Hawaii Personal Injury Blog - social media

40th Anniversary of the Internet Raises Questions About New Barriers To Its Growth

Wayne Parsons — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 06:50:00 GMT

I wonder if Len Kleinrock has a Blog? His team at UCLA began tests 40 years ago that resulted in the internet.

It all began with a comic book! At the age of 6, Leonard Kleinrock was reading a Superman comic at his apartment in Manhattan, when, in the centerfold, he found plans for building a crystal radio. To do so, he needed his father's used razor blade, a piece of pencil lead, an empty toilet paper roll, and some wire, all of which he had no trouble obtaining. In addition, he needed an earphone which he promptly appropriated from a public telephone booth. The one remaining part was something called a "variable capacitor". For this, he convinced his mother to take him on the subway down to Canal Street, the center for radio electronics. Upon arrival to one of the shops, he boldly walked up to the clerk and proudly asked to purchase a variable capacitor, whereupon the clerk replied with, "what size do you want?". This blew his cover, and he confessed that he not only had no idea what size, but he also had no idea what the part was for in the first place. After explaining why he wanted one, the clerk sold him just what he needed. Kleinrock built the crystal radio and was totally hooked when "free" music came through the earphones - no batteries, no power, all free! An engineer was born.

Social networking didn't exist. Kos was Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga and not even a kid. The founder of the most politically powerful progressive Blog in the country was not born. Daily to Kos meant afternoon naps and toys, not The Daily Kos. Porn was Playboy. There were only a few on-line unlike the Billion today. Or should I say tonight. It is 8 PM in Honolulu as I write this for posting on Kleinrock's Internet.

Artificial barriers threaten the growth of the Internet:

Spam

Hackers

Security Firewalls.

Authoritarian regimes

Corporate CEO's

Phone Wars

"There is more freedom for the typical Internet user to play, to communicate, to shop — more opportunities than ever before," said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor and co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "On the worrisome side, there are some longer-term trends that are making it much more possible (for information) to be controlled."

Few were paying attention in 1969, when Kleinrock's lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah started the whole thing. E-mail and the TCP/IP communications protocols arrived in the 1970's , allowing many networks to connect thus forming the Internet. In the 1980's an addressing system with suffixes like ".com" and ".org" created the architecture of what we have to day.

British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, invented the Web, a subset of the Internet that makes it easier to link resources across disparate locations. Meanwhile, service providers like America Online connected millions of people for the first time.

Th Internet was not in full view of the corporations and political organizations that are now threatened by its use by the people. The Internet grew free from regulatory and commercial constraints that might discourage or even prohibit experimentation.

"For most of the Internet's history, no one had heard of it," Zittrain said. "That gave it time to prove itself functionally and to kind of take root."

The U.S. government funded much development of the Internet for military applications.

The invention of the Web in 1990 by Berners-Lee, working at a European physics lab, was not hampered by security firewalls that today treat unknown types of Internet traffic as suspect.

Even the free flow of pornography led to innovations in Internet credit card payments, online video and other technologies used in the mainstream today.

"Allow that open access, and a thousand flowers bloom," said Kleinrock, a UCLA professor since 1963. "One thing about the Internet you can predict is you will be surprised by applications you did not expect."

That idealism is eroding.

Look at Apple and Google go at it and you can see that barriers are being thrown up to our use of the Internet.

Mobile devices that connect to the Internet, like the iPhone, restricts the software that can run on it. Only applications Apple has blessed are allowed.

Apple recently blocked the Google Voice communications application, saying it overrides the iPhone's built-in interface. Skeptics, however, suggest the move thwarts Google's potentially competing phone services.

On desktop computers, some Internet access providers have erected barriers to curb bandwidth-gobbling file-sharing services used by their subscribers. Comcast Corp. got rebuked by Federal Communications Commission last year for blocking or delaying some forms of file-sharing; Comcast ultimately agreed to stop that.

Consumer advocates call for the government to require "net neutrality". That means that a service provider could not favor certain forms of data traffic over others, a return to the principles that drove the network Kleinrock and his colleagues began building 40 years ago.

Service providers also discourage consumers' unfettered use of the Internet with caps on monthly data usage. They will greatly lower access and impose charges for use that now is free. The porn and sex industry on the Internet is already there. But it could be in any area where corportaions can make money off of our use of the Internet or politicians and corporations want to shut down our public access to the conversation that Christine Yi describes in The Groundswell.

"You are less likely to try things out," said Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist and one of the Internet's founding fathers. "No one wants a surprise bill at the end of the month."

Dave Farber, a former chief technologist at the Federal Communications Commission, said systems are far more powerful when software developers and consumers alike can simply try things out.

Farber has unlocked an older iPhone using a warrantee-voiding technique known as jail-breaking, allowing the phone to run software that Apple hasn't approved. By doing that, he could watch video before Apple supported it in the most recent version of the iPhone, and he changed the screen display when the phone is idle to give him a summary of appointments and e-mails.

While Apple insists its reviews are necessary to protect children and consumer privacy and to avoid degrading phone performance, other phone developers are trying to preserve the type of openness found on desktop computers. Google's Android system, for instance, allows anyone to write and distribute software without permission.

Yet even on the desktop, other barriers get in the way.

Looking at the new innovators:

Steve Crocker, an Internet pioneer who now heads the startup Shinkuro Inc., said his company has had a tough time building technology that helps people in different companies collaborate because of security firewalls that are ubiquitous on the Internet. Simply put, firewalls are designed to block incoming connections, making direct interactions between users challenging, if not impossible.

Already, there is evidence of controls at workplaces and service providers slowing the uptake of file-sharing and collaboration tools. Video could be next if consumers shun higher-quality and longer clips for fear of incurring extra bandwidth fees. Likewise, startups may never get a chance to reach users if mobile gatekeepers won't allow them.

If such barriers keep innovations from the hands of consumers, we may never know what else we may be missing along the way.

___

Anick Jesdanun, deputy technology editor at The Associated Press, has been writing about the Internet since its 30th anniversary in 1999, and most of this Blog come from the AP article

As Internet Turns 40, Barriers Threaten Its Growth

Mr. Jesdanun can be reached at njesdanun(at)ap.org.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Wayne Parsons

Is A Social Networking Website Like MySpace Responsible For a Rape That Occurs Between Users? A California Court Says "No"!

Wayne Parsons — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:57:29 GMT

The San Francisco Chronicle (7/2, B3, Egelko) reports, "Girls who were sexually assaulted by men they first contacted on MySpace cannot seek damages from the social-networking Web site, which is protected from liability by federal law, a state appeals court has ruled. The decision by the Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles rejected claims by the parents of four girls who were 13 to 15 years old when they posted their profiles on MySpace." The parents "argued that the girls could have been protected if MySpace had used age-verification software or had taken other steps to shield their accounts from sexual predators. But the court said Tuesday that the 1996 federal Communications Decency Act prohibits suits against any interactive computer site that merely posts messages written by others."

Section 230 of The 1996 federal Communications Decency Act provides:

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (a common name for Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996) is a landmark piece of Internet legislation in the United States, codified at 47 U.S.C. § 230. Section 230(c)(1) provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an "interactive computer service" who publish information provided by others:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

In analyzing the availability of the immunity offered by this provision, courts generally apply a three-prong test. A defendant must satisfy each of the three prongs to gain the benefit of the immunity:

The defendant must be a "provider or user" of an "interactive computer service."

The cause of action asserted by the plaintiff must "treat" the defendant "as the publisher or speaker" of the harmful information at issue.

The information must be "provided by another information content provider," i.e., the defendant must not be the "information content provider" of the harmful information at issue.

Is this right? Do you agree or do you think that the social media companies share responsibility for bringing evil and vulnerable together? If it was club in your town that brought young women into contact with potential rapists would you say that is okay? My example looks a lot like many singles bars that are perfectly acceptable in our society.

One final note. The purpose of the Act is listed at the beginning:

To promote competition and reduce regulation in order to secure lower prices and higher quality services for American telecommunications consumers and encourage the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technologies.

It seems that the purpose was to make more money for the social technology companies. This ruling will help accomplish that goal.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Wayne Parsons

JAMA Hides Public Disclosures Of Conflicts Of Interest - Calls Scientist "A Nobody"

Wayne Parsons — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:53:56 GMT

In the Wall Street Journal on March 23 David Armstrong writes in his Health Blog that the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA):

"says it is adopting a new policy under which anyone asserting that study authors have failed to disclose conflicts of interest should keep the matter confidential until JAMA investigates."

The decision comes after Jonathan Leo, a professor of neuro-anatomy at Lincoln Memorial University, "published a letter in another medical journal, BMJ, that highlighted an unreported conflict of interest in a study published by JAMA." Perhaps the energetic response from the doctors and drug manufacturers through the AMA and the Wall Street Journal is because the journal BMJ is a completely transparent on line journal that allows the public to see full articles at no cost. As with the Blog you are reading now - my Blog - this is a part of the democratization of the media - the Groundswell as it is popularly described. The AMA reacted emotionally calling Jonathon Leo, who is a scientist with a Ph.D., "a nobody". The power brokers hate it when their insider, privileged status is challenged. As Armstrong writes in his Blog:

Editors of The Journal of the American Medical Association, better known as JAMA, can be a little thin-skinned when it comes to outsiders taking issue with studies published in the prestigious medical journal.

Mainstream power brokers hate to be challenged by anyone. JAMA is one of the dinosaurs, living inside an ivory tower and only dealing with people with powerful connections and a lot of money. The medical profession is not well served by elitism like this but most rank and file physicians are thought of as "nobody" by the once powerful AMA and JAMA.

According to Bloomberg News (3/23, Cortez), the journal's new policy "was introduced in an editorial published on line on March 20." Catherine DeAngelis, editor-in-chief of JAMA, and Phil Fontanarosa, executive deputy editor, stated that "in the future, whistle blowers must provide a detailed, written explanation of conflicts and provide documents to support their conclusions." Leo had initially reported that "a researcher studying Forest Laboratories Inc.'s Lexapro for preventing depression in stroke patients failed to disclose previous work for the drug company" to "JAMA in October 2008 after the journal confirmed that being on a speakers' bureau of a pharmaceutical company would constitute a conflict of interest that should be declared."

The powerful doctors lobby and insider publications like the Wall Street Journal no longer can control what the public sees and disclosure through new sources of public information will provide a better educated public. The political power groups do not want the public to know the facts. Fortunately for the public, it is too late for their type of control to work. Jonathon Leo's assertions will stand on their own merits and will be exposed to praise, criticism and response in full public view. Take a look at the Journal BMJ. It seems like a helpful resource on a variety of medical subjects.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Wayne Parsons