Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

There is a fascinating article in Science News about how scientists are investigating ways to identify individuals based on the rhythm of their keystrokes when they type and their individual patterns of using a mouse. This research goes beyond, but is complemented by, research in text analysis that can sometimes identify authorship of a piece of text when a large body of text is available for comparison.

• Digital Fingerprints by Julie J. Rehmeyer, Science News, Vol. 171, No. 2, Jan. 13, 2007, p. 26.

As people type messages on their computer keyboards and browse Web sites, they leave a trail of electronic fingerprints. Scientists are investigating those keystroke and mouse-use patterns to develop methods to strengthen security and reduce online fraud.

Textcasting has arrived. By Andy Bowers

Slate’s new “textcasting” hack leverages the iTunes podcast distribution infrastructure to
deliver text stories to iPods. How? By embedding the stories in the metadata of silent MP3s.

And you needed another reason to get a new ipod?!

The End of the Internet?

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, wrote this article back in February. In fact, we probably blogged about it right here because net neutrality is a HUGE issue for libraries. And if you didn’t get a chance to read the article the first time around, Amy Goodman has a very good interview with Chester on today’s Democracy Now. Give it a listen. It’s incredibly pertinent. (This is part one with part 2 being broadcast tomorrow).

And for those of you in the bay area, be sure to go to the EFF fundraiser next thursday April 20th. There’s to be a panel discussion about pay email and net neutrality between Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0, CNET’s quarterly technology-industry newsletter, Danny O’Brien, Activist coordinator for EFF, and Mitch Kapor, President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation. T

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.
–Jeff Chester, “The End of the Internet?”

Maine Seeks to Opt Out of GATS Library Agreement

According to a recent post on American Libraries, the state of Maine has petitioned the Bush administration to have the state excluded from the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) Library Agreement that is currently being negotiated in Geneva, Switzerland. Maine Governor John Baldacci wrote, ÒLibraries are important sites of free and democratic exchange of information. For this reason few developed countries have committed libraries to the terms of the GATS. By committing libraries to the GATS and not specifically exempting public funding from GATS rules, we compromise the support that taxpayers give to ensure that public libraries continue to serve as valuable democratic spaces. Please carve Maine out of the libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural services sector.Ó

Public Citizen notes that “the U.S. has never specified that public funds for libraries are limited to public institutions only and, ’since aspects of these services are provided in competition with other service providers,’they may be subject to claims of unfair competition by the commercial sector.” What exactly does that mean? Well, libraries could be sued for offering videotapes and dvds, and even ostensibly for loaning books since all of those services could be viewed as unfair competition.

SPOCK! …. must …. get…utility belt…..SPOCK!!!

Here is a dilemma: lots of information is online, but it is
hard to find. Here’s another: search engine technology based
on keywords has trouble finding the information you need because of
the inherent ambiguity of human languages. Here’s a third: systems
that help us find what we need based on our personal preferences
expose more of our personal information to others who may or may not
care about our privacy.

Researchers
developing precise search software,
By Greg Kline Sunday (News-Gazette.com (Champaign, IL),
February 26, 2006) reports on some research being done at the University
of Illinois into new ways of thinking about searching and finding
information and addressing issues of privacy. The article describes
“Data mining” in
the humanities, genomic research, new ways to catalog and search non-textual
materials such as images and more.

What about privacy? This is particularly relevant in light of recent
reports that, when Congress thought it killed John Poindexter’s
“Total Information Awareness” program, most of the privacy-invading
programs survived, but the privacy protecting part of the program
was killed. (See:
TIA Lives On, By Shane Harris, National Journal, Feb. 23, 2006, and
Taking
Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine
Data, By John Markoff, New York Times,
February 25, 2006).

John Unsworth, the dean of the UI Graduate School of Library and
Information Science believes that this particular dilemma might
be solved by a professional class of trained, bonded, “trusted
stewards of information,” which library and information science schools
like his could be put to work producing.

Have you heard of Scroogle? This is a search interface — created by the non-profit org google-watch. Put in your search term into the “google scraper” (there’s also one available for yahoo!), scroogle searches google, and returns google results WITHOUT ads, WITHOUT cookies and WITHOUT search term records (their access log is deleted within 48 hours whereas google keeps this information FOREVER!). Check it out!

As a side note, there’s been a lot of talk lately about google and the ethics of their aiding in Chinese censorship. See the boingboing story for more background.

Since 2000, Google has recorded your search terms, the date-time of each search, the globally-unique ID in your cookie (it expires in 2038), and your IP address. This information is available to governments on request. (From the Scroogle Web site)

What was once private is now under Google’s domain
San Jose Mercury News Editorial, Feb. 06, 2006.

This time, the government wasn’t looking for information that could be traced to specific people. But next time, it could, and the effects on personal privacy could be devastating.

Search engine companies and other Internet firms are amassing unprecedented amounts of very personal information about every one of us. If the information were revealed — whether by government order, inadvertent exposure, malicious hackers or deliberate misuse by the companies that collected it — we would be digitally naked in the public eye.

Memography and the Memetic Web,
By Bob Doyle. EContentmag.com
(January/February 2006 Issue).

The new “Memetic Web” lets you add your own machine-readable meaning to a page, with a link to the meme aboutness page, so inference engines could also discover something about your meaning.

Keeping Secrets - A simple prescription for keeping Google’s records out of government hands, By Tim Wu, Slate, Jan. 23, 2006.

With all the recent press about the subpoena
of records from search engines (e.g.,
Google subpoena roils the Web, By Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, January 21, 2006), this article puts the underlying issues in perspective.

Imagine we were to find out one day that Starbucks had been recording everyone’s conversations for the purpose of figuring out whether cappuccino is more popular than macchiato. Sure, the result, on the margin, might be a better coffee product. And, yes, we all know, or should, that our conversations at Starbucks aren’t truly private. But we’d prefer a coffee shop that wasn’t listeningÑand especially one that won’t later be able to identify the macchiato lovers by name. We need to start to think about search engines the same way and demand the same freedoms.

Check out and compare these search results from Google China and Google US. I would say that Google has now broken at least 4 of their 10 commandments.

In other google news, the NYTimes reports today that the DOJ suit is not a matter of protecting user privacy, but of protecting trade secrets. Google lawyer Ashok Ramani stated, “Google objects … because to comply with the request could endanger its crown-jewel trade secrets.”