Hand-forged posts since 2002
As in “away from blog.”
I spent much of this past week at Etech but the blog posts from the conference have gotten way backlogged, and now I’m off for a family vacation marking the annual rite of spring break at my kids’ school.
So everything will have to…wait.
Alberto Gonzales has bigger problems these days, but his Justice Department just lost the latest round in a longstanding Internet censorship conflict.
The Child Online Protection Act went on trial again in recent months, and today, again, a federal court has struck down the law — which would require commercial online publishers like Salon to make sure that their readers are over 18 or face criminal prosecution for publishing material that might be “harmful to minors.” Publishers are supposed to be able to protect themselves from prosecution by requiring site visitors to register with their credit cards, thus ostensibly demonstrating their adult status.
The law is supposedly only aimed at commercial pornographers, but the law is absurdly vague. Somehow, publishers are supposed to trust the Justice Department to make the right call and understand who is a “bad” publisher and who isn’t. Placing such trust was problematic when the law was passed, under the Clinton administration; in the era of Bush justice, doing so would be utterly foolish.
Here’s the decision, which concludes that:
COPA facially violates the First and Fifth Amendment rights of the plaintiffs because: (1) COPA is not narrowly tailored to the compelling interest of Congress; (2) defendant has failed to meet his burden of showing that COPA is the least restrictive and most effective alternative in achieving the compelling interest;
and (3) COPA is impermissibly vague and overbroad.
I am proud that Salon has been a plaintiff in this suit since 1998, when the ACLU first launched it. (Here’s my account of the 1994 oral arguments before the Supreme Court in an earlier phase of the COPA fight.) I have no idea whether, defeated at every turn, the Justice Department will drag this proceeding into another decade by appealing it. In the meantime, we can take another deep breath and be glad for the victory.
Here’s the AP story. And here’s a post by Salon editor Joan Walsh, who testified in this most recent round of the case. And here’s the ACLU’s page. And here’s CNET’s story.
[tags]copa, aclu, child online protection act, salon, internet censorship[/tags]
Today’s Journal features an op-ed piece by Edward Jay Epstein on the recent confession by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (“KSM”). The article is headlined “KSM’s Confession.” The subhead (that’s how it appears online — in the print paper, it appears as a blow-up quote) reads: “New Questions About the Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda.”
I’d read the general coverage of this event, in which the imprisoned al Qaeda leader confessed to a long list of attacks and crimes. I hadn’t followed it in great detail, but I couldn’t recall anything in the confessions that seemed to offer any real news about the long-discredited notion that, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam and al Qaeda were in cahoots (they were, it was reasonably clear before the war and even more evident today, enemies).
So I read the Epstein piece closely, looking for “new questions” about “the link” that never was. And, strangely, though the article discusses many subtleties about the information the 9/11 commission relied on, about possible connections between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks, and other complex intelligence issues, the name “Saddam” does not appear once in the piece. There is virtually nothing in the article about putative links between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
There is only one paragraph that even mentions Iraq: that’s where one of the 1993 bombmakers, a guy named Abdul Rhaman Yasin, fled. But the notion that this reopens the question of a Saddam-Qaeda link depends on a long list of conditionals — If KSM is telling the truth (which Epstein says is a big question); if the network KSM used to plot the 9/11 attack also drew on support from his former cohorts from 1993; if one of those supporters was the Baghdad-protected Yasin. There are no “new questions” at all; there is, at best, a set of preliminary question that, should they all align in one direction, might set up a new question or two. That may be why Epstein himself confines the matter to a convoluted aside in his article, which mostly focuses on what he views as mistakes made by the 9/11 commission (which he’s writing a book about).
Is it possible that someone at the Wall Street Journal editorial page is still clutching desperately at the thinnest reeds of justification for the Iraq war, still trying to put flesh on the ghastly skeleton of Dick Cheney’s misleading claims about the Saddam-Osama axis, still doing everything possible to burn the phrase “link between Saddam and al Qaeda” into our consciousness?
Oh, right, it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable.
I was all set to dive into “No Silver Bullet” for the next Code Reads, but given last night’s news of the passing away of John Backus, father of FORTRAN, I thought I would do a quick revision of the plan.
The next Code Reads will focus on Backus’s 1977 Turing lecture, “Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?” It’s full of equations and math notation that, superficially at least, look daunting to this reader — but I will give it a try, and perhaps the collective expertise of all of you will help bolster me in those areas where I falter!
Jay Rosen and his team at NewAssignment.net, a sort of citizen-journalism or “open source reporting” lab, have unveiled their first project: Assignment Zero, a coproduction between Rosen’s group and Wired News. The focus of the work is an attempt to create a comprehensive study of the phenomenon known variously as “crowdsourcing” or distributed peer-production. This is precisely the form NewAssignment.net’s journalism takes. So, depending on whether you’re a glass-half-full or -empty type, there’s either a lovely form-follows-function dynamic happening, or the whole undertaking is hopelessly involuted and self-referential.
I’m betting that Jay’s idea is worth pursuing. There’s stuff to be learned here. Eventually this technique needs to be cut loose from introspection and trained on topics that are less “meta.” That, of course, is already taking place informally — most vigorously and impressively, to me, over at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. But I can see the value for NewAssignment to get its feet wet with one immersive overview of the field before it takes a deeper plunge.
I’ve been on the site’s advisory board from early on, and now I’ve volunteered to take on one of the literally hundreds of assignments the project has been broken down into — manageable morsels of reporting that will eventually be assembled into a tapestry of information. There’s lots of work for NewAssignment still in making its site easier to use; that will come in time. In the meantime, Rosen’s looking for more volunteers — pros and amateurs, people who want to do reporting and people who want to help organize the project.
Friday’s Wall Street Journal included a book review of Almost Human: Making Robots Think,
That work, it seems, has its frustrations, and — as the reviewer, George Anders, tells it — the difficulties sound eerily like those recounted in Dreaming in Code’s description of the things that make software hard:
Mr. Gutkind’s second big insight involves Carnegie-Mellon’s approach to project management. It’s awful. Goals aren’t defined. Interim deadlines aren’t met. Crucial subsystems turn out to be incompatible. People rely on all-nighters to get everything finished. Such bad habits invite catastrophic blunders by exhausted people whose last-minute “fixes” snarl everything else.
In the most maddening breakdown of all, the scientists devising research projects seldom communicate well with the engineers trying to build them. Even the word “target” becomes a sore spot. To scientists, it means their working hypothesis. To engineers, it means the robot’s physical destination. Unaware of this gap, supposed colleagues get mired in confusing conversations.
Gutkind’s book is now on my “must read” list. One final irony to me, coming out of Dreaming in Code, is that Carnegie Mellon is not only home to Gutkind’s roboticists; it also harbors the Software Engineering Institute, which is ground zero for the CMM, CMMI, TSP and other acronymic attempts to add a framework of engineering rigor around the maddeningly difficult enterprise of producing new software. I might be jumping the gun (not having read Gutkind’s book yet), but it sounds like those roboticists and the SEI people should have lunch some time.
One of the more common criticisms of Dreaming in Code is that some people are disappointed the book ends without a clear resolution to the Chandler story (which was still unfolding at the beginning of 2006, as I wrapped up my work on the book, and is still unfolding today). So my ears perked up last week as I listened to NPR’s Weekend Edition and heard its film critic, Elvis Mitchell, defending the David Fincher movie Zodiac (which I haven’t seen and have no opinion about) from Scott Simon’s complaint that it lacked a satisfying wrap-up. Mitchell argued that the whole movie is an homage to the ’70s indie-film aesthetic and that a willingness to tell stories without providing a traditional ends-tying conclusion was a hallmark of that era’s directors.
Here’s the passage:
SIMON: The film doesn’t tie anything together with a pretty — or in this case, since you’re talking about a murder, an ugly — series of bows. I know it’s real life, I know there was no way of avoiding it; but I found tht dramatically unsatisfying — to go through this long movie, and not have that at the end.
MITCHELL: It’s so funny you say that, Scott, because that’s a ’70s movie ethic — they’d say, basically, you can’t say that things are tied up anymore, these aren’t John Wayne movies, these aren’t Jimmy Stewart movies, these aren’t Henry Fonda movies. The real act of creative bravery in Zodiac is to follow with that, and to say that this is what these movies were, these movies that influenced me as a filmmaker, and I’m going to use that here, in a case where people really want that kind of closure, and not give it to them.
I can’t claim that my choice to conclude Dreaming in Code the way I did was any sort of statement of allegiance to authors or auteurs past. More, it was just a belief that, in non-fiction, you’d better let the shape of the story be dictated by reality and not wishful thinking.
I am proud to announce that Dreaming in Code is now in its third printing.
No, it’s not on any bestseller lists. (That I know of!) As a hit, it is of the slow-burn kind. But it’s selling well enough to give me a gentle feeling of vindication towards those observers who, at various stages of the project, doubted that a detailed chronicle of a software project with no world-changing heroic outcome or billion-dollar payoff could attract many more readers than you could count on the fingers of one RSI-addled hand.
Like any introspective and at least marginally neurotic writer, I of course had a voice in my own head saying similar things. So it gives me some calm satisfaction to note the book’s success and to continue to read the generous flow of comments, kudos and criticisms flowing back at me from the blogosphere and the media.
In recent coverage, Glenn Fleishman (in the Seattle Times) said that — since I ended up “adrift with an intrepid crew, a host of dogs and an ample food supply” yet found that “After three years, no land was in sight” — I should be humming the Gilligan’s Island theme. (Okay, but only in one of the punk cover versions!)
In the Chicago Tribune, Mark Coatney said that “Rosenberg clearly knows what he’s talking about and knows how to tell a story.”
Still, my favorite pro-media review to date appeared in the Irish Times (alas, behind a pay wall) — perhaps because, despite the mainstream venue, the author is the estimable geekographer Danny O’Brien, creator of the NTK newsletter, progenitor of the Life Hacks movement and (I think) currently a staffer at the EFF. Here’s a bit of the review:
Books like Rosenberg’s do a great job at allowing us to step away from the keyboard and see our foibles as others might see them. His skill in portrayal lies not just in explaining the tribulations of the software project to the layman, it also lies in explaining them afresh to the seasoned — and therefore oblivious — hacker.
His mastery in picking just the right metaphor to pull an obscure coding controversy into the common world is unparalleled: I’ve never seen the difference between software’s “back-end” and “front-end” portrayed better than in Rosenberg’s analogy between the incomprehensible R2D2 and its fey, deferential interpreter, C3PO.
But even more impressive (at least, to me) is his ability to uncover anecdotes and connections that even the most oversurfing geek would not have heard. Even for me, an obsessive follower of the trivia of tech culture, there were genuine surprises in every chapter…
…It’s perhaps forgivable that such great literature on programming should happen so rarely: the mix of tech skills, explanatory abilities, and sheer determination to trail and document what from the outside looks as exciting as an accountant’s meditation retreat, is rare among writers of Rosenberg’s calibre. But we badly need those books to be written.
I’m reading the otherwise perfectly reasonable New York Times piece on the Viacom/Youtube lawsuit and I encounter this bizarre misrepresentation of recent history:
“In the early 1990s music companies let Web companies build business models on the back of their copyright,” said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “I think the video industry is being more aggressive for the right reasons, to protect the future value of those assets.”
It’s hard to imagine how one could find more ways to be wrong on this topic.
First, there were no “Web companies” in the early 1990s; the first Web companies emerged in 1994-5 — and aside from some unusual efforts, like Michael Goldberg’s Addicted to Noise zine, there was not a lot of music happening on the Web. The MP3 revolution didn’t begin to roll until late 1997 or early 1998 (here is Andrew Leonard’s early report on the MP3 scene, which I edited).
More important, Mr. Nathanson has the history here precisely inverted. What happened in the Napster era was that music companies refused to allow Web companies to build business models on the back of their copyright. They decided that MP3s were all about piracy and they sued Napster out of existence. They refused to do deals with companies that wanted to distribute their music online, and in fact they failed to offer their music online in any way palatable to consumers until Steve Jobs whacked them on the side of the head — and even then they saddled his whole iTunes enterprise with a cumbersome “digital rights management” scheme that even he is now disowning.
The Viacom suit against YouTube does not represent a break with the way the music industry dealt with its rocky transition to the digital age; it is an instance of history repeating itself. The RIAA strategy of “sue your customers” may have succeeded in driving file-sharing underground, but it didn’t do anything to protect the profits of the music industry, which have been in a tailspin ever since. If the Viacom suit is an indication that the owners of TV shows and movies are going to pursue a similar strategy of I’d-rather-sue-than-deal, they may find themselves in a similar downward spiral.
Google has a pretty good case based on the 1996 Telecommunications Act safe harbor provision. If Viacom fails to win against its corporate opponent, will it start suing all the Jon Stewart fans (and, possibly, the show’s own staff) who are uploading clips to YouTube?
If the TV and film industries look carefully at the music industry’s story, they will see that their danger lies not in being too soft on copyright infringers but rather in missing the tidal wave of a platform shift.
[tags]youtube, google, viacom, napster, drm[/tags]
I should be on KQED Forum tomorrow (Tuesday) at 10 AM Pacific time, if all goes as planned, talking about Dreaming in Code. Tune in — or call in!
I’ve now concluded my two week stint in the Well’s Inkwell conference — a slow-motion interview about the book that goes a little deeper in various ways than some of the other conversations I’ve had about the book. (Unlike most stuff on the Well, this is “world-readable” — no membership required.)