The Gutnick decision

Thoughtful essay by Glenn Harlan Reynolds of the University of Tennessee on the Australian High Court decision to allow an Australian citizen to sue Dow Jones for defamation — in Victoria (where he lives) rather than in New Jersey (where the Dow Jones servers are located). Reynolds starts with a lovely historical analogy:

“IN the 1950s, before space travel was a reality, scholars worried about whether orbiting the Earth would even be legal. Under the law as it existed at that time, each nation’s sovereignty extended usque ad coelum – literally “to the heavens”.

Each nation’s territory thus consisted of a wedge beginning at the Earth’s core and continuing infinitely upward and outward.

This posed a number of absurdities, but the greatest difficulty was to orbiting spacecraft. Flying over a nation’s territory without permission was illegal, perhaps even an act of war. But although aircraft could change course to avoid passing over countries who desired to bar their way, spacecraft – their orbital paths fixed by the laws of physics – could not. If any country beneath them (which might mean any country in the world, depending on the inclination of their orbit) objected, it didn’t matter that everyone else agreed.

People worried about this at some length, but after the launch of Sputnik the Soviets and the US, soon followed by the other nations of the world, agreed that parochial concerns should not stand in the way of a promised worldwide communications revolution. Spacecraft in orbit were thus regarded as beyond the reach of earthbound law, and subject only to international space law and the law of the launching state, not that of the nations that they happened to pass over. The benefit, of course, was an explosion of satellite-based communications that was a boon for the entire world, and especially for previously isolated nations.

Now another new technology – the internet – faces a similar problem. In the case of Dow Jones and Company v. Gutnick, the High Court of Australia, yesterday ruled that anyone who publishes on the internet should be liable to be sued in any country in which an individual believes that he or she has been defamed by that publication. This is so, even though the High Court admits that, much as spacecraft cannot control their orbits: “The nature of the web makes it impossible to ensure with complete effectiveness the isolation of any geographic area on the Earth’s surface from access to a particular website.”…

More on this here and here.

When all else fails, try Banner Ads

The FBI has decided to put banner ads on Lycos in an attempt to catch one of the most wanted fugitives in the US. Hasn’t anyone told them about the infinitesimal clickthrough rate on ad banners?

A new phenomenon — weblogs by major politicians

My friend and colleague, Gerard de Vries, mentions in an email that two prominent dutch politicians are now running weblogs. And so it proves. Klees de Vries (no relation of Gerard’s) of the PVDA (Dutch Labour party) has one; Gerrit Zalm, of the VVD (Conservative party) runs the other.

This is fascinating, on several levels. For one thing, these are among the most important politicians in Holland and I find it impossible to imagine any comparable British politician being able to do this. For another, although I read Dutch with difficulty (and a lot of help from Gerard over the phone) both seem to be authentic weblogs. Zalm’s in particular has the authentic mix of personal, intellectual, trivial and self-indulgent content that characterises the techie weblogs I usually read (not to mention the one I write!)

Other thoughts: from a cynical point of view, weblogging could be a Very Smart Move for politicians (a) by enabling them to acquire street cred with a generation which thinks of established politicos as Boring and Sad; (b) by enabling them to project an image without having it diffracted through the distorting lens of steam media.

Zalm (a former Finance Minister) seemed such an unlikely Blogger that Dutch journalists began inquiring whether he had a ‘ghost Blogger’ who did it for him. He indignantly produced (and published in GIF form on his Blog) a scribbled note of the previous day’s entries to make the point that while he may not actually type the stuff (that’s done by a secretary), he does compose it.

And it’s working: according to the NRC-Handelsblad (Monday, Dec 2) the Gerrit Zalm weblog attracts between 5000 and 10.000 hits each day. From its inception it’s had 100.000 page-views in total. Not bad, given that Holland is a small country.

Thinks: there’s an interesting career opening for us Bloggers — becoming ghost bloggers to the rich and famous. Bags I do Dubya — unless Michael Moore hasn’t got there first.

US sees Wi-Fi as homeland security risk: Paul Boutin reports from a session at 802.11 Planet on homeland security about the government’s view of wireless networking.

[80211b News]

WiFi hits the big time in the US?
“NYT” story by John Markoff.

“The wireless technology known as WiFi, which allows users of personal and hand-held computers to connect to the Internet at high speed without cables, got a significant stamp of approval today when AT&T, I.B.M. and Intel announced a new company to create a nationwide network….”

What do mathematicians do in their spare time?

Why, work out the optimum pattern for lacing up shoes. “The knotty problem of choosing the optimum way of lacing up shoes has been solved by a new mathematical proof. The criss-cross and straight patterns are strongest, but the bow-tie pattern is the most efficient The criss-cross and straight patterns are strongest, but the bow-tie pattern is the most efficient

There are many millions of different possibilities but, reassuringly, the proof shows that centuries of human trial and error has already selected out the strongest lacing patterns. However, the pattern using the least amount of lace possible, the decorative “bowtie” lacing, is usually only seen in shoe shop displays.

Burkard Polster, of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, used combinatorial mathematics to come up with his proof. This branch of maths is used to solve a huge variety of problems, including resource allocation and finding the best ways to lay chips in a computer.

Formulas describing the physics of pulleys were used to work out how much force is exerted on the sides of a shoe using different lacing techniques. The most widely used “criss-cross” and “straight” lacing patterns were identified as the strongest. ”

What would Dewey do? US Librarians grappling with the Internet

I thought this “NYT” piece would be about classification systems, but in fact it’s about the problems librarians face when people use library computers to view sexually explicit material. Makes you wonder if the ‘shame threshold’ is reducing. I remember once using a computer in a Washington hotel lobby to read my email via a browser, and then looking at the ‘history’ cache of sites explored by previous users of the same machine. Every single site on the list was an ‘adult’ one. What does this tell us about human nature?

Internet filtering in China

Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman have created an intriguing online tool for testing whether a particular URL is being filtered. I’ve tried it and got ‘indeterminate’ results, but they have just released a report after trying 200,000 sites. According to the “NYT” summary, “China has the most extensive Internet censorship in the world, regularly denying local users access to 19,000 Web sites that the government deems threatening, a study by Harvard Law School researchers finds.

The study, which tested access from multiple points in China over six months, found that Beijing blocked thousands of the most popular news, political and religious sites, along with selected entertainment and educational destinations. The researchers said censors sometimes punished people who sought forbidden information by temporarily making it hard for them to gain any access to the Internet.

Defying predictions that the Internet was inherently too diverse and malleable for state control, China has denied a vast majority of its 46 million Internet users access to information that it feels could weaken its authoritarian power. Beijing does so even as it allows Internet use for commercial, cultural, educational and entertainment purposes, which it views as essential in a globalized era…”

The BBC Online take on this is that the Chinese censors seem to be ambivalent about porn (some well-known soft-port sites) are not filtered. But they are, for some reason, very exercised about Slashdot, where the only vice is technolust.

Models and monocultures: a fascinating exchange

Paul Strassman did a lovely, polemical piece for PBS about the risks implicit in a software monoculture (i.e. a world where everybody uses Microsoft software) in which he used analogies like the Irish potato famine to illustrate the point. Microsoft then replied with a thoughtful piece. Both arguments are flawed, but the exchange is instructive and would make excellent material for class discussion.

What people actually use broadband for

The conventional wisdom about the benefits of high-speed internet access has little to do with how people actually use broadband, a report has found.

According to the study, the technology’s often-touted selling points – speed and the capacity to be always on – have little clout with the people that use broadband.

Instead it found that the main advantage for users is that they do not have to worry about the cost of spending too much time online.

The work is part of a long-term project by a think-tank, the Work Foundation, into how people use technologies such as mobile phones and the internet. Bill Thompson has written a perceptive analysis of the study, pointing out that, if it’s correct, then broadband vendors are trying to build a business by offering people things (like massive downloading capacity) that they don’t actually value.