Berkman Buzz: Week of July 26, 2010

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* Wendy Seltzer, "Jailbreaking Copyright's Scope."
* Facebook caper? Jonathan Zittrain holsters his pitchfork.
* Facebook privacy settings? danah boyd, Eszter Hargittai ask, "Who cares?"
* Peace on Facebook? Ethan Zuckerman tries to do the math.
* Dan Gillmor's initial comments on the WikiLeaks "Afghanistan diary."
* Weekly Global Voices: "Côte d'Ivoire: Journalists accused of document theft are freed"
* Herdict on court-ordered filtering in Russia.
* CMLP on the FTC's defense of its Blogger Endorsement Guidelines.
* Radio Berkman 160: "Business, Meet Web"
* Doc Searls' belated eulogy for Ricochet.
* David Weinberger imagines a software-defined radio future.

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The full buzz.

"A bit late for the rule’s “triennial” cycle, the Librarian of Congress has released the sec 1201(a)(1)(C) exceptions from the prohibitions on circumventing copyright access controls. For the next three years, people will not be ” circumventing” if they “jailbreak” or unlock their smartphones, remix short portions of motion pictures on DVD (if they are college and university professors or media students, documentary filmmakers, or non-commercial video-makers), research the security of videogames, get balky obsolete dongled programs to work, or make an ebook read-aloud. (I wrote about the hearings more than a year ago, when the movie studios demoed camcording a movie — that didn’t work to stop the exemption.) Since I’ve criticized the DMCA’s copyright expansion, I was particularly interested in the inter-agency debate over EFF’s proposed jailbreak exemption. Even given the expanded “para-copyright” of anticircumvention, the Register of Copyrights and NTIA disagreed over how far the copyright holder’s monopoly should reach."
From Wendy Seltzer's blog post Jailbreaking Copyright’s Scope

(And, for Chilling Effects, David Abrams reviews the Librarian of Congress' latest DMCA circumvention exceptions.)

"So, is this a problem? As I’m writing, news is only just breaking, so it’s like that moment when a toddler trips, falls, and then has to think about whether to cry or not. “You’re OK!” is usually what the alert parent encouragingly says — and if the toddler buys it, it’s usually true. In fact, even if the toddler doesn’t buy it, it’s still usually true. In this case, I think I’m with the metaphorical parent. The data that Ron grabbed is precisely what Facebook users have chosen (or perhaps more accurately, passively acquiesced) to share. For those who lock their privacy settings to avoid having a public listing in a Facebook search, they’re not present here. For those who have, they are — along with a click through to their respective Facebook pages however they’ve chosen to share them."
From Jonathan Zittrain's blog post Facebook’s ocean of names becomes a torrent

(Harry Lewis also shares his thoughts on the scraping of Facebook's directory.)

"Eszter Hargittai and I just published a new article in First Monday entitled: “Facebook privacy settings: Who cares?” Abstract: With over 500 million users, the decisions that Facebook makes about its privacy settings have the potential to influence many people. While its changes in this domain have often prompted privacy advocates and news media to critique the company, Facebook has continued to attract more users to its service. This raises a question about whether or not Facebook’s changes in privacy approaches matter and, if so, to whom. This paper examines the attitudes and practices of a cohort of 18– and 19–year–olds surveyed in 2009 and again in 2010 about Facebook’s privacy settings. Our results challenge widespread assumptions that youth do not care about and are not engaged with navigating privacy......"
From danah boyd's blog post Facebook privacy settings: Who cares?

"I’m a data junkie, and there’s little more frustrating to me than an incomplete data set. Basically, by showing us a very small portion of the nation to nation social graph, Facebook is hinting that the whole graph is available: not just how many friendships Indian Facebook users form with Pakistani users, but how many they form with Americans, Canadians, Chinese, other Indians, etc. Obviously, this is info I’m interested in – I’ve been building a critique that argues that usage of social networking tools to build connections between people in the same country vastly outpaces use of these tools to cross national, cultural and religious borders."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post Counting International Connections on Facebook

"WikiLeaks' roles -- intermediary, publisher, P.R. agent and more -- is not utterly unprecedented, but the size and importance of this story takes the shifting changes in media to new levels. (Do read Jay Rosen's smart instant analysis on all of this.) What do we make of such a "stateless news organization," as Jay elegantly puts it, which works so hard to subvert so many media assumptions of the past?"
From Dan Gillmor's post in Salon, The WikiLeaks war logs change everything

(More responses to the WikiLeaks news this week -- from
Doc Searls, The Wikileaks Story
Herdict, Wikileaks Censored?
Global Voices Online, Afghan Bloggers on Wikileaks War Logs)

"The three journalists of Le Nouveau Courrier d'Abidjan arrested for refusing to reveal their sources have been finally released this evening after a two-week ordeal. On July 13th, Le Nouveau Courrier published an investigative report on the coffee and cocoa export trade in Côte d'Ivoire, which provoked a police raid in the newspaper offices. Since they didn't find the base documents used for the article, and the editorial team refused to give them up, publisher Stéphane Guédé, managing editor Théophile Kouamouo [who is also a Rising Voices grantee] and editor Saint Clavier Oula were taken into police custody. Two days later they were taken to jail, where they have been waiting for their sentence since then."
From Elia Varela Serra's blog post for Global Voices, Côte d'Ivoire: Journalists accused of document theft are freed

"Although the ISP used a “common carrier” argument, saying that the sites themselves were not responsible for the content created or uploaded by their users (a la section 230 of the CDA here in the US ), the court ruled in favor of the Prosecutor and forced the ISP to block the sites. Allegedly, the first four mentioned sites had copies of “Mein Kampf” and on YouTube the video “Russia for Russians”. The court considered all of these materials to be “extremist materials” and thus ordered the IP blocks to prevent access."
From Alex Fayette's blog post for Herdict, Russian court blocks YouTube and other sites

"As I've explained in detail in prior posts, the Commission revised the guidelines last year for the first time since 1980, with a particular emphasis on endorsements by bloggers and other online citizen journalists who do not disclose that the products or services they review were provided to them for free or at a discount. Despite a number of questionable incidents since the FTC issued its revised guidelines, it has taken only one public action under the revised rules: sending a letter in April to Ann Taylor Loft raising concerns about a promotion the clothing company ran for bloggers and warning the company not to undertake any similar campaigns. The FTC's new factsheet states that "since the FTC issued the revised Guides, advertisers, ad agencies, bloggers, and others have sent questions to endorsements@ftc.gov," and offers what it says are "answers to some of the most frequently asked questions." But the factsheet also seems to be responding to criticims of the rules, by myself and others."
From Eric Robinson's blog post for CMLP, FTC Seeks to Clarify -- and Justify -- Its Blogger Endorsement Guidelines

This week on Radio Berkman: This week on Radio Berkman: Berkman fellow and Law Lab co-director Oliver Goodenough speaks with Zeba Kahn about Vermont's virtual business laws...
Radio Berkman 160: Business, Meet Web
More episodes of Radio Berkman

"In retrospect, Ricochet was way ahead of its time. It used mesh networking, spread spectrum, low-power license-free channels, and other forms of network coolness. It failed, like so much else, by being gassed up and deflated in the dot-com boom and bust. But what it negotiated with the cities and with private residents for node sites still impresses me."
From Doc Searls' blog post Remembering Ricochet

"Software-defined radios (SDRs) are not the next generation of transistor radios or boomboxes (ask your parents, kids). They are radios in the more primordial sense of being devices that can receive radio-wave signals. The radios you and I are used to are hard-wired to do one thing: Tune into specific frequencies and translate the radio signals into toe-tapping tunes or the blather of infuriating talk show hosts. SDRs can be programmed to do anything they want with any type of signal they can receive. For example, they might treat messages as, say, maps, or signals to turn on the porch light … or as Internet packets."
From David Weinberger's blog post GE pushes ahead with software-defined radio … good news for civilians, too?

(See/hear also The Wonderful World of Spectrum with Christian Sandvig, on Radio Berkman.)

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The weekly Berkman Buzz is selected from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects: http://cyber.harvard.edu/planet/current/

Suggestions and feedback about the Buzz are always welcome and can be emailed to syoung@cyber.harvard.edu