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Where It’s @

During Internet History Month, we bring you a happy-talk Today Show segment from 1994 wherein Brian and Katie ask, “What is internet, anyway?”

Also, for your consideration, this vintage Prodigy ad.

Feds Consider ID Plan

Last week, Ars Technica reported, officials from the Commerce Department and private security firms met at Stanford to discuss the development of a government administered digital identity ecosystem. “What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities,” Commerce Secretary Gary Locke told the attendees. The full text of Mr. Locke’s speech is posted on the Commerce Department’s site.

An interesting feature of the Commerce plan is the use of cellphones as security tokens. Businesses are already doing this. Bank of America, for example, issues a text message containing a security code to a customer’s cellphone as a prerequisite to larger online transactions. The customer has to input the security code to complete the transaction.

Despite what Libertarians and privacy mavens may think, there is a need for online identity verification and government may have a role to play in that process. The government already issues Social Security numbers, drivers licenses and passports, so it’s not unreasonable to look to a government agency to help administer a digital ID. In November, the German government rolled out a new national identity card with an RFID chip in it. The European Union is still wrestling with the concept of an EU identity card.

Like the other cards issued by the federal and state governments in the US, the digital ID would have to be voluntary. One would hope that a national digital identity program would also adhere to the Laws of Identity set out by Microsoft’s Kim Cameron in 2009.

Another promising feature of the plan set out by Commerce Secretary Locke was the establishment of NPEs — Non-Person Entities, such as corporations and service providers. Imagine how much spam would be eliminated if you set your mail system to only accept messages from validated NPEs and individuals.

There is still a lot of work to be done on this plan. There have already been some security flaws found in the German ID card. However, the institution of a safe and reliable identification method will ensure the viability of the net as a place for commerce and communication.

Wikileaks and Distributed Information

Whatever your opinion about Julian Assange and Wikileaks’ release of US State Department documents, the whole affair has become a case study in censorship and open networks. As you’ve probably heard, Amazon kicked the Wikileaks site off their servers December 2 and EveryDNS booted the site December 3. Effectively, www.wikileaks.org is blocked, but if you go to www.wikileaks.ch you will find a working copy of the site. How does this happen?

James Cowie, writing on the renesys blog, does a good job of explaining the global game of whack-a-mole going on now with Wikileaks. As Cowie writes, “To prevent a repeat performance of the EveryDNS experience, the Swiss site [.ch is the Swiss country domain -- ed.] seems to have been selected for heavy reinforcement through DNS diversification. If you ask for the authoritative servers for wikileaks.ch today, you’ll find no fewer than 14 different authoritative nameservers, spread across eleven different autonomous systems, in eight different countries, from Switzerland to Canada to Malaysia.”

In short, the internet is doing what it was designed to do: transmit information even if one or two, or two hundred nodes on the net are disabled. As Cowie notes in his conclusion:

You can’t burn down the Library of Alexandria any more — it will respawn in someone’s basement in Stockholm, or Denver, or Beijing.

Meanwhile, New York Magazine’s Intelligencer column has a pretty smart take on Assange’s emerging social media strategy (hint: check out #cablegate on Twitter).

FCC Takes Half Step Toward Open Net

Yesterday Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski put forward a framework of rules for preserving an open internet. The chairman’s points are outlined in a brief Huffington Post article and can be heard in full in this  video of the chairman’s December 1 speech on YouTube.  “Our rules will protect against corporate gatekeepers prioritizing access to one person’s content over another’s,” Mr. Genachowski said.  In summary, the chairman’s points seem to agree with the principles of net neutrality. However, there is a lot left unsaid.

Unfortunately, Chairman Genachowski said nothing about reversing a 2005 FCC vote that categorized the internet as an “information service” not a “telecommunications service”. Congress has given the FCC broad powers to regulate telecommunications services; the regulation of “information services” is something of a gray area. Also, as noted in this New York Times article, the chairman’s remarks offer weak protections against “paid prioritization” or “specialized services”, two of the latest terms-of-art put forward by the telecoms to make tiered internet service more palatable. Also unsaid in Genachowski’s statement is any attempt to ensure open access to the net over wireless connections.

More can be found on the FCC site. The commission is set to vote on these rules December 21.

Clean Up Your Bookmarks

For a long time I’ve wished for a utility that would help me clean up my bookmarks. In 15 or so years of web browsing, I’ve accumulated over 2000 of these links with no good method to identify and erase the bad links.

Most people wouldn’t give this a second thought — ‘bad data happens, so what?’ And really, with faster processors and cheap storage, there’s no real penalty for letting detritus accumulate in your data. Probably it’s a symptom of OCD to even worry about dead links in a favorites file. But I did.

So it was with relief and gratitude that I found Andy Halford’s CheckPlaces add-on for Firefox. According to the write-up on Mozilla’s Firefox site CheckPlaces, “Checks your bookmarks are valid and the pages still exist, checks for duplicates and for empty folders and can restore missing favicons”. It does all that simply and with a minimum of effort. You can download your copy of CheckPlaces here.

So what percentage of the 2000 links were bad? About 10 percent.