where the attacker installs a long-lived software agent or "bot" on many end-user computers. After being installed, the bots receive commands from the attacker through a command-and-control mechanism. You can think of bots as a more advanced form of the viruses and worms we saw previously.)

Botnets are a serious threat, but as usual in cybersecurity there is no obvious silver bullet against them. I gave a laundry list of possible anti-bot tactics, including a mix of technical, law enforcement, and policy approaches.

Phil Reitinger talked about Microsoft's anti-botnet activities. These range from general efforts to improve software security, to distribution of patches and malicious code removal tools, to investigation of specific bot attacks. I was glad to hear him call out the need for basic research on computer security.

Scott O'Neal talked about the FBI's fight against botnets, which he said followed the Bureau's historical pattern in dealing with new types of crime. At first, they responded to specific attacks by investigating and trying to identify the perpetrators. Over time they have adopted new tactics, such as infiltrating the markets and fora where botmasters meet. Though he didn't explicitly prioritize the different types of botnet (mis)use, it was clear that commercially motivated denial-of-service attacks were prominent in his mind.

Much of the audience consisted of Senate and House staffers, who are naturally interested in possible legislative approaches to the botnet problem. Beyond seeing that law enforcement has adequate resources, there isn't much that needs to be done. Current laws such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and anti-fraud and anti-spam laws, already cover botnet attacks. The hard part is catching the bad guys in the first place.

The one legislative suggestion we heard was to reduce the threshold for criminal violation in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Using computers without authorization is a crime, but there are threshold requirements to make sure that trivial offenses can't bring down the big hammer of felony prosecution.

The concern is that a badguy who breaks into a large number of computers and installs bots, but hasn't yet used the bots to do harm, might be able to escape prosecution. He could still be prosecuted if certain types of bad intent can be proved, but where that is not possible he arguably might not meet the $5000 damage threshold. The law might be changed to allow prosecution when some designated number of computers are affected.

Paul Ohm has expressed skepticism about this kind of proposal. He points to a tendency to base cybersecurity policy on anecdote and worst-case predictions, even though a great deal of preventable harm is caused by simpler, more mundane attacks.

I'd like to see more data on how big a problem the current CFAA thresholds are. How many real badguys have escaped CFAA prosecution? Of those who did, how many could be prosecuted for other, equally serious violations? With data in hand, the cost-benefit tradeoffs in amending the CFAA will be easier.

Senator Bennett, in his remarks, characterized cybersecurity as a long-term fight. "You guys have permanent job security.... You're working on a problem that will never be solved."