With the news of its unwillingness to turn over large quantities of data to the federal government, the spotlight has been on Google all week: What exact information does the Department of Justice want, why is Google refusing to provide it, whose privacy might or might not be compromised?

These are certainly important questions. But the Google glare has obscured, in much of the coverage, the nature of the case that has caused this strange collateral damage — the proceeding that has been variously known through the years since its inception in 1998 as ACLU vs. Reno, ACLU vs. Ashcroft, and now ACLU vs. Gonzalez.

This case, a challenge to the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), has dragged on for so many years that even people who once perceived it with great clarity have succumbed to varying degrees of fuzziness around it. We start with the misleading name of the original law, which leads many people (and many reporters) to assume, wrongly, that the law has something to do with stopping child pornography.

It is, in fact, a law that, according to its proponents, is intended to keep more garden-variety forms of Internet-based porn away from kids’ eyes. That’s not a goal I object to, either as a journalist or as the parent of young kids (they’re six now, though they weren’t even born when this case started). Unfortunately, COPA adopted both a much broader definition of the kind of content it aims to restrict and a harsh set of criminal remedies. The law says that if you publish material that is “harmful to minors” and you don’t use a credit-card verification check to make sure that everyone who accesses the material is a grownup, you’ll face extended imprisonment, hefty fines or both.

Which leaves publishers like Salon, along with other publishers who are plaintiffs in the ACLU suit, wondering exactly where the government would draw the line: which articles about sexual mores intended for adults? which pages of sex-ed information intended for teenagers? Who are we supposed to trust to draw the line between gross, “harmful to minors” porn and legitimate, First Amendment-protected expression — John Ashcroft and his ilk?

The government playbook in this matter is to say to publishers like Salon that are not commercial pornographers, “Hey, don’t worry, relax, you’re not the target here.” We’re supposed to trust the Bush Justice Department’s interpretation of the law and ignore what the law actually says. No wonder every court that has considered this matter to date has sided with the ACLU and against the government.

All of this explains why my hackles went up when I read Slate columnist Adam Penenberg, in an otherwise sensible column about the Google/Justice dispute, describe COPA as a law that “required that adult sites implement age-verification policies.” Any reader of that description of the law who doesn’t know more about it will think, “What’s the problem? Shouldn’t adult sites require age verification?”

The problem is, that’s not what the law says. Penenberg’s description plays right into the government’s spin; by describing COPA this way, he’s making it sound like a perfectly reasonable statute.

I emailed back and forth with Adam about this today, and as far as I can tell he believes he hasn’t written anything inaccurate. It’s true that COPA does “require adult sites to implement age-verification policies”; but that’s an incomplete description that fails to explain to readers why anyone would find the law problematic. Say there was a new law that aimed to reduce street crime by enforcing a universal national curfew; you could decribe it as a law that “required all convicts to stay indoors at night,” and technically you’d be right, but you wouldn’t be helping anyone understand why people would find the law objectionable.

I’m zeroing in on one sentence here because, really, it’s the crux of the issue at stake in the case. The press seems to have a very hard time providing a simple, accurate description of what COPA is. (The original Mercury News report on the Google dispute also garbled its attempt to summarize the law.) By describing COPA this way, Penenberg is simply assisting the government’s effort to deceive people into thinking that this extreme law is really nothing to get upset about. That, you know, upsets me.

One result of the whole Washington Post comments debacle is that, as Jay Rosen puts it, “We’re going backwards in our ability to have a conversation with the Washington Post.” The Post circles its wagons against the barbarians; its online readers and critics storm off, convinced more than ever that the newspaper “doesn’t get it.”

The word “conversation” is at the heart of the ideals that so many of the brightest lights and most ambitious prophets of blog-era journalism embrace. It began this trajectory in the hands of the Cluetrain Manifesto’s authors; today it represents the hope for a new kind of post-media world in which a vastly broader spectrum of voices can speak and be heard.

Observers for whom “blog” is synonymous with “political blog” are often skeptical of this vision, because the conversations in the political blogosphere have become so closed-ended, repetitive and intramural. Political blogging in the rigid partisan landscape of 2006 too often resembles the parallel enforcement of party discipline. (Yes, there are many exceptions, but it is sad that they are exceptions.)

But you can find exchanges today that model the possibilities of a post-media conversation — where the actors in a field talk directly to each other, engaging and challenging and correcting each other. One place you can find them is the software world. It certainly has its feuds and its entrenched patterns of provocative trolling (just drop an anti-Macintosh comment and watch the group-mind hive buzz on cue). But, in following this field, I’m amazed, day after day, to see rivals and competitors lace their barbs with friendly banter and honest efforts at persuasion, or to watch critics and their subjects take on the awkward but fruitful back-and-forth that can actually move readers a few notches closer toward the truth.

One little example from this past week: As the Post was shutting down its comments, a tech-industry blogger named Mike Arrington, whose TechCrunch has become a hot water-cooler for the Web 2.0 crowd, was posting a critique of Ning — the roll-your-own Web application factory backed by Marc Andreessen that launched in October. Arrington wrote, in Ning — RIP?: “The reality of Ning is that it’s lost whatever coolness it had, no one uses it and Ning is going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when they finally do roll out better functionality.”

Diego Doval is a developer for Ning. Yesterday he responded to Arrington (I found the link via Dave Winer). The gist of his post is that Arrington basically got it all wrong — the facts and the spin. But Doval didn’t flame his critic; he just patiently walked through his points and thanked Arrington for inadvertently showing him and his company how much better a job it needs to do to get the word out about its product. Scroll down to the comments on Doval’s retort and the first one is from Arrington — thanking Doval for the great post.

Now just imagine how this sort of conflict would have played out if we were dealing with, say, a liberal blogger who mangled some facts and a conservative critic (or vice versa).

Of course, the emotions engendered by political debate are of a different order from those inspired by software development. But, you know, they’re not that different — there’s pride and ego and anger and passion about the future in both realms. What the software universe lacks (except, perhaps, on some old-line corporate campuses, in certain corners of the open source world, or in the extremes of Mac fandom) is the emerging tribal behavior patterns of the political blogosphere’s ideological camps. It’s a lot easier to have a real conversation when you aren’t looking over your shoulder at a crowd that expects you to toe a particular line.

In turning off comments on a blog that it had recently opened as a channel for dialogue with its readers, the Washington Post today followed the same road that the L.A. Times went down last year when it shut down an experiment with wiki-based editorial reviews. Instead of grappling with the flood of input from their customers, these institutions are throwing up their hands and reasserting the one authority that they are most comfortable with — control of the mike.

The Post had been trying to contain a brewing controversy over a piece by its ombudsman, Deborah Howell, which enraged many readers by stating (incorrectly, as Howell eventually admitted) that Democrats as well as Republicans had received contributions from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. (It’s Abramoff’s clients that directed some portion of their cash toward Democrats, though the lion’s share seems to have wound up in Republican pockets.)

Post readers thronged the paper’s blog with complaining comments. Unfortunately, we can’t read those comments now and decide for ourselves whether the Post was right to turn them off — the paper didn’t just block further comments, it effaced the entire body of reader contributions.

CBS News blogger Vaughn Ververs reports that the many comments he read were angry or disrespectful and many called for Howell’s head, but they weren’t “hate speech” or explicitly personal attacks. Of course, maybe we never saw those: A “late update” to Post Web editor Jim Brady’s discussion of the decision suggests that Post editors were already pounding the “delete” key like mad, and getting tired.

What’s obvious is that, like the L.A. Times before it, the Post was sadly clueless about how to deal with the situation. If, in 2006, you’re an iconic media institution that’s seeking to give the public a platform to vent its disagreements and complaints, you should plan for a certain volume of problems. You should expect some disrespect. You should state what standards you intend to enforce, and you should have a plan for how you expect to enforce them.

Instead, we have the repeat spectacle of newspapers naively opening their doors — imagining, it seems, that they are going to have a little tea party with their readers — and then, shocked at the volume and the vitriol, slamming the same door shut again.

Ververs tries to lay some of the blame for the Post’s abrupt retreat at the users’ feet: “More than that, the news audience has been terribly served by a few loudmouths incapable of having a rational discussion….Real dialogue, after all, is a two-way street.”

I don’t doubt that there were a lot of obnoxious loudmouths posting screeds on the Post blog. But that’s a given, an inevitability. Hosting any kind of forum means taking measures to keep the loudmouths from swamping the rest of the speakers.

I wouldn’t expect newspaper editors to start out as experts in that difficult art. But it’s not too much to expect them to try to learn it — or simply to acknowledge that, if they want to host a dialogue, it’s part of their job.

Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing and Search Engine Watch have more on Google and COPA: it seems that several other search engines, including Yahoo and MSN, complied with the government’s demand for log files. Only Google is putting up a fight.

My friend Josh Kornbluth, in Philadelphia to perform his great Ben Franklin solo show as part of the city’s celebration of the Franklin birthday tercentenary, got robbed — but that didn’t stop him from posting this moving little story and tribute to Franklin, the power of song, and more. Go read it.

Salon — along with the ACLU and a diverse group of plaintiffs — has been in the thick of the fight against the misguided and, we believe, unconstitutional Child Online Protection Act since 1998. The argument went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2004. Having lost the five-year-long preliminary round, the Bush Administration is taking the matter to full trial. And guess who’s getting dragged into the argument? Google, and all its users for an entire week — among whom, most likely, are you and me.

The Mercury News reports today on this strange turn of events. It appears that the Bush Justice Department believes that, somehow, a gigantic, indiscriminate data dump of a week’s worth of search engine activity logs will help it demonstrate that the 1998 law is not a censorship measure at all but rather an effective measure limiting minors’ access to online porn.

It’s a peculiar idea, given the vast volume of Net smut that originates outside of U.S. jurisdiction, the reasonable effectiveness of search engines’ own decency filters and the likely use of the law by prosecutors to go after uppity publishers. But it’s of a piece with the rest of the new Imperial Presidency’s tactics: When in doubt, seize as much private citizens’ information as you can and see what kind of a case you can patch together!

Just as we are supposed to let the Bush Administration decide in secret when and how to break the wiretap laws, we are supposed to trust it to use discretion in applying this broadly-worded statute — which punishes all publishers of material considered “harmful to minors” with fines of up to $50,000 and imprisonment of up to six months for each day of publishing such material, unless the publisher puts it behind a wall of credit-card verification.

Relax, says the administration lawyers — we’ll only go after the real bad guys. If you’re a legitimate publisher, you’ll be okay. Why am I not reassured? I’d be wary of any government receiving that power; this particular administration long ago squandered any trust it might have possessed.

Note the error in the Mercury copy, which reads, “The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content inaccessible to minors.” I assume the paper meant, “accessible.” Actually, who knows what the law was meant to do? All that’s certain is that, if it is ever enforced, it will give the government a potent new weapon to use against any online publisher it doesn’t like, if said publisher dares to post non-PG-rated material.

I know I’ve already lit into Lloyd Braun, Yahoo’s Hollywood guy, but it’s irresistible.

Today’s Journal carried news of his latest plot to bring TV-style hit shows to the Web — a revival of the long-forgotten, ill-starred reality show “The Runner.”

Braun’s aim, the Journal reports, is “For Yahoo to create the first mass-market Internet hit, which would do for the medium what ‘The Sopranos’ did for pay cable or Milton Berle did in the early days of broadcast TV.”

Now, this is not a direct quote from Braun. Maybe he’s not as dumb as the Journal summary implies.

That aside, well, Braun needs to be brought up to speed about the Web. And wait, he’s in luck! All he needs to do is hop on his private plane and fly up to Sunnyvale and sit down with two guys named Jerry Yang and Dave Filo. They can tell him a lot about what a “mass-market Internet hit” really is. Yang and Filo created the very first one; it was even a reality show of a sort — just a little directory of Web sites that evolved into the juggernaut we now know as Yahoo.

Some other Internet hits Braun could study: Amazon. EBay. Napster. Linux, Apache and open source. You fill in the rest.

Sure, these are not “shows” at all — they’re complex hybrids of businesses, services and communities in which people connect and, in a sense, perform for one another.

That is what a “hit” on the Web looks like. Few of us could see that a decade ago. To not see it today is just plain blind. Braun’s quest for a mass-market “hit show” on the Web displays a complete misapprehension of its nature.

I get this picture of a TV executive in the early ’50s. Someone who worked in the movies until this new thing came along. He sits, fretting, in his office. He knows exactly what he’s looking for — that first breakthrough TV show, one so compelling, so overwhelmingly great that people would want to see it in a movie theater!

I have returned to work at Salon — more on that, and what I’m up to, anon. But first, a meditation on “life hacks.”

I attended the original “Life Hacks” talk that Danny O’Brien gave at the Emerging Technology Conference in 2004 and was intrigued to learn how leading geeks organized their lives and files. (For instance, store everything in plain text files — they’ll never become obsolete or unusable, like fancier file formats.) When Merlin Mann started up his personal-productivity blog I was further hooked. There’s something irresistible about observing how software engineers apply the inhumanly rigorous logic of their calling to the mess of daily life: Sometimes it’s like a train wreck, but often the rest of us can learn something.

Life hacks now appears to be something of a minimovement, with its own Gawker Media blog called Lifehacker and an O’Reilly book apparently in the works. This page on Mann’s site offers a fine overview of the sort of “Hints from Heloise” meets “The Wisdom of Crowds” stuff we’re talking about here. Suggestions range from the violently ingenious (“Keyboard improvement — For those with a PC keyboard who don’t have perfect typing skills: rip out the ‘insert’ and ‘caps lock’ keys…”) — to the sneakily devious (“Messy house? Always keep several get well cards on the mantel….. so if unexpected guests arrive, they will think you’ve been sick and unable to clean”).

So here is my little contribution to the great parade of Life Hacks.

I have long felt that time spent matching socks is time lost forever. There is no edification, no lesson to be mastered, no pleasure to be wrung from the ordeal. Music can alleviate the boredom but not fully redeem the experience. I have achieved the zen of washing dishes, and even the tao of sorting laundry. But socks — nah.

So here is my method allowing you to Never Ever Sort Socks Again (patent pending):

(1) Throw out all your old socks (or donate them, if they’re presentable).

(2) Decide what color socks you need. The fewer colors the better. I’ve gone minimalist-retro: there’s the black socks, and there’s the white socks, and that’s it.

(3) Purchase large quantities of socks in those colors. You can get different brands/makes for each color, as long as all socks of the same color are exactly the same.

(4) Just dump the socks in your dresser drawer as is from the clean wash — don’t sort or pair them. When you need a pair, grab any two of the same color — they’re guaranteed to match!

Your socks will all be of the same vintage, and as long as you mix them up periodically and don’t let some languish at the bottom of the drawer, they will wear evenly. When they become grimy or sprout holes — go back to step (1).

This method comes to you fully tested. I have eaten my own dogfood. It works, I promise you.

But wait, you say you want color and variety and style and pizazz in your life?

I say: buy some sweaters!

Intel has a big new consumer technology initiative. The company is reaching beyond the corporate and engineering worlds that it calls home and trying to make further inroads into the home. So why does its new platform have a name that defies pronunciation and looks like a typographical error?

Viiv. When I first saw a reference to it, I thought, gee, those crazy geeks, playing games with Roman numerals again! (OK, I studied Latin for too long.)

Rhymes with “peeve”? Apparently not. According to this morning’s Wall Street Journal, it is supposed to be pronounced “five.” Gee, that’s obvious! And even if Intel’s gajillions of ads pound it into the heads of consumers everywhere that when they see “Viiv” they should think “Five,” still, why? Five what?

Doesn’t Intel have enough money to pay someone to do this stuff right? Or perhaps they paid someone too much. Considering how successful the company was with “Intel Inside,” which it has now decided to ditch, this move strikes me as vwacky.

I don’t have as low an opinion of Edge in general as Dave Pollard does, and I found the site’s annual Q&A intriguing as always: this year, John Brockman asked his assembled literati, digerati and cognoscenti to answer the question, “What is Your Dangerous Idea?” I enjoyed skimming the answers, but also enjoyed Pollard’s rejoinder of his own list. Two of my favorites from the latter:

Read the whole thing.