Interesting example of crowdsourcing and government transparency

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.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/30/white-house-releases-visi_n_340578.html

We're All Fact-Checkers Now

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.

...

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/esther-dyson/were-all-fact-checkers-no_b_328390.html

Beth Noveck contact info

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

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

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

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/

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

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

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.