-Prof. Z was elected to the Internet Society’s board of trustees for a three-year term. The Internet Society is an international nonprofit organisation founded in 1992 to “provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy.”

- For those who missed it, the audio of the interview featured on WNPR (April 30) on “What’s Next For the World Wide Web?” is up on the web!

-The Zittrain Twitter feed has been added to the site. Of course, you can always follow the professor directly through Twitter if you set up your own account (it’s free).

-Prof. Z participated in a workshop hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School titled “Cultures in Common: 50 Years of Reflection on Science, Technology, and Society” on May 8. He spoke about “Ordering the Wild Frontier: The Cultures of the Internet”

-Z was in London on May 19 to deliver a lecture on “The Future of the Internet: Private Sheriffs in Cyberspace” for the Society for Computers and Law.

Coming up…

-Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Cluetrain Manifesto, Prof. Z will talk with Cluetrain authors Doc Searls and David Weinberger at Harvard Law School  on June 16. The event is open to the public. More info here.

-Z will deliver the keynote “Future of Video and How to Stop It” on June 20 at the Open Video Conference in New York.

April 7: The Harvard Law School News reports on Prof.Z’s talk at the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center’s 20^th Anniversary Technical Symposium at Carnegie MellonUniv.

April 13: Prof. Z talks to PayPal and Clarium Capital founder Peter Thiel about whether monopolies can save the Internet. Click here for video.

April 15: Prof. Z interviews Daniel Hoffer, Founder and Chairman of CouchSurfing. Click here for video.

April 19: “In a down economy, one might surf for an hour rather than spend $15 at a multiplex,” Z says in Cnet article on online piracy.

April 22: Interview (podcast) on Command Line. (updated 4/23)

April 28: Discussing the Wolfram Alpha demo with Stephen Wolfram (updated April 29)

* On NPR’s On the Media, Prof. Z talks about the future of the internet and security issues

* Z introduces  Herdict on the World Technology Podcast 234, Air Mozilla (Media player available on Air Mozilla’s website), and Radio Berkman.

-yvette wohn

Snowfall in Cambridge is keeping people at home but perfectly illustrates situations that can be solved with ubiquitous human computing. Prof. Z discusses this concept of using remote human resources in a recent interview with Nokia’s Ideas Project. Cheap networks, he says, enables organizations to get things done regardless of location. Bad news for those who enjoyed sleeping in on a Monday morning.

Prof. Z’s working paper on ubiquitous human computing can be found here.

Jonathan Zittrain’s brainchild Herdict was officially released today. (Watch the project’s mascot — a sheep — demonstrate “the verdict of the herd” in a short video… does its voice sound familiar?)

Herdict is a tool that employs the distributed power of the Internet community to provide insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility. People can participate by reporting websites that they cannot access, testing sites that others have reported, or downloading the browser add-on for reporting sites on the fly.

Herdict is a portmanteau of ‘herd’ and ‘verdict.’ Using Herdict Web, anyone anywhere can report websites as accessible or inaccessible. Herdict Web aggregates reports in real time, permitting participants to see if inaccessibility is a shared problem, giving them a better sense of potential reasons for why a site is inaccessible. Trends can be viewed over time, by site and by country.

Herdict Web builds out from the OpenNet Initiative’s research on global Internet filtering. The OpenNet Initiative tests Internet filtering through an academic methodology. Herdict Web takes a different approach, crowdsourcing reports to learn about and display a real-time picture of user experiences around the globe.

Watch Prof. Z discussing Herdict Web at a recent Berkman luncheon, or listen to a podcast of Herdict on Radio Berkman.

Celebrating the first anniversary of its publication, The Future of the Internet- And How to Stop It will be available in paperback on March 15, making it easier for those who want to read on the go. The book can also be downloaded to the Kindle for $16.50 and is available for free on this web site.

With Internet security issues getting hotter and hotter, our cyber scholar is in high demand.

On March 12, Prof. Z will be giving a luncheon talk at the CERT Technical Symposium at Carnegie Mellon Univ. The theme of this year’s symposium is “Security Challenges in an Evolving World.” On March 14, he will be flying out to Texas and joining other Internet experts at SXSW Interactive. His presentation/panel is titled “Civic technologies and the Future of the Internet.”

Suppose that we agree on a rough (to some, controversial) value judgment: the Internet’s architectural openness (its “generativity”) — and its progression into the mainstream — has been a genuinely awesome thing, facilitating radical (and mostly good) revolutions in how we express and entertain ourselves, how we learn, how we shop, essentially in how meaning is made. 

Then: is there a signal threat to it apart from the ones arising from people (and regulators) who reject or are harmed by the Net’s openness even when it’s functioning as designed?  I.e., apart from those who don’t share the value judgment about openness?

I gather that some say no.  David Akin and David Isenberg, and perhaps Gene S. (although he sort of seems to say “a pox on both your houses”), say that for all its vulnerabilities, the Internet manages to keep on ticking, and suggestions that there is a growing — perhaps existential — threat to its functioning arising from anti-libertarian control freaks and mercenary security vendors — those who benefit from rejecting its generative premise rather than those who want to save it.

I say yes.  It’s an tough empirical question and there is plenty of room for disagreement — much of this is crystal ball gazing — but it clouds the ball further to argue that anyone who tries to describe the threat is only doing so because he or she seeks lockdown.  I worry both about the problem that will, if no better alternatives are offered, drive people away from open systems, and life in the gated communities that will welcome them.

So what’s the problem?  As Gene says, the issue is not only with networks that are not secure, but also the endpoints: reprogrammable machines, PCs, that provide the basis for the botnets that can wreak various forms of havoc.  It’s a miracle and an absurdity that infused in homes, workplaces, and laps around the world are PCs that can be repurposed in an instant, running code from the other side of the world without the vendor of the machine or its operating system, or the network service provider, having anything to say about it.  That’s how an innovation like Skype — or, for that matter, a Web browser — can come about and hit prime time.  It’s also how worms and viruses spread, and it’s not just about OS bugs: many of these come in through the front door, with the user choosing to run new code without understanding what’s hidden within it.  I remember Microsoft’s “first immutable law of security“:

There’s a nice analogy between running a program and eating a sandwich. If a stranger walked up to you and handed you a sandwich, would you eat it? Probably not. How about if your best friend gave you a sandwich? Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t — it depends on whether she made it or found it lying in the street. Apply the same critical thought to a program that you would to a sandwich, and you’ll usually be safe.”

This is well intentioned, of course — we know what the author is trying to say by it — but it’s also crazy.  Millions of years of evolution have helped us intuitively discern a good sandwich from a rotten one, and we don’t continually ingest little bits of food every few minutes as we walk down the street.  There’s no such help with code.  That’s why for 99.9% of the people out there, the idea of merrily running any code they see is already a fiction.  (Most of the .1% are people who just don’t care if their PCs melt, rather than geeks who know how to secure them.)  People turn to anti-virus vendors, firewall makers, and all the other patchy tech that Gene rightly dismisses as baling wire and twine.  If that’s all they’ve got, people will be ripe for persuasion that they should lock themselves down more, opting for sterile environments like the Kindle for more and more tasks, or hybrid environments like that of the iPhone or Facebook Apps: outside code can run, but only with the prospective and ongoing  permission of the platform operator.  These are attractive solutions — I love my iPhone — but they are worrisome in the big picture, especially as the model for them begins to predominate across all software.  Already, many of the otherwise-generative machines out there are being locked down by the boxes’ actual owners: PCs in corporate environments, schools, cyber cafes, and libraries are frequently unable to run new code without bureaucratized approval.  And in the developing world, much of the excitement around the adoption of mobile platforms instead of clunky PCs tends, with a few notable exceptions, to play into the walled gardens.  Where demand goes, supply follows: for the next generation of geeks and tinkerers, many find these walled gardens to be an unremarkable feature of the landscape.  Today’s kidz are coding for Facebook and iPhone, not for GNU/Linux or Windows.

It’s not much answer to say: “Well, *I* don’t have problems with viruses; it’s just losers who don’t know how to protect their machines.  Let them have a playpen, then.”  This response reminds me of the end of Atlas Shrugged, when the handful of good capitalists retreat to a golden valley and mow each others’ lawns in a new economy, while the rest of the world melts.  I don’t want an Internet where only the nerds remain.  (USENET was fun, but …)

So, David’s subject line sounds right to me: “Fixing the Internet might break it worse than it’s broken now.”  But that doesn’t mean that we should accept the status quo.  If we do, we’ll lose it — or we’ll find that we’re one of a comparative handful clinging to it as everyone else migrates away.

What are the solutions that aren’t iatrogenic?  I’m less sanguine than many on this list that some sort of liability regime for buggy code is the way to go, both because I think it will in many cases lead to less generative platforms and because the problem transcends mere bugs in code.  (For a more detailed treatment of this, see <http://yupnet.org/zittrain/archives/18#29>.) And “more training” for users would be great, but seems unrealistic.  We need solutions that require only a critical mass of people to implement, rather than counting on lots and lots of people to suddenly become tinkerers themselves — even as they rightly should enjoy the benefits of an experimentalist culture like that of the Internet and PC.  My own ideas run less in the direction of re-architecting the entire Internet, though I’m intrigued by the Clean Slate project and its siblings, like that run by David Clark at MIT.  David Isenberg is right that I’ve suggested some promise in virtual machine technology that allows promising but suspect code to run in a “red” zone, but this approach also has limits and drawbacks.  (Who decides what’s red and green when the users’ cluelessness is what gives rise to the need for a red zone at all?)  See, e.g., <http://yupnet.org/zittrain/archives/18#6>.

Instead, I think that collecting and making available more data about the shape of the problem can help enormously.  We really don’t know what’s going on out there, and the sooner we can replace speculation with reality — and not have what little we know be a trade secret! — the better.  See <http://yupnet.org/zittrain/archives/18#48> for more details on how this could work:

Social problems can be met first with social solutions — aided by powerful technical tools — rather than by resorting to law. As we have seen, vandalism, copyright infringement, and lies on Wikipedia are typically solved not by declaring that vandals are breaking laws against “exceeding authorized access” to Wikipedia or by suits for infringement or defamation, but rather through a community process that, astoundingly, has impact.

The Google/Stopbadware partnership — which made news a few weeks ago for reasons unrelated to its core operations — is one experiment in this area.  I’m all for the Net solving its own problems — someone does always tend to step up.  (E.g., thanks, Luis von Ahn, for the CAPTCHA!)  Maybe that someone is among us?

There, now, I’ve gone ahead and ended with the thought that we are the change we’ve been waiting for.  Or is it Ready to Lead? …JZ

Assuming that most people who visit this site are interested in the thoughts of Jonathan Zittrain, I will try to keep readers up to date on the latest JZ-related news. (Those who wish to see more random updates of our cyber professor may want to follow him on Twitter.)

On Feb. 18, the Berkman Center will be screening “Secrecy“, a film about the vast, invisible world of government secrecy, which will be followed by a roundtable discussion with the directors Peter Galison and Robb Moss, featuring Harvard Law Professors Jack Goldsmith, Martha Minow, and Jonathan Z. The two-hour event is open to the public and starts at 5pm at Ames Courtroom in Austin Hall, with soda and popcorn provided. More details here.

On Feb. 28, Prof. Z will be going to Mountain View, CA, to participate in a panel for “The Impact of Information Technology on Society,” a symposium hosted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The panel, titled “Alternative Futures of the Internet: Fears and Optimism,” includes David Clark (MIT), Cynthia Dwork (Microsoft), and Hal Varian (Google). Proceedings will later be available at the Academy’s web site and in print.

It is with a complicated mix of excitement and sadness that I make the following announcement.

As some of you remember, just over a year ago I reported that I was shifting my academic (and activist) work from free culture related issues to (what I called) “corruption.” At Stanford, a year ago, I outlined what this work would be: To focus on the many institutions in public life that depend upon trust to succeed, but which are jeopardizing that trust through an improper dependence on money. Read the New York Times Editorial of last week. Or think of medical researchers receiving money from drug companies whose drugs they review; legal academics receiving money to provide public policy advice from the very institutions affected by that advice; or Congress filled with Members focused obsessively on how to raise money to secure their (or their party’s) tenure. In all these cases, dependency on money in these ways tends to weaken public trust. Or so was my hypothesis when I launched on this project.

But how I would pursue this work has been a constant challenge. I started immediately to devour the books recommended to me by colleagues and on my wiki. I attended conferences and gave talks about the subject. I began a series of interviews with insiders. And with the help of Joe Trippi, I launched Change Congress, which was designed to focus these issues in the context of American politics.

Throughout this process, however, I have felt that the work would require something more. That the project I had described was bigger than a project that I, one academic, could pursue effectively. This wasn’t an issue that would be fixed with a book. Or even with five books. It is instead a problem that required a new focus by many people, across disciplines, learning or relearning something important about how trust was built.

About six months ago, I was asked to consider locating this research at a very well established ethics center at Harvard University. Launched more than two decades ago, the Safra Center was first committed to building a program on ethics that would inspire similar programs at universities across the country. But the suggestion was made that after more than two decades of enormous success, it may make sense for the Center to consider focusing at least part of its work on a single problem. No one was certain this made sense, but I was asked to sketch a proposal that wouldn’t necessarily displace the current work of the Center, but which would become a primary focus of the Center, and complement its mission.

I did that, mapping a five year project that would draw together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to focus on this increasingly important problem of improper dependence. Harvard liked the proposal. In November, the Provost of Harvard University invited me to become the director of the Safra Center. Last week, I accepted the offer. In the summer, I will begin an appointment at the Harvard Law School, while directing the Safra Center.

This was a very difficult decision to make. Stanford is an extraordinary law school, and I have loved my time here. The students are brilliant, yet balanced. The faculty is brilliant, yet surprisingly humble. The Dean has an amazing vision of the future of legal education, and is redefining the law school in ways that I completely support. I am endlessly proud of the Center for Internet and Society and the Fair Use Project. I have the very best assistant in the world (and she promised at least 5 more years if I stayed). I have written four of my five books while here. I’m almost finished with my 6th, the book I am sure I will be most proud of. This is a place that has given an enormous amount to me, and from which I have benefited greatly.

On a personal level, too, this was a difficult decision. California has become our home. My wife is strongly attached to everything Californian; we both have very close friends here; I hadn’t ever imagined raising my kids in anything but the social and political environment of San Francisco. I still find it hard to imagine that I won’t, if not now, sometime. And the enormous beauty of the environment here still takes my breath away. A year into my time at Stanford, I was certain I would never leave. After a blissful weekend with my family last week, it still hasn’t registered that I will be leaving.

But in the end, it was impossible for me to be committed to the project while turning down this opportunity. It is not just the institution, nor the (partial) freedom from teaching. It is the chance to frame a large-scale project devoted to a large, important and complex problem. Once we saw it like this, my wife and I decided that returning to this old home was the right thing to do. And so in June, we will pack up the car for a cross country trek, back to Harvard.

Of course, I have no objective cause to complain. Harvard too is an extraordinary law school. As anyone who knows me knows, some of my closest friends in the world are at Harvard, including the Dean (or at least until Obama steals them all away). Harvard has grown and changed in wonderful ways over the past eight years. It will be an enormously exciting place to teach and learn.

But I regret deeply doing anything that is hurtful to those I respect and like. Worse, I hate doing anything that can be misunderstood. When Dean Sullivan recruited me, she said Stanford was paradise. I thought that was just a slogan. It isn’t. I consider the 8 years I have had here to be the most important and invigorating in my career. And I will miss everything about this place.

Some things won’t change. I will continue to work with Joe Trippi to build Change Congress. And I will continue to explore how best to incorporate this space (the Net) into this research. But I will do all of this, and my work, in the context of Harvard’s Safra Center and its Law School, and of old friendships, revived.