You are under surveillance
An awesome piece. It’d be fabulous if someone *cough cough* printed a few hundred of these and started putting them up throughout the US in public spaces.
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The fact that American copyright holders basically govern an arm of the US government that can, and is, shutting down website URLs at the TLD root is terrifying. That degree of power, however, looks like nothing compared to what happened in the recent MegaUpload takedowns. Consider the following:
The width and breadth of the global police action are simply massive, and are, quite justly, being painted as a massive over-reach. The full indictment goes so far as to mention Canadian bandwidth provider Cogent, whose headquarter employees were even held and questioned during the raids this week. Indeed, anybody who provided bandwidth, rack space or Internet services appears to have been held, questioned, and/or pressured in the global raids.
The policy of seizing domains and hardware first, without any adversarial court process, limits every person’s ability to contest American efforts to silence free speech. Moreover, the maneuvers taken impose American understandings of American law upon all people living around the world. Such actions not only makes associating with certain others, and certain behaviours, legally dangerous but given a willingness to even threaten major ISPs’ employees it suggests that even third-party data transit providers are at risk. America is (rapidly) developing a policy process and technically-informed system capable of censoring any communication, any speech, any uploaded data that its rights holders believe might damage those corporations’ economic interests.
In the 30s and 40s there was a name for this kind of behaviour: fascism. We’re now witnessing the final stages of what was intended to be the greatest republic in the world go the way of Italy. All that stands between the RIAA and running considerable elements of American law enforcement are the courts.
God save us all.
This is how you leverage a monopoly in one domain (search) to force yourself into other markets while strip-mining users’ privacy expectations. I’m so glad that Google is a ‘do no evil’ kind of company and that they value users’ privacy.
The revamped Google account creation page adds some additional fields to the sign up form, including name and gender which are both necessary for creating a Google+ account. There’s also a new agreement — turned on by default — granting Google permission to “use my account information to personalize +1s on content and ads on non-Google websites.”
I would note that Facebook didn’t become successful by requiring people to sign up; it made the service cool and prestigious to drive early adoption. They also weren’t pushing people from one service into another, separate and unrelated, one. I can’t wait to see what the Europeans do to Google: it’s going to make the hell the Microsoft went through look like a brief, and sunny, walk in the anti-trust regulatory park.
To outfit a student body of 700 students at current prices schools would need to spend approximately $350,000, and that’s just for the hardware. To outfit one particular class, say Chemistry, with the needed textbooks—at Apple’s quoted $15 per book price—would likely cost a little over $10,000, to outfit the entire school with every textbook they needed for every course would cost significantly more than the hardware itself.
All told, an average size school would need to find approximately $500,000 to equip its entire study population with iPads and digital textbooks, and with most schools struggling to find funding for programs like art, music, and physical education, current financial priorities may be elsewhere.
My vote: an expensive money pit. Unless, of course, schools start deferring costs by requiring parents to pony up and pay for expensive Apple iGear. I’m sure parents would just love that extra expense of $500/year in hardware costs. I bet replacing damaged screens, stolen devices, and so forth will also improve parents’ sunny dispositions towards school systems that adopt Apple’s digital textbook extravaganza.
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Must Read on Apple ‘Saving’ Education
While I’m skeptical about the reasons that publishers are embracing Apple’s new iBooks Author system, Kieran Healy has a terrific piece that strikes to the problems with iBooks themselves: they’re a solution that insist on defining the problem. The issue is that, the problem it’s ‘solving’ is unlikely to be a significant problem actually facing educators, students, or the educational market.
The punchline in particular is great: Encarta is not the future. I’m not saying WHY that’s such a great punchline but you can find out if you go and read the article.
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Why Papers Books Beat iBooks
Dieter Bohn, over at The Verge, has a masterful analysis of paper-based books versus Apple iBooks (and eBooks in general). A few choice quotations are below, but you should really just take a few minutes of your day and go read the whole article.
The list of “specs” for your standard paper book gets surprisingly long when you expand your definition of technology to include elements that don’t require a computer chip.
- Readable with any form of light
- Very high contrast display
- Requires no battery power
- Depending on model, lasts anywhere from five to five thousand years or more
- Immersive and non-distracting user interface
- Offers a spatial layout for immediate access to random information
- Conforms to the standardized “page number” spec for easy reference
- Supports direct interaction via pen or highlighter
- DRM-free for easy lending and resale
- Standards-based system not controlled by any single corporation or entity
- Crash-proof and immune to viruses (though vulnerable to some worms)
- Easy to learn user-interface consistent across most manufacturers
- Supports very large number of colors and also black and white images
- Compatible with a wide variety of note taking systems
…
I understand that free and open access to paper books isn’t available everywhere, that various hegemonies have stifled and do stifle dissent. Books can be burned, banned, and censored. But if we are going to be putting our collective knowledge into digital formats with DRM, we are adding another layer of possible censorship on top of the layers of control we already contend with. This isn’t (entirely) paranoia that Apple or Amazon will control access to human knowledge, it’s also a practical concern founded in the experience of being blocked by poorly designed DRM.
….
The thousand year view is simple: if you’re going to commit knowledge to writing in some form, you need to ensure that it will exist and be readable in a thousand years. I can tell you that I’ve personally gained insight and understanding about our world by reading a lightly-distributed instruction manual for rural, parish priests in England — written in the fourteenth century. Will an independently-created iBook 2 textbook be around in the thirty first century?
From Ars:
… e-book publishing experts have concerns about the formatting that iBooks Author can output, which isn’t fully ePub 2 or ePub 3 compliant. Furthermore, Apple has added a clause to iBooks Author’s end user license agreement that prohibits selling e-books created with iBooks Author anywhere but the iBookstore.
…
“The offending language in the iBooks Author EULA is a condition on the use of the software, sort of disguised as a condition on the use of the books that are created,” Brown said. “Imagining how this might play out in a dispute reveals the nuance. Say a user makes her iBooks Author created work available for sale through some non-Apple platform. Would Apple sue, claiming that that book is infringing? Of course not—it would lose that lawsuit big time. Instead, Apple would claim that the use of iBooks Author to create that work violated this condition of the EULA, thus was beyond the scope of the EULA, and thus was infringement. Any lawsuit would be for infringement of the software, not of the book.”
On first glance, the new iBooks Author application looks really interesting. I’m incredibly impressed with it’s general ease of use and the capability to make works created through the application available to anyone using an iDevice. Unfortunately, I’m unwilling to produce works for a platform or publisher that so dramatically limits the scope of my potential audience. The licensing requirements mean that only freely available works can be made available in multiple domains, and inability to export to ePub (and expect it to work) means that I’d effectively be creating locked-in text for a hyper-small audience.
As an author, Apple is punishing me. Hell, if I were a content publisher (in the large commercial sense) that gave a damn about content accessibility I’d run for the hills.(Yeah, I know, there really aren’t many of those!)
The public shouldn’t regard the fact that major publishing houses have partnered with Apple as indicating any interest whatsoever in ‘democratizing’ education. No, what is really happening is a clever end-run around democratizing education. You see, by adopting Apple’s environment and charging for works, publishing houses are creating new license-based reasons to rebuff those who want publishers’ texts in standards-compliant, multiple-device accessible, formats. In effect, the publishers have single-handedly stepped into Apple’s reality distortion field to appear to be ‘reshaping education’ while actually locking out efforts to truly democratize textbooks.
Well played textbook publishers. Well played.
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Iran clamps down on internet use
From the Guardian a while back, we learn:
Iran is clamping down heavily on web users before parliamentary elections in March with draconian rules on cybercafes and preparations to launch a national internet.
Tests for a countrywide network aimed at substituting services run through the world wide web have been carried out by Iran’s ministry of information and communication technology, according to a newspaper report. The move has prompted fears among its online community that Iran intends to withdraw from the global internet.
The police this week imposed tighter regulations on internet cafes. Cafe owners have been given a two-week ultimatum to adopt rules requiring them to check the identity cards of their customers before providing services.
Since the Green Revolution the Iranian government has massively committed resources to identifying and undermining Iranian citizens’ ability to communicate with one another using electronic systems. From their integration of deep packet inspection into their main ISP networks – and configuring them to identify and stop some kinds of encrypted traffic – to the creation of cyber-police, and now attempts to physically identify those who use public computers, it is getting harder and more dangerous for Iranians to communicate with one another over the Internet.
You should go read Chris’ paper, available at SSRN. Abstract below:
Today, when consumers evaluate potential telecommunications, Internet service or application providers – they are likely to consider several differentiating factors: The cost of service, the features offered as well as the providers’ reputation for network quality and customer service. The firms’ divergent approaches to privacy, and in particular, their policies regarding law enforcement and intelligence agencies’ access to their customers’ private data are not considered by consumers during the purchasing process – perhaps because it is practically impossible for anyone to discover this information.
A naïve reader might simply assume that the law gives companies very little wiggle room – when they are required to provide data, they must do so. This is true. However, companies have a huge amount of flexibility in the way they design their networks, in the amount of data they retain by default, the exigent circumstances in which they share data without a court order, and the degree to which they fight unreasonable requests. As such, there are substantial differences in the privacy practices of the major players in the telecommunications and Internet applications market: Some firms retain identifying data for years, while others retain no data at all; some voluntarily provide government agencies access to user data – one carrier even argued in court that its 1st amendment free speech rights guarantee it the right to do so, while other companies refuse to voluntarily disclose data without a court order; some companies charge government agencies when they request user data, while others disclose it for free. As such, a consumer’s decision to use a particular carrier or provider can significantly impact their privacy, and in some cases, their freedom.
Many companies profess their commitment to protecting their customers’ privacy, with some even arguing that they compete on their respective privacy practices. However, none seem to be willing to disclose, let alone compete on the extent to which they assist or resist government agencies’ surveillance activities. Because information about each firm’s practices is not publicly known, consumers cannot vote with their dollars, and pick service providers that best protect their privacy.
In this article, I focus on this lack of information and on the policy changes necessary to create market pressure for companies to put their customers’ privacy first. I outline the numerous ways in which companies currently assist the government, often going out of their way to provide easy access to their customers’ private communications and documents. I also highlight several ways in which some companies have opted to protect user privacy, and the specific product design decisions that firms can make that either protect their customers’ private data by default, or make it trivial for the government to engage in large scale surveillance. Finally, I make specific policy recommendations that, if implemented, will lead to the public disclosure of these privacy differences between companies, and hopefully, create further market incentives for firms to embrace privacy by design.
Nate Anderson writes, in reference to Spain’s new web blocking law:
Resistance from locals was fierce. The US embassy, which enthusiastically supported the Sinde law, noted that “serious challenges” lay ahead, that the law was opposed by Internet groups and lawyers, and that “the outcome is uncertain.”
Still, the government didn’t think much of the opposition. Carlos Guervos, Deputy Director for Intellectual Property at the Ministry of Culture, told the US ambassador that “the dogs bark but the caravan moves on” and that the law would be passed.
The dogs put up a good fight, though. As the BBC noted, “Last year hacktivist group Anonymous organised a protest at the Goya Awards—Spain’s equivalent of the Oscars—which saw several hundred people in Guy Fawkes masks booing the minister of culture while applauding Alex de la Iglesia, then-president of the Spanish Film Academy. The movie director had previously voiced opposition to the Sinde law on Twitter and later resigned over the issue.”
Then in late 2010, opposition parties managed to halt the bill in parliament. On December 21, the Electronic Frontier Foundation declared victory and said that a committee had “just stripped the website shut-down provision from the Sustainable Economy Bill”—in part due to the revelations about US pressure.
But the government found a way to bypass the barking mutts, leaving the law for the incoming administration to handle after November 2011. (The law was so unpopular that the former administration elected not approve it after huge levels of animosity surfaced on social networking sites.) The new government did so quickly, passing a modified version of the Sinde law—judges will now have to issue the actual blacklist order, for instance.
…
Whatever you think of the resulting legislation, the process was grotesque: the Spanish film industry got one of its officials into power, then promoted a tough new law backed by the threats (and even active lobbying) of the US government—though the US didn’t take the same measures itself.
This is yet another demonstration of American content industries’ ability (and willingness) to exert political pressure through the State Department to affect legislative changes around the world. It’s absolutely absurd that such a small segment of the American economy can wield such incredible power. The Web, and Internet, is larger in economic, political, and cultural importance than any particular group of rights holders; copyright should not trump the laws governing the next generation of content generation and dissemination. As a content producer – with items in print – it’s absolutely reprehensible that any rights holder would actively attempt to undermine the principles of open and free exchange of knowledge that the Web is based upon.
Excited Pixels 