The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

From an NYT op-ed by Xeni Jardin:

If American companies are already obligated to disclose the sale of bombs and guns to repressive regimes, why not censorware?

Just noticed the rather meaty and link-rich entry on the Suda in Wikipedia, which also links externally to the SOL.

Reflections concerning podcasts and education from Bryan Alexander.

Samuelson’s course at Berkeley on
Law 278.31 Technology and Intellectual Property in Law
now comes in a series of podcasts.  “If you are interested in the basics of copyright law from one of the best in the country, it is quite a treat.” (Elizabeth Townsend Gard)

From John Battelle’s Searchblog:

Boing Boing has recently been added to a blacklist of “nudity” related sites run by the US-based company Secure Computing, resulting in its being banned in entire countries – like the UAE, as well as many corporate firewalls. Here’s the editor’s searing response. I think it’s well worth reading. From it:

Today, we’ve learned that Internet Qatar, the sole ISP in the State of Qatar, has also banned BoingBoing.

We’ve heard from librarians in Africa who want to watch the video of the American Register of Copyrights denouncing Congress, employees at the Australian Broadcasting Company, students, and workers around the world who can’t gain access to our work.

At fault is a US-based censorware company called Secure Computing, which makes a web-rating product called SmartFilter. But SmartFilter isn’t very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity — even Michaelangelo’s David appearing on a single page out of thousands — as a “nudity” site, which means that customers who block “nudity” can’t get through.

Last week, Secure Computing updated their software to classify Boing Boing as a “nudity” site. Last month, we had two posts with nudity in them, out of 692 — that’s 0.29 percent of our posts, but SmartFilter blocks 100 percent of them. This month, there were four posts with nudity (including the Abu Ghraib photos), out of 618 — 0.32 percent.

In fact, out of the 25,000+ Boing Boing posts classed as “nudity” by SmartFilter, more that 99.5 percent have no nudity at all. They’re stories about Hurricane Katrina, kidnapped journalists in Iraq, book reviews, ukelele casemods, phonecam video of Bigfoot sightings (come to think of it, he doesn’t wear clothes either), or pictures of astonishing Lego constructions.

….The question of keeping your child from viewing content you don’t want them to see can be addressed more efficiently locally, with tech tools like the browser Bumpercar. As BoingBoing founder (and father of two) Mark Frauenfelder explains, “My daughter and I found a bunch of great kid-friendly sites and have added them to the ‘white list.’ As a parent, I have local control of the sites she visits instead of handing over control to a remote group of people that I don’t trust to do my job of being a parent.”

The fact is, there’s no effective way to censor the Internet in broad strokes. Only dumb CIOs and totalitarian governments like the UAE believe that adding censorware to your network will prevent the naughty stuff from slopping in.

A timely article (from Computer World) for those of us becoming interested in e-Science…

FEBRUARY 16, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) – A huge 100,000-PC grid-computing network being built to help research the origin of the universe passed the third of four major tests recently when it reached a data-transfer milestone, with up to 1GB/sec. of physics data sent over the global grid.

…

Francois Grey, an IT spokesman for CERN, said the latest test was part of a scheduled series of four tests that must be completed before the grid goes live next year.

“This was the first time that this model was tested with real data” at the 1GB/sec. data-transfer rate, Grey said. A previous grid test conducted last April involved seven major computer centers in the U.S. and Europe and transferred data at lower speeds — sustained rates of up to 600MB/sec.

Brent Seales alerts me to the fact that the Wikipedia article on Herculaneum now links to an article on the EDUCE project (down at the bottom).  The Herculaneum Society site also has lots of good links to recent news.

I noticed the Center for Hellenic Studies in the background behind the pro-Denmark rally pictured on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish today.

Elizabeth Townsend Gard writes:

January 1, 2006 brought a fresh new crop of unpublished works into the public domain.  Now, the unpublished works of anyone dead since 1935  are in the public domain.  17 USC 303(a).

Here a a few of the most noteable: Jane Addams, Alfred Dreyfus, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., T. E. Lawrence, Huey Long, Will Rogers, and Henri Barbusse.

More can be found at these websites:  NNDB who died in 1935, Wikipedia’s death list of 1935, Who2, politicians who died in 1935, and baseball players who died in 1935.

We need more of these kinds of lists, couple with where the archival papers are kept.  This is how to build upon the new unpublished public domain.

Also, we should also be looking to the coming years, as scholars, to see who else’s unpublished works soon enter the unpublished public domain.  In 2007 (death date during 1936),this will include Rudyard Kipling, King George V of the United Kingdom, Maxim Gorky, John Heisman, Federico García Lorca, and Luigi Pirandello.  In 2008 (death deat during 1937) this will include John D. Rockefeller,Edith Wharton, George Gershwin,and Elihu Root.

But we should also be looking towards spaces that will help us uncover the less well-known deceased for these years.  For instance, Winifred Holtby (author; friend of Vera Brittain) died in 1935.  How are we to know what other treasures are out there?

Electronic Frontier Foundation has an amusing post today, in the finger-in-the-dike category:

RIAA Says Ripping CDs to Your iPod is NOT Fair Use