The speech itself [Transcript here. ] is about 30 minutes with about 20 minutes of Q&A. And if you can’t bring yourself to watch the entirety, I’ll recap it here.

I want to be clear here. Neither I, nor Cory Doctorow or any other responsible person advocating for sensible copyright and electronic liberty is condoning theft. What we are against are two things really. One, the idea that just because a corporation has made a profit in a certain way, with a certain business model for a number of years, the legislature or the courts are responsible for guaranteeing those profits in the future regardless of changes in the underlying economy or technologies. Two, is the making of outright stupid laws that would break the Internet.

Now, while there is certainly some amount of outright theft of intellectual property on the Internet it has been shown again and again that Big Content regularly inflates its “estimates” for losses due to piracy. More and more what we are seeing is a desperate rear-guard action by the entertainment industries to hold back the tide of change. A really good overview of how all this affects culture (and how this is just the same old story) is this TED Talk by Lawrence Lessig.

Cory Doctorow Photo: Jonathan Worth

And on the network side, attempts to make a network that can’t be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments. So, SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, bans tools like DNSSec because they can be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. And it blocks tools like Tor, because they can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures. In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo, citing research that SOPA would probably work, because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argued that these measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in America, too!

He makes an excellent analogy for why this is just stupid. Wheels and bank robbers.

If I wanted Congress to write, or Parliament to write, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it’s unlikely I’d succeed. If I turned up and said “well, everyone knows that wheels are good and right, but have you noticed that every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from the bank robbery? Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would of course be “no”. Because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys. And we can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we’d be foolish to risk them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies by changing wheels. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies, even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies, no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

So, that’s what’s wrong with things like SOPA, the crazy legislation currently making its way through Congress despite the fact that practically every business (except the content producers) involved in the Internet (Cisco, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Dell, Google…) and everyone who ever had a hand in designing the Internet is basically yelling, “Are you nuts?!”

But even if we dodge the SOPA bullet and whatever else comes down the pike from Corporate Content, we still have the problem of the fact that all of these content producers are more and more joined at the hip to the hardware and software industries. Think of the relationship between Sony (Entertainment conglomerate) and well… Sony (hardware manufacturer, producer of game systems, TV’s and PC’s).

So today we have marketing departments who say things like “we don’t need computers, we need… appliances. Make me a computer that doesn’t run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn’t run programs that I haven’t authorized that might undermine our profits”. And on the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea — just a program that does one specialized task — after all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don’t worry if it’s still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that’s not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We’re not making a computer that runs only the “appliance” app; we’re making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn’t want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer — it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.

And finally, this entire shitstorm about copying games, movies and music? Hacking your car’s computer? Totally penny-ante stuff. Because looming on the horizon are technologies like 3D manufacturing and genome manipulation on the desktop.

And it doesn’t take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it’s really… really… important to make sure that computers can’t execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat their lunch… literally. Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the same place — “can’t you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

Julian Assange on the Cover of Time Magazine

All your secrets are belong to us. Philandering politicians, lawmakers on the take, Saudi royalty willing to “fight Iran to the last American.” There is nowhere for you to hide any more. The question is no longer whether people will find you out, it is when. And will they care? Fundamentaly, we are now living in a much more transparent society whether we want to or not. From the recent graduate with some sordid Facebook entries who finds it hard to get a job, to the 19th Century tyrant trying to keep his people in the dark in the 21st Century, the effects will be felt at all levels of society. This has the potential to be a promising development. There is much less propensity to dissemble if you know you will be caught. So, perhaps we will get a society and politics that is more truth-based. For example, the Republican party isn’t making any effort to hide its bottom line strategy any more: They are not bothering to issue patently lame policy proposals with regards to deficit reduction, economic growth or jobs. No, their goal is simply to make Obama a one term president. You gotta say, such a revelation of their bald-faced politics-for-its-own-sake position is sort of refreshing in a very depressing sort of way.

Technology is in the driver’s seat, not WikiLieaks. In the long run, Julian Assange’s future — most likely arrest when his UK visa expires in early 2011 — or WikiLeaks’ ability to maintain an online presence — difficult but possible — are irrelevant. The enabling technologies are what matters. WikiLeaks could be snuffed out tomorrow by the Russians or Chinese should the whislteblowing organization pose anything like a threat to those two countries’ leaders. But it wouldn’t matter. The WikiLeaks archive is now mirrored on hundreds of servers both open and hidden. Another organization would rise to take its place. The evolutionary process of technology adaptation being what it is, “WikiLeaks 2.0″ would probably be more resistant to attack and more sophisticated in its approach. The technology that allows for anonymous whistle-blowers to provide content and for distributed organizations to host the material means that this new era of radical transparency is here to stay.

Read the rest at The Des Moines Register.

Back in the glory days of TV news getting an exclusive usually meant an entire day’s advantage over the competition; what with just the one daily evening newscast. If teased appropriately a good scoop would add viewership to that evening’s newscast but mostly it was a prestige moment that helped build the network’s news brand. So, a good scoop (or more rightly consistently being able to get scoops and exclusives) had a positive business impact, but much less immediate and tangible than newspaper scoops.

But what is a scoop/exclusive worth in the Internet age? At best a media outlet will have the story to itself for a few hours before it is cited, cross-linked, and tweeted all over the world by other outlets. Granted, an exclusive will drive some traffic to the website and might, might, MIGHT drive some advertising click-throughs. But people who are looking for a quick read on breaking news are highly unlikely to take the time for a diversion into web advertising.

No, the only real business driver for working a scoop in 2010 has to be for the prestige of it. It is purely a brand-building exercise.

If that is the case then the aim should be to get the story right AND first, or to be in-depth AND first. And if being first is not possible (say for an afternoon newspaper with a 9 a.m. deadline) then it seems the business case would say that being right and/or in-depth would trump the now very ephemeral advantages of being first.

Being first with a bullshit story is probably worse than not covering it at all. It ruins the news brand. Unless your “brand” is focused on whipping up a particular market segment and reinforcing their existing belief structures. Then it’s fine. But it’s not really news, its commentary and opinion

It seems to me that the business aim for entities in the actual news business — especially for web-only outlets — should be quality and depth of reporting that will create stickyness and build the brand. Stickyness is web-speak for having viewers stay on your site for more than a few minutes and view more than just the one page that you might have entered by via an external link. Better yet, to be compelling enough to entice people to come back and be regular readers or god-forbid, actual subscribers to an actual newspaper.

I guess none of this is really earth shattering. Unless you run the Clinton Herald, our local newspaper. In which case your local beat is consistently scooped by the Gannett outlet, The Quad City Times forty miles downriver. The Times also does a better job of driving traffic to the website with a full twitter stream of breaking news (the Herald tweets maybe once a day) but more importantly the Times has all of its news archived on the web site unlike the Herald which still seems to think that if it’s not ink on paper delivered to the door then it doesn’t count.

The Herald consistently embargoes content on the website to drive people to the paper edition. If I miss a local story in the dead-tree edition and it doesn’t make the cut to the web page three or four days after publication? I have to physically go to the friggin Library. Which I’ve done. Once.

What I’m getting at is that it just doesn’t make a lot of sense that if you have a near-monopoly on the local newspaper business and are, in the claims of the publisher, “consistently one of the most profitable papers in the company,” to be consistently lagging your competition from down-river. Gannett, like all major publishers has a huge debt-load (unlike the privately-held CNHI, the Herald’s parent) and is always cutting budgets to the bone. Considering the minor marginal costs of placing additional, non-print content to the website and driving traffic and adding value with Twitter feeds, it would seem like a no-brainer.

We’ve got a web site up and running, google4clinton.org. There’s nothing there yet, but we’ll have some content up later today.

Yesterday afternoon we met with officials from the Clinton Regional Development Corporation, the Chamber of Commerce and City Aldermen and agreed that this is worth pursuing and divided up responsibilities for collecting the information required by the Government application.

We’re moving forward. Most of my efforts will be consumed by work and this initiative for a couple of weeks so do check back but don’t expect much posting here.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, start here.

Posting will be light while I add this to the to-do list.

This isn’t really that much of a shock. Microsoft itself has been pushing its users to dump IE6 for more than a year. Not just because the shiny new IE7 and then IE8 came out. But because IE6 is a security nightmare and they don’t want to expend the resources any longer. Also, newer technologies like advanced JavaScript and the new HTML5 extensions will not be supported by IE6 ever.

Google is pushing its Chrome browser. I use it every day and like some of the features, but for my money, Firefox, even with its large memory footprint is still the best browser out there. Explorer is a distant third.

If you sill use IE6, notable by its plain blue logo, then you should, at a minimum upgrade to IE8. But really, you should just get Firefox or Chrome
.

The plain vanilla Internet Exlorer 6 logo.

The logo for Internet Explorer 8

In today’s episode, the Newspaper Industry. To recap: newspapers are going broke. The large multi-paper conglomerates overspent in the 80′s and 90′s and loaded themselves down with debt. So, even though their flagship newspapers are still doing okay, they cannot meet their debt obligations. See: The Tribune Company. Other papers are seeing one of their main revenue sources, classified advertising, eaten away by Craigslist, et. al.

For smaller papers, lower revenues mean a smaller “news hole” and fewer reporting resources. This leads to a downward spiral where there is less original, local reporting, the relevance of the newspaper decreases, readership – already hemorrhaging to the web – decline further through disatisfaction and so on.

The news business is changing radically. There will be a new business model for printed news. The problem is no one knows what it is and there are darn few volunteers to find out among the big players. One thing is certain, in the future, ink on paper will only be a small part of a “newspaper’s” distribution model.

So, today’s post is from noted new-media observer and critic, Dan Gillmor, and Eleven Things I’d Do If I Ran a News Organizaton.
Example:

2. We would invite our audience to participate in the journalism process, in a variety of ways that included crowdsourcing, audience blogging, wikis and many other techniques. We’d make it clear that we’re not looking for free labor — and will work to create a system that rewards contributors beyond a pat on the back — but want above all to promote a multi-directional flow of news and information in which the audience plays a vital role.

But my personal favorite:

6. We would refuse to do stenography and call it journalism. If one faction or party to a dispute is lying, we would say so, with the accompanying evidence. If we learned that a significant number of people in our community believed a lie about an important person or issue, we would make it part of an ongoing mission to help them understand the truth.

Which seems to me not a New Rule at all, but a fundamental definition of what it means to be a journalist, period. The fact that we have to “reinvent” this is a sign of just how far mainstream news organizations have fallen from their core business in the quest for higher profits in the 1990s and to fight for survival in the 2000′s. And yes, I am looking across 6th Avenue South when I write this.

One of the best features of the Internet is the ability to bring people who are dispersed all over together to work on like-minded projects. This can be don ad-hoc by self-forming groups or by private concerns. Either way, crowdsourcing is a powerful tool. Wikipedia, who I just linked to there is the most obvious example.

Another example is the ability to use crowdsourcing as a way to keep tabs on the government both as I’ve recently mentioned efforts by both the government and private companies who are doing this.

A new entry into this field is washingtonwatch.com, which attempts to track all congressional earmarks. But the story of how washingtonwatch was conceived is every bit as interesting as the site itself.

After the recent birth of a child, Andi Brown scaled back her work hours and began to telecommute from home. That left her with a bit of extra time to get involved with Jim Harper’s Washington Watch project. Harper, a Cato Institute scholar and privacy/transparency advocate, launched a website earlier this year that hoped to use the power of crowdsourcing to collate every single earmark request made by every single member of Congress. In only weeks, the job was done.

Right now, senators and representatives release earmark requests, but no government entity collects, sorts, and maps them. Getting the information requires digging through 535 different websites, each putting the 42,000+ bits of earmark information in a different place and offering it in a slightly different format.

When Harper launched his site and asked people to join him in digging up the earmark requests and submitting them to his new database and mapping system, he had no idea what to expect. Those first few days of waiting to see who would show up to help felt like throwing a party and having no one show up for the first hour, he tells Ars. Would anyone come at all?

A small group did arrive to help—about 40 people—and Andi was one of the most prolific. From her home in Missouri, she trolled Congressional websites, unearthed each representative’s requests for directed government payouts, and copied the data into the Washington Watch database at a terrific pace… 1,500 to 2,000 entries per week.

This of course opens the door to the entire subject of earmarks, the bete noir of last fall’s election campaign. Leaving that aside for the moment, here is the link to Bruce Braley’s entry. It is five pages long and includes the usual list of research projects at UNI, highway and economic development funding requests. Included therein are also requests for Clinton and Camanche wastewater treatement funds, 19th Avenue North in Clinton, Washington Blvd in Camanche, the Railport, etc.

Everybody hates pork, unless it fails to appear on their table.

Yes, we have been notified that our forums no longer will be Hey Martha forums as of Sept. 1. We currently are looking at our options concerning the hosting of the site. We know our readers like the forums and we are doing our best to make sure that continues. I’ll let you know more as those decisions are made.
Charlene Bielema
Herald Editor

The Herald is owned by Community Newspapers Holdings Inc. a Birmingham, Alabama-based concern that owns a metric buttload of small market newspapers. As of now, it looks like they have moved to a new content-management and/or hosting service.

The original posting in the thread was cross-posted from the Norman, OK Norman Transcript. It appears that the Transcript will be moving to a more community-based blogging and aggregation model. Something that has been talked about as a new business model for newspapers. See Jeff Jarvis’ blog buzzfeed. Mr. Jarvis just gave a rather compelling presentation of a very similar business model at an Aspen Institute forum.

Regardless of the fate of the Hey, Martha! forums, I’ve been wanting to get some serious hands-on time with the really cool-looking website development and management tools from squarespace.com for a month or so now. We’ll this is a good chance. I’ve set up a community site called Aww, Martha!. If the Herald pulls the plug, there will be a place for people to gather. It is a $50 a month hit, so its permanence depends on a couple of factors: a) whether it gets used at all and b) whether it is needed.

In the meantime, feel free to play around and post some stuff. Membership is required but totally free and privacy will be respected. Aww, Martha!

The curious thing, which I mentioned on the radio, is that CIS has significant assets both physical and virtual and could very easily sell the business to another provider or allow someone to come in and run the business for a fee. None of it makes much rational sense. But then everyone kind of knew that Bob always did things for his own reasons.

Here are your options:

• If you are an individual subscriber to CIS with just cis.net e-mail on the line
• I advise you to get with Iowa Telecom, Qwest or Mediacom and get on with your life. Unless CIS comes back up for some period that will allow customers to make an orderly transition, there is no way to access e-mails, address books or web pages on those servers.
• If you like webmail, get a Yahoo or Gmail account and get on with your life. Hopefully, you have a local copy of frequently used e-mail addresses and you can send a message to friends and customers that your address has changed.
• If you have web pages that you don’t have a local backup for, check the Internet Archive for a recent copy of your web page. You should be able to suck down most of the content from there.
• Business customers. CIS registered its own and its customers’ domains with Network Solutions LLC one of the major domain registrars. Get a copy of a billing statement from CIS that specifically states that you were charged X for registering and/or hosting your domain.
• Call Network Solutions at 1-800-333-7680 and explain what has happened and that you would like the administrative records for your domain transferred to your control
• Be patient and work the process. Network Solutions has had its own problems with customer service in the past.
• If you still run into a brick wall or you feel like going after CIS for loss of business, call a lawyer that has familiarity with Internet and intellectual property law. I have been using Des Moines attorney, Brett Trout as my resource on this issue. He gave a presentation at Ignite IT in Ames a couple of years ago and I was quite impressed.

Riverfront Technology is partnering with a Quad Cities-based web hosting and web development company to offer migration assistance and new virtual digs for homeless CIS domains. My advice here is that if you have a business that relies on the web and e-mail for day-to-day transactions don’t wait for Network Solutions, register a new domain now, get your web site back up and running. When you finally get your old domain back, it can be merged with the temporary one so that it will appear to be transparent to the user regardless of whether they use olddomain.com or newdomain.com.