This article was originally published on Salon on August 2, 2010.

Our Web browsing habits are under growing surveillance. Can we fight back?

UPDATED

The next time you leave home, are you willing to have someone follow you with a video camera? The idea would be to record every step you take, everything you look at and especially everything you purchase. That information would be available to people you don’t know and whose specific reasons for wanting to see it — apart from wanting to know your habits better so they can sell you things — are considered none of your business.

This is the rough equivalent of what happens when you browse online these days, and not just at shopping sites. Data surveillance by marketers, as the Wall Street Journal is describing in a series of articlesthat started running over the weekend, is one of the online world’s “fastest-growing businesses.”

The main article begins by describing the eerily granular information that online surveillance and marketing companies have learned about Ashley Hayes-Beaty, a 26-year-old woman in Nashville, without her direct knowledge or permission. Then we are told:

In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen — tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks — competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests. The data on Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s film-watching habits, for instance, is being offered to advertisers on BlueKai Inc., one of the new data exchanges.

“It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”

The Journal examined the 50 most popular U.S. websites, which account for about 40% of the Web pages viewed by Americans. (The Journal also tested its own site, WSJ.com.) It then analyzed the tracking files and programs these sites downloaded onto a test computer.

As a group, the top 50 sites placed 3,180 tracking files in total on the Journal’s test computer. Nearly a third of these were innocuous, deployed to remember the password to a favorite site or tally most-popular articles.

But over two-thirds—2,224—were installed by 131 companies, many of which are in the business of tracking Web users to create rich databases of consumer profiles that can be sold.

To be sure, the Journal’s coverage is lurid — more so than necessary to make the point. And the series, at least so far, doesn’t address the disturbingly huge amount of information collection and sales by the shadowy offline industry that combines our credit-card, banking and other information into a gigantic data bazaar over which we have little or no control.

That said, the Journal’s coverage is valuable in at least one respect: It explains just how pervasive the surveillance has become and with what indifference the people doing the surveillance view your privacy.

They will say, with some truth, that it’s all in the interest of creating advertising and services aimed at your interests. Why, then, do they cloak what they do in such opaque ways?

My friend Jeff Jarvis, who leads an unusually public life, says the Journal is telling us nothing we don’t already know. Granted, the fact that websites have put cookies and other user-observation mechanisms on our computers is not news. But do we all know that tracking systems have become not just ubiquitious but also disturbingly interlinked? I pay fairly close attention to this field, and the Journal series has opened my eyes a bit wider; for those who have a vague idea of what’s going on, the stories may well come as a nasty shock.

I’m closer to what another friend, Doc Searls, concludes: This is creepy, and we need to turn it around. Doc, a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, writes:

There is no demand for tracking by individual customers. All the demand comes from advertisers — or from companies selling to advertisers.

For now.

Here is the difference between an advertiser and an ordinary company just trying to sell stuff to customers: nothing. If a better way to sell stuff comes along — especially if customers like it better than this crap the Journal is reporting on — advertising is in trouble.

Here is the difference between an active customer who wants to buy stuff and a consumer targeted by secretive tracking bullshit: everything.

Two things are going to happen here. One is that we’ll stop putting up with it. The other is that we’ll find better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising.

Doc is working on a project to create “Vendor Relationship Management,” turning on its head the idea that sellers should manage customers. Rather, he says, we should be the ones in charge.

At best, getting there from where we are will take years. What do we do in the meantime?

It’s encouraging to see that venture funders have “spotted a new market opening and are pumping millions of dollars into privacy-related start-ups,” as the Journal reported last month. What we need, sooner than later, are tools to manage our own privacy.

When I browse I use several extra tools in the browser that help me block unwanted spying. In particular, Firefox has a well-developed add-on ecosystem including BetterPrivacy (for “super-cookies like Adobe’s irritating Flash plug-ins) and NoScript (lets me specify by domain). Whatever browser you use most, you’ll probably be able to find ways to block at least some unwanted behavior. I’m testing Abine‘s tools, which go much further than others (too far, by some accounts), as well.

One thing I don’t do is block cookies from host sites. I don’t mind at all if a website I use regularly — especially a site offering me services at no charge — wants to keep track of what I do there, or ask me to register. These are entirely fair tradeoffs.

What I mind a great deal is when that information becomes cross-referenced with what other sites and services learn about me. What I do at the Journal’s site (which I pay for, making further data collection even more outrageous, in my view) is emphatically not the business of, say, Dictionary.com, or vice versa. Yet I have no clear idea if they or third-party data collectors are sharing or cross-referencing, or what they’re doing with the data if they are.

The alleged transparency efforts by data collectors is an illusion of openness. Read the various privacy statements and disclosures, not  just on the sites you’ve visited but the third-party trackers they don’t always tell you about, and if you can decipher it all you’re a lot smarter than the rest of us. It’s obfuscation and plainly designed to be.

A few years ago, when supermarkets started offering frequent-shopper cards that provided discounts in return  for creating shopper databases, some people I knew came up with a clever idea. They met once a month and put their cards into a hat, then drew someone else’s card out of the hat and used it. This clearly violated the spirit of the bargain, and probably the letter, too. But it reflected a wise mistrust of the corporate motives behind the shopping cards, especially because it was not clear what would happen to the data.

I suspect we’ll need to do things like this on the Web, too. Until we have vastly more transparency from the companies collecting, massaging, renting and selling this information, I’ll be inclined to mislead the marketers.

This article was originally published on Salon on July 29, 2010.

Andrew Breitbart should be held accountable for his deceptions, but is there a libel case here?

This is no surprise: Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department official who was forced out in the wake of false claims that racist views affected her work, says she’ll sue Andrew Breitbart for his bogus “journalism” about her. But are the courts the best place to hold him accountable for his sleaze?

I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to predict the outcome of any Sherrod libel claim. A court — and Sherrod herself — would have a number of issues to consider, however.

One is whether Sherrod was a public official or public figure at the time when Breitbart posted his now-infamous Web article featuring an excerpt from a video that purported to show her, an African-American, acknowledging racial bias against white farmers and then acting on it to their detriment. (Your town’s mayor is a public official; Lindsay Lohan is a public figure. Which makes California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger both, I suppose.)

Public officials and public figures have higher hurdles in libel cases, thanks to Supreme Court rulings that required a showing of “actual malice” on the part of the person making the false statement. Essentially, malice means that the defamatory material was published with the knowledge that it was false, or that the publisher showed “reckless disregard” for the truth. (See the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s page on defamation law for more detail.)

Breitbart has claimed he didn’t know the video was a hack job — purporting to show racism when in fact her point, made clear in the context of the full recording, was that the issue was class, not race and that she did her best to help the farmers. If he didn’t know, did he try to find out? Would that matter in a libel case?

Even if he’s telling the truth about not knowing the true nature of the video, and even if that is enough to make the commentary non-libelous, Breitbart may have another problem: his bogus “correction” of the original. Here’s the correction:

While Ms. Sherrod made the remarks captured in the first video featured in this post while she held a federally appointed position, the story she tells refers to actions she took before she held that federal position.

As friend and colleague Scott Rosenberg has pointed out, this is not much better than the original.

A genuine correction, Scott writes, would read something like this:

Our original story was wrong. We quoted Sherrod to suggest that she drove an old white couple off their farm because she was a racist. In fact, she helped that couple hold onto their farm and used the tale to argue against racism.

So, even if the original wasn’t libelous under the current public-figure standard, is Breitbart’s refusal to admit he was wrong about so much — in the face of utterly clear evidence — legally actionable? Again, I’m not a lawyer, but I have a feeling we’re going to find out the answer.

David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard’sBerkman Center for Internet & Society (I co-founded the project when I was a fellow at the center several years ago), says the correction “appears to give her a stronger case on the question of actual malice” than the original posting — again assuming Breitbart wasn’t complicit in the video’s editing. These cases depend on state of mind, he says, but it seems clear that Breitbart knew at the time he posted the correction what was in the full video.

Some other questions, legal and otherwise, that may come up include:

• Will California’s shield law let Breitbart keep the name of his source confidential?
• Should anonymous sources be permitted to launder their defamations through others? (I’ll be coming back to this in another posting.)
• Was Breitbart doing journalism, however crappy it may have been?
• Has Sherrod ever said or done anything that could fairly be characterized as having racist intent, regardless of what happened in this case?

If Sherrod proceeds with this case, her adult life will almost certainly be put under a microscope — this one with a court order behind it in discovery proceedings — where Breitbart’s lawyers look for even a hint that she’s the kind of person Breitbart was claiming in the first place. Can anyone whose father was lynched by white racists not have had such things to say, ever? My sympathies lie strongly with Sherrod, and I’d hope a jury’s would as well, but I wonder if she’s ready for the legal attack dogs who may demonstrate even less honor, if that’s possible, than Breitbart.

David Ardia notes that individuals seeking libel damages, even when totally justified, often don’t get the results they expect in an often vicious process. In fact, he tells me, it’s fairly rare to get anything close to full satisfaction.

There’s one more question, and I still think it’s the most important one.

• Why should anyone believe anything Breitbart says at this point?

The answer, of course, is that Breitbart has no credibility whatever among those who count honor and fairness as an element of journalism. He could regain some with a forthright admission of what he did, but at this point that looks unlikely.

Sadly, he still has a substantial audience. I hope anyone reading this is not among its members.

This article was originally published on Salon on July 27, 2010.

Federal ruling allows slightly more freedom to use what you’ve bought the way you want, but much more is needed

Good news in the copyright world is rare, but we have a couple of small victories to celebrate this week. The bad news: They only emphasize how grossly unbalanced our system remains.

These wins for customer freedom center around a technology broadly known as DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management — methods used by hardware and software companies to allow customers only certain rights. It should more properly be called Digital Restrictions Management, because that’s the real aim of DRM. People have found ways to break or work around DRM, but federal law makes it illegal to do so in most circumstances.

The cracks in DRM’s legal facade are starting to grow, too. On Monday, the Copyright Office and librarian of Congress said, among other things,that it’s OK to A) “jailbreak” your phone, thereby letting you install software not approved by the phone seller; and B) use brief excerpts of DVD videos in other works. Renewing a previously granted exception to federal copyright law, the office also said it was OK to unlock your phone so that you can use it with a different mobile network.

The exceptions are still fairly narrow, to be sure, and how widely they’ll be used remains to be seen given the way our mobile phone and media markets work in the real world. But they’re notable in several ways.

One is the language the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, used in his rulemaking document (1.5MB PDF). For example, he called the act of jailbreaking a phone “innocuous at worst and beneficial at best.”

Industry arguments against these exceptions, for which the Electronic Frontier Foundation had led the fight, had been laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Apple, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, took the hardest-line stance against the concept that customers should have the right to use the devices they’ve purchased as they see fit.

Apple’s objections ultimately came down to its insistence that customer freedoms would “undercut the overall iPhone experience” (emphasis from the original document filed in the case). In other words, you should only be able to use the iPhone, which is nothing more than a handheld computer connected to digital networks — albeit a wonderfully designed device — in precisely the ways Apple determines.

Having lost in the Copyright Office, Apple responded with typical arrogance, telling the Cult of Mac blog that it might now be legal to use your iPhone the way you want to, but you’ll void the warranty if you do. And you can expect Apple to keep up its cat-and-mouse game of using software updates to screw up jailbroken phones, as the iPhone Dev-Team — leaders of the jailbreaking movement – are warning.

The continued ability to unlock your phone and use it on a competing network isn’t much help, because of the insanity of America’s competing mobile standards. Even if you unlock a newer iPhone, you can’t use it to its maximum capabilities on Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile because of various radio and chip incompatibilites.

But if you travel overseas frequently, unlocking your GSM-based AT&T or T-Mobile phone will be nontrivial (assuming it isn’t already unlocked, as mine is). You can use local SIM cards in many countries and save a huge amount of money.

The other important move by the Copyright Office was to allow people to remix videos in other works. Essentially, the copyright officials observed that it was ridiculous to believe that we’re all but forbidden from quoting from others’ creative work just because it’s in a DRM’d video format.

Unfortunately, this exception is way too narrow in the real world. It allows circumvention of the DRM solely for:

(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;

(ii) Documentary filmmaking;

(iii) Noncommercial videos.

In other words, it’s still not allowed to quote from another video work for commercial use (other than in a documentary). This is nuts. If authors had to get permission from every writer or publisher whose work they intended to quote, scholarship and journalism would grind to a halt.

The copyright office’s exemptions also included the right to bypass computer system dongles that are broken or obsolete; a research exception for studying video game security; and read-aloud functions in e-books if not provided by the publisher.

Again, we shouldn’t overstate the value of Monday’s ruling. The law remains horribly unbalanced in favor of the copyright holders. But any progress is helpful.

This article was originally published on Salon on July 26, 2010.

Afghanistan diaries mock secrecy and highlight shifts in war, politics, media. Look for a counterattack

It’s hard to escape the sense that we’ve hit one of those historical pivot points in the wake of  WikiLeaks’ release of the Afghanistan war document trove. The conduct of politics, war and media — so intertwined these days — has changed irrevocably.

A few points seem clear (I plan to revise this as new information becomes available):

First: Daniel Ellsberg said today this is comparable to the Pentagon Papers, which he leaked to the New York Times and others back in the 1970s. I’m old enough to remember that event, and it was a pivotal moment in its own right. (The Atlantic’s Jim Fallows has valuable perspective on the larger meaning of both leaks, as well as their similarities in key ways, as they applied to American policy and war aims.)

If he was contemplating the same decision today, Ellsberg said in April, he’d just scan the documents and put them online. But just posting documents isn’t enough. While media are becoming democratized, there’s still the matter of getting people’s attention beyond a small circle of those who care deeply about any given topic. You want the biggest bang for the buck, you still take your story to the media organizations that will give your story a ride.

So the fact that WikiLeaks” Julian Assange gave an early look at the documents to three selected organizations — the New York Times, theGuardian and Der Spiegel — is proof of his incredible savvy at how traditional media actually operate. In a recent New Yorker profile, he lamented the general uninterest he perceived among journalists when it came to huge stories. When everybody has the story, he realized, they don’t care much about it.

When a few selected journalists at major institutions get it first, that’s how you create buzz. This says more about journalists’ competitive instincts and their Pavlovian response to “exclusives” than it does about their willingness to actually do their jobs for their audiences.

Second: WikiLeaks’ roles — intermediary, publisher, P.R. agent and more — is not utterly unprecedented, but the size and importance of this story takes the shifting changes in media to new levels. (Do read Jay Rosen’s smart instant analysis on all of this.) What do we make of such a “stateless news organization,” as Jay elegantly puts it, which works so hard to subvert so many media assumptions of the past?

Even though the New York Times took huge care in what it printed, and kept some of the material out of its own reports at the request of the Obama administration, a newspaper’s redaction is not very important if WikiLeaks puts out everything on its own.

That’s a big “if” — because WikiLeaks hasn’t put everything out. On its War Diary front page, here’s this item:

We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually, in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.

We’ve become accustomed to seeing traditional news organizations delay publication or broadcasts at the request of governments. The New York Times, you’ll recall, held off for more than a year when it came to telling the American people about the Bush administration’s illegal surveillance of our communications — a decision made in what the paper considered journalistic good faith but which to many of us was an outright betrayal of the craft.

Journalists also do what sources demand, if that’s what it takes to get stories. This is why so many articles have so many unnamed sources.

In this instance, WikiLeaks is holding back, at least temporarily, to keep its source happy. You and I can’t judge whether this is really about minimizing harm or something else. We have to take WikiLeaks at its word, for now. One reason we may be more inclined to do so is the promise that these new documents will be released in full at some point.

Third: A week ago — seems longer, doesn’t it? — the Washington Post ran a superb series of articles on how America’s national-security state is emerging from the 9/11 paranoia, a “Top Secret America” that is at once terrifying and expected given the public’s twitchy fears and politicians’ eagerness to cater to our worst instincts. We learned that almost 900,000 people holding “top-secret” clearance are part of an apparatus that almost certainly spies on everything and everyone it can identify as even remotely, potentially, possibly suspicious — with no real oversight.

(This helps explain the White House’s panicky response to the WikiLeaks war documents, including the spectacle of administration officials complaining that Assange is antiwar and therefore must not be trusted. What if he is? The documents speak for themselves. Or do they? It’s an impressive number, 90,000 documents with the promise of 15,000 more, but do they provide full context? We don’t know. I’ll discuss this in an update later.)

Whatever our keepers of intelligence secrets do know, and whatever abuses they’ve done to our civil liberties to learn them, they must feel less sure today about keeping it all contained. When that many people have access to information, however compartmentalized their bosses may think they’ve made the system, some of it will get out, which leads to something else we should worry about.

Fourth: The WikiLeaks war diary will absolutely spur our powerful institutions to look for increasingly draconian ways to clamp down on how we share information. What WikiLeaks represents is what governments and corporations fear: a threat to their cultures of secrecy and dominance in their domains.

Look for Washington and our corporate media to call for new laws to stop this kind of thing. Politicians and bureaucrats who don’t trust us to know what’s really going on — they are legion in both major parties — have allies among the traditional media and the entertainment industry that would gain enormously if the Internet were to be turned into a slightly more interactive version of 20th century print and broadcast media.

If you think the rich and powerful people who run governments and corporate media aren’t working every day to turn back the clock on information they can’t control, you’re not paying attention. WikiLeaks may well have given them new ammunition for pushing the harshest kinds of restrictions. Do we want to be like Saudi Arabia and China? We may find out one of these days, sooner rather than later.

Finally, this: I have donated money to WikiLeaks in the past. I plan to donate in the future. What Assange and his team are doing is an inevitable result of what technology has brought us in democratizing our media. Some of what they do troubles me. But the bottom line seems to be this: They are performing a public service.

This article was originally published on Salon on July 21, 2010.

When the Andrew Breitbarts of the world can spread lies with lightning speed, knee-jerk reactions are dangerous

UPDATED

If you’re one of the people who believed, even for a minute, that former U.S. Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod misused her government position in racist ways, you have plenty of company — and you may also believe you have a plausible excuse. After all, you were told by Big Media, the Obama administration and the NAACP that it was true.

Except, as we’ve all learned, it wasn’t true. It was a brazen lie, pushed initially by the infamous Andrew Breitbart and his allies at Fox News and other right-wing media outlets, and given credence via the cravenness of other media organizations, Obama’s secretary of agriculture and America’s most prominent civil rights organization.

No surprise that Fox and others leaped aboard the Breitbart wagon: Here was “news” that A) fit their worldview and B) came with video. So what if the video was incomplete. Don’t look for even a shred of genuine remorse, ever.

(UPDATE: Looks like I spoke too soon on that; watching Fox this evening, I heard some commentators offering sound cautions about leaping to conclusions — and Bill O’Reilly has forthrightly apologized, according to the Washington Post. Let’s welcome these thoughts and hope the Fox audience pays attention. Further update: Josh Marshall, ina scathing piece on the media’s failure in this case, calls the Post story a whitewash.)

The other players named above, who credulously endorsed the lie, should be ashamed. Afraid that they might be seen as giving cover to a black person with racist thoughts, they leaped on the discredited “evidence.” At least the NAACP apologized for its role in the smear. (UPDATE: And, as we’ve all heard now, so has the administration.)

But the misdeeds by others don’t let the rest of us off the hook. And if this isn’t a teaching moment about media, politics and our twitchy culture, nothing is.

I’m lucky, in a way. I first heard about the story and Breitbart’s role in it at the same time. So I instantly had doubts.

I didn’t doubt that an African-American could express racist ideas. What I doubted was that Breitbart could be taken at face value. His record was evidence, beyond my reasonable suspicion from my perspective, that the only smart way to approach his work is to wait for absolute proof — and not trust anything until seeing it. And his sulphuric spin of the current situation is beyond disgusting.

In our evolving media ecosystem, we should be skeptical of everything we read, see or hear — online and in traditional media. But we should not be equally skeptical of everything. We need to find sources we trust (more than not) and recognize that even they will make mistakes.

This means, in particular, that we all need to take a deep breath before making knee-jerk assumptions, or at least before we act on them. The consequences of acting before verifying can be minor, or they can be ugly — as in Sherrod’s blatantly unfair forced resignation.

I heard some regret on CNN last night for its role in spreading the lies, and hope other big-media organizations are doing the same. That’s not the real test, however. What they do in the future is the test, and it’s an easy one: The next time you see a Breitbart-pushed story moved forward by a serious journalism organization that hasn’t checked out the facts in every particular, you’ll know that organization has failed.

Time for an office pool on which one will fail first. I can all but guarantee, with sadness, that someone in the office will win.

(Update also reflects that Fox was hardly the only conservative media outlets to find this story worth covering.)

This article was originally published on Salon on July 19, 2010.

The Library of Congress and other preservation-minded organizations ponder how we preserve what we’re creating

They’re trying to save the news. Among other things.

No, this isn’t yet another thumb-sucking cogitation about the future of journalism, at least not the kind we typically see these days. Rather, this is about a different issue: How do we save journalism (and other media) that’s already been created — including the all too ephemeral information that we’re creating online?

This week in Washington, DC, the Library of Congress is gathering its “Digital Preservation Partners” for a three-day session — one of a number of such meetings the library has been holding under a broad initiative called the “National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.” Its multi-year mission is:

to develop a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations.

It’s what my technology friends call a non-trivial task, for all kinds of technical, social and legal reasons. But it’s about as important for our future as anything I can imagine. We are creating vast amounts of information, and a lot of it is not just worth preserving but downright essential to save.

My role this week, and at a workshop I joined last year, is to be thinking about the news. My mind almost explodes when I consider the issues.

Even when there were relatively few community information sources — mostly newspapers — we had preservation issues. I started my newspaper career at a small weekly that has long since closed down. While I’m sure someone, somewhere, has a printed copy of the issues, the journalism is nowhere to be found online. And what happens when a newspaper with some printed archives and some online shuts down? Sometimes those archives go dark, too.

Even newspaper archives that exist online tend to live behind paywalls that prevent most people from using them. This greedy policy, which I’ve discussed before, has helped ensure that newspapers are less relevant in their communities than they should be.

A newspaper company I worked for deleted years worth of my blogging, twice. Once was when it changed publishing platforms. The second time was after I left the company. With some technical help I recovered and republished most of it myself.

TV and radio broadcasters have tended to save tapes or digital archives, though huge gaps have emerged in the record. Remember, storage used to be expensive.

The rise of citizen media has complicated everything. Now we had vast new sources of information, some useful and some not. (Kind of like traditional media, no?) Who had the obligation, if there was one, to save this material?

Well, we have the wonderful Brewster Kahle and his team at the Internet Archive to thank that a bunch of it still exists (including my old blogging that we recovered, no thanks to the newspaper company that killed it). The reality, however, is that much of the Web — not to mention many if not most of the great BBS conversations of earlier times — is lost.

After last year’s digital preservation meeting I suggested that we needed better ways to do our own archiving of blogs and other social media. I still believe the Library of Congress, Internet Archive and other preservation-minded folks should help the rest of us with this task.

The social question arises about people who don’t want to save what they’ve done.? Do they have a right to delete it? The Archive will take things down on request. But once you’ve put something up publicly, isn’t it public?

It’s not just a social question, but a legal one, now that judges areordering newspapers to delete archived stories. It’s a legal issue as well because copyright laws are constantly getting in the way of reasonable use of published material. The entertainment industry has taken us down a troubling path in this regard, and things are only getting worse.

And then there’s the entire question of material we create spontaneously, using databases that provide individualized experiences when we seek information. This isn’t just about search queries but about many kinds of community information sources; what you and I see when we visit Everyblock may well differ based on what we type into the text box. The only people archiving this stuff are the ones who own the databases; will the rest of us every have a look? Privacy interests say that we should not reveal it, but historians in the next century and beyond would find this absolutely crucial to their understanding of our times.

Happily, smarter people than yours truly are working on all of this. I’ll be filing some reports from the Washington meetings, to let you know what they’re thinking.

This article was originally published on Salon on July 16, 2010.

Steve Jobs offers new cases and refunds, and tells the media to stop making such a big deal of reception problems

UPDATED

Here, in a nutshell, is Apple’s defense in the so-called AntennaGate affair:

Our customers love the iPhone4, and everyone else has the same problem, so shut up already, media. But because we’re so generous and customer-focused, we’re giving all iPhone4 buyers a free “bumper” case (and a software update) that makes everything hunky-dory.

OK, that’s a bit oversimplified. But not by much.

Apple brought a small group of selected journalists (given what I’ve saidabout Apple lately I was, unsurprisingly, not invited) to Apple’s Cupertino headquarters for an event that is unlike any I can remember in the company’s history: an attempt to slow if not halt the deluge of bad press the iPhone4 has been getting over the reception problems buyers of the new device have discovered in the real world.

Apple has been taking enormous heat — sometimes fairly and sometimes not — for the iPhone’s flaws. Based on the amount of coverage it’s received, you might imagine that the iPhone is about an order of magnitude more important than, say, the financial “reform” law that has made its way through Congress. (The New York Times’ Nick Bilton wrote, “It’s Just a Phone,” but that, too, was part of the massive coverage, right?)

On the Apple stage Friday morning, CEO Steve Jobs tried to make a casethat a) the problem isn’t bad in the first place; b) it’s a common one in the industry; and c) we should all just stop talking about it.

Regarding the first point, for example, Jobs said half of 1 percent of new buyers called to complain about the reception problem. I’d call that a huge percentage. Most people don’t call support in the first place. And the early adopters of the iPhone are surely predisposed to wanting to be happy with their decision.

I’m more inclined to cut Apple a bit of slack on the second point. There is clearly an industrywide issue with reception, but I’m not persuaded at all — especially after the Consumer Reports testing — that the iPhone4 experience is typical. I’d like to see a much broader research effort by Consumer Reports and other unbiased testing agencies on this, so we really understand what’s happening.

But Jobs was admitting, at the same time, though he didn’t put it this way, that Apple didn’t do sufficient testing of the new phones. (So, by the way, was Consumer Reports admitting that it didn’t do sufficient reporting when it first recommended the phone, only to unrecommend it later.) This is an inevitable consequence of maintaining a corporate culture of such secrecy and paranoia — wanting to spring new products on the world with the maximum amount of hype, an Apple phenomenon that journalists serve so well with their long-standing adoration, only now being tested.

Give Jobs some style points for unintended irony in calling Apple “totally transparent.” But was he taking a subtle jab at AT&T to mention that the carrier keeps dropped-calls data a secret? Pot, meet kettle.

Apple’s insistence that the media are blowing the situation out of proportion is a matter of opinion, of course. I tend to agree that the antenna issue is not exactly earthshaking, but Apple’s claims of near-perfection — its new devices are magical, remember? — leave the company more open to the perception of failure than would otherwise be the case.

The entire affair reminds me of the Intel “Pentium Bug” fiasco back in the 1990s, when Pentium chips were found to have small flaws in the way they handled certain calculations. Intel executives believed the flaws were not important enough to matter, but public concern snowballed and the company — doing the right thing belatedly — did an expensive recall.

Perhaps, given its industry-leading position these days — a long, long way from its earlier days as an underdog — Apple is beginning to realize that it has to be more forthcoming than it’s been in the past. That would be a wise realization, though an unlikely one as long as Jobs is in charge.

Meanwhile, it’s updates and bumpers for all! Well, for some, anyway.

This article was originally published on Salon on July 12, 2010.

Google’s Android “App Inventor” tries to bring mobile programming to the masses

UPDATED

Back in the 1980s, Apple Computer (as it was known then) released a product called Hypercard. It was an easy-to-use programming tool, based on a simple and elegant programming language called HyperTalk, combining databases and a graphical display to create applications called “stacks.” Programmers and non-programmers alike flocked to it, and created a huge variety of stacks that ranged from useful to quirky.

In the 1990s, Microsoft released Visual Basic. It, too, greatly simplified the programming process and was adopted by vast numbers of people — many inside large enterprises — whose work reinforced the Windows monopoly.

In the past decade, Web development took on some of the same qualities, giving average people ways to create applications to run on the Web with great ease and simplicity. Blogger, WordPress and Drupal, among others, became the content-management systems of choice, for example, and Yahoo’s brilliant Pipes let people do sophisticated mashups without knowing a line of Java or other popular languages.

Now comes a tool from Google that is getting quick buzz. It seems more in the Hypercard/Blogger genre than Visual Basic, which was made for beginners but did take some skill, but nonetheless a possible breakthrough. This one, built for the mobile age, is called the AndroidApp Inventor. I haven’t been able to try it yet, but its description suggests great potential. Google says:

You can build just about any app you can imagine with App Inventor. Often people begin by building games like WhackAMoleor games that let you draw funny pictures on your friend’s faces. You can even make use of the phone’s sensors to move a ball through a maze based on tilting the phone.

But app building is not limited to simple games. You can also build apps that inform and educate. You can create a quiz app to help you and your classmates study for a test. With Android’s text-to-speech capabilities, you can even have the phone ask the questions aloud.

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.

Based on the work of a number of people including Hal Abelson at MIT — a brilliant computer scientist who also understands how app development need to get into wider distribution, not just the coder community — the open-source environment leverages of other educational software projects.

One of the most important elements of App Inventor is that it will let developers take full advantage of the mobile hardware. Part of what makes mobility so interesting is that sensors built into devices — compasses, GPS radios, accelerometers, for example — add  capabilities that were unavailable in the PC era. To be able to leverage those in a dead-simple way is just huge.

I don’t want to overstate the potential here. Google’s not alone in working on such things, no doubt. But from what I can see this is going to be a seriously big deal if it works as advertised.

And I’ll be shocked if Apple doesn’t do something equivalent for its iPhone ecosystem. (It will have to be Apple, because the company forbids app developers to use any tools but its own — one of the most arrogant yet ultimately foolish moves Apple has made to date.) (See the update below for some high irony.)

The downside, if there is one: The number of Android apps is about to explode. This is a giant opportunity for Google — or anyone else, for that matter — to offer better curation than the current Market via various marketplaces and recommendation systems, as well as simple aggregation. Help the users. Don’t control them.

I’m going to start working on an app for the journalism marketplace, a project I’ve wanted to do but couldn’t get going with because of the cost. From what I can tell, I’ll be able to do most of what I need with this tool, maybe not everything but enough to get going and then iterate later.

UPDATE: One of the building blocks for App Inventor happens to beScratch, a programming language aimed at kids and developed at MIT. One guess what happened when the developers of Scratch submitted a version they’d created for the iPhone platform to the Apple App Store: Yep, Apple rejected it.

(Note: Google has supplied some of its early Android phones, the G1 model, to my university for experiments. Many other companies, including Google rivals Apple and Microsoft, have supplied gear and/or software, and offer discounts to university students, faculty and staff.  I purchased (at list price) the Google Nexus One phone that is my main mobile device.)

This article was originally published on Salon on July 10, 2010.

Soccer officials and their foolish rules, trying to restrict what fans can say from inside the stadium

In the technology whack-a-mole sweepstakes, please meet this month’s winner: FIFA, the cartel that operates the World Cup. The organization actually appears to believe it can stop fans attending the games from telling people outside the stadium what’s going on inside, at least in any timely way.

Allow me to quote from the Stadium Code of Conduct, which prohibits fans from bringing into the stadium (unless perviously authorized) a long, long list of items including:

p) cameras (except for private use and then only with one set of replacement or rechargeable batteries), video cameras or other sound or video recording equipment;

q) computers or other devices used for the purposes of transmitting or disseminating sound, pictures, descriptions or results of the events via the internet or other forms of media…

Skip down a bit and you find another long list of prohibited actions once inside the stadium. The relevant one here says one may not:

record (except for private purposes), transmit, or in any other manner disseminate over the internet or any other media, including mobile devices, any sound, image, description, or result of any event taking place within the Stadium, in whole or in part, or assist any other person(s) conducting such activities; commercially exploit any photographs or images taken within the Stadium…

FIFA’s motives aren’t mysterious. Like all professional entertainment organizations — and pro sports is nothing but an entertainment business when you come down to it — the organizers want to control who’s going to make money off at least the immediate event, if not every ancillary piece. But FIFA’s rules, like so many others, are unsustainable.

In an hour or so, I’ll be heading to the consolation game of the 2010 World Cup in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, with a group of journalism educators from around the world. (The sponsors of a conference where I spoke have helped pay my expenses, including a ticket to the game.) I’m not sure whether I’ll commit one of the prohibited actions, but I’ll definitely be violating the rules of what I can bring inside. And, of course, I’ll be one of the tens of thousands of people there who does so.

This is because, as FIFA knows perfectly well, most of us — surely a majority of those attending a World Cup game — carries a video camera and sound recording device at all times, as well as a computer. It’s called a mobile phone. If it’s a so-called smart phone, it’s capable of everything FIFA and other big sports cartels, such as the International Olympic Committee, have no real idea how to handle in an ecosystem they want to control so completely but which is opening up despite their wishes. (The Olympics officials made themselves look truly idiotic earlier this year with their attempts to restrict even what athletes could say.)

They can discover the pro-quality, high-definition video cameras with zoom lenses and the works, and keep that gear out. But some newer mobile devices are getting pretty slick in their video capabilities, and hidden cameras, for better or worse, are getting much, much more capable and simple to disguise. In a few years it’ll be trivially easily to disguise even a HD video recorder in, for example, buttons or caps. What will FIFA and similar organizations do then?

Rather than try to restrict the use of these devices, FIFA would be wise to encourage them. I’m not urging them to invite people to bring in fancy video gear with super-resolution close-up capabilities (yet, anyway). But to suggest that people should not be allowed to send an SMS to a friend after a goal is scored is lunatic even for the most control-freakish outfits.

In fact, if I were running FIFA’s communications/media operation, I’d invite people to be posting videos wherever they wished, and would do my best to aggregate the best ones as quickly as possible. I’d invite the global Internet audience to piece together whatever looked the most interesting videos in any way they chose, and then invite those folks to tell us where to find them so we could promote the best ones.

Will there be a time when fan-TV in real time is good enough to be good enough for the people who pay for TV service that advertisers sponsor at huge costs? Eventually, perhaps. But not right away, and there’s plenty of time for live-entertainment industries to figure out rational new rules.

Real-time social media should be a boon to big-time entertainment, including sports. I wonder if the official bodies that run them will recognize that soon enough.

This article was originally published on Salon on July 8, 2010.

Android software update turns Internet access loss into a minor problem

As noted several days ago, problems in an intercontinental fiber-optic cable have caused Internet outages for a lot of folks in South Africa this week. Those of us attending the Highway Africa and World Journalism Education Congress meetings were among the mostly disconnected.

But not completely in my case, due to a truly nifty feature in the latest version of its Android mobile operating system: The phone becomes a Wi-Fi hotspot. It’s simply a matter of going to the Settings and turning it on.

I’d already bought a local SIM card and a voice/data plan — total cost about $75 for ample voice time plus 2 gigabytes of data — for the two weeks we were scheduled to be in the country. I didn’t want to pay the outrageous Internet charges hotels tend to charge in much of the world, and also knew we’d be visiting some non-urban areas; the mobile networks do a comprehensive job of covering the country, and in a pinch, I figured, this would suffice. The pinch became a crunch with the cable failure, making the investment an even better one than I’d anticipated.

It’s not new to convert a mobile phone to a modem via tethering. I’d done that before with several other phones. Turning it into a hotspot was more difficult. With this feature, Google has added a service that users will relish — but which some mobile carriers will loathe, because the need for expensive extra dongles and data plans just went away in many cases. Some carriers seem to be preempting this feature, it seems, just for that reason. (It’s possible to unlock these and other “prohibited” features, though it takes some work, which I’ll describe in another posting one of these days.)

My U.S. mobile carrier charges a data fee for the phone, and with a bandwidth cap of (I believe) about 5 GB per month. It doesn’t care, as far as I can tell, whether I use it with the phone alone or a phone/computer combination. This is the right approach, but some carriers want you topay more just for the convenience of tethering your laptop to the phone.

Unfortunately, the latest Android OS isn’t available yet on many of the Android phones. (And the word is it won’t work, ever, on some older phones like the ones, such as the G1s.) So if you have one of those, you’ll just have to wait until your carrier decides to a) install the upgrade; and b) enable the hotspot.