Press release from La Quadrature Du net:

Paris, November 26th 2009 – La Quadrature is calling on European citizens to submit questions aimed at finding out where the next European Commission (2010-2014) stands on EU citizens’ fundamental freedoms on the Internet.

The Council of the European Union and the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, just agreed1 on a college of Commissioners designate. The Parliament will now conduct hearings2 before appointing the full college.

These hearings, which were introduced in 2001 (article 214 of the Nice Treaty), are an important feature of the emerging European democracy. They help the legislative branch evaluate the executive branch’s competence and commitment to serve human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights3. It is also an opportunity for the Members of the European Parliament – who directly represent European citizens – to ask the Commissioners designate to take position on issues that are relevant to their occupation.

Internet regulation is high on the next Commission’s legislative agenda. This is why it is so important for citizens and civil society groups to step in the debate and question the next Commissioners about their vision for the future of the Internet. Do they want to protect the democratic nature of the this new essential mean of communications, or are they going be oblivious to its progressive potentialities and give in to special-interests asking for more control?

La Quadrature calls on citizens to help drafting a list of questions to be asked to Commissioners designate. Submitted questions should address various topics related to citizens rights and freedoms on the Internet, such as:

• The fight against filesharing;
• Net neutrality;
• Filtering of Internet content;
• Copyright law;
• Privacy;
• Other issues that you might find relevant.

Questions should be addressed to the Commissioners for: Information Society and Media, Justice and Home Affairs, Competition, Internal Market or Trade.

The complete questionnaire will be transmitted to the Members of the European Parliament before the auditions.

Ask what the next European Commission will do for our Freedoms!

Q.15 Personalisation

I am pro web based personalisation because I believe that it has the ability to deliver dynamic, customised, and relevant content to the website visitor, through the visitor’s web page or email.

Personalisation finds and delivers information to the consumer that goes beyond the use of search engines, whereby users need to know what they are looking for, but studies show that just 2% of what users actually know comes from a direct search; the rest comes through passive means, by monitoring our environments, browsing and staying aware.

How does personalisation benefit the retailer and the consumer?

Typically what we see on the web for personalisation is a technology called collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering depends heavily upon user ratings and users going around and rating different things, especially on ecommerce websites such as Amazon.  

Amazon uses the collaborative filtering techniques; cross-selling and up-selling, in order to deliver personalised content to the customer. Cross-sell models predict the probability or value of a current customer buying a different product or service from the same company (cross-sell). Up-sell models predict the probability or value of a customer buying more of the same products or services.

On Amazon, the personalisation starts for me as soon as I have signed in to the website. Under the “Today’s Recommendations For You” area of my personalised homepage, I clicked the product in the “New for You” area which was the Microsoft Windows 7 operating system.

Amazon.co.uk-Recommended For You

Below is the collaborative filtering/data mining techniques that I see after I have scrolled down the page.

Amazon.co.uk-Up-selling and cross-selling

The up-selling technique used displays a second product, Microsoft Office 2007 that Amazon believes will compliment the product that I am interested in buying. If I actually wanted to buy both items, this system benefits me, as the consumer, by eliminating the repetitive task of going through the purchasing and transaction process twice. It also suggests a product that I am interested in buying, that I might not have actively thought about buying until I saw it appear beside the original item. For the retailer they gain an extra sale, where they would otherwise have only made the one sale.

The cross-selling technique used tells me what percent of other Amazon users bought this item after viewing it, which gives me two other versions of the operating system along with the currently viewed item and Microsoft Office 2007, which was used in the up-selling technique above. This model gives me, the consumer, similar products of interest which I might want to buy instead, or that I just want to use to compare against. For the retailer this may result in the sale of another product that the user may not have otherwise even looked at had they decided not to buy the original item that was being viewed.

With collaborative filtering, the recommender is not able to handle items until they have been ranked by a minimum number of customers; furthermore, the recommendation capabilities are poor if the medium storing the product ranks is fairly bare, because in that case it is difficult to identify customers having tastes similar to those of the current one. To overcome these issues personalisation is being innovated a lot further from what collaborative filtering has done.

The next generation of personalisation uses a behavioural model, because it’s not what user says that’s important; it’s what they do that matters.

Next Generation Personalisation

Humans do not make decisions without knowledge or input. We influence each other and are influenced by the groups, communities, and networks in which we participate. Every decision we make affects our own personal experiences as well as the experiences of those around us. Next generation personalisation uses this idea to drive the importance of socialisation in personalisation in our networks.

Technology should not finish at the interface layer; it should be pushed forward so that consumers have great online experiences. The interface should support the technology with more information about consumer behaviour. This is the feedback loop being utilised by the creators of the next generation of personalised content delivery platforms.

It is the next generation of personalisation engines which I am in favour of more so.

Web 3.0 is about recommendation and personalisation

A new survey by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and the University of Michigan Child Health Evaluation and Research finds that about half of US parents use Internet parental control software.  A June, 2009 survey found 55% use them, and 2005 Pew survey recorded 55%.  What’s new is the rise in the use of monitoring software, which I think is largely a response to social networking use.  Because filters are “blunt instrument” for social networking – they either block everything from a social network or allow everything, parents seem to be turning to monitors instead:

 Parents were asked if they take specific actions to protect or monitor their children’s use of the Internet. Overall, parents report the following actions:

• • 65% disable pop-ups
• • 62% monitor social networking sites
• • 61% check history of websites
• • 49% block websites they don’t want kids to use
• • 32% use child-safe software

68% of parents report taking 1 to 4 of the above actions, while 19% take all 5 the of the actions listed. However, 13% of parents whose children access the Internet report not taking any of these actions to protect or monitor that use.  

Also interesting is what parents expressed the most concern about, “Predators, Privacy, and Porn:”

Just saw this in the twitterstream

Scobleizer Lots of good stuff on Twitter today: http://twitter.com/scobleiz… are my favorite tweets out of thousands.

so I clicked through and had to admit, there was some really good stuff in there. So I clicked around on the favorites lists of a few of the people that tweet awesome content from my twitterstream, and found the results quite mixed. Many of them are not added to regularly, and I was surprised to see that one of my favorite info sources has never favorited a single tweet.

I wonder if this is a habit we could develop to help us find even better info… if we set up Lists to organize people into certain interest groups, and if those people are consistently adding the content they scour into their favorites category, pretty soon we have a really great set of resources.

___

referenced:

Robert Scobe @scobleizer

thoughtstream update:

notthisbody @VenessaMiemis I use favorites religiously. i probably have many more than tweets. haven’t yet tried to publish an rss feed of them…hmmm

Aside from the features listed yesterday, I want to be able to filter by the number of friends/followers so I can e.g. look at all friends with more than 1.000 or 10.000 friends even, to see who is legit and who I want to unfollow. Like this:

More tomorrow at the BarcampHamburg09.

Larry Magid at CNET reports:

Google has long allowed parents a SafeSearch filtering setting that keeps kids from using the search engine to find inappropriate sites like those with explicit sexual images or text. The problem was that kids could easily change those settings.  Starting Wednesday, however, the company is allowing parents to lock those settings to make it harder (though not impossible) for kids to bypass the settings. To change the settings, the parent will have to log into his or her Google account and enter a password. 

This is great news for parents looking to make search engines, the primary means for accessing web content, safer for kids.  This is an improvement on Yahoo’s safe search password lock, which only requires a child to click “log out” to circumvent the settings.  When the user logs out of Google, the Google Safe Search cookie keeps the settings intact.  But as the CNET article points out though, this solution isn’t perfect:

If you set them only for Internet Explorer, for example, they won’t restrict access from Firefox, Chrome, or other browsers. Also, according to a Google representative, the child can get around the settings by using the private browsing feature that is now built into the latest versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome. 

Not only does using the IE InPrivate setting defeat the SafeSearch lock in Google, but the safe search settings of both Yahoo and Google are defeated by simply clicking Tools/Delete Browsing History/Cookies in IE and deleting all cookies.  Again, safe search password locking is a  great feature for younger users, but won’t stop a tech-savvy teen.  The best overall solution is for filtering vendors to build a safe search lock into their products that covers all major search engines.

Justin.tv will be rolling out new technology designed to filter out streams of live, pirated video content beginning later this week, according to CEO Michael Seibel.

Speaking to an audience at NewTeeVee’s Video Rights Roundtable, Seibel said that the digital fingerprinting technology, which was first announced in August, would go live in three days. By doing so, the live-streaming company will be able to automatically take down any live video streams that infringe on copyrighted content, without content owners needing to send takedown notices.

Justin.tv is enlisting the help of Vobile to filter videos, using the company’s MediaWise for Publishers product to scan live streams that appear on the site. Vobile then compares those streams against a database of video content that is known to be copyright-protected. Justin.tv had already been using Vobile to filter out videos that had been saved to the site, but extending that capability to live content is likely to further appease copyright holders.

Vobile has partnerships with six studios and three TV networks, which feed their content into its comparison database. Fox will be the first content company to take advantage of the technology.

Seibel said that Justin.tv has long worked with copyright holders to help get their content off the site, but it reached a turning point around the time of the 2008 Olympic Games. At that point, the company started building tools for content owners so that they could remove any channel without its direct intervention.

While the initial implementation will automatically take down any videos that are known to infringe, Vobile CEO Yangbin Wang says that the technology could also be used by rights holders to point consumers to higher-quality streams of the same content online or enable them to purchase the content.

Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.

Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If
sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL:

Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

Words/phrases:

Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images:

Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments:

With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honoured to remove the subscriber from future messages.

Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

• http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
• http://www.bondedsender.com
• http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & White listing

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific white listing programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

http://www.homesinflowermound.net

Technorati : email, filtering, opt-in, robertjrussell, spam
Del.icio.us : email, filtering, opt-in, robertjrussell, spam
Zooomr : email, filtering, opt-in, robertjrussell, spam
Flickr : email, filtering, opt-in, robertjrussell, spam

The Wee Book of Pee

The Amazingly Gross Human Body Series

By Kelly Regan Barnhill

Capstone, 2010 (Edge Books)

ISBN #1-4296-3357-3

Reading level grades 3-4   

Interest level grades 3-9

“Pee isn’t just some stinky yellow stuff people flush down the toilet. The body’s cells are constantly making waste products while they work. Something has to clean out all the gunk. Luckily, we have an amazing system of organs that keep our bodies clean and healthy. Let’s take a closer look at pee and how it’s made.

From needing to “go” on a car trip to peeing through history, this book sets the scene for the job the urinary system and its organs do in relationship to proper body functioning as an organism. Going about the job of cleaning the blood isn’t necessarily the polite topic of conversation in most places, but the importance of the job the urinary system does certainly is, and the book not only gives the outright facts but makes it fun, fascinating, and of course, gross!

New vocabulary is highlighted in blue and defined in a little sidebar at the bottom of the page. Details about how the organs work and their place in the urinary system make up a big part of the text areas. Photos and labeled diagrams clarify the text, and difficult ideas, such as pH, are explained clearly. The major illnesses related to the urinary system are mentioned and odd, quirky facts will help draw in the reader.

The title certainly drew me in. As a former science teacher, I can’t help but love topics (and books) like this. I wish this sort of book had been readily available when I was a child. I’m drawn to the way the systems in the body are so unbelievably intertwined and books like this can appeal to budding scientists or readers who want to know something gross equally well.

On a personal note, my dad had Type I diabetes and went into kidney failure when his kidney function dropped to 12% capacity. He started dialysis and I came to learn much about the disease, system, and nutrition involved with the shutdown of this important system of organs. While much progress has been made in controlling blood sugar and the damage it causes in the kidneys, the rise of Type II diabetes and resulting kidney failure continues to affect many people today.  This post is in memory of my dad, George Smith.

Activity 1

Review the organs of the urinary system. Draw the urinary system and label the major organs. Write a paragraph that follows the sequence of the wastes filtered from the blood through the kidneys to the urethra.

This print out of the urinary system can be used for the younger students.

Here’s a short movie about the urinary system.

This kid friendly site has information, games, and a coloring page.

Activity 2 For the older students

Look up dialysis and find out how it works to mechanically clean the body’s wastes.

This site has helpful information.

This site provides links to more kidney information.

National Science Standard: organization in living systems

This book is one in a series of six books about the human body and functions titled The Amazingly Gross Human Body.

Book received from Capstone Press.

One of my big projects in 2008 was making the transition from my old firewall to a new solution.  I’ve had 18 months or so to work with ISA and the workstations running the Firewall Client software, and thought I’d share my experiences.

First, a little background.  The network I inherited long ago was protected by a Watchguard Firewall.  At the time, it was a moderately capable stateful packet inspection (SPI) unit that performed what was asked of it;  ingress filtering with a little protection from a few application layer proxies.  But times had changed and communication sessions had become more sophisticated.  Exploits were getting more creative and difficult to defend against because they were occurring high up at the application layer.  Like many SPI firewalls, it’s ability to intelligently control outbound traffic was limited.

My acceptance criteria included better protection at the application layer, as well as close integration with my Active Directory based infrastructure.  I also needed a firewall that would help me get a handle on outbound traffic.  ISA 2006 was the answer.  I chose a Celestix MsA4000i appliance running ISA to simplify the hardware procurement and deployment process.

During my implementation planning, I had the opportunity to talk at length with Richard Hicks, a Senior Engineer for Celestix Networks.  Celestix makes a fine product line of security solution appliances running ISA, and Richard (a recent MVP award winner) had excellent insight into ISA implementations, large and small.  I give him credit for helping me translate the functional requirements I was used to with my old firewall, while giving practical recommendations on how ISA performs those same functions, and policy design and implementation.

One of the unique traits of ISA is the various methods it allows internal clients to communicate with. 

• SecureNAT.  The most basic of the three, and uses ISA as the gateway/router for traditional perimeter based protection.  Used when a default gateway is assigned to the client.
• Web Proxy Client.  Generally called upon when there are web based requests such as HTTP and FTP calls, etc. 
• Firewall client.  An optional piece of the ISA solution that runs on Windows clients, and extends the functionality of ISA in ways that cannot be matched by other solutions.

None of these are mutually exclusive, and can be run all at the same time.  Unfortunately, this flexibility can hinder your intentions.  If you want to restrict outbound communication to authenticated access only, running SecureNAT will compromise that ability.  The solution?  Run all non server systems without a default gateway, to force the client to use the web proxy client, or firewall client.  In the event that the target is beyond your LAN, the firewall client will handle all routing.

The easiest transition would have been using SecureNAT for the initial deployment, but there was an opportunity for monumental improvements if I attempted to go without it.  Am I glad I took this extra step?  Yes!  Some of the highlights have been:

• Outbound connections limited to authenticated users only.  If an outbound connection is made,  I could see what user is requesting it.  Logging provides meaningful data now.
• True egress control.  Connections initiated from the inside can finally be controlled.  Once everything was up and running, it was fascinating to see what was initiating outbound connections.
• Forces compliance of application related restrictions.  IM and P2P applications specialize in working their way around firewalls.  The combination of the web proxy, and the firewall client with no SecureNAT helps achieve this.
• Suppression of malware.   The combination of allowing only authenticated outbound access, along with utilizing an automated malware blacklist database helped control users who had a knack of making a mess out of their PCs.

The results of the improved security stance was impressive.  So was the amount of complaining from end users.  They were furious.  I had angry developers shutting off the firewall client software on their PC.  It made them feel good until they realized shutting down the firewall client gave them less access, not more.  They made claims that BitTorrent was a necessary part of their job, and found it insulting that outbound SSH sessions were not allowed to any host on the Internet.  They didn’t like that their non-domain joined test machines (or unapproved personal laptop) would require a username and password before they could access the Internet.  Their complaints went straight to the top of the organization, as did my explanations.  Security won out, and policies stood without change.

There were some hiccups along the way.  Most deployment related problems were fixed, while others forced some changes in how we worked.  The ISA community is an active one, but with the move of using workstations running the ISA firewall client without a default gateway, it made finding out answers much more difficult.  Some of the obstacles I ran into were:

• Lack of support for CIFS traversing across network segments.  The firewall client cannot handle this alone, and needs a default gateway.
• Vista and later workstations need a static route added for remote targets that were not web based.  This can be added via DHCP (option 121, but don’t try to add it via the DHCP snap-in in Vista, otherwise it won’t work).  Thanks to some assistance from Richard Hicks and Microsoft for ultimately explaining the reason behind the inconsistent behavior between XP and Vista.  More info can be found here: http://tmgblog.richardhicks.com/2009/01/10/dns-resolver-behavior-in-windows-vista/ 
• Building up a healthy list of domains that will be allowed to have anonymous outbound access.  OS and application update domains and mirrors are good examples of this.
• Older Outlook Clients (2003) wouldn’t talk to the internal Exchange Server using it’s MAPI connection until the following tweak was made:  http://www.isaserver.org/articles/2004olpop3smtp.html
• Web services that use SSL, but do not run over port 443 had to be accommodated for.  http://www.isaserver.org/articles/2004tunnelportrange.html
• Browser proxy configurations in *nix workstations may not be enough.  For those workstations, leave a default gateway.

As you can see from the links I provide, I found www.isaserver.org invaluable during my implementation.  It attracts some of the brightest and the best in the security world who contribute articles, and to community forums.  It’s a great resource for any ISA administrator. 

My biggest annoyances in using the firewall client are small, but still worth mentioning.

• The virtual black hole that the occurs on socket of the workstation running the firewall client.  Trying to debug via traditional methods is nearly impossible.  It simplifies the number of connections from the client, but it’s hard to tell the contents of the connection.
• The name.  “Firewall Client” implies that it is some application that protects a workstation like ZoneAlarm, Norton, or the Windows Firewall.  A simple name change would eliminate this confusion to newer users, and some IT guys not familiar with ISA.

If I were to do it over again, I would have given more notice on what changes would be occurring, and why.  I had previous verbal green lights from management to restrict thing things like P2P and IM sessions, and our written IT policies had already reflected these restrictions.  I just never had the capability to do so.  I warned staff, but apparently not enough.  I had to do a healthy amount of explaining, which was fine because I had the technical reasons, and the business case on my side. 

I look forward to the next version of ISA (Threat Management Gateway, or TMG) and the steps it takes to improve upon the Firewall Client component.  Recommended reading on using the Firewall Client in ISA 2004 and 2006 can be found below.

Firewall Client
http://www.isaserver.org/tutorials/Understanding-ISA-Firewall-Client-Part1.html

http://www.isaserver.org/articles/2004firewallclient.html

http://www.isaserver.org/tutorials/Understanding_and_installing_ISA_Firewall_Clients.html

http://www.isaserver.org/tutorials/ISA_Clients__Part_2_SecureNAT_and_Web_Proxy_Client.html

Database of malware domains that can be imported directly into ISA
http://www.malwaredomains.com/

A special thanks to Richard Hicks from Celestix, and my good friend Glenn Barnas from Inno-Tech, who provided invaluable information when I needed it most.

I feel as though I’m sitting in the eye of a hurricane. All around me, ideas, and thoughts and teachers and decisions are swirling while I sit in the relative calm and try to work out what is happening. As with all good hurricanes, this one has a name: filtering.

There appears to be a real impasse with regards to the issue of filtering the internet in schools. On the one hand, we have the teachers who are finding and using a wide variety of online tools that can enhance their practice and engage their learners, while on the other, we have the poor and vilified tech support people who are trying to maintain a vital school network and so they are often required to block sites as a matter of course. The impasse comes because all too often, there are no clear guidelines, or discussion, about what value a site/tool adds, or why a particular site has been blocked. It is too easy to slip into a simplistic ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality, but all that does is allows the rather unsatisfactory status quo to prevail. We need to think afresh, and to be more pro-active… hence this post.

I am in a position where hardly a day goes by without one of my colleagues complaining about being unable to access a particular site or resource or tool… and I should point out that by ‘colleague’, I don’t just mean the teachers in my own school, I mean the educators from across the globe that I come into daily contact with through my blog, through twitter, and through professional forums like MirandaNet or even the TES. This issue is not a parochial, single school issue. This is a truly global experience. Filtering is a pain, but it is also a necessary pain for a variety of statutory and legal reasons… though it may interest those in Britain to consider this post about duty-of-care because all too often we over-exaggerate the fears through our own ignorance.

Ironically, given the nature of Web2.0 tools, I believe the heart of the problem lies in a lack of communication between the educators at the chalkface and those who are there to support them. I am as guilty as anyone when it comes to making glib comments about the problems of school filtering, but I am sure I am not alone in having never sat down and worked my way through what I want from the online world in my classroom. Just about everyone has seen the Karl Fisch “Did You Know / Shift Happens” presentation (Now up to Version 4 would you believe!), but the truth is, that when it comes to education, for many of us the Shift hasn’t happened! In fact, when version one of the presentation came out, most of us could probably still access Youtube in school… not now!

So… in an effort to get a real discussion and proposal put together, I’ve set up an etherpad document with the intention of getting people to chip in their own thoughts. What I’m trying to do is to put together a put together a policy document that can be put to the Scottish Education Department, Learning & Teaching Scotland, ADES, the HMIe, the GTCS, and/or any other body that might be able to progress the conversation. I also hope that what ever recommendations or ideas we come up with will be suitable for any educator, anywhere to take and adapt to suit their own situation. To this end, all submissions will be covered by a Creative Commons “Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.5 UK: Scotland” agreement.

I’ll let the etherpad document run for a week or so, then will be transferring it to a wiki to allow us to expand on the initial document by adding examples of good practice, links to research, and to use the forum feature of the wiki to engage in discussion of the document. This is an ambitious idea, and may come to nothing, but as there appears to be a lack of willingness from the any one body at the “top” to make a decision about how we are allowed to harness the online opportunities we have available, I thought I would take it on myself to get the ball rolling… Pretentious? Moi?

These are the starter questions/discussion points on the etherpad, but I hope you’ll add more as well as taking the time to chip in. I also hope you’ll pass the link on… this attempt will be more valuable the wider the involvement… and I would dearly love to see some of the support staff and those who do make the decisions about blocking and filtering get involved as well. This is meant to be an inclusive and positive discussion, so let’s stop wingeing, and start learning how to smile!

QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS!

Click this link to access the etherpad!

As I see it, there are four main things to consider here.
• Suitable tools
• Keeping kids safe online
• Bandwidth issues
• Free versus ‘Paid for’

At the moment, I have nothing but questions, I’m hoping you will start providing the answers! To get us started, here’re my initial ponderings. Feel free to add your own, in fact, I expect it!

1 – Is there an argument for allowing teachers access to a wider range of tools/sites than pupils, or is this hypocrisy?

2 – I am struck by the thought that as a teacher, I am treated the same as the pupils with regards to the internet — ie: not trustworthy. How do I persuade a school to trust me?

3 – Are there sound technical reasons for blocking some sites? (ie: bandwidth concerns for video streaming)

4 – Which tools should ALL teachers be able to access? Is it possible to have a common toolkit… or do different age groups need access to different things?

5 – Do you have a great lesson that is dependent on a particular online tool… and would you be willing to share it?

6 – Can you get a site/programme unblocked easily?

6a – (Associated question) Are you able to install necessary updates such as flash/java/etc…?

7 – Do you even know how to go about getting something unblocked in your school/authority?

8 – Does your employer/school/authority have a policy document on online tools/software, and if so, have you a) read it, and/or b) been involved in creating the policy?

9 – Are authorities right to avoid adopting ‘free’ tools? Is community support a viable model for education?

10 – How do we get our voices heard by those who have the power to make changes?

11 – Is this an issue that needs a National response rather than a local ‘authority by authority’ approach?

Click this link to access the etherpad!

and let the smiling begin…

The FCC has yet to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) formally kicking off the process of writing and promulgating net neutrality regulations, but the battle over the scope of the new rules is already well underway within media and technology circles in Washington, D.C. At the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit on the campus of Georgetown University on Monday, for example, panelists clashed over whether the agency will or should allow, or even mandate, the use of deep packet inspection (DPI) and other invasive techniques to block the illegal transfer of copyrighted content over broadband networks.

“The devil is certainly going to be in the details,” Hal Ponder, director of government affairs for the American Federation of Musicians, said. “I don’t know if there’s a technical solution but I think everything needs to be explored, including filtering, because we do want to see artists’ work protected.” The AFM officially supports the principle of net neutrality, Ponder said, but insists that any new regulation permit the use of technical measures to protect copyright.

But there were numerous skeptics of filtering, the loudest being Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, a non-profit public interest group that has frequently sparred with copyright interests. The problem, he said, is that there’s a culture of user behavior and there’s a culture of regulatory behavior, and the two are completely disconnected. “If you introduce filtering, or require filtering, people will find a way around the filtering,” he explained. “They’ll start encrypting content so the filters can’t detect it, or they’ll find some other way. Then you’ll have people coming to Washington saying we need to make it illegal to find a way around the filters and that somehow that will solve the problem. That’s exactly what we did in 1998 when we passed the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act], which made it illegal to get around DRM. Does anyone think piracy disappeared in 1998?”

The real issue, Feld insisted, is not whether copyrighted works should be protected against piracy, but whether users of digital networks should be subjected to the sort of intimate and intrusive monitoring of their behavior that filtering would require. “How comfortable would you being having someone listen in to all of your phone conversations?” he asked. “Because that’s really what you’re talking about with DPI: someone listening in on everything you do online and monitoring your behavior.”

In a brief keynote address, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski himself shed little light on how — or even if — the agency will address the use of DPI or filtering. “Openness and respect for copyright can and must coexist,” he said, reiterating comments he made to the Brookings Institution two weeks ago. But he said nothing about how the FCC will seek to balance those priorities.

Daniel Klein, media accounts director for London-based cyber-security firm the Detica Group, cautioned that banning the use of DPI would be counterproductive, arguing there are parts of the technology that are incredibly useful. Ultimately, Klein said, the question of filtering isn’t technological, but behavorial. “The day we start blocking [content] people will change their behavior. They’ll start encrypting or whatever. Encryption is a very real fear. If you want to affect piracy you really have to focus on the behavior.”

According to Klein, less is known about aggregate online behavior than could or should be, in part because firms such as Detica Group that could measure it fear being drawn into a dispute over filtering. “Nobody in the world is measuring what is actually going down the pipe because they’re terrified of the filtering side of the debate,” he said. “The truth is that could provide very valuable information to the industry and to artists about what people are really doing with the content so that they might be able to respond in some way other than filtering. You really need to separate the question of measurement from the question of how you respond.”

Whether the FCC will be able to keep those issues separate in setting net neutrality rules no one yet knows. The agency plans to publish its NPRM in the Federal Register later this month.

Paul Sweeting writes The Media Wonk blog and is author of an upcoming report on the e-book market for GigaOM Pro.

by Nitrozac & Snaggy

We receive content in so many different formats, at any given time, and the constant stream of information can at times be too much to handle.  Information overload refers to the excess of information we receive daily through all kinds of mediums and the individual’s difficulty in processing and assessing validity towards that information. Information overload is a serious issue that I think more people should consider.  For instance,

Researchers now say that the stress of not being able to process information as fast as it arrives – combined with the personal and social expectation that, say, you will answer every email – can deplete and demoralize you.

Studies also suggest that the bombardment of information lowers people’s intelligence and causes other detrimental work habits. Some people may not be susceptible to information overload.  There are those who feed off the constant flow of information and without it can feel lost.  These feelings would be categorized with information addiction.

I believe that one of the notable consequences of information overload is that it can blur the line between work and play.  Many people face information overload in regards to email.  Coworkers may be vying for your attention and have questions for you and will send these to you any time of day.  When you’re always connected to the network your employer can always get in touch with you.  Because of this, I don’t think there’s a great deal of respect for traditional work hours anymore.  We are bombarded with so many different distractions  it is difficult to recover from these interruptions and refocus our attention to the task at hand.  Studies also show that there is “reduced creative activity when work is fragmented by interruption”.

There have been steps to fight information overload.  One suggestion by Jerry Michalaski is to “trust your community to filter and flow the right things to you when you need them.”  This works exceptionally via Twitter.  There have been efforts in software that prioritizes email for users.  A Google engineer has also designed a helpful tool for email addicts, by shutting down gmail for the user and prompting them to take a break.  Information overload has been around for a long time and the only way to combat it is through filters.  It’s important we research filtering technology to learn how to navigate the digital information landscape.

Source: Information Overload (The Guardian, UK)

While the authorities balk at replacing the outmoded public filtration methods, evidence of harmful toxins in your tap water mounts. Filtered tap water is no longer seen as something ‘nice’ to have but vital. Modern farming practices, industrial waste, pharmaceuticals and house chemicals are now being added to the environment. These enter the water supply either directly or indirectly. If they are not taken out by the public filters they will be piped to your house.

To be fair, it is not known what the affects of consuming some of those chemicals over a long period of time are. But, I for one don’t relish the idea of drinking water, laced with second hand drugs for example. You see, a portion (about 10%) of those medical or psychiatric drugs pass through the body and eventually back into our water supply. What is known however, is the affect of giadia, a waterborne parasite and chlorine.

That chlorine in un filtered tap water is known to cause physical problems, especially to asthmatics. The steamy air in the shower booth contains chlorine. Chlorine combined with other air elements produces ammonia. It is a good enough reason to have a shower filter as well as a tap filter, if you are considering getting one. A whole house filter of course, takes care of all of the water entering the house.

It is important that your filter not only takes out the harmful stuff but also leaves in those vital trace elements present in water. They give it its taste and supply the body with needed minerals such as calcium and magnesium. The best types employ a multi stage filtering process. Only in this way can all of the toxins found in water be removed. It takes a different process to eliminate chlorine than it does to take out lead for example.

As an added bonus, think of how much money you will save by filling up your water bottles from the tap instead of buying bottled water. Given that bottled water is only legally required to be ‘as good as’ tap water, filtered tap water is a much better option.

Douglas A Jack, through his research and experience, has identified a company leader in home water filtration. Visit http://www.clean-filtered-water-site.com/ and receive a 20% factory direct discount on all water filtering products.

Last week, a report by the United Nations released a jaw-dropping statistic, reported by the AP and elsewhere: 

The number of Web sites containing child pornography is increasing and more images show serious abuses, a U.N. expert said Wednesday.  More than 4 million Web sites worldwide show images of children being sexually exploited, said the U.N. investigator on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, Najat M’jid Maalla. “There is an increase in the number of sites recorded,” she told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, citing research by the U.K.-industry group Internet Watch Foundation. 

Four million seems a staggering number.  The Internet Watch Foundation maintains a blacklist of child porn sites, and issued research in January, 2009 that stated  the number was “fewer than 3,000.”  The IWF website notes that, “The list typically contains less than 1000 live child sexual abuse URLs at any one time.”  A blacklist maintained by Danish ISPs in February 2008, reported 3,863 blocked sites.  And an Australian government blacklist published by the website WikiList listed 2,395 pages. 

So where would these researchers get a figure like 4,000,000?  I see two possibilities, either credible:

1)       The four million number refers to child pornography images, not websites. In an interview with Reuters, “Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble said its database now contains more than half a million images of children being sexually exploited.”  Not four million, but at least in the same ballpark.  A statistic of 4 million child pornography images in existence worldwide seems very credible.

2)      The four million number refers to all pornography sites, not just child pornography sites.  Research from 2004 and 2005 reported the total number of Internet pornography sites at 1.2 to 1.5 million, so a 4 million number is credible here as well. (Side note: counting the number of Internet pornography sites is difficult because the Internet porn industry operates by creating large numbers of free “feeder” sites that display free content in order to “feed” users to a few thousands pay sites).

 In any event, we need some explanation from the U.N. here on this number that seems wildly at odds with other research.

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is the new extensibility framework from Microsoft.  Pioneered by Glenn Block in the patterns & practices group, and leveraged by the behemoth Visual Studio 2010, it has a striking resemblance to my own Inversion of Control (IoC) and Dependency Injection (DI) framework—which led to me to have a couple great conversations about IoC with Glenn at Tech Ed 2008 and then again at PDC 2008.

But MEF isn’t really written to be your IoC.  Instead, the IoC engine and DI aspects are implementation details, allowing you to do really no more than “MEF things together”.  The core concept of MEF is to provide very simple and powerful application composability.  Not in the user interface composition sense—for that, see Prism for WPF and Silverlight (explained in MSDN Magazine, September 2008)—but for virtually all other dynamic component assembly needs, MEF is your best friend.

The two things I like most about MEF is its simplicity as its lack of presumption on how it will be used.  Compose collections of strings, single method delegates, or implementations of complex services.  All you’re doing is importing and exporting things, with little code required to wire things up.

MEF is currently in its seventh preview release, so expect beta-like quality.  My own experience with it has been very positive, but there are a number of shortcomings in the API.  This article is about a few of them and what can be done to add some much-needed functionality.

System.AddIn vs. MEF

There’s been some confusion with Microsoft coopetition among products with similar aims, and extensibility and composition are no exception.  The AddIn API (team blog) serves a similar purpose as MEF.  (See this two-part MSDN article on System.AddIn: first and second.)  The primary differentiator, from my understanding, is that the AddIn API is a bit more robust and a lot more complicated, and supports such things as isolating extensions in separate AppDomains.

With Visual Studio siding with MEF, it’s personally hard for me to imagine using the AddIn API.  If MEF is flexible and robust enough for Visual Studio, is it really likely to fall short for my own much smaller software systems?  Krzysztof Cwalina suggests they are complementary approaches, but I find that hard to swallow.  Why would I want to use two different extensibility frameworks instead of one coherent API?  If anything, I imagine that the lessons learned from the AddIn API will eventually migrate to MEF.

Daniel Moth notes that with the AddIn API, “there are many design decisions to make and quite a few subtleties in implementing those decisions in particular when it comes to discovering addins, version resiliency, isolation from the host etc.”  A customer of mine using the AddIn API was using a Visual Studio plug-in to manage pipelines, and things were a real mess.  There were a bunch of assemblies, a lot of generated code, and not much clarity or confidence that it was all really necessary.

MEF: Import & ImportMany

In MEF, the Import attribute allows you to inject a value that is exported somewhere else using the Export attribute—typically from another assembly.  There is also an ImportMany attribute which is useful when you expect several exports that use the same contract.  By defining an IEnumerable<T> field or property and decorating it with the ImportMany attribute, all matching exports will be added to an enumerable type.

[ImportMany]
public IEnumerable<IVehicle> Vehicles;

What if you want to filter the exported vehicle types by some kind of metadata, though?  Let’s take a look at the IVehicle contract and some concrete classes that implement the contract.

public interface IVehicle { }

[Export(typeof(IVehicle))]
[ExportMetadata("Speed", "Slow")]
public class ToyotaPrius : IVehicle
{
    public ToyotaPrius() { }
}

[Export(typeof(IVehicle))]
[ExportMetadata("Speed", "Fast")]
public class LamborghiniDiablo : IVehicle
{
    public LamborghiniDiablo() { }
}

The object model isn’t very interesting, but that’s not the point.  What is interesting is that MEF allows us to supply metadata corresponding to our exports.  In this case, my contrived example has defined a metadata variable of “Speed”, with two possible values: “Fast” and “Slow”.  The variable name must be a string, but its value can be any value; that is, any value that’s supported from within an attribute, which means string literals and constants, type objects, and the like.

Filtering Imports on Metadata

What if you want to ImportMany for all exports that have a particular metadata value?  Unfortunately, there are no such options in the ImportMany attribute class.

In my scenario, I’ve defined a static factory class called VehicleFactory, which at some imaginary point in the future will be responsible for building a city full of trafic.

public static class TrafficFactory
{
    // type initialization fails without a static constructor
    static TrafficFactory() { }

    public static IEnumerable<IVehicle> SlowVehicles =
        App.Container.GetExportedValues<IVehicle>(metadata => metadata.ContainsKeyWithValue("Speed", "Slow"));

    public static IEnumerable<IVehicle> FastVehicles =
        App.Container.GetExportedValues<IVehicle>(metadata => metadata.ContainsKeyWithValue("Speed", "Fast"));

    public static IDictionary<object, IVehicle> AllVehicles =
        App.Container.GetKeyedExportedValues<IVehicle>("Speed");
}

This is what I want to do, but there is no overload of GetExportedValues that supplies a metadata-dependent predicate function.  Adding one is easy, though.  While we’re at it, we’ll also add the ContainsKeyWithValue which I borrow from The Code Junky article also on MEF container filtering.

public static class IDictionaryExtensions
{
    public static bool ContainsKeyWithValue<KeyType, KeyValue>(
        this IDictionary<KeyType, ValueType> Dictionary,
        KeyType Key, ValueType Value)
    {
        return (Dictionary.ContainsKey(Key) && Dictionary[Key].Equals(Value));
    }
}

public static class MEFExtensions
{
    public static IEnumerable<T> GetExportedValues<T>(this CompositionContainer Container,
        Func<IDictionary<string, object>, bool> Predicate)
    {
        var result = new List<T>();

        foreach (var PartDef in Container.Catalog.Parts)
        {
            foreach (var ExportDef in PartDef.ExportDefinitions)
            {
                if (ExportDef.ContractName == typeof(T).FullName)
                {
                    if (Predicate(ExportDef.Metadata))
                        result.Add((T)PartDef.CreatePart().GetExportedValue(ExportDef));
                }
            }
        }

        return result;
    }
}

Now we can test this logic by wiring up MEF and then accessing the two filtered collections of cars, which will each contain a single IVehicle instance.

class App
{
    [Export]
    public CompositionContainer Container;

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        AssemblyCatalog catalog = new AssemblyCatalog(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());
        Container = new CompositionContainer(catalog);
        Container.ComposeParts();

        var FastCars = TrafficFactory.FastVehicles;
        var SlowCars = TrafficFactory.SlowVehicles;
    }
}

Viola!  We have metadata-based filtering.

You’ll also noticed that I added an Export attribute to the Container itself.  By doing this, you can Import the container into any module that gets dynamically loaded.  It’s not used in this article, but getting to the container from a module is otherwise impossible without some kind of work-around.  (Thanks for pointing out the problem, Damon.)

Using Metadata to Assign Dictionary Keys

Let’s take this one step further.  Let’s say you want to import many instances of MEF exported values into a Dictionary, using one of the metadata properties as the key.  This is how I’d like it to work:

public static IDictionary<object, IVehicle> AllVehicles =
    App.Container.GetKeyedExportedValues<IVehicle>("Speed");

Again, the current MEF Preview doesn’t support this, but another extension method is all we need.  We’ll add two, so that one version gives us all exported values and the other allows us to filter that selection based on other metadata.

public static IDictionary<object, T> GetKeyedExportedValues<T>(this CompositionContainer Container,
    string MetadataKey, Func<IDictionary<string, object>, bool> Predicate)
{
    var result = new Dictionary<object, T>();

    foreach (var PartDef in Container.Catalog.Parts)
    {
        foreach (var ExportDef in PartDef.ExportDefinitions)
        {
            if (ExportDef.ContractName == typeof(T).FullName)
            {
                if (Predicate(ExportDef.Metadata))
                    result.Add(ExportDef.Metadata[MetadataKey],
                        (T)PartDef.CreatePart().GetExportedValue(ExportDef));
            }
        }
    }

    return result;
}

public static IDictionary<object, T> GetKeyedExportedValues<T>(this CompositionContainer Container,
    string MetadataKey)
{
    return GetKeyedExportedValues<T>(Container, MetadataKey, metadata => true);
}

Add an assignment to TrafficFactory.AllVehicles in the App.Main method and see for yourself that it works.

If you’re using metadata values as Dictionary keys, it’s probably important for you not to mess them up.  I recommend using enum values for both metadata property names as well as valid values if it’s possible to enumerate them, and string const values otherwise.

Now go forth and start using MEF!

Internet filtering is drawing a lot of controversy and attention right now in the international press as well as the blogosphere. 

• In the United States, Suren Ramasubbu writes on the Huffington Post that “Internet Filtering Software Makers Held to Higher Standard on Sharing User Data.” Ramasubbu expands on the EchoMetrix story to take on the issue of data gathering by filtering companies more generally, including Symantec’s publication of anonymous web surfing data last month.  The issue of web filtering data is complicated, because “telemetry” data from users on blocked website is an extremely powerful tool for improving filters, but as Ramasubbu points out, extra care is required to ensure privacy.
• In the United Kingdom, Zack Whittaker on ZDNET asks, “Could Internet filtering cause more harm than good?:”
  Because of Pandora’s Box theory – once something happens, it can never be undone and is no doubt deemed to repeat itself in the future. Where does it stop? Should the Internet be entirely monitored and blocked to ensure the safety of its users? When is Internet filtering an abuse of governmental power, and how should it be regulated?
  
• In Thailand, the Wall Street Journal writes about, “Web Censoring Widens Across Southeast Asia:”
  Attempts to censor the Internet are spreading to Southeast Asia as governments turn to coercion and intimidation to rein in online criticism. Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam lack the kind of technology and financial resources that China and some other large countries use to police the Internet. The Southeast Asian nations are using other methods — also seen in China — to tamp down criticism, including arresting some bloggers and individuals posting contentious views online.
  
• In Canada, legislation has been proposed that would create a CIPA-type law for Canada requiring filters in schools and libraries.