Category Archives: internet

Harvard Law Library director again in the news

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News from the Berkman Center at HLS:

 

Internet Safety Technical Task Force Releases Final Report on Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies

Findings To Be Presented Today at State of the Net Conference in Washington, D.C.

January 14, 2009, Cambridge, Mass., and Washington, D.C. - The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University today released the final report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, a group of 29 leading Internet businesses, non-profit organizations, academics, and technology companies that joined together for a year-long investigation of tools and technologies to create a safer environment on the Internet for youth.

The Task Force was created in February 2008 in accordance with the Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Safety announced in January 2008 by the Attorneys General Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking and MySpace.  The report was delivered to the 52 Attorneys General in December, 2008.

To read the final report, including the executive summary, as well as reaction statements from members of the Task Force, visit:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/pubrelease/isttf,

 

John Palfrey, chair of the Task Force and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center, will discuss the findings of the final report today at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time at the Congressional Internet Caucus Fifth Annual State of the Net Conference in Washington, D.C. (http://www.netcaucus.org/conference/2009) along with members of the Task Force.

 

 

Source:

Seth Young
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard University
+1.617.384.9135
<syoung@cyber.law.harvard.edu>

Change.Gov meets Public.Resource.Org

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Carl Malamud offers President-Elect Obama “5 Suggestions for Change” on http://public.resource.org/change.gov/.

You can visit the site to read the full suggestions (with PDFs), but here is the quick list:

  1. Rebooting .Gov.
  2. FedFlix.
  3. The Library of the U.S.A.
  4. The United States Publishing Academy.
  5. The Rural Internetification Administration.

Yes, we can….

Harvard Law Library’s John Palfrey Noted and Quoted

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In these two stories:

Underage kids flock to social networks
‘They keep signing up and we keep chasing them,’ says Nexopia’s Chris Webster

DAVID HUTTON
Globetechnology.com
September 15, 2008 at 11:27 PM EDT

According to a recent study, more than 750,000 kids between the ages of 8 and 12 have set up a profile on the big social-networking sites. Most simply enter a false birth date when they register; others get a friend or sibling to help them circumvent the age-restriction policies.

. . . Attorney-General Michael Mukasey has commissioned an Internet safety task force to find better ways to verify the age of users.

The task force is looking at implementing age-verification technology from Microsoft and IBM on several sites and even opening the process of enshrining age restrictions in law, said John Palfrey, . . .  who chairs the task force. But determining the age of users is a complex problem without clear answers, Mr. Palfrey said. “There’s no way to stop people from getting on to the site at the front end, when they sign up,” he said. “But I think there are ways we can improve the systems that work behind the scenes to find the underage kids and deter them from using sites where they shouldn’t be.”

 

CNET

Harvard professor sees answers to nagging Web-youth issues

John Palfrey, one of Harvard’s leading thinkers on the Internet, has recently finished a study on kids raised in the digital age. He now has a few tips to share about Web porn, online piracy, and Sen. John McCain’s lack of tech know-how–Palfrey, who wrote a book about the study called Born Digital, was fairly upbeat about the Web’s affects on young people. That’s not going to surprise too many people as Palfrey is a recognized Internet booster. But after completing 100 “in-depth interviews” with young people, ages 13 to 22, Palfrey sees some possible solutions to problems confronting Web-connected youth.

 

Source: Source:  Harvard Law School’s News@Law – September 17, 2008

Government Data Mining

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“Government Data Mining“

MCGRAW-HILL HANDBOOK OF HOMELAND SECURITY, 2008

FRED H. CATE, Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington

NEWTON MINOW

Government data mining is widespread and expanding. A 2004 report by the General Accounting Office found 42 federal departments – including every cabinet-level agency that responded to the GAO’s survey – engaged in, or were planning to engage in, 122 data mining efforts involving personal information. Thirty-six of those involve accessing data from the private sector; 46 involve sharing data among federal agencies.

These programs present vexing legal and policy issues about the government’s access to, and use of, personal information, especially when that information is obtained from the private sector or another government agency or when it concerns individuals who have done nothing to warrant suspicion. Surprisingly, many of these issues have not yet been addressed by statutes or judicial decisions, or the applicable law is uncertain or unclear.

This paper examines the technological and geopolitical factors that have raised – and complicated – this question, and helped to render existing law inadequate. It describes that law and the legal and other issues posed by data mining, but not resolved by existing law. The paper includes a summary of the recommendations of the DOD Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee – the most recent word on the subject – which are currently under consideration by Congress and the Secretary of Defense.

 

Source: LSN Information Privacy Law Vol. 1 No. 12,  08/26/2008

New book by Harvard Law Library’s director – Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives

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I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, by Harvard’s John Palfrey and Urs Gasser.  It just arrived yesterday and it is fascinating and wonderfully readable, right from page 1.  I highly, highly recommend it (even though I’m only through the second chapter!). 

The second chapter, “Dossiers,” offers much food for thought.  And here’s a little taste:

The amount of information that goes into the digital files kept about a baby born today is extraordinary.  To see just how extraordinary, let’s look at the digital dossier of a hypothetical baby:  We’ll call him Andy.

Andy’s digital life begins well before he is born — before he even has a name.  The first entry in his digital file is a sonogram that his proud parents-to-be affix to the refrigerator, anticipating the happy event of his birth.  That same image is recreated in the hospital database, the first formal record of Andy’s life.  . . . In this case, with good reason, the obstetrician’s team will copy Andy’s image into a file for the pediatrician who will care for him after he’s born.  Start counting: That’s one digital file, copied in at least four places.

. . .

Even the digital information that we perceive to be out of reach from third parties may in fact be more accessible than we realize, now or in the future.  We can only hope that the Social Security Administration’s computer system, which processes and stores the application for Andy’s new Social Security number, is a digital Fort Knox.  But the biggest search engines — like Google and Baidu, China’s largest search engine — are constantly improving the ability of their Web crawlers to unearth more and more data from the dark recesses of the Internet.  These crawlers copy information, without asking permission, and dump it into a massive, structured global index.  At the same time, social networks and other services hosting personally identifiable information are eager to get the traffic from these search engines, so they are exposing more and more about people to the likes of Google and Baidu.  This combination of factors — the incentive for search engines to index all the world’s information and the incentive of online service providers to draw people to information on their sites — means that information about Andy that was once in a silo is now in a more open, public space. . . .

. . .

The problem with the rapid growth of digital dossiers is that the decisions about what to do about personal information are made by those who hold the information.  The person who contributes the information to a digital dossier may have a modicum of control up front, but he or she rarely exercises it.  The person to whom the information relates — sometimes the person who contributed it, sometimes not — often has no control whatsoever about what happens to the data.  The existence of these dossiers may not itself be problematic.  But these many, daily, individual acts result in a rich, deep dataset associated with an individual that can be aggregated and searched.  The process, start to finish, is only lightly regulated.

 

On the book jacket our Professor Lawrence Lessig writes “Digital technologies are changing our kids in ways we don’t yet understand.  This beautifully written book will set the framework for a field that will change that.  It is required reading for parents, educators, and anyone who cares about the future.”

I agree that it is beautifully written and that it should be required reading. 

Here’s the catalog record:

Author: Palfrey, John.
Title: Born digital : understanding the first generation of digital natives / John Palfrey and Urs Gasser.
Imprint: New York : Basic Books, c2008.
Physical Description: vii, 375 p. ; 25 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: Identities — Dossiers — Privacy — Safety — Pirates  — Creators — Quality — Overload — Aggressors — Innovators — Learners — Activists — Synthesis.
          Subject (LC): Information society–Social aspects.
          Subject (LC): Information technology–Social aspects.
          Subject (LC): Technological innovations–Social aspects.
          Subject (LC): Internet and children.
          Subject (LC): Internet and teenagers.
          Subject (LC): Internet–Social aspects.
          Subject (LC): Technology–Social aspects.
          Subject (LC): Digital media–Social aspects.
          Added author: Gasser, Urs.
                  ISBN: 9780465005154

LAW CALL NUMBER                                              
   1)HM851 .P34 2008

Using distorted words to build digital libraries

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REALLY fascinating story in today’s Wall Street Journal about inventor Luis von Ahn and the use of his Captcha — “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” to help get old books and newspapers online faster and cheaper.

 

Web-Security Inventor Charts a Squigglier Course

Digitizing Books
Is Tied to Revamp
Of Captcha System

By ETHAN SMITH
August 13, 2008; Page B5

 

The primary inventor of a Web security technique is putting the system to work in another security scheme dubbed ReCaptcha.  This time he wants users to assist with what he thinks is an important public service: heling get old books and newspapers online as part of digitized libraries.

From the story:

When the ReCaptcha project is fully up and running, this month or in early September, Mr. von Ahn expects it to process about 160 books a day being scanned by the Internet Archive, a San Francisco nonprofit. The Internet Archive has paid employees scanning 1,000 books a day at 70 public and university libraries, mostly in the U.S., from the Library of Congress to the Allen County Public Library, in Fort Wayne, Ind.

. . .

Most of the books can be digitized using typical optical character recognition software. Those that prove troublesome are to be handled by ReCaptcha.

“It’s a really mind-blowing application,” says Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle.

Wikipedian meeting in Egypt

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Great, lengthy article in today’s Wall Street Journal about Wikipedians’ largest-ever meeting just held in Alexandria, Egypt, at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina:

Wikipedians Leave Cyberspace, Meet in Egypt

In Alexandria, 650 Devotees Bemoan Vandals, Debate Rules; Deletionists vs. Inclusionists

By James Gleick

“James Gleick is the author, most recently, of ‘Isaac Newton.’ He is working on a history of information.”

From the WSJ article:

. . .

Even without vandals, even without trolls and sock-puppets and other notorious malefactors, anarchy can always break out. Because everyone in the world has the power to edit, Wikipedia has long been plagued by the so-called edit war. This is like a house where the husband wants it warm and the wife wants it cool and they sneak back and forth adjusting the thermostat at cross purposes. One Wikipedian says “potato,” another says “potahto,” and they reverse each other’s edits ad infinitum. There have been edit wars over gods and edit wars over commas. “Betwixt” or “between”? Is the Conch Republic (aka Key West) really a “micronation”? Is it “Daylight Saving Time” or “Daylight Savings Time”? You may know the answer for sure; rest assured, a significant faction of humanity knows you are wrong and can prove it. At the end of 2006, people concerned with the “Cat” article could not agree on whether a human with a cat is its “owner,” “caregiver” or “human companion.” Invective was hurled. Over a three-week period, the argument extended to the length of a small book.

Anyone looking at the ebb and flow of edit wars may wonder how equilibrium can ever be established. Yet invariably factions reach accommodation, and articles tend to be, if not perfectly consistent, amazingly accurate. This, too, is part of the maturing of Wikipedia. All editors are created equal, but they don’t stay equal. There are unmistakable signs of hierarchy (another dirty word). A longtime trusted user can become an “administrator,” with special powers: to protect articles, to delete articles, and, in cases of vandalism or other bad behavior, to block other users. In Alexandria, as newbies mingled with old-timers, complaints were heard: The community has gotten less friendly; its organization is more “top down.” And who administers the administrators? There are “stewards,” “sysops” and “arbitrators.”

“It changes the dynamic, and think I miss the old days,” Kat Walsh, aka Mindspillage, a law student and Wikimedia board member, tells an introspective session called “Welcome to the Wiki-Cabal.” There’s no glory in adminship — “It’s like going around behind people and picking up the trash.” Articles get rated now, too: A “good” article must have met the “good article criteria” and passed through the “good article nomination process,” always subject to “good article reassessment.” Predictably, the emergence of hierarchy has demanded a structure of policy and rules.

. . .

The Google Dilemma

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“The Google Dilemma”

New York Law School Law Review, Forthcoming
NYLS Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08/09#2

Web search is critical to our ability to use the Internet. Whoever controls search engines has enormous influence on all of us; whoever controls the search engines, perhaps, controls the Internet itself. This short essay (based on talks given in January and April 2008 ) uses the stories of five famous search queries to illustrate the conflicts over search and the enormous power Google wields in choosing whose voices are heard on the Internet.

 

Source: LSN Young Scholars Law APS Vol. 5 No. 36,  08/04/2008

JAMES GRIMMELMANN, New York Law School

Information Policy for the Library of Babel

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Yesterday’s mail brought along Vol 3, No. 1 of the Journal of Business & Technology Law.  This issue contains a Google symposium, “Google: An Intersection of Business and Technology,” which includes these articles:


Google and Fair Use, Jonathan Band

Information Policy for the Library of Babel, James Grimmelmann

The Google IPO, Matthias Hild

Asterisk Revisited: Debating a Right of Reply on Search Results, Frank Pasquale

From Making Money without Doing Evil to Doing Good without Handouts: The Google.org Experiment in Philanthropy, Shruti Rana

Google Benefits or Google’s Benefit?, Susan J. Stabile

Privacy on Planet Google: Using the Theory of “Contextual Integrity” to Clarify the Privacy Threats of Google’s Quest for the Perfect Search Engine, Michael Zimmer

Clearly an issue for us to take with us on our summer vacations for beach or pool-side reading!

James Grimmelmann’s article, published under a Creative Commons license, sets “out a few principles of sensible information policy for the Library of Babel.”  Here are the article’s concluding principles:

III. THE INTERNET

As it announces in its very first sentence, The Library of Babel is an allegory for the universe. This essay has also treated it as an allegory–and an anachronistic and transparent one at that. For “Library of Babel,” read “Internet.” For “book,” read “Web site.” And for “Book-Man,” read “search engine.” It’s almost a cliche to assert that the Internet is like a vast library, that it causes problems of information overload, or that it contains both treasures and junk in vast quantities. Looking at it through the lens of Borges’s Library amplifies these themes to their utter limit, and thus makes them fresh again. The ten principles set forth above are completely serious. Here they are again, using the proper terminology:

1. The public interest means readers’ interest.

2. Infrastructure matters.

3. Censorship is usually irrelevant.

4. The problem is access, not creation.

5. The Internet is nearly, but not completely useless.

6. Search engines make the Internet useful.

7. An impostor could not pretend to have a good search engine.

8. Search engines could keep secrets from us and we’d never know.

9. Search engines can play favorites.

10. The more search engines the better.

The Library of Babel provides an exhilarating and frightening metaphor for the Internet. Exhilarating because it reminds us that we are all now “the possessors of an intact and secret treasure” of knowledge beyond compare. Frightening because it reminds us that that knowledge is shut away in a “feverish [place], whose random volumes constantly threaten to transmogrify into others, so that they affirm all things, deny all things, and confound and confuse all things, like some mad and hallucinating deity.” Only the god-like Book-Man, whose knowledge of the Library is an “honor and wisdom and joy,” can make sense of it for us. In the Library of Babel, the Book-Man is but a “superstition,” but on the Internet, his name is Google.

Associate Professor of Law, New York Law School. As of January 1, 2009, this Article is available for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/.

The Future of Reading and Researching the Pacific Northwest tree octopus

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Today’s New York Times has a front-page feature “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?,” by Motoko Rich.  “This is the first in a series of articles that will look at how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read.”  The article contains numerous instances of using the internet for research and the resulting potential liabilities; for example:

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy.  In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.

The article also mentions Nicholas Carr’s article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” the subject of a post here, “Jet Ski research” – Is Google Making Us Stoopid?  The New York Times article offers a good example of some “Jet Ski research” as performed by a 16-year old boy:

When researching the 19th-century Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for one class, he typed Taney’s name into Google and scanned the Wikipedia entry and other biographical sites.  Instead of reading an entire page, he would type in a search word like “college” to find Taney’s alma mater, assembling his information nugget by nugget.