Regulating the global village

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Timothy Garton Ash has a thoughtful column about the wider background to the Google-China spat. And he comes to a gloomy — but I think accurate — conclusion.

In thinking about the way information is supplied to us, we have, it seems to me, four possible approaches: (1) the state I live in decides what I can and cannot see, and that’s OK; (2) the big companies I rely on (Google, Yahoo, Baidu, Microsoft, Apple, China Mobile) select what I see, and that’s OK; (3) I want to be free to see anything I like. Uncensored news from everywhere, all of world literature, manifestos of every party and movement, jihadist propaganda, bomb-making instructions, intimate details of other people’s private lives, child pornography – all should be freely available. Then it’s up to me to decide what I’ll look at (the radical libertarian option); (4) everyone should be free to see everything, except for that limited set of things which clear, explicit global rules specify should not be available. The job of states, companies and netizens is then to enforce those international norms.

At the moment, we have a combination of (1) and (2). Developments in technology will give us more of (3), whether we like it or not. (4) currently looks like a pipe dream. Nonetheless, it is to (4) that we should aspire. It’s in the infosphere that the world is coming closest, fastest, to a global village, so it’s the infosphere that most urgently needs a global debate about the village rules. If we don’t have that debate, and have it soon, then what you get to see on your screen will be the result of a power struggle between the old-fashioned power of the state in which you happen to be, the new-style power of the giant information companies, the insurgent force of novel information technologies, and the ingenuity of individual netizens. That’s a likely outcome, but not the best.

LATER: Clay Shirky has interesting things to say about this in the current Guardian media podcast.

Congress in a Wordle

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From the Pew Research Center.

Shortly before the House vote, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to provide the one word that best describes their current impressions of Congress. The results were overwhelmingly negative. Of those offering a response, 86% said something negative while just 4% gave a positive one-word description. The three most frequently offered terms were dysfunctional (21 people offered this), corrupt (20) and some version of selfish (19). Many of the words reflected perceptions that Congress has been unable or unwilling to enact legislation (inept, confusing, gridlock, etc.).

The Icarus Project

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This is such a lovely geeky idea, beautifully executed.

The Icarus project is a home brew project to send a camera high into the stratosphere to take pictures of the Earth from near space. The camera is enclosed in a flight box and attached to a helium weather balloon which lifts the camera to an altitude of approximately 35,000 meters above sea level. The camera is controlled by a small micro computer which takes pictures at timed intervals in various directions. Other sensors to measure temperature, barometric pressure and altitude are incorporated into the flight box.

Photographs are great too.

The art of the ligature

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The Museum of Modern Art has decided that the ligature chosen by Ray Tomlinson, the engineer who invented email, is Art.

The appropriation and reuse of a pre-existing, even ancient symbol—a symbol already available on the keyboard yet vastly underutilized, a ligature meant to resolve a functional issue (excessively long and convoluted programming language) brought on by a revolutionary technological innovation (the Internet)—is by all means an act of design of extraordinary elegance and economy. Without any need to redesign keyboards or discard old ones, Tomlinson gave the @ symbol a completely new function that is nonetheless in keeping with its origins, with its penchant for building relationships between entities and establishing links based on objective and measurable rules—a characteristic echoed by the function @ now embodies in computer programming language. Tomlinson then sent an email about the @ sign and how it should be used in the future. He therefore consciously, and from the very start, established new rules and a new meaning for this symbol…

“Hoon: v. trans. To offer oneself for hire; to propose oneself for Chairman”

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Watching the wonderful Dispatches/Sunday Times sting on TV last night, I was suddenly struck by the thought: imagine what would happen to the journalists who pulled off the coup if the sting had been conducted in Putin’s Russia.

It’s difficult to decide which of the victims was the most nauseating. The most pathetic was the fat Tory (about whom we’ve heard surprising little since) who told the interviewer (“in confidence”, of course) that he expected to be going to the Lords in due course. Not any more, he won’t.

But the most nauseating was surely the spectacle of Geoff Hoon proposing himself for the chairmanship of the fake’ Advisory Board.

Verily, a new verb has entered the language: “to hoon”.

Later: Tweet from Alan Woodley tells me that “Hoon in Oz slang=hooligan; hoodlum; loudmouth; fast, reckless driver ; pimp; bludger; despicable person.” Hmmm….

For ‘attack’ read ‘protect’

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Fascinating piece in the NYTimes about US reaction to a Chinese academic paper on cybersecurity.

It came as a surprise this month to Wang Jianwei, a graduate engineering student in Liaoning, China, that he had been described as a potential cyberwarrior before the United States Congress.

Larry M. Wortzel, a military strategist and China specialist, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 10 that it should be concerned because “Chinese researchers at the Institute of Systems Engineering of Dalian University of Technology published a paper on how to attack a small U.S. power grid sub-network in a way that would cause a cascading failure of the entire U.S.”

When reached by telephone, Mr. Wang said he and his professor had indeed published “Cascade-Based Attack Vulnerability on the U.S. Power Grid” in an international journal called Safety Science last spring. But Mr. Wang said he had simply been trying to find ways to enhance the stability of power grids by exploring potential vulnerabilities.

“We usually say ‘attack’ so you can see what would happen,” he said. “My emphasis is on how you can protect this. My goal is to find a solution to make the network safer and better protected.” And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang’s work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid.

The difference between Mr. Wang’s explanation and Mr. Wortzel’s conclusion is of more than academic interest. It shows that in an atmosphere already charged with hostility between the United States and China over cybersecurity issues, including large-scale attacks on computer networks, even a misunderstanding has the potential to escalate tension and set off an overreaction…