Tag Archives: government

The different meanings of internet freedom

Posted on by

This week we have seen some incredible riots in London. Interestingly, some of these riots were actually predicted by some of the youths a few weeks back, at the end of the video one of the youths mentions that there will be riots. David Cameron had some choice points about the use of social media, Ars Technica has a good discussion about the different sides of social media. However, it is mostly discussing it in terms of causing the riots as well as leading to the clean up of the cit of London.

I find the reaction that we’re seeing on the internet to the usage of Black Berry Messenger and Twitter interesting. These are the same forces that while in affect in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, social media were forces to be praised. However, now that they are being used in England instead they are being vilified. Also, we are seeing pressure from the government to use social media to arrest the members of these gangs.

First, I think what these groups did was horrible. If I was able to I’d try to help the victims of these crimes. However, we need to be aware of the precedence we are setting in the response to this. While there are some differences in the actions, there was looting in Egypt and Tunisia, there are also differences in the situation. The major difference comes from the leaders being elected compared to being despots.

Based on the interviews the Guardian conducted we can see that the youths are unemployed and marginalized. This is similar to what was going on within Tunisia and Egypt. High unemployment and lack things for the kids to do. It’s something of a structural issues. Which Cameron acknowledged yesterday in a speech. So some of the reasons are similar between the rioters in London and with the Arab spring.

However, since it is England asking for data from Twitter and BlackBerry, they are much more will to cooperate with the police. I’m not entirely sure this would have happened in any of the countries involved in the Arab Spring. Leverage over Twitter during the Arab Spring could have killed it. Do we pick and choose which riots we support? I think it’s clear that we do.

We just need to be aware of the precedence we are setting and that all countries around the world are going to emulate the response of the US and England in this riot. There’s no reason why China, Iran, North Korea, or any other country shouldn’t expect Twitter to comply with them if Twitter complies with England.

The actions that our governments take in this case could have long term implications in regards to internet freedom. It also will indicate if there are two different classes of countries when it comes to the allowable types of internet freedom.

I don’t condone what happened, but we need to really understand the repercussions of the actions in wake of these riots.

Pseudonymity and Anonymity II

Posted on by

Yesterday I gave an extensive overview of the debate that is ongoing between “Real name” supporters and “Pseudonym/Anonym” supporters. If you haven’t read it I suggest you check it out. There are quiet a few different groups of people discussing it, American and International.

Why do I think it’s a big deal though? I mentioned yesterday that I made a personal choice to use my real name instead of a pseudonym. This is partially because I’m really bad at coming up with them, but also because I try to speak with my real voice as much as possible. I’m also aware that this is could have some repercussions depending on what I try to do after I graduate. I haven’t also been the most supportive of the US government. At  one point when I was debating with a hardcore conservative he pointed this out to me as well.

The problem is that we don’t know who has our information. We lose control of it as soon as it’s put on the internet. I have no idea who has access to the conversation I’m talking about. I know that Facebook and the people involved in the conversation do, but I don’t know if that information got passed onto any sort of governmental body.

This is a huge change from what has happened in the past. We had control over who we gave our information to. It was easy because it had to be face to face or perhaps through a letter. Once that conversation was finished unless notes were taken or it was recorded most of the information would only be remembered only imperfectly by the people involved. This is not the case now. it can be stored and recalled perfectly through the internet and web records.

This permanence is dangerous, as the past will haunt people for decades to come instead of only a few years and only with their friends. However, that is not all. Forcing people to use their real names in all cases causes a chilling affect on activism as governments try to stamp down on it. Twitter will be a more popular communication tool for activists than Google + or facebook because of their pseudonym policies.

Regardless of if we like it or not, Facebook, Twitter, Google + and other social networking sites have become our public forums. We don’t have a town square to meet and discuss life. We don’t have the community unity that once used to pervade life so we use the tools that we have. However, all of these new meeting places are controlled by corporations that are required to give data to the US government and other governments as well. The ability to protect your identity from the government, other organizations and from people you don’t want to have find you is important. It allows people to be honest and investigate different parts of themselves or try to fight to bring down repressive regimes.

Pseudonyms are part of the internet’s social norms, a method to protect free speech and to protect yourself. They are very important and we need to fight to keep them. The US government should be seeking to protect our ability to have pseudonyms and not fighting against them. The State Department claims they support internet freedom. Supporting pseudonyms and the ability to be anonymous on the internet is the best way to do so.

Ethics in Science

Posted on by

So, right now the UK is in a big uproar about ethics in science. There have been parliamentary hearings which have deeply concerned scientists. In one opinion piece from the guardian the author argues that it’s been too long going that the scientific community has been able to function without some sort of regulation. Scientists of course object to this. Because there is a method to the manner in which they work. Many, from the tone at the hearings, feel this is another assault on the scientific community.

However, it maybe that there’s some scientific work that is more likely to have fraudulent activity in it. Today the Guardian published an article about scientific ghost writers. Scientific Ghost writers can come in two forms. The first is harmless where the author is really the person that got the funding. Depending on the journal these authors are either the second or very last author on the paper. This is normal, as typically you’re working in that person’s lab and they are paying you. So they should get some credit for the work done as they may also have had an advising role. The second kind of ghost writing is much worse. These writers were in no way associated with the research and their names are put on the article to give it weight, or if they were the ones supposed to be doing the research and some one else did it. In the Guardian article they are focusing on clinical trials for medicines.

This isn’t the only country where fraud, exaggerating claims or ghost writing occurs. Although, the UK has had one of the most famous cases with the retracted article linking MMR vaccine to Autism (meaning it was fraud). This also happens in the US and in many clinical trials. In fact a Greek doctor has made it his mission to unearth clinical trial fraud and really understand what was going on there. The Atlantic had a great write up about this in November of 2010. The doctor  Ioannidis has been making a career out of debunking claims as well as researching the causes of these problems. He argues that the double blind clinical trial isn’t giving us the best results we could possibly be getting in medical science. Although, he doesn’t offer a huge amount of alternatives. 

The New York Times also ran a story about in September of last 2010 about some of the ethics behind clinical trials. This article discusses how two cousins ended up in the same trial and one cousin was given the treatment and the other was not. It was a story that was really questioning the ethics of the clinical trial, because it was obviously working. However, pushing through these treatments without fulling testing them can be just as dangerous. Granted these people were near the end as it was. The cousin that didn’t receive the new treatment died from only getting the chemo.

One the one hand we want to get promising medicine out as fast as possible. However, we want to ensure we are properly testing these medicines to ensure safety. This leads to a great deal of ethical concerns. For promising medicines do we make exceptions? Do we allow fully untested medicine into the wild? These are difficult questions. From an ethical and moral standpoint allowing a patient to die because of a randomized test is very questionable, which is what happened in the case above. However, in some cases rushing through medicines like these end up causing deaths in other manners. In the case of Vioxx this is exactly what happened. In many people it reduced the risk while in others it out right killed them. Where is the balance? I think this is why the UK is pushing for more oversight in these cases.

*Note: my dad, a nurse practitioner pointed out that i was slightly wrong about Vioxx. He’s correct. There were more ethical problems than the fact it was a bad drug. Simply the creators of Vioxx hid the fact that it impacted african americans differently than white americans. If Vioxx hadn’t done this it wouldn’t have been a problem for the drug to stay on the market. If you want to read more about Vioxx there’s a chapter in the book Denialism By Michael Specter

In my next blog I’ll discuss scientific fraud and ethics in other fields.

Software Patents are the new Copyright

Posted on by

In one of my previous posts I commented that I was seeing a convergence withing copyright activities. I believe that something just as horrible is starting to happen within the software patent world. I think that it will threaten the free software movement as well. We’ve had patent trolls around for a long time now. Almost since the first patent was created, however, this didn’t interact with our daily lives. It was similar to the way that copyright didn’t affect you and me on a daily basis. Sure, changes in prices or the removal of a product could affect us, but typically we were able to find a replacement or dealt with the price change. However, I think that this new type of patent troll is more dangerous. Yesterday I saw a post on Ars Technica discussing how Lodsys is going after Apple app developers. Apple isn’t happy about this at all, because it threatens to ruin the base they have developed.

I think there are some other problems with this as well. Historically, if a company, that produces software, was looking to go for an IPO or bought by another company there’s a thing called due dilligence, where the products are checked for stolen code. This is a big deal, because if I stole the code from Linux or some other open source software, my entire project falls under the GPL, and forces my source code to become open as well. This can create massive headaches for companies.

There is a key difference between what used to happen in the past and what is happening now. Before it was the method of making something happened that mattered. For example if I took a really fast way to sort something from open source how it was sorted was what mattered, not that it sorted. Why does this matter? Well the code is also technically copyrighted and owned by the writer. Now the outcome matters as well. What if some one had a patent on sorting. I’ve mentioned how crazy this would have been in the past and how this would impact innovation.

Let’s say some one decided to put in for a patent on shooting animals at some sort of target through a controlled interface. Once the animal hit the target the animal interacted with the target which changed the user interface to indicate that the change had occurred. I have two games on my phone right now, Angry Birds and Monkey Blaster that would both be impacted by this patent. Both of them have very different goals and methods for shooting an animal at a target and different results once it hits the target. Indeed, the definition of target is different between these two games. However, neither of these developers are going to be looking for patents when they have an idea about what’s the next game they want to make.

The patent that is mentioned in the Ars article is absurd. It should never have been approved. There’s nothing novel in the development of the in app purchase. That is something that should be obvious from any one in the computer industry. You could easily see the relationship between a website and an application. In fact, I’m sure that there have been cases of this in the past. Another question that remains to be seen is this going to impact services like Steam? The article notes that Lodsys has already gone after EA.

This change in behavior towards apps and software patents is a very bad change. We need to work to address these types of problems. Returning to the requirement of producing a product to have on the market within a certain number of years could help address these problems. However for software this will likely just lead to a crappy product put on the market that no one buys and no one knows about.

EFF’s Tor challenge and Internet Freedom

Posted on by

First of all, no I didn’t participate in the Tor challenge. I don’t feel I can use my computer in this way while I’m doing a lot of work on it for school. However, I think the idea is excellent. I didn’t explain what TOR is did I? Well here’s the EFF website about Tor. TL;DR: basically it provides a way for You, to hide your actual IP address. You have to install a piece of software to access the network. Once you access the network you’re data will bounce around and come out an exit point, which is your “final” IP address. This final address will take the brunt of any legal or illegal activity being conducted on the TOR network. The EFF suggest that you do not run an exit relay out of your home and the Tor project has some recommendations on running an exit point. However, it should be safe to run a middle relay to allow traffic to flow through your home address. The data that flows between middle nodes is encrypted. See the picture below.

EFF representation of the Tor network: from Tor Project

Why is this technology important? This helps with freedom of speech. The US constitution allows free speech and this is an important tool in allowing freedom of speech. Of course like any proxy website, or VPN it can be used for other purposes, as can the ideas of free speech. We may not like what it is being used for, what is being said or why, but it’s still legal. One thing that is noted repeatedly on both the EFF and Tor page is the risk of DCMA take downs and law enforcement attention. Both of these have a chilling affect on freedom of speech.

It seems to me that copyright control and protection may seriously damage a project like this. If all the exit nodes are shut down because of copyright take down notices we lose a valuable tool in preserving our freedom of speech as well as an assumed right to use the internet in the way we feel is best.

Another concern I have about this technology is the obvious potential use by hackers. This tool is going to be used by hackers. It would be foolish for them not to. This of course puts this technology at odds with the wishes of the government to control copyright infringement and prevent hacking of businesses and government agencies. I seriously hope that the US government, and the EU, gives protection to the exit nodes from legal repercussions from hackers using these networks. Used in the right way Tor could be a modern Underground Railroad for dissenters in countries like Libya, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.