Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
Netizens-Digest Volume 1 Number 449
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" <hcb@gettcomm.com>
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" <hcb@gettcomm.com>
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 <jrh@umcc.ais.org>
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" <hcb@gettcomm.com>
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" <hcb@gettcomm.com>
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
******************************
