Today's section is on Censorship and Free Speech... and truthfully, it's mostly a re-hash of my earlier definition of censorship; after this has been posted for a bit I intend to remove that article and replace it with a pointer to this chapter.

However, this chapter has the advantage of putting the whole thing on much firmer theoretical ground, and it will be used as a foundation for quite a few other chapters.

Communication Ethics book part for Legal Attempts To Deal With The Change. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for Ethical Drift. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for After The Internet - Stasis Broken. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

lindner writes "According to a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the United States No-Fly List uses a soundex algorithm to match names. Designed 'to quickly summon passenger names or to catch deal-hunting passengers making duplicate bookings.' The system has only managed to rack up a slew of false-positives, including everyone matching soundex ("J. Adams") at one point in time. The problem has gotten so bad that there is now a "Fly List" for chronically misidentified passengers." [Privacy Digest]

This should be a firing offense for the programmers. With millions of inputs even the (inevitable) slightest inaccuracy instantly means hundreds of false positives; using such an ancient, English-centric algorithm for a mission-critical instantly renders the system utterly useless, made more useless by the fact the system (software + people) is too arrogant to admit it is wrong.

Maresh had spent two years in front of the console, but, he says, "I had never seen anything like that." Fifty-five million meaningless database server requests were traversing the globe - and one of Akamai's Hong Kong locations was caught in the crossfire. Maresh was the first person on earth to spot the Internet worm that came to be known as Slammer. [Tomalak's Realm]

Pretty interesting piece. I remember when the "Warhol worm" idea was being mocked; Slammer technically wasn't such a worm but it got pretty close to implementing it and it didn't even take the pre-scan steps outlined in the Warhol worm paper.

Communication Ethics book part for Before Internet - Almost Attained Stasis. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for Final Diagram. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Chapter 3 of The Ethics of Modern Communication has been posted. As mentioned in yesterday's post, this is the most foundational chapter of the work, the Big Idea that I think everyone is missing. In theory you could derive the rest of the essay from this chapter, though in practice I think it would be difficult, or I wouldn't have written it ;-)

The PDF is now 302KB, 30 pages.

Communication Ethics book part for Telephones. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)