John Palfrey

An insightful take
on the HLS weblogs experiment in this month’s Harvard Magazine. 
Lots of good quotes from Berkman Center regulars — including thoughts
from Dave and Wendy — and other friends. 

What I like most about the article is that it brings us back to why we
started this initiative in the first place: in no small part, to try to
build additional bridges among the disparate parts of the Harvard
community, in 02138 and beyond.  Harvard’s Provost, Dr. Steven Hyman, urged
everyone at the 2002 Internet & Society conference to work on the
problem of building these bridges using ICTs.   Blogs have seemed
like a good way to keep conversations going among people at different
parts of the university and those elsewhere with an interest in similar
ideas.  It’s good to remember where we’re coming from.

Berkman Center senior fellow Andrew McLaughlin has published a new working paper that critiques Mongolia’s proposed new Information Technology law.  “The core conclusion of this analysis and critique,” McLaughlin writes, “is that the Draft Law as it now stands would do significant harm to Mongolia’s vibrant and promising information and communication technology (ICT) sector.”

Thoughts on RIAA, Jon Johansen, and more.  (Via Dave).

We’ve just released a 15-minute audio clip (available for stream or download, from the Berkman Media Library) about our Digital Media Project.  It’s a take-away from a conference we hosted in Cambridge earlier this fall.  Our idea is to try to produce reports out of our Digital Media events that are not just paper-based.  We’re working on more of this sort.  Let us know what you think.  Big thanks to producer Ben Walker and to our partners in putting on this conference, Gartner|G2.

A very interesting development
in the digital music crisis.  The US Court of Appeals for the DC
Circuit holds: “Because we agree
with Verizon’s interpretation of the statute [the DMCA Section 512], we
reverse the
orders of the district court enforcing the subpoenas and do not reach
either of Verizon’s constitutional arguments.”  Verizon’s
argument, in the court’s terms: the DMCA’s “§ 512(h) does not authorize
the issuance of a subpoena to an ISP acting solely as a conduit for
communications the content of which is determined by others.”  Add
this
development to the Grokster opinion, and the trend of the law in favor
of digital rights holders is at least in a holding pattern.

I’m working on a simple list of things that ordinary people can do to help themselves and the rest of us in the fight against spam.  Here’s a start.  It’s meant to help answer the question: “What can I do about spam?”  I know it won’t solve the problem, but it strikes me that users taking some responsibility can only help — probably moreso than any federal or state law will help solve the problem, frankly.  Please add suggestions in the comments field below.  Thanks to the Berkman geeks for edits that have already been worked into this list.

* Install spam filters or blockers on your personal computer.  Or just use the spam fighting capabilities of your existing mail program — Eudora, Outlook, and Mozilla all have spam blocking.  [The great lawyer Wendy Seltzer notes that one ought to be familiar with the trade-offs one is accepting once one installs filters.  In particular, one ought to know what one might be missing in the event of the inevitable “false positives” that will occur.]

* Use anti-virus software on your personal computer.

* Subscribe to your ISP’s spam-fighting services.

* Consider moving to “challenge-and-response” for e-mail addresses you particularly want to protect.  [Hal Roberts says: “Bleh.”  He concedes it might be helpful as a short-term partial fix, if noxious.]

* Never give out your preferred e-mail address online. Instead, set up and use a free e-mail account (like Yahoo! or hotmail) to give out.

* Never post your e-mail address to a public place online.

* Ask your systems administrator at work to install good spam filters or blockers on the work network.

* Report particularly bad spam to your state attorney general’s office.

* Beware e-mails that ask you for your credit card or social security numbers.  Never respond to an email that asks for a password or to install a security update.  These are likely forgeries since a system administrator will never ask for such a thing over e-mail.

* Think twice before “unsubscribing” to e-mails from merchants you don’t know.  These links mostly just alert the spammer that there is a live user at your address.

* More of a virus thing: Don’t open emails from people you don’t know. And never open an attachment in any email unless you know the sender and are specifically expecting an attachment from that person (viruses generally spread by sending trojan horse programs to victims from people that they know).

I’m trying to keep it straightforward and non-technical to include only things that are 1) uncontroversial and 2) more or less unharmful to things we like about the Internet.

There might be a second-order list of things for those more technically inclined, such as:

* Consider using RSS feeds rather than e-mail based lists.

* [More.]

[Updated after original posting thanks to input of others. And a news story on lawsuits by MSFT and NY State against big spammers, from Salon’s Erin Mclam, via Catherine Bracy.]

An amazing record in the making: onling postings of CNN transcripts.  (The downside: you can look back — here too — and see just how incoherent you were.)  What an archive these transcripts will make.

Are citizens really re-engaged in the political process?  And if so, what would a president elected by a citizen-powered groundswell do once elected to govern in a manner consistent with how s/he was elected?  Participate in a discussion ongoing here; it’s free and experimental and it’s only going to work if lots of us dig in.  You’ll just have to sign up with a simple form, join the project called “Internet and Society” and reply to the question posted by Jim Moore and Kelly Nuxoll.  (We at the Berkman Center don’t support any candidate, but we do support citizen engagement in the political process using Internet technologies.)

A nice short essay on politics and the Net, by Jim Moore.

We’ve released a new study
on public participation at ICANN, plus a serious critique of that
study by senior fellow Andrew McLaughlin here.  (It’s a forceful statement, and I’ll have to give some thought to a response to his critique).

A few notes, speaking for myself only:

1) I mean to be constructive, not piling on criticism on an institution
struggling mightily to reform itself.  The purpose of this study
is to take a hard, objective look at about 100,000 messages posted to
online forums to determine whether ICANN has succeeded at creating an
open and representative decision-making process.  My view is that
this experimentation, at least with respect to these online forums, has
not worked well.  The technology of online message forums and
listservs has not been effective at attracting and then enabling the
incorporation of Internet user community input into the ICANN
decision-making
process.  And, it’s my view that ICANN is not the right venue –
given its highly technical mandate and other factors — in
which to seek to prove a point about Internet user community
involvement in a global decision-making process.  It’s not the
right place to prove a big point about the Net and global democracy.

2) I have some reservations about our study, primarily with respect to
its scope.  While I believe that our methodology and research
into the 100,000 public forum postings is defensible, I quickly
acknowledge that we have been cursory in our review of public
participation through the SOs.  Why?  After probing some of
the data available, we thought it would be too hard to draw meaningful
conclusions using a consistent methodology.  Someone might succeed
where we’ve ventured only gingerly.  Such a follow-up would be a
worthy undertaking, as it may well be that the SOs are the place where
public participation in ICANN is the most effective.

Given this mode of seeking to be constructive and these reservations, I’m pleased that my very insightful colleague Andrew
McLaughlin is offering a concurrent critique of this study.  Andrew is well-positioned
to put this work in context — and certainly to do so from a healthily and helpfully skeptical place.

Update: Andrew blogs about his critique here, with a summary of his argument.