The following is based on a comment I made on Digg yesterday. I don’t usually base blog posts so heavily on comments to social networking sites, but in this case I feel the comment on Digg captures my feelings on how many media outlets are damaging the public discourse and democratic process in the United States.
First some background. In a couple of segments on Fox News’s Fox and Friends morning show the hosts attempted to establish Iman Rauf, the leader of the attempt to build the controversial Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, as a terrorist sympathizer by discussing the possible financing of the community center by Middle Eastern figures and groups. The Daily Show quickly took Fox News to task over this by pointing out the logical fallacies Fox and Friends employed in order to convey its message of distrust. I’ve embedded the Daily Show clips in case you haven’t seen them, and they are also linked here: 8/19 segment and 8/23 segment.
This whole controversy centers on Fox News, and the comment below is in response to Fox News’s reporting, but the same comment can apply to any number of liberal and conservative media outlets that attempt to promote a particular ideology instead of simply reporting the facts in an unbiased manner.
The Comment:
The issue isn’t that Fox News is bashing their owner, or even that they are bashing a particular person. It’s that they are making serious accusations and advocating an ostentatious opinion on very flimsy logic that they are touting as full proof. If you are going to claim that somebody is a terrorist you better damn well have solid evidence of such. Showing that a person may have received money from somebody with a funny sounding name is not solid evidence; it’s an organization stretching to reach a conclusion based on the limited information they are willing to share. Stewart is bashing Fox for its poor logic and proving that logic’s fallacy by showing how that logic leads to an unfavorable situation for Fox News.
The other logical fallacy that this ordeal highlights is Fox News’s tendency to paint everything as only black or white, and to use very broad strokes. Fox’s narrative for years has been that someone/thing is either good or evil and that these are mutually exclusive categories. For years Fox has also categorized most Muslims, and virtually all Arabs, as evil while categorizing conservative Americans as good. The problem with this logical framework is that no person, group, or organization is exclusively “good” or “evil.” From the perspective of a given group (Fox News) some individual (Waleed bin Talal) is likely to perform actions that the group supports and that the group opposes. Within Fox’s logic that makes the individual both good and evil, but due to the mutually exclusive nature of the categories an individual can not be both good and evil. It’s a contradiction and it shows the fundamental flaw of trying to forever brand a person or group based on one action or political stance.
Furthermore, it shows the flaw of trying to paint things in such extreme lights. Very, very few people are truly good or evil. The vast majority of people are simply acting in self interest. Sometimes these interests conflict with other people. That doesn’t mean one person is inherently good while the other is evil. It also doesn’t mean that the two people have to hate each other or forever be in conflict. If the two people remain calm they can probably work out a mutually beneficial solution. But when the two people each have their own cheer squads making inflammatory statements, hatred results and solutions can’t be created.
I’ve been wanting to do this for quite a while, but this week I finally got around to overhauling The Web’s Bushiest Site. I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress and got a spiffy and elegant new theme.
Before the migration the blog had been running on Joomla, which seems to be a capable foundation for a multipurpose site. However, after 15 months I grew tired of its weaknesses as a blog. Joomla forces the use of a two tiered category hierarchy for posts which I found to be almost entirely useless and frustrating. It also has a terrible preview function. I could never know what a post would look like until it was actually live, which meant I often had to publish a post and then edit it several times to fix formatting issues. Finally, Joomla doesn’t include comment support out of the box and none of the comment plugins available have a good mix of ease of use, ease of administration, and good visual design.
As for WordPress, the platform is meant to only do one thing and it does that one thing really well. In my opinion the themes and plugins available for WordPress are much nicer for blogging than those available for Joomla. The category hierarchy is way more flexible, and the admin interface is much cleaner and easier to use than Joomla’s. Finally, comment support out of the box is great.
Comment on your love/hate of the new blog; I always appreciate feedback.
I’ve seen dozens of articles telling me how Google and Verizon have changed the Internet forever. As it’s the popular thing to do this week, here is my take on the proposal:
What it has done
Not much. Despite what some of the headlines say, the Google/Verizon proposal is not the law of the land nor of the Internet. It isn’t even an agreement of action between the two companies. It is simply a policy proposal that they think Congress should consider. Google and Verizon have stated their opinion, which is something that everybody can do.
Pros
Adds to the Discussion – At least someone’s talking.
Puts Pressure on Congress – This proposal is targeted at Congress and its begging for legislative resolution that should have occurred years ago.
Non-Discrimination – Under the proposal an ISP will not have the ability to discriminate among legal content on the Internet.
Transparency – ISPs have to make it plainly clear to consumers what network practices are occurring that may alter their Internet experience. w00t for informing consumers.
Regular Federal Reports – The Internet is vital economic, social, and democratic infrastructure; I agree that the GAO and FCC should be regularly reporting to the government on Internet use and what needs to be improved.
Cons
A Neutered FCC – Not surprisingly, the industry proposal presents a more hands off FCC. In cases of consumer protection the FCC is asked to defer to independent Internet governance groups and is striped of rule making power. And, as discussed below, the proposal does not allow the FCC to oversee certain Internet markets.
Wireless – Google and Verizon are asking for an unregulated wireless market based on the fact that wireless is more competitive than wired. This is true, but a market of four providers is not going to provide the choice that is required for an unregulated market to serve consumer needs. Also, there is no guarantee that the market may not coalesce in the future and raise the need for government oversight.
“Additional Online Services” – Defined vaguely enough that it could be almost anything, the proposal allows for a new and fairly unregulated market of Internet service. While the services have to differ from broadband access, they can access Internet content and applications, which begs the question of how these services would actually differ from regular broadband. This is the provision that has drawn the most criticism as a threat to net neutrality, and there may be some merit to that criticism. However, it isn’t really clear what Google and Verizon are intending by this clause, so for now the only thing I’ll say is that it is poorly worded and really needs to be clarified.
“Legal” Language – Insisting that non-discrimination is limited to legal content and legal applications raises the questions of how ISPs will determine the legality of content (deep packet inspection?) or what ISPs can do with content or applications of unknown legality, such as encrypted BitTorrent traffic. Also, this potentially places ISPs in the position of enforcing law, which I find deeply troubling because private companies are not accountable to citizens or the courts in the way that the police are and they may hold conflicts of interest by enforcing law in an area in which they competitively seek business.
Infrastructure – Aside from the Universal Service Fund and Intercarrier Compensation, the proposal doesn’t really address a plan for improving broadband infrastructure. The net-neutrality debate is linked with broadband deployment and improvement, so I would really like to see a goal or plan for infrastructure included in any net-neutrality proposal. Also, I think including a plan would alleviate the concern among some that the proposed Additional Services market will lead ISPs to not invest in the open Internet.
Google’s Neutrality Sell Out?
This proposal seems to favor ISPs, which leads me to believe that either Verizon had the upper hand in writing this proposal or Google doesn’t care about the debate because they have the resources to succeed in any future Internet. In either case, what is clear is that consumers should not be relying on a content provider to protect their rights on the Internet.
So that’s what I think, but honestly you don’t need to waste your time reading mine or anybody else’s thoughts on the proposal. You can read the actual, plain-English, two page proposal here. I encourage you to read it and to tell your Congresspeople what you think of it.
This is making the rounds on the net, and it reminded me how fascinated I am by the graffiti on bathroom stalls. The mix of intelligent humor and toilets really cracks me up.
There are a lot of aspects of the recent Facebook privacy debacle that evoke hostility towards the website. A shift in privacy context and the assumed consent of users likely the top list for most. However, I believe that Mark Zuckerberg and company are doing a lot to take would could have been a heated public debate about the nature of privacy online and turning it into a national flamewar. What are they doing exactly? They are acting like condescending assholes.
A while back, when I was a Berkman intern, fellow Berktern Brian Young and I spent an afternoon modifying a Python script called BTE (Body Text Extraction). The script is an automated way to pull out the principal portion of text (the body) of an HTML document, and works by finding the portion of the document that has the highest ratio of text to tags. At the time I was interested in using BTE in a web application to do real time body extraction, which meant I needed something that was fast. BTE wasn’t quite fast enough, so Brian and I made it faster (for the nerdy among you, we improved BTE from O(n3) to O(n2)).
So why am I posting this now? Well Brian and I contacted BTE’s author, Aidan Finn, regarding the changes, and Aidan has recently incorporated our changes into the official code.
Big thanks go to Brian. I couldn’t have done the coding myself (I didn’t and still don’t know Python,) and while at the end we weren’t sure who did what, I’m sure Brian’s 1337 computer hacking skills were far greater than mine.
More information on BTE can be found here, and the code can be found at GitHub.
For most of the 90s and the early 2000s the home PC served as the foundation for an incredibly generative computing platform. By generative I mean that this PC platform allowed for relatively easy innovation and modification. Pretty much anybody was able to install whatever software was available to them, either at a store or on the Internet, in order to modify their PC foundation to meet their needs and desires. At the same time, because the PC platform was so open, a great number of people were able to create programs to meet their needs and desires, and with the advent of the Internet these programs could easily be distributed to users all over the world who wished to install them.
During this period a set of social, economic, and technical norms were established regarding a user’s ability to modify and define their personal computing platform. In general, users either purchased a finished piece of software or they acquired free (as in beer) software in order to modify the functionality of the PC hardware that they owned. The user knew what features he/she was acquiring and therefore, in theory, knew exactly what features his/her computing platform had and what activities occurred on it. Further, mostly due to the technical limitations of the time (especially the limitations of the Internet) as well as the ownership that users had over their computing platform, the norm of the time was that any changes that the software producer wanted to make to the software required some conscious act of permission on the part of the user, such as purchasing and installing an upgrade. Therefore, the user was fully aware of any changes that were occurring to his/her computing platform.
This paradigm is currently shifting. Beginning in the mid to late years of the first decade of the 21st century, the Internet became a feasible foundation for a cloud based computing platform. While the cloud has not yet replaced the PC as the favorite computing platform of society, users are recognizing the benefits of cloud based services, especially the link to a ubiquitously available network, and making use of cloud based services. As the cloud becomes a new foundation for a generative computing platform the question has been raised: so what? Read the rest of this entry »
Why do people jailbreak their Apple products? Sarah Perez asked this question at ReadWriteWeb and has concluded that people want better applications for their Apple products. Since the new iPad either addresses or nullifies many of the complaints posed by consumers, Perez then argues that there are far fewer (legitimate) reasons to jailbreak the iPad. As the argument goes, if you want some aspect of your iPad experience improved then talk to Apple, they will take care of your desires.
Perez’s argument is about the end product, the features and quality of the computer platform that I will hold in my hands. What is missing, however, is a consideration for the process. How will that end product get made? Who will make it? What role will I, as a consumer, have in the production process? While analysis continues to revolve around the quality and features of the software on the iPad, the issue that really motivates jailbreaking is the desire to change the process that leads to software on the iPad. Autonomy is the real motivation. Consumers remember having the power to define their computing platform and there are many who are not ready to cede that power to some licensors in Cupertino.
Last semester the students in the Humphrey Institute’s Science and State class were assigned to write a pseudo letter to the editor on a current issue in science or technology from the perspective of a sitting policy maker. I choose to put on my Senator cap and write about the ridiculousness of damages being awarded in piracy trails, with a particular emphasis on the trial of Minnesota resident Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Given the recent activity that has occurred in that case (Ars coverage here,) I figured now is as good a time as any to throw it up on the Internet.
