"internet policy" entries
The "New Privacy"
There was a great session on Online Privacy on NPR's Science Friday today, including a guest spot by Emily Vander Veer, the author of O'Reilly's Facebook: The Missing Manual. You can subscribe to the podcast or download today's episode directly. The discussion here is yet another independent confirmation of the new definition of privacy that's emerging in American culture. We…
Network neutrality: how the FCC sees it (Part 1 of 2)
The mere announcement of an FCC hearing on “broadband network
management practices” was a notch in the gun of network neutrality
advocates. Yet to a large extent, the panelists and speakers were like
petitioners who are denied access to the king and can only bring their
complaints to the gardeners who decorate the paths outside his gate. I
wrote a major
analysis two years ago
that I really think still stands as an accurate representation of the
issues. What we’ll end up getting is a formal endorsement of
non-discrimination as a policy that Internet providers must follow,
leading to continual FCC review of current practices by telecom and
cable companies.
US Judge censors WikiLeaks.org by ordering DNS records removed
The BBC and many others report that the international whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.org has been taken down as of this morning. Judge Jeffery White ordered that the WikiLeaks.org domain be removed at the request of Julius Baer Bank & Trust. Not only does the judge order that the site be removed, he orders that the whois privacy protections be turned off…
Amazon S3 / EC2 / AWS outage this morning…
Many of Amazon.com's Web Services were down this morning with some customers reporting outages lasting over three hours. Sites that depend on services that depend on EC2 or S3 are down as well. Failures like this happen in every system, and anyone that promises otherwise is foolish or lying (or both). Amazon does not promise that their systems won't fail,…
Understanding the undersea cable cuts… (updated: "fifth cable cut")
The Fiber Cuts in the Middle East are getting a lot of attention. The economic damage is real and the geopolitical issues are extremely complex (which is why I edited my earlier post). From an operations perspective these kinds of outages are nothing new, and underscore why having "many eggs in few baskets" is such a problem. I believe we…
Failure Happens: Transcontinental fiber-optic submarine cables
The Guardian published a summary of the ongoing impact from the transcontinental fiber-optic submarine cable cuts along with a map from Telegeography.com: According to reports, the internet blackout, which has left 75 million people with only limited access, was caused by a ship that tried to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather on Wednesday. Since then phone…
Privacy 2007: Hiding in the Crowd
Each year I pick out a pressing topic in Internet policy and write a
year-end article summarizing trends in that area for an online
newspaper called the
American Reporter.
It has just published my article
“Privacy 2007: Hiding in the Crowd,”
which may interest Radar readers although it was aimed at more of a
lay audience. I also gave the article a more
permanent URL.
My favorite iPod accessory is my EFF Membership…
If you are searching for accessories for your new iPod or other music player, please consider membership in the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The EFF helps people fight abusive file-sharing lawsuits and is working to provide ways for artists to be paid for their work. The EFF helps ensure we have fair use of our media, which makes membership the…
'Computing in the Cloud' workshop hosted by Princeton University – January 14-15
Marc Hedlund and I will be speaking at the 'Computing in the Cloud' workshop hosted by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton on January 14-15. The sessions look very interesting and registration is free. Panel 1: Possession and ownership of data – In cloud computing, a provider's data center holds information that would more traditionally have been stored…
Reputation: where the personal and the participatory meet up (installment 4 of 4)
Most online work, like other
peer-generated information, is done by volunteers without financial
remuneration. In commons-oriented production, such as Linux and Wikipedia,
everyone derives a shared benefit without money exchanging hands.
Money becomes a factor in peer production when it gets integrated into
a company’s value chain, as with Amazon.com rankings or the kinds of
user innovation networks researched by
Eric von Hippel.
Reputation and privacy used to be a top-down affair between
the collector of information and the person being tracked. Rules get
more complicated in an age of Amazon.com ratings and Facebook Beacon,
where the collector uses the reputation of the individual to affect
the decisions of third parties.
The attempt to stretch reputation to support the
reputation of other people or companies could lead to spam-like
annoyances as well as privacy concerns.