The Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog

I just finished reading through The Economist's new 14-page special report on cloud computing, "Let It Rise" in which Ludwig Siegele provides an outstanding overview of cloud computing and why it is so important:

The rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited. It will undoubtedly transform the information technology (IT) industry, but it will also profoundly change the way people work and companies operate. It will allow digital technology to penetrate every nook and cranny of the economy and of society, creating some tricky political problems along the way.

Even if you are very familiar with cloud computing, I recommend you take a look at the article. Anyway, while I was reading it, I was unsurprised to come across some comments from Nicholas Carr, whose new book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, is essentially an early history of cloud computing and an investigation into its effects on our economy, culture, and society. And that also reminded me that, even though I have mentioned Carr's book here several times since it was released earlier this year, I have failed to give it a dedicated review. And it certain deserves one because "The Big Switch" is easily one of the most important technology policy books of 2008.

If you're here in D.C. next Thursday, you might want to drop by the New America Foundation to watch Jonathan Zittrain and me go at it about his important new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Our debate will take place on Thursday, November 6th from 3:30 - 5:00 p.m. at New America Foundation headquarters (1630 Connecticut Ave, NW, 7th Floor). My old friend (but frequent intellectual sparring partner) Michael Calabrese will also be speaking. Michael is the Director of New America's "Wireless Future Program" and one of the all-around nicest guys in the world of tech policy. You can RSVP for the event here.

I've been quite critical of the thesis that Jonathan sets forth in his book, and I have discussed my reservations in a lengthy book review and a series of follow-up essays here and elsewhere. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). We've also debated his book on the an NPR-Boston affiliate station if you care to hear a preview of our debate next week. That show is online here.

I encourage you to join us for what promises to be a very interesting discussion. As I pointed out in my original review of his book, if you have never had the chance to hear Jonathan speak, you're in for a real treat. He is, bar none, the most entertaining tech policy wonk in the world.

Again, RSVP here.

Read Matt Lasar's article on Ars today ("Satellite Radio Minority Channel Decision Looms for FCC") about how somebody has suggested that Irish-Americans "deserve a channel on satellite radio which informs, educates and entertains them with all things Irish."

Folks, you just can't make up stuff this good.

Of the titles I included in a mega-book review about Internet optimists and pessimists that I posted here a few months ago, I mentioned Lee Siegel's new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. It is certainly the dourest of the recent books that have adopted a pessimistic view of the impact the Internet is having on our culture, society, and economy. Because Siegel's book is one of the most important technology policy books of 2008, however, I decided to give it a closer look here.

Siegel's book essentially picks up where Andrew Keen's leaves off in Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture (2007). I posted a two-part review of Keen's book here last year [Part 1, Part 2], but here's a quick taste of Keen's take on things. He argues "the moral fabric of our society is being unraveled by Web 2.0" and that "our cultural standards and moral values are not all that are at stake. Gravest of all," Keen continues, "the very traditional institutions that have helped to foster and create our news, our music, our literature, our television shows, and our movies are under assault as well."

As I noted in my earlier "Net optimists vs. pessimists" essay, after reading Cult of the Amateur, I didn't think anyone else could ever be quite as over-the-top and Chicken Little-ish as Keen. But after working my way through Siegel's Against the Machine, I realized I was wrong. It made Keen seem downright reasonable and cheery by comparison! Keen and Siegel seem to be in heated competition for the title "High Prophet of Internet Doom," but Siegel is currently a nose ahead in that race.

Earlier this year, I mentioned an outstanding book that John Palfrey of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School co-edited entitled Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering. It's an excellent resource for anyone studying the methods governments are (unfortunately) using to stifle online expression across the globe. It's one of the most important technology policy books of the year.

Well, it looks like John Palfrey will have a second title on this year's "Best Tech Books" list. I've just finished his new book with his Berkman Center colleague Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, and it is definitely worthy of your attention. In my book review posted today on the City Journal's website, I argue that "Palfrey and Gasser's fine early history of this generation serves as a starting point for any conversation about how to mentor the children of the Web." It's a comprehensive and very even-handed discussion about a variety of concerns or Internet pathologies, including: online safety, personal privacy, copyright piracy, offensive content, classroom learning, and much more.

My City Journal review is down below, but in coming weeks I will be posting some additional thoughts about some specific things in the book worthy of more attention (including a few things I disagreed with). Overall, I'd say Born Digital is a close runner-up in the race for "Tech Book of the Year," closely trailing Jonathan Zittrain's Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (which I have reviewed multiple times) and Nick Carr's The Big Switch. But I found far more to agree with in Born Digital than I did in those two books. Highly recommended.

I've been re-reading Nicholas Negroponte's brilliant and extraordinarily prescient 1995 book Being Digital this week, and I just came to the famous section in Chapter 12 about "The Daily Me." It's his visionary discussion of a future of personalized filters for all things digital to perfectly tune news and entertainment to your personal preferences. Here's the key passage (again, remember that he wrote this in 1995, long before most of the digital things we take for granted today existed):

Imagine a future in which your interface agent can read every newswire and newspaper and catch every TV and radio broadcast on the planet, and then construct a personalized summary. This kind of newspaper is printed in an edition of one. [...]

Imagine a computer display of news stories with a knob that, like a volume control, allows you to crank personalization up or down. You could have many of these controls, including a slider that moves both literally and politically from left to right to modify stories about public affairs.

These cotnrols change your window onto the news, both in terms of size and its editorial tone. In the distant future, interface agents will read, listen to, and look at each story in its entirety. In the near future, the filtering process will happen by using headers, those bits about bits.

Well, that future came about sooner than even Negroponte could have predicted. We all have a "Daily Me" now; it's called our RSS feed. And there are other components to the "Daily Me," such as iGoogle and Google Alerts, which provide automated search results served up instantaneously. And there are many other digital tools and services out there today that help us personalize our media experience.

You really gotta hand it to Negroponte for being way ahead of the curve in foreseeing all of this at a time when most of us where still using Trumpet Winsock and 14.4 modems. Hell, Al Gore hadn't even built the Internet yet!

Let's hope things don't turn out this badly!

"Hasn't Steve Jobs learned anything in the last 30 years?" asks Farhad Manjoo of Slate in an interesting piece about "The Cell Phone Wars" currently raging between Apple's iPhone and the Google's new G1, Android-based phone. Manjoo wonders if whether Steve Jobs remembers what happen the last time he closed up a platform: "because Apple closed its platform, it was IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Microsoft that reaped the benefits of Apple's innovations." Thus, if Jobs didn't learn his lesson, will he now with the iPhone? Manjoo continues: Well, maybe he has--and maybe he's betting that these days, "openness" is overrated. For one thing, an open platform is much more technically complex than a closed one. Your Windows computer crashes more often than your Mac computer because--among many other reasons--Windows has to accommodate a wider variety of hardware. Dell's machines use different hard drives and graphics cards and memory chips than Gateway's, and they're both different from Lenovo's. The Mac OS, meanwhile, has to work on just a small range of Apple's rigorously tested internal components--which is part of the reason it can run so smoothly. And why is your PC glutted with viruses and spyware? The same openness that makes a platform attractive to legitimate developers makes it a target for illegitimate ones. I discussed these issues in greater detail in my essay on"Apple, Openness, and the Zittrain Thesis" and in a follow-up essay about how the Apple iPhone 2.0 was cracked in mere hours. My point in these and other essays is that the whole "open vs. closed" dichotomy is greatly overplayed. Each has its benefits and drawbacks, but there is no reason we need to make a false choice between the two for the sake of "the future of the Net" or anything like that. In fact, the hybrid world we live in -- full of a wide variety of open and proprietary platforms, networks, and solutions -- presents us with the best of all worlds. As I argued in my original review of Jonathan Zittrain's book, "Hybrid solutions often make a great deal of sense. They offer creative opportunities within certain confines in an attempt to balance openness and stability." It's a sign of great progress that we now have different open vs. closed models that appeal to different types of users. It's a false choice to imagine that we need to choose between these various models.

Sorry if it seems like I am beating a dead horse here, but the folks at the City Journal asked me a pen a review of Jonathan Zittrain's new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Faithful readers here will no doubt remember that I have already penned a review of the book and several follow-up essays. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4). I swear I am not picking on Jonathan, but his book is probably the most important technology policy book of the year--Nick Carr's Big Switch would be a close second--and deserves attention. Specifically, I think it deserves attention because I believe that Jonathan's provocative thesis is wildly out of touch with reality. As I state in the City Journal review of his book:

[C]ontrary to what Zittrain would have us believe, reports of the Internet's death have been greatly exaggerated. [...] Not only is the Net not dying, but there are signs that digital generativity and online openness are thriving as never before. [...] Essentially, Zittrain creates a false choice regarding the digital future we face. He doesn't seem to believe that a hybrid future is possible or desirable. In reality, however, we can have a world full of some tethered appliances or even semi-closed networks that also includes generative gadgets and open networks. After all, millions of us love our iPhones and TiVos, but we also take full advantage of the countless other open networks and devices at our disposal. [...]

And so the series continues. The Washington Post reports that the Department of Justice has just released "a scathing report" finding that over a 5-year period the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) "lost dozens of weapons and hundreds of laptops that contained sensitive information." The DOJ's Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found that 418 laptop computers and 76 weapons were lost. According to the report:

Yesterday's report showed that ATF, a much smaller agency than the FBI, had lost proportionately many more firearms and laptops. "It is especially troubling that that ATF's rate of loss for weapons was nearly double that of the FBI and [Drug Enforcement Administration], and that ATF did not even know whether most of its lost, stolen, or missing laptop computers contained sensitive or classified information," Fine wrote. [...]

Many of the missing laptops contained sensitive or classified material, according to the report. ATF began installing encryption software only in May 2007. ATF did not know what information was on 398 of the 418 lost or stolen laptops. The report called the lack of such knowledge a "significant deficiency." Of the 20 missing laptops for which information was available, ATF indicated that seven -- 35 percent -- held sensitive information. One missing laptop, for example, held "300-500 names with dates of birth and Social Security numbers of targets of criminal investigations, including their bank records with financial transactions." Another held "employee evaluations, including Social Security numbers and other [personal information]." Neither laptop was encrypted.

The findings regarding lost weapons were equally troubling, if not a bit humorous: