Transparent Commons

/ Christopher Parsons

We live in a society where there is a strong desire to commoditize everything – water, energy, pollution, and each packet of data that is passed along digital networks. This desire comes from a position that (at least in part) holds that by giving everything a value, by associating costs with the degradation or poor management of commodities, it becomes possible for society to operate more ‘efficiently’. This is the great myth of capitalistic societies; that the deregulation of social goods provides a means to maximally divide wealth, opportunity, and power across the society. In Canada it is NAFTA, and its associated market pressures, that have been largely responsible for the deregulation of social programs and Crown Corporations that were previously responsible for providing core services to Canadians. We now see the specter of similar efficiencies mobilizing to ensure that bandwidth is distributed more efficiently, that people pay proportionate fees for the bandwidth and the actions they use that bandwidth for. In the process, private corporations will limit the possibilities of the Internet – they will stifle innovation by militating how their networks can be used and, as a result, inhibit development that can unexpectedly occur at each bend of these digital highways.

The Notion of Commons

It is possible that you’re not entirely familiar with the notion of the Commons, save for having heard in news reports of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, without any real guidance as to what the catchphrase means. To put it quickly, the Commons identifies all places, spaces, items, and products that belong to society at large rather than to any particular individual. This can be better explained by turning to town squares and roads. In the case of town squares, they operate as public space that is available to any and all members of the public to use. Because there is a greater advantage to having those spaces available to a large number of people than if there were not they continue to remain in public hands. By having squares as a public space it is possible to hold various town functions, rallies, readings, and other social events, whereas if they were privately owned the these goods would not have a space where they could be grown, potentially stunting the growth of the community’s identity.

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Who Are You?

/ Christopher Parsons

If you visit this blog, or any facet of my website, I can identify the IP addresses that have been here. From there I can backtrack and identify the geographic location(s) that my visitors are from and, if I really desire, can spend the time to trace individual computers. This means that I can identify a visitor to the terminal that they access the computer from; I can bridge the ‘divide’ between digital environments and the analogue environment that we eat and breathe in.

Dynamic Identity and Static Info-Requirements

There is a common myth that you can be anyone that you want on the ‘net, that identity is effectively infinite, that identity is mutable insofar as people can assume a multitude of identities that deviate from their analogue identity. Some argue that this degree of mutability persists online, and often identify Massively Multiplayer Online (MMOs) environments such as Second Life (SL), Guildwars (GW), and World of Warcraft (WoW) as prime examples of this mutability, but such assertions are misleading at best. Players in these digital environments assume command of avatars that are created during the character generation phase of the MMO experience. During this phase you can choose your avatar’s gender, race, and basic ‘geographical’ starting locations.

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Who Decides ‘Analogue’ Citizenships?

/ Christopher Parsons

Typically when asked ‘who is responsible for setting citizenship rules’ there are two general answers that fall out. On the one hand we might hear ‘the government is responsible for setting down citizenship regulations,’ and on the other we might hear ‘the people are responsible for establishing membership guidelines.’ The latter explicitly locates power in the hands of the people, whereas the former recognises legitimised political bureaucracies and machinations are responsible for citizenship. In this post, I want to briefly look at some of the processes and theoretical discussions surrounding citizenship and immigration, and in particular how they relate to ‘Fortress Europe’ and a recent British controversy surrounding citizenship tests.

The Boundaries of Citizenship

Western nation-states have developed around liberal conceptions of citizenship. As a consequence, citizenship is associated with a particular legal status that requires members to fulfill a set of legally enforceable requirements. These requirements can include holding a certain amount of money, it may involve active participation as a citizen (i.e. remaining active in communities that one is being naturalised by volunteering, being active in local politics, etc), or being born in a geographic area.

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When Does Legal Publicity Punish Citizens?

/ Christopher Parsons

I use Facebook. I blog. I am a registered member of various online services, as well as several offline ones. Google, Facebook, several IT forums, credit card companies, my bank, and my employer (to name a few) can develop a fairly good picture of what I do and where I go on a regular basis. They can predict what I can, and likely will, do. While these issues are important, and I continue to write about them, for this post I want to attend to public documents. Specifically, I want to think about the implications of making legal decisions and court transcripts publicly accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

Welcome to Law, Online

As mentioned I use Google. I also use a series of other search engines, as I’m sure many others do. Some are specialized for journal articles, others for books to borrow, yet others for books to buy, and so on. Sometimes, when I’m bored, I also search for law cases to read up on (yes, I realize that makes it sound like I have too much time on my hands. It’s for research purposes, really!). Members of the Canadian public can request access to judgments that have been made in a Canadian court; while it may cost the first person to request the transcript a few dollars, subsequent visitors will face negligible costs where costs are imposed at all. Digitized judgments are increasingly placed online for major search engines index and which members of the public can access them at any time. This is done in accordance with precedent – citizens have always been able to read transcripts of court cases by visiting the court where the judgment is kept, finding the documents, and sitting down and reading them. The digitization of such documents (the argument goes) is just a natural extension of past systems of public use.

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Three-Strike Copyright

/ Christopher Parsons

To fully function as a student in today’s Western democracies means having access access to the Internet. In some cases this means students use Content Management Systems (CMSs) such as Drupal, Blackboard, or wikis (to name a few examples) to submit homework and participate in collaborate group assignments. CMSs are great because teachers can monitor the effectiveness of student’s group contributions and retain timestamps of when the student has turned in their work. Thus, when Sally doesn’t turn in her homework for a few weeks, and ‘clearly’ isn’t working with her group in the school-sanctioned CMS, the teacher can call home and talk with Sally’s parents about Sally’s poor performance.

At least, that’s the theory.

Three-Strike Copyright and Some Numbers

I’m not going to spend time talking about the digital divide (save to note that it’s real, and it penalises students in underprivileged environments by preventing them from acting as an equal in the digitized classroom), nor am I going to talk about the inherent privacy and security issues that arise as soon as teacher use digital management systems. No, I want to turn our attention across the Atlantic to Britain, where the British parliament will soon be considering legislation that would implement a three-strike copyright enforcement policy. France is in the process of implementing a similar law (with the expectation that it will be in place by summer 2008), which will turn ISPs into data police. Under these policies if a user (read: household) is caught infringing on copyright three times (they get two warnings) they can lose access to the ‘net following the third infringement.

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Techno-Trinkets: Firefox Bookmarks, Flash Books, and Redundent Data Storage

/ Christopher Parsons

This is going to be the beginning of a semi-regular series where I’ll post some of the (what I find) interesting things that I’ve been playing with/working on. I expect that the its will tend to be somehow related to my work in IT, my work as a graduate student, and my persistent work in developing a redundant large storage system at home.

Bookmark Sync and Sort

I work on a lot of computers on a regular basis. I have a series of them at work, my laptop (which travels pretty well everywhere with me), and a few at home. You know, in addition to all the other computers I pass by on a regular basis. To date, the best bookmark synchroniser that I found was Foxmarks, but I wasn’t a terribly large fan of putting my data on another person’s server. In addition to that, when you send your data it isn’t encrypted (while https data will be encrypted using standard Firefox encryption, it still means that what you have bookmarked will be sent along whatever networks you happen to be operating on). Ultimately, those two matters meant that I wasn’t particularly comfortable with the Foxmarks solution.

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