Welcome to the new ReadWrite. Today we are relaunching this legendary tech site with a new name, a new design and a new approach. I’m thrilled to be joining ReadWrite as the site’s new editor-in-chief, and to be teaming up with Fredric Paul, a veteran tech journalist who is our new managing editor. And I’m very excited to tell you about our plans.

Change, For The Better

First: I know change is scary. But if you’re one of ReadWriteWeb's devoted long-time readers, please know that we remain committed to delivering the kind of smart, thoughtful analysis that you’ve come to expect from the site since its inception in 2003. We hope to build on that legacy and add to it.

As for our new name, the rationale for the change is pretty simple. Technology has evolved beyond the Web, and we’re adapting to keep up with the changing digital media landscape.

The new design is fresh, clean and modern, and easy to navigate. The top box lets us highlight a story that we think is really important, and enables us to run big, beautiful photos and illustrations.

Tablet First

What you might not notice at first is that the site has been rebuilt with a tablet-first approach, meaning that instead of starting with a PC and browser as our reference and then scaling that design down to mobile devices, our designers and engineers used mobile as a starting point and worked out from there. We’ve built a proprietary publishing system called Orion that has been developed under the direction of the experienced and talented John Vars and Eric Dahl.

You’ll find that as you move across your various devices - laptop/desktop, tablet, smartphone - the site seamlessly adapts itself to where you are, rearranging itself as if by magic. It’s incredibly responsive and smooth, and boasts slick new features like variable scrolling, contextually aware smart feeds, deeper social integration and improved navigation. This new design was dreamed up and brought to life by our creative director, Alex Schleifer, and the world-class designers and engineers on his team.

ReadWrite's Expanded Coverage

But all that stuff has to do with how you read. Let’s talk about what you read. We have a great core staff of writers, and over time you’ll start to see some evolution in the tone and scope of our coverage.

We’re doubling down on mobile, because that’s where the action is. The mobile computing wave is the biggest thing that’s happened in the 25 years that I’ve been writing about technology. But it’s more than that. Mobile devices combined with social networks are evolving into a new mass medium that will displace television and define our age.

As for the tone: We want to turn our writers loose and let them write from the heart, in ways that are more personal, passionate, provocative and fun than ever before. We want ReadWrite to be a lively place filled with wit and energy, a place where you find great stories told in a convincing, engaging way, with brains and a point of view.

We also plan to bring in a wider mix of voices, inviting interesting people from across our industry to share their ideas and opinions. These will include entrepreneurs, investors, authors, academics, industry executives and, most of all, readers.

The best thing about digital publishing is that the audience can be part of the show. We really want to find ways to turn readers into contributors, so that ultimately the site belongs to them as much as to us. In our vision of success, ReadWrite becomes not so much a publication as a conversation.

The Say Media Connection

ReadWriteWeb was launched in 2003 by Richard MacManus, a visionary writer and pioneer of online publishing who built a devoted global following. Richard remains a hero to us, and every day we remain mindful of the need to live up to the standards he set.

Last year ReadWriteWeb was acquired by Say Media, a forward-looking media company from San Francisco that operates a stable of properties including XOJane, Dogster, Catster, Remodelista and Gardenista. Say Media started out as an advertising network, so it understands the business side of the equation as well as the importance of powerful content that keeps readers coming back for more. 

Also part of the Say Media family (we call ourselves “Sayers”) is an incredibly talented engineering team behind our award-winning Orion publishing platform. As the media business increasingly becomes a technology business, teaming up with this kind of visionary talent gives us a huge advantage. We're able to optimize the way you view the site to ensure an amazing experience online and on mobile devices.

SAY’s management roster reads like an all-star team of digital publishing. These folks really get the Internet. Our CEO and co-founder, Matt Sanchez, is a techie who studied engineering and computer science at Yale. Our president, Kim Kelleher, was previously the publisher of Time magazine. (Yes, that Time magazine.) See why we’re excited?

The History Of Dan Lyons

As for me, I’m joining from Newsweek, where I was technology editor. Before going to Newsweek I spent a decade at Forbes. I also created The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, in the persona known as Fake Steve Jobs. Fake Steve will not be making any appearances on ReadWrite. But his spirit of candor and irreverence remains part of everything I write.

So: we are blessed to have the best of both worlds. We have a great brand built on the legacy created by Richard MacManus; and we have the support of a smart, growing, tech-savvy parent company. Now it’s up to us - and to you - to figure out what ReadWrite will become next. The only way to find out is to leap into the digital stream and start experimenting. Some stuff will work, some stuff won’t. We’re pretty sure you’ll tell us which is which.

We promise you that we will do our best to find great stories, to be entertaining, witty and passionate, to write from the heart, to tell you what we really think, to admit mistakes when we make them and to deliver the best coverage of the digital revolution that we can. We hope you will come along with us and become part of creating the future.

Russia's new Web blacklist is only the most recent of an alarming series of authoritarian moves to muzzle networked communications. National governments bent on censorship are eating away at the global, public Internet. 

On Wednesday, the Russian parliament's lower house approved legislation that would block Web pages selectively. The proposed law reportedly lets officials filter out specific domain names and IP addresses. Law enforcement agencies could add URLs to the blacklist without a court order. Hosting services would need to remove banned materials within 72 hours or risk being shut down.

Ostensibly, the law would protect children from pornography, drug abuse, suicide and information "harmful to their health and development" - surely a worthy goal. However, the ulterior motive behind the proposed legislation isn't hard to figure out: The Internet has become central in coordinating antigovernment protest, and the new law would hand the government a Net-busting sledgehammer. 

Russia's government routinely crushes challenges to the status quo. The Putin regime has taken tight control over broadcast media and dragged its heels in investigating the murders of 26 journalists. It has battled U.N. resolutions that would compel it to respect human rights. Another bill currently in the Russian parliament would increase penalties for defamation, while yet another would compel nongovernmental organizations that accept foreign financing to register as foreign agents. The new law lays the groundwork for tighter state control of expression, assembly, fundraising - indeed, just about any activity that threatens the government's grip on power.

An International Wave of Net Censorship

Russia's action is disturbing - but far from unique. Reporters Without Borders, a journalism watchdog organization, documents a rising tide of network censorship cases worldwide in its "Internet Enemies Report 2012." Egypt cut Internet access for five days in January 2011. Syria makes a habit of throttling bandwidth during political crises. Thailand blocks expression critical of the monarchy. Tajikistan blocks Facebook. And the impulse to censor isn't confined to habitually repressive governments: South Korea blocks North Korean propaganda, while India pressures service providers and hosting companies to block content that might inflame ethnic tension. Australia filters pages it deems objectionable. In the U.S., San Francisco Bay Area transit officials cut mobile service to disrupt the Occupy movement.

The mother of all Internet censorship programs is, of course, the infamous Great Firewall of China, which suppresses not only destabilizing dissent but discussions of history, religion, government corruption and social issues of all kinds - communications essential to the progress of a society undergoing rapid change, as all societies must in an era of exponential technology development.

The Role of the Resistance

Internet companies can play a critical role in resisting such censorship. Wikipedia, LiveJournal and the Yandex search engine have removed their Russian-language pages in protest. Internet giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter - sites that play a fundamental role in making the Internet work - would do well to join the resistance, not to mention companies such as Deutsche Telekom that keep Internet packets flowing. Their withdrawal of service would make a strong statement that the Internet is, by nature, global, and that the entire world has a stake in maintaining its integrity.

The Internet, according to Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe's famous law, gains value exponentially with each additional node. Conversely, its utility degrades as nodes are removed. The creeping restriction of Internet traffic - no matter what the rationale - does incalculable damage to the Net as a whole. 

Metaphors are fickle things. Given enough time, they cease to apply to the concept for which they were created (e.g., "conservative," "socialist," "reality show") and just hang on as labels, often arcane references to ideals pertinent to an earlier age.

Just what the Web is today depends upon whom you ask. A recent list of what are frequently called the "most valuable Web startups" is topped by the following six entries: Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, 360Buy.com, Twitter and Dropbox. The common factor among them, in the context of everyday conversation, is that they're considered Web businesses. The keyword here is "considered." If you ask Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, Facebook already ate the Web and is licking up the remains.

Insert Cloud Here

Perhaps more than any other company, Salesforce represents the perspective of "the cloud;" and from this point of view, the cloud is the technology that is driving the Internet today and not the Web. Salesforce was founded in 1999, just four years prior to Facebook, although the phrase "cloud startup" has yet to be used to refer to Salesforce. Instead, when Salesforce itself becomes an investor in a new company, and it characterizes that company as a "cloud startup" as opposed to a "Web startup," then by gum, it's a "cloud startup." Otherwise, it might be considered a "Web startup."

The lesson here would appear to be that a company that builds in the cloud is building a platform like Heroku, or a mobile app framework like Appirio.  But if that's the case, then Facebook should be a cloud startup, too. If any company in history is responsible for deploying a successful platform, it's Facebook. After all, company No. 2 on the list - Zynga - is a user of that platform, and one of the fastest-growing companies ever.

Which makes Zynga what? As the most important user and chief validator of the Facebook platform, Zynga is what Salesforce would perceive as an outgrowth of the online social phenomenon - the force that Benioff says is helping Facebook and Twitter eat the Web. More users are accessing Facebook and Twitter through mobile apps - or, as they're being called more frequently these days, "apps." As such, they are bypassing browsers, and in so doing steering clear of the one portal that most users associate with "the Web." When someone the other day saw me checking Twitter through a browser, he looked at me as though I had just started tapping a telegraph key. "What are you doing??" he asked.

No more important symbol of the Web browser's ongoing sublimation exists today than the validation of HTML5 apps in Windows 8 as legitimate, fully fledged, "Metro-style" apps.  It may be Internet Explorer that provides the rendering engine, but the user doesn't have to know this. To the user, an app can be just another program.

But to the W3C, the caretaker of HTML5 development, one of whose W's still stands for "Web," any methodology that relies upon a technology that's an outgrowth of the Web, is itself an outgrowth of the Web. Thus Dropbox, which manifests itself for all its users as an app, and which is widely considered the most recognized "cloud app" deployed thus far, would be part of the Web. Put another way, the Web ate the cloud.

Tell that to Dropbox users on Apple's platform, however. If Dropbox were truly the Web as defined by Tim Berners-Lee (the fellow who coined the phrase "read/write Web") then the service should be freely linked to by others. Since Apple evidently has a say in that matter, whether Dropbox wants it to or not, surely the Web's most steadfast advocates should agree that any platform whose usefulness may be limited by proprietary or political interests, should not qualify as "the Web."

You Are Here

So that takes care of entries Nos. 1, 2, 5 and 6. Now, 360buy.com is undeniably "the Web" (you use it with a browser), but we could start a little digression over whether it's a "startup."  Indeed, it may be gearing up for one of the largest IPOs in world history - larger than Google or LinkedIn (which for more and more members, by the way, is an app, not a Web site). Yet since it's a recent online outgrowth of an existing Chinese retail outlet, if 360buy.com is a "startup," then so is Sears.com.

Why do these definitions matter? Because the Web is a marketplace that, like any other market, depends upon the power of location. As more and more people get their functionality, information and entertainment from services that they install on their home screens as apps, and as they perceive these services as independent from operating systems and even from Web platforms, traditional Web publishers will find their current locations being abandoned. Think of the downtown business district of a metropolitan area after the businesses moved to the suburbs. When Internet users don't have to double-click the blue "e" to get to their pages, or type "facebook login" into Google to find what they want, any service whose entire viability relies upon Search Engine Optimization as their fountains of revenue will be endangered.

Things that get old online, age very quickly - like time-lapse photography. You may have noticed more services are running away from the "Web" metaphor. That might not be a bad idea, so long as they know what it is they're running towards.

Stock image by Shutterstock

The problem is that we live in an era when almost any system that can be exploited will be. The Internet is one example. The law is another.

You can’t disagree with what the napkin version of CISPA implies: Government alone cannot provide information security. When it’s put that way, everyone could get behind it. There are plenty of political ideas that, when presented as cleansed, bleached and distilled bullet points, immediately garner broad public support. The challenge lies with implementing these bullet points in a system that can’t be exploited. If SOPA taught us anything, it’s that anyone can exploit a system.

First, Shut Down Everything

The problem with CISPA’s original draft is that it would establish policies in a way that invites exploits. Any network admin will tell you that the best network access policies are implemented as restrictions with exceptions. You turn off all access, and then you create a whitelist of specific identities or functions that may bypass that roadblock. And then you establish a comprehensive audit trail around that bypass.

Yesterday evening in The Atlantic, Alexander Furnas made the point that CISPA is bad policy, at least insofar as it was originally crafted. He’s right in ways he didn’t get around to enumerating. While the basic principles of its author, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., may be laudable, CISPA wasn’t built for the Information Age. Specifically, it sets up a channel for security agencies and security companies to talk about stuff that may (a very interesting word in this context) apply to cybersecurity.

This sharing of cybersecurity-related information between private and public agencies may entail the disclosure of personally identifiable data, or information that can be combined with such data to reveal other hidden characteristics (using what software vendors refer to as analytics).

Yes, there needs to be a way to accept that this sort of issue will crop up when information is being shared, and to excuse it so that every security issue doesn’t end up being resolved (or not) in a courtroom.

No, No, No “Notwithstanding”

But it is no longer good policy to simply legislate that certain information that may fall within a certain context may be shared; that anything that violates privacy may be excused; and that, worst of all, any law that says such violations may not happen may be overlooked.

That’s the danger of the clause that, even after Rogers' first set of amendments last week (PDF here), remains in play - the one that begins, “Notwithstanding any other provision of law.” But many of the advocacy groups that seized on this clause did so in such melodramatic and apocalyptic terms as to invite reasonable people to defend it.

Yet there really is a problem with a policy that says, “Ignore everything else and treat this as paramount.” That’s not the type of exception that good information systems policy requires – the kind that creates a limited way around a blanket restriction. Instead, it is a weakening of links in the legal chain, and any weak link is likely to be exploited.

One fear is that such an exploit will come from rights holders who argue that compromising the security of a network in order to commit copyright violation is a threat to the nation’s economy and thus, by extension, to national security.

When you distill an idea to its basic bullet points, it’s harder to disagree with it. That’s why TV political ads are 30 seconds long instead of 30 minutes.

In reality, though, the theft of intellectual property is a legal matter, and should not be treated as a “cyber threat.” So the second set of Rogers bill amendments is quite welcome. They help define terms and refine the context of the discussion.

For example, the revised Definitions Amendment (PDF here) redefines “cyber threat information” using phrases such as: “information directly pertaining to… a threat to the integrity, confidentiality, or availability of a system or network of a government or private entity, or any information stored on, processed on, or transiting such a system or network.” Granularity is good.

A CISPA Whitelist

Now for the next step: a new set of recommended CISPA amendments. Rephrase the new policy the way a good admin would: as a prohibition against the distribution, without court order or lawful mandate, between private entities and government security services, of any information that may be used to identify or characterize a U.S. citizen. Start with a blank slate.

From there, use the classifications in the latest Definitions Amendment as exceptions. Stipulate that these are the circumstances in which exceptions must be made to protect vital national security interests.

Then, establish an audit trail. State that all transactions must be registered, and the log of those registries may be obtained by public request, pending the approval of a judge.

The danger is that this ideal may be boiled down to its bullet points to garner opposition:

• Government must not be open.
• The free flow of information is dead.
• People don’t have the right to know what’s being shared about them without a judge’s approval.

With the master’s touch of a political activist, almost any beneficial idea may be spun to sound fascist.

My 30-second rebuttal: We do need something like CISPA, but the privacy of American citizens and the national security of the United States are too important to be left to intentionally vague regulations and legislation. That’s the wrong kind of openness. With each set of CISPA amendments, however, a viable solution is coming closer.

Scott M. Fulton, III is the author of this document and is solely responsible for his content. He will appear live on NTN24 (DIRECTV 418) Friday, April 27, at 12:30 EST/9:30 PST to talk CISPA with Monica Fonseca.

Stock images by Shutterstock.

I'll call him Jack, for reasons I'll explain in a bit.

His Commodore Business Machines was already a two-decades-old firm, and perhaps the first retail manufacturer of pocket-sized calculators (there's conflicting evidence), by the time he conceived a way to sell fully functional personal computers.

In 1976, Jack didn't just buy MOS Technology's 6502 microprocessor (based on Motorola's 6800), he bought MOS Technology itself, along with its creator, the legendary Chuck Peddle. That purchase led to the creation of the Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor), and if you still think Steve Jobs invented the personal computer, realize that Jack's acquisition of MOS made Jobs' and Woz' design decisions possible.

One of my first personal computers was a Commodore PET 2001 which, despite the numeral, was actually made in 1977. It was an early edition, meaning it had the "Chiclet" keys rather than the standard keyboard layout, produced by Commodore's calculator division back before full QWERTY-style computer keyboards became marketable.

The PET 2001 is as indicative of Jack Tramiel's personality as anything he or any of his companies would ever produce. I still have my old PET, and last I checked, it still worked. It had a steel case like a microwave oven and a shape like some "Mr. Computer" character in a children's TV show, with a tapered roof for the screen that seemed to merge Napoleon's hat and the old NET TV logo. It had 8K of RAM, which I leveraged to create a lunar lander game (for the 10th anniversary of Apollo 11), a MasterMind game (guess the four-digit sequence) and an American History quiz generator.

I pitched all of these to Commodore at one time or another, for distribution through its software channels. (You could mail-order a program, and it would come to you on a cassette tape - an ordinary audio cassette - in a plastic bag.) While my pitches were all rejected, the rejections came on formal business stationary signed by human beings.

This was how a Jack Tramiel company did business. He was perhaps the first businessman to understand the personal computer business as just another business, another way to access the customer. And as just another businessman (which is what he truly was, and would want to be remembered as), he knew how to build relationships with customers, with suppliers and with supporters.

Jack and his sons, Gary, Sam, and Leonard - all of whom were involved in the family business - were perhaps the most accessible executives of any computer company I've ever encountered. In my first escapades as a correspondent covering the computer industry, I'd call up the company and leave my name with a secretary - not a PR person, but a real secretary. And in a half-hour or so, I'd get a call back from one of the Tramiels, and we'd spend a another half-hour discussing everything I needed to understand about the way business works. Here I was, perhaps the only serious writer in the business with a 405 area code, getting same-day callbacks from a CEO or president or executive VP.

Every die-hard computer programmer of the early 1980s was a loyalist to one brand or another. I was an Atarian. When the Commodore 64 - which I rejected as an Atari 8-bit ripoff - became the best-selling computer in history, the reason was because the Tramiels were better businesspeople. The C64 wasn't really a better computer, but it wasn't bad, and it sold for a better price point. It had a better software base, and was visible through more retail channels. No other businessperson in the 1980s could have pulled off the C64.

So even though the Tramiels were the "opposition" I could share my feelings openly with them, and they'd be happy to argue with me. Usually Leonard, though more than once Jack joined in shouting talking points into the speakerphone.

All this changed in 1984, when the Tramiels exited Commodore, purchased my beloved Atari, and built Atari Corp. Perhaps the reason I got my first regular column at an Atari magazine called ANALOG Computing was because I could get a Tramiel on the telephone.

The Tramiels wanted to produce a new 16/32-bit architecture machine called the Amiga. It was no secret, because the Tramiels kept no secrets - whenever they decided to do something, step one was to put out an announcement. When Commodore scooped up the Amiga instead, Jack and Sam Tramiel tasked former Commodore designer Shiraz Shivji to break out a back-drawer design for something they wanted to do at Commodore - a business machine capable of doing Macintosh-style graphics in color and, of course, for less money.

The Atari ST was a brilliant device, and the focus of about five years of my working life. Based on the same Motorola 68000 chip that ran the Mac, it enabled families to purchase a complete computing system with a working laser printer for less than $1,000. Compared to anything else built at the time, including the IBM PC AT, it was supremely fast at number crunching. Nicknamed the "Jackintosh," it wasn't much of a secret that "ST" didn't really stand for "sixteen/thirty-two" but for "Sam Tramiel," just as the "busy bee" icon was essentially the family crest, the Polish "trzmiel." (Born in Poland in 1928, Tramiel survived Auschwitz, and emigrated to the U.S. after the war.)

The ST was not a ripoff of the Macintosh or the Amiga, though it did attempt to capitalize on their success of the former. But while it had the most innovative hardware of its day, it struggled against the notion that better hardware was just around the corner - a notion put into buyers' heads by the Tramiels themselves, who never could keep quiet about what was to come later. Unfortunately, what was to come sometimes never came at all.

Other times - the Atari TT and the Jaguar, for example - it came way too late to make a difference. Jack Tramiel played by an old set of rules that was perfectly legitimate, honorable, and competitive for an earlier era. When Apple changed the game, the Tramiels didn't change with it.

And that's a shame, because Jack Tramiel's stubbornness has kept him from his rightful place among the giants who helped create the personal computer.

The PET 2001, the Commodore 64, and the Atari ST are three of the most important consumer products ever produced. Although only one was a huge financial success, the way you use your PC and your tablet and your smartphone all depend on the paths blazed by those three devices. Jack was the rare tech-company leader with true retail consumer product experience. He didn't invent anything, but he set many of this industry's wheels in motion, and we all owe him a huge debt for doing so.

While both these apps are ostensibly for sharing, they're also asking people to use them to store their own memories. Facebook and Path both put great effort into pretty presentations of these memories. But each could change tomorrow for business reasons. If we want to be able to reminisce about this early era of mobile tech, we can't depend on the free, hosted apps we use to share our lives now.

These apps, as well as Instagram, Google+ and so many other life-streaming apps, are free for a reason. Their business models are based on user data, and they need as much of it as they can possibly get to make money. If these businesses can make money selling our personal data, it must be valuable.

To us, they're invaluable. We can't put a price on our photos from college or of the day our child was born. But advertisers are optimistic about their ability to do so, so they pay for these social apps for us. And we dutifully upload our photos there because it's free, it's easy, it looks pretty, and our friends are there.

Hopefully, you keep your photos backed up on your own computer. If not, let me stop you right there. Please try to do that. You won't regret it.

But we're increasingly putting effort into the arrangement of those memories on other people's servers. When we organized physical photo albums, we owned the metadata of that arrangement, so to speak. But our albums, orders and captions on Facebook aren't ours. Facebook's data portability is definitely getting better, but it's a bit like dumping out your old photo albums on the floor.

When we put the effort into trimming our Timelines, choosing which events to highlight and which to hide, we're doing data entry for Facebook, but there's no guarantee that work will hold its value for us.

What happens when Facebook changes its business model, or Path or Instagram comes up with a business model, and they decide to rearrange our histories for better ad value? Would you let someone do that to your physical journal or photo gallery? This is why I quit Path, because I didn't want to put too much work into making great memories I could someday lose.

So my solution is to journal first and share second. I want to make Day One the first app I launch to record a memory. I back it up to iCloud and my own computer. If a post is worth sharing to a social network, I'll do that next. If someone makes a great comment I want to remember, I'll copy it into my Day One entry. It's worth it to me to own the data.

You might say you don't care enough about the things you share on Path or Facebook, or that they're just temporary. But scroll back in your timeline and ask yourself if that's true. When I do that, it feels like these trivial little things become much more valuable over time. I think that's exactly why Facebook and Path let us share them for free. Later, when they're worth more to us, we'll want to see them again. They might be monetized by then.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock

For which "that" is Path the app? Is it the app for being all of those apps at once, but prettier? Is that a problem we have? Do we need an app to solve it? When Path pivoted into version 2.0, it called itself a "smart journal." That sounds like a nice thing. But after a good run, it doesn't seem so smart anymore.

Path Is a Monument to Path

I had my doubts about Path 2.0 when it launched. It was like a gorgeous mirror for gazing at oneself. It seemed vain and unnecessary. But after awhile, to my surprise, a few friends began to join. Over the holidays, Path became wonderful.

Not long after I learned to love Path, I read this great post (now gone, unfortunately) by Tag Savage. It shook my confidence a little bit. "Path is pretty in the same designy way as our modern museums," Savage wrote.

"These museums are very exciting when they open. You show up and marvel along with all of the other fans of architecture. Maybe you return for one of those nights where they stay open late and there is a band and drinking. 'A great space,' you think... The art doesn't get talked about so much at these museums."

At the time, I couldn't see that happening, but it turned out to be prescient.

"Path is a monument to Path," Savage said. It is no place to scribble in. I wish it longevity so that it might find shabbiness."

It has that shabbiness by now, but it's not charming. It's boring. It's cupcakes and workouts. Guilt and pride. Your friend's moment of self-satisfaction is brought to you by Nike+! The little emoticons mar the bottoms of the posts like graffiti, and it's the same handful of people day in and day out. There's no novelty.

I've long since lost the reason why I'm sharing these moments with all these people. The reactions are nice and fuzzy, but they're inscrutable because everybody interprets emoticons differently. They're very crude approximations of human expression.

For a quiet place, Path's signal-to-noise ratio is no better than any other network. The content is mundane on purpose. Without the Web in it, what else is there to do? At least links are clickable now, but there are no previews or anything. It's really not a great place for sharing.

"We Are Sorry. We Made a Mistake."

Then, of course, there's the sliminess of the company. Path was shady about privacy. It uploaded users' address books to its servers without asking. When caught, Path publicly apologized and said it would delete the data if asked.

Lots of people asked, including my friend David Barnard. He emailed Path and asked for all his data to be deleted, and the support person said it would be done. But when David tried to sign up again a month later, he found his data right there waiting for him.

Seriously @path? After asking that my account be *completely* deleted last month, I tried signing up again. "Email is already in use." Doh!

— David Barnard (@drbarnard) March 20, 2012

@drbarnard Took more than a week and 4 emails to get my @Path account deleted. Just checked and my email is still in use too. Not happy.

— Phil Lee (@philrlee) March 20, 2012

Guess what? @path hadn't deleted my account as promised. I reactivated and all my data was still there. Support email: t.co/RxixxDSc

— David Barnard (@drbarnard) March 20, 2012

When trying to recover from a privacy related PR nightmare, retaining user data that was supposed to be deleted isn't a good move @path.

— David Barnard (@drbarnard) March 20, 2012

And to think, I was signing up again, taking @path at its word that the contacts thing was a mistake and they care about users. Never again.

— David Barnard (@drbarnard) March 20, 2012

Path may fix the problem going forward, but it obviously doesn't care about it that much.

Whose Path Are We On?

David's incident was almost enough to get me to quit there and then, but it got me thinking about what kinds of data I have in Path. The dust-up was over our address books, which is bad because it's other people's data, not ours.

We probably shouldn't be able to do with our friends' addresses and phone numbers as we please, but we can, and so does Path. It's not just Path. Our contact info is basically up for grabs out there.

But the data I own that I put into Path is stuff I made. I keep some of it closed off within Path, but I'm sharing it with other people. It's not like I expect it to be a secret. I don't really care what Path does with it, either. Presumably, someday, they'll try to monetize it.

But like I said, I don't really know why I'm putting it in there anymore. The museum has gotten shabby.

So before I decided to quit, I tapped over to my Path and started scrolling back to see what I'd put in there. And for the first time in months while using Path, this feeling of wonder came over me.

All these memories were so touching and vivid. Big, momentous photos punctuated by little thoughts and check-ins and a handful of my favorite songs. It was so beautiful... So me. My friends' little emoticons adorned the margins of the posts, but this was all about meeeeeeee.

Give Me Back My Journal

After gazing intently at my own life for a few minutes, I snapped out of it. Just like I thought at the beginning, I mused. Path is just a pretty mirror to gaze into narcissistically. It's a journal you let other people read.

Path calls version two a "smart journal." What is smart about it, exactly? The smarts are all on Path's side. I don't own the data. Path is the one using "smart" on it to calculate some kind of business model.

Yeah, I thought. I should get out of here.

And then I realized I couldn't. Months of my life are beautifully recorded inside this app, lured out of me by my selfish lust for an audience, and I can't get them out.

Path has stolen my journal, and it won't give it back.

Facebook is doing the same thing, you know. Timeline is going to be a big ol' billboard about our whole lives, and years from now, we're going to want to scroll back through it and see what we were up to. And Facebook will be able to show us nice, nostalgic ads along the way. I bet that's what Path wants to do, too.

But screw that. If we have any data we should host ourselves, it's our personal journals. I don't care whether it's digital or analog, paper or plastic, but journaling is important. It's just as narcissistic on Path as it has always been; we occasionally need to reflect on ourselves to remember what has happened to us. But our journals could never "pivot" or "exit" before. Nor could they advertise to us.

I've been convinced by the handiness of digital journals. I use Day One, myself. That lets me keep the data on my computer and in my iCloud account, not on someone else's leaky server. I used to be paper all the way. Now I'm a bit scattered. But I'm not putting these valuable memories in the hands of a private company like Path. I'd better close the book on this journal before I risk missing too much of my life.

That's it. I'm about to go to sleep and watch that goofy moon rise for the last time.

Are you using Path? How is it going for you?

With the Republican primaries in full swing, you may see more political-minded posts tend to gathering at the top of your news feed. Depending on how much or how little you care about politics, you'll either find yourself glued to the news feed or avoiding it all together. Politics and social networking sites, particularly Facebook, don't mix as well as you think. Keeping the conversation light means only posting about more benign subjects, like sports, news and the weather. When it comes to politics, you're bound to piss someone off. But chances are that pissed off user will remain silent. A new study from Pew finds that almost four-in-ten users discovered through postings by friends that their political beliefs were different than they thought. Some users even blocked, unfriended or hid those users' posts from the news feed because they so strongly disagreed, or they were just sick of seeing so many posts all the time.

Others decided to stay away from politics all together. A total 22% of social networking site users do not post sensitive political commentary or links for fear of pissing someone else off. After all, it's hard to get political without upsetting at least a few friends. You won't even know if you've pissed someone off because they probably won't comment or like your post. Pew also found that liberals have the highest visibility on social networking sites - and they also make up the highest percentage of Internet users.

Among social networking site users, 25% agree or mostly agree with their friends' political postings; 73% of users "only sometimes" agree or never agree. If there is disagreement, 66% of SNS users say they usually ignore posts and only 28% of those users respond with comments or posts of their own. Only 5% say it's all circumstantial.

Social Networks and Politics Do Not Make Good Bedfellows

Logging onto Facebook and Twitter is always a crapshoot. You never know what type of information you'll start receiving, especially since the Facebook news feed uses an algorithm to identify what it thinks you want to read, and from whom. If you're rather particular, you could go through and categorize Facebook users into smart lists and just check those. Facebook is also rolling out interest-based lists in the coming weeks. But the list element does take away the oft-times enjoyable randomness of the Facebook news feed. On Twitter, users can at least rely on real-time updates, or neatly categorize using lists.

If there's some big political event going on, logging onto Facebook sometimes feels like accidentally walking in on a political rally...depending on who you're friends with. It will most likely be a rally organized around people you agree with because that friend whose political beliefs you disagree with may not actually show up. Facebook shows you what you want. So you won't see opposing views unless you actively seek them out, which means that you can create your own filter bubble of news and information. Says the Pew study, "as a rule, the most active and engaged political participants on SNS sit at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, yet their experiences around political material on SNS are quite similar."

Like most public social networks, Facebook and Twitter are just platforms for discussion. What you choose to discuss is up to you. But if your friends and followers are not either far Left or far Right, chances are they're a bit more complex. Your friends and followers are not political organization fan pages. They are the people you talk with, most likely about more than just politics. They are your friends.

On social networking sites, polarizing conversations and charged story articles elicit tons of feedback and commentary. It's easy to receive quick, simple feedback by posting a polarizing political story. Yet it is the more complex, nuanced stories from a thoughtful friend or follower that don't get noticed as much - and it's those that may cause a more subtle shift of the personal-as-political on social networks, including yours. Meanwhile, some conversations on social networks create echo chambers of agreement and mutual outrage rather than real, honest discussion.

But what of identity? How do we define who we are online vs. who we are offline? In our hyperconnected world, identities are fractured. Facebook wants to be your online identity's one true login. Studies have shown that we perhaps divulge more online than we otherwise would offline. Social networks are strange indeed.

Will we be happier, healthier people if we follow Zuck's advice and become one with the Internet (and give all our data to Facebook)? Or should we stick to a more 4chan-esque approach, which suggests that we're way more complex than that?

In our real lives, we constantly struggle between who we think we are, what others think we are and what people think we think we are. The real self is saddled somewhere in the overlap between these three circles. These ideas of the self apply in both an online and offline context. This abstraction, explains ScepticGeek, may come at least partially from Carl Rogers.

Online, we battle with the same conflicts, plus a few other quirks. We are a Facebook identity (or two), a Twitter account, a LinkedIn oh-so-professional account and maybe even Google+ (plus search your world, no less). Each online identity is in and of itself an identity. Maintaining them is hard, often times treacherous work. We must slog through the Internet-addled identity quagmire.

"It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole says. ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell continues that thought: "In other words, we're only presenting one, Facebook-facing aspect of ourselves when we share online via Facebook," he writes in his story, A Proposal to Fix Online Identity. "The advertisers who make Facebook possible don't have a full picture; they have a Facebook caricature."

Keeping that in mind, your online persona will always be just that - a persona, a caricature of the real you. But how much should that differ from the real life you?

It all comes down to trust: Are you who you say you are? Can others trust you?

In ScepticGeek's post, he suggests that you'll experience quite a bit of stress if you are different online from how you are in real life. It's not easy being two different people. But one writer argues that online it is indeed easier to make oneself vulnerable, which is part of the appeal of social networks.

"When people have the opportunity to separate their actions from their real world and identity, they feel less vulnerable about opening up. Whatever they say or do can't be directly linked to the rest of their lives," writes Rider University's John Suler. He coined the term "disinhibition effect," which suggests that people on social networking sites feel free to share very personal things that they might not share in real life. But online actions do have real, offline emotional consequences.

So consider how much of your online persona does match the offline you - not in terms of ads you look at and click or products you buy, but how you behave.

"A Marsh Frog" image courtesy of Shutterstock. Complex identity chart via ScepticGeek.

The gist is this: Cookies are set by the site you're on, but some allow third-party sites to set a tracking cookie through them. That's how advertisers (like Google) personalize ads for you all around the Web. By default, Safari allows cookies from the site you're on, but it blocks third-party cookies. Google and others found a way around that. That sucks... I guess.

For the most part, I'm with my colleague, Dan Rowinski: track me all you want, just don't think we won't catch you if you do something wrong. I don't think Google's new privacy policy is a big deal. All browsers worth their salt make it very easy to either block cookies or go totally incognito, and Google lets you dump your entire Web history if you so desire. So while I'm public, track me. I'd rather have personalized ads than totally irrelevant ones.

I don't have a problem with the idea of ad tracking. But this end-run around Safari's settings has wider implications. I just read a post by Jonathan Mayer at Web Policy about this topic, and he makes some excellent points. There's a slippery slope here. Even if Google's tracking is innocuous now, cracking other companies' preferences sets some bad precedents for users.

"No account, login, or user preference was required for circumvention. The circumvention behaviors affected all users, independent of whether they had a Google account, were logged into a Google account, or had made a choice about social advertising."

Users who have a Google account can change their Google privacy settings. They can tell Google not to track them, and they can delete their histories. But Google tracks users without accounts, too, and there's nothing they can do about it.

"Circumvention is not a commonly accepted business practice. We only identified four advertising companies that deployed technology for circumventing Safari's cookie blocking, and all have since stopped the practice."

That doesn't look good.

"Furthermore, a self-regulatory organization for the online advertising industry cites Safari's cookie blocking feature as a way to stop cookies from advertising companies: '[Safari's] default setting will block all third-party cookies, including those of our member ad networks and those of other, non-member ad networks.'"

And, as Mayer points out, Apple makes it pretty clear that this setting is intended to block ad tracking. Whether or not Google's tracking is inherently bad, it's messing with Apple's user experience without regard for Apple or its users.

But, importantly, Safari has worked this way since long before Google was advertising this way. Apple just wants its users to have this privacy when they're browsing the Web.

Google argues that its users had "opted to see personalized ads" in their Google preferences, so it thought it was fine to honor those preferences over Safari's. But first of all, what about people who didn't have Google accounts? Secondly, why do Google's Web preferences get to overrule the user's browser preferences? Google used to say Safari's default preference "effectively accomplishes the same thing" as opting out of its tracking. As of last Tuesday, that's gone.

Again, it's my opinion that Web ad tracking, in and of itself, is not a big deal. But Mayer's points are important. Google and the three other advertisers who did this (and stopped when caught) were breaking into the agreement between Apple and its users, even when they had made no agreement whatsoever with Google or the others. That's not kosher.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock

It comes down to this fundamental question: How much responsibility do you want for the workings of your device? The religious divide between iOS and Android hinges on this point. There are nerds - and I always use the term affectionately - whose nerdliness depends upon that responsibility. Without it, they feel no control over their computer. There is no doubt that Android places more of that responsibility on the user than iOS does.

Without setting up straw men or comparing apples to oranges, I'll offer an observation: some nerds believe that Apple does not allow its users to achieve their full nerdly potential because it limits their responsibility. We should reframe this argument. Apple nerds do not believe that nerdliness hinges upon responsibility. We would prefer to concentrate our nerd powers on the things we do with our computers.

But we do not surrender control over our devices to the corporation as the Android straw man might allege. Far from it. We elect representatives to fight for control, and sometimes - though not always - Apple listens to them.

The App Store is a republic. The citizens vote with their Apple IDs, downloading the apps that best represent them. The makers of those apps are elected officials. But it's not a congress of equals. It's a meritocracy. The influence of representatives is proportionate to the importance of their apps. Apple, of course, is the president. It has veto power. But it can't make good laws with a hostile congress.

We All Depend On Something

Many Android-style nerds have already thrown up their hands in disgust. This notion of representative platform governance is an assault on their beliefs. It's against the Orthodox Hacker Way. I honor and respect that belief. Thank the Makers there are multiple platform choices.

But that's just it. We all ultimately depend on the Makers. We all sacrifice some control over our platforms. What are you going to do, make your own phone? Maybe someday. But today, we all give up responsibility for some things in exchange for control of other things.

Apples & Androids

Android users maintain the ability to root their devices, but they might be out of luck for future software updates. Apple users must fight against Apple for the ability to jailbreak. But I submit that Apple nerds don't need to jailbreak to be nerdy. Apple users accept the laws of Apple's land, and that is just a different-strokes-for-different-folks proposition.

Within those borders, Apple users are free to be nerds about their tasks, their solutions, their workflows and their aesthetics. They elect the best developers in their world to defend the platform and write the code. They exercise a different kind of nerdiness, a soft nerdiness of finding the best tool for the job, down to every minute detail. If there is no best tool, anyone with the skill, the time and the sensibilities can build it themselves. They can run for office in the App Store.

The Union & The Confederacy

Android has apps. It has app marketplaces, but it's a loose confederacy. Device and OS fragmentation, a relative free-for-all of app availability and a weak judicial system - or app review process - mean that users must cobble together solutions and developers must cobble together businesses. In exchange, Android users, developers and OEMs alike retain more personal responsibility for the experience.

In Apple country, the experience is consistent and set by the president. The App Store is the House of Representatives, and votes are one-to-one. An app means the same thing to all users, so each app is a vote. If Apple users did not vote, if they blindly accepted the solutions put forth by Apple, then they would surrender their nerd cred. But they do vote. They vote for third-party developers. They vote by the hundreds of millions.

Responsibility To Govern

As elected representatives, Apple developers are in a position to speak truth to power. When Apple's unilateral decisions threaten the republic, developers speak out. Apple doesn't always bow to the will of its congress. But it does listen.

When Apple launched iOS 5, it changed the way the system handled two directories: /Caches and /tmp. Before iOS 5, those were safe places for apps to store data. With the introduction of iCloud as Apple's preferred place for files, Apple began to "clean" those directories when devices were low on space. That threatened Instapaper, which stores articles for offline reading in /Caches.

Lesser nerds would have rolled over. President Apple had issued a decree. But Speaker Marco did not give in. He took to his influential blog and outlined the problem. The functionality of a successful and beloved app was in jeopardy.

A month later, when developers received the iOS 5.0.1 beta, the problem had been solved.

Amending The Constitution

To take the analogy just a little further, the constitution of this Republic would be the App Store guidelines. Sure, it was set unilaterally by Apple, but let's say that developers have also ratified it by building a thriving ecosystem. Apple's reviewers are the Justice Department. But who is the Supreme Court? How does this congress amend its constitution?

The address book privacy problems brought to light by Path provide an instructive example. Path, along with many other apps, exploited a weakness in App Store rules, and it infringed upon the rights of the people. One representative, Matt Gemmell, engaged another, Path's Dave Morin, in an open debate about the constitutionality of the practice.

Path's decision to delete the data and put in a dialog box for permission shows the republic at work. But the real story is that this constitutional convention about address book privacy has led Apple to amend the rules in the upcoming iOS 5.1 update. It will now provide a dialog box for address book access at the system level.

The Supreme Court, if you will, is the marketplace. If customers, investors and regulators won't tolerate an Apple policy, the constitution can be amended.

Threats To The Republic

It would be naïve to believe that a republic can function without corruption. The bylaws of Apple's congress are more strict than the tenuous agreements of the Android confederacy, but its app review process is still rife with abuse. The plague of low-quality scam apps could break users' trust in their government, and the republic could be lost.

But Phill Ryu, a newly elected representative behind the new hit iPhone app Clear, made an eloquent speech on the floor foretelling a troubling future if Apple does not address this problem.

Apple users and developers share a nerdy devotion to user experience, the highest ideal of Apple itself. With developers like Ryu keeping Apple's shortcomings in the spotlight, it's hard to believe that Apple would not act to solve this problem.

As Apple moves toward a more unified ecosystem across iOS and OS X, its executive orders will be bold. Its sandboxing and its challenges to the notion of the file system worry some citizens and developers. But this is how sausage gets made. There have been dark times in Apple's republic, and they may come again. But as long as their nerdly representatives have a say, Apple nerds will be safe to practice their religion.

Apple should coddle the developers who kept them alive from 1995-2005. The new guys won't stick around if things get rough again.

— Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) February 21, 2012

Top Image: Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson

iPad "cleaning" screenshot via Marco.org via someone on Twitter Marco couldn't remember

@_nicolassarkozy , an account created in September 2010 and clearly labeled as a satirical Sarkozy impersonation, was suspended on Feburary 16th.

Powerful People & Targeted Botnets: the End of @ Political Satire?

@_nicolassarkozy was managed by Kaboul.fr, a French political and satirical online webzine, that holds many other satirical Twitter accounts, like @_Carla_Bruni, Sarkozy's wife, @_Jacques_Chirac, the former french president, and @FrancoisHolland, Sarkozy's main competitor in the ongoing presidential race.

In fact, the official response, leaked to Pastebin shows Twitter describing the account as "engag(ing) in non-parody impersonation." The chance that the parodic nature of the account could be missed is slight.

More troubling, three other accounts, all clearly opposing Sarkozy's political views, were suspended at the same time: @mafranceforte, @fortefrance and @SarkozyCaSuffit. Those accounts were not related to Kaboul.fr, nor impersonating local politicians, but straight-ahead, and recently-created, politically-oriented Twitter accounts.

Although the news is making a huge buzz in France, it isn't the first time a such censorship has occurred in the country. Other Twitter accounts that were problematic to the French president's personal brand management were massively suspended last summer, those belonging to French gossip website Mixbeat.

A total 29 accounts managed by Mixbeat where suspended during July 2011. The only three of theirs that weren't suspended were created from a different I.P. address, according to Mixbeat's Carl de Canada.

All other accounts opened since by Carl de Canada have ended up being suspended, and despite a public dispute with Twitter, and many posts publised on Mixbeat, the website is still unable to be on Twitter in any way, fighting some mysterious forces and an uncooperative Twitter customer service.

The Gallic Infowar @Twitter

Information war on Twitter is a common practice, especialy since the beginning of the Arab Spring, in January 2011. Twitter has proven to be a solid propaganda platform used by many authoritarian regimes.

Twitter botnets, consisting of a network of centrally-controled twitter accounts, are a common practice. By mass-reporting a targeted account as spam, a group can easily get a Twitter account suspended.

But according to Mixbeat, this is not what happened to its accounts. Carl de Canada claims some special messenger from Sarkozy asked Twitter to suspend them.

Still, the Twitter botnet "targeted spam report" technique could explain the three other suspicious account suspensions which occured last thursday. Such tools are quite common, and are actualy far from being the most sophisticated infowar tool made to cheat and deceive social networks. The U.S. army accidentaly posted in June 2010 a call for proposals on its website for a very sophisticated software called "persona management." A Twitter botnet is far from being as complex.

France is one of, if not the leader in online warfare, when it comes to digital weaponry designed to be used against civilian using the Internet. A market recently estimated by Wikileaks to around $US10 billion. France sells Internet surveillance technology to numerous African and Middle East countries, including Syria , Iran and Qaddafi's Libya. Both Twitter and Facebook are battlefields for dictatorships willing to extend political oppression to the online world, and, since the Tunisian Revolution, the market is skyrocketing.

As Sarkozy officially opened the race for the presidency in France last week, it looks like this will be France's first presidential election in which the Internet could play a major role. But it also looks like it will not be, in any way, what happend during Obama's first run for the presidency. In France, the Internet will most probably be used in a very dirty way.

As we say in the startup world: eat your own dogfood

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Google gets a lot of blame for its tracking behaviors in relation to advertising and cookies. I stopped trying to hide data from Google a long time ago because I am not sure it is even feasible anymore. I am a denizen of the Internet, therefore Google knows everything about me. The undisputed king of tech, Apple, often gets a pass on privacy concerns because we all love our damned iPhone and iPads so much. Apple should get no such pass. It wants your data as badly as all the other tech companies and it does not want to share. Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon? Yeah, you are in this discussion too. At some point I just throw up my hands and say, "you know what? Screw all of you."

I am not generally opposed to tech companies tracking my activities and data. Most of the time I believe that the general purpose is to provide me a better experience. I do not set any of my browsers for private browsing by default and only use "safe browsing" techniques on mobile devices to keep me away from spam and botnets. I use an HTTPS connection whenever possible to make sure my user name and passwords are not being intercepted by nefarious third-party entities.

What I am sick of is that every time one of these privacy stories breaks, it is nobody's fault. The script is the same: "we're sorry, we didn't mean to do it, we will shut it down right away." You know what? It is everybody's fault.

For instance, the most recent blow up is that Google and three other advertising networks were violating Apple's Safari guidelines for third party cookies. Google issued a statement to Ars Technica saying that the tracking was completely unintentional and was a product of tying the "+1" button to Safari to determine if a user was signed into his/her Google account. Apparently, the third-party advertising cookie running through doubleclick.net also accidentally made it through too.

Wups.

Whatever.

Apple allows cookies in Safari across all of its devices. That can be first-party cookies from the homepage of a domain or certain social third-party cookies, like the ability to like something through Safari on Facebook. Cookies are used for important things, like remembering logins and password credentials. They are also used for delivering important outside information, like location-aware messages and advertising.

Apple wants this information as much as Google does. The more Apple knows about you, the more it can tailor your experience and keep you coming back to Apple for devices and services. Blocking third-party cookies in Safari is not some altruistic motive by Apple. It is a marketing gimmick and a way to shut out other services from accessing data that would be available elsewhere on the Web without Apple's intervention.

Google wants the Web to be as open as possible to serve its purposes. Apple wants the Web to be as controlled as possible, providing a funnel about everything you do and everywhere you go back to Apple and/or its developer partners. To many, this has become a war against the "open" Web. Facebook has also been accused of this very same practice with its closed platform. Microsoft has long known everything you do through its Windows and Internet Explorer platform. Amazon wants to track you so it can provide better shopping data.

John Battelle sums up the nature of Safari in regards to his iPhone nicely when reacting to the Google tracking story:

Or perhaps it's because Apple considers anyone using iOS, even if they're browsing the web, as "Apple's customer," and wants to throttle potential competitors, insuring that it's impossible to access to "Apple's" audiences using iOS in any sophisticated fashion? Might it be possible that Apple is using data as its weapon, dressed up in the PR friendly clothing of "privacy protection" for users?

That's at least a credible idea, I'd argue.

This is why I throw my hands up and say, "you know, screw it." Every one of the tech companies has an agenda and each of them wants your personal data. Whether that is Path, Twitter, Foursquare or others uploading your contacts list without your consent or Google tracking your cookies or Apple tracking your location. Each is going to push the boundaries of what is perceived to be acceptable and when they get caught they are going to say "sorry, we'll stop now."

I am also a firm believer that the technology and the Web is not free. The foundation of the Web was built off of user data. User data keeps the Web gassed up and moving down the information super highway (as we used to call it in the 1990s). I do not mind giving up my cookies and a certain bit of my privacy for a better experience. Take Path for instance. After Path allegedly deleted all of the contacts it had automatically uploaded, it prompted me if I wanted to upload my contacts. I said yes. Because without doing that, Path would be a barren place to me and I would have no way of finding my friends on the platform.

What I am really trying to figure out when it comes to privacy decisions by technology companies is whether or not harm is being done. Is this going to hurt me now? Will it in the future? Will it hurt my friends and family? My greatest fear is that I am framed for a crime and all of my data on the Internet will be used against me. Or that someone will cause harm to me or my family financially or physically. Will the government take my data and make my life difficult? These are all legitimate fears.

I then ask myself when these "scandals" take place, who is being harmed? The media loves a big "my god, they did what?!" story. If we put it in perspective, this Google tracking Safari story is no big deal. They then shame the offending company until it apologizes and gets on with its life. The fact of the matter is that it does not really matter to the user to share in this shame and outrage because in the long run nothing is going to fundamentally change. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, Amazon, Path and all the rest are going to use our personal data however they want. We may cry privacy violations and they may apologize again. And again. And again.

That is why I say screw it. Screw the companies for setting up the system that perpetuates this mess, screw the media for making it a scandal every time, screw the users who let it happen. Everybody is to blame.

Use my data. I wash my hands of you and it. Just make for damn sure that no harm comes of it.

Because then, we would really have problems.

But lord knows tech news is an echo chamber. A successful meme like "Google sucks" tends to amplify. It's easy to laugh at blustery executive statements and paint a whole picture of Google's decline. But, surprise surprise, things are more complicated than what you read on the blogs.

It's Complicated

Yes, unambiguous failures of Google products have come to light recently. There's no excuse for Google's mobile payments to be insecure. Score one against Google. It has also come to light in the last day or so that Google does sneaky things with Apple's mobile Safari browser to track users' browsing habits. Does that mean Google is evil, period? Or is there perhaps more to the story? What about every other technology company involved here?

Online privacy is a generally sad state of affairs. Is Google all-the-way evil for exploiting mobile Safari like this, even though its users can delete their browsing histories? Can Facebook users delete their tracking history, which Bing uses for social search? (No.)

Search, plus Your World

Other Google products have changed recently, and our reactions are matters of opinion. I'm just glad I vented my Google+ spleen when its integration into the rest of Google was still mostly hypothetical, because what eventually shipped was not that bad. You might even like it if you try it for a few months before you blog about it.

Google iterates constantly in response to huge, statistically significant amounts of data from its millions of users. That's why, for example, it hasn't settled on a top nav bar yet. It might be temporarily annoying to users and provide temporary blog fodder, but Google's public beta testing gives it statistical confidence about its product decisions. The opinions of bloggers aside, the behavior of millions of users doesn't lie.

Search, plus Your World is no different. It may be propelled by business imperatives, but as Google Search lead designer Jon Wiley told me yesterday, the design team's motto is "don't break search." If SPYW breaks search for its users, Google will change it. I don't much like it myself yet, so I just turn it off. "We're at the very beginning," Wiley told me, "and how that experience is going to grow and change is kind of an unknown, because it really is dependent upon how people use it."

As I said on Twitter at the time:

When a large-scale Web service puts an opt-out switch on a new feature, it's because they know users will like the feature.

— Jon Mitchell (@JonMwords) January 10, 2012

When I talked to Wiley yesterday (more from him on RWW soon), I asked him if "people have chilled out" about Search, plus Your World since it launched. But even as I asked it, I realized the question was smeared with blog-juice. "That implies that they were not chill to begin with," Wiley pointed out, and that's true. I was biased by the blogosphere into thinking that people hate this thing.

If the numbers didn't support it, even if Wiley hadn't been straight with me about it, I would have heard it in his voice. But "Search, plus Your World is working as intended," he said. That sounds opaque. But Google's intention is to enable hundreds of millions of users to find what they're looking for. If that wasn't working as intended, this product would change.

Google Is People, Not Just Data

But more can be said for Google products right now than that the data support the decisions. Some of Google's current projects are completely irrational, and yet they're wonderful. Have you tried a Google+ Hangout? You should. Lots of Web products in 2011 liked to call themselves "social." How many of them really were? Lots of people in 2011 liked to say that Google doesn't "get" social. Is that true?

No, Google+ will not replace Facebook. Is Facebook your standard for what "social" means now? "Like" buttons and virtual farms? Google+ has those, too, and that's a bummer. But Google+ also lets you hang out, face to face, with anyone with a computer or smartphone. Even people with dumbphones can join in by voice. Which is more social: being the Foursquare mayor of your neighborhood Starbucks or talking to people?

Yep. It's ironic that I'm praising hangouts. I've had three straight hangouts go horribly wrong due to technical glitches. The conversations themselves were fantastic, but Google lost them afterwards. Google+ has given +ReadWriteWeb Hangouts On Air capability, and no, it hasn't worked very well so far.

You know what else Google has given me, just another of its users, other than the ability to broadcast high-quality, 10-way video conversations to everyone in the world for free? Tech support for Hangouts On Air in the middle of the night. In-person training on how to use it. Why the hell are they doing this? Isn't this ridiculously expensive in both human and machine terms? What does Google get out of making a product like this?

You know, other than a hangout with the President of the United States?

That's a pretty good question. Maybe Googlers just think it's amazing.

Just So We're Clear

You might notice I haven't mentioned Android. It is my opinion that that product isn't serving its users well, which is why I am not one of them. But I haven't mentioned Chrome either, and I think that's the best browser in the world. The point is, Google is a big company. It's working on lots of things.

Some are bad. Some are dumb. Some are wrong. Some are the best tools on the entire Web. Some are insane, totally irrational, like free face-to-face hangouts for everyone. We should never fail to hold Google accountable, but don't fault it for trying, either.

My life is interesting enough, even in its dull patches, that I would be mortified if you know where I was at any given time in a day. And plus, no offense, but if you were interesting enough to deserve that knowledge, I would already have given it to you.

I did not come to social consciousness during the build up of self-broadcasting. I was well and truly whole by the time blogging and location tech started to rise above the horizon. What appealed to me most with the advent of social media was the ability to publish. That is to say, the power to register my opinions or achievements in the public sphere without mediation. Also appealing, though somewhat less so, was the ability it gave me to watch what others desired to publish. Finally, the dialogic function of social media has also had its appeal.

Although I am also concerned with issues of privacy - control over my information - I am more distressed by issues of location. Any data I produce, on purpose or unwillingly, is going to give you, at best, an imperfect picture of me. Probably it will give you a largely fictitious picture. That makes me jump up and down and laugh and clap my hands together like a tiny child at Christmastime. But being able to locate me in time and space and assign a valid name to me? That is creepy to the crawliest of degrees. The notion that people are out there allowing that to happen to themselves on purpose makes me want to open a home for abused app-users.

Glassmap and its ilk are like avalanche beacons for the ego, constantly broadcasting a signal to prove its user exists; cheeping incessantly as though, were it to stop, its user would cease to possess any existence at all. It also removes any opportunity to make the single most exciting offer one person can make another, "I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

Foursquare was bad enough, Path and Twitter and their pickpocketing even worse, but Glassmap and its ilk are like the Jim Rose Circus.* I just have to ask, who would do that to themselves?

Photos courtesty Shutterstock.

*Told you I was old.

Facebook's social graph of you isn't you. It's an approximation and an extrapolation based on little clues you've left lying around the Web. Using your Facebook or Google identity gives those services more data points about what you do, but that doesn't mean it substitutes for who you are.

The central thing wrong with the social Web is that users don't own their identities. Users share themselves with identity services - like Facebook and Google - that then act as representatives of the people using them. Facebook and Google allow other sites to rent those identities. But when you log in to a new service using Facebook Connect, you are actually constraining your identity to the Facebook version of it, though you're expanding Facebook itself. Do you want to be the same version of yourself everywhere else as you are on Facebook? Or Google?

Facebook & Google Act on Our Behalf

By doing things this way, Facebook, Google et al. can lend your name to things without really asking you, like ads and promotions of various kinds. You have implied your permission by "liking" things or "checking in" to places.

But you didn't create the ad. You just initiated an action that triggered it. Social applications that speak for us this way are using our identities without us.

Identity Is Prismatic

Our Facebook and Google identities are like constellations. The stars are our actions on the Web. Facebook and Google are on the ground, staring up at the sky with a bunch of marketers and advertisers. They're the know-it-alls pointing at abstract shapes and confidently labeling them with names.

But the actual user, not the vague constellation of her online actions, is a multi-faceted person. "Identity is prismatic," as Chris Poole says, and "Facebook and Google do identity wrong."

"It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole says. In other words, we're only presenting one Facebook-facing aspect of ourselves when we share online via Facebook. The advertisers who make Facebook possible don't have a full picture; they have a Facebook caricature.

Today's Social Web Is a Performance

The more about ourselves we share with Facebook, the more stars you can see in the night sky, the clearer the constellation appears. Hence, Facebook rolls out Timeline and asks us to share our entire life story.

But what Facebook has to acknowledge is that this is still a performance. It's a make-believe Facebook self. And Facebook's (and Google's) business consists of spinning that self on our behalf, mapping it and stereotyping it and selling it.

It's not wrong of Facebook or Google to do that, per se. But I have a feeling that better products, better ads, and a better Web would be possible if users owned their identities, showing as many (or as few) facets as they want to show.

A Proposal: Online Identity as a Fingerprint

Users should have signatures that are truly theirs, instead of their Facebook and Google guardians signing on their behalf.

Identity on the Internet should be embedded by the user like a fingerprint. It should be written into the digital material we make using hardware we have authorized. We should also be able to withhold it whenever we choose and make the content anonymous.

We should also be able to sign multiple and pseudonymous identities, but we'll have to hash that out later, as a political issue, once this is even technically possible. The first step is to create a protocol that lets us sign off the bits we've written as being of us, so that they remain identifiable no matter where the content is repackaged or republished.

Why Do We Want This?

We want this because it would delineate a difference between something we made or we said and something an outside service extrapolated about us.

We want this because it would simplify problems of attribution and copyright on the Web. If we didn't sign something we created, it would default to the other ways we deal with unsigned content. But content that is signed would have an unmistakable origin.

We want this because it will make identity services like Google, Facebook and the rest compete honestly for our attention instead of boxing us into their worlds.

Facebook and Google can only make enough money from their profiles of us by tracking our activity and extrapolating who we are and what we do. But that would still be possible on top of a layer of authentic identity that those services didn't own. They would be able to compete based on whose recommendations were more accurate, but there would be a layer of protection between who we declare we are and who companies assume we are. We would no longer be tied to just one of those identity constellations.

OpenID is not what I'm talking about, either. It's more than just logging in to websites. This is something we write in. It's not a handle and a password. It's like one of those wax seals on a letter, except with Information Age security measures.

The Naïve Things About My Idea

Many things about my above proposal are naïve. Here are just a few:

1. I am not well-versed enough in the longstanding projects of this nature that already exist, like GnuPG signing or Mozilla's BrowserID, to know what the challenges are. But I'm working on it.
2. I haven't specified at which layer of the user interface this identity signature should take place, whether at the device level, the browser level, or what. Again, that's because I am not well-versed enough in the technical requirements of such a project.
3. And yes, the inertia of moving away from siloed Web identities (Google/Facebook) towards this is unconscionably humongous.

So I know there are experts on these problems out there. Talk to me. What's right and what's wrong about this idea? Who's working on it? How is it going? Is it impossible? Is it unnecessary? Is it hopeless? In the interest of a better Web, let's talk about this.

See also: Scott M. Fulton, III's year-end post, "Issues for 2012 #3: Who Gets to Define Your Online Identity?"

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

FIIIINALLY! Google released a Chrome beta for Android! GODDDDD. What took them so long? All the Ice Cream Sandwich users have been waiting, like, FOREVER!

Finally, Tweetbot for iPad came out. I've only been asking them for, like, EIGHT MONTHS! Jeez.

Apple fiiiinally released iTunes Match after a whole month, and it didn't even work right!

Listen to how this sounds. How do we, the tech bloggers, get away with headlines like this? Where do users get off complaining impatiently about updates to a service that costs them $2.99? Or a free service? Let's have a reality check. Remember how awesome technology is?

This is an appeal to all of us, myself wholeheartedly included, to start appreciating how amazingly fast the world is changing and stop complaining about having to wait a week or two for the next incremental update of the future to arrive.

Let's Walk From San Francisco to Los Angeles

Sometimes, it takes longer to build amazing software than developers planned back at the beginning, when they were all psyched to get started. A great Quora thread about this popped up last week: Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?

Michael Wolfe's answer lays it out. Developing software is like planning a hiking trip down the coastline. When you're zoomed out, looking at the big map, the line is pretty straight. But as you actually start walking, you realize that the line on the big map glosses over the details.

The actual coastline twists and turns. There are cliffs and boulders and sand. "Angry sea lions!" It's not as simple as walking a straight line for the distance calculated by Google Maps. It might take 10 times longer to go one mile today than it did to go five miles yesterday.

So that's the part of the problem we can't control. Software projects take longer than expected. But the customers - and the bloggers - have to do more than just cut the devs some slack.

An App Costs 1 Cup of Coffee

We have to appreciate a few things. First of all, if you can afford a computer, if you can afford a monthly Internet bill, you can afford an app that costs $3. Let's assume we're talking about Apple stuff here. If you paid $3, the developer made $2.10 (and Apple took 90¢).

Just think about how many times a developer has to make $2.10 in order to make a living. That is your personal share of the app you bought. If it takes the developer a month longer than you wanted for a big update full of new features, just keep that in mind before you go ranting off to the Internet and leaving ????? reviews.

If the app is free, you should be saying "thank you."

Time & Perspective

The other part of this problem is our perspective on time. This is the one that affects the bloggers. We have our noses in this stuff every day, so the cycle of software releases tends to feel longer than it really is. But it affects lay users as well. We've gotten so used to things changing online all the time that we've started to think one month is a long time for a technological innovation.

That's craziness. It used to take a month to send a message to someone. Let's dial back the whininess and appreciate the amazing speed and plummeting costs of technological change. You can write your best-selling novel on an app that costs as much as a beer. I'm reminding all of us, especially myself, to try to stop saying "finally" and start saying "thank you."

Lead photo courtesy of Shutterstock

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." - Immanuel Kant

Ours is an imperfect society. The nature of our reality, our desires and our need to possess, while maintaining a façade of moral righteousness, puts us at odds with the reality that exists within the systems we have created.

In recent days, the character of our era of consumerism has been put in question. We want what is new, shiny, fashionable. We want it now. With this desire we turn our heads from the consequences it takes to produce our toys, our symbols of status. When The New York Times reports that our gadgets are made in Chinese factories where working conditions can be horrendous, we express outrage and tweet the article from our iPads. The culture we have created comes with the cost of doing business.

The Conditions at Foxconn

The conditions at Chinese factories that make our gadgets can be deplorable. Workers often live in crowded dorms, work more than 60 hours a week, are punished with physical labor and withholding of wages, according to The New York Times report on conditions at Foxconn, which makes Apple's iPhones, iPad and iPods. In a response to the article, Apple CEO Tim Cook sent an email to Apple employees and the company released a "Supplier Responsibility Report." This is not a discussion solely about Apple though. Apple is the most valuable company in the world, so it naturally faces the most scrutiny. Other device makers, such as Dell, Nokia, Motorola and Hewlett-Packard, are clients of Foxconn as well.

Apple and Foxconn are just two examples in a larger system. Companies have to weigh the cost and benefits of the manufacturing process. This is not a new dilemma but is a matter of fact within the economy created by the Industrial Revolution. Nor is this quandary solely a matter of high tech devices. Companies like Nike have been cited in the past for the conditions at their manufacturing plants in Asia. How much do you really want to know about the synthetic polymer that is the backbone of much of the world's textile industry? What about the bread you eat, the TV you watch, the socks you wear?

Framing the Utilitarian vs. Deontological Conversation

"The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your fact, it takes on color. It is all the difference between hearing of a man being stabbed in the heart, and seeing it done." - Mark Twain

Image: Samsung Galaxy Tab

The dilemma created by the source of our products can be explained in a utilitarian framework. Utilitarianism, "is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good." Another word for this is consequentialism. In philosophy, consequentialism is the determination of the moral good of an act based on its consequences.

A utilitarian worldview can be beneficial. The most good for the most people is the highest degree of morality that can be strived for, many believe. The detriments to a utilitarian view are that it does not factor in the needs of the individual. "One must die so a thousand can live." Is it fair to that one person that must be sacrificed to the greater good?

On the other side of utilitarianism is the concept of deontologicalism. It is the opposite of consequentialism: "no matter how morally good their consequences, some choices are morally forbidden." Deontological ethics suppose that humans have a duty (the Greek word deon) to support the moral rights of the individual. The boundaries are thus drawn between the concepts of utility and duty.

How do we then rationalize these concepts into our modern era of consumerism? When we hear that four people died and 77 were injured at explosion and subsequent fire at Foxconn, where do we place our own morality on the spectrum between utility and duty? While many of these types of accidents are avoidable on a case-by-case basis, the nature of industrial manufacturing has always lead itself to these types of catastrophes. In a perfect world, everybody would be happy and well fed and the conditions at such factories would never cause harm to those employed. It is something to strive for but a reality that is not easily attained. We have to reconcile our idealism where all parties' interests are satisfied against the reality of the systems we have created.

This is not a perfect world; we create systems that are fundamentally unfair. The more money is spent and made, the harder it is to change these systems. The two largest device makers in the world, Apple and Samsung, announced this week a sum total of nearly a hundred billion dollars in revenue ($46 billion for Apple, $42 billion for Samsung) in their most recent quarters. The two companies make devices that make people's lives easier and happier and enable them to perform acts that are a benefit to the greater good. There is little question about the utility that is being produced from an individual perspective and in the dynamics of a worldwide information system. It can also be argued that the existence of companies like Apple and Samsung make the lives of the people that work in their factories better.

There is no doubt that the companies that are customers of factories like Foxconn (and Foxconn itself) can do a better job in maintaining safe, happy, healthy work environments. Yet, implementing changes that are beneficial to those workers may also lead to an imbalance in the system. Can the diverse nature of technological consumerism be monetarily supported if the efficiency that is demanded by companies like Apple and Samsung from factories like Foxconn is diluted?

For The Good Of Whom?

When we speak of the most good for the greatest number of people in this scenario, who are we talking about? The good of the consumer, the good of Apple's shareholders, the good of the plant owners or the good of the workers? The different stakeholders will give you an array of answers.

Consumers want high tech devices can make their lives simpler, more efficient and arm them to do their jobs and make the world a better place. Shareholders want profits. Similarly, there is profit motivation for those who own the factories. The good of the plant owners theoretically could mean the good of the factory workers as the factory owners can open more factories, employ more people and create a higher standard of living for their employees.

The good of the factory worker... well, that is what is missing from the conversation. From a utilitarian perspective, what is morally right for the factory worker may not be of the greatest good to the other parties. From a deontological perspective, the other parties have a moral duty to uphold the rights of the factory worker. This is the dilemma that must be reconciled.

We are stuck at a crossroads. How to balance the utilitarian systems that provide the world with the devices that make peoples' lives better versus the deontological morality of those systems. This is not a new dilemma but a scenario that has been played out thousands of times throughout the course of humanity, from the feudal systems of agrarian Europe to the factory towns of New England in the 19th century to the manufacturing plants in Chengdu that make our computers today.

While we all hope that humanity can rise to create a more perfect world where the balance of human moral values is no longer a question, it is not the world in which we live.

That is the cost of business.

Unfortunately, our do-it-ourselves recording didn't work out, or I'd post the whole thing. Maybe our new friend Vic can talk to somebody and get us On Air capabilities, so we can record (winky face). I promise we'll use it. I'd love to do this again. I'll do my best to recap how it went and what we learned.

Robert Anderson started us off with a great question about search. Google+ has changed the way search works by incorporating personalized results, and, as Robert pointed out, Google used other personal signals before all this, such as location and browsing history. How is all this affecting the Web?

I think there was consensus in the Hangout that global and personalized search are both important for different reasons. As Ashwini Gore and others said, we don't always want our friends' daily activities popping up in our searches when we're trying to get work done.

I mentioned that I'm often searching for news articles for work, and between personalized search and Google's recent "freshness" tweaks to the search algorithm, personalized search makes it hard to find old or obscure pages.

But Robert Redl shared the way he uses the Search, plus Your World features, and he had some ingenious suggestions. He uses private Google+ posts, shared only with himself, as little notes or reminders, which he can now easily find when he searches Google. The search features that put Google+ ahead of other social networks have caused an uproar in the blogosphere. But as Robert demonstrated, there are ways in which Search+ is a huge benefit to Google+ users.

Personally, I don't use Google+ for much more than submitting articles to the Googleverse, so Search+ is not that useful to me. My social graph lives elsewhere. But that's okay, because we can turn it off. Many users won't though, so social search will change what they find through Google.

We talked about how Google+ affects search engine placement, and Daniel Fontaine said it has helped his business. I think that's great. Search, plus Your World has changed SEO, but it has made it into something that users can control.

For the 19 of us who hung out, the ways we use Google+ as a "social network" varied. Some love it, some hate it, others will wait and see how it goes. People debate whether Google+ "counts" as a social network, or whether it's an "identity service," or whatever. One thing is for sure: Hangouts are AWESOME!

"Social" is surely a word we use too much on the Web. What could be more social than a bunch of people hanging out face to face? There were no "+1s" or "likes" going on in there, just words and body language. I don't have to like the Google+ interface, or the way its comment threads work, or even the way it affects search results to love what just happened.

We may argue about Google+ user statistics, whether it has umpty million users, whether they're "active" or not. We may argue about whether its new, overarching privacy policy is evil and terrifying or easier to understand and not that different. But I'm getting bored of that, aren't you? If you hate Google, don't use it. But I really recommend trying a Hangout. You'll smile a lot.

We should hang out sometime!

They were given links to click on to learn more. Some of those links led to the White House Web site, where over a hundred thousand people signed petitions urging the President to veto any bill that would suborn Internet censorship. A few of those links led, to our own surprise, to ReadWriteWeb; and for a few hours yesterday, our traffic rose to unprecedented levels.

You can never step in the same river twice

Whenever you divert a river through a narrow channel, the result is always raging and torrential. Google, Wikipedia, several blogs published through WordPress and Tumblr, and a few other sites yesterday successfully stuck a few logs in the river. They diverted people's attentions for a moment, and got quite a few of them to agree that changes in the Internet to divert traffic away from content (except for this one) are usually bad.

The result was a logjam of public support, a signal of concerted public opposition to government altering the mechanism of the Internet. Principal sponsors of the SOPA and PROTECT-IP (PIPA) legislation publicly withdrew their support of both bills in their respective houses. Now, despite new markup hearings scheduled for next month, it is extremely unlikely that anti-piracy legislation will emerge from Congress this term.

Victory, it would seem, for the SOPA and PIPA opponents. But we need to ask ourselves, do millions of Internet users truly know more today about the efforts to preserve the Internet and the industries that depend on it, than they did 48 hours ago? Or did Google and Wikipedia just present everyone with yet another popup (like the one with the green button and the red button where the green one says, "YES, I'M 18 OR OVER") and people click the one closest to the content they're really looking for.

But you can surely step in it once

You've often told us this yourself: We in the media are too full of ourselves; we think we're so clever. We can stick our foot in the river, and when it changes direction we proclaim ourselves God and say we, too, can change the course of mighty rivers. We're always trying to make ourselves "mainstream," and we scratch and claw for any means necessary to have Google make us "mainstream."

But we typically fail to keep track of where the river goes from here. Which makes the report this morning from Nikki Finke of Deadline Hollywood an ominous and foreboding indicator of future events for anyone preparing a "Mission: Accomplished" banner for the victory party. Finke cites an "anonymous" memo from an unnamed Hollywood studio executive (who, despite not being named, openly states he produced a TV series called "24") as making clear that Hollywood's campaign contributions are not guaranteed to anyone. After last Saturday's statement from the Obama Administration, the content industry may be rethinking its support for Democratic Party fundraising efforts in the near-term.

Hollywood, which is in California, the home state of Rep. Darrell Issa, who has become the loudest SOPA opponent in the House. California, with 55 electoral votes. The state where recent polls expressed a preference for that nice fellow who worked with Hollywood to help produce the Salt Lake City Olympics.

In the two decades-plus that I've covered anti-piracy legislation in the U.S., as well as other countries, I've provided the nasty details, the ironic twists, the points of conflict where the legal, creative, and technology worlds fail to connect. And in all of that time, I've been told by editors (when I've had editors), and even frequently by some readers, that folks like you simply don't care. I can still hear the words of one editor who hosted a media workshop resounding in my head: "The Internet is not about facts," he said. "It's about traffic. And you don't get traffic by publishing a bunch of facts, facts, facts, facts."

If anything is less about facts than that particular editor's view of the Internet, it's politics. You can't garner public support or opposition to an issue, I've been told, through a technical recitation of every use case. Instead, it's been suggested, to make an issue popular, you should boil it down to two words that fit on a protest sign. Case in point: Easily the most convincing explanation I've ever read about the potential effects of the anti-piracy system SOPA suggested comes from the blog of an ISP named SoftLayer. It's a detailed technical description of the mess that any DNS server would have to wade through if it were to be amended with instructions preventing it from resolving only certain domain name requests.

As an optimist, I'd think a reasonable person would come away from that blog post convinced that SOPA's suggested remedy was not viable. But you can't fit "DNS Pre-emption Would Break Name Resolution Cycles" on a campaign banner.

Insert cause here

You need something else. Up until 2009, the two-word slogan that anti-piracy opponents went with was "government conspiracy." (Which still made for a big protest sign.) Yet it did not resound with a broader audience, probably because none of the players in the alleged conspiracy had any direct relationship with you, the everyday user. It was all taking place in soundproofed, smoke-filled, underground bunkers, probably with Peter Sellers playing at least three roles.

What ended up working was something more like this: "Censorship bad."

And you know, it's true. Censorship bad. You don't want censorship? Of course not. Here's a nice popup for you. Click the button that says censorship bad. You can do it. Good boy.

Never mind that none of the bills are really about censorship. If they have the same effect, I've been told, it's the same thing. As you go forth about your business today, and as you take heart in the very probable fact that the Internet will not be ruined by an ill-considered bill from folks who didn't comprehend the technology, ask yourself this: How long will the Web maintain its integrity as a source of unfettered, unfiltered facts, facts, facts, facts as long as congresspeople, service providers, content providers, artists, publishers, journalists, political candidates, and you continue to let yourself be used as a tool for someone else's two-word-slogan, private interests?