Michael Jay Lissner

The Interactions of Law and Code

2009-01-22T10:35:59-08:00

For my new Cyberlaw course, we were assigned a reading by Lawrence Lessig called The Law of the Horse. In it, he writes about how code can control law, and vise versa. He makes some good points that are intuitive yet bear saying nonetheless. Cyberspace as it currently exists is a largely unregulated domain. People can use it pretty much anonymously, so accountability is pretty limited. Lessig argues that this is because of the architecture of the Internet as it has been created by programmers.

As the Net grows, as its regulatory power increases, as its power as a source of values becomes established, the values of real-space sovereigns will at first lose out. In many cases, no doubt, that is a very good thing. But there is no reason to believe that it will be a good thing generally or indefinitely. There is nothing to guarantee that the regime of values constituted by code will be a liberal regime; and little reason to expect that an invisible hand of code writers will push it in that direction. Indeed, to the extent that code writers respond to the wishes of commerce, a power to control may well be the tilt that this code begins to take. Understanding this tilt will be a
continuing project of the law of cyberspace.

So in other words, cyberspace is a good place these days, ruled by fairly liberal ideals, but there is no guarantee that it will stay that way, and we may eventually need more regulation.

Log Your Friend Out of Gmail

2008-07-04T12:16:16-07:00

I keep having this problem where I want to use somebody’s computer to check my gmail, but I know that if I go to mail.google.com, I will see their email. I was thinking about this last night, and I came up with two solutions. The first was to bookmark the gmail logout link into their browser or maybe del.icio.us so that I could visit it without having to go to their gmail, and the second solution was to post that link here.

So, if you know that you want to log out your friend from gmail without seeing their inbox, all you have to do is click here.

It’s Official. I’m Going to Grad School.

2008-02-21T22:37:02-08:00

I hadn’t mentioned this previously here on the blog, but for the past several months, I’ve been working my butt off putting together two grad school applications for Masters of Information Management (MIMS). The two applications were for UC Berkeley School of Information and University of Washington Information School.

I am elated to announce that yesterday I heard from UW, and today I heard from Cal. They have both officially offered me entrance into the Fall 2008 class. Amazing.

I applied to the program at Cal last year and was denied, so I didn’t really expect them to let me in this year, but things are looking up. Now I just have to decide which one to go to.

On the one hand, UW is a bigger program with seemingly more resources, but Cal is a smaller, leaner, and more personalized. I think it looks like I need to plan a visit to UW for an on-campus day.

Anybody have any ideas on which to go to?

Search Concept

2008-01-15T18:00:04-08:00

There’s this ongoing problem I’ve been having in that search engines do not have the ability to search the insides of password protected sites. It’s a little frustrating from time to time because so many sites have gads of information that search engines just can’t get to, which means that you have to rely on the site’s search engine, which invariably does not work very well.

So, here’s the concept. The search engine creates an opt-in program wherein websites (like banks for example) can give the engine a generic login and password, and then the search engine can get in, crawl the site, make an index, and then get out. Later, when you search for content, you can search for that information, if you desire, but to see it, you’ll need to log in.

Similarly, if you are a person who uses the secure site, you can give the search engine the ability to log in as you, and then crawl the site for your information. Thus, if you gave the search engine the login to your bank, you could later search for all your transactions at Cha Cha’s restaurant….or whatever. Actually, this might be a privacy concern…but it’s a thought.

Taxonomy Features Are Go

2008-01-13T16:56:44-08:00

I have been rather busy since starting this blog many months ago, so I never got to finish rounding out its features. One that I have been wanting to figure out and to apply was Drupal’s taxonomy feature, which allows you to categorize your content as you write it.

After I turned it on today, I had to make up about 40 terms categorizing the content that I have written thus far, and I am now in the process of quickly going through and applying these tags to my old entries. What’s cool about having this feature turned on is that in the future, say, when I have 80 gazillion entries about various topics, if you are a reader of the blog, you can easily find entries matching your interests. Assuming, of course, that I write 80 gazillion things.

A Website that Irks My Soul, and the Internet’s Inability to Kill It

2007-11-19T21:15:49-08:00

There’s a website a friend pointed out to me. It’s called c o n s e r v o p e d i a, only without the spaces and with a .com at the end. It exemplifies so much in the world that is wrong. For example, here’s the picture on the page entitled “Liberal”:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is a just a bit annoying.

Now, I don’t mention this to bash that site (though I hate it), I mention it because it exemplifies a problem of sorts with the Internet. The problem is this: if I want to give props to a site, I can do so in a heartbeat by linking to it. A fine example of this was Google Bombing, while it lasted. On the other hand, if a website blows and I feel that it is making the world a worse place, all I can do is put spaces in its name and hope it becomes obscure enough to go away (which this one is not about to do).

I imagine there are some rather contentious issues regarding an internet where websites can be voted up and down on a grander scale than digg, but really, if something is evil and doing harm and disservice to the world, there should be a way to make it more obscure than the search engine’s algorithm. Similarly, if a website is doing illegal stuff, we should be able to get rid of it quickly and without a lot of hassle (think Internet scam sites).

Mashups

2007-10-28T13:10:16-07:00

For a while, I’ve been reading that mashups between various website technologies would soon be really easy to work with and play with and such. I didn’t believe it until I noticed my website today.

Today, I added the last.fm feed you all should be seeing on the left that lists the last five tracks I listened to on my home computer. With it’s addition, on my homepage I now have a post about the San Diego fires that includes a java-based Google Map, a picture gallery that uses code from menalto.com, and a nifty widget that ties in with my home computer.

I think mashups, in my opinion, are officially a reality. Pretty cool.

The Singularity Is Near

2007-10-12T22:53:24-07:00

I know what you’re thinking: “The Singularity - What is Mike talking about? This must be stupid.” I’m here to say that it might be stupid, but bear with me because I can’t decide if it is, and I need to know the public consensus.

The Singularity is this theory I have been reading far too much about that there will come a time when “computers transcend biology.” Think about that for a moment: computers…transcend…biology. In other words, there will come a time when computers are so advanced that they have moved beyond the limitations of biology; beyond what we now think of as computers, and into some biocomputing nano-thing.

The book I’m reading right now is The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. It sounds like a joke, and you’d think he was some two-bit writer that didn’t cite his references, or that didn’t know his shit, but sadly, the book has over 100 pages of references, and the man teaches at Stanford. So he’s qualified to write about crazy future ideas.

Imagine if technological change occurred at an exponentially exponential rate (crazy, I know), and that in about 33 years - give or take - we will experience the Singularity. At that point, computers will be able to build themselves. Software will write itself, and because it is being written by software that doesn’t make mistakes like ordinary humans, new versions and steps forward in technology will happen so quickly that we won’t be able to keep up. It sounds crazy at first, but then you start to think about it: We have programming languages, and we have Integrated Development Environments that help us mortals to write software. Is it so crazy to think that the two might merge, and that software might write itself?

Yes? OK, you’re probably referring to the fact that computers don’t have creative powers. This is true, but, like a child, they can learn language autonomously, and build themselves autonomously already. For example, out here in the Bay Area, we’re near Google, who has just rolled out a new service called Goog-411. Basically, you call 1-800-Goog-411, and a machine will record your voice, ask you what location and business name. It will then (seemingly without fail), give you the phone number for the location, and connect you (for free). It’s great, and what’s more amazing is that the success of your call teaches the computer how to better help the next person. The more people call, the better it works.

So, we have computers that can build themselves already, and we have computers that could theoretically write themselves from the ground up. Imagine if we had computers that could analyze the news, and attempt to fix problems.

All of the above seems plausible to me, more or less. I mean, forty years ago, we didn’t even have computers. Now we have ones that can write the entire human genome on a CD, or if you prefer, it can do it eight or nine times on a DVD. That’s all the information needed to create a human. On a CD. Is it so crazy to believe that computers will be able to do what we humans can? I’m not so skeptical any more. Will the timing be around 2040…I think it may. Freaky.

Richard Stallman, Eccentric or Rather Well-Spoken?

2007-09-12T21:48:22-07:00

I had the chance to see Richard Stallman speak the other day at the UC Berkeley School of Information, and it was quite an experience. In case you don’t know the name, Richard Stallman is the man behind GNU, and GNU is the software/philosophy that makes GNU/Linux what it is. Stallman’s belief is that all software, and indeed just about everything that you create should be freely available to anybody that wants it. This is in stark opposition to the Microsoftian or even the Apple perspective of software, and indeed Stallman has written a book about this called *Free Software, Free Society*. As you might expect, from a man with such beliefs, the book itself is free, and you can find it here.

If that doesn’t convince you of his awesomeness, allow me to roughly quote a part of his introduction:
     Moderator: “…Richard Stallman has been awarded with four PhD’s — “
     Stallman: “—That’s six now.”
     Moderator: “I guess somebody needs to update Wikipedia…”

The speech he chose was “Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks.” It was a real real eye-opener for me. I assumed that the recording and publishing companies were essentially screwing the artists, but I had no idea just how bad it really was. Imagine, if you will, that your garage band suddenly became really popular, and that you got signed with a big recording company. They publish your album, and they distribute it across the USA, where it sells well. You’d expect that your art would probably be making you some good money, would you not? I know I would, but apparently that’s not how it works.

The way Stallman tells it, the first place they nail you is by charging you for the distribution. So, until your album has sold some critical quantity, you’re still paying back the record company the loan they gave you to distribute your album (sounds vaguely like the mafia here, but it gets worse). The next place they nail you is by not giving you much of the album sales. I would think that you’d be given a good buck or two of each album sold, but apparently it’s more like a quarter, or maybe 50 cents. Not much profit there.

The third place they nail you is by owning your creativity. You created something from nothing, but if you want to make a copy of your album and give it to a friend, that’s just too bad, you’re going to have to buy the album for your friend just like everybody else. And you know what’s worse? Even many years later, after your album has pretty much stopped selling, and the record company has stopped pressing it, you still don’t own your creativity. In fact, as of 1998, the copyright they own for your creativity can last as long as 120 years, so even after you are long dead, they still own your music. It doesn’t stop there. You now have a schedule to produce more albums for them, each with the above problems.

Now, aren’t you glad you made it big, and that copyrights are there to protect you?

As you might expect, Stallman explains this a bit more thoroughly in his presentation, but that’s the basic gist of it. As is the case with just about everything related to Richard Stallman, this essay is available for free. In fact, if you’re interested in a bit of reading, it’s here.