Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Do: ‘Objectivity’ in the Age of the Internet

Meggs, Philip B. A History of Graphic Design. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1998. (p 64). Used via Wikipedia.

Alan Mutter, a media critic who is both wise and smart, has pointed to the elephant in the room: journalists aren’t objective. Can’t be, really (though many try). But their biases are so mundane, he argues, that these collections of predilections and conflict-appearing life facts certainly don’t disqualify the conscientious ones from being respected reporters — if the rest of us know about them instead of treating them like the insane aunt you won’t admit is locked in the cellar.

Mutter notes that the history of journalism is about partisanship, driven by newspaper owners with agendas. “Objectivity was not their objective,” he says. But it’s no accident that the internet — blogs, Facebook, Twitter — has accelerated the discussion not only of who is a journalist but how “objective” a journalist has to be.

Mutter sets as an example to us all the über disclosures of Kara Swisher of AllThingsD, which begins: “It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.”

In a former life I did some media criticism, and often focused on the unhelpful, unsustainable fiction that reporters could be considered pure only if they lived by some sort of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Do” policy. The subject is very much alive, and just as confusing, with the recent firings of Juan Williams at NPR (an analyst, no less) and CNN’s Octavia Nasr.

Mutter is right to suggest it is time to stop the madness. And he is on to something, but it’s a very old media solution.

I think the answer is not a “data dump,” in which the clever can conceal (ask any lawyer) and which, by definition, isn’t ever complete. Someone can always say you didn’t include this or that and thus your intention was to evade.

The internet has also taught us that self-descriptions and stated preferences are very imperfect but recommendations based on behavior do approach perfection. You may tell a survey taker one thing, but what you bought, what you watched on TV, what movie you rented, and what web sites you have visited tell the real tale. This is why Netflix offered $1 million for a recommendation engine that was only a little bit better than the one they created and how Google has built a company that takes in some $25 billion a year based on scanning keywords in your e-mail.

We can all live amazingly transparent lives now, but some of us have an obligation to actually be more transparent than others. The answer may just be to be yourself in every arena — use your real or the same name, and the same picture — and to participate on the issues of the day, and then aggregate your life feed and make it widely available.

There are some obvious metrics that still bear immediate and bare disclosure, like sources of income that would appear to create a conflict of interest — witness Swisher’s discussion of her marriage to a senior Google executive, which exposes two potential conflicts.

The charade of blank slate can’t be sustained in the age of the internet but life-casting with abandon will make the charge of bias boring.

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Xmarks Lives: LastPass Buys Downtrodden Bookmark-Syncing Service

Just when we all thought we’d never see it again, the cross-browser bookmark syncing service Xmarks has received a life-saving injection.

The company has been acquired by LastPass, maker of a cross-browser password manager and form filler add-on. The deal was announced Thursday, and terms were not disclosed.

Xmarks will live on as a freemium service. The initial cross-browser syncing tool you’re already familiar with will be free, but users will be encouraged to upgrade to a paid subscription to unlock more advanced features. It’s the same model employed by LastPass for its own Premium version of its (otherwise free) password-syncing service.

Xmarks Premium will be offered for $1 per month ($12 per year) and it comes with some new features like apps for the iPhone and Android phones, and technical support. You will also be able to bundle the premium offerings from LastPass and Xmarks together for $20 per year.

There’s already an iPhone app for Xmarks, and the company just recently released an Android app, too. Xmarks says anyone currently using the iPhone app can continue to use it without upgrading to the premium service, but they will have to buy in to the $12 per year plan to get future upgrades.

It looked like curtains for Xmarks in September, when the company announced it would shut down its service in early 2011.

Continue Reading “Xmarks Lives: LastPass Buys Downtrodden Bookmark-Syncing Service” »

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Google Streamlining its Approach to Digital Copyright

As the battle over intellectual property and online piracy heats up, web titan Google is announcing some significant changes to the way it deals with copyright infringement on its ubiquitous search engine. In making the changes, Google seems to be sending a message that it is a good citizen when it comes to online copyright infringement, and it’s taking some very tangible steps to demonstrate that.

The big picture is that Google just got quite a bit more inhospitable for people and websites that violate digital copyright law.

“There are more than 1 trillion unique URLs on the Web and more than 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute,” Kent Walker, General Counsel at Google, wrote in a blog post. “It’s some pretty fantastic stuff –  content that makes us think, laugh, and learn new things. Services we couldn’t have imagined ten years ago — iTunes, NetFlix, YouTube, and many others — help us access this content and let traditional and emerging creators profit from and share their work with the world.”

“But along with this new wave of creators come some bad apples who use the Internet to infringe copyright,” Walker wrote. “As the Web has grown, we have seen a growing number of issues relating to infringing content. We respond expeditiously to requests to remove such content from our services, and have been improving our procedures over time. But as the Web grows, and the number of requests grows with it, we are working to develop new ways to better address the underlying problem.”

One of the main goals of the changes is to increase the speed and efficiency with which the company addresses copyright takedown notices sent to Google under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the seminal law that protects websites like Google and Facebook from liability if they promptly remove infringing content when notified by copyright owners. Google already receives thousands of such requests; the goal of these changes is to streamline the process both for itself and rights-holders.

“We’ll act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours,” Walker wrote. “We will build tools to improve the submission process to make it easier for rightsholders to submit DMCA takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and Web Search). And for copyright owners who use the tools responsibly, we’ll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less. At the same time, we’ll improve our ‘counter-notice’ tools for those who believe their content was wrongly removed and enable public searching of takedown requests.”

Google says that it will also “prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete,” the search engine’s tool that fills in the query box as you type.

Additionally, the company says it will work with rights-holders to “expel violators” from its AdSense ad serving product. Google has always prohibited AdSense on sites that provide infringing materials. Here, again, the company’s goal is to work with rights-holders to make the process faster and more efficient.

Finally, Google says it will “experiment to make authorized preview content more readily accessible in search results.” In other words, the company will now actively be trying to make sites with legitimate content “easier to index and find.” While the details of this particular initiative are still somewhat vague, one can see what Google is trying to do — create incentives for good behavior and disincentives for bad behavior.

In other words, play by the rules and Google wants to make your site “more readily accessible.” Don’t play by the rules and say sayonara the world’s biggest search engine.

The changes will be rolled out over the next several months.

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BBC to Launch Subscription-Based Global iPlayer for iPad

The BBC iPlayer is coming to the iPad in the form of an international, subscription-powered app. Right now you need to be in the UK to watch the on-demand service, which streams BBC shows from the past seven days.

The app won’t launch until the middle of next year (just in time for the next series of Doctor Who, hopefully), and the price has yet to be decided. One thing is pretty certain, though: there won’t be any commercials. In the UK, the BBC shows no ads. The service is supported instead by a mandatory “License Fee,” payable by anyone with a TV.

The service will roll-out internationally, and the U.S. will be among the first markets added. Somewhat ironically, the Global iPlayer will not be available in the UK, where the BBC is prohibited from charging for content. UK users can access an iPad-friendly version of the browser-based iPlayer, though.

BBC picks iPad for iPlayer global launch [Financial Times - subscription required]

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Google Unveils ‘Personalized Channels’ to Bridge TV Attention Gap

Some 35 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube every minute, but the numbers Google are most interested in are “5″ and “15.”

The former is the number of hours the average person watches TV every day. The latter is the number of minutes the average person stays on YouTube per session — yes, I thought that was low too.

So Google is pressing its advantage — a seemingly limitless supply of content on what would seem to be every topic imaginable, and a pretty good idea already of what you like to watch — in a bid to bridge that attention gap.

The search giant is calling its new feature “Personalized Channels” and rolling it out as part of YouTube’s “Leanback” service, a quasi-TV experience complete with pre-curated channels like “comedy” and “gaming,” and a “remote control” via Android smart phones.

With the personalization, you will be able to create a never-ending video stream based on keywords that you provide, and on your viewing history. Your channels get better over time, the company promises.

Users of Pandora and similar cloud-based music services will be familiar with the concept: You name an artist and you get a “station” playing that act’s tracks as well as those which the algorithm deems is in a similar genre. And, like streaming audio stations, you can vote up and down specific video streams to try to exclude types of content from bubbling up downstream.

The music metaphor isn’t lost on Google. A spokesman brought it up spontaneously in a briefing with Wired.com in advance of the announcement.

But there are big differences. It’s easy to create a station based on, say, Rick Astley. But there are lots of possible ways to describe things that aren’t household words. “On YouTube it is hard to know what to call ‘keyboard cat’ videos,” said Shiva Rajaraman, Group Product Manager. “So the challenge was, ‘How do we create a vocabulary?’”

This is where user history comes in handy as a starting point.

Creating online video channels around behavior seems way overdue — after all, TiVo tagged you as gay nearly a decade ago. It’s been long possible on YouTube to subscribe to individual feeds, and to do ad hoc searches which play one clip and suggest others when that one ends. “Personalized Channels” leverages YouTube as a vast library rather than as a subscription service, introducing a more refined means of discovery that could prove quite sticky.

The irony is that YouTube is battling to become more like TV even as Google TV tries to make television more like the internet. The main paradigm of television is to sit back and do nothing.

So this new effort to limit interaction, and the need for limiting it, ironically emphasize YouTube not as a mere repository, visited for a specific reason and for a short period of time, but as a genuine lean-back experience — rivaling the boob tube for your attention, loyalty and disposable, time-wasting minutes.

Wait — that’s a good thing?

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Google, Facebook, Twitter to Feds: Man Up on Net Neutrality

Amid the cacophony of reactions to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposed internet openness rules, one group has been conspicuously absent — the world’s largest internet companies.

Not any more.

On Thursday, the Open Internet Coalition, a diverse interest group that represents Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Skype, Amazon, eBay, and scores of other internet-dependent companies, will run ads in two prominent Washington, D.C., publications — Politico and The Hill — expressing their displeasure with Chairman Genachowski’s new compromise rules.

The Open Internet Coalition participated in the now-infamous closed-door talks held by FCC Chief of Staff Edward Lazarus last summer. It didn’t end well. Markham Erickson, the respected tech policy lawyer who is Executive Director of the OIC, confirmed the authenticity of the ads in a phone conversation with Wired.com Wednesday evening.

In their ads, for which the group paid tens of thousands of dollars, OIC makes a simple point: What Chairman Genachowski is proposing isn’t real net neutrality.

This is the ad copy (emphasis original):

“President Obama promised to protect the open internet,” the ad reads. “That means no gatekeepers. That means no internet access providers building toll roads or blocking traffic.”

Here the group is making a not-so veiled reference to Comcast, which this week startled internet users after the cable giant got into a screaming match with backbone provider Level 3 over streaming video.

“It’s called net neutrality, and it’s not a new regulation. It’s the way the internet has always worked.”

Here the group is trying to make the point that net neutrality is the de facto standard on the web — which is why a lot of people take it for granted. The Open Internet Coalition wants to keep it that way.

“Our companies, public internet groups, and millions of Americans are united in support of real Net Neutrality without paid prioritization that applies to wired and wireless connections.”

Here OIC is taking a shot at Chairman Genachowski over what the group sees as a wimpy stance. Real net neutrality is code for “Title II” re-classification, which apparently scares the bejeezus out of Genachowski. That would have put ISPs like Comcast in the same regulatory category as the phone company, and left no doubt as to its authority to prevent abusive behavior by the companies that control the nation’s internet pipes.

“The FCC is poised to act. We join President Obama in our support of real Net Neutrality. Americans should expect nothing less.”

Ok, thanks for clearing that up guys.

Full list of OIC members after the jump:

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Telecom Giants Cheer FCC Plan, Net Neutrality Advocates Aren’t Amused

On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski set a vote on rules to protect network neutrality, the principle that broadband companies shouldn’t block or degrade rival web content, services or applications. The vote will be held on December 21st.

The compromise rules would re-establish the principle that U.S. internet users can use whatever software, websites and equipment they like on their cable or DSL connections. Those companies would also be barred from slowing down or blocking content from competitors. The ISPs will also have to be transparent about how they manage congestion on their networks to ensure that anti-competitive behavior isn’t being disguised.

Wireless companies like Sprint and Verizon would also have to be transparent about their “network management” and be barred from discriminating unfairly (such as blocking Netflix because they’d rather you use their video service.) However, consumers would not have the explicit right to use the equipment of their choice, run the software of their choice or use the online services of their choice.

The new rules do not bar cable and phone companies from creating for-pay fast lanes on the net, nor is the FCC re-classifying the internet as a “telecommunications service,” which would have given it clear authority to enforce these and other rules.

Instead, the FCC is using the same shaky legal foundation set-up by the Bush administration, when it created the first net neutrality rules. Those were obliterated in a legal challenge by Comcast earlier this year, setting up the need for these rules, which don’t look to be on any firmer ground and could dissolve the first time the FCC tries to enforce them.

Here are some of the reactions coming in from various experts and stakeholders in the debate.

Marvin Ammori, Visiting Scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet & Society (2010):

“FCC Chair Proposes Garbage, Calls it Net Neutrality“

“President Obama’s FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski, has a reputation in DC of being a “tepid” regulator. From reports of his net neutrality proposal, he’s living up to that reputation.”

“The proposal does not meet Obama’s campaign promises, or Obama’s other agencies’ actions, on net neutrality. It is ‘make-believe net neutrality.’”

Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge:

“We commend the Federal Communications Commission for tentatively putting open Internet rules on the agenda for the Dec. 21 Commission meeting and for, we expect, circulating a draft order.  As Comcast’s recent actions have shown, such rules are urgently needed.”

“Public Knowledge looks forward to working with the Commission to strengthen the order so that consumers and the vitality of the Internet are protected.”

John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco:

“Cisco supports the FCC completing this policy debate in a way that maintains an Open Internet, allows network operators to engage in reasonable network management and preserves incentives for investment in network infrastructure.”

“We look forward to Chairman Genachowski making progress on the key goals of his National Broadband Plan such as additional spectrum for wireless broadband and reforming Universal Service for broadband.”

John Doerr, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers:

“Maintaining an Open Internet is critical to our economy’s growth and Chairman Genachowski and his team deserve kudos for their thoughtful leadership.”

“This effort is a pragmatic balance of innovation, economic growth and crucial investment in the Internet.  We look forward to working with FCC to protect these principles so the Internet grows and thrives for generations to come.”

Ron Conway, one of the founders of SV Angel, a Silicon Valley early-stage investment fund:

“As an early-stage venture capitalist for over 20 years, I treasure the Internet as an engine for innovation and economic possibility-protecting its openness is vital to protecting America’s critical technological competitive advantages.”

“I am proud to join a diverse coalition in support of the Chairman’s proposed rules of the road. This light-touch, common-sense framework will help protect investment and innovation throughout the ecosystem and will ensure certainty in markets for years to come.”

Jim Cicconi, AT&T senior executive vice president:

“We are pleased that the FCC appears to be embracing a compromise solution.”

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FTC Backs ‘Do Not Track’ Browser Setting

The nation’s top consumer protection agency came out Wednesday in favor of tougher restrictions on online data collection, backing a “Do Not Track” setting in browsers and proposing that companies make it easier for individuals to see the data collected about them.

The FTC’s 122-page draft privacy report (.pdf) comes after more than a year of hearings, and a string of complaints and lawsuits against online ad companies for surreptitiously collecting data on internet users. The online advertising industry has long argued that it can police itself, but today’s report said those efforts haven’t worked.

“Industry efforts to address privacy through self-regulation have been too slow, and up to now have failed to provide adequate and meaningful protection,” the draft report said.

The FTC’s head Jon Leibowitz went further in a call with reporters.

“Self regulation of privacy is not working for American consumers,” Leibowitz said.

And in a thinly-veiled warning to online companies to clean up their acts, he added, “A legislative solution will surely be needed if industry doesn’t step up to the plate.”

The most prominent of those efforts has been the National Advertising Initiative that purports to give internet users a one-stop shop for opting out of advertising networks that track what users do online to build profiles in order to serve targeted advertisements. That system works via cookies in your browser that tell an advertising network such as Google’s DoubleClick system that puts ads on non-Google websites.

But that system has been buggy, inconsistent and often used identifiable tracking cookies to set a preference not to be tracked. Those practices were exposed by outspoken security and privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian, who subsequently worked for and then left the FTC.

The “Do Not Track” proposal endorsed by the FTC simplifies the process of opting out. The idea is that users would be able to choose to have their browser tell any website not to track them for advertising purposes, and that setting wouldn’t be wiped out if a user clears her browser cookies, as currently happens with opt-out cookies.

But the FTC says “Do Not Track” is not just about behavioral advertising. It could apply to any service, such as Google Analytics, that have to do with “sites and servers that build up a profile of what an individual does online,” according to the FTC’s incoming staff technologist Professor Ed Felten.

Leibovitz called on browser makers — including Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple — to build in “Do Not Track” technology and called out Adobe for privacy problems in its ubiquitous Flash plug-in, which some advertisers are now using to place tracking cookies that can’t be controlled by browser settings. Unlike the “Do Not Call” list, users will not have to register with a government database.

It’s not clear that the FTC has the power to force advertisers to obey the browser setting, and called for voluntary cooperation from the online ad industry. The agency could, however, go after companies that pledge to obey but then do not. To force compliance, the FTC would likely need Congress to pass legislation but the current report makes no recommendations for new legislation.

The report also calls for companies to make it easier for individuals to see the information collected about them. Some online advertising companies, including Yahoo and Google, allow individuals to see what topics the companies have inferred that they are interested in.

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Cable Traffic: WikiLeaks, Facebook, and You

As Wikileaks leaks occur with increasing frequency and with the usual suspects reacting in the usual ways and with no real bombshells going off, it won’t be long until, for most of us, these sorts of disclosures become background noise. But there is a good reason they shouldn’t: these are warning shots about the efficacy of privacy in every corner of the digital world.

As my New Yorker colleague Blake Eskin argues: If the United States can be embarrassed by a low-level employee those of us who live in Google Land and Facebook Ville should be a little more nervous with every Wikileaks disclosure.

As Eskin says:

Part of what comes with the State Department retaining the name “cables” for its now-electronic internal messages is the expectation of secrecy. The various classifications of cables—top secret, secret, noforn, secret/noform, confidential—remind me of the privacy settings for information shared on Facebook. You might let only certain friends see your e-mail address and phone number, but friends of friends can see your status updates, and everyone can see your Wall.

These gradations of secrecy or privacy permit the illusion that you can say something you wouldn’t say to the whole world. And yet, the data is all in Facebook’s servers, and the company has a history of expanding its user base, changing its policies, and revising its defaults, with the collective effect of its users sharing information with more people than they intended or expected to. Revelations about what a Saudi sheikh really thinks about Israel and Iran have broader repercussions than the photos of a bong-wielding Ivy Leaguer with her heart set on a career in banking. Both are open secrets, at least in certain circles, and the betrayal or horror the subjects both feel once their private words and actions spiral out of control are probably quite similar.

We are increasingly living on the cloud, and on a cloud if we think there aren’t inherent risks that accompany the convenience of using a netbook or a tablet or someone else’s storage space even from full-blown computer. It isn’t time to panic, but to worry, at least a little.

It took one soldier with the rank of private first class to feed information to WikiLeaks. One day there might be a rogue employee at Google or Facebook or AOL or the company where you work who could make something public that you wish they hadn’t. Ultimately, all these systems come down to trust in other people, corporations, and governments. We know trust will be violated sometimes, but not every Internet user will do as Dan Gillmor, of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, has done, avoiding Gmail and Facebook in favor of “your own home base on the Internet that is controlled by you.” But how many of us can live that way? And I don’t mean knowing enough about technology to be masters of our own data. Life without trust can be unlivable.

Cable Traffic: WikiLeaks, Facebook, and You [The New Yorker]

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Ruckus Smart Antennas May Be Key to Nationwide Wi-Fi

A commercial-grade Ruckus Wireless access point, opened up to show its innovative antenna. Photo: Ryan Singel/Wired.com

I’m standing in the middle of the some of the most congested airwaves on Earth, and I’m watching Russell Crowe in 1080p like I just don’t care.

If you opened your laptop to log on to the net here, you’d find a list of 160 different Wi-Fi access points to choose from. Normally, mere mortals would have a hard time even checking their e-mail in that cacophony.

But I’m walking away from the conference-room router I’m locked onto, past Ruckus Wireless’s finance and administration cubicles toward the corner office of CEO Selina Lo. I forge on, past the marketing department, the product management team and the guy in the engineering department who has decorated his cube with successive generations of Ruckus’ Wi-Fi router motherboards.

Crowe keeps fighting without a jitter.

It’s not until I’m nearly 200 feet away, approaching the radiation-proof Faraday cages used for testing Ruckus’ newest Wi-Fi antenna designs, that Crowe falters.

I’m toting a standard 15-inch laptop and watching Crowe seeking bloody Gladiator vengeance. It’s an HD video encoded in MPEG-2 — a luxurious experience that requires a steady 19 Mbps pipe (give or take) to play without stuttering.

It’s an impressive performance, and I’m not talking about Crowe’s fighting skills. The fact that Ruckus’ Wi-Fi antenna can hang on to a fat pipe even in the midst of a huge number of competing Wi-Fi signals is amazing. Just ask Steve Jobs, who watched a recent presentation grind to a halt earlier this year due to an excess of hogging wireless signals.

The secret is the patented antenna designs, the brainchild of the company’s co-founders Bill Kish and Victor Shtrom.

Traditional Wi-Fi routers use omnidirectional antennas, such as the little sticks on the back of Netgear and Linksys routers, which spill out signals equally in all directions.

Ruckus’ routers have 19 separate antennas, arranged in a circle on the motherboard, which constantly triangulate the receiver’s location. The router then sends out signals on the antennas that have the best path to a given laptop.

The algorithm driving the process finds the best path hundreds of times per second, because even just moving a laptop a bit or having a co-worker stand near you means that there’s likely a better combination to avoid the interference. Even more impressive? The router figures out individual optimal paths for each device connecting to the router.

Think of the router as housing up to 150 little people with cheerleader megaphones, tracking where you move and making sure you can hear them by aiming their cones at your ears. The idea is that Ruckus solves the problem that confronted Steve Jobs when he was trying to demo the iPhone 4 and had to ask the audience to turn off their 3G-to-Wi-Fi hotspots because he couldn’t lock his phone in on the Wi-Fi signal. Continue Reading “Ruckus Smart Antennas May Be Key to Nationwide Wi-Fi” »

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