Today I switched fungibleconvictions.com from Go Daddy to a new registrar and host.

I was willing to give the company a chance to come out against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). It did, slightly. But it’s much too little too late.

I’m not all that interested in patronizing a company that equivocates on such ill-conceived legislation. The option to remain anonymous to governments, the need for the internet’s structural integrity, and the non-negotiability of freedom of speech must be defended — most of all by the intermediaries between content-creators and end-users, intermediaries like Go Daddy who, as much as any government, are in the technical and moral position to protect speech and due process.

Lindsay and I picked a couple Evos on Friday with a great deal reupping my old Sprint plan to a family plan, with unlimited data. Hence, this first-ever mobile post.

Thanks to Alan, Jade, and others for initial app recommendations…the Boston bus map realtime app is astounding. I can watch the #77 bus from my window at the same time the icon passes home on the app’s map. If I had that in 2008, I might have literally stayed at Tufts a few months longer instead of applying for new jobs near reliable T stops.

Of course now I get to work with people who make the apps, so it’s a good deal all around.

Anyway, we’re both geeking out. Or as my now-working-in-Silicon-Valley sister-in-law said Friday: “Welcome to 2006!”

Here in Boston there’s an commercial running where an auto dealer will pay the first year of a lease if the temperature at Logan Airport reaches 96 degrees this Labor Day. I wanted to see what the chances of that happening are, so I texted KGB “What’s the hottest Labor Day on record at Boston’s Logan Airport?” KGB’s reply was, “The highest temperature ever recorded in Boston, MA was 107 degrees Fahrenheit on Aug 2 1975.”

So KGB ignored two key parts of the question that a human would see—that I’m asking specifically about Logan Airport and specifically about Labor Day—leaving me to think a computer is doing the answering, at least initially. (There’s a third part, “on record,” that’s more or less redundant.)

When I replied that they didn’t answer the question, they followed up with an acknowledgment that they couldn’t find the answer and they were issuing me a credit for the $0.99 charge per answer. It’s a little disappointing overall, because there is an answer—KGB staff would simply have to click 122 times (the first official Labor Day in Boston was in 1887) through a page like this one at Weather Undergound. KGB just wasn’t interested in spending the time it takes to look it up.

I went ahead and did it. The answer to “What’s the hottest Labor Day on record at Boston’s Logan Airport?” is 94 degrees in 1928*. So if you’re thinking of leasing a car with Pride Motors of Lynn, Massachusetts, don’t do it just because you think you might get a year free.

* Temperature records at Logan go back to 1920, and the airport itself opened in 1923, making ’23 the latest possible year applicable to the question.

Based on the syntax of that last sentence, you can tell I’m exhausted. But I got to meet some folks that I’ve admired for a long time, such as Dan Gillmor, and got to promote the 2009 Knight News Challenge winners.

I’m conflicted. This conference was the last big set of tasks from now until the fall, so I’m glad I can rest a bit. But it was why I wanted to work with MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media—a chance to rock out with media innovators and meet a few of my long-time heroes.

I’m glad there’s a full year until the next conference, but I hope I get to convince all of these folks to come hang out at MIT before then.

The interview was the first time I’d had a chance to think through my use of Tor and other electronic security tools. It comes down to: while I don’t really have anything to hide; while I’m not a security master; and while I’m not a paranoid, it still feels like an obvious best practice, like locking up your bike. It’s easy, and it’s free, so why not take that extra step? (And sometimes you get props, or suspicion, or both, like when Chris Csikszentmihalyi walked by my laptop and said conspiratorially, “You’re running Vidalia?”)

One thing I mentioned in the interview but largely glossed over was my use of TrueCrypt, a harddrive encryption program.

TrueCrypt is freaking awesome. It would take thousands of years to decrypt your data if someone ever got a hold of it. Except there’s a weak link: you have to remember your password. There’s absolutely no password-recovery option. When I went out sick in ’07 with the memory problems, the person Tufts brought in to cover my work didn’t know the password. And neither did I, anymore. I had to go into the office a couple weeks after my surgery, and luckily, amazingly, my fingers had enough muscle memory that they typed out the password on the first try. (But I uninstalled TrueCrypt on both my computers after that. I wrote to Bruce Schneier sometime afterward and asked him what you’re supposed to do about a TrueCrypt password if you have a crappy memory. His three-word reply: “Write it down.”)

Electronic security tools today are dead-simple to use, free, and open source (therefore verifiably safe). They don’t get a lot of attention, but each one of them—Vidalia, TrueCrypt, or a password-organizer like KeePassX—are all worth the 5 minutes to set up.

Bain News Service,, publisher.

Fenway Park exterior

[between 1910 and 1915

1 negative : glass ; 5 x 7 in. or smaller.

Notes:
Date based on research by the Pictorial History Committee, Society for American Baseball Research, 2006.
Forms part of: George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress).

Format: Glass negatives.

Rights Info: No known restrictions on publication.

Repository: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

General information about the Bain Collection is available at hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.ggbain

Persistent URL: hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.11857

Call Number: LC-B2- 2554-7

.)

So perhaps I’m biased when I don’t see a problem with Google archiving so-called orphan works, publications that have been abandoned by both author and publisher, are out of print, and are effectively if not technically out of copyright. I don’t see a problem with making available works that no one can easily see/acquire, that no one is promoting, and that no one is making money from—but that may, and often do, still have great value.

I’m also biased, however, in favor of one of the great archival minds of our age, Robert Darnton:

Critics say that without the orphan books, no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create, giving the company more control than ever over the realm of digital information. And without competition, they say, Google will be able to charge universities and others high prices for access to its database.

The settlement, “takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,” said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. “Google will be a monopoly.”

The question for Darnton and others, though, is: is this a bad thing? Google does not somehow become the exclusive copyright holder to orphan works. Other groups and companies are welcome to do the same thing and to also make money from it. And this particular monopoly is, contradictorily, limited and temporary. There will be well-funded competitors. There’s no indication that Google wishes to charge for access—it’s fair to assume Google will monetize the collection through targeted advertising as it does with search results and within Gmail. The original orphan works don’t disappear.

So I don’t begrudge Google its ambition. While experience shows that powerful groups try to control archives as a way of shaping history, experience also shows that seemingly dominant businesses, such as General Motors and Microsoft, are inevitably outflanked. And most important, as Schmidt explains in the Auletta interview, Google thrives only in so far as it is trusted. It’s a business that deals in user data, and that demands trust. Trust broken once is trust lost, so it’s in Google interest to welcome competing ideas, to accept criticism, and to be, above all, open.

The technology in question was Twitter, which Giles knocked as yet another distraction. She ultimately derided it as something that splits our attention, leaving people a puddle of half-thoughts.

Though Twitter is indeed pitched to its users as a way to “Answer a single question: What are you doing?”, Giles ignores the ways Twitter is actually used (hence the Rooney level of non-research). She doesn’t mention that people can reply to one another. She doesn’t describe the use of hash tags to organize erstwhile strangers around a single topic. She’s oblivious to the potential for viewers of CBS Sunday Morning to immediately, publicly respond to Giles’ segment.

And though it’s a little more technical, she never once explained what every general-interest piece on Twitter has to explain: why a message is limited to 140 characters. The character limit makes sure every message can be sent as a text message. Though most messages are sent from desktops, the uses of Twitter from a mobile device are profound.

An example of how all this comes together, all of which Giles is oblivious to. Let’s say it’s November 2010. A election-monitoring group in northern Virginia has set up a “#nova10″ hashtag to track tweets about voter problems. (A hashtag is any arbitrary term preceded by “#” and is a Twitter feature that organizes all messages sharing that term.) Two hours after polls open in Fairfax Co., Virginia, voters notice irregularities with some voting machines—the machines have frozen, poll workers are rebooting them, but a Republican poll watcher is yelling that rebooting is deleting the first two hours worth of votes.

So voters waiting in line use their cell phones to send messages to Twitter using the #nova10 hashtag. What happens? Factual information is shared and replied to among voters. A political science professor and lawyer down the road at George Mason University see the messages and zip over to the polling station to help smooth out the legal issues. And, if problems escalate, local reporters tracking the hashtag can cover the dispute.

In all, Twitter helped announce a major problem and coordinated its response and solution.

If you think this is all pie-in-the-sky, consider the fact that this not only already happened here during the 2008 Presidential election but also in Pakistan, leading to circumvention of marshal law and ultimately the ouster of Pervez Musharraf.

If only CBS’s Nancy Giles would have bothered to do some research on how Twitter is actually used, she could have put together a story that didn’t leave her sounding like Andy Rooney.