Google's terms and conditions are less readable than Beowulf

Google's terms and conditions are less readable than Beowulf: "Richard Mortier, a lecturer in computer science at Nottingham, ran Google’s latest revision through the plug in and found it to have a SMOG score of 15.48. That means users need a GCSE-level reading age to understand it. According to Literatin, 43% of the adult English population would not be able to read the terms.
Texts with a SMOG value in this range require a reading age of between 15-18 if they are to be understood, so anyone hoping to wade through Google’s terms of service and make it out the other side would need to go in equipped with a pretty decent education.
In comparison, the epic Old English poem Beowulf has a SMOG score of 13.9" 'via Blog this'

The road from Bali to Rio… to Dystopia? Mapping the future of Internet governance

[Unedited version of a blog post which was heavily edited for LSE Media Policy blog].

The Internet Governance Forum is a diverting annual sideshow, a pit-stop on the flying circus towards Internet governance, with no heads of state, few ministers, no European Commissioner and only a few of Internet engineering’s legendary inventors, such as Louis Pouzin. But it matters, as much as for what is said than what is not done. Yes, it is “sprawling, unfocused and formally useless” with five days of often ten parallel workshops all with bewilderingly similar titles, but it is also a vital junction between the governing and the governed. You have never seen Internet governance in action until you have seen a Chinese diplomat make ludicrous and chilling claims about human rights and free expression in their censored Intranet, to be hissed and laughed at by a roomful of activists. It makes for a wonderful forum of differences.

Make no mistake, there are real problems with Internet governance – encryption is broken by bad faith government actors (Dual EC DRBG in particular), which is shattering to its integrity as a communications network. Imagine a postal system in which every letter can be opened. That will be high on the list of issues argued at the IETF Vancouver meeting beginning this Sunday – though encryption is marginal to the central work of most IETF network engineers and no-one has a real solution.

Bad faith and loss of integrity also neatly sums up most governments’ and people’s view of the Five Eyes’ activities, even though avuncular Ed Vaizey, Britain’s telecoms minister, avoided discussing PRISM and surveillance by the British secret services at the IGF. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has had her phone bugged since 2002 when she was an opposition politician, and it is bugging of her phone that has finally led her to real upset at Five Eyes surveillance (personal offence leading to a general public interest inquiry just like the UK Leveson Inquiry). Laws may not stop surveillance by foreign governments, and proposed United Nations resolutions will be studiously ignored by the US, but European data protection laws can really impact on US multinational actors, hurting the US government in the wallet.

So we move on from the Bali forum, with its post-modern ironic Miss Indonesia Internet (surely?), to a summit that will really matter: the Rio Summit of April 2014. There is a magnificent description from BestBits of how ICANN President Fadi Chehade managed to persuade the Brazilian President to hold a multistakeholder rather than multilateral meeting, over the head of her state-centric communications minister (who continued to dig himself into a multilateral hole throughout the Bali forum). For the un-initiated: multilateral means governments, which means China, Russia, Arab, Asian and African kleptocracies plus a few well-meaning others, multistakeholder means some lucky winners from civil society will be able to speak truth and expertise to power at an actual decision-making forum: Bali with balls.

What will the Rio Summit aim to do? First, it has to deal with the issue of ICANN and IANA – who rules the root and will the US hand over control in 2015? The last head of ICANN also tried to declare independence in 2011/12, and was shackled by the renewed Affirmation of Commitments to the US government, which “basically gave him the finger” in response. As a result, ICANN is “almost free” but still under formal unilateral legal control. We shall soon see where that hyperpower’s digit is placed next – in Bali it was firmly jammed in its ear to avoid hearing the word ‘Snowden’.

Second, the Rio delegates must deal with the intractable ‘orphan’ issues, which Ian Brown and I recently described as the “hard cases” where there is no current regulatory settlement in place. These include glacial IPv6 adoption, the Internet of Things (think ‘Stuff’ rather than people) which Alison Powell described in yesterday’s blog post, as well as international rules for interconnection, and the reaction of telecoms companies to Over The Top services and apps, which were debated at the new Dynamic Coalition on Network Neutrality (video of panel here). These dynamic coalitions do a lot of the serious regulatory preparatory work at the IGF, while most workshops are less substantive and more sloganised. The I* (pronounced I-star) standards organisations (ICANN, IAB, IETF, W3C, ISOC) had substantial presence at the Bali Forum, and discussed the benefits of their self-regulatory approach, though Jeremy Malcolm, Avri Doria and Amelia Andersdotter highlighted the lack of formal multistakeholderism and significant corporate capture in W3C. Network architecture is a critically important part of Internet governance.

Jeremy Malcolm argues that the Rio Summit itself effectively reduces next April’s WSIS+10, the decade-on retrospective on the original World Summit on the Information Society which kicked off the travelling circus, to irrelevance, and predates the November 2014 ITU Plenipotentiary (hosted by South Korea) at which Russia and China are expected to renew their power grab after their failure at the WCIT in December 2012 (see my earlier post). A lot rides on this Rio summit as the ‘last best hope for civil society’ before the ugly face of undemocratic government tries to reframe these issues. One of the Five Eyes’ domain registrars, Australian Chris Disspain, argued using unfortunate Iraq War language that our current US-controlled arrangements are a “quiet coalition of the willing” that could fall victim to multilateral control (i.e. ITU under China-Russia-others).

Fans of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope will recall a series of Road To… films in which a backlot of a Hollywood studio doubled up as paradise for US marines nostalgic for the WWII beaches they fought for and their families read about (including Road to Bali, Rio and Utopia, which turned out to be an Alaskan goldmine). Internet governance is much the same, with the real action taking place in ICANN’s California headquarters, even if its President is moving himself to Singapore and the travelling circus continues, ICANN convening on 17 November in Buenos Aires for instance.

We shall see if the Brazilian government, which has anti-corruption riots in its own streets, can conjure a solution to Internet governance in its annus mirabilis, which is somewhat closer to multistakeholder dialogue than its brutally censorious Chinese and Russian allies would like. The latter would be a road to an awful Dystopia…in fact to zemblanity. We will have to be exceedingly careful what we wish for in the next chapter of Internet governance.

Benjamin Franklin - a previous Snowden type whistleblower

Craig Murray: "in 1773, Benjamin Franklin leaked confidential information by releasing letters written by then-Lt. Governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson to Thomas Whatley, an assistant to the British Prime Minister. The letters suggested that it was impossible for the colonists to enjoy the same rights as subjects living in England and that “an abridgement of what are called English liberties” might be necessary. The content of the letters was so damaging to the British government that Benjamin Franklin was dismissed as colonial Postmaster General and had to endure an hour-long censure from British Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn." 'via Blog this'

Energy companies' reasons for price hikes cast into doubt

Energy companies' reasons for price hikes cast into doubt - Telegraph: An appalling example of regulatory failure and profiteering. Will the public trust smart metering plans after this? "Consumers have in recent weeks been hit by price rises of up to 11.1 per cent. A number of the “Big Six” energy firms have claimed that the increases are because of rising wholesale prices.
However, data from Ofgem, the energy regulator, suggests that wholesale prices rose by only 1.7 per cent over the last year. The figures, reported in the Financial Times, will prompt fury across the country as homeowners prepare for winter. According to the analysis, the element of the average energy bill due to wholesale prices would only have gone up from £600 to £610." 'via Blog this'

Real time Network Management of Internet Congestion: BITAG Technical Working Group Report

BITAG: "Network operators typically estimate demand months to years in advance, and use such demand estimates to plan a schedule for capacity upgrades. Since it may take months to implement a capacity upgrade, the time scale for managing congestion in this manner is months to years. Thus, although capacity planning can greatly affect how much congestion occurs on a network over time, it cannot react to congestion as it occurs." 'via Blog this'

Hillary Clinton: we need to talk sensibly about spying

Hillary Clinton: we need to talk sensibly about spying | World news | The Guardian: "David Bickford, a former legal director of MI5 and MI6, told the Guardian that the current oversight regime for Britain's intelligence agencies was "obviously inadequate."
"Secrecy in this country is over-protected and under-regulated," he said. "The UK has signally failed to prepare itself for openness when dealing with politically sensitive issues such as terrorism or the involvement of their secret agencies in the gathering of information by secret means."Bickford added: "We see only a fleeting and ephemeral face of the intelligence agencies chiefs; ministers glide over the threats, never explain their relationship with those agencies and are content to retain an obviously inadequate system for their supervision."
Bickford said public scepticism was "made worse by the Communications Data Bill's proposal that the agencies themselves control their mining of communications data."
He added: "Unless government takes this debate seriously, secrecy will be pierced by the needs of society and terrorism and organised crime will plunder our sovereignty."" 'via Blog this'

net.wars: The opposite of zemblanity

newswireless.net .:. News .:. net.wars: The opposite of zemblanity: "Zemblanity, introduced by Chris Marsden, co-author of Regulating Code, was new to me. It means the opposite of serendipity. Serendipity is an accidental lucky discovery; it's Charles Schulz unexpectedly finding a warm puppy or searching the Internet for an old high school friend and finding he lives a few streets away. By contrast, zemblanity is an accidental unlucky discovery: in Marsden's example, the realization that on the Internet you are never alone - ever. Or the rediscovery of how much geography matters: a guy with a spade cuts off Armenia for five hours in 2011; the NSA taps cables; and you could probably still wreck an awful lot of the Internet by simply buying ten backhoes and deploying them strategically." 'via Blog this'