are the massive cuts to UC and the cuts to our gorgeously intellectual library.
For this assignment I decided to browse http://personals.nerve.com/.
How do these services support/fail to support dating and/or friendship?
Nerve definitely seems configured to support dating... and maybe friendship. Each little people-profile has a ton of information (actuall, too much information, I think) about things that people consider important when looking for someone to date. In the end though, I think all of these types of sites are oriented mainly towards two different types of users: voyeurs and swingers. That is, I can imagine people surf these sites briefly now and then to see who is new that shows up in the listings (the voyeur). As well, I can imagine the heavy users of these sites that actually make face-to-face connections don't do so for the more traditional kinds of relationships... probably mostly for casual sex and something to do with their boring-as-hell evenings.
However, I do know of quite a few people that have gone into one of these sites determined to find someone special... and they have. I wonder how this type of user is facilitated... that is one who has a lot of activity right after registration and then systematically dates a list of people they find looking for Mr./Ms. Perfect.
Analyze the service with particular attention to the analysis of ‘profiles’ using Goffman’s concept of the presentation of self. How well does this analysis derived from face- to-face encounters apply to online encounters? Can it be modified, or are these fundamentally different kinds of encounters?
I really thinkt that these are fundamentally different types of encounters... it's amazing how much a face-to-face interaction can change what "self" the person on the other side of the equation is either articulating (on-line) or presenting (face-to-face). It's the small details that are lost... while most of the profile data is big things or "show-stoppers" (like sexual orientation). For example, I was just talking to someone who dated another person on-line who found their date to have a "really annoying" way of talking despite seeming so stellar on paper.
One thing that would be interesting—but nearly impossible like so much interesting stuff—would be to have some sort of "Veracity Indicator". I'm not sure how such a thing would work but the idea would be: take the articulated version of ones identity and figure out how much that matches other people's estimations of this person's identity. It could also be called a bullshit-o-meter... as the more you fudged your profile, the higher the bullshit meter would be.
Analyze the service considering the issue of deception and identity.
I guess I did a little bit of that in the last point... the gist is that most people put forth only what they want to put forth and even when they do admit to a flaw, it's likely to be more of badge of honor to them or something they take pride in.
The really interesting material is the small things... the things that you don't talk about with people to their face, or that you don't talk about even with people that know the person out of fear that it might get back to them and hurt their feelings or put you in an awkward social position. Some of this kind of detail is either very sensitive to most people or they don't realize it. But they, just as easily as the big stuff, can be "show-stoppers".
For example, I'll use myself: One thing I've recently realized about myself that people don't tell me is that I tend to talk down to people. That is, when I know something well or think I know something well, I can be quite patronizing. I don't like this... I don't even notice it! If you know me and have read this far, call me on it!
Queer Eye for the Country Guy
Have today's C&W stars been consulting with the Fab Five?
BY JOHN NOVA LOMAX
A few years ago, many people were shocked when Judas Priest lead singer Rob Halford came out of the closet. They shouldn't have been -- after all, Halford had long been roaring on stage on a motorcycle looking like the biker in the Village People, or one of the leather-clad macho men painted on the exterior of Mary's. But then you couldn't blame people for being surprised -- in the world of heavy metal, the fact that Halford was openly flaunting a gay stereotype flew right under the radar, and in an ironic way, the hypermacho image Halford was peddling jibed as well with metal as it did in bars like Ripcord. Hell, some people were even surprised to learn that Freddy Mercury was gay, despite his image and the fact that his band was named Queen.
This article's not about rock or metal, though. It's about another macho genre -- namely, country music. Neither is it an article about outing people. We don't know if any of the people featured here are gay, nor are we making any allegations about their sexual preference -- as far as we know, k.d. lang (in town this week for a performance with the Houston Symphony) is the only gay musician with a country connection, though Ty Herndon was caught in a compromising George Michael-like situation in a Fort Worth men's room a few years back. We're just examining images here, and lately it seems as if many of today's top country artists have been spending some quality time with the Fab Five.
Wow... we've come such a long way (my first paper was on looking through the haze of Titan to see clouds):
A "Dragon" on the Surface of Titan
VLT Looks through Narrow Atmospheric Window and Produces Most Detailed Images Yet
New images of unsurpassed clarity have been obtained with the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) of formations on the surface of Titan, the largest moon in the Saturnian system. [...]
Don't ask why I'm up this late... some of you know. Well, here's some of the things you notice at 3am.
First, from Scientific American:
Patents on Ice
Antarctica as a last frontier for bioprospectors--and their intellectual property
One or two blockbuster drugs derived from Antarctic bacteria could spur a veritable stampede. A United Nations study released in February cautioned that the push to exploit extremophiles requires new rules to protect the continent's fragile ecosystem. Regulation of these activities presents special challenges. The Antarctic Treaty System pledges to protect the continent's environment but does not address bioprospecting directly, which could encourage more of these endeavors. Moreover, existing international policies on bioprospecting are of limited use. For instance, although the Convention on Biological Diversity has established a framework for allowing access to biological resources, it assumes that individual states in fact have sovereignty over these resources, a presumption that does not hold for Antarctica.
and... (warning: New York Times article... if you will want this later, print to PDF.)
Rosie Issue Fades Away, Copyright Issue Rises
Last month, Playboy Enterprises pressed criminal charges against Prisma Presse, Gruner & Jahr's French unit and the owner of Voici, a French women's weekly that printed small photographs of Playboy pages that featured the actresses Shannen Doherty and Daryl Hannah. Mr. Ganz, left, was in court in France to face charges that the magazine had engaged in "counterfeiting by publication or reproduction."
Publishing companies get into legal squabbles all the time, but there is a European twist in this instance. Under French law, breaking copyright can be a criminal offense and rights holders are sometimes allowed to choose between the civil system and the penal system to seek redress.
I freakin' love GMail... it's all I've wanted in an email tool. Some observations that I'll add to as my use goes on:
GMail seems to accept anti-GMail sponsored links... so even they have a sense of humor!
One thing that I mentioned at the GMail plenary at CFP 2004 was that most of the privacy concerns with GMail center around people who haven't consented to the GMail privacy policy having their emails scanned (then there's also the ubiquitous storage issue).
That is, if you send an email to me at joehall at GMail you haven't specifically consented to the GMail privacy policy, but your writings will still be scanned and indexed by Google. The answer that I proposed at CFP was to allow email senders to include an "X-dont-scan-me:" field in email headers that Google would recognize as being the email equivalent of a robots.txt file. That is, if this header field was present, Google would make a good faith effort not to scan the given email. This has various drawbacks and such, but one big plus is that it can be used by all sorts of applications that scan email text for one reason or another.
Conversations are neat. In GMail, responses to emails are all clustered in one place so that you can find all the emails in a given string of thought. However, if anyone changes the subject line of an email, the conversation is broken and I haven't found a way to add an email to an already-started conversation.
The ads aren't that bad. In fact, I don't notice them that much... and the ads already in emails sent in Yahoo groups and the like tend to set off more of the GMail ads than anything specifically said in an email. (for example, I thought it would be spooky to be having a conversation about abortion and then to get served up ads about RU-486)
The interface is quite usable and it's great to be able to effectively save emails in multiple folders... using the GMail labels feature, you tag emails with labels and then you can sort via labels. The trick here is that you can add multiple labels to a given email.
So my county, Alameda County, is facing the prospect of having their newly purchased electronic voting machines decertified for use in the November presidential election (Alameda doesn't use the TSx, note). That's profound. What are we supposed to do? Can we get the old equipment back? No, we can't. Older voting systems used in previous elections cannot be re-certified... and even if they did, the older systems would completely disenfranchise the same people they had in the past (across racial and disabled constituents). So, it seems, with the following editorial the San Jose Merc is calling for a herclean effort to get a system like that of the OVC up and running in time for November.
I can't emphasize enough how crazy that would be... to go from essentially ground up: from a demonstration system to a deployed, certified and fully functional voting system would be crazy. But, I'm telling you, I would volunteer for the effort and we could make it happen. It could be the State's voting system... developed by the citizens themselves. Cool!
DIEBOLD CAUSED ELECTION HAVOC IN MARCH
Mercury News Editorial
The public apology by the president of Diebold Election Systems isn't enough. His company's promises and excuses for failure ring hollow.
In misleading state election officials, the touch-screen voting company destroyed its credibility and damaged voter confidence in elections. It used uncertified software; equipment malfunctions created havoc in March's elections in several counties.
Diebold's conduct justifies the immediate decertification of the latest electronic voting system used in San Diego, Solano, Kern and San Joaquin counties. That's what an eight-person panel of election officials unanimously recommended Thursday that Secretary of State Kevin Shelley do.
The penalty would be unprecedented. And it would leave county registrars and supervisors scrambling for another voting system six months before a presidential election.
But it also would force voting machine companies to listen to an unambiguous message they've ignored: The state demands more secure and accurate voting systems. Follow state regulations. Don't jerk officials around by forcing last-minute, untested software fixes on them. Replace your proprietary code with open-source software that voters can trust. Treat the development of a paper version of the touch-screen ballot -- a voter-verified paper audit -- with the speed of the Manhattan Project, in time for November.
Some touch-screen critics, including credible computer scientists, are calling for an even tougher response. They want the decertification of all touch-screen machines, including the new $20 million system that Santa Clara County bought from Sequoia Voting Systems. State Sens. Ross Johnson and Don Perata are pushing a bill to do that.
But that would be unwise. The benefits of touch-screen voting -- ease of use by the handicapped, multi-language capability and versatility -- are undeniable. Shoving all touch-screen machines aside now would be expensive and chaotic. County registrars would revolt; companies would sue.
Shelley has forcefully taken on the voting companies. Diebold has all but mocked him. It's time to rattle some cages.
Brian Carver and I took it upon ourselves to record some audio and video of this year's Pioneer Awards put on by the EFF at the Chabot Space and Science Center. Both of us missed all or part of Brad Templeton's truly hillarious and quite brilliant introduction. We did manage to get the remarks made by the three award recipients:
An mp3 (recorded at 64 kbps) of the entire night (17.8 MB):
http://cfp2004.org/blogs/files/eff_pioneer_awards_2004.mp3
Here are some AVI's:
Kim Alexander (23.9 MB)
David Dill (1 of 2) (24.4 MB)
David Dill (2 of 2) (10.5 MB)
Avi Rubin (1 of 2) (24.0 MB)
Avi Rubin (2 of 2) (23.2 MB)
Avi Rubin (3 of 2) (19.5 MB)
Here are some parting shots from CFP 2004:
The Gmail Plenary at CFP. Nicole Wong, the Chief Compliance Officer for Google, was a great sport to show up amid the recent controversy. It was also great to get David Link from Sen. Figueroa's office. Note, thanks to Ms. Wong, I know have a Gmail account... email joehall at GMail plus the dot com part to reach me. From left to right: Chris Hoofnagle, Electronic Privacy Information Center; Sunil Paul, Brightmail; Sonia Arrison, Pacific Research Institute; Nicole Wong, Senior Compliance Counsel for Google; Ari Schwartz, Center for Democracy & Technology; J.C. Cannon, Microsoft; David Link, Technology Counsel, Cal. Sen. Liz Figueroa; Amalie Weber, UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law.
The ChillingEffects concurrent session. From left to right: Agnes Li, J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School; Jennifer M. Urban, Visiting Acting Clinical Professor, University of California Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall); Wendy Seltzer, Intellectual Property Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Stanford professor and Verified Voting founder David Dill kicks things off in the mock election. The idea was to mimic having two states (California and Florida) where only one state had an verifiable audit trail.
Recenly tenured professor from Johns Hopkins University Avi Rubin votes. I didn't get a good shot to see if he voted for himself or not (he was one of the two candidates for "CFPer of the Year").
EFF staff technologist Seth Schoen votes.
Verified Voting director Will Doherty recording the vote.
EFF chairman Brad Templeton prepares to vote.
The election attracted a lot of attention from people around the Claremont... inlcuding that of Ping Yee (center).
It also attracted the CBS evening news and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.
Douglas Kellner, Commissioner, New York City Board of Elections (center left) and Aaron Swartz prepare to vote.
Avi Rubin and Barbara Simons of USACM.
Deirdre Mulligan, newly elected "CFPer of the Year (for California)", with Lorrie Cranor's baby girl.
SIMS students Parker Thompson, Dave Schlossberg and Me (Joseph Lorenzo Halll).
The ceiling of the Empire Ballroom at the Claremont was covered with mirrors. The other face looking up is that of Aaron Perzanowski (Boalt).
Lorrie Cranor is the chair.
Showed a cooking pot and then a laptop. He said, what's the difference between these two? Ping yells: "The pot doesn't crash!"
David then showed something called the Therac 25. A medical device that killed quite a few people before it was discontinued. The problem was that they moved from the older system to the Therac 25 very quickly and that there was not sufficient testing. People died in the quick adoption.
You can't recount votes unless they're on paper. NYC asked for the first design of an electronic voting machine. Mr. Kellner ended up showing that how ever many safegaurds you insert into the system, you still need an official record in order to be able to verify the vote and reconcile an audit trail.
NYC ended up stopping the electronic voting machine procurement as it was to error-prone and not a valid representation of the electorate's votes.
Tremendous progress can be made by speaking out... the computer professionals have done a good job.... NYC will demand an paper-based audit trail.
We are still calling for the de-certification of all machines that do not produce a paper record. Yesterday was a great day as the TSx was recommended for decertification.
Here's notes from the case Kim made to SoS Shelley yesterday about decertification of all electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper-based audit trail:
There were wide-spread problems with electronic voting machines in the March 2 election. There were smart card encoder problems in Alameda and San Diego Counties. In Orange County the wrong ballot was presented to voters. There were problems getting the optical scan ballots recorded. In Napa county the Sequoia machines didn't record votes because they couldn't recognize the ink used to record votes.
They produced results that cannot be verified. (Kim walked us through the life of an electronic ballot). Each of these steps much be glitch-free and perfectly programmed. Any errors are difficult to detect and it would be impossible to figure what the correct vote would have been.
This all erodes public confidence in the legitimacy of state and federal elections.
It's bad enough that we use any software given the poor state of software regulation... but given what we've seen, it's also irresponsible and dangerous.
A government can only be legitimate when the process is transparent and verifiable.
Whatever the problems are, paper is not the answer.
Every election that has been manipulated has been done so with paper. Any time a human being has custody over the ballots, bad things an happen.
There has never been a proven case where electronic elections have been manipulated. There are two cases: the equipment is garbage or elections are stolen maliciously. Adding a paper trail actually increases the likelihood that a machine won't boot in the morning.
"I view the problem as an engineering problem. Specify the properties of a system that you want, we test to those criteria, we certify the machine."
If a vendor could produce a machine that is certifiable, I would recommend that we let it go. We need to test the things. No testing mechanism will uncover all possible errors.
The election system is much broader than just what happens on election day. There are many more opportunities to disenfranchise voters. There are many layers of checks and balances that exist in this process.
I hear this argument all the time: you can't disprove that you don't know what you don't know. It is intellectually dishonest to claim these systems are insecure, because it's never been proven.
I have a vested interest in making sure that there is an audit trail. "The VVPAT and other audit trails are needed. A poorly concoted version of such a thing is not desirable."
He's a former ACLU counsel. He teaches civil rights.
There's something else that he cares about besides this: equality. Something that is especially important in the rights to vote. This is sacred.
The proposal to require a VVPAT (which he calls a CPR (contemporaneous paper record)) advances the right to vote. It will certainly deny equality.
There are three dimension to this debate:
What kinds of voting rights do people have?
Accuracy: Many people's votes are not counted. Paper-based systems loose thousands to hundreds of thousands of votes.
Racial disparagement: Electronic voting machines help eliminate racial gaps in counted ballots.
Disability rights: People need to be able to vote unassisted.
Anti-DRE folks make four mistakes:
(I'm going to stop here)
--- dream.sims.berkeley.edu ping statistics ---
465 packets transmitted, 352 packets received, 24% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 7.425/28.703/429.003 ms
Here are more pictures from CFP:
The Trusted Computing plenary. (from left to right: Seth Schoen, Staff Technologist, EFF; David Safford, IBM; Danny Weitzner, W3C and Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT (Moderator); Geoffrey Strongin, Platform Security Architect, AMD). Yes, that is John Gilmore in the foreground.
The "Open Source, Open Society" plenary. (Kenneth Neil Cukier, Fellow, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (Co-moderator); Eric Makuli Osiakwan, Association of African Internet Service Provider Associations (http://www.afrispa.org/); Tom Kalil, Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology for UC Berkeley; Bernard Benhamou, Director of Forecasting and Internet governance, E-Government Development Agency, Office of the Prime Minister, France; Jennifer M. Urban, Visiting Acting Clinical Professor, University of California Berkeley School of Law (Co-moderator); Jason Matusow, Microsoft; Tony Stanco, E-Government.)
The "The Next Drug War: Possession Statutes Target Technology" concurrent session. (from left to right: Christian Genetski, Partner, Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, Anti-Piracy Counsel for DirecTV; Jason Schultz, EFF; Fred von Lohmann, EFF; Albert Zakarian, Esquire, DTVDefense.com; Robert S. Apgood, Attorney at Law, AvantLaw PLLC). Yes, that is Dave Schlossberg's hair to the left and Parker Thompson's hair to the right.
Robert S. Apgood, modeling his gorgeous DeCSS tie.
Here I'll keep running notes of the Plenary 6 "Open Source, Open Society".
The Panelists are: Jennifer Urban co-moderator, Boalt Hall, Kenneth Neil Cukier co-moderator, Fellow, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; Tony Stanco, E-Government; Bernard Benhamou, Director of Forecasting and Internet governance, E-Government Development Agency, Office of the Prime Minister, France; Jason Matusow, Microsoft; Tom Kalil, Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology for UC Berkeley)
(Tony Stanco could not attend)
e-Government and open software in French government.
When public authorities use open software it is used as a "main tool" for software diversity.
Previously, all French government software was produced by one vendor.
This poses problems financially and for interoperability with citizens.
When IBM made mainframes, they could only compete there... when people can create their own software, they can compete in many different arenas (operating systems, etc.)
Why is it important to have an action that balances all of this? Technology is the main link between the government, citizens and industry. Need a climate of trust... if there is no trust, we create a danger of mistrust which is not acceptable for business processes.
It is very important to create this atmosphere of trust in government computing. What was said yesterday about electronic voting is especially important to have transparency; to know what the systems are doing. These activities need to be controlled by democratic activity: open source software is a movement in that direction.
We are beginning to create a large movement in Europe to migrate operating software and desktop systems to many different options. (Mr. Matusow frowned here).
We want systems to be based on open software. It will not ban proprietary software. The co-existence of the two types of software is crucial for not only economical reasons but for democratic reasons. This is becoming a political issue... these are not just technological issues. It is international and intranational.
Shared source (talk title)
It is comforting to see that Ken drove as far to the right as possible.
Microsoft is understanding open source as a development model and a business model.
First, there is a difference between product competition and the role of software in standardization.
Windows and Linux compete... so does Linux and BSD.
Software production itself has a very complicated history. There is no correct method for producing software. Interaction of multiple models is best for good quality software.
As the role of linux has grown... the models of non-commercial and commercial-ization of open source software has changed.
Vendors are especially good at testing and verifying software quality and usability.
Most Shared Source programs are released under BSD-style licenses.
At the end of the day, the primary driver is value. Is the software going to deliver the value that is wanted by the user.
"And now for something completely different!"
Not going to be talking about what usually gets talked about.
A few premises:
There are some applications that have high social return on investment and low private return on investment.
Either not provided at all;
or the cost to provide is very high.
We should experiment with promoting creation.
Example: reading software. Software that helps young students learn how to read. Why isn't this happening? This market is not attractive... lots of schools, not much money spent.
What would be the social ROI?
There are fewer age-appropriate books per household in inner-city neighborhoods as compared to affluent neighborhoods. Reading software won't solve all these problems... but will move us in the right direction.
Other examples: software for human rights organizations, software the thwarts state-sponsored surveilance, K-12 math and science education, software for adult literacy and GED education.
How to support? Traditional: grants for development. Could be more active: awards for certain deliverables, guaranteed purchase for software that meets the specs. (could be tied to open source license)
Public investment would not be stranded. High-quality, low-cost promotes public policy.
Q (Ken): To Eric, explain what the FOSS Africa is and what we're missing?
The FOS Foundation for Africa founded two years. We noticed that there was a lot of development in Africa. Our strategy is to try and create a demand on the supply-side of the equation. There are many Africa-specifc problems. The other side of the question is to try and create a pool of developers.
There is an OS in swahili. We cannot pay for large costs of software. Can we create a feasible solution.
Q (Ken to Tom): From government, working on tech. policy under the rubric of economic policy. You had many interests. I'm wondering, if you were to advise the next president on whether or not the US government should adopt OS software? What would you say?
There ought to be a broad consensus that their should be the possibility to compete. The more interesting question is are there situations in which there needs to be OS software. Voting seems to be a obvious example.
The second part is, does the government have an obligation to request communication in one, open format?
Third, if there is a division of the government that has needs that can't be fulfilled by vendors should they look to OS?
Finally, researchers have a mandate to communicate their results... should there be encouragement to license OS to increase the diffusion of their results?
Bernard: Also, we have to prepare for the next evolution that will not only be open software, but open hardware. We will have open hardware development communities. There will be many more chip producers with open platforms. We need to prepare for a wider experience in technology hardware.
Jason M.: A couple clarifications: Transparency doesn't equate to modification rights. We wouldn't want to see republican and democratic development squabbles. Government, indiviiduals and industry is seeking transparency.
There is a role of open standards is to create a mechanism to increase accesibility to communication. That doesn't dictate the use of systems that write these formats.
On research maximization... very often, when governments produce research, absolutely an open source license would be appropriate.
Q (Jennifer): Could you follow up on this and comment on Shared Source?
There is no one way to release software. Governments need to understand what they mean by open source.
Straw poll: Should we require that Government use open source software? (It was not a majority saying yes)
Q (Peter Swire): Dept. of Commerce has a unique perspective. There is a tempation there to assume that the US is an exporter of software. If there was a push in negotiations to require proprietary software to increase revenue what would you say?
(I'm going to have to stop here... my hands hurt.)
Here's some pics from CFP 2004:
The Datamining Panel (from left to right: Lara Flint, Center for Democracy and Technology; Stewart Baker, Steptoe & Johnson LLP (and former counsel at National Security Administration); Doug Tygar, Professor, University of California, Berkeley; Jeff Jonas, SRD; Peter Swire, Professor of Law, Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University).
Doug Tygar, a professor of mine and CFP panelist for the datamining panel here at CFP 2004, just completed a call to arms with respect to privacy research. He mentioned that at the IEEE security and privacy conference, security submissions outnumber privacy submissions 10 to 1. He then mentioned that there is much research to be done in privacy research.
Another place I see this kind of a call to arms is in electronic voting.
Both these areas share one major problem: It is hard to convince funding organizations like the NSF to fund this research because it is considered applied research instead of basic research. Applied research should be funded by industry, they say. The way I see the voting people solving this problem is through framing... that is, voting combines anonymity, auditiability, veracity and auditability. It's basically the hardest computer security problem out there.
Is there a similar framing that can be done with privacy research? I think there is and that sensor network policy/privacy is the area to start... now we just need to distill something out of that that will be digestible by funding organizations.
Google has to remove some search results from its service because of legal obligations under the DMCA (like section 512). Google, in an attempt to be transparent, adds a few lines to the bottom of search results saying as much.
For example, search for "content on their sites. Whether it's product information". At the bottom of the page is the following phrase:
In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results.
A sharp member of the audience asked, "Why can't this notice be where the removed link would have appeared in the search results instead of the bottom of the page where I don't see it?" The Google Rep. (Andrew McLaughlin), said that sounded reasonable but that he wasn't sure what would have to be done on the engineering side to make this happen.
A not-so-smart member of the audience (me) then said, "Something that wouldn't require any effort on the part of your engineering staff would be to put these notices at the top of the page." Word.
So, I just got out of the concurrent session entitled, "Gatekeepers of the Web: The Hidden Power of Search Engine Technology" here at CFP 2004. One thing that was mentioned quite a bit was the process of "Google-bombing". (or "search-engine spamming" in a world where search services are competitive)
One question I would have liked to ask is, "Is their such thing as legitimate google-bombing?" That is, what if I know a page exists, and that it should be the first (or close to first) entry in the search results for a query?
For example, there is a great band from Olympia, Washington called Veronica Lipgloss and the Evil Eyes. If you do a Google search for this phrase (with or without quotes) like the following:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22veronica+lipgloss+and+the+evil+eyes%22
this band's official web site does not appear in the first page of search results (didn't check other pages).
So, how does someone go about correcting this? Well, I introduce legitimate google-bombing:
Veronica Lipgloss and the Evil Eyes
Veronica Lipgloss and the Evil Eyes
Veronica Lipgloss and the Evil Eyes
Veronica Lipgloss and the Evil Eyes
Veronica Lipgloss and the Evil Eyes
UPDATE (): Check the comments for another example of legitimate Google-bombing and Seth F. has just released a report on the JewWatch example.
I've created an OPML file of all the RSS feeds for CFP 2004 blogs. It is here:
http://pobox.com/~joehall/nqb/archives/cfp2004.opml
If you use a newsreader (I like Bloglines), you should be able to easily import these feeds into your reader (you might need to change the file extension to ".xml").
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(I'll have pictures once they make their way through email!)
I spent Tuesday in the full-day workshop at CFP 2004 lead by Barbara Simons entitled, "Privacy and Civil Liberties Issues in Computer Science Research". It was simultaneously a blast and simultaneiously exhausting as we all realized how dark the future of privacy is. Here's a brief recap of the workshop (panelist Terry Winograd of Stanford University didn't present but did chime in quite a bit):
The first speacker was Susan Landau (Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems Inc.) with a talk, "Science -- and Thinking About Ethical Solutions". She spoke about a polish nuclear scientist, Joseph Rotblat who was involved with the development of the atomic bomb during the 1939-1943 period. His goal in the development process was to make sure that the U.S. got the bomb before Germany. When Germany surrendered, he went through quite an ordeal to sever himself from the atomic bomb development. This prompted others members of the development team to question their goal of buliding the bomb.
The discussion after Ms. Landau's talk was quite interesting. It started with a discussion about how the atomic bomb is quite distinct from—a bright-line case—the issues we're dealing with in modern-day technology. That's what makes current ethical dilemas so hard... no one's necessarily going to die. The other part of the discussion centered around what the proper place for ethical education in computer science and engineering curricula. Some pointed out that people like Dave Farber, Terry Winograd, and Prof. Kastenberg (Berkeley) have been teaching well-attended "ethics in copmuter science research" classes for years. Ms. Bajcsy and Barbara Simons pointed out that ethical education should be infused throughout engineering education. I personally feel that a combination of the two is best.
Nest up was Ruzena Bajcsy, the director of CITRIS from University of California, Berkeley who pointed out how difficult it is to get research professors to thing about the privacy implications of their research. A talkative guy from [Crytporights][] named del Tordo asked how hard would it be to require PIs to include a privacy implications statement in their proposals. Ms. Bajcsy seemed to think that this is something that the NSF could do and would be responsive to.
Next was Andrew Grosso Andrew Grosso & Associates. Mr. Grosso told a story of a typical day in the life of a modern American and how much we are tracked. His thesis seemed to be that further regulation of privacy rights other than HIPAA and the Privacy Act wouldn't do much.
Philippe Golle from Xerox Parc described some really interesting research that he and his team at PARC were involved with until the TIA funding was cut by congress. They were looking at a way of making sure that government analysts who don't have a warrant can not compromise an individual's privacy by requesting certain sets of information. That is, no one piece of data can pinpoit an individual but a few certain pieces can. There system (all on paper) would not allow analysts to request certain suites of data that would, in aggregate, pinpoint an individual uniquely. To do this, they would need a warrant. Unfortunately (and fortunately), funding dissappeared.
Marcia Hofmann from EPIC schooled us about CAPPS II, the new system proposed to screen American plane passengers. Two key take aways: 1) CAPSS II has taken 30 months to get 2/9 phases of development complete... at this pace it will be 2014 before it is done although the Transportation Security Administration says it will be "fully operational" (read: death star) in 2004 and; 2) Congress is very skeptical about CAPPS II and is dissapointed that the GAO found that only 1/8 of their concerns were addressed. What was that one concern that was adequatly addressed? They set up an oversight committee.
Finally, David Culler from University of California, Berkeley came to talk about privacy in sensor networks. This was the most scary and the most interesting talk of the day in my opinion. What does privacy mean when the world is blanketed with networked sensors? None of us knew... and there were many smart people in the room. Maybe confinement is the way to go... maybe some basic regulation is the way. It's totally unclear. The one clear thing is that this is set to become a whole new field: Sensor Network Policy.
This is huge. Apparently, during the EFF/Diebold litigation (presumably since that's when Jones Day became Diebold's West Coast legal representation), Diebold was warned by their attorneys that they were violating the law with respect to running uncertified software on electronic voting machines in California. There has got to be some criminal prosecution in the works and I can imagine some sort of refund from the company (I'm trying to get my hands on the Alameda Co. / Diebold procurement contract).
Diebold knew of legal risks
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
Attorneys for Diebold Election Systems Inc. warned in late November that its use of uncertified vote-counting software in Alameda County violated California election law and broke its $12.7 million contract with Alameda County.
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