Chris Peterson

I don’t normally post about pingbacks, but I got a shoutout from the Nudge blog today about my “Saving with Shoeboxes” post describing design improvements that might improve money management in online banking.

I’m posting to say that (wholly separate from the shoutout) if you haven’t read Nudge by Dick Thaler and Cass Sunstein you should. It’s a more developed version of their “Liberatarian Paternalism is Not An Oxymoron”, and compelling argues that certain tweaks – or “nudges” – to the defaults of different laws could enhance social welfare without limiting freedom. Good book, good argument, good way of thinking about the things public policy should concern itself with.

If you read my earlier post about mapping banned books you’ll know that I put out a call for people to submit banned books to the Google Map I made. I figured it would an awesome opportunity for collaborative distributed social production among many decentralized but responsible netizens, straight out of a Yochai Benkler article.

My glorious plan was upstaged when a brilliant and talented [and, full disclosure, very close friend of mine] at the ABFFE named Alita Edelman mapped every book in the ALA records over the past two years.

It’s cool (if scary) stuff. Check it out.

A friend of mine is working over at American Booksellers for Free Expression helping them prepare for Banned Books Week. In case you are not familiar with Banned Books Week, the ALA sez:

Banned Books Week (BBW): Celebrating the Freedom to Read is observed during the last week of September each year. Observed since 1982, this annual ALA event reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted. BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where the freedom to express oneself and the freedom to choose what opinions and viewpoints to consume are both met.

The ABFFE has a list of the most challenged books from years past. These are real books that real Americans are trying to ban from real libraries. For most of the books, they provide background information, including where and by whom the book was challenged. There is also a PDF of the most challenged books over the last year or so. No news yet on the most challenged books from 2009, but I’m told that’s coming.

Some of the challenged books are old standbys of censorial aggression – your Huck Finns, your Harry Potters, your Brave New Worlds, and so forth. Some are new to me, like the potentially adorable “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding”, which apparently documents the struggles of a small guinea pig as she learns to adapt to her uncle Bobby getting gay guinea pig married. Others just confuse, bemuse, amuse, and unsettle me, such as the challenge to Esther Drill’s Deal With It, a sex-education novel for girls which was challenged on the grounds of being – and I am not making this up – “happily nonphallocentric.”

These are enlightened times.

Anyway, I’ve created a Google Map to map out the book challenges. I think it might be an interesting exercise to visualize whether there are hotspots of censorship in the country. Anyone can edit the map, so if you’d like to help, feel free to join in. You can either refer to the ABFFE’s detailed list or add your own, but please supplement them with corroborating evidence!

Zack Parsons (also known as elpintogrande) of SomethingAwful.com has written a fantastic book. It’s called Your Next Door Neighbor Is A Dragon.

As Zack writes, it is a colorful guide to Internet subcultures and the people who live them. Not in the sense of people who make cat macros, but people who believe they are dragons.

From his description:

Pretending that any author could write a comprehensive guidebook to the Internet is the sort of dumb crap that publishers dream up. “Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon” is not a comprehensive guidebook, it’s a travelogue about the Internet in which I visit and talk to people outside the Internet. I focused on the subcultures and fetishes I was familiar with and I took the dangerously stupid step of leaving the Internet and going outside.

Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon details my encounters with otherkin, vores, furries, and erotic fan-fiction authors. It includes interviews and adventures that reveal the truth about aspartame, self-diagnosed Asperger’s syndrome, the Ron Paul blimp, and how much white power you can download. I even risked my life and visited a doomsday religious cult in Texas against my will.

I am through the first few chapters and it is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Does it provide deep insight into the cultural anthropology of the Internet? No. That’s not the point. The point, the book puts it, is that the Internet is a spectacle, like Caligula’s brain swimming around in a fish tank, and he pokes the glass a bit.

Buy the book. It’s funny as hell and Zack is a good guy too.

So I’m rewriting my senior thesis to explore possible publication options in different law reviews. If anyone out there read the original thing and has any feedback I’d be much obliged if you shared it with me.

My revisions are mostly streamlining and refining the argument. I’ve also got to come up with a new name as Grimmelmann’s Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy has been retitled “Saving Facebook” for forthcoming publication in the Iowa Law Review.

Below is excerpted a draft of my new introduction. (continue reading…)

Catherine White, Amar Ashar, and I debrief the OpenVideoConference. Via MediaBerkman.

Suppose you go to the movies. You buy a gallon bag of popcorn for $5. Your twin also pays $5, but she receives her popcorn in four sealed quart bags. You are both equally hungry, have equivalent stomachs, and have the same love for salty treats during showings of Up. Will you both eat the same amount of popcorn?

Probably not. At least, that’s the answer suggested by the behavioral economist Dilip Soman. I subscribe to the podcast Arming the Donkeys by Dan Ariely. On last week’s show, Dan interviewed Dilip about “The Effect of Bracketing on Spending“, cowritten with Amar Cheema.

The basic finding of Soman and Cheema is this: portions affect consumption. Nothing new to dietitians, perhaps, but definitely new to economists. Soman explains that, ceteris paribus, your twin will eat less than you, because putting the same amount of popcorn into different bags creates “brackets” that contextualize consumption. There’s nothing to stop you from eating all of the giant tub of popcorn, but the tiny barrier of opening the bag makes you think about how much you are eating and gives you the chance to reevaluate your total consumption.

Soman and Cheema found the same effect held true with gambling. Roughly speaking, give a gambler an envelope with $X, or give them 10 envelopes each containing a tenth of $X, and they will gamble differently. According to Cheema, partitioning this way can reduce spending by 50%.

Now, what on earth does this have to do with my bank?

(continue reading…)

Germany’s major carrier Lufthansa became the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack…The attack was initiated by Andreas-Thomas Vogel, an activist and website administrator for the Libertad, an advocacy group criticizing as “inhumane” Lufthansa’s policy of letting the police use its planes for the forced deportation of asylum seekers. On June 20, 2001, Vogel called for Internet users to participate in what he claimed to be an “online demonstration.” He released software that systematically contacted the website of Lufthansa and flooded the company’s web server with messages, forcing it to shut down. According to Lufthansa lawyers and Human Rights organizations, Lufthansa registered about 1.2 million hits that day, which originated from some 13,000 computers.

I’m currently doing some work on cyberaggression for Urs Gasser at the Berkman Center. The Vogel case – quoted above – would seem to be a textbook example of malicious online aggression: a number of users, acting in concert, overwhelm the web servers of a foe until the site shuts down. As far as I can tell, it is a textbook distributed denial of service attack, with the one rather noteworthy exception that instead of hiring out a botnet for an hour or so Vogel actually got real people to run the software.

So here is the question: should we treat Vogel like a ruthless criminal or like a virtuous activist? Or, in other words, was the Lufthansa DDoS more like blackmail (Vogel was charged with coercion) or more like a sit-in?

(continue reading…)

Re-reading Marshall’s article, there is one clarification I want to make. After quoting me saying that Facebook information is decontextualized (as danah boyd has exhaustively noted), Marshall writes:

Perhaps no longer! The new Facebook publishing feature lets users share things with just a particular list of their friends. (Or with the public at large if they so choose.) The contexts are un-collapsed. Communication is human again. That’s a very big deal and is the kind of change that could make far more people comfortable sharing far more information about their lives on Facebook. It’s also a feature that no major competitor (namely Twitter) offers.

I share his hope, but I am not sure that the Publisher by itself reconstructs contexts. Certainly, it is a powerful tool with which one may take steps to rebuild the walls that separate social situations.

However, the tool itself doesn’t help much if it is to be exercised in an unhelpful environment. As I wrote on page 52 of my paper:

(continue reading…)

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb (syndicated to the New York Times) had a great article about Facebook privacy today that incorporated some stuff from my thesis/working paper. Marshall was nice enough to contact me before he ran the article to ask what I thought about the new Facebook Publisher.

Basically, Facebook is introducing a new Publisher that gives people easier access to (and more granularity over) what they publish to whom. While I don’t have access to the new Publisher yet, here’s what I told Marshall yesterday:

(continue reading…)