When SSL became available for standard searches, it was first set up so you would simply type in https:// instead of http:// before accessing Google. This caused a problem for schools and others who restrict the content their users can search for, in many cases because of laws governing school Internet connections. When SSL is enabled on an HTTPS connection, however, filters can’t block based on the words people search for, because even the query is encrypted. Thus schools were faced with having to block the “google.com” domain for their users, something Google did not want.

Therefore, they amended their strategy to create a new address entirely, encrypted.google.com, instead of offering https://google.com. This may seem like a trivial change, but it’s important for several reasons.

First, and this is no small problem, the word “encrypted” is harder to remember for non-English-literate users. Adding an “s” to the protocol was simple and direct.

Second, more importantly, just as this change separated secure search from standard search for schools to discriminate, another kind of firewall and censorship—the system of content filters in China known collectively as the Great Firewall—can discriminate.

As it turns out today, this has come to pass. After Rebecca MacKinnon noted someone was having trouble reaching Google from China, I tried a few things from my connection in Beijing. After some strange behavior, one problem remains consistent: If I type in “encrypted.google.com.hk,” which is the encrypted version of Google’s Chinese-language search product, which is no longer hosted in the Mainland, then I get sent to an error page and a Baidu search for the URL (see screen shot).

What does this mean? Although these things are notoriously uncertain, what appears to be happening is that at least one connection in China has blocked the Chinese-language encrypted search. Thus searches for sensitive terms or searches that return results containing sensitive words stand the chance of being blocked. I tried some famous ones, and they indeed resulted in an error.

Google has made the decision to make censorship easier for schools, in the process making it easier for China. A Chinese system could of course block Google outright, but this would not still be an issue if that was an easy pill to swallow. Google’s e-mail, translation, and other services may not dominate the market in China, but they are popular among many elites and many others.

As of yet, the U.S. site, encrypted.google.com, is loading as normal from Beijing, but this site lacks customizations for Chinese users. If this condition continues, open information just got one step harder to get from inside the GFW.

Are you in China? Can you access these sites? Leave a comment.

I love my iPhone, but I don’t love the fact that it is programmed only to work with AT&T—or “locked.” This is not for the normal reasons: Honestly, AT&T’s service has been more or less fine for me. This is probably because I used it mostly in Boston and Colorado; trips to New York proved frustrating at times.

My reason to hate locked phones is that I regularly leave the United States. Here I am for the second summer in a row in Beijing, using China Mobile’s prepaid Shenzhouxing service, and Apple doesn’t want me to be allowed to use my iPhone. Luckily I have my old HTC Touch when I’m in a bind, but I like my iPhone, and I paid for it. I’m even still paying for AT&T, because they eliminated the option of suspending service.

Last summer, I followed the directions from the “Dev-Team,” and unlocking for use in China was no sweat. This summer, I have a phone that has lost its ability to use wi-fi, a hardware problem Apple claims cannot be fixed. That’s fine when I have 3G, but wi-fi is needed for step two of the jailbreak-unlock process.

After much nonsense, here’s how I got around this problem.

1. My iPhone 3G used to have software version 3.1.3, which is hard to jailbreak. Jailbreaking being compulsory for an unlock, I upgraded to the new software 4.0.
2. The redsn0w team has released a beta of its jailbreaking software that works for iPhone 3G on software 4.0. I used this.
3. The jailbreak now complete, I needed to find a way to put ultrasn0w, a package that unlocks the phone and allows it to use any carrier, on the phone. Unfortunately, the standard way to do this is to use the Cydia application repository and download ultrasn0w using wi-fi.
4. Eventually I found the raw files for ultrasn0w’s most recent version, and instructions to download and install into a directory on the iPhone’s jailbroken file system. Those files go in the iPhone’s private/var/root/Media/Cydia/AutoInstall directory, which I had to create.
5. To install these files, I first tried iPhone Explorer, but the Mac version of the software (irritatingly!) lacks the ability to put files in ALL directories, thus the target /private/var/root was off limits. Therefore, I turned to PhoneView, which mercifully has a seven-day demo period and accesses root. I connected the phone and dragged and dropped the two ultrasn0w files.
6. I put in the China Mobile SIM, shut down the phone, and when it woke back up I was in business.

This probably took six or eight hours to figure out over a week, so I wanted to contribute my mini-success story. Hope this helps people before it becomes totally out of date.

WORD PROCESSOR:

1. The citation software and the word processor must work together consistently. This may seem simple, but I had several periods when inserting a cite-while-you-write note in Word would cause Word to crash. This is, for obvious reasons, very bad. Upgrading to a new version of EndNote solved this once. Copy-pasting the entire document into a new Word doc worked another time. No one should have to solve this problem.
2. The word processor must give reasonable GUI controls over formatting. Word goes overboard on its GUI, but colleagues who say LaTeX is my solution overestimate my patience in looking at unformatted text. Perhaps I have missed some good solutions, but the only way I have found to make LaTeX work is to edit everything in a raw text editor. This is not how I prefer to see my words while writing. As an Apple user, I tried Pages, but this leads to another problem:
3. The word processor must have auto-save! Sure, we should all hit save frequently while working. The problem is that we don’t. Microsoft knows this; even WordPress saves automatically. Apple’s Pages is out of contention for my use, despite attractive type handling and intuitive formatting, because I would some day compose a few hundred excellent words and then lose them forever.
4. The workflow must handle non-Latin scripts. Some people have told me they eventually got it to work, but LaTeX simply does not like to handle Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. I haven’t tried other languages, but several attempts to set things up for mixed English-Chinese text on LaTeX ended in failure. For word processors where switching script is less trouble, there is still the problem of line spacing. If I set a paragraph at 12 pt type with 14 pt line height, this should not be overridden by the insertion of a Chinese phrase. Microsoft and others fail on this.

CITATION MANAGEMENT:

1. The citation software and the word processor must work together consistently. I know I’m repeating myself, but there are a few more notes on this compatibility front. First, now writing two weeks after starting this post, I have had another discouraging experience. Frustrated by EndNote and Word, I decided to use Mendeley and OpenOffice while writing a draft working paper that should be out some time this fall. In at least once case, inserting a citation caused OpenOffice to crash. I lost about 20 minutes worth of writing, which I was able to do better the second time. But this relationship needs to be stable!
2. The citation software should stand alone. This point is targeted at Zotero, the excellent Firefox add-on that takes and organizes snapshots of websites, and in some cases can do a decent job of grabbing citation data from academic article depositories. Zotero, however, is so far inextricably tied to Firefox, a memory hog that gives a less than ideal interface for these kinds of jobs. Luckily, Mendeley will ably import from Zotero.
3. The citation software should be in the cloud, but not only in the cloud. And this point targets RefWorks, a cloud-based package that many universities subscribe to. Problems with cloud-only solutions: Working while out of wi-fi range; using data after you leave a subscribing institution; lack of native GUI and dependence on keeping more browser windows open. I love the cloud. My e-mail and research are backed up there, but they also live on my laptop. Citations should obey the same rules.
4. Non-Latin script support. This echoes point four above. An additional concern: an ideal citation management system would happily deal with multiple citation styles. Say I am citing English sources alongside Chinese sources. The most effective convention might be to follow an English format for English and a Chinese format for Chinese. It would be nice if that would work.
5. File management is a must. Zotero and Mendeley are the primary examples here, but even EndNote has some infrastructure for keeping files at hand. These days, any research project means the accumulation of dozens of PDFs—of articles, books, maps, reports—and other file types including audio and video. My fantasy system would handle this all with grace.

Have I asked too much? I don’t think so. Mendeley is almost there. OpenOffice is a good package, if a little unstable. Zotero is working on a stand-alone application. But to make this work, we’re going to have to move these things forward a step.

The other possibility is that I’m missing some important solutions. Any thoughts out there?

The White House requires staffers to use official e-mail for all business to ease compliance with rules requiring the maintenance of presidential record. The fun part, though, is that this was apparently first noticed because of the much-discussed privacy flaw embedded in Google Buzz at the time of its sudden release that revealed frequent contacts.

This goes to show that it’s not just activists in authoritarian countries who could get into political trouble because of privacy slips. Here’s Tony Romm on how it happened.

Concern that McLaughlin may have violated federal archiving and ethics rules first arose in April, upon the debut of Google Buzz. The new social network, which automatically adds a user’s recent contacts to his or her subscriber list, reflected that McLaughlin had communicated in the past with top Google staffers.

The link was not totally surprising, given McLaughlin’s previous position as Google’s head of global public policy.

But after seeing McLaughlin’s contacts on Google Buzz, Consumer Watchdog filed a FOIA request for his e-mails, and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) questioned McLaughlin’s conduct in his own, separate missive.

As a developer, my loyalty to the Web as a whole rests upon the legitimacy of the institutions that govern it: there are ways to voice my concerns effectively, and there are ways to “agree to disagree” by exiting a debate and building my own Web site with my own policies in place.

My reasons are hardly original: that insight is due to “Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States,” an influential treatise by the arguably Nobel-worthy economist Albert Hirschmann. In it, he explained how consumers ‘teach’ producers what to sell and how, by choosing to complain or switch. Competition — the existence of a viable exit — can actually amplify the impact of “voice” and increase loyalty. Or, as Tyler Cowen put it: “HBO is more responsive than was East Germany.”

According to this model, my friends who chose to cope with their dissatisfaction by deciding to exit by opting-out were also implicitly deciding that Facebook’s official channels for voice were insufficient, such as the conversation on site governance or voting on the new Terms of Service (and, with a turnout of only 0.32%, they might even be right).

There are barriers to exit, he notes. The first is that Facebook doesn’t make it easy to download the data you have submitted to the site over time. To that end, Khare and others created an online app that downloads your updates, but so far not your pictures.

Hirschmann sees competition as an opportunity for exit, but in the case of a social network, where the data you have given it and the connections you have made constitute much of the value of the service, competition from other services is not especially viable. An irony is that, as Facebook becomes more open to the web, various other developers might find ways to compete by porting this data to less controversial pastures.

Howard Schmidt, the new cybersecurity czar for the Obama administration, has a short answer for the drumbeat of rhetoric claiming the United States is caught up in a cyberwar that it is losing.

“There is no cyberwar,” Schmidt told Wired.com in a sit-down interview Wednesday at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

“I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept,” Schmidt said. “There are no winners in that environment.”

I am usually on the side of defending the principles of journalism, but I found myself disagreeing with Gillmor’s construction of “real journalists” versus the money-motivated “fantasy world” of tape-delay television. I put some thought into a comment on his site, and thought I would put it here as well.

I think there’s a difference between sports and entertainment news and news on public affairs. I, for one, neither watch NBC’s coverage nor read more timely coverage of the Olympics: I don’t care who wins! But I am a graduate of a journalism school and a young veteran of reporting in several media. I understand the drive to put things out there quickly. Timeliness, I was taught, is an important element of newsworthiness.

The argument that allowing people to structure their information in a different bundle is offensive to journalism, however, depends on the idea that timeliness trumps other values in news. I think the most important value of news is its civic function.

Do entertainment and sports news serve a civic function? If you believe that community identity and cross-cutting ties are a key element of U.S. democracy (which puts you in the company of de Tocqueville and Robert Putnam), then the answer is yes. But does timely reporting online matter in this context? I think there may be a civic, social capital-based argument for letting people wait for the NBC coverage, so that they will watch these things together.

Is timeliness more important than the civic outcome? Elements of newsworthiness do not always serve us well; witness the speed- and conflict-fueled daily political crossfire. My point here is that if “journalism” is a form to be defended, we must ask why. To the extent that fundamentals of journalism were developed in an era of daily newspapers, I think it’s important to ask whether a reliance on the fundamentals serves the same purpose now.

I know I am not alone in reevaluating the pillars of newsworthiness that the late Professor Dick Schwarzlose introduced me to as an undergraduate journalism student. Gillmor is far more forward-looking than most. I think we do, however, need to keep in mind that the defense of journalism as an institution is motivated by civic outcomes. (Paul Starr last year in The New Republic gave eloquent voice to this perspective.) Fundamentals of journalism are intermediary goals and must be adjusted if conditions change.

The study, produced by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University under principal investigator Yochai Benkler, analyzed market-oriented democracies and their efforts to expand broadband, aiming to inform U.S. efforts. Broadband is conceptualized here as having two key components: high download speeds and ubiquitous, seamless access.

Open access accompanies advanced access

Our most surprising and significant finding is that “open access” policies—unbundling, bitstream access, collocation requirements, wholesaling, and/or functional separation—are almost universally understood as having played a core role in the first generation transition to broadband in most of the high performing countries; that they now play a core role in planning for the next generation transition; and that the positive impact of such policies is strongly supported by the evidence of the first generation broadband transition.

It may not be surprising that Benkler and a Berkman team would come out in favor of open access, but there is no reason to assume anything other than a good-faith inquiry. Based on case studies of half of the OECD countries, the researchers found that the countries with stronger open access provisions are out-performing others. In the advanced broadband markets of Japan and South Korea, open access “has taken the form of opening up not only the fiber infrastructure (Japan) but also requiring mobile broadband access providers to open up their networks to competitors.”

I have not read the full report, but it contains a chapter that covers the existing literature in econometrics and qualitative studies on open access. In the report, open access is touted as driving innovation by allowing new entrants to the market to lease or otherwise use infrastructure built by established firms.

Open access may drive prices down

The highest prices for the lowest speeds are mostly offered by firms in the United States and Canada, all of which inhabit markets structured around “inter-modal” competition—that is, competition between one incumbent owning a telephone system, and one incumbent owning a cable system, where the price of entry into the market is the ability to build your own infrastructure. The lowest prices and highest speeds are almost all offered by firms in markets where, in addition to an incumbent telephone company and a cable company, there are also competitors who entered the market, and built their presence, through use of open access facilities.

Though the study does not appear to be designed to show causation or even rigorous correlation between lower prices and open access, the researchers suggest that this is a key factor.

State investment has been present in better-developed broadband

Noting that the U.S. recovery funding for broadband is strong per capita at more than 7 billion, the researchers suggest that experiences in other OECD countries show that public investment has been a part of successful development.

I have lost track of the state of broadband projects, but I know the FCC is actively working on it and the recovery funds, which were reportedly to be focused on rural and under-served areas, need to be spent. It will be interesting to see whether these principles make it into U.S. broadband policy.

This map of Ohio marks broadband availability in red and gaps in service in beige.

We literally have companies fax in a map with lines drawn in that say, “Here’s where we provide service.” Someone might send addresses covered by their network. We have to normalize all that so we can present it as a covered area on a map.

The validation process is something we invest as heavily in as the data collection. Once we receive the data from providers, we translate it into a GIS format and then validate it by sending it back to provider and ask if it accurately represents where they provide service. There will be additions, deletions and other changes.

Our engineers will then spot-check that their (broadband network) equipment is actually where they say it is. They use spectrum analyzers to provide wireless analysis. Then we do telephone surveys with homes and businesses to check their availability.

“Twenty years ago, people who came to work in the federal government had better technology at work than at home,” said [Peter] Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget. “Now that’s no longer the case.

“The American people deserve better service from their government, and better return for their tax dollars.”

The White House release that included Orszag’s comments said one “specific source” of ineffective and inefficient government is the huge technology gap between the public and private sectors that results in billions of dollars in waste, slow and inadequate customer service and a lack of transparency about how dollars are spent.

This doesn’t mean the public will necessarily see the physical results of any upgrade. The inefficiency is seen as within the government, rather than in the government’s interactions with citizens.

“Improving the technology our government uses isn’t about having the fanciest bells and whistles on our websites — it’s about how we use the American people’s hard-earned tax dollars to make government work better for them,” Obama said in a statement.