- FOI Topics and Links of the Week
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 (The story was written pre-Google announcement, so some portions are out of date.)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
- Life in a clickshop
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
- A quick cosmology question
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 takes on China
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.
- Malicious Apps in the Android Market
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
June 15th, 2009 at 11:35 pm (#)
Yes, Professor JZ. Less really is more.
They, the Iranian government, might be able shut down the entire Internet for most of their people but they are really going to have trouble stopping all flash drives, iPods, cell phones, gaming devices, and cameras from moving through their borders…both ways. The information will flow. And twitter itself is so very difficult to stop. It is a generative event of the 4th kind. . It is generative.
Mark Shea
June 15th, 2009 at 11:43 pm (#)
Great elucidation of the answer to the question- why in the world since Ahmendjani can crudely try to control everything else, can’t he just shut down Twitter – it must be driving him out of his mind- or maybe he hasn’t really figured out the “half-baked advantage” of twitter.
June 15th, 2009 at 11:55 pm (#)
The main problem with the Revolution By Twitter hypothesis is that, for one purported reason or another, a lot of noise started blotting out most of the signal. Brilliant ideas to change Twitter hashtags and change all user locations/time zones to Tehran changed the ability to search for firsthand tweets by locals, something that had helped immensely in chasing down actual information. The confusion ended up getting broadcast on Air American and who knows how many other media outlets.
I’m all for pursuing (and witnessing) a people’s response to a tyrannical government by way of the internet; but when you’re an outsider watching things unfold and start to blindly repeat every tactically and technically-disadvantageous suggestion some anonymous internet user might be twittering over, you stand to make some big mistakes. Before you go retweeting this or that from some unknown source, remember that a simple innocent mistake could be costly to someone thousands of miles away.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:15 am (#)
[...] to Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School professor and expert on internet censorship, this is a function of the rather unique way that Twitter has been built. Unlike Facebook, or other systems, Twitter’s “half-baked” approach is what makes [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 2:30 am (#)
Short of shutting off the terrestial Internet completely, there is not much the government could do to avoid Twitter being used. Anyone could post to a laconi.ca server (or any chat server for that matter) under any domain, with their updates automatically fed into Twitter.
Many people or groups in Iran use (cheap) DVB technology which uses +- 2 ft satellite dishes to connect to geostationary satellites, brought into the country “semi-legal”. These connections, a few mbps downlink and +- 64-256 kbps uplink, completely bypasses the government firewall. People have found ways to distribute that connectivity within their neighbourhood/circle of friends using wireless.
So in short: time has passed where the government can shut off internet communications in Iran. Even though they still can make it seriously difficult.
Peter
June 16th, 2009 at 4:13 am (#)
[...] to Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School professor and expert on internet censorship, this is a function of the rather unique way that Twitter has been built. Unlike Facebook, or other systems, Twitter’s “half-baked” approach is what makes [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 7:58 am (#)
Hey Nicole, seems like we’re thinking the same thing
I wrote a story about that, from a different angle: @raminedarabiha Iran Vs social media, Guerilla tactics 2.0 – http://bit.ly/6IUUf #IranElection
June 16th, 2009 at 8:00 am (#)
Hmm. I thought this was Nicole Simon’s blog, my bad, Hootsuite’s top bar got me confused
June 16th, 2009 at 10:19 am (#)
[...] organizers asking anyone who can to set up proxies to keep the flow of information free and clear, rumors, pictures, videos and foreigners (in this case us, among others) trying to help but not knowing [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 12:59 pm (#)
there are also other methods, we can even tweet by ssh’ing to a remote site and using curl.
June 16th, 2009 at 1:10 pm (#)
Jonathan, we all saw this argument happen years ago with USENET – it was exactly the same idea, the decentralized system that couldn’t be effectively censored. However, it didn’t work out the way evangelists predicted. In fact, it’s pretty easy to disrupt and poison such systems, and people are noting. Not by shutting them down, but by using them to track the dissidents, and flooding the channels with misinformation and noise.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:24 pm (#)
Nice explanation!
Less really is more in this case.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:33 pm (#)
[...] Iran und Twitter – The Revolution Will Still Be Twittered und Could Iran Shut Down Twitter? [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 3:17 pm (#)
[...] to the structure of Twitter, the service is particularly hard to block. While the government could easily stop Iranian access to twitter.com, there are dozens of ways to [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 3:29 pm (#)
Even if they would shut down all internet access access via mobile phones or the like still would be possible. Only if all possible communication lines were completely blocked it would be possible to deny any tweets to come through!
June 16th, 2009 at 4:10 pm (#)
Peter,
There are unfortunately reports from Iran of gov’t thugs confiscating satellite devices. Also, they are attempting to jam satellite communications.
Lars
June 16th, 2009 at 4:16 pm (#)
[...] Intermezzo (61) 2009 Juni 16 by nambulous Could Iran Shut Down Twitter? [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 7:15 pm (#)
[...] of the public nature of the information has been sparked in part, it seems, by the surprisingly robust design of Twitter and the fact that instant messaging services from Google, Microsoft and AOL have been turned off in [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 7:48 pm (#)
[...] information out.(Some of the public nature of the information has been sparked in part, it seems, by the surprisingly robust design of Twitter and the fact that instant messaging services from Google, Microsoft and AOL have been turned off in [...]
June 16th, 2009 at 8:15 pm (#)
[...] of the public nature of the information has been sparked in part, it seems, by the surprisingly robust design of Twitter and the fact that instant messaging services from Google, Microsoft and AOL have been turned off in [...]
June 17th, 2009 at 5:19 am (#)
[...] out that as content is divorced from delivery through such open systems, blocking, for example, Twitter-as-a-network-system much harder than simply blocking Twitter the site, since there are dozens of tools and sites that [...]
June 17th, 2009 at 7:49 am (#)
[...] masiva a través de Internet a los que resulta relativamente fácil acceder -gracias sobre todo a su facilidad de uso para terceros-. Además, la compañía del pajarito es una de las pocas solidarias con los disidentes del país [...]
June 17th, 2009 at 11:08 pm (#)
[...] media, Twitter, TWT, YouTube. Leave a Comment Currently watching various media personalities pick Jonathan Zittrain’s brain regarding Twitter in Iran. While Twitter has definitely had a powerful impact here, I’m [...]
June 18th, 2009 at 3:15 am (#)
[...] proposito del fatto che le storie sono molecole e le informazioni sono atomi, Zittrain ha scritto ieri che Twitter “è un atomo disegnato per essere ricostruito all’interno [...]
June 18th, 2009 at 12:57 pm (#)
[...] so people can report filtering as it happens. And I’ve also been thinking a lot about Twitter and its cousins — how much social media is making a difference in what’s [...]
June 18th, 2009 at 7:20 pm (#)
[...] Web sites that aren’t blocked and hoping that they can connect to those that are — the way that Twitterfall can be used to tweet even if twitter.com is blocked, or visiting an anonymizer [...]
June 24th, 2009 at 12:58 pm (#)
[...] Warum Iran Twitter nicht einfach blocken kann. [...]
June 24th, 2009 at 2:50 pm (#)
[...] Could Iran Shut Down Twitter?, di Jonathan Zittrain [...]
June 24th, 2009 at 10:09 pm (#)
[...] mean it’s (necessarily) revolutionary, just that it’s a building block. Its open APIs allow it to be baked into all sorts of other services, and like other foundational technologies — [...]
July 7th, 2009 at 2:01 am (#)
[...] interactive social media are also means of coordination. A tool like Twitter with its open APIs and ‘half-baked’ development allows users to gather in different virtual networks and share APIs, content and scripts. Accessible [...]
July 24th, 2009 at 12:16 am (#)
[...] Could Iran Shut Down Twitter? Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, 15 June 2009 http://futureoftheinternet.org/could-iran-shut-down-twitter Extract: “The very fact that Twitter itself is half-baked, coupled with its designers’ willingness to let anyone build on top of it to finish baking it (I suppose it helps not to have any apparent business model that relies on drawing people to the actual Twitter Web site), is what makes it so powerful. There’s no easy signature for a tweet-in-progress if its shorn of a direct connection to the servers at twitter.com. And with so many ways to get those tweets there and back without the user needing twitter.com, it’s far more naturally censorship resistant than most other Web sites.” [...]
December 18th, 2009 at 2:17 am (#)
[...] sites like Twitter or Facebook? This is an interesting question raised in a website called “The Future of the Internet.” Here’s part of the article: “So it’d be trivial for the Iranian government to block [...]