Networking
If I had the time, that is, I’d be blogging like crazy on issues like these:
* Blu-Ray’s triumph over HD-DVD
* The latest wild claims about Net Neutrality.
* The latest wild claims about Open Source.
* Jimbo Wales’ underwhelming new search engine.
* The NFL playoffs (maybe not, since the Titans are out.)
* The Swisher and Haren trades.
* My new job.
* The presidential race
* Gov. Arnie’s initiatives
* Britney’s custody beef.
* Jeremy Clarkson’s ID theft experiment.
But I don’t, so I won’t.
Chris Soghoian is claiming that Congressmen Rick Boucher wants to slap some regulations on Comcast for engaging in Admission Control. Not so:
[Soghoian] asked Boucher what he would do if Comcast stuck to its guns and kept discriminating against BitTorrent. In particular, [Soghoian] asked him if he would propose legislation compelling the company to treat all traffic fairly.
Unfortunately for fans of Net neutrality, the congressman said he was not ready to go down this path and instead stressed market-based methods of fixing the problems. Instead of tinkering with packets, the congressman said that in the short term, Comcast should “simply tier their offerings and engage in a pricing structure that allocates more bandwidth to those who pay more, and less to those who pay less.”
However, he said “the long-term answer is to deploy more capacity. That is what municipal broadband and other telecom companies are doing. Ultimately, the cable companies will have to deploy fiber to the house.”
I don’t think it’s appropriate for the Congressman to dictate wiring specifications, but he’s entitled to his opinion as long as he doesn’t try to legislate it.
I’ve criticized the critics of phone companies who banded together to promote the dubious cause of network neutrality, so it’s only fair for me to criticize the phone companies when they get out of line. The recent flap over AT&T and Verizon’s AUPs might be such an occasion. AT&T tells its customers not to smack-talk them:
AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes … tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.â€
Now what’s up with that? Critics charge that this provision is activated by any negative opinion expressed against the phone company, to wit:
This effectively means that if you are an AT&T customer and the company believes that you have spoken negatively about them in, oh let’s say a blog post, they can cut off your service and you have no recourse. Apparently AT&T’s attitude is “either like it or lump it”.
Unfortunately, my criticism of the phone company will have to come on some other day, because it appears to me that the critics are way out of line once again. Remember this provision was drafted by a lawyer, and therefore its content has to be understood in terms of the legal meaning of its language, not the common-sense meaning. This AUP is, apparently, legal boilerplate that says you can’t use the AT&T network to slander or defame AT&T. Simple criticism, if it happens to be factual or the result of honest error, isn’t covered by this provision. Go check on the legal meaning of “damage to name or reputation” for some insight.
Words which on the face of them must injure the reputation of the person to whom they refer, are clearly defamatory, and, if false, are actionable without proof that any particular damage has followed from their use. Words, on the other hand which merely might tend to injure the reputation of another are prima facie not defamatory, and even though false are not actionable, unless as a matter of fact some appreciable injury has followed from their use…
If in any given case the words employed by the defendant have appreciably injured the plaintiff’s reputation, the plaintiff has suffered an injury which is actionable without proof of any other damage. Every man has an absolute right to have his person, his property, and his reputation preserved inviolate.
The way I read this is that you can’t damage a man’s or a company’s reputation simply by criticizing them; if you’re truthful, the issue is the deeds you’re describing, not the description. If you’re not truthful you still have to cause some damage to the target’s reputation to be afoul of the law. So I can talk smack about AT&T all day long so long as I don’t invent facts about them, and I can even make up facts about them as long as nobody pays any attention to me. And so can you.
AT&T is simply invoking slander and defamation law to its benefit and short-cutting the legal process. If this provision were removed from their AUP, they would still be protected by the law, but they would have to sue to assert the right. Is that what we want?
So once again we learn that we can’t believe everything we read on-line, a lesson that never seems to sink in.
See Seth for more on the subject.
This is a cold analysis of the Bible:
“Those who call the King James Version of the Bible the unerring word of God,” writes reviewer Doug Brown, “have a slight problem. The New Testament of the KJV (as the King James Version is usually referred) was translated into English from a version of the Greek New Testament that had been collected from 12th-century copies by Erasmus. Where Erasmus couldn’t find Greek manuscripts, he translated to Greek from the Latin Vulgate (which itself had been translated from Greek back in the fourth century). Here the problem splits into two problems. First, Jesus spoke Aramaic — his actual words, never recorded, were only rendered in Greek in the original gospels. Thus, the KJV consists of Jesus’s words twice refracted through the prism of translation. Second, Erasmus’s Greek New Testament was based on handwritten copies of copies of copies of copies, etc., going back over a millennium, and today is considered one of the poorer Greek New Testaments.”
Consider this just one example of a “sacred text” treated almost as a farcical text in regard to its having a single, coherent, intentional, shaping, authorial, divine mind behind it. Is the Bible, in one counting, the 66 books of the Protestant Bible, the 73 books of the Roman Catholic Bible, or the 77 books of the Eastern Orthodox Bible?
After a litany of examples of intercopy disagreements, scribal clarifications, arbitrary decisions on what is canonical and what is apocryphal, and putative scribal addenda such as the controversial last twelve verses of Mark (16:9-20) with their references to snake handling and speaking in tongues, it is difficult to think of such texts as sacred as opposed to much-handled — compilations over time by committee. If you’d been told recently that the seventh and final volume of the Harry Potter series had gone through changes at the hands of 10 copyists and editors, not to mention been translated through several languages before reaching English, would you feel confident it was J.K. Rowling’s sacred conclusion to her tale? Writes Brown, “In many respects, the Bible was the world’s first Wikipedia article.”
Unfortunately for religious fundamentalists, it’s largely correct as well.
This is quite an interesting example of how blogs, the Internet, and new technology are improving our world, our culture, and our American way of life. Major League Baseball has installed cameras in 20 ballparks or so that allow MLB’s Gameday to chart the speed and trajectory of every pitch thrown in a ballgame, and the results are archived (click on the Gameday link). USS Mariner blogging dude Dave Cameron studied the data for the Mariners’ ace pitcher, young Felix Hernandez, and found he’s been throwing too many fastballs in the first inning. So he sends the pitching coach an e-mail, which he passes on to Felix, and things change:
This team needs Felix to be better in 2007 than he has been. Since it’s unlikely that you can fix his command before his next start, there has to be another way you can help Felix get over his first inning struggles. Thankfully, I believe there is. It’s pitch selection.
Last night (6/26), Felix threw 10 straight fastballs to start the game. Coco Crisp singled on an 0-2 fastball. Dustin Pedroia singled on the first pitch he saw, a pitch he knew was going to be a fastball. David Ortiz drew a four pitch walk, all on fastballs. The bases were loaded with nobody out after 8 pitches, all fastballs.
In his previous start against the Pirates (6/21), Felix threw 13 consecutive fastballs to start the game. Those 13 pitches turned into 5 outs, as the Pirates hitters aren’t very good.
Of course, this could go too far, as we certainly don’t want Mike Lascioscia taking Matt Welch’s lineup and batting order suggestions.
Anyhow, computers are cool, and so is baseball. Link via Slate.
David Frum isn’t one of my favorite people, or even one of my favorite Republicans, but he understands Karl Rove better than anyone:
Mr. Rove often reminded me of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam. His attempts to prospect a new motherlode have led the Republican party into the immigration debacle…
Building coalitions is essential to political success. But it is not the same thing as political success. The point of politics is to elect governments, and political organizations are ultimately judged by the quality of government they deliver. Paradoxically, the antigovernment conservatives of the 1980s took the problems of government far more seriously than the pro-government conservatives of the 2000s.
The outlook is not, however, entirely bleak for Republicans. I notice that much of the Democratic party, and especially its activist netroots, has decided that the way to beat Rove Republicanism is by emulating it. They are practicing the politics of polarization; they are elevating “framing†above policy; they have decided that winning the next election by any means is all that matters — and never mind what happens on the day after that.
There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Karl Rove and Markos Moulitsas. They’re both in the business of exploiting emotional weakness and creating division, and they’ve both profited handsomely from this ability.
The Democrats will most likely elect the next president since Bush has made such a hash of things that he’s given them a free pass to the White House. But, to the extent that netroots fanaticism is instrumental in picking the Party’s champion, the nation and the Party will suffer.
Maybe that’s the secret to Rove’s search for a “permanent Republican majority:” get the Democrats to blow themselves up by embracing extremism and hysteria. If it’s a long-term strategy, it’s working, now all that has to happen is for the Republicans to abandon their irrational roots. I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.
You don’t normally associate Valleywag with profundity, but damned if they didn’t go there today:
This is why geeks shouldn’t try to change the world. Nor should they be held accountable, as Scoble’s trying to do to Kaplan, for not changing the world. They aren’t equipped to. They are ignorant of the real world. They live narrow, insular lives defined by their monitor screen, a reality that has very little to do with the outside world. It’s a world that they cannot learn about by searching Google, and a world they can’t change by writing a blog post.
I’d have to agree with that. Geeks (and other sheltered, middle-class children) don’t have the knowledge of the real world to effectively change it. That’s the problem with things like political blogs and idealistic blogger conferences. Bloggers gravitate to causes with snappy labels on them, like “net neutrality”, not to causes they understand.
And you really can’t help until you know what you’re dealing with.
Jeff Jarvis wants your advice. He’s been asked to debate Andrew Keen and he doesn’t know what to do:
Andrew Keen and his publisher have asked me to debate him about his book, The Cult of the Amateur, in New York in June. I’m asking your advice because I’m torn.
The problem is that Keen’s book is the worst of link bait. It’s link whoring. Or should I say talk-show prostitution? It’s frilly lace tempting those who want so much to dismiss this change. He tries to push every internet button he can. Like others, Keen wants to be the contrarian’s contrarian. But that only makes him a double negative. It makes him a curmudgeon, a conservative trying to hold onto the past, a mastadon growling against the warm wind of change. Now I’d be fine having an debate about what the change means and what’s good and bad about it, but Keen makes it all bad with sloppy generalities and blanket insults — like the very worst blog. It’s simply not a good book or a compelling argument.
Do we give this attention? Do we play wack-a-mole with these tiresome arguments? Or do we just ignore it with the sure knowledge that it will go away in an act of self-extinction?
It’s obvious to me that he should, so I told him this:
Of course you should debate Keen.
After a turn at balanced assessment of the influence of amateur writing on the Internet circa 2002-4, you’ve recently gone whole-hog in the cheerleading camp for all things amateur. You wrote one of the best analyses of the toxic effect that bloggers had on the Howard Dean campaign, one in which you acknowledged the echo-chamber effect that cut Dean off from the mainstream and any hope of winning the nomination. Somehow you managed to satisfy yourself that the problems you saw in 2004 have gone away, or never mattered much to begin with.
So your angle should be “I once thought the way Keen does, but now I don’t, and here’s why.†If you arrived at your current position through a process of reflection, it should be very easy to wipe the floor with Keen and expose him as the real amateur. That will kill his book sales and establish the legitimacy of your new vision.
The fact that Keen is your opponent and not any of a half-dozen other people who’ve written about the negative trajectory of the Internet shouldn’t bother you, as any old prop will do.
You once said that Kool-Aid drinking conferences such as O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies would do well to invite critics and curmudgeons. You can make them part of the debate by engaging Keen.
Don’t wimp out, stand up for what you believe.
Back in the Golden Age of Blogging, 2002, I was very enthusiastic about the potential of blogging and the Internet generally to improve the quality of civic discourse and such, because I believed it was a way to bring experts into discussions that had heretofore been handled by the iterate generalists who practice journalism. Instead of dealing with complex issues in terms of vague analogies, expert bloggers would be able to explain deep technical issues in ways that intelligent people could grasp them. This hasn’t panned out for two reasons:
1) Experts often lack perspective on the issues surrounding the areas of the expertise. When the phony Dan Rather memos emerged, typography experts quickly exposed them as fakes, which they were, but that ended the story on favors that Bush received in his National Guard service. So the big story was sacrificed to the small story.
2) The most influential bloggers aren’t experts in any particular subject matter, they’re simply skilled at self-promotion and pandering: the Daily Kos and MyDD, for example, hyped the bogus “net neutrality” issue to drive up their traffic and increase their influence with the public. It’s a nonsense issue, as the regulations that side propose are the only real harm the Internet faces in the immediate future.
So not only has “citizen journalism” and its relative “peer production” failed to bring informed opinion out of the woodwork, they’ve damage the quality of civic debate. Those who continue to bang that drum uncritically have a lot of ‘splaining to do, and shirking debate isn’t the way to go about their business.
There’s been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth lately about words. Kathy Sierra claimed to be too scared to leave her home in the woods because of threatening words left by anonymous cowards in her blog’s comment section, and the result was general uproar, trips to CNN, and speech codes. Don Imus described a women’s basketball team in unflattering language, and the nation’s race pimps demanded – and got – and end to his employment.
Perhaps that reaction was justified. Maybe it’s reasonable to fear violence at the hands of people who are too cowardly to use their real names in blog comments. It doesn’t seem that way to me, but perhaps I’m just insensitive. And perhaps there’s a magnetic force that freezes radios to the Don Imus show such that they can’t be tuned to any other station when he says stupid things. Or perhaps the radio listening public is too weak, too stupid, and too infantile to tune him out. Legitimate civil rights advocates such as Connie Rice (cousin of Condi, not a typo) who defended Imus are full of it and words of that sort can’t be tolerated and I’m just too insensitive again.
But there’s something about that reaction that doesn’t add up to me. Sometime after the Sierra hubbub broke out and the firing of sad old Imus, the Attorney General of North Carolina held a press conference where he said he was dropping all criminal charges against the three Duke athletes accused of rape by Crystal Gail Mangum. He offered a new law to prevent such miscarriages of justice in the future, and he blasted the DA who brought the case and suppressed evidence, Mike Nifong. He made the extraordinary assertion that the Duke Three are innocent, not just “not guilty.” They were framed, slandered, and abused for no good reason. And it all started with bad words: lies.
And none of the people who sympathized with Kathy Sierra or accused Don Imus of “violating the black community” had a word to say about it.
What the hell is up with that?
The words of Mike Nifong and Crystal Gale Mangum had real consequences. The Duke Three were suspended from school and smeared in newspapers and TV and radio shows all over the country. Their reputations have been permanently altered, and I don’t expect they’re ever going to be as optimistic about justice and fairness in America as they were before those words were spoken again.
The words spoken against Kathy Sierra and the Rutgers basketball girls, on the other hand, were hollow bullshit and everybody knew that and reacted accordingly from the beginning. They weren’t harmed in any meaningful way, certainly not on the same level as the Duke lacrosse boys.
Jesse Jackson falsely accused the Duke boys:
The Duke scandal should lead colleges across the country to hold searching discussions about racial and sexual stereotypes, exposing the myths that entrap so many. But it shouldn’t take the brutalizing of a mother of two to raise these issues. Justice must be pursued at Duke. But Duke should not be treated as an isolated extreme – but as a goad to probing discussion and concerted action to lift students above the hatreds, the fears and the fantasies that still plague our society.
And also gloated over his pound of Imus flesh:
CBS refused to lower its standards anymore to house Don Imus. It is a victory for public decency. No one should use the public airwaves to transmit racial or sexual degradation.
Now I see it: instead of using the airwaves for racial or sexual degradation, we should return them to their rightful mission: slandering innocent white boys. Now it’s all clear.
Perhaps the severity of the reaction to Imus’ admittedly idiotic comment was driven by the needs of Jackson, Sharpton, and the feminist left to avoid any discussion of the conclusion to the Duke case, which doesn’t exactly make them look like heroes.
So why is the media letting them get away with it?
The answer to that has to include the obvious fact that the media was by and large complicit in the symbolic lynching of the Duke Three. The discussion went straight from allegations of rape to national soul-searching about the brutality of sexism and racism without every stopping to consider whether the boys were actually guilty. As it generally goes in rape cases, the defendants were guilty until proved otherwise. Rarely are defendants acquitted of rape because it’s treated in such a special way by the justice system, but this case was so egregious it didn’t even have to go to trial, just to a semi-honest prosecutor.
So the mere fact of the charges being dropped should be enough to make news. Maybe not as great as the feeding frenzy that accompanied the false allegations, but something. (UPDATE: See Terry Moran of ABC News spin his irresponsible journalism.)
And what will the consequences be to the accuser, Crystal Gale Mangum? Nifong faces disbarment, which would be appropriate, but I don’t see any hint that Mangum will be charged for making a false report, libel, defamation, or anything else. She’s going to keep on taking her clothes off for money, turning a few tricks on the side, and running her con games as if nothing had ever happened.
And that’s not right. If words have consequences, if they’re so scary they keep consultants away from conferences, radio hosts off the air, and cause attorneys to lose their licenses, they should have consequences for rape liars as well.
This is America, and fair is fair.
I’ve decided to be nice.
This is because the blogosphere is full of bang-up, hardcore, high-integrity people who read carefully, consider all sides of an argument before posting, and always check their facts. It would be a dishonor to this wonderful crew if I was to go on complaining and arguing all the time. As I want nothing more than universal brotherhood and understanding, I have to set a good example for the others by behaving in an exemplary fashion.
It’s the right thing to do, of course.