Category: Media / Sociology

Your post(wo)man as a server admin?

Google execs, tech experts focus on future of Postal Service – The Federal Eye – The Washington Post.

I like this — a lot.  I’m a fan of the postal service, because of its important role in our history, but realize the challenge that the Internet poses to a costly distribution of paper could be too much for the service to bear. It may be that the postal service somehow gets into the business of providing e-mail addresses, or credentialing/identity verification.

Regardless of the role that the service might play in our national communication landscape, I’m interested in another aspect of this story. Postal workers have a bit of a professional ethic (“neither rain, nor sleet…”). This is the kind of thing that I think we could use more of in the technological realm. Sure, my sysadmin warned me that sudo access comes with “great responsibility,” but given the recent oversights at Sony, how common is this approach? It seems to me that, as security and privacy become increasingly core to what technologists need to concern themselves with on a daily basis.  I think that professionalism might do more than laws to cultivate this approach among the guardians of our servers and wires.

This idea is still in the hatching stage, so I hope to blog more about it in the future.

Grassroots organizing against Facebook TOS?

Facebook is running into some trouble over their handling of post settings for some anti-corporate leaning grassroots groups.

As the number of Facebook members signed up for the “Boycott Target Until They Cease Funding Anti-Gay Politics” page neared 78,000 in recent days, Facebook personnel locked down portions of the page — banning new discussion threads, preventing members from posting videos and standard Web links to other sites and barring the page’s administrator from sending updates to those who signed up for the boycott. (via Activists upset with Facebook – Josh Gerstein – POLITICO.com)

As Facebook has built up their network, they’ve become the defacto place for sharing information and informally organizing into groups of similar interests. I wonder, if the telephone company could get away with taking similar advantage of their network-effect-built userbase, and censored political speech. The answer, of course, is that they could not, due to the regulations governing the industry.

While actions like this bring critical folks like me ever closer to quitting Facebook, the thought of so many lost connections is what keeps us from doing it. It’s as though one must choose between their principals and their social network — and that’s a position I believe no one should be placed in.

As face-to-face meeting places have become privatized (think public square vs. malls and coffee shops), being able to connect freely online is becoming increasingly vital to social life.  We shouldn’t let these spaces similarly fall into private hands, where we are subject to one entity’s terms of service.

This is why projects like Diaspora and StatusNet are so important.

I didn’t quit Facebook over this, but I did donate to the EFF.  It was far, far overdue.

Edit: Here is a good post from Ars about a similar issue with ISP TOS agreements.

The Economist’s guide to Net Neutrality

The future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolution | The Economist.

This issue of The Economist contains an excellent overview of the Net Neutrality issue.  It would be a great resource for anyone who wants to get up to speed on the issue (or to pass along to friends).  They address it primarily from the standpoint of the fragmentation of the Internet, and give current examples like international domain names and closed applications to support their point. They back it up with an oft-forgotten historical point:

Devotees of a unified cyberspace are worried that the online world will soon start looking as it did before the internet took over: a collection of more or less connected proprietary islands reminiscent of AOL and CompuServe.

International examples also show how we approach the issue much differently than the rest of the world.

It is telling that net neutrality has become far more politically controversial in America than it has elsewhere. This is a reflection of the relative lack of competition in America’s broadband market. In Europe and Japan, “open access” rules require network operators to lease parts of their networks to other firms on a wholesale basis, thus boosting competition.

Things close with Zittrain’s argument that a more closed internet might harm innovation.

Should the network become a collection of proprietary islands accessed by devices controlled remotely by their vendors, the internet would lose much of its “generativity”, warns Harvard’s Mr Zittrain.

Props to the Economist for such a clearly written, accessible piece on this important issue.