Outside the Lines

Robert Vamosi and I discuss the new features and browsing capabilities of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 and how it stacks up with other browsers. The new release brings IE up to par with Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and even pushes Microsoft a little ahead of the competition in a few areas.

See also:

IE 8 beta gives other browsers a run for their money

Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 review

Internet Explorer 8 screen shots

Internet Explorer 8 gets a massive makeover

It's not clear why anyone should be surprised that Gmail, Amazon.com's cloud services, Salesforce.com, MobileMe, or Netflix have periods of instability or downtime. These services are not promising five-nines of uptime, and they are dependent on complex code and a vast network "tubes," as the beleaguered Sen. Ted Stevens has said, to deliver bits to users. Services such as Twitter have set a new standard for unreliability, making the other cloud-based services look good in comparison despite their outages.

The much-ballyhooed cloud from which Web services emanate is inherently unstable and prone to odd behavior from any number of causes. At the same time, the Internet overall is incredibly robust and redundant. You just don't want to be caught at the intersection of some errant configuration change or badly behaving router. In the case of a Gmail outage, you need to have alternative e-mail services that capture messages from multiple sources to stay afloat.

Over time, the complex network systems underlying the Internet will become more reliable, but don't count on the Internet of 2008 or even 2015 to be operationally flawless. If you are not careful and proactive, the cloud will rain on you without warning.

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and Google's chief Internet evangelist, talked with Beet.tv's Andy Plesser about the future of video and broadband at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York.

Cerf expects that video will be downloaded rather than streamed over time. With gigabit for second speed, users could download an hour of video in 16 seconds. "It's like the iPod--you can download music faster than you can listen to it," he said. Cerf also said that broadcasting, rather than downloading a separate copy to every user, is a good delivery model, and that users will have more control over which ads to watch.

However, obtaining the bandwidth to download a movie in seconds is a problem. Cerf said that the U.S needs policies that will cause more broadband to be rolled out everywhere in country. "We need to have as many broadband solutions as possible to evaluate for cost and deploy in the places where they are most effective," he said.

He added that incentives are needed for investments in infrastructure, and it could entail regulation of some aspects of the Internet in order to assure that there is either competition or fair access to the underlying broadband resources. The U.S. is far behind other countries in its regulatory posture and still very hands off, Cerf said. "As a nostrum, it hasn't worked out very well," he said.

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Harvard Law and Berkman Center scholar Yochai Benkler and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales deconstructed Wikipedia and discussed peer production models at an event here Thursday.

Benkler, who is the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at the Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Center, were participating in a program marking the Berkman Center's 10th anniversary at the Harvard Law School (see my earlier coverage of the conference). Wales is a Berkman Fellow and hopes to find ways for groups to come to better decisions in his research.

Jimmy Wales: Given enough time. humans will screw up Wikipedia just as they have screwed up everything else, but so far it's not too bad.

(Credit: Dan Farber)

During his remarks, Wales outlined what makes Wikipedia different in light of the perception that world's most-relied-upon information resource is counterintuitive. The following are notes from his remarks from the session (in his voice):

There were a lot of mistakes made in the early social design of the Internet. The unmoderated Usenet groups were difficult to control and exclude bad behavior. It gave the Internet a bad name in some circles, leading to spam, trolls and flamewars, and still exists today.

Given that background, and seeing the worst brought out in people, the community has no means to self-regulate. You end up with the top-down police state to manage it.

The idea that anyone could edit anything at any time made obvious that most people were horrible and it makes the Internet worse. I've learned the analogy to a restaurant. You've been given the task to design a restaurant and serve steaks. So customers have access to knives, and people with knives might stab people, so you need to keep people in a cage. This model makes a bad society, and its view of human nature we mostly avoid except at the airport.

People get the idea the only way to design a social space is to have top-down control. Wikipedia is more like a restaurant--people go in and eat and don't start stabbing people, and there are tools and institutions to deal with misbehavior.

The technology allows us to have a space that is safe and you can block the worst offenders. But how does neutrality fit into this?

Neutrality Point of View (NPOV) is absolute and non-negotiable in Wikipedia. The problems come up in obscure topics, such as Japanese anime. For common topics people come together and make a decent statement on what it is. It turns out what is really important is that participants have a shared vision of what they want to accomplish.

Mutually-assured destruction is inherent in Wikipedia. People who want to push an agenda end up having to write "for the enemy" rather than to those who share the same bias. Most people are pretty reasonable, but you don't get that sense from TV where they put up two people on opposite sides. Most people are in the middle and aware of pros and cons of issues.

We are really strongly focused on consensus. One criticism of Wikipedia is that the majority rules. But majority is not the right way to describe it. We strive for consensus rather than majority rule. If you are in a group of five or ten people working on an article, if 30 percent of those working on the article dissent, then continue to write the article until all but the most unreasonable agree. Those who continue to disagree are typically exhibiting non-collaborative, and sometimes abusive, behavior.

As Wikipedia has grown, there are subcommunities and a risk of changing interactions from small group to more atomistic random people. It's a lot harder to maintain civility. It's a lot harder to be rude to people you know.

Companies working on their own entries are mostly overblown. We see that a lot more from small mom-and-pop companies trying to get an article on Wikipedia. A lot of communications professional understand that interacting with social media requires accepting the norms.

I definitely think we have a problem with the amount of tradition and jargon. People trying to change their biographies, for example, found their changes were reverted with strange codes as an explanation. People should not be required to become expert Wikipedians to join the conversation. It gets really hard when there is too much jargon.

How does Wikipedia decide what is published? The community decides on a case-by-base basis. Wikipedia has gotten bigger in two ways--sheer size of the work, which means when we started out we were covering George Bush and Michael Jackson and they are so famous they don't care. Secondly, we have become very powerful in search engines like Google, so it actually matters to people. Because of those two factors, it's becoming much more on the minds of the community to say how to thoughtfully reflect on question. We look for reliable sources--verifiability. Someone could start an article about their mother, but if they are not well known, who can verify it, so we can't have an article about it. We also look at the question of human dignity. One of the rules of biographies is that if the person is only notable for one event, and perhaps did some bad thing, and it's a unique odd event, we typically try to have an article about the event, not the person.

Intentional vulnerability is really important. Sometimes it's reported that a Wikipedia page was hacked, which we chuckle at. The advanced computer skills to hack Wikipedia are not much. Put a curse word on Wikipedia and we fix it in one or two seconds so it's not that thrilling. We do actually lock the front page though.

Wikia and Wikipedia are completely separate. The only link between the two is that Wales is the founder. Like Mozilla (which makes money from Firefox) Wikipedia could follow that model, but nobody is thinking about it that much.

Given enough time humans will screw up Wikipedia just as they have screwed up everything else, but so far it's not too bad.

Yochai Benkler: We are building systems loosely coupled because we can't design perfect systems.

(Credit: Dan Farber)

As you would expect, Benkler took a more academic approach to deconstructing Wikipedia. "Ten years ago we would not have had this conversation," he said, referring to the rapid changes in the last decade. "We are moving generationally from 90s of imagining the world and projecting hopes and fears to a more detailed analysis, moving beyond hoping to organizing our research and getting large scale data and new modes of analysis."

The author of The Wealth of Networks, Benkler said he had been studying Wikipedia since it was four months old. He compared it to the Encyclopedia Britannica, which represents the "structure of authority over knowledge," rather that the process of conversation and human interaction as in Wikipedia. He noted that Wikipedia has moved from being quirky and on the side to something that is mainstream.

"Encyclopedia Britannica is a stable view of knowledge embedded in a human relation and legal system. It was challenged by a much more loosely coupled system that allows for much greater change and unpredictability, and requires more learning and critique," Benkler said. It requires the freedom to change, the will to engage and a certain cooperation dynamic, he added.

Benkler concluded that a very different model of human motivation is needed, that is much more capable of cooperation. It will require looking at many disciplines, including experimental economics, game theory, and organization sociology. "We are building systems loosely coupled because we can't design perfect systems. We have to allow freedom as a practical human agency designed for cooperation to replace rational actor model with something much more rich and close to way the conversation is," Benkler said.

Dark energy powers the Internet, at least according Jonathan Zittrain.

Zittrain is the Jack N. and Lillian Berkman visiting professor for entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard Law School, the chair in Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, and a founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

With all those titles, he was the center of attention at a Berkman Center event on the occasion of its 10th anniversary at the Harvard Law School.

The author of the new book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Zittrain is being recruited to return from Oxford to Harvard as a tenured professor, but Stanford is also making a play for him.

The conference organizers had no problem using the venue to appeal to the audience of scholars and Internet wonks to cajole Zittrain into making Harvard his choice. It was like the Boston Red Sox crowd trying to convince Big Papi not to leave the team. Elena Kagan, dean of the Harvard Law School, and Charles Nesson, the William F. Weld professor of law at Harvard and a Berkman Center founder, stood up and offered a Harvard cheer for Zittrain.

"Jonathan is the Berkman Center, as well as his charisma and brilliance," Kagan said.

After several more preambles by Harvard law professors, Zittrain finally took the microphone to discuss his book. He outlined the beginnings of the Internet as built quietly, modestly, playfully, and whimsically, without the thought of making money, and yet capable of out-competing the existing proprietary networks. This is the dark matter, the secret sauce of that underlies the power of Internet, he said.

"We don't need to measure, we just need to build," he said of the early Internet. With no plan for content, people brought their own content and the Internet ended up with far more than the groomed content from proprietary services. A lack of pretension, formality, and graveness characterizes the people who brought us the Internet, he explained.

Jonathan Zittrain

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

The Apple II and the VisiCalc spreadsheet are an example of the dark energy that will carry you if you can tap it, Zittrain said. "Openness" created the off-the-shelf software market--people wanting to share what they made on their Apple II computers. Hook up the generative PC to the generative Internet and creativity is unleashed, in such forms as eBay, Skype, Kazaa, and Wikipedia, Zittrain said. Wikipedia, for example, is like a community-run park--you don't need a company to come in to clean it up or the government to increase the laws against littering, he said.

"The social ideal of incompleteness allows people to take things in different directions," Zittrain said.

Twitter also fits into the social idea of incompleteness...and brevity. "It does not get much more inane that Twitter...I know it's being twittered right now," Zittrain said. He pointed out how someone who was arrested in Egypt sends a Twitter message to 500 followers and eventually is released. He wouldn't have had time to write a blog post, Zittrain said.

"The Internet is a collective hallucination that works as long as we don't stare at it too carefully," Zittrain said. It's like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and not looking down. Somehow, the chaotic and mischievous Internet, as Zittrain described it, manages to keep running.

We are looking at the end of the PC as we know it and a migration away from the Swiss army knife device to more specialized devices like BlackBerry, TiVo, iPod, iPhone, and Kindle, Zittrain said. The idea isn't to harness the dark energy of the Internet via the iPhone app store. Zittrain's thesis is that a locked device controlled by Steve Jobs or others who control the major platforms won't allow for the openness and creativity that led to the disruptive services, like Kazaa, that allowed an iTunes to come into being.

Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia, Zittrain said. It allows for reversion and for people to have dialogue and to collaborate. He noted the Berkman Center's Stopbadware.org, a collaborative effort to help in the search to enumerate content filtering and identify sites delivering drive-by downloads.

In his book, Zittrain writes:

A lockdown on PCs and a corresponding rise of tethered appliances will eliminate what today we take for granted: a world where mainstream technology can be influenced, even revolutionized, out of left field. Stopping this future depends on some wisely developed and implemented locks, along with new technologies and a community ethos that secures the keys to those locks among groups with shared norms and a sense of public purpose, rather than in the hands of a single gatekeeping entity, whether public or private. The iPhone is a product of both fashion and fear. It boasts an undeniably attractive aesthetic, and it bottles some of the best innovations from the PC and Internet in a stable, controlled form. The PC and Internet were the engines of those innovations, and if they can be saved, they will offer more. As time passes, the brand names on each side will change. But the core battle will remain. It will be fought through information appliances and Web 2.0 platforms like today's Facebook apps and Google Maps mash-ups. These are not just products but also services, watched and updated according to the constant dictates of their makers and those who can pressure them.

On the privacy front, Zittrain said, "My hope is that there are ways at the social layer to express social preferences and allow people to make a choice and whether to respect them." If a user wants to have some information kept private or a part of a site not open to Web crawlers, there should be mechanisms to manage online presence and just plain ethics or norms of behavior in cyberspace, he said.

At the beginning of the proceedings, Kagan announced that the Berkman Center will be elevated to become part of Harvard University, not just part of the law school. "It will remain rooted in the law school," she said, "but will reach out more than in the past."