A frosh view on the Internet and Society

Recent stuff

2011-11-13T16:05:00.000-08:00

Interesting review on Google by Daniel Soar: "It knows"

And while we're on the subject of "it", a recent article about our official class snack, It's It (or for Aaron, Pop-tarts)

And one on location and privacy from the New York Times,

And one that Anders sent on NSA spying
And one from Jenny on Digital textbooks
--t

Current items

2011-11-10T09:20:00.000-08:00

Some items relating to our recent discussions:

On open social network information, The Social Graph is Neither , a blog post by Maciej Ceglowski.

We talked about planned obsolescence of things like toasters. A great piece on the way all this works is Annie Leonard's Story of Stuff

I mentioned the article about direct brain connection in the Economist, called "Mind goggling" (not googling)

And a current New York Times article by Claire Miller on our friend Larry,

Privacy in the mall

2011-11-03T09:45:00.000-07:00

A new startup called Euclid Elements emerged from stealth mode today to debut its customer-tracking solution for brick-and-mortar merchants it’s calling “Google Analytics for the physical world.” The name is an apt description for the new solution, which employs sensors and wireless technology to track customer behavior...

So what does Euclid actually do? It uses preconfigured in-store sensors plugged directly into switch in the network closet to track the Wi-Fi signals on customers’ smartphones. In doing so, Euclid can map out and analyze customer shopping behavior, including things like foot patterns (the movement in and out and through the store), plus customer loyalty, retention rates, “dwell time,” and even things like “window conversion rates,” which can be thought of as the offline “click-though.” (A window conversion means a customer sees a window display and then decides to enter the store).

Privacy conference

2011-10-31T17:47:00.000-07:00

You might be interested in what is getting covered at the Public Voice Conference on Privacy.

Even as privacy rights spread around the world the struggle to promote privacy continues to be challenging. Laws and regulations continue to face economic and technological challenges, effective protections continue to require constant campaigning, implementation of rights continue to be questioned on the grounds of culture and conflict of laws. This Public Voice meeting aims to address these challenges with an emphasis on developments in Latin America. Follow #TPV11for updates and information related to the meeting.

Liberation Technology Seminar this Thursday - How the Street, Institutions, and Mediascape Converge in Egypt

2011-10-19T15:09:00.000-07:00

Layers of Networks: How the Street, Institutions, and Mediascape Converge in Egypt
Liberation Technology Seminar Series

October 20, 2011
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Wallenberg Theater
Wallenberg Hall
450 Serra Mall, Building 160

Speaker
Ramesh Srinivasan - UCLA

Abstract

Running across freeways with labor organizers, speaking with taxi drivers and laborers, and visiting rural areas of Egypt convinced me during my fieldwork that neither social media technologies nor the youth that use them caused or directly led a revolution where people from every walk of life took to the street. Indeed, only 15% of Egyptians and other Arab Spring countries have Internet access and a small percent of them are active on social media. These dynamics replay themselves in the many countries and cultures that I have worked within - from Kyrgyzstan, to Native America, to India. Indeed, while re-telling a story that places heroic youth and wonderfully liberating technologies at the center ignores the masses, dismissing social media’s dramatic impact on journalism and high-end organizing in turn is equally shortsighted. This talk will bring up different arguments (sometimes in conflict with one another) of how networks of the street and networks of the Internet work with one another, placing working classes and community organizers side-by-side with social media users.

Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote a front page article on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post, an Op/Ed in the Washington Post on Social Media and the London Riots, an upcoming piece in the Washington Post on Myths of Social Media, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He was also recently in the New Yorker based on his response (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv

Anonymity and rage

2011-10-15T10:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/24/internet-anonymity-trolling-tim-adams

How the internet created an age of rage

The worldwide web has made critics of us all. But with commenters able to hide behind a cloak of anonymity, the blog and chatroom have become forums for hatred and bile

- Tim Adams
- The Observer, Saturday 23 July 2011

Interesting followon to today's discussion on Internet and ID

2011-10-12T16:47:00.000-07:00

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9b28f1ec-eaa9-11e0-aeca-00144feab49a.html?ftcamp=rss#axzz1abZ0ZBlO
Founding father wants secure ‘Internet 2’
By Joseph Menn in San Francisco
Vint Cerf, known as one of the fathers of the internet, acknowledges that he and co-founder Bob Kahn did not think enough about security when they built the framework for the web. He shares a view held by a growing number of experts that the best way to defend against cyberattacks might be to simply start again.
“I would have put a much stronger focus on authenticity or authentication – where did this email come from, what device I am talking to . . . those things are elements that would make a big difference,” Mr Cerf says.
More
ON THIS STORY
Chinese army mobilises cybermilitias
FT series Cyberwarfare - the new arms race
Agreement on cybersecurity ‘badly needed’
US starts to tackle hacking curse
Interactive Cybersecurity deals
The fight to secure the current internet is unwinnable, says Ori Eisen, founder of a security company called 41st Parameter, which defends banks against online crime.
A faulty initial design – with net protocols that rely on trust and freely allow anonymity – has been compounded by the slow rollout of security gear, he says.
“I can do a very good job,” says Mr Eisen, whose company tries to keep pace with advancements in the cybercrime underworld. “But in the long run, it is essentially hopeless.”
So, what would a secure internet look like? Mr Eisen has set out plans for Internet 2 in a document called Project Phoenix. Included in his blueprint are biometric identification, encryption of all keystrokes and virtual machines created for every transaction.
His plan has drawn praise from the security industry, including Michael Barrett, PayPal’s head of security, who calls it a “very helpful scenario”.
“There are a number of people in the community who have been arguing for a while that we need to press the proverbial reset button and start again,” Mr Barrett said.
The US government has made some tentative steps in that direction. Military contractors funded by the Pentagon’s defence advanced research projects agency – which sponsored the first version of the internet – are also contemplating redesigns. But these efforts are aiming mainly at isolated government locations and not broad adoption in the civilian world.
A new internet, along the lines of Project Phoenix, seems destined to remain a plan on paper only – at least for now. A company based on Project Phoenix would be doomed without a government mandate or a consortium of banks or telecommunications companies stepping in, says Ted Schlein of Kleiner Perkins, 41st Parameter’s prominent venture capital investor.
“The concept of a more secure network that customers or vendors are willing to pay for is probably the only way to provide the security that people want to have,” Mr Schlein says.
Mr Cerf said the ubiquity of the present internet need not block the adoption of a new version.
“I’m actually quite interested in the clean-slate ideas,” Mr Cerf said. “People will say, ‘Oh you can never do that, it’s already too deeply embedded in everything else.’ But you could have said that of the telephone system in 1973, and the internet is replacing the telephone system.”
Additional reporting by Tim Bradshaw in London

Talk Thursday: The Last Mile: Grassroots Development and Technology in Africa

2011-10-10T16:51:00.001-07:00

The Last Mile: Grassroots Development and Technology in Africa
Liberation Technology Seminar Series

October 13, 2011
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM

Wallenberg Theater
Wallenberg Hall
450 Serra Mall, Building 160
Speaker
Joshua Stern - Co-Founder and Executive Director at Envaya

ABSTRACT:

A system is only as strong as its weakest connections. The most fragile and easily disrupted links of international development and foreign aid structures are unfortunately the most important: those connecting community stakeholders with one another and with the larger system designed to support them. Grassroots civil society organizations are essential to sustain growth in developing regions. Across Africa, these groups do the hands-on, local development work that changes lives, but the overwhelming majority operate in isolation, unable to collaborate, to plan new interventions, share best practices, or communicate directly with funders and supporters.

Joshua Stern will discuss some of the systemic obstacles facing grassroots civil society organizations, and the impact that web technology is having in developing communities across East Africa. Stern co-founded Envaya whose mission is to build and deploy a software platform that provides “the last mile” of connection between grassroots activists and the larger development sector. Built to be easy-to-use and optimized to work in challenging, developing-world environments, Envaya's online and mobile tools empower community organizations to stake out an online presence, connect and coordinate with each other, and directly engage the international development sector. The tools encourage collaboration and transparency, inspire activism and civil society engagement, and increase the efficiency of established programs. In just over one year, the Envaya platform has become the largest online network of civil society organizations in East Africa.

Joshua Stern (Stanford '06) is the Executive Director of Envaya. After graduating, Joshua served in the Peace Corps in Tanzania. He founded Envaya in 2010 with Jesse Young (Stanford '06, MS '07) and Tanzanian civil society leader Radhina Kipozi. Joshua splits his time between Africa and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Contact: Kathleen Barcos at kbarcos@stanford.edu

Talk on Control System Security, Wed right after class

2011-10-10T14:58:00.000-07:00

Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium

4:15PM, Wednesday, Oct 12, 2011
Skilling Auditorium, Stanford Campus http://ee380.stanford.edu

Control System Cyber Security - State of the State

Joe Weiss
Applied Control Solutions, LLC

About the talk:Industrial control systems are used in electric power, water, pipelines, etc. These systems were designed for performance and safety considerations, not security. Traditional IT security technologies, policies, and testing may not apply to these systems. Moreover, there is currently no university with an interdisciplinary program accross multiple engineering disciplines to address control system cyber security. There have already been more than 200 actual control system cyber incidents to date, though most have not been identified as cyber. In the US alone, there have been 4 control system cyber incidents that have killed people, 3 major cyber-related electric outages, 2 nuclear plants shut down from full power, etc. With the advent of Stuxnet, cyber has been introduced as an offensive weapon. The purpose of this presentation is to provide a state-of-the-state view of control system cyber security.
Resources:
Book: Joe Weiss, Protecting Industrial Control Systems from Electrionic Threats
CNN video: Idaho 'ground zero' in cyber-terror war
Slides:
There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.
About the speaker:

Joseph Weiss is an industry expert on control systems and electronic security of control systems, with more than 35 years of experience in the energy industry. Mr. Weiss spent more than 14 years at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) where he led a variety of programs including the Nuclear Plant Instrumentation and Diagnostics Program, the Fossil Plant Instrumentation & Controls Program, the Y2K Embedded Systems Program and, the cyber security for digital control systems.

Artificial Intelligence - a legal perspective - Panel at Stanford

2011-10-09T14:12:00.000-07:00

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6732

Stanford Law School, Thursday October 26 6-9 pm
RSVP for this free event: http://bit.ly/cis-ai-rsvpEveryone is invited.

In the summer of 1956, several key figures in what would become known as the field of "artificial intelligence" met at Dartmouth College to brainstorm about the future of the synthetic mind. Artificial intelligence, broadly defined, has since become a part of everyday life. Although we are still waiting on promises of "strong AI" capable of approximating human thought, the widespread use of artificial intelligence has the potential to reshape medicine, finance, war, and other important aspects of society. The Center for Internet and Society, along with the the Stanford Law and Technology Association (SLATA), and the Stanford Technology Law Review (STLR) bring together four scholars who have begun to examine the near term, short term, and long term ramifications of artificial intelligence for law and society. This panel follows up on our Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics panel from November 2009.

Virtual realities

2011-10-05T17:58:00.000-07:00

After today's visit I thought you might be interested in a couple of virtual spaces that are quite different, from the early 90s. Brenda Laurel's Placeholder (1992) was a two-person VR with mythological character avatars.

See http://www.tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/Placeholder/Placeholder.html

Char Davies Osmose (1995) was an underwater experience where you navigate by breathing.

http://www.immersence.com/osmose/
for a short video see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlV6pgVJapI

Article on Willow Garage, where we'll visit in November

2011-10-03T12:17:00.000-07:00

Household robots are moving from science fiction to reality

Willow Garage's PR2 robot can fold clothes, set a table and bake cookies. It costs too much and does too little to interest consumers, but researchers are rapidly developing technology to make it more useful and less expensive.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-robots-20110928,0,2682137.story

Getting started - To the new students

2011-09-23T13:18:00.001-07:00

By now, you're getting used to Stanford and finding out a lot of new things. Welcome!

On Monday classes start, and we'll meet at 3:15 in Gates 100. The course website has now been updated for this year and you can get a preview at http://hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs047n/
All of the readings will be available on line.

I'm really looking forward to the course. See you next week!
--t

Welcome to 2011

2011-09-02T16:04:00.000-07:00

I am again teaching the Stanford Freshman Seminar on The Internet and the Open Society. This blog is for general discussion, updates, etc. about the course. Each student in the course will also be creating a blog on a particular topic, and I'll put links to those in here.
Looking forward to a great quarter.
--t

Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages

2009-11-24T09:10:00.000-08:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125893981183759969.html

Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.

...

"People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen," says Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied Wikipedia and other large online community projects. "Yet the more people you throw at a problem, the more difficulty you are going to have with coordinating those people. It's too many cooks in the kitchen."

Are you becoming the older generation?

2009-11-18T10:29:00.001-08:00

"When you start getting friended by your grandmother, I think that's when it starts to lose its cool," said Huw Griffiths, evp and global director of marketing accountability and research.

http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/media/e3i15e6314384dccfe3fbf6715a445e0e2b

Is Facebook Getting Uncool for 18-24s?

Media agencies debate the consequences as usage among younger consumers appears to slip

On Journalism

2009-11-18T10:24:00.000-08:00

YouTube Direct Provides 'Citizen Journalist' Clearinghouse

YouTube Direct provides a forum for budding amateur journalists and broadcast news media to connect. Surrendering news to ‘citizen journalists’ may be expedite the demise of journalism as we know it.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/182488/youtube_direct_provides_citizen_journalist_clearinghouse.html

Interesting example of crowdsourcing and government transparency

2009-10-30T15:55:00.001-07:00

From today's Huffington Post:

White House Releases Visitors List; Help Us Look Through It

n a Friday afternoon news dump, the Obama administration has released a list of nearly 500 visitors to the White House. Among the names: a host of prominent politicians who swung by to meet with the president and/or his aides....The new data is below. A challenge to the readers: sort through it and tell us what, if anything, is interesting that you find.

We're All Fact-Checkers Now

2009-10-30T11:43:00.000-07:00

Interesting post from Esther Dyson,

We're All Fact-Checkers Now

...

As the journalistic priesthood erodes and everyone can become a citizen reporter or commentator, regulating or training all would-be journalists is not the answer. In line with the bottom-up, do-it-yourself ethos of the Internet, where people book their own flights, publish their own photos, and sell their own second-hand goods, it should be the users' responsibility to do their own fact-checking.

...

Beth Noveck contact info

2009-10-26T17:03:00.001-07:00

Beth Simone Noveck

United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer

Director, White House Open Government Initiative

Office of Science and Technology Policy

Executive Office of the President

opengov@ostp.gov

Privacy in Britain

2009-10-24T10:53:00.000-07:00

From today's New York Times:

Constant Surveillance Rankles Britons

...A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore.

But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same.

Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood school, local officials here began a covert surveillance operation. They obtained her telephone billing records. And for more than three weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole education department secretly followed her around, noting on a secret-agent-style log the movements of the “female and three children” and the “target vehicle” (that would be Ms. Paton, her daughters and their car).

...

Internet Backbone for East Africa

2009-10-13T15:04:00.001-07:00

In planning for our Spring course on Designing Liberation Technologies I ran across information on a newly built backbone structure for Africa. The description mentions a number of things we talked about in class. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEACOM_(cable_system)

Sweden joins the bad luck club

2009-10-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

To emphasize the Internet issues we talked about in class yesterday, the following news item appeared this morning:

Sweden’s Internet broken by DNS mistake

Posted in Main on October 13th, 2009 by Pingdom

Last night, a routine maintenance of Sweden’s top-level domain .se went seriously wrong, introducing an error that made DNS lookups for all .se domain names start failing. The entire Swedish Internet effectively stopped working at this point. Swedish (.se) websites could not be reached, email to Swedish domain names stopped working, and for many these problems persist still.

According to sources we have inside the Swedish web hosting industry, the .se zone, the central record for the .se top-level domain, broke at ~~21:19~~ 21:45 local time and was not returned to normal until 22:43 local time.

However, since DNS lookups are cached externally by Internet service providers (ISPs) and web hosting companies, the problems remained even after that. It wasn’t until around 23:30 local time last night that the major Swedish ISPs had flushed their own DNS caches, meaning that they cleared away the broken results so that new DNS lookups could start working properly again. If they had not done this the problem would have remained for a full 24 hours.

There are still a large number of smaller ISPs that have not yet fixed the problem. It is also likely that ISPs outside of Sweden is not aware of the incident, so the effects of the problem may remain there as well.

For more detail see http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/10/13/sweden’s-internet-broken-by-dns-mistake/

2009-10-10T15:40:00.001-07:00

Thanks again to Jonathan Zittrain for a great session. You can read the rest of his book at http://futureoftheinternet.org/download and see his blog, at http://futureoftheinternet.org/blog

Identity on the Internet

2009-10-06T13:35:00.000-07:00

Great discussion yesterday. In the context of anonymous identities on the Internet I mentioned the famous dog:

Also mentioned that Reeves and Nass had done a lot of work on how people respond to computers as though they were responding to people. Their book is The Media Equation

You can Google them to find out more, and also check for the courses they teach in the Communication dept.

New Speaker

2009-10-03T10:24:00.000-07:00

I was at a meeting yesterday and one of the people there was Cory Ondrejka, one of the creators of Second Life. (see profile and you can Google for more). Since we were talking about Second Life this week I thought it would be great to have him in class. He couldn't come Monday so I invited him for Wednesday and we'll shuffle some of the readings around. Like Bing, he's both an entrepreneur and a thoughtful observer of the technology.

2009-08-10T14:52:00.000-07:00

This is Terry Winograd's blog for the Stanford Freshman Seminar on the Internet and Open Society, Fall 2009. The students will each have a blog, posting about a topic on which they will be come individual experts. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with.