Monthly Archives: November 2005

Rebuilding Iraq

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From today’s New York Times…

Last week Robert Stein Jr. was charged in federal court with a slew of crimes allegedly committed while he was a financial officer for the American occupation authority in Iraq. The affidavit in the case says that Mr. Stein accepted over $200,000 a month to steer contracts to an American businessman whose companies often did poor work and sometimes did no work at all.

The case is a painful reminder of the absolute dearth of planning for rebuilding Iraq after the war. According to reporting by James Glanz in The Times, Mr. Stein was convicted of a fraud-related felony in 1996 and also fired from a job in 2002 for falsifying payroll records and invoices. The American government then sent him to help oversee construction projects in Hilla and the Shiite holy city of Karbala, with $82 million in taxpayer funds.

There must be accountability higher up for this clearly bad judgment. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning. Officials at the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction say they are pursuing 50 more cases and have already referred at least six more to prosecutors.

The importance of Search

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From the latest survey of the Pew Internet and American Life project…

Search engines have become an increasingly important part of the online experience of American internet users. The most recent findings from Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and consumer behavior trends from the comScore Media Metrix consumer panel show that about 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day.

These results from September 2005 represent a sharp increase from mid-2004. Pew Internet Project data from June 2004 show that use of search engines on a typical day has risen from 30% to 41% of the internet-using population, which itself has grown in the past year. This means that the number of those using search engines on an average day jumped from roughly 38 million in June 2004 to about 59 million in September 2005 – an increase of about 55%. comScore data, which are derived from a different methodology, show that from September 2004 to September 2005 the average daily use of search engines jumped from 49.3 million users to 60.7 million users – an increase of 23%.

This means that the use of search engines is edging up on email as a primary internet activity on any given day. The Pew Internet Project data show that on a typical day, email use is still the top internet activity. On any given day, about 52% of American internet users are sending and receiving email, up from 45% in June of 2004.

Richard Stallman detained by UN Security

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Wonderful story on Bruce Perens’s Blog…

Richard Stallman, Mark Shuttleworth, and I are in Tunis, Tunisia for the UN World Summit on the information society. We’ve had an interesting day :-)

Richard is opposed to RF ID, because of the many privacy violations that are possible. It’s a real problem, and one worth lobbying about. At the 2003 WSIS in Geneva, there was objection to the RF ID cards that were used, resulting in a promise that they would not be used in 2005. That promise, it turns out, was not kept. In addition, Richard was given a hastily-produced ID with a visible RF ID strip. Mine was made on a longer schedule, it seems, and had an RF ID strip that wasn’t visible. I knew it was there because they clearly had us put our cards to a reader at the entrance gate.

You can’t give Richard a visible RF ID strip without expecting him to protest. Richard acquired an entire roll of aluminum foil and wore his foil-shielded pass prominently. He willingly unwrapped it to go through any of the visible check-points, he simply objected to the potential that people might be reading the RF ID without his knowledge and tracking him around the grounds. This, again, is a legitimate gripe, handled with Richard’s usual highly-visible, guile-less and absolutely un-subtle style of non-violent protest.

During his keynote speech at our panel today, Richard gave a moment’s talk about the RF ID issue, and passed his roll of aluminum foil around the room for others to use. A number of people in the overcrowded-to-the-max standing-room-only meeting room obligingly shielded their own passes. UN Security was in the room, not only to protect us but because of the crowd issue, and was bound to notice. Richard and I delivered our keynotes, followed by shorter talks by the rest of the panel and then open discussion.

At the end of the panel, I went out in the hall to be interviewed by various press entities including Al Jazeera. Another item for my CIA dossier, but I’m sure my association with Richard would have caused more notes to be taken today. I was busy with the press for two solid hours. So, I didn’t see what happened with Richard. But a whole lot of the people in the room did, and stayed with Richard for the entire process.

Apparently, UN Security would not allow Richard to leave the room.

Richard and I are actually here representing the United Nations, and are carrying UN Development Program IDs. I would otherwise merit a “business entity” ID, but I guess because of our keynote-speaker status our UN Development Program hosts ordered us better treatment. Richard and I also have some limited immunity as delegates to this conference. So, this was no doubt an interesting problem for the security folks, who had no real idea who Richard was except that he was someone reasonably distinguished who was visibly violating their security measure….

[From Bruce’s entry for November 18. Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.]

Who hosted the WSIS Summit?

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Why, Tunisia, a country not noted for its commitment to freedom of expression, or indeed of anything else. In the course of his amiable overview of the Summit, Bill Thompson notes:

Hosting WSIS has not made Tunisia freer or more open. In fact, the endorsement we have provided by being here may even help sustain the government of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.

But in the long-term, if every time we talk about Tunisia we remind people that it hosted a summit dedicated to free expression, and point out its failure to live up to its international obligation, then it may help those who want to reform Tunisian politics.

Hmmm… And pigs might also fly. Bill posted (on Flickr) some vivid photographs of the demonstration by Reporters without Frontiers of a world map with lots of blacked-out areas representing countries whose ruling regimes censor the Net.

More cynical views of WSIS were posted by Kieren McCarthy, who noted how the Swiss Prime Minister was ‘hounded’ by Tunisian media for calling a spade a spade:

Mr Schmid stunned delegates to the Summit when he said it was not acceptable for the UN to “continue to include among its members those states which imprison citizens for the sole reason that they have criticised their government or their authorities on the internet or in the press.”

He then mentioned Tunisia in particular: “For myself, it goes without question that here in Tunis, within its walls and without, anyone can discuss quite freely. For us, it is one of the conditions sine qua non for the success of this international conference.”

Quote of the day…

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… comes from a nice NYT profile of Lynne Truss, author of Eats, shoots and leaves, the best-selling book on the importance of the apostrophe.

Asked if he had any insight into the book’s popularity, Andrew Franklin, whose tiny company, Profile Books, published it in Britain, appeared to give the question extended thought. “I have a theory,” he finally said. “It’s very sophisticated. My theory is that it sold well because lots of people bought it.”

No one ‘owns’ the internet

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This morning’s Observer column about WSIS.

The governance row was so acrimonious not just because of resentment of America’s allegedly dominant role, but also because many regimes throughout the world cannot abide the notion that something as powerful and pervasive as the net should not be controlled.

What these folks do not grasp is that lack of control is the whole point of the net. It was designed from the ground up to be a self-organising, permissive system. A central feature of its architecture is that there would be no ‘owner’, no gatekeeper. If your network’s computers spoke the agreed technical lingo, you could hook up to the net, with no questions asked.

In other words, lack of control is not – as Iran, China and a host of other repressive UN members think – a bug, it’s a feature. And it’s what has enabled the explosive, disruptive growth that has made it such a transformative force in the world. In these circumstances, entrusting responsibility for the net to an organisation such as the UN would be as irresponsible as giving a clock to a monkey…

Late subbing at the Economist

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The one periodical I try to read every week is The Economist. Although I often disagree with its editorial line, it’s very well written, has terrific journalists and a very wide range of interests. It is also the best-subbed periodical I know — which is why it was so strange to come on a lexicographical error on page 84 of the issue of November 12th. (The first time I’ve detected one in years of reading.) Here’s the relevant extract from the online edition:

Trade associations representing publishers and authors are suing Google, claiming that the very act of scanning books without permission is an illegal reproduction. The case promises to keep the lawyers busy. Google seems to have begun back-pedalling, noting that the books it is currently scanning are ones that are out of copyright. It is even working on a model of pay-per-view charging, according to one publishing executive.

Nothing wrong there, you say, and you are right. But in the print edition “back-pedalling” is “back-peddling”. Only a small thing, I know, but we pedants notice these things. And even Homer nodded occasionally.

Professor Negroponte’s Laptop

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Andy Carvin has done an interesting — and revealing — interview with the CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project. She’s refreshingly open and honest about the difficulties and possibilities of the project. Confirms my hunch that it will have as much impact on the West as it has on the developing world because it will effectively commoditise computing. And it runs Linux!