Debate on Section 230 and Internet Intermediaries

Posted on by
1

ArsTechnica has posted my debate with Adam Thierer, the eloquent director of the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Center for Digital Media Freedom.  I read more or less everything Adam writes and by and large agree with it all.  Here, we disagree on whether it’s time to rethink the scope of Section 230 immunity in certain cases.  Urs Gasser and I argue, in Born Digital, that there are cases where Section 230’s scope is too broad from the perspective of child safety in particular.  I realize that I break ranks with many in the Internet policy community in making this argument.  I think it’s an important debate for us to have as a society.

Spamdog Millionaire: Social Media Spam and Internet Filtering

Posted on by
1

Our friends at StyleFeeder have offered up some great data about the geographic sources of social media spam on their tech blog.  The background: Philip Jacob, the founder of StyleFeeder, is a long-time anti-spam advocate, while also being a careful guy who doesn’t want to ruin the Net in the process of fighting nuisance online.  At StyleFeeder, they are seeing a growing number of posts about illegal movie downloads, pharaceuticals, adn the usual spammy subjects.  Along with his colleagues, he’s developed a tool called Assassin to identify the source of the posts and get rid of them on the StyleFeeder site.  In the process, they’ve noticed that the vast majority comes from India (with the US next, Pakistan as a distant third, and China weighing in over 5% in fourth place).

The rest of the post examines a familiar ONI-style question: wouldn’t it be much easier for a US-based site simply to filter out users from India, Pakistan, and China, for instance?  After all, it’s a for-profit company, with no revenues being generated through these markets.  Much to their credit, Phil and co. are taking a different path.

Phil’s post ends with a great research question: “How widespread is this kind of blocking by startups who are susceptible to the armies of computer-literate Indian social media spammers? I’m wondering what other small companies do when faced with annoying users in countries that aren’t part explicitly part of their target markets. If our experience is representative, this challenge may be more widespread than most people realize.”  In the ONI world, we study state-mandated Internet filtering.  It’s a dream to be able to figure out how frequently corporate actors in one part of the world are filtering content in another on their own, for simple business reasons.

(My disclosures: I hold equity in Stylefeeder and am an unpaid member of its board of advisors.)

Peter Suber at Harvard University on the Future of Open Access

Posted on by

Peter Suber is addressing a standing-room-only house today at Harvard, in a session jointly hosted by the Berkman Center, the Office for Scholarly Communications, and the Harvard Law School Library. He insisted on a question-mark at the end of the talk’s title, so his topic is “The Future of Open Access?”, not “The Future of Open Access.”

The premise of Peter’s talk is his assessment of a series of cross-over points which move us from a proprietary world for scholarly information to an open world. There are different cross-over points for information found in books, journals, funder policies, peer-reviewed manuscripts, author understanding of the issues involved in open access, and university policies.

Peter mentioned, in passing, that the OA movement has no equivalent to the Free Software Foundation in the context of free/libre/open source software. This comment gives rise to a series of interesting side-issues. Who are the members of the OA movement? How are they (we?) organized? What is the trajectory of the movement? Is there anything that the OA movement’s leadership or followership could learn from other similar movements as to effective modes of advocacy?

It’s also interesting to think about the many disciplines involved in moving the world toward open access. Many specific fields are implicated: computer science, economics, law, and library sciences, among many others. FWIW, the crowd here at Harvard Hall is dominated by librarians, so far as I can tell, which I think is great.

Stay tuned for the archived version of the talk, to be posted soon at the Berkman Center’s site.

The Future of Open Access

Posted on by
Reply

It’s our great pleasure at the Harvard Law School Library and the Berkman Center, along with the university’s Office of Scholarly Communications, to host Peter Suber for a public talk next week on the Future of Open Access. It will take place on Thursday, February 26 at 12:30 p.m. We’ve had a tremendous response from the Harvard community, but also across Boston, for this talk. Please do let us know — at rsvp AT cyber dot law dot harvard dot edu — if you plan to attend.

Welcome back, Urs Gasser!

Posted on by
Reply

It is our great good fortune at the Berkman Center that Urs Gasser has returned, on a full-time basis, to be our new executive director. I can’t think of anyone better positioned to move us forward in our second decade. Urs has been a longtime fellow of the Center, but most recently has been living back home in Switzerland, where he has been a professor at the University of St. Gallen, one of our key research partners. Urs is committed to the highest standards in scholarship; the expansion of our collective minds through serious, collective inquiry; and to having fun in the process. In addition to his leadership and teaching skills, Urs is a wildly productive legal scholar in his own right, and no doubt will continue to contribute directly to what we know about the law as it relates to information and networks around the world. He has been a terrific co-author to work with on projects such as Born Digital, the book we wrote together over the past few years.

One of the great things about Urs taking this job is that he is focused on international collaboration and on interdisciplinary scholarship. These are important goals for the Center in its second decade. Urs has a particularly strong skill set in both of these regards and a commitment to proving that scholarship can be stronger when we work together across geographic and disciplinary boundaries.

And personally, it’s just a joy to have him back with us full-time.

For more: listen to a podcast from Radio Berkman this week on Urs’s plans as executive director, as interviewed by David Weinberger. David has his own blogpost on Urs’s appointment here.

Quite a Saturday morning at StopBadware

Posted on by
Reply

This morning, it seems that many (all?) Google search results led to a warning page meant to be associated with sites that have malware on them.  We at StopBadware are partners with Google, among others, working hard to fight malicious code together.  Our role, as researchers, is to help set the criteria for what constitutes a site with Badware; we keep a public, online clearinghouse of sites that may harm one’s computer; and we run a review process to get sites off that list when they are clean.  There have been a series of blog posts about this strange, short occurence this morning which include misinformation about what happened on the Google side. 

What happened? Google’s VP Marissa Meyer wrote: “Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message ‘This site may harm your computer’ if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.“We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.”

Nothing like it has happened in the first three years or so of the StopBadware project’s existence.  A few minutes after this large number of warnings appeared, the StopBadware server crashed under the load of people looking for more information about what had taken place.  Everything seems back to normal now. 

 

Here is the official Google statement about what happened, from which the quote above is pulled.  (Changes from the original post appear in blue in the Google post.)

Media Re:Public Final Report Released

Posted on by
Reply

Today, we at the Berkman Center have released a new report on the changes in the news media landscape.  For several years, we have been puzzling over the relationship between online and legacy media, dating back to the first BloggerCons; Dave Winer’s setting up a blog server on the Harvard campus; the first series of podcasts; our Thursday blog group; the Bloggers Journalism and Credibility conference, at which Jay Rosen proclaimed that “bloggers v. journalism is over”; the rise of Global Voices, the Citizens Media Law Project, and so forth.  We release this report today against a much changed backdrop: major news outlets are failing or consolidating; more people than ever are engaged in participatory journalism; and the need for more credible and diverse sources of information — and skills to assess them — continues to be substantial. 

The Media Re:Public report is an update on where things stand, and where they are headed, at a precarious moment in the news and information business.   It takes the form of a primary report, several commentaries by Berkman fellows and friends, and a series of short case studies.  We had lots of help from lots of people, through two conferences, writing and resesarch projects, and commentary on multiple drafts. 

We owe deep thanks, as we so often do, to John Bracken and our friends at the MacArthur Foundation for their support and involvement in this reflective process and work.

As for the findings?  Well, please read it!  At a minimum, there’s the main report (52 pages, with a handy executive summary, by project lead Persephone Miel and Berkman’s research director Rob Faris).  Or Ethan Zuckerman’s inspiring and challenging piece on International News.  Or at the very least watch the teaser video on YouTube.