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?”

He does a great job of explaining for security professionals some of the “core truths” about the Internet and society. The speech in full is on his website. A couple of highlights:

Ten years ago, your verdict about the meal in front of us could only have been shared with a few – your neighbours, your friends, your partner. The only opinion that mattered, that would have travelled, would be the professional critic’s, distributed in print.

The same goes for theatre, or television, music, or our views on the Prime Minister. Now, of course, there is a place to review everything.

We assume that every meal we eat, every hotel bed we sleep in, every piece of culture we consume, is something we can have an opinion on, and have it be given the same importance as an opinion from anyone else. There are rating sites online for you to rate just about anything, legal or not, and the sheer weight of amateur reviews outdoes the professionals for authority most of the time.

It’s another example of a network beating a hierachy, and it’s all pervasive in the national discourse. We are used to having our opinions matter, and so now, at the one end, politics is more shrill – more rabble-like – and at the other end, we have rioting.

Indeed, a small part of the trigger for the London riots can be understood as the gap between the respect given to peoples’s opinions by the internet, and the complete disrespect given by the government and the ruling elites.

He also makes what I think is a critical point about how 9/11 changed our perception of threats and our reaction to “security warnings.” There are numerous academic studies that show that people react to repeated security warnings that come to nothing by basically tuning them out. And by warning people about the wrong things, we become less able to decide which security warnings are actually important.

The government, and the security industry, in this country and elsewhere, have spent the past ten years really blowing it. Time and time again there has been a demonstration of security theatre, or overreaction, or overstatement of the risks in hand. From liquids in airports to invading Iraq, no one believes this stuff any more.

While there is no doubt that religious extremism, whatever the religion, has presented a risk to life, that threat has been so overstated as to render any other warnings, on any other subject – including the one in hand today – completely impotent.

A world where Al-Qaeda can be described by the government as an existential threat to the UK, when it is patently not, is a world where warnings about updating your virus scanner because of Chinese cyberwarriors or Russian mafia will be ignored as yet more paranoid security bullshit.

Despite the fact that it probably isn’t.

What’s worse, is that the phrase “security precautions” has become a synonym for “pointless annoying thing to do because politicians are either stupid or oppresive”.

This is bad. But it’s a very common belief. The speeches given after the London riots, about closing social networks down in times of national emergency were triply stupid in this respect.

1. They disregarded the centrality of those services in people’s lives, which made people look out of touch with modernity.
2. They were technically dubious (which pretty much everyone who would have been affected well knew),
3. They reinforced the impression you get when you go through an airport, that this is all self-justification.

In total it both makes one both feel less secure, and be less secure.

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.

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

Gone forever? Closed for overhaul? We don’t know because management isn’t telling its paying and non-paying users anything. In fact, unless you had read one specific post in one thread in the forums over the last two weeks you wouldn’t have heard anything about it from management at all.

Head over to Aww, Martha!

Update 11:00 a.m. 9/1/09
Statement from the Clinton Herald

Today, CNHI, the Clinton Herald’s parent company, shut down the community forum software on its newspapers’ Web sites, leaving it up to each newspaper to decide whether to continue to offer forums as well as administration and platform responsibilities.

After careful consideration and much discussion, we at the Herald have decided to discontinue offering community forums on our Web site at this time.

We weighed many factors and this decision was not made lightly. Although we will no longer be offering the forums on this site, we will continue to offer local, state and national stories, breaking news and photos.

We are working to bring back the “Old Clinton Photos” thread that was popular on our site, as well.

Our site also will continue to evolve and we invite you to come back often to see what we have to offer.

More later.

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.

Locally, it is a much different story. In the early years of the Internet Age, waaay back in 1996 or so, CIS Internet was a pioneer. A local link to this whole Interweb superhighway thingie. He was the first locally available wireless service provider for residents and businesses outside the service area of Mediacom and DSL.

Recently though, CIS has been characterized by poor to nonexistent customer service. Bob as primary technical contact was so irascible he made Gary Boden look like the milkman of human kindness. He maintained a sense of entitlement to private and public locations where he had been allowed to install antennas for his wireless service. Basically, it was Bob’s Internet and we were lucky to have it.

In the last several months a number of businesses had contacted us at Riverfront Technology saying that their CIS connection had been down for several days and they could not get a response from CIS. Some of these were very prominent citizens and businesses. We simply shrugged our shoulders and helped them transition to another provider.

We speculated that Bob probably owned all the equipment outright, having long since paid for everything. Therefore aside from his bandwidth bill from his upstream provider every month, everything else he made was profit. Ergo, he just didn’t give a shit about his customers any more. Those what worked would continue to send him money and to hell with those who didn’t. He would ride the gravy train as far as it went, so the theory went.

Of course that level of service was bound to draw unwanted attention and we heard that the Iowa Attorney General’s office began fielding complaints earlier this year.

So, no real shock when we learned today that CIS seemed to have been completely down since Monday-ish.

Not shocking per se, but surprisingly dickheaded.

Because he didn’t completely turn things off. He turned off his DNS servers for sure, which means that most of cis.net is un-findable to the world. But he must either have some services hosted elsewhere or still have something running. Mail for example: cis.net and other domains he hosts appear to still be accepting mail as usual instead of being down and out and rendering the mail undeliverable.

This means that everyone sending mail to cis.net and the domains hosted there thinks everything is normal and has no idea why no one is replying to them.

Furthermore, for those people who use web-based e-mail they can’t get to their mail. Maybe ever. And for those people who have domains hosted with CIS (KROS Radio, for one) those domains will now be in limbo until control of them can be wrested from the smoldering hulk of CIS and transferred to new web hosting companies. That is if those companies had good, current copies of their websites.

We have had some reports that Bob has been in touch with the authorities, calling from an undisclosed location (I’m totally not kidding!) and claiming to have been cut off by his upstream provider, Qwest. He has promised to try to get his customers access to their sites. I’m dubious. One, unless he was totally daft (a distinct possibility, I’ll grant you) he would never have had only one upstream provider. He should have had at least a DSL line or a Mediacom connection for emergency failover. Two, if he was shutting the doors and wanted to do the right thing, he could have just handed the backup tapes (assuming they exist) ot the keys to the server room to someone who could help out all those people who provided him with a rather comfy little living for the past ten-plus years.

Riverfront Technology is offering help sifting through the rubble and relocating.

There are also a couple of companies already sniffing about looking to pick up on the wireless ISP market in Clinton. So, it might all end up being for the good. Sure is good riddance to CIS, which was a walking corpse for a long time.

It is true that many states and municipalities have made their citizen’s lives easier by putting so much information on the web. But, in too may areas there is still a fundamental misunderstanding of exactly the type of sea-change that the Internet is bringing to society and governance.

Here is an excerpt of a teriffic post by Tom Steinberg of the UK-based mysociety.org, which builds community organizing and open government websites, called What The Government Doesn’t Understand About The Internet And What To Do About It:

Current government policy in relation to the Internet can broadly be summarised as occupying three areas:

1. Getting people online (broadband access, and lessons for people who don’t have the skills or interest)
2. Protecting people from bad things done using the Internet (terrorism, child abuse, fraud, hacking, intellectual property infringement)
3. Building websites for departments and agencies.

The government does all these things primarily because it believes that the Internet boosts the economy of the UK, and that IT can reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality. Together, these outweigh the dangers, meaning it doesn’t get banned. Gordon Brown’s recent speech at Google was an exemplar of this mainly economically driven celebration of the Internet’s virtues, telling audience members that your industry is driving the next stage of globalisation”.

The first challenge for the government is to understand that whilst these beliefs are true, they are only a minor part of the picture. Tellingly, Browns’ speech contained almost no language that couldn’t have been used to explain the positive impact of electrification or shipping containers.

What is different is the way in which the Internet changes social and economic practices – the vector of attack. In the 20th century, advancement of human welfare went hand in hand with the rise of companies that used economies of scale to deliver better goods and services for customers. Technology effectively made it possible and much easier to be a big, highly productive company, to gather expertise and capital together and to target markets for maximum yields.

Now take a look for a moment at Wikipedia, MoneySavingExpert, Blogger or Match.com – all big websites, all doing different things. Each one, however, is in its own way is reducing the ability of large, previously well functioning institutions to function as easily.

These services are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional ‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing, and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business.

Disruption like this is scary for any institution, which will tend to mean that as a public entity which interfaces with other institutions the temptation will be to hold back the sea, not swim with it. Government must swim with the tide, though, not just to help citizens more but to avoid the often ruinous tension of a citizenry going one way and a government going another. There are various things government can do to be on the right side.

1. Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public). This means accepting that federated identity systems are coming and will probably be more successful than even official ID card systems: ditto citizen-held medical records. It means saying “We understand that letting train companies control who can interface with their ticketing systems means that the UK has awful train ticket websites that don’t work as hard as they should to help citizens buy cheaper tickets more easily. And we will change that, now.”

2. Seize the opportunity to bring people together. Millions of people visit public sector websites every day, often trying to achieve similar or identical ends. It is time to start building systems to allow them to contact people in a similar situation, just as they’d be able to if queuing together in a job centre, but with far more reach and power. This does open the scary possibility that citizens might club together to protest about poor service or bad policies, but given recent news, if you were a minister would you rather know about what was wrong as soon as possible, or really late in the day (cf MPs‘ expenses, festering for years)?

The killer app of the Internet as it relates to human politics and governance is not any sorf of enabling of direct democacy, which is simply too unwieldy for a handful of people let alone hundreds of millions. Instead it is the ability to maintain honesty in government through distributing the load of watchdogging it among millions.

Take the groundbreaking recovery.gov: “The site will include information about Federal grant awards and contracts as well as formula grant allocations. Federal agencies will provide data on how they are using the money, and eventually, prime recipients of Federal funding will provide information on how they are using their Federal funds. On our end, we will use interactive graphics to illustrate where the money is going, as well as estimates of how many jobs are being created, and where they are located. And there will be search capability to make it easier for you to track the funds.”

This is groundbreaking in the sense that this is the first time an administration has seriously attempted to embrace the Internet not as an extension of existing media but as a new medium in its own right. But it is still not up to snuff, it still shows an attitude that the primary role of the Internet is to reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality — in this case making it faster and cheaper and more efficient to maintain a (albeit well-intentioned) veil of accountability for the massive spending being undertaken.

The recovery.gov site is kind of clunky. It also doesn’t go very deep. Mousing over the map of Iowa for example shows that $1,08 billion has been announced for Iowa. Clicking on Iowa takes you to a list of spending programs (of which the state budget stabilization fund is at the top at $472 million) for which money has been allocated. And… that’s pretty much it.

On the other hand, recovery.org is far more in depth. At their website, I can see that there are 291 active projects valued at $250.4 milion. I can drill down by county to see that Clinton has 2 active projects valued at $1.6 million and by drilling down further I can see that those two projects are for replacement buses for the Transit Authority.

Now, recovery.org is the product of onvia.com, a for-profit organizaiton that helps companies find state and fedral contract opportunities. They have a large research staff that combs federal, state and local media to glean this detailed information and post it not only for the benefit of their customers but free for everyone. Onvia’s information is not complete, just showing what projects are currently open for bid, instead of all projects planned, let and in progress or complete. But that’s okay, that’s not what Onvia is about.

What it does show is the power of community production and how the creative collective production that creates something like Wikipedia can be harnessed to keep our government accountable. And while things like recovery.org can scale up to the national level, they can also be scaled down to the state and local level.