Reality asserts itself. Like the nursery rhyme lady who swallows a spider to catch a fly, and has to swallow a bird to catch the spider, and a cat to catch the bird, so must these regulations, which have broad general appeal but are disastrous in their implementation. Each regulation begets a new one, aimed at shoring up its own failures.—Cory Doctorow, “Lockdown“

There’s a war brewing against the Internet, and it’s not just SOPA (the bill in Congress that threatens to break the Internet in the name of fighting overseas content piracy). It is, in the words of Cory Doctorow, a “war on general-purpose computing.” (read his post on BoingBoing, if you haven’t already).

What he means is that in trying to clamp down on a very specific problem on the Internet (the wide availability of pirated movies, music, and other content on foreign servers beyond the reach of U.S. laws such as the DMCA), laws like SOPA start messing around with the inner workings of the Internet such as blocking DNS servers. Applying special-purpose rules to a general purpose technology messes it up for everyone. Doctorow explains the difference between general-purpose and special-purpose technologies with a parable of the wheel:

The important tests of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose are first whether it will work, and second whether or not it will, in the course of doing its work, have effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress, Parliament, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it’s unlikely I’d succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles, and asked, “Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would be “No”. This is because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications, but useless to bad guys. We can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we’d be foolish to risk changing them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies—even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies—no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

The same is true of the Internet and computers. The Internet is designed to transmit information to anyone who connects to it. If regulators try to prevent certain types of information from reaching its destination by disabling part of the Internet, all sorts of unintended consequences will arise. First, legitimate parts of the Internet may also be disabled as a result. And second, the information they are trying to block or suppress will find its way to the people who want to find it one way or another because the Internet routes around roadblocks. That is what it was designed to do—find alternate paths for information to get to its destination.

Attacking the general underpinnings of the Internet to prevent a specific problem on the Internet is a recipe for disaster. It is like taking the spokes out of all wheels to stop bank robbers from making getaways.

Photo credit: Snowcat

“They have Internet in Europe?” my friend in the US joked via Facebook Messenger, as I checked into Foursquare from the Athens airport.

Yes Virginia, they do have Internet in Europe, or Greece specifically. In my case I had to buy an expensive worldwide data plan for my iPhone before I left the US, and then watch it like a hawk so I don’t go over my allotted 340 MB of data. $99 to stay connected.

Upon arrival to my brother’s house in Athens, I was told that I couldn’t call Greek cellphones from our landline, as they were too expensive.

My brother’s advice was to buy a dumbphone for 15 €​ ($21), and then use a 10 €​ credit to make calls to cells. Another 25 € ($36) to stay connected. One call to my friend’s cell to confirm our travel plans later and that credit was gone.

So until I plunk down another 10 € ($14) to stay connected I’m basically stuck with an iPhone in default airplane mode as my only way of communicating to the outside world. And as I desperately downward swipe my Twitter feed and frantically try to reload Instagrams from the beach, only to meet with the taunting Failed message over and over again, the dumb phone sits unused in my purse. It has a game on it I think.

Mark Zuckerberg said once that he knew that Facebook was successful when his friends told him that they had seen it open in European Internet cafes while traveling. While a lot has changed since then, the gnawing impulse to check Facebook or whatever your social media drug of choice while you’re purportedly trying to escape has only grown stronger.

For many of us with #firstworldproblems, ubiquitous Internet has become a utility, like electricity. Thus it seems odd to visit a household without a wi-fi connection, it’s almost like saying um, “We don’t have lights, and you’re just going to have to make due without them.”

But, as anyone who has traveled is aware, not everyone lives in the #firstworld. And thus I have spent a good part of my remote Greek island vacation chasing connectivity, using my iPhone as some sort of Internet divining rod, and meeting obstacles at every turn. CONNECTING. CONNECTING. NOT CONNECTED.

A Greek WIND USB data stick? Incompatible with OS X Lion (Really). Something called “Free Internet” that pops up as I drink my morning coffee in the town square? Turns out it’s not so free and not so Internet.

Finally yesterday night I saw some guy at a café working on his laptop at a bar and rushed over in hopes that I had come across some wi-fi hotspring. “How do you have Internet?” I asked him in Greek. “I brought my own.”

Because of this tenuous connection to the outside world I have missed out on all the details of Steve Jobs resigning as CEO of Apple and have no idea about Hurricane Irene. Someone apparently leaked a Greek Wikileak, and I’m too afraid of going over my data plan to load it. Oh and what’s up with Twitter Recent Images?

An iPhone in Greece costs 650 € ($ 936)​, and a Cosmote unlimited data plan another 50 € ($ 72) a month. The average salary in this time of widespread economic crisis is 1000 € ($ 1441)​ but still enough people own pricey smartphones that Foursquare is over-populated with obscure Greek venues. My Greek friend also has a similar dumbphone to my newly purchased one, for when she goes over her iPhone data allotment.

“So,” you say, “Get offline and enjoy your vacation you dork.” Sure, but nowadays if a trip isn’t posted to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, does it make a sound?

Thus I have started to be jealous of anyone with more online connectivity rations than I, mobile or otherwise. Yesterday as one of my traveling companions fingered her phone under the table I whispered, “Instagram or Twitter?” “Neither,” she said, satisfied. “Neither?!” I said incredulously. “Yeah, I’m on Foursquare, trying to figure out what the name of this taverna is so I can check in.”

Right. I am typing this from a hotel room with no Internet connection, and plan on walking downstairs to something called “Internet Point Prive” in order to post it to TechCrunch. “Internet Point Prive” actually sounds like you should be getting bottle service or champagne with your Internet. It sure costs enough.

Connected.

It was twenty years ago today/ Tim Berners-Lee taught the world to play/ Although 20 years ago he would have sworn/ That there wouldn’t have been so much porn. That’s right – the world’s first website, a placeholder page written by Sir Berners-Lee way back on August 6, 1991 in the then-nascent Hypertext Mark-Up Language, is celebrating its 20th birthday today. And, on this important anniversary, we ask what hath the web wrought?

In the past two decades we’ve been given ecommerce and spam, we’ve torn down the music, news, and publishing industries, and we’ve LOLed at more CATS than we can count. We’ve seen empires rise and fall, the dissolution of the line between public and private, and the end of enforceable copyright. We’ve seen new modes of communication drive out unwanted regimes at home and abroad and we’ve heard the endless howl of a million voices calling out at once, most of them in comments on this site.

We’ve also seen lots of the aforementioned porn.

The original (can there be an original?) page is mirrored here and it’s a fascinating look at the seed crystal that catalyzed change to the world as we knew it in those heady pre-Internet days. Also porn.

Happy birthday, Internet Web. Here’s to another 20 happy, healthy years.

UPDATE – You guys win. Mea culpa.

We’ve all been there; You’re at an outing or a dinner table with friends but itching to check your email or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Google+ or Yammer or what ever digital hit of serotonin you prefer. Have you ever “gone to the bathroom” in order to check email or come up with a socially appropriate excuse to pull out your smartphone just so you can check your @ replies on Twitter?

Remember when the critical mass of smokers used to leave the table or meeting in groups to go indulge their habit? I straight up open my laptop at bars and parties, and then feel more guilty about that than drinking.

A new British study released today backs up what we otherwise know intuitively, that Internet usage is increasingly becoming an addiction. Out of 1000 people surveyed after being cut off from the Internet for 24 hours, 53% reported feeling “upset” about being deprived of online access and 40% said that they felt lonely after not being able to connect to the Internet. Participants described the digital detox akin to quitting drinking or smoking and one even said it was like having his hand chopped off (!).

This British survey comes after a University of Maryland study in April that came to pretty much the same conclusion — With one student saying that she was “itching like a crackhead” after abstaining from any form of media for 24 hours. Geez.

Add this insight to the yet un-proven concerns that smartphone usage leads to Cancer and the smoking analogy becomes more and more apt (see image left). But for the moment Googling the name of a movie you can’t remember is hands down a lot healthier than smoking an actual cigarette, at least physically. For the moment.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at his Startup Blog, BothSidesoftheTable.

WWDC. The annual Apple event where no real hints about what products they plan to release are floated in the public domain in advance. No private head nods are given to small startup companies to help them prepare. We’re in a market where 800-pound gorillas throw their weight around and the rest of the market races to react and survive.

Any company who develops products reliant on iOS spends weeks crapping their pants before WWDC. No vacation schedules allowed for weeks before or weeks after. The announcements come out in one day and then even if you survive the annual release announcements you often still have to scramble to make sure your product is ready to work on time.

It’s madness.

This happens with Google, too. Every change in the algorithm wipes years of effort off of the traffic numbers of affected companies as anybody hurt by the Google Panda release will tell you.

Or Twitter launches its own photo-sharing app integrated into their product.

What is a startup to do?

For starters, fear not. The world seldom ends. You just have to deal with some insufferable VCs and journalists for a while. They risk little but of course knew better all along.

It is the same movie I saw 10 years ago when every VC would say to me, “yeah, I get that you’re an online document sharing service, but what’s going to happen when Microsoft enters the market? You’ll be dead.”

Puh-lease. Tell that to DropBox. Or Box.net. Tell that to DocStoc, Scribd or SlideShare.

Right. Just like Microsoft stopped AOL from winning the early online wars. And AOL stopped Yahoo! from winning the Internet portal wars. And Yahoo! in turn killed Google when it came to search. While Google stopped Facebook in their tracks when they built a social networking company. And Facebook stomped out Twitter from building an open social network. And we know how Facebook stomped out FourSquare.

And on and on. eBay / StubHub. Amazon / Zappos. Twitter / Instagram.

Focus wins.

In your head you know that the reality is that bigger companies simply cannot compete effectively on all fronts. Focus by extremely talented teams beats breadth. It’s why we all exist.

The golden rules to live by are:

• Platforms are channels not businesses. Don’t confuse the two. If you put all of your eggs into one platform shame on you, not them. If their business torpedoes you, you should have been diversified.
• You need to be clear on what your sources of differentiation are from the biggest competitors or you’re dead anyways. If your product isn’t 10x better in your own mind, hang up your cleats now.
• You need to be “known” for your sources of differentiation so even when the press declares you dead because Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter are going to eat your lunch they are describing the threat in terms of them copying you. When they talk about “check-ins being dead” it’s because you created them. Or “gamification.” Innovation has become synonymous with you.
• You need to stay focused. Have clarity of purpose. Don’t be scared. Be willing to shift positioning based on new market information but not lose your inner core.

Here are some examples.

FourSquare – I was recently asked on Quora whether I thought FourSquare was dead now that Facebook was going to launch “Places“. Others feared Yelp. Me? I chuckled. Sure, if Zuckerberg thought that check-ins were the single most important part of his future business and put 200 engineers on the problem and all of their market might, they’d squash FourSquare like a bug. That’s not going to happen.

In reality Facebook will have a small team on it. They’ll have to integrate with every other initiative on Facebook and adhere to common internal standards. They’ll fight for resources. End users come to Facebook to share photos, chat with friends or play games. Checking in is an afterthought for most. FourSquare is a different and unique product. The law of large numbers means Facebook will have plenty of check-ins on Places but that doesn’t negate a focused competitor.

I can’t tell you whether FourSquare will end up being a huge and lasting company or not. I’m not on the inside. But I feel confident that its future is its own to execute and innovate on and whether it succeeds or not will have little to do with Facebook itself. I have on several occasions said publicly that I felt the biggest challenge for FourSquare is to know what comes after the check-in? What is the next major innovation. They seem to have several interesting ideas.

It will certainly be interesting to watch.

Group Messaging –  We just came off of another annual WWDC. In it Apple announced its new iMessage product. Apple built the product, so no doubt it will be freakin’ awesome. I’m sure I will personally use it as we own 2 Macs, 2 iPads, 3 iPods and 2 iPhones. Yes, we’re a fanfamily. The New York Times came out with their list of companies impacted by Apple’s new releases and all of the major group messaging companies were on the list of companies in need of checking their shorts.

The major players are GroupMe, Kik and TextPlus (I’m an investor). Actually, I wouldn’t consider all of them “group messaging” companies but ever since SxSW that seems to be what the press wants to talk about.

Let’s look at some simple facts:

• Apple will let you communicate seamlessly with all of your other friends using Apple devices. That’s a lot of people.
• But the much larger market for smartphones will be non-Apple and all of the app-to-app messaging companies allow you to communicate with a much broader set of smart phones. iMessage will not. At least not initially. It does for the Apple world what BBM was for the RIM world.
• And beyond app-to-app messaging some of the products will allow you to also send SMS messages to the 10′s of millions of people who don’t yet have any smart phones at all.
• Many of the services are moving toward providing you phone numbers, voicemail and eventually free phone calls
• Some services like Tango already do video calls. This is already better than what Apple’s Facetime provides out-of-the-box.
• Beyond that I see the market bifurcating into “utility players” that provide iMessage-like services on a cross-platform basis and those that evolve into either mobile, social networks or mobile, social games companies. iMessage will not quickly follow either route.

BBM will have another major push and we expect an inevitable Google rebuttal to iMessage. Purely being “group messaging” will be stuck in the cracks of the giants. Group messaging isn’t a market, it’s a feature.

Are the companies competing in this sector shitting their pants? Hardly. They’re focused. They know their purpose. They know where they’re going. It will be differentiated. It will be hard for the largest players to compete with their vision. If they don’t get there one day it will be their lack of execution.

Bit.ly – Remember when Twitter announced that they would be embedding their own URL shortening and the Bit.ly obituaries were written in the first 24 hours? As far as I can tell Bit.ly is still around. In fact, they continue to be the dominant URL shortner and provide a plethora of analytics data to go with it. Next market moves? I dunno. But dead? Hardly. I still use them nearly every day.

Boxee – I remember talking with Avner Ronen before the announcement of the new Apple TV last year and just as Google TV was ramping up their marketing messages. Boxee had gone from marketing darling to dead man walking in the press in a matter of months. Avner was so calm. He pointed out that Apple would build a closed system that would appeal to part of the market. Ultimately a small percentage of his total opportunity. Boxee was about being open. It was about freeing up content to be displayed on big screens regardless of the source or content type. Where Apple would veer toward control, Boxee would bend toward open.

And whenever you see closed systems all of the major players not invited inside the velvet rope will search for technology partners. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. So every OEM not included in the Apple TV universe now knows they’re on notice to innovate. And no TV manufacturer with a brain doesn’t see that Apple will likely one day have its own Internet TV that will be scooped up by adoring fans like me. They already have beautiful monitors that are practically TVs. So hardware players need some software friends. Boxee might just be what the doctor ordered.

And GoogleTV? Yeah, that would slow down his discussions with OEMs whom he hoped would be building on the Boxee software stack more quickly, but he said to me,

“Mark, we’re not looking to build a quick flip. We have a long-term vision that video content will be widely available whether you produced it and it sits on your computer, whether it’s the sports you love but is currently only available on a content bundle or whether it’s long-tail content that appeals to large audiences of people who currently can’t get it over the Internet. And we’ll build the best discovery engine to find the best content.”

Will he get there? I’m not sure I’d easily bet against Avner. He really does have a great vision in a market that will undoubted be disrupted. But his story doesn’t map to an easy headline. Let’s see if he can put up the numbers over the next 3-5 years.

Summary
It’s not a sufficient strategy to think you’re going to win because you’re competing with big, dumb companies. They’re usually much smarter than you think. But they’re not nimble. They can’t take as many risks. They can’t iterate as quickly. They can’t easily have a focused set of marketing messages and a user experience that will have clarity of purpose for users.

You must figure out how you deliver real differentiation. What you’ll stand for, be known for. You have to have a core. You can’t let the market machinations and press proclamations worry you. The big guys can’t crush you as easily as others think. Be a cockroach. Be indestructible. And remember that competing with the big boys is not for wimps. Fight hard. No cry babies. The big boys will do what the big boys will do. And if you raise VC make sure your backers have a long-term vision and the internal fortitude to last the periods where it seems that the big boys will eat your lunch.

And if there are no big boys—you’re probably in the wrong market.

Good luck.

Image courtesy of Fotolia via @ryanborn

Are the kids alright? Probably not, if you follow this study from the University of Maryland that says students today all but admit to being addicted to the Internet and media consumption. One student in the study likened prolonged separation from the Internet drug addiction, saying she was “itching like a crackhead” after not using the Internet for a bit. Not healthy, no.

The study looked at 1,000 students from 10 countries, including the US, UK, and China, to see how they’d react to 24 hours without Internet access. Here’s a few choice quotes from some of the students:

“I am an addict. How could I survive 24 hours without it?”

“I felt sad, lonely and depressed”

“Sometimes I felt ‘dead’.”

Incidentally, I did a quick and wildly informal poll in the CrunchGear chatroom, and while we’re all pretty much connected to the Internet for every waking hour, none of us felt addicted to it, but perhaps for that very reason: if you’re online all the time, then you become numb to it.

The countries with the highest percentage of “addicted” students were the U.S. (23 percent) and China (22 percent).

The study didn’t only look at Internet addiction. Student also reported great difficulty with coping without access to mobile phones or media players like the iPod. (Though I guess since the portable media player and mobile phone have all but converged it won’t be long before the two devices are indistinguishable from one another.)

Another interesting bit was examining how students consume news nowadays. They don’t really search for news per se anymore, but rather let it come to them via Twitter and Facebook. If you’re into baseball odds are you follow on Twitter players and writers who cover the game, right? (A pretty high percentage of people I follow on Twitter are soccer writers and players. How else would I have learned about the launch of The Blizzard if Johnathan Wilson didn’t tweet about it?)

It’s a topic that broached in Michio Kaku’s latest book, Physics of the Future. The gist is that in the next 100 years we’ll be “connected” all day long to the point where being “connected” 24 hours a day will be the new normal; not being “connected” will be the odd state of being. Whether that’s with implants or high-tech contact lenses, for better or worse you’ll always be plugged in.

Sometimes humor is the best mechanism to explain an opaque topic. Public Knowledge, a group that concerns itself with defending consumer rights in “the emerging digital culture,” has released a report today entitled “Peak Bandwidth.” [Here's the PDF.] Keep in mind today’s date, is all I have to say. The report says that the “era of plentiful, low-cost bandwidth is approaching an end. The supply of bits, the raw material of our information economy, is rapidly dwindling… unless mitigation is orchestrated on a timely basis, the economic damage to the world economy will be dire and long-lasting.” You hear that, we’re running out of bits!

The bandwidth crisis—and why else would the likes of AT&T have to impose bandwidth caps if we’re not in the middle of a crisis?—has been caused by hogs like “young people” and “cord-cutters.” These people have placed an “unbearable strain on our bandwidth supplies,” and in effect have clogged the pipes to the point where we now have to ration bandwidth.

Most ominously: “Once bandwidth is gone, it’s gone. Used up bits are gone forever. They don’t come back and can’t be replaced.”

What to do about the coming crisis? Public Knowledge offers up a few ideas, including moving away from inefficient file formats like MP3 toward formats like MIDI, and replace too-big-for-their-own-good images with ASCII art. We could also move toward “renewable communications technologies” such as carrier pigeons and sneakernets. Walking down the hall and handing over a burned DVD is more much bandwidth-efficient than setting up an FTP server and having people download files over and over again, no?

Now you see the light. Now you understand why it’s so hard to be an ISP in 2011: bandwidth hogs have used up the Internet’s bandwidth, so now it’s time to start rationing.

Unless, of course, you’re OK with destroying the global economy and holding back innovation.

The various cases of Internet use may be divided into four different classes. Though each class will be found to have many symptoms in common, yet there are variations so marked that there will be little-difficulty in placing each patient in his proper class for treatment. When this division is made and the characters peculiar to each described, it will be well to give the various local and constitutional measures which have been found useful in all—therapeutical agents which are indicated in all, and then point out the special indications which belong to each particular class.

In the first class the mental derangement is greater than the physical. The mental status approximates more nearly to that of the lower animals than in any other affection short of complete insanity. These cases are happily of rare occurrence.

Patients of this class are found usually between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. The habit of Internet use commenced in early childhood and was indulged in to excess for many years. The patient does not seek medical advice himself. His parents or friends generally compel him to submit to treatment. He has been warned and instructed carefully as to the evils which surely accompany a persistence in the vile habit. The best directed efforts to show him that the path he is following will eventually terminate in complete destruction of mind and body, give negative results. And though he is fully aware of his debased, hardened condition he persists in browsing the Internet.

He accomplishes the act at every opportunity. Alone and in company of friends or strangers he gives rein to his propensities. Every vestige of moral sense seems to have disappeared and he cares only for the sensual gratification which masturbation produces.

This class of patients may or may not be emaciated. I have seen two cases where there was very little loss of flesh. The face has usually a yellowish pallor, and is often covered with pimples. The eyes are restless and wander from one object to another, studiously avoiding the gaze of the examiner. The head hangs down and rests on the chest. He is restless and unable to remain long in one position. He ” slouches” around from one corner to another, dragging his feet slowly along after him as if they were too heavy for his body. When the countenance is at rest he has all the appearance of an imbecile. The hands are placed between the thighs, or are held in the pockets of the pantaloons in close proximity to the genital organs. The answers which he gives may have no special bearing on the subject under examination. He prefers to answer in monosyllables. “Yes” and “No” are all that can be obtained from him in the way of information. He cannot or will not pronounce a sentence of any length. To get more of his history some harshness is necessary. In fact his mentality is so much below par—so sluggish in its action, that only by great labor can he speak connectively. He may be seen even while undergoing the physician’s examination to twist his hands about and so endeavor to bring on an Compuserve Hot Tub session. Sometimes his public attempts at Internet usage seem to be done unconsciously. The mind losing sight of the fact that persons are around him, is occupied by the one controlling desire, a desire which absorbs every faculty of his being.

via Gawker.tv
Warning adapted from THE ETIOLOGY, PATHOLOGY AND TREATMENT OF THE DISEASES.

via NYT Image via LivingInternet

The United States government is now in the business of professional trolling. The Guardian has discovered a program referred to as “Online Persona Management,” the goal of which appears to be to manipulate online conversations so that they’re seen as being more “pro-American.” The Pentagon says the program doesn’t have an English language component, and that it merely exists to combat misrepresentations found on Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, and Urdu language Web sites.

The program’s contract, which set back the U.S. taxpayer a cool $2.76m, is part of the larger, $200m Operation Earnest Voice program. (Operation Earnest Voice was described [PDF] by the inspector general as “an operation to influence regional and international audiences to achieve U.S. Central Command strategic objectives.”)The contract was awarded to a California company by the name of Ntrepid Corporation.

Ntrepid’s Web site has a solitary e-mail contact. There’s no whois information either, as the site is registered to Domains By Proxy, Inc., whose slogan is: “Remember, your identity is nobody’s business but ours.”

Yup, the U.S. taxpayer is funding this program, but it’s none of our business to have so much as a telephone number to call to ask a question or two. Fairly suspicious, yes.

LinkedIn does have an Ntrepid Corporation listing.

Anyhow, Centcom, the people who awarded the contract in the first place, told the Guardian: “The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US.”

The program would accomplish this goal by having a team of users setup and maintain a variety of online profiles. The trick is that it enables one person to control up to 10 separate online profiles, or identities.

Imagine a scenario where, say, a negative-toward-the-U.S. article appeared on an Arabic language Web site. One person working for Ntrepid would then be able to create 10 accounts to try to “correct” or “add balance” to the story. Person 1 says: this story is a bunch of lies! Person 2 says: this story is false! Person 3 says: I agree with Person 1 and Person 2! All the way through to Person 10, all of which are the same person. And that’s just one Ntrepid employee. Remember: this is a $2.76m contract we’re talking about. Presumably that can pay for more than a few such employees, who are then allowed to create these 10 profiles. Please RT!

In other words, Ntrepid is being paid $2.76m to run a bunch of sock puppets. Neat.

Each sock puppet, of course, would have a plausible backstory, so that, unlike the case of BioWare the other day, they’re not easily found to be manipulating the system. The idea is to create “excellent cover and powerful deniability” for these sock puppets.

Dance puppet dance, in other words.

The whole operation smells fishy. I’m also not sure what it says about the values of the government to be handing out multi-million dollar contracts so that a couple of people in an office park in California can troll people online, but what are you gonna do? Accept that this is merely a case of high-tech espionage (if you can call trolling “high-tech”), or something altogether more sinister?

Australia’s Special Broadband Service has warned that the steady increase in broadband speed, and its increasing availability, may lead to “digital ghettos.” The premise is simple: faster and more reliable broadband means that more and more people can participate effectively online. As affordable broadband access spreads to different ethnic groups, argues the SBS, these communities could form tight-knit “communities” online—ghettos, in other words. Instead of broadband, and more generally the Internet, bringing people together, it threatens to further separate different groups of people from each other.

The SBS warned, in speaking about Australia’s plan for a national broadband network, that broadband will encourage different ethnic groups to “retreat inward,” rather than embrace different peoples and ideas.

Such a phenomenon could also be described as narrowcasting. Rather than create programming that attracts a wide audience, you instead create programming that appeals only to a small niche. There are networks that only show sports, networks that only show movies, networks that only show reality TV, networks that only show the news. The same principle applies online: Web sites that only cover sports, Web sites that only cover tech, etc. Sirius XM has discrete channels that appeal only to a certain audience: I doubt very much that fans of The Boneyard listen to BPM all that often. (I listen Sirius XM, but I primarily only listen to The Virus. I have no idea what happens on the several hundred other channels on the platform.)

The danger, of course, is if this separateness moves beyond simple pastimes and becomes part of a community’s larger identity. Group A only visits Web site A for news, while Group B only visits Web site B. What happens if these sites have different editorial slants? Group A and B may see the very same story in two totally different lights, which could lead to problems down the line.

The point, I suppose, is that increased broadband availability won’t automatically solve the world’s problems. Just because you give people access to greater communication doesn’t mean they’re not going to use it as an extension of their already present communication channels or biases. And if people only see their opinion online, and see it constantly reinforced and validated, well, that could be problematic.

I understand this all sounds somewhat backwards—give people greater access to communication and they’ll merely turn inward—but let’s not pretend we can’t already see that happening.

The days of cookies surreptitiously tracking your every movement online could be coming to an end. A European law goes into effect this May that would require Web sites to get “explicit consent” from its users before putting a cookie, or cookies, on their system. A reasonably big deal, yes.

The idea is to limit so-called behavioral advertising, at least when it comes to unsuspecting users. With this type of advertising, an advertiser creates a sort of user profile that’s based on your Web surfing habits. They do so by placing a cookie on your system. If you visit a lot of sports sites you’ll see sports ads. If you visit a lot of music sites you’ll see music ads. I know I sometimes see “learn English!” ads, which is probably because I visit so many Spain-based Web sites ( Marca , El Mundo Deportivo, etc.) to read up on La Liga.

What should happen after the law goes into effect is that you’ll get a pop-up, or some other mechanism, that asks your permission to put a cookie on your system. You can say “sure, no problem,” at which point you’ll be setting yourself up for these targeted ads, or you can opt-out.

This, combined with something like Internet Explorer 9′s new privacy features should make your Web browsing all the more private.

The complete Internet shutdown this week in Libya involved a new way to turn off web access for an entire country. Earlier this year, the total Internet blockade in Egypt backfired and emboldened the protesters. China is well known for blocking Internet services, but it’s not just China. Of course, having the government turn off the Internet could never happen in the United States. We couldn’t condemn the action in other countries while at the same time plan it here. No one would even suggest such a thing, right?

Wrong. The topic came up last June when Senators Joseph Lieberman, Susan Collins and Thomas Carper introduced the controversial “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010″. [PDF] One vague provision in the bill gave the president the power to “authorize emergency measures to protect the nation’s most critical infrastructure if a cyber vulnerability is being exploited or is about to be exploited.” It became known as the Internet “kill switch” bill even though the words ‘kill’ and ‘switch’ are not found in the bill.

When talking about an Internet kill switch, an image of a giant switch in the Oval Office, perhaps next to the “red telephone,” used to shut down the entire Internet comes to mind. But that’s fiction and gives the bill’s sponsors cover to deny the bill contains a total kill switch. The Internet was originally designed as a distributed network exactly to survive an attack. Egypt was able to turn off the Internet by forcing its relatively few Internet Service Providers to shut down their servers. In Libya, the servers are answering and the route is open but the traffic is being throttled down to zero. If the U.S government told the major Tier 1 ISPs to close, that’s technically not a single “kill switch” but it would cause a shutdown. In fact, one report claims, in the event of a cyberwar, an Internet shutdown would cause more problems that it would prevent.

While denying the bill authorized a presidential “kill switch” in a fact sheet, Lieberman told CNN, “Right now, China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have that here, too.” Just because China does it is a laughable argument. It’s also clear he wants a way to turn parts of the Internet off.

Lieberman generously suggested the president is “not going to do it every day” (phew), but he did argue “we need the capacity for the president to say, Internet service provider, we’ve got to disconnect the American Internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country, or we’ve got to put a patch on this part of it.” This sounds a lot like what might have been said inside Mubarak’s presidential palace.

The bill met with outcry from privacy and Internet groups but was popular with the public. A study commissioned by Unisys last August, before the Eqyptian shutdown, showed a majority of Americans believe the president should have the power to control or kill portions of the Internet if the U.S. was under a cyberattack by a foreign government.

The bill was approved by a Senate committee last December and then expired with the new Congress.

The legislation was re-branded and revised as the “Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act of 2011.” [pdf] Note the clever use of the phrase Internet Freedom for a bill that gives the government power over privately owned computer systems. Ironically, it was re-introduced on the same day as the Egyptian shutdown, when President Obama was called on “the Egyptian government to reverse the actions that they’ve taken to interfere with access to the Internet.”

Lieberman changed his approach:

“We want to clear the air once and for all. As someone said recently, the term ‘kill switch” has become the ‘death panels’ of the cybersecurity debate. There is no so-called ‘kill switch’ in our legislation because the very notion is antithetical to our goal of providing precise and targeted authorities to the president. Furthermore, it is impossible to turn off the Internet in this country.”

The new bill says “neither the president, the Director of the National Center for Cybersecurity and Coummunications, or any officer or employee of the United States Government shall have the authority to shut down the Internet.” But, it does give the Department of Homeland Security the power to issue decrees to privately owned companies in a cyber emergency.

Surprisingly, the president has the power to shutdown the Internet already. This authority originated well before the Internet existed, in the Communications Act of 1934 that created the FCC. Section 706 gives the president authority, in a state or threat of war, to “cause the closing of any facility or station for wire communication” with no advance warning. [PDF]

“A station for wire communication” may not sound like the routers that power the Internet. But the Department of Homeland Security has cited the 1934 Act as one of the powers the president would rely on if the nation was under a cyberattack.

Why does our government even need the power to block the Internet? One of the justifications for the bill, that’s even written into the legislation, is the fact that the computer systems of the government are probed or attacked an average of 1.8 billion times a month. Most of these involved attacks infiltrating government workers copies of Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Office. Or, phishing attacks with malicious email attachments, hardly a reason to justify even a partial Internet shutdown.

Collins argues the president needs the power to shut down “critical infrastructure” during a serious cyberattack. As an example, the sponsors say if a cyberthreat was detected, the president should be able to instantly shut down any infrastructure connected to “the system that controls the floodgates to the Hoover dam.” On the surface, it sounds reasonable. You wouldn’t want 10 trillion gallons of water to cause havoc.

But, I checked the Hoover Dam website. I couldn’t find a way to control the floodgates and I’d be surprised if that control was connected to the public Internet. [Update: The agency in charge of the Hoover Dam says it is not connected to the Internet and has several physical and technological safeguards to prevent the floodgates from opening.] And even if a hacker could control it, the government should be able to cut off the connection without this legislation.

Lieberman says the bill is needed because “the Internet can be a dangerous place with electronic pipelines that run directly into everything from our personal bank accounts to key infrastructure to government and industrial secrets.” Yes, the Internet can be a dangerous place. It’s also essential to the freedom of its citizens and nation’s commerce. And, it’s pretty good at self-policing. In the case of the private banks, the banks themselves know more about protecting customers accounts than then government.

John Dvorak says the senators supporting the legislation “aren’t Internet experts trying to protect the Net from damage. They, to be frank, are clueless about the Internet.” Recall former Senator Ted Stevens, who headed a committee in charge of regulating the Internet, describing the net saying “It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.”

While TechCrunch and other blogs hosted by WordPress are hardly part of the nation’s “critical infrastructure” (wouldn’t that be great, though), those websites were hit by a huge cyber attack this week. Matt Mullenweg, who oversees the blog platform at wordpress.com, says the attack was the largest in its history. 98% of the attacks came from China. The target was a Chinese-language site, but it caused many other WordPress.com hosted sites to fail.

Let’s just pretend these sites were critical to the nation. The problem was the sites were shut down. An additional government-ordered shutdown isn’t the solution. Even if the sites were hacked, shutting down routers isn’t the answer. Private industry worked to identify and solve the problem, with no need for additional regulations.

Good ol’ government, spreading freedom and whatnot. The U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said yesterday that the government plans to invest a cool $25 million in order to help people get around Internet “thugs, hackers, and censors.” The money will go toward developers so they can build the tools necessary to fight Internet tyranny across the globe.

You’ll recall that the Egyptian government completely shut off Internet access in its dying days a few weeks ago, a move that drew wide condemnation. Not that the U.S., or any other entity, had the ability to influence Egypt’s decision there, of course.

Clinton said that an open Internet was in the interest of all countries in the world. My guess is that she’d have a hard time convincing China to dismantle its Great Firewall.

Evgeny Morozov, one of the better folks to follow online vis-à-vis the intersection of technology and freedom, voiced skepticism, saying:

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Haystack was talked up as the singular solution to rid the world of oppressive regimes, but the reality was far less impressive.

Continuing our series of Valentine’s Day-related posts, let’s take a moment to talk about security. Valentine’s Day is a particularly onerous time of year when it comes to keeping your computer safe from malware and other maladies. “Hackers” (or whatever you want to call the people who craft and disseminate malware, steal private information, etc.) prey upon people’s emotional vulnerability, sending phony “I love you” e-mails, mass blasting messages across dating sites that lead to phishing sites, the whole nine yards. So, what can you do to keep yourself as safe as possible over the next week or so, and how many of these skills can you then use throughout the year? Let’s find out!

To get a better idea of some of the scams that pop up around Valentine’s Day, I spoke to Paula Greve, McAfee’s Director of Web Security Research. McAfee seems like a good group of folks to talk to about this kind of thing.

First, what exactly should you be on the lookout for? Greve explained that hackers (I’m going to keep using the word “hackers” for convenience’s sake) primarily exploit the Valentine’s Day holiday in three different ways: running online dating site scams (look at today’s eHarmony hack); appealing to people’s sensual curiosities as seen with the recent Kama Sutra PowerPoint trojan; and plain ol’ e-mail spam, often under the guide of e-cards.

“[Right now we’re seeing that] about one out of every 200 e-mails is a Valentine’s spam e-mail,” said Greve. “And they’re not just spam e-mails, but they’re scams, e-cards with viruses, that sort of thing.”

It’s partially because people tend to let their guard down around this time of year, expecting electronic Valentine’s cards from friends and family, scrolling through dating sites looking for friendly people to chat-up, and so forth, that hackers can take advantage of people’s natural inclinations and turn that against them.

“People are thinking about [Valentine’s Day] so they’re more likely to click on these types of things,” said Greve. “People know that Valentines are going around, so its easier for [hackers] to send those types of e-mails and have them reach your inbox, and have you open them.”

The following graph, which McAfee kindly provided, shows the percentage of spam e-mails containing the world “valentine” in the subject field. As you can see, once February hits there’s a pretty dramatic upswing.

Hackers know that once February rolls around people begin the tricky process of selecting the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for their loved ones, so they naturally take advantage of that added interest.

“With everybody thinking about Valentine’s Day, and it being something that people want to be excited about and want to participate in, [hackers] know they have a willing market,” she said.

Greve explained that these hackers are after any number of things, including credit card information, login credentials, or merely looking to install malware on your computer. Some are profit-motivated, while others are just out to cause a little destruction. In any case, there are a number of things you can do to prevent something bad happening to you.

One, and I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but it absolutely behooves you to have up-to-date anti-malware software up and running on your computer. Even if you’re a savvy user, and I expect anyone reading good ol’ CrunchGear to know their way around a computer and the Internet(s), you really ought to have anti-malware software. How many times have we seen so-called “trusted” Web sites inadvertently serving up malware by way of a rogue, third-party ad server? (I seem to recall a similar situation happening here several months ago…) Just because you know not to launch random .exe files that have magically download to your desktop doesn’t mean you’re Superman. And I mean that with no disrespect, of course, it’s just that there’s so much nonsense out there that even the savviest of users need help. Nothing wrong with admitting that you need help.

Two, if you’re going to take the time to buy and install an anti-malware software suite, you really ought to consider one that operates via the cloud. More and more anti-malware suites have moved some of their operations to the cloud over the past year or so. That means if McAfee (or Symantec or Kaspersky, or take-your-pick) discovers a new exploit on Monday morning and releases an update to its software by lunchtime you’ll automatically be protected. No having to remember to manually update your definitions (if you ever bother to). Downloading the free version of AVG, while a good first step, probably isn’t sufficient these days.

Three, software installed, pay attention to what you’re doing. Did you received an e-card from someone you don’t know? Maybe it would be a good idea to hit “delete” rather than viewing the card, much less clicking on a link within. Just “met” someone on a social networking or dating site, and now all of a sudden they’re asking for money? You’re not a mark, right? If someone came up to you on the street and said they were the wallet inspector you wouldn’t hand over your wallet, right? Of course not.

I know most of these tips are probably second nature to most of you guys, but not everyone spends all day in front of a computer reading tech sites. Remind your friends and your family of some of the dangers that may pop up around this time of year, and of the things they can do to mitigate said dangers. Unless, of course, you have nothing better to do than try to play tech support over the phone, which, in my experience, is outrageously frustrating. “Is your anti-malware software up-to-date?” “Well, I updated ‘my iTunes’ yesterday, does that count?”

“AHHHHHH~!”

This is just what Alone Together predicted: people, particularly young people, feeling more comfortable with themselves online than they are offline. Black is white, up is down, and the Mets are a well-run organization. The study comes to us by way of Kidscape, a children’s charity.

The story is that 45 percent of 11-to-18-year-olds said they were happier online than offline, and the reasons why are as you’d expect. These youngsters say it’s “easier to be who you want to be, because nobody knows you and if you don’t like the situation you can just exit and it is over.”

What I’d like to know is, what kind of “situations” are these kids finding themselves in? Surely if you have an interest in basketball you’ll visit basketballs message boards. If you’re into comic books you visit comic book blogs. Just like in real life, if you’re not into music you probably wouldn’t wander into a music store (not that those exist anymore), if you’re not into whatever why would you visit a whatever site?

Boggles the mind.

Other chilling stats:

• 47 percent of these kids admit to behaving differently online than offline

• 60 percent of these kids admit to lying about their age

• 40 percent of these kids admit to being dishonest about their personal relationships

• 10 percent of these kids admit to “[changing] aspects of their appearance and their personality for their online activity”

I guess it would be silly to ask if kids still read in 2011, right?

Oh dear.

What happened recently to trigger the U.S. government’s sudden interest in Internet-policing? We saw the Department of Homeland Security seizing Web sites’ domain names last week, despite the fact the those Web sites weren’t based in the U.S. Odd. Now there’s word that the U.S. is wheeling and dealing over the right to approve any and all new top-level domains. You know, things like dot com or dot org. What’s at stake, essentially, is who’s in charge of the Internet?

It’s not too hard to follow what’s going on. There will be a meeting next month to determine the final application process for groups to apply for new top-level domains. Dot XXX has been on the table for several years now, but there are other, more benign TLDs up for grabs: dot nyc, dot health, dot movie, etc. New TLDs would make it easier for organizations to make their home on the Internet. Rather than having to register “SomeMovieName-TheMovie-ForReal.com,” you could register—and advertise—”SomeMovieName.movie.”

The issue becomes whether or not to allow “controversial” TLDs; dot gay is one such TLD. Would a “conservative” country want to see the creation of such a TLD? Who should make the call whether or not to approve a dot jihad, to pull an example out of thin air, TLD?

It’s fairly tricky deciding exactly who should be in charge of this. There are those who will say that ICANN, working at the pleasure of the U.S. government, has done a good enough job so far. Perhaps, but again, Homeland Security just seized a bunch of domains of sites that aren’t even in the U.S., so why should the U.S. be trusted exclusively? And if not the U.S., then who? The United Nations, the organization famous for having less-than-savory individuals and countries on its Human Rights Council?

What we need is disinterested Hall of Justice to mediate this type of thing, because I have a hard time trusting pretty much all proposed parties.

In-flight Internet is, in a word, great. However, I worry that it is severely hampering my movie watching time these days as I’m encouraged to write and work during flights as opposed to read magazines and watch movie’s I wouldn’t normally watch with the lady wife like The Box and Pootie Tang. Gogo is available on American, United, Delta, Virgin America, and Air Canada and airlines love it, as Dan Frommer points out, “because it’s a way to distract passengers and generate revenue at the same time — unlike installing TV sets and on-demand movies, which costs money.”

Canada’s Internet innovation-killing usage-based billing scheme may already be dead in the water. The Toronto Star says the decision has been made to reverse the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s plan to implement the controversial billing method, which would have led to a situation where people there could have expected to pay up to CDN$2.35 per gigabyte. The CRTC is expected to make its case in front of the House of Commons later today.

The country’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, had asked for a review of the CRTC decision, and senior government sources last night made it known that the government would not abide by said decision. (The CRTC, like the FTC here in the U.S., is an independent agency, but its decisions are subject to government review.)

“I remain very concerned by the #UBB decision of the CRTC & look forward to my review being completed ASAP,” tweeted Tony Clement, Canada’s information minister. When asked, also via Twitter, if he would reverse the decision even if the CRTC refused to cooperate, Clement left no wiggle room: “True. CRTC must go back to drawing board.”

It would certainly appear that usage-based billing, at least as it has been proposed, is not long for this world. Well, not long for Canada.

And why should it be? What probably should happen, and not only in Canada but in every country with an advanced Internet infrastructure, is a thorough review of current and expected bandwidth use. Services like Netflix and Steam aren’t going away, so why not figure out how to properly integrate their associated data use? It’s a much better solution than clamping down and wishing they’d disappear—in order to prop up ancient distribution methods, or course.

How much good will Twitter and Facebook do your revolution once the government completely shuts down Internet access? “Not much good” is the correct answer. (Can something similar happen here in the U.S.?) That’s why it’s high time we pay homage to some of the old technology that’s really making this Egyptian situation tick: ham radio, fax machines, and good ol’ fashioned dial-up modems. Remember those?

You’ll recall that the Egyptian government completely shut off Internet access on January 27—kinda hard to tweet #egypt when there’s no Internet to be found. That means you have to get creative. Instead of relying upon 3G to tweet the time and location of the next rally, maybe you’ll have to use a dial-up modem to connect to a Spanish ISP? A number of ISPs all over the world, from France to the U.S., from Sweden to Spain, had set up “pools of modems” that could be used to accept international calls. Dial in to these modems, and you’re able to communicate with the outside world.

But even that’s a little too “new” to be considered old fashioned.

A group called We Re-Build had set up ham radio listening stations around Europe, monitoring the airwaves for any and all news vital to the situation on the ground. Once said news was intercepted, they would then spread it around the world quicker and faster than Egyptians could ever hope to.

Even Anonymous, the group perhaps most famous for its involvement in the post-Wikileaks brouhaha, got into the act. It used fax machines—fax machines!—to relay information to and from students on the ground.

Another mass rally seems to be in the works for tomorrow, and while it’s probably appropriate to attribute at least some of the situation to the use of social media and the like, it’s probably just as appropriate to recognize the contribution of other, less snazzy forms of communication.

In a sense, social media is merely an evolution in the way people communicate, but I suppose “social media revolution” makes for a better headline; “People communicating with each other” isn’t as flashy.

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