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Web Domains

Today’s the 25th anniversary of the first .com registration. And no, the registrant wasn’t IBM (March 19, 1986), Apple (February 19, 1987) or even Microsoft (May 2, 1991). It was Boston-area AI firm Symbolics.

According to Wired, only 5 domains were registered in 1985. Once the Web was invented, domain registrations skyrocketed. And a mere 22 years later icanhascheezburger.com was born.

Fandango Mobile Tickets

Airlines have been testing cellphone-based paperless tickets for a couple of years now. Now Fandango’s testing mobile movie tickets in 8 U.S. markets — all of ‘em *not* Philly, btw. (What’s so special about Houston? They were the first city in which mobile airline boarding passes were tested. Now they’re in the first Fandango test group. Sheesh.)

Google vs. Apple

The NY Times gives us a good overview of the deteriorating relationship between Apple and Google. The following quote …

“It’s World War III. Amazing animosity is motivating two of the most powerful people in the industry. This is emotional. This is the biggest ego battle in history. It’s incendiary.”

… pretty much sums up the tone of the piece. (So does the URL for the story: 14brawl.html.) Anyway, it’s all about the mobile market.

Google vs. China

Not content with merely taking on a company that qualifies as a small country, the Big G has also decided to take on #3 on the world list. I refer to China. After calling them out on spying charges back in January, Google is real close to deciding to pull the plug on Google.cn. That means Chinese users who manage to circumvent the Great Firewall will get unfiltered content. And that makes the Chinese authorities real twitchy.

After yesterday’s crazy guilty verdict for 3 Google execs in the Italian YouTube case, I decided to do a quick-and-dirty recap of the state of Internet censorship in the European countries with the highest rates of Internet access.

Germany

Last week German President Horst Kohler signed a law aimed at blocking access to child porn sites. That law was introduced by the previous coalition government. It was very unpopular and the new government doesn’t want to enforce it:

“The German government now finds itself in the embarrassing situation of having a law it no longer wants. Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said Wednesday that the government was unanimous that it would not apply the new law. ‘New regulations will quickly be introduced that correspond to the principle of deleting rather than blocking access,’ she said. The Interior Ministry also said in a statement that the government plans to introduce a new law reflecting the new approach. Until that law is passed, the government’s position is that offensive sites should be deleted, rather than access blocked, the statement said.”

UK

The Internet Watch Foundation is the choke point that “combat[s] online child sexual abuse content in partnership with police, government and the online industry”. The only problem, according to Frank Fisher of The Guardian, is:

“The IWF, a notionally independent charity, in fact acts as a quasi-governmental clearing house for every nutjob with a bee in his bonnet about other people’s surfing habits. Without any legal authority or legislative backing, this secretive group prepares a list of prohibited IP addresses, which it forwards to ISPs, and to the British government. We’re not privy to any information regarding the British government’s own additions to the list – they could add anything. No one outside a tiny department in the Home Office would know.”

France

A law making its way through the French parliament would, if approved, allow the government to block access to “criminal” Websites. Again, this is all under the guise of fighting child porn. Unlike the UK system, the French Interior Ministry would maintain the list of banned sites.

Did I mention that this is an election year?

“The French government’s hard line should not surprise anyone. In a few weeks’ time, regional elections will take place in France. In the 2004 regional elections, Sarkozy’s UMP party did particularly badly. By showing himself to be a tough leader, Sarkozy hopes to avoid history repeating itself and shore up support for his policies … He is hoping that fear of criminals will convince voters to come to the polling booths. In that respect, there is no more suitable issue than child pornography on the Internet and the hunt for pedophile criminals whose only desire is to seduce innocents via their home computers. According to that argument, it is necessary to impose controls on the digital world and introduce state surveillance, so that a pro-active Big Brother can fight the cyber world’s sexual deviants who are, in all likelihood, lurking on Facebook or Twitter.”

Italy

The NY Times reports today that the case may not have been about “protecting human dignity,” as the prosecutor said:

“In Italy, where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi owns most private media [including television stations - ed.] and indirectly controls public media, there is a strong push to regulate the Internet more assertively than it is controlled elsewhere in Europe. Several measures are pending in Parliament here that seek to impose various controls on the Internet. Critics of Mr. Berlusconi say the measures go beyond routine copyright questions and are a way to stave off competition from the Web to public television stations and his own private channels — and to keep a tighter grip on public debate.”

Or maybe not. Italian judge Oscar Magi yesterday convicted 3 Google executives — David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes — of violating Italian privacy laws in the case of a YouTube video uploaded by students tormenting a handicapped classmate. Google removed the offending video immediately once it was notified about it, but apparently that wasn’t enough for the Italian court.

When I blogged about this previously, I asked, “Does this make sense to you?” I’m still asking this question. Why doesn’t Google have a safe harbor in this case? Google wants to know, too:

“But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.”

… But this appears, at first blush, to be a *huge* privacy no-no by Lower Merion School District.

In a civil suit filed in U.S. Eastern District Court, school administrators are accused of “indiscriminate use of and ability to remotely activate the webcams incorporated into each laptop issued to students by the School District.” At the heart of the case is a Harriton High student who was disciplined by the school for “improper behavior in his home.” The school produced an image from his webcam as evidence.

Read the last 2 sentences again. Doesn’t that sound real chilling? Doesn’t that sound like:

“The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

UPDATE, February 19: Here’s Lower Merion’s response:

“The District is dedicated to protecting and promoting student privacy. The laptops do contain a security feature intended to track lost, stolen and missing laptops. This feature has been deactivated effective today … The tracking-security feature was limited to taking a still image of the operator and the operator’s screen. This feature has only been used for the limited purpose of locating a lost, stolen or missing laptop. The District has not used the tracking feature or web cam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever.”

UPDATE, February 20: Now the FBI’s investigating. LMSD spokesman Doug Young also said that the district activated webcams 42 times over the last 14 months, and that it “never violated its policy of only using the remote-activation software to find missing laptops. ‘Infer what you want,’ Young said.”

And it’s not Facebook. It’s Google’s new Google Buzz, which is a Facebook/Twitter hybrid product. It’s supposed to be plug-and-play: you set up your profile and Google determines your social circle based upon whom you Gmail the most. But it’s got some privacy issues, viz.:

(1) Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider is one (of many) who takes Google to task for revealing Buzz users’ closest contacts to the world:

“But we have a message for the brilliant people behind Google Buzz (and the rest of Google’s products): the rest of the world is NOT like you. These privacy concerns aren’t for the incredibly computer savvy, the patient beta testers, or Twitter and Facebook power users. Our concerns are for the people who, when encountering a new service, click ‘save and continue’ until it is completely set-up and functional, reading as little text in various dialogue boxes as they can. These people are the people we call the ‘normals’. Some of these ‘normals’ are physicians or mental health professionals who have patients they email with. Some of these people are journalists (ahem!) dealing with anonymous sources. Some of these people are spouses who are finding a safe way out of bad marriages with the help of someone their spouse doesn’t know about. Some of them are junior staffers, secretly arranging to get a 50% raise going to a new company to become a manager for the first time.”

Google has made some changes to Buzz to address these issues, but again, “normals” probably won’t take advantage of them.

UPDATE, February 14: Google has made further changes. Buzz now suggests people to follow instead of auto-following your closest contacts. You can also opt-out of publicly displaying your contacts.

(2) Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch says that Buzz inadvertantly exposes private email addresses:

“Google Buzz borrows the @reply convention from Twitter so that if you want to reply to someone or direct a comment to them you simply put the @ sign in front of their name. Google autosuggests names from your contact list as you start typing. Normally, this doesn’t cause any problems if you select the Gmail account or chat name associated with that person’s public profile. It ends up posting their name, and not their email address. But if you select a name or account that is not public, Buzz will fill in with their private email. For example, I wanted to direct a comment at TechCrunch writer MG Siegler, so I typed in ‘@mg’ and up came three of his different emails. I picked his TechCrunch email, not realizing that his public profile is linked to a different Gmail account. What this means is that the 231 people following me on Buzz can all see MG’s private email address in my comment even if they had no direct connection to him before.”

Google says that it will be “very obvious that the email address is publicly visible, and you can always edit and/or delete that post.” Schonfeld says that’s expecting too much from the average user, and I agree.

UPDATE, February 14: Google now shows asterisks instead of private email addresses.

The common thread through these 2 problems is that Google puts the burden on the basic user of figuring out the privacy implications of everything they do on Buzz. It’s like they’ve never heard of people accidentally CCing the whole company on a private email.

CNET reports that the FBI wants Internet Service Providers to log the Websites you visit and keep the data for 2 years. Frankly, this does not surprise me, given the government’s predilection towards outsourcing surveillance to the owners of the pipes.

I’ve blogged in the past about how Tor can enable you to surf anonymously. But afaik Tor can’t help you evade your ISP’s prying eyes. You’d have to use a proxy that would encrypt traffic to and from your computer; I can’t see that working out for you very well.

As Sun Microsystems Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy said a few years back, “You have no privacy, get over it.”

Why does this Washington Post article, Google to enlist NSA to help it ward off cyberattacks, remind me of Cory Doctorow’s short story Scroogled?

In the real-world, Google isn’t the security contractor for the U.S. It’s the other way ’round — the NSA is helping Google get a handle on the big Chinese hack they announced last month. I guess it’s just that I’d prefer that there was a — pardon the expression — Chinese wall between a huge info company such as Google and government intelligence agencies. And I’m not the only one who feels that way:

“When you rise to the level of Google . . . you’re looking at a company that has taken great pride in its independence,” said [Matthew] Aid, author of ‘The Secret Sentry,’ a history of the NSA. “I’m a little uncomfortable with Google cooperating this closely with the nation’s largest intelligence agency, even if it’s strictly for defensive purposes.”

Amen.

This morning, two outwardly disparate stories hit my feed reader. But taken together, they spoke to me about privacy in the digital age. I read this one first: A Recluse? Well, Not to His Neighbors. It was an amusing look back at J.S. Salinger’s relationship with his neighbors in Cornish, NH. To them, he wasn’t a crank — he was “just Jerry” — and they respected his need for privacy:

“‘Nobody conspired to keep his privacy, but everyone kept his privacy — otherwise he wouldn’t have stayed here all these years,’ said Sherry Boudro of nearby Windsor, Vt., who said her father, Paul Sayah, befriended Mr. Salinger in the 1970s. ‘This community saw him as a person, not just the author of “The Catcher in the Rye.” They respect him. He was an individual who just wanted to live his life.’ The curious constantly descended on Cornish and the surrounding area, asking residents for directions to Mr. Salinger’s house. Instead of finding the home, intelopers would end up on a wild goose chase. How far afield the directions went ‘depended on how arrogant they were,’ said Mike Ackerman, owner of the Cornish General Store. Mr. Salinger, he said, ‘was like the Batman icon. Everyone knew Batman existed, and everyone knows there’s a Batcave, but no one will tell you where it is.’”

(That’s exactly how Salinger was portrayed in Shoeless Joe, btw, the book upon which the movie Field of Dreams was based. And imho one of the best books ever written.)

Then I viewed the second post, which was a link to a video of Clay Shirkey’s talk, It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure. at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in September 2008. Shirkey talks about the problems of managing privacy, which is essentially managing information flow, in today’s online environment. He gives us the example of a colleague who created a “self-inflicted privacy meltdown” when changing her relationship status on Facebook. Shirkey says it happened because managing online privacy preferences is an “unnatural act”. He points out that prior to the present era, only Greta Garbo — “I want to be alone” — had privacy preferences that worked.

To which I’d add J.D. Salinger. And those two kept their privacy simply by trusting a relatively small, *analog*, circle of people. Once you go digital, the filters will inevitably break (so says Shirkey) and it’s so much easier for information to escape. And then you become just like Ashton Kutcher.