Oblomovka

2007-10-30»

Back from a whistle-stop tour (in that it lasted about as long as I can whistle) of University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Reed College, Portland, doing my regular speaking job explaining EFF issues to college students.

I do these gigs about once a month, so if you know any students (or perhaps turn into one after 11AM), contact Samara and get me to come talk at your school. All the monies go to EFF. I like the format; I have a standard pitch, but I have room to throw in extra material or explore topics the audience are interested in. At Michigan, the talk was organised by WUMD, and we had DJs play a set beforehand, so we ended up talking a fair bit about artists’ rights and distribution. At Reed, I was invited by the college’s Free Culture chapter, so we spent some time dissecting public policy. Both times, the audience was fantastic, and we all had a great time. It’s nice to do some more public speaking, after quite a few years of not much performance.

I also liked the more random questions after the main event. We spent a long time at Dearborn talking about Valley culture. In one of the city’s hookah bars (Dearborn has a really distinctive and self-assured arab community, from what I could glean), we meandered over mesh networks and data havens, mainstream game companies and whether it sucked to work for them, why Ruby was better than C++. “Is it true that the guy who wrote BitTorrent wants to live on an oilrig?”, they asked. I explained that was two different people, with entirely different livejournal accounts. The organiser at WUMD runs the radio station, studies at the college, works in his father’s video shop, and then at the weekend runs a clothing company with his cousin. He wants to study law, and is an EFF member. I still love the future, and glad I get to travel to meet it so much.

Comments Off on never not blog if you have too much to say

2007-10-25»

We should have had a plan to do something with the NTK site after we trailed off updating it, but I don’t think we could have come up with something as deeply wonderful as ntk.org.uk, part of the current No To Knives campaign in the UK.

Things I like about this site:

• It’s all in Flash.
• It’s aiming to get 1,000,000 people to pledge not to carry knives on the hard streets of Britain
• So far, they’ve got seven.
• I can’t link to anything on it, because it’s all in Flash.
• But that’s okay, because the terms of conditions would ban me from doing so anyway:
  

  You may link to our home page, provided you do so in a way that is fair and legal and does not damage our reputation or take advantage of it, but you must not establish a link in such a way as to suggest any form of association, approval or endorsement on our part where none exists. You must not establish a link from any website that is not owned by you.

• Also, I had to quote that bit, because they also say:
  

  We may revise these terms of use at any time by amending this page. You should check this page from time to time to take notice of any changes we made, as they are binding on you. Some of the provisions contained in these terms of use may also be superseded by provisions or notices published elsewhere on our website.

• Amusingly, the terms and conditions are the only page that I can link to, because it’s the only page not in Flash.
• …unlike their accessibility page, which you can only get to in (inaccessible) Flash.

And I haven’t even started on my questions about why the Royal Armouries of all people want everyone to stop carrying knives. Is this like how only the Queen can own swans?

Comments Off on i’m in ur country, pollutin ur namespace

2007-10-18»

Sorry about the extended pause: I just spent a week in Beijing. About the only thing wrong with Beijing is that everyone abbreviates it to “BJ”. Oh, that and the repressive and autocratic regime: which, incidentally, I am more optimistic about. (Understand that I could scarcely have been more pessimistic about it, given my formative civil liberties event was waking up to the Tianenmen Square massacre.)

Bear in mind of course that I am randomly extrapolating from barely a week of interaction, but There was a lot less respect than I was expecting. Lots of teasing and undermining of authority, from giggling waitresses teasing their stern boss, to extended, loudly gesticulated debates between hotel managers and bellhops, between out-of-town cabbies and bemused police officers. It felt more like New York than a cowering, centrally-planned potemkin Olympic village it’s sometimes painted.

Even experiencing the Great Firewall filled me with my perverse sense of hope. (At work, my self-given title is “World’s Most Conflict-Averse Activist”, but I am a also a fair runner-up for “Digital Rights’ Biggest Gap-Toothed Optimist”. At a Canadian privacy conference last month, a TV crew filmed me specifically because I was the only pro-privacy speaker who didn’t seem actively suicidal).

The Great Firewall, in brief, is appalling. Appalling enough for it to be one day abandoned, I hope. It damages the entire experience of the Internet — not just for obvious political searches, but for everyday business, too. DNS queries fall over regularly, connections drop for random but broadly discoverable reasons, searches are arbitrarily banned. A resident and I spent a few minutes whittling down the use-case for a new and frustrating Google block. It turned out the PRC was blocking any Google search with the Chinese pinyin syllable “zhēng” in it. That’s like someone blocking any search term that contains the English word “trip”. My colleague had discovered it because they were searching for a Chinese company that included that syllable – Zhēngtu Networks, local creators of the second most popular MMORPG in China. Google has been down in the last few days; so has YouTube. This isn’t just breaking Google’s service; it’s breaking the whole functionality and usefulness of the Net.

The Firewall divides China into a local domain with okay connectivity and rampant self-censorship, and the “foreigner” domain with crummy degraded performance and arbitrary blocking. As a policy, I don’t think that can work. You can build a walled garden as big as half a continent, and you’re still going to painfully suffer competitive disadvantage to your trading partners. If the US had declared itself a Net isolate from the rest of the world, the Net would have died on the vine. As everyone who has every tried to pick out what they thought everyone would need from the Internet has learnt, it’s not about having “enough”, it’s about having all of it. You don’t know which part of the Net you need, because everyone else is finding different parts that they need — and you need them.

I think far more sinister is the developing technology that silently drops parts of the Internet with little observable effect on even quite close neighbours. For instance, British Telecom’s Cleanfeed, which can block individual URLs within a domain, and leave the rest untouched. A manifestly broken Internet will provoke all kinds of debate, offline and on. A silently censored Net may encroach until the lack of debate becomes perfectly natural.

No narrative dreams in China, just lots of mental processing of my attempts to learn and understand Chinese ideograms. Like semantic tetris, you close your eyes, and the radicals leap up out of the visual noise.

Here’s the Chinese for Internet, or “cyber”:网际 (wǎng jì). It’s the image for “net”, appended to the ideogram for “edge/boundary/between”.

I like its X X eyes, as though the sign for Internet has its own embedded emoticon.

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2007-10-09»

I’ve now had a few nightmares, I am sorry to report. Recurrent nightmares, or at least endless rehashing of the NIGHTMARE THAT IS MY BOURGEOUS LIFE was what led my subconscious to forgo the whole dreaming thing for the last few years. It’s not too bad, though – my last nightmare had dragons in it. We hid under the kitchen table; very effective. Then, Mike Myers turned up and filmed the new Austin Powers in my bedsit. He’s uch more humble in real life. And by “real life”, here I mean “in my dream”.

So, a lot of people smershed my mentioning of the old P2P revolution in the last entry with my general thinking about the future move to the edge. I hadn’t intended to make a direct comparison, but it’s worth noting, as many did, the changes in the network since the glory days of 2001, and how that would effect creating edge services now, as the P2Pers were trying to do then.

First, and most obviously, the massacre of dial-up users is proceding as planned. There are still plenty of them out there, but we no longer have to feel guilty if we do not care about them. More importantly, always-on Net connections are pretty much everywhere. Even dynamic IPs are generally fairly static in the medium term. Hooray!

Second, the realisation by most protocol-designers that it’s an HTTP world, and that we just try and communicate in it. HTTP was a fantastic fit for the early net, so good in fact the modern Net has now co-evolved to be a good fit with HTTP. Nobody cares a goat’s fig about NAT because it don’t mess with the HTTP — and that’s one of the main reasons the Internet is now so NATty. That makes everybody lean toward HTTP to work well in this new infrastructure. One of the reasons why REST stuff just works is that it lives in HTTP space, so there are no sudden moves. P2P protocols have always had HTTP elements, but I think it may be true that whatever develops next in the peer-to-peer realm will just look like local webservers talking in a RESTy way with other webservers – or to talk with humans or other userspace applications (I count humans as a “userspace application”).

A corollary of this is that I think you really have to just deal with everything else that comes with HTTP — including DNS. All the old P2P dances have sexy URLs of their own devising, and hashes, and DHTs, and all that jazz — but without popping up in DNS-land, these servers are just invisible to everyone. Even Microsoft’s own P2P DNS-a-like, PNRP, falls into this category. Sure, your machine may be announcing to other Microsoft peers that it’s My-Computer474342.pnrp.net, until Microsoft does the obviously sensible thing and starts resolving those addresses in standard DNS (please somebody write in and tell me they do) , those addresses are just burial plots in a walled garden.

(John Gilmore once proposed a decentralised solution to this problem, whereby the toppest level domain would actually determine which protocol the IP service should use to find the rest of the domain. The current TLDs would be grandfathered in as ‘.com.icann’, ‘.net.icann’, etc. You wouldn’t need to change any URLs, because search domain ‘.icann’ would be default. But ‘My-Computer743473.pnrp.’ would run using Microsoft’s P2P name-finding algorithm, ‘7a7898bef783ed731aaf.bittorrentilikehashes.bittorent.’ would find a bittorrent resource, and so on. Obviously this would reduce ICANN’s role to one Postel-looking geek adding a list of protocols onto a list and chatting to the BIND guys. Since that geek wouldn’t need a multi-million travel budget, it will never happen.)

But I digress. The key point here is that if you can control your own DNS, and your can control your own webserver, you’re pretty much ready to go as a generic everything server on the Net, whether you’re hanging off the edge, or partying in the affluent middle zones.

Oh, you say, but what about NAT! What about the unreliability of the edge! What about if the kitchen table was made of wood, and the dragon just went RAAAARGGGGH and breathed fire over the top of it?

These, and other nightmares, I will discuss after this word from my sponsors.

The Democrats are currently considering caving to the White House on granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunication companies for breaking the law and spying on your phone calls. It’s all going to happen this week. If you haven’t already, please call the Congressional leadership and tell them not to give an amnesty for lawbreakers.

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2007-10-04»

The two background themes of this blog conspire: my digestive problem is keeping me awake, and stopping my dreams. Well at least I’m not fitfully asleep, dreaming that there’s a small weasel biting the left side of my trunk or something.

Lots of great conversations with people about my ongoing flailing ideas here. I am awful at replying to email, because by the time I’ve found the reply button, there’s another email to read and oh, bright shiny blog thing, but I did read them all. Even the guy who said that I’d just rediscovered Ray Ozzie’s Groove (sorry if I was a bit rude in my reply, Andre).

What made me rub my hands with glee was that all of the replies were by people who I know are much smarter than me, which means I’d managed to fulfil my primary aim of expressing an idea so irritatingly vaguely that better heads will fill it in for me.

A telltale of my favourite smart people is that they don’t prematurely pessimize, which is to blindly announce “Well that would never work because X, Y, and Z”. Buzzkill. No, my kind of smart people go “Well, you’ll have to fix X first, which I think you could do by doing A, B, and — oooh, I bet we could solve ‘Z’ with some string and that doorknob over there! Let’s go!”

However, to speed things along, I’m now explaining to such people there’s a class of problems that I don’t even want to fix in this thought experiment (which, to remind everyone, is — what happens if we push to the edge everything that we’re currently throwing onto Google Documents and other Web-based services). Examples of this class of problem in my gedankenexperiment are:

• There’s not enough bandwidth for a home or mobile servers.
• Customer-level connections are too unreliable for services.
• Hard-drives are too fragile to lug around with you.

These are examples of problems that I hand-wavily announce will bore themselves to death. That is to say, I don’t want to talk about them, because I believe they are very dull, and I am confident there are clever people who don’t find them quite as boring as me will solve them for me.

There is risk here. You do have to be careful of what problems you assume will die of boredom, because sometimes they turn on you and bore your entire future vision to death instead.

NAT traversal is a good example of that. NAT traversal is a tremendously dull topic that was far too boring for most of the people excited about P2P technologies in 2001 to think about for very long (although the ones that did find it fascinating kept the rest of us up until 4AM drawing funny diagrams). They had a revolution to lead! Endless opportunity lay just beyond the horizon!

P2P was what Web 2.0 was supposed to be, incidentally, five years earlier, almost literally (the Web 2.0 conference came from Emerging Technology which came from the ashes of P2Pcon). Sadly, P2P never developed escape velocity, and the entire fledgling industry collapsed more-or-less into BitTorrent and Groove, and that was that. NAT traversal was one of the problems that still hinders it, as is the fact that client PCs generally don’t act like servers, but vanished off and on the networks in irritating ways. By the time you’d coped with constantly self-dismantling networks and impossible to reach edge nodes, I understand most P2P developers wanted to gnaw their own legs off in tedium. The endless opportunity had to be endlessly postponed while everyone fixed this one last problem with getting the Network to work over firewalls, and with constantly changing dynamic IPs, and a whole rats-nest of other dull issues.

If you want a more modern way of thinking of the risks of a boring problem, think of the utterly dull issue of cross-platform JavaScript compatibility. An entire generation of AJAXian prototypes died on intranets because they weren’t cross-platform, and it took decent JS frameworks and know-how built by Stakhanovite miners in the dark pits of tedium.

But we prevailed! The problem, pinned down by the corpses of endless headslapping programming hours, finally died of its own boredom, and JavaScript ultimately came into its own. About seven years later than anyone imagined.

Boring problems can heavily delay the arrival of the future, but they don’t really change the game.

So because we are all Buckminster Fullerish futurists here, let’s airily discount them. Our problems with bandwidth, at least in the United States, are down to awful, creaking monopolies, that will slowly die choking on their own gorged subsidies and foul bellhead toxins (and if not, there’s always China). The fragility of harddrives isn’t going to last another generation.

The unreliability of consumer connections, though. Um. I don’t know whether this is a problem that will die or be fatal. One could argue that it was what actually *did* kill the P2P unboom. Certainly, unreliability is something that the Internet is supposed to deal well with, and when it doesn’t, we could certainly do with some deliciously generalisable solutions. It’s not like it’s not a problem if you keep servers where they’re supposed to be, in yonder cloud. When your main server goes down, what do you do? And can you do that when your edge server drops off the Net a couple of minutes every day, or a bunch of seconds every hour?

Oh, all right. Have your damn comments. You’re just going to pile on and say you don’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about, and have I tried peppermint tea, aren’t you?

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2007-10-02»

I have had more vivid dreams, but the last one was a long debate between me and my friends because I was using mutt 1.0.2.1 and it was calling “mailbox deadlocks” on their servers. Nothing more draining than waking up after dreaming an imaginary one hour conference call, especially when you realise you have a real one hour conference call in a few minutes. So I shan’t talk about that.

I’ve been spending some time explaining in a hand-waving fashion my instincts about moving to the very edge. Usually I keep this stuff close to my chest until I’ve thought it all out, for fear of looking like an over-obvious idiot. But over time I’ve seen a lot of obvious idiots become fantastically smart just by letting it all hang out online, so I will bore you with my half-baked, poorly styled, not-very-viral ideas as they occur.

Brief summary of the thesis: I’m bored of this current revolution, so I’m doing the cheap trick to help plot out a possible next one, which is to reverse and take to its extreme one of the obvious contemporary trends. My question right now: given that we’re entrusting so much data and control now to the cloud and the server-farm, what happens if we pull the other way, and swing more power out to the edge, and the end-user? How far can we go with that?

Intermediaries have been what I’ve been considering today. Browsing EFFish issues, I see a lot of problems which are caused by the distance between an intermediaries’ goals, and that of its customers. When your hosting provider, includes as part of their terms and conditions that they reserve the right to take you down if you cause problems with them (or even criticise them)

Intermediaries don’t have to be corporate though, nor middle-men. Pooling resources in a communal way can have problems, too (witness my dream, where my mutt process brings down everybody else’s accounts on a communal co-loc). And even having a home server doesn’t seem to fit how I imagine protecting data and providing user power. There are interactions and privacy that exist within a home, and between friends.

I guess what I’m imagining is the single-person server: holding and electively sharing your data with other single-person servers. I don’t see this as substantially different from people having their own phones. Indeed, phones are already powerful enough to support that.

(The 21st century question about this is — what are the energy costs? I’m not going to have that argument for a while, because I want to find out more about the nature of decentralised energy systems.)

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2007-09-28»

I’m in the air, wheeling into San Francisco, having just finished William Gibson’s Spook Country. I brought it with me on a trip to Canada, because you should read later Gibson on airplanes and in slightly-foreign Western hotels, just as you should read Ballard in airports and light industrial parks, and William Burroughs off your face on purest horse.

I like Gibson in exactly the way you thought I would, so I’m not sure I can say anything unpredictable here. The potted-review I came up with when I was about twenty pages will do: This feels like Eighties Gibson, writing about our recent past as his envisaged near future. Set in 2006, it has geohacking, retro-fame, rogue states, cold war warriors gone white hot with rage: they’re all written about as though extrapolated from 1985, instead of marked back from 2007. I feels like a 20th century dystopia, which sadly doubles up as rather optimistic from our point of view.

There, gnomic enough for you? I’m trying to be awkward. I was mildly irritated all the way through by a spoiler I’d read in a review — which turned out not to be a spoiler at all, but an inept phrasing by the critic. No-spoilers are even worse than spoilers, because you don’t even have that grim sensation of following through. You just read to the end of the book, and then go “Hey, wait, wasn’t it supposed to turn out they were all otters all along?”

I’m still having dreams — which may, now I think about it, due to my steadily worsening stomach (it may be horrendously nasty gut-rot, but I doubt it: I think it’s just IBS turned psychosomatically psychopathic. I’m seeing a gastro in a fortnight. I’m sure he’ll just recommend a change of diet. Gastro! The menu!).

Last night I dreamt I was in a jeep in South America with Cory, planting explosives to covertly excavate out a new, spare, Panama canal for the US. The day before I was a sort of inept Professor Xavier, doing childcare for a bunch of superpowered preschoolers and having to defend them from some bigger supercriminal kids. Lots of soccer-coach encouragement of them to shoot percussive sonic blasts while I cowered behind them. This is a parental anxiety dream, but more exciting than most.

I was in Canada to meet with privacy activists. I can’t give you their names because obviously we all met in darkened rooms wearing blindfolds. I did get to see Michael Chertoff give a keynote though. Boy did he misread the audience. Never ever tell an international conference of data protection and privacy commissioners that you can scan a fingerprint at the US border, and match it to a print on a document found in a safe house in Europe. Because while you’re sitting there thinking “hooray for l33t national security tricks!”, they’re thinking: what the hell else are you doing with that tech?

I guess we’re all in a fucking jeep driven by a science fiction author now.

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2007-09-23»

Gikii, the UK day conference for law, tech, and popular culture, took place last week. The papers look fascinating, especially these slides about tattoo and copyright from ORG volunteer and past EFF intern Jordan Hatcher. It’s hard to make out all of the points he makes from just the slides, but towards the end you can see he’s asking some tough questions about the European principle of moral rights in creative works. If an artist has a inviolable natural right to control what is done with his artwork after it is produced, does that mean tattoo artists can sue to stop their work being erased modified (Thanks Ian for schooling me on the limits of moral rights)?

Also good is Ray Corrigan’s examination of the proto-copyright beliefs of Saint Columba, patron saint of bookbinders, founder of the Scottish Church, and cause of 3000 dead over the unauthorised copying of a manuscript in 6th century Ireland. Columba transcribed without permission a rare copy of the Vulgate Bible brought back by a colleague from Rome. The suit over the case went to the Irish court, where some familiar debates ensued:

Finnen first told the king his story and he said “Colmcille hath copied my book without my knowing,” saith he and I contend that the son of the book belongs to me.

“I contend,” saith Colmcille [Columba], “that the book of Finnen is none the worse for my copying it, and it is not right that the divine words in that book should perish, or that I or any other should be hindered from writing them or reading them or spreading them among the tribes. And further I declare that it was right for me to copy it, seeing the was profit to me from doing in this wise, and seeing it was my desire to give the profit thereof to all peoples, with no harm therefore to Finnen or his book.”

“Have attitudes to law and technology really changed a whole lot in 1400 years?”, Corrigan asks. For how the judgement goes and the rest of the story of the Battle of the Book, you’ll need to read the paper. A full list of papers from the conference is also online.

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2007-09-22»

I’ve started dreaming again. I don’t mean this metaphorically — for the last few years, I’ve dreamt very very rarely and could not remember anything of the dreams when I did.

A few nights ago, I had a wonderful dream, integrating lots of metaphorical images of San Francisco, full of dioramas and mise en scenes, a giant commune-theme-park in the mountains, full of the nicer kinds of aging in drag and with guns, where I wandered with Liz and Ada, and got into miscellaneous (and continuous) adventures. It went on for hours, and I woke up open-mouthed.

I don’t know what it means, or whether it will continue. It may just mean that I had more grilled cheese on toast than I should have done (I have something stomachy and unpalatably unbloggable going on, which involves me inventing a low residue diet while it resolves, so plenty of cheese and bread for me).

But I’ve also noticed my writing capacity eking up. Also, I realised earlier this year that I’ve answered my two big questions for the last decade, at least to my satisfaction. They were, nostalgia-fans: “How deep a culture is geek culture?”, and:”How many people do you need to be famous for?”.

The second wasn’t really my question, it was Stew’s (at least, it was his response to NTK‘s micro-pico-celebrity that prompted it), and so it’s fitting that he answered it. In a piece about being unable to evade druck heckling English rugby fans, even in New Zealand, he noted:

In the mid-90’s I was on television, and was of the mistaken belief that this represented a logical end-point in comedy. Returning to stand-up recently after four years off, the actual numbers game seems much simpler. I need about 7000 fans. If each of them gave me about £5 a year after tax, agent’s commission and travel expenses, I would be making a fine living, and probably never having to deal with sports fans coming to my shows. There is no need for that 7000 strong audience to include English rugby fans. If I can find some way of operating at such a level whereby they never find me, I could have the most wonderful life.

(Stew will probably now be picketed by thousands of fundamentalist rugby fans, furious at his blasphemous comments.)

So, there you go, the answer is: 7000 people. It sounds about right.

The first question was “how deep a culture is geek culture?”, and I have always had terrible problems explaining it, or how I would know when I had found an answer. The nugget explanation I gave was that I wanted to know whether geekdom was intergenerational: was it like the beatniks, or the mods, likely to be buried in aspic within a decade of its beginning. Or did it have more life than that: like Quakers at one end, or Goths at the other; able to leap generationally, and grow a depth beyond the years of its earliest creators?

I declare that I have discovered the answer to this now, but I’m not sure I can show it to you. It’s a small pamphlet by Len Anderson, a poet from Santa Cruz. It’s a wonderful, 15-page parody of Howl, giving the history of the personal computer.

1.0

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by MS-DOS in T-shirt & sneakers eating microwave popcorn,

dragging themselves through endless dungeon arcades at dawn looking for an angry joystick

longhaired hackers burning for the serial port connection to the silicon dynamo that powers the machinery of thought &mdash

3.0

Bill Gates! I’m with you in Redmond
where you’re the richest man in the country, engaged to be married, building a new home that includes a nursery and you are madder than I am

Steve Jobs! I’m with you in Silicon Valley
where you still dream the next dream and have a wife, a home, kids, a dog and like it and still are madder than I am

Steve Wozniak! I’m with you in Los Gatos
where now you’re retired and built a cave playhouse for your children and you must feel very strange! and I think we’re both about equally mad

It’s beautiful and funny and to me, who so often can only mediate my emotional reactions through accurate parodies, quite moving.

It was also, as you might be able to tell from the second extract, written over a decade ago, in 1993. It doesn’t feel like history, though. It doesn’t even feel that much like nostalgia. The litany it reels off (before Gates and after), would wring a response from a whole class of geeks aged from fifteen to their fifties. It feels like a plumb-line on the sort of depth I was looking for.

Deep enough, then. Deep sleep with enough deep dreams.

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2007-09-17»

[I refuse to admit that I am restarting this blog until further evidence is provided. But, anyway, it occurred to me that almost everyone who still has this in their RSS feed is probably the CEO of some Web 2.0 startup by now, so let me plug my sainted employer’s latest wheeze for you:]

Save the Date: October 10 for EFF’s Compliance Bootcamp .

Does your interactive company have to contend with the maze of laws dealing with user privacy and publishing user content? Want to do the right thing by the online community that gives your business value, and still fulfill your legal obligations?

EFF is hosting a one-day session for Web 2.0 workers who handle issues arising from users and user-generated content. From DMCA to CDA to ECPA, the law surrounding internet content can be confusing, especially for the folks who have to decide on the fly whether to let something stay up or take it down, or whether to give their customer’s name to the FBI agent on the phone. Let us help.

What

One-Day bootcamp. EFF’s staff attorneys will be teamed with private attorneys specializing in the various legal issues. We’ll give you the basics on the key topics and you’ll leave better able to protect your customers, your company and your job.

Topic areas

• Defamation, harassment, and other accusations of bad behavior.
• Fair use, free culture, and the right to remix.
• Copyright take-downs and put-backs: Understanding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
• How to respond to cops, crooks, and courts who want your customers’ communications and other private information.
• How to avoid becoming the next Napster and stay on the safe side of the Copyright Wars.
• The rights of anonymous speakers.
• Porn, predators, and the pressure to police.
• Lightning rounds on Creative Commons licenses, webcasting and what to do when you’ve been hacked.

Who should attend

People who do front-line or mid-level work for companies and projects that rely on user-generated content and communications. This includes compliance, customer service and community management workers.

Why

In the past year or so we’ve met with several Web 2.0 companies, sometimes before — and sometimes after — embarassing incidents when they found themselves out of step with their communities or the law. We’d like to give the people who make these important initial decisions the tools they need to do the right thing by their companies and their customers.

Where

Fenwick and West Silicon Valley Center
Mountain View, California

How much

Sliding scale of $100-200 per person. For individuals, some portion may be deductible as a charitable donation. Space is limited, so sign up soon. Email bootcamp@eff.org.

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