Tonycurzonprice's Favorite Links on montpelerin from Diigo

The Becker-Posner Blog: Blogging, Spam, and the Taxation of Internet Transactions�Posner

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:43:20 -0000

self-censorship motivated simply by a concern with avoiding offense may impair the marketplace of ideas by excluding heterodox ideas and perpetuating comfortable myths.

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Cracking Physical Identity Theft - Desktop Security News Analysis - Dark Reading

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 23:20:47 -0000

Cracking Physical Identity Theft

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FBI ready to demand detailed logs of Britons' internet and travel habits | Technology | The Observer

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:32:33 -0000

Another area of concern relates to what 'appropiate safeguards' have been agreed to prevent the US authorities from requesting further information such as the religion, political opinion and 'sexual life' of a British resident.

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Everyone should be on DNA database says judge

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:25:40 -0000

The Beeb quoted Prof Stephen Bain of the database's strategy board as saying:
"If the information about you is exposed due to illegal or perhaps even legalised use of the database, in a way that is not currently anticipated, then it's a very difficult situation."

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Brown exaggerates usefulness of DNA database

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:22:15 -0000

GeneWatch does not oppose the existence of the the NDNAD, noting its usefulness for law enforcement. It has lobbied against its rapid expansion under the current government from about two million individuals in 2002/03 to around four million individuals in 2006/07. In that time the proportion of crimes solved by DNA profile evidence has remained around 0.35 per cent.

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National Journal Magazine - China’s Cyber-Militia

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:04:54 -0000

China’s Cyber-Militia.

if paranoid, then look at damage; if not paranoiud, look at damage ...

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How local councils use anti-terror laws to spy on ordinary people

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:02:34 -0000

SCOTTISH COUNCILS ARE USING SURVEILLANCE AND security powers intended to fight terrorism and organised crime in order to spy on ordinary members of the public suspected of petty offences such as breaching the smoking ban, playing music too loudly and dropping litter.

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Beware rise of Big Brother state, warns data watchdog - Times Online

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:50:31 -0000

BRITAIN’S information watchdog gives warning today that the country risks “sleepwalking into a surveillance society” because of government plans for identity cards and a population register.

Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, says that there is a growing danger of East German Stasi-style snooping if the State gathers too much information about individual citizens.

He singles out three projects that he believes are of particular concern. They are David Blunkett’s identity card scheme; a separate population register planned by the Office for National Statistics; and proposals for a database of every child from birth to the age of 18.

He says: “My anxiety is that we don’t sleepwalk into a surveillance society where much more information is collected about people, accessible to far more people shared across many more boundaries than British society would feel comfortable with.”

Asked if he thinks there is a risk of this occurring because of the Government’s plans, Mr Thomas tells The Times: “I think there is a danger, yes.” The office of the Information Commissioner is an independent body created by statute and answerable to Parliament.

Mr Thomas, 55, a solicitor, was appointed two years ago after a career in the private, public and voluntary sectors. His job is to promote greater public access to official records while ensuring that the State does not collect more information about citizens than is necessary.

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

It was put forward after the failure of official agencies to share information in the Victoria Climbie child abuse case. School achievements, medical and social services records and parental marital status could be on the database. The health department is also planning a database detailing treatments and social care for all patients.

Mark Oaten, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said he was concerned about the proliferation of databases: “While the Government can sometimes justify each measure individually, the danger is that we are slipping into a Big Brother society by stealth.”

Tags: montpelerin orwell kafka

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ONLamp.com -- The Long View of Identity

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:46:06 -0000

When we go online to a forum on some topic that interests us, nobody knows us from Adam. We feel anonymous, and we possibly share personal information on that basis.

In fact, identifying us is pretty easy. It's just that nobody bothers to try, unless a record company decides to make an example of us for uploading MP3 files or the Chinese government decides to call us in for questioning about some posts containing the word "democracy." Consider that:

* Your ISP or system administrator knows your IP address at every moment. Many governments have passed laws or (as in the U.S.) are considering laws that would require the ISP to store this data about you for a long period of time.
* Everything you've ever put online (including sophomoric postings to ancient newsgroups) is still there, and it's searchable.
* Many people can be singled out through a combination of a few pieces of data (such as zip code, age, etc.) that they freely surrender to web sites.

Our identity situation is the worst of both worlds: people with bad intentions can find our data, but we are isolated from the people with whom we'd like to form communities. This once again raises the tension between holistic identity and compartmentalized identity.

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

An example of how someone determined to stay in hiding can succeed for a long time appears, by coincidence, in the most recent Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2006). A cheerleader for al-Zarqawi's Iraqi insurgency posted terror training videos and other propaganda anonymously for years, despite coordinated efforts on several continents to track him down. I'm not sure that what he did would be illegal in the U.S., but it certainly was in the U.K., where he was finally located.

Stefan Brand. Brand admitted to feeling near despair sometimes, because we could easily move into a society where RFIDs are embedded in our bodies and every move is tracked. "I'm afraid that, despite all our best efforts, our technical solutions may drive us into totalitarianism." There were many responses that tried to assuage this fear, but no one could banish it.

Perhaps our best hope was cited by Berkman Center fellow Mary Rundle, who said that we must maintain multiple sources of power that can constrain each other, so that "power cannot be used to amass more power."

Tags: montpelerin identity privacy

Posted by: tonycurzonprice

ONLamp.com -- The Long View of Identity

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:37:32 -0000

We can layer all sorts of powerful features and describe all manner of personal attributes in an identity, and develop ever more sophisticated protocols for exchanging the data securely, but all identities come down ultimately to the authorities we entrust with them. This means that identity management is not really the management of individual identities, but the management of institutions we trust.

As you tussle out the policy issues around online identity, keep one idea in mind: your identity is an entry in the database of the authority that authenticates you. Feel better? Whether you do or not, at least you will be guided down the right policy-making paths.

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Our credit ratings are a function of the companies that maintain the ratings; were the companies to go out of business and lose the expertise needed to maintain their databases, we'd lose our credit ratings. The same goes for online identities; they persist only as long as the institutions that offer them.

I don't really believe Equifax will go away (without some other responsible authority taking over its databases), so a more pertinent worry is that the government will take ownership of data that companies have promised--or at least, users have assumed--would be confidential. This fear reflects the reality that our online identities are owned by the authorities that grant them. We also fear that companies will mine our data and use it for purposes we haven't authorized.

Contractual: the authority promises the user not to misuse the data stored with the authority.
Technical: the software used to store and transmit user data encrypts and digitally signs it in such a way that is hidden from everyone except the sites at the endpoints with a need to know.

Tags: montpelerin identity privacy

Posted by: tonycurzonprice

ONLamp.com -- The Long View of Identity

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:28:14 -0000

# People exercising free speech rights could be identified by repressive regimes.
# The user-friendly tools promoted by companies in the identity space will encourage users to send out more data without thinking adequately about the risks.
# The authorities responsible for passing the data between users can track it, if it's not adequately protected by technical measures.

Tags: montpelerin identity privacy

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Consider the economics in network neutrality - O'Reilly ONLamp Blog

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:15:36 -0000

Applications with high data volumes require us to ensure that we have sufficient capacity to handle them, but so long as someone pays the ISP, it has an incentive to build out infrastructure as needed. But when the cost is shifted to the ISP without compensation, there’s no incentive (and in fact, no available capital) to grow to accommodate it.

Tags: montpelerin net-neutrality

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Interview: The cellphone anthropologist - being-human - 11 June 2008 - New Scientist

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:51:02 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

The common denominator between cultures, regardless of age, gender or context is: keys, money and, if you own one, a mobile phone. Why those three objects? Without wanting to sound hyperbolic, essentially it boils down to survival. Keys provide access to warmth and shelter, money is a very versatile tool that can buy food, transport and so on. A mobile phone, people soon realise, is a great tool for recovering from emergency situations, especially if the first two fail.

n a country like Uganda, most mobile phones are prepay. What we saw was that people are using their phones as a kind of money transfer system. They would buy prepaid credit in the city, ring up a phone kiosk operator in a village, read out the number associated with that credit so that the kiosk operator could top up their own phone, then ask that the credit be passed on to someone in the village - say, their sister - in cash.

But, for instance, we did a study on phone sharing in Uganda and Indonesia, and within a year - which is really quick when you're talking about hardware changes - we had two products out which support multiple address books, allowing people to share a device within a family or a company while giving them a degree of privacy.

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Facebook apps users sacrifice privacy for laughs - TECH.BLORGE.com

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:40:15 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Then again, maybe users just aren’t savvy enough to stay away from the pretty applications and advertisements yet. How many computers have been infected with terminal viruses and trojans when they couldn’t resist clicking some enticing pop-up browser window? Perhaps the only way people will realize the value of privacy is to truly see the adverse results of living a completely “public” life. In the mean time, keep your nasty application invites to yourself!

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Close encounter with Facebook Beacon

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 09:06:56 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Close encounter with Facebook Beacon

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Master of 500 Hats: Facebook Beacon & Privacy Settings for External Websites (ex: BustedTees.com)

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 09:05:16 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Facebook Beacon & Privacy Settings for External Websites (ex: BustedTees.com)

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? » the billblog

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:30:25 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

When Bill Cobb, eBay’s head of North American operations, announced the changes he admitted that ‘the biggest issue with the system is that buyers are more afraid than ever to leave honest, accurate feedback because of the threat of retaliation.’

Patti Waldmeir was sad that ‘the company has basically admitted that the cybersouk model does not work: buyers did not tell the truth about sellers, and sellers did not tell the truth about buyers. And in a market where traders lie, the trust that is so central to online commerce cannot flourish’

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Edge: ELIZA'S WORLD - the computer re-codes the self

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:02:09 -0000

Do we lose touch with reality when computers take over that reality?

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

The machine's influence shapes not only society's structures but the more intimate structures of the self. Under the sway of the ubiquitous, "indispensable" computer, we begin to take on its characteristics, to see the world, and ourselves, in the computer's (and its programmers') terms.

computers have the power to sustain megalomaniac fantasies.

His own invention, Eliza, revealed to Weizenbaum the ease with which we will embrace a fabricated world. He spent the rest of his life trying to warn us away from the seductions of Eliza and her many friends. The quest may have been quixotic, but there was something heroic about it too.

if you believe in computers too much, you lose touch with reality. That’s the real danger of the magic dust so liberally sprinkled by the mainstream. We pass this fallacy from the lab out into the world. This is what apparently happened to Wall Street traders in fomenting a series of massive financial failures. Computers can be used rather too easily to improve the efficiency with which we lie to ourselves. This is the side of Weizenbaum that I wish was better known.

worried that in trying to make thinking machines, we would become machines ourselves.

Printing, writing, and the alphabet did in fact bend the culture to favor themselves. They also made themselves so indispensable that we cannot imagine culture and society without them. Who would deny that our culture is unrecognizable without writing? And, as Weizenbaum indicated, the new embedded technology tends to displace the former mindset. Orality is gone, and our bookish culture is often at odds with oral cultures.

There may indeed be reasons to worry about AI, but the fact that AI and computers tend to be pervasive, indispensable, foundational, self-reinforcing, and irreversible are not reasons alone to worry. Rather, if the past history of printing and writing is any indication, they are reasons to celebrate. With the advent of ubiquitous computation we are about to undergo another overhaul of our identity.

Tags: montpelerin self

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The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It » Chapter 4: The Generative Pattern

Thu, 29 May 2008 22:03:11 -0000

stallmans 4 freedoms

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Chapter 4: The Generative Pattern

hierarchies

principle at work

Generativity is a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.

consumers

f code.

specialized

training

accessible

generative

frequently generativity at one layer is the best recipe for generativity at the layer above.

generates

Free software satisfies Richard Stallman’s benchmark “four freedoms”: freedom to run the program, freedom to study how it works, freedom to change it, and freedom to share the results with the public at large

generative

platform

detail

Generative systems facilitate change.

breakthrough

compete

market model.

initial spark

They represent tinkering done by that one person in a hundred or a thousand who is so immersed in an activity or pursuit that improving it would make a big difference—a person who is prepared to experiment with a level of persistence that calls to mind the Roadrunner’s nemesis, Wile E. Coyote.

The genius behind such innovations is truly inspiration rather than perspiration, a bit of tinkering with a crazy idea rather than a carefully planned and executed invention responding to clear market demand.

Web service

Generativity, then, is a parent of invention, and an open network connecting generative devices makes the fruits of invention easy to share if the inventor is so inclined.

He then noted the innate value of being able to express oneself idiosyncratically

We are seeing the possibility of an emergence of a new popular culture, produced on the folk-culture model and inhabited actively, rather than passively consumed by the masses.

makers

policy issues

innovation

contribution

eccentric

The divide is not between technology and nontechnology, but between hierarchy and polyarchy.⁷² In hierarchies, gatekeepers control the allocation of attention and resources to an idea. In polyarchies, many ideas can be pursued independently. Hierarchical systems appear better at nipping dead-end ideas in the bud, but they do so at the expense of crazy ideas that just might work. Polyarchies can result in wasted energy and effort, but they are better at ferreting out and developing obscure, transformative ideas. More importantly, they allow many more people to have a hand at contributing to the system, regardless of the quality of the contribution.

Internet

disruption

economic harm.

But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.

The generative Internet and PC were at first perhaps more akin to new societies; as people were connected, they may not have had firm expectations about the basics of the interaction. Who pays for what? Who shares what? The time during which the Internet remained an academic backwater, and the PC was a hobbyist’s tool, helped situate each within the norms of Benkler’s parallel economy of sharing nicely, of greater control in the hands of users and commensurate trust that they would not abuse it.

This is the generative pattern, and we can find examples of it at every layer of the network hourglass:

123

An idea originates in a backwater.
It is ambitious but incomplete. It is partially implemented and released anyway, embracing the ethos of the procrastination principle.
Contribution is welcomed from all corners, resulting in an influx of usage.
Success is achieved beyond any expectation, and a higher profile draws even more usage.
Success is cut short: “There goes the neighborhood” as newer users are not conversant with the idea of experimentation and contribution, and other users are prepared to exploit the openness of the system to undesirable ends.
There is movement toward enclosure to prevent the problems that arise from the system’s very popularity.

surfing

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FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - Web 2.0 fails to produce cash

Mon, 26 May 2008 22:58:37 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.

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