Mike English's blog

The White House released yesterday a draft document for a plan to create “Trusted Identities in Cyberspace.”

At first it sounds like a Good Thing… “no longer should individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to login into various online services,” it would be “user-centric,” etc. … this sounds like OpenID. But it’s not.
The draft imagines a world where:

An individual voluntarily requests a smart identity card from
her home state. The individual chooses to use the card to
authenticate herself for a variety of online services, including:

• Credit card purchases,
• Online banking,
• Accessing electronic health care records
• Securely accessing her personal laptop computer,
• Anonymously posting blog entries, and
• Logging onto Internet email services using a pseudonym

(cf. “Envision It!” box on pg 4)

This is a world where you need a “voluntarily” obtained ID card just to access a laptop that is compatible with a closed “Internet.”
(It’s telling that this initiative is a project of the Department of Homeland Security, having consulted with over 70 “stakeholders.”)

The document is essentially the groundwork for a plan to eliminate real online anonymity/pseudonymity by incentivizing buy-in to an “Identity Ecosystem.” Combine this with recent the Supreme Court decision concluding that names and addresses of petitioners are part of the public record, and you have the ingredients for a serious clash between political dissidents steeped in the cyber-culture of the largest ever “functioning anarchy” in recorded history and the powers that be in government and corporate America.

Yesterday, Dr. Peter B. Reiner at The National Core for Neuroethics (an interdisciplinary research group dedicated to tackling the ethical, legal, policy and social implications of frontier technological developments in the neurosciences) commented¹ on one of the points Nicholas Carr makes in The Shallows. In the book², Carr notes some recent studies that have shown a difference in the way people read text with hyperlinks versus the way people read text without hyperlinks. Simply put, hyperlinks are distracting. Internet use promotes a multitasking mindset that is changing the way our brains are wired, and hyperlinks are fundamental to this enabling infrastructure.

Reiner writes:

The neuroethical concern is not just that the hyperlinked world in which we live is changing our brains, because every encounter that we have with the environment around us changes our brains (members of the Core, as well as my wife, will be rolling their eyes about now, thinking “Peter always says that”. But it happens to be true. Even reading this blog post, in some way, is changing your brain.) The nub of the issue is this: there is an important distinction between encounters which change the informational content of your brain and those that change the way your brain processes information. Most importantly, these changes are going on without anyone having intended them to come into being. Young children are growing up in an environment in which multitasking is the norm and not the exception, and we are still unsure of the effects. We put more effort into insuring the safety of toys than we have of the way that people read on the internet. This might be imprudent.

I have considered using a combination of footnotes and hyperlinks in my blog posts due to similar concerns—in fact, I’m experimenting with one format in this post—but I worry about losing machine-readable content. Is there a semantic web solution that would allow the hyperlinking data to be accessible to crawlers in the appropriate context while also preventing the hyperlinks from distracting readers? Is there an existing ontology that could be used to add invisible metadata to traditional footnotes? How do you link a semantically rich bibliographic entry to its reference within the text? Might COinS work? Bibliographic footnotes could be encapsulated in a span containing an OpenURL description of the item, but could processing agents link the footnote anchor to its reference within the text? What is the value of that contextual information anyways?

1. Peter B. Reiner, “Hyperlinks,” Neuroethics at the Core, http://neuroethicscanada.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/hyperlinks/
2. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).

As technology advances, many people have started questioning the future of printed books. However, ebook readers like the Amazon Kindle are still trying to catch up to all of the “features” so well established by physical paper books: dog-eared pages, marginalia, sharing, ease of navigation, portability, zero energy consumption, low eye strain, etc. Much of the concern regarding the future of print is associated with environmental concerns over the energy use and waste production by mechanisms of information distribution. Many feel that digitization provides a simple solution avoiding the problems caused by paper production. However, assumptions about the “eco-friendliness” of digitization go largely unexamined.

In the past ten years, two studies (that I know of—please let me know if there are others!) have been conducted to compare the environmental impact of ebook readers and printed books. The first study, released in 2003, was conducted by Greg Kozak, a graduate student at the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems. Using the ISO standards for Life Cycle Inventory Analysis (LCA), an emerging standard analysis tool in the field of industrial ecology, he concluded that printed books pose a greater threat to the environment than ebook readers. However, he failed to account for the toxicity of electronic components, the biodegradable and renewable nature of paper, and the planned obsolescence of consumer electronic devices. Cleantech Group produced a similar study with similar findings in 2009, but has not made the report available for public reading (“Cleantech Group report: E-readers a win for carbon emissions” 2009). Therefore, neither LCA is sufficient to justify a large-scale change in the way we store and distribute information.

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine a book that sits on a library shelf for 30 years — you can pick up and read it long over 30 years after it is first printed. Now imagine a computer sitting on a desk for 30 years — after 30 years, computer technology will have advanced so much that a workstation will have gone obsolete several times over. Indeed, the digital information of an ebook may be transferred from one computer to the next with ease, but what about the waste of all the hardware that needs upgrades and replacement along the way? Unlike paper, which is biodegradable, computer hardware is not biodegradable, and it is full of toxic chemicals. With more paper being made from recycled post-consumer material and/or sourced from sustainable pulpwood forests, environmental concerns about modern printed books pales in comparison to the numerous problems with electronic devices.

Maybe we’re not quite addicted to computer mediated communication, but we’re certainly becoming increasingly dependent on it. Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, The Big Switch, and the forthcoming book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, argues that:

The problem with the addiction metaphor … is that it presents the normal as abnormal and hence makes it easy for us to distance ourselves from our own behavior and its consequences. By dismissing talk of “Internet addiction” as rhetorical overkill, which it is, we also avoid undertaking an honest examination of how deeply our media devices have been woven into our lives and how they are shaping those lives in far-reaching ways, for better and for worse. In the course of just a decade, we have become profoundly dependent on a new and increasingly pervasive technology.

Too often today, concerns about the implications of technology are dismissed because of the over-anxious language used by under-informed news media crying wolf to cash in on the zeitgeist. What are we doing to ensure that the voices of well-informed scholars and experts are not lost in the cacophony caused by the democratization of media? For example, how do we engage the public in civil discourse about issues like privacy, identity, and the changing face of media consumption before their attention becomes over-saturated by base sensationalism?

I’ve been playing with Google Wave for about a week now, but I still haven’t figured out what to do with it.  Yes, it has a lot of very cool features, but the as the combination is so unlike existing communication technology, it’s very difficult to know just how to use it.  I doesn’t help that at this point there is virtually no integration with existing communication channels (e-mail, IM, twitter) making it so that you have to be on Google Wave to know if anything is happening on Google Wave.  Most of the friends I’ve invited so far seem to have given up on trying to force this new technology into their lives.  There’s probably some wisdom in that, but I’d like to see this catch on because I do think it has a lot to offer.

Ann Michael has an post at The Scholarly Kitchen that outlines similar woes. From the post:

Google Wave is a cacophony of functionality that doesn’t even try to reveal its value or purpose to the user. You have to be determined to use Google Wave in order to make it work for you. Even then, since it’s a “preview,” the functions you try to use don’t always work. Being a new user you are left wondering if the function doesn’t work or if you’re just not doing it right.

My hope is that Google Wave will become much more useful and user-friendly as more extensions are developed and more invites filter out into the general public.  Once more people start to use it, it’s use(s) will become more defined.

That said, I have a couple invites left.  I’d like to trade them for something interesting (handmade crafts, mix tapes, etc.). Comment if you’re into that idea.

News of Google’s plans for Chrome OS have started me thinking about computer hardware – trying to decide what my next upgrade will be. While I can’t afford anything new in the immediate future (I’m a poor college student), I’m beginning to grow anxious about my aging PowerBook’s health.

Besides my laptop’s impending and inevitable demise, my cell phone contract will be up soon, and I’m considering downgrading from my BlackBerry to a “dumb” phone when that happens. Rates for data are exorbitant when you consider the ubiquity of WiFi coverage these days.

More and more, I find myself wondering if I might be in the market for a netbook. I ridiculed a friend of mine for months after she bought a tiny MSI Wind, but now that I’ve seen how convenient it is, I really think it might be just what I need: a lightweight computer that I can type on and carry almost everywhere.

The thought of phasing out my laptop – my “real computer” – is frightening. However, I recall that I had similar fears about phasing out my desktop when that was my “real computer” and I bought this PowerBook to take to college. Netbooks are a whole different animal though, especially when you consider the growing demands of media.

I’ll cut to the chase. One possibility for the future of my digital life is this: a dumb phone with unlimited text messaging, a netbook of some kind, and a NAS/Media server. It’s the last piece of the puzzle that’s leaving me… well, puzzling.

I’d like to digitize my entire CD collection. I’d like to store the audio on a server in some lossless format (FLAC perhaps) to save having to re-digitize from the physical media in the future when I might want better quality files (than if I had stored them all as MP3s). I’d like to keep my movies on there too, and my photos, and backup all of my documents (including a small but growing reference library of articles and research papers for school). I’d like it to hook up easily to a television or stereo (read: surround sound + HDTV). Oh, and it’d be really nice if I could get at some of this stuff while I’m away from home too.

Humoring my imagination (and helping me wrap my head around the costs of this next generation of computing hardware), can anyone recommend a good NAS/media server (and/or netbook)?

Thanks!
I’ll be looking for myself too, and I’ll post what I find in the comments here.

Wanted:

A small web application that can help log plays for vinyl records to Last.fm and also report them to Twitter.

It would draw album data (including track length times and track numbering) from Discogs.com after the user identifies the correct album (or if they’re a member on the site, selects it from their collection.)

Then it would allow the user to “play” the album, one side at a time, using a timer to “scrobble” each track at the appropriate interval to Last.fm. It would offer the option to “tweet” the play of the album to Twitter with a link to its Discogs entry. It would pause at the end of each side and wait for the user to flip the record and press play before beginning to “scrobble” the tracks on the next side.

Accurate track duration data is essential to the proper functioning of this application.  If Discogs does not have the necessary data, it might be possible to retrieve it from the MusicBrainz database.

http://www.discogs.com/help/api

http://www.last.fm/api/submissions

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/WebService

If anyone would be so kind as to help me out with this, it would be much appreciated.

Sorry, everyone. I had really hoped to keep this updated more often, but this semester has turned out to be a rather busy one. I’d like to write something about trust, privacy, and activity streams, but I just haven’t had time to read up on the latest developments. Would anyone care to explain foaf+ssl to me?

Also, when I have time I’m going to be changing some things with the blog to clean it up and make it run a little better. Consider this a heads-up that change is ahead.

I’ll leave you with a nod to Chris Saad’s post about Peered Data Portability.

I really like this graph:

In response to Michael Arrington‘s post, The Meaning Of Friendship.

Bucketing and “fake following” are good enough for now.

Why?

Most of this social data will be public soon because managing changing relationship is a huge time-sink, and the benefits of carefully managed privacy just aren’t worth the efforts. I already have to think of it this way – as if all my social data were potentially public – just because I can’t mentally juggle which bits of my data I’m give to whom. (The users most affected by increasingly public social data are the popular users who receive a lot of attention. But they’re also in the best position to deal with potential problems because they can call on their ‘tribe’ to self-manage aberrant behavior.)

There are a number of problems with trying to manage relationships online as if they were analog equivalents to real life relationships. One problem has to do with two things, presence, and the persistence of data.

In real life, as Arrington points out,
“when you don’t want to be friends with someone, you just find ways not to spend time with them.”

This isn’t only true in a binary sense, but actually applies to how we manage all of our relationships. All relationships are constantly in a state of flux. You’re never just ‘friends’ or ‘not friends’ with anyone. The degree and nature of our relationships has a lot to do with how and when we spend time with people.

In the real world relationships are built up by when the two people spend quality time with each other and relationships can wane when people are apart. In the real world, these events are always symmetric. Online, this isn’t always the case.

Online, someone can read your profile data, or your blog, or your activity streams when you’re not there. Depending on what information you’re sharing, this could be like leaving a copy of your journal or diary at every single one of your friends houses.

Getting away from privacy paranoia, say we’ve already accepted that all of our social data may as well be public, one remaining problem is that this exchange is not equivalent to symmetric relationship building in the real world. It’s difficult to gauge online, without the subtleties of body language &c, the exact nature of our developing relationships. When the data exchange is inherently asymmetric, we may find a lot of people far more interested in us then we are in them. ( = problematic.)

In real life, for the most part, data about us is present when and where we are present. Outside of that it’s only present in our friends’ memories, and perhaps though gossip. Online, our social data is like everything else on the web, persistent. Every exchange is potentially immortalized in a log somewhere, and it’s quite acceptable to leave “wall posts” up forever. The social data is persistent, and this changes things.

Additionally, our relationships aren’t only determined by the amount of time we spend with other people, but how we spend it. Besides the quantitative aspect, there is a very important qualitative aspect to social interaction.

To put it in terms of data, we don’t exchange the same subset of our personal data with everyone. Every relationship is unique, because every person is unique and has slightly different interests. Within certain groups some general subset of data may be more relevant, but our relationship with one member of the group is still not identical with our relationship with every other member of the group; each relationship is unique, qualitatively and quantitatively. Even if the quantitative aspect is nearly identical (maybe you go bowling with the same group every Tuesday and you don’t see any of them outside of bowling,) still we couldn’t say that our relationship with every member of the group is identical. (You wouldn’t potentially ask Bob out on a date, but you might ask Mary out sometime.)

To mimic all of these nuances of relationships in both their quantitative and qualitative aspects would require extremely complex granular controls. It would be a huge time sink to manage manually, but I also wouldn’t begin to think I cold trust a computer to do it for me – at least any time soon.

Instead, I find it better to simply recognize that being “friended” on Facebook is not equivalent to being friends in real life. You can say that I’m “Facebook friends” with Robert Scoble, but that doesn’t tell you what our relationship is beyond the most basic level of trust. For example, I’d be out of place offering an intervention for his FriendFeed addiction – I don’t know him that well.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Following up on the FriendFeed discussion from Robert Scoble‘s post, some interesting questions were raised.

Susan mentioned that Robert was acting as “bionic human socnet filter” after which I asked if we were all becoming part of a social super brain. The discussion turned to the segmentation of the social web with George Smith commenting that:

“Birds of a feather flock together. And sometimes it’s people with polar opposite views arguing. But I don’t think one place really has a large enough spectrum of human discourse…yet. We have to remember there is still a large portion of the population that does not participate in these conversations.”

The web is often hailed as great boon for democracy and learning with freedom of information and global interconnectedness, but I think George makes a good point. The social web is, and tends to be segmented because that’s simply how people are tending to react to the capabilities of the Internet as a new communication medium.

So what brings people together?

Read the rest of this entry »