This afternoon at 4:30 I’ll be talking (though not alone… it’s a discussion, not a lecture) at the Ethos Roundtable in Cambridge (the new one with Harvard and MIT, born in 1630-something; not the older one The topic will be The Intention Economy: What happens when free customers prove more valuable than captive ones.

More here.

That same pitch would also do for the VRM Event in Amsterdam on Thursday. I’ll be there too. Big thanks to Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald and friends for putting that together, even as Maarten continues to withstand medical insults in the midst.

If spoilers were as incompetently directed and edited as Quantum of Solace:

Kwantom of Solars begins with this bigg car chase where it luks like a heliokopter is going to smash into a tunnel, but it turns out that the haliockropter is rally just where the camera is. Anyways, Jammes Bond lives at the end of the caar chase. Oh, but first there’s this carr chaise where three carrs are all the same, even the colorr is the same because they’re black, and they’re filmed like all quick and everything. So, one of the carz is going real fast, and another car is oh and there’s a truck, but it’s all smudgy in the shooting, so another carr or maybe the first carr is shooting at the second smudge and then the first smduge, no wait, it was the second no wait it was the third, well, no then the third smudge would be shooting at itself, anyway the blurry one is now the traffic is going the other way and there’s a truck and two of the smudges are clunking up against one and other, and wait one of them probully has Jumms Bornd in it and twank twank you here the zounds of them bullits twanking and it’s really exxciting what harppened?

[Tags: movies james_bond quantum_of_solace spoilers marc_forster incompetent_directors humor ]

If you’re interested in music, or in radio — especially if you’re interested in both — listen (or watch) in on Tim Westergren’s talk, going on right now. Tim founded Pandora, and is its Chief Strategist. My notes…

“We want to fix radio. And we want to fix it globally. And do it for musicians as well as listeners.â€

What they’re doing is heroic, actually.

Tim just talked about Pandora’s brief experience with a subscription model. They let you listen for awhile and then began to charge — and found out listeners would find workarounds to stay in the free zone. “Systemic dishonestyâ€, he called it. This makes me think that VRM is systemic honesty.

“There is going to be a flight to quality,†Tim just said. Good line.

I’m enjoying watching various sub-cultures appropriate Obama as one of their own. Nerds, basketball fans, fantasy football leaguers, Blackberry owners, Mac owners, anti-torture believers in the Constitution…

[Tags: politics obama ]

Root canal

My burning bone
magnified by proximity
smells sweet,
oaky,
Chardonnay.

On a fall day
like this
distance once rendered
the concentration
of molecules
the same.

Strong measures
were in the air.

[Tags: poetry root_canal ]

In case you missed it:

Watch CBS Videos Online

[Tags: obama ]

From 8:02 until 8:58 this morning, I was in the care of an excellent endodentist, having a root canal. At the end of that hour, I was presented with a bill for $1,080, a number I associate more with high definition TVs than with hourly wages.

My endodentist was excellent. She’s highly skilled and had great chair-side manner, narrating each step, and preparing me for every delightful little surprise ( “You’ll feel a dull thud as I jam this this phillips-head screwdriver into your tooth, handle first.†“The smell of your own body burning may be a little pungent.â€) I am old enough to remember when root canal was the standard measure of pain, just as “the length of a football field†is the standard measure of distance and “as many books as in the Library of Congress†is the standard measure of volume, so I have no complaints about a procedure that has become merely uncomfortable with occasional sharp twinges.

But $1,080 an hour? In Boston, that’s seems to be the going rate, albeit at the high end. On the other hand, after dental insurance, it only cost me $1,080….because there’s no practical way for me to get dental insurance.

I seriously don’t understand the pricing model. The endodentist is part of my dentist’s general practice. She shares the facilities and uses the same rooms. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of complex special equipment involved, outside of some rasps, a keyhole saw, and a cash register. She’s had some specialized training, but are root canals really that much more complex than the range of procedures my general dentist can do, from reconstructing a tooth to diagnosing gum problems? Meanwhile, the endodentist is in danger of getting repetitive stress syndrome from doing the same motions — drill, scrape, fill, phone her broker — over and over.

Is it pure scarcity that drives the prices up? At those prices, why is there a scarcity? And why aren’t other dental procedures broken off and priced as exorbitantly? Or is this a residue of the days when root canals were so painful that people wanted to feel like they were getting their money’s worth? [Tags: endodentists root_canals capitalism health_care dentistry_crabby_after_a_root_canal i_don't_understand_economics ]

That’s from a preliminary 70-page review of the literature on the topic. Actual research, not scare stories or assumptions. The draft was put together primarily by Andrew Schrock and danah boyd (of the Berkman Center), for the Research Advisory Board of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. It of course finds some important problems — for example, “the Internet increases children’s risk of ‘unwanted’ (accidental or inadvertent) exposure to sexual material†— but “Threats involving the Internet have not overtaken other harmful issues that youth encounter.†There’s lots and lots of details in the paper. For example:

The Task Force will publish its findings in January.

[Tags: internet child_safety ]

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Charles Nesson
Date: Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 11:36 AM
Subject: american jury
To: IvyGate

what if the net itself became a learning machine

we can identify where the differences are among us

we could engage in process that would moderate them

we the jury of the internet, the court of public opinion

we need questions soundly framed for us

we need established form which if worked to its ideal will provide structured process for us

feel this in the federal rules of civil procedure

what are the rules within civil procedure for processing a claim that an opponent is abusing process

is it a defense for them that they have the congress on their side when we can show the disproportion in lobbying strength between their side and our side

can we as a cyberone class organize effective use of the civil process the plaintiffs claims make available to us to give substance to our counterclaim

I’ve come to look forward to Jason Linkins ultra-snarky live-blogging of the Sunday morning news talk shows. Very funny. Here’s today’s.

[Tags: news jason_linkins snark politics ]

"Online Threats to Youth: Solicitation, Harassment, and Problematic Content" is a draft of the Literature Review that Andrew Schrock and I prepared for the Internet Safety Technical Task Force with the help of members of the Research Advisory Board.

The Internet Safety Technical Task Force was formed to consider the extent to which technologies can play a role in enhancing youth safety in online spaces. The Task Force was collaborative effort among a wide array of Internet service providers, social network sites, academics, educators, and technology vendors. It was created in accordance with the Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Safety announced by the Attorneys General Multi-State Working Group on Social Network Sites and MySpace in January 2008. For more information on the ISTTF, see: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/isttf/

The Task Force asked a Research Advisory Board, comprised of scholars and researchers whose research addresses children’s online safety, to conduct a comprehensive Literature Review of relevant work. This is an early draft of that Literature Review. It was primarily written by Andrew Schrock and danah boyd. Members of the RAB provided valuable feedback and insights, critiques and suggestions. Members of the RAB were selected based on their longstanding, ongoing, and original contributions to this field of research. All members of the RAB are U.S.-based and do research with U.S. populations. This Literature Review – and the scope of the Task Force – is intentionally U.S.-centric.

In January, the Task Force will publish a report documenting its findings. This Literature Review will be an Appendix of that report. We are making a draft of this Literature Review available to the public early because we are seeking public feedback, especially from other scholars whose work is connected to this field. We are currently looking for feedback concerning the breadth, depth, and accuracy of this Literature Review. If you know of original research that we are missing concerning U.S. populations, please let us know immediately. A finalized version of this document will be available in January.

If you have comments or feedback, please email me directly, although you are also welcome to leave comments here.

safety Internet children LitReview ISTTF MySpace Facebook

My friends Susan Crawford, Kevin Werbach and Jim Kohlenberger have joined the Obama team [announcement here].

Susan and Kevin are listed as, "FCC Review Team Lead." I don't know exactly what that means, but it can only be good news for those of us who care about keeping the Internet open and vital.

Jim Kohlenberger shares National Science Foundation review duties with Henry Rivera. Again, good news; federal scientific efforts badly need renewed focus, and I am sure Jim will give it his all!

Technorati Tags: FCC, Obama, KevinWerbach, Science, SusanCrawford

Before:

After:

I just put up a gallery of shots I took as the sun was going down today, and the evacuation barricades were lifted — at least from some of the Tea Fire burn area.

The aerial shot above is from the excellent Live Search Maps. If you want to look around, the top shot is in this view here.

Most of my shots were after the sun went down, so they’re not the best. But they reveal some of what went on at the western edge of the fire perimeter.

Most of the houses north of Sheffield Reservoir (which is now buried beneath a park) were spared. But many along Gibraltar, El Cielito and West Mountain Road (such as the one above, a beautiful house with a view across a pool and Parma Park) were burned. It wrenched my heart to see residents visiting some of these homes. They weren’t all “mansionsâ€, as the out-of-town media called them. Many were not even especially upscale. But most were beautiful, and all were in a beautiful setting. And they were homes. They contained the lives of their residents. Lives that will have to start over in many ways.

We know people who lost homes here. Our hearts go out to them.

One thing that amazed me was how good a job the firefighters did protecting many homes in this area. One official said it would have been reasonable to expect to lose 500 or more homes in a fire like this one.

I head back to the place our kid calls “alt.home†or “shift_home†in Boston tomorrow. Meanwhile I am appreciating every minute I’m here.

Meanwhile, here’s a thankful shout-out to the firefighters who did their best to save what they could. Which happens to be the rest of Santa Barbara.

Bonus pic: Here’s exactly the same area, after the Sycamore Canyon fire in 1977.

[Later...] I’m on a pit stop at the Starbucks Coffee & Reggae Disco in King City, where the music is so loud that people go outside to talk on their cell phones. Just did that myself.

It was weird to hit SCAN on the rental car radio and have it stop at 87.7, where KSBY/Channel 6 in San Luis Obispo was running a live press conference on the Tea Fire from Santa Barbara. I stayed with it until the signal gave out around San Ardo. Meanwhile, here’s what I picked up that matters: Homes were lost on the folowing roads:

They said 210 structures were lost. More than 5000 homes were evacuated across a large area outside the fire perimeter, ours among them.

Only residents with government-issued IDs will be let into the main burn areas: Mountain Road, Conejo, Coyote, a few others.

Okay, hitting the road again. Next stop, SFO. Then BOS and back to work.

[Later...] I’m at SFO now. No time to say more than to look at this map, this City 2.0 summary, and these images and headlines.

Oh, and look at this. It’s the same scene after the 1977 Sycamore Fire. Some home sites have burned three times: In the 1964 Coyote Fire, the Sycamore Fire, and now the Tea Fire.

Well, the Tea Fire has been upstaged by the Sylmar Fire. (Both links are to LA Times stories. Do LA Times stories still drift behind a paywall after a week? Not sure. If so, I’ll change them to more permanent pages later.) Here’s the latest I’ve heard from KCLU radio…

Noozhawk says the number may be as high as 200. Here’s more.

I’m heads-down, finishing a major writing assignment, and won’t be revisiting fire matters until later today. Meanwhile it’s clear that the Tea Fire is in the mopping-up stage, as the life-rebuilding stage has barely begun for hundreds of people here.

A friend just called and said that the barricades are still up, but the cops there also said they expected some areas to be opened within an hour. If you’re in an evacuated area, check with SB County Fire or Montecito Fire.

Other links: fire.ca.gov on Tea Fire, Edhat news, Noozhawk news, SB Independent news, City 2.0 bulletin board… Here are some pictures of the Westmont campus. Amazed it wasn’t much worse.

More later. (Including the pictures I just put up.)

[Later...] Back home. Other parts of town are still barricaded, but ours isn’t. I’m at my desk now, getting to work.

Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur are writing a book on innovative business models that’s due out in May. That seems to them to be too far away, so they’re thinking that maybe for $24 you could get a subscription to their book that provides:

Alex calls this idea a prototype and welcomes comments, as well as suggestions for what other benefits the authors might offer. (He does not require that you pay a subscription to read his blog and comment on this idea itself, however. Recursion is not always a good idea.)

I’m glad they’re floating this idea — because floating ideas rises all tides? — although I am skeptical. This doesn’t sound like a book that’s so urgent that people will pay a 50% premium ($24 + half off the printed version) for some number of out-of-sequence rough drafts. Of course, I could be wrong about that, especially since about a dozen people in the comments to Alex’s post have already said they’d sign up. But, since the authors benefit from comments from early readers, this business model also has a cost to the authors. It limits the community, but maybe it will also gel the community. We won’t know until we know.

These social projects are all in the details. In 2000-1, I wrote Small Pieces Loosely Joinedcompletely in public, posting my current draft every night. I got some excellent commentary and during the dark days of writing that book I received encouragement that was quite important to me. But I inadvertently structured the engagement in way that discouraged readers. The writing process was Penelope-like, so I think I would have done better to have updated the site only when I had finished a complete draft of a chapter. Readers get understandably discouraged by commenting on a draft that is undrafted the next day.

I wrote the next book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, offline for reasons I can’t articulate, except to say that I felt that the book posed a challenge to me as a craftsperson. So, I blogged about the ideas in the book and floated pieces from it in various forms, but I composed the actual text with the door closed. I’m not recommending that. I’m thrilled by the fact that writers now routinely break out of the old “private ’til it’s published†constraint. But there are many ways to do that, as well as times when you shouldn’t do it. There may even be times when you should charge $24 for the service.

All ideas are good until proven otherwise. [Tags: business_models publishing writing Alex_Osterwalder Yves_Pigneur books media ]

Building on the excellent work of OpenNet Initiative as well as many other folks here at Berkman and beyond, the wonderful folks at FLOSS Manuals, have just released a terrific new manual intended to help people use some of the tools and techniques available to circumvent blocking and filtering of the Internet.

You can download it for free at their site, or you can buy a copy via Lulu.com!

Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach are heading Obama’s FCC transition team.

OMG. This makes me so happy. Not only are they amazingly knowledgeable about the issues, they also share Obama’s political temperament: Strong beliefs, an ability to listen, a respect for others that is manifested as gentleness, and a practicality that carries them past mere ideology.

Change is coming to the FCC.

[Tags: fcc susan_crawford kevin_werbach obama net_neutrality ]

From the AP (via my daughter Leah):

[Tags: second_life marriage ]

Craig Newmark has dropped by the Berkman Center to chat. He begins by asking us what we want him to talk about. A voice opts for the history of CraigsList.com. [NOTE: I'm live-blogging, typing quickly, not correcting typos, getting things wrong, missing entire paragraphs, etc.]

He says that he got a better education than he needed at Case-Western. In early 1995 he wanted to give back some of what he received, he started some mailing lists, including for events, AnonSalon (a fundraiser) and others. People suggested new categories, including apartments. He was using Pine for email, but it started breaking at 240 mailing addresses. He was going to call the list “SFEvents,†but people said they already call it “CraigsList†and that it’s a brand. Craig didn’t know what a brand is, but he stuck with it.

He says he was a literal nerd in HS. He was not on the AV Squad [I was] but he was on the debating team, which led him to delusions about the effectiveness of rational discourse. He says he’s now comfortable with being a nerd.

Eventually he realized he could turn emails into HTML, an instant Web-publishing solution. Over the next few years, he refined the software. If a task took more than an hour a day, he would automate it. At the end of 1997, he hit three milestones: 1. A million page views per month (he hit a billion in 2004 and now is headed toward 13B. There are 26 people at the company). 2. Microsoft Sidewalk asked him to run banner ads. He turned them down because “I am an overpaid programmer.†3. People volunteered to help. But it failed because he didn’t lead. So, in 1999 he turned it into a business.

He hired Jim Buckmaster “who is a full foot taller than I am.†He’s a really good manager. “I suck as a manager.†The culture there is that people make suggestions, they listen, and they decide what to act on. Also, it’s continued to try to be simple. And they decided to charge people who are already paying but for less effective ads, so they started charging people listing jobs and real estate brokers. “They asked us to charge them to cut down on certain types of spam, and on the need to post and repost.â€

He’s always surprised people are willing to pay for what he does for fun. He’s generalized it to nerd values, including: once you have a comfortable living, it’s more fun to change things than to make more money. His business model: “We can do really well by treating people well and doing some good.â€

He says he’s now going to half time as a customer service rep, after 14 years of fulltime. You sometimes see ugly things in customer service, he says. E.g., they saw ugly racist stuff during the campaign. “That takes something out of you.â€

“I’ve only regretted giving my email address out once.†It was when he was on The View.

Over the past several years, they’ve begun to understand why CL is successful. “It has to do with the culture of trust we have.†There are bad guys but they’re a tiny percentage. “People look out for one another.†E.g., you can flag abusive ads. If enough people vote for it, it’s removed automatically. “That’s a flawed mechanism,†but it works better than not doing it. As Jon Stewart says, (Craig says) you do hear from extremists, but that’s because moderates have stuff to do. You should treat people the way you want to be treated. Corollaries: Live and let live, and give the other person a break. Nothing profound, he says, but it’s hard to follow through. “We’re trying to listen to people still.†“We decide on new cities based primarily on requests for them.†(567 cities now.) Novel ideas are rare. Most of what’s on the site is based on community feedback, although the child care section was Craig’s idea.

“I have no vision at all, but I know how to keep things simple, and I listen some.â€

“We’re a good example of how people collaborate in mundane ways to make things happen. Not bad.†On his way to One Web Day he realized, “I’m a community organizer. I’m more of a meta-organizer.â€

Nothing about CraigsList is, in his view, altruistic. It’s just people giving another person a break. “I figured I should extend this to other areas.†E.g., “I help people smarter than me help figure out the future of journalism.†E.g., Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen.

He’s also interested in grassroots democracy. Face to face is a better way of communicating but it doesn’t scale. On the Net, we get millions of people working together to make stuff happens. “This changes the nature of our democracy,†so that grassroots democracy can address the traditional problems with representative democracy. Craig thanks Joe Trippi and Zephyr Teachout. Now we have this big grassroots infrastructure. What do we do with it? “2008 is the new 1776.â€

All sorts of things are happening. “It used to be that the guys with money, power and guns got to write the history and our narratives about ourselves. With Wikipedia, everyone has a shot at doing that…It changes the whole course of human history.†We are at a “singularity,†he says. We’re living in a time like 1776. It’s happening faster because the Internet accelerates everything. “I’m trying to play a microscopic part in it.â€

He’s involved with the SunlightFoundation.org. He’s working with ConsumerReports. He was involved a little bit in SF’s 311 number. “Mundane, but it’s part of everyday governance. In my fantasies, I apply that to all levels of government.†A bunch of this is in the Obama platform, he says, and we could see some of it next year.

Veterans have been treated badly by the White House, he says, so he’s on the IAVA.org board. To screen claims faster, maybe they shouldn’t care about fraud so much, since veterans and their families are suffering as they wait for their claims to be processed.

As a nerd, it’s a “crime against nature†to be involved in promotion or communication. But he does it anyway. For one thing, he likes the idea of more people getting involved in service. “I do have one message for the kids: Stay off of my lawn.†:)

“The Constitution will be restored on January 20.â€

He says focuses on people who can get things done. He lacks patience for those who can’t get things done.

Q: Are there any ways Craigslist has gone in directions you couldn’t have imagined?
A: I never tried to foresee them so it’s hard to answer. I had to have my arms twisted to create personals. They’ve done much more good than problems. Like “missed connections.†I’ve been asked to perform marriages. In a way, the whole thing has been a surprise. I have no vision. I’ve only responded to feedback. It’s all very surreal, but that’s life now.

Q: Why did CL succeed in the early days, as opposed to doing it over newsgroups?
A: Part of it was that everyone understood mail and Web browsers, while newsgroups were hard to used. And newsgroups were ad-spammed badly.We have a problem with spam, and last week we announced a suit against a company that sells ad-spam software. We aren’t litigious but we thought that was a good way to do it.

Q: Has it been a problem keeping CL simple?
A: Keeping it simple is a habit. There are times when we have to debate whether there should be a specific category, or should people have to register with a valid email on the message boards, but I don’t know how to do things except simply.

Q: What about the deal with National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.. How consensual was the deal?
A: Jim knows the details. He felt strongly about it. There was genuine abuse of our site involving minors. We’re not law enforcement professionals, so we got advice from the real experts. There is that sort of abuse and we have to help out. We just started charging for erotic services and we’ll contribute all that to philanthropies. And how do you manage anonymity? Sometimes you need it, for whistleblowers. We tend to the anonymity side. But congresspeople want to know that an email comes from a constituent rather than a mass spammed email. We’re talking about ways to balance anonymity and authentication, but we do need anonymity as a kind of check and balance against an oppressive government.

Q: Does your exposure to some of the uglier aspects has led you to see a more expansive role for government?
A: I have become more balanced, but mainly because I’ve been doing customer service. The best label I can figure is “moderate Libertarian.†I’m looking for a better label. I’m increasing interested in private-public partnerships since I’ve seen market solutions don’t always work, like for health insurance. I’m in the Net neutrality debate and see people misrepresenting it on purpose. (He adds that most lobbyists are ok, and a small number are predatory.)

Q: You’re in many cities but it still seems to be geared towards regional breakdowns. On purpose?
A: Initially we just followed our gut. CL is like a flea market. People get together to do commerce, but really just to socialize. Penelope Green talked about our site being a market in the ancient sense: chaotic and vividly human.

[me] Why doesn’t your company have meetings?

A: We have some. But we minimize them. A meeting of more than six people is already going to be dysfunctional (small group comms theory). Effective communication is a meeting is tough. This also reflects my impatience, a flaw as a human being.

What will be the future of the Communications Decency Act?
A: This is the part of law that says that a site isn’t responsible for what people say on the site, so long as they take some reasonable measures. I think it will stay and possibly be improved.

Q: Have you had any negative interactions with the police?
A: Not really. Once the FBI called asking if we knew there was an ad for plutonium on our site. The result was that someone got a stern talking to from his parents. The police just want to be treated decently and not jerked around. That’s our customer service idea.

Q: Why can’t people search for subsections?
A: Mysql chews up server time doing these searches. We have some ideas for how to do this, but there are bigger things they’re working on.

[Tags: craiglist craig_newmark customer_service community_organizer cluetrain berkman ]

The fire in Santa Barbara is officially called the Tea Incident, because it started near (or at) a (or the) tea house, on Mountain Road in Montecito. (Here? Ah, no, here.)

There are lots of good places to see what’s happening. One of the best is this Google Map. KEYT, Edhat, the Independent, Noozhawk and others are helpful. Inciweb has nothing so far, perhaps because the Tea Incident is not yet an official wildfire. It’s usually very helpful once it gets rolling on a fire. And the MODIS maps are great. That’s a screenshot of one, above.

It’s also a little too interesting that temperatures will be as high as 90° today (unusually hot for here) with strong winds from the northeast. Which will be bad, if any of the fire is still going. Some of it will be, but it’s clear that this is not a rolling conflagration like the Oakland fire in 1990 or the San Diego fire last year. Watching the Montecito and Santa Barbara fire chiefs and Santa Barbara Mayor Marty Blum in a press conference right now. The phrases “damage assessment†and “mopping up†are being used. Also “narrow window of opportunity†to contain the fire.

So right now the top thing people want to know is, Which houses have burned down? Can we be exact about what has burned? Saying “over a hundred homes†gives us a quantity of nothing.

If anybody has something exact — streets and neighborhoods, if not addresses — let us know in the comments below. Meanwhile I’ll be headed out shortly to check things out, or at least to sit at a coffee shop and hang out with concerned and/or evacuated neighbors.

[Not much later...] The County Sherrif is on now, and giving specifics. The Mount Calvary Retreat House and Monastery is completely distroyed. (A beautiful place, and a terrible loss.) Areas where many homes burned: Las Canoas, East Mountain Drive, Gibraltar Road, Scofield Park. Mostly inside a triangle between Westmont Collage, the East Riviera and St. Mary’s. (By Rattlesnake Canyon.) Over 100 homes lost, but many also saved.

Unaltered from an email going around:

One sunny day in 2009 an old man approaches the White House from across Pennsylvania Avenue where he’s been sitting on a park bench. He speaks to the U.S. Marine standing guard: “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.†The Marine looks at the man: “Sir, Mr. Bush no longer is president, and no longer resides here.†The old man says, “Okay,†and walks away.

The following day, the same man approaches the White House, says to the same Marine, “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.†The Marine again tells the man, “Sir, as I said yesterday, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.†The man thanks him and, again, just walks away.

The third day, the same man approaches the White House and speaks to the very same U. S. Marine saying “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.†The Marine, somewhat irritated at this point, looks hard at the man and says, “Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr. Bush. I’ve already told you that Mr. Bush is no longer President and no longer resides here. Don’t you understand?â€

The old man looks at the Marine: “Oh, I understand, all right. I just love hearing you say it.â€

The Marine snaps to attention, salutes, and says, “See you tomorrow, sir.â€

[Tags: jokes bush obama ]

Doc Searls has an essay about bringing fiber optics to every home in America. It is aimed in the right direction, but makes a couple of mistakes on the numbers and falls to ground way short of its target. It troubles me that I appear to be the sole source for Doc's numbers (on the basis of some informal conversation and my Telecom Day speech in Wellington NZ last May).

This post is an attempt to correct the record, and to create one where my previous thinking has been private.

Doc writes:
Almost. Each fiber, in fact, can carry 10 gigabits per second **on each of 160 wavelengths** using today's off-the-shelf technology. In other words, each fiber, lit like this, carries 1.6 terabits. The arithmetic shows that 10 gigabits times 864 fibers is 8.64 terabits -- wrong. The actual computed capacity of an 864 fiber cable, lit as described above, is 864 times 1.6 terabits, or 1.4 petabits.

It is very bad to trust me on simple arithmetic; I have been known to think about dividing by six while I divided by four. I have been known to divide when I should be multiplying. And I've made plenty of oversight mistakes. But I've worked this particular problem a few times from scratch, but please check my work . . .

I'll leave it to the reader to calculate whether 6.5 billion people on earth, each generating 64 kbit/s at the same time, with all that traffic going to a fiber cable in which each fiber is carrying 10 gigabits per second on each of 160 wavelengths, whether all that traffic could squeeze into 764 fibers.

Another quibble. Doc writes that a *typical* fiber cable is 864 fibers. Typical? The fiber in front of my house is a 144 fiber Sumitomo cable. I saw it installed. My understanding is that 864 fiber cables are mostly used for long-haul these days. The example of 10 gigabits by 160 lambdas by 864 fibers is only *typical* of what's possible. You can light more than 160 wavelengths, and jam more than 10 gigabits down each one. I saw a Sumitomo fiber cable with 2000 fibers in it in 2004. You can have more **or less** of any of these quantities.

Here's another item from Doc that needs a bit of post-hoc sharpening: Doc writes,
Yes and no. I've been using $2000 per urban/suburban home and $6000 per rural home as a rule of thumb, a first approximation average cost. This includes homes hooked up for 50% of the homes passed. It is an impressionistic amalgam of lots of stuff I've been told in private conversation with fiber mavens, and it has been verified as reasonable by several people who have actually built fiber networks. [ By the way, others, telco types and Washington DC policy people, tend to cite lower numbers, closer to $1000 per home, but when I dig, this is only the cost of passing the home, not hooking it up.] But it is also worth noting that the costs can be very much higher than $6000 in individual cases, urban or rural.

So, if you assume 100 million urban and dense-suburban residences in the United States at $2000, and 15 million rural homes at $6000, that's $290 billion. (Heck, the U.S. found $700 Billion in a few days last month cause we had to have it now . . . but we still don't know what we're going to use it for.)

Doc didn't get anything overtly wrong when he wrote:
But he sure ignored a lot of relevant detail.

I'm nitpicking, right? Well, how do we know whether Doc missed another factor of 160 (or its conceptual equivalent) when he concludes (perhaps based on another unvetted morsel from another sole source) that a public-private partnership can build all the bandwith for any purpose its users want to use it for, even as it
Sorry, Doc. We can't pretend there's no incumbent, no installed base or that the market is always right. The intellectual heavy lifting in the Fiber to Every Citizen effort will be in getting the details right. This includes how the new infrastructure is regulated. Yes, regulated with laws that say, "No snooping, no blocking, no discriminatory pricing or treatment, and what goes in is what comes out." We don't need any more Enrons, Blackwaters or AIGs. We need the private companies to partner with the public, not the reverse. We need to get the incentives right. We might even consider whether public-private-partnership is the right model at all. But, in any case, we need to do the math.

Technorati Tags: Deregulation, DocSearls, fiberoptics, FTTH, NetworkNeutrality, Organizational Culture

Apple continues to exercise its control over the iPhone platform, recently rejecting an app for using too much bandwidth. CastCatcher was a radio streaming app, which had been approved in several previous versions; the latest update was rejected for violating the TOS provision limiting bandwidth use. The developers are upset—they say the updated version didn’t use more bandwidth than previously-approved versions. This move bodes ill for other streaming radio or video services. It also emphasizes the difference between Apple (with partner AT&T) and a traditional ISP. Comcast, for instance, would love to be able to ban applications that use too much bandwidth.

In other news, the writers and commenters at TechCrunch have been having a lively debate over whether a possible iPhone exploit (possibly allowing developers to update code without approval) is cause for concern. Jason Kincaid notes an interesting issue: on PCs, most users are trained to be wary of new code, and look for assurances of safety before the download applications. But because Apple’s platform is considered safe, people download apps without a second thought. This means that, in the event a malicious app is developed and slips through the imperfect approval process, the damage could be extensive. Apple can always yank back malicious apps once they’re discovered, but by then, the harm could be done.

Another walled garden, Facebook, has also found itself facing malicious code lately—so far, relatively tame. Do Facebook users—who are clearly trusting enough to expose lots of personal information to large networks—expect Facebook to be a safe space, free of malware? And if they discover it’s not, will that reduce their willingness to buy Facebook apps, halting the Web 2.0 party?

—Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Just learned there’s a fire in Santa Barbara. Our house is not in the evacuation area (that’s Cold Springs, and some surrounding sections in Montecito and SB C ), but we’re still concerned. I’m taking public notes, before I head down there. (I’m in the Bay Area.)

I’m listening to KNX/1070 from Los Angeles right now. “The main body of this fire is in wilderness, but there are homes below the thick black smoke… 60 mph winds… East of Mountain Drive and Cold Springs Road… the KCAL helicopter is fighting turbulence. Heavy winds.†Now they’re talking to the retired fire chief. He says the winds are high and “downcanyon†toward the ocean. “There are structures involved in this fire.†Now burning Southwest. That’s toward town. Bad.

To watch: Inciweb, MODIS western region fire maps. Also here.

Twitter Search for Santa Barbara.

If you have news sources, or news you want to share, post it in the comments below. Thanks.

[Later...] It’s 3am and I’m in Santa Barbara now, getting ready to crash at some friends’, sitting on a chair out front in the cool smoky moonlit night.

I could see the fire high on the mountain face as I drove into town, but smoke obscured it when I tried to see more from the Mesa, above downtown. The town itself, and the Riviera above it, looked normal from what I could tell, even though I know at least a couple houses within sight had already burned. Beyond that, in Montecito and beyond the back side of the Riviera, 70+ homes gone. Or so reports say.

I listened mostly to KNX on the way down. They became, in effect, a Santa Barbara station. Then, once in range, I lisened to local reports to KCSB/91.9 and KTYD/990.

I noticed that many stations on Gibraltar Peak were off the air, and learned on KTYD that their sister station KSBL/101.7 had lost its antenna to the fire. That antenna was closest to the woods, and to the source of the fire. Also gone were KQSC/88.7, KSBX/89.5, religious station translators on 89.9 and 91.5, KCLU’s translator on 102.3, and KMGQ/106.3. Still on the air were KDB/93.7 and KTYD/99.9. All those off the air are near brush on the side of the peak facing town. KDB is on the back side of the transmitter building, away from brush. The fact that it’s on the air tells me that the transmitter building survived, but that most antennas outside did not. All but KDB’s were close to the ground. KTYD is farther up the hill, and high on one of KTYD’s three towers.

Hard to imagine fire up that high, and in country so thick with flammable chapparal, not spreading and consuming the whole mountain, especially if the winds are right. But… I dunno. Meanwhile, read Ray Ford’s report while I go to bed.

Ethanz has a backgrounder (or get-up-to-dater) on the elections in Ghana that closes with the unexpected presence of Obama on (well, near) the ticket.

[Tags: obama ghana africa ethan_zuckerman ]

There is a terrific parody (or, perhaps, satire) of the New York Times available both in cyberspace and in print (over a million copies were distributed in cities nationwide, mostly New York and LA). (The Times is calling it a “spoof.â€) This is detailed, careful artistic work: if you explore the site, you’ll see that the fake content goes several levels deep, and even knocks off the ads one commonly finds in the Times (or on New York subways). Here’s the rub: is it legal?

On copyright grounds, I think the spoof is safe, but it’s a close call. If it’s a parody of the Times, then the fake version is a fair use (after Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, parody is essentially paradigmatic fair use). If it’s satire: well, that’s a different story. The Ninth Circuit didn’t think it was fair use when The Cat NOT in the Hat! made fun of O.J. Simpson using rhyming, Seussian doggerel. Satire, courts seem to think, is gratuitous: it uses someone’s artistic creation (copyrighted) to poke fun at a different target altogether. Since the choice of weapon is nearly arbitrary, the resulting work infringes. Of course, the analysis gets harder when, as here, the accused parody makes fun both of its host and of society at large.

On trademark grounds, it’s less clear. The trademark doctrine of fair use (better called descriptive fair use / nominative use) is far less forgiving of infringement, even for parody, than copyright’s analog. When the parody confuses consumers, there’s essentially a sliding-scale, tradeoff analysis of the public interest in free expression against the public interest in avoiding consumer confusion. The challenge is that a socially critical work like the one here depends on (briefly) confusing consumers. If someone handed you a paper called “The Daily Ridicule,†with the headline “Iraq War Ends,†you’d probably throw it away. But when it’s the Times, with the same headline, you’re briefly thunderstruck, and you read it (and then throw it away). That moment of confusion - of Zen-like unmooring of assumptions - is precisely what makes this piece work and what creates risk under trademark law.

So, I’m waiting to see if a lawsuit comes out of this. This is social criticism at its most biting. IP law shouldn’t prevent it.

[Update - 2:40PM - I shamefully forgot to hat-tip Ken Marx. Also, we could talk about whether the spoof is a "use in commerce," but use is too painful to spend a lot of blog space on. I think it could cut either way, depending on one's sympathy towards parodies and one's views on TM use generally.]

UPDATE 13Nov: Now that I've read the original study[.pdf], by Doris Kelley, cited below, I know that
a) Waterloo is bigger than Cedar Falls by population.
b) Historically, Waterloo has been the commercial center and Cedar Falls has been the "bedroom," but with the advent of the municipal network, with first Internet service starting in 1997, the study says that this changed rapidly.
c) Land in technology parks with fiber sold (in 2003, the year of the study) for $5000 to $25,000 more per acre than did land in tech parks without fiber.
d) The study points to a 2002 article in the local paper that says,
Thanks to Jim Baller for, ahem, strongly suggesting that I go to the source!

ORIGINAL POSTING:
Cedar Falls and Waterloo are twin cities in Iowa separated by a city limits sign. The incumbent telco and cableco ignore both. So Cedar Falls decided to build a municipal fiber optic (and residential HFC) network. But Waterloo's citizens voted against it. A study, reported here, found that 11 businesses moved from Waterloo to Cedar falls around the time the network was built. Ouch.

Waterloo Mayor John Rooff complained, "I believe it has hurt us economically to not be able to provide fiber optics to businesses locating in our city."

Waterloo Municipal Telecommunications Utility Board member Doris Kelley exclaimed, "Everyday we're falling farther behind."

A November 2007 story in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reports that a non-profit company, Waterloo Telecom Partners, Inc., has been organized to help Waterloo catch up. Waterloo Telecom Partners is building an open, access, fiber optic network.

Waterloo City Attorney Jim Walsh describes the project like this:
"We're not talking about having millions of dollars available to go out and do another overlay of the whole city . . . We're going to be patching this together one connection at a time."

Walsh continued, "If they don't want it, we'll be out of business shortly, and it won't matter." Indeed.

Technorati Tags: fiberoptics, MunicipalNetworks, MunicipalUtilities

From a post by Firuzeh Shokooh Valle and Christopher Soghoian at the Open Net Initiative site:

Wow. Argentinian celebrities either have a different view of celebrity or of the Web, or both.

The post (which contains much more detail) notes that Yahoo was not notifying searchers that their search results were being blocked, a violation of the Global Net Initiative ethical guidelines that Yahoo, Google, and others recently promulgated. But, Chris Soghoian in an email notes that yesterday Yahoo fixed the transparency problem.

[Tags: berkman oni open_net_initiative argentina celebrities censorship filtering google yahoo global_net_initiative gni ]

nov 7, 2008
isaac has found the justice-of-the-peace case from alabama, which is close on point, an unconstitutional system for passing out speeding tickets unconstitutional because the enforcers were paid from the take. the declaration of this statute punitive unconstitutional would do a most wonderful service. when we argued Eldred in 1998 the Court then had little or no appreciation for the public domain. The public domain is, in internet terms, all you can get to on the net for free. The law for our digital future was set in place by the smart lawyers and lobbyists for the copyright industry in 1976 before anyone recognized the interest of the mass of coming population of digital natives that value what they can reach and do on the net for free.

Our case is not only against RIAA, it is against the court and court system that is exerting this power. It is against the statutory law, the law the legislature has passed, captured as it was and still in by special interest. Observe that the disproportion between actual damage caused by joel to the copyright holder and the damage mandated by the legislature to be given the copyright holder is in inverse proportion to the lobbying power of the copyright industry in the legislature compared to the lobbying power of joel and the teenagers like him who are meant to be frightened by the punitive damages being imposed.

seems to me we want to seek not only punitive damages for abuse of law and process but also injunctive relief, just as in the justice-of-the-peace case, which, for finding, isaac winds a prize. when the supreme court summarily affirmed the trial judge’s ruling and yet the extortionate practice did not desist, a second case was required in which were joined sufficient parties so that judicial injunction could stop the practice. We seek to join RIAA. We seek injunction not only against the filing of suits but the issuance of threats as well. Let the record companies make their money from people who make commercial use of their music the way it’s done in many other places, and even how it’s done in significant part right here in the United States. Notwithstanding the lobbying power of the copyright industry , let us move law toward an environment in which digital music can be non-commercially shared, instead of holding the law in the dead hand of the past . In the environment of internet any incentive beyond that is neither necessary nor proper as a means of promoting the useful arts. Interpreted to suit a digital age, the “exclusive right†of the constitution extends only to the right to exclude commercial exploitation.

how does this relate to Eldred, in which at oral argument internet was mentioned but once, the argument cast instead on commerce clause grounds. yet the idea is the same. what is this power that congress was granted by the constitution? how far does it extend? The presumption of freedom to share deserves not to be arbitrarily snuffed out amongst children who have been brought up to believe in the liberty to explore and learn on the net, enjoy cooperative connection, values of equality that come with sharing with others who in some measure are different from you, and certainly not to be snuffed out by draconian punitive deterrence.

How does one make argument based on observation that the current misallocations of power have produced distortion even in how we see the problem, distortion that imposes great dangers and costs on the system of law itself, how but by appeal to a vision of the role of law outside the system, Gödel’s proof, appeal to truth outside the system as basis for all action within, in metaphor the value of equitable well-distributed order like the ordinal numbers framed in context transcendental.

Did the copyright clause give congress the power to invest the law’s credibility in telling citizen’s not to click through check boxes? How many check boxes will you click through today, how like clicking to kill the enemies that appear on the screen in the adventure games you grew up playing on your way to how to get where you are going and find what you want, click click, on to the next level.

Is the idea to teach joel tenenbaum, in his sunglasses and redsox shirt, wise-ass kid, teach him the lesson that there is a real world out here. It’s a world of pain imposed on you by power. You were mistaken as a teenager to think you could ignore the warnings, sharing music and porn and digital skill among your adolescent friends. Learn that what you were doing because was morally wrong because you violated law that we have written.

or is it time for the recording industry to see that reality has changed, and all their lobbying power in the congress, and all their litigating power in the courts, and all their manipulation of the public mind to equate sharing music with theft, cannot stop the growth of a digital environment in which peers have ability to gather and share.

i believe the strategists of RIAA see that, and that their litigation strategy is designed to create such a scourge that their real strategy goal of placing copyright filters on the net will come to seem a welcome alternative to the universities and commercial internet service providers on which they will be imposed and to the congress, which will do the industry’s bidding of imposing them.

Is it not your ultimate goal to alter the architecture of the open net in a way that you believe will allow your industry profit. Is that not a motive and purpose ulterior to this litigation.

President-Elect Obama said during the election that he would appoint a chief technology officer to bring 21st century thinking to the White House. (This is not to be confused with the position of “intellectual property czar†recently created by Congress.)

The Obama campaign was more comfortable with new technology than any past presidential candidacy. But there is reason to wonder how that will translate into governance. The transition team’s “Change.gov,†for example, has slicker design than most bureaucracy web sites, but it’s nowhere near as interactive as the campaign’s web site.

One effort to create two-way communication with the incoming administration is a new site called Obama CTO, which uses a Digg-like voting system and discussion board to advance ideas for the as-yet-unnamed CTO. If you are interested in Info/Law issues (and really, why are you on this blog if not?), take a moment to sign in and vote for ideas there.

Tim Wu and I are going to be presenting our forthcoming paper about customer-owned last-mile broadband connections —  â€Homes With Tails†— next Friday at the New America Foundation.

For more on the concept, see my previous post. We’ll post the v1.0 of the paper early next week.

If you’d like to come to the event, here are the details, or see below.

Homes With Tails: What if You Could Own Your Internet Connection?

America’s path to becoming a broadband leader is uncertain. Few dispute that deploying fast, universal, and affordable broadband is imperative, but the costs of robust network infrastructure are daunting for the private sector and governments.

In a forthcoming New America Foundation working paper, Tim Wu and Derek Slater propose an innovative way to drive broadband deployment: a model that encourages consumers to purchase and own the “last-mile†connection that runs into their home. By purchasing their own fiber optic connections, consumers would be able to connect to a variety of service providers. This model holds the potential for higher broadband speeds, greater competition, and lower Internet service prices.

The idea of customer-owned fiber may seem odd at first, but buying items like personal computers, answering machines or even telephones was also unheard of only a few decades ago. Home fiber could someday become a must-have technology.

Join the authors for a presentation and discussion of this new proposal, and learn more about “Homes With Tails.â€

Start: 11/21/2008 - 12:30pm

End: 11/21/2008 - 1:30pm

New America Foundation

1630 Connecticut Ave NW 7th Floor

Washington, DC, 20009

United States

The Cato Institute has published Tim Lee’s paper arguing for a neutral Net but against Net neutrality regulation. Stephen Schultze, of the Berkman Center, has posted a careful and thoughtful rebuttal.

[Tags: berkman net_neutrality cato tim_lee stephen_schultze fcc ]

Here's a big idea.

The customer-centric view is that the connection between the home and the Internet is the FIRST mile. So it seems obvious that the new frame should be FFTH -- Fiber From The Home -- rather than FTTH. Then the home owner can take his business to various Internet providers and assess their offers of service. It would be a much more two-sided transaction. I spoke with Ken Carter about this idea just a couple of weeks ago. It also fits Doc Searls' notion of Vendor Relations Management (VRM).

Now the New America Foundation's Wireless Futures Program is sponsoring a talk called "Homes With Tails" by Tim Wu, who recently brought us that elegant piece of legal jujitsu called Wireless Carterphone, and Derek Slater, formerly with the Berkman Center, then EFF, and now Google.

Wu and Slater envision that the citizens, information gatherers, homeowners and content producers of the Internet [ahem, "consumers"?] purchase their own fiber first mile and offer their business to the network. They say,

Slater offers more details here.

Kudos to Wireless Futures regulars Michael Calabrese and Sascha Meinrath for sponsoring this fiber-rich event, to be held a week from Friday, November 21, in Washington DC at the New America Foundation. Details here.

I've got another obligation, darn!

Technorati Tags: Competition, Customer, fiberoptics, FTTH, StructuralSeparation

RDR Books, which lost in a copyright lawsuit filed by Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling against its planned Harry Potter Lexicon book, has filed a notice of appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. (Hat tip: Slashdot, Ray Beckerman; coverage: Stanford’s Copyright & Fair Use blog, P2PNet; list of documents in the case from Ray Beckerman) Since both Lord Voldemort and Harry Potter rise from the (nearly) dead, you can read the analogy however you want. I think the appeal is very helpful; while I thought the original verdict was correct in its outcome (including the minimal statutory damages), I found the reasoning confused in a number of key areas. The Second Circuit should, hopefully, affirm, but with a clear opinion setting straight some of the issues related to derivative works and fair use. It’s great to have such capable counsel on both sides, improving our odds of a thoughtful decision.

Rant: It’s a little frustrating to read the comments on the Slashdot post about the case. There’s just so much FUD out there about fair use. Even reading the relevant statute - 17 U.S.C. 107 - isn’t all that helpful, not just because its test is a non-exclusive four-factor totality of the circumstances test, but also because the 1976 Copyright Act was intended to codify, not supplant, the well-developed common law regarding fair use. When I teach Copyright, I tell the students that I think making predictions about what is or is not fair use (when you’re representing someone as counsel) is just about malpractice. It’s very hard for experienced attorneys to assess fair use (as the debate over the Lexicon case proves). For those in the Slashdot crowd who think it’s straightforward, or formulaic, I hope you don’t rely on those perceptions in making actual decisions about copyright. OK, Rant off.

I’m going to be on the radio news show Here and Now tomorrow to talk about Google.org’s ability to track outbreaks of flu by charting search terms (â€flu symptomsâ€), time, and presumed IP location. I plan on talking about it as an example of the power of having enormous amounts of data, and of putting to use information generated for some other purpose.

Any ideas about how else this sort of technique could be used or is being used? (Amazon’s personalization is a different sort of example.) Any concerns (other than the how-not-to-do-it example from AOL)? [Tags: google flu crowd_sourcing wisdom_of_the_crowd privacy ]

“George Bushâ€: 25M hits at Google (with the quotation marks)
“George W. Bushâ€: 48M
“Barack Obamaâ€: 105M
“Obamaâ€: 248M
“Bushâ€: 344M

Wow, that seems screwy! The combined total for “George Bush†and “George W. Bush,†after 9 years of coverage (campaign and presidency), and including two George Bushes, is only about 75% of the number of hits for Barack Obama before he’s taken office?

Either we’re really excited about Barack Obama or something’s gone wrong in my Google searches. Or, more likely, both.

[Tags: google obama ]