John Palfrey

We have the great honor of hosting the ASC’s third big public meeting here at the Harvard Law School. We’re grateful to Ari Schwartz and Ross Schulman for bringing the meeting to our campus. We’re proudly a member of ASC through our StopBadware project, which has grown into one of the biggest and most interesting projects at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Steve Gibson, the podcaster of Security Now! and InfoWorld columnist and computer developer and many other important things, is giving the keynote right now. Steve is recounting his personal experience in discovering spyware creeping onto the network and onto his PC, and leading to him coining the term “spyware.” He says his PC is his temple. He recalls having been “immediately pissed off” when PKZip for Windows brought “the first bit of nastiness” to his PC by trying to phone home. Steve says that that current story is the “Tyranny Of The Default” — default settings that are still not safe.  His stories evoke much the same picture that Jonathan Zittrain paints in his article, The Generative Internet, and his forthcoming book, The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It.

The faculty and fellows of the Berkman Center will publish four books this year. Two of them are out already: David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous and John Clippinger’s A Crowd of One. In celebration of this high-water mark for the team, we’ve put together a new page on the Berkman web site called Berkman Books, which features most of the relevant books written by Berkman faculty and fellows since our founding nearly 10 years ago. We’ll keep it updated as new ones come online, such as the ONI’s Access Denied (on Internet filtering) and Prof. Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It, both due out later this year.

In real life, Prof. Charles Nesson has been flat on his back the last few days, sadly just in time for the conference that he’s spent a year or more pulling together. It’s the 2007 Internet & Society conference, this time on the topic of University. His co-chair, Charles Ogletree, has done a masterful MC-ing job in Charlie’s (physical) absence. The virtual Charlie has been very much present, though: eon, and his Second Life avatar, have been in the ether throughout the event. And blogging it. Charlie, we miss you, eon, we’re thrilled you’re here in the room.