The cluelessness of Andy Burnham

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Nice reproof by Charles Arthur of the Culture Secretary’s potty proposals for ‘regulating’ web content.

The cluelessness of so many of these ideas hasn't been lost on all ministers, however. Tom Watson, of the Cabinet Office, is inviting views about Burnham's comments on his personal blog. As he points out,

Internet regulation is not in my policy area but I promise you I will forward your views to Andy Burnham and Lord Carter.

One would have to say that the comments aren't really running in Burnham's favour so far, but possibly the Daily Mail's commenters haven't been alerted about the blogpost's existence. Except even they don't think it's workable.

I think, Mr Burnham, that if even the Daily Mail's commenters don't think it's worth trying to do, then it's not worth trying to do.

(We should point out, by the way, that Watson emphatically does get the net. Perhaps Andy Burnham should drop by for a quick briefing.)

What Should I Read Next?

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Interesting idea — What Should I Read Next?. You type in the title and author of a volume that you’ve finished reading and it comes up with suggestions. It’s based, I’d guess, on a collaborative filtering algorithm. It’ll get better with more signed-up users, but it wasn’t very impressive on first attempts. For example, it’d never heard of J.K. Galbraith’s The Great Crash, and produced weird follow-ups for Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.

The worst photograph ever made?

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Well, this is a pretty strong contender. And it’s by Annie Leibovitz too. It’s crass in the way that Woolworth prints used to be. (Remember Woolworths? Neatly organised kitsch — as Nye Bevan put it. He famously observed that listening to a speech by Neville Chamberlain was “like paying a visit to Woolworth’s: everything in its place and nothing above sixpence”.)

Minimising the risk of credit/debit card fraud

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Here’s a sobering way to start the new year — precautions you can/should take to minimise the risk of having your cards cloned or your bank account ripped off. By Saar Drinen of the Cambridge Computer Lab’s Security Group.

People often ask me what can they do to prevent themselves from being victims of card fraud when they pay with their cards at shops or use them in ATMs for on-line card fraud tips see e-victims.org, for example. My short answer is usually “not much, except checking your statements and reporting anomalies to the bank”. This post is the longer answer — little practical things, some a bit over the top, I admit — that cardholders can do to decrease the risk of falling victim to card fraud. Some of these will only apply to UK issued cards, some to all smartcards, and the rest applies to all types of cards.

Sobering because I’ve realised that I don’t take many of the precautions recommended.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for the link.

So what is ‘appropriate’?

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Thoughtful post by David Robinson on Freedom to Tinker.

A couple of weeks ago, Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica, Ben Smith at Politico and others noted a disturbing pattern on the incoming Obama administration's Change.gov website: polite but pointed user-submitted questions about the Blagojevich scandal and other potentially uncomfortable topics were being flagged as "inappropriate" by other visitors to the site.

In less than a week, more than a million votes-for-particular-questions were cast. The transition team closed submissions and posted answers to the five most popular questions. The usefulness and interest of these answers was sharply limited: They reiterated some of the key talking points and platform language of Obama's campaign without providing any new information. The transition site is now hosting a second round of this process.

It shouldn't surprise us that there are, among the Presdient-elect's many supporters, some who would rather protect their man from inconvenient questions. And for all the enthusiastic talk about wide-open debate, a crowdsourced system that lets anyone flag an item as inappropriate can give these few a perverse kind of veto over the discussion.

If the site's operators recognize this kind of deliberative narrowing as a problem, there are ways to deal with it…

There’s an interesting parallel here between the mindset of Obama supporters and that of ANC supporters when Mandela came to power in South Africa. I knew several South African journalists who had been passionate opponents of apartheid and who found it very difficult to report frankly on the deficiencies of the new black government run by people who they had hither admired and supported.

Lessig’s move

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From Jonathan Zittrain, relaying a message from Larry Lessig’s blog, which was down (maybe still is).

With the help of Joe Trippi, I launched Change Congress, which was designed to focus these issues in the context of American politics.

Throughout this process, however, I have felt that the work would require something more. That the project I had described was bigger than a project that I, one academic, could pursue effectively. This wasn’t an issue that would be fixed with a book. Or even with five books. It is instead a problem that required a new focus by many people, across disciplines, learning or relearning something important about how trust was built.

About six months ago, I was asked to consider locating this research at a very well established ethics center at Harvard University. Launched more than two decades ago, the Safra Center was first committed to building a program on ethics that would inspire similar programs at universities across the country. But the suggestion was made that after more than two decades of enormous success, it may make sense for the Center to consider focusing at least part of its work on a single problem. No one was certain this made sense, but I was asked to sketch a proposal that wouldn’t necessarily displace the current work of the Center, but which would become a primary focus of the Center, and complement its mission.

I did that, mapping a five year project that would draw together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to focus on this increasingly important problem of improper dependence. Harvard liked the proposal. In November, the Provost of Harvard University invited me to become the director of the Safra Center. Last week, I accepted the offer. In the summer, I will begin an appointment at the Harvard Law School, while directing the Safra Center.

Mark Anderson’s predictions for 2009

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I like and admire Mark, and wish I was as sure of anything as he is about everything. But he was the first person I heard predicting (over two years ago now) the havoc that the sub-prime mortgage business would wreak. At the time I was embarrassed to have to admit that I didn;t know what a sub-prime mortgage was.

Jobs, health and the future of Apple

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The latest piece of second-hand gossip about Steve Jobs’s health from “a previously reliable source” (who, of course, cannot be named) provoked a (temporary) drop of 4 per cent in Apple’s share price. Even as I write, business reporters are frantically tapping out speculative articles on the subject whether Apple could survive the demise of its charismatic CEO.

There’s something deeply neurotic, nay pathetic, about this. It’s the journalistic equivalent of that mysterious phenomenon, “stock market sentiment”, which is just a fancy way of describing the way a flock of sheep acts when one of its members fancies that she might have seen a wolf.

That’s not to deny that people and personalities matter. Steve Jobs brought Apple back from the dead: he took a company that had become incoherent and gave it a sharp focus. He then helped it to re-invent itself. If he hadn’t returned from NeXT and Pixar when he did, Apple would now be just a fond memory, or perhaps just another trophy acquisition of HP like Compaq and DeC.

Similarly, without Bill Gates in the 1980s Microsoft would never have become the ferocious, paranoid, single-minded corporation it was. It became, for a time, literally a corporate extension of its co-founder’s weird personality. And indeed that fact nearly caused its break-up in the Netscape anti-trust case, from whose consequences it was saved only by a fortuitous change in the US Administration.

But that was then and this is now. If Steve Jobs were to die or to stand down because of ill-health, Apple would undoubtedly be affected (and its share price would undoubtedly fluctuate). But it’s a different outfit now from the demoralised one that Steve rescued. It’s a much more mature company — indeed, like Microsoft, it’s approaching corporate middle age. It more or less owns the online music business. It’s on its way to doing the same in video downloads. And it is causing havoc in the mobile phone business which — if the industry isn’t careful — it will also come to dominate.

So while Jobs would be a big loss to Apple — and an even bigger loss to the feature writers and columnists who feast on the Reality Distortion Field that surrounds him — I’ve no doubt that the company would weather the storm, just as Microsoft survived the departure of His Billness to the charity business.

Huntington’s clash

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Samuel Huntingdon, the guy who most annoyed the triumphalist US neo-cons, died on Christmas Eve. The Economist‘s Lexington column had an astute appreciation of him.

Samuel Huntington thought that all this [‘end of history’ stuff] was bunk. In “The Clash of Civilisations?” he presented a darker view. He argued that the old ideological divisions of the Cold War would be replaced not by universal harmony but by even older cultural divisions. The world was deeply divided between different civilisations. And far from being drawn together by globalisation, these different cultures were being drawn into conflict.

Huntington added another barb to his argument by suggesting that Western civilisation was in relative decline: the American power-mongers who thought that they were the architects of a new world order were more likely to find themselves the victims of cultural forces that they did not even know existed. The future was being forged in the mosques of Tehran and the planning commissions of Beijing rather than the cafés of Harvard Square. His original 1993 article, in Foreign Affairs, was translated into 26 languages and expanded into a best-selling book.

The “Clash of Civilisations?” was only the most famous of numerous exercises in goring sacred cows. In “The Third Wave: Democratisation in the Late 20th Century” (1991), he argued that democratisation might have more to do with the Second Vatican Council, which had unleashed a wave of democratisation across the Catholic world, than with the spread of free-markets. In “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity” (2004) he challenged the reigning orthodoxy of multiculturalism, pointing out that American civilisation is the product of Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, and warning that the huge influx of Latinos threatened to unmoor it from its roots.