From Evgeny Morozov, Boston Review
In 2006 Stacy Snyder, a 25-year-old student at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, was denied a teaching degree just days before graduation. University officials had discovered a photo of her, captioned “Drunken Pirate,” on MySpace. The photo showed Snyder wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, and the university accused her of promoting underage drinking. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger tells the story in his new book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Snyder lost control over the photo when it was indexed by Google and other search engines: “the Internet remembered what Stacy wanted to have forgotten.”
Snyder’s story, and others like it, motivate Delete’s plea for “digital forgetting” (though it turned out that the university had other reasons to deny Snyder her certificate, including poor performance). According to Mayer-Schönberger, we have committed too much information to “external memory,” thus abandoning control over our personal records to “unknown others.” Thanks to this reckless abandonment, these others gain new ways to dictate our behavior. Moreover, as we store more of what we say for posterity, we are likely to become more conservative, to censor ourselves and err on the side of saying nothing.
For people like Snyder, Mayer-Schönberger proposes a creative remedy: enable users to set auto-expiry dates on information. Thus, Snyder’s “drunken pirate” photo could disappear from the Internet in time for her to receive the teaching certificate. Even if a third-party discovered the photo, Snyder could adjust its expiration date and destroy all digital copies—including those cached by search engines—with a few clicks. Were she to appear in someone else’s photo, Snyder would be able to negotiate the proper expiration date for this photo with the photographer.
Image from The Smoking Gun
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From Brad Stone, The New York Times
In the 1990s, Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley lawyer, almost single-handedly brought the antitrust weight of the federal government down on that era’s high-tech heavyweight, Microsoft. Now Mr. Reback contends there is a dangerous new monopolist in the catbird seat: the search giant Google.
This month, Mr. Reback shepherded Adam and Shivaun Raff, the husband-and-wife entrepreneurs behind the London comparison shopping site Foundem, around Washington. The three held meetings with Congressional staff members and antitrust enforcers at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.
Their goal was to air the Foundem couple’s complaint that in 2006, Google’s supposedly objective algorithms suddenly dropped Foundem into the netherworld of Google search results. They say Google also raised the rates Foundem had to pay to advertise alongside search results. These moves, the couple say, pushed their comparison shopping site out of view, and Google later put the spotlight on its own shopping listings.
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From Ronen Kadushin, de zeen
Designer Ronen Kadushin has designed an open-source mallet for smashing up iPhones.
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From David Talbot in Technology Review:
Multilingual Web content has been around for years. Now Web domain names in non-Latin languages are finally arriving–including Arabic addresses launched in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates earlier this month; Cyrillic, launched in Russia last Thursday; and soon Chinese–easing Web access for hundreds of millions of people around the world.
“This is the biggest change in the Internet in 40 years,” says Tina Dam, senior director of international domain names for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which is working on implementing 21 international applications for domain names in 11 languages. “You should have seen the Russian celebration of this, it was so emotional. Suddenly their own language can be used.”
…
Nevertheless, the impact will be enormous around the world, [Veni Markovsi, the Russian and eastern European representative to ICANN,] says. “Think what would have happened if the Internet was created in China, and we in the U.S. needed to write the Web address in Chinese. And suddenly the world Internet community says, ‘Well, now you can type your Web address in Latin characters.’ That is the same feeling is for people who don’t know Latin [letters]. Suddenly you will have people who might get online because they are not going to be afraid of the keyboard.”
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From Alex Iskold in ReadWriteWeb:
Two weeks ago, Facebook has announced a major new initiative called Facebook Open Graph. This is an attempt to not only re-imagine Facebook, but in a lot of ways, an attempt to re-define how the Web works. We wrote in details about the implications of this move for all interested parties.
A big part of the announcement is Facebook’s vision of a consumer Semantic Web. In this new world, publishers have an incentive to annotate pages by marking up activities, events, people, movies, books, music and more. The proper markup, would in turn, lead to a much more interconnected Web - people would be connected with each other across websites and around the things they are interested in.
Directionally, this vision is both correct and important. We’ve been talking about pragmatic approach to the Semantic Web for sometime, and we’re excited at the possibility of it finally happening. Yet, two weeks after the announcement it is becoming more and more apparent that there are gaps in Facebook’s offering and intentions. A close look reveals that perhaps Facebook’s intent is not to make the Web more structured, but instead to engineer a way for more data - mostly unstructured - to flow into Facebook databases..
As you will see from the rest of the post, it appears that getting semantics right has not been a big priority for Facebook, at least not prior to the announcement.
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From information aesthetics
The BBC recently announced [bbc.co.uk] that the results of the UK general election 2010 are to be projected on to St Stephen’s Tower, world-famous as the clock tower that houses Big Ben.
The idea behind projecting the results in this way is to provide a clear and simple source of information and to create an “arresting” image. The results projection, which will be removed after dawn on 7 May, will feature a “winning line”, representing the 326 seats that any party will need to win to be sure of an outright victory. The idea was approved by the parliamentary authorities, responsible for the management of its buildings and the BBC is said to be “delighted” with the initiative.
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From Peter Singer, Project Syndicate
Google has withdrawn from China, arguing that it is no longer willing to design its search engine to block information that the Chinese government does not wish its citizens to have. In liberal democracies around the world, this decision has generally been greeted with enthusiasm.
But in one of those liberal democracies, Australia, the government recently said that it would legislate to block access to some Web sites. The prohibited material includes child pornography, bestiality, incest, graphic “high impact” images of violence, anything promoting or providing instruction on crime or violence, detailed descriptions of the use of proscribed drugs, and how-to information on suicide by Web sites supporting the right to die for the terminally or incurably ill.
A readers’ poll in the Sydney Morning Herald showed 96% opposed to those proposed measures, and only 2% in support. More readers voted in this poll than in any previous poll shown on the newspaper’s Web site, and the result is the most one-sided.
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From Jenny C. Aker and Isaac M. Mbiti, Boston Review
Ten years ago the 170,000 residents of Zinder were barely connected to the 21st century. This mid-sized town in the eastern half of Niger had sporadic access to water and electricity, a handful of basic hotels, and very few landlines. The twelve-hour, 900 km drive to Niamey, the capital of Niger, was a communications blackout, with the exception of the few cabines téléphoniques along the way.
Then, in 2003 a Celtel mobile-phone tower appeared in town, and life rapidly changed. “I can get information quickly and without moving,” a wholesaler in the local market told me. Before the tower was built, he had to travel several hours to the nearest markets via a communal taxi to buy millet or meet potential customers, and he never knew whether the person he wanted to see would be there. Now he uses his mobile phone to find the best price, communicate with buyers, and place orders.
Zinder, which has since grown to some 200,000 residents, still has no ATMs or supermarkets, and many roads to surrounding villages are made of sand or compressed dirt. But it is filled with small kiosks freshly painted in the colors of the prepaid mobile phone cards they sell.
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The second issue of Volume 6 of