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Tuesday, June 11, 2002 |
History Didn't Foresee Cyber Sleaze
"Suppose someone asked you to explain the Internet to the framers of the Constitution. What would you say? You're talking to men from the era of broadsheets and pamphlets. And you're trying to get them to understand an invisible network that beams music, news and advertisements for lower interest rates all over the world. How would you do it?"
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you'd find it a tad difficult, if not downright impossible. Those men would not have the context, nor even the vocabulary, to properly comprehend the Net.
Yet we are required to regulate it according to rules they wrote. That gives you some sense of the difficulty Congress faces in its repeated efforts to craft laws protecting children from cyber sleaze. Three times, legislators have legislated, three times judges have slapped them down, ruling that their efforts ran afoul of the Constitution....
If, as has often been said, the genius of the Constitution is its adaptability to changing times, then the Internet is testing that adaptability as few things ever have before. Cyberspace recognizes no national borders. It encompasses multiple billions of Web sites. Anyone with a server and a registration fee can set up shop. With its mixture of ubiquity and anonymity, the Internet has rendered laws in many areas -- copyright, libel and obscenity, to name a few -- more difficult to enforce if not downright obsolete. Should we really respond by making new laws?...
Legislating cyberspace is like trying to legislate rain. Granted, the framers of the Constitution had no way of knowing this.
But Congress has no excuse." [Mercury News, via Library Stuff]
The only thing I would dispute in this article is the suggestion that minors can be restricted to filtered computers in the children's section. While I'm a parent myself and I applaud efforts to protect children from pornography, filters usually block sites that are even tangentially related to abortion, contraception, alcoholism, drug use, homosexuality, and other subjective categories that have nothing to do with porn.
If kids (teens in particular) can't access resources about these kinds of subjects, they're not going to find what could be potentially valuable information as they make their own choices. The filters block sites about abstinence as well as contraception, so either way the sanitized funnel of information fails them. And what kid is going to ask a librarian to unblock a site about marijuana, abortion, or gay rights (even if the library allows for this circumstance)? I find it difficult to justify denying kids access to the empowering sense of community that you and I have discovered online, especially when that community can help them through that wonderfully difficult stage known as adolescence.
I don't have an answer. I wish I did. Laws by an uninformed Congress aren't it, though.
Having said all of this, I think the most thought-provoking idea in this editorial is the question asking how you would explain the internet to an 18th Century person. Now there's a subject worthy of discussion! I'm going to be thinking about that one for days....
11:51:31 PM Permanent link here
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(Re)defining the News Aggregator (And Your User Interface While We're At It)
"Dave talks about what a news aggregator is.
deus_x is thinking about what an aggregator should be.
I'll take it one step further, I think the entire computer interface should be overhauled to be more aggregator like, events streaming by, hover your mouse for some info, click for even more info. An incoming email slides by, click to read, or just let it go by and in a while your folders with unread mail in them will stream by. A friend just updated their weblog? You'll see the update stream by in your interface. Instant messages slide by, click it to reply. A computer process just started hogging CPU? You'll get an event for that too.
Ok, the two rhymes at the end of that signaled that my brain had overloaded so I'll leave it at that for now. Please, please, please send me your thoughts on this, either email, comment, or AIM (acemcburney)." [Adam Wendt's Agnostic Audiophile Smorgasborg]
I had an interesting IM chat with Adam tonight about news aggregators, and he's got some great ideas for the next generation of this software. Adam opened the conversation by asking what I thought aggregators will need to be and do in the future. My response is that I think aggregators will be our information faucets (funnels?) in the future, so they need to become mobile to go where we go. That means they need to scale to everything from tablet PCs to cell phones. The biggest barrier to this scaling is a usable interface (assuming wireless bandwidth projections are accurate and we do get high-speed, always-on connections at some point).
I like the implementation of CSS in Aggie to hide the full post in order to facilitate scanning. The content is still there, though, waiting for my "click." But as Les Orchard and Adam note, we need other ways to access the items flowing through the faucet. We need to be able to weight those channels we feel are most important, we need subject and keyword access, we need to be able to group channels and posts in whatever arbitrary ways we see fit. We'll also need ways to scale enclosures, audio, video, and otherwise (it will happen someday). Adam throws in ratings, especially by a trusted group, in order to highlight the flotsam from the jetsam.
Of course, then Adam totally blew me away with the idea of throwing away the computer interface altogether and using an aggregator to access everything from email to instant messages. Whoa. I'll take the red pill!
The point, of course, is that the next generation of aggregator software, if done right, has the chance to tip, which would be a Martha Stewart Good Thing.
11:27:28 PM Permanent link here
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Stalker Tech
"Do you know where your boyfriend is? If he attends the University of California at San Diego, finding him may be as easy as turning on a PDA.
The university is equipping hundreds of students with personal digital assistants that allow them to track each other's location from parking lot to lecture hall to cafeteria. The technology is sophisticated enough to pinpoint where a person is in a building -- say, a dorm -- within a margin of error of one floor.
No one is forcing students to use the $549 Hewlett-Packard Jordana PDAs, which are provided for free, or requiring them to allow their buddies to watch them wander across campus on a zoomable map. But students still worry about protecting themselves from stalkers, university administrators, FBI agents and nosy parkers....
The official goal of the PDA project is to test whether location trackers will encourage students to find each other more easily on a sprawling and rapidly growing campus. 'What used to feel like a small town is starting to feel like a big city,' said William Griswold, a computer science professor who is overseeing the project.
The PDAs detect each other through the university's Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) network, the same radio wave-based system that allows lap-toppers to go online from coffeehouses and airports.
The location-tracking software itself, developed by a 15-year-old student at the university, draws upon triangulation technology used by global positioning system (GPS) devices. The PDAs figure out their locations by comparing the strength levels of signals traveling from the devices to various Wi-Fi antennas.
The software only allows a person to track the location of another user if both agree. If Shapiro doesn't want his best friend to track him, he can leave him off his PDA's equivalent of an America Online 'buddy list.' According to Griswold, the location data is protected by the standard SSL Internet encryption technology....
Hackers don't even need to be on the campus to invade the PDA location tracker system. Students can log in to a Web site from anywhere and check where their friends are. The system offers both a zoomable map of the campus -- with moving dots representing their friends -- and a text list of where people are. If students program their PDAs properly, their buddies can also track their locations around the world whenever they log into a Wi-Fi network.
System administrators can gain access to the locations of students or employees equipped with the PDAs, although designers hope to eventually make that impossible. Law enforcement officers could also conceivably try to track someone without their knowledge, but 'it's not our intention to be a party to activities like that,' Griswold says." [Salon.com]
The article focuses on use by students, but does this apply to faculty, too?
10:10:02 PM Permanent link here
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The Future of Text
"I grew up wanting nothing more than to see my words in print, and so my online work these days sometimes seems bittersweet. A few of my fellow creative writing graduates even consider me a traitor to the paper tradition. But in fact, the way we view text has been in flux since long before Gutenberg, and will remain so well after the present generation has turned its final page. An unusual museum exhibit, “Experiments in the Future of Reading,” now on view at the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey, is an imaginative and playful reminder of just how fluid text can be....
The XFR exhibit is definitely thought provoking. One example: a tilting table, three feet on a side, on which the entire glowing surface is the reading area, covered in text several inches tall. Push one side of the table down and text flows across and down as if pulled by gravity; tilt it to another side and a different topic flows in. In one example, the tilting table contains folk-tales from half-a-dozen sources—Indian, Chinese, Native American and so forth. Depending on how you tip the table, you can read one or several at the same time, as words in various colors flow from each quadrant of the table....
In the end, XFR does just what Balsalmo suggests: it underscores the limitations of our current notions of text. We inherited the tradition of paper books, newspapers and magazines-forms of technology so highly evolved and accepted that we no longer regard them as technology but as permanent institutions. And at the same time we are still so early in our transition to electronic displays that everything we have come up with thus far—from personal computer screens to dedicated e-books—strikes most serious readers as crude and uncomfortable.
What is it that makes us uncomfortable? At heart, much of what we miss in current electronic text display is the additional information and functionality that printed matter contains in its physical presence. We know by shape and heft whether we’re buying a magazine, a newspaper or a book. We flip through pages to know whether we have a long or short read ahead of us; we bookmark, dog-ear, fold, tear or clip." [Newsweek]
While I agree with all of the points made in this article, my only caveat is that many of the assumptions we make are based on our place in that timeline. When information starts out in a digital format, there is less to lose. When a generation of kids grows up with information that lives its entire life in a digital format, expectations will be different.
There is no better proof of this than a comment made by Lori Bell at the SLS Tech Summit last month. While it is uncomfortable for most of us to lack the inability to "scan" the length of a digital title (how fat/thin is it?), younger readers don't have this problem. In fact, the lack of pagination is an incentive to them, because they're not worried about how many pages are left to read.
5:24:46 PM Permanent link here
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Have Geocache, Will Travel
" 'N 40° 47.920 W 073° 57.384' marks the spot.
Actually, those coordinates mark just one of the thousands of special spots in a high-tech worldwide scavenger hunt known as geocaching.
The rules of the game are simple: Someone creates and hides a cache -- usually a weatherproof container holding a stash of inexpensive goodies -- and then posts coded clues and the cache's latitude and longitude coordinates on one of the many websites devoted to the sport.
Anyone can then attempt to find the cache.
"It's a game where you are the search engine," explained Jeremy Irish, who maintains a popular geocaching website.
In January 2001 there were just a few hundred caches in the world. There are now around 25,000 caches in 122 countries. Some are easy to find: Just plug the location coordinates into a global positioning system device and follow the trail.
But locating others requires a major investment of thought and physical effort....
Stone enjoys brain-busting caches like one he designed called "Graveyard Grumble." The navigational clues are birth and death dates on tombstones at the cemetery where the cache is hidden.
Player Nick Gerald, a website designer from New York, likes caches that lead him directly to the person who hid them." [Wired News]
Where has Wired been? I've been including geocaching in my presentations since 2000 (mostly to make the point that if you're a librarian sitting at a reference desk and you think you're going to just sit there and wait for people to come in to your building to ask you questions, then you haven't checked in with reality lately).
My favorite geocache trend is easily the traveling cache, in which an item (such as a Mr. Potato Head) travels across the country from cache to cache.
On a tangentially-related side note, ZDNet Anchordesk notes the use of kiosks for maps-on-demand printing:
"National Geographic has set up map kiosks in outdoor retailers like REI, where you can have customized maps printed onto waterproof paper in full color. This is a boon to people who don't like laminating the standard USGS topo maps or who happen to need an area that spans several maps. The special paper is also available for sale, allowing you to print maps (or other documents) at home."
It would be a stretch to call this book-publishing-on-demand, but maybe it's a baby step towards that end. I wonder how much it would cost to put one of these in a public library?
2:50:52 PM Permanent link here
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Drat! This is the program I wanted to do for our next Tech Summit at SLS (in concept, at least). Unfortunately, I won't make it to the ALA Conference (in Atlanta) this year, so if you attend this session and you feel like sharing notes, please contact me!
"Pirates on the Commons: Legal and Political Assaults on Information
Access by the Expanding Domain of Copyright
ALA Annual Conference - Atlanta
Sunday June 16 9:30 - 12:00 in the Hilton Ballroom A
Find out about the politics of copyright and fair use from the experts. Learn how current legal trends could have a profoundly negative effect on libraries, teaching and scholarship. Hear about alternatives to copyright and the growth of the commons movement. Find out what ALA is doing and what you can do to get involved.
Speakers: L. Ray Patterson, Pope Brock Professor of Law, University of Georgia;
David Bollier, Senior Fellow USC Annenberg Center for Communications, Norman Lear Center;
Mary M. Case, Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication, ARL;
Carrie Russell, Copyright Specialist, ALA"
Is it too much to hope that this will be an ALA Streaming Webcast? It's certainly an important enough topic. I'd still like to do something similar at SLS, so please also feel free to send along any suggestions for speakers.
Other cool things about this year's conference:
- "The ALA Annual Conference Event Planner is now Active! Click on the Event Planner link in the upper left hand corner to access a complete listing of all events and exhibitors for the 2002 ALA Annual Conference, and to plan your own agenda. You must be a registered attendee to use the agenda function."
- The Indigo Girls will be performing at the ALA/ProQuest Scholarship Bash (the last one I went to was the Neville Brothers in New Orleans!).
- There's an Interactive Atlanta Map and Exhibit Floor Map! (all done in Flash).
11:11:25 AM Permanent link here
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'Sniffer Dog' Site -- Wireless Killer App?
"The controversial www.snifferdogalert.com Web site is in the process of upgrading to a larger server following high traffic loads which have frequently knocked its services off air.
The site, which is operated by NSW Council for Civil Liberties and Redfern Legal Centre, sends registered members SMS messages to warn them where police are patrolling drug detection dogs. It hit the headlines last month, sparking an outcry from NSW Police Minister Michael Costa who called for the site to be taken down....
The server verifies the scout and sends an SMS out to people registered warning them of the detection dogs. The site, he said, is able to send out 400 messages a second and to date, 36,000 people have registered to receive SMS alerts.
Since going live, registering to receive alerts at certain times of the day, say Friday and Saturday nights, and to be warned of sniffer dogs patrolling in particular areas of Sydney, has proved popular, Murphy said." [ZDNet News]
If they really want to save on bandwidth, they need to figure out how put GPS in the equation in order to target the messages.
9:49:55 AM Permanent link here
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There is no better way to start your workday than to come into the office and find that a co-worker has brought in Krispy Kreme donuts! Happy birthday, Jody! (And belated happy birthday to Donna, too!)
9:04:28 AM Permanent link here
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Websense - Free Sex Sites and "Blacklist Wars"
"Websense, a censorware company, is now distributing daily lists of sex sites supposedly not blacklisted by other censorware companies. This is hilarious. I am not making this up....
So, a person will find "This is not as hot a party as I had anticipated". But still, you might get lucky. Websense is certainly giving sex-site seekers a head start, and plenty of ideas. Fresh leads every day....
I can hardly imagine how censorware critics would be pilloried if they pulled a stunt like this. Think of the children!" [kuro5hin.org]
Next thing you know, censorware proponents will be arguing that we need filters in libraries because the companies that make the software put their lists online. Oy vey.
8:09:12 AM Permanent link here
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I Used to Think Accenture Was Bad.
"The accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has changed its name. Henceforth, it will be known as:
Monday
No joke. Monday. As in www.monday.com. As in, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences will have its Academy Awards tallied by Monday. (Since the Oscars telecast is usually on a Sunday, that could be a problem.)
Sheesh. Monday. As in "I Don't Like Mondays." And they paid someone for this?
(By the way, domains for the other days of the week are already taken.)" [Over the Edge]
12:30:06 AM Permanent link here
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RSS Crazy
"...So far, I've tried out three RSS tools pretty extensively, the previously mentioned AmphetaDesk, FeedReader, and Aggie. I'll post short reviews of the pros and cons of each of them this week.
I'm also creating a growing list of RSS feeds that I watch. It's truly amazing how complementary RSS is to blogging (and more importantly, to reading blogs). I confess that there are time periods when I don't read many blogs at all due to lack of time and frustration with going to blogs and seeing that they haven't been updated since my previous visit. Viewing things in an RSS reader eliminates both of those problems, for the most part." [rc3.org]
Rafe articulates what I've been experiencing for the past five months, so consider this yet another plug to get you to think about using a news aggregator if you have yet to discover the joys and efficiency they provide! I'm looking forward to Rafe's reviews.
Also, another reminder to please fill out one of the two following surveys if you haven't already done so:
12:26:42 AM Permanent link here
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Volunteers Sought for Real-Time Web Translator
"Worldwide Lexicon prepares peer-to-peer network of online dictionaries, people to promote on-the-fly translation.
Imagine being able to communicate via instant messaging with people who don't speak your language, or translate a foreign-language news bulletin automatically when you open it in your browser.
These are just two of the applications envisioned by promoters of the Worldwide Lexicon, an all-volunteer project founded by Brian McConnell. His concept: a distributed computing architecture drawing on nodes of participating PCs--and people--around the globe. At its heart is a simple protocol that links Web-based dictionaries, encyclopedias, and translation servers. It can even query human translators via a Gnutella-like peer-to-peer network.
'The Internet has eliminated physical boundaries, but there are still language boundaries,' McConnell says, describing the project at the recent O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference. He proposes the Worldwide Lexicon as a simple, effective way to provide access to the wealth of language resources on the Web. Potential volunteers can inquire at the site, and the first components are expected to go live this summer. As WWL project leader, even McConnell is a volunteer; he is a cofounder and developer at Trekmail.com, a dictation service that enables customers to send e-mail by telephone....
The last piece of the puzzle is development of applications that let people access WWL servers for language translation in near-real time, according to McConnell and others on the project. By embedding hooks to WWL in instant messaging clients, for example, people could request automatic machine translations of incoming and outgoing messages. They could also request a translation of slang, metaphors, or other words not in the dictionary, by one of the volunteer client translators....
McConnell foresees the WWL will eventually automatically translate news reports and other topical information. Client translators could volunteer to work on small parts of long documents in a translation process called "segmentation." The separate translations are recombined automatically and output in HTML." [PC World]
This would be fantastic if McConnell can pull it off. One of the outcomes of blogging that I'm really looking forward to is reading blogs from ordinary people in other countries. I'm fascinated by the Middle East blogs, and as I've noted before, I think it would have been interesting to read Afghani blogs last year. (I understand all of the barriers to this, but I can still dream, so please don't flame me on this one.)
Here's a good example. I found Panjereh.blogspot.com in my referers starting a few days ago. I have no idea what any of it says, but I'm assuming that it's written in an Arabic language. The script on the page is beautiful, and I would use the WWL in a heartbeat to translate it if I could.
12:09:26 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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