Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Google, Slate and the reality of COPA

January 26, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg

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.

Filed Under: Politics, Salon, Technology

More on COPA and Google

January 19, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg

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.

Filed Under: Media, Technology

Hitsville Yahoo

January 16, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg

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!

Filed Under: Media, Technology

Viiv easy pieces

January 5, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg

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.

Filed Under: Technology

Quicken little

January 2, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg

Over the weekend the New York Times business section published a slightly damp kiss for Intuit, the maker of Quicken. I wouldn’t have paid the piece much mind except for two things, one trivial and the other less so.

The photo for the piece showed Intuit execs who were, according to the caption, “working out problems in software.” But if you looked at the picture you actually saw two guys moving Post-it notes around a whiteboard. In previous posts I’ve noted the unexpected value that software developers have found in this low-tech information-management and project-planning tool; I even found my own use for them in outlining my book. More evidence: Stickies rule!

More importantly, I have to say that this paean to Quicken left out one huge problem with the product. I’ve used Quicken for something like 12 years now to manage my finances, carrying my data from an early Quicken for Windows over to Quicken for Mac (in the mid 90s) and then back the Windows in the late 90s. I’ve found that the Windows version has steadily, if slowly, improved since I finally settled on it. I tend to upgrade about once every four years. When I recently upgraded from the 2002 edition to the 2005 version I was thrilled to discover that the helpful but slow-moving wizards at Intuit had finally, after all these years, made it possible for you to merge transaction categories without requiring you to go back and manually reassign each transaction (something no sane person with years of records would ever undertake, making merges effectively impossible). Progress!

My Mac-based wife wants to get her Quicken into better shape and reorganize some of those barnacled categories, so we upgraded her version from 2003 to 2006. Intuit charges twice as much for the Mac version — and, for your extra dough, throws in only half the features. Now there’s a business model. Among other things, the category-merging feature that Windows users enjoy, and that was the whole point of our upgrade, is not available on the Mac. (Macintouch offers a host of other gripes from Mac hands.)

The whole experience has left me disgruntled and eager to explore the variety of Quicken alternatives on the Mac platform. And the Times piece, by praising the company’s revitalization of the Quicken product line without noting how poorly it treats its Mac customers, did a small disservice to this small but passionate and legendarily vocal population of users.

Filed Under: Business, Technology

Frog review

November 28, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg

Frogs reviewing web sites? I don’t know why they’re frogs, but they’re funny, and they’re right about Ticketmaster…

Filed Under: Media, Technology

Hundred dollar laptop debate

November 28, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg

There’s been a lot of press about the effort being led by Nicholas Negroponte and others to develop a $100 laptop. It appears to be a well-intentioned plan, but like so many tech-industry causes, it seems to be starting from the position of “we’ve got the answers” instead of asking good questions and listening to people’s needs. That, at any rate, is the thoughtful analysis offered here and here by personal-computing pioneer Lee Felsenstein, who has done his own work in the area of bringing computing to rural third-world communities

Filed Under: Technology

Programmers and cuisine

November 28, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg

I’ve spent a lot of time attempting to fathom the mindset and thought patterns of software engineers in the course of my labors on my book. Two sites that reflect the collision of programmers and cuisine are fascinating in their own right: First, there’s Cooking for Engineers, which applies an analytical mindset to techniques for cooking bacon or making Rice Krispies treats. (Shades of the Twinkies Project!) After indulging in such fare, you can have a look at the Hacker’s Diet, in which Autodesk founder John Walker explains the essential similarities between computing systems and the human body (garbage in, garbage out; calories in, calories out).

Filed Under: Culture, Dreaming in Code, Technology

All your Google Base are belong to — whom?

November 22, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg

Like many others, I have been trying to figure out what Google Base is all about. Plainly most of the world sees it as a repository for classified ads, and thereby competition to both old-school businesses (newspapers etc.) and newer Web enterprises like Craigslist.

But it also seems to be intended as a way for people to pump large quantities of any information at all directly into the Google searchstream. Since Google is where so many of us go first when we’re looking for stuff, Google seems to be saying, give us your information directly so others can find it.

In some ways this is the ultimate “Web 2.0” play — just open up the gates to a world of users “information,” see what they put in, and make it accessible.

But I’ve now spent some time on the Google Base Help and FAQ pages and I still can’t really figure out the answers to some basic questions. Like: If I post a whole lot of material and then want to remove it in bulk, can I? Can I export stuff as easily as I import it? How does Google Base know who I am and that I am who I say I am? Is there an open interface that allows other services access to the information in Google Base the way they would have access to it if it were published on my own Web site? And so on. Maybe if I were using Google Base these questions would be easier to answer. But really, this product could have used some better framing, and perhaps some better thinking.

I’m all for experiments in moving the Web forward toward its programmable destiny, and it could be that Google Base’s structure and openness will emerge more clearly and favorably over time. Right now, I am uncomfortable with what Google Base seems to be all about — piling tons of information into containers owned and operated by a company that is less than fully transparent. I’d rather see a world in which a myriad of individual, independent content providers (i.e., Web users, i.e., people) publish stuff, and then mark it up with discoverable tags and XML annotations that allow Google and other third parties to organize and use that stuff in cool ways. In the latter scenario, I remain closer to what I’m publishing, I can reorganize it as necessary and control its fate more easily, and there’s a plainer connection between who I am and what is connected to my name.

Filed Under: Business, Technology

EFF Drive

November 16, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been fighting good fights on the Internet since the early 1990s — it was doing so even before there was a Salon. Most recently the EFF has begun doing important work on behalf of the emerging blogosphere, as complex and confusing issues about bloggers’ rights as citizens and journalists begin to be adjudicated in court.

They’ve got a membership and fundraising drive on right now. If you’re a blogger and want to help out, there are ways you can do so, here. Even if you’re not, think about joining and donating. I just did (that is, I moved beyond thinking about it, and actually did it!).

Filed Under: Politics, Technology

« Previous Page
Next Page »