“Tags are keywords that you type into a pastel box, and keywords are tags that you type into a green-screen application”
Articles by Tim Lee 
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Over at Ars, I beg to differ with Eric Alterman’s concerns that Web-based journalism will be somehow inferior to the 20th-century variety:
Looking at the broader media world, it’s true that the majority of high-quality journalism still happens in traditional mainstream media outlets. It would surprising if this were not the case, since they still control a majority of eyeballs and advertising dollars. But the idea that the web is, or is likely to become, a journalistic wasteland doesn’t make a lot of sense. As the reader attention—and with it, advertising dollars—shift to the web, web-based publications (along with those mainstream publications that successfully navigate the transition to the web) will have the resources to recruit the best journalists to work for them. High-quality reporting draws eyeballs, and eyeballs generate advertising revenue, so talented writers will continue to be in demand regardless of the medium.
One of the big challenges that mainstream media outlets will face is that their size and bureaucracy makes it difficult for them to experiment with new news gathering techniques. As we’ve seen here at Ars, one of the big advantages of web-based publishing is that it’s possible to draw on contributions from a broader range of professional writers, bloggers, and amateurs with subject matter expertise. Large, monolithic news organizations, which rely on full-time employees for the bulk of their writing, may have difficulty exploiting this model. If a natural disaster occurs, for example, a news organization that flies a professional reporter to the scene of the tragedy will likely get scooped by a news organization that has an existing network of freelancers in the area who can cover the story without leaving their home towns. What those writers lose in writing skills they are likely to make up in timeliness and depth of local knowledge.
One other criticism Alterman makes that seems off base to me is that at one point he faults the web-based publications like the Huffington Post for failing to be “full service” media outlets–lacking a sports section, say, or book reviews. But this is actually a strength, not a weakness, of the web model. I’m not at all interested in the sports section of my local paper, and if I took the paper that section would have been nothing but landfill. More to the point, there’s no particular reason to think the same hierarchical organization that brings you your technology or political news is also the best qualified to deliver you book reviews or sports news.
Anyone who’s upset that the Huffington Post doesn’t have a sports section should learn to use an RSS reader and subscribe to any of the hundreds of excellent
sports blogs and news sites out on the web, just as anyone who wants more technology news than the Huffington Post has to offer can subscribe to Ars or the Technology Liberation Front. The “one stop shopping” model of 20th-century media was a reflection of the limitations of 20th-century communications technologies. It wasn’t, in and of itself, anything to celebrate or emulate.
I originally found the link to the New Yorker via Yglesias, who made some additional good points on the subject, especially that the 20th century American model of “objectivity,” in which reporters pretend not to have opinions about the subjects they’re covering, is far from universal and not necessarily superior to the more adversarial model that prevailed in the 19th century and still prevails in parts of Europe.
A number of readers let us know about the Chaos Computer Club’s latest caper: they published the fingerprint of German Secretary of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble (link is to a Google translation of the German original). The club has been active in opposition to Germany’s increasing push to use biometrics in, for example, e-passports. Someone friendly to the club’s aims captured Schäuble’s fingerprint from a glass he drank from at a panel discussion. The club published 4,000 copies of their magazine Die Datenschleuder including a plastic foil reproducing the minister’s fingerprint — ready to glue to someone else’s finger to provide a false biometric reading. The CCC has a page on their site detailing how to make such a fake fingerprint. The article says a ministry spokesman alluded to possible legal action against the club.
Any TLF readers going to have the opportunity to go drinking with Sec. Chertoff?
Luis Villa has an interesting write-up of his week at the Microsoft Tech Summit. The explicit goal of the summit, apparently, was to bring together the two major worldviews in the software development world: the “cathedral” model, represented by Microsoft’s own top-down software development process, and the “bazaar” model of the typical open source/web 2.0 project. I’m not sure what Microsoft was hoping to get out of this, but I can think of a couple of likely answers: to soften up the antagonism toward Microsoft in some corners of the open source world, and to keep their own people on their toes by learning more about the types of criticisms they’re likely to encounter on the other side of the fence.
This is something that Microsoft, to its credit, has put an impressive amount of effort into. Way back when I was in college, almost a decade ago now, Microsoft hired a friend of mine to be Microsoft’s official campus evangelist. Basically he got paid $15/hour to hold meetings where he’d tout (and in some cases give away) Microsoft products. They were totally up front about it, and I think it was pretty effective. Lots of us still disliked Microsoft’s products for various reasons, but it definitely took the edge off of anti-Microsoft attitudes. More recently, Microsoft hired prominent blogger Robert Scoble (who has since left to help evangelize Microsoft’s products. This sort of thing has helped to counteract the negative publicity the company has gotten from its more open-source-hostile actions.
I also think it’s interesting to reflect on the fact that the software industry is virtually unique in even having these kinds of distinct, well-defined ideological camps. Maybe I just don’t know other industries well enough, but I can’t think of any other examples. The philosophical distinctions here are totally orthogonal to conventional ideological categories. Yet they attract similar levels of fervor from their adherents as do liberalism, conservatism, or libertarianism. Geeks like to half-jokingly refer to these kinds of disagreements as religious difference, and they really are only half joking. Questions about software licenses and project organization do, in fact, inspire exactly the same kind of passion as debates over theology.
I found this aside from Dean Baker interesting:
I have had a policy of never commenting on news stories that mention me or CEPR to avoid the obvious problem of a conflict of interest on this blog. I complain to reporters directly if I think they misrepresented my comments.
Can somebody explain what the conflict of interest would be? I’m sure I don’t get anywhere near as much press as Baker does, but it’s never occurred to me that I shouldn’t link to and comment on the press I do get. Have I been committing some kind of policy analyst faux pas all this time?
A great post by Tom Lee. In a preceding post, he had pointed out (without getting into details) how easy it was to extract unencrypted MP3s from a couple of neat but legally-questionable music-sharing websites. He got some angry comments from folks who accused him of being a kill joy. He responds:
I don’t consider the current state of music sharing sites anything more than a temporary step in the music industry’s inevitable evolution. The point I want to make by all this is that the present state of affairs does not constitute a complete solution; we’re not done yet.
I don’t want to discount the well-made interface of Muxtape or the excellent aggregation and social features of the Hype Machine. They are both impressive sites and their creators deserve all the recognition they’ve received and more. But although these things add value, the essential underlying reason for these sites’ popularity is that they give music away for free.
I’ve finally had a chance to flip through the FISA amendments the House passed a couple of weeks ago. The most striking thing about the bill is how long it is. At 120 pages, it’s twice as long as the RESTORE Act the House passed last fall. And frankly, I’m not sure it’s an improvement, although I don’t have the time or patience right now to read the whole thing in detail. What the Dems appear to have done (and I only skimmed it, so I’m probably missing some of the nuances) is to give some ground on the idea that the Bush administration “authorizations” can be used in place of traditional warrants for foreign-to-domestic communications, but then trying to avoid funny business by imposing an extremely robust system of judicial review of these “authorizations.” That’s certainly better than the Senate bill, which required courts to rubber-stamp the “authorizations.” Certainly, if we’re going to loosen the requirement that eavesdropping on individual Americans doesn’t require a warrant, we should do our best to protect our privacy in other ways. But the result is a bill that’s far more complex than it would have been if Congress had left the existing FISA framework in place and focused on clarifying those edge cases that technological changes have rendered obsolete.
Ultimately, however, none of this may matter very much. The administration has long since made it clear that they’re not interested in good-faith negotiations on this subject, and that they’d veto any legislation that preserves the principle of judicial review. Nor has the Senate shown any particular concern with preserving civil liberties. So in practice, the only FISA legislation that’s likely to pass while George W. Bush is in office would have been bad FISA legislation.
So what might matter the most about the latest House surveillance bill is that the House had the backbone to—again—pass legislation they knew the White House would veto. It’s now looking increasingly likely that neither side will budge, and that Congress won’t produce FISA legislation at all this year. That’s probably the best outcome we realistically could have hoped for. There’s a good chance that our new president will be more respectful of civil liberties than our current one. And hopefully at that point Congress and the new president will be able to craft surveillance legislation that makes the minor changes to the FISA regime that are necessary without gutting Americans’ privacy in the process.
Over at Ars Technica, I take an in-depth look at the Patent Reform Act now being debated in the Senate and conclude that it won’t come close to fixing the damage patents do to the IT industry:
To help us understand the implications of the Patent Reform Act, Ars talked to James Bessen, co-author of a recent book on the patent system. Bessen told Ars that the most important changes currently under consideration on the Hill are the post-grant review process, the apportionment of damages, and willful infringement. But he argued that none of these changes will address the serious flaws that plague the patent system. Rather, their most important effect will be the signal it sends that the IT industry is finally taking patent issues seriously and organizing to tackle the problem in Congress. He predicted that Congress will need to revisit the issue in the coming years as patent problems continue to mount.
Bessen had three major suggestions to offer to Congress once it gets serious about fundamental reform. First, there needs to be much stronger limits on patenting of abstract ideas, including software and business methods. Bessen argued that narrowly construing patent scopes will significantly improve the situation by preventing patent holders from using a single, broad patent to harass entire sectors of the technology industry.
Second, Bessen said that dramatically increasing maintenance fees would give patent holders a strong incentive to let unimportant patents lapse. That would reduce the total number of patents in effect and make it easier for potential innovators to review the remaining patents for possible infringement.
Finally, Bessen told Ars that the law needs to have protections for inadvertent infringers. Under current law, in most cases there are no legal protections available to a firm that independently develops a technology that is covered by an existing patent. An independent invention defense to patent infringement would be the strongest possible reform in this direction. A less ambitious approach would be to reduce damages in cases where independent invention can be demonstrated.
Needless to say, none of these more serious reforms have any serious chance of passage in Congress. In the short term, our best hope for reform is probably that the Supreme Court will continue taking cases and undoing some of the damage the Federal Circuit has done over the last couple of decades.
Wow:
Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.
I would have guessed something like this—I haven’t read a paper newspaper regularly since high school—but I didn’t realize the statistics were that stark. If hardly anyone under 35 reads a newspaper today, that suggests that within 20 years the readership of newspapers will be almost entirely retirees. And not too long after that, it will likely cease to be profitable to print and distribute newspapers at all. The New Yorker quotes one author who predicts the last newspaper will be printed in the 2040s. Newspapers will be to our grandchildren what punch cards are to us.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.