The Web Difference

Link

The worldwide “block” was only for two hours but it’s still pretty ridiculous stuff. I can’t quite wrap my head around how they managed to change the “internet’s routing tables” for the entire world. From my understanding, you have to be pretty huge (like an entire country in this case) to get other country’s routers to mis-route addresses. I don’t think it was their intention to take YouTube down for the entire world, but it’s pretty scary that they had the power to at all. Meanwhile, the block in Pakistan will continue until further notice.

The Pakistan-Wide-Web has just shrunk a little.  Their government has just blocked YouTube due to “objectionable content.”  Not too surprising given the Pakistani government’s extreme sketchiness.  What is surprising is that CNN.com carried the story as its feature headline.

This article related to our conversation with Danah about employers accessing information about prospective employees through Facebook. What’s next? Will it become acceptable for employers to demand access to prospective employees’ Myspace and Facebook pages during the application process - kind of like drug testing? As unethical as that may seem, we may be heading in that direction. Who knows - maybe then people will become more aware that there really is no privacy on the Web.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/business/30digi.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1203858119-uBeZ7Z9%20CDtxVq8Zk3e9KA

(Let me know if this link doesn’t work. This is the first time I have posted on a blog

I know we’re not going to hit the topic for a little while, but this Associated Press article is a great example of a Web Difference in regards to voting (among other things).  This is a difference of a clearly negative ilk, as it disenfranchises voters who wouldn’t have been disenfranchised pre-electronic voting.

In anticipation of the FCC hearing on Monday, I want to draw everybody’s attention to some of the prior authority on ISP prioritization. In In the Matter of Madison River Communications (20 F.C.C. Rcd 4295 (2005)), the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau investigated Madison River Communications for allegedly blocking ports used for VOIP applications. The practice hampered subscribers’ ability to use certain VOIP services, much like Comcast’s de-prioritization of p2p services has limited subscribers’ ability to use those services. The FCC believed that Madison River’s practice violated section 201(B) of the Communications Act of 1934. Madison River ultimately agreed to a Consent Decree, which prohibited the blocking of ports used for VOIP applications. It also barred Madison River from “otherwise prevent[ing] customers from using VOIP applications.” Also in 2005, the FCC issued a Policy Statement that most people interpret to endorse Network Neutrality (http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-05-151A1.pdf). It included four Internet Principles, all of which were intended to “preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the Internet.” Madison River and the FCC Policy Statement seem to prevent filtering based on the type of transmission and is consequently encouraging for anyone who thinks p2p services offer legitimate legal functions and should be widely available to Internet users.

Here is a Newsweek article about companies like Reputation Defender that help you manage your online persona by cleaning up unflattering information about you.  If I remember correctly, we briefly discusses Reputation Defender in the first week of class.

Something I find very interesting is the different techniques these companies use to clean up negative information.  Reputation Defender simply contacts hosts of websites with offending material and asks them to take it down.  On the other side of the spectrum, Done! SEO, which labels itself an “search engine marketing” firm, essentially Google bombs your name by linking to websites that you designate containing positive information about you.  The idea is to push the negative information to the third or fourth page of Google search results, which most people don’t bother checking.  The Done! method makes me uncomfortable because they also market the same service to get your business’ website at the top of the Google search results, thus (in my opinion) diluting the whole purpose of Google ranking their search results the way they do.

Somewhat of a follow up to our earlier class discussion on gender and Internet use, the Times reports that teen girls are more likely than their male counterparts to be web innovators.

Howard Gardner (the famous Harvard psychology prof) says no in a op-ed in the Washington Post.

On Today’s Episode of Web Difference: Danah Boyd. Professor Weinberger warned us all by email that this class would “involve deep and squishy beliefs about the nature of the self.” (UPDATE: Professor Weinberger was talking about Monday in that email. My Bad. Still, I insist that we nonetheless) Bring on the squish.

1:04 pm
Professor Palfrey bridges the “fairly abstract metaphysical discussion” on Monday (yesterday) to the more “law school concepts” of today (Tuesday). We’ll be discussing whether age contributes to the Web Difference and taking a closer look at data.

Question: What, if anything, do we think we should do about this difference from a law/policy perspective?

Class Reactions to the reading and yesterday’s class:

-Student: I shaved down my Facebook profile. I took down my Fan app, and was reassured about leaving my “interests” section blank.

-Student: Some people think of Facebook as a utility, rather than a place for serious social interaction.

Danah Boyd is the leading scholar on social networking sites with scholarly work on (I didn’t get even half of the intro here because it moved so quickly) Xanga, Myspace, and whether or not we should regulate Social Networks (significant advocacy work surrounding the suburbanite-friendly, freedom-hating Deleting Online Predators Act [hypenated adjectives added]). She’s wearing a really cool t-shirt that says “wearing my twitter t-shirt.”

1:10 pm
Danah gives us a basic overview of the history of Social Networking Sites.

-Ryze

-Friendster:
+Started as a community for “Geeks [Geek Culture Buffs], Freaks [Burning Man types], and Queers [Gay Men living in NY].” Brackets Added
+Friendster “Testimonials”
+”Fakester Genocide”-Friendster kills off all non-dating profiles and “jumps” to Asia.
+ http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0323,oshea,44576,1.html

1:17 pm
-Myspace/Facebook (sorry to clump them together, I can’t type that fast)
+Hosts members who Friendster rejected (Freaks roll over to http://bm.tribe.net/)
+Side note: IM is used by middle school kids, and usually drops off by high school (high school kids like to use text messages—they can delete them before their teachers search through their phones without any regard for their dignity, privacy, or natural rights. Oh, teachers.

+Myspace becomes an informal place to hang out. “Kind of like a cocktail party”
+”Friends” are not your closest and dearest.

1:24 pm
Professor Palfrey surveys the class. 100% are on Facebook, most of us do it every day. Not that many of us are on Myspace.

Professor Palfrey puts his facebook profile on the projector. I wonder if he’s Facebook friends with Lawrence Lessig. Or Barack Obama. (His friend is “Voting for Barack Obama in the Rhode Island Primary on March 4^th!”). Andrew Sullivan called Lessig an “Obamacrat” yesterday. I know, I know, I’m obsessed and I need to stop. It’s an addiction.

Professor Palfrey goes back to the student who said he adjusted his facebook profile. He asked whether this had to do with a shift in the perception about the audience of his profile. Student responds that he instead was trying to “get as much out of facebook while putting as little into facebook”

1:33 pm

There’s a psychological effect on our hesitation to divulge info on Facebook, now that it’s been opened up to the public (actually, it’s been open like this for two years). But Facebook is much less private that MySpace.

1:39 pm

I’m back. Danah indirectly convinced me to remove virtually all of my facebook apps.

1:41 pm

Man I’m not very good at Live Blogging because I keep looking up all this interesting stuff that Danah’s talking about. http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

Danah: Big Difference between the Digital and the Physical

In the physical, where there are collisions of multiple contexts, there are major social rules. For example, in a wedding, you give all of the actors specific rules of how to operate.

In the digital, we’re not so used to coping with these collisions. There are multiple audiences with different social contexts with no physical walls.

1:46 pm

We check out Professor Palfrey’s profile on Ratemyprofessor.com Danah points out that people don’t rate when they’re happy, they rate when they’re P.O.’d.

If something is written online, in what cases should it be legal to use it to make a hiring decision?

Problems:

A loss of control of how you are presented to the world (on certain topics…no one knows you’re a dog [or a white man who’s 6 foot] on the internet). [BUT is the lack of control bad? Couldn’t it push forward the threshold for what’s socially acceptable?]

Mistaken Identity (“Push Back”->But is that really a Web Difference?)

Effects of persistence-ability to respond

Searchability and Findability

Solutions:

Trust

Norms v. “Sturking”

Youth Rights Groups

Norms about what to put online

Notice about privacy

Keep parents out of some networks publics

http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml;jsessionid=JIFB4EPRDWVX0AKRGWCB5VQBKE0YOISW?id=R0706A&referral=2341

2:10 pm

Question: Are the Youth Rights? Basic Answer: Haha, yeah right.

2:20

The Web is changing our understanding of what a “public” is. Youths don’t have access to a large number of publics. (E.g., “the Pit” in Cambridge). There are all sorts of reasons that publics are developing online. Teenagers are rebuilding the kinds of public spaces that they would hope to have in online places.

2:30 Your Live Blogger shamelessly plugs a few of his favorite websites:

http://www.bugmenot.com

http://www.dizzler.com

http://www.metafilter.com

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/

Despite Professor Weinberger’s warnings (UPDATE: See above, but still,) there wasn’t as much squish as I was prepared for. For the record, I (UPDATE: continue to) love saying squish.

Squish,

Conor

Wikileaks.org, a site that allows whistleblowers to anonymously post confidential documents, has been taken offline by court order in California. The BBC article states that a case brought by Swiss bank Julius Baer resulted in the judgment along the following lines:

… the main site was taken offline after the court ordered that Dynadot, which controls the site’s domain name, should remove all traces of wikileaks from its servers.

The court also ordered that Dynadot should “prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.”

Other orders included that the domain name be locked “to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar” to prevent changes being made to the site.

The site is apparently still available in other countries such as Belgium and India, though I think these must be localised versions. The site claims they couldn’t defend themselves at the hearing because they were only given hours notice.

BBC news story

EDIT: See Kparker’s comment below explaining that the site has just been removed from the DNS so it is still available if you know the IP (it is hosted in Sweden).