Technology
Entries related to technology.
#cfp08 Project VoteProtector
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/20/2008 - 20:46After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, volunteers self organized a project on the Internet to help people find missing loved ones. Hurricane Katrina disproportionately affected poor people and African-Americans. This afternoon at Computers, Freedom and Privacy there was a workshop on deceptive campaign practices. Many ideas were presented and it struck me that perhaps a project similar to PeopleFinder, let’s call in VoteProtector, should be created.
The groundwork was laid by discussing ways that people have presented deceptive information in an effort to suppress votes, particularly of the poor, minorities, and increasingly, of the youth. Tova Wang of Common Cause and Lillie Coney of the Electronic Privacy Information Center led a discussion including Jenigh J. Garrett of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, John Aristotle Phillips, co-founder of Aristotle, Jon Pincus of Tales from the Net, and Ruchi Bhorwmik who works as legislative counsel to Senator Barack Obama.
Many stories were told about spreading false information in efforts to discourage voters from voting or telling them to vote at wrong locations or on wrong days.
A lively discussion followed about different ways of addressing this. One part of the solution is to get more people aware of 1 866 Our Vote, a phone number, and a website that can be used to get people to report voting irregularities and seek help. The problem is getting more people to know about this, to know about their voting rights and to work together to fight deceptive practices.
It struck me that a project like PeopleFinder focusing on these issues could be a powerful way to do this. People could create tools to mashup reports of voting suppression efforts. These efforts could quickly be brought to the attention of the press in the area of the attempted voting suppression. Voting rights, on a state by state basis could be explained. What are the rules about registering to vote? What sort of identification do you need do you need to bring with you to the polls? What are your options for early voting, absentee voting, and provisional ballots?
What are the rules about voting if you’ve been convicted of a felony? I believe some states allow felons to vote. Others do not. Many have rules about felons being able to vote after they have served their time, and perhaps done a few other tasks to get their voting rights back.
Techniques to make encourage voting and discourage voting suppression could be discussed, such as the great idea of getting a group of people to go to the polls together. If you go as part of a group, you are less likely to be turned away, and you are more likely to stand up for your rights if challenged.
This could then be promoted across all the social networks, not only Facebook, which serves a demographic which is perhaps less likely to run into voter suppression activities, but also MySpace, Hi5, and many other sites that have a tendency of getting overlooked.
So, anyone want to pick up the Project VoteProtector ball and run with it?
#cfp08 Pregame
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 05/19/2008 - 21:45Tomorrow marks the opening of Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008. This is an annual conference that has been held since 1991. This year, it will be in New Haven, CT, which makes it very convenient for me to attend.
As with most conferences, I like to read the program ahead of time to try and decide which sessions I’ll try to attend. Often it is hard to choose with many panels happening at the same time. Frequently, I make last minute choices as I wish from one hour long panel to the next. I may run into this later in the week, but the first decisions seem pretty straight forward to me.
Tuesday starts off with a choice between Scott Spetka leading a workshop entitled “Maintaining Privacy While Accessing On-line Information”, and Mike Godwin leading a workshop entitled “Constitutional Law in Cyberspace”. Through my coverage of the Avery Doninger case, I’ve been steeped in constitutional law around freedom of speech issues, at least as it applies to students in public high schools in the United States. Mike Godwin is general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation. The workshop should cover a much great array of topics than just the freedom of speech issues I’ve been following. Fortunately, it is three hours long. Even that amount of time will probably only allow the surface to be scratched.
The afternoon provides a choice between Robert Ellis Smith’s presentation, “A Short History of Privacy” and panel organized by Lillie Coney, Associate Director with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and moderated by Tova Wang, Vice President of Research at Common Cause about entitled, “e-Deceptive Campaign Practices: Elections 2.0”. Both presentations sound very interesting. Yet by the sounds of it Robert Ellis Smith’s presentation will be based substantially on his book “Ben Franklin’s Web Site”. It sounds like a great book, and I’ll put it on my reading list. However, I think I’ll attend the campaign practices session. I should probably say hello to Tova, since my wife now works for Common Cause. Also, the panel has a bunch of interesting folks. It should be fun.
Wednesday morning start off with “Presidential Technology Policy: Priorities for the Next Executive”. It will be co-moderated by Ari Schwartz, Vice President, Center for Democracy and Technology and Susan Crawford, Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School. The panel will include Douglas Holtz-Eakin who is Senior Domestic Policy Advisor for the McCain '08 Campaign and Daniel Weitzner who is a member of the Technology Media and Telecommunications policy committee advising the Obama '08 Campaign. I hope the discussion will be lively and fear that the two hours allotted for it may not be enough.
Wednesday afternoon starts the more traditional conference fair with concurrent ninety minute long sessions. I’ll probably start picking which of those sessions to attend sometime around lunch on Wednesday.
So, I hope I have the stamina to attend and write coherently about what looks like a fun conference.
An idiot's guide to OpenSim
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 05/11/2008 - 07:33Over on the Second Life educators mailing list, a member asked for an 'Idiot's Guide to Second Life'. I wrote a reply there, which seemed like it might be a useful post here as well.
OpenSim is a project to create software so that others can create their own servers that run similar to Linden Lab's Second Life servers.
Typically, people running OpenSim set up a grid, similar to the Main Grid, the Teen Grid or the Beta Grids that Linden Lab runs.
Some example grids like this are:
Central Grid has about 20 regions and about 1,400 active members. They are focusing hard on the business community.
OpenLife has nearly 200 regions and a population of over 20,000. They support the RealXtend viewer.
OSGrid claims 240 Regions and 2400 active users. They are running as a non-profit.
When you use a Second Life client, you can specify a parameter to get your client to connect to one of these other grids. (e.g.
"C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" -multiple -loginuri http://osgrid.org:8002 )
If you have a reason to, you could create your own Grid that you control, e.g.
Orient Lodge Grid
In the old days of MOOs, this was a common thing. People would set up their own MOOs for their universities, or any other place they wanted. I ran LogMoo, which is actually still sitting around in mothballs. When I get a better Internet Connection, I may bring back LogMoo and perhaps setup LogGrid.
As a general rule, there is essentially no connectivity between grids. Just as it is at best very difficult to move stuff from TeenGrid to the MainGrid, etc., it is very difficult to move stuff to the any of the OpenSim based grids.
There are a few interesting exceptions.
SecondInventory now supports OpenSim. What this means in theory as that you can create something on one grid, say the Main Grid, or an OpenSim grid, and then restore it to other grids. I've had limited success with that, that it looks very promising.
For communications between grids, there has been some work done on using IRC channels so that a space in the main grid could listen and/or talk on an IRC channel and a space in an OpenSim grid could listen and/or talk on the same IRC channel. I've heard this discussed, but I don't know anyone who has done this in practice. I think this fits in nicely with the talk about Twitter as well.
The folks at Central Grid have been working hard to get currency working in OpenSim, including working with a company to do intergrid currency exchange. I believe it is still in development, and it raises a lot of issues. Most notably, some of the folks behind Central Grid have been accused of being scammers on the Second Life main grid and people have expressed skepticism about financial transactions on any OpenSim grid.
It is also possible to run a portion of OpenSim so that you run just a region and that region becomes part of another groups grid. Some of the OpenSim grids discussed above have been exploring allowing remote regions to be part of their grid. I'm not sure how well that has worked yet. You can also run a region without it being part of a grid. I've done that from my laptop when I wanted to have a small Second Life environment that I could bring with me.
As a final note, Open Sim is still in early development. Unless you are pretty geeky and like playing things that might break even more frequently than the Linden Lab Main Grid, you might want to leave Open Sim to others. I'm a hard core geek, so I love OpenSim.
Okay. Perhaps that was a little bit longer and geekier than a true idiots guide to Open Sim, but I hope it is helpful.
Saturday Morning Surfing
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/03/2008 - 11:49Saturday morning. These allergies or virus, or whatever it is that has had me wheezing and coughing and not sleeping for a week has waned slightly and I slept well last night. I’m still at a very low energy level, so I thought I would do a little low impact surfing.
By low impact surfing, I mean visiting blogs by following links from sites like EntreCard or MyBlogLog. What I like about these sites is that you can let people know that you were there without having to actually think up some sort of comment to leave. With Entrecard, you can drop a card which the site own sees, and hopefully decides to come and visit your site. You can also buy advertisements, and I’ve been running Entrecard advertisement right below my list of MyBlogLog readers.
MyBlogLog shows a list of recent readers on your site, and I like to check out the blogs of people who have visited via MyBlogLog, as well as people who have been reading their sites.
Typically, these sort of visits bring me to sites very different than I would stop at as a progressive political blogger. Most of the time, I like that. However, sometimes it can be a bit tedious. EntreCard listed a whole bunch of people that had dropped cards on me, but said I hadn’t dropped cards on them. I went to visit a few and found that we’re all ones that EntreCard said I had visited, so I couldn’t drop a card on them. More annoying, as I tried following some of the ads most of them were for opportunities to make money fast on the Internet.
So, I switched over to checking my visitors via MyBlogLog. First on the list was Jill Miller Zimon. Jill is a great writer. We’ve crossed paths talking about different issues and conferences, but I don’t believe we’ve ever met face to face, even though I now live in the town where her parents live. One of these days we will meet.
Unfortunately, her blog doesn’t fit nicely into my idea of Saturday Morning Surfing. While the make money fast blogs were too mindless, Jill’s writing is always thoughtful and requires more time than I wanted to commit to any blog entry. I read her post about Bush, Marc Dann, and Women’s Voices Women’s Votes. Go check it out.
Jill’s list of recent readers included Susan Mernit. Susan is another great writer that I typically wouldn’t visit for some light Saturday morning reading. In her recent blog posts she talks about why she is reading more Twitter and Friend Feed. They act as effective filters for those of us already on information overload. I have problems keeping up with the flood of emails and haven’t gotten through all of the blogs in my feed reader in ages, but Twitter provides a good quick glimpse into what is going on.
She also talks about Digerati as media brand. Well worth the read. It seems like digital natives get both of these ideas. Teenagers spend much of their online communication in short blasts, and do a good job of defining their personal brands online, although some adults might question the markers used to denote a teenagers brand online.
With all this in mind, I went over to Twitter. It struck me, that here I was seeing a much better snapshot of our twenty first century world. whatsnext just finished reading Empress Orchard. chrisbrogan is saying hello to PodCamp in San Antonio. He, along with jerikpotter are twittering about SOBCon. ZoeConnolly is checking the air field in Caledon Penzance in Second Life. Earlier, several friends from Second Life were complaining about difficulties logging in. Others had been twittering about problems with YouTube earlier.
nprpolitics is talking about polls, Rev. Wright, and John McCain. JasonBarnett is reporting live from the Minnesota DFL Second CD convention and MikePanetta is at the DC Democratic State Committee Convention. kentbye saw a bunch of old friends at the Maryland Film Festival. Many friends are talking about Maker Faire.
acarvin is just 49 people away from having 2000 followers. PurpleCar and jeffpulver are talking about Iron Man. Apparently, it is getting great reviews on Twitter and they are both looking forward to seeing it. http://twitter.com/jcnork>jcnork is preparing for his son’s first communion.
As I scan through all of this, my mind goes to Mrs. Dalloway as she reflects on London on the fine day of her party. Pink Floyd’s lyrics come to mind, “Snapshot in the Family Album”. rickmahn twitters from SOBCon08, that Brian Clark says “It is marketing suicide to be too general in blogging today”. I don’t know. Maybe for the make money fast blogs, that I decided to skip over earlier today, it is marketing suicide to be too general. Yet as Susan Mernit points out, people like Scoble, Calcanis, Arrington and Winer have done a good job of creating compelling brands. I’d much rather read PurpleCar and jeffpulver talk about what movie they want to see today, and jcnork talking about his son’s first communion than I would listen to people who have lost authenticity in their business blogging as they try to focus on a narrow niche.
So, I’ll return to my random surfing, until Kim and Fiona get home from riding, and then maybe we’ll find something fun to do on this overcast weekend as well.
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18th Annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/02/2008 - 09:28From May 20th through May 23rd, the 18th annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference will take place in New Haven. This year’s topic is Technology Policy ’08. Early bird registration ends today, so if you are thinking of attending and haven’t signed up yet, today would be a great day to sign up.
In addition, “The Yale Journal of Law & Technology (YJoLT) is seeking essay-length submissions concerning the technology policy platform of the new American presidential administration.” The deadline for the entries is May 5th, and details can be found on the YJoLT Essay Contest
More information can be found at the CFP 2008 Main Page as well as many other sites they list, such as their Facebook Group and their blog. On their blog they have a post entitled Bloggers Wanted. If you are a blogger and planning on attending, please let the organizers know.
It looks like a great conference and I look forward to attending as much of it as possible.
