- FOI Topics and Links of the Week
A roundup of happenings that bear on the issues in The Future of the Internet –
Canadian Android Carrier Forcing Firmware Update. A Canadian carrier wanted users to download a firmware upgrade that fixed a glitch prohibiting users from dialing 911, so it made the upgrade mandatory. Seems reasonable. But it bundled in an update that “prevent[ed] users from ever gaining root access to their phones.” Sneaky—one more way that contingent generativity really is contingent, even for savvy users.
Biggest Mobile Operators Join Forces On App Store Project. A few dozen mobile operators have come together to try to create a mobile developer’s dream: a set of standards for applications that would work across phones and mobile OSes, and a single app store (with a single approval process) in which to sell those apps. This could be a good thing if it worked—developers might have more say in big-picture application development, and single carriers or hardware manufacturers would have less ability to be a development chokepoint. (It would also be nice for consumers, generally making the smartphone world look more like the PC world.) I’d be more excited if efforts to create uniform mobile standards weren’t so difficult and historically so unsuccessful.
Demand for Android Phones Makes “Monstrous” 250% Jump. Another developer’s dream (perhaps), Android, is seeing significant growth. “Android has finally caught consumer interest,” according to a research firm. Also, Android users are almost as happy as iPhone users with their phone (72% to 77%).
Big Brother Is Here, Families Say. This story is so bizarre, I don’t know what to make of it. A school in Philadelphia gave out laptops without telling the students or their families that the cameras could be remotely activated. The idea was to use the cameras if the laptops were stolen, but one family claims a camera was used to spy on a student. If true (details are cloudy), that would (a) be mind-bogglingly dumb on the school’s part, and (b) reminiscent of this (ubiquitous cameras) and this (remote activation) in the book. Check out the Onion’s take here.
Microsoft takes the StopBadware Approach Further. Last week, MS obtained a restraining order to deactivate 277 domain names it had linked to the Waledec botnet. Severing the connection between drones and the mothership goes beyond tactics employed by the Google/StopBadware Project. It effectively makes the targeted websites invisible, instead of slapping a prominent warning label on them. Although MS attempted to cut off only addresses used exclusively for spam, it appears that the single U.S.-based target may be a legitimate site, if a hapless drone. While owners have the opportunity to reclaim their addresses, MS’s actions raise questions of proportionality and whether cooperation and information-sharing between prominent Internet denizens, such as MS and Google, if possible, would result in more efficient and just solutions. Their approach also highlights the tension between the need for secrecy to effectively attack the spam network and the notice usually required prior to legal action.
One step behind. Thesixtyone.com, a site that allows the public to listen to, rate, and buy largely indie music, is looking for a hacker that can break up the bot-powered voting rings seeking to game their democratic rating system. A laudable goal, but one spammers have already begun to circumvent by using real people instead of bots.
Passing through the cloud. Katherine Boehret recently reviewed Pogoplug, a device that makes files web-accessible without actually storing them in the cloud. While this type of solution doesn’t address data-portability concerns surrounding extraction of personal data in usable form – to allow seamless transition between social networking sites, for example – it does let the user to maintain more control over data instead of entrusting it entirely to the cloud. This control prevents third parties from holding data hostage and from losing, allowing government access to, selling, or mining personal information; but users can still access their files from almost anywhere.
Please think twice. A website launched last week illustrates the risk of publicly sharing information online. Pleaserobme.com aggregates Twitter posts that contain location-sharing information from Foursquare in a chronological list to show the potential for exploitation by Internet users with malicious intentions. While it’s probable that only a small set of burglars will take advantage of this information, the site is an example of a grassroots campaign to raise awareness of potential problems for users who don’t recognize how the information they freely give can be mined. Whether this awareness leads them to alter their behavior or simply “get over it” is up to the individual.
Facebook messaging glitch. A subset of Facebook users experienced firsthand the risk of entrusting control of personal messages to third parties. Last Wednesday, FB accidentally sent the private messages of a “small number” of users to strangers instead of the intended recipients. Unlike well-publicized security breaches of credit card companies and banks, the misdirected messages were largely personal in nature and contained little identifying information, so the risk of actual injury is low. But that may not be very comforting to those who had intimate details divulged to strangers. Some of the accounts indeed provoke a gut-level enquiry as to how privacy violation should be measured. On the flip-side, the occasional misrouting of a letter by the Post Office doesn’t give rise to much concern – and in that case the sender is usually clearly identifiable – so why should electronic mail be afforded greater scrutiny?
—By Jennifer Halbleib and Elisabeth Oppenheimer
- FOI Topics and Links of the Week
AppMakr Transforms App Store Landscape, Enables Anyone To Make Their Own iPhone App. Gagan Biyani raves about AppMakr, a product that allows anyone to make a simple RSS-based iPhone app for $199. The company will even submit the app to the App Store. (So, for instance, Biyani put together an app that aggregates all of MobileCrunch’s offerings.) The comments on the article are worth reading — one person says that “these types of startups definitely bridge the gap between idea people and actual phone developers,” and others consider how this will change the App Store.
Mike Petrucci’s AppMakr Saga. Mike Petrucci decided to use AppMakr to put together an app aggregating his Twitter, blog, etc, feeds…only to have Apple reject it because it wasn’t of general interest. That’s a big difference between iPhone apps and, say, web apps (blogger has definitely never rejected someone for being of limited interest). It’ll be interesting to see what line Apple decides to take on this, and how AppMakr and similar companies push them.
Apple orders Android mention scrubbed from App Store. Speaking of Apple…they order a developer to take “Finalist in Google Android’s Developer’s Challenge!” out of the description of its app. Just silly.
In Europe, Challenges for Google. Much attention has been paid to Google’s business in China, but Europe (particularly Italy) poses difficulties, too—different copyright laws, different privacies laws, and different free speech traditions.
Google Buzz Privacy Issues Have Real Life Implications. However, Google has more pressing privacy concerns to worry about this week, with the rollout and reaction to Google Buzz. Google generally does just fine releasing a half-baked product and cleaning up the details later, but that’s a terrible idea when the rollout includes auto-sharing previously private information. It’s disturbing that this concern made it past however many rounds of internal testing Google did.
—Elisabeth Oppenheimer
- JZ on the iPad
JZ has recently pondered the iPad in a column in the Financial Times. Some excerpts of his thoughts…
First, he begins with a quick history of the subtle but massive shift between the Apple II and the iPhone:
In 1977, a 21-year-old Steve Jobs unveiled something the world had never seen before: a ready-to-program personal computer. After powering the machine up, proud Apple II owners were confronted with a cryptic blinking cursor, awaiting instructions.
The Apple II was a clean slate, a device built – boldly – with no specific tasks in mind. Yet, despite the cursor, you did not have to know how to write programs. Instead, with a few keystrokes you could run software acquired from anyone, anywhere. The Apple II was generative. After the launch, Apple had no clue what would happen next, which meant that what happened was not limited by Mr Jobs’ hunches. Within two years, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston had released VisiCalc , the first digital spreadsheet, which ran on the Apple II. Suddenly businesses around the world craved machines previously marketed only to hobbyists. Apple IIs flew off the shelves. The company had to conduct research to figure out why.
Thirty years later Apple gave us the iPhone. It was easy to use, elegant and cool – and had lots of applications right out of the box. But the company quietly dropped a fundamental feature, one signalled by the dropping of “Computer” from Apple Computer’s name: the iPhone could not be programmed by outsiders. “We define everything that is on the phone,” said Mr Jobs. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work any more.”
The openness on which Apple had built its original empire had been completely reversed – but the spirit was still there among users. Hackers vied to “jailbreak” the iPhone, running new apps on it despite Apple’s desire to keep it closed. Apple threatened to disable any phone that had been jailbroken, but then appeared to relent: a year after the iPhone’s introduction, it launched the App Store. … But the App Store has a catch: app developers and their software must be approved by Apple. If Apple does not like the app, for any reason, it is gone.”
This blog has covered many of the apps that Apple has axed: the countdown to Bush’s departure, the app with information about health care, BabyShaker, religious spoofs, and programs to redirect calls, Google Voice, and I am Rich, among many others.
But the lingering question is, so what? Is the world really worse off because we can’t pay $999 for an app that does nothing (I Am Rich), especially given that Apple’s screening system does get rid of many apps with security problems? Is this like First Amendment absolutism — a preference for open systems that doesn’t take into account actual costs and benefits?
In response, JZ tries to imagine what we would have lost had the PC been as appliancized as the iPhone:
To be sure, many rejected apps will not be missed. (Only eight spendthrifts bought I Am Rich before it disappeared.) And users can be protected from harmful software from suspect sources. But consider: the world wide web started as, and remains, an app. Its first versions were written by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist who was unaffiliated with any software or hardware vendor. How worthy of approval would Wikipedia have seemed when it boasted only seven articles — dubiously hoping that the public would magically provide the rest? How threatened might today’s content publishers feel by peer-to-peer apps that let iPhone users trade data from one phone to another? We know the answer to that: enough that they have persuaded Apple to exclude all such apps from the App Store.
The web, Wikipedia, p2p — that’s a lot to lose. And at the same time we lose those benefits of generativity, as JZ points out, we give companies (and through them, governments) unprecedented censorship power. But the iPod, Pad, and Phone aren’t going anywhere. JZ concludes:
Hope lies in more balanced combinations of open and closed systems, such as that embodied by the traditional Apple Mac – or phones based on the Android operating system from the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of hardware, software and telecoms companies. Android Market is the approved counterpart to Apple’s App Store but, in this case, users are also free to go off-roading, installing any code they like. Android is a canary in the digital coal mine: will its more open model survive should people load suspect apps and find they cannot make calls any more?
Mr Jobs ushered in the personal computer era and now he is trying to usher it out. We should focus on preserving our freedoms, even as the devices we acquire become more attractive and easier to use.
—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer
- 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
January 12th, 2010 at 8:14 pm (#)
Well, I’m not sure you really grasp the essential perspective on this one: what matters is public opinion in China, not in Stanford—and that opinion can be violently populist and nationalist even. For years, I couldn’t find any non-racist explanation on why Google’s market share was so low in China; now, I can’t find any information about what Chinese people thing about Google’s reaction… I mean: don’t call the Chinese government a dictatorship if you care less for the people’s opinion then they do.
January 12th, 2010 at 9:22 pm (#)
If China does go ahead and block google.com, what does it mean for:
1) Chinese businesses that use Google Apps (docs, email etc)
2) Non-China based businesses that operate in China and use Google Apps?
I guess they can route the traffic over VPN, and call it Business Contingency i.e. end-to-end business traffic. But what will China’s position be on such sort of re-routing?
January 13th, 2010 at 4:23 am (#)
[...] Jonathan Zittrain argues But [Google] drawing [the] 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. [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 4:55 am (#)
[...] * Jonathan Zittrain [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 9:18 am (#)
“They’re unexplored not because they’re infeasible, but because most sites would rather not provoke a government that filters.”
But remember the difference between values and technology: If it works for citizens in China seeking human rights, it works for teenagers in America seeking porn.
January 13th, 2010 at 9:36 am (#)
[...] Google takes on China (tags: google censorship internet) [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 9:37 am (#)
[...] Google takes on China (tags: google censorship internet) [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 9:45 am (#)
[...] up to bat against China for the case of freedom of information. I think that Jonathan Zittrain has a great take on the situation: My hope, and expectation, is that Google engineers who might have been a bit halfhearted about [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 1:01 pm (#)
[...] Google takes on China futureoftheinternet.org: Google gjør det riktige når de dropper sensur i Kina, skriver Jonathan Zittrain. (tags: kina internett sensur google ytringsfrihet zittrain) [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 2:45 pm (#)
[...] online. Evgeny thinks Google is bluffing, or simply retreating from an unsuccesful market position. Jonathan Zittrain sees this as a masterstroke, aligning Google’s business with its values, and shares my hope that Google will dedicate [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 3:52 pm (#)
[...] Zittrain anticipates that if Google pulls down its China-based operations, it may be well positioned to develop [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 5:45 pm (#)
[...] in their analysis by exploring multiple scenarios that influenced Google’s decision. And on still others suggest the move will “realign Google’s business with its ethos”. This is one of those [...]
January 13th, 2010 at 7:06 pm (#)
I’m not convinced Google has “nothing more to lose” by promoting anti-circumvention. I forget the name of the Chinese dissident who was attacked at his home in the USA by unknown assailants – it’s an outlier, but it demonstrates the risk that Google would put its thousands of employees in if they declare war on the GFW. And as Peter Fleischer’s troubles in Italy demonstrate, this is a company that doesn’t want employees to be arrested on vacation at the real Great Wall.
But who knows, maybe they can support in more oblique ways?
January 14th, 2010 at 8:04 am (#)
[...] Jonathan Zittrain hofft auf mehr Unterstützung von Google bei der Umgehung von Zensur: Google takes on China. [...]
January 14th, 2010 at 2:45 pm (#)
[...] Jonathan Zittrain, Future of the Internet [...]
January 15th, 2010 at 4:33 pm (#)
One interesting item to think about is Google’s stock price after the announcement. When companies disclose a cyberattack against them, there is often an ensuing run on their publicly traded stock. Not the case here. Google’s rose through most of Wednesday and Thursday, but fell today. A delayed reaction to the China announcement? Perhaps.
January 15th, 2010 at 8:40 pm (#)
[...] a post on The Future of the Internet, Jonathan Zittrain says the lion’s share of the post is devoted to describing a series of [...]
January 16th, 2010 at 2:03 pm (#)
When I was in China, most of the people I knew used baidu.com (the search engine of choice) simply because it gave the best Chinese language search results. Google.cn is not as popular in China for the same reason Yahoo.com is not as popular in the US — it’s not the best search option.
(Also, baidu.com allows a Napster-like download of popular music, but only if your IP address is coming from China — an ironic twist to internet filtering.)
Whether Google decides to pursue the unfiltered search results option for China most likely won’t affect the average internet user in China because he or she simply won’t care.
In response to Saqib Ali, Google and its applications are extremely unstable in China. Individuals and businesses use them with the acknowledgment that they may experience arbitrary downtime.
January 16th, 2010 at 2:19 pm (#)
[...] Jonathan Zittrain: [...]
January 17th, 2010 at 5:44 pm (#)
[...] on still others suggest the move will “realign Google’s business with its ethos“. This is one of those moments where I am less concerned about motivations and more [...]
January 17th, 2010 at 10:45 pm (#)
Your “hope and expectation” seems surprisingly infantile, for someone of your purported pedigree.
Let’s imagine that Google.com does engage in Internet guerilla warfare, finding a way to make Google services available in China.
What then? How many multinational advertisers will want their brands and ads involved in this guerilla warfare? If Google escalates this conflict, how long until China returns fire by punishing other media creators (like Hollywood distributors) and/or advertisers that partner with Google? You play with fire, you take steps to *actively* violate Chinese law… you will get burned.
The best result Google can possibly hope for at this point, is that China allows it to take its ball and go home. It seems Google’s master plan for the next 10-20 years would be: survive as the big fish in the small pond that is the non-Chinese Internet.
January 17th, 2010 at 11:45 pm (#)
[...] Google.cn – with some of the clearest found in posts by Ethan Zuckerman, Evgeny Morozov, and Jonathan Zittrain, among others. The debate and points of interpretation mostly deal with Google’s potential [...]
January 18th, 2010 at 1:40 am (#)
The Obama Administration, following the Bush Administration (and Administrations all the way back to Nixon), is in the curious position of alliance with China. China is both enjoying what it cherry picks from the American Revolution as this revolution sweeps the globe, and at war with the other parts it picks from the same American Revolution. Obama and his administration are bewildered, but that is only because of their unswerving devotion to status quo radical corruption as politics rather than having any devotion to the American Revolution. Google is devoted to the American Revolution. History on on Google’s side, against China’s and against the US Government’s. Surely we live in the most interesting of times.
January 18th, 2010 at 6:02 am (#)
[...] “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,” Mr. Zittrain wrote on his blog, The Future of the Internet and how to Stop It. [...]
January 18th, 2010 at 8:01 am (#)
“Whether Google decides to pursue the unfiltered search results option for China most likely won’t affect the average internet user in China because he or she simply won’t care.”
pls do not make The decision for Chinese people unless you REALLY know what they CARE!!
January 18th, 2010 at 10:43 am (#)
The ethics of Google self-serving gamble and the false expectations that it has generated are a confusing sign of where things are heading with the internet. The internet is evolving as realistically as possible. First, it was a “free-for-all” playing field where every participant did what he wanted. Then, came business which realized that the only commodity really produced using the web was the selling, trading, and buying of personal information disguised as a service and up to now that is their only business model on the internet. Now, we have governments trying to establish control of how society uses the information that is on the web as a mechanism of governing.
It would be naive to think that only France and China are the only governments trying to manipulate the medium as a mechanism of governing without thinking that our government here in the U.S. also uses the internet to keep tab on what it considers threats to the nation. China, though has taken it to a different level. They realize that in this day and age control of native web servers and filtering of external ones means control of how their people can think and view the world. They also realize the enourmous potential of the internet as weapon of both economic, and political war.
It is the beginning of a new internet age which will engender a battle between those seeking total openness and those seeking total control. There will be no in-between
compromises. That is why Google stands a good chance of being kicked out of China. American companies will continue to sell their souls to their Chinese business host as long as China throws them a bone from their markets. That is the real ethics of American business.
When it comes to personal involvement with the internet, the future will demand a more careful and knowledgeable participation. The mass of reckless participants will be manipulated in one form or another by both business and government. So, eventually it is going to be up to us as individuals to watch and care for our freedom of expression and interchange of ideas within this medium. There is no going back to the good old internet days, and there is no reason to expect that business and government will keep the medium a free for all medium.
January 18th, 2010 at 11:22 am (#)
Google employees have suffered in China, and if it weren’t China, that sort of treatment would bring down the wrath of Hillary. Markets tend to get the treatment their potential for growth allows. The big question, as I see it, is why is Google seemingly taking on China, and the U.S. seems to be out of focus? This is more about “informationization” which you can read about at: http://tek-tips.nethawk.net/blog/the-informationization-age
January 18th, 2010 at 3:06 pm (#)
Call on China to be firm to oppose Google hegemony – it has violated Chinese sovereignty with US government backing. The developing nations look to China to oppose US hegemony of all kinds.
January 18th, 2010 at 4:01 pm (#)
Google and China are bringing up a 21st century battle of democracy and freedom verse Communism and restricted personal freedom. When we started using cloud computing systems we saw the HUGE area of security problems being created in cross country internet usage. Thrown in that the entire world is “outsourcing” computer stuff to Southeast Asian countries, and you have a plan for these socio-technology issues going to ahead. We study search demand/supply trends from around the world to find profitable niches and products. A niche, or hot predictions, is not just a demand side issue, but a supply/demand curve. If you predict IPHONE apps will take off, and there are already 100,000 aps, then you aren’t going to hit that one. If you see that demand for cell phone radiation shields is going nuts and there are only two suppliers, then you can be pretty sure that it will be a good year for those 2 supplies. The software at http://www.TheInternetTimeMachine.com studies both the demand (search volume) and supply (think “results” in Google). The Google Phone is generating much more buzz right now then say the Apple Tablet.
Cheers,
Curt
Here is a video on what I mean.. http://bit.ly/SupplyDemandCurves
January 20th, 2010 at 8:35 am (#)
[...] Google takes on China :: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. VN:F [1.8.0_1031]please wait…Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)VN:F [1.8.0_1031]Rating: 0 [...]
January 20th, 2010 at 8:47 am (#)
[...] Jonathan Zittrain [...]
January 21st, 2010 at 8:25 am (#)
[...] Jonathan Zittrain [...]
January 23rd, 2010 at 1:29 pm (#)
[...] Google takes on China [...]