First, we take Baghdad: Scott Rosenberg on (dis)information

“I have been reading with great interest the recent reports on the front pages of the New York Times and (today) the Wall Street Journal, outlining our government’s plan to invade Iraq in considerable detail.

Presumably there are many people in Iraq, up to and including its dictator, doing the same. It must make for even more interesting reading over there.

Has a war plan ever been quite so brazenly run up the flag pole in full view? What’s really going on here?

There are only a handful of credible scenarios:

(1) This “war plan” is bogus. Our military leaders are planting disinformation in the media. This would be an entirely appropriate tactic on their part; what’s astonishing is that the Pentagon correspondents reporting on the plans do not seem ever to mention the possibility that they are being used.

(2) The “war plan” — which involves a blitzkrieg-like “war of effects” to paralyze the enemy’s command structure with precision-guided attacks — is a deliberate intimidation effort, a chess move on the part of the Bush administration to avoid war entirely by convincing the Iraqis that resistance is futile. In such a scenario, there’s a different kind of disinformation at work — an inflation of the potency of American forces to persuade the enemy to fold. Again, it seems amazing that the reporters who may be serving as a conduit for this propaganda game do not ever raise the possibility that this is their role.

(3) The “war plan” is real, and the administration doesn’t want it revealed, but the Pentagon reporters are just so good at their jobs that they got the story anyway. This is certainly possible, but unlikely, given the extremity and effectiveness of the Bush administration’s press-management techniques.

(4) The “war plan” is real, and it is being intentionally leaked to Pentagon reporters by officials who are so confident of our might and so certain that everything will go as planned that they do not mind letting the enemy in on their playbook. In a way, this is the scariest of the possibilities, because it suggests a troubling level of hubris on the part of our leadership.

Yes, the American military is unmatched in the world today. Yes, we have technology that is several generations ahead of our opponents. But war is hell; the fog of war is real; happenstance and chaos remain powerful players on the battlefield. If the big Iraq attack doesn’t go exactly as planned, this kind of overconfidence may come to look costly and foolish.” [Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment]

Common sense about copyright. Jonathan Zittrain in the Boston Globe

“[O]nce one embraces turning ideas into saleable items, there is no easy end point. One can claim that a songwriter should be paid when her song is broadcast over the radio, and again when the radio is played in a restaurant – and again when the song is sung by a listener to a group of friends.

It was this reasoning that inspired ASCAP to send thousands of letters to summer camps across the country, demanding hundreds of dollars in annual royalties from, among others, Girl Scouts, presumably for songs sung around the campfire. An ASCAP official explained, ”They buy twine and glue for their crafts… they can pay for the music, too.” He was right as a legal matter – indeed, it is against the law to sing ”Happy Birthday” in public without paying a royalty – and disastrously wrong as a practical one….[ More…]

Contested Space — update

Content owners are becoming increasingly aggressive in targeting file-sharers. This report is about an attack on Danish file-sharers, in which they are being sent bills for up to $16,000 by lawyers acting for content owners. And the RIAA has even gone for US Navy cadets, some of whom are now being disciplined for using Navy machines for infringing copyright. But at the same time, students in US universities are finding ways of concealing what they’re up to. The battle continues.

Where Webcams dare to tread

There’s a nesting box on the verandah outside my study, and every year a couple of Blue Tits use it to raise a brood (much to the interest and disgust of our cat, who watches their comings and goings with sinister intent). Last year I thought of installing a webcam in the box, so that we could unobtrusively observe the growth and development of the chicks — but other things intervened and by the time I was in a position to do the installation the nest was already in use. But it made me think about the ways that webcam technology has opened up observational possibilities. Even so, I was taken aback by this report in the “NYT” about Necrocam, a striking new Dutch film in which “a teenager with cancer, tells her friends that upon her death she wants a digital camera with an Internet connection installed in her coffin. Images of her decaying remains will then be transmitted to a Web page for all to see, making her virtually immortal. The friends pledge to install a Webcam in the coffin of the first one to die, and they seal their pact with an oath to the computing world’s highest power: ‘This we swear on Bill Gates’s grave.’

‘Necrocam’ was shown in September by VARA, a public-broadcasting network in the Netherlands. Now, the entertaining and — given its grotesque premise — unexpectedly moving film will have an opportunity to find its natural audience of online viewers. Last week the network put a version of the film with English subtitles on its Web site, at vara.nl/necrocam.”

Throttling Viruses: Restricting propagation to defeat malicious mobile code

Fascinating paper by Matthew Williamson of H-P Labs. Abstract reads:

“Modern computer viruses spread incredibly quickly, far faster than human-mediated responses. This greatly increases the damage that they cause. This paper presents an approach to restricting this high speed propagation automatically. The approach is based on the observation that during virus propagation, an infected machine will connect to as many different machines as fast as possible. An uninfected machine has a different behaviour: connections are made at a lower rate, and are locally correlated (repeat connections to recently accessed machines are likely). This paper describes a simple technique to limit the rate of connections to “new” machines that is remarkably effective at both slowing and halting virus propagation without affecting normal traffic. Results of applying the filter to web browsing data are included. The paper concludes by suggesting an implementation and discussing the potential and limitations of this approach.”

Microsoft losing money! Oh yeah? Pigs also fly in close formation

But wait — News.Com: “Four of Microsoft’s seven business divisions lost money in the most recent quarter, according to financial statements the company filed last week.” This is fascinating stuff — it shows that Microsoft is totally dependent on Windows and Office. All the other stuff they do loses money like it was going out of fashion. No wonder they’re bothered by Linux.

NY Times: entrenched interests fear Wi-Fi may cause retrenching: In a nicely clever piece of reasoning, John Markoff spells out Wi-Fi’s potential to disrupt entrenched telecommunications interests especially as the FCC examines opening up more spectrum to unlicensed or related use. As I have often said, incumbent market interests always get angry when consumers produce a more efficient marketplace. Rather than fight in the market, they encourage regulation or legislation to tip the playing field that’s already heavily tilted their direction.

[80211b News]

WSJ article on weblogs. [Scripting News]

Change Urged in Broadband Policy. A group of technology and media companies argue that the open nature of the Internet will be lost unless the F.C.C. amends its broadband policy.  [New York Times: Technology]

Read it and weep: This morning I went to hear Jin-wook Son, the managing director of the UK office of Korea Telecom, speak about S. Korea’s phenomenal broadband market — it has 10 million b/b subscribers (mostly DSL), around 70 per cent of households, the highest b/b penetration in the world. 55 million Koreans are online. Most Koreans subscribe to the ‘premium’ DSL offering from Korea Telecom, which gives 8 Mbps for… ready?… about 33 $/? a month. Modem rental is an additional 2.50 and the one-off installation cost is ?/$25. Setting aside factors such as very high density housing, which makes getting people wired up easier, he ascribes the fast take-up to huge govt support, a competitive telecoms market (and remember, he is from the incumbent operator!), and lots of content and services. Online gaming is very, very, VERY big in Korea. More on all this during the week. [[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]