Bayosphere

I’m at the Supernova conference. Here’s the semi-official conference weblog. For some of the best real-time blogging (as usual), check out Cory Doctorow and David Weinberger.

Former Federal Communications Chairman Reed Hundt just gave a powerful pitch for a national broadband policy.

He wants a $20 per month taxpayer subsidy per household, to last long enough to get fiber optics everywhere, to every home. The details are unclear to me (he says he’ll send me more today), but the overall design is alluring in at least one sense.

Hundt says current policy, encouraging the installation of competing “broadband” lines that are obviously superfluous — one fiber line to every house is enough — is leading us down a foolish path. He would make the installer of the pipe a utility, essentially, and force open access to third-party retail data-service providers.

More later on this…

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Ric Ford at MacInTouch has posted this note — “The Future of MacInTouch” — which prompted me to send some money. If you think the site is doing good work, as I do, considering offering your own financial support.

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Amazingly, the Hong Kong government has made a nod to the will of the people. It’s delaying and modifying (Washington Post) an “anti-subversion” law that would inevitably have led to Beijing-style repression.

Whether this is the harbinger of things to come, or just a temporary sop to the fury of the citizens, remains to be seen. But it’s a positive step nonetheless.

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Back from a long trip to this news from Jeff Jarvis about AOL’s smart moves into the blogging sphere. Jeff offers excellent advice to a variety of parties.

Welcome to AOL and its customers. There’s room for everyone, and we’re going to see some great conversations.

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Congrats to Larry: Looking Back on Two Decades of PCs and Tech Columns.

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Take some time soon and read Ray Ozzie’s chewy new essay, “Extreme Mobility”, in which he asserts a first principle we all implictly understand now but aren’t sure what to do with — “that the ‘platform of old’ is no longer the platform of the future. The PC has done us well; it’s truly an incredible platform for innovation, and will continue to be so. I’m tremendously excited by what I’ve seen in the upcoming versions of Windows and Office, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens as a new generation of developer explores the deep, rich capabilities afforded by this next generation platform.”

The platform, as the title implies, is an extremely mobile one, and it’s going to shift all our attitudes, and ways of doing things, into areas that — so far — no company owns. We have a chance to start with a relatively clean slate this time.

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Wired News: Bloggers Gain Libel Protection. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily.

This is good news for folks who are blogging just for the sake of getting some more speech out there in the world. I wonder, however, if it will apply to the increasing number of people whose blogs are an outgrowth of their work or other for-profit activities.

Moreover, the court here is by far the most liberal of the nation’s appeals courts. Other jurisdictions haven’t been heard from yet, and the loser may appeal in any event.

It’s always a good idea to check inflammatory material a little further before sending it to other people, anyway. Just because you may be legally protected from the consequences of hurting other people doesn’t make it right.

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Mercury News: Judge to bubble investors: Tough luck. A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by investors trying to blame Wall Street brokerage firms for their Internet-era stock losses, saying the investors knew full well the stock market was a “freewheeling casino.”

There’s some logic in this ruling, but only some. It says that Wall Street is basically free to lie to investors, because investors should know better than to trust anything Wall Street says.

OK. Investors did get greedy during the bubble. They bought uncritically and, in some cases, without doing any homework.

But I don’t see how that lets Merrill Lynch and other investment banks off the hook for their sleaze during this period. The victims may have brought some of this on themselves, but the judge is wrong to suggest that investor greed excuses Wall Street wrongdoing.

We don’t let con men go free just because their victims were stupid. Or do we?

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Washington Post: Web Firms Choose Profit Over Privacy. To parents interested in buying the popular Hooked on Phonics learn-to-read programs, the company made a firm promise on its Web site: It would never sell or rent their personal information to other marketers. But that pledge was empty. In the pages of a marketing trade publication, Gateway Learning Corp., the product’s California-based parent company, was advertising to rent the list of Hooked on Phonics buyers to other marketers.

What penalty will Hooked on Phonics face for this betrayal of its word? Probably none — and that’s the problem with privacy policies today.

Oh, I expect the Federal Trade Commission to read the Post story and launch some modest action, resulting in a slap on the wrist that won’t deter this kind of behavior at all. We need more.

The trial lawyers have gone overboard on many issues, but I find my self hoping they’ll file a class-action suit against the companies involved. It’s obvious that Congress and state lawmakers won’t do much.

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Salon: Goofus Al and Gallant George. In 2000, the media hounded Al Gore over alleged minor exaggerations. So why does it give Bush a pass when he doesn’t tell the truth about life-and-death matters like Iraq and tax policies?

Maybe the political press has simply lost its courage. Or maybe shallowness, callowness and a short attention span are the order of the day in political reporting. Who know? But it’s amazing, and kind of depressing, to watch.

Some of the media’s current uncritical worship of Bush stems from the nearly total lack of spine in the political “opposition,” a Democratic party that has few interesting idea and fewer real leaders. The media can spot a leader, and Bush, however awful his policies may be, is one.

But leadership morphs to pure arrogance when the press fails to challenge political deceptions. It was not a coincidence that more than half of the American people came to believe that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were from Iraq. They were gulled into this utterly wrong notion by an administration that is brilliant in its propaganda. Where was the press?

Too bad. Now that we need the political reporters and editors to stand up for the truth, they’re hiding. Why, indeed?

See also: The Daily Howler.

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