Author: mklang

Death, Internet & Law PhD

This is so cool! Almost makes me want to do a second PhD… More info here.

PhD Studentship in

Law

University of Strathclyde – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences – School of Law -– Legal Aspects of Transmission of Digital Assets on Death

The School of Law in the University of Strathclyde invites applications for a PhD studentship which will research the area of how the law regulates the transmission of digital assets on death, including notions of access, control, propertisation, and ownership. These assets might include: Facebook profiles, photos on Flickr, tweets, virtual assets in online game worlds such as Second Life, e-money, blog texts, eBay trading accounts, etc. This is a novel area where the student will be expected to research independently into appropriate areas of private law (eg property, succession, probate, contract) as well as intellectual property law, personality law and privacy law. A back ground in technology law is not essential, nor a technology qualification, but an interest in the information society is probably essential.

Applicants from any jurisdiction (including non-UK EU jurisdictions) are welcomed but English law will most likely form one of the jurisdictions of the study. Applicants should hold a first or upper second class Honours degree or equivalent in an appropriate discipline. A Masters qualification may be helpful. The studentship is funded by the Horizon Digital Economy Research Hub (https://www.horizon.ac.uk/) who are a major interdisciplinary centre for study of the Internet and ubiquitous computing funded by the RCUK Digital Economy programme and based at Nottingham University; the successful candidate will be based within the expanding Centre for Internet Law and Policy at Strathclyde Law School, but will have opportunities to participate in Horizons activities. The student will be supervised by the Director of CILP, Professor Lilian Edwards.

Applicants should submit, by SEPTEMBER 16 2011, a full CV, two academic references, evidence of academic qualifications to date and a covering letter detailing interest in the area of research to:

Janet Riddell (Horizon Digital Economy Scholarship), Graduate School Manager, Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, Room LT205, Livingstone Tower, 26 Richmond Street, Glasgow, G1 1XH

Or by e-mail to: hass-postgrad@strath.ac.uk

Successful applicants will have their fees at home/EU rates only ((sadly)) waived for three years together with an annual maintenance award for three years of £13,590. The scholarship is for one year in the first instance and subject to satisfactory progress, will normally be renewed up to the maximum of a further 2 years.

Visit www.strath.ac.uk/postgrad for general information on postgraduate research study at the University of Strathclyde and http://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/courses/law/courses/lawbyresearch/ for further information on research degrees in the Law School.

Informal enquiries may be addressed to: lilian.edwards@strath.ac.uk

Posted on by mklang

ShareMeNot

Via Bruce Schneier come news of an important plugin

ShareMeNot is a Firefox add-on for preventing tracking from third-party buttons (like the Facebook “Like” button or the Google “+1” button) until the user actually chooses to interact with them. That is, ShareMeNot doesn’t disable/remove these buttons completely. Rather, it allows them to render on the page, but prevents the cookies from being sent until the user actually clicks on them, at which point ShareMeNot releases the cookies and the user gets the desired behavior (i.e., they can Like or +1 the page).

The add-on is also important as it highlights the fact that information is being shared even when the button is not clicked.

Posted on by mklang

Under attack

My inbox is overflowing with warning messages from my anti-virus service. I am receiving almost 100 messages per hour warning me that someone is attempting to send me a potential virus. The information in the message is:

The virus or unauthorised code identified in the email is >>> Possible MalWare ‘Exploit/Phishing-westernunion-6576’ found in ‘13812907_1X_PM1_EM7_MH_FW__message.htm’. Heuristics score: 200

This is so annoying!

Posted on by mklang

Information diets

What happens when we finally reach a point of information saturation? Can we see information in the same way as food? Some food would be healthy, some would be unhealthy, but no matter what food – overeating is never a good thing.

In 2004 Jimmy Wales was quoted saying (“Wikimedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds,” Slashdot (2004–07-28)):

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge

This is, in essence, a wonderful idea – but imagine what will happen in a world were the sum of all human knowledge is available? I began to explore this in a presentation called Wikipedia & Dr Faustus? where I discussed the effects all the worlds information being made available.

The problem with wishing for access to information is that we today have an infrastructure that can provide all the information that we desire but the technology will not discriminate between healthy and unhealthy information. As part of summer reading I began The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser and came across an interesting quote from Danah Boyd from her speech at the 2009 Web 2.0 Expo:

Our bodies are programmed to consume fat an sugars because they’re rare in nature… In the same way, we’re biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we’re not careful, we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We’ll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.

Maybe Boyd is making a value judgement on the different forms of information and compares the “gross, violent, or sexual” to fatty foods – which would probably make necessary facts and information (e.g. maps, statistics) high protein or high fiber. In relation to food we are programmed for fats and sugars but in relation to information we are programmed to relationships. Information about which berries are edible varies but information about relations is universal. We are programmed to be wary of precisely the gross, the sexual, the humiliating and the embarrassing – our survival in the group depends upon it.

The problem is that our interests in these areas is related to other people, people who we are not related to or dependent upon they serve only as entertainment or simple diversion. The evolutionary role of diversion is unclear but we certainly do seem to desire it – or at least fear boredom. So in our desire to avoid boredom we overindulge in our consumption of unhealthy information.

There are basically two ways of dealing with over-consumption (1) more exercise, or (2) dieting. The former is not really efficient but is more a method of coping with the effects of over-consumption. The latter is healthier as it reduces the intake and avoids the negative side effects of over-consumption. Exercise is hard work, but dieting is harder still. It goes against all our natural instincts to overindulge in preparation for the next information glut.

We need to learn healthy information habits right from the start and to ensure that we keep away from information binges. Staying information healthy may be important, but it sure sounds boring.

Posted on by mklang

Boredom as source of creativity

When was the last time you were bored? Do you remember where you were, what you did and why you were bored? Think about it…

The whole point of the early Internet was to connect – an active effort was needed to access the content that existed. You had to turn on the modem and wait (ah, the nostalgia of modem sound). This active Action was often preceded by a reason: we connected to find out something, do something, or maybe (more rarely) to avoid having to do anything else. With fixed lines the active step disappeared. All we have to do is look at the screen.

From fixed connections to embedded connection

The heady days of fixed connectivity, moved quickly to wifi and now to smart phones and pads. Today connection is not the issue. Technology is all around us and our technology is in constant communication with the rest of the world. This is nothing new, years of technological development – all of which so we can surf over to Facebook while waiting for the bus. What began out of necessity became the ultimate source of constant diversion.

What is lost in a world without boredom?

Now please don’t take this as a nostalgic longing for a time without technology. That’s not the point of this text. The point is to look at what disappears when we become embedded in connection. The first thing our connected toys did was make waiting unnecessary – and before long waiting became intolerable. My purpose is to consider what happens when our opportunity, and capacity for, boredom disappears from our lives. What is lost in a world without boredom?

Boredom is usually experienced as a terrifying abyss that most of us instinctively and habitually flee. We are afraid of the abyss that boredom represents we are afraid that it will swallow us if we let it live inside of us. Or, as Nietzsche writes (Beyond Good and Evil, chapter 4):

And if thou gaze long Into an Abyss, The Abyss Will Also Gaze Into thee.

Boredom is a sickness and every sickness needs a cure. Since boredom is negative it is natural to see a world free of boredom as positive. But is boredom really a disease? It could also be understood as a time when the brain disengaged from tasks and is allowed to be, allowed to experience and roam. But with our technology we are not bored and our minds need not begin to roam.

The end of creative boredom

At my department, all faculty and students have laptops, smart phones and we are all embedded in wireless environment. If meetings are boring, lectures difficult, if group work unpleasant… we surf away. I’m not worried that we don’t do our jobs or our students will not learn. But what is lost is the creative boredom that Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own, chapter 2) refereed to when she wrote:

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, That the submerged truth Sometimes Comes To the top.

Giving your brain time to process, bubble, draw connections, and finally present new ideas, thoughts and imaginative creations. Creativity requires boredom. Requires time where nothing happens, where everything is still.

When was the last time you bored?

Do you remember the last time you were bored? If you are like me, it was probably about an hour when it was socially unacceptable or technically impossible to use your technology. Escape routes were cut off: Technically or socially. Next time it happens, don’t reach instinctively for your technology. Stride toward the abyss and enjoy the breathtaking view. Release your mind and wait for the next creative impulse to bubble up from your subconscious.

(This post originally appeared in Swedish in March 2010)

Posted on by mklang

Stormtrooper Copyright

Every grown child dreams of his very own Storm Trooper uniform and this dream can come true! The original designer Andrew Ainsworth has been selling copies to fans. But there has been a long drawn copyright battle over the uniforms. But now the final battle has come to a close when Ainsworth won yet another victory (via BBC):

Andrew Ainsworth, 62, of south London, successfully argued the costumes were functional not artistic works, and so not subject to full copyright laws.

Judges at the Supreme Court upheld a 2009 Court of Appeal decision allowing Mr Ainsworth to continue selling them.

But they also ruled that the director’s copyright had been violated in the US.

Mr Ainsworth told the BBC: “This is a massive victory, a total victory, we’ve already got the champagne out.”

I have written about this earlier here and here.

Posted on by mklang

Social media madness

So I am still trying to figure out what the best use of Google+ is, and how to integrate it into my information chaos. But today I when engaging in light procrastination instead of editing an article I looked at my circles and was a bit shocked to see this:

A dozen of the people in my circles seemed to have changed the pictures in their profiles. And they had all chosen to use my image! What was this? Intense hero worship? Finally the recognition I desire? An advanced form of anonymity or pseudonymity? A sure sign of my descent into madness due to article editing? Or just a bug?

The most likely theory is that social media really is just a game where high scores are obtained by collecting “friends”. I have obviously progressed to an advanced level of cheating and instead of collecting friends I have begun to make them up and to populate my social media universe with clones of myself.

While questioning my own reality in this way – I ask myself whether Mats, Jenny, Niklas, Alexander, Rickard, Jonas, Chris, Fredrik, Krister, Stefan, David & Natasja know that they are actual people or just figments of my overactive imagination?

Posted on by mklang

Our answer is more democracy

Its been an incomprehensible weekend in Norway. Being far away from harms way all life revolves around flows of information. First the unbelievable news of bombs in the center of peaceful Oslo. Then, while still trying to process this, shootings on Utöya. The latter was so strange it was easily ignored. Then slowly the reality of the actions became clear. A total nutcase – acting out of sick ideology – had planted the bombs as a diversion and then traveled to an island where a political youth camp was meeting. Dressed as a policeman he called the youths to him and opened fire. His bloodbath lasted 1,5 hours. One of the survivors: Prableen Kaur blogged about her experiences in a post entitled Helvete på Utøya (Hell on Utoya translated here).

The total death toll in Oslo and Utöya is now 93 lives lost.

The gunman was caught, identified, images of him came online. His Facebook & Twitter accounts “discovered”. They were started on the 17th July and contained only a quote “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100 000 who have only interests” The quote is by John Stuart Mill – he would probably be sick to be misquoted in this way. Facebook removed the account but his Twitter remains online.

While the official death toll increased and rescue teams worked heroically – more information about the gunman became available. This peaked with the discovery of his 1500 page manifesto “2083 A European Declaration of Independence” written under the pseudonym Andrew Berwick.

This work has supposedly been written over a period of nine years and is an awful mix of puerile history, incoherent anti-islamist, ignorant theory, planning for the deeds and a glorifying self interview. The manifesto seems to have been a necessity in order to present his actions as a part of what he believes to be a European revolution against multi-culturism. The work would be simply be seen as embarrassing if it wasn’t for the actions he carried out.

Update: Not only is the work messy, incoherent, racist crap. Much of it is plagiarized from other sources – among others from the Unibombers (Ted Kaczynski) Manifesto.

The best to emerge is the reaction of the Norwegian people and that of the Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg whose speech today  is brilliant. It contains the words

Vi er fortsatt rystet av det som traff oss, men vi gir aldri opp våre verdier.

Vårt svar er mer demokrati, mer åpenhet og mer humanitet. Men aldri naivitet.

We are still shaken by what has happened but we will never give up our values. Our answer is more democracy, more openness and more humanity. But never naivety.

 

Posted on by mklang

Pirate Bay torrent for 33 GiB Scientific papers

An huge collection of Papers (18,592) from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society has been made available on The Pirate Bay. The torrent includes this information:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

  This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling
33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
and which should be  available to everyone at no cost, but most
have previously only been made available at high prices through
paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the  documents here is typically sold for $19
USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as
cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article
at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to
locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a
checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.

ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3ebcc6a sha256sum.txt

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I
published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who
profit from controlling access to these works.

I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney
General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers
from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd systemΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥the authors are not paid for their
writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics),
and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the
authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously
expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access
fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals,
but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little
significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The
"publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly
weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary
scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather
than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They
are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the
resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask
for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on
the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to
which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they
realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would
benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed
to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending
it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic
documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid
scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their
attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has
classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions
with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give
up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for
creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more
works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence,
when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use
threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly
owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and
lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.

These particular documents are the historic back archives of the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal SocietyΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥a prestigious scientific
journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published
prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some
18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind,
and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available
freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's
viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to
Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, WikisourceΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ where they
could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting
historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus
was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at
the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the
several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of
other papers he authored?)

But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing:
publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation
from the publishers.

As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish
reproductionΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥scanning the documentsΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ created a new copyright
interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial
watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They
might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained
the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover
the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only
unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and
the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is
legally and morally everyone's property.

In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary,
the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archivesΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥but "free"
only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about
100 articles.

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not
disseminators of knowledgeΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥as their lofty mission statements
suggestΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing
they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are
valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one
steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word
on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value
they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence
competition.

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific
inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive
copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question
of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not
paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access
to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued
survival may even depend on it.

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous
industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding,
then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justifiedΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥it will be one
less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent
lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers
a crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed
out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would
probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous
charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe
that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful
applications which come of this archive.

- ----
Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011
gmaxwell@gmail.com  Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

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via Papers from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, fro download torrent – TPB.

Posted on by mklang