Myths of the Information Age according to Robert Darnton

5 Myths About the 'Information Age' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Confusion about the nature of the so-called information age has led to a state of collective false consciousness. It's no one's fault but everyone's problem, because in trying to get our bearings in cyberspace, we often get things wrong, and the misconceptions spread so rapidly that they go unchallenged. Taken together, they constitute a font of proverbial nonwisdom. Five stand out:

Reality and traditional media business models

Reality Check for News - Guilt Trips Aren’t a Business Model - NYTimes.com

Jarvis sets out to disabuse existing media players of some of the myths and rationalizations they have for why people should pay them for their content. For example, he says:

“Should” is not a business model. You can say that people “should” pay for your product but they will only if they find value in it.

and later adds:

Virtue is not a business model. Just because you do good does not mean you deserve to be paid for it.

Review of book on WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency: Micah Sifry explores the history, successes and failures of online transparency - Boing Boing

Micah Sifry's WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency is a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at the promise and limits of Internet-based transparency efforts. Sifry looks at everything from digital sunshine laws to the Iranian election to Cablegate, and examines what has worked to make the world's governments and corporations more accountable and when technology-driven transparency efforts have failed. His postmortem on the Obama administration's largely abandoned transparency efforts are particularly sharp, especially in light of how much mileage the few successful government transparency projects delivered.

Climate Gate and its effect

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones

Climategate had a substantial impact on public opinion, according to Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. It contributed to an overall drop in public concern about climate change and a significant loss of trust in scientists. But—as we should expect by now—these declines were concentrated among particular groups of Americans: Republicans, conservatives, and those with "individualistic" values. Liberals and those with "egalitarian" values didn't lose much trust in climate science or scientists at all. "In some ways, Climategate was like a Rorschach test," Leiserowitz says, "with different groups interpreting ambiguous facts in very different ways."

US government lab hacked -- advanced persistent threat

Top Federal Lab Hacked in Spear-Phishing Attack | Threat Level | Wired.com

Zacharia called the attack against the lab “sophisticated” and compared it to so-called “advanced persistent threat” attacks that hit security firm RSA last month and Google last year.

The attacker used an Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability that Microsoft patched on April 12 to breach the lab’s network. The vulnerability, described as a critical remote-code execution vulnerability, allows an attacker to install malware on a user’s machine if he or she visits a malicious web site.

Freedom on the net report

freedomhouse.org: Freedom on the Net 2011

In order to illuminate the emerging threats to internet freedom and identify areas of opportunity, Freedom House created a unique methodology to assess the full range of elements that comprise digital media freedom. This report examines internet freedom in 37 countries around the globe. The study’s findings indicate that the threats to internet freedom are growing and have become more diverse. Cyber attacks, politically-motivated censorship, and government control over internet infrastructure have emerged as especially prominent threats.

No information on Canada, but the questions and methodology outlined could be applied to Canada.

online identity

Online Identity Isn’t a Transaction — It’s a Feeling: Tech News and Analysis «

Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams noted in a blog post this weekend that online identity is one of the thorniest issues any web-based service has to deal with — in part because the word “identity” means a number of different things. Williams tried to parse the term’s various meanings in his post, including authentication, reputation and personalization. But one thing he doesn’t really grapple with is that what we mean by “our identity” can change depending on where we are and what we’re doing, and that may be the most difficult problem of all to solve.

the end of email

Is Email’s Reign Coming to an End? - NYTimes.com

The report’s authors highlight the fact that, while the respondents believed they would newer technologies like VoIP and videoconferencing increasingly in the future, the more traditional tools like email and the office landline showed a noticeable downward trend.

These findings shouldn’t be surprising; having a greater range of useful (and relatively inexpensive) communications tools at our disposal means we can pick the best tools for a given job, which should make our communications more effective. The availability of tools like Dropbox and box.net, for example, has greatly simplified the process of sharing files with others, and should mean fewer people trying to send large files as email attachments. And for internal office communications, social business tools like Yammer and Chatter make for easier conversation than can be had over email distribution lists.

I have blogged about this before. Email is one of those technologies used more but defined by many as doomed. I am sure it will be complemented by other technologies--which may take the place of some messages. But, I do not myself experience a decline in the messages in my inbox. I am waiting for some stronger evidence before I buy this one.

the TV can go

Plugged-in Canadians value Internet over other media - The Globe and Mail

A survey of plugged-in Canadians suggests most value their Internet access over their TV, cellphone and newspaper subscriptions.

And if they could keep just one service, they'd stay online.

The Canadian Media Research Consortium, based out of the University of British Columbia, commissioned the online survey and found 42 per cent of respondents said the Internet would be the last service they'd cut. Twenty four per cent said they'd keep their cable TV and 17 per cent each would keep their cellphone service or newspaper subscription.

The Conservatives and their proposed Internet Surveillance Law

Canadian Privacy Law Blog: Why internet privacy matters

The Internet is not quite like the real world. When you go to a library, you don't have to provide ID or leave a record of what you looked at or that you were even there. When you step into a store in the real world, you don't necessarily leave a trace of what you perused and what you bought (if you paid cash). You can send an anonymous letter to the editor of your local newspaper to voice an unpopular opinion without giving your name or any other identifying information. (They probably will not publish it, but that's beside the point.) But the Internet doesn't work like that.

looking for work. Remember to self-Google first.

You've been Googled: what employers don't want to see in your online profile | Guardian careers | guardian.co.uk

So, what will employers want to find, and what will put them off? Luci Baldwin, IPC Media resourcing and recruitment manager, says anything constructive and positive will work in a candidate's favour. "Evidence of involvement in community activities, a presence on a business network such as LinkedIn, and anything to demonstrate good communication skills are key attributes we look for," she said.

"Written material should be positive and error-free. So much the better if there is evidence of teamwork, or an account of some really special project a candidate has been involved with. Anything constructive and memorable can go a long way to supporting an individual application."

And what about the bad stuff? Shuvo Loha, director of headhunting specialists Janikin Rooke, starts simply. "It would worry me to find negative remarks about a person or from them," he says.

Journalism and Theft

Why Arianna Huffington is Bill Keller’s Somali Pirate « zunguzungu

The real problem, however, is that journalists are, by their nature, thieves of words. You can call it what you like; you can say “Possibly I am old-fashioned,” and talk about how “actual journalists are laboring at actual history, covering the fever of democracy in Arab capitals and the fever of austerity in American capitals” (Keller) or you can brag about the “148 full-time editors, writers, and reporters engaged in the serious, old-fashioned work of traditional journalism” (Huffington), but all this “old fashioned” stuff is just a way of covering over something really basic about what “actual” journalists “traditionally” do, all the time: write down what other people say. They can exercise editorial discretion in how they integrate and harmonize the various quotes they‘ve aggregated. They can confirm, they can contextualize, and they can (very rarely) manage to witness something with their own two eyes. They can produce collages out of stolen scraps. And they should do these things. But at the core of the journalistic process is the act, inescapably, of taking other people’s texts, weaving them together, and then placing them under your byline (with appropriate citation) and profiting from the activity.

Piracy as a market failure

Geist: Canadian-backed report says music, movie, and software piracy is a market failure, not a legal one - thestar.com

Trademark and copyright holders frequently characterize piracy as a legal failure, arguing that tougher laws and increased enforcement are needed to stem infringing activity. But a new global study on piracy, backed by Canada's International Development Research Centre, comes to a different conclusion. Following several years of independent investigation in six emerging economies, the report concludes that piracy is chiefly a product of a market failure, not a legal one.

The Social Science Research Council launched the study in 2006, identifying partner institutions in South Africa, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, and India to better understand the market for media piracy such as music, movies, and software. The result is the most comprehensive analysis of piracy to date.

Online Reputation Management Business is Growing

Erasing Individual’s Digital Past - NYTimes.com

And then there is the Philadelphia physiologist who became unwittingly linked to a consumer advocacy site, when it listed him as a graduate of a distance learning school that was shut down. “I felt totally victimized because there was nothing I could do,” said the physiologist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want added attention. “My case load started to dry up.”

At first, some tried manipulating the Web results on their own, by doing things like manually deleting photos from Flickr, revising Facebook pages and asking bloggers to remove offending posts. But like a metastasized cancer, the incriminating data had embedded itself into the nether reaches of cyberspace, etched into archives, algorithms and a web of hyperlinks.

After failing to rid the negative sites on their own, most turned to a new breed of Web specialists known as online reputation managers, who offer to expunge negative posts, bury unfavorable search results and monitor a client’s virtual image.

Hacking the security at RSA Security

The RSA Hack: How They Did It - NYTimes.com

But on Friday RSA shed some light on the nature of the attack. In a blog post titled “Anatomy of an Attack,” the company’s head of new technologies, Uri Rivner, described a three-stage operation that was similar to several other recent prominent attacks on technology companies, including a 2009 attack on Google that it said originated in China.

In the attack on RSA, the attacker sent “phishing” e-mails with the subject line “2011 Recruitment Plan” to two small groups of employees over the course of two days. Unfortunately, one was interested enough to retrieve one of these messages from his or her junk mail and open the attached Excel file. The spreadsheet contained malware that used a previously unknown, or “zero-day,” flaw in Adobe’s Flash software to install a backdoor. RSA said that Adobe had since released a patch to fix that hole.

APT stands for Advanced Persistent Threat.

From 40 years ago, an idea of the future but no idea, really.

Prophecies of the Internet, 1971 - Boing Boing

as we looked through our library of Baran's brilliant, and still-relevant, research papers, we came across a mind-blowing report from 1971, titled "Toward a Study of Future Urban High-Capacity Telecommunications Systems." At the time, Baran and his IFTF colleagues were considering how the military's ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, might someday change our everyday lives if it became publicly accessible. This particular report contained a delightfully prophetic page of forecasts titled "Brief Descriptions of Potential Home Information Services."

It is true these are amazing predictions, but still so rooted in the print and TV technologies of the day. They reveal just how fundamental the change has been.