The Web’s infrastructure can be thought of as composed of four horizontal layers; from bottom to top, they are the transmission medium, the computer hardware, the software, and the content. … I am more concerned about companies trying to take a vertical slice through the layers than creating a monopoly in any one layer. A monopoly is more straight forward; people can see it and feel it, and consumers and regulators can “just say no.” But vertical integration — for example, between the medium and content — affects the quality of information and can be more insidious.

– Weaving the Web, p130

Cyberspace is real and so are the risks that come with it. It is the great irony of our information age [that] the very technologies that empower us to create and to build also empower those who would disrupt and destroy…

It’s encouraging to hear Obama talk about education as a necessary component of cybersecurity. If an actual education initiative does emerge from this, I hope it will focus on both the empowering and threatening aspects of cyberspace.

Obama also noted that national cyber security policy would not entail the surveillance of Internet traffic or private networks, citing privacy concerns and a committment to net neutrality. So far, so good…

Sweden’s Pirate Party won a seat in the European Union Parliament, swept in Sunday amid outrage over a new copyright law and the convictions of the four founders of The Pirate Bay.

The party, formed to protest copyright law, took 7.1 percent of votes in Sweden and one of that country’s 18 seats in the European Parliament. The party stands for radical reform of copyright legislation, abolition of the patent system and guaranteed online-privacy rights.

Check out wikipedia for background on the Pirate Party or visit the official Pirate Party website.

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become. We must alternately consult history and existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult labor will be to understand the combination of the two into new products at every stage. The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past.

(emphasis added)

Here’s the article’s abstract:

Cookie Monsters: Seeing Young People’s Hacking as Creative Practice

This paper examines the benefits and obstacles to young people’s open-ended and unrestricted access to technological environments.  While children and youth are frequently seen as threatened or threatening in this realm, their playful engagements suggest that they are self-possessed social actors, able to negotiate most of its challenges effectively. Whether it is proprietary software, the business practices of some technology providers, or the separation of play, work, and learning in most classrooms, the spatial-temporality of young people’s access to and use of technology is often configured to restrict their freedom of choice and behavior.  We focus on these issues through the lens of technological interactions known as “hacking,” wherein people playfully engage computer technologies for the intrinsic pleasure of seeing what they can do.  We argue for an approach to technology that welcomes rather than constrains young people’s explorations, suggesting that it will not only help them to better understand and manage their technological environments, but also foster their critical capacities and creativity.

Keywords: children, youth, Internet, cyberspace, security, hacking

And here is some background on the Children and Technological Environments special issue:

Children, Youth and Environments has just published a special issue on “Children and Technological Environments.” It features a substantive introduction by the guest editors, Nathan G. Freier and Peter H. Kahn, Jr., and 14 high-quality, peer-reviewed articles on such topics as interactive humanoid robots, digital libraries, virtual natural environments, video and online games, hacking, assistive technologies for children with learning disabilities, and learning by doing with shareable interfaces. The authors include leading researchers from the U.S., Britain and Japan.

“(ii) DISCONNECTED YOUTH.–The term `disconnected youth’ means any
individual who is certified by the designated local agency–

“(I) as having attained age 16 but not age 25 on the hiring date,

“(II) as not regularly attending any secondary, technical, or
post-secondary school during the 6-month period preceding the hiring
date,

“(III) as not regularly employed during such 6-month period, and

“(IV) as not readily employable by reason of lacking a sufficient
number of basic skills.”.

Like many of you, when I first heard “disconnected youth” I assumed it was a reference to the digital divide and its effects on youth. Not so much. According to this bill, “connecting” youth simply means softening them up for corporate circulation.

To help ask this question, and to bring the public’s attention to the rise of a surveillance society, the American Civil Liberties Union has setup an educational website. Check it out: http://youarebeingwatched.us

After losing an appeals court challenge last July, proponents of 1998’s Child Online Protection Act received a final blow to their cause – this time from the United States Supreme Court, who quietly declined to review the law without comment.

COPA – not to be confused with COPPA – was passed overwhelming by congress under the Clinton administration; it sought to bar for-profit websites from allowing children access to materials deemed harmful for inappropriate to them, as judged by “contemporary community standards.”

As Daily Tech notes, COPA (Child Online Protection Act) is NOT to be confused with COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). Unlike COPPA, COPA would have done absolutely nothing to protect children online and certainly would have shattered whatever privacy children have left online. COPA was a shameful attempt to institute broad surveillance and censorship online under the banner of “child safety.” As U.S. District Judge Lowell A. Reed, Jr. noted on March 22, 2007, during the last rejection of COPA by the courts:

perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.

Of course - while this crappy piece of legislation died a long slow death in the courts, defending it provided Bush’s Justice Department with a great opportunity to seize private user information from information companies like Google and Yahoo.

]]> http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2009/01/29/good-riddance-copa/feed/ http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2008/12/16/stop-the-madness/ http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/2008/12/16/stop-the-madness/#comments Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:11:45 +0000 gtdonovan http://gregorydonovan.org/cyberenviro/?p=142 Yet another major security flaw found in Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s proprietary web browser. Via the BBC:

Users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.

The flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people’s computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say.

There’s no sense in using a proprietary web browser. Free and open-source browsers such as FireFox or Opera may be just a susceptible to security breaches as proprietary ones, but the problems are almost always identified and fixed in a shorter of time. Hierarchical dinosaurs like Microsoft may be good for certain things, but they simply can not identify and solve security breaches as quickly as a large decentralized community of networked users.

Just stop the madness and just switch to an open-source browser. I recommend FireFox.