Alice Marwick, assistant professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, discusses her newly-released book, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Marwick reflects on her interviews with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, technology journalists, and venture capitalists to show how social media affects social dynamics and digital culture. Marwick answers questions such as: Does “status conscious” take on a new meaning in the age of social media? Is the public using social media the way the platforms’ creators intended? How do you quantify the value of online social interactions? Are social media users becoming more self-censoring or more transparent about what they share? What’s the difference between self-branding and becoming a micro-celebrity? She also shares her advice for how to make Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and other platforms more beneficial for you.

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Related Links

• Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, Marwick
• Engineered Performances Alice E. Marwick’s ‘Status Update’, The New York Times
• Biography, Marwick

With renewed interest in the failings of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the role of prosecutorial discretion in its application in light of the tragic outcome in the Aaron Swartz case, I went back to what I wrote about the law in 2009.

Back then, the victim of both the poorly-drafted amendments to CFAA that expanded its scope from government to private computer networks and the politically-motivated zeal of federal prosecutors reaching for something—anything—with which to punish otherwise legal but disfavored behavior was trained on Lori Drew, a far less sympathetic defendant.

But the dangers lurking in the CFAA were just as visible in 2009 as they are today.  Those who have recently picked up the banner calling for reform of the law might ask themselves where they were back then, and why the ultimately unsuccessful Drew prosecution didn’t raise their hackles at the time.

The law was just as bad in 2009, and just as dangerously twisted by the government.  Indeed, the Drew case, as I wrote at the time, gave all the notice anyone needed of what was to come later.

Here’s the section of The Laws of Disruption from 2009 discussing CFAA:

What did Lori Drew do?

The late-forties suburban St. Louis mother was apparently unhappy about the “mean” behavior of Megan Meier, a thirteen-year-old former friend of Drew’s daughter Sarah. The Drews, along with Ashley Grills, the eighteen-year-old employee of Lori Drew’s home business, hatched a plan. They created a fake MySpace profile for a bare-chested sixteen-year-old boy named “Josh,” who would befriend Megan and encourage her to gossip about other girls. Then they would take printouts to Megan’s mother to show her what the girl was up to.

Not only was the idea stupid, it wasn’t even original—Sarah and Megan, back when they were friends, had done the same thing, creating a profile for a boy who didn’t exist as a way to talk to other boys. This time, however, the plan went awry. Megan became deeply infatuated with Josh. She pressed for his phone number. She wanted to meet him in person. The women behind his account looked for a way out.

According to Grills, “We decided to be mean to her so she would leave him alone . . . and we could get rid of the page.” After deliberating on the easiest way to end an ill-conceived hoax that was going very wrong, Grills sent an instant message to Meier: “The world would be a better place without you.”

The consequences were tragic. Meier, who was being treated for depression, took the suggestion all too literally. After an argument with her parents, who had closely monitored the relationship with Josh from the beginning, Meier went to her room and hanged herself.

Media accounts of the teen’s suicide and the subsequent revelation of who was behind “Josh” created a froth of outrage and hand-wringing. Commentators invented and then proclaimed an epidemic of “cyberbullying.”

When it became clear that the mother of one of Meier’s former friends was involved, Drew herself was subjected to death threats and vandalism. A fake MySpace page for her husband was created. On cable news and the blogosphere, Drew was instantly convicted and sentenced to hell. (“Call me vindictive,” a typical blog entry read, “but i hope that someone kills the woman who is responsible.”)

In the midst of the media storm, state attorneys in Missouri announced there would be no prosecution of Drew for the simple reason that no criminal law had been broken. Federal prosecutors weren’t so sure. They found a 1986 law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, that set stiff penalties for breaking into and damaging computers.

Drew was charged under the novel theory that since the MySpace terms of service agreement prohibits posting false information in one’s profile, the creation of Josh violated Drew’s contract. Hence, she “accessed” MySpace computers without “authorization.” The creation of Josh, in other words, was a kind of hacking. The victim was not Meier (who with her parents’ permission had also violated the TOS, which requires users to be at least fourteen years old). The victim was MySpace.

Although the jury ultimately refused to convict Drew on the felony charge, they did convict her of the lesser crime of unauthorized access. Valentina Kunasz, the jury’s foreperson, made no apologies for the conviction. “It was so very childish; so very pathetic,” she told reporters after the trial. “She could have done quite a few things to stop it, and she chose not to. And I think she got kind of a rise out of doing this to another person and that bothers me, it really irks me.” Drew faces up to three years in prison and $300,000 in fines.

Legal scholars were generally in agreement that the prosecution was deeply flawed and will very likely be set aside or reversed on appeal. (N.B.  Later, it was.) First, there were gaping holes in the government’s case. For one thing, it was Grills, and not Drew, who set up the Josh account and therefore agreed to the TOS (Grills, testifying for the prosecution in exchange for immunity, admitted she never read the TOS). Drew herself was only occasionally involved in the hoax.

By a weird twist of irony, one of the few times she communicated with Meier it turned out she was talking to Meier’s mother, who told Josh he ought to be looking for friends his own age. The fateful message was sent by Grills without Drew’s knowledge, and wasn’t even sent through MySpace.

As a matter of public policy, the prosecution is even more disturbing. Even assuming Drew was bound by the TOS, these contracts are notoriously long and intentionally unreadable. Most of us, even lawyers, don’t read them.

Yet following the logic of the Drew prosecution, anyone who misrepresents some of their personal details on an online dating service has committed a federal crime. Anyone who gives a nonworking telephone number when signing up for a Web site has committed a federal crime.

Indeed, after the verdict, one social network researcher was pained to admit, “We’ve been telling our kids to lie about ID information for a long time now.”

The computer fraud law began as a protection against hackers targeting government computers. The law has never before been used in connection with the violation, willful or otherwise, of private terms of service. There’s no reason to believe Congress intended to criminalize cyberbullying in 1986 or any other time.

Supporters of the conviction argue that the real problem here was a hole in the law—the lack of a statute outlawing whatever it was Lori Drew had done.  But the decision of lawmakers not to criminalize a behavior is no reason to correct the problem in a way that undermines the very idea of law. People are often cruel to each other. Other children, adults, and even parents can and do humiliate children in the real world. No laws, in all but extreme cases, are being broken.

It’s difficult to see how this case differs in any respect other than the use of a computer and the tragic outcome.

If the conviction stands, it effectively gives every federal prosecutor a blank check to charge anyone they want with criminal behavior, subject only to their discretion of whether and when to use that power.

Some commentators, pleased with the result if not the process, argued that there was no cause for alarm. Prosecutors, they said, will only use this power in extreme cases.

The Drew prosecution suggests precisely the opposite. For elected prosecutors, the real temptation is to exercise discretion not when the law would otherwise let a heinous crime slip through the cracks but when passions are high and the facts (at least the version presented by the media) are the most lurid—when, in other words, an angry mob demands it.

Here’s the notice I’ve been getting the last few days when, logged into Facebook from a computer, I try to post a comment or update my status.

Clever observers will note that the recommendation to log in from a computer is misplaced, as I get it when I’m logged in from a computer. Facebook gives me no instructions when I log in (or when I log out and log in again), though it did once ask me to change my password, which I did.

Most likely, Facebook’s algorithms believe I’ve violated some part of the Terms of Service, such as by repetitive posting or other spammy behavior. My exclusion from the site began contemporaneous with my attempt to post a single comment that failed for reasons I couldn’t discern in several tries.

Undoubtedly, my friends at Facebook will leap to my aid and clear this up for me in short order, feeling slightly stung that I “went public” with the problem rather than going to them. But I wanted to experience this as an ordinary consumer, not as a member of the digerati with insider access to people at important companies. In the past, I’ve used insider access with services like PayPal and (the now defunct) Bitcoin7 to get help that an ordinary user couldn’t have gotten. Bully for me that I can do that, but my experience is atypical and no basis for observing how the world works.

Some observations:

I’ve been reading a lot about data mining lately, and I have a lifelong love of mental error (not only as a practitioner!). My best guess is that the folks at Facebook have come up with an algorithmic way to recognize and exclude bad behavior (which they see in droves and endless variety). Keenly focused on excluding baddies, they’ve kind-of forgotten to double-check about making sure not to exclude good people. The sources of error here are many. It could be that my behavior as a user of the site produced a false positive for spamming or similar behavior. It could be that a computer of mine has a virus that is seeking to abuse my access to Facebook (though I do practice good computer hygiene). Other things might be happening that I don’t know about.

But Facebook’s folk haven’t successfully produced a way for me to signal to them, “I am here. I’m a human, and I’m a user of your site whose behavior is ordinary and within your terms.”

Thus, I can log in to Facebook, I can see what my friends are doing, and I can see what they are posting and saying about me. I just can’t post any comments or update my own status. It’s kind of like being locked out of your house and watching your friends have a good time inside, unable to bang on the doors or windows loud enough to get anyone’s attention.

[While I think of it, would someone please post a link to this blog post on my wall? Thanks.]

It’s all a little strange, but this is exactly what one can expect from a company with a customer base as large as Facebook’s, enjoying continuing growth and working to add new features: imperfection.

Which brings me to my second observation: I really don’t think social networks ought to scale like we’re trying to make them scale. Having come to rely on one a little too much, I’m now being forced to reconsider whether I want to rely on one—and I don’t. Giving the bulk of my interaction to any one platform is a risk to my ability to interact. Here, it’s mistake, but any number of risks could manifest themselves, with individuals or society as a whole, if we lean too heavily on any one way of interacting.

As a basic privacy protection, for example, don’t put everything you do in one place. Think of your Internet access and your social networks (and lots of other things) the way you would your stock portfolio. You’re a fool of you don’t diversify.

So it sure is great we have markets and competition!

I’m a Twitter user, of course. You can get an odd blend of public policy comment and quirky personal observations there at @Jim_Harper. I also have Twitter account(s) you don’t get to know about.

And I’ll be ramping up my use of Google+, which I did not really want to do—but, yes, I should. And I’ll use it for stuff that’s more work oriented. Because I’m a stickler for the meanings of words, Facebook will be for actual friends. (Meeting once is not a friendship, friends. Nor is me referring to you as part of the collective “friends” in that last sentence.)

I’ll also do more on Diaspora, which is still nascent, but I think a very important network because nobody owns it. Kinda like the meatspace social network, it has no central controller, and that’s a very important protection for a lot of our human and political interests—even if Diaspora is not yet hitting on all cylinders.

So there you have it! Companies are imperfect, and if you’re part of the infinitesimal fraction of their customers who they fail to serve, you do get some hassles and annoyances. This counsels diversification—not only in social networks, but in all things under innovation—as a security against hassle and worse.

And finally: Ain’t it cool we got options!

The National Transportation Safety Board recommended yesterday that states ban all non-emergency use of portable electronic devices while driving, except for devices that assist the driver in driving (such as GPS). The recommendation followed the NTSB’s investigation of a tragic accident in Missouri triggered by a driver who was texting.

Personally I don’t see how someone can pay attention to the road while texting. (I’m having a hard enough time paying attention to a conference presentation while I’m typing this!) But the National Transportation Safety Board’s recommendation is a classic example of regulatory overreach based on anecdote.  The NTSB wants to use one tired driver’s indefensible and extreme texting (which led to horrific results) as an excuse to ban all use of portable electronic devices while driving – including hands-free phone conversations.  Before states act on this recommendation, they should carefully examine systematic evidence – not just anecdotes — to determine whether different uses of handheld devices pose different risks. They should also consider whether bans on some uses would expose drivers to risks greater than the risk the ban would prevent.

Daily news service TechLawJournal (subscription) reports that the U.S. District Court (DC) has granted summary judgment to the National Security Agency in EPIC v. NSA, a federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case regarding the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s request for records regarding Google’s relationship with the NSA.

EPIC requested a wide array of records regarding interactions between Google and the NSA dealing with information security. Reports TLJ:

The NSA responded that it refused to confirm or deny whether it had a relationship with Google, citing Exemption 3 of FOIA (regarding records “specifically exempted from disclosure by statute”) and Section 6 of the National Security Agency Act of 1959 (which prohibits disclose of information about the NSA).

The FOIA merits of EPIC’s suit are one thing. It’s another for Google to have an intimate relationship with a government agency this secretive.

This would be a good time to not be evil. Google should either sever ties with the NSA or be as transparent (or more) than federal law would require the NSA to be in the absence of any special protection against disclosure.

My expectations of the Electronic Frontier Foundation are high. It’s an organization that does a tremendous amount of good, advocating for rights to freely use new technologies. Alas, a blog post about how good EFF is would be as interesting as a newspaper story about the lack of house fires in Springfield. So I’ll share how I feel EFF has gone wobbly on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin, the very interesting distributed digital currency that is inflation-, surveillance-, and confiscation-resistant, has been getting a lot of attention. EFF announced yesterday, though, that it would reverse course and stop accepting donations denominated in Bitcoin.

Its justifications, laid out in a blessedly brief and well-organized blog post, were three:

1. We don’t fully understand the complex legal issues involved with creating a new currency system. Bitcoin raises untested legal concerns related to securities law, the Stamp Payments Act, tax evasion, consumer protection and money laundering, among others. And that’s just in the U.S. While EFF is often the defender of people ensnared in legal issues arising from new technologies, we try very hard to keep EFF from becoming the actual subject of those fights or issues. Since there is no caselaw on this topic, and the legal implications are still very unclear, we worry that our acceptance of Bitcoins may move us into the possible subject role.

My insta-reaction was to joke: “Related: ACLU to stop bringing ‘right to petition’ cases.” That’s a little ambiguous, so: Imagine that the government took a position in litigation that suing the government was not protected by the First Amendment, but was in fact actionable. Under EFF’s logic—avoid becoming the subject of a rights fight—the ACLU would not fight the government on that issue. Luckily, the ACLU would fight the government on that issue—as fiercely or more fiercely than any other!

There are some ambiguities. Bitcoin is legally novel. But every new technology is legally novel. EFF didn’t shy away from publishing commentary online while publisher liability was legally ambiguous.

Accepting a Bitcoin donation is like accepting a donation in kind, in contract rights, or in cat food. If it’s worth taking, you go figure out how to accept the donation and square it with existing law. If it’s clearly illegal, you don’t accept the contribution. (EFF would have said so if they felt it was.) If it’s in the middle, a defender of rights to use technology should be inclined toward accepting Bitcoin and clarifying the law, not away from accepting Bitcoin in deference to legal ambiguity and free-ranging government power.

Bitcoin is a currency, and it trades on currency markets, so you would treat it like a donation tendered in non-U.S. currency. If EFF were to start getting contributions in soybean futures, or rights to free oil changes at JiffyLube, I think it would have figured out how to accept those contributions, the absence of caselaw notwithstanding.

EFF, of course, is not “creating” a new currency system—it’s just one user. Its potential liability drops off precipitously because of that, and because EFF would scrupulously ensure that it’s acceptance of Bitcoin—just like any contribution—should not violate money laundering laws (while such regulation exists).

But if the government argues that any use of Bitcoin is money laundering, well that’s worth fighting, isn’t it? Because that’s a huge claim to power. Bitcoin is a value transfer protocol, and it can be used for anything, good or bad. If you pay your taxes on Bitcoin transactions that would have been lawful if conducted in U.S. dollars, why should the use of this less expensive and faster value-transfer protocol be grounds for punishment?

Were this issue to have arisen in the context of a similarly decentralized domain name system EFF would probably have been there, full of effrontery to government power, both promoting and using such a system.

2. We don’t want to mislead our donors. When people make a donation to a nonprofit like EFF, they expect us to use their donation to support our work. Because the legal territory around exchanging Bitcoins into cash is still uncertain, we are not comfortable spending the many Bitcoins we have accumulated. Because of this, we’re giving the Bitcoins that have been accumulated, or that may accumulate in the future, in the account set up in our name to the Bitcoin faucet, so that they can continue to circulate in the community.

For the most part, this point just restates the first, retooling it to sound like a service to donors and not timidity in the face of legal ambiguity. Donors can expect good faith effort on EFF’s part to use their donations, however denominated, in support of its mission. It doesn’t undermine the mission if the form of donation is non-U.S.-dollars.

In fact, refusing donations in Bitcoin seems to detract from EFF’s mission because it denies the organization a source of funds. The donors who gave U.S. dollars expecting EFF to defend things like Bitcoin may feel mislead by EFF’s reluctance to do so.

3. People were misconstruing our acceptance of Bitcoins as an endorsement of Bitcoin. We were concerned that some people may have participated in the Bitcoin project specifically because EFF accepted Bitcoins, and perhaps they therefore believed the investment in Bitcoins was secure and risk-free. While we’ve been following the Bitcoin movement with a great degree of interest, EFF has never endorsed Bitcoin. In fact, we generally don’t endorse any type of product or service – and Bitcoin is no exception.

So put a disclaimer up that says “We don’t endorse any type of product or service – and Bitcoin is no exception.” That solves the problem with potential miscontrued inferences from accepting Bitcoin.

To be cheeky, I’ll wonder aloud whether EFF’s acceptance of U.S. dollars is an endorsement of that currency—with it’s relentless loss of value to inflation, heavy contribution to surveillance, and amenability to illegal government seizure. Well, of course they don’t. And there’s no real inference from accepting a currency that one endorses a currency. Similarly, if you send an email to EFF written in French, and they use the ideas in your email, EFF is not endorsing French.

The point here is not that EFF or any organization must use Bitcoin. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of its utility—it might not be convertible to other forms of value easily enough; it might not have enough reliable value; holding it might involve security risks that remain too great. But legal ambiguities around a novel technology are not a sound basis for a digital rights organization to decline using that technology. That’s a reason to embrace and protect that novel technology.

I look forward to EFF reversing course once again, invigorated in its fight for digital liberty by fear of my mighty blog wrath.

If you’re like me, you woke up at the crack of dawn today to maximize your enjoyment of World IPv6 Day. Don’t want to miss a minute! If you’re like me, you’ll also say untruthful things as a very dry form of sarcasm. I hope you got that.

Whatever your interest in IPv6—learn more by reading this heresy—you should take interest in whether the next generation of the Internet protocol will erode or enhance your ability to protect privacy. That’s a question that’s been gnawing at me for a long time.

IPv4 was designed without enough numbers to accommodate the worldwide, multiple-device Internet we’ve got today. IPv5 seems to have disappeared—and I’m desperate to know what happened to it. (see above re: sarcasm) Now we’re talking about IPv6, a major feature of which is that it has enough numbers to assign one to every device on the globe.

IPv6’s ginormous number space is great for simplifying the maintenance of quality communications on the modern Internet, but it could suck for privacy. You see, if every device can be assigned a permanent number, that number will act as a permanent identifier, and lots of privacy-reducing inferences can be drawn. I.e., “If I saw this IP number before, it’s probably the same device and the same person I dealt with before.” Communications and interactions that don’t require or benefit from tracking become trackable anyway. We lose a structural protection of privacy.

Luckily, the designers of the IPv6 protocol thought of that. Christopher Parsons explains in a thorough post from last year that the IPv6 protocol calls for rolling assignment of randomized numbers for initiators of communications. A Web server has to have a fixed address, of course. It’s the target of communications requests, and people need to know where to find it. But the computers that ask for content from such servers do not. IPv6 allows those devices to have transient, pretty darn random numbers that change with regularity. This way, the records of your surfing that come to rest in servers all over the world cannot be combined into a dossier of everything you ever did online. Your computer’s IP address does not become your de facto worldwide identifier.

But here’s the question: To what extent is this part of IPv6 being implemented? Are the organizations implementing IPv6 including randomized numbers for initiators of communications? Parsons has a clever turn of phrase suggesting one reason why they may not: “the ‘security institutions’ are better at dissolving privacy protections than the privacy community is at enshrining privacy in law.” It could also be simply that there’s some cost associated with IPv6’s randomization.

So, does anyone know the status of randomization in the IPv6 protocol? Is it being implemented?

The good news, I think, is that it seems fairly easy to test whether an ISP is deploying IPv6 in full or short-cutting on randomization. Set up a server out there, ping it with a consistent communication, and see if it sees the communication coming from a consistent IP address. If it does, then IPv6 randomization is not working. That’s a problem.

Given the wisdom of “trust but verify,” I suppose this is not only an appeal for information about present practice, but a request that some group of technical smarties out there set up a system for routine verification that IPv6 randomization is fully and properly implemented by Internet service providers and other major deployers of Internet protocol. If you’ve already done it, do tell! Thanks!

In previous posts, I’ve criticized the Federal Communications Commission for arbitrarily jacking up the speed in its definition of broadband (to 4 mbps download/1mbps upload) so that third generation wireless does not count as broadband. This makes broadband markets appear less competitive.  It also expands the “need” for universal service subsidies for broadband, since places that have 3G wireless but not wired broadband get counted as not having broadband.

The FCC’s definition is based on the speed necessary to support streaming video.  I rarely watch video on my computer. But tonight I had a chance to test the wisdom of the FCC’s definition.  I’m in rural southern Delaware with broadband access only via a 3G modem. I wanted to watch more State of the Union coverage than the broadcast channels out here carried. So, I fired up the old PC and watched things on CNN.com.  The video showed up fine and smooth, and it didn’t even burp when I opened another window to start working on this post.

So now I have not just analysis that questions the FCC’s definition of broadband, but that most precious of commodities in Washington regulatory debates: AN ANECDOTE!!!

When it comes to technology policy, I’m usually a fairly optimistic guy.  But when it comes to technology politics, well, I have my grumpier moments. I had at particularly grumpy moment earlier this summer when I was sitting at a hearing listening to a bunch of high-tech companies bash each other’s brains in and basically calling for lawmakers to throw everyone else under the regulatory bus except for them.  Instead of heeding Ben Franklin’s sound old advice that “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately,” it’s increasingly clear that high-tech America seems determined to just try to hang each other. It’d be one thing if that heated competition was all taking place in the marketplace, but, increasingly, more and more of it is taking place inside the Beltway with regulation instead of innovation being the weapon of choice.

That episode made me think back to the outstanding 2000 manifesto penned by T. J. Rodgers, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, “Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations with Washington, D.C.”  I went back and re-read it upon the 10th anniversary of its publication by the Cato Institute and, sadly, came to realize that just about everything Rodgers had feared and predicted had come true.  Rodgers had attempted to preemptively discourage high-tech companies from an excessive “normalization” of relations with the parasitic culture that dominates Washington by reminding them what Washington giveth it can also taketh away. “The political scene in Washington is antithetical to the core values that drive our success in the international marketplace and risks converting entrepreneurs into statist businessmen,” he warned a decade ago. “The collectivist notion that drives policymaking in Washington is the irrevocable enemy of high-technology capitalism and the wealth creation process.”  And he reminded his fellow capitalists “that free minds and free markets are the moral foundation that has made our success possible.  We must never allow those freedoms to be diminished for any reason.”

Alas, as I point out in my new Cato Policy Report essay “The Sad State of Cyber-Politics,” no one listened to Rodgers.  Indeed, Rodgers’s dystopian vision of a highly politicized digital future has taken just a decade to become reality. The high-tech policy scene within the Beltway has become a cesspool of backstabbing politics, hypocritical policy positions, shameful PR tactics, and bloated lobbying budgets. I go on in the article to itemize a litany of examples of how high-tech America appears determined to fall prey to what Milton Friedman once called “The Business Community’s Suicidal Impulse“: the persistent propensity to persecute one’s competitors using regulation or the threat thereof.

It’s a sad tale that doesn’t make for enjoyable reading, but I do try to end the essay on an upbeat (if somewhat naive) note. If you are interested, you can find the plain text version on the Cato website here and I’ve embedded the PDF of the publication down below in a Scribd Reader.

Sad State of Cyber Politics (Cato Policy Report) http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf

To hails of derision in some quarters—I’m looking at you, Adam—I have talked about how social media will occupy some of the space being ceded by traditional news reporting, which is struggling to find a business model. Perhaps with validation from an official, vetted, professional, dead-tree news source, it will seem less ridiculous to talk about news reporting being generated spontaneously by people “on the scene” or with the greatest knowledge of facts and conditions in a particular area.

Think of the mental habit that has us calling police and fire personnel “first responders.” They are almost always, in fact, second responders, with first response undertaken by average citizens, who often do a pretty good job of it. Think of the true first responders to recent attempted bombings on transatlantic flights: ordinary citizens who thwarted the underwear and shoe bombers. (I risk painting too heroic a picture . . . .)

Newspaper reporters and photographers are intellectual second responders, who come in after the fact, as generalists, to summarize events and trends for us. Yet these are who we look to as authorities on what happened, and how to think about it? That doesn’t seem to make sense if there are other options for being informed. And now there are.

I’ll take a cue from Adam’s good work in debunking the Internet pessimists who argue that “closed” access and technology models are strangling the open/’generative’ Internet: There’s plenty of room for both—both traditional journalism, as it finds its new niche, and reporting by ordinary people who are on the scene and who have superior knowledge in a particular domain.

I suspect that we’ll find better media and filters than Twitter’s firehose of info-pellets by which to learn about things like the hostage-taking in the D.C. area. There may even be a business model in it. Go to it, technology and markets!

At ten A.M. Pacific this morning, CNET News.com asked if I could write an article unraveling the legal implications of a rumored deal between Google and Verizon on net neutrality. I didn’t see how I could analyze a deal whose terms (and indeed, whose existence) are unknown, but I thought it was a good opportunity to make note of several positive developments in the net neutrality war this summer.

Just as I was finishing the piece a few hours later, another shocker came when the FCC announced it was concluding talks it had been holding since June with the major net neutrality stakeholders. It’s possible the leaked story about Google and Verizon, and the feverish response to it, whipped up by the straggling remnants of a coalition aimed at getting an extreme version of net neutrality into U.S. law by any means necessary, soured the agency on what appeared to be productive negotiations. Or maybe they’ve just gone as far as they can for now.

So I started over, and added emphasis to the outside-the-beltway developments that, in the end, may offer the best hope for a resolution to what is, after all is said and done, a technical problem requiring a technical solution.

I’ll let the piece speak for itself, in part out of necessity–I’m pooped. (I now have renewed sympathy and appreciation for the work of real journalists, which I am not.) But had I had more time and more column inches, I would have emphasized one point I hope comes across in the story. And that is that the politicization of problems of network management has done nothing to solve them. It has done the opposite.

What’s become even clearer in the last 24 hours is how the extremists in this largely-choreographed fight are determined not to have it end. They don’t care about free enterprise, consumers, or respect for the rule of law–though these are the principles they make the most noise about. But that’s just what it is, noise.

Memo to Silicon Valley: you’re wise to avoid as much as possible the politics of technology. But the best way to take issues away from politicians is to solve them with engineering.

Declan McCullagh of CNet News reports (“Congress May Roll Dice, Legalize Net Gambling“) that some in Congress are reconsidering the wisdom of prohibitions on Internet gambling, which we have discussed here many times before. Declan notes there’s another hearing on the issue today and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) will be discussing his continuing effort to allow Internet casinos to obtain licenses from and be regulated by the federal government:

Frank, who will be testifying during Wednesday’s hearing, says that because nearly all states already permit some form of traditional gambling–including lotteries, betting on horse and greyhound racing, and sports wagering — the federal government should legalize and regulate the online equivalents. Instead of a blanket legalization, his legislation would require the Treasury Department to police the industry and ensure that it takes adequate steps to identify minors and compulsive gamblers.

My TLF colleague Tom Bell has done seminal work in this field and you will definitely want to check out his recent essay, “The UnInGEn-ious Act’s Non-Impact on Internet Gambling” and his classic 1999 Cato white paper, “Internet Gambling: Popular, Inexorable, and (Eventually) Legal.”  What Tom has done better than anyone else is to show that, as is the case with almost every “market activity devoted to the pursuit of happiness,” eventually the law will adjust to accommodate these activities.  It may take some time for the law to adjust, but it will.

Incidentally, I loved this little gem of a quote that Declan included in his story from the activist group Focus on the Family, which argues of this effort to legalize online gambling:

“This is all about Big Government decriminalizing an addictive, predatory vice in order to exploit more citizens for more money…When federal government tries to cannibalize its own citizens for more revenues, something is wrong.”

Wait, what?  How can the decriminalization of something about “Big Government.” The exact opposite is the case. Look, you can find other excuses to try to regulate “vice” — although I’ve always subscribed to the theory that not every sin should be a crime — but don’t ask us to believe that this is about fighting Big Government when Big Government is the one fining people or throwing them in jail for exercising their freedom to enjoy themselves and spend their money as they wish.  That’s true freedom.

Of course, I would find more sympathy for Focus on the Family’s argument if it really was all about fighting the imposition of taxes on Net gambling proceeds. But that’s not what Focus on the Family really cares about here. They just want to keep Net gambling banned.  And that’s true “Big Government” at its worst.

According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press’ First Amendment Handbook, twelve states forbid the recording of private conversations without the consent of all parties. Maryland is one of them.

And now a guy who was recording his own antics on a motorcycle is facing a felony charge because he continued recording during a traffic stop. David Rittgers has more on the Cato@Liberty blog.

Laws that ban all surreptitious recording to get at wrongful recording are overbroad and damaging. Laws that prevent the recording of police officers are particularly wrongheaded. Maryland needs some technology liberation.

San Antonio too.

The headline strikes fear: “House Takes Steps to Boost Cybersecurity,” says the Washington Post.

What boondoggle are they embarking on now?

Cybersecurity is hundreds of different problems that should be handled by thousands of different actors. The federal government is in no position to “fix” cybersecurity, as I testified in the House Science Committee earlier this year.

But this is a good news story. Realizing that its own cybersecurity practices are not up to snuff, the House of Representatives will be ramping up training for its staff.

Better awareness of the ins and outs of securing computers, data, and networks will disincline Congress to undertake a rash, sweeping “overhaul” of the systems and incentives that produce and advance cybersecurity.

I wrote here a couple of months ago about the shady practice among a few Internet retailers of handing off customers who accept a “special offer” to a company that charges people a monthly fee for some kind of credit monitoring service. And I argued hopefully that maybe technologists and the Internet community could generate a response to this problem:

Being a smart, informed, and aggressive consumer is each person’s responsibility if a free market is to operate well. The alternative is a negative feedback loop in which government authorities protect us, we rely on that protection and stop policing retailers. Thereby we abandon the field of consumer protection to government authorities, who—try as they might—can never do as good a job for us as we can for ourselves.

The Senate Commerce Committee is having a hearing today on “Aggressive Sales Tactics on the Internet and Their Impact on American Consumers.”

PFF summer fellow Eric Beach and I have been working on what we hope is a comprehensive taxonomy of all the threats to online security and privacy. In our continuing Privacy Solutions Series, we have discussed and will continue to discuss specific threats in more detail and offer tools and methods you can use to protect yourself.

The taxonomy is located here.

The taxonomy of 21 different threats is organized as a table that indicates the “threat vector” and goal(s) of attackers using each threat. Following the table is a glossary defining each threat and providing links to more information.Threats can come from websites, intermediaries such as an ISP, or from users themselves (e.g. using an easy-to-guess password). The goals range from simply monitoring which (or what type of) websites you access to executing malicious code on your computer.

Please share any comments, criticisms, or suggestions as to other threats or self-help privacy/security management tools that should be added by posting a comment below.

Adam Thierer has been named the new president of the Progress & Freedom Foundation.

TLF readers don’t need to be told that he’s a tireless advocate for technology policies that preserve freedom and innovation. He was the driving force behind creation of this blog, for example, and he is a prodigious writer and commentator.

Adam will do even more to advance those goals and protect the Internet from stifling regulation from his new perch. Congratulations, Adam!

Last night, thanks to Craig’s List and a Web-enabled cell phone, I unloaded two extra tickets to tonight’s World Cup qualifying game between the U.S. and Costa Rica in under an hour. (8:00, ESPN2 “USA! USA! USA!”)

Wanting to avoid the hassle of selling the tickets at RFK, I placed an ad on Craig’s List offering them at cost, figuring I might find a taker and arrange to hand them off downtown today or at the stadium tonight. Checking email as I walked to the gym, I found an inquiry about the tickets and phoned the guy, who happened to live 100 feet from where I was walking. A few minutes later, he had the tickets and I had the cash.

This quaint story is a single data point in a trend line—the high-tech version of It’s Getting Better All the Time. Everyone living a connected life enjoys hundreds, or even thousands, of conveniences every day because of information technology. Through billions of transactions across the society, technology improves our lives in ways unimaginable two decades ago.

Before 1995, nobody ever traded spare soccer tickets in under an hour, on a Tuesday night, without even changing his evening routine. If soccer tickets are too trivial (you must not understand the game), the same dynamics deliver incremental, but massive improvements in material wealth, awareness, education, and social and political empowerment to everyone—even those who don’t live “online.”

Sometimes debates about technology regulation are cast in doom and gloom terms like the Malthusian arguments about material wealth. But the benefits we already enjoy thanks to technology are not going away, and they will continue to accrue. We are arguing about the pace of progress, not its existence.

This is no reason to let up in our quest to give technologists and investors the freedom to produce more innovations that enhance everyone’s well-being even more. But it does counsel us to be optimistic and to teach this optimism to our ideological opponents, many of whom seem to look ahead and see only calamity.

The cloud won’t grow quite the way Berin notes, at least not if I can help it.

As the ongoing T-Mobile Sidekick failure shows, if you release your data to “the cloud,” you give up control. In this case, giving up control means giving up your data. (Speculation about what happened is here.)

When you combine that with the privacy consequences of delivering your data to god-knows-where, and to service providers that have heaven-knows-what data-sharing agreements with governments and corporations, the cloud looks a lot more gray.

There will always be a place for remote storage and services—indeed, they will remain an important part of the mix—but I think that everyone should ultimately have their own storage and servers. (Hey, we did it with PCs! Why not?) Our thoroughly distributed computing, storage, and processing infrastructure should be backed up to—well, not the cloud—to specific, identifiable, legally liable and responsible service providers.

Our job here at TLF is generally to talk about policy as opinion leaders, but I tend to be a little campaign-y sometimes. When I see something I don’t like, I’ll use this platform to sound off about it.

It appears that ProFlowers.com engages in a shady practice: handing customers who accept a “special offer” from them to a company that charges people a monthly fee for what appears to be some kind of credit monitoring service. There are write-ups of varying depth and quality here, here, here, and here.

Question: Does the Internet provide enough feedback to suppress this practice? How could the e-commerce ecosystem be changed to alert people about this kind of thing ahead of time?

Being a smart, informed, and aggressive consumer is each person’s responsibility if a free market is to operate well. The alternative is a negative feedback loop in which government authorities protect us, we rely on that protection and stop policing retailers. Thereby we abandon the field of consumer protection to government authorities, who—try as they might—can never do as good a job for us as we can for ourselves.

Should we each run a “scam” search on new online businesses before we deal with them? Maybe so. But that’s a little clunky. With the popularity of Firefox plug-ins for problem solving around here, maybe one of the consumer review/complaint sites could develop a plug-in to provide people reviews of a retailer as they visit the site.

I hope that prompting a conversation around the apparent ProFlowers.com credit card ripoff scam will alert savvy shoppers to a risk of doing business with them. (For the sake of searchability, feel free to blog a little bit yourself about the apparent ProFlowers credit card ripoff scam.) Perhaps this discussion will also generate a systemic fix that preempts shady dealings of the type alleged here.

One of my favorite recurring themes here on TLF is the definitional dispute/clarification. We point out where a term has been used in many different ways and explain the positives and negatives of the various behaviors described by that term. I just did this with privacy.

Of course, it is somewhat pointless to argue about the “true” meaning of a term, but that’s not exactly what’s involved here. Yes, we libertarians can lament when terms that used to describe things we believe in, like “liberal,” “freedom,” “rights,” “choice,” etc., get appropriated by others and terms that used to describe things we don’t believe in, like “coercion,” get ascribed to us. There may be some battles we can win, some terms we can hold onto, but these disputes often end up with two ships passing in the night.

But I’m talking about something a little different. Lots of terms that have, or get, normative connotations – that sound like they describe something good (think “democracy”) or bad (think “terrorism”) – get way overbroadened. Speakers use such terms to describe nearly anything (as long as it’s vaguely related to the original meaning) to which the speaker wants to ascribe the good/bad connotation. We here on TLF catalog those various ways such terms have been used – break the term down – and describe which ways are really good and really bad. As I said, I just did this with privacy. If this were a more lawy, as opposed to techy, blog I’d do it with “activism,” one of my pet peeve words. (Maybe I’ll do it anyway; after all, I posted on the best and worst Supreme Court decisions even though they weren’t especially tech-focused.)

But today, it’s “regulatory capture.” We have discussed it a bit recently, including just tonight. Tim Lee did some great posts on it back in the day. It’s definitely a recurring theme here. We seem to have something fairly specific in mind when we use the term. As Tim put it, it is when “established businesses argue in favor of regulations that they perceive as hurting their competitors (often smaller competitors) more than themselves.” Indeed, I argued with a commenter on one of Wayne’s posts that this definition that makes the most sense given the meanings of the words:

Regulatory capture is when businesses capture regulatory actions and use them as tools, backed by the force of government, for imposing burdens on their competitors. Businesses banding together to oppose government intrusion is not “capture.” Fighting an enemy is not the same as capturing him and using him to do your bidding…

Call Tim’s and my definition the “appropriation” definition.

As I pointed out, however, others (in particular, fans of regulation) seem to think of “regulatory capture” as being – or at least including – when businesses use their connections with regulators to try to get the regulators to stop regulating. Call this the “abdication” definition.

There’s another sense, too, that’s an even more direct form of capture than appropriation – where businesses try to win government contracts or other favors for themselves (as opposed to trying to get new regulations to hurt their competitors). The defense industry is infamous for this, but it’s of course all over the place. Call this the “bribery” definition, since it basically describes bribery, broadly defined.

What makes these forms of regulatory capture happen? What are their effects? Should any be celebrated or all condemned?

Of course, Iron Triangles are a big part of what makes all forms of regulatory capture possible. Iron triangles are complex webs, of course, but I’m most familiar with the relatively simple example of lawyers going back and forth between government agencies (or the DoJ) and private firms. For example, a tax firm would sensibly love to hire someone who has worked at the IRS or Treasury and knows its internal procedures and thought processes. Relations develop from these revolving doors, of course. But what incentives do the regulators have to listen to their former colleagues, now working for the businesses they regulate? Well, this depends on what the businesses want.

In the case of bribery, they want contracts or other favors and can offer regulators bribes in exchange. That’s pretty simple. But it’s also pretty illegal, and so this is hardly the worst problem in terms of scope that comes from regulatory capture.

In the case of appropriation, it’s a little more subtle. Say AMD wants to disadvantage its big competitor, Intel, but without having to, you know, make better products for less money. Instead, they can go to antitrust regulators and get them to sue the pants off Intel. It costs AMD little. But what do the regulators get? They get to make themselves look great! It’s similar to journalists taking stories from activists – they get their jobs done from them, and in a way that makes them look good. They don’t even have to think of the choice sound bites. (I think we saw this with NebuAd and the regulatory fall-out as companies like Google scrambled to sic the FTC on their competitors.) The regulators can justify their jobs and even expanding their authority as being necessary and can look tough, fighting business, not beholden to it! Of course, they are beholden to one business by fighting another. Not only is this legal, it makes the regulators seem super-diligent. So, we see a lot of this kind of regulatory capture. This is, needless to say, bad. It causes massive deadweight loss. Companies should be fighting in the marketplace, where their wars result in better products at lower prices.

In the case of abdication, however, there is little the business can offer the regulator. The company wants the regulator to do less – to go home and put herself out of a job. Good luck with that sales pitch. If the regulator goes along, she looks like she’s in the pocket of big business and can only justify her actions by reciting true arguments (ugh) about the bad effects of regulation. And those are the same arguments those lobbyists made, so she must just be their puppets (regardless of whether the arguments are right). That’s why we don’t see a lot of successful “regulatory capture” of this type. In fact, it’s a rare cause for celebration when companies even try to get regulations lifted. (There’s a coordination problem from the companies’ perspective too. It’s much less costly to get the DoJ to go after a competitor than to take a stand that benefits the industry as a whole, since there’s a big free rider problem.)

Can anyone think of one big example of this kind of regulatory capture – a situation where a law passed by Congress has been left unenforced because of successful lobbying by businesses? To say the least, this seems much less common than laws being used way beyond their purposes, or even regulatory actions taken without any statutory basis whatsoever, but I’d love to hear counter-examples.

So, maybe – since it doesn’t happen and doesn’t really mesh with the meaning of “capture” – we should not call regulatory abdication “regulatory capture” at all. And we already have a word for “bribery.” (It’s “bribery.”) So, perhaps we could save the term “regulatory capture” for the specific pattern of companies convincing regulators to use their coercion wands to whack competitors.

It’s fascinating to continue watching developments in Iran via Twitter and other social media.

The fact that Twitter delayed a scheduled outage to late-night Tehran time was laudable, but contrary to a growing belief it wasn’t done at the behest of the State Department. It was done at the behest of Twitter users.

Twitter makes that fairly (though imperfectly) clear on its blog, saying, “the State Department does not have access to our decision making process.”

As my Cato Institute colleague Justin Logan notes, events in Iran are not about the United States or U.S. policy. They should not be, or appear to be, directed or aided from Washington, D.C. Any shifts in power in Iran should be produced in Iran for Iranians, with support from the people of the world – not from any outside government.

People are free to speculate that the State Department asked Twitter to deny its involvement precisely to create the necessary appearances, but without good evidence of it, assuming that just reflects a pre-commitment that governments – not people and the businesses that serve them – are the primary forces for good in the world.

. . . follow @persiankiwi.

This is the third in a series of articles about Internet technologies. The first article was about web cookies. The second article explained the network neutrality debate. This article explains network management systems. The goal of this series is to provide a solid technical foundation for the policy debates that new technologies often trigger. No prior knowledge of the technologies involved is assumed.

There has been lots of talk on blogs recently about Cox Communications’ network management trial. Some see this as another nail in Network Neutrality’s coffin, while many users are just hoping for anything that will make their network connection faster.

As I explained previously, the Network Neutrality debate is best understood as a debate about how to best manage traffic on the Internet.

Those who advocate for network neutrality are actually advocating for legislation that would set strict rules for how ISPs manage traffic. They essentially want to re-classify ISPs as common carriers. Those on the other side of the debate believe that the government is unable to set rules for something that changes as rapidly as the Internet. They want ISPs to have complete freedom to experiment with different business models and believe that anything that approaches real discrimination will be swiftly dealt with by market forces. But what both sides seem to ignore is that traffic must be managed. Even if every connection and router on the Internet is built to carry ten times the expected capacity, there will be occasional outages. It is foolish to believe that routers will never become overburdened–they already do. Current routers already have a system for prioritizing packets when they get overburdened; they just drop all packets received after their buffers are full. This system is fair, but it’s not optimized. The network neutrality debate needs to shift to a debate on what should be prioritized and how. One way packets can be prioritized is by the type of data they’re carrying. Applications that require low latency would be prioritized and those that don’t require low latency would not be prioritized.

Cox’s Internet service, like most Cable internet services, was built on top of its cable TV service, which was designed to share TV signals in only one direction to households in a relatively small geographic area. Cable companies segment their networks into neighborhoods or “nodes,” with each node connected to a Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS). The size of each node can vary from a few thousand households to a few hundred thousand households. All cable Internet customers connected to a single node share the available bandwidth.

Here’s a simple analogy: Imagine you buy a house with your new spouse. The house has a tankless water heater that can provide an unlimited supply of hot water at a rate of 2-5 gallons per minute, which is adequate for the two of you. When you have houseguests, you manage the limited flow rate by having some people shower in the morning and some people shower in the evening. Then you have kids. As your kids grow up, you all need to shower around the same time in the morning and you experience hot water outages more and more often. You’re faced with two options: Continue to restrict how many people can shower at any one time, or buy a larger-capacity water heater. Substitute broadband for hot water and you’ve got the situation that ISPs are in.

As cable companies add more cable Internet subscribers and individual households use more bandwidth, the cable companies have essentially three options:

• Segment their networks so each node is serving fewer users; or
• Deploy new technology to increase the bandwidth of their CMTSes (e.g. DOCSIS 3.0);
• Use the existing bandwidth more “efficiently.”

Using a network more efficiently means deploying some sort of “network management” system. Even though tankless water heaters can supply an endless amount of hot water, if you connect too many sinks and showers to a single heater and turn them all on at once, you will have a (temporary) hot water shortage. That’s why it’s usually not a good idea to run the dishwasher or washing machine when you’re taking a shower. Similarly, bandwidth on the Internet is only limited by the electricity needed to keep the routers running, but when everyone tries to use high-bandwidth applications (like streaming video) simultaneously, the network gets congested and slows down.

When thinking of hot water systems, washing machines and dishwashers can be thought of as non-time-sensitive uses of hot water because it’s usually not important when they’re done, as long as they’re done within a few hours of your preferred time. On the other hand, when you go to wash your hands, you want hot water immediately. This would be an extremely time-sensitive use. Showers probably fall somewhere in the middle. The same variety of time-sensitivity also applies to Internet applications.

When done right, network management is nothing to fear. It allows ISPs to provide better service to more customers at a lower cost. Hopefully, those customers will be happier because their time-sensitive applications will have enough bandwidth. And the lower costs to the ISP may result in lower prices to customers. For customers who want/need more bandwidth than average, ISPs can and do offer different levels of service.

Even in areas where the incumbent broadband ISP does not face any serious competition, network management is good for users: Without network management, it may be completely impossible on an overloaded network to make a VoIP call, remotely connect to your office network, or play online multi-player games.

Cox’s network management policy seems eminently reasonable. First, it only affects “upstream” traffic (i.e. traffic sent from users’ computers). The new system classifies all traffic as either “time-sensitive” (prioritized) or “less time-sensitive” (unprioritized). Unprioritized traffic includes FTP uploads, peer-to-peer file sharing, and Usenet posts. Most importantly, “Any traffic that is not specifically classified will be treated as time-sensitive.” Thus, the policy will not affect new Internet applications and anyone who encrypts their traffic (because using encryption prevents your ISP from being able to determine which application you’re using).

If you’ve noticed your Internet connection has suddenly slowed, your ISP’s new network management policy is probably not the cause. It may simply be that there are more households sharing the same last-mile connection and those households are using it more. What is needed are new metrics to compare broadband offerings. Heavy users of peer-to-peer file transfer applications may indeed see faster speeds by switching to an ISP that doesn’t use network management. But if all such users in a particular area switch to that ISP, the ISP’s network will likely quickly become overloaded and have to implement network management practices themselves. Just as insurance companies and financial institutions must avoid setting policies that attract the sickest or least-credit-worthy customers, ISPs may face the same problem of “adverse selection” by attracting the most bandwidth-intensive users if they do not either impose some form of network management or charge a premium for not limiting bandwidth.

New Metrics

Choosing an ISP based only on price and downstream rate is simply not enough anymore. The old adage that “you get what you pay for” still applies. The first thing bandwidth shoppers that have a choice between cable Internet service and some other form of Internet service like DSL or fiber need to realize is that only cable Internet services share the last-mile connection among multiple households. DSL and fiber services do not. Next, you need to understand that the quoted transfer rate is not guaranteed; it’s simply the fastest speed you can expect to obtain under ideal conditions–which may only occur when all your neighbors have their computers turned off). Beyond that, the following are some terms that should help you decide between ISPs and the different packages offered by each.

To return to the water heater analogy, if you move into an apartment building with a central tankless water heater, knowing the water heater’s flow rate is meaningless if you don’t know how many other people are living in the building and sharing the same water heater. Of course some people take longer showers than others. If how much hot water you get for your morning shower is really important to you, you may be better off finding an apartment with your own private water heater. But for those that will have to share a water heater with others, you’ll want to know the capacity of the water heater and the number of people it will be shared with.

• Bandwidth – Bandwidth measurements are exactly like the flow rate measurement for tankless water heaters: It’s a measure of how much of some quantity (water or data) the system can deliver over a fixed period of time. Tankless water heaters are measured in gallons per minute. Bandwidth is measured in megabits per second. NOTE: Most telecommunications equipment measures quantities in bits (and multiples of bits such as kilobits, megabits, and gigabits) but most storage devices measure quantities in bytes (and kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes). When abbreviated, MB means megabyte and Mb means megabit. There are 8 bits in a byte, so a high-quality photo from a 6 megapixel camera (approximately 2.2 megabytes in size) would take about 3 seconds to transfer across an otherwise unused 6 megabit per second (Mbps) connection. For more about bandwidth and how it relates to latency, which is a truer measure of actual speed, refer to my earlier article in this series, “Some basic about edge caching, network management, & Net neutrality.”
• Powerboost – This technology, now used by a number of ISPs, gives a speed boost to the first few megabytes of each upload and download. This is great for casual web surfing, but for large files the boost isn’t all that significant. With one ISP’s package, the speed boost is from 6Mbps to 15Mbps for only the first 10Mb of each download. This saves a maximum of 8 seconds per download regardless of how big the file is. When comparing packages, be sure to compare the actual download speeds as well as the boosted download speeds. In some cases, the actual download speeds are not reported in the ISPs advertising and you need to call to find them out.
• Contention Ratio – This is the ratio of the total bandwidth promised to all users (based on their service plan) to the actual bandwidth available on the connection. If there are 2000 households, each with a 10Mbps plan, sharing a last-mile connection with a total capacity of 1Gbps, the contention ratio would be 20:1. To go back to water heaters: If each of 20 apartments in a single building is promised hot water at a flow rate of 3 gallons per minute, the building would need a heater with a flow rate of 60 gallons per minute to meet the demand if everyone takes a shower at the same time. That would result in a contention ration of 1:1. But if the building tries to save money by installing a cheaper heater with a flow rate of only 30 gallons per minute, the contention ratio would drop to 2:1. ISPs in the U.S. do not normally disclose contention ratios, but the practice is common in the U.K, where leading ISP BT has guidelines requiring a ratio between 20:1 and 50:1. There’s no way to determine your own contention ratio, but it might be worth asking the next time you’re shopping around for broadband service, if for no other reason than to raise awareness of this important metric.

In conclusion, there are a number of potential causes for a slow Internet connection and a number of possible solutions–but the deployment of network management systems by ISPs is probably not to blame. If anything, most users on such ISPs should notice their connections become faster for most applications. If you’ve ever had no hot water to wash your hands because someone was running the dishwasher, you’ll understand why network management is important. As long as an ISP isn’t using its network management system to favor one application over a competitor (e.g. prioritizing its own voice-over-IP (VoIP) service but not prioritizing other VoIP services), network neutrality advocates should have no cause for alarm. As explained above, Cox’s new system meets this test.

I’ve gotten an unusually strong reaction to a TechKnowledge piece that went out today describing how the Nordstrom retail chain is capitalizing on a Patent and Trademark Office error to throw a small business under the bus.

Beckons is an organic yoga and lifestyle clothing business that Nordstrom is trying to force off of a trademark – or out of business. It’s owned by two businesswomen in Colorado who have done everything right to get a trademark, but now may have tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills to defend it. The short article is called U.S. Patent and Trademark Office: FAIL.

I wrote about it because I think it’s an outrage. People have written to me since I published it asking what they can do.

Well, there are a couple of things. The original error is with the PTO, so you can send a copy of the story or a link to your Member of Congress. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is within the jurisdiciation of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

But it’s Nordstrom that has really taken advantage of things. And you don’t have to beg for a politician’s help to bring companies to heel. Here’s a four-step plan for helping Beckons beat Goliath. Do one or all of the items listed below.

1. Send this page to all your friends. That’s probably the most important thing, because the more people doing the other things on this list, the better.
2. Write a letter to Nordstrom, telling them that you disapprove of their abuse of the trademark process, and that you won’t be shopping there until they mend their ways. Here’s the address for the president of the company. Blake W. Nordstrom, President Nordstrom, Inc. 1700 Seventh Avenue, Suite 300 Seattle, WA 98101
3. Print this page, copy it, and hand it out at Nordstrom. Or slip copies into the purses they sell – especially any with the “Beckon” label!
4. If you do yoga, or know anybody who does, shop at Beckons! (Be sure to send this along to friends who do yoga.)

So those are just a few ideas for getting Nordstrom to correct its abuse of the trademark process against this small business. Please feel free to put additional ideas or report on your successes in the comments. (Got a sample letter to Nordstrom, for example?)

A well-functioning marketplace requires assertive consumers – so assert yourself!

WASHINGTON – November 4 /TLF News Service/ — The recently announced Alcohol Liberation Front event, Thursday, November 6 from 5:30pm on at Gazuza (1629 Connecticut Ave NW), has already roiled the social media world, but organizers pledge to carry on despite the ALF 7 controversies.

“I ain’t a quitter. People ask me to quit. ‘Stop Tweeting – it’s hurting my eyes,’ they say,” said someone other than Brooke Oberwetter, ALF 7 organizer. “But I ain’t a quitter. I’m keepin’ on keepin’ on. ‘Keepin’ on keepin’ on’? Did I just invent that! Better Tweet it!”

Trading on shares of privately-held Facebook remained suspended on the major markets today after it was revealed that the platform doesn’t permit the names of events to be changed. A typo rendering ALF 7 as ALF 6 on the Facebook event page threatens to bring down the social networking giant.

“Facebook won’t let me change the event name,” roared an enraged Berin Szoka on the Facebook page announcing the event. “I pledge to do everything in my power to destroy Facebook,” he didn’t say.

Meanwhile, one pageview of the Facebook event page displayed an ad that caught TLFer Jim Harper as an outrageous effront to the law of trademark. The image at right, displayed exclusively here on TLF and anywhere someone deems it appropriate, shows a screenshot of an ad that may violate Apple’s rights in the iPod trademark.

“It’s not outrageous. Don’t say that. I just think that calling a shaver the ‘iPod of shaving’ has the potential to cause consumer confusion as to the source of the shaver by suggesting that it’s an Apple product. There are so many mistaken allegations about trademark law – this could be a real trademark violation, and it’s worth pointing out.”

Asked if he would be an expert witness in any case brought by Apple, Harper replied, “You’re not funny, you know. You’re writing this yourself, by yourself, and not interviewing anybody. Oh yeah. You’re being ‘meta’ or something. Whatever. How stupid.”

“Sourpuss” Harper will be one of the attendees at the Alcohol Liberation Front event, Thursday, November 6 from 5:30pm on at Gazuza (1629 Connecticut Ave NW).

I was amused to read that a draft Army intelligence report identified micro-blogging service Twitter as a potential tool for terrorists. On the other hand, it’s regrettable that this terrorism mania persists to foster this kind of report and media attention. There’s no distinct terror threat from Twitter. (Do check out the send-up of an Osama Bin Laden Twitter feed by clicking on the image.)

Sure, it’s possible that terrorists could use Twitter, just like it’s possible with any communications medium. Twitter is right up there with telephones, pen and paper, email, SMS, and smoke signals as a potential tool for terrorism. Each of these media have different properties which make them more or less susceptible to use for wrongdoing — and more or less protective of legitimate privacy for the law-abiding.

Like most common digital communications, Twitter is a pretty weak medium for planning bad things. Copies of every post are distributed far and wide — and all “Tweets” are housed pretty much permanently by a single organization.

If you want to get caught doing something wrong, use Twitter to plan it.

Securing against terrorism is hard because terrorists don’t wear uniforms or occupy territory. Their tools are our tools: sneakers, sandwiches, credit cards, cars, steak knives, box cutters, cameras, cell phones, driver’s licenses, Web sites, Napster, Friendster, Facebook, spinach. The list goes on and on and on.

(Yes, spinach — it grows terrorists’ muscles.)

The problem is determining what things in our society have a proximate relationship to terrorism that is greater than their relationship to all the good things we do with them. Box cutters were integral to the 9/11 attacks, but they are used by millions of people every day for wonderful purposes, so we haven’t pursued restrictions on, or monitoring of, box cutters (beyond airplanes, of course). Highly enriched uranium can be used to do a lot of damage. There is exceedingly little chance of it being used by terrorists, but it’s prudent to pursue controls on this material and monitor for peoply trying to acquire it.

Twitter and other digital media are used billions of times a day for all the good things law-abiding people do. There is also a small chance that they’ll be used for wrongdoing, and we have rules about what to do when that chance arises. Alas, Supreme Court cases under the Fourth Amendment are a little too permissive these days.

The chance of Twitter being used by terrorists (real ones, serious ones) is very small and not newsworthy. We’re all relatively inexperienced with the security dilemmas created by terrorism, and it’s appropriate to give a brief thought to how all the implements and infrastructure in society might be used to do damage. In summary, the production of a report on Twitter terror is just shy of silly. The media attention paid to the question: fully silly.

You should check it out and figure out which channel you like best.

Then you should donate.

Or buy the music you like.

Or buy a t-shirt.

I received the most fascinating email from a group called ASTRA just now. I don’t think I ever even heard of them before, but apparently I’m on their mailing list. ASTRA is the Alliance for Science and Technology Research in America, a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

Most people know that non-profits are not allowed to lobby for passage or failure of legislation. So let me now share with you ASTRA’s email to me. It may not be orginated by ASTRA and there could be several innocent explanations, but on the surface this looks like a clear violation of non-profit rules by an over-excited Washington, D.C. supplicant group.

[ Update: Cooler heads have it right. Non-profits are allowed to spend some percentage of their funds on lobbying. What I’ve noted here is an unclear violation of non-profit rules. What’s clear is that ASTRA is a big-government supplicant group not to be trusted by proponents of liberty and limited government.]

ACTION ALERT

Dear Friend of ASTRA:

WHAT HAS HAPPENED: The U.S. Senate has passed by a wide margin (74-25) an Economic Recovery Bill that contains important provisions beneficial to the science, engineering and technology communities – in addition to the massive restructuring made necessary by the current financial crisis The Senate measure includes the important tax incentives which either expired earlier this year or will by December 31.  The House will now vote on these provisions as well.  They include extension of the Research & Experimentation (R&E) Tax Credit and the soon to expire Alternative Energy tax incentives which make it more economically feasible to deploy alternative energy sources including solar, wind and geothermal power.

ACTION REQUESTED: ASTRA urges you to consider contacting your Member of the House of Representatives, which is expected to vote on the measure as early as tomorrow, Friday, October 3.

In particular, “Friends of ASTRA” who live in districts represented by so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats should communicate their support of the measure.  These individual Members who voted “No” against the original package include:

Baca (CA) Barrow (GA) Carney (PA) Chandler (KY) Davis (TN) Giffords (AZ) Gillibrand (NY) Hill (IN) Holden (PA) Lampson (TX) Matheson (UT) McIntyre (NC) Michaud (ME) Peterson (MN) Salazar (CO) Sanchez, L (CA) Herseth-Sandlin (SD) Schiff (CA) Shuler (NC) Scott (GA) Taylor (MS) Thompson (CA)

House Republicans who voted “No” against the original package but who might now be amenable to supporting the new measure also need to be contacted.  They include:

Aderholt (AL) Alexander (LA) Barton (TX) Biggert (IL) Bishop (UT) Blackburn (TN) Brown-Waite (FL) Boustany (LA) Conaway (TX) D. Davis ( TN) Dent (PA) Fallin (OK) Frelinghuysen (NJ) Gerlach (PA) Gingrey (GA) Goodlatte (VA) Hall (TX) Hastings (WA) S. Johnson (TX) Latham (IA) Latta (OH) LaTourette (OH) Lucas (OK) McHenry (NC) McMorris-Rodgers (WA) Mica (FL) J. Miller (FL) Murphy (PA) Myrick (NC) Neugebauer (TX) Petri (WI) Pitts (PA) Price, T. (GA) Togers (MI) Ramstad (MN) Roskam (IL) Shimkus (IL) Shuster (PA) Smith, A. (NE) Stearns (FL) Sullivan (OK) Thornberry (TX) Tiberi (OH) Wamp (TN) Young, B. (FL) Young (AK)

Time is of the essence.

HOW TO REGISTER YOUR OPINION QUICKLY: Please click on the following link, provided by the National Association of Realtors, if you are interested in participating in this exercise.  The link will provide instructions on how you can contact your individual Member of the House.

http://takeaction.realtoractioncenter.com/campaign/mainstreet?qp_source=wsjeesa

PLEASE SEND THIS  MESSAGE ON TO OTHERS:

This message has been sent to approximately 32,000 scientists, engineers, university employees, students, technology workers, policy makers, researchers and others on our “Friends” list.  An estimated total of  150,000 people will be contacted by this message, and we urge you to send it on to any friends, associates and family who may share our interest in passing this critically important legislative measure.

Thank you!

This e-mail was sent by ASTRA, located at 1155 16th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 (USA). To receive no further e-mails, please click here or reply to this e-mail with “unlist” in the Subject line.