Radio Berkman

You don’t need to be a crowned Ranger class master hacker to sneak into someone’s email or facebook account these days. Which means that you’re not simply being a nervous nellie if you’re worried about security. In fact, users of public WiFi should be worried. If you use WiFi to access some of the most popular email and social networking services, like, gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, and facebook, your account information floats around in the air, often completely unsecured. You want some more fear with your coffee? Chris Soghoian, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, took a look into WiFi and account security to find out just how scary the situation is. CC-licensed music this week: General Fuzz – Cream Arslkhan – Love Odyssey

At $80,000 per song, the 24 tracks Jammie Thomas-Rasset is accused of sharing on Kazaa could represent the most expensive album of all time. Last week a federal jury suggested the fine, adding up to $1.92 million, seemed like a fair price for willful infringement. Thomas-Rasset’s pro bono legal team of Kiwi Camara and Joe Sibley promise to appeal the verdict in this, the first file sharing case to see trial. A conversation shortly before the trial showed a number of issues that indeed did not make it to court this time around – including the constitutionality of the RIAA’s investigative tactics. Check out David Weinberger’s conversation with Thomas-Rasset’s lead attorney Kiwi Camara to find out where the defense stands. CC-licensed music this week: State Shirt – Computer Cordafonia – Dreamland

Commons are becoming so common in the digital age (pardon the pun) that they are redefining the term. Music, video, literature, scholarly works, software – all of these can be placed under Creative Commons licenses to allow culture and knowledge to proliferate more freely. Wikipedia operates by similar principles. But where did these principles come from? How do they operate? Where are they going? Journalist and author David Bollier recently released a history of the digital commons movement, called Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. He sat down with David Weinberger to shed some light on this fascinating topic. CC-licensed music this week: Chad Crouch – “Horizon Event” and “Be Inspired”

In this day of camera phones, automatic uploading to YouTube, blogs, and twitter telepathy we are all content creators. But if you’re not careful you might get sued for copyright infringement. Making a fan tribute, borrowing something for educational use, or even taping your vacation could open you up to thousands of potential claims for copyright infringement. How do you know when you’re in the clear? The Center for Social Media at American University developed the Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video to help creators figure this out. Last week they released a video explaining the concepts of Fair Use even more clearly. We spoke with Patricia Aufderheide, Director of the Center for Social Media to help us understand where this effort came from, and where it might be going.

When NBC took its programming off of iTunes in 2007, part of their motivation may have been to reduce the proliferation of their content in digital form. Well, recent research shows that the takedown may have directly resulted in a spike in piracy of their content. Research from the i-Lab at Carnegie Mellon University shows that after the NBC takedown, requests for NBC content on pirate networks grew by 11.5%. What happened to piracy when they put the content back up on iTunes a year later? And what lessons should the industry take from this experience? David Weinberger speaks to researchers Michael Smith and Rahul Telang about the results of their study. And how does big media learn from piracy and the culture of transparency on the web? Journalist and new media expert Daisy Whitney speaks to Daniel Dennis Jones about how big media and new media are learning to get along. The Reference Section: • Follow the work of the iLab • Follow Daisy Whitney’s work, and her shows TWiM and New Media Minute • Read up on iLab’s recently released report on piracy and NBC Converting Pirates Without Cannibalizing Purchasers: The Impact of Digital Distribution on Physical Sales and Internet Piracy CC-licensed music this week: Morgantj – Café Connection General Fuzz – Cream J Lang – Crazy Love

If you like the idea of the above equation, well, you are either looking forward to a Robot vs. Lawyer stand-off, or, like today’s guest, you simply believe that law can be made better and more efficient through the use of software and applications to streamline repetitive legal tasks. Richard Susskind is the IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and author of the recently published (and provocatively titled) The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services. He recently sat down with the Berkman Center’s Brock Rutter to chat about how technology might be able to simultaneously make the work of lawyers more efficient, reduce overhead costs, and improve access to justice. The Reference Section: • Follow Richard’s work • Watch Richard’s recent talk at the Berkman Center’s Law Lab • The recent NYTimes article on the firm that did away with its lawyers CC-licensed music this week: Arslkhan: “Love Odyssey” Coconut Monkeyrocket: “Accidental Beatnik”

The new “Computational Knowledge Engine” called Wolfram|Alpha has gone through a full media cycle before it has even been unleashed on the world. It has been hyped as a “Google Killer” and denounced as snake oil, and we’re still at least a few days from release. The simple goal behind the engine is to connect searchers with precise information. Wolfram|Alpha’s search magic comes through a combination of natural language processing and a giant pool of curated data. If that doesn’t make sense, all you need to know is that people can’t wait to get their information hungry hands on it. A 10-minute preview posted by the Berkman Center on YouTube late last Wednesday has already garnered over 100,000 views. Stephen Wolfram, the brains behind Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science, launches his brand new knowledge engine this month. He spoke to David Weinberger this week about how the tool works, and what it might do to search. The Reference Section: • Listen to the uncut audio of this interview on Radio Berkman Supreme • Bookmark the soon-to-be-launched Wolfram|Alpha page • David Weinberger speculates on the significance of Wolfram|Alpha • Follow Stephen Wolfram on his blog CC-licensed music this week: Neurowaxx: “Pop Circus” Greg Williams: “Teagarden Blues and Rain”

A first look at Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine, with Stephen Wolfram. This is uncut audio from David Weinberger’s 55 minute interview with Stephen for Radio Berkman. Look for the more concise version in next week’s episode. Enjoy!

It is a foregone conclusion in media circles that journalism as we know it is, or soon will be, kaput. As the huge machine that is 20th Century journalism is dismantled, long before the vultures get a chance to pick at the bones of the last remaining printing press, a class of media creators, critics, and consumers are getting a chance to look over the damage and see what is worth preserving, what is worth building upon, and what is worth throwing away. Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is one of those multi-hyphenate creator/critic/consumers. In a recent submission for the Media Re:Public series, Dan suggested a vision for a participatory media, including five principles that could guide journalism in the 21st Century. The Reference Section: Follow Dan’s Blog More on the “5 Principles” Dan’s recent presentation at the Berkman Center EVEN more on the “5 Principles” CC-licensed music this week: Neurowaxx: “Pop Circus” Podington Bear: “The Squeaky Song”

If you’ve been following the Facebook Terms of Service flap you probably have some idea of how big a deal a company’s terms of service can be. If Facebook were a country they would be the sixth largest in the world, just by the sheer number of citizens they can claim. But how a citizen of Facebook participates in society – at least in the microcosm of society that is Facebook – is subject to a confusing and overlapping set of legal infrastructures – not just the Terms of Service Facebook sets out. Gillian Hadfield a law and economics professor at the University of Southern California argues that Facebook and other companies in the new economy are inhibited by current mechanisms for producing law, and need more leeway in developing their own legal infrastructures. Is Professor Hadfield looking to put the government out of a job? Not exactly. Listen to today’s episode to find out what private lawmaking really means, and how it could power innovation.

The CIA’s Intellipedia project has brought the Wikipedia concept into the the highly secretive intelligence sector. How does it work? Will using a technology that encourages openness and collaboration affect the culture of the agency? Do you think they have an entry for Area 51? Two principals from the Intellipedia project, Don Burke and Sean Dennehy, chatted with David Weinberger this week about some of the challenges and advantages that the technology could have on our nation’s most secretive agency.

What do you call a web-enabled political system? Dot-Communism? A Meme-ocracy? Either way, US President Barack Obama has been up to some interesting tricks in building .gov’s web presence. A memo (linked here) that came out of the Oval Office in late January ordered all federal agencies not only to err on the side of transparency in their dealings, but to embark on ambitious new web-enabled methods for bringing in citizen participation. President Obama himself led one of the first online townhalls in which Americans submitted and voted on over 100,000 questions, which Obama then responded to in more traditional setting. Gene Koo, a Berkman Fellow, posted some advice on his blog for the Obama administration on how they could improve this process in the future, and potentially build a more web-savvy democracy. We caught up with him last week to get his thoughts on this fascinating topic.

The tech world is an alphabet soup of acronyms referencing all kinds of fascinating concepts. But “VRM” might actually have implications for YOU as a consumer. This week, in a special extended episode of Radio Berkman, one of the innovators of Vendor Rights Management (VRM) gives us an inside look at how the relationship between customer and retailer could become more efficient, practical, and personal. For those worried about how the future of commerce, media, and the internet could play out this episode is a must listen.

Crowdsourcing has been touted as a future business model for everything from design, to advertising, to reporting, to data analysis. But is it for real, or just trendy? Jeff Howe, of Wired Magazine, put a stamp on the phenomenon with his 2006 book Crowdsourcing, and has been gathering evidence for its development as the future of a participatory economy. He sat down with David Weinberger to go into detail.

With newspapers shuttering left and right, revenues plummeting, and readers spiking in all directions for their news content, journalists are very quick to turn the mirror on themselves these days. This kind of morbid narcissism is not without purpose. In fact, many journalists, editors and publishers understand that their survival depends not just on soul-searching, but finding some accurate data on how the stories they produce are read and spread. Last week saw the launch of a powerful new tool for news analysis: Mediacloud.org. Frequent guest and Mediacloud principal Steven Schultze joins us in the studio once again to talk about what media cloud is, and why it matters.