This defence of Australian internet censorship is more disturbing than the censorship itself

For those who have been living under a rock (i.e. not checking reddit) recently, the government here in Straya is planning to censor our internet access in a clumsy stunt aimed at cornering the “think-of-the-children!” vote. Veteran lefty Clive Hamilton’s defence of the filter, however, is no tabloid hack job: although he couldn’t resist including some choice examples of porn site copywriting, the worst spectre he bothers conjuring is “evidence” that “indicates” some porn-hound boys may develop “perverse attitudes towards girls, such as being disgusted by pubic hair.” Gasp.

Indeed, with such slim pickings for the knee-jerk moralists, it’s hard to figure out exactly who Hamilton is trying to convince. The thrust of his argument seems to be that the selfish libertarians who want the internet to stay free should not be allowed to get in the way of parents who “club together and decide that it is too difficult or untenable for them to protect children by themselves and want their governments to help them”. Exactly why the parents needs the government’s help is never made clear – even if they really are incapable of monitoring their children, in itself a strange assumption, why do they need the government’s help to do so, and why should it involve intruding upon the private lives of all Australians? If they are already clubbing together, why can’t they solve this “problem” on the level of civil society and voluntary participation, leaving the rest of us out of it? Particularly perplexing is this oxymoronic declaration:

[Parents] don’t want to be the household spy and policeman, forever looking over their children’s shoulders or checking to see what they have downloaded on their mobile phones. They want governments to help them.

A word to the wise, Mr. Hamilton: when your opponents are accusing you of authoritarianism, it’s best not to associate the words ‘household spy and policeman’ with ‘government’ in your response. Is he really suggesting that most Australian parents hold a deep desire for governments to take over an aspect of parenting – guiding the child’s media consumption – that requires enormous trust, discretion and communication with the child? And why on earth did he couch this assertion in words that make the police-state overtones of the censorship plan so explicit?

Hamilton’s piece descends almost into self-parody with this brazen admission:

I have deliberately not considered the question of whether it is feasible to effectively filter extreme and violent pornography on the internet.

Why not? Because, of course,

We need a community debate on the question of whether we should do it before we consider the question of whether we can do it because too many internet libertarians and industry spokespeople cover up their refusal to countenance any sort of regulation by insisting that it won’t work.

That’s right: we need to decide that something should be done before asking whether it is possible, in order to prove that the reality-based nay-sayers were only saying it was impossible in the first place because they thought it shouldn’t be done. Where does the (incredibly well-evidenced) fact that it really can’t be done fit into this decision-making rubric? Nowhere. Catch-22.

I can’t even tell who is trying to convince who of what anymore in this bizarre and scary debacle. I just want my usually sane and reasonably free country to give itself a good kick up the arse and close the book on internet censorship for good.

Sydney protest, December 13 (Facebook event)

Jamendo’s artist donations are paltry

Torrentfreak’s Ernesto crunched the artist donation numbers on Jamendo, the awesome Creative-Commons powered free music community:

Of the 423968 users, 1650 have donated something, little under 0.5%. In total, these users were good for 2712 donations adding up to just over $36,000. This translates into an average of little over $10 per donation. The largest donation on Jamendo thus far was 200 Euros ($250) [...] Jamendo currently has close to 10,000 artists (not all of them accept donations), and 648 of those received at least one donation.

(If you doubt Ernesto’s figures, see for yourself). Even factoring in Jamendo’s sharing of advertising revenue with artists, it’s pretty clear that there are not many indie musicians out there supporting themselves through Jamendo donations. It’s hard to draw general conclusions about this future of the music industry as this sample is heavily biased: Jamendo probably attracts more serious music lovers, who donate more than the average music consumer does or would, while there is large volume of utter crap on the site which never had much hope of drawing a profit, deflating the average donation per artist.

Nevertheless, I take this as weak confirmation of my belief that donations will never significantly replace old-media sales as a major pillar of artist profits. As Enernesto points out, a lot of minor and\or independent artists are realistic about this and choose to release their music through Jamendo or similar free channels in order to capture other benefits such as acclaim, merchandise sales and concert attendance. I’m not all that confident about the merchandise-and-concerts model either: there are only so many concerts even a die-hard music lover can go to. Many people have tried to convince me that only a handful of megastar artists were scraping massive profits from music sales anyway, and the inevitable (and largely complete) shift to free media will not affect the living wages of indie artists for whom it has always been a labour of love. I’ll believe it when I see the statistics.

In related news, I was intrigued by the decision of Magnatune, a creative-commons music store, to switch to a pay-what-you want model for their DRM-free all-you-can-eat subscription. I particularly loved the subtle bit of behavioural framing below the text box for the customer’s chosen price. It will be interesting to see how it pans out, although as far as I know Magnatune is not particularly open when it comes to sales figures. I was tempted to sign up myself, until I remembered that the limiting factor on my own Jamendo addiction was not catalogue range or quality, but time and bandwidth.

Children are not second-class humans

What’s wrong with this picture? (Apart from the over-repetition of a phrase I would be hypocritical to condemn).

It took me a little while to figure out why it bothered me so much. Take a look at the list of possible ‘policy violations’ and ‘inappropriate behavior’: no chewing gum or public displays of affection in this school. Who gets to decide what language is inappropriate, or what behavior is disrespectful or disruptive? Could not accepting “no” lead to – never! – independent thought?

I’m not insensible to the fact that children will generally grow up to be ratbags unless given boundaries while growing up. In fact, I would go as far as to say that parents have a duty to moderate the behavior of their children in the same way that they have a duty to provide them with food or housing. Yet this is too often taken to mean that children are a second-class kind of human, not yet ready for the rights of self-ownership and freedom magically endowed upon them us the second we turn eighteen. If parents have a duty to limit and guide their children, this unconscious logic goes, surely it is reasonable that they have the right to do so.

This ‘duty to infringe a right’ is true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, the way our societies treat children goes far beyond the license allowed by this reasonable position, yet we are so used to seeing children as second-class humans that we completely fail to recognize it. We take it for granted that schools are authoritarian cages, because we know that without discipline most schools would be madhouses. Yet the need for discipline is a specific reason to allow for specific limits on the freedom of children; to assume that these specific cases excuse authoritarianism in all aspects of the life of a child is a case of faulty generalisation. The default status of children, as it is of all humans in the libertarian conception, is total self-ownership and freedom. Reasonable cases can be made for encroaching on these freedoms, but these must be argued one at a time and never taken for granted.

This is especially true when children are compelled to go to school. In adult life, we accept limits on our behavior when we are on or using other people’s property. Although we are free to smoke, we accept that a shopkeeper has the right to throw us out of the store if we light up against their wishes. Thus, the imposition of rules on in schools seems doubly legitimate: children need to have their behavior limited, and the teachers have the right to enforce standards of behavior on school grounds. Yet children are compelled to go to school, and rarely even have a choice in which school to attend. They are forced to spend a significant portion of their waking lives on somebody else’s property, and therefore to follow somebody else’s rules. If an adult was kidnapped and held by force on somebody else’s property, we would not consider it illegitimate for them to flout the property owner’s rules.

Again, this is not to say that all school discipline is illegitimate. I am simply pointing out that the criterion by which it can be justified is narrow and specific – namely, that the encroachment on the child’s freedom is part of the parent’s, and by extension the teacher’s, duty of care – rather than broad and unrestricted. The onus is on the adult world to demonstrate, in each and every case, why a right should be taken away. This includes an onus to demonstrate that there is not a better, more free way of achieving the same end. Libertarian paternalism tries to increase freedoms in the adult world by influencing rather than controlling behavior. Yet the idea of ’soft’ behavior modification often seems absurd in the school context, and not infrequently in parenting: we argue out loud that children will run wild given half the chance; and believe subconsciously that there is nothing really wrong with encroaching on their freedom anyway.

The second point I have already delt with. The first is, again, quite reasonable on the surface. Children get up to enough trouble in school and at home as it is; it seems natural to assume that, if the boundaries are lifted, their behavior would become correspondingly worse. Again, this is a faulty generalisation that breaks down when we look at specific cases.

Let’s go back to the detention note linked to at the beginning of this post. Assuming that the school is in the US, the code of ‘uniform violations’ is probably targeted at crude or bigoted slogans or images. (Most uniform codes at non-US high schools, such as the one I went to here in Sydney, cover such heinous sins as ’sleeves too long’ and is are not worth even trying to defend). Since dictating what a person can and cannot display on their clothes is a violation of their freedom of speech and expression, there must surely be a correspondingly weighty benefit to the child’s upbringing of this policy. It can’t be reasonably argued that this benefit accrues to the child wearing the clothing: they would have seen it anyway, so it’s not protecting them from any unsavoury ideas; and they are free to wear it outside school, so it’s not modifying their behaviour in any real way. Is it to protect other children from crude language, sexual content or so on? Anybody who thinks that children are not exposed to sex, drugs, violence, bigotry or crude language and could thus have their innocence shattered by a t-shirt slogan is a fool with a very poor memory of their own childhood. Is it out of fear that it will provoke unruly behavior in the other students? This is possible, yet unlikely; and it is a very thin premise on which to restrict so fundamental a freedom.

The most reasonable explanation for uniform policies, and ironically the one generally given to students in Australian schools, is to maintain appearances. School administrators have strong incentives to find simple ways to cause big gains in the perceived quality of their schools: private schools have money on the line, and public school administrators have their reputations, performance-linked pay incentives and ultimately their jobs. Enforcing a uniform policy is a cheap and effective way to present a more polished image. It costs only the freedom of students, which nobody cares about, and the cost of enforcement, which is marginal and accrues mainly to teachers. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and when a school administrator is given near-absolute power over their students, it is natural that they will frame rules in their own interest.

Not all school rules are of this type. Many are reasonable restrictions on behaviour which generally do advance the care of the child. Others, like ‘no littering’, are reasonable compromises between a school administrator compelled to maintain the property over which they hold stewardship and the compulsion of students to attend in the first place. Nobody has ever mastered the art of parenting or teaching, and there will always be difficulty in establishing what is genuinely worth forcing children to do. In general, however, the socially accepted level of control lies far, far over the line into unjustified authoritarianism. The rule against ‘public displays of affection’ (PDA) may have had the wrong-headed intention of preventing promiscuity among teenagers, but in reality simply curbs their freedom of association and social interaction while pushing out of sight what they’re going to do regardless. If you want a reality check when considering a rule imposed on children, consider the same rule being imposed on yourself, or upon an adult if you are a child. How would an adult react if forced to spend 6 hours a day on somebody else’s property, and then told that kissing their partner during that time was forbidden? It is not exaggeration to say that this is the kind of authoritarianism for which the west routinely condemns Islamic states, yet it somehow it can be imposed upon children without a hint of outrage. Many adults may find (or pretend to find) the idea of teenage sexuality repugnant, yet repugnance has never given anyone the right to tell another what to do.

Children are not second class citizens. They are humans with the full rights and freedoms naturally accorded to us all. The only difference between a child and an adult is that children are owed a duty of care from their parents, and that when well justified, this duty can extend to putting boundaries on the child’s freedom. These boundaries, however, must be constantly justified, and the least freedom-infringing methods constantly sought. This doesn’t come naturally. The second-class position of children is ingrained into our culture and our institutions. This does not, however, make it right. Worse, children do not have anything like the voice that adults do in defending their rights. Power corrupts, and adults routinely exploit this defenselessness to take what rights from children they can. This does not make it legitimate, and it does not make it right.

“Comes with music” will fail

This week’s edition of the Economist newspaper features an article on “Comes with music” (CWM), the latest addition to the legion of subscription-based “solutions” to the file-sharing “problem”. Under CWM, mobile phone makers purchase 12 month subscriptions to online-music catalogues and bundle them with handsets. The idea is that end users will not mind paying for music if the cost is hidden inside the price of something more tangible. CWM is touted as a win-win-win model: handset makers get an extra feature to entice customers, end users get “free” music, and record companies get to make a profit. The Economist describes CWM as “potentially a big step forward”. I think it is a half-baked idea which is doomed to failure.

The first reason is the restricted nature of the service. Major record companies are a lot like alcohol addicts: although they know as well as anyone how much it hurts them, they just can’t compel themselves to give up a bad habit. So it is no surprise that the tracks available on CWM are strait-jacketed with Digital Rights Managment (DRM), the asinine technology which attempts to restrict users from moving or playing music files in anything but the most strictly prescribed way. Of course, even if the DRM method Nokia is using remains uncracked, nobody is going to put up with the restrictions or pay to have them lifted when they can just download the music from a P2P file-sharing network, unrestricted and free. At best, all DRM will achieve is to encourage users to use CWM when convenient – when they want a certain song, right now, on their mobile handset – and carry on downloading the bulk of their music the normal, illegal way. On top of this, the twelve month expiry limit is simply irrelevant to a generation for whom downloading is the norm. If the users even notice that CWM has expired, they will hardly care.

The second reason is that, of course, CWM is not free. The handset maker has to pay at least one record company for the subscription, and that cost ultimately must get passed on to the consumer. Nokia may choose to cross-subsidise the service with profits from other handsets, or cut other features from CWM handsets, or whatever. Regardless, handsets with CWM will be at a competitive disadvantage against handsets without CWM. This is only an intuition, but I strongly doubt that the addition of CWM will sway consumers purchasing decisions more than an infinitesimal amount. It simply isn’t a shiny, attractive feature when file-sharing is so easy and familiar, and when mobile carriers and ISPs are already pushing so many other DRM-stunted, mutually incompatible digital music services, subscription and otherwise. The Economist article even suggested that the “unlimited” downloads will in fact be capped by a “fair use” limit, which will tarnish CWM’s image yet further. Unless Nokia can find a way to make CWM sexy – a very tall order – or to absorb the cost, CWM handsets will not be competitive.

The final and most basic reason is that the music industry has left it far too late to supply an alternative to file-sharing. My generation grew up with Napster, Limewire and BitTorrent the way our parents grew up with television, air conditioning and jumbo jets. For us, file-sharing is not a way to get music, it’s the way. A technologically disinclined friend recently bought a new laptop and asked me what software he should put on it. I suggested, among other things, OpenOffice. He recoiled: even though OO’s user interface is a near clone of MS Office, and OO is entirely free, he would rather find a pirated copy of MS Office than deal with a slightly unfamiliar interface. He also turned down my suggestion of Vuze as his file-sharing client; he had been using Limewire for years and didn’t want to learn a new system. There are a lot of people like my friend out there, and a lot more who are open to new technologies but who just like file-sharing better. Why would they bother adopting a restricted, closed-catalogue, closed-medium system when they could just keep on downloading like they always have? Boosters of CWM must remember that it is competing against a file-sharing networks which are free, ubiquitous, near perfectly stocked and completely familiar. It’s hard to imagine a better music delivery system, much less one that would turn a profit.

I don’t know how musicians are going to make a living as music sales continue to plummet, but CWM is not part of the solution. My strong intuition is that anything which requires users to pay for music (or any digital content) is a lost cause, and profits will have to come through adjunct channels. However, I’m skeptical that donations, concert tickets, merchandise sales or advertising will entirely cover the gap. It will be fascinating to see what solutions the market comes up with. At least we can be assured that great music can be given away sustainably.

Image credit: “stereo geisha white“, by chotda, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license.

Funky french ska album, released under CC

I’ve been compulsively re-listening to the short but sweet 2007 latin/ska/rock album Kasane! by French band INTI. Like all albums on Jamendo, it’s released under a creative commons license, meaning you can download it for free, completely legal and legit.

You can download the album from Jamendo, or spare their servers and use one of these torrents: MP3 (zipped) or OGG (zipped).

Mini-review: Bibus, an open source bibliographic managment tool

After converting from Ubuntu linux about a year ago, I found that there were only two tasks that required me to boot into my Windows installation: syncing my iPod touch with iTunes, and writing documents that required heavy scientific referencing with EndNote. The first task may very soon have a viable linux alternative with the imminent release of PwnPlayer. When I recently set to work on a lengthy literature review, I decided to go and find a viable alternative for referencing too. After testing a few options, I came across Bibus. It’s not perfect, but it does competently replace all the functions of EndNote – and, of course, it’s totally free and open source.

Bibus performs all the basic referencing functions: it imports citations from files or manual input, stores and organises them in a simple database, inserts in-text citations into OpenOffice documents (MS Word is apparently also supported), and updates a formatted reference list at the end of the document. It was exceptionally stable, with not a single crash, and installation, database creation and integration into OpenOffice was streamlined and easy. There were a number of little usability hitches, however, which still require some polishing:

• Importing from Google Scholar, where I get the majority of my references, is not very streamlined. I found the best way was to open an ‘Import text window’ in Bibus, and set my Scholar preferences to offer a text-only BibTeX citation for each reference in the search results. I then had to copy and paste the citation into the inport window and hit ‘import’ and drag it from the import buffer into the reference list proper. The need for this buffer was not obvious and it felt like a totally unnessecarilay extra step.
• Inserting the reference into OpenOffice was also a little awkward. EndNote adds a toolbar which lets you insert an in-text citation from inside a MS Word window. Bibus makes you mark the spot in the OpenOffice document, change windows into Bibus and insert, then go back to OpenOffice to make sure it inserted correctly. This is a minor niggle, but can get tedious when you are inserting multiple citations for the same reference.
• The way Bibus imported the BibTeX data was a little haphazard, with it occasionally keeping curly brackets “{“, the BibTeX field delimiters, in the text of the reference itself. I couldn’t tell if this was an error on Bibus or Google Scholar’s side, but either way it meant I had to manually go though at the end and remove a number of stray curly braces from my references section.
• Formatting of the references was inconsistant, even when I repetedly applied a single ruleset to the entire list. Again, this could have been a problem on Scholar’s side.

Ubiquity, Mozilla’s new command-line tool, is the future of Firefox and the internet

In the days after Firefox 3 was released, I thought something like this:

“Well, that’s about it. They’ve solved all the memory hogging issues, tweaked tabbed browsing to as good as it’s going to get, and added a few little touches like a decent bookmark manager. Sure, the awesome bar is awesome, but there really isn’t anything Mozilla could add to this that would improve browsing without getting in the way. I guess the future for Firefox will be keeping up with the latest standards, and maybe restyling the interface every now and then.”

Turns out I was dead wrong. Ubiquity, although only in a barest of bare-bones alpha release, proves that there is still a vast untapped space of cooler and shinier – not to mention faster and more powerful – ways of interacting with the internet.

Ubiquity is a text command tool not dissimilar from quick launching utilities like Quicksilver or Gnome-do, but with a vastly greater power and integration into the web. Quick launching tools tend to act as intermediaries: they take your command, figure out where you want to go and send you there. Ubiquity is more butler than messenger. You can highlight a section of text and tell Ubiquity to translate it into French, then tell it to email that same section of text to a friend. You can look up a term in Wikipedia and do a word count on the article. Admittedly, these examples are not all that impressive or novel, and the current selection of commands is quite small. However, Ubiquity includes a simple authoring tool and language which lets you create and share custom commands to do pretty much anything. Cool.

After I installed Ubiquity for a test run, the first thing it asked me to do is map a keyboard shortcut to call it into focus. I chose ctrl + spacebar and happily started testing. I spent a few minutes looking through the list of commands (accessible by telling Ubiquity “command-list”), playing around with them and trying to see how many I could use in the course of some normal browsing. I quickly realised two things: firstly, ctrl + spacebar is a very awkward shortcut, and secondly, the need for having a shortcut at all was not entirely clear. If you type a string of text while browsing, most of the time it will just float off into the ether. It’s rare that you would have a text box or some other kind of input selected. Moreover, a lot of Ubiquity commands act upon text you have grabbed with the mouse, which automatically means any text input into the keyboard will go nowhere fast. So why can’t Ubiquity accept text input without calling the command line first? Interacting with Ubiquity doesn’t have the same feel as interacting with, say, the Linux command line, where there is no distinction between the command entry space and the output space. Ubiquity feels more like a utility that you have to call upon than a direct interaction with the browser.

The main flaw with Ubiquity is the same one that has confounded many of the previously mentioned quick launching tools, as well as pretty much any other piece of software that attempts to turn your unbounded input into useful action. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly unique about Ubiquity in the way it handles natural language commands, which make the eventual universal access dreamed of by its developers seem a little disconnected from the actual software. Without a well-implemented parser or a clear idea of how to subtly force users to make their input machine readable, the ability for Ubiquity to act upon natural language commands will be strictly limited by the foresight and contingency of the commands’ designs. When I first installed Ubiquity, I selected some text and told it to “translate into french”. It took the highlighted text and replaced it with the words “into french”. I tried “translate english into french” and got a similar result. When I read the dropdown menu the third time I typed “translate”, I saw it telling me to enter (text to translate), (to language) and (from language). Typing “translate this english to french” finally got me what I was after, but by this point the original text had long since been “translated” out of existence. Hardly intuitive.

All this having been said, Ubiquity is still a brilliant idea and a groundbreaking piece of software. If Mozilla makes this the centrepiece of Firefox 4 (or whatever it is going to be called), it will probably be their most significant contribution so far to the average user’s experience, not to mention a “into french” against Internet Explorer. Ahem, that’s a “coup de grâce”. They’re not quite there yet.