The Extraordinaries Haiti Earthquake Support Center. A followup post on the Extraordinaries’ efforts to use ubiquitous human computing to help find missing people after the Haiti earthquake — a positive vision inspired by JZ’s nightmare scenario of crowdsourced secret police work. Did they succeed? “Yes and no”—but, as they detail, there’s obvious potential for future disaster relief.

Amazon Cracks Open the Kindle. Amazon is opening the Kindle to outside developers who can market their products in what sounds exactly like an App Store, down to the 70-30 revenue split and and light policing of apps. (One difference is that developers have to pay for wireless delivery.) It’s seeming like this is *the* model for the next few years. Speaking of which…

Computers Should Be More Like Toasters. The sale of the Apple Tablet could mark an important moment for generativity. Computers have been shrinking and phones have been growing—but the critical difference has been that anyone could still code for a computer, until now. The Tablet looks more like a computer than a phone, but will Apple will prescreen apps they way it does for the iPhone? Farhad Manjoo thinks that would be a good thing, but there are clear generativity costs.

The Splinternet means the end of the Web’s golden age. Josh Bernoff points out that, as we switch to appliancized computers and smart devices instead of PCs, the web becomes a “splinternet.” Websites show up and operate differently on each device. He thinks about how to handle this from a business and marketing perspective, advising: “Here’s what not to do: panic and try to unify things again. The shattering cannot be undone.”

Technology Changes “Outstrip” Netbooks. Meanwhile, the BBC considers the convergence among netbooks, smartphones, and tablet notebooks, and who the short- and long-term winners are likely to be.

Apple censors Dalai Lama iPhone Apps in China. An interesting look at how censorship works on iPhones in China. (The story was written pre-Google announcement, so some portions are out of date.) Apple, complying with local law, appears to be removing apps related to the Dalai Lama in the Chinese App Store, and a search for Falun Gong apps freezes the search page. On the other hand, it’s possible to access YouTube through an iPhone app, which isn’t always possible on a PC.

And in the crystal ball dep’t — from JZ’s book:

Imagine entering a café in Paris with one’s personal digital assistant or mobile phone, and being able to query: “Is there anyone on my buddy list within 100 yards? Are any of the ten closest friends of my ten closest friends within 100 yards?” Although this may sound fanciful, it could quickly become mainstream. With reputation systems already advising us on what to buy, why not have them also help us make the first cut on whom to meet, to date, to befriend? These are not difficult services to offer, and there are precursors today.

As usual, there’s an app for that… the “datecheck” app allows you to enter a name, phone number, or email address, and get information on your date. The categories are “sleaze detector” (check of criminal convictions & sex offenses), “$$$” (home ownership, etc), “interests” (gleaned from social networks), “living situation” (who they live with), and “compatibility”—although unfortunately, the “compatibility” check is still just a check of astrological signs. Now all they need is friends’ feedback rankings.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

In talks about ubicomp, JZ gives an example of a worst-case scenario involving ubicomp platforms. He imagines that the Iranian government could use Amazon Mechanical Turk to identify dissidents, simply by posting pictures of protestors and ID-card pictures of the adults in the country, then asking Turkers to match protestor pictures to ID-card pictures. Voila—and the Turkers wouldn’t necessarily have to know what they were doing. In the department of amazingly cool ideas, though, the folks at the Extraordinaries reflected on the Iran example and then turned it around. After the earthquake in Haiti, they posted news wire pictures of people in Haiti (with crowdsourced help), asked others to post pictures of missing relatives, and finally asked volunteers to try to match the two up. This is v 1.0 of what could be a terrific and widely-used technology after natural disasters, allowing people at home to do more than just donate money.

As we keep thinking about ubicomp and the potential upsides and downsides, it’ll be important to keep in mind that it’s a tool—a largely undeveloped one as yet—with much room to develop in both directions. In that spirit, I wanted to comment on this piece from Technology Review that casts a skeptical eye on Prof. Zittrain’s recent column in Newsweek on cloud labor (also known as ubiquitous human computing). The Newsweek editors gave the piece the ominous headline “Work the New Digital Sweatshops,” and Tech Review bloggers question whether that’s really a fair description of the Mechanical Turk platform. I’m not sure there’s a real disagreement here—the Newsweek headline overstated the content of the piece. Much of the point, as I read it, was just that cloudwork practices are so new, dynamic, and varied that it’s hard to know what the good and bad effects will turn out to be. As they point out, this could be a boon for workers here in the US who want flexibility and autonomy, as well as creating new kinds of opportunities for workers abroad. A few specific points are worth thinking about, though.

They quote John Horton, at Harvard, who put out a HIT (“human intelligence task”) on Amazon Mechanical Turk asking about working conditions, and found that a small majority think AMT requestors treat workers better than most real-world employers. That surprised me—maybe I spend too much time reading Turker messageboards, where the theme is often discontent. I wonder, though, whether many responders use AMT for fun or small income supplements, rather than to earn a living wage, which changes the complexion of the situation. Even if Horton is wholly correct, though, it doesn’t mean requestors can’t improve. For a project I’m doing for JZ’s winter cyberlaw class, we’ve put up some AMT HITs asking about worker satisfaction. We’ve found that people do not like doing search engine optimization or creating spam, and a majority (though not an overwhelming one) likes knowing what the project is for. Disclosure of the company’s identity or the project purpose could become a much stronger norm on AMT, which would help fend off the problems of work alienation and unwittingly doing bad things with the platform, but wouldn’t detract from any of the benefits TR bloggers praise.

The other major point they make is that this type of work can be good for workers in developing countries. That’s definitely true in some cases (see, for instance, previous blogging about CrowdFlower’s GiveWork program). I certainly don’t have enough background in international development to make an unambiguous statement either way. But surely it’s worrisome that children can be made to do the work as well as adults—there’s just no way of knowing who’s at the other end of the system. Overall, for better or for worse, we live in a society where we’ve decided that paternalistic labor laws play some valuable role. Some of them can be imported into an AMT context—but maybe not internationally—and the technology means that some can’t, even if, like child labor, there’s widespread condemnation. I would agree, and I think JZ would too, that we don’t want regulators charging in with too heavy a hand. But we should be alert to what’s happening on these platforms.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

The amazing Hubble telescope has now shown us images of galaxies from 13.2 billion years ago.  That’s because the light comes from 13.2 billion light years away, and took (by definition) that much time to get here:

“The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe,” the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement released Tuesday.

So that makes sense on one level.  But here’s what I don’t get: the light only took that long to get here if the starting point for it was in fact 13.2 billion light years away.  Since the universe is expanding, if one rewinds time, it shrinks.  Indeed, I thought the Big Bang to mean that at one point the Universe was a singularity, both meaning in a condition for which our laws of physics can’t say anything, and that it was essentially compressed into a single point.

But if it was compressed into a single point — apparently about 5-600 million years further back from the 13.2 billion we’re now seeing — that means that 14 billion years ago everything was, well, extremely close to everything else.  So unless the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, how could anything be 13.2 billion light years away from us, 13.2 billion years ago?  Maybe something is that far now, but if so its light would only just be starting its journey to us.  The whole light year calculation presumes that something was that far away from us then – a time when the whole universe was much, much smaller in diameter.  Maybe it has something to do with the universe’s expansion as a matter of dark energy, e.g., the fabric of the universe itself expanding, vs. the expansion found as all the galaxies speed away from one another (countered by the actions of gravity)?  Something to do with the “inflationary period” catapulting everything really far away from everything else in one swoop?

I’m sure I’m missing something here.  What is it?

Google announced today that it would cease (well, phase out) censoring the results in google.cn, the Chinese-language version of its famed search engine.  It’s a pretty stunning move, both in its fact and in its execution.  First, the announcement of “A new approach to China” may appear to have buried the lede.  The lion’s share of the post is devoted to describing a series of coordinated attacks on the accounts of human rights activists, including those who use Google.  It includes a link to the amazing story of GhostNet, discovered by fellow ONI researchers when the Dalai Lama gave them his oddly-acting laptop to examine.

Companies rarely share information about the cyberattacks they experience — conventional wisdom has it that it makes the company appear vulnerable, and drives customers away.  Here Google is open about the attacks, while of course assuring readers that it had tightened security as a result.  Google then links these attacks to a lessening of enthusiasm for doing business in China.  Eliminating censorship in google.cn is only mentioned after that.

Suppose the Chinese government acts as expected and tells Google that it may no longer operate in China.  Google.cn might vanish as a domain name, since it’s hosted under the Chinese country-code TLD of .cn, ultimately controllable by the Chinese government.  But the search engine found there could of course keep operating from a different location, like cn.google.com.  Suppose then that China attempts to filter out traffic to and from that new location — and to and from google.com for good measure, as it has done from time to time, especially before the advent of google.cn and its agreement to censor.  (We’ll be watching for such moves at herdict.org, a site where users can report Web blockages.)

What next?  My hope, and expectation, is that Google engineers who might have been a bit halfhearted about implementing censorship mandates in google.cn could be full-throttle in coming up with ways for Google to be viewed despite any network interruptions between site and user.  There are lots of unexplored options here.  They’re unexplored not because they’re infeasible, but because most sites would rather not provoke a government that filters.  So they don’t undertake to get information out in ways that might evade blockages.  Here, Google would have nothing more to lose, so could pioneer some new approaches.  Circumvention of filtering (or other blockages, for that matter) tends to happen on the user side of things, seeking out proxies like the Tor network, or anonymizer.com.

To be sure, many of the larger benefits of operating in China originally cited by Google four years ago — exposing the citizenry to services beyond those locally grown and monitored; engaging them beyond the “China Wide Web” to which some government officials aspire to limit them; and gaining market share that can create momentum and support for later loosening of restrictions — may attenuate.  Google.cn is less known and used than, say, the local Baidu search engine, which boasts about 60% market share.  That share is about to get even bigger.

But drawing a line is both the right move and a brilliant one.  It helps realign Google’s business with its ethos, and masterfully recasts the firm in a place it will feel more comfortable: supporting the free and open dissemination of information rather than metering it out according to undesirable (and capricious) government standards.

As we knew would happen sooner or later, a dangerous malicious app has apparently made its way into Android’s Market. The app is said to “create[] a shell of mobile banking apps” and collect users’ personal information. It’s been removed; no word on how many users, if any, were actually affected.

Offhand, I can’t think of an app with comparable problems that has gotten into iPhone’s app store. What will be really interesting about this incident, and the similar ones that are sure to follow, is how users and vendors react. I can imagine this creating hysterical urging for Google to pre-screen all Android apps the way Apple does, but I think that would be premature. Yes, an open Market(s) is going to have more questionable apps, but there are many solutions other than lockdown—a strong user ranking for apps (which already exists), a way to alert people who have already downloaded the app, sandboxing (which admittedly wouldn’t have mattered here), or a quick way to freeze the app while complaints are investigating. They’re only partial solutions, but lockdown is only partial, too.

Now that the Android OS is really starting to take off, this story is going to be repeated, and we’ll get to see how strongly committed Google is to the principles it built the OS on — and whether there are models out there for vetting third party code that do better than those of the generative PC, but aren’t as restrictive as that of the iPhone.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Update: eWeek reports that Google has removed a number of suspicious apps from its marketplace.  Of course, the more generative structure of the Android market means that “banned” apps can be obtained elsewhere — unlike the iPhone app monopoly enjoyed by Apple, where the iPhone App store is the only point of distribution.  –JZ

Flurry: App Store Sees Record Breaking Christmas. Great article collecting sales and market share numbers for the App Store and Android Market. Quick summary: App Store grew 51% (!) from November to December, Android Market 22%; App Store has 13x as many downloads as Android Market (apparently not everyone is as concerned about openness as we are…); Verizon’s new Droid phone is far and away the most popular Android device.

Android Market Badly Needs A Web Presence to Compete with the App Store. Jason Kincaid argues that, while there are fewer Android apps than iPhone apps, a better web system for browsing and choosing apps could really help Android. I think he’s right that Google could think creatively about how to push the Market past (or at least toward) the App Store, but he admits that the big caveat is that 90% of apps are bought over-the-air, not via the web.

Apple Approves “Tits & Boobies” and “Pussy Lovers” Apps. Apple’s app reviewers try to figure out what to do with a “tits & boobies” app that shows pictures of the birds of that name. “One thing is clear to me: Nobody is ever going to be happy with this process, which I’m afraid will remain imperfect forever.”

Inside India’s CAPTCHA-solving economy. One huge aspect of ubiquitous human computing is sending menial computing tasks abroad; the social and economic implications of that, obviously, are potentially enormous. This piece is a good description of the market for CAPTCHA-solving work in India, where the going rate for 1000 captchas is $2.

Google Rests Its Defense of Executives in Italian Privacy Case. Some of you may have been following this case—Google executives in Italy are being prosecuted for allowing a video of students bullying an autistic teenager to remain on Youtube. The video stayed online for two months, but was removed almost immediately when Google employees were alerted to its presence. Google rested its case a few days ago; a verdict is expected in January or February. None of the executives faces jail time, because they don’t have criminal records. But if they’re convicted, it will be interesting to see what Google decides to do with its future Italian operations.

Cellphone Encryption Code Is Divulged. A German engineer claims to have broken the code used to encrypt GSM phone calls, or 80% of the world’s mobile calls. There are steps between breaking the code and actually intercepting and deciphering calls, but this is the big step. He says he’s only “trying to push operators to adopt better security measures for mobile phone calls”—measures which exist, but haven’t been implemented.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Our worries about ubiquitous human computing*—summarized in this earlier post—fall into two broad categories. First, there are potential bad effects on the workers, since traditional labor-law protections may not apply in cyberspace. Second, there are potential bad effects on the world. One example that JZ has given in talks is that lobbyists could pay workers to call their Congressional representatives and lobby for or against bills—whether or not the worker actually cared about those bills. In other words, ubiquitous human computing could offer another way to turn money into political power.

It seems that future is already here. Business Insider reports that a group called “Get Health Reform Right,” composed largely of insurers, has been paying people “virtual currency” to send emails opposing health care reform to their representatives. It works like this: Facebook users play FarmVille or Mafia Wars (I blocked them long ago, and so was surprised to find that millions of people are now playing them). To advance past certain levels, you essentially need “virtual currency” to buy better weapons, tools, whatever. You can buy virtual currency with real currency, or you can fill out various surveys and be rewarded with virtual currency. Get Health Reform Right had players taking surveys, which culminated in an email to the relevant representative: “I am concerned a new government plan could cause me to lose the employer coverage I have today. More government bureaucracy will only create more problems, not solve the ones we have.”

That’s remarkably shameless—it’s not quite money-for-contacts, but it’s only a tiny step away, since GHRR is obviously paying to have the surveys inserted into FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Interestingly, the same scheme could work without even virtual currency payments. People clearly go a little crazy in pursuit of high scores, gold stars, and other gaming achievements. GHRR could just make its own Facebook game, and demand that an email be sent between every level. That’s not the same as paying money; is it unethical? My sense is yes—making it easy for already-concerned citizens to contact their reps is okay, but giving some external reward to people who may be totally disinterested is not. These fine lines will become important if the problem grows and there’s an attempt to make these practices illegal, instead of just unethical. (Of course, that assumes it’s possible to make it illegal—there’s the First Amendment, obviously, but this sounds a little like false advertising, which can be regulated.)

If this technique becomes frequently used, maybe it will just mean that short emails become meaningless noise in Congressional offices. I don’t think that would be good—there is a qualitative difference between GHRR’s actions and, say, political groups asking members who chose to join to send “virtual postcards” to their reps. Of course, maybe Congresspeople already ignore all form emails in the first place.

One interesting side note is that Apple recently faced a variation on this problem—a developer was paying users to pump up its iPhone app reviews (actually, giving the faux-reviewers free copies of its apps). Some concerned citizens noted this, wrote to Apple, and Apple kicked the developer and its 1000 apps out of the app store. We’ve certainly spent plenty of time worrying about Apple’s control over the iPhone on this blog, but this is the obvious upside: you can get rid of astroturfing pretty effectively. Even if (big if) GHRR’s actions were made illegal, enforcement might prove tricky if they moved beyond Facebook.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

* As one commenter suggested, we probably need a better name for this phenomenon than ubiquitous human computing. Any ideas?

As Phones Do More, They Become Targets of Hacking. The NY Times observes that as computing — and especially commerce — moves onto mobile devices, security threats are growing. “It feels a lot like it did in 1999 in desktop security … People are using the mobile Web and downloading applications more than ever before, and there are threats that come with that.”  [I (JZ) am skeptical of the iPhone's "contingently generative" environment -- outside apps are encouraged, but then subject to an ongoing approval process by a central gatekeeper who can use any criteria it wants, or none at all -- but this environment does provide extra weapons against security threats.  Phones with more generative configurations, like Android, will have to figure out how to make them less vulnerable than, say, PCs, to hacking.  I think this is a big unanswered question.]

The Google Phone, Unlocked. Google is introducing a branded smartphone running the Android OS. Interestingly, it’s an unlocked phone, although because it’s GSM, it can only run on T-Mobile and AT&T in the US. I wonder if it will be subsidized by the carriers; if not, it could be a first step in helping break the carrier-subsidy model—discussed in this slightly out-of-date paper. Of course, even the iPhone couldn’t make it unsubsidized.

This Dumb Decade: The 87 Lamest Moments in Tech, 2000-2009. Not so much the future of the internet, but the recent past. Many of the recent lame moments have been covered in this blog (Danger Sidekick phones lose users’ data for weeks; Apple rejects Google Voice; Amazon removes 1984 from the Kindle). The old stuff is fun. I didn’t know that Facebook donated $9.5 million to a privacy-education foundation after the Beacon fiasco.

Obama to Name Howard Schmidt as Cybersecurity Coordinator, President Obama appoints Howard Schmidt, who also worked for President Bush, as his cybersecurity coordinator. Good to see that the administration is taking cybersecurity seriously, although they’re really looking at a different problem than the book discusses—threats to military and commercial infrastructure, rather than users’ endpoints and experiences.

Taxi Hack. A website allows users to criticize or praise service from specific taxi drivers, identified by medallion or license number. This has echoes of a future imagined in Chapter 9 of the book—you see a taxi, you punch in the number, and you have the driver’s digital reputation before you step into the cab (or choose not to).  (Hat tip: Emily Brill.)

Piqqem. A website crowd-sources stock picks. Of course, crowd-sourcing is all over the internet, but it seems it would be particularly treacherous if this website were subverted—say, by a company ordering its employees to vote its stock up.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer and JZ

Apple’s Game-Changer, Downloading Now. Long NY Times article on Apple’s App Store and how it’s changed the model of what a smartphone should be. The good parts of the article: interesting data (100K apps for the iPhone, 14K for Android, 500 (!) for PalmOS; $1B a year in iPhone app sales), some valuable musings on how important the iPhone has been, and an acknowledgment that the review process can be terrible. The bad: the article ends with “The iPhone will be remembered as the first true handheld computer.” There’s no sense of perspective on how the review process is more than a logistical inconvenience—it really changes the nature of the device. Also, the authors seem totally dazzled by the idea of a platform for which applications can be written—it’s a “breakthrough.” Have they heard of PCs?

The Month of Apple Bugs. For one month, researchers released information every day on different bugs that infect Apple products (OS X, Safari, apps for Macs, etc.). They say they’ve found public release gets quicker results than “responsible disclosure” (i.e., just telling the vendor). That’s one model for cybersecurity…

There’s lots of coverage out there about the Supernova conference, “a forum to examine all of the opportunities and challenges created in the Network Age.” Here’s JZ’s talk (starting around minute 29) and a good text summary, along with some reactions:

Pondering a Rogue Cloud wonders what government and industry pressures cloud computing providers will face.

Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms “But further, Vogels [Amazon CTO] said that users should feel comfortable trusting Amazon because the company’s mission is to be a ‘customer-centric company.’ Which seemed to be exactly Zittrain’s point.”

Cloud Computing an Option for Disaster Recovery Vogels discusses one of the big upsides of cloud computing—your data might be safer. We’ve discussed this topic here.

And bonus JZ links: a talk at Singularity University on Civic Technologies and the Internet, and an interview with Amanda Congdon on cloud computing (with spooky music).

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Here’s a roundup of some interesting stories published recently on generativity, tethered devices, and as always, the iPhone.

Generative Irrelevancy. Tim Sturgill considers Google’s video touting Chrome OS. He worries that it may be the “final nail…in the generative coffin,” but he also sees the virtue of moving beyond traditional OSes. See also JZ’s take on Chrome OS.

iDroid App Rejcted by Apple. Well, duh. Apple rejects an app that essentially just displays an ad for the Droid smartphone. “I kinda have to side with Apple on this one, although I think it would have been smarter for them to let the app through.”

iPhone or Droid. xkcd on the debate between the iPhone and the Droid.

iPhone upgrades – A One-way Control-Freak If you don’t like an update to the iPhone OS and want to revert to an earlier version, it’s going to be tricky. “We’re being told that such control is for our own good … [B]ut there are many of us who would prefer the freedom to take our own chances.”

App Rejections iPhone app developer starts a blog chronicling reasons for app rejections or slow acceptances, with the reasons for the decisions, in the hopes of helping people figure out “what you can (and can’t!) get away with.”

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer