We don’t know how to build a general-purpose computer that is capable of running any program except for some program that we don’t like, is prohibited by law, or which loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware: a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user’s knowledge, or over the objection of the computer’s owner. Digital rights management always converges on malware.

In an effort to stamp out piracy, we are stamping out legitimate fair-use rights, and accepting invasions of privacy by corporations in a way that also happens to dovetail nicely with the intelligence gathering goals of governments everywhere.

I don’t mean to sound too much like a conspiracy theory-loving whack job here. But the fact is that the same software that enables corporations to manage their intellectual property or make a profit on targeted advertising also makes it easier to spy on citizens. I’ll refer you to Evgeny Morozov’s enlightening, yet sobering book on this very subject, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (of which I have read about half thus far).

[h/t: Ben Ramsey]

For a discussion about why “Other” is problematic as a category, see Sarah Dopp’s piece from November, 2010 “Gender is a Text Field” (Diaspora, backstory, and context). She’s much smarter than I am about gender and identity, so I’ll point you there.

I, however, question the need to ask for a user’s gender at all. As Munroe said in his Google+ post:

They also (obviously) want to know more about you so they can serve ads; advertisers care about gender. But again, that’s no reason to make gender public.

Identity is a multi-faceted thing. One part of a person’s identity may well be subsumed or tempered by another aspect of it. Aside from perhaps personals ads, is there a reason to collect it at all?

By demographics, I am a married, college-educated, employed, black woman in my mid-30s. Those demographic datapoints suggest that I would care about working mother issues, Tyler Perry, and church. Ads served to me based on those assumptions, however, would miss their target. I am a child-free atheist and quite intent on remaining so. And no, I don’t like Tyler Perry.

About the only thing a gender field tells you is whether a person identifies as male, female, or neither. But if advertisers insist that they need to know gender so they can misfire ads, I propose using either or both of the following strategies:

• Make gender a text field and use taxonomy or heuristics to guess gender
• Provide a preferred pronoun field

Make gender a text field and use taxonomy or heuristics to guess gender

It’s a simple idea: put a text input field in the user interface. Users can enter what they wish. Then using a list of something gendered — male and female words (“dude” / “dudette”), names, perhaps closest connections — we can guess at the gender of the user in question.

Of course, this approach is problematic in that it is imprecise. Techie and tomboyish women may be misidentified as male. But I suspect such misidentification would actually make ads more relevant to those women.

Provide a preferred pronoun field

Even better: let the user set the pronoun he or she or ze or zir prefers. This settles questions such as those faced by xkcd where a bot or user interface needs to be grammatically correct. But it is not necessarily a definitive statment about gender.

And again: give users the option to make that data public, private, or leave it out altogether.

(Via The Mary Sue)

*Google has changed this (or will soon).

One of the best outcomes from November’s Wave Protocol Summit was a proposal for Wave to enter the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator program. Apache has a fantastic reputation for fostering healthy open source communities that create great software. Last week, that proposal was accepted, and we’re spinning up the project infrastructure so that the community can continue to grow in the Apache way.

That’s news straight from the Google Wave Developer Blog.

[Via Mashable]

Friendship is uniquely suited to fill this void because, unlike matrimony or parenthood, it’s available to everyone, offering concord and even intimacy without aspiring to be all-consuming. Friends do things for us that hardly anybody else can, yet ask nothing more than friendship in return (though this can be a steep price if we take friendship as seriously as we should). The genius of friendship rests firmly on its limitations, which are better understood as boundaries. Think of it as the moderate passion—constrained, yet also critical. If friendship, as hardheaded Lord Byron would have it, really is “love without his wings,” we can all be grateful for its earthbound nature.

From a wonderful essay in The Wilson Quarterly titled America: Land of Loners?. (Via Farbod)

My husband, who used to be a pretty good early adopter of technology, said he wishes he could turn the internet off. It’s killed journalism, it’s killing pornography, it’s killing writing, it’s killing a lot of things because everybody, anybody can write a blog now and thinks their opinion is worth as much as facts are. If you talk about intellectual degradation of the country, the Internet has helped a lot. On the other hand, that poor gay kid in Podunk no longer has to think he’s the only one like him. So for me the Internet is an extremely mixed bag.

So says porn legend Nina Hartley. That’s from her interview with Jezebel.

The title of this post is a lot funnier if you sing it to the tune of The Internet Is For Porn.

But the mobile Web means different things to different people. For more affluent populations, it generally means wireless access with a laptop computer. For poorer people it means a cellphone, which is not a perfect replacement for other forms of online access, said Mr. Smith and several others who study social issues related to technology.

From yesterday’s New York Times blog post Mobile Web Use and the Digital Divide by Joshua Brustein. [via @negrophile]

Also see: Mobile Access 2010 from The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely unfair. It gives users the illusion of choice and hides the details away from them “for their own good.”

I’m going to go sit in the corner and swoon over danah boyd’s brilliance while you all go read her latest post Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant).

Our player doesn’t just simply stream video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other things that aren’t necessarily visible to the end user.

In February, I offered four reasons why you shouldn’t count Flash out just yet. Eugene Wei Hulu.com‘s Vice President of Product offers four more in his post Pardon Our Dust about Hulu’s new video player (Via New TeeVee).

Thank you Mr. Wei for writing a follow-up post for me. HTML5 is great way to deliver audio and video to the browser in a way that frees users from having to install a plug-in. What it isn’t so great for — yet — are the things that many content creators and advertisers find important: tracking, DRM and ad serving.

Here’s a business suggestion for Hulu: offer an HTML5 player as a premium upgrade. Hulu plans to charge $10 per month. What if they offered — for, say, an extra $5 or $10 — “iPad-ready” video using HTML5?

Check out Hulu’s video introducing the new player.

The complaint has over 150 numbered paragraphs, runs 38 pages, and includes a lot of legalese. But the basic claim is simple: Facebook pulled a “privacy bait and switch.” They told users to sign up and provide personal information under one set of privacy policies, and then they changed the policies. It’s like if someone offered you a new car, took your money, and then delivered a used car. We need the FTC to act in such situations to protect consumers and ensure fairness. Otherwise, markets spiral out of control.

So says Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in a Q&A with Nisha Chittal. Check out The Case for Staying With Facebook.

Another way of looking at it from Anil Dash: I’m really enjoying seeing the public dialogue reimagine Facebook as the world’s most elaborate phishing scam. #phishbook

Also see: Pushing Back Against Facebook’s Privacy Practices

In today’s brave New World, the new economics of digital distribution mean that we no longer need to shape our copyright law in ways that disadvantage creators vis-é-vis distributors unless we want to, writes Litman.

That’s Jessica Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan. She would like existing copyright law be simplified by taking the multiple rights it now grants into a single right: the author’s right to control commercial exploitation of the work, according to Ars Technica. Download the paper [PDF]

In a country where about one-third of the population regularly goes online, the internet gives women “a place to vent out our frustrations and our dreams,“ said Reem Asaad, 37, a professor of banking and finance in the Saudi port city of Jeddah who blogs at reemasaad.blogspot.com.

This reminds me of danah boyd‘s research into teenagers’s use of social sites such as Facebook and MySpace. She has suggested teens use these sites for identity formation and community connection in the way they used to do in malls, parking lots and other public spaces that we’ve collectively chased them out of. Given Saudi Arabia’s severe restrictions on women in public spaces, I think a similar phenomenon is happening here.

I’ll be honest: this is the first time I’ve ever used the word zettabyte. I’ve heard of petabytes and even exabytes, but zettabytes are a whole new level of bytes. If a zettabyte is beyond your comprehension, too, it’s essentially one billion trillion bytes: a 1 with 21 zeros at the end. To put that into perspective, one exabyte — which equals 1/1000 of a zettabyte or 1 million gigabytes — is roughly equivalent to the capacity of 5.1 million computer hard drives, or all the hard drives in Minnesota.

From Nick Bilton’s The American Diet: 34 Gigabytes a Day

In his post Industry analyst Benoit Felten questions whether the telcos are B.S.-ing us with this notion of “bandwidth hogs” From his post:

Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the way that telcos identify the Bandwidth Hogs is not by monitoring if they cause unfair traffic congestion for other users. No, they just measure the total data downloaded per user, list the top 5% and call them hogs.

And:

TCP/IP is by definition an egalitarian protocol. Implemented well, it should result in an equal distribution of available bandwidth in the operator’s network between end-users; so the concept of a bandwidth hog is by definition an impossibility. An end-user can download all his access line will sustain when the network is comparatively empty, but as soon as it fills up from other users’ traffic, his own download (or upload) rate will diminish until it’s no bigger than what anyone else gets.

Also see: Congestion Neutrality by Herman Wagter that explains more of the nuts and bolts of how TCP/IP works. (Via Ars Techica)

From the Google Blog post Introducing Google Public DNS:

Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster, we’re launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out.

Most of us aren’t familiar with DNS because it’s often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names — e.g., www.google.com — into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers — e.g., 74.125.45.100 — that computers use to communicate with one another.

More about Google’s Public DNS service on the Google Code blog.

As extraspecial posted on Twitter if you value your privacy in the least, you’ll avoid Google DNS like the plague. Methinks Google has just crossed into Eviland. Actually, they crossed the border many years ago, but I digress.

The interview begins with a look back at Johnson’s career and ends with some of her insights about social media marketing. For example:

Even more than social media, digital content gives consumers a platform to have a megaphone and talk about anything they want. But the truth is that they are talking about brands. I recently read that 20% of tweets are about brands. We see it now as people use tools like Brightkite and Foursquare to mention the restaurants they’re in on Twitter and other social networking sites. Are people going to be a friend with your brand? That’s the part that’s funny and fishy. But if brands make content that’s relevant to people’s interests and passions then it’s a win-win.

It’s weird seeing someone you know on a somewhat personal level getting some industry-wide recognition and praise. But Johnson has been in the game for awhile, so it’s well deserved.

Bonus? The accompanying photo was captured by another blog family member, Cecily. [Via j. brotherlove]