Future Tense

Apple takes a byte out of Amazon's...

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:12:00 CST

Amazon is already reacting to the creation of Apple’s new streaming TV service and set-top box.

The Seattle based online retailer sells streaming TV shows too. Yesterday those shows cost just about 2 bucks to download. That’s twice the price of Apple’s streaming TV offerings. So today Amazon enacted a price cut. You can stream the boob tube to you computer for just 99 cents a program. Even though amazon will be taking a loss.

Microsoft hoping for mobile mojo

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:40:00 CST

By Steve Henn

Microsoft is released its latest mobile phone software to cell phone manufactures today.

Windows 7 is Microsofts’ latest crack at getting back into the mobile game. And the Redmond Washington company is desperate. Its market-share in smart phones is almost non-existent – while its rivals Google and Apple both claim to be adding more than 200,000 new mobile users every day.

Apple's in the Garden

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 07:00:00 CST

Apple is getting social. Yesterday Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs announced that his new version of iTunes will have social network built right in. It’s called Ping. Jobs says people will use Ping to see friends’ music downloads, follow their favorite artists, and review concerts. But is Ping another way for Apple to get all of us to spend more time online and less time on the Web? Apple is masterful at building “walled gardens” online. iTunes, the app store, and the iPad all offer simple, easy-to-understand online experiences with little hassle. Dan Ackerman , a senior editor at C-NET, says control and simplicity are part of Apple’s basic business philosophy, and that works for many consumers. But Jim Louderback , CEO of the Internet TV company Revision3, worries that creating walled-off enclaves online will ultimately harm consumers and undermine the Web’s promise of creating a truly democratic medium – where anyone can publish to the world. We talk with both about the pros and cons of walled gardens.

The FDA elbows into the app store

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 06:00:00 CST

By Steve Henn

This is my heart beat.

It was recorded and amplified by an iPhone app, iStethoscope. Then I shook the phone and instantly got this spectrogram, which I can e-mail to my doctor.

Cell phone apps like this are blurring the distinction between medical devices – which are strictly regulated by the FDA – and consumer electronics sold openly online.

Bradley Thompson is a lawyer at Epstein Beck and Green who focuses on the FDA approval process. He says businesses don’t know if the apps they are making will be regulated by the FDA or not.

“I think there is a good there is a good bit of ambiguity now about which of these apps require FDA clearance,” he says. “I know a number of investors who are interested ion those businesses that are kind of nervous.”

Johnson & Johnson’s working on an app that would connect iPhones belonging to diabetics to their glucose monitors. And others believe an app for ultrasound is possible. But the FDA is watching. It’s already forced some firms to pull their medical apps down if they are unproven or make claims the companies can’t back up.

MIMvista created an app that would let radiologists view CT scans, MRIs and x-rays on their mobile phones. The app was slick and beatiful, and it caught the eye of Apple executives. They asked the company to present it at Apple’s world-wide developers conference in 2008.

The FDA was less impressed. Regulators expressed concerns that doctors would be viewing these images under very different conditions than they encountered in a radiology reading room. They asked the group the reapply. After nearly a year of waiting, the FDA decided this app was so new and different that before it could be approved, the firm that made it would have to test it with full-blown clinical trials.

Get a (second) life

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:12:00 CST

By Steve Henn
A Japanese seaside resort is teaming up with Konomi Digital Entertainment to create a vacation getaway for young men and their virtual girlfriends.

According to Mashable, fans of the online game Love Plus can scan bar codes scattered around town to call up images of their virtual online girlfriends on their cell phones. Fans can snap pictures with their make-believe paramour. One hotel has even installed these bar codes in the private rooms.

Tag your tots: RFID chips for...

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:42:00 CST

By Steve Henn

So what do you do if you are a hard working school superintendent whose school system’s so strapped for cash that you don’t have enough teachers or aids to keep track of your pre-k kids, or make sure they actually eat lunch?

Seattle Municipal Archives

Well, according to the AP, Contra Costa County in California used a $50,000 federal grant to buy jerseys with RFID tags to help keep tabs on their tots. School officials say the system will save the district thousands of hours of staff time and could pay for itself in less than a year.

But if you can’t keep track of your kids, can you really expect to teach them to read?

India's security services eye Google and Skype

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:00:00 CST

Blackberry has cut a deal with security officials in India, allowing them access e-mail and data sent using BlackBerry’s network. But the Indian government isn’t done yet. It’s now applying pressure to some other high-tech players. Indian officials say they’re exploring ways to track the contents of conversations on Google’s video chat service and on Skype. This spat is just the latest international dispute over internet privacy. We speak with Fred Cate , a law professor at Indiana University who specializes in privacy and security, to understand what - if anything - security services gain when they try to mine massive amounts of information in search of terrorists.

Listen to my iHeartbeat...

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:00:00 CST

iPhone’s all over hearts these days. First, we had the iPhone Heart Monitor app for exercise buffs (sweating optional). Then the news that Apple applied for a patent on technology that could, someday, biometrically link phones to individual heartbeats. And last week, British researcher Peter J. Bentley unveiled a free version of iStethoscope, an app that threatens to turn us all into amateur cardiologists with its fascinating array of robot-like blips and swooshes being emanated by our own tickers.

Or as the London Times put it, “A wonderful instrument called the stethoscope … is now in complete vogue…” In 1824.

Apple Announcement Rumors: Music to...

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:27:00 CST

With Apple all set to make several announcements tomorrow about its music services and product line, the rumor mill is kicking into overdrive.

So without future ado, we bring you the news before it happens.* CNET says iTune’s song samples may double in length, Engadget’s guessing that Apple could begin streaming music videos. And everyone’s all a twitter about a new smaller iPod Nano.

*Future Tense reserves the right to edit this post later and change the phrase “news before it happens” to “poorly sourced speculation.”

No more paper OED

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:33:00 CST

The days of the150-lb, 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary are numbered. This week, Oxford University Press announced it’s just too expensive to print.

The next complete edition of the dictionary, dubbed OED3, will only be available online. The dictionary was first published in 1928, after 71 years of exhaustive research on all the conceivable words in the English language, including Scrabble-lovers “zyxt.” An online edition of the OED has been around since the 1980s.

Cloudy Future for Digital Property

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

Could Apple move iTunes into the cloud? It probably won’t happen tomorrow at Apple’s iTunes event – but in the long run it seems inevitable. Cloud computing is slowly taking over – it’s already changing the way we work and live. Corporations’ appetite to increase data storage is driving HP and Dell in their bidding war for the data storage company 3Par . Seems like time to ask what’s ours in a cloud-computed world? If you are uploading all your photos to Flickr, who owns them? What about the love letters sent to your husband or wife? Do you own those words if they are stored in-box on Yahoo instead of a in a shoebox in your closet? Eric Goldman , a professor of technology at Santa Clara Law School, and Justin Brookman from the Center for Democracy and Technology argue that in the digital age, our definitions of ownership are in flux.

Play tech's Great Game

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 06:00:00 CST

So we read lots and lots of tech headlines at this show. Facebook’s after Foursquare’s market; Apple’s after Microsoft; Google’s after everyone—the constant maneuvering and strategizing feels sometimes like a giant game of Risk. Now it is, literally.

This map belongs to the folks at Web 2.0 Summit, an invitation-only conference on the Internet economy. Even to them, it can be hard to see the big picture with so many players jostling for position. As Web 2.0 blogger John Battelle puts it:

The narrative is so rich, it struck us that it lends itself to a visualization – a map outlining these points of control, replete with incumbents and insurgents – those companies who hold great swaths of strategic territory, and those who are attempting to gain ground, whether they be startups or large companies moving into new ground.

You can make comments on the map, and pretty soon, the mapmakers promise, you’ll be able to play the game. Let’s hope the rules are not too complicated.

Did Blackberry Crack Under Pressure?

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:56:37 CST

By Steve Henn

Research in Motion the creator of the Blackberry smart phone has reportedly backed down in its standoff with the Indian government. India officials had been demanding that Research in Motion the country’s security services access to Blackberry data flowing through the company’s servers. Blackberry phones offer customers powerful encryption for e-mail. That encryption has made many governments, including India, uneasy. Officials there worry terrorist could use Blackberry smart-phones to coordinate attacks. Research in Motion has resisted other efforts in the United Arab Emeritus and Saudi Arabia to open up its network to surveillance. Blackberry became a leader in the smart phone market by promising corporate customers unmatched security in mobile communication. However with hundreds of millions of potential customers in India, Research in Motion was under tremendous pressure to cut a deal. The exact terms Research in Motions arrangement in India have not been made public.

Killing Cable

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:51:00 CST

By Steve Henn

I moved coast to coast about six months ago and I still haven’t hooked up a new cable connection in my house. Okay – given I’m a public radio geek – but I don’t miss it – at all. I’m still streaming shows I like. So the last few months have made me wonder, could cable be entering a death spiral? Turns out I’m not the only one asking the question. MG Siegler at TechCrunch has an overview of Silicon Valley’s assault on the idiot box. Or you can just watch this ad by Logitech.

GooglePlex

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:31:00 CST

By Steve Henn

Nirvana for film buffs. Imagine an online movie rental store with every movie, ever made always in stock - an unlimited number screens and an infinite of show times. Eric Schmidt might want you to call it GooglePlex. For months now Google’s been slowly expanding its pay-per-view service, streaming movies on YouTube into homes and mobile phones around the world. Today Financial Times reports that Google is one step closer to making this vision reality. Its reportedly negotiating with Hollywood Studio’s to radically expand its pay-per-view offerings. Hmmm… can’t you just see Schmidt thinking, “I bet this service would work a whole lot better if we could get a faster connection to our customers.”

Africans rush to create apps

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

The next wave of apps may not come out of Silicon Valley but places like Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. That’s what organizers of the Apps4Africa contest are hoping, anyway. East African software developers are rushing to meet an August 31st deadline for the contest. It’s sponsored by the U.S. State Department as well as three regional non-profits. The winners will get money and gadgets for coming up with the best apps to solve problems in East Africa. But more importantly, organizers say, is that the competition has jump-started a dialogue between developers and NGOs in these countries. And some of the software platforms recently developed in East Africa like Ushahidi are already getting widespread usage around the world. Last week , we looked at that platform’s use in flood-ravaged Pakistan. We speak with one of the contest’s organizers, Josh Goldstein of AppAfrica . And we hear from one of the judges, Anil Dash , about what developers in the West could learn from emerging tech scene in Africa.

Oil-eating swarm of robots

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:00:00 CST

It’s an MIT project called Seaswarm. Little robots drag around nano-fabric that can asborb 20 times their weight in oil. These robots dragging around the nano-fabric use wifi and GPS to communicate and position themselves without a human being directing them where to go. A prototype has been developed and was tested in Boston’s Charles River to make sure the waves wouldn’t knock the bots around too much.

Blockbuster bust?

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:38:19 CST

No more evenings wandering around Blockbuster amidst popcorn-y carpet smells and confusion about which recent movies are worth taking home. The video rental company is apparently getting ready to file for bankruptcy next month. The idea is to shed bricks-and-mortar stores during bankruptcy, and those expensive leases along with them. Blockbuster could still emerge from the ashes with branded kiosks, like Redbox has. And the company will expand in digital space.

Growing number of people 50+ use...

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:00:00 CST

We tend to think the people on Facebook are young, college-aged and writing about last night’s party. Those people are indeed there. But, there’s another demographic increasingly using social networking sites. A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows the number of internet users 50 and older using social media has nearly doubled since last year. Same story for the number of internet users 65 and older.

This really puts in perspective something one of our recent guests John Troyer brought up in a story on Twitter, Facebook and death.

A problem, a phone, a software platform: crisis relief in Pakistan

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

If you go to Pakreport.org , you’ll see a map of Pakistan riddled with red dots. Click on one, a little dialogue box pops up. “under 9 feet water. 400 stranded near Qaim Bhawana ‘Bund’. Food & medicines urgently needed. Disease everywhere. Relief camp in QB town in name only.” This is all direct information about conditions on the ground in Pakistan sent for free by text message to number called a short code. We’re coming up on the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The storm slammed into the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1700 people, displacing hundreds of thousands of others. In the aftermath, just trying to find people, getting information about who needed what, where, was a major challenge. Now, in flood-ravaged Pakistan, volunteers have a way to get people on the ground directly involved in the information sharing, and this weekend, they’re going to make a big push to make sure people in Pakistan know about it. They’re using Ushahidi , a platform for collecting and visualizing information. Patrick Meier , Director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships at Ushahidi, and Anahi Ayala Iacucci , volunteer coordinatorfor PakReport explain how it all works and how it helps in crisis situations. BASEERA, PAKISTAN - AUGUST 26: Flood victims head back home on a flooded road as the water level goes down August 26, 2010 in Baseera, Punjab, Pakistan. Pakistan is suffering from the worst flooding in 80 years, with government officials claiming as many as 20 million people have been affected by the flooding with 15 million seriously affected. The U.N has described the disaster as unprecedented, with over a third of the country under water, and the country’s agricultural heartland has been devastated as rice, corn and wheat crops have been destroyed by the floods. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Spray-on batteries grown by...viruses?

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 06:00:00 CST

The American Chemical Society just wrapped up its national meeting in Boston, and among the presentations, a lot of interesting work on batteries.

We love battery news here at Future Tense.

And actually, judging from the papers presented, there’s a battery revolution brewing right now. Scientists are envisioning batteries as something light and flexible, something you could spray onto surfaces or even weave into clothing. All with the chemical help of creatures we usually don’t find so helpful: viruses.

But the researchers are quick to note these are not viruses that attack humans. They’re specialized strains that usually latch onto bacteria or plants. In the lab, they can be used to grow tiny cathodes and anodes, the building blocks of battery cells. These new kinds of batteries could replace bulky battery packs of the sort soldiers have to carry in the field.

And if that’s not wild enough, other scientists presented their research on using mitochondria to power fuel cells. As an ACS press release describes it

The device consists of a thin layer of mitochondria sandwiched between two electrodes, including a gas-permeable electrode. Tests showed that it produced electricity using sugar or cooking oil byproducts as fuel.

Because what cyborg-like tiny fuel cell doesn’t like an occasional chip and soda?

Google search feature no longer hard...

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:01:52 CST

Google’s RealTime search got its own page today. The service turns offers search results from news sites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and more in a constantly updated stream. Danny Sullivan breaks down all the new features, including a filter that helps sort results by location and an option to see an online conversation dating back to February.

GAO finds wireless customers benefit...

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:00:00 CST

A new report from the Government Accountability Office confirms there’s not much competition among wireless service providers. Nonetheless, wireless customers are getting lower prices and better coverage than they were 10 years ago.

Photo by Valerie Everett

What Gmail Voice will give Google

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:00:00 CST

Everybody’s talking about the new service Google rolled out yesterday - making voice calls through Gmail. Wired’s Ryan Single has an interesting piece suggesting this new feature is all about keeping you logged in, tracking what you do and being able to compete with Facebook as the most effective ad platform for marketers.
Another intriguing idea comes from Peter Nowak. He suggests Gmail Voice is going to help Google develop something no one’s been able to do well yet: voice recognition search. Because soon, no one’s going to sit around their computers typing words into a web browser.

Pentagon talks about the 2008 hack...

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 12:44:23 CST

U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn III writes in the latest issue of Foreign Policy about the 2008 hack into a military laptop he calls “the most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever.” Lynn explains the previously classified story: two years ago, a foreign intelligence agent plugged a flash drive into a military laptop and infected a U.S. Central Command network. The military’s effort to deal with the worm was dubbed Operation Buckshot Yankee. This event was a wake-up call; it changed U.S. cyber policy and sparked the creation of the U.S. Cyber Command.
Noah Shachtman of Wired wonders why a foreign spy would go to all the trouble to inject such a harmless worm in the network.

"Pain ray" to be tested on inmates

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

A new non-lethal device is coming to an LA County jail . The LA County Sheriff’s Department is calling it an Assault Intervention Device, but it’s more commonly known as a “pain ray,” and was originally developed by the military for use in Afghanistan. The device uses microwave technology to heat up moisture just below the skin, creating a sensation akin to a burn. But the pain is supposed to go away within seconds of moving out of the beam’s ray. The LA County Sheriff’s Department plans to start testing it in a dormitory at the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, Calif., as a means to break up inmate brawls in common areas. We speak with Commander Robert Osborne, head of the LA County Sheriff’s Department’s Technology Exploration Program, about why he sees the pain ray as a better and safer alternative to traditional methods of breaking up prison fights. And we talk with Brookings Institution senior fellow Peter W. Singer about why the US military developed the pain ray and then decided not to use it after all. View more news videos at: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/video .

Mystery Russian shortwave signal...

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 06:00:00 CST

The blogosphere—well, OK, a select subsection—is abuzz about “The Buzzer,” the nickname for a mysterious Russian shortwave signal that’s been broadcasting continuously since 1982. The Soviet, and now the Russian government won’t say what it’s for, though it seems to be connected to the military. UVB-76, the signal’s actual name, has mostly featured a monotonous repetition of pipping or buzzing sounds. But devoted listeners (trying to imagine…never mind) have heard a few voice transmissions over the years, and even people having conversations off-mike. Then earlier this week, UVB-76 fans were rewarded with a sudden burst of activity, the gist of which you can hear in this clip:

UVB-76 audio clip (MP3)

It’s a series of numbers in Russian, followed by the nonsense word NAIMINA, some names, more numbers, and more nonsense words that native speakers say sound like they should be Russian words, but in fact are not. What’s it all about? UVB-76 devotees on Wikipedia have speculated everything from communications with spies, to a more mundane explanation—the signal helps Russian scientists research the behavior of the ionosphere./jb

E-cigarettes headed to court

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:59:00 CST

A federal appellate court in Washington DC will consider the fate of so-called e-cigarettes next month. E-cigarettes use batteries to turn nicotine into vapor. The Food and Drug Administration says it needs to approve the devices before they go to market. But online vendors and even some Seven-Eleven chain stores are defying the agency and selling the product anyway. E-cigarette makers say they can’t afford the costs of clinical tests, and FDA regulations would drive their industry underground. Some public health advocates say e-cigarettes may actually be a good way to help smokers wean themselves from the habit. But no one really knows the side effects of the product since they haven’t been subjected to rigorous testing.

Gmail now makes phone calls

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:43:00 CST

Google announced today that Gmail accounts can now take phone calls. For the rest of the year, you can use your Gmail account to call people in the U.S. and Canada for free and pay $.02 per minute to call Germany, France, Japan and other countries. If you have a Google Voice number, calls you receive on that number show up in your inbox.

A happy ending for Random House

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:28:00 CST

Finally a publisher wins a fight in the brave new world of e-books. Last month, literary agent Andrew Wylie struck a deal with Amazon to publish a handful of titles in e-book form. The titles included works by John Updike, Ralph Ellison, Nabokov. Really important books. But, Random House fought back by boycotting some of the new books by Wylie’s other clients, who include V.S. Naipaul, Dave Eggers, Salman Rushdie. Now, Wylie has dropped the Amazon deal in favor of an agreement with Random House.

photo by Tony the Misfit

Amazon isn’t doing so bad, though. They announced today the new Kindle is flying out the door.

What helium means in a world of screens

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:15:00 CST

Nobel laureate and Cornell University physics professor Robert Richardson has a warning about helium. The world is running out of it. And that could mean a lot to the tech world.

He says, “It will be impossible to have MRI machines without the liquid helium to cool the magnets.”

Helium is also used in fiberoptic cables - it helps keep the signals strong. All those screens in our lives? The LCD screens - those need helium, too. We need helium for telescopes and NASA uses it to clean out rocket engines.

Richardson co-chaired an inquiry into the world’s dwindling helium supply. He just published a report recommending the price of helium go up 20-50 fold. That would make it worthwhile for people to recover and recycle helium. And it would make balloons very expensive.

Malware on Spanair computer system

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

It’s been two years since a Spanair plane crashed just after take-off at an airport in Madrid. It was the worst crash the country had seen in 25 years, and killed 154 people. The United States is involved in the investigation; it was a U.S.-built plane. And officials have already released many of the details of the crash. Part of the problem: The wing flaps and slats were not in the right position at take off. That’s kind of like driving a car with the doors open. Also at issue … malware . We talked with Bill Waldock about how malware was involved. He’s a professor of safety science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz., and associate director of the university’s Center for Aerospace Safety Education. We also hear from Jeff Moss , founder and director of the Black Hat computer security conference, about the kind of malware found on the airline’s computer system and how it may have done the damage it did. MADRID, SPAIN: An aerial view shows the tracks of Spanair flight JK5022 beside a Barajas airport landing strip next to where the flight crashed on August 20, 2008 near Madrid, Spain. (Photo by Informativos Telecinco/Getty Images)

Lucas suing Jedi Mind, Inc.

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:45:00 CST

George Lucas is protecting the Star Wars legacy again. This time, he’s suing a company called Jedi Mind, Inc. They make a wireless headset that lets users do things like control the mouse and send emails just by using their brain. The company says it reads conscious and non-conscious thoughts. Reuters reports LucasFilm sent two cease and desist letters already, but the company hasn’t done enough to satisfy the studio. Now, they’re facing a $5 million lawsuit and they’ve ticked off George Lucas.

Soon, a trip to the airport might...

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:30:00 CST

Yesterday, body scan images were in the news thanks to a handful of U.S. Senators who want to know why 35,000 images taken of people walking into a federal courthouse in Florida were stored.

Today, Bruce Schneier noted a story on his blog about skeletal scans. The Wright State Research Institute is working on a system that would scan skeletal structures and match them with previously scanned skeletons. They say they could have this technology ready to go in a year, but it’s not going to make a difference until they have developed a database of skeletal scans for comparison.

Hybrid creep to become hybrid whirr

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:39:52 CST

The Toyota Prius has changed the car industry. Quietly.

At low speeds, you can barely hear the car. That’s about to change for Japanese drivers. Starting August 30, customers can buy a speaker system that will help get rid of “hybrid creep.” The system will go under the hood and make a whirring sound that’s as loud as the sound of a regular engine.

Last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration came out with a report that found pedestrians are twice as likely to get hit by a Prius than a car with a conventional engine in a low-speed collision.

It’s not clear yet whether Toyota will offer this system overseas. Other carmakers are also trying to figure out how to make sure their quiet, green cars will be safe as well.

Customers look at a Toyota Prius vehicle at Toyota Motor’s showroom in Tokyo on August 4, 2010. AFP PHOTO / Yoshikazu TSUNO

Taliban get to play (in) Medal of Honor

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

The latest in the “ Medal of Honor ” video game series comes out in October. The popular first-person shooter games are usually set in World War II. Players can do things like storm the beaches at Normandy or survive the attack on Pearl Harbor. But this latest version has a new twist—it takes place in Afghanistan. The company that makes the game, Electronic Arts, consulted with soldiers who’ve fought in that country. Of course, nobody’s seen the game yet, but it’s already creating controversy. That’s because it allows players to fight as members of the Taliban. Over the weekend, the United Kingdom’s defense secretary called the new game tasteless . The mother of a fallen soldier recently said on Fox News that war is not a game. EA Games president Frank Gibeau has defended his company’s vision for the new “Medal of Honor,” asking why films and books set in Afghanistan are considered OK, but games are not. We talk with a couple of gaming experts, Heather Chaplin and Ian Bogost , about games as art, as war, and what standards they need to meet if they want to be taken seriously.

No peeking at Facebook pages

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 18:30:15 CST

Imagine a world in which it’s illegal for an employer to get info about a job applicant on Facebook. That’s the world Germany might live in. On Wednesday, the German cabinet will consider a new law to keep bosses from sniffing around in prospective employees’ social media pages. The law, however, will still let them Google applicants.

Search for artificial intelligence in...

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:08:31 CST

Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) astronomer Seth Shostak says instead of listening for radio waves and looking for biological signs in our search for life beyond Earth, we need to start trying to detect alien artificial intelligence. This is apparently a growing sentiment in the Seti community. It’s based on the idea that technology evolves much more quickly than humans. Here’s a quote from Shostak:

“If you look at the timescales for the development of technology, at some point you invent radio and then you go on the air and then we have a chance of finding you,” he told BBC News.

“But within a few hundred years of inventing radio - at least if we’re any example - you invent thinking machines; we’re probably going to do that in this century.

“So you’ve invented your successors and only for a few hundred years are you… a ‘biological’ intelligence.”

Senators want to know why U.S....

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:06:00 CST

They’re images of people who entered a U.S. Courthouse in Orlando, Fl. Earlier this month, reports of the 35,000 images the U.S. Marshals Service stored sparked discussion about privacy.

Now, the leaders of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee want to know why these images were stored and whether there are other places body scan images might be stored. They sent a letter late last week asking for answers. They also urged the service to use automatic target recognition technology - that would let a machine check out the images, not a person.

In a statement, the U.S. Marshals Service said the machine automatically stores images to the hard drive and you have to have an administrative password to see them and by the way, no one looked. Also, “The millimeter wave scan images captured by the Brijot machine in Orlando can in no way be described as images of ‘naked’ or ‘undressed’ people. Rather, they are pixilated, chalky and blurred images.”

ARLINGTON, VA - DECEMBER 30: Images produced by a ‘millimeter wave’ scanner are displayed during a demonstration at the Transportation Security Administration’s Systems Integration Facility at Ronald Reagan National Airport December 30, 2009 in Arlington, Virginia. ‘Millimeter wave’ passes electromagnetic waves over the body to create three-dimensional images that look like a photo negative. The scan can detect hidden metallic and nonmetallic objects such as weapons and explosives without physical contact. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

How safe is a voting machine if some guys can turn it into a Pac Man machine?

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

A fair question. And one that frankly we never imagined ourselves asking. But there it is. We’re only in August but the fall election season is very much under way. I don’t know about your neighborhood but there are already a ton of campaign signs around where we live. And with it the ongoing controversy about the reliability and security of electronic voting. Today, we want to inject a new angle into that issue: Pac Man . Yes, Pac Man. A couple of engineers were recently able to take a standard voting machine, hack into it, and program it to play Pac Man. We talk to Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. He worked on the project with Princeton University PhD student Ari Feldman.

Pac-Man Hacks Voting Machines

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:24:00 CST

As we head into another election season, two computer scientists, J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan and Ariel Feldman of Princeton, wanted to make a point about the insecurity of electronic voting. So they reprogrammed a Sequoia touch-screen voting machine to play Pac-Man instead of showing plain-old ballots. As Tech Dirt points out:

They did this in three afternoons (and remember, these machines are often left totally unguarded, in the open at polling places for days before elections) without breaking any of the “tamper-resistant” seals that are supposed to alert anyone to any foul play. As Halderman noted:
We could have reprogrammed it to steal votes, but that’s been done before, and Pac-Man is more fun!

The Moon is shrinking!

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:10:39 CST

In an announcement that is sure to throw the world’s werewolf community into a panic, NASA announced that they’ve picked up the rumble of shrinkage from the Moon (I’ll capitalize because it’s never been given a proper name). It’s an indication that the Moon isn’t the dead rock we once thought it was but is actually capable of geological movement. They say the Moon has probably shrunk even since the time we went up there and then stopped going up there once we had golfed. Theories abound as to why this happened – Large Hadron Collider? That bomb we sent up there for no apparent reason? But it’s important to note that it’s not losing mass, just size. Pink Floyd could not be reached for comment concerning the possible de-contextualizing of their most popular album.

Do you want Facebook to know where you are?

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

Facebook already wanted to know what you were doing, now they want to know where you’re doing it Facebook Places is a new service that lets you report where you are as you go through your day. It’s the company’s long anticipate foray into geolocation, a sort of melding of cyberspace and “meatspace” that a lot of people think will become very popular. But it’s probably a good idea to know exactly what you’re sharing and what you’re keeping private, especially since that’s a line that has been a bit shaky on Facebook in the past. We talk to CNET’s Molly Wood about how Places work so you can get a better handle on how to use it. We also talk to video editor Bill Cammack who posted on his web site instructions on opting out of the “location tagging” section of Places. He walks us through that.

The Internet Tycoon Instruction Manual

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 06:00:00 CST

Christian Sandvig is Associate Professor of Communication, Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

I learned almost everything I need to know about the network neutrality debate by playing the old game “Railroad Tycoon.” Remember those games? Railroad Tycoon was a popular series by Sid Meier (master of the simulation genre and the creative force behind Civilization) first launched way back in 1990. Most important for understanding network neutrality, the Railroad Tycoon series – especially the third one – often baffled gamers who thought that the games would be more about… well… railroads.

You see, the games, just like the US railroads that they simulate, often emphasized the second word in their title (Tycoon). The GameSpot review of Railroad Tycoon III declared that it “has something for anyone with a fondness for trains or making loads of money.” An outraged gamer named BarryD told MetaCritic that “It is quite simple to gain a boatload of money by buying industries and not laying any tracks” [except the bare minimum]! In an arch warning to model railroad enthusiasts everywhere, BarryD wrote that in this railroad game “there is a lack of focus on railways.”

Well there we have it. BarryD unintentionally gives us a pithy summary of the Gilded Age in American history. This is the period when we built our first national transport and communication networks, and robber barons and railroad tycoons like Vanderbilt and Morgan became the richest men on earth thanks to building the only railroads and then exhibiting a profound “lack of focus on railways.”

Caption: Railroad Tycoon? Or a portrait of Comcast CEO Brian L. Roberts? [The Box Art for the original Railroad Tycoon] Image source: Wikipedia

It may be hard to conjure this distant past, but Adelbert Hamilton, writing in 1884, tells it like it was. The “railroad managers,” he writes, see it as their “duty” to “adjust the rates of transportation as to regulate the prices” of the goods that they convey. That is, not content to be in the railroad business, the tycoons leveraged their control over railways into “oil, coal, meat, and many other staples,” including land development. Hamilton writes that deals between railroads and privileged shippers impose “200 or 300 per cent [sic]” surcharges on goods they don’t want delivered.

Cattlemen, as just one example, depended on the railways to bring their product to market, but railroads launched their own pricier stockyards and declined to stop at the yards they did not own, even when they sat adjacent to the track. When this practice was declared illegal, the tycoons launched a strategy of traffic discrimination where the railroad would “prefer itself” (that is, it would improve service for stock destined for the yards it owned) whenever it was transporting livestock.

David Weinberger’s Future Tense blog post last Friday made clear what was at stake in the network neutrality debate. Adding to that, we can see that network neutrality is a new gloss on this old Gilded Age story. When you talk to your friends on your cellular phone, a cellular carrier like AT&T would rather “prefer itself” than let you use Skype. Comcast would rather “prefer itself” and have you watch all of your movies using Comcast On Demand, not download your torrents. (Even legal ones.)

Back when railroads ran the economy, or much of it, they did so to further their own interests. In general terms, we got out of this mess by establishing novel new independent commissions to apply a set of legal rules called “common carriage.” (The “carriage” originally referred to a horse-drawn carriage.)

These commissions, like the Interstate Commerce Commission in the US, wrestled with problems of fairness in transport, energy, and (drum roll) communication. Indeed this very system evolved into the modern Federal Communications Commission that today sits thinking about the newfangled idea of “network neutrality.”

The common carriage idea, in a nutshell, is this: We have some networked infrastructures that are essential to all kinds of other activity. These common carriers are companies that carry something very important for us (like Hamilton’s livestock or your phone call). They could be taxis, railroads, airplanes, railroads, telephones, telegraphs, or something else.

We don’t want these infrastructures to take too much of an interest in what they are carrying. We want them in the carriage business, not in the business of examining my cattle (or my video) to see how it might make them more money. No one can be turned away from a common carrier (non-discrimination), and they have to work together even if they don’t really want to (interconnection). We also ask them to publish their conditions of service, schedules and fares (transparency).

Here’s the thing: We took a sharp turn away from common carriage, mostly as a result of Bush administration policy at the FCC. We’ve used some version of these rules since England in 1348. (Really!) But the Bush FCC decided the Internet doesn’t need common carriage. Thus the entire so-called “network neutrality” debate is a way of fighting our way back to normal. As I’ve hope I’ve convinced you with all of the cattle and railroading, network neutrality problems are common carriage problems (as I have also written elsewhere in this PDF).

David Weinberger’s post is nostalgic for a geekier, open, and more transformative Internet of days past. Me too, but the Internet’s destiny isn’t the issue. Larry Downes, posting here on Wednesday wants us to think about this as a technical issue related to specific characteristics of cell phone networks and Internet protocols. Yet a common carriage regime has served us well for all kinds of diverse technologies from telegraphs to taxicabs.

In April, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced his intent to reclassify the Internet as a common carrier (in FCC-speak, a “telecommunications service”). But instead of simply returning to common carriage, he wants to take a tiny little step back in that direction.

It was absolving the Internet from common carriage in the first place that was a radical move (as legal scholar Barbara Cherry has written). Yet in the bizarre language of partisan politics today, the FCC’s passing glance at the common carriage rules caused a joint Republican statement proclaiming the idea radical.

Why would Google want to strike a deal with a carrier (Verizon) to see that its goods get preferential treatment? (Or in Wired’s extremely evocative phrasing, why did Google become “a Carrier-Humping, Net Neutrality Surrender Monkey?”). These are the enduring dynamics of networked infrastructure, not some new particular wrinkle of Internet technology that demands its own phrase.

As danah boyd playfully pointed out in May on her blog, we already hate most of these companies as though they were regulated monopolies and we often feel inextricably tied to them and unable to switch. Let’s adjust the regulations to match the user experience.

Let’s treat these problems as the enduring challenges that they are and return Internet infrastructure to the common carrier regime. Let the commission sort out the details, but please leave the railroads to be railroads and the Internet to be the Internet.

I never want to play a computer game called Internet Tycoon.

CAMERON DIAZ IS GOING TO KILL YOU

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:49:58 CST

By “you”, I mean your computer. By “kill”, I mean infect with malware. She’s going to infect with malware your computer. And by “going”, I mean might.

But by CAMERON DIAZ, I mean CAMERON DIAZ!

But Tom Cruise is your computer!

New words!

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:43:50 CST

The Oxford English Dictionary is including some tech-related words in its next edition. Congratulations to the following words for officially joining the language: tweetup, defriend, social media, and microblogging.

Groupon breaks the whole Teh Interwebz.

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:39:40 CST

The web coupon site Groupon has always offered coupons for local businesses. If enough people signed up for spa treatments in, say, Chicago, then the whole group gets a discount. Now they’ve gone national with an offer at The Gap that was so popular the site crashed.

Leading Thinkers on Net Neutrality

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:39:00 CST

Larry Downes, a nonresident Fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society. Net Neutrality: What Are We Fighting For? (8/18/10)

David Weinberger, Senior Researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society: Notes from a Disappointed Fanboy (8/13/10)

More posts to come. And you might also be interested in our Net Neutrality News Roundup.

Skype exec leaves after a month, blog...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:36:21 CST

In a weird story about the messenger becoming the message, Madhu Yarlagadda has left Skype after only a month on the job as Chief Development Officer, and just as the company is trying to go public. It’s Silicon Valley executive gossip, sure, but there’s something more going on here. When his hiring for the job was originally announced on the tech site Tech Crunch, a slew of negative comments appeared by people who had worked with him previously, most recently at Yahoo. Tech Crunch writes about the situation here. It seems the comments, many of which Tech Crunch says it removed, prompted Yarlagadda to contact former colleagues and ask them to write positive comments on him in the same space. But instead, some of those contacted merely commented that he contacted them and then they ripped him too. The lesson: BE NICE TO EVERYONE YOU WORK WITH ALL THE TIME FOREVER.

Twitter, suicide, and journalism

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:29:29 CST

Early this morning, I got a direct message on Twitter pointing me to the Twitter feed of Seattle photojournalist Joshua Trujillo. Last night, he was driving across the Aurora Bridge, which is the second most popular spot for suicide jumpers in the United States, behind the Golden Gate Bridge. Trujillo spotted a young woman who had climbed over the rail, preparing to jump. He called 911 and then parked the car and got out to watch what happened once the police had arrived. He live tweeted what he was seeing. Here’s his account of the evening.

Facebook places Places

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 09:36:54 CST

As expected, The Face added a geolocation service.

As expected, there are privacy concerns.

More updates to come.

Clickjacking: the feature Facebook isn't so proud of

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

Amid all the announcements Facebook has been making lately, there’s one feature you might not even know about. But you should. It’s called clickjacking. Maybe this has happened to you: you see a link that says “Justin Bieber’s phone number leaked” or “Top ten t-shirt fails”. Maybe it’s in an ad or maybe it even appears to be posted by your friend. So you click on it and that’s where the trouble begins. You’re taken to page after page of buttons to click, surveys to take, and permissions to give. Unlike the rest of the web, the links are associated with your friends’ names so you trust them. One recent scam was secretly placing $5 weekly charges on users’ cell phone bills. We talk to Beth Jones from internet security firm Sophos about how clickjacking works. We also check in with Mashable founder and CEO Pete Cashmore who talks about the advantages scammers have in working on Facebook.

Dudes dressed up as Spiderman at...

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:48:58 CST

Today is one of those days I just have to go home having not understood the world.

That happens a lot when it comes to Foxconn. Allow me some bullet points:

* World’s largest manufacturer.

* Hundreds of thousands of employees, evidently around 920,000.

* Almost all the factory workers are young men and women from rural areas who come to live in factory dorms and work long hours.

* Those long hours are spent building electronics YOU OWN. Phones, computers, gaming stuff, iPads, Kindles, you name it.

* They’ve had a rash of suicides, mostly involving young people jumping from the roofs of the dormitories.

* They put up nets at some of the dorms, someone jumped anyway, died anyway.

* The company started handing out huge raises to workers but also announced plans to pull out of cities where those raises were necessary to retain workers. Instead, the company is moving a lot of operations to rural areas where those workers are from and where they can pay lower wages.

* This week they held a rally to improve worker morale and to sort of, I guess, campaign against suicide…? And at that rally, some guys were dressed as Spiderman and THE INTERNET WON’T TELL ME WHY.

* I can’t even show you the Spiderman costumes due to rights issues. So go see them here. Then come back and explain why these dudes were dressed as Spiderman.

Verizon gives you a chance to watch...

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:09:22 CST

Because maybe you want to.

And maybe you wouldn’t then start bumping into stuff.

Could happen.

Verizon is talking up an app for the iPad that will let you watch live TV. I think there are some obstacles here, like the small matter of cable companies not being crazy about this. But Verizon says they have the bandwidth for the streaming and the perfect receiver in the iPad. So as long as lawyers don’t get in the way, everything is golden.

Google to debut Chrome store for web...

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:17:15 CST

This is interesting and potentially very significant. At a gaming conference in Cologne, Germany, Google detailed plans to launch a store for Chrome web apps, meaning games and tools that you can plug into your Chrome browser. Chrome is made by Google and is rapidly gaining market share. It would be like any mobile app store but just for the web. The wrinkle is that Google is apparently only taking a 5% cut of the sales, which is way less than the 30% cut taken by Apple, Facebook, and other big companies for app revenue. This could provide huge incentive to developers to want to build on the platform. Companies are realizing that they need to make developers love them in order to get ahead, that’s why Microsoft is paying developers to offer their wares on the upcoming Windows 7 Phone.

Clickjacking scam on Facebook

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:09:06 CST

The bad guys are getting into Facebook in some pretty weird ways lately. The other day we talked about a fake “Dislike” button app that ends up spamming the heck out of you and your friends on Facebook. It was annoying but largely harmless. Today, there’s word of a more harmful scam going around. It lured people in with a fake link to “10 Funny T-Shirt Fails” or something similar. Once you clicked on it, it provided a bunch more links you’d have to click through until eventually you unwittingly authorized the app to tack on an ongoing weekly $5 charge to your cell phone bill. I’m writing this in the past tense because Facebook found out and took it down. Both the clickjacking and the Dislike scams were first reported by the security firm Sophos. Seems like Facebook might be the new frontier in getting hornswoggled.

Justin Bieber slowed down, made weird...

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:13:51 CST

On today’s show we reported on the eerie slowed down version of the Bieber song “U Smile”. Here it is:

J. BIEBZ - U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

And as promised: very slow Rick Astley. Careful.

How to surf the impending geolocation wave

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

Facebook holds a press event today and they’re expected to unveil a geolocation service. Most likely it will involve the ability to identify where you are when you update your status, so it’s not just what you’re doing but where specifically you’re doing it. Geolocation is the idea of using your smart phone to report where you are as you go through your day. A company called Foursquare is the leader of this movement. They’re best known for letting you become the honorary “mayor” of a restaurant or café if you check in there enough. It’s fun. But big tech companies like Facebook are taking it very seriously and investing heavily in the idea of geolocation. Indeed, geolocation is supposed to be the next big thing online, the tool you won’t be able to live without. But how might you actually use it? We talk to Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of Location Labs . It’s a company that provides geolocation data to companies that build applications. He says geolocation as it stands today can be used for three big things: socializing, safety like knowing where your kids are, and shopping. We also talk to Baratunde Thurston , a comedian and web editor for The Onion. He’s made a sort of art project out of running for Foursquare mayor of the New York restaurant Delicatessen. Even held a rally. He’s having fun but thinks geolocation could grow into something more valuable.

Net Neutrality: What Are We Fighting...

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:30:00 CST

Net Neutrality is a complicated issue. The recent Google/Verizon policy proposal has raised new questions about the open internet - the idea that all online content gets treated equally. To explore this issue, we’re featuring a series of guest blog posts on our site. Today, a post from Larry Downes, a nonresident Fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society. His books include “Unleashing the Killer App” and, most recently, “The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces that Govern Life and Business in the Digital Age.”

As both an Internet entrepreneur and a legal scholar, I’ve been watching and sometimes participating in the “net neutrality” debate for several years now. At times it’s seemed like real progress was being made, but lately I’ve grown concerned about the prospects for a peaceful resolution. It seems that some of the participants in what has been transformed into an honest-to-goodness fight over public policy have more to gain from aggravating the situation than in solving the problem. I can’t predict what’s going to happen next. Technology and business are rational subjects—politics is not.

Many of those now arguing the loudest in favor or against minimal or even drastic changes to U.S. law simply don’t understand enough about law, business, or the engineering details of how the Internet works to be making much sense.

Unfortunately, uninformed opinions are being encouraged by a few media reform groups in Washington who have co-opted net neutrality. They see it as an issue they can use to get their foot in the door to pursue broader agendas.

(The broader agendas, which the groups make no secret of, include restrictions on media ownership—think of the pending Comcast-NBC Universal merger—and long-term hopes for full or partial nationalization of everything from the communications and broadcast infrastructure to the failing newspaper business.)

Reducing “net neutrality” to the kind of sound-bite screaming that so poisoned the debate on health care has many unfortunate side-effects. Not the least of these is that the chance of any real resolution of the problem gets farther rather than closer. For many of the groups advocating most vocally in “favor” of net neutrality, it is becoming clearer that they don’t actually want a resolution. In pursuit of their long-term interests, they benefit much more from continued rancor.

That I think it what explains the strangely hostile response to the legislative framework proposed jointly by Google and Verizon last week. Advocates and journalists, all of whom know better, continued to characterize the proposal as if it were some kind of secret deal to carve up the Internet and its users, like the clandestine treaty between Germany and Russia at the beginning of World War II. I’ve seen the proposal referred to as a “deal,” “agreement,” “treaty,” “accord,” “pact,” “contract” or worse. It’s not a business arrangement, it’s not law, and it’s not treason.

To understand why and why there’s such a strongly-vested interest in mischaracterizing pretty much everything said by anyone on the other side of the debate, let’s step back for a moment and ask how we got into this mess in the first place.

What is Net Neutrality?

For starters, it’s hard to come up with a concise definition of net neutrality, largely because it’s one of those terms, like “family values,” that means something different to everyone who uses it. For me it’s become something of a litmus test—people who use it positively are generally hostile to large communications companies. People who use it negatively are generally hostile to regulatory agencies. A lot of that anger, wherever it comes, seems to get channeled into net neutrality.

In fact the Federal Communications Commission doesn’t even use the term—they talk about the “open and transparent” Internet instead.

But here’s the general idea. The defining feature of the Internet is that information is broken up into small “packets” of data which are routed through any number of computers on the world-wide network and then are reassembled when they reach their destination.

Up until now, with some notable exceptions, every participating computer relays those packets without knowing what’s in them or who they come from. The network operates on a packet-neutral model—when one computer receives it, it looks only to see where it’s heading and sends it, depending on traffic congestion at the time, to some other computer along the way just as quickly as it can.

That’s still the model on which the Internet works. The “net neutrality” concern is not with current practice, but of future problems. Increasingly, those advocating for new laws see a few dominant providers controlling the outgoing and incoming packets to and from consumers—the first and last mile.

So while the computers between my house and Google headquarters all treat my packets to Google and Google’s packets back to me in a neutral fashion, there’s no law that keeps Comcast (my provider) from opening those packets on their way in or on their way out and deciding to slow or speed up some or all of them.

Why would they do that? Perhaps they make a deal with Google to give priority to Google-related packets in exchange for a fee or a share of Google’s ad revenues. Or, maybe they want to encourage me to watch Comcast programming instead of YouTube videos, and intentionally slow down YouTube packets to make those videos less appealing to watch.

Most of this is theoretical so far. No ISP offers the premium or “fast lane” service to individual applications. Comcast, however, was caught a few years ago experimenting with slowing down the file-sharing traffic of some of their customers who use the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol. The reason was that some of Comcast’s most active customers were slowing down the network by sending and receiving very large files (mostly illegal copies of movies and other copyrighted content, as it turns out).

When Comcast was caught, the company agreed to stop offering “unlimited” access and to use more sophisticated network management techniques to ensure a few customers didn’t slow traffic for everyone else. Comcast and BitTorrent made peace, but the FCC held hearings and sanctioned Comcast after-the-fact, leading to the court case that made clear the FCC has no authority to enforce its existing neutrality policies. (More on that in a moment.)

The Network Was Never Neutral

The revelations about Comcast revived the net neutrality debate, this time with a strongly partisan bent. Net neutrality, it was argued, was “about” free speech on the Internet, about a few large network operators destroying the innovative spirit of the net, about a secret plan to replace the Web with walled gardens of approved content. There was either complete neutrality, or there was chaos.

But the with-us-or-against-us mentality of the rhetoric that followed this shift in the discussion leaves out some important and complicated technical details.

First, some applications already require and get “premium” treatment for their packets. Voice and video packets have to arrive pretty much at the same time in order to maintain good quality, so Voice over IP telephone calls (Skype, Vonage, Comcast digital voice) get priority treatment, as do cable programming packets, which, after all, are using the same connection to your home that the data uses.

Google, as one of the largest providers of outbound packets, has deals with some ISPs to locate Google-only servers in their hubs to ensure local copies of their web pages are always close by, a service called “caching” that is offered more generally by companies such as Akamai and LimeLight. In that sense, technology is being used to give priority even to the most requested data packets, about which no one should complain.

When Should the Federal Government Step in?

So the net neutrality fight, aside from leaving out any real appreciation either for technological or business realities, is really a fight about the future. As cable and telephone companies invest billions in the next generation of technology—including fiber optics and next-generation cellular services–application providers fear they will be asked to shoulder more of the costs of that investment through premium service fees.

That’s possible, of course, and it’s also possible that network operators will make business decisions that, in the long-term, will do great damage to the remarkable engine of innovation that the Internet has proven to be for the last decade. If the market really does fail, or fails in significant local ways (rural or poor customers, for example, have no or little access to broadband Internet), then some kind of regulatory intervention might make sense.

But history has shown that it’s a bad idea to regulate ahead of a market failure, especially when dealing with technology that is evolving rapidly. In the last ten years, the Internet has proven to be a source of tremendous embarrassment for regulators trying to “fix” problems that shift under their feet even as they’re legislating. Often the laws are meaningless by the time the ink is dry or—worse—inadvertently make the problems worse after the fact.

Nevertheless, in October of last year the FCC proposed—in a 107-page document—six net neutrality rules that would codify the principles described above and a number of peripheral, perhaps unrelated, ideas. Implicit in that rulemaking was the assumption that someone needed to codify these principles, that the FCC was that someone, and that the agency had the authority from Congress to be that someone.

There are good reasons to be skeptical that the FCC in particular is the right agency to solve this problem even if it is a problem. Through most of its existence the agency has been fixed on regulating a legal monopoly—the old phone company—and on managing what were very limited broadcast spectrum—now largely supplanted by cable and more sophisticated technologies for managing the spectrum.

The FCC, recall, is the agency that watches broadcast (but not cable) television and issues fines for indecent content—an activity they do more, rather than less, even as broadcast becomes a trivial part of programming reception. (An on-going challenge to how the FCC enforces broadcast decency rules is headed back to the U.S. Supreme Court soon.) Congress has three times tried to give the FCC authority to regulate indecency on the Internet as well, but the U.S. Supreme Court has stopped all three.

But in April, as I noted, a federal court of appeals in D.C. ruled that the agency did not have the legal authority to enforce its existing net neutrality guidelines, which have been in place since 2005, regardless of their merits. That decision also threw the proposed six rules into limbo. Why? The FCC based its jurisdiction to issue them on the same legal theory the court rejected in its effort to enforce the earlier neutrality policy statement against Comcast.

So now the agency is pursuing a second avenue, which is to change the classification of broadband Internet access in a way that would give it all the authority it needs (and then some) to go ahead with the October rulemaking.

A better solution, for many reasons, would have been to go back to Congress for specific authority over broadband, but the agency is feeling political pressure to move quickly on net neutrality, and so is pursuing what everyone understands is a procedure that stands on very shaky legal grounds, at best. (Net neutrality means full employment for communications lawyers in Washington for a long time to come.)

Back to the Google-Verizon Proposal

Here’s where last week’s proposal from Google and Verizon fits in. Network operators, content providers, and responsible consumer groups have come to recognize, as has the FCC itself, that the net neutrality policy fight has gotten out of hand. Almost no one likes the way the FCC is trying to plug the holes in its legal dam which are appearing faster all the time. Investors are unhappy, content providers are distracted, and the FCC’s more productive efforts, including the truly visionary National Broadband Plan issued and then forgotten back in March, are foundering.

So FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski sensibly asked his chief of staff to try to get all the parties together and figure out some way out of the legal logjam. That shouldn’t have been hard, because almost everyone agrees on the basic principles of net neutrality—and has operated accordingly all along. And, it seems, the meetings were going well, or as well as these things can go in Washington in the middle of a hot summer.

One positive side-effect of the meetings was that Google and Verizon discovered they had more common ground than they thought. (The two companies have been working closely for some time—Verizon’s cellular network now handles smartphones that use Google’s Android operating system.) The companies had earlier written a joint letter to the FCC, and jointly filed comments in the net neutrality rulemaking. Those documents all indicated that Verizon was prepared to accept a larger FCC role in ensuring the continued success of the net neutrality model, a significant concession.

So to those of us who have been following the maneuverings for a while, the proposal released by Google and Verizon was no surprise. With one exception, it followed nearly exactly the earlier statements the companies had made together.

It also followed closely what the FCC has been proposing since October, 2009. Most of all, it proposed nearly-identical rules to the six the FCC announced.

The rules proposed by Google and Verizon include the kinds of exceptions necessary for voice, video, and new services that are already in place. The FCC proposed the same exceptions.

The Google-Verizon proposal excuses network operators from applying neutrality to unlawful content—including spam, viruses, and illegal fire sharing—just as the FCC proposal does. It recognized the need fast-changing networks and new innovations in technology and user behavior create for “reasonable network management” and private “managed services,” just as the FCC’s proposal does.

And the Google-Verizon proposal called for Congress to make the neutrality rules a matter of federal law, enforceable on a case-by-case complaint basis by the FCC—precisely what the FCC said.

What was most disappointing about last week’s response to the Google-Verizon framework was the thick layer of hypocrisy and cynicism that came with it. Much of the invective launched against the proposal criticized features of the Google-Verizon framework that were identical to aspects of the FCC proposal.

Many of those doing the loudest complaining are those who most ardently supported the same rules when the FCC proposed them.

That’s what happens when a technology problem gets perverted into a political problem. And it’s why so little progress is being made.

I mentioned that there was one important difference between the Google-Verizon proposal and the FCC’s. That has to do with wireless broadband. The FCC, albeit reluctantly, proposed in October that it would apply the six neutrality rules to wireless just as it would to wired broadband. Google initially agreed, but now takes the same position as Verizon and other cellular operators, which is that the rules should not apply—at least not for now.

Why the distinction? As anyone with a smartphone knows, wireless broadband access is seriously constrained by overburdened cellular networks. Even at its best, the capacity of the wireless Internet is a tiny fraction of what can be delivered over cable or fiber, but its users want to do the same kind of high-bandwidth activities on the road as they do at home. Watching high-definition videos or sharing large files on the wireless Internet is not just technically possible right now.

There are ways to increase the speed and reliability of cellular networks, but they require a combination of new technologies, additional spectrum allocation, and the cooperation of local communities, many of whom resist the installation of additional towers and other infrastructure.

So for now a growing consensus of Internet service and content providers acknowledge that wireless network operators need flexibility. Some applications will indeed be blocked.

This kind of network management is not “evil.” It’s simply a technical necessity. It doesn’t make sense to ban it, or even to put a slow-moving federal bureaucracy in charge of deciding how to implement it.

But that, at least, is a conversation that reasonable people could have. Unfortunately there aren’t many of them around these days.

Net Neutrality news roundup

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:52:00 CST

The evolving conversation about net neutrality in wake of the Google/verizon policy proposal now includes a letter to the FCC from four Democrats in Congress. In their letter dated August 16th(PDF), Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) urge the FCC to take formal action and consider four items:

1. The FCC must have oversight authority for broadband access services.
2. Paid prioritization would close the open Internet.
3. Wired and wireless services should have common regulatory framework and rules.
4. Broad “managed services” exceptions would swallow open Internet rules.

This week, Commissioners Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn will be in Minneapolis, Minnesota this week to hear from the public about this issue.

Online, the debate continues. We’ve been covering the story - you can hear from Google and Verizon here and we’ve explored what this proposal means for us as we watch YouTube videos and search for things online.

We’re also featuring a number of guest blog posts on the issue - the first one we’ve posted is from David Weinberger of Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society.

Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government, Professor of Computer Science at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and co-founder of the Berkman Center, has a substantial breakdown of the issue on his Future of the Internet blog.

Tomorrow, we’ll feature a post from Larry Downes, currently a nonresident Fellow with the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society, and later this week, a guest blog post from Christian Sandvig, a Berkman Fellow and visiting research scholar in the Innovation Lab at MIT Sloan.

Blackberry Torch is not selling

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:37:23 CST

Reviews of Blackberry’s new Torch smart phone have not been positive. The consensus seems to be that it’s a nice enough phone but not innovative, doesn’t really move the technology forward. Such is the level of expectations in the fastest moving sector of personal technology. Alas. Sales of the Torch have been lackluster as well and now the price chopping has commenced. Amazon is offering the Torch for $99, half off what it was before, with a 2-year contract. Blackberry’s parent company RIM still sells a ton of phones but it’s become more the phone you get at work rather than the phone you buy for yourself. Android and iPhone have much better branding as the type of personal device you want to have in your pocket and next to your bed at night. Could be that Blackberry’s identity as a “work phone” hurts it. So does the Torch being nothing special.

North Korea gets on social media with...

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:47:19 CST

Well, if you have a particular sense of humor anyway. Never known as the most web savvy of nations, North Korea has posted a series of web videos on YouTube that make fun of Hilary Clinton, Robert Gates, and a variety of South Korean leaders. At the same time, the government appears to have a Twitter feed under the name “uriminzok” (“our nation”) and it has about 6000 followers, after the New York Times wrote about it:

Another clip claimed that North Korea would prevail in a war with the “American imperialists” because it was armed with nuclear-fusion technology; because of its juche, or ideology of “self-reliance”; and because of a philosophical treatise written by Kim Il-sung, the North’s founding president and the father of Kim Jong-il, who died in 1994.
“I don’t think this propaganda from the North will have any significant impact among South Koreans,” said Yoo Ho-yeol, an expert on North Korea at Korea University here. “People watch this for fun, not to be influenced.”

Change your name to escape Google.

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

Will you have to change your name to escape all the data about you on Google? One person who thinks you might is Eric Schmidt, who just happens to be THE CEO OF GOOGLE. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview , Schmidt envisioned a day when young adults will change their identities, to get away from their digital pasts. Wow. The guy who runs Google says Google will know so much that we’ll have to hide from that which he helped create? Really? Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites. Schmidt’s statement, which may be off-the-cuff speculation but is still pretty darn provocative, kind of flips technology on its head. Instead of molding our technology around who we are, we would need to re-do who we are in order to get away from who the technology has made us out to be. What the—?! We talk with Sherry Turkle about this. She’s the director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self and the author of the forthcoming book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other . We also speak with Mary Madden of the Pew Internet and American Life Project who fills us in on the latest data about how young people manage their internet lives. And we talk with Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard . He advocates not changing your name but being able to declare reputation bankruptcy.

Twitter. And Facebook. And death.

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

Cheerful topic for a Monday morning, don’t you think? Twitter has confronted the idea of death. We all have to eventually, right? The microblogging site has announced a new policy for when users die . Once the death is confirmed, the account can come down and they can send the family an archive of the person’s tweets. Or the family can choose to just leave the account alone. Facebook offers a third choice: leave the web presence there but turn it into a memorial to the deceased. No new friends would be added but those who were already there can post things to the person’s wall. It’s kind of a weird time for social media. Sites like Facebook and Twitter have become a regular part of our society, which inevitably involves all aspects of society, including death. But while these sites are good at organizing parties and making jokes, they’ve never had a good framework for the big inevitability of death itself. We talk to Ira Brooker and Kim Osland , a couple of our Twitter followers, about how they’ve encountered and dealt with death through social media. We also check in with John Troyer , Deputy Director at the Center for Death And Society at the University of Bath in England. We get his thoughts on ritual, technology, and how we’re dealing with death in the digital world.

Battle lines being drawn for Google, Verizon, net neutrality

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

Google and Verizon issued a public policy statement Monday outlining their position on net neutrality, the idea that everything going over the internet should be given equal priority. They said they support a free and open web BUT future technologies might require special rules and shouldn’t be subject to the same restrictions. Since that announcement, battle lines have been drawn. Standing against the plan: an FCC commissioner , a ton of bloggers , and even Facebook . As this story matures, we take a look at what the fallout might be. Steve Henn from our sister program Marketplace joins us to talk about who’s aligning where. Amazon and eBay are backing Facebook but not very loudly, big media companies and most internet providers are saying nothing. We also talk to Larry Downes of Stanford University Law School’s Center for the Internet and Society who explains what this whole debate might mean for you sitting at home.

Prepare for a world full of tablet computers

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

The Dell Streak is a combination smart phone / computer tablet. We’ll call it a Smablet. It goes on sale tomorrow (Dell is taking pre-orders as of today) and it’s Dell’s entry into a potentially huge market for devices similar to Apple’s hugely popular iPad. It’s not just Dell either. HP has been working on a tablet, Blackberry may launch something called the BlackPad this fall. Pretty much any company that makes computers is either making a tablet or thinking about it long and hard. It’s a land rush. We talk to David Carnoy, executive editor at CNET, who says the Streak is not likely to have the same impact as the iPad but it’s a case of Dell trying to stake out it’s own unique settlement on the tablet frontier. We also check in with analyst Jim McGregor about why the tablet industry is exploding in terms of innovation and adoption. And we speak with Brian X. Chen of Wired who tells us what the future multi-screen world might look like.

Book publisher gives up on print. A sign of things to come?

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:48:34 CST

Dime stores disappeared a long time ago. Now it seems dime store novels may be going extinct as well. Talking about mass market paperback books, the kind you see at a drug store or Wal-Mart. Cheaply made, cheaply sold romance novels, sci-fi, westerns, true crime. Stuff that isn’t going to win the Pulitzer but will do just fine for a day at the beach. Readers have been turning to larger trade paperbacks, hardcovers, or electronic books. This week mass market publisher Dorchester Publishing said they’re walking away from paper altogether and concentrating on e-books and print on demand. Dorchester’s decision comes at a time when romance novels in electronic form are very popular but the way they’re printed is not. We talk to Tim DeYoung, a senior vice president at Dorchester. We also hear from publishing industry veteran Joseph Esposito and Frank Lyman from Libre Digital, a company that helps publishers find electronic readerships.

Google and Verizon and the future of the web

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

Google is a company that’s full of mysteries. How does their page ranking system work? What will they turn YouTube into? Why did anyone think Wave would catch on? And most recently, what is their role in the future of net neutrality? On Monday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt held a joint conference call with Verizon CEO Ivan Seiderberg to announce a new public policy statement about the future of the web . It reaffirmed both companies’ support for an open web but it also left a little wiggle room in the form of the fifth of seven points being made: Fifth, we want the broadband infrastructure to be a platform for innovation. Therefore, our proposal would allow broadband providers to offer additional, differentiated online services, in addition to the Internet access and video services (such as Verizon’s FIOS TV) offered today. This means that broadband providers can work with other players to develop new services. It is too soon to predict how these new services will develop, but examples might include health care monitoring, the smart grid, advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options. Our proposal also includes safeguards to ensure that such online services must be distinguishable from traditional broadband Internet access services and are not designed to circumvent the rules. The FCC would also monitor the development of these services to make sure they don’t interfere with the continued development of Internet access services. Essentially, the companies are saying that new forms of content may require a different approach to distribution and that the old open internet model may no longer apply. They used the somewhat bizarre example of 3D opera. We hear excerpts of Schmidt and Seidenberg’s from the press conference. We also talk to Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Networking News about what this policy proposal, which both companies made sure to say is just an idea that they wish to float, would mean to the internet of tomorrow.

Blackberry getting kicked out of countries?

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

Stories about Middle East conflict are nothing new. But they generally don’t involve the Blackberry. That’s what’s going on now, however, as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries are trying to limit or even block what a Blackberry can do. The Canadian company that makes Blackberry, Research in Motion or RIM is said to be in negotiations to keep their products online. At issue is Blackberry’s encryption, which makes messages sent from it very hard to spy on. These countries want to be able to do that. We explore the issue and what it might mean for people who use Blackberries in the United States. If you have a Blackberry are your messages any more secure than your friend who uses an Android or an iPhone or just uses a regular old cell phone to send messages? We talk to Jonathan Zittrain about it. He’s the co-director and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, where he also teaches law and economics. We also talk to privacy and security researcher Chris Soghoian says think again about who can see our messages whether we go to Dubai or not.

Gotta Hunch?

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 09:08:10 CST

The internet thinks it knows you. What products you like, what movies, music, what you want to buy next. And it advertises to you accordingly, with all kinds of junk that it thinks you will want. And the internet thinks you’ve told it all there is to know about you by leaving behind data of where you shop, where you visit, a sort of accidental bread crumb trail. The website Hunch had a big relaunch this week and it approaches things a bit differently. On Hunch, you create a profile of yourself, either directly or by importing your Twitter or Facebook information, and then you answer questions about yourself. Everything from age and location to what kind of lettuce you like to your thoughts on dolphins. There are tons of questions, you could answer them all day. Then you ask the site a question, maybe about what car to buy, and it makes recommendations based on who you are. Hunch was co-founded by Caterina Fake who joins us to talk about what she’s trying to get it to do. Fake is also the co-founder of the photo site Flickr, so she knows a thing or two about web collaboration. We also check in with Andreas Weigend , former lead scientist at Amazon.com, a company known for making recommendations. We ask him about whether data provided by an individual provides a more accurate view of who they are than data gathered surreptitiously.

Smart phone apps at war

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

Your smart phone can do a lot of things: tell you the weather, play you some music, play video games. Or help you fight a war. There’s a boom going on right now in smart phone apps for the military. Apps that estimate bullet trajectory, apps that train you to run an anti-missile defense system, anything a soldier or officer might need, there’s, well, an app for that. Or at least there soon will be. We hear from Luke Catania one of the winners of a recent contest held by the military for the development of apps to be used by the Army. We also talk to PW Singer, director of 21st Century Defense Initiative at Brookings, who says the efficiency, affordability, and easy distribution of apps makes them appealing to military brass. Singer also says that since many of the soldiers using the apps are 18 or 19 years old, they’ve grown up being somewhat native to the technology and it’s a lot easier to train them on a smart phone instead of a specially built piece of equipment.

You are a map maker. Yes you are.

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

Hey guess what! You’re a map maker. Or cartographer. Whatever you want to call it. Yes, I’m serious. The job is yours. Doesn’t pay but it might be fun to do anyway. Microsoft is making you the offer. Now don’t go getting all full of yourself, they’re making the same offer to every person on Earth. It’s part of the map service on their Bing search engine. I guess they’re looking for a leg up on other map sites. So they’re doing this thing called Bing Open Street Map where you, or anyone, can provide pictures and information and that gets added to the map, to the record of what that place looks like and is. It was inevitable, really. The Wikipedia model works, lots of people contribute for free, building something bigger. But is bigger better? We talk about the future of mapping when we’re all map makers. Our guests are Michael Goodchild , professor of geography at the University of California Santa Barbara and Mark Harrower , a map designer at Axis Maps and former professor of cartography at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

Toss out your wallet, keep your phone

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

There are a few things you always make sure you have when you leave the house: keys, wallet, phone. What if you could skip the wallet? Imagine going to the grocery store, getting all the stuff you need, and then, when you’re at the cash register and it’s time to pay, you don’t need to bother digging up your debit card. Instead you reach your phone, waggle it around a bit, and you’re on your way. And hey - why stop there? If your financial information can be on there, why not your driver’s license too? Why not your ID card at work? Your library card? Sounds futuristic but it may be fast approaching. Wireless carriers AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are reportedly about to start testing a technology known as Near Field Communications or Contactless Payment in a few different cities. Everything you would need from your wallet would be on your phone. We talk to Marc Rysman, Associate Professor of Economics at Boston University, about how the technology works. We also speak to Rachel Schneider, Innovation Director at the Center for Financial Services Innovation, about how the technology could be made even simpler, maybe just a sticker on the outside of a phone or anywhere you cared to put it.

What will be search for tomorrow?

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 07:00:00 CST

Google has been so wildly, crazily, spectacularly successful in internet search that the name has become a synonym for search. You Google something. You don’t Bing something. You don’t Alta Vista some information. Do you ever hear anyone say, “Let me Ask Jeeves that knowledge”? You do not. But Google is not search, it’s just one WAY to search. And while it’s the popular now, that’s not a guarantee it will stay popular forever. The Roman Empire was pretty popular once upon a time as well. On today’s show we look at what might be coming next with search. Facebook thinks it might have a better approach. It wants to create a more human search structure through something known as social search. Relying on people’s opinions instead of Google’s traditional mathematical approach. We speak with search guru John Battelle , one of the founders of Wired magazine. He’s written extensively about search in a book and in his own popular search blog.

Is your mobile phone a blabbermouth?

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:34:00 CST

Yesterday, we told you about computer hackers from all over gathering in Las Vegas at the Black Hat conference to talk about security. Turns out there is A LOT of vulnerability being exposed at this conference. On Wednesday, a hacker named Barnaby Jack was on stage recalling his favorite scene from the movie Terminator 2 where a character was able to hack an ATM and have money come pouring out. Jack then proceeded to do the same thing with a real ATM, hack in, get all the money. And it wasn’t even very hard (not that we’re going to tell you how to do it). Less theatrical but perhaps more urgent were a host of vulnerabilities related to mobile computing. Today’s smart phones are pretty much more computer than phone but it’s such a rapidly evolving platform that security issues are popping up all over. In one case, an Android-based app to give your phone new wallpaper was found to be capturing personal data and shipping it to China. We talk to Venture Beat’s Dean Takahashi from the conference. We also speak with John Hering , the CEO of mobile security company Lookout.

Hackers gather, hack.

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

As long as there have been computers, there have been people monkeying with computers. Trying to tinker around to see what they could learn, sometimes improving the technology, sometimes causing problems and stealing stuff. You know who I’m talking about: hackers. This week, the hacking world is in Las Vegas for a pair of conferences. The Black Hat conference, all about corporate security issues, that wraps up today. And Defcon , a freewheeling hacker culture expo that starts tomorrow. We talk to Jeff Moss , who organizes both conferences. He says the best way to think of them is that Black Hat is like a college lecture, stately, a bit formal, informative, you need to take notes. Defcon, on the other hand, is like a fraternity party. Wild, fun, messy, exciting. Moss says both are necessary for a good education. We also check in with Steven Levy . He’s a senior writer for Wired now but he wrote the influential book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution way back in 1984. We find out how hackers and hacker culture have evolved.

How will the Library of Congress's decision shape digital ownership?

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

If you bought a hammer, you could go home and pound any nail you want with it. But what if the company that made the hammer said you could only pound nails they approve and that they sold you? What kind of weird hammer is that? Substitute hammer and nails with iPhone and software. Apple has always had control over what you could do on the iPhone it sold you. But this week, the Library of Congress ruled that if you own an iPhone, you should be able to run any kind of software that works, not just what Apple says is okay. It’s called jailbreaking your phone. The decision has implications for any smart phone manufacturer but Apple is the most restrictive of what you can and can’t do on the phone they make. It got us wondering about the whole idea of owning something digital. You could go to a (used) record store and buy Frampton Comes Alive on vinyl. And you would OWN that record, lend it out, use it as a frisbee if you wanted. But if you go to the iTunes store and download that same album, there are a host of restrictions. That’s because you’re not really buying it, you’re just licensing it, agreeing to a set of conditions under which you’re allowed to encounter it. On today’s show, we explore the Library of Congress decision with veteran librarian and digital library consultant Karen Coyle . We also talk with Anthony Falzone , Executive Director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society.

What do the Wikileaks leaks mean in the long run?

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

Right now you can click on this link and go to a web site that features about 92,000 classified military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. President Obama wishes you weren’t able to do that because, obviously, the documents are classified. Nevertheless, someone within the US military got a hold of them and passed them along to outside hands in the interest of making them public. Eventually the documents reached the website Wikileaks, which exists solely for the purpose of publicizing confidential information from governments and large organizations. It’s a curious situation. On the one hand, you have these documents that couldn’t be published nearly as comprehensively and quickly anywhere but the web. And they’re published by an amorphous international organization that doesn’t have to worry about making the government upset. But on the other hand, the only way I was able to make sense of what was in the documents was to read the coverage in mainstream news outlets like the New York Times . We’ll leave it to you and the newspapers to sift through what’s in each document but we will examine the political and cultural landscape we’re now living in where such a release of documents is now possible. We hear some tape from an interview John Moe did with Julian Assange last winter about Wikileaks’ policies. Plus we hear from Micah Sifry, executive editor of TechPresident.com , and Jonathan Zittrain who teaches law and computer science at Harvard, where he is also the co-founder and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. By the way, the link at the top there probably doesn’t work since Wikileaks’ servers are completely overwhelmed with traffic.

Working in a data mine, going down down.

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

Will privacy one day be just a blip in history? A quaint notion from another time? It’s easy to think that way if you spend any time looking at the issue of data mining. Here’s the deal: we as a society have struck a bargain. We want our high tech lovely things, we enjoy our mobile phones, our social media, our interconnectivity. But we pay for that brave new world with our data. We’re constantly giving over all sorts of information about ourselves through web browsers, cell phones, even when we use those little discount cards at the supermarket. Stacey Vanek-Smith of our sister program Marketplace has been looking into the world of data mining and we mine her data to see what she’s learned. We also talk with Andreas Weigend is former chief scientist at Amazon.com. He now consults with businesses on data issues. He says we’re serving it up on a platter.

The coming data traffic jam

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:35:00 CST

If you don’t own a smart phone now, you probably will soon. Here’s the picture from Wall Street: Nokia, which pretty much makes regular old cell phones, announced a 40 percent drop in revenues Thursday. On the same day, AT&T said they had a huge quarter with lots of new customers for the iPhone activated 3.2 million new iPhones last quarter. Meanwhile, research firm Strategy Analytics says smart phone shipments are up 43 percent worldwide. Americans are ditching cell phones in favor of devices that can make calls AND check email AND update Facebook AND stream video AND you get the idea. In the process, we’re flooding the data networks these smart phones rely on. It’s lots of fun now, but is it sustainable? Can the networks do what we’re asking of them? We check in with industry analyst Cheetan Sharma , whose clients include both AT&T and Verizon, about this issue. We also talk to Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Networking News. Also in this program, Foxconn says it will raise prices for the technology companies it works with. Foxconn builds popular products for Apple, HP, Dell, and others. We’ve been watching the situation with Foxconn for a while. Here are some links to past coverage: Suicides in China (May 21) More suicides at Foxconn (May 28) Blog coverage

Why is Google buying wind energy?

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

Most news from Google involves stuff like search ads, web services, mobile computing. The occasional Buzz or Wave, perhaps, that is a little confusing. But at the very least, no matter what Google does, it always involves a computer in some way. Well, not any more. Google has begun investing in wind power. This week, Google agreed to buy 114 megawatts of electricity from an Iowa wind farm. We heard that and we were all what the—? Turns out that even though they’re a web company, Google is getting into the energy business, making plans to buy up energy, resell it, and keep the renewable energy credits that go with it. We talk to CNET’s Martin Lamonica about Google’s plans. We also check in with energy industry analyst Sam Jaffe about how this all works. ( photo from Flickr )

Colors? Check. Shapes? Check. Social networking skillz? Check.

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

In Australia, at least, parents are convinced social networks — Facebook, Twitter, ‘RooSpace (trust me, it’s huge Down Under) — are ruining their children’s brains . Half of ten-year-olds already have a social network profile. Usage stats are similar here in the U.S., and no doubt parental worry runs high here as well. After all, t(w)eens and online life have proven a combustible combination . And yet…or perhaps because of that…new social networks are springing up all the time for the kiddies, including the new Togetherville , which pushes the demographic as low as six-years-old — or lower, as CEO Mandeep Dhilllon tells us in this episode. Toddlers are already tugging on our shirt hems to see what we’re doing all the time on the com-poo-ter. Why not give them a safe space to build up their online IQ? OK, I’m listening, I’m listening… One of the innovative things Togetherville brings to the table is the way it lets…nay, requires…parents get involved in the process. Parents and kids register as a team — parents using their Facebook log-in (via Facebook Connect — the two sites are totally independent). There’s a parallel level of interaction where parents connect with the parents of their kids’ friends. But hold up. Isn’t this just another reason for kids to nurture computer addiction? Shouldn’t they be out collecting bugs to put in jars or something? No doubt there are child psychologists who might find this whole trend deeply troubling. But they would be somewhat blind to the modern world, says psychologist Dr. Pamela Rutledge , who says social media literacy can’t start too young. I’ve got a two-year-old, and this topic got me a little riled up thinking about it. Now after doing the show, I’m not sure what to think. We’d love to hear your experiences — have your kids tried out Imbee , Togetherville , Club Penguin , or any of the other kid-focused social networks? (Guest-hosted by Jeff Horwich.)

The Golden Age of Magazines (might be right now)

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

Everyone wants a piece of the iPad, but the magazine industry has responded with particular gusto. Maybe it’s that the iPad is about the size of a National Geographic. Maybe it’s that beautiful color graphics are a skill the magazine industry has honed for decades. Maybe it’s just the optimistic belief that this device, despite its parallel ability to play skee ball for hours on end, will somehow bring reading back. Last month’s most feted and vetted iPad magazine release was Wired . This month it was Popular Mechanics . We talk with the deputy editor who led the team that designed the Popular Mechanics iPad app about how they’re changing the magazine experience, and why the iPad is the place to be. But Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore is skeptical the revolution has begun . And Condé Nast veteran Jacob Lewis (now with Figment.com ) is still waiting for a new business model behind that magical screen. (Guest host: Jeff Horwich)

Jobs gets defensive, grumbles, gives away free cases

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

If you own an iPhone 4, Apple has a present for you. Starting later this week, you can get a free case for your phone. It’s an offer that Apple hope puts an end to a series of complaints about calls dropping if you touch the antenna. According to Consumer Reports , if you have a case or even just some tape covering the antenna, problem solved. On Friday, Apple head honcho Steve Jobs took to the stage at company headquarters to address this issue. It was an odd announcement. He said that all smart phones with antennae lose signal when touched like this and Apple is not alone. He also claimed that fewer people have used cases for the 4 so it’s a more noticeable problem. But in the end he said the company would provide free cases for everyone who has bought an iPhone 4 and anyone who will buy one between now and September 30. We talk to Steve Henn from Marketplace about what happened at the event. We also check in with Steven Levy , a veteran technology journalist and senior writer for Wired, about what this means to the future of Apple.

Old Spice goes viral

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

If you’d ask me what I thought about Old Spice a few months ago, I’d have said oh yeah, that stuff my dad used to use, stuff I would never use because I really don’t want to smell like my dad. But Old Spice has used new media to reinvent itself. It started with a TV commercial where actor Isaiah Mustafa urges women to buy Old Spice for their men so those men will smell like him. He’s full of both bravado and self mockery. The TV spot was a hit, people sent each other the video by email, Facebook. This week, Old Spice and ad agency Wieden + Kennedy upped the ante, releasing over 170 web videos where Mustafa’s character responds to people who’ve commented about him online. Everyone from celebrities like Alyssa Milano and Ellen DeGeneres to regular people. He even responds to his daughter and himself . We talk to Ian Tait , Eric Baldwin , and Jason Bagley from Wieden + Kennedy about how the spots were conceived and what the process was like making all those videos in the course of a couple of days. In some cases, they were able to get the online comments, turn them into scripts, shoot them, and post them online within ten minutes or less. We also talk with Dave Curry. He’s director of interactive development at POP, a Seattle digital agency . He loves the Old Spice campaign and he says to get ready for a lot more like it. Incidentally, something we soon noticed in talking to the Wieden + Kennedy guys (they use a plus instead of an ampersand, please don’t complain to us about that) is that they have a strong sense of team. To that end, some of the names they mentioned that we didn’t have time to include were: Ann Marie Harbour, Eric Coleman, and Craig Allen.

Who owns the information you put online?

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:08:29 CST

The inventory in a grocery store is eggs, milk, bread. But in a social media website, the inventory is information provided by members: names, emails, pictures. So if that website goes out of business, what happens to that information? XY magazine and it’s website xy.com catered to gay teenagers. They went out of business in 2007, the founder has now filed for bankruptcy. He’s listing among his assets the personal information of XY subscribers, including half a million online users. XY had told users they’d never share the information but creditors in the bankruptcy say they want that data. They want to be able to sell it. We talk with CNET.com ’s Brian Cooley about the details of the case. For some insight into the what the law has to say about the information you share online, we also check in with Eric Goldman . He’s an Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law and he directs the school’s High Tech Law Institute .

Go to Mars from your computer

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

Do you want to go to Mars? Of course you do. And of course you can’t. Sorry. But you can find an awfully good simulation online . NASA and Microsoft are presenting tens of thousands of high resolution images from Mars that you can get to through your computer. They’re NASA images presented at Worldwide Telescope dot org, a site run by Microsoft Research. The two organizations worked together to take a vast storehouse of pictures and present them in a way that was readily accessible for people online, either through a downloadable browser patch or through a regular web view (that is somewhat less dramatic). The result is pretty darn cool. You can see the treads left by the Mars rover, you can see rock formations, you can really patrol around the planet. Ross Beyer is a Planetary Scientist at NASA Ames Research. He fills us in on what you might be able to find on your mission to Mars. And Dan Fay from Microsoft explains the process of getting all these images into a form that was navigable from your computer. Incidentally, I asked Dan if this program could work with a Mac. He said it would but only if the Mac was running Windows 7. Also in this show, we play p0nd and try not to worry about what it all means.

Like lots of people, Google shells out money for Farmville

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

Have you played Farmville ? There are estimates that one in ten Americans has. It’s a video game that people mostly play on Facebook where you get a little patch of land that you get to / have to take care of. You tend the soil, raise crops, acquire animals. Your farm grows as you work at it and acquire points and fake money You can also pay real money for it to grow. It’s a silly game. But Google is taking it seriously. They’ve apparently invested at least a hundred million dollars in Farmville’s parent company , Zynga, who also makes other similar games that are played online. Games like Frontierville and Mafia Wars. Google is seen as getting ready to take on Facebook with a much more aggressive push into social media. The idea is for Zynga games to be at the heart of a new Google gaming site. We talk to Dean Takahashi from Games Beat who says he’s confirmed this story about Google’s investment. He fills us in on what Google is doing here. We also talk to A.J. Patrick Liskiewicz. He’s in the process of completing an MFA in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo. He’s written about Farmville online and says that what’s really at the heart of Farmville’s popularity is a compulsion toward politeness.

The I.T. Guy Who Knew Too Much

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

Turns out, that’s probably a large proportion of them. A new survey ( PDF file ) from the electronic security company Cyber-Ark reveals what you probably suspected but don’t really want to think too hard about: Two-thirds of IT professionals anonymously surveyed in the US and UK admit they have accessed information that is unrelated to their jobs. Forty-one percent say they or their colleagues have actually used their admin privileges to get at info “that is otherwise confidential or sensitive.” Yikers. Seriously: I love and respect our IT guys, and they do a ton to keep my computer ship-shape and doing what I need it to do. I’m sure it’s none of them. But all those other guys out there? For shame! Truth is, there’s a fine line for these guys between snooping and doing what they are told to do by the bosses, which these days often involves keeping tabs on private email, porn surfing and any other activity deemed not in the company interest. So does this include…emails you send applying for another job? It all starts to get very fuzzy. In this episode, we chat with a former snooper, a snoopee (Snoopy?) and of course the friendly fellow behind this excoriating survey. Just remember, most IT guys are loving, caring individuals. They just happen to swim every day in an ocean of your sensitive information. (Jeff Horwich guest hosts.)

NSA builds Perfect Citizen to protect infrastructure

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal reports on a new classified project by the National Security Agency codenamed Perfect Citizen. The NSA is working with companies and government agencies that run critical infrastructure to put sensing devices on their computer networks. Siobhan Gorman reported the story for the Journal. We speak to her for an explanation of how it will work and, since it’s classified, how much we’re ever likely to learn about it. We also check in with Stewart Baker who served as Assistant Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security. He’s the author of a new book, Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism . And to lighten things up, just a bit, we briefly examine the curious case of the Double Rainbow Oh My God video .

The horrifying hellscape of the future, as seen by The Onion

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

We like to bill ourselves as your guide to technology and the modern world. But today we explore technology and the future world, as presented by the master satirists at The Onion . They’ve been bringing funny but certainly not real news to the web for 14 years now, most recently branching out into video for The Onion News Network, an extended parody of mainstream media. Their most recent project is a 12-minute newscast from the year 2137 (acquired, they say, by wormhole technology) and things aren’t going well: humanity is trying to figure out how to die and those that remain are sometimes gored by gigantic mutant beetles. The video, funny but more than a little disturbing, marks The Onion’s first foray into paid content. We speak with Marc Lieberman, VP of Business of Development for The Onion, and Carol Kolb, head writer for The Onion News Network. Future: News From The Year 2137 Trailer

Are you paying for apps you didn't want to buy?

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

When you think about it, 4th of July weekend was a great time to pull a heist online. People aren’t on the computer. They’re too busy barbecuing and watching fireworks to notice that someone’s stealing their money. But that’s exactly what happened over the past weekend and even as early as last week. Some customers of Apple’s iPhone app store noticed some odd charges to their accounts recently for apps they never intended to download, some of them were a couple dollars but sometimes up to $100 or more. Meanwhile, in the app store “books” category, some titles you’ve never heard of - all from the same publisher- were suddenly showing up as best sellers. Apple now says it’s identified who was responsible and has kicked them out of the app store. They also advise you check your purchases and change your password. Joshua Topolsky , editor in chief of the tech site Engadget , brings us up to speed on the story. And John Hering, founder and CEO of the online security company Lookout offers tips on keeping safe online. We also hear strange news from Iran as Boing Boing ’s Xeni Jardin tells us about a new “robot man” .

An eye exam on a smart phone

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

There is no shortage of dumb things you can do on a smart phone. There are apps that simulate the vuvuzela, or a light saber, you can play Angry Birds or Plants vs. Zombies. So much dumb stuff available that it’s easy to forget how powerful a highly portable computer can really be. Fortunately, some folks at MIT are being smart about it and they’ve come up with an app called NETRA , stands for Near Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment. Couple it with a little plastic eye piece and you can evaluate someone’s eyesight and what kind of glasses they might need. It could have huge implications for the developing world where fully equipped optometrist’s offices are hard to come by. We talk to associate professor Ramesh Raskar at MIT’s Media Lab and Ankit Mohan, a postdoctoral research associate there.

ElenasInbox.com reveals Kagan's emails

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 07:00:00 CST

What if all the emails you wrote at work were published online? All the gossip, meeting agendas, dumb YouTube clips you sent to friends at work, all of it, slapped up on a website. That’s the deal right now for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. You can go right now to elenasinbox.com and read emails written by and sent to Kagan during the years she served in the Clinton administration. Messages received, sent, over 14,000 emails in all, publicly disclosed. It’s the work of Tom Lee. He’s director of Sunlight Labs , the technology arm of the Sunlight Foundation, a group aimed at increasing transparency in government. We talk with him about what was involved in getting all those emails online. We also check in with Anil Dash of Expert Labs, a nonprofit group that’s trying to use crowdsourcing to assist government.

What is Amazon up to with all these Kindles?

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 05:30:00 CST

When Amazon.com first launched the Kindle electronic book reader, it was a fairly simple proposition: a little device for reading e-books. You could download the books off Amazon.com, read them right there on the device, it all made sense. But since then, the idea of the Kindle has started shooting off in a bunch of different directions. There’s the standard Kindle, which has had a dramatic price drop recently. There’s the Kindle DX, which had a dramatic price drop just yesterday. There’s the Kindle app for the iPad, a device that also has its own electronic reader built in. That Kindle app also features embeddable video and audio, something that Amazon doesn’t offer on the Kindle itself. And this week we also saw the debut of the Kindle app for Android. It’s getting a little hard to determine what “Kindle” means any more, what they’re trying to do with it, and whether it’s worth your investment. We talk with David Carnoy from CNET (also author of “ Knife Music ”) about the moves Amazon has made lately and Joseph Esposito, CEO of Giant Chair and a publishing industry veteran about where Amazon may be going. By the way, David Carnoy has a new book .

Hulu to start charging you money. (And that's a good thing?)

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:00:00 CST

(Today’s episode features guest host Jeff Horwich) This week online TV service Hulu started rolling out Hulu Plus, a paid option that offers more content but also changes the game because, you know, it’s not all free any more. You might think this would be nothing but annoying, especially since you still have to watch the same ads as on the free Hulu service. But Hulu Plus (which is currently available by invitation only; that will change soon) comes with some bonuses: Big extra back-catalog access to popular shows, and new Hulu Plus apps for iPad, iPhone, Xbox and more. Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan has been checking out the new offerings , and joins us on this episode with the highlights. Is Hulu Plus — this model of asking people to pay a subscription for on-demand access to shows — the beginning of the end of TV as we know it? Dan Frommer of Business Insider thinks Hulu Plus is great and all, but it’s no cable-killer . He drops by with some thoughts on the bigger picture. What do you think: Is Hulu Plus going to change your TV habits? Or are you annoyed that the great heyday of free (good) TV on the web could be all too short?

Dell's on the decline and it just got worse

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 09:07:32 CST

Dell used to be one of the best selling PCs on the market. Their computers were thought to be well made, affordable, and backed by outstanding customer service. But that was several years ago and Dell has fallen from grace quite a bit since then, amid charges of irregular accounting practices, terrible customer service, and computers that break. New York Times reporter Ashlee Vance wrote about documents that were recently made public as part of a lawsuit against Dell . The documents indicate that Dell employees knowingly shipped out millions of computers from 2003 to 2005 that were likely to break, spill chemicals, and even cause small fires. When the computers were returned for repair or replacement, they were given new faulty equipment and shipped right back out again to customers like Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo, and the Mayo Clinic. We speak with Vance about the story. We also check in with Matt Wold of Geek Squad about the specific problems at issue, how you can see if your own computer is affected, and what you can do about it.

Obama wants more mobile spectrum available for that smart phone you insist on using

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 05:00:00 CST

On Monday, President Obama issued a memorandum asking to almost double the commercially available wireless communication spectrum.As a nation, we’re doing more on our mobile devices than ever before, downloading music and movies, handling bigger files, more traffic. Meanwhile, there are parts of the radio spectrum that are owned by the government and private companies that are just sitting there not being used. So the administration’s plan is to hold an auction and sell off those frequencies to companies that might do something with them and increase the capacity to move large amounts of information wirelessly. The administration hopes that the opportunity to expand wireless capabilities will lead to more jobs as well. So this could be a big issue for technology and for the online experience of anyone who wants to use the internet with a mobile device. We learn about the science of the spectrum as we talk with Marvin Sirbu , Professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. And we speak with Darrell M. West , founding director of the Center for Technology and Innovation, at Brookings.

Online life after death

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 05:00:00 CST

I want to talk about what happens when you die. There are procedures for what happens to your body and worldly possessions. But what about the parts of you that live online? Facebook page, photos on Flickr, your avatar in some online game, or email. Those things are not you exactly but they’re not objects either. It’s a shadow of who you are in this semi-alive entity called the internet. What happens to this digital shadow when you die? We’re sharing more and more of our lives online. But when it comes to death and online, we’re still trying to figure it out. Facebook relies on family or friends to notify the company when someone dies, otherwise they leave the page up. That’s led to weird moments where Facebook suggests you get back in touch with someone who you can’t get in touch with anymore. Lisa Granberg sees a need and an opportunity. She started MyWebWill , essentially a way of putting your plan together for what happens to your digital self after you die. It’s a service that’s was tested in Sweden and is now in the U.S. MyWebWill Entrustet

Who is this Mark Zuckerberg anyway?

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:28:13 CST

Short answer: he’s the founder and CEO of Facebook, he’s 26, and he’s worth four billion dollars. Long answer: it’s a little more complicated. Facebook currently has almost 500 million members all over the world. Zuckerberg said this week he’d like to double that. Get to a billion. Zuckerberg famously started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room and he’s run the company ever since, growing it to where it is today. What was originally designed as a way for Harvard kids to socialize has now become a regular part of how humans communicate with each other and keep in touch. It’s ubiquitous already AND it’s growing. So if Facebook is becoming an inescapable part of modern life, and if Facebook is controlled by one guy, we should get to know more about that guy, right? David Kirkpatrick had a great deal of access to the company and to Zuckerberg while writing his new book The Facebook Effect . We speak with him about Facebook and about Zuckerberg.