Netizens-Digest Tuesday, April 1 2003 Volume 01 : Number 449 Netizens Association Discussion List Digest In this issue: [netz] DMCA and Mini-DMCAs [netz] Sometimes stupidity and error explains better than malice [netz] Somewhere to get news Re: [netz] Somewhere to get news Re: [netz] Somewhere to get news Re: [netz] Somewhere to get news ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 09:54:35 -0500 From: "Howard C. Berkowitz" Subject: [netz] DMCA and Mini-DMCAs On another subject entirely, one I believe is quite relevant to the scope of Netizenship, centers around the area of technological means to enforce controls on intellectual property. In the US, the key piece of legislation is the (passed) Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Since this legislation has been the focal point of the major media companies, the approaches taken here affect network users worldwide, even though national laws apply. For example, the regional coding on DVDs that prevents me from displaying a DVD legally purchased in Europe on a "US region" player is part of the broader enabling strategy. As an author myself, I do sympathize with the goals of copyright protection, although I see it of reasonable scope. I do tire of the apparent immortality of Mickey Mouse, not to protect the artistic expression and personal income of Walt Disney, but as a trigger of intense political effort by the Disney Corporation and others, to protect this valuable asset. My concern comes when the industry pushes for technology to enforce copyright protection, and these protections have indirect effect on other technology. If I buy a DVD, I accept restrictions on duplication, but I seriously question the restriction on where I display it on a legally owned DVD player. Due to technical advantages over CDs, DVDs will become an increasingly important means of software distribution. I am quite concerned on restrictions that would prevent me, as a legal purchaser, from: -- copying software onto a larger/faster disk drive that is practical to administer, rather than needing a DVD drive for each product, -- permitting me to make fair-use backup copies so I can continue operating if the purchased disk fails. The industry has also proposed various technical means that could impact performance of a large part of the Internet, as they proactively search for pirated content, even in transit via a common carrier. There are many other such technical/policy issues. DMCA presents a problem because it is US law, yet has worldwide effect. Potentially even more hazardous are the emergence of more restrictive and often poorly worded "mini-DMCAs" at the US state level. Certain of these may criminalize perfectly reasonable network services, such as encrypted virtual private networks interconnecting enterprises and telecommuters, solely to focus on the sole issue of making piracy difficult. See, for example, Declan McCullagh's article at http://news.com.com/2100-1028-994667.html For those of you who do not read it, Declan's Politech list is quite relevant to things of interest to Netizens, and I encourage members here to subscribe: At 7:56 AM -0500 3/29/03, Declan McCullagh wrote: >POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list >You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. >To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 17:00:25 -0500 From: "Howard C. Berkowitz" Subject: [netz] Sometimes stupidity and error explains better than malice As I think most of you know, I am highly opposed to suppression of any political content on the net, whether or not it's unpopular or even "hate speech." The usual conspiracy theorists starting blaming the usual suspects when the Al-Jazeera website went down for a while. Turns out (see below for detail) to have been a simple error by the A-J system administrator. Incidentally, I'd be very dubious that the US would even try to bring down A-J. It's a sufficiently good intelligence source, and not all that biased, that some negative propaganda effects of its existence are, IMHO, still to the net gain of the US -- and the rest of the world. This really isn't specific to the Iraq war. It could equally well have been a North Korean server. At 10:57 PM -0500 3/29/03, Sean Donelan wrote on the North American Network Operators Group mailing list (Sean is one of the world authorities on Internet reliability): >In spite of typo's in their DNS records, Al Jazeera's web site has moved >to France and back online. Be sure you get the current IP address for >aljazeera.net (213.30.180.219). > >Al Jazeera's name server records are still a mess, and I don't think >you can really blame the Pentagon for them > >aljazeera.net. 15M IN SOA ns3.aljazeera.net. >dnsadmin.nav-link.net. ( > 2003032802 ; serial > 3H ; refresh > 1H ; retry > 1W ; expiry > 15M ) ; minimum > >aljazeera.net. 15M IN NS ns1sa.navlink.com. >aljazeera.net. 15M IN NS ns3.aljazeera.net. >aljazeera.net. 15M IN MX 10 mail.aljazeera.net. >aljazeera.net. 15M IN A 213.30.180.219 > >The NS record for ns1sa.navlink.com appears to be a typo, no such server >exists. I suspect the correct NS is ns1sa.nav-link.net (217.26.192.26), >which is not responding or the NS in the NSI registery aljns1sa.nav-link.net >(217.26.193.15) which also isn't responding. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 22:58:23 -0500 (EST) From: Jay Hauben Subject: [netz] Somewhere to get news Hi, The Internet is making possible a much more readily available spectrum of news coverage and news sources. This is especially valuable when some media see the need for "patriotism" rather than adherence to the truth. Regardless of whether a national news media becomes jingolistic, more people around the world can get other and perhaps more accurate news. Here is an exerpt from a posting to a mailing list. To me it is a small clue that the Internet is increasing the signal to noise ratio available. Jay - ----------------------------------- "A note from the classroom: Yesterday, I had an excellent discussion with my undergraduate students about the war (communication department). We agreed at the outset that we were not going to rehash the debates we've been having; that we would instead focus on how internet technologies influence how we make sense of this war. .... We talked at length about blogging and the differences between mainstream news and independent journalism, in terms of perceived credibility and truth value. We looked at various types of news sites, from the Forbes 'top five war blogs,' to some of the anti-war blog sites that I've gathered from previous ... postings, to those blogs that look more like official news sites than personal blogs. They were really into this exercise; they identified and reflected on their criteria for judging the credibility of various media. They were surprised at their own hasty judgments of non-mainstream news. After looking at news sources from other countries, they talked at length about gatekeeping and the construction of reality by the media." ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2003 00:53:54 -0500 From: "Howard C. Berkowitz" Subject: Re: [netz] Somewhere to get news >Hi, > >The Internet is making possible a much more readily available spectrum of >news coverage and news sources. This is especially valuable when some >media see the need for "patriotism" rather than adherence to the truth. >Regardless of whether a national news media becomes jingolistic, more >people around the world can get other and perhaps more accurate news. > >Here is an exerpt from a posting to a mailing list. To me it is a small >clue that the Internet is increasing the signal to noise ratio available. Jay, are you able to make a post to the list that does not in some way involve war and anti-war? It seems not, and that's a shame, because it presents an incredibly narrow view of netizenship, in which you diminish yourself by seeming to be unable to consider it in any other context. I hope you've noted that I've thrown out a couple of recent posts on topics completely unrelated to the war but directly relevant to information flow on the net (e.g., DMCA issues) and to "rumor control" such as why Al-Qazeera was down. From you, I'm still hearing sloganeering and not content, such as "construction of reality by the media." While I suspect I will regret this, I'll even mention that a discussion of how one compares arbitrary and conflicting information from different sources is still more general and useful, with respect to Netizenship, than putting it all in a war context. Still, the note you post seems to deal with identifying the differences in coverage rather than trying to ascertain objective information. If you WANT to discuss how to extract war information from dissimilar sources, I can go further into tutorials on how intelligence analysis operates. In an earlier post, I mentioned registry/biographical intelligence. Order of battle and "wiring diagrams" are extremely important. Somewhere between intelligence-driven collection and the analytic process are things like analysis of open-source imagery. Just informally, when I see news photographs of Baghdad, I try to match the locations of fire and smoke with positions on a map, trying to identify government buildings as discern some of the targeting strategy. Unfortunately, most of my resources here is Scott Ritter's book, with its maps of the government district and important installations. If I were to try to discern what is going on in Baghdad, I'd want more maps showing business and residential districts, civilian infrastructure, etc. I'd want as detailed weather information as possible. Every time I see news footage of a car or truck driving along a street, I'd make every effort to identify that street and try to build up a citywide diagram of what streets are open -- and infer what areas may be inaccessible. This is objective analysis, not judging jingoism. It works regardless of your affiliation or ideology. I'd also be working backwards to try to determine the air tasking. One has several starting points: we know the loadings of carrier aircraft, how many carriers are in the area, and the approximate flight and recycle time of aircraft. We can surmise equivalent information about heavy bombers, which are going to be flying from a limited number of sites (Diego Garcia, Britain, the main B-2 base in the US, etc.) AFAIK, there is no map readily available and updated frequently showing the best all-open-source analysis of where units are on both sides, and perhaps estimates of their effectiveness. Yes, I could set up a "war room" if I wanted to track this. I see little purpose to doing so, especially when there are issues of acute interest including restrictions on Internet information flow, the economics of the digital divide, Internet routing scalability (one of my professional interests), hacktivism and spamming, and a wide range of other issues that bear on the long-term viability of the Internet for any communications, much less political. I'd appeal to the social scientists of the list to confirm that it is much harder to judge a situation purely by comparing reporting (i.e., secondary information) from various sources. >Jay >----------------------------------- >"A note from the classroom: > >Yesterday, I had an excellent discussion with my undergraduate students >about the war (communication department). We agreed at the outset that we >were not going to rehash the debates we've been having; that we would >instead focus on how internet technologies influence how we make sense of >this war. .... > >We talked at length about blogging and the differences between mainstream >news and independent journalism, in terms of perceived credibility and >truth value. We looked at various types of news sites, from the Forbes >'top five war blogs,' to some of the anti-war blog sites that I've >gathered from previous ... postings, to those blogs that look more like >official news sites than personal blogs. They were really into this >exercise; they identified and reflected on their criteria for judging the >credibility of various media. They were surprised at their own hasty >judgments of non-mainstream news. After looking at news sources from >other countries, they talked at length about gatekeeping and the >construction of reality by the media." ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 09:02:51 -0500 (EST) From: lindeman@bard.edu Subject: Re: [netz] Somewhere to get news I believe my response to Howard's response to Jay got lost, so let me try again. > Jay, are you able to make a post to the list that does not in some > way involve war and anti-war? I'm curious about that too. > From you, I'm still hearing sloganeering and not content, such as > "construction of reality by the media." This needn't be sloganeering; the idea that construction of reality is a social process has an honorable lineage, and it's been reasonably elaborated by communications scholars with respect to the media. And while talk of media "gatekeeping" could sound like (and be) lefty rhetoric, it's a defensible way of describing media outlets' inevitably subjective judgments about what news is credible and important. > Still, the note you post seems to deal with > identifying the differences in coverage rather than trying to > ascertain objective information. Personally (I can't speak for Jay), right now I'm more interested in what could be called subjective information -- exploring the political ramifications of the war. To do that, Jay's exercise seems useful, as long as it isn't undertaken with strong prior assumptions about what the underlying reality must be. The exercise that Howard describes is also useful, just different. > AFAIK, there is no map readily available and updated frequently > showing the best all-open-source analysis of where units are on both > sides, and perhaps estimates of their effectiveness. http://www.strategypage.com/iraqwar/map.asp#map is something like this; I can't judge its accuracy, and I have some quibbles with the graphics. > I'd appeal to the social scientists of the list to confirm that it is > much harder to judge a situation purely by comparing reporting (i.e., > secondary information) from various sources. Obviously primary information, when available, is better than secondary information. Mark Lindeman ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2003 09:32:15 -0500 From: "Howard C. Berkowitz" Subject: Re: [netz] Somewhere to get news >I believe my response to Howard's response to Jay got lost, so let >me try again. > >> Jay, are you able to make a post to the list that does not in some >> way involve war and anti-war? > >I'm curious about that too. > >> From you, I'm still hearing sloganeering and not content, such as >> "construction of reality by the media." > >This needn't be sloganeering; the idea that construction of reality >is a social >process has an honorable lineage, and it's been reasonably elaborated by >communications scholars with respect to the media. And while talk of >media "gatekeeping" could sound like (and be) lefty rhetoric, it's a >defensible >way of describing media outlets' inevitably subjective judgments about what >news is credible and important. Mark, I'm not a political scientist although I have been known to play one on TV. :-) Could you suggest better terminology for the reconciliation of information from a set of (usually secondary) sources that have either open or subtle biases? I'll gladly accept a better term. As for myself, I cringe at both "lefty" and "righty" rhetoric. There are several, perhaps tangential areas of learning that touch upon this. I've described the process of intelligence analysis. Edward Luttwak's _Coup d'Etat_ is another related and excellent reference, as is Fred Ikle's _Every War Must End (2nd ed)_. In anthropology, I especially think of Edward T. Hall's writings on trying to arrive at the truth of cultural conflict in everyday life, from the de jure/de facto dichotomy, to personal space, etc. An extreme example of the idea of personal space comes up in Grossman's work at www.killology.com, which is not a bad starting place if we are looking about the psychology of warfare. I highly recommend his book, _On Killing_. In networking, one of the formative research studies was Radia Perlman's doctoral dissertation on decision formulation in the presence of partially errored data. This is available online from the MIT Laboratory of Computer Science as Technical Report MIT/LCS/TR-429, although the URL is escaping me. I can send a PDF if need be. Her research, "Network Layer Protocols with Byzantine Robustness," builds on a principle in high-availability system design that shows that simply increasing redundancy does not improve, and may decrease, reliabiity, if the underlying control information is not completely trustworthy. In other words, the Goebbels-style "big lie" technique has no place in information theory. > >> Still, the note you post seems to deal with >> identifying the differences in coverage rather than trying to >> ascertain objective information. > >Personally (I can't speak for Jay), right now I'm more interested in >what could >be called subjective information -- exploring the political ramifications of >the war. May I interpret that to mean the interaction of communications on the political process in general, or are you also thinking of matters of ideology and content? >To do that, Jay's exercise seems useful, as long as it isn't >undertaken with strong prior assumptions about what the underlying >reality must >be. The exercise that Howard describes is also useful, just different. > >> AFAIK, there is no map readily available and updated frequently >> showing the best all-open-source analysis of where units are on both >> sides, and perhaps estimates of their effectiveness. > >http://www.strategypage.com/iraqwar/map.asp#map is something like >this; I can't >judge its accuracy, and I have some quibbles with the graphics. If you refer to such things as a rectangle with an X in it, those are standard military symbols. But this is a very high-level map. The kind of information I'd be looking for would be at the, say 1 map-foot-equals-50,000 physical foot scale of parts of the Baghdad and other areas. In other words, something that shows streets and buildings and lets you plot weapons effects, identify military equipment, etc. The closest I've found is printed in Scott Ritter's book, _Endgame_, but it's not at the level of detail I'd like -- it's essentially a street diagram with a few important buildings on it, not an exhaustive urban-planner level map. I wouldn't be surprised if such maps exist, from historical, relief, or even urban development proposal sources. They would only provide a base, on which specific military information can be plotted -- not a trivial exercise. > >> I'd appeal to the social scientists of the list to confirm that it is >> much harder to judge a situation purely by comparing reporting (i.e., >> secondary information) from various sources. > >Obviously primary information, when available, is better than secondary >information. > >Mark Lindeman ------------------------------ End of Netizens-Digest V1 #449 ******************************