Internet Statistics by Alex Goldman

Professor Helen Nissenbaum has made a career out of putting philosophy to work. In a CV replete with honors (and also filled with impressive grants), she has turned a doctorate in Philosophy from Stanford University into a career researching the privacy implications of the internet. She is currently professor of “Media, Culture, and Communication & Computer Science” at NYU. I heard her speak at the Fordham University Law School, where her talk focused on her latest book, Privacy in Context; Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life.

Nissenbaum said that she thought this would be the easiest book she’s ever written, because it was simply synthesizing many papers, but that in fact it was the hardest, and it took two years. In the book (and in her current work) she is building an analytical framework that would identify the aspect of an online transaction or interaction that causes social anxiety.

The miracle of the internet is about the rapid dissemination of information. This has delivered powerful economic benefits, and it has delivered freedom.

The internet has also enabled massive data repositories that have caused concern. Nissenbaum mentioned Choicepoint and you can see the concerns of the Electronic Privacy Information Center here. Nissenbaum also mentioned the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program of the federal government. Of TIA, EPIC wrote, “TSA has failed to meet its legal obligations for openness and transparency under the Freedom of Information Act and has violated the spirit of the Privacy Act for the protection of privacy rights.”

Continue reading ‘Privacy in Context: A Speech at Fordham Law School’ »

Many people in the U.S. use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service today. But I contend that the FCC has killed the technology. How can I make this assertion? After all, there are over 20 million VoIP subscribers in the U.S.

However, the VoIP services that exist today are a shadow of what the technology makes possible. VoIP has been choked so that it no longer disrupts telephone service. VoIP has been fenced in by the FCC so that it offers no more than telephone, a move that was intended to protect cellular and wireline phone companies.

Continue reading ‘How The FCC Killed VoIP’ »

Corporations and politicians have been assaulting journalists and journalism with the full force of their political and financial fury during the past two decades. For a time, a prostitute was invited to pose as a journalist in the sanctum sanctorum of U.S. journalism, the White House press room.

And so journalism declined.

The Federal Trade Commission, worried about the decline, considered trying to stop it by subsidizing newspapers, a move that many on both the left and right said confused “newspapers with journalism.”

In fact, there are journalists, but they no longer work for newspapers, and news is no longer broken by newspapers. News breaks on the internet.

Continue reading ‘Wikileaks Shows: They Should Have Feared The End of Journalism’ »

Those who advocate for cellular as real broadband piss me off as much as they piss off Benoit Felten. See the video.

He says that advocating for cellular as a replacement for fixed network requires good writing skills — and technological ignorance.

I agree.

Update: Felton tweets: agold_stats Alex, just to clarify, I’m not thrashing cellular, I’m thrashing cellular ONLY.

Another story from Wikileaks.

Colonel Muammar Qaddafi threatened to cut Britain “off at the knees” if the terrorist wasn’t sent home.

No word in the papers as to whether BP drilling rights were mentioned, as has been rumored. However, we assume BP and other British interests in the area would have been kicked out of the area. Likewise, Libya may have cut the flow of oil exports to energy-starved Britain.

Wikileaks matters — and one has to wonder whether a certain faction at the State Department decided which documents would be leaked.

“Getting Media Right: A Call to Action” was hosted by the Columbia School of Journalism on December 2, 2010. It opened with an introduction by Bill Moyers and a clip from his 2003 show on media consolidation.

Then FCC Commissioner Copps addressed the session (the video is archived at the link above). He opened by thanking the Columbia School of Journalism and the “pathbreaking research of the New America Foundation.”

Copps pointed out that Reagan’s FCC Commission chief had called the television “a toaster with pictures” by which he meant to say that it did not need to be regulated. Most of our current problems can be traced back to the Reagan administration. As Copps has noted in an article in The Nation, Reagan’s FCC “went on to dismantle nearly every public-interest obligation on the books and to enable a tsunami of media consolidation. The results have been disastrous — reporters fired, newsrooms shuttered and our civic dialogue dumbed down to fact-free opinions and ideological bloviation.”

Copps noted that the urge to be a monopoly appears again with every new technology. In order to prevent the re-monopolization of the information industies, Copps proposed:

Continue reading ‘Columbia School of Journalism: Getting Media Right: A Call to Action’ »

With even the White House trying to block Wikileaks and conspiracy theorists saying that the CIA orchestrated false rape charges that have already been dropped once, you may be wondering where to get your wikileaks news.

Try WL Central.

Note: by posting this leak, I’m told I have lost the ability to ever work for the government. This is a poorly managed and heavy handed intimidation campaign.

Susan Crawford spoke today at NYU at Evan Korth’s Computers and Society class. I was thrilled to attend. She is an enthusiastic speaker, blogger, and activist. A professor at Cardozo Law School, she founded OneWebDay and was recently Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy. The video is available here.

She warned that key decisions being made about the internet now could harm the U.S. forever.

Crawford opened her speech by recommending the new movie “Inside Job,” which is about the banking industry and about how regulators failed to stop it from taking risks that caused the current recession.

“There is a constant flow of people, a revolving door back and forth between the industry and the regulators. The banking industry, therefore, places key people in DC, as fundraisers as well as regulators.”

Continue reading ‘Susan Crawford Says That The US Could Become a Backwater In Broadband’ »

(For Part I of this report, see: ISOC-NY: Building Tomorrow’s Broadband, Part I: The Networks)

While everyone in theory understands that the internet brings wealth and business and tax dollars, far too many governments are trying to tax it in ways that could kill it in their area. Recently, the state of North Carolina told me a few years ago that he had to deal with:

Continue reading ‘ISOC-NY: Building Tomorrow’s Broadband, Part II: All Infrastructure Projects Are Corrupt’ »

A meeting of the Internet Society of New York (ISOC-NY), Building Tomorrrow’s Broadband, three speakers presented alternative methods for building the broadband that America needs.

Continue reading ‘ISOC-NY: Building Tomorrow’s Broadband, Part I: The Networks’ »