Hot off the press: The Use of Social Security Numbers in California Colleges and Universities, a report to the California State Senate and Assembly Judiciary Committees and to the California Office of Privacy Protection.

Tags: SSN

An interesting development I heard about last week is the Content Recognition Rules (CRR) specification, an XML schema that allows content owners to express, in a standard manner, how they would like their content to be treated. Some examples from the document:

1. On recognition of at least 60 seconds (for example) of this asset, please remove it from use.
2. This asset is playable only in the US.
3. This asset is not playable in the UK until July 4, 2008.
4. In a mashup of multiple assets from the same series, if the total time of all assets from the series totals 3 minutes, then remove it from use.
5. On appearance of this asset on a UGC site, send an email notification to the rights holder.
6. When delivering an uploaded copy of this asset to a consumer, some ads are associated with it and should be shown.
7. If an uploaded video contains over 60 seconds from this movie, and that represents over 50% of the video‘s total length, quarantine it, pending investigation.
8. If an uploaded video contains more than 33% of an original asset, take it down and notify the originator of the copy and the owner of the original.
9. If an uploaded video contains an AACS theatrical use only watermark, send a DMCA notice.
10. If the quality of an uploaded video is low enough, take no action.
11. If the last 3 minutes of this show are found in uploaded content, replace the UGC with a teaser clip.

I understand CRR is not intended to express copyrights or policy, but to permit a much wider range, and granularity, of possibilities than simply "infringing" (can't use) or "non-infringing" (can use). In fact, I see here a parallel with the enabling framework of the Creative Commons that also provides for a spectrum of granularity beyond "all rights reserved" and "no rights reserved" under copyright.

50 Viral Images Part Two

Like everyone else who’s been on Facebook for a while, I’ve accumulated quite a few friends on Facebook (though not anywhere 300 of them, which I’m told is the average number of friends an average Facebook user has). They are real-life family and friends and colleagues, acquaintances, and that curious phenomenon, “Facebook friends” - people with whom you really only have a connection with within the Facebook realm for one reason or another.

When I first joined Facebook, there were distressingly few people I knew on it (two, amidst the UCLA network of about 45,000 at the time). So during an information studies class at which I was guest speaker, I described my personal struggle to overcome knee-jerk privacy concerns in setting up my Facebook profile; and ended by asking a favor of the students: would you be my (Facebook) friend? A dozen of them graciously invited me to be their friend - something I greatly appreciate to this day. A big thank you to them.

So I get a little glimpse into the lives of these students through Facebook, people who I have only met once. And presumably vice versa, unless they’ve told Facebook not to show them stuff from me. But I always wonder if this isn’t just a nuisance to them; or worse, some form of invasion of privacy, given I am essentially otherwise a total stranger.

And yet, what can you do if you no longer want to be someone’s (Facebook) friend, for whatever reason? Is there any gracious way of “unfriending” someone, without offending them or hurting them? (This is a variant of wanting to say “no” to an invitation to be someone’s friend: inevitably, if you’ve been on Facebook for a while, all sorts of people come out of the woodwork wanting to be your friend - many genuinely a pleasant surprise, others not so much so. It’s even trickier if it’s someone work-related.) Others have explored this conundrum.

But I have a solution to propose: an annual no harm, no foul “unfriending” period, during which anyone would be free to unfriend me, for whatever reason, without explanation, and I promise not to feel offended or hurt or to ask why. (Of course, conversely don’t try doing this outside this period or I will be offended! :-) Sort of like the open enrollment month we get every year to change our selections for health care options and other benefits at work.

I started thinking about offering the month of January 2009 for this purpose, but didn’t manage to execute. Perhaps I’ll aim for every November, which coincides with UC’s open enrollment period instead.

What do you think?

Tags: Facebook

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote about how much had changed between 2007 and 2008 in terms of the availability of new ways to consume music, TV shows and movies. Well, the explosion of new business and delivery models between 2008 and 2009 is really heartening (see a slide from a presentation I’ll be giving in a week’s time).

In fact, there’s so much now available - legally and often entirely for free - that the problem is finding what’s available across so many different sources. Some sites are trying to address this issue, like Modern Feed, the United Kingdom’s findanyfilm.com and the Digital Citizen Project’s Birdtrax. Of course, what these sites reveal is that there is no uniformity not just in terms of sources, but also content: some television shows are available, while others are not; some only have certain episodes available, or available for a certain length of time; and some just don’t work from a Mac (hmpfh! :-).

But I’m not complaining too much: it’s a delight to be able to get access to so much online (legally!), whether I pay for it - through iTunes or Netflix, typically - or for free. Connecting my iPhone to my television has been useful; but I can now see why people might pay for a box like Apple TV or the Netflix Roku to “just make it work.” Or use your existing PS3.

And just wait until our mobile devices really take off in this space: for example, LG confirms 2009 launch for 3G wristphone. Dick Tracy, anyone?

Not to mention this should completely change the tenor of discussions during the negotiated rulemaking to begin shortly over the P2P provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, which among other things requires colleges and universities to certify that they “...will, to the extent practicable, offer alternatives to downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property...” That language was written in the time and context of services such as Cdigix and Ruckus, both of which have now gone out of business.

Tags: new business models

UCLA Anderson School’s Noah J. Goldstein writes in the Harvard Business Review about Harnessing Social Pressure: just giving people access to data alters their behavior (e.g., letting hotel guests know others who had stayed in the same room before them had reused towels resulted in more guests reusing towels). But I love the idea of the “magnetic middle”, in which such data can not only influence people to do better, but to “backslide” to where others are if they were already ahead of the curve...

The title of this post is taken from a post on Arbor Networks’ site describing what they saw in terms of Internet backbone traffic on inauguration day due to streaming video. The graph shows a peak around noon on January 20 of about 3.5 terabytes per second - approximately 2 petabytes of data over the peak two-hour period.

Interestingly, the many people who watched through cnn.com were using a P2P-based Flash plug-in that has generated some controversy, or at least some concern. On the other hand, talk about a huge, legitimate use of P2P!

If you’re a Facebook user, you really must read 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know.

If you’re a novice Facebook user, Too Much Information: On social networking sites, you may be giving away more than you think is a quick place to start thinking about privacy issues. You wouldn’t want to be this poor dude interviewing for a job (1 minute video), would you?

On the flip side, if you’re an employer, some food for thought in Why employers should reconsider Facebook fishing. It really may be possible to know too much about people you are considering hiring!

Finally, it appears that Facebook has changed its terms of service to say it can keep and use any material you have put on Facebook even if you should close your account with them. Is this egregious or simply pratical? In the end, you’ll have to decide. [Update: Lots of controversy; revision rescinded; but more to come...]

Tags: Facebook

For three years, the Digital Citizen Project at Illinois State University has been doing some very interesting research and data analysis on what their students actually do (versus what they say they do) in terms of illegal file sharing. The first two papers that have been published out of this research are Dimensions of P2P and digital piracy in a university campus (Mateus and Peha, CMU, 2008) and Intention to Engage in Digital Piracy (Taylor, Ishida, Wallace, ISU, 2009). More papers are coming. (Disclosure: I have been on the DCP’s advisory committee from July 2008.)

The Mateus paper sought to quantify the level of digital piracy over a period of time in 2007: very loosely speaking, more than 119,000 potential infringements were detected over about a 25-day period in April 2007. Food for thought when you contrast that with the typical level of DMCA claims of infringement an institution typically receives.

A service which has come out of the DCP is Birdtrax, a list of legal sources of digital entertainment media maintained by the folks at ISU. With so much happening in this space these days, it’s great someone is taking on this task to help sort through this new world of content.

I’ll mention here Casey Green’s 2008 survey on The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance, which for the first time begins to quantify what colleges and universities are spending to combat this type of illegal activity. It’s a nice complement to the Mateus paper.

If it seems your children live in World of Warcraft as much as in meatspace, there’s still hope. :-) Playing for profit (Economist, August 26, 2008) and Play games with your resume (Washington Post, February 6, 2009) both posit that the skills developed as a successful WoW player could directly translate into success in the business world: ‘"showing that people are developing and applying all kinds of useful skills in World of Warcraft--data collection and analysis, collaboration, planning, resource management and even team management." Remove the "WoW" identification from the place of employment, and all of these accomplishments look fantastic on a résumé.’ Cool, no?

And check out some stats about these virtual worlds (Mother Jones, May 21, 2007): 20 million people as of two years ago?? And who these folks are (ars technica): “A new research study out of the US reveals that gamers are more likely to socialize and generally earn more money (read: have more epics) than nongamers. They also go out on more dates.”

Finally, this just in: Science gleans 60TB of behavior data from Everquest 2 logs. “Thanks to a partnership with Sony, a team of academic researchers have obtained the largest set of data on social interactions they've ever gotten their hands on: the complete server logs of Everquest 2, which track every action performed in the game.” Putting the privacy implications aside (hard to do, I know - do you have no expectation of privacy in this virtual world? Or did you sign it away when you joined?), there may be some very interesting stuff here.

Tags: World of Warcraft

The January 2009 issue of Wired had I Am Here: One Man's Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle, a wonderful article on both the exciting possibilities and the sobering unintended consequences of ubiquitous GPS. A must-read if you don’t use these technologies yourself.

What Was Privacy?, in the October 2008 Harvard Business Review, is a stellar piece on privacy. There’s a business slant that makes it even more interesting.

Finally, the cover essay of the January 2009 Esquire, What the Hell Just Happened? A Look Back at the Last Eight Years, has a canny first paragraph that applies nicely in a privacy context:

There is this thing we do. It's a small thing. It's a formality, at worst an annoyance. We do it every time we buy a computer or a device requiring software. We do it when we download software online, and then when the software is updated. We do it in order to buy things. We do it in order to sell or share things. We do it in order to find dates and to expand the universe of friendship. We do it in order to express ourselves in writing or film or song, and then we do it in order to read and to watch and to listen. It is the act of everyone, and it involves everything. And what it is — what we do — is this: We agree. We agree to the terms and conditions of service. We agree to use a product that is not our own — that is licensed, not sold. We agree to entrust and, if our trust is broken, to forgive. In what might be called the opposite of the moment of truth, we are given a choice, to accept or to decline, and we accept. We are in the habit of assent, and so the world we live in is the world we have helped bring into being. It is the power of our powerlessness. Our virtual signatures are everywhere, and yet we lost track of them long ago and have no idea what liabilities they might entail — what we've given up and to whom we've given it.

Tags: GPS

Robert Berdahl’s October 2008 address at the University of Missouri Centennial of AAU Membership, Research Universities Addressing the Issues of the 21st Century (PDF), is just a stellar talk and a must-read in my opinion.

Tags: research universities

Enacted in 1998 to update U.S. copyright law to recognize the digital context, few had an intimation how central the Digital Millennium Copyright Act would become to the national debate on copyright; for only a year later, (the original) Napster was unleashed on the world...

At the Tech Policy Summit held May, Fred von Lohman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation expressed the sentiment that the DMCA got it about right (even realizing, as we’ve seen, that there many who believe it went too far or not far enough) in terms of the balance of responsibilities between rightsholders and online service providers: that fundamentally there is sufficient “looseness” in the framework to permit innovation to flourish. (Would TiVo exist, if, before offering its service, it had had to go to each rightsholder to ask permission to carry content?) We see the innovation everywhere: Google, YouTube, eBay, the Slingbox … We will need to continue the national discussion to keep seeking an appropriate balance. In the mean time, it’s been an interesting ten years. Happy birthday, DMCA!

Worth reading: “Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea?” Atlantic Monthly, September 1998. Published mere months before the DMCA was enacted, it brilliantly covers the underlying issues about copyright; and is, in many ways, prescient.

(Of course, the DMCA covers a lot more than just how rightsholders and ISPs interact... there’s the anti-circumvention issue, for example, that though rather quiescent in recent times - or perhaps has now mostly just become a fact of life - was hugely controversial at the time.)

Tags: DMCA

So asks Nicholas Carr in the cover article of the July/August Atlantic Monthly. I put this here not just because i't's an interesting and worthy read, but because it resonates with me, both the good and the bad. The good is how the technology has quite fundamentally changed my ability to write: I simply couldn't do what I do with pen and paper, though like many, I still like to print out an intermediate draft now and then to read through end-to-end (but that may be simply a lack of the right technology to enable the same ability). The bad is that I, too, have slowly, over a decade, gone from voracious book reader to being barely able to keep up with print publications like the Economist and Atlantic Monthly. Perhaps the glass-is-half-full explanation is just that my information consumption has actually gone up; it's just different. The article's mention of neurological rewiring echos Marc Prensky's thought in Digital natives, digital immigrants part 2.

On the other hand, I can't say I resonate with the glass-is-half-empty predictions of the article. Change of the sort described just is. If indeed it's a problem - and I don't think so - then the genie is already out of the bottle and all we can do is manage the effects. Wired Magazine's cover article The End of Science and two related articles, Tap Into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer and Supercomputing Power Hits the Desktop, Minus the Software, curiously speak in some way to this issue from a different perspective.

Tags: Google, information literacy, Digital immigrants, Digital natives

"We literally review every single image that gets uploaded to the site on a daily basis. That's 17 million images a day that get viewed by a human pair of eyes." -- Chris DeWolf, MySpace in BusinessWeek's Facetime with Chris DeWolf, May 21, 2008

That's amazing. I wonder what kind of technology they use to hyper-streamline the process so that this is even remotely possible? At least on the surface, this affirmative review is at odds with legal frameworks and how MySpace's peers are handling this.

Some other amazing facts about MySpace: Forty percent of all mothers in the U.S. are on it (see the article for why: it's not what you would think) and twelve percent of all Internet minutes are spent there.

Tags: MySpace

"Today, when cowardly anonymity is souring Internet discourse, it really is hard to understand how anonymous speech is vital to a free society." Huh??

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, begins with "Faceless Internet sadists who ruin reputations don't deserve full free-speech protection" in this LA Times op-ed (see a compelling case in our own world) ... but then concludes along a bewilderingly different axis that anonymous speech is somehow no longer vital to a free society. Surely addressing the issue of defamation in the online world doesn't have to be synonymous with tainting the value of all anonymous speech?

Tags: Anonymity, Free speech

... of the EDUCAUSE Western Regional Conference site. I'm moderating the closing plenary, Don't Download This Panel and it's going to be a blast! The panel lineup is terrific, if I do say so myself: Greg DePriest from NBC/Universal, Kenneth C. Green of the Campus Computing Project and Fred von Lohman from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Come one, come all: early bird registration until March 3.

Thanks to Michael Berman, 2008 WRC Program Chair (Senior Vice President and CIO at the Art Center College of Design in his day job), for the impetus and all the support to make this happen.

The fine print: In case you didn't notice, this item is a shameless plug.

Tags: EDUCAUSE, DMCA

A few weeks ago, EDUCAUSE released A Blueprint for Big Broadband. This paper goes beyond describing the need for ubiquitous broadband in this country (and not just the 3-6Mbps most of us have) and offers some concrete steps towards achieving this goal. I think the paper makes for some interesting reading.

Coincidentally, Governor Schwarzenegger’s California Broadband Initiative also recently released The State of Connectivity: Building Innovation Through Broadband, whose thrust is quite consistent with the EDUCAUSE blueprint (though not as aggressive in timeline). The CPUC also recently announced a $100 million broadband fund for unserved areas of California to help bridge the digital divide.

Full disclosure: I’m a member of EDUCAUSE’s Network Policy Council which developed the Blueprint, though I personally had no hand in it.

Tags: EDUCAUSE, broadband

Gregory Jackson, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the University of Chicago, observed in The Digital Carrot, The Digital Stick (Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2007) that illegal file sharing would rapidly become moot if we could resolve these problems with respect to legal online acquisition of music and movies: I can’t always get what I want; I can’t always use what I get; and I don’t think the price is fair.

Maybe we're close. Consider:

Amazon.com offers music in MP3 format—free of digital rights management and thus untethered from the iPod—often for less than what iTunes charges. Nokia is bundling music access with cell phones, and Universal Music Group is looking to extend this model to other devices. iTunes is suddenly a dominant force in digital movie rentals, having partnered with all major studios, adding alternatives to services already offered by Amazon.com, Netflix (now with unlimited streaming videos) and hulu.com. NBC, CBS, and ABC make available streaming video of popular TV shows from their websites.

Then there's iTunes' new ranking as #2 music retailer in the world, behind only Wal*Mart. And as the ars posting indicates, that's #2 relative to all music sales, including CDs; not just digitally purchased music.

Still a lot of experimentation and practical problems, but the glimmer of a tunnel end seems apparent.

Tags: new business models

Last month, C|NET news.com ran the article Why did colleges stay mum on MPAA stats? It was in response to the disclosure by the MPAA, which noted that 15 percent, not 44 percent (as it had previously claimed), of the movie industry’s domestic losses come from illegal downloading of movies by college and university students. It wagged its finger at colleges for not standing up for its own: "learn the truth before you cower".

What a frustrating article. Let me identify issues that seem to me to be most important.

First, studies are being performed by higher ed: consider Illinois State University’s Digital Citizen Project, Kenneth C. Green’s Campus Computing Project or the Brandeis University survey on DMCA practices. [Update: the Campus Computing Project published The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance in 2008.]

Second, such studies aren’t always easy or straightforward. Most institutions set high bars for protecting individual privacy that are in place for good reason: privacy underpins the intellectual freedoms of the academy. I don’t mean to brandish privacy as a bludgeon, but I think it's fair to say the type of monitoring involved for such studies could easily cross the threshold where monitoring becomes surveillance, or the monitoring of behavior. (Consider that the Digital Citizen Project went through the standard rigorous privacy requirements for any human subjects research.)

Third, institutions are doing their own analyses. I don't know what caused the author to mention UCLA - but let me assure everyone that within the framework of our policies, we actively pursue understanding what we are seeing to better tune our programs, whether educationally or advocacy related. Sometimes these insights are very public, as in the testimonies before Congress, whereas other times the information is shared with those who may find it useful, or simply used internally to enhance what we do.

Finally, I think it's important to remember higher education comprises thousands of individual and highly individualistic institutions; and that we have to work hard in order to work together. And we do: often through national associations such as EDUCAUSE, AAU, ACE and NASULGC.

All this said, it’s hardly the case higher ed couldn’t do (a lot) better, which perhaps is the point of the article. But this is, believe it or not, a complicated issue.

UCLA School of Law Student Wins GRAMMY Foundation Writing Contest

Tags: Grammy

The horse is out of the barn: SSNs are everywhere, used by so many for identity matching it's staggering. How on earth will it be possible to protect folks from identity theft involving SSNs when so many organizations and processes depend on its more-or-less ubiquitous availability?

That question was front and center at the Federal Trade Commission's workshop on SSNs and ID Theft in November 2007, where it convened panels on the key aspects of the problem. It was fascinating. A really good summary of the issues and of the comments received prior to the workshop was put together by FTC staffers.

Jim Davis, UCLA's CIO, was asked to participate on the panel relating to organizations who have already moved to an alternate identifier (the campus's University ID, UID, or the equivalent Student ID): what it took to get there and what the ongoing issues are. Understanding these issues for UCLA is in itself interesting.

First, it's not straightforward to ensure that we only ever assign one U/SID to an individual. Someone could start as an undergraduate, then years later return as an employee with a different name and address (or vice versa). Another could be both employee and student simultaneously. The first factor used to confirm identity is ... the SSN! If SSN is not available, then a variety of other factors are used to do so with a complicated and potentially time-consuming algorithm; and the result, which may not confirm identity 100%, must then be interpreted in a specific context.

Jim used two scenarios to illustrate this. In the case of transcript ordering, an SSN is not necessary - we know a lot about a student who spent four years with us and can use these other data to confirm identity ("knowledge-based authentication"). On the other hand, during admissions, we have essentially no a priori knowledge about the applicants; and SSN is used not only to authenticate but is our basis for the credentialing process. That ~60,000 applications have to be processed in about 5 weeks also means that if SSN weren't available, the task would simply be impossible.

Coincidentally, on another front, one of the provisions of California bill AB1168, which went into effect January 1, 2008, mandates the California Office of Privacy Protection to pull together a task force to examine all aspects of use and protection of SSNs in higher ed in the state, with a final report due July 2010.

Tags: SSN, FTC, identity theft, AB1168

A few articles I enjoyed because they offered me a better understanding of what people in the music industry are facing.

The Music Man (New York Times Magazine, September 2007), follows Rick Rubin, founder of Def Jam Recordings and now co-head of Columbia Records: "Columbia didn't want Rubin to punch a clock. It wanted him to save the company. And just maybe the record business."

Then a pair of articles from the December 2007 Wired Magazine. David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music points out that music was originally tied to a certain time and space and only later, with recordings, could the knot be broken; until we've reached a point where it is the recordings, not the music, that counts. David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars is exactly that: a useful set of categorizations that can be used to think about new business models.

The recent Business week column, O.K. (Sigh), I'll Join Facebook, hit the nail right on the head for me: having overcome many of my privacy concerns (I guess some would call these hangups) about being on Facebook (with picture and all), I was still a bit uneasy. Why? The column's tag line - "But its mashup of friends and business is a bit unnerving" - is the real issue: unlike Linkedin, which is clear about a professional bent (you'd be very aware of what you put there if you're looking for a job, which I assume many are), Facebook blurs people from different parts of your life. Is this just another hangup I need to get over?

But I have another concern as well. My Facebook profile is tied to my UCLA email account. California Public Records Act requests, subpoenas, litigation and therefore e-discovery are all significantly on the rise. Do I really want to be increasingly mix my personal content with work content in this environment, in spite of the strong incidental personal use provisions embedded in the UC Electronic Communications Policy? I could use a different email account, but then I couldn't be part of the UCLA network on Facebook. [Update: Actually, that’s not true. You only have to use an email account once to prove your membership in a group, and then you can change to another one.]

Tags: Facebook

Actually, I didn't, because I didn't know where he was sitting. But Fabio was on my Virgin America flight from LAX to JFK, and had I known his seat number, I could have asked to chat with him via the seat-to-seat chat facility available through the entertainment console in front of me. Of course, he was sitting in first class and I wasn't, but that doesn't mean the flight wasn't a whole lot of fun and really very comfortable. I'm not sure how I feel about such seat-to-seat chatting anyway: as someone wrote in his blog, the possibilities are a bit creepy.

The styling of the cabin interior is unlike anything you've seen before. (I was in an Airbus 319, but I believe they also have 320s.) It has the same look and feel as an iPod - shiny white plastic - which one wouldn't necessarily think to be a good thing, but it's got a clean, sleek look. Muted purple mood lighting changes according to external lighting and time of day and for people like me who just die under fluorescent lighting, what a blessing.

The fun part is the entertainment center dubbed Red: the 9" "TV" in front of you doesn't just show a movie, it's actually a touch-screen control where you can access a large library of music, radio, music videos, TV, premium movies (this costs money) and foreign TV programs. It also offers you the ability to play games (like Doom - they provide a remote control - that you can play with others on board), do the text chat thing and connect your iPod. The usual display screen showing a terrible map of the country and where your plane currently is is instead from Google maps. And if you need to work instead, no worries about laptop batteries, as there are two power outlets for every three seats - regular 110v outlets, not the inconvenient special power jacks for which you have to purchase special converters that used by some other airlines. Ethernet jacks are already installed, just waiting for FAA approval to be activated (maybe that will mitigate people being allowed to talk on the cell phones during flight?). And wireless, too, apparently - see how.

You can also order drinks and food from the console. Like a touch-screen web page with a shopping cart, you add beverages (usual ones are free) and/or various snacks, swipe your credit card and a couple minutes later a flight attendant comes by to deliver what you ordered. I kept doing this (my credit card statement was pleasantly small, however). It was fun!

But the best part is that VA let me book an exit row for an extra $25: 7.5" of extra legroom for this flight; a no brainer. (They actually have three different types of premium seats available in coach - the two exit rows and the bulkhead seats - which all have different characteristics. Overall, the exit row I was in - 10 - I think was the best. Not as much legroom as the bulkheads, but full recline unlike row 9 and of course space under the seat in front of you. I think the additional charge is $15 for the short-haul flights.) Here's more info on these premium seats.

Wish I could fly VA everywhere. Currently, though, they only fly SFO, LAX, LAS, JFK and IAD. (And to think I'll be flying to Washington later this year - wish I'd known what I know now instead of having to fly United).

The only bad thing is having to fly into JFK, which is just a nightmare.

Well, an update: Virgin America's recent spate of ads include one showcasing the availability of power outlets on their aircraft using a model blow-drying her hair on board. I suspect I'd even take cell phone use on a flight over hair dryers! :-)

Tags: Virgin America

Esquire's December 2003 article Science & Industry: DARPA and more recently, Daniel Engber at Slate writes I Want to be a Mad Scientist.

Tags: DARPA

There's good reason to take care when you're at an Internet cafe or other public hotspot... Web 2.D'Oh!. UCLA folks, you do use VPN (campus or otherwise) when doing work, right?

Tags: VPN

Every so often I come across a reference to UCLA's approach to curbing illegal file sharing that claims, incorrectly, that we are using one technology or another that somehow shuts students down. Perhaps this isn't surprising because there is quite a bit of nuance. For example, Cindy Mosqueda's blog item from last year Are local universities in bed with the RIAA and MPAA?, while as balanced and researched as one could hope for, still says "a notification system has been installed on residence hall computers to detect violations". We don't monitor! This is entirely a reactive system to handle claims of infringement the campus receives from copyright holders (i.e., the copyright holders are the ones that are searching and monitoring).

Even back in 2004 when the quarantine was first deployed, our system was not properly described in C|NET's article Hollywood's new lesson for campus file swappers. It has plenty of small errors, but the biggest problem was the implication that our system was similar to the University of Florida's ICARUS system because they both provided automated notification - ignoring the point that our system is reactive to external claims whereas ICARUS is actively looking for illegal file sharing on its internal networks.

And most recently, I was pointed at this article, The buzz on Illegal Music on college campuses, from the IT Bulletin at the University of South Carolina, which states we are using Audible Magic's Copysense technology. We don't.

One day I'll have to write up the nuances. In the mean time, technology is an important component of any overall strategy to deal with illegal file sharing - for automating claims management (the quarantine) and ensuring the integrity, reliability and security of our network - together with education, policy and legal alternatives. Others may choose to use technology in other ways, and there is clearly an emphasis these days on using technology to "fix" things.

One interesting thought came from Craig Seidel at MovieLabs while at a workshop I attended held in April with the goal of defining university requirements for filtering technologies: technology that would communicate with users directly for awareness rather than with institutions for compliance, thereby mitigating privacy concerns in some manner. Terry Gray from UW wrote up a wonderful set of notes out of this meeting.

Tags: Quarantine approach

Ever wonder what happens so that when you order a laptop online, click on the "buy it now" button, and two days later it shows up on your doorstep? James Fallows' article in The Atlantic, China Makes, the World Takes, gives a glimpse of how this works. Amazing. Scary. Awful. Wonderful.

Two terrific sites with sensational content: ideas worth spreading from ted.com and pop!casts from poptech.org.

Tags: TED, pop!tech

Me and 4,999 others, that is: As part of the idea of the "hyperlocal, totally personal geoweb", 5,000 people were able to submit photographs that would appear only on their cover of the July 2007 issue of Wired magazine.

This is very cool, but reason magazine did something more formidable in their June 2004 print edition. The editor's note ("Kiss Privacy Goodbye") says it all: "This is no ordinary issue of reason -- or of any other magazine, either. The cover is an aerial shot of my home in Oxford, Ohio. If you were a subscriber to reason, you would have received a unique copy with your own home on the cover. What's more, the ads on the back covers would have been customized to you and your neighborhood."

I've got to do a better job of geotagging my Flickr shots.

Tags: Wired magazine

Edgar Bronfman (chairman of Warner Music): “The music industry is growing. The record industry is not growing.” See the Economist's article A Change of Tune.

Fascinating insight from the New York Times' The Music Man.

Protect Harvard from the RIAA by Charles R. Nesson and Wendy M. Seltzer (May 1, 2007).

Tags: Harvard

It's back again, the exhilaration is, thanks to Web 2.0 - whatever that is. You can become a millionaire just by working within Second Life (or experience many things you couldn't otherwise, something of particular interest to those with disabilities). You can explore the Earth and everything on it like never before. Playing World of Warcraft can get you hired. Your voice can be heard, whether by video or blog or wiki or twitter, and shared with half the population of the planet or with a few friends and family. You have access to more information and opinion and hyperlocal data than at any other time in history and combined in ways that affords so much power. No one knows what will fly or what will sink, but the ride is sure a lot of fun... so many things to try, so many things to do, so many avatars to meet!

Or should we get a first life first? A short thread between IT policy folks on the ICPL list and many of the items on this here my pseudo-blog speak to the glass-is-half-empty potential for problems: threats to privacy, digital disorder, information illiteracy, and on and on.

I admit this is just a setup to point to an article that, shorn of its political nature and specific personalities, is a favorite of mine because it characterizes this issue so well: The Problem with Problem Solvers. Have fun! (But be thoughtful. And hey, I'm a policy person after all.)

Tags: Fun

"The Murder of Mystery: How Silicon Valley joined the superstitious fringe as the enemy of open inquiry" penned by Jaron Lanier in Discover Magazine, September 2006, begins sadly, thus: "Last week I had a jarring conversation with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley. Me: I wish more kids were learning to be musicians. He: In 10 years computers will be able to ... generate music better than human musicians ... There might be good reasons to teach kids music, but creating a new generation of professional musicians is not one of them."

I say sadly, because though we don't necessarily know a lot about the relationship between music and human beings, there is something clearly wonderful between the two. Farhad Manjoo's review of Daniel Levitin's book This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of A Human Obsession in Salon: "Why human beings make and enjoy music is, in Levitin's telling, a delicious story of evolution, anatomy, perception and computation -- a story that's all the more thrilling when you consider its result, the joy of living in a world filled with music ... The brain systems they discovered explain why music -- whether in high school or in life beyond -- can touch you so deeply: Our brains seem to have evolved to maximize musical ability. Indeed, Levitin argues, music has been essential to our very success as a species." There's Paul Robertson's research in this area (Music: an ancient medium for a new millennium is the text of a talk he gave in 2000). And I can't wait for Oliver Sacks' upcoming book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

Rapture from listening to some special piece of music can be a Stendhal Syndrome experience. The 1993 Arts & Antiques article The Stendhal Syndrome by Alexander Theroux is a much more wonderful portrayal than the Wikipedia version I point to, but it's not on the web. A small passage: "I remember a friend of mine being transported - weeping - as he sat on the floor, feet crossed, listening to Wagner's great opera, Tristan and Isolde."

And speaking of weeping while transported: If you haven't yet read about the experiment with the marvelous violinist Joshua Bell, set up by Gene Weingarten and the Washington Post, do so: Pearls Before Breakfast and also the follow-up commentary.

Tags: Music, Stendhal Syndrome

They've gone head-to-head on this now: an interesting representation of the "Wikipedia vs Britannica" debate.

David Weinberer is author of Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. "We're very good at organizing things in the real world ... But ... we always have to follow two basic principles: Everything has to go somewhere, and no thing can be in more than one place. That's just how reality works. But in the digital world we're freed from those restrictions."

Andrew Keen is author of The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture and, as you'll see, says himself he is "a disgraceful fascist luddite communist control freak monarchist failed dotcom entrepreneur".

Tags: information literacy, Digital immigrants, Digital natives

"Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Who goes where gets kinda sticky... probably because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class."

boyd, danah. 2007. "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace ." Apophenia Blog Essay. June 24 .

Tags: MySpace, Facebook, Digital natives

BusinessWeek’s article, Cheating - Or Postmodern Learning?, provides a novel defense against cheating that underscores the continuing and increasing complexity of assessing individual ability in a collaborative context.

Tags: information literacy, intellectual dishonest

These articles I’ve found worth reading, not so much for the scare value but to be thinking about what needs to be thought of. First is the October 2006 Mother Jones article Is Google Evil?

Second is a wonderful article on privacy and the net generation in New York magazine, Say Everything. Though it covers well-trodden ground, it does so admirably. I particularly like this: "Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not."

Tags: Google

The video of the UCLA tasering incident made available on YouTube (not for the squeamish - you’ve been warned) raises a number of interesting questions. Lauren Weinstein paints this incident in a bigger picture, and, in a short, wonderful note on the subject, reminds us that our critical thinking skills are more important than ever. And a nice little article in The Atlantic on the unexpected consequences of everyone having a camera with them all of the time by James Fallows. Finally, take a look at some state-of-the-art digital photo manipulation looks like from research on content-aware image sizing presented at SIGGRAPH 2007.

This seems to be a good place to add mention of this unusual piece on fantasy football and information literacy ("National Librarian Sport Declared").

Tags: information literacy, cell phone cameras

"Web 2.0 in just five minutes." Fabulous.

Reference: Tim O'Reilly's founding document on "What is Web 2.0". Also, a timely article about Web 2.0 in Science from Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch.

Tags: Web 2.0

“In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?” Eight minutes well worth your time. This isn’t very new, but it’s pretty staggering how things have evolved. A sideways commentary begins Michael Hirchorn’s article in the December 2006 Atlantic Monthly entitled “Get Me Rewrite!”

Tags: information literacy

An absolute classic must-read: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants by Marc Prensky. “It is amazing to me how in all the hoopla and debate these days about the decline of education in the US we ignore the most fundamental of its causes. Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.”

Tags: Digital natives, Digital immigrants

On March 21, 2007, Jim Davis, UCLA’s AVC-IT and CIO testified at a hearing chaired by Senator Dianne Feinstein entitled Identity Theft: Innovative Solutions for an Evolving Problem. Senator Feinstein is proposing S.239, similar in principle to SB1386 enacted in California in 2003 - the first notification law in the country. Jim’s testimony, Lessons Learned from Notification of a Large Breach, talked about lessons learned by UCLA during its 2006 breach of SSN. Other witnesses spoke to other facets of notification.

Tags: identity theft, SB1386

Jim Davis, UCLA’s AVC-IT and CIO, testified before a Congressional hearing chaired by Representative Howard Berman entitled An Update – Piracy on University Networks on March 8, 2007. His testimony, A Student-Life Approach to Copyright Infringement at UCLA, articulates UCLA’s student-life approach to this issue.

Two articles covering this hearing are Congress is Unhappy With Higher Ed’s Copyright Infringement Activities and the Washington Post’s article Music Industry Tightens Squeeze On Students Campus Network Access Targeted. (Interestingly, BusinessWeek’s April 9, 2007 article Now Playing: Digital Disarray, supports the argument that good business models aren’t there yet.)

Jim also testified in October 2004 before the same subcommittee on the UCLA Quarantine Approach and Studios Working Group.

Tags: Quarantine approach, DMCA