Internet matters – Page 29 – a sibilant intake of breath

Strategy for denier commenters

I am happy to say that traffic to this site has been steadily increasing. Visits are up 138% from last year, and October was our best month ever. Increasingly, a sibilant intake of breath is well ranked by search engines.

One problematic element that accompanies popularity is that I attract ever-more climate change deniers and delayers (those who accept that it is real, but think we should take no action). Ordinarily, I am happy to debate with people and try to provide quality information. That being said, it can take up a lot of time to try to refute those who repeat faulty arguments over and over. These people call themselves ‘skeptics,’ but I think they are mis-applying the term. I have yet to encounter one that is willing to back away from even thoroughly discredited positions. Instead, they just move on to another misleading argument.

The question, then, is how to deal with these commentors without losing all scope for socializing and personal projects. Some of the options:

Briefly assert that their position is incorrect and point to a resource that says why. Ignore further attempts at rebuttal.
Point all such commentors towards pre-existing posts and conversations, without offering specific responses.
Adopt the Zero Carbon Canada approach: “ATTN climate change denier trolls: you are cooking our kids and will be deleted.”
Continue to provide detailed, personalized responses as much as possible.

(1) and (2) are appealing because they reduce the extent to which one person seeking to spread disinformation can waste my time. That said, leaving comments unaddressed could lead readers to believe that the points made therein are valid. (3) is appealing because it would prevent bad information from appearing online, though it is obviously a form of censorship. (4) is the ideal world solution, though I do need to wonder whether refuting deniers and delayers in blog comments is really the best use of my time, even if all I am taking into consideration is whether I am acting effectively on climate change.

Which option do readers think is most suitable? Are there other options I ought to consider?

International domain names

This month, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved domain names written using non-Latin scripts, such as Cyrillic and Kanji. While this is an appropriate recognition of the international character of the internet, I worry that there will be serious problems with both usability and security.

Starting with usability, many people will soon be in the position of being unable to input the universal resource locater (URL) for various websites using their existing keyboard. On-screen keyboards are an option, but they are annoying to use and there will be confusion regarding characters that look identical (or nearly so) yet actually differ.

The latter problem leads to the major security concern: namely, that people will use identical looking characters (homographs) to trick users into thinking they are actually at a different site. For instance, someone could register ‘sindark.com’ where the lower-case ‘a’ is the Unicode character U+0430 (from the Cyrillic alphabet), rather than the identical-looking Unicode character U+0061 (from the Latin alphabet).

This isn’t much of a threat for a blog, since people don’t enter sensitive information here, but it might make attacks against banks and commerce sites even easier than at present. The designers of web browsers are considering various methods for countering this threat – such as highlighting non-Latin characters somehow, or creating blacklists of fake sites – but it seems virtually certain that at least a few scams will succeed before good solutions are developed.

Personally, I hope browser manufacturers offer users the option of disabling non-Latin domain names entirely, until such a time as some desirable content appears on sites that don’t use them and mechanisms to prevent abuse have been demonstrated successfully.

Three strikes rules for internet piracy

The British ISP TalkTalk has been working to show why banning people from the internet, based on unproven allegations of piracy, is a bad idea. Specifically, they have highlighted how many people still use WEP to protect their wireless networks from use by strangers, despite the fact that WEP encryption is easily compromised. That means it is easy for someone to use software tools to access a nearby network and then use it for illegal purposes. My own experience with wireless networks has demonstrated that people really will use them for criminal purposes if they can gain access.

Beyond that, the idea of cutting people off on the basis of three accusations alone runs fundamentally contrary to the presumption of innocence in our system of justice. It would inevitably be abused by copyright holders, and it would inevitably lead to innocent people being cut off from the internet, an increasingly vital part of life for almost everyone. Indeed, Finland recently declared broadband access a right.

To me, the fact that laws like this may well emerge in France, the UK, and elsewhere seems like another example of just how badly broken our intellectual property (IP) systems are, and how badly skewed they are towards protecting the rights of IP owners rather than the public at large. We would be a lot better off if patents were granted more selectively, if licensing of them was mandatory, if copyright was less well defended and expired sooner, and if fair use rights were more effectively legally enshrined. Here’s hoping ‘pirate parties’ continue to proliferate, pushing back the IP laws that have become so unfairly weighted towards those who own the content.

After all, it needs to be remembered that there is nothing libertarian or natural about IP protection. Rather, content owners are having their property claims enforced by the mechanisms of the state. The justification for this is supposed to be that doing so serves the public interest; if that is no longer the case, the laws ought to be watered down or scrapped.

Google’s new malware notifications

In a welcome move, Google will now be sending detailed information to people whose websites have been infected with malware. This occurs frequently when people use old versions of content management systems like WordPress or Joomla. Attackers use known security flaws to add their own code to vulnerable sites: spreading viruses, stealing information, manipulating search engines, and so on.

Given how many blogs get started and abandoned – and how many bloggers lack the technical savvy to identify and remove infections themselves – this should help make the web a bit safer.

Half the world with mobile phones

The Economist recently published an interesting survey on mobile phones and telecommunications in emerging markets. One fact that is a bit startling is that, of the world’s estimated 6.8 billion people, 3.6 billion (53%) are estimated to own cellular phones. As one of the articles argues, a luxury item has become a tool of global development.

It will certainly be interesting to see what happens as smartphones begin to make the same transition. As the internet turns ubiquitous, it seems likely to change in ways more profound and unexpected than simply being available anywhere. As my own experience with smartphones demonstrates, the formfactor of these devices makes them less-than-ideal tools for browsing the conventional web.

Comment to win a Wave invitation

In the spirit of the comments for photography contest, I have another. I’ve been invited to participate in the invitation-only trial of Google Wave. I was given eight invitations, seven of which I have sent off to people I thought it might be useful to share Wave with. I will award the last one to a random person who leaves a comment on this site, during the next week. All eligible comments posted before 2:47pm Ottawa time on Tuesday October 20th will be entered into the random draw. The rules are the same as those for the previous contest.

Note that invitations aren’t processed instantly. As Google explains: “Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.”

Edgy campaign from the Young Greens

The Young Greens of Canada recently launched a new website emblazoned with the slogan “[Y]our parents f*cked up the planet – [I]t’s time to do something about it. [L]ive green, vote green.” Obviously, it is intended to provoke controversy, and it is arguably a tactical mistake. That being said, it is certainly factually true. The ancestors of those now alive helped to expand the fossil-fuel-driven society that is the fundamental cause of climate change. Most of them did so in ignorance of what the consequences would be, but that is no longer a legitimate possibility for those now alive. Faulty arguments from deniers aside, we all now know that climate change is real, dangerous, and caused by us. We have to stop. That being said, it would be more correct to say “our parents” or “all our parents” and to mention that, so far, we are all doing the same thing.

We certainly need a diversity in media campaigns to address climate change and, even if some people object to this one, I think there is some cause for raising the issue of responsibility. We need to move from a mindset where we pat ourselves on the back for walking to the grocery store or using a compact fluorescent light to one where we recognize the harm our emissions will cause to other people and take major steps to reduce them (while also demanding change in the economic and political structures within which we live).

Canada’s political system forces the Greens to engage from the outside. Whether you think this communication strategy will alienate more than it educates or not, that is clearly what the Young Greens are trying to accomplish here.

What does the internet know about you?

Through my friend Antonia, I discovered the Personas project over at MIT. The creators claim that it is “a critique of data mining, revealing the computer’s uncanny insights and inadvertent errors.” Putting in my name yields lots of results, though less information than a simple Google search. Indeed, it is probably what Google turns up when we enter our names that should concern us most. The MIT project is more about nice visuals than about providing a comprehensive precis on someone, based on publicly accessible information.

Even so, it’s a neat little thing to try out, especially if you have a rare or unique name.

Pondering smartphones II

At the end of June, I pondered smartphones for the first time and decided on the Nokia E71 (preliminary review here). Since then, I have witnessed mine sicken and die, getting progressively buggier. Bugs aside, I have also found the phone much less useful than I expected before getting it. The web browsing experience is poor; blogging from it is impossible; the audio quality is lower than with my cheap old phone; and the email capabilities that were my primary motivation for buying it were always finicky, awkward, and temperamental. The media capabilities were never a major concern of mine, but it is fair to note that the media player and camera are both rather poor.

Today, my dead phone was revived by the Fido store in Ottawa’s ByWard Market – eliminating all my saved notes to myself (foolish to save anything in local memory!), settings, and applications. The generic OS they installed lacks some of what my phone came with initially, and it still won’t pair with Bluetooth devices. The people at the shop say that the matter of any further repairs is between me and Nokia, and I should be glad that they didn’t charge me for flashing the phone.

As such, I see myself with three options:

Give the E71 another try, in hopes that the bugs are mostly gone and I will learn to live with its limitations as a device.
Get an iPhone, with the annoyance of a three year contract.
Abandon smartphones altogether and get a basic GSM phone with the capability of making calls and sending text messages only.

The choice is complicated by the apparent defectiveness of the E71. It wouldn’t really be ethical to sell it to someone else in this state. Given that, and my displeasure at the prospect of an exclusive contract and locked phone (or spending $700 on an unlocked iPhone), option two is basically out for now.

In some ways, option three is actually the most appealing right now. Smartphones may simply be more trouble (and expense) than they are worth. Perhaps waiting for a few more generations of devices to pass by makes the most sense. That said, given that I have a phone that I cannot really sell, I will probably continue with option one.

If I could send advice back in time to myself in June, I would probably say: “Wait a few more years before going for a smartphone, and if you must get one now, go with Apple’s offering.”

Now a historical authority

People talk about how the internet and Wikipedia have made the collection and categorization of information more democratic, but the point is really driven home when one of your blog posts gets used as a reference by the Hungarian version of Wikipedia.

I don’t know what the Hungarian text says, but there must surely be a more authoratative source than my blog regarding how George de Hevesy hid the Nobel Prize medals of James Franck and Max von Laue by dissolving them in aqua regia.

This page on the Nobel Prize website discusses the events in question.