The Stanford Digital Library Project

The Stanford Digital Library Project stated its goal thus:

The Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project will develop enabling technologies for an integrated “virtual” library to provide an array of new services and uniform access to networked information collections. The Integrated Digital Library will create a shared environment linking everything from personal information collections, to collections of conventional libraries, to large data collections shared by scientists.

Stanford librarians Vicky Reich and Rebecca Wesley provided the "library" input for the research.

Wayback Machine, 11/11/98

In particular Vicky explained citation indices, the concept behind Page Rank, to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Andy Bechtolsheim was famously instrumental in persuading them to turn their demo of a Page Rank search engine into Google, the company. In his fascinating interview in the Computer History Museum's oral history collection, Andy explains why the idea of ranking pages by their inbound links was so important.

Below the fold I have taken the liberty of transcribing and cleaning up the relevant section of Andy's stream of conciousness, both because it is important history and because it exactly reflects the Andy I was privileged to know in the early days of Sun Microsystems.

Even More On The Ad Bubble

I've been writing for some time about the hype around online advertising. There's a lot of evidence that it is ineffective. Recently, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office concluded an investigation into Cambridge Analytica's involvement in the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum. At The Register, Shaun Nichols summarizes their conclusions in UK privacy watchdog wraps up probe into Cambridge Analytica and... it was all a little bit overblown, no?:

El Reg has heard on good authority from sources in British political circles that Cambridge Analytica's advertised powers of online suggestion were rather overblown and in fact mostly useless. In the end, it was skewered by its own hype, accused of tangibly influencing the Brexit and presidential votes on behalf of political parties and campaigners using its Facebook data. Yet, no evidence, according to the ICO, could be found supporting those specific claims.

Below the fold I look at this, a recent book on the topic, and other evidence that has emerged since I wrote Contextual vs. Behavioral Advertising.

Contextual vs. Behavioral Advertising

In his New York Times op-ed entitled What if We All Just Sold Non-Creepy Advertising? Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo (Jack Dorsey's and my default search engine), draws a clear distinction between the two types of Web advertising:

There is no reason to fear that sites cannot still make money with advertising. That’s because there are already two kinds of highly profitable online ads: contextual ads, based on the content being shown on screen, and behavioral ads, based on personal data collected about the person viewing the ad. Behavioral ads work by tracking your online behavior and compiling a profile about you using your internet activities (and even your offline activities in some cases) to send you targeted ads.

He argues that the creepiness of behavioral ads isn't necessary for sites to make money from ads. Below the fold I look at the evidence that Weinberg is right.

Regulating Social Media: Part 1

It has become obvious that self-regulated social media are a threat to pretty much every country's national security. This is intended to be the start of a series looking at the range of suggestions as to how, at least in the United States, it might be done, including (I hope) at least these:

• How to Regulate (and Not Regulate) Social Media by Jack Balkin
• Bipartisan legislation would force Big Tech to allow interoperability with small competitors by Cory Doctorow
• The Good And The Bad Of The ACCESS Act To Force Open APIs On Big Social Media by Mike Masnick
• Testimony by Maciej Cegłowski to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs for their hearing on Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy
• A Framework for Regulating Competition on the Internet by Ben Thompson.
• A Better Internet Is Waiting for Us by Annalee Newitz

Below the fold, I start with the first of them.

Advertising Is A Bubble

The surveillance economy, and thus the stratospheric valuations of:

Facebook and Alphabet (Google’s parent), which rely on advertising for, respectively, 97% and 88% of their sales.

depend on the idea that targeted advertising, exploiting as much personal information about users as possible, results in enough increased sales to justify its cost.This is despite the fact the both experimental research and the experience of major publishers and advertisers show the opposite. Now, The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn provides an explanation for this disconnect. Follow me below the fold to find out about it and enjoy some wonderful quotes from them.

The Data Isn't Yours (updated)

Most discussions of Internet privacy, for example Jaron Lanier Fixes the Internet, systematically elide the distinction between "my data" and "data about me". In doing so they systematically exaggerate the value of "my data".

The typical interaction that generates data about an Internet user involves two parties, a client and a server. Both parties know what happened (a link was clicked, a purchase was made, ...). This isn't "my data", it is data shared between the client ("me") and the server. The difference is that the server can aggregate the data from many interactions and, by doing so, create something sufficiently valuable that others will pay for it. The client ("my data") cannot.

Below the fold, an update.

Google's Fenced Garden

In the wake of Lina Khan's masterful January 2017 Yale Law Journal article Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, both anti-trust investigations of the FAANGs and anti-trust remedies have been consuming extraordinary numbers of pixels. Although the investigations cover all the major platforms, the discussion of remedies has tended to focus on Facebook and Amazon. Below the fold, I ask whether, assuming any of the multifarious investigations lead to anything other than cost-of-doing-business fines, any of the proposed remedies would be effective against Google. I apologize for the inordinate length of this post; it seemed that the more I wrote the more there was to write.

What is Amazon?

In Why It's Hard To Escape Amazon's Long Reach, Paris Martineau and Louise Matsakis have compiled an amazingly long list of businesses that exist inside Amazon's big tent. After it went up, they had to keep updating it as people pointed out businesses they'd missed. In most of those businesses, Amazon's competitors are at a huge disadvantage:

While its retail business is the most visible to consumers, the cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, is the cash cow. AWS has significantly higher profit margins than other parts of the company. In the third quarter, Amazon generated $3.7 billion in operating income (before taxes). More than half of the total, $2.1 billon, came from AWS, on just 12 percent of Amazon’s total revenue. Amazon can use its cloud cash to subsidize the goods it ships to customers, helping to undercut retail competitors who don’t have similar adjunct revenue streams.

In the mid-50s my father wrote a textbook, Organisation of retail distribution, with a second edition in the mid-60s. He would have been fascinated by Amazon. I've written about Amazon from many different viewpoints, including storage as a service, and anti-trust, so I'm fascinated with Amazon, too. Now, when you put recent posts by two different writers together, an extraordinarily interesting picture emerges, not just of Amazon but of the risks inherent to the "friction-free" nature of the Web:

• Zack Kanter's What is Amazon? is easily the most insightful thing I've ever read about Amazon. It starts by examining how Walmart's "slow AI" transformed retail, continues by describing how Amazon transformed Walmart's "slow AI" into one better suited to the Internet, and ends up with a discussion of how Amazon's "slow AI" seems recently to have made a fundamental mistake.
• Izabella Kaminska's series Amazon (sub)Prime? and Amazon (sub)Prime - Part II provides the deep dive to go with Kanter's big picture, looking in detail into one of the many symptoms of the "slow AI's" apparent mistake.

Below the fold, a long meditation on these posts.

Facebook's Catch-22

John Herrman's How Secrecy Fuels Facebook Paranoia takes the long way round to come to a very simple conclusion. My shorter version of Herrman's conclusion is this. In order to make money Facebook needs to:

1. Convince advertisers that it is an effective means of manipulating the behavior of the mass of the population.
2. Avoid regulation by convincing governments that it is not an effective means of manipulating the behavior of the mass of the population.

The dilemma is even worse because among the advertisers Facebook needs to believe in its effectiveness are individual politicians and political parties, both big advertisers! This Catch-22 is the source of Facebook's continuing PR problems, listed by Ryan Mac. Follow me below the fold for details.

Trust In Digital Content

This is the fourth and I hope final part of a series about trust in digital content that might be called:

Is this the real  life?
Is this just fantasy

  The series so far moved down the stack:

• The first part was Certificate Transparency, about how we know we are getting content from the Web site we intended to.
• The second part was Securing The Software Supply Chain, about how we know we're running the software we intended to, such as the browser that got the content whose certificate was transparent.
• The third part was Securing The Hardware Supply Chain, about how we can know that the hardware the software we secured is running on is doing what we expect it to.

Below the fold this part asks whether, even if the certificate, software and hardware were all perfectly secure, we could trust what we were seeing.

Vint Cerf on Traceability

Vint Cerf's Traceability addresses a significant problem:

how to preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet while protecting against the harmful behaviors that have emerged in this global medium. That this is a significant challenge cannot be overstated. The bad behaviors range from social network bullying and misinformation to email spam, distributed denial of service attacks, direct cyberattacks against infrastructure, malware propagation, identity theft, and a host of other ills

Cerf's proposed solution is:

differential traceability. The ability to trace bad actors to bring them to justice seems to me an important goal in a civilized society. The tension with privacy protection leads to the idea that only under appropriate conditions can privacy be violated. By way of example, consider license plates on cars. They are usually arbitrary identifiers and special authority is needed to match them with the car owners ... This is an example of differential traceability; the police department has the authority to demand ownership information from the Department of Motor Vehicles that issues the license plates. Ordinary citizens do not have this authority.

Below the fold I examine this proposal and one of the responses.

What Does The Decentralized Web Need?

In, among others, It Isn't About The Technology, Decentralized Web Summit2018: Quick Takes and Special Report on Decentralizing the Internet I've been skeptical at considerable length about the prospect of a decentralized Web. I would really like the decentralized Web to succeed, so I admit I'm biased, just pessimistic.

I was asked to summarize what would be needed for success apart from working technology (which we pretty much have)? My answer was four things:

• A sustainable business model
• Anti-trust enforcement
• The killer app
• A way to remove content

Below the fold, I try to explain of each of them at more readable length.

Josh Marshall on Facebook

Last September in Josh Marshall on Google, I wrote:

a quick note to direct you to Josh Marshall's must-read A Serf on Google's Farm. It is a deep dive into the details of the relationship between Talking Points Memo, a fairly successful independent news publisher, and Google. It is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the business of publishing on the Web.

Marshall wasn't happy with TPM's deep relationship with Google. In Has Web Advertising Jumped The Shark? I quoted him:

We could see this coming a few years ago. And we made a decisive and longterm push to restructure our business around subscriptions. So I'm confident we will be fine. But journalism is not fine right now. And journalism is only one industry the platform monopolies affect. Monopolies are bad for all the reasons people used to think they were bad. They raise costs. They stifle innovation. They lower wages. And they have perverse political effects too. Huge and entrenched concentrations of wealth create entrenched and dangerous locuses of political power.

Have things changed? Follow me below the fold.

Might Need Some Work

"I Agree" - Source

Cory Doctorow writes:

"I Agree" is Dima Yarovinsky's art installation for Visualizing Knowledge 2018, with printouts of the terms of service for common apps on scrolls of colored paper, creating a bar chart of the fine print that neither you, nor anyone else in the history of the world, has ever read.

Earlier, Doctorow explained that the GDPR requires that:

Under the new directive, every time a European's personal data is captured or shared, they have to give meaningful consent, after being informed about the purpose of the use with enough clarity that they can predict what will happen to it.

Correlated Cryptojacking

On February 11 at least 4,275 Web sites were found to have been simultaneously cryptojacked:

they include The City University of New York (cuny.edu), Uncle Sam's court information portal (uscourts.gov), Lund University (lu.se), the UK's Student Loans Company (slc.co.uk), privacy watchdog The Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) and the Financial Ombudsman Service (financial-ombudsman.org.uk), plus a shedload of other .gov.uk and .gov.au sites, UK NHS services, and other organizations across the globe.

Manchester.gov.uk, NHSinform.scot, agriculture.gov.ie, Croydon.gov.uk, ouh.nhs.uk, legislation.qld.gov.au, the list goes on.

They were all running Coinhive's Monero miner in visitors' browsers. How and why did this happen and what should these sites have been doing to prevent it? Follow me below the fold.

Web Advertising and the Shark, revisited (and updated)

There's a lot to add to Has Web Advertising Jumped The Shark? (which is a violation of  Betteridge's Law). Follow me below the fold for some of it.

It Isn't About The Technology

A year and a half ago I attended Brewster Kahle's Decentralized Web Summit and wrote:

I am working on a post about my reactions to the first two days (I couldn't attend the third) but it requires a good deal of thought, so it'll take a while.

As I recall, I came away from the Summit frustrated. I posted the TL;DR version of the reason half a year ago in Why Is The Web "Centralized"? :

What is the centralization that decentralized Web advocates are reacting against? Clearly, it is the domination of the Web by the FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and a few other large companies such as the cable oligopoly.

These companies came to dominate the Web for economic not technological reasons.

Yet the decentralized Web advocates persist in believing that the answer is new technologies, which suffer from the same economic problems as the existing decentralized technologies underlying the "centralized" Web we have. A decentralized technology infrastructure is necessary for a decentralized Web but it isn't sufficient. Absent an understanding of how the rest of the solution is going to work, designing the infrastructure is an academic exercise.

It is finally time for the long-delayed long-form post. I should first reiterate that I'm greatly in favor of the idea of a decentralized Web based on decentralized storage. It would be a much better world if it happened. I'm happy to dream along with my friend Herbert Van de Sompel's richly-deserved Paul Evan Peters award lecture entitled Scholarly Communication: Deconstruct and Decentralize?. He describes a potential future decentralized system of scholarly communication built on existing Web protocols. But even he prefaces the dream with a caveat that the future he describes "will most likely never exist".

I agree with Herbert about the desirability of his vision, but I also agree that it is unlikely. Below the fold I summarize Herbert's vision, then go through a long explanation of why I think he's right about the low likelihood of its coming into existence.

The Box Conspiracy

Growing up in London left me with a life-long interest in the theatre (note the spelling).  Although I greatly appreciate polished productions of classics, such as the Royal National Theatre's 2014 King Lear, my particular interests are:

• Long-form theatre, such as Tony Kushner's 7+ hour Angels in America, Ken Campbell's Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool's 9-hour Illuminatus Trilogy, or Taylor Mac's 24-hour A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.
• New plays, for which I support San Francisco's Magic Theatre and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Ground Floor program.
• Plays that experiment with the form of theatre, such as the Royal National Theatre's London Road and Earthquakes in London.

I've been writing recently about Web advertising, reading Tim Wu's book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, and especially watching Dude, You Broke The Future, Charlie Stross' keynote for the 34th Chaos Communications Congress. As I do so, I can't help remembering a show I saw nearly a quarter of a century ago that fit the last of those categories. Below the fold I pay tribute to the prophetic vision of an under-appreciated show and its author.

Has Web Advertising Jumped The Shark?

The Web runs on advertising. Has Web advertising jumped the shark? The relevant Wikipedia article says:

The usage of "jump the shark" has subsequently broadened beyond television, indicating the moment when a brand, design, franchise, or creative effort's evolution declines, or when it changes notably in style into something unwelcome.

There are four big problems with Web advertising as it currently exists:

1. Bad guys love it.
2. Readers hate it.
3. Webmasters hate it.
4. Advertisers find it wastes money.

#4 just might have something to do with #3, #2 and #1. It seems that there's a case to be made. Below the fold I try to make it.