AH HA!!! I knew there was something fishy about Facebook.com. This may be a little paranoid, and totally neurotic, but there are some pretty compelling cases out there for why we should all be a little worried by the growing size and connections at Facebook.com.

Facebook is a social-networking site, like MySpace or Friendster, but that is growing at an incredibly fast pace and with exactly the demographic advertisers want — college students. And received good and widespread press following the Virginia Tech shootings.

First, view this slideshow, which makes a good argument for the ties between Facebook, right wing funding sources, and even the CIA.

But also this blogger breaks down these connections and finds them to be both credible and suspicious.

It’s for that reason alone that if you log into Facebook and can’t find me anymore, it’s because I’ve cancelled my account.

(HT: Dave Farber’s IP listserv.)

What we really should be afraid of on the Internets. (Flickr thx: Steve the Engineer).

Internet2, the name of the supposed successor to the Internet, and what many academics and computer scientists see as the only hope to avoid the network overload that most see coming over the next decade as millions (maybe billions) more people start logging onto the Internet.

And so its kinda disheartening, and a bit scary, when the new supercalifragilistic Internet2 is crashed — by a homeless man and a cigarette.

Per TechDirt:

when it came to Internet2, apparently designers didn’t pay as much attention to that kind of stability. The news today is that a homeless man in Boston tossed a cigarette on a mattress, setting off a two-alarm fire that happened to knock out the Internet2 connection between New York and Boston. It’s true that Internet2 is supposed to be experimenting with different methods of building network infrastructure, but you would think that redundancy would have been considered a feature worth keeping.

Remember the first real Internet worm, the Morris Worm, that freaked out Internet users in the 1980s because it exposed some of the network’s major instabilities. This kinda reminds me of that — well, you know, minus the homeless man.

After Viacom made news early this month by filing a $1 billion lawsuit against Google/Youtube, news outlets made a point of describing and explaining why Youtube had been legally in the clear up to now, under most legal interpretations of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The reason was the “good faith” provision of the law, which made it legal to allow companies like Youtube host user-posted illegal content as long as they immediately removed it after being notified of it’s illegal status.

Most techies I’ve talked with interpret this part of the DMCA as one of its few saving graces, and that provision has allowed the growth of user-generated content sites such as Youtube and Myspace. But now, the big corporate suits may have finally figured out a way to exploit the good faith exemption with a loophole that involves nothing more than reams and reams of good ol’ legal paperwork.

Take the case of Wendy Seltzer, who posted a clip of the NFL’s copyright notice on Youtube to use as an example of “fair use.” According to poster Implied Oral Consent at Slashdot.org:

You know how the NFL puts up those notices before every game saying ‘This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience, and any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions or accounts of the game without the NFL’s consent is prohibited?’ Well, Ars Technica is reporting that Wendy Seltzer thought that that was over-reaching and posted a video of the notice on YouTube. Predictably, the NFL filed a DMCA Take Down notice on the clip. But Ms. Seltzer knows her rights, so she filed a DMCA Counter Notice. This is when the NFL violated the DMCA, by filing another Take Down notice instead of taking the issue to court — their only legitimate option, according to the DMCA. Unfortunately for the NFL, Ms. Seltzer is a law professor, an EFF lawyer, and the founder of Chilling Effects. Oops!

(more…)

So, even though I am in Berlin, over the weekend, I cohosted a public radio program on KPCC in Los Angeles. The program, called Zocalo (”town square” in Spanish), airs on Sunday nights for an hour, and is an arts and culture program specifically geared towards Angelenos.

(The guilty secret of public radio, and broadcast journalism in general, is that things aren’t always live. And that applies in spades to this show. I recorded these interviews (which aired in December) over the summer. But KPCC didn’t have an opening for this show until this week. So I got to hear the program live on KPCC, in the middle of the night, here in Berlin.)

In the episode, titled Life 2.0, features two 20-minute interviews I did with people whose lives are consumed by virtual worlds: Prof. Edward Castronova and Second Life CTO Cory Ondrejka.

The first time I encountered this world was in a story I did for Marketplace, called Coming soon: Virtual debt. And I think both my Marketplace story, and these interviews, are really, seriously interesting — and important to the world we live in now.

Just as I finished posting about how public radio (and all content producers, really) need to adapt to the web and really find new ways to use the technology, I listened to an OPB podcast from April Baer, the local Morning Edition host in Portland, Ore. Her Quicktake Northwest podcast is definitely moving in the right direction in terms of making the web and the ‘net a bigger part of the public radio landscape.

(As an aside, a good example of how not to force radio-web integration is the PRI-distributed show Open Source, which is too forced and heavy-handed in its blog segments.)

On Tuesday, Nov. 14, Quicktake Northwest directed listeners to a hilarious video about the current storm hitting Portland. It used the web as a compliment — not a supplement — to its programming. And, hopefully, successfully drove traffic the web without compromising the quality of the podcast.

Here’s that video Quicktake mentioned:

When the Google-Youtube purchase went down, I criticized Google for the acquisition, thinking that when the site became part of a larger company, the lawsuits and copyright complaints would start crawling, en masse, from the woodwork.

And the scramble is happening. Even though the lawsuits haven’t start piling up yet — videos have been pulled much more quickly and frequently in recent days. Still, Google/Youtube is trying to work on how to legitimize.

But today, the college football blog EDSBS reminded me why I love Youtube, and why if the site can figure out a way to monetize and legitimize this stuff, it could be gold:

In Bruce Sterling and William Gibson’s book The Difference Engine, they look at how the world would be different if a computing machine had been invented by Charles Babbage in 1855.

It is sci-fi, to be sure, but it serves as a good parable for how much change can be (will be) wrought by the computer.

It’s either scary or exciting, depending on how you look at it. Either way, we are still just at the tip of the computing iceberg, or so says technology writer Steve Lohr in today’s NY Times.

Lohr’s article keys off a recent conference from the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board that looks at where we’ve been — and where we’re going — in the field of computers.

Spend a day perusing the futurist topics on slashdot, or sign up for Dave Farber’s IP listserv (which is where I first stumbled on Lohr’s essay). Both serve as interesting outposts from which to view the frontiers of technological development.

Gary Rivlin breaks it down in the Sunday Times:

“It is not too late for Mr. Abrams and his investors to see a handsome payout from Friendster, a well-known brand in a nascent business sector. But why and how Friendster missed the mark is a salutary Silicon Valley tale so instructive that Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, uses the company’s inglorious fall as a case study in his strategy classes.“

Funny thing is, Friendster even figured in the Martha Stewart insider trading case, if you remember. And really, this isn’t a new topic for me, I’ve wondered how this happened before.

(Thanks, Aaron.)

Everyone’s heard of This American Life, which is still, unquestionably the best 50-minutes of storytelling radio on the air.

But what people don’t know is that there are a number of narrative radio outlets around that also provide color and depth and soul to public radio.

Studio 360. Soundprint. Weekend America. Radiolab. And B-Side, which is a show out of Berkeley, Calif., by a new generation of public radio reporters and producers.

This week’s version is titled, The Extraordinary Lives of Otherwise Ordinary People.

And in it, there is a piece produced by yours truly: A Virtual Bruce Lee.