Month: December 2010

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Holidays or whatever else takes your fancy

Whatever it is, I hope you’re able to take some time off to relax, to refresh, to recharge yourself.

I’m going to try my best to be offline for a long while. So, in the holiday spirit, I wanted to share a few things with you very quickly.

First and foremost. Wolfgang’s Vault. I’ve been using the Vault for some years now, yet I don’t remember writing about it.The free streaming live music alone makes the site worthwhile; I’ve chosen to be a paid-up WVIP, and for a (shy? not really) retiring hippie like me, the vault is Fort Knox. There’s gold in them thar hills. Take today for example:

Visiting the site, I was greeted by new live videos of The Allmans/Whipping Post, The Band/King Harvest, Ten Years After/Love Like a Man, along with some fresh Zappa. How can you top that?

And all this, a few days after I’d received this book in the post, along with a bonus USB stick carrying some fabulous Airplane tracks. They’re going to be listened to on the way to Calcutta.

To me Wolfgang’s Vault is an extreme nonrival good. My enjoyment of the Vault is not diminished one jot or tittle by the act of my sharing news of its existence. Incidentally, the iPhone app is pretty good as well.

From music to books. I was at Waterstones yesterday, idly looking around, hoping to stock up on some analog reading matter for the journey. And I met Stephen Benatar, who’d set up a table and was selling his books there, largely self-published. What a nice man. We had a chat for a while, I landed up buying four of his books (the only ones he’d got on sale that day), and I like everything I’ve read so far. An interesting talent. I look forward to discovering more of his work.

From books to food. Have you read Alimentum? Fascinating journal, describes itself as “the literature of food”. Read two issues so far, very good.

And finally to an old friend, one I haven’t seen for a while. I will have to correct that.

Hugh MacLeod. Hugh’s usually in good form, often in fine form. Here’s his latest, on the high-end microaudience:

It’s not just tidings of great joy that Hugh writes/draws about, he has this uncanny ability to touch you where you’re still able to feel something. So if you haven’t discovered Hugh yet, now’s the time.

But in the meantime.

Tidings of great joy to all of you.

gently musing about keeping secrets and trust and privacy

There I was, quietly reading last week’s Economist, and I came across this article on UK telephone calling habits, drawing from MIT’s Senseable City Lab research on the subject.

Its core finding? Calling habits tend to reflect cultural/political boundaries.

While I’d been aware of the study, I hadn’t seen this particular representation of the data. And it reminded me of something else I’d read about, and written about, a few years ago. There was a paper titled Understanding Individual Human Mobility Patterns, by Gonzalez, Hidalgo and Barabasi (yes, he of Linked and Bursts fame).

Its core finding? People were creatures of habit when it came to making mobile phone calls. Often from the same place, at the same time, to the same people, for the same duration.

A little while later, a bbc.co.uk headline caught my eye. Facebook connections map the world.

Apparently an intern had been working at Facebook, trying to map friendship pairs relative to cities of residence. The core finding? The friend graph network looked a lot like the political map of the world, with a few glaring exceptions.

When it comes to communications, we’re as predictable as can be. We’re creatures of habit. We tend to speak to the same people. Many of these people have similar cultural, geographical or political backgrounds to us.

That’s enough, I hear you say, mumbling scatological questions about ursines in forested areas. Which is all fine, but given recent events to do with secrets and leaks, I felt it was worth making a few points here:

  • 1. If you really want to keep something completely secret, don’t tell anyone.
  • 2. If you do want to (or sometimes even have to) tell someone, then only tell people you trust.
  • 3. Which means that if you do want to keep a secret online, you must have a way of making sure that all the people you’re telling are people you trust.
  • 4. Which in turn means that you have to have a way of figuring out who those people are and whether you trust them or not.
  • 5. The more people you tell, the harder it will be to make sure of these things.

Or, as Bruce Schneier so elegantly put it, access control is hard. [If you haven’t done so already, read his article on Real-World Access Control from just over a year ago.]

Trust is a key component of secrets, and for that matter a critical component of privacy as well. When my daughter friends me on Facebook, she trusts me not to delve into her wall and posts and conversations and photographs. She trusts me to respect her privacy. Even though she gives me the right to invade it.

This is nothing new. There are drawers in my bedroom I don’t open, they’re my wife’s things. There are drawers in our children’s rooms that we don’t open, they’re their things.  And they’re private. If a guest should sleep in one of our bedrooms, we don’t expect that guest to be looking into cupboards and drawers.

Respecting privacy is common courtesy amongst friends. We trust each other.

When you trust someone with a secret, you give that person the right to betray you. Trust, like faith, grows only when exercised.

The very concept of bankruptcy comes from a breach of trust, and the consequences of breaching trust. The word bank itself comes from the word banco, meaning bench. Lombardy merchants, the early bankers, gathered together and transacted business while seated on benches. Your word was your bond. You were trusted. And if you breached that trust, they sent the heavy mob after you. Who dumped you unceremoniously off the bench, then, just to make sure you understood what had happened, they broke the bench in half, for good measure. So the banco was rutto. Bankrupt.

Privacy and confidentiality and secrecy have always been about trust.

And yet trust is about one other thing.

Transparency.

Bilateral transparency. Multilateral transparency. And sometimes universal transparency.

We have to be careful. Some of the events that have happened, they happened because of poor design (too many people trusted) poor implementation (too many things to be kept secret) and poor behaviour (too many indiscreet actions).

The events did not happen because trust broke down; the events did not happen because transparency is wrong. Trust models will continue to emerge, will continue to evolve, and we will continue to learn about how to scale them.

We have to be careful. Because there will be a backlash against trust-based models, there will be a backlash against transparency. If we don’t do anything, there will be a reversion to the evils of “lobbying” and “briefing”, behaviours designed to break trust down even further. You know the types, they exist in every government, every firm, every department of any scale. Whispering behind the scenes. Wielding the power of corruption. The corruption of power.

And this world will be poorer as a result.

Sea of Joy

….waiting in our boats to set sail/ Sea of Joy

Steve Winwood, Sea of Joy. Blind Faith, Blind Faith, August 1969

Steve Winwood. One of my all-time favourite musicians. Someone whom I heard for the first time in the early Seventies, someone whom I’ve been an ardent fan of ever since. Even went to a pub in Gloucestershire decades ago because I was told he drank there, just to see him in the flesh. He wasn’t touring then. He has, since, resumed touring, and I’ve been fortunate enough to see him maybe half a dozen times since. I was able to see him “live” twice this year, and I shall be doing so again next May. In fact, I took the photograph above while watching him play with Eric Clapton at Wembley Arena earlier this year. But that’s not what this post is about. [Even if I did enjoy being able to link to the concert using setlist.fm; what a lovely service!].

Sea of Joy. One of my all-time favourite songs, taken from one of my all-time favourite albums, Blind Faith by Blind Faith. A song dating back to times when working out the meanings of song lyrics was a hard thing to do…..”Once the door swings open into space, and I’m already waiting in disguise”……There was a time when I used to try, until I heard what might have been an apocryphal tale about the Doors and Mr Mojo Risin’. Erudite people had written erudite essays about what Jim Morrison may have meant in his repeated use of the phrase “Mr Mojo Risin” in a number of Doors songs. Extremely erudite essays about the meaning and role of mojo at the time, in terms of hoodoo and voodoo symbolism and representations of power and sex-appeal. And it is possible that Jim Morrison may have been influenced by all that when he chose to use the phrase as a motet. But. But then I heard the story of a little old lady who wrote in to some magazine some years after Morrison’s death, wondering what all the fuss was about. She said that the Morrisons used to live next door to them when little Jim was growing up. And Jim used to come and play in their yard. And her husband made up the phrase Mr Mojo Risin’ to describe the young James Douglas Morrison, who would have been 67 last week if he hadn’t died so tragically in 1971. Her husband liked crosswords and suchlike. And Mr Mojo Risin’ is a perfect anagram of … Jim Morrison. As I said, the tale is apocryphal. I don’t have a shred of evidence to back the story. And yet I believe it.

But that’s not what this post is about either.

This post is about a sea of joy. Maybe even an ocean of joy. Oceans of joy.

The internet.

I know, I know, comparisons can often be odious. And while pictures paint thousands of words, they come with frames. And anchors. Which can constrain imagination.

Nevertheless.

I’ve always imagined the internet to be a whole heap of rivers, feeding many seas, feeding one large ocean. Living, breathing, moving. A giant organism which is more than just a space. Containing water, that wondrous substance that helps keep us alive. A place where people swim and frolic, laugh and play. An environment of magic, of depth, of beauty we’re still discovering. A place full of life in all its brilliance. A repository of rich resource we can mine and use, sensibly and sustainably. And yet a place where danger lurks, where death too can be found. With pirates. And with pollution.

Despite all that, a sea of joy.

Which is partly why I’ve found recent discussions about Wikileaks intriguing to say the least. For some time now I’ve been talking about having to “design for loss of control”, referred to here and here, here and at the TED Salon here.

Humour me for a moment or two.

Imagine it’s raining outside. [For some strange reason I find this very easy to do. Perhaps it’s because of where I choose to live.] Imagine you go for a walk around your house, with a beaker in your hand, collecting rainwater, getting absolutely drenched in the process. [For an even stranger reason I’ve done this, as part of a school Physics question set by Resnick and Halliday, in 1974….I remember the question as “Drops are falling steadily in a perpendicular rain. You need to get from A to B in this rain. In order to encounter the least number of raindrops in your journey, would you (a) travel at your fastest speed (b) travel at your slowest speed or (c) travel at some intermediate speed you determine? Explain your answer.“]

Anyway, where was I? More importantly, where were you? Oh yes, I had you out collecting rainwater. Imagine you have a beaker full of rainwater. Imagine you take that beaker of rainwater and pour it into a nearby brook, which feeds a river, which empties out into a sea and forms part of the oceans.

For the sake of argument, let’s leave aside the philosophical question of whether you “own” the rainwater you collected. Imagine just trying to find that rainwater in the ocean, something you’re going to have to do if, for some reason, you’re keen on staking a claim to your rainwater.

Hmmm.

The sea is designed to be plentiful, abundant. Quite different from lakes and ponds, which are contained and isolated, controllable. And often stagnant. [No, I’m not going to enter into angels-dancing-on-pins arguments about the Caspian Sea or for that matter the Dead Sea here].

Making things that are abundant by design somehow appear scarce is not an easy task. As I’ve said before, and said many times before, every artificial scarcity will be met by an equal and opposite artificial abundance; over time, the artificial abundance will win. Region coding of DVDs and music DRM are simple examples of the principle.

So it is with the internet. When you make something digital, you have something that is cheap to copy. When you connect that digital something to the internet, you have something that is cheap to distribute far and wide. That is why Kevin Kelly called the internet a “copy machine” in his seminal essay, Better Than Free, from which the illustration below is taken. If you haven’t read it yet, stop here and follow the link. It’s a must-read.

So now the internet exists, does it mean no one can keep a secret any more? No. It’s just like in the good old days before the internet: if you want to keep something secret, try not telling anyone.

The internet is designed to share.

There are many things that people don’t want to share, for a variety of good reasons: personally identifiable information; commercially sensitive information; and information demonstrably pertaining to national or international security. Sometimes it’s because the information is held asymmetrically and misused; in polite society we would call this “blackmail”, and in the civilised world this is illegal. Sometimes it’s because the information is considered “private”, and a right to privacy is seen to exist, a right not to be embarrassed because something you said in private somehow makes its way into the public domain. Which is why the recent spate of leaks has caused such consternation. Contrast this with Eliot Spitzer and the Wall Street firms he went after, the whistleblower/leak aspect of all that happened, and the difference in reaction then. Contrast this with Talking-To-Journalists 101, which says Nothing Is Ever Off The Record. In England, thirty years ago, when I was given rudimentary media training, I was told “always imagine that anything you say, everything you say, could be on the first page of the Mail tomorrow”.

Bruce Schneier, an erstwhile colleague and someone whose writings and sayings I pay attention to, wrote a wonderful little piece on the subject, making five simple points:

  • Encryption is not the issue
  • Secrets are only as secure as the least trusted person who knows them
  • Access control is hard
  • This has little to do with Wikileaks
  • Governments will have to learn what the music and film industries have been forced to learn already, that it’s easy to copy and publish digital files

You should read the whole essay, which I’ve linked to here. Bruce is brilliant, terse and trenchant as ever.

Clay Shirky, another writer I have a lot of time for, writes a very balanced piece here, about the importance of the legal process in all this. Any medium of communication, any method of publishing and propagating, needs to have its principles and guidelines, and over time, its laws and its regulations. Of particular importance is the following paragraph from his post:

The key, though, is that democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the U.S. trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us, “You went after WikiLeaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.”

Due democratic process is always important; it is doubly important when we’re dealing with an emergent, valuable phenomenon. Such as the internet and all things digital.  Which is why I was so concerned with the apparently trivial all-downloaders-are-thieves approach that Mandelson et al sought to steamroller through via the Digital Economy Act. Which is why I remain concerned now. [Incidentally, I’m delighted that BT was part of the lobby that fought for, and won, a judicial review into the DE Act].

Not that I have anything against secrets per se.

Secrets are important, and there is a place for secrets. There are ways of keeping secrets secret.

Sharing is also important. And there is a place for sharing. It’s called the internet.

And it is really important that there continue to be ways of keeping shared things shared.

Which is why I appreciate the tireless work of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in all this; John Palfrey, and, more recently, Urs Gasser, do a great job there. Which is why I look up to people like Charlie Nesson and Jonathan Zittrain and Larry Lessig as they strive to make sure that the law cannot be confused with genus Equus subgenus Asinus, and that due democratic process is followed when new laws are constructed. Which is why I appreciate the time that people like Doc Searls and Cory Doctorow spend on this. Which is why I appreciate the work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; of the Open Rights Group; of Creative Commons; of the Web Science Trust, particularly for their work on open data. People in all these places have somehow found the time and the motivation to devote to this cause. I am privileged to count many of them amongst my friends, too many to list here. You know who you are. Thank you.

You see, it’s not really about Wikileaks. Artificial scarcities will continue to be met by artificial abundances. There will be many more Wikileaks. In many places. At the same time. And some of them will be very damaging. Which is not a good thing. But. There is a right way to stop it. It’s called the democratic process.

The internet is about sharing. It’s about making it easier to copy things and to move them around, to publish at scale. It’s about making it easier for Linus’s Law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. It’s about the power of democratised access. Access to publishing. Access to editing, to changing. Access to reading. Access to community skills and talent.

The internet makes it possible for us to do things we could never do before, like the World Wide Web itself. Like Wikipedia. Like Craigslist. Like being able to listen to “A symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom” live yesterday at the Personal Democracy Forum, as thousands of us were able to do yesterday.

The internet is capable of transforming lives at the edge, making radical impacts on education, on healthcare, even on government. Of course the internet is dependent on all of us having ubiquitous affordable connectivity, something I continue to be optimistic about. It will happen. Perhaps not in the way we thought it would. But it will happen. And there won’t be a digital divide. Because that too would be an artificial scarcity….

Steve Winwood, when he penned Sea of Joy, also had these words to say in the song:

Having trouble coming through,
Through this concrete, blocks my view
And it’s all because of you.

All because of you. The “you” in that phrase is us. We have a responsibility to future generations that the internet is governed the right way, that the right laws are formulated and promulgated, that the right process is followed.

Because there are generations to come….

Waiting in their boats to set sail, Sea of Joy.