ManyMedia

My colleagues said it so well before the words came to me. On the matter of technology policy statements from the presidential candidates, telecom prosultant™ David Isenberg said this about John McCain’s technology policy statement:

I was hoping that McCain’s Tech Policy would emphasize and extend the two McCain pro-Internet initiatives — the McCain Lautenberg Community Broadband Act and Spectrum Re-regulation, neither of which have yet seen the light of day — but it doesn’t. In the first case, it makes a vague nod in the direction of “market failure and other obstacles.” In the second, it treats spectrum policy as a done deal; now that we can surf the Web in coffee shops, we’re done.

David Weinberger’s take is more to-the-point:

Much of the McCain policy is the expected stuff about public-private partnerships, educating the workforce, and providing incentives to reach under-served populations, etc. But he shows his hand on three issues:

1. He’s flat against Net neutrality.
2. He wants to see copyright extended and enforced more vigorously.
3. He thinks the current infrastructure only needs a couple of tweaks.

In sum, our Internet policy should be the same as our energy policy: Hand a key resource off to big corporations whose interests are fundamentally out of alignment with ours as citizens.

Hmm. Not a surprise and not what I hope for. Reminds me of the early days of television: so much hope for the betterment of society and the world, but delivered to the strict commercial interests of several large corporate interests. Development of the dream and betterment of society? Not so much.

Compare McCain’s policies with Ars Technica’s thoughtful summary from last November of Obama’s policy statement:

The document begins with a set of policy goals that pretty well sum up the major areas that the proposals address:

• Ensure the full and free exchange of information among Americans through an open Internet and diverse media outlets.
• Create a transparent and connected democracy.
• Encourage the deployment of a modern communications infrastructure.
• Employ technology and innovation to solve our nation’s most pressing problems, including reducing the costs of health care, encouraging the development of new clean energy sources, and improving public safety.
• Improve America’s competitiveness.

This is closer to what I had in mind for my future.

Having said that, I realize (and everyone has touched on the limitations of each policy document) that it’s going to be very hard to bridge a gap between where we are now and where we should be in a more connected world.

Now I’ll be watching this race to see what kind of future we’ll really have.

Content, Network, Policy, Scenarios control, election, Internet, ownership, Policy, president, technology, telecom

Yesterday the NY Times ran an article on passwords as access tools for our online accounts. The author rightly points out that passwords have problems:

Password-based log-ons are susceptible to being compromised in any number of ways. Consider a single threat, that posed by phishers who trick us into clicking to a site designed to mimic a legitimate one in order to harvest our log-on information. Once we’ve been suckered at one site and our password purloined, it can be tried at other sites.

The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords — and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on. … In short, we need a log-on system that relies on cryptography, not mnemonics.

The article continues, extolling the virtues of Identity cards and bemoaning the security distraction caused by OpenID. I think the author is missing the point about how we have choices as to combining tools. No single tool is going to be a silver bullet.

The Times article also rightly points out the challenge in adopting any alternative access system: users must adopt tools that are workable for them, and the websites must allow access to their services through these tools. This is really the more significant problem.

Identity authentication, choice, identity cards, openID

Big shout out and great appreciation to Eric (of I Can Has Cheezburger and soon: LOLcats book fame), who located the appropriate tools to import ALL of my prior Blogger posts into my new and improved WordPress blog.

Thanks also to Manoa Geeks (truly a friendly bunch!) for sharing their expertise all around.

Life choice, emergence, IDmanagement, ownership, relationships, self-determination