Online libel — one public policy problem that is LESS bad than it appears
The Register raises concerns about a proliferation of internet-related libel suits. Apparently, these are an outgrowth of heated flame wars. If we let our imaginations go a bit, it isn’t hard to think of all sort of noxious possibilities here, with various kinds of baddies suppressing justified commentary about themselves.
Even so, there’s a simple solution — people just have to learn how to write. Everything you write that’s defamatory or otherwise nasty should clearly indicate your reasoning and/or evidence for the claim. If you claim factual evidence, you can and should be held accountable for libel if the evidence is wrong. If it’s just unsupported (or very lightly supported opinion), and you make the lack of support clear, then it would be very hard to tag you with libel, at least in the US.
Now, I’m obviously a lot better trained in libel-avoidance — and hopefully a much clearer writer anyway! — than most people. But the basic principle applies to everyone:
Be intellectually honest, and you won’t be committing libel.
As for Google, et al., who might be construed as republishers of the libel — give me a break. Give them a break. Maybe web pages will all need routine disclaimer notices renouncing responsibility for their contents, especially the contents of what they link to. But otherwise the big internet players should not, and I’m confident will not, be under serious threat of libel judgments.
| Categories: Public policy and privacy | 20 Comments |
Research on technology economic development – Please help!
I’ve gotten involved in some pro bono research and education, and I’d appreciate whatever help my friends in the industry can provide.
The project is: I want to offer pithy advice to developing countries that seek to strengthen their technology industries. Major subjects include:
• What kind of policies should they adopt (and avoid!) to foster development?
• What sectors should they emphasize or even try to prosper in, given their present starting conditions?
I was inspired to pursue this by – and intend to present preliminary results at– a panel I’m running on May 21 at the TECHLEB|06 conference in Cambridge, MA. So that’s my deadline for finishing Phase 1 of the project.
How you can help
I’d appreciate your thoughts in any format – email, phone call, comment to this blog post, whatever – on questions like these, for any developing country you have familiarity with:
• If the country has had well-run tech companies that failed to prosper, why did they fail?
• If the country has had tech companies that succeeded but probably would have failed in many other developing countries, what were the differences among countries that seem to have allowed success?
• Were there any events or particular developments that seem to have made a big difference in starting or stopping tech industry success? Which government policies, if any, were a big help or hindrance?
• What is the availability of educated people? Academic/technical training? Tech industry experience? In what respects is that adequate/inadequate?
• Same questions – physical and logistical infrastructure.
• What else should I be asking?
In all cases, it would be very helpful to note which sectors(s) of technology you’re talking about, because different countries have succeeded in different ones. For example, India started out with professional services companies, while Taiwan succeeded primarily in electronics manufacturing and assembly. And mainland East Asia’s successes (domestic Chinese companies somewhat excepted) seem to be mainly in branches and satellite operations of large global tech companies. Israel’s tech industry, perhaps even more than the US’, seems driven heavily by defense spinoffs, and is divided across a variety of electronics sectors accordingly.
And if you have insight into biotech or other fast-growing areas, that would be phenomenal too.
I’ll put my own preliminary thoughts in another post. Watch the comments section to this one for a trackback!
| Categories: Economic development, Public policy and privacy | 3 Comments |
An unusually ambitious conference — TECHLEB!06
“We want TECHLEB to be a turning point in Lebanon’s economy. For there to be a time before and a time after TECHLEB.”
H.E. Jihad Azour
Minister of Finance
Lebanon
TECHLEB!06, “Under the Auspices of the Prime Ministry,” is an extremely worthy and ambitious effort. With participation from the Minister of Finance on down, a large fraction of all the stakeholders in Lebanon’s nascent technology industry are convening May 20-21 at MIT. Their goal? Clear away roadblocks and kickstart Lebanon’s tech industry. Indeed, there’s a strong intention to decide upon and announce substantial public policy changes before the close of the conference. The possible payoff? A major engine of prosperity in a wartorn, rebuilding, geopolitically crucial crossroads country.
Mainly, this is a conference of, by, and for the Lebanese. But I’m spearheading an exception — a panel to bring in lessons learned from other countries that have succeeded in improving their lot with the tech industry’s help. We have speakers already committed with expertise in Ireland and the Arab world. We’re still looking to add panelists with knowledge of India and perhaps Eastern Europe. One of the panelists is a name familiar to many of you — John J. Cullinane, founder of Cullinet Software, the leading independent software vendor of the mainframe era. (Companies that succeeded largely because of ex-Cullinet people include, in my opinion, Powersoft, Cognos, Silverstream, and to some extent Lotus — and Oracle copied big parts of the Cullinet strategy.)
My panel is at 9 am on Sunday, May 21. Most of you will have no interest in being there. Even so, I’m going to ask a couple of you for help in recruiting speakers. And I hope you all consider helping me with my research into just what we should advise the Lebanese Minister of Finance to promise to technology entrepreneurs.
I’ll post a formal panel description when I have one. It will be linked in the trackback/comment section to this post.
| Categories: Economic development, Public policy and privacy | 3 Comments |
Flash drives and security — a modest proposal
I’ve argued that Flash-based “diskless” PCs would offer major improvements in security. On the other hand, evidence from US military installations in the Middle East suggests than Flash drives are actually a major security hole.
Can these views be reconciled? I think so. The answer, simply, is that Flash drives need embedded RFID chips (or some substitute technology) so that their movements can be detected and controlled.
“But wait!”, you cry. “Doesn’t that mean anybody who legitimately carries a secure Flash drive around can have her movements nefariously tracked?” Well yes, it does, but that genie is out of the bottle anyway. We just have to deal with it on another level.
Technorati Tags: Flash, security, privacy, RFID
| Categories: Diskless PCs, Hardware, Privacy, censorship, and freedom, Public policy and privacy, Security and anti-spam | Leave a Comment |
How to beat Chinese Censorship — Operation Peking Duck
I argued in a previous post that, as individuals and webpage publishers in the West, we have the solution to Chinese censorship in our own hands. While I can’t have been the first person to think of this, a quick search isn’t turning up other references to the idea. So here is the outline of what I’ll call “Operation Peking Duck.”
(The name comes from my favorite Chinese dish, which unlike other most Chinese dishes is made by wrapping several disparate things up in the same tortilla-like flatbread. It’s also a bit of wordplay on “peek” and/or “duck.”)
The problem is not that Chinese residents are cut off from most outside information. Rather, they’re cut off from information on selected topics, commonly associated with keywords such as “democracy,” “Taiwan,” “Tibet,” etc. Thus, things would be much improved if a fairly limited and slowly-growing set of documents were freely available in China, presenting news about and balanced views of these subjects. 10 gigabytes of reference plus a 1 gigabyte/year of new material doesn’t sound like a lot, but if it were text-only that would actually be a great deal of material to start with. Even a much smaller amount would be highly worthwhile.
The plan (and this is just an idea, but I’m confident that the technological parts are straightforward) would be this:
1. For coordination, there would be a central repository of material to get to the Chinese people. It should be kept somewhere that is pretty well secured against denial-of-service attacks and the like, since the Chinese can play hardball.
2. Ideally, material would be donated by news services and the like. Otherwise, it would have to be written by volunteers.
3. Large numbers of volunteers would each embed some of the material in web pages, at least those being served to Chinese IP addresses. It would be cloaked in a way that makes it hard to filter.
Obviously, any site serving this material is a prime candidate for winding up on a Chinese blocklist. So to make all this work, there are four hurdles to overcome:
- Technically, defeat censorware filters. This should be almost straightforward. The general idea is to encode the text in a way that in can be decoded by a VERY simple browser plug-in, and rely on the Chinese to write and circulate such plug-ins themselves. The simpler it is, the harder it would actually be for antivirus and other filtering software to stop the internal distribution of such plug-ins. Directly delivering the plug-in is of course a bit more problematic, because it’s easier for the “antivirus” software to target. I would be very interested in any discussion of the best implementation strategies for this part of the plan.
- Technically, defeat the blocklist. Unfortunately, while it should be possible to keep the Chinese government from filtering out the “offending” additions to webpages, they probably can create a unreliable filter (i.e., one with too many false positives) that flags a high fraction of all Peking Duck pages served for manual review. So they’ll get onto a blocklist fast. Thus, they need to be disposable pages. That aspect is easy, many minor sites now have 500,000 pages plus via the magic of automatic page generation. What’s more, they need to be on domains that China can’t afford to block in their entirety.
- Socially, get enough participants, especially participants of the right kinds. So a necessary condition for the success of Operation Peking Duck would be, it seems, significant participation from sites that China can’t afford to block. The list of such sites probably starts and ends with major universities. The good news is that universities are (at least in theory) committed to intellectual freedom, and to not being intimidated by retaliation for the expression of intellectual ideas. On the bad news side, they generally have a ton of static URLs, but not many dynamic ones. So getting around the blocklist would be a nontrivial effort for them. Whoops; this is an area in which some work needs to be done.
- Socially, get enough content. Whatever the obstacles here, this is not a dealbreaker. Why? Because even a little bit would be hugely beneficial. Indeed, a small amount would actually be easier to circulate (or at least circulate pointers to) in-country.
At this point Operation Peking Duck is just a personal brainstorm of mine. So before I get serious about trying to promote it — does anybody have thoughts about its feasibility? Specific ideas? Links to sites where these ideas have already been exhaustively discussed?
If so — thank you!!
Google in China — Tough question, wrong question
Henry Blodgett poses the question — if you don’t think Google should have cooperated with the Chinese authorities in fostering censorship, what do you think it should have done instead? I think that’s the wrong question (although I’ll answer it below anyway). Rather, I think the right question is:
What can the rest of us do to help overcome Chinese censorship?
In the 1980s, Western information flow was huge in bringing down the Iron Curtain. The main influence was free TV, undermining communist-regime propaganda by showing how people in the West lived (much more affluently than in the East, for starters). George Soros also famously donated copiers, fax machines, etc., which seem to have been a nontrivial aid to internal information flow.
China of course is more open today than communist countries were then. TV, movies, travel, the uncensored part of the internet — they all help ensure a reasonably high level of understanding of Western thought and Western information. Even so, the Chinese government tightly controls discussion of — and access to infomation about — certain sensitive political issues, such as democracy, Taiwan, Tibet, etc., just as several Arab governments do on their favorite hotbutton issues.
But we in the West, if we choose, should be able to overcome that censorship! We can’t even keep ourselves from getting unwanted information — email spam, search engine results spam, etc. Getting information to Chinese people who want it should, by comparison, be straightforward. (I’ll write up a post with a specific plan shortly; the URL should appear in the trackback section to this post.) That’s where effort and attention need to go.
Back to Blodgett’s question. As a number of insightful links and comments in Blodgett’s thread illustrate, Google’s decision about whether or not to cooperate was not an easy one. I really only have two observations to add to those there. First, this isn’t just about short-term revenue and market presence. It’s also about developing technology cost-effectively that will be useful in any future Chinese endeavors under any future Chinese regime.
Second, that technology development point cuts both ways. Google will be training a lot of smart Chinese engineers in exactly the skills they’d need to make automated censorship more effective. And for that reason, I think Google should have stayed away.
Since I also favor proactive steps to fight censorship, I guess that puts me in Blodgett’s “Option III” group.
| Categories: Google, Public policy and privacy | 1 Comment |
IBM mixes its paradigms — or does it?
I’ve been writing this month about the three different paradigms used by the leading enterprise software vendors:
- Data/information-centric (IBMOracle)
- People-centric (Microsoft)
- Process-centric (SAP)
Well, in a recent announcement IBM set out to straddle the three categories, and a couple more to boot:
IBM has identified five entry points to enable customers to more easily approach and initiate an SOA project. These entry points include people-, process- and information-centric approaches as well as connectivity and the ability to reuse existing assets.
But a look at some of the detail from the announcements strongly suggests that the three paradigms haven’t overnight truly become co-equal.
For supporting a people-centric approach to SOA, WebSphere Portal version 6.0 integrates IBM Workplace and collaborative technologies, making it easier for users to build and deploy composite applications that can be tailored by industry, role or task. The new release takes advantage of AJAX to create a more responsive user environment.
Sounds like pretty basic stuff.
Additionally, the latest version provides a workflow builder that utilizes the process engine from WebSphere Process Server, open standards-based software powered by WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that helps simplify the integration of business processes.
Ditto, although I’d put that in the “process” rather than “people” category.
To improve business visibility and deliver a process-centric approach to SOA, IBM announces WebSphere Business Monitor version 6.0. This software provides an aerial view of the business and enables customers to proactively identify potential issues before they impact productivity. New features in WebSphere Business Monitor include business alerts, links to third party reports that combine real-time performance and historical analysis, and scorecards to track the status and metrics of projects.
Again, pretty basic.
For an information-centric approach to SOA, IBM is delivering industry-specific models to help clients successfully launch their SOA initiatives. The enhanced IBM Banking Information FrameWork and IBM Insurance Application Architecture models provide a set of critical processes, workflows, and activities to help organizations reengineer their business processes to implement strategic initiatives such as master data management.
Now, I’ve in no way been briefed on those, but off the top of my head that sounds more than just “basic” to me.
Data is still pre-eminent at IBM.
| Categories: DBMS vendors and technologies, IBM | 1 Comment |
NSA at AT&T: Universal monitoring apparently confirmed
An AT&T engineer has stepped forward, accusing the NSA of monitoring all AT&T internet traffic. EFF is suing the Feds accordingly.
Maybe this should be going on and maybe it shouldn’t, but one thing seems obvious to me — if it is going on, there should at least be a heckuva lot more transparency and disclosure.
A blueprint for the analytical organization
I just ran across Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene’s great article What Corporate Projects Should Learn From Open Source. Basically, it’s a detailed argument for the virtues of the open source ethos — careful analysis, transparent analysis, open-minded analysis, honest analysis. Nothing real new there, but they did a particularly good job of spelling it out.
And then it struck me — their arguments don’t just apply to software development. It’s really just basic good management sense, very similar to what business schools and BI vendors have been trumpeting for years. Only in their case the motherhood-and-apple-pie rhetoric is bolstered by — well, by analysis.* After all, we can do fairly objective after-the-fact observations as to whether and to what degree any given development project has succeeded.
*At least of the handwaving sort — but does anybody really doubt that what surveys and anecdotal consensus seem to show about software development projects is essentially correct?
If I can, I’ll flesh out these ideas into one of my next columns.
| Categories: Analytic technologies | Leave a Comment |
Cool map of internet ownership
I just found the CIO blogs post with the really cool map of internet ownership. Click on the map and keep enlarging it. Read the text to see how not to misinterpet it.
Truth be told, I haven’t looked at it long enough to get any analytic usefulness out of it whatsoever. Still, I think it’s cool. 😀
| Categories: Fun stuff | Leave a Comment |