I read The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll at the beginning of the summer 1993. I had never read a book so quickly; four days’ worth of morning and evening commutes on the city bus (less than five hours) to and from my summer job at the Communications Research Centre.

My job included an email account. I exercised it on the Friday of my first week. I had just finished Cliff’s book that morning and I sent him an email to say that I enjoyed it. Cliff wrote back about four hours later. He came across as a genuine person which turned me in to a follower of his work.

Since then, I’ve read Silicon Snake Oil and High Tech Heretic (also by Cliff). Both books present extremely compelling arguments against computers in school classrooms. If memory serves me, High Tech Heretic tells one story of a Texas school which replaced a teaching position with a dedicated ISDN line. That kind of logic makes you wonder.

His ideas make great sense to me and I was disappointed when he very politely turned down an invitation to be interviewed for my Electric Sky podcast.

It turns out that around the same time that I extended the invitation, he was a speaker at the TED conference. The video of his presentation was just released two days ago and it reminded me why I wanted to have Cliff on my program. At one point he settled down from his manic manner and very calmly, very directly said:

“If you really want to know about the future, don’t ask a technologist,
a scientist, a physicist. No. Don’t ask someone who’s writing code.
If you want to know what society’s going to be like in twenty years,
ask a kindergarten teacher. They know.
In fact, don’t just ask any kindergarten teacher; ask an experienced one.”

There are a lot of people in the social media community that are futurists. Many of us are called upon to speculate on the world-yet-to-be. It’s time to invite other disciplines to the community. If you don’t involve the right mix of people in the conversation, the conversation will never advance. If we don’t listen to fresh voices — the right voices — and we don’t shake up our current ways of thinking, we will set ourselves up to make the same mistakes we’ve always made.

Thanks, Cliff, for the fresh idea for an episode of Electric Sky.

Photo: TED.com

ars technica reported, yesterday, that Bell Canada has come clean and announced that it has implemented traffic throttling technology across its DSL service and expects to complete the rollout by early April (Canadian ISPs furious about Bell Canada’s traffic throttling).  And in the same way that it’s not much of a shock that Bell has made this unpopular move, it’s no shock that they did this secretly, leaving downstream ISPs to face the music of unhappy customers.

For several months now I have struggled to get my Blackberry’s calendar to sync with iCal on my Mac. This is true with both Missing Sync and PocketMac for Blackberry. Today, my Blackberry started to chew up my address book — both in my computer and on the device. Hard to believe but it erased all but three contacts from my computer and nearly 200 from itself. Fortunately I had a backup.

I spent hours on the phone with Blackberry support today… hours! We worked through a number of troubleshooting options using PocketMac and eventually resynced the address book. Then, feeling lucky, we moved on to the calendar. After about 40 minutes of stalled calendar syncing we discovered that my Blackberry was systematically erasing all of the appointments in iCal. It was hard to say who was more shocked, me or the support tech who sounded amazingly stressed when we made the discovery. Luckily, I had a backup of iCal, too.

RIM has made it quite clear that they are far more committed to supporting their Blackberry devices on the PC platform.

I have a 7190 and a Pearl. Both are officially for sale.

It’s a technological barn raising; an innovative idea called Web Weekend, modeled after something called Startup Weekend.

The concept is simple. A group of people gather in one place for an entire weekend to conceive a web-based product. By the time everyone heads home on Sunday night, a new company will have been formed with shares allocated based on individual contributions. The first of these Startup Weekends took place in Boulder, Colorado in July of 2007. Since then there’s been similar events around the world including Toronto, Hamburg, San Francisco and London.

According the Ottawa Web Weekend website, Ottawa will be hosting its first Web Weekend, May 9-11, 2008 at theCodeFactory (246 Queen Street).

Nora Young and the production team of CBC Radio’s Spark have published this video which explains the origins and inner workings of their fantastic radio show — with only a bit of humour.

By now, most Canadians have heard that US weapons manufacturer Alliant Systems has made on offer to purchase MDA (MacDonald, Detwiler and Associates) and, with it, Canada’s highly successful Radarsat, builders of the Canadarm.

MDA was built largely with Canadian taxpayer money.

You can find a great summary of the situation at The Council of Canadians’ ACTION ALERT: Prentice Must Reject the sale of MDA to US Weapons Manufacturer web page.

Jim Prentice, Canada’s Industry Minister, was first introduced to the impact of the online community when Michael Geist launched the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook Group on December 1, 2007. That group grew to around 30,000 well-informed people in 10 days and was instrumental in convincing Minister Prentice to delay the introduction of copyright reforms to the House of Commons before the end of 2007.  Reforms have still not been introduced.

I see that there is a Facebook group called Keep Radarsat Canadian!  I have joined this group and I will be contacting my MP and Minister Prentice’s office to express my concerns.  I encourage you to do the same.

Canadian podcaster and musician Sean McGaughey has launched an initiative call K7 Days (in Facebook) to increase voice feedback for fellow podcasters.

The K7 reference is an acknowledgement that most podcasters use the free K7.net voice feedback service which provides a Seattle-based phone number and emails digital recordings of voice messages to the user of the service.

Sean’s blurb reads as follows:

A lot of podcasters use the free K7 voicemail service to receive voice comments. A drawback of the service is that like many free internet services, if you don’t use it for 30 days, you lose your K7 number. I also know that podcasters love to receive voice feedback, so I have a simple proposal:

I am declaring the 7th, 17th and 27th of each month as K7 days. On a K7 day take 7 minutes to leave voice feedback for some of your favorite podcasts.

I am all for this. By the way, the voice feedback number for MarkBlevis.com, JustOneMoreBook.com and ElectricSky.net is +1.206.350.6487.

Following the Facing up to Facebook session at the University of Ottawa on Wednesday, Bob LeDrew and I chatted for quite a while about the privacy implications of social media. Specifically, we talked about services like Facebook and how they exploit trust and personal information for corporate gains — their own and their clients’. These companies do warn you on some level that, by accepting their terms of service, you forfeit your claims to privacy of your information and that you also assign full licensing rights (including for their own financial gain) for your content (text, photos, videos, etc…) to the them. However, they do this through obscure (certainly not plain English) terms and conditions. They also serve up what I call a ‘crippling and confusing suite’ of information sharing controls disguised as privacy controls.

Bob and I came to the realization that the key element in the discussion about privacy and an individual’s right to privacy in social media tools is the amount of complexity and confusion in the way the agreements are structured and what our real rights are. This is further complicated by the fact that privacy laws differ from country to country and while most countries have adopted strict privacy regulations in order to do business with the EU, the United States has managed to get by with a more relaxed set of rules called Safe Harbor.

From the Safe Harbor main webpage:

While the United States and the European Union share the goal of enhancing privacy protection for their citizens, the United States takes a different approach to privacy from that taken by the European Union.

This raises a lot of concerns when Canadian companies like Flickr move their data servers to the United States.

As we talked, I mentioned to Bob that what the world needs is a Privacy Commons — a simple and easy to understand deed to privacy which clearly communicates the privacy (or absence of privacy) controls built in to a service (I blogged about this in November). We fantasized about a simple Privacy Commons modeled after the Creative Commons that would elegantly and concisely allow service providers to designate privacy features in a deed-like interface, indicating elements like:

• do they collect personal identifying data
• is the data stored and transferred in a way that protects confidentiality
• is the data shared or sold
• does the company expect blanket consent to share/sell private information or do they require case-specific consent
• how long data is kept
• how data is destroyed

Some would argue that it would be hard to get companies to adopt this model. I suggest that companies that are committed to privacy would have no issues adopting a model which would make that immediately obvious to people.  At the very least, it will help people understand the privacy features of the site. In the same way that the Creative Commons took a while to stick and connect those with a common vision of making creative works available under specific implicit terms as well as send a message to licensing bodies, the Privacy Commons would take some time to prove that taking privacy seriously is good business.

Many cultural, political, business and media revolutions have taken place online over the last few years. A revolution for simplified privacy in an increasingly public world seems like a logical next step.

Two questions come to mind:

• Who would build a Privacy Commons?
• Does anyone else see a Privacy Commons as being beneficial?

Yesterday, after Bryan Person pointed out that there were some problems with it, I removed the FriendsRoll block from my site.  Steve, one of the developers at 76design, whipped into action and released a corrected v1.2 beta.

My FriendsRoll block is back online.

I attended the Facing up to Facebook session at the University of Ottawa, yesterday. It was a panel discussion with Law and Technology Faculty Professors Jeremy de Beer, Ian Kerr, Jane Bailey, Val Steeves and Michael Geist and it was moderated by Andy Kaplan-Myrth.

The discussion was lively and informative and had a unique mix of social media participants (Profs de Beer, Kerr and Geist) and observers/researchers (Profs Bailey and Steeves). While there was a clear recognition of the role of social media tools such as Facebook, the discussion focussed largely on the impacts of these technological gathering places on culture and privacy, and their not-so-subtle use for corporate interests.

I found it particularly interesting when the panel explored the influence of culture on the need for social media tools and influence of social media tools on culture. Prof. de Beer introduced the room to John Fiske’s concept of Semiotic Democracy, “the delegation of the production of meanings and pleasures to viewers”.

The majority of the conversation focused on privacy concerns, the misrepresentation of information sharing controls as privacy controls and the use of aggregate information (not specific information) to generate consumer profiles. Prof. Bailey wondered if privacy is now passé. Indeed, social media tools are about publicity and micro-celebrity rather than privacy.

The session reinforced my realization that businesses that have stood up social media services (such as Facebook) are manufacturing a three-tiered privacy-crippled environment:

• crippling amounts of information that creates an environment in which privacy may be possible through obscurity
• crippling suite of options designed to perpetuate a false sense of privacy
• crippling terms of use agreements designed to protect the interests of companies through obscure language, excessive text and circular references beyond the patience and comprehension of most people

Excerpts of the Facing up to Facebook session are available in this week’s episode (#95) of the Canadian Podcast Buffet. The entire session will be released as a podcast through the University of Ottawa.