Reason Magazine - Topics > Internet

Remembering Your First Time

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:59:00 EDT

Siva Vaidhyanathan is writing a book called The Googlization of Everything and he's collecting data:

Do you remember the first time you used Google? When was it? How did you hear about Google? What was you first impression?...As Mudbone (Richard Pryor's character) used to say, "you only remember two times, your first and your last."

Put your experience in his comments section and/or share it here.

My first google was of my unusual last name "Mangu" in honor of the fact that my grandfather used to check every phone book he encountered on his travels, hoping to find out that there were more of us in America. At the time, the search wasn't fruitful. Now I know that there are Indian and Kenyan Mangus, plus a popular Dominican plantain dish.

Of course, 50 percent of Americans still haven't googled themselves.

Sign It and Move On

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:34:00 EDT

Chris Hayes has written an interesting, balanced profile of the liberal cyber-group MoveOn, which is about to turn 10. Here's an excerpt:

In many ways MoveOn's relationship to its members looks a lot like a business's relationship to its customers. If a product isn't selling, they take it off the shelves. For activists rooted in an earlier generation of social movements, which tended to prize long, disputatious meetings and the unwieldy process of forming bottom-up consensus, this approach is at best alien, at worst insidious. Customers, after all, aren't part of the creation of the product: they're not running the meetings where new packaging is designed; their input is limited to the final result and expressed through the transaction of purchase. And the role of customer imposes no obligations. You are free to buy or not buy, or in MoveOn's case, sign the petition or not sign the petition. Oscar Wilde once complained that the trouble with socialism was that it took "too many evenings." MoveOn holds out the promise of progressive change without the evenings.

Reihan Salam has some sensible follow-up comments, and Jim Manzi adds that the group is "the Richard Viguerie of the contemporary era" -- an especially potent comparison, given Viguerie's mixed legacy.

Barely related bonus video:

What Politicians Are Actually Saying, In Case You Care

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:40:00 EDT

So much of political coverage is hearsay and paraphrase. But actually sitting and listening to politicians talk in order to find out what they think is a fate worse than death. What's a mildly interested political observer to do?

Now, thanks to a super-cool new Google gadget, you can cut to the chase. The Elections Video Search Google Gadget lets you search for keywords in transcribed YouTube videos from the Politicians channel. The gentlemen from Mountain View admit that accuracy is far from 100 percent at the moment—many of the transcriptions are terrible and the videos aren't well-sorted—but it's a start. You can even search just McCain or just Obama clips. And it sits right on your iGoogle homepage, so even the truly lazy can satisfy the smallest tremors of curiosity about what those guys are blathering about.

Via the Official Google Blog

Is It Safe?

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:05:00 EDT

Gmail announced on its blog yesterday that it has upgraded its privacy settings to allow users to sign out of their accounts remotely, as well as track who has signed in under their name:

The top table, under "Concurrent session information," indicates all open sessions, along with IP address and "access type" -- which refers to how email was retrieved, for example, through iGoogle, POP3 or a mobile phone. The bottom table, under "Recent activity," contains my most recent history along with times of access. I can also view my current IP address at the very bottom of this window, where it says "This computer is using IP address..."

With this information, I can quickly verify that all the Gmail activity was indeed mine. I remember using Gmail at the times and locations listed. Being extra cautious, I can also click on the "Sign out all other sessions" button to sign out of the account I left open at home.

Scott Loganbill at the tech blog Web Monkey wrote about the privacy upgrades like a gleeful, paranoid voyeur, and calls the new application features an opportunity "to turn the table and spy on the spies"—proof that even innocuous geeks suspect that someone, somewhere, is reading their email.

And now, Marathon Man:

"Don't Forget the Children"

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:08:00 EDT

Flickr, the popular photo sharing site owned by Yahoo, took down Dutch photographer Maarten Dors’ pictures of a Romanian teenage boy smoking a cigarette, arguing that it broke the site’s rules for appropriate photos. Dors says he didn’t intend to glorify smoking, but to document the living conditions in one of Eastern Europe’s less prosperous countries. Someone from Yahoo put the photo back on Dors’ profile, but another employee who was unfamiliar with the exception took it down a few months later. Someone else later put the picture back up, and it's still there, for now.

Dors’ story is a reminder that ever-increasing usability has been accompanied by the de-liberalizing of user rights. Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, warns against Internet users relying too heavily on applications and software over which they have little or no control.

Tony Curzon Price at Open Democracy sums up Zittrain’s position below:

JZ's impassioned cry in the face of all these attempts to move problems into the realm of authority is to “give communities a chance.”….If at every turn we acquiesce and allow the top-down “solution'', the Internet will have demonstrated its “self-closing'' property: the open system that shut itself down.

But what if Zittrain’s community model still allowed for censoring under the guise of “filtering,” and corporations assimilated the language of communitarianism? Below is Yahoo's response to the Dors case:

While mindful of free speech and other rights, Yahoo and other companies say they must craft and enforce guidelines that go beyond legal requirements to protect their brands and foster safe, enjoyable communities—ones where minors may be roaming.

Guidelines help "engender a positive community experience," one to which users will want to return, said Anne Toth, Yahoo's vice president for policy.

And below is an excerpt from the Flickr Community Guidelines:

Don't forget the children

Take the opportunity to filter your content responsibly. If you would hesitate to show your photos or videos to a child, your mum, or Uncle Bob, that means it needs to be filtered. So, ask yourself that question as you upload your content and moderate accordingly. If you don’t, it’s likely that one of two things will happen. Your account will be reviewed then either moderated or terminated by Flickr staff.

Also worth mentioning is that Flickr’s guidelines, full of community references, seem flexible and open compared to those of another popular photo sharing site, Photobucket:

Prohibited Content includes, but is not limited to, Content that, in the sole discretion of Photobucket:

is patently offensive or promotes racism, bigotry, hatred or physical harm of any kind against any group or individual;

harasses or advocates harassment of another person;

exploits people in a sexual or violent manner;

contains nudity, excessive violence, or offensive subject matter or contains a link to an adult website;

constitutes or promotes information that you know is false or misleading or promotes illegal activities or conduct that is abusive, threatening, obscene, defamatory or libelous

Is Flickr, with its relatively mild restrictions, an example of a Zittrain-style community, in which users abide by a set of shared values? Or do these standards represent the “closing” of the Internet simply because the community is owned by a larger corporation?

Jacob Sullum wrote about Yahoo and censorship here.

"If We Could Just Get Our Arms Around the Internet"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:41:00 EDT

With gloomy economic news all around, people are fretting a little more than usual about cash flow these days. So thank god Oregon has already taken steps to keep people from safely, legally getting their hands on a little extra cash in an emergency.

Neon signs like the one at right are going out all over the state as three out of every four payday lenders close their doors after the state imposed a cap on the amount of interest they can charge. The storefronts that remain open to wrap up pending business are having to turn away prospective customers:

"The sad part is we have 25 people a day coming into our stores begging to borrow from us," said [Ken Wayco, president of small, high-interest lender], "but we can't lend to them."

So where are those people going? Online, of course:

In Oregon, officials now worry most about residents going into debt with payday lenders on the Internet, Tatman said.
Internet lenders selling to Oregonians are required by law to register with the state and abide by its regulations, but many do not.
It is difficult for the state to control Internet payday lenders who charge triple-digit interest rates, Tatman said. "If we could just get our arms around the Internet better to make sure people don't jump out of the fire and into the frying pan."

We'll give the final word about this state of affairs to the upbeat Angela Martin, director of economic fairness for Our Oregon, a nonprofit "consumer advocacy group" in Portland.

"It is fantastic for Oregon."

60 Percent of Americans Won't Read This

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:01:00 EDT

A new study out from Pew finds that only 40 percent of Americans get news about the presidential campaign from the Internet. Useful for all of us pixel-stained wretches to keep in mind.

But the numbers are changing fast:

At this point in the 2004 election cycle, 31% of Americans had used the internet to get political news and information. The jump to 40% who say this now is even more striking because the population of online political users already exceeds the number of Americans who had used the internet for politics in the entire 2004 campaign. Moreover, the proportion of Americans getting political news and information on any given day in the spring of 2008 has more than doubled, compared with a similar period in 2004. In May and June of 2004, about 8% of adults were using the internet on a typical day to stay in touch with political developments. In April and May of this year, 17% of adults are getting political news online on a typical day.

And maybe, just maybe, Obama Girl actually is going to decide the election:

35% of Americans have watched online videos related to the campaign and 10% have used social networking sites to engage in political activity.

Via The Weekly Standard blog

ICANN Embraces Censorship

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:34:00 EDT

The voting members of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decided yesterday to expand the number of top-level domains (TLD), or ends of web addresses (.com, .org, .net). In anticipation of the vote, I argued that more domain names would be a good thing, for the reasons listed by Jesse Walker, and also on principle: More choice is better than less choice.

But ICANN dropped the ball:

New names won't start appearing for at least several months, and ICANN won't be deciding on specific ones quite yet. The organization still must work out many of the details, including fees for obtaining new names, expected to exceed $100,000 apiece to help ICANN cover up to $20 million in costs....
The streamlined guidelines call for all applicants to go through an initial review phase during which anyone may raise an objection on such grounds as racism, trademark conflicts and similarity to an existing suffix. If no objection is raised, approval would come quickly.

So, what some people initially thought was going to be good for everyone is going to end up being good mostly for the special interest groups that have ICANN's ear. Not one to let the organization's history of bureaucratic failures get him down, tech guru Brad Templeton suggests someone break up ICANN:

In effect, allow a moderate to large number of largely autonomous, competing name managers. Each could have its own system, its own rules, its own prices and its own dispute resolution policy. Each would innovate and price to attract users and win the competitive battle. Some might be almost identical in function, others might be quite radical. Each would have its own brand—as a top level domain, and be fairly free about what was done below it.
The stripped down remains of ICANN would be a trans-national organization, beyond the power of any single national government, which would exist only to maintain the root servers and to assure that the competing name companies remain on a level playing field.

Thanks to Patrick Melody for the Templeton link.

"Still a Developing Country"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:41:00 EDT

Someone in China is hacking into the computers of American congressional offices. They've hit several congressmen in the last couple years.

Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) gave a speech on the floor yesterday described the incursion on his offices computers in 2006. The first target? "The computer of my foreign policy and human rights staff person." Why?: "My suspicion is that I was targeted by Chinese sources because of my long history of speaking out about China's abysmal human rights record."

China's defense:

"Is there any evidence?" Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a regular news conference in Beijing. "China is still a developing country."

Apparently, the country that maintains an elaborate censorship regime on Internet access at home, and manufactures huge amounts of computer hardware for use abroad is utterly bereft of gifted hackers. Go figure.

Via Ars Technica

Fake Teams, Real Money

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In the 2007 romantic comedy Knocked Up, a woman who suspects her husband of having an extramarital affair discovers he is actually sneaking off to play fantasy baseball. In real life, people who participate in fantasy sports generally do not feel a need to hide what they're doing, and neither do the companies that offer them the opportunity.

Fantasy sports is a burgeoning industry in the United States, one that probably will grow even faster now that the U.S. Supreme Court has let stand an appellate ruling that makes the business easier and cheaper to run. But the legitimacy of fantasy sports highlights the arbitrariness of U.S. gambling law, which for no good reason prohibits forms of betting that many millions of Americans enjoy.

Participants in fantasy sports choose real players for pretend teams that compete against each other based on the players' real-world performance. The online industry that facilitates these contests, which emerged a decade ago, today consists of more than 100 companies, including major players such as ESPN and Yahoo! Sports, and generates about $500 million in revenue each year, mainly from participant fees and advertising, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA).

The FSTA expects the industry's growth to accelerate as a result of the Supreme Court's recent refusal to hear Major League Baseball's appeal of a 2007 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit. Last fall, in response to a lawsuit by CBC Marketing and Distribution, which operates CDM Fantasy Sports, the 8th Circuit ruled that companies like CBC need not pay license fees to professional sports leagues because they have a First Amendment right to use players' names and statistics.

Freed from the burden of getting league permission and paying millions of dollars in license fees, fantasy sports businesses are likely to expand and proliferate. Already, the FSTA estimates, 18 million Americans play fantasy sports. Mostly they do it for fun, but they can also win prizes, ranging from bobble-head dolls to cash awards as high as $25,000.

In other words, sports fans are paying for the chance to win money in contests that hinge on the performance of professional athletes. Why isn't this gambling?

One answer is that playing fantasy sports requires knowledge and skill. But so do sports betting and poker.

Here's the real reason playing fantasy sports is not gambling: The government says it isn't. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which took effect at the beginning of last year, includes a specific exemption for fantasy sports, provided the prizes are determined in advance and the imaginary teams do not correspond to any real teams.

The latter condition is aimed at preventing fantasy sports, which the professional leagues endorse, from morphing into sports betting, which they oppose. License fees aside, the leagues like fantasy sports because they increase interest in their games.

But so does sports betting, the market for which dwarfs the size of the fantasy sports industry. A 2003 ESPN survey found that more than 100 million Americans bet on sports each year, wagering something like $100 billion.

Yet taking sports bets is legal only in Nevada, and the leagues are adamantly opposed to broader legalization because they fear it would have a corrupting effect. Or so they say. Their actions suggest they know better.

"Most of the leagues now have a deal with the Las Vegas sports consultants," notes Jim Murphy, a professional handicapper. "The leagues pay them to track improper betting trends....Anytime you read about a point-shaving scandal or that so-and-so has been charged with trying to fix a game, it was the Las Vegas bookmakers that ferreted it out."

Whatever the likelihood that promising college players or well-paid professionals would jeopardize their careers by helping to fix games, keeping sports betting in the shadows of the black market is hardly a sensible way to reduce the odds.

Finally, a Good Reason to Declaim Wikipedia

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:30:00 EDT

Mark Bauerlein, occasional reason contributor and author of the provocative and exhaustingly subtitled book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30), has come up with a legitimately interesting critique of my favorite online resource:

The site is criticized for its superficiality, erroneousness, and amateurism, but, in fact, Wikipedia provides ready access to a fact, definition, or overview. No, the real problem with Wikipedia is a stylistic one. Read a dozen entries on the similar topics and they all sound the same. The outline is formulaic, the prose numbingly bland. Sentences unfold in tinny sequence. Perspectives arise in overcareful interplay. If a metaphor pops up, it’s a dead one. Consider the entry on Moby-Dick:
Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great white whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaling ships know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered the whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab’s boat and bit off Ahab’s leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge on the whale.
Compare that to a sentence from Collier’s Encyclopedia, first published in 1950: “As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which governs man thoughtlessly...” Or the description of Ahab in the 1953 Encyclopedia Americana: “a crazed captain whose one thought is the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him...” Or even this in CliffsNotes from 1966: “Ahab’s monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as the symbol of all the evil of the universe.”

Wikipedia, concludes Bauerlein, an English prof at Emory, is "a useful repository of information, but as a model of discourse, it’s a killjoy."

Whole thing here.

reason on Wikipedia creator and libertarian visionary Jimmy Wales.

Is Being Mean Online a Federal Crime?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 19 May 2008 12:41:00 EDT

Remember Lori Drew, the Missouri woman accused of playing a cruel prank on Megan Meier, a 13-year-old girl who killed herself afterward? On MySpace, Drew allegedly pretended to be a boy who at first befriended Meier, a former friend of her daughter's, and then turned on her, saying "the world would be a better place" without her. After looking into the case, local and state law enforcement authorities could not find any criminal laws that Drew had broken. But last week Thomas P. O'Brien, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, brought four federal charges against her: one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing a computer without authorization via interstate commerce to obtain information to inflict emotional distress. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. "To my knowledge it is the first case of its kind in the nation," O'Brien said. "But when an adult violates terms on a MySpace account to gain information that creates this type of reaction, it caused this office to take a really hard look."

A little too hard, I'd say. O'Brien is by no means alone in wanting to hold Drew at least partly responsible for Meier's death, but the law does not allow him to do so. So instead he has resorted to legal contortions aimed at converting Drew's violation of MySpace rules into a federal crime. (The rationale for indicting Drew in California, by the way, is that MySpace is based in Beverly Hills.) There are plenty of reprehensible things people do that are not and should not be crimes. One of them is being mean to emotionally vulnerable people. Since individual reactions to insults are unpredictable and highly variable, a rule that criminalized speech when it leads to suicide or other forms of self-harm would chill any expression more negative than "Nice day, isn't it?" Because there is no such rule, O'Brien has twisted a law aimed at fraud, spying, vandalism, and child pornography into an excuse to punish a woman everyone hates.

Back in 2003, George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr warned that broadly construed laws against unauthorized computer access could "criminalize contract law on the Internet, potentially making millions of Americans criminals for the way they write e-mail and surf the Web."

Some Bets Are Off

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 19 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

On July 16, 2006, the CEO of BetOnSports.com attacked an anti–online gambling bill that the House of Representatives had overwhelmingly approved a few days before. “We want to be regulated,” David Carruthers wrote in the Baltimore Sun. “We want to be taxed. We want to be licensed. Instead of dealing with us constructively to address issues of mutual concern, these legislators prefer to pretend that they can control the Internet. Instead of protecting the public, they would rather waste time on public posturing to their partisan base.”

It wasn’t hard to understand why Carruthers was upset. The bill, part of the “American Values Agenda” championed by House Republicans, would have classified him as a felon, subject to a five-year prison sentence for the crime of accepting bets from Americans. What Carruthers evidently did not realize was that the U.S. Justice Department already considered him a felon. On the very day his plea for legitimacy appeared in the Sun, Carruthers was arrested at the Dallas/Forth Worth International Airport during a layover between London and Costa Rica.

Carruthers, a native of Scotland, thought he was running “the largest online wagering company in the world.” But according to Catherine Hanaway, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, he was running a racketeering conspiracy. Now awaiting trial in St. Louis, Carruthers faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of racketeering or mail fraud, which he supposedly committed by advertising that BetOnSports was “legal and licensed.” Never mind that BetOnSports was legal and licensed in the U.K., where it was incorporated, and in Costa Rica, where its operations were based.

Although he had been a highly vocal and visible critic of U.S. gambling policies, Carruthers miscalculated just how determined prosecutors and politicians were to deny Americans the right to bet online. Opponents of Internet betting, including both paternalists afraid of human frailty and domestic gambling interests afraid of competition, are eager to prosecute businesses the rest of the world considers legitimate. They are prepared to go after not just the gambling sites themselves but also third-party payment processors, marketers, even media outlets that carry ads for online poker or sports betting. In doing so the prohibitionists are willing to risk the collapse of international trade agreements and saddle American financial institutions with the onerous burden of monitoring transactions for signs of “unlawful Internet gambling.” All in a vain attempt to stop Americans from doing online what they already do by the millions in convenience stores and delis, at racetracks and casinos, and in poker games and football betting pools throughout the country.

‘The Crack Cocaine of Gambling’
The bill that Carruthers criticized on the day of his arrest was the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act, sponsored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a Republican who since 1993 has represented a northwestern Virginia district that includes Roanoke and Lynchburg (home of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University). Goodlatte had tried for years to ban online gambling, which he calls a “scourge on the Internet.” He was joined in that effort by other conservatives, including Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.), who calls Internet betting “the crack cocaine of gambling,” and former Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), who says it “erodes family values.”

In 2006 Goodlatte’s bill was combined with a Leach bill to become the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). The law was tacked onto an unrelated, supposedly urgent measure dealing with port security, which Congress passed just before adjourning for mid-term elections in 2006.

Unlike Goodlatte’s original bill, the UIGEA does nothing to clarify or expand the Wire Act of 1961, which prohibits using “a wire communication facility” to accept bets “on any sporting event or contest.” The Wire Act applies only to people “engaged in the business of betting,” not individual gamblers. It also seems limited to sports betting, an interpretation endorsed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in 2002. Although the Justice Department implausibly maintains that the Wire Act covers other forms of gambling as well, including poker and blackjack, all the defendants it has successfully prosecuted under the law were involved in sports betting. Even in those cases, the equation of the Internet with a “wire communication facility” is questionable, as is the extraterritorial application of the law to businesses with no U.S. presence.

While Goodlatte’s original bill would have updated the Wire Act with the Internet in mind and extended it to cover other forms of online gambling, the UIGEA does neither. It makes accepting money in connection with “unlawful Internet gambling” while “engaged in a gambling business” a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison, but it leaves the definition of unlawful Internet gambling as fuzzy as ever. “It’s a mess,” says Nelson Rose, a professor at Whittier Law School and a leading expert on gambling law. “Nobody ever read it. There were no debates on it. It’s really a piece of garbage. It doesn’t clarify what’s legal and illegal, so the definition of what is an unlawful Internet gambling transaction depends on other federal or state laws.”

The UIGEA’s definition of unlawful Internet gambling explicitly excludes fantasy sports, in which participants create imaginary teams whose performance is judged by the real-life performance of the teams’ players. The law says these contests are OK as long as the prizes are determined in advance and the fantasy teams are not identical to any actual teams. The latter condition is aimed at preventing fantasy sports contests, which the professional sports leagues endorse, from morphing into actual sports betting, which they oppose. The leagues, which supported the UIGEA, are adamantly against broader legalization of sports betting, currently permitted only in Nevada, because they fear it would have a corrupting effect.

The UIGEA also includes an exemption for intrastate online gambling that is “expressly authorized” by state law, such as lotteries. Whether the law allows online participation in multistate lotteries such as Powerball is unclear. So is the legal status of interstate betting on horse racing via the Internet, offered by sites such as allhorseracing.com and youbet.com. The UIGEA includes an exemption for “any activity that is allowed under the Interstate Horseracing Act of 1978.” Businesses that take off-track bets and the state governments that license them read that law as allowing online betting, but the Justice Department disagrees. The UIGEA explicitly declines to resolve the issue, saying “this subchapter shall not change which activities related to horseracing may or may not be allowed under Federal law.”

Since the Justice Department is not likely to prosecute the officials who run interstate lotteries or the state-licensed businesses that take horse racing bets, the upshot is that the UIGEA leaves unmolested two politically favored forms of gambling that happen to generate government revenue and campaign contributions. (The horse racing industry donated more than $3 million in the run-up to the UIGEA, overwhelmingly to Republicans, including Goodlatte.) The law also lets brick-and-mortar casinos—another source of tax revenue and campaign money—offer remote gambling that does not cross state borders.

“No bill that would completely ban Internet gambling has advanced very far,” says Dan Walsh, director of government affairs at the Interactive Gaming Council, which represents online gambling companies. “It has to have exemptions, and when you have exemptions, you get caught in internecine fights between [Indian] tribes and commercial casinos, between horse racing and dog racing, between states that want to take lotteries online and convenience stores that don’t want the states to take lotteries online. The whole point of the bill is to stay out of those fights.”

Eliot Spitzer Doesn’t Want You to Pay for Fun
Although the UIGEA did not ban online gambling, it made life more complicated for operators of gambling websites. To begin with, it created a new federal charge, “acceptance of any financial instrument for unlawful Internet gambling,” and an additional penalty for people involved in gambling businesses that were already considered illegal. The Justice Department could have included this charge in its indictment of David Carruthers, adding five years to his potential sentence, if only the UIGEA had existed prior to his arrest.

By saying that unlawful Internet gambling includes betting prohibited by the state in which the bet “is initiated, received, or otherwise made,” the UIGEA also may have made it easier to prosecute people who accept online bets on things other than sports. About a dozen states explicitly ban online gambling, and “just about every state either has in their common law or in their state constitutions a flat prohibition on gambling that’s not expressly authorized,” says Behnam Dayanim, an attorney specializing in gambling issues at the Washington law firm Paul Hastings, which represents the Gibraltar-based online gambling company PartyGaming.

Prior to the UIGEA, other federal gambling statutes referred to state law, but none of them mentioned the Internet. Hence it was doubtful that Congress had authorized states to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, a federal power under the Constitution, by criminalizing the actions of website operators in other countries. An online casino also could argue that its acceptance of a bet from a gambler in, say, Salt Lake City occurred in Costa Rica (or wherever its server was located) and therefore did not violate Utah law.

“In one fell swoop, Congress destroyed both of those defenses,” says Dayanim. “As far as the locus [of the violation] goes, they’re saying it doesn’t matter for the purposes of UIGEA where the wager is occurring or where the business is located. And by referencing laws of a state in the definition of unlawful Internet gambling, Congress has said it’s deferring to state law on this.” It’s less clear, he adds, whether the UIGEA changed anyone’s liability under other federal laws, such as the Illegal Gambling Business Act or the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

Nelson Rose disagrees with Dayanim’s reading of the UIGEA, saying “the only thing this statute did is it created a new federal crime of being in a gambling business and accepting money for an unlawful Internet gambling transaction.” Until the Justice Department tries to prosecute someone with no involvement in sports betting for violating the UIGEA, it won’t be clear who’s right. So far there have been no prosecutions under the new law.

Assuming that foreign operators of gambling websites avoid layovers in the U.S., the biggest problem the UIGEA created for them is its chilling effect on the processing of online bets. Under UIGEA regulations proposed by the Treasury Department, U.S. financial institutions will have to adopt “policies and procedures” that are “reasonably designed” to block transactions associated with unlawful Internet gambling. But neither the UIGEA nor the Treasury Department will say precisely which transactions those are. Given the uncertainty, the safest course for banks is to avoid any sort of online gambling, whether clearly illegal, arguably illegal, or clearly legal.

Even before the UIGEA, most U.S. credit card issuers had stopped processing online gambling transactions under pressure from state and federal prosecutors. PayPal, the online payment processor, picked up much of the slack, but in 2002 it reached deals with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the U.S. Justice Department under which it promised to eschew online gamblers. Spitzer, who got into some trouble of his own involving payments for illegal recreational activities after he was elected governor, said “this case shows that we intend to stop any company who facilitates illegal gambling transactions.” PayPal paid New York $200,000 in “disgorged profits, costs of investigation, and penalties,” a pittance compared to the $10 million the company shelled out to settle federal charges that it had violated the PATRIOT Act by transmitting funds derived from criminal activity.

Neteller, a payment processor based in the Isle of Man, stepped into the breach left by PayPal until January 2007, when company founders Stephen Lawrence and John Lefebvre, both Canadians, were arrested in the U.S. on charges of conspiracy and money laundering. Like Carruthers, they faced prison sentences of up to 20 years for helping Americans place bets via the Internet, a line of work the FBI called “a colossal criminal enterprise masquerading as legitimate business.” Last June, Lawrence pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of five years; Lefebvre is still awaiting trial. After the arrests, Neteller abruptly abandoned the U.S. market.

Money Wandering
Despite the UIGEA and the Justice Department’s threats, several options remain for Americans who are determined to brave Bob Goodlatte’s disapproval by playing poker or placing sports bets online. “Overseas banks, because they’re not covered by the statute or the proposed regs, are going to look at this as a great opportunity to sell credit cards to Americans,” says Rose. Other methods include foreign-based e-wallets, e-checks, cashier’s checks, money orders, faux phone cards, foreign bank accounts, and payments to overseas intermediaries that do not sound like gambling operations.

“People have been setting up payment processors in all sorts of weird locations, including Russia, specifically to process gambling transactions,” says Jim Murphy, a professional sports bettor. “They’re basically just names to get money to the sports book, but instead of sending it to, say, 5Dimes Sportsbook in Costa Rica, you’re sending it to ABC Investment Consultants or ABC Shipping International in Costa Rica.”

Even an ordinary paper check in the mail will do in a pinch, since the Treasury Department has decided it would be too onerous to demand that banks scrutinize every handwritten payee’s name for gambling connections. “I don’t know of anybody who’s had serious difficulty in actually providing payment to an online operator,” says Joseph Kelly, a professor of business law at SUNY-Buffalo and co-editor of the journal Gaming Law Review.

At the same time, driving online gambling transactions underground increases the potential for fraud and money laundering, two problems Goodlatte and his allies claimed to be concerned about. “It forces people who want to play to find alternative means of funding their accounts rather than just using the most transparent system of all, the U.S. banking system,” says John Pappas, executive director of the pro-legalization Poker Players Alliance. “What we’d like to see is a regulated system that provides consumer protections.”

Passage of the UIGEA, combined with the BetOnSports and Neteller arrests, scared publicly traded gambling companies such as PartyGaming and 888.com out of the U.S. market. But scores of privately held operations, including Bodog, Poker Stars, Full Tilt, and Ultimate Bet, remained. “There still are a number of very reputable sites serving the U.S. market,” says Pappas, and “the people who were playing on the publicly traded sites have simply migrated to these other sites.”

There don’t seem to be any firm numbers on how online gambling revenue—estimated at $12 billion worldwide in 2006, about half of it from the U.S.—has been affected by the new crackdown. In February 2007, right after the UIGEA took effect, the Associated Press cited “industry observers” who estimated that online betting was “down by as much as 50 percent” worldwide. Since that would mean American betting had been completely eliminated, it seems implausible. In any case, business seems to have bounced back. “Every anecdotal response I’ve gotten is that there was a [downward] blip at first but that things are pretty much back to normal,” Kelly says.

For companies driven out of the American market, of course, the number of U.S. customers has fallen to zero. Some, such as PartyGaming, have entered into negotiations with the U.S. Justice Department to avoid civil and criminal charges based on their pre-UIGEA actions. By admitting wrongdoing, paying fines, and agreeing to asset forfeitures, they can eliminate the threat of lawsuits and prosecution while positioning themselves to re-enter the U.S. market should the legal environment become more hospitable.

The Mouse That Gambled
Not all of the foreign-based companies banished by the Justice Department’s threats have taken it lying down. The most conspicuous act of resistance was a World Trade Organization (WTO) complaint filed in 2003 by the tiny Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda, home to 69,000 people and dozens of online gambling companies. Antigua argued that the United States was violating its WTO commitments by allowing some forms of domestic online gambling, including bets on horse races, while trying to stop foreign companies from serving American gamblers. Although the complaint seemed quixotic at first, in 2004 an arbitration panel agreed that America’s gambling policies amounted to a discriminatory trade barrier, a finding that was upheld on appeal a year later. Showing a comical lack of self-awareness, Goodlatte called the ruling “appalling,” saying, “It cannot be allowed to stand that another nation can impose its values on the U.S.”

The WTO said Antigua was entitled to compensatory sanctions, and Antigua asked for $3.4 billion a year, an estimate of the revenue businesses there would lose as a result of being excluded from the American market. It also suggested that, given the relative sizes of the two countries, the sanctions take the form of permission to disregard U.S. intellectual property rights, which would allow it to recoup its losses in the gambling market by selling unlicensed CDs, DVDs, and software. Last December a WTO arbitration panel agreed but limited the proceeds to $21 million a year, 42 times the $500,000 proposed by the U.S. but less than one-hundredth the figure suggested by Antigua. Mark Mendel, Antigua’s lawyer, called the award “absurdly low.”

But Antigua isn’t done. To comply with its trade agreements, the U.S. government could open its online gambling market to foreign companies, the option preferred by Antigua. Alternatively, it could impose a blanket ban on all forms of online gambling, which would eliminate the discriminatory treatment of foreign companies. Instead it has announced its intention to withdraw its trade commitment covering remote gambling. In other words, rather than changing its gambling laws so they comport with its trade commitments, the U.S. has said it will change its trade commitments so they comport with its gambling laws. Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.), who wants to study the feasibility of legalizing and regulating online gambling, calls this move “the trade equivalent of taking our ball and going home.”

In January, Antigua, joined by Costa Rica, asked the WTO to arbitrate the dispute regarding America’s unilateral revision of its trade commitments. The arbitration process could put the kibosh to deals the U.S. reached in December with the European Union, Canada, and Japan, each of which was inspired by Antigua to file its own gambling-related trade complaint. Under those deals, the U.S. promised broader access to several American service sectors in exchange for cutting remote gambling out of its trade agreements. But now that Antigua and Costa Rica have revived the issue, WTO rules say parties that have reached settlements can reconsider them. Macau and India, which have filed gambling-related WTO complaints that have not yet been resolved, could tag along as well. Meanwhile, at the urging of the Remote Gambling Association, a trade group, the E.U. is looking into the possibility of filing a new WTO complaint arguing that the U.S. government is violating its trade commitments by treating foreign businesses involved in online gambling like criminal gangs, as illustrated by the BetOnSports and Neteller cases.

Antigua’s WTO victory could play a role in those cases. A brief filed last year on behalf of BetOnSports founder Gary Kaplan (who was indicted along with David Carruthers) argues that the U.S. government’s prosecution of Kaplan violates legally binding trade agreements. The brief cites the Charming Betsy doctrine, which derives from an 1804 Supreme Court case involving a schooner of that name: “Where fairly possible, a United States statute is to be construed so as not to conflict with international law or with an international agreement of the United States.”

The authors warn that disregarding this principle could have serious international repercussions. “If the United States can today continue to enforce criminal legislation that is not only violative of binding international law norms but that has been definitely condemned by tribunals to whose rulings we have pledged to adhere,” they note, “there is nothing to prevent other countries from following the same course when faced with WTO rulings favorable to the United States and unfavorable to them.”

New York University law professor Joseph Weiler, an international trade expert who advises law firms whose clients could be prosecuted for helping Americans gamble online, took up the same theme in testimony to the House Judiciary Committee last fall. “There is no question that under international law the ban on remote betting by providers situated in WTO countries is illegal,” he said. “Despite this illegality, the executive branch has persisted in indicting and prosecuting individuals and corporations whose activities should have been protected by the binding international obligations.”

That policy, Weiler warned, “is detrimental to the reputation of the United States as a champion of the rule of law” and “is an invitation to other countries…to withdraw commitments rather than honor them.” Should China one day decide it no longer wants to respect U.S. copyrights, or should the E.U. decide to exclude U.S. agricultural products, the United States could not reasonably object to such unilateral revision of trade agreements, given the precedent it is setting in the area of gambling.

Abetting Betting
The international implications of the online gambling crackdown extend beyond trade. According to the U.S. Justice Department, anyone who operates a gambling website that’s accessible to Americans, even if it’s based in a jurisdiction where the business is legal and licensed, is criminally liable in the United States. If he should happen to visit or pass through the U.S., he is subject to arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment.

How would Washington react if an American visiting Tehran or Beijing received similar treatment because he had posted material on a U.S.-based website that authorities in Iran or China deemed indecent or subversive? How would it view a request for the extradition of such a “criminal”? “This is a very dangerous precedent,” says attorney Behnam Dayanim, “because it sets the stage for that kind of activity, and to the extent we object we would be subject to charges of hypocrisy.”

A week after David Carruthers’ arrest, London’s Daily Telegraph quoted “a source close to PartyGaming” who said, “If they start doing this they risk behaving like China.” He was referring to the Chinese government’s effort to prevent Chinese citizens from visiting websites it considers objectionable, an effort in which it had enlisted the assistance of U.S.-based search engines, to the consternation of American politicians. “The U.S. Congress that was appalled by Google’s supine attitude,” the Telegraph noted, “is the same Congress that overwhelmingly passed an anti-online gambling bill last week.”

The comparison with Chinese censorship is not so far-fetched, especially when you consider that the U.S. government has threatened to prosecute people merely for providing information about online gambling. In June 2003 Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Malcolm sent a letter to media trade groups warning that their members could be breaking the law by accepting ads for gambling websites. Under the Justice Department’s theory, running the ads could amount to “aiding and abetting” illegal gambling, a crime punishable by up to two years in prison.

“It was our attempt to be as gentle as we could,” a Justice Department spokesman told The National Law Journal in 2005. “We were letting them know that accepting advertising from an Internet gambling firm is against the law and it could be used in an aiding and abetting statute.…A lot of that pressure has worked.” This intimidation campaign has spurred cable TV channels, radio stations, magazines, search engines, and billboard companies to stop carrying ads for gambling websites.

To people who view online gambling as a legitimate business, the U.S. government’s insistence that citizens of other countries help it protect American gamblers from themselves is all the more galling because the moralism underlying it is so inconsistent. Last fall Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick produced a particularly glaring example of politicians’ gambling hypocrisy when he proposed a bill that would authorize three casinos in the state while at the same time banning Internet betting.

Under Patrick’s bill, people who place online bets, including casual poker players and sports bettors, could be punished by up to two years in jail and a $25,000 fine. The idea, it seems, is to protect the casinos from competition and thereby maximize the revenue they generate for the state through license fees and taxes. Similarly, a Washington state law enacted in 2006 treats most online gamblers as felons, subject to penalties of up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, but exempts state-sanctioned horse racing.

Protectionism helps explain why, despite all the railing against online gambling by politicians like Bob Goodlatte and John Kyl, the bill that finally passed Congress left the law ambiguous. “For me this is more about driving foreign traders out of action so Nevada and Vegas don’t lose out on business in the future,” a London lawyer told the Sunday Telegraph last year. “The moves being made now give the U.S. time to sort out the legalization of online gaming and give the Vegas brands time to establish [themselves] online.”

The American Gaming Association, which represents brick-and-mortar casinos, was officially neutral on the UIGEA, and it is not backing a bill sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, that would create a federal system of licensing and registration for online gambling businesses while allowing states to restrict or prohibit Internet betting within their borders. But the association “strongly supports” a bill sponsored by Nevada’s Rep. Berkley that would commission a one-year National Research Council study of how best to regulate online gambling, including an examination of methods used to block bets by minors and discourage excessive betting.

“They want an objective study,” says Kelly, the law professor. “They’ve got to make the case before the American people. They’ve got to convince some of their own members.…Then the American Gaming Association, I think, would push for regulation.”

Since legal gambling sites have been up and running for years in various countries, it’s not clear why such a study is needed. Excluding minors is, in essence, a matter of identity verification, something that commercial websites ranging from banks to booksellers routinely do. The methods, which include passwords and inquiries about personal information, are not 100 percent effective, but they work well enough for millions of online businesses to function profitably. Gambling sites have a strong incentive to avoid unauthorized transactions, because they bear the burden of charge-backs if a customer turns out to be a kid with a purloined credit card. Preventing bets by self-identified problem gamblers is also a matter of identity verification, and gambling sites use other methods, such as rules against multiple accounts and preset limits on the size or frequency of bets, to discourage excessive gambling.

‘Some Human Beings Enjoy Doing It’
Opponents of online gambling nevertheless warn that legalization would lure millions of Americans into an addiction that will wipe out their savings, break up their families, and drive them to theft and suicide. “Gambling is not a victimless activity,” Goodlatte told the House Judiciary Committee in November. “Online gambling can result in addiction, bankruptcy, divorce, crime, and moral decline…the costs of which must ultimately be borne by society.…Financial ruin and tragedy are not uncommon among online bettors.”

Actually, they are. In a study sponsored by the Austrian gambling business bwin.com and reported in the Journal of Gambling Studies last year, researchers at Harvard Medical School examined the gambling patterns of more than 40,000 online sports bettors for eight months and found that less than 1 percent qualified as “heavily involved bettors” with large losses. A 2007 survey by the British Gambling Commission found that 6 percent of people who had placed sports bets online and 7 percent of people who had placed other kinds of online bets in the previous year qualified as “problem gamblers,” based on American Psychiatric Association criteria. That does not mean they faced “financial ruin and tragedy”; it means they reported at least three of 10 gambling-related problems, such as “chasing losses,” “a preoccupation with gambling,” “a need to gamble with increasing amounts of money,” and “being restless or irritable when trying to stop gambling.” Notably, the overall rate of problem gambling in the U.K. remained unchanged between 1999 and 2007, despite the rise (and legalization) of Internet betting.

Opponents of online gambling focus on extreme cases and imply they’re typical. A June 2007 hearing on Internet gambling held by the House Financial Services Committee featured testimony by an Ohio minister whose college-age son robbed a bank to pay off the debts he incurred while playing online poker. The research firm Ipsos estimates that 15 million Americans play online poker for money; most of them do not end up robbing banks. According to industry data collected by the Poker Players Alliance, the average online player spends $10 to $20 a week. Players like these are neither winning nor losing large amounts of money; they are mainly having fun, a concept that Bob Goodlatte seems to have trouble comprehending.

Barney Frank, by contrast, gets it. In July 2006, during the congressional debate over the UIGEA, Jim Leach averred that “there is nothing in Internet gambling that adds to the GDP or makes America more competitive in the world.” Frank took exception to Leach’s argument:

“If an adult in this country, with his or her own money, wants to engage in an activity that harms no one, how dare we prohibit it because it doesn’t add to the GDP or it has no macroeconomic benefit? Are we all to take home calculators and, until we have satisfied the gentleman from Iowa that we are being socially useful, we abstain from recreational activities that we choose?…People have said, ‘What is the value of gambling?’ Here is the value: Some human beings enjoy doing it. Shouldn’t that be our principle? If individuals like doing something and they harm no one, we will allow them to do it, even if other people disapprove of what they do.”

Senior Editor Jacob Sullum is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: How The Week Is Redefining News Mags for the 21st Century

Thu, 15 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Bill Falk is editor in chief of The Week, the magazine that promises to "tell you all you need to know about everything that matters." Six years old and boasting a growing circulation of 500,000 subscribers, The Week has redefined the news magazine for the 21st century by offering wide-ranging and witty takes on the topics of the day. For each issue, Falk and his staff sift through thousands of newspapers, magazines, websites, and other sources to produce a concise and comprehensive gazette of news, opinion, and attitude.

Although The Week is a non-partisan publication, Falk has no shortage of opinions about the state of the media-and particularly the troubles facing old-style, mass-circulation print behemoths such as Time and Newsweek. Such mags are "clearly in a bad place," he says. "It's unclear what their role is in this new media landscape....They're fishing around for what their role is going to be."

In this 10-minute interview conducted and filmed by reason.tv's Nick Gillespie and Dan Hayes, Falk explains why he thinks The Washington Post is the best newspaper in America, why content will always be king across all media platforms, and why it may not be a bad thing that politics is starting to look more and more like a reality TV show in which contestants get voted off the island.

Click below to view. To add this video to your site and more reason.tv, go here.

Missing Pedophiles

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In March, London’s Daily Mail reported that a British elementary school had obscured the heads of children in group photographs on the school’s website with oval smiley faces, “apparently to protect them from paedophiles.” The widespread anxieties underlying that bizarre incident are almost entirely off the mark, according to a recent review of the evidence concerning Internet-related sex crimes.

Writing in the February-March American Psychologist, Janis Wolak and three colleagues at the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center conclude that “the stereotype of the Internet child molester who uses trickery and violence to assault children is largely inaccurate.” In their survey of more than 2,500 law enforcement agencies, “99 percent of victims of Internet-initiated sex crimes…were 13 to 17 years old, and none were younger than 12.” The cases typically involved teenagers who knew they were talking to adults online, agreed to meet them specifically for sex, and were not forced or threatened with violence.

In short, Internet-related sex crimes are overwhelmingly cases of statutory rape rather than child molestation.

Based on telephone surveys of 10-to-17-year-old Internet users, Wolak et al. also question commonly held beliefs about what kinds of online behavior expose teenagers to the risk of such encounters. Neither posting personal information nor participating in social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace was by itself associated with victimization. Instead the researchers found that “youths who interacted online with unknown people and also engaged in a high number of different risky online behaviors” (such as “having unknown people on a buddy list, talking online to unknown people about sex, seeking pornography online, [and] being rude or nasty online”) were “much more likely to receive aggressive sexual solicitations than were youths who interacted online with unknown people but restrained their risky behaviors.”

The idea that the Internet has fostered a “shocking increase in the sexual exploitation of children,” as Newsweek put it in 2001, also appears to be unfounded. Wolak and her colleagues estimate that Internet-related sex crimes account for something like 7 percent of all statutory rapes. They note that “several sex crime and abuse indicators have shown marked declines during the same period that Internet use has been expanding.”

RateMyCop.com

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Many police departments have set up Internet registries for sex offenders and drug offenders, and police also have begun posting the pictures and names of suspected johns online. Still, police groups took umbrage when a site called RateMyCop.com appeared in March.

Site founder Gino Sesto wrote to police departments across the country and obtained lists of the names and badge numbers of their officers. He then posted the names online in a format broken down by state and city, encouraging users to rate their experiences with individual officers.

All of the information Sesto posted was already open to the public, and he didn’t reveal the identities of any undercover officers. But police groups were outraged, making the dubious argument that posting publicly available names and badge numbers on the Internet somehow jeopardized officers’ safety. Jerry Dyer, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, told Wired the site could give citizens the opportunity to “unfairly malign” individual officers. He added that he’d be asking the state legislature to ban sites like RateMyCop.com.

Then in March, hosting service GoDaddy mysteriously terminated Sesto’s account and pulled RateMyCop.com offline. GoDaddy has offered several explanations to Wired, none of which has made much sense. Sesto gave up on GoDaddy and tried to get the site hosted at RackSpace. After initially accepting his down payment for hosting services, RackSpace sent a letter to Sesto saying, “We believe that the website to be found at www.ratemycop.com as described to our sales representative could create a risk to the health and safety of law enforcement officers.” At press time the site was back online, but its future is uncertain.

Virtually Free

info@reason.com (Wagner James Au) — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Ready, Aim, Firewall!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:28:00 EDT

Remember how anyone protesting China in Nepal risked getting shot during the Olympic torch relay at Mt. Everest?

Well, that's not the only censorship that's going to surround the Olympics, though it's a rather more dramatic interpretation of the word firewall: Technology Minister Wan Gang told Reuters some sites would be shut down or screened during the Games. "To protect the youth there are controls on some unhealthy websites."

In light of statements like there, there seems to be a serious case of unfounded optimism at the IOC:

Wan's statement comes just over a month after the International Olympic Committee reminded China of its obligations as an Olympic host city to allow the press to report as freely as they have in the past—which usually includes full, unfettered access to the Internet. The IOC insisted to the government that the Internet be "open at all times during Games time," and commission vice chairman Kevan Gosper appeared optimistic that China would comply. "On all issues where that's been concerned they've lived up to the (host city) agreement so we don't see any reason why they'd step back from that now," he said at the time.

More on China here. More Beijing Olympics here.

Question: What do Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Nine Kittens Bobbing Together to a Song, and PayPal Co-Founder Peter Thiel Have in Common?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:48:00 EDT

Answer: Stories about them were recommended to pals of FriendFeed cofounder Paul Buchheit last week, according to The New York Times.

Following the feeds of people you like and admire, these companies say, allows the serendipitous discovery of needles in the information haystack. "Friends are likely to have some similar interests and tastes. Just the fact that your friends find it interesting should make it more interesting to you," said Paul Buchheit, one of FriendFeed's four founders, all of them former Google engineers.
Last week, for example, Mr. Buchheit's followers on FriendFeed were treated to what he himself had discovered and found valuable online: links to interviews with the investor Peter Thiel in Reason magazine and the Google co-founder Larry Page in Fortune, an article about Justice Antonin Scalia's views on torture on a political Web site, and a YouTube video of nine kittens moving their heads in rhythm to a song, among other Internet ephemera.

Read "Friends May Be the Best Guide Through the Noise."

Compensate Much?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:32:00 EDT

Via Reddit, the 50 most popular pages on "Conservapedia," the reference wiki for right-wingers.

I Am Curious (Wiki)

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:53:00 EDT

I'm pro-Wikipedia. I think it's an inspiring example of bottom-up collaborative creation. Knock it for its inaccuracies, and I'll reel off the usual defenses: Sure, it isn't completely reliable, but there are thousands of eyes monitoring it. When someone makes an obviously inaccurate edit, someone else will usually pounce to fix it. In the meantime, the uncertainty encourages a different, more skeptical sort of reading.

That said: Boy, but some weird crap manages to slip through the cracks there. From the entry on Curious George:

As stated in an interview, the book Curious George Takes a Job was inspired by a true story. A boy, whose name is not known today, was born in Hamburg in 1909 with Down's Syndrome. He was institutionalized by his parents, condemned to a life at the facility.

When the boy was 15, he escaped from the institution and fled into the city streets. Hungry and in search of food, he found the briefly unattended kitchen of a restaurant, where a cook found him playing with the food and eating it. The cook, intrigued, put him to work to clean dishes, and took him home that evening. Within the following days, the cook arranged with a friend to have the boy wash windows at an office building.

The boy's work went well at first. But in one office, he found colored paints. He used them to paint a mural on the wall of the office. The tenant returned to his office after a lunch break to find the boy busy painting, and he started to chase after him. The boy jumped out a third-story window, breaking some bones.

The story made local headlines. After several weeks of hospitalization, the boy was formally adopted by the cook, and he later became the star of an amateur movie. He was recognized in the coming years as a talented artist. Some of his artwork was sold by the renowned bookseller, A.S.W. Rosenbach.

Tragically, his identity, art, and other details of his life were lost in the ravages of World War II, and he is believed to have been put to death by the government of Nazi Germany.

That passage has been part of the article for over a year. During that time, the page has not suffered from an absence of attention. There has been a long-running battle about whether George is an ape or a monkey. There have been arguments over the political subtexts of the stories. There have been efforts to add obviously phony info to the entry, prompting editors to leave comments like this one:

I seriously doubt "Curious George Gets AIDS" was one of the books. I don't want to change it myself since last time I made a minor edit I was banned from making any further ones by Wikipedia.

Yet that shaggy-dog story about Curious George Takes a Job is still there. No one has even suggested that it be sourced with a citation stronger than the vague "As stated in an interview."

It is my power as a Wikipedia reader to make the necessary changes myself. But a bizarre and funny passage like that one deserves to be immortalized, so I'm blogging it instead.

Bonus links: A communiqué from the Curious George Brigade.

Fr. Archimedes Aloysius Anarchy's Curious George fan fiction, including such unforgettable tales as Curious George Goes to Jail and Curious George Does LSD.

A Curious George true crime story.

Curious George meets rave culture:

Is Googlezon Upon Us?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:08:00 EDT

Two headlines from DrudgeReport this morning:

BOOM: GOOGLE 1Q profit climbs 30%; tops analyst views...

SHOCK: NEW YORK TIMES POSTS LOSS; worst period 'company and newspaper industry have seen'...

Perhaps the long-predicted Googlezon media apocalypse will be here sooner than you think:

Don't Be Evil, Revisited

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:28:00 EDT

Google and AOL cheerfully encouraged people worried about their privacy in the age of targeted ads to turn to technological solutions at an event today, and talked about ways they are trying to make it easier for users to block their ads. They were, of course, fending off government regulation.

The Network Advertising Initiative already offers a cookie that lets users opt out of ads from the biggest players, but cookies aren't 100 percent protection, they can expire or be erased.

Google chief privacy officer Jane Horvath predicted that in the future, there may be a technological solution "that will have a cookie or something that will allow this (opt-out preference) to be a constant," adding, "that would be a very promising direction to go."

Other much worse, likely less effective ideas include a federal Do Not Track database, similar to the Do Not Call list. And this:

A broad coalition of consumer and privacy advocates last fall called on the Federal Trade Commission to establish such a registry. The concept is this: Any advertising entity that sets a "persistent" cookie on a user's machine would be required to give the FTC the domain names of servers used to place it. Consumers would then be able to import that list of domain names and block them from tracking their Internet surfing behavior.
Polonetsky said that while he supports the concept, "I think the way to do it isn't a government place where your browser goes and gets stuff."

This sounds like a little bit of the old "Don't Be Evil" to me: Working to make it easier for people opt out is pretty sportsman-like. Personally, even if I could permanently opt out, I'm not sure I would. At least for now, eerily well-targeted ads, like the "Barack and Roll t-shirts" the scroll bar at the top of my email is currently offering, still amuse me. For more ads like these, and fewer for penis pills, I'll happily accept Google's electronic nose sniffing in my email.

Little Brother Is Watching

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:00:00 EDT

A Cup Holder in the Bathroom, and Other Brilliant Ideas

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:05:00 EDT

About a month ago, as part of it's ohmygodwe'relosingourchokeholdonthecoffeeindustry panic campaign, Starbucks launched MyStarbucksIdea.com. Customers log on and suggest improvements for Starbucks stores, like a shelf in the bathroom for your cup, coffee ice cubes for cold drinks, or this clever idea:

One idea that has gained traction is to embed a customer's regular order on her Starbucks card so when she enters the store she could swipe the card, her order would be put in and paid for, and she'd avoid (and shorten) the line. Other suggestions call for the ability to send in orders by phone or Web. These customers are telling Starbucks that long lines irritate them. But note well that they didn't come online to complain. Instead they offered solutions. This is the gift economy of online.

An excellent article on the project in BusinessWeek emphasized the positive, open-sourceishness of the whole endeavor. So quit yer bitchin' and go fix Starbucks.