You could say that I’m partial to Lessig’s maxim that “code is law.”

I also think it goes a long way to explaining some decisions James Cameron made while making Avatar. More specifically, the code and technology responsible for the majority of the movie’s (we can’t very well go on calling them films much longer, can we?) visual experience actively constrained the choices of the production team and thereby the choices of the Avatar characters themselves. Neytiri couldn’t have had voluminous hair even if she wanted to, because James Cameron’s hardware and software wasn’t good enough.

If you haven’t followed computer graphics closely you might not know that certain textures and materials, like hair, are incredibly difficult to get right. Though there has been quite a lot of progress in the realm of still CG, capturing the motion and flow of humanoid hair is still very difficult if not virtually impossible. Cameron’s Avatar didn’t significantly advance the state of the art, but he was able to creatively sidestep the issue by giving his characters thick braids and dreadlocks which he could motion capture.

This alleviated the chore of trying to artificially generate the realistic movement of millions of individual hairs: if all the Na’avi had braids or dreadlocks, then all of that movement could be motion captured by actors in reality.

Much has been made of Cameron’s innovation to accurately develop motion capture for individual facial movements, and it is my strong feeling that the team also took this approach for the hair of their characters. As Wired pointed out in their features on the movie, this is an evolution in the modern director relationship to computer graphics: instead of trying to *simulate* real world phenomena using procedural software, directors opt to direct a close enough analog in the physical world whose motion could be captured at a very high resolution using camera-like devices.

Don’t believe me? Check out these screen grabs from the Avatar making of video floating around:

Look closely at Zoe’s head and it doesn’t require a lot of imagination to believe that her dreadlocks have individual motion capture devices embedded in them. It’s also probably true that motion capture systems of this type can not be scaled small enough for individual hairs. This might change in the future, but for now it is a real technological constraint in the world of Pandora. There are a couple other examples of technology constraining creative choice: why don’t any animals in the Pandora jungle have fur? Might it be because Cameron couldn’t get CG fur to look right?

So Cameron’s technological constraints and innovation drove choices that would have have otherwise been purely creative. Code became law on Pandora. Sometimes the origins of code’s constraints are artificial (such as copyright law) but sometimes they’re just practical constraints like software and CPU horsepower, and I think that’s what happened here.

Let me know if you agree or have any evidence to the contrary.

I just launched a project on Kickstarter (an awesome NYC based startup that helps people fund their ideas) to translate Moby Dick into Emoji using Amazon Mechanical Turk. I’m calling it Emoji Dick:

This project will fund the production, via crowd sourcing, of a never-before-released translation of Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick in Japanese emoji icons.

Here’s an example of an Emoji sentence from Moby Dick:

Each of Moby Dick’s 6,438 sentences will be translated 3 times by different Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Those results will then be voted on by another set of workers, and the most popular version of each sentence will be selected for inclusion in the book.

I’m trying to reach $3,500, and you can give at the $5, $10, $20, $40, and $200 levels and get different awesome rewards, like their name included in the book, a CC BY-SA licensed PDF, the raw data, and either a softcover black and white copy or a limited edition color version.

If you want to support the project, just visit the page here. Thanks!

Some iPhone app store developers are beginning to suffer from Stockholm syndrome and are now sympathizing and fighting on behalf of their captor, known as the iPhone approval process.

From Wikipedia’s article on Stockholm Syndrome:

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in abducted hostages, in which the hostage shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker, regardless of the danger or risk in which they have been placed.

And just as Patty Hearst picked up a machine gun to rob a bank while being held captive by the Symbionese Liberation Army, these developers are attacking the sane programmers trying to save them.

Here’s a guest post on TechCrunch where Matt Galligan, a CEO of an iPhone app development shop where he calls out Yelp for not abiding by Apple’s rules:

Call it sneaky, call it clever, but I call it deceit. Apple has put forth specific guidelines, and “rules” around their app development, and while I don’t always agree, it’s the reality of how we must work with them for now. Yelp hid their easter egg behind shaking the device, which isn’t always the most intuitive action to take on an app that contains some maps and lists. As a result, the unsanctioned Augmented Reality view was gone from Apple’s radar.

Why is Galligan chastising Yelp? Sure, he acknowledges, the app store may act badly sometimes, but hey, rules are rules, right?

Wrong. He should be commending Yelp for putting their app’s approval on the line by risking Apple’s wrath. Yelp must have one of the most popular free apps in the iPhone app store, so it is quite a risk to release it with functionality purposely hidden from Apple.

But its the right kind of risk; it’s gutsy, offers a new whiz-bang feature, and asserts Yelp’s right to develop whatever features they want outside the scrutiny of their captor.  These are values that all developers need more of when creating iPhone applications.

And, if as Galligan predicts, Yelp’s risk forces the App Store approval process to spend more time digging through source to discover undocumented functionality using forbidden (Gasp!) API calls, then maybe it will demonstrate to Apple that it’s just not worth treating your developers like hostages, and they’ll dismantle the approval process entirely.

Apple now has such strict control over the development process that some developers have clearly lost the ability to think for themselves. That means we have to find every opportunity to encourage them to fight against their captor’s tyranny.

That means encouraging risks like Yelp’s and developing more Easter eggs for iPhone apps.

So if you’re reading this and are also currently developing an iPhone app, think about including an Easter Egg that might rankle Apple. You won’t be ruining it for the rest of us, you’ll be chipping away at the wall of Apple’s tyranny over developers.

A quick update about the Facebook governance post I wrote a while ago where I wondered whether disclosing private facts about yourself on your Facebook page would constitute “public disclosure of private facts” and thereby prevent you from claiming invasion of privacy should a friend disclose something they discovered on your semi-private profile:

… American law prevents me from disclosing private facts about Alice that are not news worthy. However, if Alice had disclosed such private facts in a public space (perhaps in front of a large audience), I can pass on the facts to others and even publish them.

But what if Alice discloses her private fact on her Facebook profile? It remains private in the sense that only I and her friends can see it by logging into Facebook’s private service, but it also arguably public in the sense that I and her friends are also an audience. Does it matter how many friends she has? What privacy settings did she have in place?

Through a Slashdot post, I just stumbled across a case that hinged on a very similar fact pattern, Moreno vs. Hanford Setinel. The judge decided that since a teenager wrote a post on her MySpace blog revealing facts she believed (and now regretfully wishes) were private, she could not claim a breach of privacy under the doctrine.

The judge astutely points out that since the teenager’s MySpace page and blog were publicly available to “anyone with a computer and Internet connection.”, they couldn’t be considered private even if she believed her actual audience to be tiny. But this leaves open the question of whether using Facebook’s privacy settings would create a particular level of security that would classify the profile and facts as “private.”

Obviously details about actions and relationships matter a great deal in determining whether privacy has been breached and whether certain disclosures are public “enough” to negate a plaintiff’s privacy claim. But what is still interesting to me, is whether certain technical choices a user can make on Facebook are substantial enough to shift a profile from being public to being private in the eyes of the law.

As Lessig argues, code is law, but in this case, we might be able to see it the other way around: Facebook’s code could amount to sufficient law.

First, if you don’t like Twitter (I know, this blog is becoming a Twitter fan page, but hey, its my blog, right?) don’t read this post. It’ll just annoy you, so consider this your fair warning.

Last night I finally figured out how to change Tweetie on the iPhone’s setting to allow me to post RT’s instead of via’s. The setting was buried in “Advanced -> Experimental ->  RT-gurgitationability” an obviously spiteful placement and label.

This means that my retweets look like this:

RT @creativecommons: June’s CC Salon NYC / @OpenVideo Conf Pre-Party: http://bit.ly/jAk1b Facebook RSVP: http://bit.ly/qJU3b

instead of this:

June’s CC Salon NYC / @OpenVideo Conf Pre-Party: http://bit.ly/jAk1b Facebook RSVP: http://bit.ly/qJU3b (via @creativecommons)

Why would Tweetie make it so difficult to use the RT convention over their suggested via convention?

This answer seems seems to be rooted in a minority view held by the creator of Tweetie. He doesn’t think the RT form is “cool” and thinks that it discourages people from “thinking for themselves”.

Or something.

The points raised against RT followed by my thoughts:

• Its not cool

I don’t know how to reply to this. Is the @ symbol in e-mail cool? Its a convention, get over it.

• You’re “regurgitating” tweets as opposed to linking to them.

So what? A massive amount of human creation is “me too”; there’s no reason to discourage this on a software level. Let people filter out the “me-too’ers” using their own agency and following habits. You’re not going to suddenly encourage people to be more original by breaking your own software and bucking a convention.

• RT is for verbatim forwarding and that’s the equivalent of spamming.

There are plenty of people that I stopped following on Twitter because their output consisted only of RT’s, and I agree, they were spammy. But again, hiding a useful feature because you think its going to decrease spam is naive at best, and fascist at worst.

More importantly, however, there’s value in verbatim copying: you preserve the tone and the meaning of the source. How should I retweet something that Shaq says, if I want my followers to see it, supposing they don’t already follow him? Am I supposed to rewrite Shaq’s words? The curious way in which Shaq interprets the English language on Twitter is one of the best reasons to follow him. Rewriting Shaq’s tweets would kill the meaning, and so would linking to them.

I also fail to see the difference in the claim that all retweets should be rewritten or linked from the claim  that all journalists must rewrite and link quotes from their sources. The point is making the actual quote available in their words, right now, not through a link, and not through your lens.

• RT is hard to understand, via is easier to understand.

I actually have sympathy for this, to a certain extent. Many friends were confused by RT when joining twitter, but they asked questions and discovered the meaning. Same with e-mail.

• Standardization is important.

You’re making my point for me!

One final point against Tweetie’s suggested convention: when you use (via @ … ) you’re adding 3 unnecessary characters compared to RT, which are precious when faced with Twitter’s 140 limit.

Anyway, at the end of the day, the developer of Tweetie’s behavior represents a strong argument for software freedom. If you can view the source, modify it, and distribute a new version, why not just fork the project and “fix” the bug instead?

I suppose this is what I get for using closed source software. Too bad Tweetie works better than the open source clients.

The following is a modified version of Seth Finkelstein’s Guardian column “Twitter is a sucker’s game that only serves the needs of a tiny elite”:

Let me start by confessing I do have a Google account. But I won’t be fooled again. That is, I refuse to once more play the attention-seeking game, where everyone enriches the contest runner and surrounding marketers for the privilege of aspiring to be one of the very few big winners.

Google is a “search engine”. Users can search quickly for web pages from a host, though the web pages are of dubious quality. Think USENET posts, but faster and less organized.

If someone finds your web page to you, they’re called a “visitor”, while subscribing to a website feed is called “reader”. The language is already revealing of the structure.

When I first heard of Google, I made the mistake of thinking it was like USENET, an old system that allows a group to exchange content among themselves. So I wondered why there was such a fuss over a variant of that ancient idea.

After I saw Google in use, I realised the difference was that, while USENET had all participants equal, Google implements a distilled version of many problematic aspects of posting to newsgroups. Namely, a one-to-many broadcasting system that serves the needs of high-attention individuals, combined with an appeal to low-attention individuals that the details of one’s life matter to an audience.

The “A-list” phenomenon, where a few sources with a large readership dominate the information flow on a topic, was particularly stark. Since the numbers of “visitors” and “readers” are visible, the usual steep ranking curve was immediately evident. A highly ranked site is free to attack anyone lower down the ranks, as there’s no way for the wronged party to effectively reply to the same readers.

Getting a significant readership and thus being socially prominent is also important. Hence, there are major incentives to churn out quick punditry that is pleasing to partisans.

And Google evangelism has gone down a path similar to USENET evangelism. There is the same two-step of arguing: roughly, it can be both diary/chat and journalism, thus a promoter can switch back and forth between those two concepts whenever convenient. The word “conversation” is contorted in a now familiar way, to mean mutual pontification among a tiny elite. The dream of potential stardom of a quasi-intellectual sort is dangled in front of the masses, though the only beneficiaries would be the data-mining companies profiting off the result.

When the entrepreneur Jason Calacanis offered $250,000 to have his product’s account be a “suggested link” for two years, saying, “Google has the ability to unleash a direct marketing business the likes of which the world has never seen”, that was a blunt illustration of the real dynamics at work. Though Google didn’t accept his offer, monetisation must eventually happen somehow. People aren’t being connected, they’re being bundled up and sold.

Recently, venture capitalists invested $35m (£23m) in Google (adding to an earlier $20m in funding). Such a sizable investment can buy a corresponding amount of hype. I suspect money is partially responsible for some (though by no means all) of the breathless media coverage Google has garnered.

Note the potential survivor’s bias effect. You may far more often hear from the rare person who has benefited from the service, than one who reports trying it and finding it a total waste of time. Some sceptical analysis by Nielsen Wire has pointed out that user retention is relatively low: “But despite the hockey-stick growth chart, Google faces an uphill battle in making sure these flocks of new users are enticed to return to the nest.”

Google is low-level celebrity for the chattering class. And the pathologies of celebrity are all on display, including the exploitative industries that prey on the human desire to be heard and noticed. My answer to Google’s slogan of “Are you feeling lucky?” is: “I’m not playing a sucker’s game.”

Aside from searching and replacing “Twitter” with “Google” I also replaced “IRC” with “USENET” and replaced “follower” with “visitor” and “reader”, etc.

The effect is certainly entertaining if not surprising: most of Seth’s criticism’s could be levied against Google and the web a decade ago. Admittedly, other parts don’t make any sense, but many of the overall criticisms still hold. Google’s ranking of sites is based on webmasters linking to those sites. The more links to a particular site, the more Google deems it valuable and the more exposed it becomes in Google search results and the more likely that site will retain larger number of readers.

The reason Seth’s criticisms apply to both Twitter and Google is because they are not criticisms of a certain platform or service, but criticisms of how humans filter for value in social environments. We rationally aggregate things that we consider valuable regardless of whether they’re web sites or people’s status updates. When we have tools to help us organize and discover those things, those tools are going to beat out other less efficient ones.

Twitter is filled with heaps of suckers, as Seth would put it. But the web is also filled with heaps of suckers. Sturgeon’s law applies in all mediums. Google found a way to aggregate this organize the most valuable information in an efficient matter, and it became the standard tool for discovering better information. Twitter is now helping us discover it in another medium and context: the real time short text message.

Seth seems to be worried that individual dissenting voices are being drowned out in the litany of “elite” or “celebrity” voices which are rewarded by massive numbers of followers and those voices will just be reinforced by Twitter. So what? Celebrity names and issues dominate Google’s search terms every year. This doesn’t diminish the general value of the platform.

Seth’s worry is premised on a false dichotomy. Even if there is plenty of junk on Twitter, that doesn’t mean we must ignore the platform all together. The same criticism could have been levied against Google, and even the web itself. But Seth wouldn’t know — he doesn’t actually use Twitter, he follows exactly 0 people. As Mike Masnick said, debating the value of Twitter with a non-user is like debating the value of music with someone’s who’s deaf.

For those of you who don’t use Twitter, for the record, it’s not difficult at all to calibrate one’s Twitter feed into something useful. Just choose to find the people whom you might be interested in hearing from occasionally, and ignore the rest. Just like Google.

Obviously, this is written by someone with a deep understanding of copyright and the Internet: Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the EFF. Congrats Brad, this video beats the rest of them.

Brad explains the video here, but you can also read more about about Downfall remixes here.

A lot of my time is spent thinking about the Internet as a public place. That may seem like an obvious and intuitive concept to grasp, but it is practically difficult for a number of reasons. Some of these reasons are legal, such as copyright law, and other are technical.

Many of Facebook’s struggles are, at their core, symptoms of a public vs. private schizophrenia massive centralized platforms are beginning to suffer from. Wikipedia is one solid counter-example: most decisions and policies are the result of decentralized consensus or vote.

The current row over whether Facebook should allow Holocaust deniers the right to organize at first appears as a freedom of speech issue. This is certainly how the Facebook team has justified allowing certain groups to stay online. But because it is all happening on Facebook’s servers, it is also (and perhaps singularly) a Facebook Terms of Service issue.

Facebook has the right to throw people off their service for reasons they deem appropriate just as Club Penguin has the right to censor children from cursing at each other when playing a video game. Facebook is not the United States government and it is therefore not subject to the same kind of first amendment scrutiny when censoring speech.

But Facebook is a government of some kind. With over 175 million users, the site is now more populous than most countries. They’re also holding elections and convening debate over the rights and responsibilities of their users. It’s clear that they are governing user’s actions much in the same way that a government governs citizens’ actions, but it is now totally unclear what inalienable rights Facebook users have when engaging with their friends and colleagues in what has become a public space. It is my hope that projects like Autonomo.us will help shift the debate towards greater user freedom and data portability in the long run, but we aren’t there yet. More specifically, whether Facebook respects an external bill of rights (as drafted by Autonomou.us) is a separate issue of whether Facebook will ever legally be considered a public or private space. This battle has occurred in the physical world, and the law seems conflicted over whether massive private spaces can be considered public. In Iowa, malls are considered private property, but New Jersey’s State Supreme Court disagrees, and the 1980s Supreme Court decision, Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, the court decided that states like California could affirm free speech rights in places like malls.

The ToS modification fiasco is another example of Facebook’s public vs. private schizophrenia. At the heart of the blow-up over the revised Terms of Service, was a sentence claiming that users content “will survive” on Facebook despite said user deleting an account. Consumerist rightly interpreted this phrase as allowing Facebook to exploit (if not behave as if they own) your content in perpetuity. This was a dire and cynical prediction, but not unfounded.  Julius Harper did a masterful job of organizing the outrage over the modified ToS and was subsequently invited into the negotiations, which was certainly a step in the right direction.

A good-will interpretation of Facebook’s new phrasing was that the sites administrators couldn’t be absolutely sure that all of your content would be gone once you deleted your account. Consequently, Facebook’s lawyers wanted to preclude liability (privacy, copyright and otherwise) if your content happened to show up somewhere in a backup or internally archived version of the site. Anyone familliar with running a user platform (and backing it up) will be aware of the complexity involved in keeping track of user data across many servers, so do not dismiss this challenge as an easy task until you talk to a server administrator.

But there was also a feature-based reasoning behind Facebook’s ToS modification. Facebook did not want to be obligated to remove messages, wall posts, and photos from other users accounts and inboxes simply because one user deleted their account.

If Alice sent Bill a message on Facebook, and then deleted her account, should Facebook be obligated to remove Alice’s message from Bill’s Facebook Inbox? This is something the site could do very easily. We’ve all seen instances of our friends removing status updates, profile information, or photos, so there’s no question Facebook can unilaterally perform the same action without our permission. But our intuition says that they shouldn’t do this. Even though Bill may not own the copyright to reproduce Alice’s content, he should at least be afforded the dignity of perpetually retaining a record of his communication with her, despite her desire to remove her presence from Facebook.

This is how the Internet works: if Alice and Bob were communicating over e-mail, there would be no question as to whether Bob would have the right to retain Alice’s e-mail even if she deletes her e-mail account.

But Facebook is not the public Internet, where users have no control of servers across the world. Quite the opposite: Facebook does have control over everything and can actually unilaterally delete e-mails out of inboxes. This presents a unique liability and responsibility that the company’s lawyers were interested in attenuating. I wouldn’t be surprised it was motivated by threat of a lawsuit by an angry user wanting *all* of their content off the site, including messages sent to other users.

Ultimately, Facebook’s desire to retain the metaphors of Internet communication is at odds with the company’s power to unilaterally control that communication. While Facebook actually has the power to delete Alice’s e-mails from Bob’s Facebook Inbox, they choose not to, out of respect for norms established long ago on the public Internet. In other words, Facebook is attempting to behave like a public space while remaining a private company by crafting its own rules and laws.

There’s also the issue of public disclosure of private facts on Facebook. American law prevents me from disclosing private facts about Alice that are not news worthy. However, if Alice had disclosed such private facts in a public space (perhaps in front of a large audience), I can pass on the facts to others and even publish them.

But what if Alice discloses her private fact on her Facebook profile? It remains private in the sense that only I and her friends can see it by logging into Facebook’s private service, but it also arguably public in the sense that I and her friends are also an audience. Does it matter how many friends she has? What privacy settings did she have in place?

The public and private nature of Facebook feels very complicated.

In the end, I don’t think the phrase “walled garden” suits the scale and character of these kinds of issues anymore, as we’re no longer talking just about access to content. These issues are about government, control, public spaces, and censorship, so our freedom and laws should apply accordingly.

MPAA shows how to videorecord a TV set from timothy vollmer on Vimeo.

This video is shot by my friend Timothy Vollmer at the current DMCA exemption hearings. The issue is whether Congress should allow educators and students the rights to rip DVDs for educational purposes. Peter Decherney succeeded in establishing this right for film historians working at universities, and is now seeking to broaden it to all educators and students.

In the video, a representative from the MPAA is demonstrating that it is “easy” to access and compile content from a DVD without the need to rip it using decryption software. Their suggested technique? A camcorder pointed at a flatscreen hooked into the audio signal.

This is evil and hypocritical a number of reasons. First, the MPAA has positioned themselves against camcording movies. Here, they’re showing how easy it is to do. They’re also one of the main organizations which have successfully lobbied for criminal penalties against people bringing camcorders into movie theaters.

Second, the software used in the presentation is VLC. VLC disables the MPAA’s price fixing scheme known as region encoding and can also decrypt DVDs, providing yet another example of where the MPAA thinks their own rules don’t apply to them.

Third, the MPAA has been leading the pack in attempts to close the “analog hole” through legislation and collusion with hardware manufacturers. The analog hole is precisely the phenomenon demonstrated in this video; since audio and visual data needs to be broadcast into an analog signal eventually (our brains are not capable of decrypting 1s and 0s into images and audio yet), there will always be a avenue in which to record media so long as our computers obey us.

“Closing the analog hole” refers to forcing manufactures to cripple hardware so that it is incapable of broadcasting analog signals and also incapable of recording them. It is the stuff of a dystopian science fiction plot not technical reality.

Ultimately this video demonstrates the insidiousness of the MPAA’s strategy: they want to force educators to use a technique that they’re simultaneously lobbying to prohibit.

End result? The precise strategy suggested by the MPAA, the analog hole, gets legislated away by the MPAA, and educators are left wasting money and time on multiple copies of crippled media.

UPDATE: Another way I’m thinking about this video: it proves that the MPAA knows closing the analog hole is impossible, thus exposing their attempts at legislation as disingenuous.

Props go to Tim for posting such a illustrative video (not to mention the nerve to post clips of Harry Potter under fair use!)

I spent the first week of college living through September 11th in and around New York City and have since endured recurring plane crash nightmares.

Which is why I was relieved to find out after the fact that today’s close call with Air Force One and two F-16s was a photo-op rather than another generation-defining tragedy.

Reading the New York Times’ extensive coverage of the episode on their blog had me wondering about how the event unfolded on everyone’s-favorite-real-time-reporting-source: Twitter. What was the first tweet that observed the fly by? Was it panicked? How many people retweeted it? What would have Twitter looked like on 9/11?

We’ll never know, but I’ve done a bit of searching for terms related to today’s news (“nyc plane”)* and have discovered one of the first tweets at around 10:30am (around the time of the first flyover) by n8s8e asking JetSetCD whether Obama was supposed to be in NYC:

Shortly after, @The_Pace asks a similar question, and then @hugoyles mentions that Goldman’s trading floor was evacuated. Then @ChicagoSooner reports that CNBC had confirmed the sightings. @Rithesh asked if there was a plane crash in lower NYC, and then @grapejamboy breaks the news that the Pentagon confirmed the flights as a photo-op. From then on, most tweets cover the story properly.

It’s clear that Twitter beat traditional news outlets today in relaying that something was happening with a plane over NYC’s downtown skies. However, as @Rithesh’s tweet demonstrates, there is potential that misinformation gets disseminated (there was no crash) as well, so the system is not noise proof.

There’s also a limit to what can be gleaned from Twitter search at any given moment, and a very real chance that all the signal will itself become noise. As commentators smarter than I have observed, this makes Twitter a fantastic “raw material” in a journalist’s process, but not a final product itself.

But really, what’s the difference between leaving a search open in Tweetdeck and leaving CNN on in the background?

UPDATE: Zander points out this great piece in the Nieman Journalism lab breaking down the Twitter accounts of today in much better and greater detail than I did.

*This search is not scientific at all and is probably leaving out earlier sightings. I tried searching for “plane” but Twitter’s search is frustratingly limited to narrowing queries by day as opposed to hour and minute (which would be ideal here) and will only deliver a max of 1500 results for any term. There are obvious security reasons for this, but it presents a fantastic example of how Twitter can capitalize on search: I’m  willing to shell out a couple of dollars for access to do more sophisticated searching.