Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

Smoke, Mirrors and Silence: The Browser Wars Reignite
By Nigel McFarlane, InformIT,
May 28, 2004 .

Web browsers and the open, public web are essential tools of modern libraries. But imagine a world without either and in its place a “proprietary global infrastructure.” Could this happen? This article says that is about to happen.

Slashdot has one of its usual spirited discussions of this article.

The Open Voting Consortium

Open Voting Consortium (OVC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the development, maintenance, and delivery of open voting systems for use in public elections.

Read more from the NYT magazine story, “A Really Open Election”
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International > Middle East > From the Editors: The Times and Iraq” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/international/middleeast/26FTE_NOTE.html”>The Times and Iraq (registration required)

Amazing! The New York Times, paper of record, has done the unthinkable. They’ve gone back and reviewed their entire coverage of Iraq and found some disturbing evidence:

“But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged.”

What, you expected them to flaggelate themselves? This is evidence that the wheels are starting to fall off of the Bush Administration’s little red wagon (he says with much hope!). Journalists all over the political spectrum are starting to ask the hard questions of the Administration — anyone remember the April 13 press conference where Bush stumbled when asked if he had made any mistakes after 9/11?

Read more criticism from the public editor’s column “Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction?”

A list of NYT stories can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/critique.

This site is still in beta testing, but check out TodaysPapers.com, a combination news aggregator and discussion community, pulling data feeds from sources around the world.

RSS feeds are categorized, top stories wade to the top based on a combination of clickthroughs to story, number of comments, and number of trackbacks.

[Thanks Research Buzz]

A GAO report issued yesterday entitled, Data Mining: Federal Efforts Cover a Wide Range of Uses reveals that government agencies are conducting or planning nearly 200 data mining programs for a variety purposes, from identifying terrorists and other criminals to managing human resources. Requested last year by Senator Daniel Akaka (D-HI), the report also explained that agencies are heavily relying on private sector data in those programs.

Federal agencies are using data mining for a variety of purposes, ranging from improving service or performance to analyzing and detecting terrorist patterns and activities. Our survey of 128 federal departments and agencies on their use of data mining shows that 52 agencies are using or are planning to use data mining. These departments and agencies reported 199 data mining efforts, of which 68 are planned and 131 are operational. The figure here shows the most common uses of data mining efforts as described by agencies.

Here’s a little background from the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Letter to Sen. Akaka from CDT, ACLU, EPIC

Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Governmental Public Domain Information by Paul F. Uhlir, UNESCO, May 2004.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has published a new set of policy guidelines intended to encourage member nations to publish government information.

“One of the greatest values associated with placing governmental information in the public domain is transparency of governance and the promotion of democratic ideals: equality, democracy, openness.”

and…

“Open and unrestricted dissemination of public information also enhances public health and safety, and the general social welfare, as citizens become better able to make informed decisions about their daily life, their environment, and their future.”

[Thanks Project on Government Secrecy]

IT Conversations: Lawrence Lessig - The Creator’s Dilemma

“The Creators’ Dilemma: Open Source, Open Society, Open Innovation.” This keynote presentation was recorded at the Open Source Business Conference 2004 held in San Francisco, CA.

BTW, IT Conversations has some great audio archives of IT speakers like Lessig, Gillmor, O’Reilly, Norman etc…

Bill Moyers | An Eye On Power: Address delivered at the Newspaper Guild/Communication Workers of America dinner on May 19, 2004.

as secrecy grows, and media conglomerates put more and more power in fewer and fewer hands, we have witnessed the rise of a new phenomenon-a quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration that is in turn the ally and agent of powerful financial and economic interests that consider transparencies a threat to their hegemony over public opinion. This convergence dominates the marketplace of political ideas in a phenomenon unique in our history. Stretching from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s empire to the nattering nabobs of know-nothing radio to a legion of think tanks bought and paid for by corporations circling the honey pots of government, a vast echo chamber resounds with a conformity of opinions, serving a partisan worldview cannot be proven wrong because it admits no evidence to the contrary. When you challenge them with evidence to the contrary-when you try to hold their propaganda to scrutiny-you’re likely to wind up in the modern equivalent of a medieval iron maiden, between the covers, that is, of an Ann Coulter tirade, or wake up in an underground cell at FOX News, force fed leftovers from a Roger Ailes snack, and required for 24 hours a day to stare at photographs of Rupert Murdoch on the walls of the cell while listening to a piped-in Bill O’Reilly singing the Hallelujah Chorus in praise of himself.

[thanks t r u t h o u t]
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GPO hunts fugitives. I’ve got an idea: convince the various agencies to add RSS feeds to their websites. Then GPO catalogers could simply open their favorite aggregator and catalog/index/capture everything that comes through. OR…they could give $$$ to a private vendor to come up with some highly technical solution that doesn’t answer the problem.

As more federal agencies publish government information on Web sites without notifying GPO, important documents that should be indexed, catalogued and preserved for public access in the Federal Depository Library Program have instead become “fugitive” documents, according to GPO officials.

Their answer to the problem is to use Web crawler and data-mining technologies to find them. GPO officials request that companies with those technologies submit proposals by June 2 for services they describe as “Web harvesting” in a recent solicitation for bids.

[Thanks LISnews]

Wally Watch. Here’s a great culture-jamming idea: blog your Congressperson!

Pat Berry has decided to keep a close watch on Wally Herger, the rep from California’s Second Congressional District, who is Pat’s congressman. So he’s sending Herger letters, asking him to answer for the government’s mess in Iraq — and other messes — and blogging Herger’s form responses, with detailed, hyperlinked critiques.

[thanks boingboing!]