Two years ago, Hollywood talent agent Ari Emanuel made a remarkable statement about the future of media. He said he could see a time when certain movies premiered on Facebook instead of in theaters. “For the $150 million movie, you’ll still need to go to Warner Brothers, but for the $25 million movie, probably not,” he said at a San Francisco conference.

After a decade of war with Silicon Valley, big chunks of Hollywood’s establishment are thinking about technology differently. Instead of freaking out about how high-tech companies will drain their pockets, Hollywood executives are increasingly looking at deals with firms such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon as a way to line them. As we spend more time online — almost as much time as we spend watching television, according to Morgan Stanley — these companies are becoming TV networks for the digital age. They are hugely valuable advertising and distribution engines for Hollywood content.

The initial public offering documents that Facebook filed this past week reveal just how big an advertising and distribution juggernaut it has become. The company said that last year it made $1 billion on $3.7 billion in revenue, making it more than twice as profitable as Google was when it went public in 2004 and almost as profitable as the CBS television network is today.

Facebook’s reach turned out to be even bigger than previously thought — it has 845 million monthly active users (more than a third of the Internet), 483 million daily active users and more than 37 million fan pages. Most of the top-ranked fan pages are for celebrities such as Lady Gaga, but there are companies on the list, too. The firm with the largest number of Facebook fans, after Facebook, YouTube and Coca-Cola? Disney — with nearly 32 million.

Going public is a seminal moment for a company. It means the world gets to see once-private financial statements. Employees and investors who have been paid largely in stock or some other illiquid compensation finally can turn that into cash. And most important, the company can suddenly buy things previously out of its reach. Not only does a firm raise cash in an IPO, it gains a currency — its stock — which is often as legitimate as cash.

Facebook has $1 billion in cash now. It will have at least $6 billion when its IPO is complete later this year. And it’s not hard to imagine where some of that money is headed: content deals with Hollywood. Almost from the day he started Facebook, founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has talked about it as a next-generation media company. It’s no accident that two of his six board members are media executives — Netflix founder and chief executive Reed Hastings and The Washington Post Co.’s chairman and chief executive, Donald Graham.

Already, Zuckerberg has signed up Netflix, Hulu and the music service Spotify as content-sharing partners. Meanwhile, studios have been cozying up to the social networking site for more than a year. Facebook has launched a movie-rental application with Warner Bros., debuting last year with “The Dark Knight.”Paramount has made its “Jackass” films available for rental on the site. And last month, Lionsgatemade its 2011 movie “Abduction” available to rent on Facebook.

But that’s probably just a glimpse of Zuckerberg’s ambitions. Even for a company with Facebook’s massive distribution, true content deals with Hollywood don’t get done without hundreds of millions of dollars changing hands. As a private company, Facebook didn’t have that kind of money. As a public company, it will have it in torrents. Competitors Google and Apple are already hard at work on TV offerings. Expect Facebook TV — or whatever Zuckerberg ends up calling it — sometime soon as well.

It’s ironic that Facebook’s IPO announcement came only a couple of weeks after the flare-up of hostilities surrounding Hollywood’s online piracy bills. Pundits and even a few Hollywood executives have been openly worrying about a return to the bad old days of a decade ago, when the recording industry sued Napster out of existence and when top executives at Disney and Intel screamed at each other during a 2002 congressional hearing.

It is misplaced hand-wringing. Silicon Valley, with its social networks and mobile devices, has enabled consumers to profitably access entertainment content in places that media moguls could once only dream about — in line, on the bus, in the elevator, in the back of a car and even in the restroom, as well as in a movie theater and in front of the living room TV. The world’s eyeballs are increasingly online. It is where Hollywood — or anyone who wants their content to be widely seen — will go as well.

¿Se ha preguntado alguna vez qué sucede con sus datos personales cuando se conecta a internet para reservar un vuelo? ¿Puede borrar realmente una foto que en su día subió usted a una red social? ¿Sabe quién puede ayudarle si han robado sus datos o los han utilizado incorrectamente?

Muchos europeos se hacen las mismas preguntas. A pesar de que aceptamos la creciente importancia que tiene internet en nuestra vida diaria, un 72% (71% en España) de los usuarios de internet son conscientes de que proporcionan demasiados datos personales. Solo algo más de la cuarta parte de los usuarios de las redes sociales (26% en la UE, 23% en España) e incluso menos en el caso de los compradores en línea (18% en la UE, 21% en España) creen tener un control absoluto sobre sus datos personales.

En las redes sociales, en los teléfonos inteligentes que nos dicen dónde encontrar restaurantes en nuestra ciudad y en las tarjetas inteligentes que guardan información sensible sobre la asistencia sanitaria que recibimos dejamos rastros digitales cada vez que damos un paso. En este nuevo y desafiante mundo de los datos necesitamos dotarnos de un conjunto sólido de normas sobre protección de los mismos. En Europa, la directiva sobre protección de datos de 1995 constituyó un hito en el camino para garantizar nuestra intimidad y la protección efectiva de nuestros datos personales. Sin embargo, las diferencias en la manera en que los países han aplicado la ley han provocado lagunas jurídicas en esa protección, que varía en función de dónde vivamos o dónde compremos bienes y servicios. Es preciso modernizar las normas actualmente vigentes, que se remontan a una época en la que solo una pequeña parte de nuestros datos circulaba por internet y en la que el fundador de Facebook tenía 11 años.

Para proteger de manera más eficaz los datos personales, la Comisión Europea acaba de proponer una reforma global de esas normas. Con las nuevas normas tendrá usted un mayor control sobre sus datos personales y podrá acceder más fácilmente a ellos. Además, estará usted mejor informado de lo que sucede con sus datos si decide compartirlos. Las propuestas están pensadas para garantizar que sus datos estén protegidos con independencia del lugar al que se envíen o en el que estén almacenados, incluso si se mandan o almacenan fuera de la UE, como suele suceder en internet.

¿Qué cambiará concretamente para usted? Habrá un único conjunto de normas sobre protección de datos en los 27 estados miembros de la UE. Las normas de la UE se aplicarán cuando las empresas manejen datos personales fuera de la Unión o cuando ofrezcan servicios a los ciudadanos de la UE. Podrá acceder más fácilmente a sus datos personales y podrá transferirlos de un servidor a otro. Sus fotos, vídeos y contactos le pertenecerán a usted, no a la empresa que haya elegido para poner su perfil en la web. Si solicita sus datos, le serán devueltos en un formato usado habitualmente, lo que facilitará la elección de otro servidor. Se trata de una cuestión de competencia leal.

El derecho al olvido le ayudará a gestionar mejor los riesgos de la protección de datos en línea. Cuando ya no quiera que se traten sus datos y no haya motivos legítimos para conservarlos, podrá eliminarlos. Imagine que ha colgado una foto comprometedora en su página en una red social y tiene una entrevista de trabajo al día siguiente, por lo que desea eliminarla. Con arreglo a las nuevas normas, este derecho será una realidad y no un mero principio. Gracias a ellas, todos nosotros podremos controlar nuestros datos. Esto no significa que podamos borrar las noticias sobre nosotros que hayan aparecido en los periódicos o que podamos limitar la libertad de prensa. Las nuevas normas también dejarán claro que cuando usted autorice el tratamiento de sus datos, este deberá hacerse de forma explícita y con su conocimiento. En caso de que sus datos se roben, pierdan o pirateen, se le deberá informar de ello cuanto antes, no transcurrida una semana.

Por lo que se refiere a las empresas, las nuevas normas se traducirán en menos burocracia y mayor seguridad jurídica. En la medida de lo posible, se eliminarán las obligaciones de información exigidas a las empresas que resulten superfluas. Las organizaciones solo tendrán que tratar con la autoridad de protección de datos del país de la UE en el que tengan su sede principal.

Los ciudadanos podrán navegar por la red con seguridad y aprovecharse de las ventajas de comprar en línea y de las nuevas tecnologías, así como compartir información con amigos en todo el mundo. El lugar en el que se viva o en el que se encuentre el servidor o la sede principal de una empresa no dará pie a diferencias, lo que reforzará la confianza en el mercado interior y contribuirá a dar un mejor servicio a los consumidores en toda Europa, cuyos datos personales serán tratados de manera más segura y con menos gastos. En los complicados tiempos que vivimos, esto es lo que Europa necesita.

This interview was edited and excerpted from a longer taped transcript. Interview archive: latimes.com/pattasks

Brewster Kahle has the gleeful air of a man who has just found something wonderful and wants to tell his friends all about it. And his friends are the 2 billion people, and counting, who are on the Internet every day.

What he has found — or more accurately, crafted — are the means and the mechanisms to preserve the human record, the whole human record, in its many media, so other humans can get to it with a tap or a mouse click, on www.internetarchive.org and www.openlibrary.org.

For a geek who made his fortune in cutting-edge search engines, Kahle sure does love books and print. He taught his kids geometry out of a 19th century volume of Euclid and does hand-set letterpress printing in his basement.

Thanks to Kahle’s Wayback Machine — a search engine named in homage to a cartoon on “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” — you can follow the history of vanished Web pages. At the archive’s website, download a book that’s in the public domain or borrow one — electronically — that’s not.

Kahle’s home base is a onetime Christian Science church in San Francisco. Where the week’s hymn numbers were once posted, there are now two canonical tech-world numbers: the golden ratio, and pi. Everybody sing!

You love libraries, Web pages, pretty much all forms of information, but you worry about preserving it all.

What happens to libraries is that they burn. And they get burned by governments. The Library of Congress was burned once; it was burned by the British.

So let’s design for it. If the folks at the [ancient] Library of Alexandria had made a copy and put it in China or India, we would have the works of Aristotle, the other plays by Euripides.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could put all the published works online? The Internet Archive is trying to become useful as a modern-day digital library. We’re trying with [today's] Library of Alexandria [among others].

The Alexandria, in Egypt, right?

Yes. They have this gorgeous building; you walk in, turn to your right and [there is] the running Internet Archive. They’re scanning their books for it. We have [such] agreements with five or six [libraries] around the world.

Let’s not have the Library of Alexandria, version two, burn this time. [Let's be prepared for] when Iron Curtains go up or down, when governments say, “We’re not really interested in this library thing anymore.”

The Internet Archive started [by] collecting all the Web pages, a copy of every page from every website every two months. We collected, collected, collected. Then we made the Wayback Machine.

Then we started collecting television — 20 channels worldwide since the year 2000, mostly news.

The book collection — we’re digitizing 1,000 books every day [in] 29 scanning centers in six countries. There’s a room in the Library of Congress and they keep bringing us maybe 100 or 200 books a day [to scan].

We get a couple of million people a day to see these collections.

One of the ways your collection of current books differs from Google’s quest to record all books is that you’ve structured yours like a lending library — people check out a book virtually and return it virtually.

We started by scanning public domain books and now have about 2 million available [to download] free. [We get books] from around 500 great libraries. The California state library participates. The libraries, or some foundation, [pay] to have them scanned. The national library of Spain [has] us collect all Spanish websites.

It costs 10 cents a page; about $30 a book. We can do it all in about one hour.

But we wanted to get more modern books [too], so we came up with the lending library system at openlibrary.org.

[He pulls up the site on his laptop and demonstrates.] “Mr. Popper’s Penguins” — it probably has some rights issues, so I can take this book for two weeks. Anyone else who wants to borrow it, they’ll have to wait until I return it. OK, so now I’m going to return the book — ta da!

How do writers get paid? And will all libraries be online affairs?

All this is in transition. We’re starting to see a few companies really suck the air out of the room [with] central points of control: Google, Apple, Amazon. Let’s find an [open] alternative.

We see libraries [online], buying ebooks as they buy books today: Buy them and lend them out. [Some] publishers are not selling ebooks to libraries, but if the $3 billion to $4 billion that libraries currently spend on publishers’ products [still goes] to publishers and authors, then there is a future for all concerned.

Slate called you an evangelical librarian. Do librarians like you?

Yes; we’re doing things they wish they could be doing.

You sound like a liberal arts major!

Nah, I just read all these books. My background really comes from geekdom and the idea of building a smart machine. If we’re going to build a smart machine, let’s have it read good books.

So when you went to the library as a kid, you thought, we can do better than this?

Oh yeah — [the library] is all romantic, but it’s super-slow. Answering questions in a physical library with books — that’s the sort of thing we expect to do like that [he snaps his fingers] on the Net now.

The problem is the Net doesn’t have [enough of] the good stuff yet. It’s shallow. The way most people are learning these days is through screens, so let’s make sure they have as good a [screen] library as [the kind] we grew up with.

My kids are 14 and 17; the books of the 20th century are not at the fingertips of my children, and the 20th century was pretty impactful. If we don’t [change] that, we’re going to end up with a generation that’s going to learn only [from] corporate stuff or Wikipedia.

I read you have 40 billion Web pages from 50 million websites. Do you lie awake at night and think there are millions more being created at this very moment, how do we catch up?

Yes, absolutely. And the Web is changing. It’s more difficult to [keep up], but that’s our challenge.

With the early websites from the 1990s, a lot of [things] didn’t work out but at least we have copies of them. And next time, let’s go back and make sure our technology can support those dreams better.

What’s [the Web] going to become? I’m hoping [it] isn’t just the next glorified television.

You do ephemera like seed catalogs and political brochures too?

A lot of ephemera, old computer magazines, people love that stuff.

And you’ve got a “book ark.”

We don’t want to destroy the books we’re scanning. We love books! So we said let’s get good at storing books. Libraries spend a lot of money storing books. We [do it for about] one-tenth of what libraries spend.

We do it much more densely. We put them in boxes, then on pallets, then in modified shipping containers. We know where everything is. It’s not meant to be a circulating library. It’s collection-oriented.

If you’re wondering [if] “1984” by George Orwell has been changed [in a new edition], can we check the original? We’re a place to do that. It’s the original testimony of the artifact. Is this level of protection the ultimate? I don’t know. But it’s another shot at it.

Do you read on a Kindle?

No, I like books.

How close are you to getting it all digitized?

When we started, we were thought of as crazy; it was impossible. Or if you could do it, you wouldn’t want to. We don’t hear that anymore. People are saying, glad you’re there; I’ve used it; it’s helped me out. So in 15 years — somewhat because of us doing it and showing it’s valuable — we’ll use the Net as the library. By being a library, we’re able to remember and live a civic role that existed before the Internet.

Hace unos años, cuando comenzó la revolución digital (y muchos no creían que esa interminable fiesta también se iba a celebrar), un amigo cercano que cumplía altas funciones de Estado me presentó a un hacker verdadero. Era un muchacho de unos veinte años, alto, espigado, vestido con pantalones vaqueros y una camisa blanca de manga corta. Fumaba con la displicencia de Bogart en una película con guión de Dashiell Hammett, doblaba las piernas con la naturalidad estética de la gente del 68 cuando éramos jóvenes y alocados; era flaco y despeinado, y echaba humo por la boca mientras hablaba, aunque hablaba poco. «¿A qué te dedicas?», me preguntó con distancia generacional. Pensé una respuesta brillante, que lo descolocara de la ventaja que me llevaba desde el principio. «Me paso todo el día discutiendo con los adjetivos…», le dejé. «¡Qué bonito!», sonrió, «parece atractivo… ¿Y para que sirve eso?», volvió a preguntar como si me tirara un guante al rostro. «Para escribir bien». Le pegué un par de golpes bajos, de púgil experimentado. «Ya sabes que escribir mal es muy difícil, lo decía Salvador Garmendia, aunque siempre es más difícil escribir bien», le dije. No noté los efectos de mis zarpazos. Como si no le hubieran rozado el cuerpo ni el alma. No le pregunté a lo que él se dedicaba, porque ya lo sabía y además era una de las preguntas que el hackeresperaba que yo le hiciera. Jugábamos con la palabra a los duelistas de Conrad, cuando los dos sabíamos quiénes éramos y lo que hacíamos en la vida.
El hacker había llegado a ser agente de la Inteligencia del Estado gracias a que inventó un sistema electrónico («un programa monstruoso», me confesó mi amigo) con el que había vulnerado con suma facilidad las fronteras de nuestra seguridad tecnológica y se había enterado de muchos de nuestros secretos mejor guardados. Con una cierta honestidad, el hackerse presentó un día a las autoridades del Centro Nacional de Inteligencia y les dijo que tenían un grave problema.

Inmediatamente lo contrataron y le compraron su programa de bucanero electrónico por una millonada («lo valía», me confesó mi amigo). Así se pasó de pirata a defensor de la integridad del Estado en plena juventud y por delante del tiempo. En un momento de la inconexa conversación, porque yo usaba una compleja filigrana sintáctica en mi verbalidad (para que el hacker supiera que no todo el monte era orgasmo) mientras él soltaba frases sueltas con una semántica de otra dimensión, trucadas por una gramática nueva llena de términos desconocidos, me habló como si fuera un verdadero intelectual. «Yo paso horas en el fondo del espejo», me dijo. Como pueden imaginarse, me vinieron a la cabeza los libros de Alicia, sus infinitas maravillas, sus juegos perversos y la imagen de Lewis Carroll, un matemático singular que se cambió de nombre para entrar en el gran espejo de la literatura a través de una escritura llena de jeroglíficos inteligentes. El hackersabía que yo sabía lo que era el otro lado del espejo, pero también sabía que yo ignoraba lo que significaba el fondo del espejo. «¿Eso es el vacío?», le pregunté con ánimo de doblarle con un golpe al hígado un segundo después de su contestación afirmativa (por ejemplo, preguntarle «¿y de qué color es?»). «No», me contestó esquivando mi golpe, «es el lleno total. El infinito en mis manos».

Algunos exégetas de la obra de Carroll dijeron que no era una obra para niños, como había sugerido su autor, sino un libro de y para locos. Incluso llegaron a hacerse estudios dentro de los manicomios de la primera parte del siglo XX y una inmensa mayoría de los enfermos mentales respondía que «Alicia en el país de las maravillas» cuando se les preguntaba (a los enfermos) por el libro que más les había impresionado al leerlo. Esos mismos exégetas y algunos más sostienen que Carroll se abismó en la visión de un futuro caótico que desembocaba precisamente en la electrónica sin fin, que traería al mundo un gran desarrollo de comunicación (a través del espejo, esa es la metáfora) pero, como todo progreso, encerraba miles de peligros desconocidos.

En un libro de reciente aparición, titulado «Contra el rebaño digital», Jaron Lanier, inventor de muchos de los programas de Apple y estrecho colaborador de Jobs, advierte de la tentación constante que tenemos en estos momentos para entrar hasta el fondo del espejo y añadirnos a lo que él mismo llama «el ganado digital». Ya hace tiempo que estamos corriendo libremente por la gran pradera de la red digital, donde el bestiario humano crece y se enriquece (aunque también, por el otro lado, se empobrece) intermediando opiniones que no tienen ninguna autoridad. Pero si no estamos en la red, en la realidad virtual, ¿dónde estamos? ¿Dónde estaba Alicia cuando traspasaba el espejo? Hay legiones de gentes, sobre todo entre las nuevas generaciones, que se pasan el día conectadas con el mundo (su mundo) a través de las redes sociales, hasta el punto de haber convertido ese mundo virtual en un mundo real, tal como Alicia vivió las aventuras una vez que caía del otro lado de la realidad. Películas, series televisivas, sesudos debates y soliloquios de expertos nos dicen que todo ese mundo maravilloso de la red está aún por explorar y que, como el universo, es infinito. Tal vez haya llegado ya el día, sin que lo sepamos científicamente, en el que una conciencia humana, con todas sus pasiones y sus sensaciones, haya entrado ya en un ordenador y la vida virtual forme parte de la vida real, una realidad que se está creando mientras se vive, como la vida misma que vivimos.

Los descubrimientos de Jobs cambiaron el mundo. Aceptémoslo aunque sea a regañadientes: el mundo de Gutenberg, concreto, papel y tinta, se nos está evaporando entre las manos y, aunque quiero imaginar que nunca desaparecerá del todo, lo más probable es que conviva en inferioridad de condiciones con los bichos electrónicos que vayan saliendo mes a mes de los laboratorios y las compañías de altas tecnologías. Turing acabó suicidándose después de intentar reproducir el cerebro humano en una máquina tan rápida que era, por eso mismo, un arma de doble filo y un idiota que recibía órdenes y las cumplía con una rapidez asombrosa. Turing abrió el camino. Hoy los últimos descubridores de dimensiones tecnológicas que todavía desconocemos nos advierten del riesgo que cada uno de nosotros tenemos para convertirnos, con suma facilidad, en un búfalo galopante más de la manada digital que navega sin parar entre constelaciones que parecen situarse en el fin de los mundos, en el lleno total o en el vacío absoluto. El idiota más rápido del mundo, el mejor ordenador del universo, tiene más posibilidades de equivocarse a toda velocidad que ninguno de esos escritores (conozco algunos) que, lenta y minuciosamente, golpe a golpe de su máquina de escribir, fabrican mundos que quieren parecerse a los que Carroll inventó, de puño y letras, con Alicia y las maravillas de los libros.

From the streets of Tunis to Tahrir Square and beyond, protests around the world last year were built on the Internet and the many devices that interact with it. Though the demonstrations thrived because thousands of people turned out to participate, they could never have happened as they did without the ability that the Internet offers to communicate, organize and publicize everywhere, instantaneously.

It is no surprise, then, that the protests have raised questions about whether Internet access is or should be a civil or human right. The issue is particularly acute in countries whose governments clamped down on Internet access in an attempt to quell the protesters. In June, citing the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, a report by the United Nations’ special rapporteur went so far as to declare that the Internet had “become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights.” Over the past few years, courts and parliaments in countries like France and Estonia have pronounced Internet access a human right.

But that argument, however well meaning, misses a larger point: technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.

The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time. Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the Internet was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.

What about the claim that Internet access is or should be a civil right? The same reasoning above can be applied here — Internet access is always just a tool for obtaining something else more important — though the argument that it is a civil right is, I concede, a stronger one than that it is a human right. Civil rights, after all, are different from human rights because they are conferred upon us by law, not intrinsic to us as human beings.

While the United States has never decreed that everyone has a “right” to a telephone, we have come close to this with the notion of “universal service” — the idea that telephone service (and electricity, and now broadband Internet) must be available even in the most remote regions of the country. When we accept this idea, we are edging into the idea of Internet access as a civil right, because ensuring access is a policy made by the government.

Yet all these philosophical arguments overlook a more fundamental issue: the responsibility of technology creators themselves to support human and civil rights. The Internet has introduced an enormously accessible and egalitarian platform for creating, sharing and obtaining information on a global scale. As a result, we have new ways to allow people to exercise their human and civil rights.

In this context, engineers have not only a tremendous obligation to empower users, but also an obligation to ensure the safety of users online. That means, for example, protecting users from specific harms like viruses and worms that silently invade their computers. Technologists should work toward this end.

It is engineers — and our professional associations and standards-setting bodies like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — that create and maintain these new capabilities. As we seek to advance the state of the art in technology and its use in society, we must be conscious of our civil responsibilities in addition to our engineering expertise.

Improving the Internet is just one means, albeit an important one, by which to improve the human condition. It must be done with an appreciation for the civil and human rights that deserve protection — without pretending that access itself is such a right.

¿Por fin ha madurado Google? El cuidado con el que ha manejado la tecnología del reconocimiento facial parece sustentar esa tesis. Compárenlo con Facebook. Cuando el pasado junio la red social de Zuckerberg desveló su tecnología del reconocimiento facial se vio envuelta en una violenta reacción de la privacidad universal. Pero Google ha evitado esa fatalidad: hace pocas semanas hizo pública una tecnología que es capaz de identificar automáticamente a tus amigos en fotos subidas a Google +; y casi nadie se dio cuenta.

Las diferentes reacciones son fáciles de explicar: Facebook posibilitó esa prestación para todos los usuarios sin pedirles su permiso, mientras que Google la dispuso como una herramienta opcional. Facebook podría estar ahora en vísperas de adoptar también ese modo más cortés de propuesta: su reciente acuerdo con la Comisión Federal de Comercio estipula que todos los futuros cambios en los controles de privacidad existentes requerirán el consentimiento del usuario.

La Red parece estar apartándose de la mentalidad del opt-out (habilitar salvo que se diga que no) propia del intimidador: “sabemos que a usted le gustará esta aplicación, así que la habilitaremos por defecto”, en favor de la mentalidad del opt-in (no habilitar a menos que se dé permiso), propia del diplomático persuasivo: “hola, verifique esta nueva aplicación, pero solo si usted lo desea”. Como demuestra la adopción por parte de Facebook del “compartir sin fricciones” una cosa es obligarnos a compartir alterando nuestros parámetros de seguridad y otra muy distinta persuadirnos de que compartir es algo que realmente queremos hacer. Lo primero es una ofensa; lo segundo merece celebrarse.

Y, sin embargo, ese triunfo del opt-in no es todo lo que parece ser. Aunque ciertamente es menos coercitivo, todo opt-in hace que la tecnología subyacente -en este caso, el reconocimiento facial automático- parezca normal y aceptable. Pero ninguna compañía tecnológica lo admitirá. “La decisión está totalmente en manos del usuario”. “Todo consiste en dar más control a los usuarios”. “No forzamos a nadie; la gente puede mantenerse al margen”. Este tipo de insulsa retórica sobre “otorgar poder al usuario” ha sido durante décadas una característica básica del evangelio de Silicon Valley. Se funda en la ingenua creencia de que las tecnologías son solo herramientas y que su impacto es más bien escaso y limitado a la consecución (o no) de la tarea en cuestión. Así, si los usuarios quieren utilizar la Herramienta X para realizar la Tarea Y el único asunto a debate es la conveniencia de la Tarea Y. El hecho de que una ampliaaceptación de la Herramienta X pueda provocar también un imprevisto Efecto Z nunca preocupa a los que lo instrumentan o, si lo hace, simplemente lo descartan como algo imponderable.

Por desgracia, tal razonamiento pasa por alto el hecho de que las tecnologías, además de servir para sus funciones inmediatas, tienen también su impacto ecológico, con el que pueden transformar entornos, ideologías, usuarios, relaciones de poder e incluso otras tecnologías. Aunque los coches puedan ser un medio perfectamente útil para ir desde el Punto A al Punto B, uno no debería centrarse solamente en esa característica y no tener en cuenta de qué modo la cultura del automóvil en general pueda estar afectando a la calidad e incluso a las formas de vida urbana, o a los índices de contaminación, o a las estadísticas de mortalidad. Centrarse en los usos inmediatos de un artefacto -independientemente de que sean opt-in u opt-out- parece una pobre manera de gobernar su complejidad.

De un modo similar, suponer que una determinada tecnología no es problemática porque sus usuarios pueden desconectarla parece descaminado. ¿Por qué no se tiene en cuenta la posibilidad de que, una vez que un número suficiente de gente opta por utilizarla, la aceptación colectiva de esa tecnología puede transformar drásticamente el entorno social, haciendo difícil o imposible su falta de uso? Una vez que un número suficiente de californianos optaron por utilizar el coche, algo cambió -a nivel tanto de infraestructuras públicas como normativo-, lo que en buena medida hace de California un lugar completamente inhóspito para vivir sin coche. El coche todavía nos lleva desde el Punto A al Punto B, pero ¿no sería nuestra calidad de vida mucho mejor si intentásemos anticiparnos a sus efectos colaterales desarrollando una idea más polifacética de la tecnología automovilística?

Volviendo al asunto de las tecnologías de reconocimiento facial automático, digamos lo que sabemos al respecto: que esa tecnología puede ser objeto de abusos con facilidad; un motor de búsqueda que genera los nombres de las personas a partir de sus rostros sería muy bien acogida por los dictadores, más que interesados en poder reprimir cualquier protesta popular. También sabemos que la tecnología del reconocimiento facial ha penetrado en diversos estratos sociales. Es una manera popular de proteger nuestros teléfonos inteligentes y ordenadores portátiles. Se utiliza en diversas consolas de videojuegos para crear una experiencia de juego más personalizada. Se utiliza para averiguar (¡y en tiempo real!) el número de clientes masculinos y femeninos en los bares. Y la lista continúa.

Esos usos aparentemente inocuos engendran una generación de incipientes negocios que buscan dar nuevos usos a esa tecnología, no todos ellos inocuos aunque varios de ellos previstos por sus críticos. Naturalmente, para cuando el público en general toma conciencia de ello, esa tecnología se halla tan profundamente implantada en nuestra cultura que es demasiado tarde para hacer nada.

En cierto sentido nos encontramos ante un proceso que es más perverso que la popular noción del “efecto mariposa”, esa idea de que el batir de alas de una mariposa en Brasil puede desencadenar un tornado en Tejas. Llamémosle el “efecto Palo Alto”: un despreocupado usuario en Palo Alto, California, que se decide por el opt-in y utiliza la tecnología del reconocimiento facial de Google acaba fortaleciendo a un dictador en Damasco. ¿Por qué “perverso”? Porque el usuario de Palo Alto, a diferencia de la mariposa, siempre puede pensárselo antes, pero prefiere no hacerlo.

¿Qué se puede hacer? Bien, podemos hacer caer de lleno la responsabilidad ética sobre los usuarios de Internet y concienciarles acerca de las últimas (aunque indirectas) consecuencias de sus opciones. Existen muchos precedentes al respecto. Crecientes preocupaciones sobre desigualdad económica, cambio climático y trabajo infantil han hecho emerger el movimiento del “consumo ético”, que pretende que los consumidores tomen en consideración las ramificaciones éticas que acarrea su conducta en el mercado.

En una línea parecida, ¿por qué no pensar en aplicar conceptos similares a nuestro compromiso con Internet? ¿Qué implicaría una “navegación ética” o participar en “redes sociales éticas”? ¿No utilizar nunca sitios que se aprovechan de la tecnología del reconocimiento facial? ¿Negarse a comerciar con las compañías de Internet que cooperan con la Agencia de Seguridad Nacional? Esas son las decisiones que tendremos que tomar si no queremos que Internet se convierta en una zona sin ética. Después de todo, el uso irreflexivo de la tecnología -lo mismo que el shopping irreflexivo- no hace de nadie un modelo de buen ciudadano.

Pero tampoco dejemos a las compañías de Internet libres de culpa. Naturalmente, Google y Facebook son diferentes de las codiciosas corporaciones que explotan a los agricultores pobres o a los menores. Ninguna de las dos compañías está creando herramientas de vigilancia para que sean utilizadas por dictadores. Lo que hacen, sin embargo, es ayudar a crear la pertinente infraestructura técnica e ideológica para que tales herramientas surjan de un modo aparentemente natural. Lo cual no proporciona sólidos fundamentos para su regulación, pero abre las puertas al activismo ciudadano, a los boicoteos, y, como último recurso, a la desobediencia civil.

Las compañías de Internet saben perfectamente bien que han contraído responsabilidades. Este mismo año, Eric Schmidt, presidente ejecutivo de Google, tildó a la tecnología de reconocimiento facial de “escalofriante” y expresó su preocupación acerca de la misma. Y, sin embargo, Google acaba de refrendar esa tecnología, si bien con la salvedad del opt-in. Esto, cree Google, les protege de cualquier acusación de comportamiento poco ético; al fin y al cabo, todo depende del usuario. Pero ¿acaso nos convencerían las compañías petroleras de que cualquiera que estuviera preocupado por el cambio climático no tiene que conducir un Humvee? Quizá no. Al pretender que no saben cómo acaba esta triste película es cuando se hace evidente la gran metedura de pata ética de las empresas tecnológicas.

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.

We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.

Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful.

I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, during three distinct periods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not periods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His illness. His dying.

Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.

That’s incredibly simple, but true.

He was the opposite of absent-minded.

He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.

When he got kicked out of Apple, things were painful. He told me about a dinner at which 500 Silicon Valley leaders met the then-sitting president. Steve hadn’t been invited.

He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.

Novelty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.

For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.

He didn’t favor trends or gimmicks. He liked people his own age.

His philosophy of aesthetics reminds me of a quote that went something like this: “Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.”

Steve always aspired to make beautiful later.

He was willing to be misunderstood.

Uninvited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iteration of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly inventing the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the program for the World Wide Web.

Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talking about love. Love was his supreme virtue, his god of gods. He tracked and worried about the romantic lives of the people working with him.

Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dashing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to dinner with my sister?”

I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”

When Reed was born, he began gushing and never stopped. He was a physical dad, with each of his children. He fretted over Lisa’s boyfriends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.

None of us who attended Reed’s graduation party will ever forget the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.

His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.

Steve had been successful at a young age, and he felt that had isolated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dissolve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With the just the right, recently snipped, herb.

Even as a young millionaire, Steve always picked me up at the airport. He’d be standing there in his jeans.

When a family member called him at work, his secretary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a meeting. Would you like me to interrupt him?”

When Reed insisted on dressing up as a witch every Halloween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.

They once embarked on a kitchen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hotplate in the garage. The Pixar building, under construction during the same period, finished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bathrooms stayed old. But — and this was a crucial distinction — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.

This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his success: he enjoyed his success a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and gleefully realizing he could afford to buy the best bike there.

And he did.

Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.

Once, he told me if he’d grown up differently, he might have become a mathematician. He spoke reverently about colleges and loved walking around the Stanford campus. In the last year of his life, he studied a book of paintings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, thinking of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.

Steve cultivated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the history of English and Chinese tea roses and has a favorite David Austin rose?

He had surprises tucked in all his pockets. I’ll venture that Laurene will discover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an exceptionally close marriage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.

With his four children, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.

He treasured happiness.

Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life compress into a smaller circle. Once, he’d loved walking through Paris. He’d discovered a small handmade soba shop in Kyoto. He downhill skied gracefully. He cross-country skied clumsily. No more.

Eventually, even ordinary pleasures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.

Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his illness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.

I remember my brother learning to walk again, with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor towards the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He counted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.

Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.

“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.

He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emotional man.

I realized during that terrifying time that Steve was not enduring the pain for himself. He set destinations: his son Reed’s graduation from high school, his daughter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launching of a boat he was building on which he planned to take his family around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.

Even ill, his taste, his discrimination and his judgment held. He went through 67 nurses before finding kindred spirits and then he completely trusted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.

One time when Steve had contracted a tenacious pneumonia his doctor forbid everything — even ice. We were in a standard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who generally disliked cutting in line or dropping his own name, confessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.

I told him: Steve, this is special treatment.

He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”

Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.

For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to.

By that, he meant that we should disobey the doctors and give him a piece of ice.

None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

I suppose it’s not quite accurate to call the death of someone who lived with cancer for years unexpected, but Steve’s death was unexpected for us.

What I learned from my brother’s death was that character is essential: What he was, was how he died.

Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leaving us.

He started his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m coming. I’m in a taxi to the airport. I’ll be there.”

“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”

When I arrived, he and his Laurene were joking together like partners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.

Until about 2 in the afternoon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.

Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.

His breathing changed. It became severe, deliberate, purposeful. I could feel him counting his steps again, pushing farther than before.

This is what I learned: he was working at this, too. Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.

He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.

Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.

He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.

This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.

He seemed to be climbing.

But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

Just about the last thing the world economy needs right now is a trumped-up digital trade war over electronic data stored and processed on servers located virtually anywhere. However, unless the governments of the United States and Europe and multinational tech companies start talking soon about reconciling and simplifying international data-protection rules, some ominous storm clouds could threaten trans-Atlantic e-commerce.

Given the staggering potential of cloud computing to promote economic growth, it is well worth preventing trans-Atlantic privacy wars from bogging down and balkanizing the cloud. Policymakers and businesspeople on both sides understand the power and benefits of cloud computing for commerce, consumers and economic growth. In fact, former White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra established a “cloud first” policy for new government expenditures on information technology (IT) resources, and the cloud strategy he published for the White House in February estimated that $20 billion of the federal government’s $80 billion IT budget could be shifted to the cloud. His White House strategy document gushed that “cloud computing will not just be more innovative than we imagine; it will be more innovative than we can imagine.”

Unfortunately, whether inspired by polemics, protectionism or genuine privacy concerns, some European officials are speaking up against cloud computing because of unwarranted fears about the data-protection practices of U.S. companies. For example, in September, the Dutch minister of safety and justice cited the USA Patriot Act to exclude U.S. providers of cloud computing services from bidding on Dutch government contracts, and a member of the Dutch parliament proclaimed that “data from Dutch citizens that is managed by the government should exclusively be stored within Dutch borders using Dutch companies” in order to guarantee the privacy of Dutch citizens. Even the United Kingdom’s Liberal Party worried recently that “cloud computing is an area where, if left unchecked, there is serious potential for abuse – for example, large corporations taking control of enormous quantities of public or private data outside the reach of national law.”

With all of this digital xenophobia, it is no surprise that a provincial privacy commissioner for Shleswig-Holstein in Germany ruled earlier this year that the only permissible cloud in Europe is a European cloud. This inspired Deutsche Telekom to petition the German government to certify German and European cloud providers because certified German computer companies will be “well-positioned if we can say we’re a European provider in a European legal sphere and no American can get to them.” The Deutsche Telekom official didn’t pull any nationalistic punches when he promised that “a German cloud” would be a “safe cloud.”

In truth, U.S. privacy practices, and even the Patriot Act, can withstand comparison to the powers and practices of European governments. While the United States bears the brunt of criticism from privacy advocates, every European government has as much legal authority to conduct digital surveillance and obtain personal information about individuals as does the U.S. government. In fact, the EU’s own privacy bible, the Data Protection Directive, contains an express derogation of personal privacy allowing member states to protect national security and conduct law enforcement. The European governments are not shy about using their extensive powers of surveillance and monitoring. Indeed, Google, which publishes statistics about the government data requests it receives, reports that Germany, the Netherlands and other EU member states are all pretty well practiced at requesting and acquiring personal information directly from that American cloud service provider.

The Patriot Act is not the only problem U.S. cloud providers face in Europe. There is an ongoing battle between the United States and Europe regarding how to protect the privacy of personal information. At present, the EU Data Protection Directive prohibits the transfer of personal information from Europe to the United States. The prohibition goes so far as to block the ability of a company to send data about its own employees from the company’s offices in Europe to its offices in the States unless the American company jumps through certain rather complex procedural rings of fire. This is because the EU has taken the official position that the U.S. approach to data protection is “not adequate,” that is, not up to European standards – largely because America doesn’t have a single comprehensive federal privacy law and an independent federal privacy commissioner.

While the United States and Europe do indeed have different procedures for assuring protection for private information, the substance of data protection is more comparable across the ocean than the EU has so far given us credit for. To achieve “data-protection detente,” the U.S. side thus needs to engage Europe more effectively on the digital standards for global commerce. The imagined privacy gap does not exist. In truth, American business and government can make a compelling case for the U.S. data-protection regime: We have myriad federal and state privacy and data-security statutes (many with private rights of action and statutory damages), comprehensive data-breach notification laws, common-law privacy torts, federal and state prohibitions against unfair and deceptive practices, and aggressive, multimillion-dollar enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and the plaintiffs’ bar.

There are some new rays of hope for such digital detente. European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding understands that “Our societies have been transformed as users embrace social networks, blogs, newsfeeds and shared bookmarks that are kept in the cloud. Companies cut costs by outsourcing data storage tasks.” And EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes has acknowledged that because the cloud is “by definition a global issue,” “Europe should work with the U.S. and Asia in setting policy.”

More business and government dialogue with Europe is needed to tamp down undue suspicion regarding the Patriot Act and help ameliorate the current international imbroglio over privacy. A trans-Atlantic digital initiative to rationalize online standards will allow international cloud providers to benefit businesses and consumers around the globe. The current legal quagmire of divergent, muddled and unduly complicated national rules may be protectionist, but it is not protecting anybody’s privacy.

Earlier this month, researchers discovered a cunning strain of malware, dubbed the Lurid Downloader, that has been systematically and silently stealing data from carefully targeted government computers in 61 countries.

The discovery was made by Trend Micro, a Tokyo-based computer security company, which identified the invader as a version of a well-known strain of malware that exploits vulnerabilities in the popular programs Adobe Reader and Microsoft Office. It inserts itself into a computer’s core, and then phones home to a remote operator who moves continually from domain to domain on the Internet to avoid detection.

The Lurid Downloader had been at work for more than a year inside sensitive government networks (diplomatic offices, space agencies, research institutions), mostly in Russia and countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. Once in place, the virus can easily hop around inside a network and, under the control of a remote operator, observe users’ keystrokes, peruse files and upload any data it wants to keep.

It is just the most recent example of the newest trend in cyberattacks, something those in the field have dubbed “advanced persistent threats,” or APTs. They forgo the more familiar blunderbuss methods of mass infection in favor of sniper-like precision, and they have begun bedeviling cyberspace like a cloud of stinging insects. All take advantage of the anarchic nature of the Internet itself, which emerged 30 years ago free of any central governance or oversight. Because of the essential fluidity of Internet Protocol addresses, which locate a computer in cyberspace, such attacks can be launched with little fear that authorities will be able to pinpoint their origin.

As modern society leans ever more heavily on the Internet for commerce, communications and the management of its vital infrastructures, its fragility becomes an ever greater concern. It was built to share data and to enable connection, with scarcely a thought given to the potential for malice. The only answer to the persistent problem of malware may be to rebuild the Internet from scratch, an undertaking in the planning stages by the Internet Engineering Task Force, an association of volunteer Internet experts supported by the computer industry. A redesigned Internet might “fingerprint” every bit and byte of data so that each packet launched can be traced to its source.

“The Internet has enabled any Mickey Mouse single player to launch something that could be catastrophic,” said Rodney Joffe, head of security for Neustar Inc., a company that provides directory services for the Web. “In the real world, you have to have access to plutonium or fleets of fighter jets to wreak widespread havoc. Because of the Internet, any one person can wreak havoc if they have knowledge and a computer.”

Sophisticated attacks

Malware has come a long way from the standard Hollywood portrayal of the hacker as an unwashed rebel surviving on junk food in his parents’ basement and showing off his skills online. “Botnets” capable of wreaking the kind of havoc Rodney Joffe was referring to, like the one assembled by the Conficker worm starting in 2008, pull computing power from millions of illicitly linked computers. Advanced persistent threats are designed for theft, espionage and sabotage and are the work of nation states or rich criminal gangs. They show a programming sophistication that rivals the best computer security experts in the world.

Here’s how Matt Olney, a Maryland-based security expert, defines those behind APTs: “There are people smarter than you, they have more resources than you, and they are coming for you. Good luck with that.”

A well-known strain called Poison Ivy has successfully penetrated the networks of the Defense and State departments. Another is the Stuxnet worm, thought to have been designed by Israel or the United States, or both, which set back Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons program. Perhaps the most surprising recent victim was RSA, the security arm of EMC Corp., which provides top-level encryption for the public transfer of sensitive data. Earlier this year, hackers stole privileged information and used it to craft fake RSA SecurID tokens, meant to be a key to supposedly secure information anywhere.

Whether posing a giant or a narrowly sculpted threat, malware relies on the ease of operating anonymously on the Internet. The mysterious creators and controllers of the Conficker worm, which infected an estimated 10 million to 12 million computers worldwide in 2008 and 2009, move daily among 50,000 randomly generated Internet domains. Volunteer security experts — known as the Cabal — labored mightily to shut down the botnet, which is no longer growing but remains very much alive.

The Cabal established an unprecedented template for international cooperation and security that must have given malefactors pause. It meant recruiting every national top level domain — the 110 Web addresses denoted by country initials (such as “.ca,” for Canada) — to thwart the worm.

The government steps up

The Conficker threat woke up the U.S. government, which had been conspicuously absent from the fight. In the years since, the Pentagon has established a cyber-command at the headquarters of the National Security Agency, and this year formally classified certain kinds of cyberattacks as acts of war. At the new National Cyber-Forensics Training Alliance in Pittsburgh, a privately funded effort affiliated with Carnegie-Mellon University, federal agents working with industry researchers helped bust a Ukrainian cyber-crime ring that used the Conficker botnet to drain $72 million from American bank accounts.

But law enforcement and security experts have their work cut out for them trying to protect systems designed to make data sharing easy, and looking for bad guys who are free to launch their malware from no fixed address.

The Internet was born, after all, in that brief period of inanity before and after what was dubbed the Summer of Love. Openness was the point. Sharing. It sprang out of a utopian spirit: Power to the people! Information should be free! Knowledge is power! No one was in charge. No one was allowed to be in charge. This pleased the anarchic spirit of the times, but it gave those bent on crime, espionage or sabotage a tool to reach nearly any computer anywhere.

“What were they thinking?” asks Paul Vixie, the author of Unix software who now sits on the advisory committee for security for ICANN, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the closest thing there is to a governing body for the Internet. “Were they thinking?”

They were far more worried about protecting the Web from state control than from the evil that lurks in the hearts of men. Such is the nature of most hopeful ventures. So along with the inestimable benefits of the Internet, we must live with the dangers of loosely guarded interconnectivity.

This is pretty much where Vixie comes down. In an email posted at the height of the Conficker battle, he wrote: “These problems have been here so long that the only way I’ve been able to function at all is by learning to ignore them. Else I would be in a constant state of panic, unable to think or act constructively. We have been one command away from catastrophe for a long time now…. In a thousand small ways that I’m aware of, and an expected million other ways I’m not aware of, the world has gotten dangerous and fragile and interdependent…. But I’ve lived with it so long that I have lost the ability to panic about it. One day at a time, I do what I can.”

In the memorials to Steven P. Jobs this week, Apple’s co-founder was compared with the world’s great inventor-entrepreneurs: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell. Yet virtually none of the obituaries mentioned the man Jobs himself considered his hero, the person on whose career he explicitly modeled his own: Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography.

Land, in his time, was nearly as visible as Jobs was in his. In 1972, he made the covers of both Time and Life magazines, probably the only chemist ever to do so. (Instant photography was a genuine phenomenon back then, and Land had created the entire medium, once joking that he’d worked out the whole idea in a few hours, then spent nearly 30 years getting those last few details down.) And the more you learn about Land, the more you realize how closely Jobs echoed him.

Both built multibillion-dollar corporations on inventions that were guarded by relentless patent enforcement. (That also kept the competition at bay, and the profit margins up.) Both were autodidacts, college dropouts (Land from Harvard, Jobs from Reed) who more than made up for their lapsed educations by cultivating extremely refined taste. At Polaroid, Land used to hire Smith College’s smartest art-history majors and send them off for a few science classes, in order to create chemists who could keep up when his conversation turned from Maxwell’s equations to Renoir’s brush strokes.

Most of all, Land believed in the power of the scientific demonstration. Starting in the 60s, he began to turn Polaroid’s shareholders’ meetings into dramatic showcases for whatever line the company was about to introduce. In a perfectly art-directed setting, sometimes with live music between segments, he would take the stage, slides projected behind him, the new product in hand, and instead of deploying snake-oil salesmanship would draw you into Land’s World. By the end of the afternoon, you probably wanted to stay there.

Three decades later, Jobs would do exactly the same thing, except in a black turtleneck and jeans. His admiration for Land was open and unabashed. In 1985, he told an interviewer, “The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be — not an astronaut, not a football player — but this.”

The two men met at least twice. John Sculley, the Apple C.E.O. who eventually clashed with Jobs, was there for one meeting, when Jobs made a pilgrimage to Land’s labs in Cambridge, Mass., and wrote in his autobiography that both men described a singular experience: “Dr. Land was saying: ‘I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me, before I had ever built one.’ And Steve said: ‘Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.’ He said, If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it, so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say, ‘Now what do you think?’”

The worldview he was describing perfectly echoed Land’s: “Market research is what you do when your product isn’t any good.” And his sense of innovation: “Every significant invention,” Land once said, “must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.” Thirty years later, when a reporter asked Jobs how much market research Apple had done before introducing the iPad, he responded, “None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

Land, like Jobs, was a perfectionist-aesthete, exhaustively obsessive about product design. The amount he spent on research and development, on buffing out flaws, sometimes left Wall Street analysts discouraging the purchase of Polaroid stock, because they thought the company wasn’t paying enough attention to the bottom line. (When a shareholder once buttonholed Land about that, he responded, “The bottom line is in heaven.”)

His supreme achievement, the folding SX-70 camera of the 1970s, was as covetable a luxury object in its moment as the iPod was 30 years later. At the touch of a hand, it collapsed down to a flat, clean pocketable prism, beautifully finished in brushed chrome and leather. One source says he spent $2 billion — and those are 1960s and early-1970s dollars — on developing the camera and its film. Jobs saw, and Jobs understood: “Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that.”

And Land was, like Jobs in 1985, all but forced out of the company he’d built. In the mid-’70s, Land threw himself behind a doomed project called Polavision. It was an instant 8-millimeter home-movie system, and a gorgeous bit of technology, and it also took more than a decade to get out of the labs and into stores. By the time it did, it was dead on arrival, clobbered by Sony’s burgeoning Betamax video cameras.

For the first time, Land had spent a fortune and failed to deliver, and colleagues began to question his infallibility. His board had long been hinting that he needed to put a succession plan in place, and, at 70, Land was coaxed into ceding his chairmanship. For the first time, he had to get his research budgets approved, and he chafed at his lack of autonomy. He couldn’t exactly be fired — he was far too knitted into his company’s structure, both financially and spiritually — but, as one colleague put it, “He liked winning, and when in the end he didn’t win all the time, it became very difficult for him.” After a frustrating couple of years, he quit Polaroid in 1982, soon selling all his stock. He even skipped the company’s 50th-anniversary bash five years later.

After their founders departed, both Polaroid and Apple slowly began to lose their edge, their innovation machines gradually cooling down and falling behind other technology companies’. Apple lost a huge amount of its head start to Microsoft and the cheap-PC business; at Polaroid, one-hour photo labs and then digital photography began to encroach, helped along by some management decisions that ultimately backfired. By 1996, Apple was up against a wall, and called its founder back in, who immediately began to perform one of the great turnarounds in business history. (By the time things started to get really tough at Polaroid, there was no going back to the source; Land died in 1991, at 81.)

Polaroid still exists, but it is nothing like the cauldron of innovation that Land and his colleagues built. Since 2001, the company has declared bankruptcy twice and been sold three times. One of the former C.E.O.’s is now serving a 50-year prison sentence for fraud. The company’s newest owners appear to be making a promising move toward the future again, but few people are expecting Polaroid to be the extraordinary scientific think tank, pumping out ideas and profits in tandem, that it once was — or that Apple is. Here’s hoping that Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s new C.E.O., is paying very close attention to the Polaroid cautionary tale.

In 1980, Steve Jobs went to a brown-bag lunch at Stanford business school, looking for summer help. Other Apple executives were busy explaining what a personal computer was when he sauntered in; they stopped mid-sentence as, dressed in a vest, jeans and Birkenstock sandals, he settled himself, cross-legged, on top of a desk. He looked as if he were about to hold a yoga class. Then he began to talk, instead, about revolutionizing the world.

Some four or five students heeded his call, including my husband-to-be, David O’Connor. This was less than half the number who signed up to work for Hewlett-Packard, but never mind. That summer job became a full-time job when David graduated, and a kind of dream. Apple, back then, had a hot-air balloon. It had a race car. When the second “Star Wars” movie opened, Apple bought out a theater so the whole company could go. A friend’s father called a job at Apple the worst possible thing that could happen to a young person, as everything that followed was bound to be a disappointment. And perhaps that was true.

But, of course, it was exciting in a way even an onlooking writer could understand — strangely familiar, too, as if it were being run by a cousin. Apple was, for example, antiestablishment, as all writers are. It was anti-DEC and anti-I.B.M, a harborer of an anti-acronym acrimony that writers, naturally, shared. What’s more, Steve Jobs’s perfectionism made perfect sense to people like me: Of course, he sweated every detail; of course he drove others mad. He was a J. D. Salinger who, weirdly, knew computing.

Was this why the Apple computer felt like a thing worth trying to write on? Though I would never have thought to use a word processor — those were for offices — I was open to the Apple II, and first worked on one at David’s apartment in the fall of 1980. The screen was black and the type green, and there were only 40 characters per line. But you could insert things; you did not have to retype an entire page if you had a new line of dialogue. And, equally exciting: you could delete things.

More important, you worked with that little blinking cursor before you. No one in the world particularly cared if you wrote and, of course, you knew the computer didn’t care, either. But it was waiting for you to type something. It was not inert and passive, like the page. It was listening. It was your ally. It was your audience. And with it — on it — whatever — you could try things. You were not wasting paper; you were not making a racket. You were not even writing, exactly, as no one you knew wrote this way. Everything you’d read as an English major was far, far away; words like “the literary tradition” belonged to another galaxy. It was just you and this little blinking light, which somehow made you feel like it was always the middle of the night. But for the on-off switch, you would never have called the computer a machine.

Later, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I used a typewriter. But whenever I visited David in California, I wrote on his computer. I did not hide the fact that I did this, but I did not advertise it, either: “real writers,” many believed, used paper and pencil. O.K., so fiction writers, hacks that we were, used typewriters. But computers were suspect. Some writers I knew used the university mainframe to prepare manuscripts, but they typically doctored their pages before sending them out to magazines. They whited things out here and there, and made corrections by pen. They turned a page upside down, or rumpled the pages a little. In short, they tried to make their stories look as though they’d been, not printed, but typed.

And so did I, sometimes, though I knew that the prejudices were all wrong. Maybe there was something dronelike about working on a mainframe; maybe sitting at stations and terminals really was at odds with the play at the heart of creative work. The Apple II, though, was born both in play and to encourage play; and this was even more true of the Lisa and Macintosh computers that followed. My first Lisa was a prototype, whose graphic interface I still glow to recall, and not just because David had worked on it. Truly, it was the sheer friendliness of the interface that I loved. And the mouse! No longer did you need to think about what you were doing; you just did it.

What came out of this computer was not further from the human heart; it was closer. It was looser, freer, more spontaneous — more democratic, too. Writers in the past had often depended on an amanuensis to get their work out; behind the Mr. Tolstoys there was often a Mrs. Tolstoy. But now Mrs. Tolstoy could also write, if she liked. She could get her thoughts down and send them out with an ease she could never have dreamed of before.

As for whether the Apple computers changed not only who wrote, but what they wrote, I can’t speak for others. I can only say that these computers coaxed out of me an expansiveness the typewriter never did. For every writer, the leap from short story to novel is, well, a leap. It involves faith, and resources, and a conception, finally, of how much room is yours in the world. I was not a person who would have looked at a ream of paper and thought, “Sure, that is mine to fill up.” But I turned out to be a person who could keep moving a cursor until I’d filled one ream, then another. It is a truly minuscule reason, in the scheme of things, for which to celebrate and mourn Steve Jobs. Still, I add my small reason to the infinity of others.

Steve Jobs was an enemy of nostalgia. He believed that the future required sacrifice and boldness. He bet on new technologies to fill gaps even when the way was unclear.

He often told the press that he was as proud of the devices Apple killed — in the parlance of Silicon Valley, he was a master of “knifing the baby,” which more squeamish innovators cannot do because they fall in love with their creations — as the ones it released. One of the keys to Apple’s success under his leadership was his ability to see technology with an unsentimental eye and keen scalpel, ready to cut loose whatever might not be essential. This editorial mien was Mr. Jobs’s greatest gift — he created a sense of style in computing because he could edit.

It would be fascinating to know what Mr. Jobs would make of the outpouring of grief flooding the developed world after his death on Wednesday. While it’s certain he’d be flattered, his hawk-eyed nature might assert itself: this is a man who once called an engineer at Google over the weekend because the shade of yellow in the second “O” was not precisely correct. This is a man who responded to e-mails sent by strangers with shocking regularity for the world’s most famous C.E.O. His impatience with fools was legendary, and the amount of hagiography now being ladled onto his life with abandon would undoubtedly set his teeth on edge.

Many of Silicon Valley’s leaders regularly ask themselves “What would Steve do?” in an almost religious fashion when facing challenges, and it is a worthy mental exercise for confronting the fact of his death. I think Mr. Jobs would coldly and clearly assess his life and provide unvarnished criticism of its contents. He’d have no problem acknowledging that he was a genius — as he was gifted with an enormously healthy ego — but he would also state with salty language exactly where he had fallen short, and what might be needed to refine his design with the benefit of hindsight.

Mr. Jobs leaves behind a dominant Apple, fulfilling his original promise to save the company from the brink when he returned in 1997. Because of its enormous strength in both music sales and mobile devices, Apple has more power than at any time in its history, and it is using that power to make the computing experience of its users less free, more locked down and more tightly regulated than ever before. All of Apple’s iDevices — the iPod, iPhone and iPad — use operating systems that deny the user access to their workings. Users cannot install programs themselves; they are downloaded from Apple’s servers, which Apple controls and curates, choosing at its whim what can and can’t be distributed, and where anything can be censored with little or no explanation.

The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt.

Apple’s rise to power in our time directly paralleled the transformation of global manufacturing. As recently as 10 years ago Apple’s computers were assembled in the United States, but today they are built in southern China under appalling labor conditions. Apple, like the vast majority of the electronics industry, skirts labor laws by subcontracting all its manufacturing to companies like Foxconn, a firm made infamous for suicides at its plants, a worker dying after working a 34-hour shift, widespread beatings, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to meet high quotas set by tech companies like Apple.

I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, “It’s a kind of magic.”

Mr. Jobs’s magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to. If we view him unsparingly, without nostalgia, we would see a great man whose genius in design, showmanship and stewardship of the tech world will not be seen again in our lifetime. We would also see a man who in the end failed to “think different,” in the deepest way, about the human needs of both his users and his workers.

It’s a high bar, but Mr. Jobs always believed passionately in brutal honesty, and the truth is rarely kind. With his death, the serious work to do the things he has failed to do will fall to all of us: the rebels, the misfits, the crazy ones who think they can change the world.

With Apple widely expected to release its iPhone 5 on Tuesday, Apple addicts across the world are getting ready for their latest fix.

But should we really characterize the intense consumer devotion to the iPhone as an addiction? A recent experiment that I carried out using neuroimaging technology suggests that drug-related terms like “addiction” and “fix” aren’t as scientifically accurate as a word we use to describe our most cherished personal relationships. That word is “love.”

As a branding consultant, I have followed Apple from its early days as a cult brand to its position today as one of the most valuable, widely admired companies on earth. A few years back, I conducted an experiment to examine the similarities between some the world’s strongest brands and the world’s greatest religions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tests, my team looked at subjects’ brain activity as they viewed consumer images involving brands like Apple and Harley-Davidson and religious images like rosary beads and a photo of the pope. We found that the brain activity was uncannily similar when viewing both types of imagery.

This past summer, I gathered a group of 20 babies between the ages of 14 and 20 months. I handed each one a BlackBerry. No sooner had the babies grasped the phones than they swiped their little fingers across the screens as if they were iPhones, seemingly expecting the screens to come to life. It appears that a whole new generation is being primed to navigate the world of electronics in a ritualized, Apple-approved way.

Friends who have accidentally left home without their iPhones tell me they feel stressed-out, cut off and somehow un-whole. That sounds a lot like separation anxiety to me. Not long ago, I headed an effort to identify the 10 most powerful, affecting sounds in the world: I found that a vibrating phone came in third, behind only the Intel chime and the sound of a baby giggling. Phantom vibration syndrome is the term I use to describe our habit of scrambling for a cellphone we feel rippling in our pocket, only to find out we are mistaken. Similar to pressing an elevator button repeatedly in the belief that the elevator will descend sooner, we check our phones for e-mails and texts countless times a day, almost as if we can will others to text, call, e-mail or Skype us.

So are our smartphones addictive, medically speaking? Some psychologists suggest that using our iPhones and BlackBerrys may tap into the same associative learning pathways in the brain that make other compulsive behaviors — like gambling — so addictive. As with addiction to drugs or cigarettes or food, the chemical driver of this process is the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine.

Earlier this year, I carried out an fMRI experiment to find out whether iPhones were really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping or video games. In conjunction with the San Diego-based firm MindSign Neuromarketing, I enlisted eight men and eight women between the ages of 18 and 25. Our 16 subjects were exposed separately to audio and to video of a ringing and vibrating iPhone.

In each instance, the results showed activation in both the audio and visual cortices of the subjects’ brains. In other words, when they were exposed to the video, our subjects’ brains didn’t just see the vibrating iPhone, they “heard” it, too; and when they were exposed to the audio, they also “saw” it. This powerful cross-sensory phenomenon is known as synesthesia.

But most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion. The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member.

In short, the subjects didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction. Instead, they loved their iPhones.

As we embrace new technology that does everything but kiss us on the mouth, we risk cutting ourselves off from human interaction. For many, the iPhone has become a best friend, partner, lifeline, companion and, yes, even a Valentine. The man or woman we love most may be seated across from us in a romantic Paris bistro, but his or her 8GB, 16GB or 32GB rival lies in wait inside our pockets and purses.

My best advice? Shut off your iPhone, order some good Champagne and find love and compassion the old-fashioned way.

Agents of the East German Stasi could only have dreamed of the sophisticated electronic equipment that powered Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s extensive spying apparatus, which the Libyan transitional government uncovered earlier this week. The monitoring of text messages, e-mails and online chats — no communications seemed beyond the reach of the eccentric colonel.

What is even more surprising is where Colonel Qaddafi got his spying gear: software and technology companies from France, South Africa and other countries. Narus, an American company owned by Boeing, met with Colonel Qaddafi’s people just as the protests were getting under way, but shied away from striking a deal. As Narus had previously supplied similar technology to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it was probably a matter of public relations, not business ethics.

Amid the cheerleading over recent events in the Middle East, it’s easy to forget the more repressive uses of technology. In addition to the rosy narrative celebrating how Facebook and Twitter have enabled freedom movements around the world, we need to confront a more sinister tale: how greedy companies, fostered by Western governments for domestic surveillance needs, have helped suppress them.

Libya is only the latest place where Western surveillance technology has turned up. Human rights activists arrested and later released in Bahrain report being presented with transcripts of their own text messages — a capacity their government acquired through equipment from Siemens, the German industrial giant, and maintained by Nokia Siemens Networks, based in Finland, and Trovicor, another German company.

Earlier this year, after storming the secret police headquarters, Egyptian activists discovered that the Mubarak government had been using a trial version of a tool — developed by Britain’s Gamma International — that allowed them to eavesdrop on Skype conversations, widely believed to be safe from wiretapping.

And it’s not just off-the-shelf technology; some Western companies supply dictators with customized solutions to block offensive Web sites. A March report by OpenNet Initiative, an academic group that monitors Internet censorship, revealed that Netsweeper, based in Canada, together with the American companies Websense and McAfee (now owned by Intel), have developed programs to meet most of the censorship needs of governments in the Middle East and North Africa — in Websense’s case, despite promises not to supply its technology to repressive governments.

Unfortunately, the American government, the world’s most vociferous defender of “Internet freedom,” has little to say about such complicity. Though Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton often speaks publicly on the subject, she has yet to address how companies from her country undermine her stated goal. To add insult to injury, in December the State Department gave Cisco — which supplied parts for China’s so-called Great Firewall — an award in recognition of its “good corporate citizenship.”

Such reticence may not be entirely accidental, since many of these tools were first developed for Western law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Western policy makers are therefore in a delicate spot. On the one hand, it is hard to rein in the very companies they have nurtured; it is also hard to resist the argument from repressive regimes that they need such technologies to monitor extremists. On the other hand, it’s getting harder to ignore the fact that extremists aren’t the only ones under surveillance.

The obvious response is to ban the export of such technologies to repressive governments. But as long as Western states continue using monitoring technologies themselves, sanctions won’t completely eliminate the problem — the supply will always find a way to meet the demand. Moreover, dictators who are keen on fighting extremism are still welcome in Washington: it’s a good bet that much of the electronic spying done in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt was done with the tacit support of his American allies.

What we need is a recognition that our reliance on surveillance technology domestically — even if it is checked by the legal system — is inadvertently undermining freedom in places where the legal system provides little if any protection. That recognition should, in turn, fuel tighter restrictions on the domestic surveillance-technology sector, including a reconsideration of the extent to which it actually needs such technology in our increasingly privacy-free world.

As countries like Belarus, Iran and Myanmar digest the lessons of the Arab Spring, their demand for monitoring technology will grow. Left uncontrolled, Western surveillance tools could undermine the “Internet freedom” agenda in the same way arms exports undermine Western-led peace initiatives. How many activists, finding themselves confronted with information collected using Western technology, would trust the pronouncements of Western governments again?

A name is just a sound or sequence of letters. It carries no value or meaning other than as a pointer to something in people’s minds – a concept, a person, a brand, or a particular thing or individual.

In modern economies, people distinguish between generic words, which refer to concepts or a set of individual things (a certain kind of fruit, for example), and trademarks, which refer to specific goods or services around which someone has built value. By law, actual words can’t be trademarks, but specific arrangements of words – such as Evernote or Apple Computer – can be protected.

The Internet’s domain-name system (DNS) was formalized in the late 1990’s by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). I was ICANN’s founding chairman, and we more or less followed the rules of trademarks, with an overlay of “first come, first served.” If you could show that you owned a trademark, you could get the “.com” domain for that name, unless someone else with a similar claim had gotten there first. (The whole story is more complex, but too long to go into here.)

Our mission was to create competition for Network Solutions, the monopoly player at the time, but we did so only in part. Network Solutions retained control of the .com registry, whereas we created a competitive market for the reseller business whereby registrars sold names directly to users.

Now ICANN is taking a different tack, allowing for a dramatic expansion of the namespace with a host of new Top-Level Domains (TLDs), the suffixes that go after the dot, such as .com, .org, and, soon, .anything.

The problem is that expanding the namespace – allowing anyone to register a new TLD such as .apple – doesn’t actually create any new value. The value is in people’s heads – in the meanings of the words and the brand associations – not in the expanded namespace. In fact, the new approach carves up the namespace: the value formerly associated with Apple could now be divided into Apple.computers, apple.phone, ipod.apple, and so on. If this sounds confusing, that is because it is.

Handling the profusion of names and TLDs is a relatively simple problem for a computer, even though it will require extra work to redirect hundreds of new names (when someone types them in) back to the same old Web site. It will also create lots of work for lawyers, marketers of search-engine optimization, registries, and registrars.

All of this will create jobs, but little extra value. To me, useless jobs are, well, useless. And, while redundant domain names are not evil, I do think that they are a waste of resources.

Imagine you own a patch of land and have made it valuable through careful farming practices – good seeds, irrigation, fertilizers, and bees to pollinate the crops. But now someone comes along and says, “We will divide your land into smaller parcels and charge you to protect each of them.”

Coca-Cola is that farmer. It and other trademark holders are now implicitly being asked to register Coca-Cola in each new TLD – as well as to buy its own new TLDs. Otherwise, someone else may create and register those new TLDs. ICANN’s registrars are already offering services to do this for companies, at a cost of thousands of dollars for a portfolio of trademarks. That just strikes me as a protection racket.

The problem is not the shortage of space in the field of all possible names, but the subdivision of space in Coca-Cola’s cultivated namespace. The only shortage is a shortage of space in people’s heads.

The issues are slightly different when it comes to “generic” TLDs, such as .green. I recently had a Twitter conversation with Annalisa Roger, founder of DotGreen.org, who told me about the value her group will be adding to .green: marketing, brand identity, raising money for NGOs. But I couldn’t help wondering why she can’t just add the same value to DotGreen.org. Instead, she will have to start with a $185,000 application fee to ICANN, and spend thousands more on lawyers to study and fill in application forms.

Of course, you could argue that “green” already has quite a bit of value – as a generic term that stands for something. Indeed, it makes me slightly uncomfortable that ICANN can claim control of it in order to sell it to someone. Suppose, for example, that a cheese maker buys .cheese (as was suggested by one person at a new-TLD meeting recently) and uses it to favor only its own brands?

Proponents argue that more TLDs would foster innovation. But the real innovation has been in companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Foursquare, which are creating their own new namespaces rather than hijacking the DNS.

Indeed, when ICANN started more than ten years ago, we were accused of commercializing the Internet. In fact, we were building an orderly market, setting policies for how much registries could charge, fostering competition among registrars, and making sure that we served the public interest.

Unfortunately, we failed to deliver on that promise. Most of the people active in setting ICANN’s policies are involved somehow in the domain-name business, and they would be in control of the new TLDs as well. It’s worth it to them to spend their time at ICANN meetings (or to send staffers), whereas domain names are just a small part of customers’ and user’ lives. And that means that the new TLDs are likely to create money for ICANN’s primary constituents, but only add costs and confusion for companies and the public at large.

Of course, if I am right, the DNS will lose its value over time, and most people will get to Web sites and content via social networks and apps, or via Google (or whatever supersedes it in the competitive marketplace). The bad news is that there could well be much superfluous expense and effort in the meantime.

Last spring, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas acquired the papers of Bruce Sterling, a renowned science fiction writer and futurist. But not a single floppy disk or CD-ROM was included among his notes and manuscripts. When pressed to explain why, the prophet of high-tech said digital preservation was doomed to fail. “There are forms of media which are just inherently unstable,” he said, “and the attempt to stabilize them is like the attempt to go out and stabilize the corkboard at the laundromat.”

Mr. Sterling has a point: for all its many promises, digital storage is perishable, perhaps even more so than paper. Disks corrode, bits “rot” and hardware becomes obsolete.

But that doesn’t mean digital preservation is pointless: if we’re going to save even a fraction of the trillions of bits of data churned out every year, we can’t think of digital preservation in the same way we do paper preservation. We have to stop thinking about how to save data only after it’s no longer needed, as when an author donates her papers to an archive. Instead, we must look for ways to continuously maintain and improve it. In other words, we must stop preserving digital material and start curating it.

At first glance, digital preservation seems to promise everything: nearly unlimited storage, ease of access and virtually no cost to making copies. But the practical lessons of digital preservation contradict the notion that bits are eternal. Consider those 5 1/4-inch floppies stockpiled in your basement. When you saved that unpublished manuscript on them, you figured it would be accessible forever. But when was the last time you saw a floppy drive?

And even if you could find the right drive, there’s a good chance the disk’s magnetic properties will have decayed beyond readability. The same goes, generally speaking, for CD-ROMs, DVDs and portable drives.

Even the software needed to read the bits may prove elusive. Like Egyptian hieroglyphs, whose code was indecipherable until the rediscovery of the Rosetta Stone, the string of 1s and 0s on a floppy is meaningless in the absence of a set of computer instructions for translating them. If you don’t have a copy of WordPerfect 2 around, you’re out of luck. No wonder preservationists often wax ominous about the “digital dark ages.”

Of course, there’s always the option of migrating data from old to new media. But migration isn’t as simple as copying files — it’s more like translating from Japanese to Hungarian. Information is invariably lost; do it enough times and the result will be like the garbled message at the end of a game of telephone.

Another option is emulation, in which a software program impersonates a retro hardware environment; essentially, an emulator temporarily “downgrades” a modern computer to act like an old one. But over time, emulation becomes unwieldy: because the host systems for which emulators are designed will themselves become obsolete, emulators must eventually be moved to new computer platforms — emulators to run emulators, ad infinitum.

Nor is the problem just with the medium. We generate over 1.8 zettabytes of digital information a year. By some estimates, that’s nearly 30 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever published. Even if we had perfectly stable storage, could we ever have enough to preserve everything?

The short answer is no — but only because we’re trying to replicate the practices used for decades to maintain paper archives. In this model, preservation begins only after a record is past its use. With data, intervention needs to happen earlier, ideally at an object’s creation. And tough decisions need to be made, early on, regarding what needs to be saved. We must replace digital preservation with digital curation.

Perhaps the most impressive effort to curate digital information is taking place in the realm of video games. In the face of negligence from the game industry, fans of “Super Mario Bros.” and “Pac-Man” have been creating homegrown solutions to collecting, documenting, reading and rendering games, creating an evolving archive of game history. They coordinate efforts and share the workload — sometimes in formal groups, sometimes as loose collectives. Nor does the data just sit around. These are gamers, after all, so they are constantly engaged with the files. In the process, they update them, create duplicates and fix bugs.

Despite often operating in legal gray areas, such curatorial activism can be a model for other digital domains. A similar pattern is emerging in data-intensive fields like genetics, where published data sets are often “cleaned” by third-party curators to purge them of inaccuracies.

It might seem silly to look to video-game fans for lessons on how to save our informational heritage, but in fact complex interactive games represent the outer limit of what we can do with digital preservation. By figuring out how to keep a complex game, like a classic first-person shooter, alive, we develop a better idea of how to preserve simulations of genetic evolution or the behavior of star systems.

True, not all data is worth saving. But that’s as true for bits as it is for sheets of paper. In this model, at least, the decisions on what to save are informed by a deep knowledge of the field, while the cost is shared by everyone involved.

Above all, the model allows us to see preservation as active and continuing: managing change to data rather than trying to prevent it, while viewing data as a living resource for the future rather than a relic of the past.

Hubo una época en que la radio fue algo muy parecido a lo que hoy representa Internet. Para quienes nunca se lo imaginaron -o ya lo habían olvidado-, Tim Wu, profesor de Derecho en la Universidad de Columbia, dedica The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (2010) a recordar que la utopía de un sistema de comunicación sin restricciones no es precisamente un descubrimiento de la era digital.

A comienzos del siglo XX muchas voces independientes (y algunas que califican de “marginales”) vieron en la radio una posibilidad de hacerse oír sin intermediarios. El panorama parecía ilimitado, y un montón de gente “rara”, desde predicadores hasta empresarios deportivos, pasando por todo el espectro de libertarios y “colgados” en los que Estados Unidos siempre ha sido pródigo, fundaron numerosas estaciones radiales que alcanzaban a miles de oyentes. Aquella especie de locura comunicativa, muy parecida al esplendor de la blogosfera hace unos años, dio lugar a varias polémicas que pueden leerse como el primer antecedente de las comunidades virtuales: se debatía sobre cómo aliviar los males de la sociedad, cómo la gente sería liberada, cómo el discurso se elevaría y la distancia desaparecería…

A finales de 1924 -nos cuenta Wu- los fabricantes norteamericanos habían vendido más de dos millones de aparatos de radio capaces de emitir una señal local. Apenas unos años después “lo que era un medio abierto… estaba preparado para convertirse en un gran negocio, dominado por un monopolio radial; lo que fue antaño una tecnología no regulada cayó bajo el estricto mando y control de una agencia federal”.

En su entretenida historia de la tecnología de la comunicación en Estados Unidos durante el siglo pasado Wu quiere mostrarnos cómo muchos inventos asociados a los medios masivos tuvieron su fase de novedad revolucionaria antes de ser absorbidos por la industria en poderosos monopolios. Muchas empresas que hoy controlan el flujo de los contenidos y fabrican políticas a partir del comercio también fueron concebidas en su día como canales accesibles y armas de la libre expresión. Pero el paso “del hobby de alguien a la industria de alguien” parece ser, en la versión de Wu, una ley más ineluctable que la Divina Providencia. Y ahí están la RCA, AT&T, NBC, CBS, etc… para probarlo.

“Esta oscilación de la industria de la información entre lo abierto y lo cerrado -explica Wu- es un fenómeno tan típico que yo le he dado un nombre: el Ciclo. Y para entender por qué eso ocurre debemos entender cómo las industrias que trafican con la información son natural e históricamente diferentes de aquellas basadas en otros productos”.

La singularidad de la comunicación como sector radicaría, según Wu, justo en la falibilidad de la regulación y la lógica de los mercados que tienen que ver con ella. En pocas palabras, los fracasos en esta industria tienen consecuencias mucho peores que en otras. Por eso hace falta establecer un conjunto de principios en torno a la propiedad, la concentración y estructura de tales medios, y que estos se regulen en gran medida por una “moral de la información”, no por un solo organismo regulador o un único estatuto, sino en última instancia por un consenso emergente sobre el valor de la libre información como soporte vital para las sociedades abiertas.

El libro de Wu se lee, por supuesto, en el contexto de la polémica actual sobre la regulación de Internet, su legitimidad y sus límites. El autor es conocido por haber acuñado en 2002 el término “net neutrality”, la noción de que los operadores no deben bloquear ni favorecer ciertos contenidos para que Internet siga siendo un sistema abierto en que cualquiera pueda conectarse y publicar, y donde el dinero y las reglas técnicas no favorezcan nunca a un usuario contra otro, incluso si ese usuario es una corporación poderosa con ilimitados recursos económicos.

Uno de los puntos fundamentales de su análisis es la noción del “interés público” aplicada a las nuevas tecnologías concebidas como “redes de transporte”: “Desde el siglo XVII ha habido la fuerte sensación de que las redes de transporte básicas deben servir al interés público sin discriminación” -decía Wu en Slate, hace 5 años-. “Esto se debe a que mucho depende de ello: ellas catalizan industrias enteras, lo que significa que la discriminación gratuita puede tener un ‘efecto dominó’ en toda la nación. Siguiendo esta lógica, siempre y cuando usted piense que Internet es algo más parecido a una carretera que un expendio de pollo frito, debería ser neutral con respecto a lo que transporta”.

En este gran debate sobre los sistemas de información Wu también ha sido muy criticado. Los empresarios lo acusan de “proponer soluciones para problemas que no existen”. Otros se burlan del agorero de una “Oscura Edad Digital de los Sistemas Cerrados”. El Ciclo de las industrias poderosas tragándose a las nuevas tecnologías está demasiado cerca de las predicciones semiapocalípticas de Lawrence Lessig y coloca en una posición difícil a quienes han hecho de la tecnología el nuevo bálsamo de Fierabrás de las sociedades digitales.

Uno de los presupuestos que sostiene el entusiasmo casi incombustible generado por los “revolucionarios de Internet” es que esta vez la estructura tecnológica ha conseguido romper con esa especie de maldición o destino manifiesto, perfectamente condensada en la metáfora del “conmutador principal ” o “interruptor maestro” que define al Leviatán corporativo.

Para Wu, sin embargo, Silicon Valley no está a salvo de la vieja tentación y los peligros monopolísticos. Recientemente acusó a Apple de buscar reemplazar la “caótica libertad personal de los ordenadores personales” con “un nuevo régimen de artefactos controlados” y de querer encarnar la idea platónica de la dictadura de los sabios como el mejor gobierno posible. Al mismo tiempo, Wu es capaz de sostener que “la piratería ha sido una parte del desarrollo de las tecnologías de la información desde al menos 1890″ o de parafrasear la advertencia de Schumpeter: cuidado con ese tipo especial de hombres que no están motivados por el dinero o el confort, sino que buscan poder para fundar su reino privado. En pocas palabras, “the mogul makes the medium”. Wu no es precisamente una voz neutral: sus ideas han fortalecido la agencia para la que trabaja, la Comisión Federal de Comercio de Estados Unidos, convirtiéndola en “un contrapeso público al poder privado”.

No todo lo que parece “natural” es necesariamente inevitable, y además Internet ha sido diseñado para resistir la integración y el control centralizado. Sin embargo, los influyentes argumentos de The Master Switch han contribuido a moderar nuestro exceso de confianza en la tecnología. Es un hecho que la telefonía, la radio, la TV y el cine cambiaron nuestras vidas. Pero ¿hasta qué punto modificaron la naturaleza de nuestra existencia? ¿Hasta qué punto representaron un hito en la libertad de expresión? ¿Consiguieron ampliar la democracia norteamericana a nivel de base, o acabaron absorbidas por la lógica del Ciclo?

Tras muchas metáforas políticas que parecen remedos de Un mundo feliz de Huxley, Wu ha puesto sobre la mesa una serie de problemas reales. La distribución de contenidos asociados a plataformas tecnológicas específicas controladas por los gigantes de la industria parece una tendencia consolidada. En la nueva era, el periodismo tiene que afrontar que la gente prefiera la transparencia a la objetividad, como dictaminaba hace poco The Economist. Internet como el foro de libre expresión por excelencia, como ese lugar donde una persona con talento puede competir con un periódico importante, no parece hoy la tendencia en boga. Y todo esto sucede justo cuando la ONU acaba de incluir el acceso a la Red como parte de los Derechos Humanos. Este reconocimiento “oficial” de un instrumento fundamental de la libre expresión coincide con un momento de desencanto: al mismo tiempo que se consagra como derecho, es posible que Internet como modelo de libertad esté llegando a su fin.

I got a real thrill in December 1999 in the Reading Room of the Morgan Library in New York when the librarian, Sylvie Merian, brought me, after I had completed an application with a letter of reference and a photo ID, the first, oldest notebook of Isaac Newton. First I was required to study a microfilm version. There followed a certain amount of appropriate pomp. The notebook was lifted from a blue cloth drop-spine box and laid on a special padded stand. I was struck by how impossibly tiny it was — 58 leaves bound in vellum, just 2 3/4 inches wide, half the size I would have guessed from the enlarged microfilm images. There was his name, “Isacus Newton,” proudly inscribed by the 17-year-old with his quill, and the date, 1659.

“He filled the pages with meticulous script, the letters and numerals often less than one-sixteenth of an inch high,” I wrote in my book “Isaac Newton” a few years later. “He began at both ends and worked toward the middle.”

Apparently historians know the feeling well — the exhilaration that comes from handling the venerable original. It’s a contact high. In this time of digitization, it is said to be endangered. The Morgan Notebook of Isaac Newton is online now (thanks to the Newton Project at the University of Sussex). You can surf it.

The raw material of history appears to be heading for the cloud. What once was hard is now easy. What was slow is now fast.

Is this a case of “be careful what you wish for”?

Last month the British Library announced a project with Google to digitize 40 million pages of books, pamphlets and periodicals dating to the French Revolution. The European Digital Library, Europeana.eu, well surpassed its initial goal of 10 million “objects” last year, including a Bulgarian parchment manuscript from 1221 and the Rok runestone from Sweden, circa 800, which will save you trips to, respectively, the St. Cyril and St. Methodius National Library in Sofia and a church in Ostergotland.

Reporting to the European Union in Brussels, the Comité des Sages (sounds better than “Reflection Group”) urged in January that essentially everything — all the out-of-copyright cultural heritage of all the member states — should be digitized and made freely available online. It put the cost at approximately $140 billion and called this vision “The New Renaissance.”

Inevitably comes the backlash. Where some see enrichment, others see impoverishment. Tristram Hunt, an English historian and member of Parliament, complained in The Observer this month that “techno-enthusiasm” threatens to cheapen scholarship. “When everything is downloadable, the mystery of history can be lost,” he wrote. “It is only with MS in hand that the real meaning of the text becomes apparent: its rhythms and cadences, the relationship of image to word, the passion of the argument or cold logic of the case.”

I’m not buying this. I think it’s sentimentalism, and even fetishization. It’s related to the fancy that what one loves about books is the grain of paper and the scent of glue.

Some of the qualms about digital research reflect a feeling that anything obtained too easily loses its value. What we work for, we better appreciate. If an amateur can be beamed to the top of Mount Everest, will the view be as magnificent as for someone who has accomplished the climb? Maybe not, because magnificence is subjective. But it’s the same view.

Another worry is the loss of serendipity — as Mr. Hunt says, “the scholar’s eternal hope that something will catch his eye.” When you open a book Newton once owned, which you can do (by appointment) in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, you may see notes he scribbled in the margins. But marginalia are being digitized, too. And I find that online discovery leads to unexpected twists and turns of research at least as often as the same time spent in archives.

“New Renaissance” may be a bit of hype, but a profound transformation lies ahead for the practice of history. Europeans seem to have taken the lead in creating digital showcases; maybe they just have more history to work with than Americans do. One brilliant new resource among many is the London Lives project: 240,000 manuscript and printed pages dating to 1690, focusing on the poor, including parish archives, records from workhouses and hospitals, and trial proceedings from the Old Bailey.

Storehouses like these, open to anyone, will surely inspire new scholarship. They enrich cyberspace, particularly because without them the online perspective is so foreshortened, so locked into the present day. Not that historians should retire to their computer terminals; the sights and smells of history, where we can still find them, are to be cherished. But the artifact is hardly a clear window onto the past; a window, yes, clouded and smudged like all the rest.

It’s a mistake to deprecate digital images just because they are suddenly everywhere, reproduced so effortlessly. We’re in the habit of associating value with scarcity, but the digital world unlinks them. You can be the sole owner of a Jackson Pollock or a Blue Mauritius but not of a piece of information — not for long, anyway. Nor is obscurity a virtue. A hidden parchment page enters the light when it molts into a digital simulacrum. It was never the parchment that mattered.

Oddly, for collectors of antiquities, the pricing of informational relics seems undiminished by cheap reproduction — maybe just the opposite. In a Sotheby’s auction three years ago, Magna Carta fetched a record $21 million. To be exact, the venerable item was a copy of Magna Carta, made 82 years after the first version was written and sealed at Runnymede. Why is this tattered parchment valuable? Magical thinking. It is a talisman. The precious item is a trick of the eye. The real Magna Carta, the great charter of human rights and liberty, is available free online, where it is safely preserved. It cannot be lost or destroyed.

An object like this — a talisman — is like the coffin at a funeral. It deserves to be honored, but the soul has moved on.

Iran’s recent announcement that it plans to disconnect Iranian cyberspace from the rest of the world was another dramatic sign that the Internet is at risk of being carved up into national mini-Internets, each with its own rules and restrictions. In contrast, the United States has staked out a clear position of leadership in building a global consensus around the benefits of an open, interconnected Internet.

In May, President Obama issued the U.S. International Strategy for Cyberspace, our agenda for safeguarding the single Internet. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has developed a groundbreaking Internet freedom agenda, a principled approach to preserving the freedom to connect — the freedoms of expression, association and assembly online — and to ensuring that the Internet can be a platform for commerce, debate, learning and innovation in the 21st century. Senior government officials and stakeholders, meeting at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) this month, took a major step toward these goals by committing to Internet policymaking principles.

The Internet is a powerful tool for innovation and expression because it allows information and ideas to flow freely. According to McKinsey, the Internet has generated as much growth over the past 15 years as the Industrial Revolution generated in 50 years. This is a clear jobs issue — particularly in the United States. Over the past five years, the Internet has been responsible for 21 percent of the growth in mature economies and has created 2.6 jobs for every job it has displaced. Its power to generate innovation is rivaled only by its potential to help people realize their rights and democratic aspirations.

The Internet is so productive — and powerful — because no centralized authority governs it and no nation owns it. You do not need permission to share ideas or associate with others around the globe. Instead, a decentralized system of public and private actors collaborates to ensure its function and expansion.

But this means that nations that choose to take a heavy-handed approach to regulating the Internet can reduce its value for every other nation and user.

For this reason, collective action is needed to safeguard this global treasure. A foreign policy that accounts for the Internet has become essential. We need to work with other countries and stakeholders to build a global consensus on the importance of open communications online among all users — everywhere in the world. And we must build consensus around norms and expectations of behavior essential to that vision.

That’s why the president’s strategy calls for international partnership to support an open Internet that is secure and reliable. And it’s why the secretary of state has called for the global community to “join us in the bet we have made, a bet that an open Internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries.”

The recent meeting called by the OECD (the international economics policy standards organization) assembled leaders from 40 governments, business and the Internet technical community. It produced a set of broad principles for safeguarding the open Internet that address three key international threats to the seamless, interconnected Web.

The first threat is posed by some governments and international institutions intent on imposing pre-Internet-era telecommunications regulatory schemes to provide them control over the flow of information (and money) they enjoyed in the old days of the monopoly phone company. The OECD consensus principles provide Internet diplomats a rallying point of best-practice guidelines, including support for today’s multi-stakeholder approach as the pro-growth alternative to backward-looking controls over the Internet.

The second challenge is how to address important concerns, including protection of personal data, children and consumers; intellectual property rights; and cybersecurity without balkanizing the Internet or restricting competition and the free flow of information. The OECD principles provide guidelines for how to respond. The Obama administration is already implementing them domestically and working with other countries to find technology-savvy solutions that avoid onerous regulations that run counter to the design of an open Internet.

The third threat comes from Iran, Syria and other cyber-autocracies that use pretexts to deny their citizens their rights to express themselves, seek and receive information, and freely associate. These OECD guidelines make clear that countries can address policy challenges without violating these fundamental rights.

Our Internet foreign policy will require building support for these principles with governments, business and civil society. We will need to work with other countries to demonstrate that the principles work. Our diplomacy will also entail continuing to build support for the “freedom to connect” for everyone, and for the human rights, innovation and free-trade benefits that flow from it. The stakes are high, but the OECD principles are an important tool to help us achieve those objectives.

When I was 17, I took a record of John Cage’s piano pieces out of the library. The pieces were interesting, but what really arrested my attention was the B-side of the album — a work called “The Dreamer That Remains,” by a composer I’d never heard of named Harry Partch. This was music from another planet: unearthly yowling strings, metallic twangs, rippling liquid percussion. I couldn’t even identify the instruments.

I loaned the record to a friend of mine, the only other person in the world I then knew who liked classical music. The piece’s refrain, in which a chorus of corpses in a funeral home sing, “Let us loiter together/And know one another,” became a two-man in-joke between us. For years, as far as we could tell, we were the only people who knew about Harry Partch. He was, in a sense, ours.

This was in the ’80s, a time when there was simply no way of learning much more about Harry Partch, at least not that I knew of. If I were a 17-year-old discovering Harry Partch today, I could Google him, and I’d immediately find the Harry Partch Information Center and Corporeal Meadows, where I’d learn all about his system of intonation with a 43-note octave and his instruments made of bamboo, jet-engine nose cones, artillery-shell casings and whiskey bottles, with names like the Gourd Tree, Boo II, Zymo-Xyl and Marimba Eroica. I’d even find listings for the rare public performances of Partch’s work. Maybe most important, I’d be able to connect with hundreds of other people who were interested in Harry Partch, avant-garde music and other weird stuff, and not have to feel so eccentric and freakish and alone.

All of which is good, of course. That’s what the Internet is for, yes? Information — zettabytes of information — at our instantaneous disposal.

Except if I’m recalling correctly, adolescents secretly like feeling eccentric and freakish and alone, hoarding pop arcana and cultivating ever-dweebier erudition. They recite lines from cult movies like “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Repo Man” and “Napoleon Dynamite” as though they were passwords to a speakeasy; wear buttons bearing the names of obscure music groups as if they were campaign ribbons; and list favorite films and books and bands on their Facebook pages as if they were as essential as name and age and gender.

That proprietary sense that my friend and I had about Harry Partch, our sense of belonging to an exclusive club of cognoscenti, is why teenagers get so disgusted when everybody else in the world finds out about their favorite band. It’s fun being In the Know, but once everyone’s in it, there’s nothing to know anymore.

There was, back then, a genre of literature whose purpose was simply to let you know about cool stuff you might not have heard about. The beloved Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine consisted of stills from half-forgotten horror films like “It! The Terror from Beyond Space” and “Taste the Blood of Dracula.” The copy seemed to have been written not only for but by 10-year-old boys who’d stayed up all night: crazed, breathless and completely exhaustive scene-by-scene descriptions of the entire plots of those movies.

When I was older, I pored over a book called “Cult Films” that described the plots of movies like “King of Hearts,” “Harold and Maude” and “Behind the Green Door.” This was not only before the Internet, but also before home video. The only way you were ever going to see any of these films was if they happened to be on TV late at night or came to a repertory theater near you, which, if you lived in suburban Maryland, good luck.

There are some celebrated films that have long been hard to find on DVD or the Internet: Stanley Kubrick’s first feature, “Fear and Desire,” the British absurdist black comedy “The Bed-Sitting Room,” Joseph Losey’s “Secret Ceremony.” When I found out the former two, at least, had become available, I was almost disappointed. It was fun not being able to see them, not having every last thing a click away. Because what we cannot find inflames the imagination.

Kurt Cobain once said in an interview that long before he’d heard any actual punk rock music, he studied magazine photos of punk musicians and imagined what the music sounded like. It must have sounded to him — who knows? — something like what would later be called grunge.

Instant accessibility leaves us oddly disappointed, bored, endlessly craving more. I’ve often had the experience of reading a science article that purported to explain some question I’d always wondered about, only to find myself getting distracted as soon as I started reading the explanation. Not long ago the Hubble telescope observed that Pluto’s surface is changing rapidly, and noticeably reddening. It’s not a bland white ball of ice, but the color of rust and soot. We’re not likely to learn anything more until the New Horizons spacecraft gets there in 2015. In the meantime, we just get to wonder.

I find this mysterious and tantalizing. As soon as I began reading possible explanations — ultraviolet light interacting with chemicals, blah blah blah — I started to lose interest. Just knowing that there is an answer is somehow deflating. If some cryptozoologist actually bagged a Yeti and gave it a Latin name, it would just be another animal. An intriguing animal, no doubt, but would it really be any more bizarre or improbable than a giraffe or a giant squid?

I hope kids are still finding some way, despite Google and Wikipedia, of not knowing things. Learning how to transform mere ignorance into mystery, simple not knowing into wonder, is a useful skill. Because it turns out that the most important things in this life — why the universe is here instead of not, what happens to us when we die, how the people we love really feel about us — are things we’re never going to know.

“Au e-G8, je me sens comme un Indien ou un Africain en train de regarder les puissances coloniales s’armer pour conquérir ma terre”. Ce tweet du journaliste américain Jeff Jarvis résume le clivage entre le monde de l’Internet et ceux qui cherchent à le “civiliser”, au premier rang duquel figure désormais Nicolas Sarkozy. Opération de communication, l’e-G8 aura eu le mérite de souligner l’importance croissante du numérique, longtemps cantonné en France à un secrétariat d’Etat, de mettre en scène des rapports de domination et surtout de révéler le choc de conception en matière de gouvernance entre les Etats et Internet.

Commande politique financée par des industriels et orchestrée par un groupe publicitaire, l’e-G8 aura finalement traduit une conception étroite du système international. Il n’est guère parvenu à saisir les dynamiques transnationales actuellement à l’œuvre.

L’e-G8 a d’abord butté sur la question récurrente de la représentativité. Réseau décentralisé, Internet fonctionne sans contrainte hiérarchique. Etats, industriels, start-up, organisations non gouvernementales et utilisateurs, tous jouent un rôle dans sa transformation incessante. Dans la mesure où Internet leur permet de s’exprimer directement, ils éprouvent peu le besoin de s’y faire représenter indirectement. Cette disjonction explique pourquoi la désignation par les organisateurs de mandataires censés représenter Internet est perçue au mieux comme une usurpation et au pire comme un non-sens.

SURSAUT DES AUTOCRATES

Suggérer ensuite qu’Internet puisse être “civilisé” signifie qu’il ne le serait pas encore. Cela traduit une méconnaissance du phénomène à l’oeuvre. Près de 2 milliards d’individus utilisent aujourd’hui Internet à travers le monde. Selon TNS Sofres, 60 % d’entre eux y contribuent directement.

Dans les pays du G8, l’Internet n’est plus réservé à une élite ou dégagé de la vie sociale, comme l’expression “virtuel” l’a longtemps fait croire. Il est le fruit et l’expression de la majorité des citoyens. Dès lors, comment prétendre sérieusement “civiliser” ses propres citoyens ? Comment surtout, dans des systèmes démocratiques, y trouver la matière d’une vraie discussion entre les gouvernements et les peuples qui les ont élus pour les représenter ?

Comble de l’ironie, c’est à Tunis, en novembre 2005, que s’était tenu le Sommet mondial sur la société de l’information. Les présidents égyptien et tunisien, Moubarak et Ben Ali, étaient ensuite appelés à être les piliers de l’Union pour la Méditerranée (UPM), projet de civilisation lancé par M. Sarkozy en 2008. Le “printemps arabe” a illustré la réalité politique d’Internet, tout en démontrant que les tentatives de le couper étaient l’ultime sursaut des autocrates face aux manifestants. Qui incarne alors la civilisation ?

De manière plus surprenante encore, l’e-G8 s’est détourné du numérique comme facteur de puissance, en considérant que l’essentiel du débat s’inscrivait dans le cadre transatlantique. Les organisateurs de l’e-G8, s’ils veulent lui donner un prolongement, feraient bien de réfléchir à l’agenda d’un éventuel e-G20, et de se demander quels seraient ses moyens pour “civiliser” les politiques numériques de pays comme la Turquie, l’Arabie saoudite ou la Chine. Il n’est plus possible d’ignorer que l’influence relative exercée sur l’Internet par Washington et Pékin est désormais au coeur des relations sino-américaines.

En d’autres termes, les avatars de l’e-G8 doivent être en mesure d’identifier les dynamiques d’Internet, tout en comprenant les logiques des pouvoirs. Pour appréhender les rapports entre la puissance établie des Etats et la puissance montante d’Internet, c’est donc peut-être maintenant l’approche des gouvernements qu’il convient de civiliser.

Oh, dear. Something else to worry about.Cellphones may cause brain cancer. “May” is the key word in that sentence, as in “maybe,” “possibly” or perhaps even “not likely.” The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, has not concluded that cellphones do lead to brain cancer, but that “we need to keep a close watch for a link between cellphones and cancer risk.”

Cellphones join a list of 32 things beginning with the letter C that are possibly carcinogenic to humans, including coffee, carpentry, coconut oil in shampoo and carrageenan, a thickener found in instant-pudding mixes. You’ll be happy to know that cookies and cupcakes are not on the list. Yet.

Science ultimately may be able to prove whether or not you risk your health by using a cellphone. But science has already proved something else about cellphones: They are really annoying.

Cellphones give us intimate and frequently unwanted insights into the lives of others. Is it really necessary to learn the details of a recent colonoscopy from the diner sitting at the next table in a restaurant? It may seem that cellphones annoy us simply because we think someone talking loudly in a public setting, especially to an invisible companion, is rude. But our reaction may also be biological.

In fact, brain science may explain why we are annoyed by lots of the small disturbances of daily life. We humans are programmed to impose order on ourselves; we get annoyed when the unpredictable messes up that program. And while many of our annoyances are highly idiosyncratic and individualized, cellphone chatter is a universal irritant, transcending race, age, gender and culture.

Psychologist Lauren Emberson’s research suggests that the way our brains process speech affects how we feel when we hear these one-sided conversations. She became interested in the question of why cellphones annoy while living in Vancouver, where she had a 45-minute bus ride to school each day. During her commute, she wanted to read essays on the philosophy of the mind, but she found herself distracted by her fellow passengers’ phone conversations. At first, she thought her distraction was “because I was nosy,” she says. “But I actually didn’t want to listen. I felt myself forced to, almost.”

After studying the issue, she’s concluded that when we hear half of a conversation, or a “halfalogue” — such as when someone is talking on a cellphone — “our brains are always predicting what’s going to happen next, based on our current state of knowledge. . . . When something is unexpected, it draws our attention in, our brains tune in to it.”

Speech, especially, reels us in. Listening to it, our brains are not passively soaking up words like a sponge — they’re actively trying to predict what’s coming next, to make it easier to make meaning from conversation. You may be able to finish your spouse’s sentences, but your mind wants to finish everyone else’s sentences, too.

There’s plenty of evidence that humans are good at filling in the blanks. One example is what’s called verbal shadowing. “The task is to listen to someone speaking and repeat what they say as soon as possible after they say it,” says University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman. “There used to be people who would go on variety shows because they could do it almost as fast as the person was talking. They hardly seemed to be behind them at all.” The brain has developed to make sense of the world in real time, even as it changes.

Even people without any special skills can do this fairly rapidly, but only when the speech is logical. Ask them to shadow someone reciting nonsense phrases, and everything slows down, studies show. And then people get annoyed.

Emberson has shown that halfalogues distract us more than dialogues or monologues do. In one study, she and her colleagues asked people to perform a task that required a lot of attention: using a mouse to keep a cursor on a dot that was moving around a computer screen. The researchers wanted to know if people were worse at this when overhearing halfalogues.

Indeed, people started to make more errors moments after the halfalogue commenced. “When the person starts talking, your attention is really drawn in,” Emberson says. “It’s really automatic.”

To make sure that the effect was caused specifically by understandable speech, Emberson then filtered the halfalogue so that it was garbled and unrecognizable as words. In that case, the distracting effects went away.

Her theory is that because our brains have to work harder to predict speech when we’re hearing only half a conversation, we divert more attention to it and get more distracted from what we actually want to be doing. Annoyance ensues.

Although cellphones are fairly new, halfalogues are not a new irritant. More than a century ago, when good old-fashioned land lines were coming in vogue, Mark Twain railed against halfalogues in “A Telephonic Conversation” in the Atlantic in June 1880:

“You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise or sorrow or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says.”

Lucky for Twain he didn’t live to see the cellphone. At least the phone cord once tethered us to our desks or kitchens or phone booths. Now people are free to roam. Restaurants, waiting rooms, bathrooms, gyms, even libraries are fair game for the modern communicator.

There’s a chance that cellphone conversations will eventually fade into the noise tapestry of life. If everybody is yakking all the time, it’s unlikely that our overworked brains will be able to track a multitude of halfalogues simultaneously.

But even if we do manage to tune out cellphones, the multitude of other annoyances will still be waiting. Why do the little things bother us? You might think scientists would have a ready answer, since annoyance is one of the most recognizable human emotions. But with a few notable exceptions, they don’t.

So it fell to us, two science journalists, to try to generalize what can be learned from the cellphone research, as well as from studies in a variety of other fields, including physics, psychology, acoustics, ethology, chemistry and linguistics, to define what makes something annoying.

Our conclusion: Things that are annoying have three basic components. First, they are unpredictable, or at the very least unavoidable. You might know that the Mixing Bowl in Springfield will be snarled at rush hour, but there’s not much you can do about it.

Second, they are unpleasant (but not harmful — annoyances are, by definition, trivial). There are few universals in this category: the sound of fingernails on a blackboard or the smell of rotten eggs may qualify — or, of course, halfalogues — but not many more. Poor grammar may not bother you, but it makes some people nuts. Noisy eaters drive other people bonkers. Still others can’t stand it when people wear too much cologne.

Third, annoying things are of uncertain duration. You know they will end, but you don’t know when. This allows time for recursive annoyance, also known as terminal annoyance, where you become annoyed with yourself for being annoyed.

There’s one paradoxical quality of annoyances that we still don’t quite understand: Nobody likes to experience them, but everybody seems to like to talk about them. It’s as if they give us an excuse for a community catharsis, all of us railing together against aggressive drivers, pointless red tape and that guy on the Metro clipping his nails.

All of these things can drive you nuts, but they’re unlikely to end up on anybody’s list of potential carcinogens.

Once upon a time, the story goes, we lived in a broadcast society. In that dusty pre-Internet age, the tools for sharing information weren’t widely available. If you wanted to share your thoughts with the masses, you had to own a printing press or a chunk of the airwaves, or have access to someone who did. Controlling the flow of information was an elite class of editors, producers and media moguls who decided what people would see and hear about the world. They were the Gatekeepers.

Then came the Internet, which made it possible to communicate with millions of people at little or no cost. Suddenly anyone with an Internet connection could share ideas with the whole world. A new era of democratized news media dawned.

You may have heard that story before — maybe from the conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds (blogging is “technology undermining the gatekeepers”) or the progressive blogger Markos Moulitsas (his book is called “Crashing the Gate”). It’s a beautiful story about the revolutionary power of the medium, and as an early practitioner of online politics, I told it to describe what we did at MoveOn.org. But I’m increasingly convinced that we’ve got the ending wrong — perhaps dangerously wrong. There is a new group of gatekeepers in town, and this time, they’re not people, they’re code.

Today’s Internet giants — Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft — see the remarkable rise of available information as an opportunity. If they can provide services that sift though the data and supply us with the most personally relevant and appealing results, they’ll get the most users and the most ad views. As a result, they’re racing to offer personalized filters that show us the Internet that they think we want to see. These filters, in effect, control and limit the information that reaches our screens.

By now, we’re familiar with ads that follow us around online based on our recent clicks on commercial Web sites. But increasingly, and nearly invisibly, our searches for information are being personalized too. Two people who each search on Google for “Egypt” may get significantly different results, based on their past clicks. Both Yahoo News and Google News make adjustments to their home pages for each individual visitor. And just last month, this technology began making inroads on the Web sites of newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times.

All of this is fairly harmless when information about consumer products is filtered into and out of your personal universe. But when personalization affects not just what you buy but how you think, different issues arise. Democracy depends on the citizen’s ability to engage with multiple viewpoints; the Internet limits such engagement when it offers up only information that reflects your already established point of view. While it’s sometimes convenient to see only what you want to see, it’s critical at other times that you see things that you don’t.

Like the old gatekeepers, the engineers who write the new gatekeeping code have enormous power to determine what we know about the world. But unlike the best of the old gatekeepers, they don’t see themselves as keepers of the public trust. There is no algorithmic equivalent to journalistic ethics.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, once told colleagues that “a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” At Facebook, “relevance” is virtually the sole criterion that determines what users see. Focusing on the most personally relevant news — the squirrel — is a great business strategy. But it leaves us staring at our front yard instead of reading about suffering, genocide and revolution.

There’s no going back to the old system of gatekeepers, nor should there be. But if algorithms are taking over the editing function and determining what we see, we need to make sure they weigh variables beyond a narrow “relevance.” They need to show us Afghanistan and Libya as well as Apple and Kanye.

Companies that make use of these algorithms must take this curative responsibility far more seriously than they have to date. They need to give us control over what we see — making it clear when they are personalizing, and allowing us to shape and adjust our own filters. We citizens need to uphold our end, too — developing the “filter literacy” needed to use these tools well and demanding content that broadens our horizons even when it’s uncomfortable.

It is in our collective interest to ensure that the Internet lives up to its potential as a revolutionary connective medium. This won’t happen if we’re all sealed off in our own personalized online worlds.

Los datos perdidos de más de 77 millones de usuarios de la PlayStation de Sony se han ido y no volverán. Como los niños perdidos en el país de nunca jamás del célebre libro de Peter Pan; pero, en esta ocasión, los que se han apoderado de los datos no han sido los piratas del capitán Garfio sino los piratas informáticos.

Es un robo preocupante dado el tipo de datos registrados, básicamente nombres, direcciones postales y de correo electrónico, fechas de cumpleaños, nombres de usuario, contraseñas y números de tarjetas de crédito. Tanto es así que Sony aconseja revisar regularmente los movimientos de las cuentas bancarias, cambiar el nombre de acceso y la contraseña y ser especialmente cauteloso cuando se reciban comunicaciones procedentes de bancos o de la misma PlayStation.

Quizá ya es hora de que, a diferencia del irresponsable Peter Pan, las empresas y los propios usuarios asuman responsabilidades en lugar de seducirnos con unas prestaciones aparentemente sin peligro aprovechándose del desconocimiento del nuevo entorno de la web.

Se acusa a la compañía de haber tardado demasiados días en comunicar a los usuarios el robo de sus datos. Al principio, sus representantes declararon que no se tenían evidencias de que el intruso se hubiera hecho con los datos privados de los usuarios, aunque tampoco se descartó. ¿Se trataba de ocultar el problema o de estar seguros del alcance del ataque? Desde el 2002 la legislación de California obliga a notificar lo más pronto posible las pérdidas de datos, y la directiva europea de 2009/136/CE se mueve en el mismo sentido.

Después de conocer que los servicios de PlayStation Network iban a comenzar a restablecerse poco a poco, la compañía japonesa volvía a notificar que la plataforma Sony Online Entertainment también había sido víctima de un ataque informático que se hizo con los datos de 24,6 millones de cuentas activas, incluyendo información referente a fechas de nacimiento o correos. La empresa se ha apresurado a precisar que ambos casos no están relacionados.

¿Tiene acaso Sony algún problema específico con la seguridad o simplemente se ha dado cuenta de que lo mejor es reconocer lo más pronto posible esta nueva fuga de datos? Aunque Sony ya ha prometido compensaciones a los usuarios en forma de días de suscripción gratuitos y otras fórmulas, es probable que después de lo que ha pasado numerosos clientes decidan anular sus cuentas.

Precisamente esto es lo más grave de la situación: junto a la pérdida de datos hay una pérdida de confianza de los ciudadanos respecto a cómo compañías pioneras en las nuevas tecnologías gestionan su información personal.

La confianza es un estado subjetivo que se nutre de hechos objetivos que la hacen aumentar o disminuir. Es un patrimonio que se pierde con mucha facilidad y que cuesta mucho recuperar. No hay duda de que la pérdida de confianza afectará a otras iniciativas que puedan proponer empresas de este y otros sectores. El comercio online se expande a la moda, al turismo, a la música. Tener presentes casos como este al comprar un billete de avión hace más difícil atreverse a introducir el número de tarjeta de crédito en el sistema.

Desde la perspectiva técnica es muy probable que hayan fallado muchas medidas de seguridad y organizativas. Además, un incidente como este pone en el punto de mira la seguridad del cloud computing, un modelo de aprovisionamiento de servicios de tecnologías de la información y la comunicación que almacena los datos y aplicaciones de los usuarios en la red.

Durante el primer trimestre del año, otra empresa del sector sufrió un percance similar. Los datos personales de 4.000 usuarios quedaron al descubierto, pero a diferencia de la situación actual se comunicó el problema inmediatamente en un ejercicio de transparencia.

Tanto las entidades públicas como las empresas privadas están obligadas a adoptar medidas de seguridad para que los datos personales no se pierdan o sean utilizados por terceros. No basta con diseñar procedimientos de seguridad idóneos e implantarlos; hay que verificar de forma periódica que cumplen con su función, muy especialmente, como en este caso, cuando se detectan incidentes.

Si las empresas que tratan datos de carácter personal dieran formación especifica a sus profesionales y les informaran de sus obligaciones y responsabilidades se podrían detectar estas situaciones de riesgo. Porque el factor humano es un elemento crítico en la seguridad de la información.

En la actualidad se está planteando un nuevo enfoque global de la normativa europea de protección de datos para adecuarla a las nuevas tecnologías. El problema es que las organizaciones se resisten, como Peter Pan, a asumir responsabilidades y solo ven sus inconvenientes. Si se hubieran adoptado los mecanismos de seguridad que hemos señalado, recogidos ya en las distintas legislaciones, estos habrían sido eficaces y se hubieran evitado perjuicios a todos los usuarios.

On Tuesday, Denny Chin, a federal judge in Manhattan, rejected the settlement between Google, which aims to digitize every book ever published, and a group of authors and publishers who had sued the company for copyright infringement. This decision is a victory for the public good, preventing one company from monopolizing access to our common cultural heritage.

Nonetheless, we should not abandon Google’s dream of making all the books in the world available to everyone. Instead, we should build a digital public library, which would provide these digital copies free of charge to readers. Yes, many problems — legal, financial, technological, political — stand in the way. All can be solved.

Let’s consider the legal questions raised by the rejected settlement. Beginning in 2005, Google’s book project made the contents of millions of titles searchable online, leading the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers to claim that the snippets made available to readers violated their copyrights. Google could have defended its actions as fair use, but the company chose instead to negotiate a deal.

The result was an extremely long and complicated document known as the Amended Settlement Agreement that simply divided up the pie. Google would sell access to its digitized database, and it would share the profits with the plaintiffs, who would now become its partners. The company would take 37 percent; the authors would get 63 percent. That solution amounted to changing copyright by means of a private lawsuit, and it gave Google legal protection that would be denied to its competitors. This was what Judge Chin found most objectionable.

In court hearings in February 2010, several people argued that the Authors Guild, which has 8,000 members, did not represent them or the many writers who had published books during the last decades. Some said they preferred to make their works available under different conditions; some even wanted to make their work available free of charge. Yet the settlement set terms for all authors, unless they specifically notified Google that they were opting out.

In other words, the settlement didn’t do what settlements are supposed to do, like correct an alleged infringement of copyright, or provide damages for past incidents; instead it seemed to determine the way the digital world of books would evolve in the future.

Judge Chin addressed that issue by concentrating on the question of orphan books — that is, copyrighted books whose rightsholders have not been identified. The settlement gives Google the exclusive right to digitize and sell access to those books without being subject to suits for infringement of copyright. According to Judge Chin, that provision would give Google “a de facto monopoly over unclaimed works,” raising serious antitrust concerns.

Judge Chin invited Google and the litigants to rewrite the settlement yet again, perhaps by changing its opt-out to opt-in provisions. But Google might well refuse to change its basic commercial strategy. That’s why what we really need is a noncommercial option: a digital public library.

A coalition of foundations could come up with the money (estimates of digitizing one page vary enormously, from 10 cents to $10 or more), and a coalition of research libraries could supply the books. The library would respect copyright, of course, and it probably would exclude works that are now in print unless their authors wanted to make them available. It would include orphan books, assuming that Congress passed legislation to free them for non-commercial use in a genuinely public library.

To dismiss this as quixotic would be to ignore digital projects that have proven their value and practicability throughout the last 20 years. All major research libraries have digitized parts of their collections. Large-scale enterprises like the Knowledge Commons and the Internet Archive have themselves digitized several million books.

A number of countries are also determined to out-Google Google by scanning the entire contents of their national libraries. France is spending 750 million euros to digitize its cultural treasures; the National Library of the Netherlands is trying to digitize every Dutch book and periodical published since 1470; Australia, Finland and Norway are undertaking their own efforts.

Perhaps Google itself could be enlisted to the cause of the digital public library. It has scanned about 15 million books; two million of that total are in the public domain and could be turned over to the library as the foundation of its collection. The company would lose nothing by this generosity, and might win admiration for its good deed.

Through technological wizardry and sheer audacity, Google has shown how we can transform the intellectual riches of our libraries, books lying inert and underused on shelves. But only a digital public library will provide readers with what they require to face the challenges of the 21st century — a vast collection of resources that can be tapped, free of charge, by anyone, anywhere, at any time.

El cloud computing (o computación en la nube) consiste en usar programas informáticos en línea, sin tener que descargárselos, y en depositar en internet toda clase de documentación, sin necesidad de ocupar espacio físico en ordenadores y servidores ni gastar dinero en energía y mantenimiento. Quienes lo preconizan, tanto particulares como empresas, lo presentan como un sistema de gestión eficiente, sencillo, económico y seguro. ¿Seguro?

Se trata de una innovación que parece pensada para combatir con imaginación los rigores de la crisis, aunque también para alegrar la vida a los piratas y espías industriales, ávidos de información sensible con la que traficar y de oportunidades para perpetrar sus boicots.

Los antecedentes de la nube digital se hallan en el uso del correo electrónico como almacén de datos y en las tiendas virtuales, auténticos inventarios de artículos que sólo se convierten en tangibles cuando han sido adquiridos por alguien. El reto del cloud computing estriba ahora en trascender estos ámbitos e introducirse de un modo masivo en el terreno mercantil.

Y es que cualquier ciudadano que guarde fotografías en internet o que consulte su cuenta corriente mediante esta plataforma, a través del ordenador, el teléfono móvil u otro dispositivo, ¿por qué tendría que resistirse a archivar en la web la documentación de su despacho y tramitar desde el ciberespacio los pedidos y las ventas?

El cloud computing no debe confundirse con el hosting, la actividad de otro tipo de compañías que albergan en su espacio las páginas y los contenidos digitales de los internautas. Comparten atributos – los programas, la red, el pago por utilización-, sin embargo son diferentes en esencia.

Muchos de los responsables de estos servicios rehúsan referirse a sus firmas precisamente como nubes,puesto que la palabra recuerda a algo etéreo, vaporoso, conceptos de dudoso atractivo en un entorno tan materialista como este, en el que sólo cuentan los resultados patentes.

Pero esta denominación inglesa ha hecho fortuna y se ha convertido en tema de debate en congresos académicos, encuentros profesionales y ferias sectoriales como el Mobile World Congress, celebrado en la ciudad de Barcelona entre los pasados días 14 y 17 del recién finalizado mes de febrero. Por eso los gigantes de la informática (Microsoft, IBM, Google y demás) luchan por hacerse con este mercado, porque ha dejado de ser una curiosidad. Según ellos, las ventajas de la nueva fórmula son enormes.

En el pasado, un emprendedor que quisiese montar un negocio se veía obligado a levantar su correspondiente infraestructura tecnológica y a contratar a personal especializado. En cambio, la nube virtual evita los quebraderos de cabeza que comportan esas instalaciones y el coste de su conservación. Los expertos calculan que el ahorro oscila entre el 30% y el 70% en electricidad, refrigeración y reparaciones. Se supone que nada es comparable hoy a la flexibilidad que ofrece la red en este aspecto.

Para empezar, hay una versión pública de la nube,es decir, software estándar, y otra privada, de acceso limitado a los consumidores que encargan sus productos. Pero los meteorólogos cibernéticos alertan de que este cielo encapotado anuncia unos chubascos que, si arrecian, pueden desencadenar tempestades y hasta huracanes.

Los servidores que dan cobijo a estos datos suelen situarse en Estados Unidos y en Hong Kong. A partir de esa constancia, el usuario sabe qué leyes se aplican sobre aquello que ha confiado a su proveedor. Esa es la razón por la que es tan importante que, antes de cerrar un acuerdo, las compañías o los sujetos interesados averigüen quién, cómo y dónde se custodiarán sus ficheros. Si considera que no hay suficientes garantías de seguridad, lo realmente sensato es que la parte más vulnerable – o sea, el cliente-aborte el proceso.

Directivos y representantes de firmas de cloud computing insisten en que el próximo decenio será suyo. Lo hacen con un entusiasmo que mezcla su convicción con las ganas de vender. Con todo, es casi imposible que esta nube y sus precipitaciones, por muy intensas que sean, borren en breve las modalidades tradicionales de trabajo. Es previsible, por tanto, que las antiguas y las modernas convivan en paz.

Los escépticos señalan que las consecuencias de un apagón eléctrico o de una interrupción de la conexión en un momento clave de una transacción comercial podrían ser fatales. Esos accidentes, comunes y aparentemente inocuos, desharían la nube en un segundo. Es lo que podría pasar, por ejemplo, por culpa de un aguacero otoñal. He aquí un desenlace que contrasta con la robustez de una caja fuerte a prueba de goteras con un dossier impreso en su interior.

When the Berlin Wall fell, the western response was swift and obvious: send in the free-market economists. Soviet Communism was a system structured for failure that had left a group of governments and citizens in need of political and cultural tools, as well as knowledge of markets and the institutions they require to function.

Professor Jeff Sachs, the economist, was dispatched to Poland and across the former Soviet Union (FSU). Funding streams were brought online and bright students from the eastern bloc attended Harvard Business School and learned about how markets work. There were also parallel democracy building programs established. Partnerships and exchanges proliferated and the Soviet-era systems were transformed to engage and contribute to the global market economy.

As the Mubarak regime steps out of the way, Gaddafi’s collapses, and as Tunisia continues to re-establish its democratic roots, similar questions are raised with less obvious answers: what can be done to alleviate the extreme unemployment and income gaps that plague these countries? Certainly, the removal of the authoritarian regimes that oversaw these systems is a tremendous first step, but what what else must happen to ensure that the conditions that spurred these uprisings improve?

The answer is, in part, right in front of us if we look closely at the banners that were waved by brave protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square featuring three well-known organisations: Facebook, Twitter and al-Jazeera. This new, more democratic configuration of media gave voice to new players.

While the revolutions taking place are fuelled by the blood, sweat and tears of the brave protesters that fought for change, one central component that underlay and helped spark, mobilise and globalise these events is the rise of the information society. Satellite communication technologies, mobile smart phones and landline telephones turned into wifi networks were the nervous system that facilitated, maintained and publicised the protest movements. Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian born Google Marketing executive who tirelessly worked with new communication technologies and used his marketing smarts to help orchestrate the end of Mubarak’s reign, is a new kind of information age hero.

Of course, the corollary to the rise of the information society is the rise of the knowledge economy. The future of global growth will be found in the knowledge based corporations, and these industries are just now starting to emerge in the Middle East. Central to their success are ambitious, well-educated and innovative young minds thinking about how to use, adapt and innovate modern technologies to improve their societies.

So what should the US do?

Substantial improvement in telecommunication infrastructure, investment, laws and literacy is needed. Mobile phones may be prevalent, but internet penetration in Egypt is approximately 21%, and 34% in Tunisia, which are good figures for the region, but not compared to the rest of the world. More importantly, these internet connections are mostly at dial-up speeds, with content and service providers regulated by autocratic regulations focused on slowing and controlling rather than energising the flow of information.

Just as Americans have recognised the need for faster and more flexible access to global information networks in order for the US to compete in the 21st-century global economy, Egyptians and Tunisians are grasping this, too. Transforming infrastructure established to allow for the unidirectional distribution of information from the state to its people into networks of collaboration and innovation requires radical reworking of the legal, technical and economic structures governing communications and telecommunications systems.

The American private sector is poised to help. Silicon Valley is unmatched in the talent and capital required to radically transform the communications infrastructure which the Middle East so badly needs. Let’s facilitate the exchanges between Cairo and Cupertino, Alexandria and Mountain View, as soon as possible.

And let’s share ideas that better sustain local communications networks and eliminate the possibility that a future Mubarak will even be able to technically switch off the internet. We know that Egypt can’t immediately transform into a democratic union, but without a democratic information infrastructure, there is little likelihood that the gains made by protesters will be sustained. Equitably shared and unlicensed use of airwaves and community-controlled communications infrastructure are a good place to start.

But this story isn’t only about new technologies. Although new technologies have often allowed room for new voices, the fax machine didn’t cause the Berlin Wall to crumble, neither did the smart phone bring down Mubarak. The skills required to develop and deploy solutions to locally generated demands are likely to come not from business schools, but from information-schools and computer science programmes. The newly democratic societies of tomorrow won’t need people steeped narrowly in the monetarist economics of Friedman and Schwartz, but in ideas fused from computer science, sociology, communication and human-computer interaction studies.

If the United States is going to continue to be the beacon of democracy, it must realise that the beacon beats with a digital heart these days – and it must engage accordingly. But we’ll need to be humble and not repeat the errors of eastern Europe, thinking we have all the right answers. The prescriptions of the economists were far from perfect, and partnerships, not diktats are what is needed now. It’s about government understanding the new levels of citizen participation and becoming more accessible. In fact, learning could work in both directions – for the US, too, has much to learn about governing in the age of information.

Last year’s Stuxnet computer-worm attack on several Iranian nuclear installations may have been our collective digital Sputnik shock. It highlighted the significant security challenges we face in the digital sphere.

Yet in addition to this very public case, cyberspace is contested every single second, although these attacks do not normally get the same level of public attention.

Unlike the outer space that Sputnik reached, the Internet and the structures it rests upon are already heavily populated and utilized — by governments and companies, research institutions, public bodies and billions of citizens.

In fact, public and private life depends on functioning telecommunications and information-technology infrastructures. They are already critical to the survival and prosperity of most economies and societies.

Thus one of our greatest strengths — an increasingly networked global communications infrastructure — could also be one of our greatest vulnerabilities.

Stuxnet vividly illustrated how vulnerable industrial infrastructures are and how precise attacks against them can be. We have also seen highly professional attacks against big Internet and credit-card companies.

They became possible through vulnerabilities in standard software suites or through distributed “denial-of-services” attacks, like the payback attacks launched by supporters of WikiLeaks.

In its latest threat assessment of Internet organized crime, the European law enforcement agency Europol quoted a study from the computer security company McAfee that put the damage caused by malign digital activities to be even as high as a trillion dollars a year.

With the emergence of one global network, this threat will increase. Systems that were previously separate are now being connected — information systems of banks, clinics or air-traffic control systems, not to mention the plethora of end-user devices like smartphones, tablet PCs and even board computers in cars.

This trend is inevitable if we want to foster the knowledge-based society, to increase productivity and to drive innovation. We have to make our infrastructures smarter. But infusing intelligence into infrastructures also means making them vulnerable to digital attacks.

Protecting these critical infrastructures will be central to public safety as well as to national security. The consequences of a breakdown of the energy grid or the takeover of a critical industry plant from outside could be devastating — even more so as primary infrastructures often depend on one another.

On the one hand, this is an issue of software security. Symantec, a manufacturer of antivirus software, already lists 3 million viruses in its database, but it is virtually impossible to identify each new virus in time. According to Jonathan Zittrain, professor at Harvard Law School, the Slammer worm in 2003 was able to infect 120,000 servers — 90 percent of the type of server it was designed to attack — within 10 minutes.

On the other hand, we also face a hardware challenge. We cannot check the hardware components we use in detail today. A normal processor has several million circuits on a few square centimeters.

So what can we do to enhance cybersecurity? I believe we must adopt a three-sided simultaneous approach.

•First, security has to become a design principle. For us, this means extensive security checks at each step of our production processes. It also means that we reserve access to critical systems and sites to certified employees. We use different technologies to avert “distributed denial-of-service” attacks against our infrastructure and important services like IPTV (Internet Protocol Television), fixed-line VoIP (voice-over Internet Protocol) and Domain Name Services. We also help our customers protect their networks against this threat on demand.

•Second, security must be a part of daily business. At Deutsche Telekom, we constantly track attacks against our networks with self-learning systems. In December 2010 alone, we observed 7,500 attackers who carried out more than 200,000 attacks. Last year, our experts at the Telekom Computer Emergency Response Team identified more than 1,000 vulnerabilities in third-party software products. We share this information with the antivirus industry. A few of these samples were completely new and not detected by usual antivirus products.

All these measures are costly, but this money is well spent. Yet such efforts become more difficult if European telecommunications regulation is solely focused on lowering prices and thus does not support the necessary additional infrastructure investments.

Frankly, this is counterproductive to our efforts to secure vital infrastructures. In the long term, security even has the potential to increase the competitiveness of our economies, as it is becoming an increasingly important enabling service.

•Third, we must accept cybersecurity as a shared responsibility. The Internet chain is only as strong as its weakest link. It starts with the individual user — the best lock in the world is useless if people leave the key under the doormat. Consumers should use digital services responsibly, for example when sharing their data or trusting unknown sources.

But we also need a comprehensive dialogue with all relevant stakeholders in order to develop a coherent strategy to protect our societies and our economy in the digital sphere. Cybersecurity is a public good, so we need intelligent rules that encourage societies and companies to shoulder a part of this burden.

The Sputnik shock led to a burst of activity that finally put a man on the Moon. It is time to address the cybersecurity issue with the same resolve.

This year, the 47th Munich Security Conference included for the first time a special session on cybersecurity. “This may be the first time,” the president of a small European noted to the high-powered assembly, more accustomed to dealing with armies and alliances than with worms and denial-of-service attacks, “but it will not be the last.”

Until now, the issue of cybersecurity has largely been the domain of computer geeks. When the Internet was created 40 years ago, this small community was like a virtual village of people who knew each other, and they designed a system with little attention to security.

Even the commercial Web is only two decades old, but as British Foreign Secretary William Hague reminded the Munich conference: It has exploded from 16 million users in 1995 to more than 1.7 billion users today.

This burgeoning interdependence has created great opportunities and great vulnerabilities. Security experts wrestling with cyber-issues are at about the same stage in understanding the implications of this new technology as nuclear experts were in the early years after the first nuclear explosions.

The cyber-domain is a volatile manmade environment. As an advisory panel of defense scientists explained, “people built all the pieces,” but “the cyber-universe is complex well beyond anyone’s understanding and exhibits behavior that no one predicted, and sometimes can’t even be explained well.”

Unlike atoms, human adversaries are purposeful and intelligent. Mountains and oceans are hard to move, but portions of cyberspace can be turned on and off at the click of a mouse. It is cheaper and quicker to move electrons across the globe than to move large ships long distances through the friction of salt water. The costs of developing multiple carrier taskforces and submarine fleets create enormous barriers to entry and make it possible to speak of U.S. naval dominance. In contrast, the barriers to entry in the cyber-domain are so low that nonstate actors and small states can play significant roles at low levels of cost.

In my book, “The Future of Power,” I describe diffusion of power away from governments as one of the great power shifts in this century. Cyberspace is a perfect example of the broader trend. The largest powers are unlikely to be able to dominate this domain as much as they have others like sea, air or space.

While they have greater resources, they also have greater vulnerabilities, and at this stage, offense dominates defense in cyberspace. The United States, Russia, Britain, France and China have greater capacity than other state and nonstate actors, but it makes little sense to speak of dominance in cyberspace. If anything, dependence on complex cybersystems for support of military and economic activities creates vulnerabilities in large states that can be exploited.

There is much loose talk about “cyberwar.” But if we restrict the term to cyber-actions that have effects outside cyberspace that amplify or are equivalent to physical violence, we are only just beginning to see glimpses of cyberwar — for instance in the denial-of-service attacks that accompanied the conventional war in Georgia in 2008, or the recent sabotage of Iranian centrifuges by the Stuxnet worm.

If one treats most hacktivism as mostly a nuisance, there are four major categories of cyberthreats to national security, each with a different time horizon and with different (in principle) solutions: 1) cyberwar and 2) economic espionage, both largely associated with states, and 3) cybercrime and 4) cyberterrorism, mostly associated with nonstate actors.

For the United States, at the present time, the highest costs come from the espionage and crime, but over the next decade or so, war and terrorism may become greater threats.

Moreover, as alliances and tactics evolve among different actors, the categories may increasingly overlap. As the former director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, said, “Sooner or later, terror groups will achieve cyber-sophistication. It’s like nuclear proliferation, only far easier.”

At this stage, however, according to President Obama’s 2009 cyber-review, theft of intellectual property by other states (and corporations) is the highest immediate cost. Not only does it result in current economic losses, but by destroying competitive advantage, it jeopardizes future hard power.

Security experts are far from certain what terms such as “offense, defense, deterrence, or the laws of war” mean in the cyber-realm. We are only at the early stages of developing a strategy. And public understanding lags even further behind. That is why this year is likely to be just the beginning of many discussions like the one at the Munich security conference.

In the category “What Do You Know?”, for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything in existence and it means to give a couple of the world’s quickest humans a run for their money at their own game.

The question: What is Watson?

I.B.M.’s groundbreaking question-answering system, running on roughly 2,500 parallel processor cores, each able to perform up to 33 billion operations a second, is playing a pair of “Jeopardy!” matches against the show’s top two living players, to be aired on Feb. 14, 15 and 16. Watson is I.B.M.’s latest self-styled Grand Challenge, a follow-up to the 1997 defeat by its computer Deep Blue of Garry Kasparov, the world’s reigning chess champion. (It’s remarkable how much of the digital revolution has been driven by games and entertainment.) Yes, the match is a grandstanding stunt, baldly calculated to capture the public’s imagination. But barring any humiliating stumble by the machine on national television, it should.

Consider the challenge: Watson will have to be ready to identify anything under the sun, answering all manner of coy, sly, slant, esoteric, ambiguous questions ranging from the “Rh factor” of Scarlett’s favorite Butler or the 19th-century painter whose name means “police officer” to the rhyme-time place where Pelé stores his ball or what you get when you cross a typical day in the life of the Beatles with a crazed zombie classic. And he (forgive me) will have to buzz in fast enough and with sufficient confidence to beat Ken Jennings, the holder of the longest unbroken “Jeopardy!” winning streak, and Brad Rutter, an undefeated champion and the game’s biggest money winner. The machine’s one great edge: Watson has no idea that he should be panicking.

Open-domain question answering has long been one of the great holy grails of artificial intelligence. It is considerably harder to formalize than chess. It goes well beyond what search engines like Google do when they comb data for keywords. Google can give you 300,000 page matches for a search of the terms “greyhound,” “origin” and “African country,” which you can then comb through at your leisure to find what you need.

Asked in what African country the greyhound originated, Watson can tell you in a couple of seconds that the authoritative consensus favors Egypt. But to stand a chance of defeating Mr. Jennings and Mr. Rutter, Watson will have to be able to beat them to the buzzer at least half the time and answer with something like 90 percent accuracy.

When I.B.M.’s David Ferrucci and his team of about 20 core researchers began their “Jeopardy!” quest in 2006, their state-of-the-art question-answering system could solve no more than 15 percent of questions from earlier shows. They fed their machine libraries full of documents — books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, databases, taxonomies, and even Bibles, movie scripts, novels and plays.

But the real breakthrough came with the extravagant addition of many multiple “expert” analyzers — more than 100 different techniques running concurrently to analyze natural language, appraise sources, propose hypotheses, merge the results and rank the top guesses. Answers, for Watson, are a statistical thing, a matter of frequency and likelihood. If, after a couple of seconds, the countless possibilities produced by the 100-some algorithms converge on a solution whose chances pass Watson’s threshold of confidence, it buzzes in.

This raises the question of whether Watson is really answering questions at all or is just noticing statistical correlations in vast amounts of data. But the mere act of building the machine has been a powerful exploration of just what we mean when we talk about knowing.

Who knows how Mr. Jennings and Mr. Rutter do it — puns cracked, ambiguities resolved, obscurities retrieved, links formed across every domain in creation, all in a few heartbeats. The feats of engineering involved in answering the smallest query about the world are beyond belief. But I.B.M. is betting a fair chunk of its reputation that 2011 will be the year that machines can play along at the game.

Does Watson stand a chance of winning? I would not stake my “Final Jeopardy!” nest egg on it. Not yet. Words are very rascals, and language may still be too slippery for it. But watching films of the machine in sparring matches against lesser human champions, I felt myself choking up at its heroic effort, the size of the undertaking, the centuries of accumulating groundwork, hope and ingenuity that have gone into this next step in the long human drama. I was most moved when the 100-plus parallel algorithms wiped out and the machine came up with some ridiculous answer, calling it out as if it might just be true, its cheerful synthesized voice sounding as vulnerable as that of any bewildered contestant.

It does not matter who will win this $1 million Valentine’s Day contest. We all know who will be champion, eventually. The real showdown is between us and our own future. Information is growing many times faster than anyone’s ability to manage it, and Watson may prove crucial in helping to turn all that noise into knowledge.

Dr. Ferrucci and company plan to sell the system to businesses in need of fast, expert answers drawn from an overwhelming pool of supporting data. The potential client list is endless. A private Watson will cost millions today and requires a room full of hardware. But if what Ray Kurzweil calls the Law of Accelerating Returns keeps holding, before too long, you’ll have an app for that.

Like so many of its precursors, Watson will make us better at some things, worse at others. (Recall Socrates’ warnings about the perils of that most destabilizing technology of all — writing.) Already we rely on Google to deliver to the top of the million-hit list just those pages we are most interested in, and we trust its concealed algorithms with a faith that would be difficult to explain to the smartest computer. Even if we might someday be able to ask some future Watson how fast and how badly we are cooking the earth, and even if it replied (based on the sum of all human knowledge) with 90 percent accuracy, would such an answer convert any of the already convinced or produce the political will we’ll need to survive the reply?

Still, history is the long process of outsourcing human ability in order to leverage more of it. We will concede this trivia game (after a very long run as champions), and find another in which, aided by our compounding prosthetics, we can excel in more powerful and ever more terrifying ways.

Should Watson win next week, the news will be everywhere. We’ll stand in awe of our latest magnificent machine, for a season or two. For a while, we’ll have exactly the gadget we need. Then we’ll get needy again, looking for a newer, stronger, longer lever, for the next larger world to move.

For “Final Jeopardy!”, the category is “Players”: This creature’s three-pound, 100-trillion-connection machine won’t ever stop looking for an answer.

The question: What is a human being?

In January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest version of their heart-monitoring software from piracy. They called it Brain, and it was basically a wheel-clamp for PCs. Computers that ran their program, plus this new bit of code, would stop working after a year, though they cheerfully provided three telephone numbers, against the day. If you were a legitimate user, and could prove it, they’d unlock you.

But in the way of all emergent technologies, something entirely unintended happened. The Alvis’ wheel-clamp was soon copied by a certain stripe of computer hobbyist, who began to distribute it, concealed within various digital documents that people might be expected to want to open. Because almost all these booby-trapped files went out on floppy disks, the virus spread at a pre-Internet snail’s pace.

Still, it did wreak a certain amount of low-grade havoc, freezing computers across the world. The hobbyists did it because they could, or to proudly demonstrate that they could, or to see what would happen, or simply because they thought it was neat.

This proved hellishly embarrassing for the Alvi brothers, whose three telephone numbers were often inadvertently included in the files, and eventually they had to cut all three lines. There were far too many angry callers, mainly from the United States and Britain. In short, the road to our present universe teeming with viruses, worms and Trojan horses was paved, a quarter-century ago this month, with the Alvi brothers’ good intentions of securing their intellectual property.

At the time, I found it surprising that these virus-writers were apparently amateurs, civilians. I had imagined computer viruses as strategic military weapons, the business of governments, not practical jokers. Viruses might be sometimes purloined by specialist criminals looking for a big score but were never something one could cobble together at home.

But precisely the opposite happened. Virus-writers seemed, at least at first, to be in it for anything but money. The outcome was simply vandalism, as dull as someone smashing out the light fixtures in a bus shelter. Random bits of software or pieces of equipment would temporarily quit functioning. Random strangers were anonymously discommoded. Somewhere, I assumed, someone had a rather abstract giggle.

I wasn’t impressed, however arcane the know-how that was required. But I was embarrassed at how thoroughly I’d missed this in my fiction: the pettiness of most virus-writing, the banality of the result. I had never depicted, much less imagined, anyone doing anything as pointlessly ill-intentioned. (I began to try, on the margins of my work, to remedy that oversight, if only for the sake of naturalism.)

Last fall, when I learned of the Stuxnet attack on the computers running Iran’s nuclear program, I briefly thought that here, finally, was the real thing: a cyberweapon purpose-built by one state actor to strategically interfere with the business of another.

But as more details emerged, it began to look less like something new and more like a piece of hobbyist “street” technology, albeit one expensively optimized for a specific attack. The state actor — said to be Israel, perhaps working with the United States, though no one is sure — had simply built on the unpaid labor of generations of hobbyist vandals.

Stuxnet isn’t spectacularly original, as computer worms go, and those Iranian systems aren’t terribly exotic. They’re like ours. As a result, I expect we’ll see a wave of unpleasant backwash, with military money and technology beefing up the code, the digital DNA, of the descendants of Brain.

Any hobbyist worth his or her salt will, in turn, be admiring the Stuxnet code that shut down the Iranian centrifuges, looking to imitate and improve on it. And non-state players, from digital vandals to terrorists, will be casting an appraising eye, if they haven’t already, at the computers that monitor and control more ordinary but nonetheless critical systems: water treatment and distribution, sewage, oil and gas pipelines, electrical transmission lines, wind farms and nuclear power plants.

Should the lights go out in our online bus shelters one day, or some critical control system go spectacularly awry, it may in a sense, however distantly, be because Israel found a way to shut down Iran’s centrifuges. But in another way it will be the result of a bright idea two brothers once had, in the vicinity of Lahore Railway Station, to innocently clamp a digital pirate’s wheel.

Stuxnet, the computer worm that last year disrupted many of the gas centrifuges central to Iran’s nuclear program, is a powerful weapon in the new age of global information warfare. A sophisticated half-megabyte of computer code apparently accomplished what a half-decade of United Nations Security Council resolutions could not.

This new form of warfare has several implications that are only now becoming apparent, and that will define the shape of what will likely become the next global arms race — albeit one measured in computer code rather than firepower.

For one thing, the Stuxnet attack highlights the ambiguous boundaries of sovereignty in cyberspace. Promoting national security in the information age will, from time to time, cause unpredictable offense to the rights and interests of innocent people, companies and countries.

Stuxnet attacked the Iranian nuclear program, but it did so by maliciously manipulating commercial software products sold globally by major Western companies. Whoever launched the assault also infected thousands of computers in several countries, including Australia, Britain, Indonesia and the United States.

This kind of collateral damage to the global civilian realm is going to be the norm, not the exception, and advanced economies, which are more dependent on advanced information systems, will be at particular risk.

What’s more, offensive and defensive information warfare are tightly, insidiously coupled, which will significantly complicate military-industrial relations.

The expertise needed to defend against a cyberattack is essentially indistinguishable from that needed to make such an attack. The Stuxnet programmers are reported to have exploited proprietary information that had been voluntarily provided to the American government by Siemens, that German company that makes data-and-control programs used in nuclear power facilities — including Iran’s.

Siemens did this to help Washington build up its ability to fend off cyberattacks. Will Siemens and other companies think twice next time the American government calls? Probably. Whether it’s true or not, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the United States is now in the business of offensive information warfare, along with China, Israel and Russia, among others.

It’s not hard to imagine, then, the splintering of the global information technology industry into multiple camps according to their willingness to cooperate with governments on security matters. We can already see this happening in the telecommunications industry, where companies promote their products’ resistance to government intrusion. At the same time, other companies might see an advantage to working closely with the government.

Stuxnet also raises sticky and perhaps irresolvable legal questions. At present there is no real legal framework for adjudicating international cyberattacks; even if victims could determine who was responsible, their governments have few options outside of diplomatic complaints and, perhaps, retaliation in kind. An international entity that could legislate or enforce an information warfare armistice does not exist, and is not really conceivable.

A similar question exists within the United States. Under American law the transmission of malicious code is in many cases a criminal offense. This makes sense, given the economy’s reliance on information networks, the sensitivity of stored electronic data and the ever-present risk of attack from viruses, worms and other varieties of malware.

But the president, as commander in chief, does have some authority to conduct offensive information warfare against foreign adversaries. However, as with many presidential powers to wage war and conduct espionage, the extent of his authority has never been enumerated.

This legal ambiguity is problematic because such warfare is far less controllable than traditional military and intelligence operations, and it raises much more complex issues of private property, personal privacy and commercial integrity.

Therefore, before our courts are forced to consider the issue and potentially limit executive powers, as they did after President Harry Truman tried to seize steel plants in the early 1950s, Congress should grant the White House broad authority to wage offensive information warfare.

By explicitly authorizing these offensive operations in appropriate, defined circumstances, a new statute would strengthen the president’s power to provide for the common defense in cyberspace. Doing so wouldn’t answer all the questions that this new era of warfare presents. But one thing is sure: as bad as this arms race will be, losing it would be even worse

For a long time, I relied on my Brooklyn neighbors’ generosity — that is, their unsecured wireless networks — every time I connected to the Web.

So, to linksys of Park Slope, in 2005, for allowing me to do my first freelance work from home; to Netgear 1 and Netgear 2 of the same neighborhood, in 2006, for supporting my electronic application to several graduate schools; to DHoffma, from 2007 to 2008, for letting me pay my taxes online and stream new episodes of “Friday Night Lights” each evening for a whole winter; to belkin54g, Cooley and, above all, to the blessed Belkin_G-Plus_MIMO of Ditmas Park, from 2009 to 2010, for the ability to speedily reply to student e-mails, video-chat with my sister, keep abreast of the latest literary hoo-ha, “like” as many of my friends’ Facebook posts as I liked and learn all about lentil-sprouting or Prometheus whenever the mood struck: Thank you. And may you rest in peace.

A few months ago, the Belkin_G-Plus_MIMO network changed its name and gained a padlock icon in my computer’s list of available connections. Then — crickets. The era of unintentional, unasked-for or simply unacknowledged Internet sharing, it seemed, had come to an end.

Suddenly disconnected, I realized how lucky I’d been all those years, having that tremendous body of information and awesome communication technology at my fingertips, all basically free. It may have been unfair, but I don’t believe I was stealing: the owners’ leaving their networks password-free was essentially a gift, an ethereal gesture of kindness. Sometimes I’d imagine my anonymous benefactors, those people behind Netgear 1 or belkin54g, thinking, “Well, I have Internet to spare.”

And, really, who doesn’t? Home wireless networks can usually support five or more computers, yet there are only about 1.4 computers per American household.

For a few blindered weeks, I debated whether or not to finally “buy” the Internet. The whole system, though, seemed wasteful: paying a company to come wire my apartment, then paying a monthly fee so that I could maintain my own private territory within the cloud of 20 or so wireless networks that were already humming around my apartment. It would be all the more wasteful given the likelihood that, just as cellphones made landlines optional, smartphones and tablets will soon replace the need for home networks at all.

Why couldn’t I instead shell out a nominal fee — to someone, anyone — to partake of the riches that were all around me in abundance?

Paying for Internet access, after all, isn’t like paying for cable TV, where cable providers pay cable networks in turn. My establishing a new network instead of sharing with neighbors does nothing to benefit the Web sites whose content benefits me and whose value to advertisers is based on views and visits.

Nor is it like paying for phone service, where the physical object that makes and receives calls is inseparable from your unique number. My e-mail address is utterly portable: it’s not bound to an I.P. address or one computer — and, like the vast majority of the Internet’s services and information, it’s free.

Which is part of why getting online free felt so natural. During my Internet-less weeks, in desperate moments, I checked e-mail on my Kindle’s wireless connection, which is complimentary (to encourage e-book purchases). But that was a painfully slow experience akin to surfing the Web on an Etch a Sketch.

In an ideal world, the Internet would be universally available to anyone able to receive it. Promisingly, the Federal Communications Commission in September announced that it would open up unused analog airwaves for high-speed public wireless use, which could lead to gratis hotspots spreading across cities and through many rural areas.

But an Internet as freely obtainable as broadcast TV hasn’t yet arrived. And so I recently found myself watching as a technician strung a wire from a tall pole in the backyard to my third-floor apartment so I could have my own connection (wired, to ease myself into the world of paid Internet). It was a process that took nearly three hours, and meant the addition of another long cable to the fistful already circling the building.

When he finished, I had to ask: “Shouldn’t this all be wireless? Wouldn’t that be much easier?”

“Too much interference,” he said. “Too many networks affect the signal.” I thought again about all the people close by with all their overlapping networks.

Perhaps the solution is a simple, old-fashioned gesture. Just knock on a neighbor’s door, and ask if she might be able to spare some wireless.

More than anything since the invention of the postal service, Facebook has revolutionized how we relate to one another. But the revolution hasn’t come in quite the way that the people behind it and other social networking sites assume.

These sites may have allowed us to amass thousands of “friends,” but they have not yet devised a way to cut through the clunky, old-fashioned nature of relationships themselves. Our circle of actual friends remains stubbornly small, limited not by technology but by human nature. What Facebook has done, though, is provide us a way to maintain those circles in a fractured, dynamic world.

Social networking and other digital media have long promised to open up wonderful new vistas, all from the comfort of our own homes. The limitations of face-to-face interaction that have, until now, bound us to our small individual worlds — the handful of people we meet in our everyday lives — would be overcome.

The critical component in social networking is the removal of time as a constraint. In the real world, according to research by myself and others, we devote 40 percent of our limited social time each week to the five most important people we know, who represent just 3 percent of our social world and a trivially small proportion of all the people alive today. Since the time invested in a relationship determines its quality, having more than five best friends is impossible when we interact face to face, one person at a time.

Instant messaging and social networking claim to solve that problem by allowing us to talk to as many people as we like, all at the same time. Like the proverbial lighthouse blinking on the horizon, our messages fan out into the dark night to every passing ship within reach of an Internet connection. We can broadcast, literally, to the world.

I use the word “broadcast” because, despite Facebook’s promise, that is the fundamental flaw in the logic of the social-networking revolution. The developers at Facebook overlooked one of the crucial components in the complicated business of how we create relationships: our minds.

Put simply, our minds are not designed to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world. The emotional and psychological investments that a close relationship requires are considerable, and the emotional capital we have available is limited.

Indeed, no matter what Facebook allows us to do, I have found that most of us can maintain only around 150 meaningful relationships, online and off — what has become known as Dunbar’s number. Yes, you can “friend” 500, 1,000, even 5,000 people with your Facebook page, but all save the core 150 are mere voyeurs looking into your daily life — a fact incorporated into the new social networking site Path, which limits the number of friends you can have to 50.

What’s more, contrary to all the hype and hope, the people in our electronic social worlds are, for most of us, the same people in our offline social worlds. In fact, the average number of friends on Facebook is 120 to 130, just short enough of Dunbar’s number to allow room for grandparents and babies, people too old or too young to have acquired the digital habit.

This isn’t to say that Facebook and its imitators aren’t performing an important, even revolutionary, task — namely, to keep us in touch with our existing friends.

Until relatively recently, almost everyone on earth lived in small, rural, densely interconnected communities, where our 150 friends all knew one another, and everyone’s 150 friends list was everyone else’s.

But the social and economic mobility of the past century has worn away at that interconnectedness. As we move around the country and across continents, we collect disparate pockets of friends, so that our list of 150 consists of a half-dozen subsets of people who barely know of one another’s existence, let alone interact.

Our ancestors knew the same people their entire lives; as we move around, though, we can lose touch with even our closest friends. Emotional closeness declines by around 15 percent a year in the absence of face-to-face contact, so that in five years someone can go from being an intimate acquaintance to the most distant outer layer of your 150 friends.

Facebook and other social networking sites allow us to keep up with friendships that would otherwise rapidly wither away. And they do something else that’s probably more important, if much less obvious: they allow us to reintegrate our networks so that, rather than having several disconnected subsets of friends, we can rebuild, albeit virtually, the kind of old rural communities where everyone knew everyone else. Welcome to the electronic village.

2010 was the year that removed all doubt that cybersecurity is now a geopolitical problem.

We learned from diplomatic cables exposed by WikiLeaks that from Europe to the Middle East to China and beyond, Washington is having an even tougher time than we thought getting what it wants. The leaks themselves have only made matters more delicate, not just by embarrassing some of America’s friends, but by fueling conspiracy theories that Washington was somehow behind the leaks.

Yet WikiLeaks was far from the only big cyberstory in 2010. Google’s public spat with China, the fight over BlackBerry devices in India and the Persian Gulf, and the sudden appearance in July of a virus called Stuxnet that appears to have targeted and degraded Iran’s nuclear facilities made news, as well.

We also learned that cyberattacks are no longer simply a weapon for petty criminals and teenagers. They are now a full-fledged part of national arsenals. In fact, WikiLeaks showed that a cyber-villain can prove just as elusive and decentralized as Al Qaeda. Indeed, as with Al Qaeda, the WikiLeaks problem will be with us for years. This could be just a hint of what is to come.

Osama bin Laden will probably never be taken alive, but unfortunately for U.S. diplomacy, the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, will probably have many days in court. If he is prosecuted in the United States, some will cast him as the world’s first cybermartyr. Unlike bin Laden, many Americans will treat him primarily as a curiosity or even as a hero of free speech. His confederates — but also legions of WikiLeaks-inspired hackers — will defend that freedom with more acts of cyberrevenge. They could make common cause.

In other words, up until now Washington has worried that terrorists will become hackers. Perhaps we all should worry that hackers will become terrorists.

In addition, the WikiLeaked information about U.S. foreign policy will have consequences for international relations.

Pakistan was probably behind the outing of the C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad, who was immediately brought home. More worrisome, given its traditional ties with Israel, the Argentine government’s decision to join Brazil in recognizing an independent Palestinian state was likely a response, at least in part, to a leaked cable in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton questioned the mental health of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The damage to U.S.-Argentine relations is likely to be lasting.

Then there are the risks that WikiLeaks poses for corporations. When U.S.-based multinationals MasterCard and PayPal agreed to U.S. government demands to block WikiLeaks financial transactions, they quickly suffered denial-of-service attacks from hackers sympathetic to WikiLeaks’ case. As a result, these companies and others like them will become ever more reliant on governments for information on (and protection from) such attacks. In the past, corporate willingness to provide the U.S. government with sensitive data hasn’t been hugely consequential for these firms, because they didn’t yet face a powerful cyberenemy capable of launching sophisticated attacks. But “Anonymous,” the organization that retaliated against threats to Mr. Assange, appears much more capable.

The implications of this problem for multinational companies could be new limitations on globalization itself. If firms begin to seek safe-haven by building gated online communities that are well removed from the information superhighway, a move toward secure Intranets, information will be tougher to come by. And as technology companies more often seek the protective embrace of government security agencies, global sales and expansion plans will become ever more dependent on the rules that govern national security.

So far, WikiLeaks hasn’t divulged significant industrial secrets, but given the focus on U.S. diplomatic cables, that fact simply reminds us that American embassies play a comparably small role in promoting U.S. commerce. If a similar tranche of cables were leaked from Japanese or French governments, the commercial fallout would be far greater. That’s why it may not be long before we see a set of leaks — stolen from governments or companies — that panic markets, sink stock prices, and even undermine a cartel like OPEC. As the continuing drama around Julian Assange demonstrates, governments will struggle to manage these sorts of problems. But for a corporation, even a wealthy one, the challenges will be far greater.

In 2010, WikiLeaks pushed freedom of information to a whole new level. We can only imagine the implications we’ll see in 2011.

The Anonymous web protests over WikiLeaks are the internet equivalent of a mass demonstration. It’s a mistake to call them hacking (playful cleverness) or cracking (security breaking). The LOIC program that is being used by the group is prepackaged so no cleverness is needed to run it, and it does not break any computer’s security. The protesters have not tried to take control of Amazon’s website, or extract any data from MasterCard. They enter through the site’s front door, and it just can’t cope with the volume.

Calling these protests DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks is misleading, too. A DDoS attack is done with thousands of “zombie” computers. Typically, somebody breaks the security of those computers (often with a virus) and takes remote control of them, then rigs them up as a “botnet” to do in unison whatever he directs (in this case, to overload a server). The Anonymous protesters’ computers are not zombies; presumably they are being individually operated.

No – the proper comparison is with the crowds that descended last week on Topshop stores. They didn’t break into the stores or take any goods from them, but they sure caused a nuisance for the owner, Philip Green. I wouldn’t like it one bit if my store (supposing I had one) were the target of a large protest. Amazon and MasterCard don’t like it either, and their clients were probably annoyed. Those who hoped to buy at Topshop on the day of the protest may have been annoyed too.

The internet cannot function if websites are frequently blocked by crowds, just as a city cannot function if its streets are constantly full by protesters. But before you advocate a crackdown on internet protests, consider what they are protesting: on the internet, users have no rights. As the WikiLeaks case has demonstrated, what we do online, we do on sufferance.

In the physical world, we have the right to print and sell books. Anyone trying to stop us would need to go to court. That right is weak in the UK (consider superinjunctions), but at least it exists. However, to set up a website we need the co-operation of a domain name company, an ISP, and often a hosting company, any of which can be pressured to cut us off. In the US, no law explicitly establishes this precarity. Rather, it is embodied in contracts that we have allowed those companies to establish as normal. It is as if we all lived in rented rooms and landlords could evict anyone at a moment’s notice.

Reading, too, is done on sufferance. In the physical world, you can buy a book with cash, and you own it. You are free to give, lend or sell it to someone else. You are also free to keep it. However, in the virtual world, e-readers have digital handcuffs to stop you from giving, lending or selling a book, as well as licences forbidding that. Last year, Amazon used a back door in its e-reader to remotely delete thousands of copies of 1984, by George Orwell. The Ministry of Truth has been privatised.

In the physical world, we have the right to pay money and to receive money – even anonymously. On the internet, we can receive money only with the approval of organisations such as PayPal and MasterCard, and the “security state” tracks payments moment by moment. Punishment-on-accusation laws such as the Digital Economy Act extend this pattern of precarity to internet connectivity. What you do on your own computer is also controlled by others, with non-free software. Microsoft and Apple systems implement digital handcuffs – features specifically designed to restrict users. Continued use of a program or feature is precarious too: Apple put a back door in the iPhone to remotely delete installed applications and anotherin Windows enabled Microsoft to install software changes without asking permission.

I started the free software movement to replace user-controlling non-free software with freedom-respecting free software. With free software, we can at least control what software does in our own computers.

The US state today is a nexus of power for corporate interests. Since it must pretend to serve the people, it fears the truth may leak. Hence its parallel campaigns against WikiLeaks: to crush it through the precarity of the internet and to formally limit freedom of the press.

States seek to imprison the Anonymous protesters rather than official torturers and murderers. The day when our governments prosecute war criminals and tell us the truth, internet crowd control may be our most pressing remaining problem. I will rejoice if I see that day.

For the past year, I’ve been working on a study on distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against independent media and human rights sites with colleagues at the Berkman Centre. The resulting report will be out shortly, but one of the main conclusions is that independent media sites are not capable of independently defending themselves of large, network based DDOS attacks.

There are many things an independent site can do to protect itself against smaller DDOS attacks that target specific application vulnerabilities (including simply serving static content), but the problem with a large, network-based attack is that it will flood the link between the targeted site and the rest of the internet, usually causing the hosting ISP to take the targeted site down entirely to protect the rest of its network.

Defending against these large network attacks requires massive amounts of bandwidth, specific and deep technical experience, and often connections to the folks running the networks where the attacks are originating from. There are only a couple dozen organisations (ISPs, hypergiant websites, and content distribution networks) at the core of the internet that have sufficient amounts of bandwidth, technical ability and community connections to fight off the biggest of these attacks.

Paying for services from those organisations is very expensive, though, starting at thousands of dollars per month without bandwidth costs, and often going much, much higher. An alternative is to use one of a handful of hosting services like blogger that offers a high level of DDOS protection at no financial cost. One of the recommendations we make in our report is for independent media sites that think they are likely to be attacked and want to be able to defend against themselves either find the resources to pay for a DDOS protection service or accept the compromises of hosting on a service like blogger in return for the free DDOS protection.

We make this recommendation with a great deal of caution, however, because moving independent media sites to these core network actors trades more freedom from DDOS attacks for more control by one of these large companies. It’s great to be able to withstand a 10Gbps DDOS attack on YouTube, but it’s not so great for YouTube to take down your video at its sole discretion for violation of its terms of service.

In general, these core companies have struggled in this genuinely difficult role. How is YouTube supposed to judge what to do when it receives complaints about a violent video in Arabic posted from Egypt? Do videos of police brutality qualify as the “graphic or gratuitous violence”, which YouTube disallows in its terms of service?

So, with this context, I’ve been watching the WikiLeaks attack with great interest. It has been suffering a pretty big network attack (WikiLeaks claims about 10Gbps, which is big enough to take down all but a couple dozen or fewer ISPs in the world; arbor claims about 2-4 Gbps, which is still big enough to cause the vast majority of ISPs in the world major disruption). The attack successfully took its site offline at its main hosting ISP. WikiLeak’s textbook response was to move to Amazon’s web services, one of those core internet services capable of defending against big network attacks.

The move seemed to work for a couple of days, but then Amazon exercised its control, shutting the site down. Joe Lieberman claimed responsibility for Amazon’s decision to take the site down. But Amazon responded with a message claiming that it made the decision to take the site down based purely on its decision based on its terms of service. The core of their argument is that WikiLeaks was hosting content that it did not own and that it was putting human rights workers at risk:

“for example, our terms of service state that ‘you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.’ It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy. Human rights organisations have in fact written to WikiLeaks asking them to exercise caution and not release the names or identities of human rights defenders who might be persecuted by their governments.”

If this is really how they made their decision, this is a worse process than merely succumbing to the political pressure of the US government. At least Lieberman is an elected official and therefore, to some degree, beholden to his constituents. Amazon is, instead, arguing dismissively that it made the decision based on its own interpretation of its terms of service. Without getting into the merits of either side, the questions of whether WikiLeaks has the rights to the content and especially of what level of risk of harm merits censorship are very, very difficult and should clearly be decided by some sort of deliberative jurisprudence, rather than arbitrarily and dismissively decided by a private actor.

This need for careful, structured and public deliberation on these questions is obviously balanced by Amazon’s right to decide what to do with its own property. But as a society, we have reached a place where the only way to protect some sorts of speech on the internet is through one of only a couple of dozen core internet organisations.

Totally ceding decisions about control of politically sensitive speech to that handful of actors, without any legal process or oversight, is a bad idea (worse even than ceding decisions to grandstanding politicians). The problem is that an even worse option is to cede these decisions about what content gets to stay up to the owners of the botnets capable of executing large DDOS attacks.

From the standpoint of traditional post-Pentagon Papers, post-Watergate journalism, the decision by The New York Times, along with the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel, to publish news stories based on the purloined State Department documents made available by WikiLeaks was really no decision at all.

News organizations are in the business of publishing news. They can exercise their judgment with regard to whether, in exceptional circumstances — usually those regarding potential loss of life — news might be redacted, delayed or, on extremely rare occasions, permanently withheld. But the likely embarrassment to individuals, or inconvenience to U.S. diplomats, does not even begin to approach this bar.

The manner in which the newspapers received the information is really not that special, either. The press is always attacked for publishing leaks, but the attackers almost always pick the leaks of which they happen to disapprove.

The conservatives who criticize the publication of the WikiLeaks material were not heard complaining when President George W. Bush and his national security team provided Bob Woodward and his coauthor, Dan Balz, with notes and minutes of still-secret National Security Council proceedings regarding the most sensitive matters of U.S. war planning and intelligence collection.

Similarly it was liberals, not conservatives, who took the Bush administration officials to task for leaking the identity of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame in order to discredit the information provided by her husband, Joseph Wilson.

What is different about the WikiLeaks data is the scale of the leak, the motive of the leaker, and the manner in which it was ultimately made available.

The traditional motive for a high official to orchestrate a leak is to attempt to control the media narrative. That’s what President Bush and Karl Rove were doing, and what Daniel Ellsberg did decades earlier when he gave the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times.

But in the case of the WikiLeaks material, the trove of information is so enormous and contains so many stories of real import and/or prurient interest that there is no single narrative to control — nor any means to do so. The target is not any U.S. policy or even the U.S. government. It is secrecy itself.

In this respect, the mainstream media institutions are actually playing a far more useful role than they have in many past cases — including, in particular, the run-up to the war in Iraq. The sheer size of the data drop, coupled with the lack of deadline pressure, allowed editors to present what would have been an unmanageable mountain of material in a careful, considered and (partially) contextualized manner.

It also gave the State Department plenty of time to identify which cables were genuinely deserving of continued secrecy. On the basis of State’s suggestions, according to Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, the paper “edited out any information that could identify confidential sources — including informants, dissidents, academics and human rights activists — or otherwise compromise national security.”

At the same time, the technological advances that make possible the publication of the documents demonstrate the loss of power and influence of these institutions.

One reason that nobody has ever leaked on this scale before is that nobody could have transported, much less published, 250,000 documents containing who knows how many (millions of?) pages.

When Ellsberg provided his copies of the Pentagon Papers — a fraction of the size of this document dump — first to The Times and then the Washington Post, one of his biggest concerns was how to store and copy the documents without being discovered and arrested.

Today, the digitization of information has empowered “citizen journalists” like the folks at WikiLeaks to actually determine the agenda of the mainstream media — and of world governments — to a degree most of us are only beginning to understand.

The fact is that if The Times and the other papers had, for whatever reason, declined to play along with WikiLeaks, the material would still have been published. But then we would all be talking about the growing irrelevance of the mainstream media in an age when guerrilla “journalists” can easily execute an end run around them. This has already happened many times, and it hardly serves the interests of the press once it is revealed.

So while it is understandable for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others to fulminate about the potential loss of confidence in U.S. diplomacy and the difficulties the leaked documents will undoubtedly cause, she — and everybody else attempting to keep secrets from the rest of us — need to understand that the game has new rules.

When 250,000 documents can be placed on a zip drive smaller than a popsicle stick, and thousands of citizen journalists are working to make it available to the public, then the guarantee of secrecy for any powerful institution is only a comforting fiction.

So far, in the case of WikiLeaks, those involved in the publication of the papers appear to have operated responsibly, given their respective motives for playing the game. But mainstream editors and reporters may be forgiven for wondering just how long they can remain central in dramas like this one. When the gate’s been toppled, how long does the keeper keep a job?

Over the weekend, while hosting the largest intelligence leak in history, WikiLeaks was hit by a distributed denial of service attack. Someone, it seemed, was trying to silence the whistleblowing website.

Thanks to the internet’s flexible architecture, however, WikiLeaks was able to quickly shift its weight to Amazon.com’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) servers, ensuring that the 250,000 leaked diplomatic cables remained online. Earlier today, reports circulated that Amazon had bowed to political pressure from US lawmakers and booted WikiLeaks off its servers. And yet, WikiLeaks remains online as I am writing this, having presumably moved to yet another cluster of servers.

WikiLeaks endurance illustrates why the internet’s decentralised nature has made it such a valuable platform for the dissemination of information. To attempt to take a site like WikiLeaks down is to engage in a pointless game of whack-a-mole; no matter how many times you shut the site down, it will always pop up again elsewhere. And yet, WikiLeaks and sites like it do have another point of vulnerability, one that is increasingly being targeted by governments: their web addresses or urls.

In order to visit WikiLeaks, most of us would point our browser to WikiLeaks.org. Unlike the internet itself, the administration of top-level domains – such as .org, .com, .net and .uk – is surprisingly centralised. The top-level domain name space, in which such domains reside, is managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), a US-based non-profit organisation. Icann oversees the creation of new domains and assigns administration of these domains to various parties. The .com domain, for example, is administered by the American company VeriSign, while the .uk domain is administered by the UK non-profit, Nominet UK.

This centralisation of domains provides an attractive target for those seeking to silence free speech and dissent on the web. In the US, a group of senators has introduced a bill known as the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (Coica) that aims to expand the American government’s power over domain names. If passed, the bill would allow the US government to shut down domains that are managed in the US (.com and .net domains, for example) and demand that American ISPs not connect users to domains administered elsewhere in the world.

As its name implies, Coica is being peddled as a solution for combating the sale of counterfeit goods online. However, if granted the ability to seize and censor domains at whim, one imagines that the American government might be tempted to use its newfound ability for other purposes – including suppressing sensitive documents like those made available by WikiLeaks.

If you’re wondering what this kind of seizure would look like in practice, you need look no further than this week’s news. This past Monday, in a show of force timed to coincide with “cyber Monday” – the year’s largest day for online shopping – the US department of homeland security seized some 82 domains, most of which belonged to sites trading in counterfeit goods. A few of the sites whose domains were seized, however, were not involved in counterfeiting. Two popular hip-hop websites – OnSmash.com and dajaz1.com – had their domains pulled due to accusations of copyright infringement. These sites, which hosted hip-hop mixtapes and which have been cited as contributing to the recent success of major-label recording artists like Kanye West, claim to have been in compliance with the law by responding to takedown notices received from record labels and other rightsholders. As of this writing, however, both sites still redirect to a stern warning notice from the department of homeland security. While the legality of these seizures in the absence of Coica is a matter of debate, the message sent by the US government is clear: despite the decentralised nature of the internet, web sites that run afoul of US policies are anything but invincible.

While it remains unclear what ramifications a piece of legislation like Coica would have for free speech, political dissent and the flow of information online, the US government’s ability to confiscate domains could certainly spell trouble for sites like WikiLeaks in the future. Some engineers aren’t taking any chances: in response to the cyber Monday seizures, a group of online activists has announced plans to create a decentralised – and therefore, censorship-resistant – domain name system, based on the popular BitTorrent file transfer protocol.

The game of whack-a-mole, it seems, continues unabated.

There you are, peacefully reading an article or watching a video on the Internet. You finish, find it thought-provoking, and scroll down to the comments section to see what other people thought. And there, lurking among dozens of well-intentioned opinions, is a troll.

“How much longer is the media going to milk this beyond tired story?” “These guys are frauds.” “Your idiocy is disturbing.” “We’re just trying to make the world a better place one brainwashed, ignorant idiot at a time.” These are the trollish comments, all from anonymous sources, that you could have found after reading a CNN article on the rescue of the Chilean miners.

Trolling, defined as the act of posting inflammatory, derogatory or provocative messages in public forums, is a problem as old as the Internet itself, although its roots go much farther back. Even in the fourth century B.C., Plato touched upon the subject of anonymity and morality in his parable of the ring of Gyges.

That mythical ring gave its owner the power of invisibility, and Plato observed that even a habitually just man who possessed such a ring would become a thief, knowing that he couldn’t be caught. Morality, Plato argues, comes from full disclosure; without accountability for our actions we would all behave unjustly.

This certainly seems to be true for the anonymous trolls today. After Alexis Pilkington, a 17-year-old Long Island girl, committed suicide earlier this year, trolls descended on her online tribute page to post pictures of nooses, references to hangings and other hateful comments. A better-known example involves Nicole Catsouras, an 18-year-old who died in a car crash in California in 2006. Photographs of her badly disfigured body were posted on the Internet, where anonymous trolls set up fake tribute pages and in some cases e-mailed the photos to her parents with subject lines like “Hey, Daddy, I’m still alive.”

Psychological research has proven again and again that anonymity increases unethical behavior. Road rage bubbles up in the relative anonymity of one’s car. And in the online world, which can offer total anonymity, the effect is even more pronounced. People — even ordinary, good people — often change their behavior in radical ways. There’s even a term for it: the online disinhibition effect.

Many forums and online communities are looking for ways to strike back. Back in February, Engadget, a popular technology review blog, shut down its commenting system for a few days after it received a barrage of trollish comments on its iPad coverage.

Many victims are turning to legislation. All 50 states now have stalking, bullying or harassment laws that explicitly include electronic forms of communication. Last year, Liskula Cohen, a former model, persuaded a New York judge to require Google to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger who she felt had defamed her, and she has now filed a suit against the blogger. Last month, another former model, Carla Franklin, persuaded a judge to force YouTube to reveal the identity of a troll who made a disparaging comment about her on the video-sharing site.

But the law by itself cannot do enough to disarm the Internet’s trolls. Content providers, social networking platforms and community sites must also do their part by rethinking the systems they have in place for user commentary so as to discourage — or disallow — anonymity. Reuters, for example, announced that it would start to block anonymous comments and require users to register with their names and e-mail addresses in an effort to curb “uncivil behavior.”

Some may argue that denying Internet users the ability to post anonymously is a breach of their privacy and freedom of expression. But until the age of the Internet, anonymity was a rare thing. When someone spoke in public, his audience would naturally be able to see who was talking.

Others point out that there’s no way to truly rid the Internet of anonymity. After all, names and e-mail addresses can be faked. And in any case many commenters write things that are rude or inflammatory under their real names.

But raising barriers to posting bad comments is still a smart first step. Well-designed commenting systems should also aim to highlight thoughtful and valuable opinions while letting trollish ones sink into oblivion.

The technology blog Gizmodo is trying an audition system for new commenters, under which their first few comments would be approved by a moderator or a trusted commenter to ensure quality before anybody else could see them. After a successful audition, commenters can freely post. If over time they impress other trusted commenters with their contributions, they’d be promoted to trusted commenters, too, and their comments would henceforth be featured.

Disqus, a comments platform for bloggers, has experimented with allowing users to rate one another’s comments and feed those ratings into a global reputation system called Clout. Moderators can use a commenter’s Clout score to “help separate top commenters from trolls.”

At Facebook, where I’ve worked on the design of the public commenting widget, the approach is to try to replicate real-world social norms by emphasizing the human qualities of conversation. People’s faces, real names and brief biographies (“John Doe from Lexington”) are placed next to their public comments, to establish a baseline of responsibility.

Facebook also encourages you to share your comments with your friends. Though you’re free to opt out, the knowledge that what you say may be seen by the people you know is a big deterrent to trollish behavior.

This kind of social pressure works because, at the end of the day, most trolls wouldn’t have the gall to say to another person’s face half the things they anonymously post on the Internet.

Instead of waiting around for human nature to change, let’s start to rein in bad behavior by promoting accountability. Content providers, stop allowing anonymous comments. Moderate your comments and forums. Look into using comment services to improve the quality of engagement on your site. Ask your users to report trolls and call them out for polluting the conversation.

In slowly lifting the veil of anonymity, perhaps we can see the troll not as the frightening monster of lore, but as what we all really are: human.

The European Union has announced that it will overhaul its data protection rules in 2011. Later this month, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Commerce Department will release their own reports on online privacy. Meanwhile, as part of the much-hyped efforts to prepare for “cyberwar,” the U.S. National Security Agency is strengthening ties with organizations like Google and its efforts to mine social networking sites like Facebook.

The dynamic is a familiar one. As usual, privacy will lose.

In recent years, the battleground of privacy has been dominated by fights over warrantless electronic surveillance in the United States and closed-circuit television( CCTV ) in Britain. The coming months will see further debates over data mining, DNA databases and biometric identification.

There will be protests and lawsuits, editorials and elections resisting these attacks on privacy. The battles are worthy, but the war will be lost. Efforts to prevent governments from collecting such information are doomed to failure because modern threats increasingly require that governments collect the information; because governments are increasingly able to collect it; and because citizens increasingly accept that they will collect it.

Spying on foreigners has long been regarded as an unseemly but necessary enterprise. Spying on one’s own citizens in a democracy, by contrast, has historically been subject to various forms of legal and political restraint.

There were, to be sure, violations of these principles — spectacularly culminating in Watergate and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Such scandals reinforced the 20th-century view that foreign and domestic intelligence should and could be kept apart. That position is no longer tenable.

Three factors are driving the erosion of the distinction.

First, many of the threats facing modern democracies do not respect national borders. For the foreseeable future, the most significant threat of violence in countries like the United States will come from terrorists who do not have an obvious state sponsor. The targets of intelligence services will therefore be individuals rather than states.

The second factor is the revolution in technology and communications.

The increased use of electronic communications has been matched by the development of ever more sophisticated tools of surveillance. It has also blurred the distinction between what is foreign and what is domestic.

The idea that the National Security Agency, for example, can intercept e-mail sent by foreigners but not by U.S. citizens poses — apart from anything else — a technical challenge: When a message is routed through strings of Internet service providers, it is not always clear what is “foreign” and what is “local.”

Third, changes in culture are progressively reducing the sphere of activity that citizens can reasonably expect to be kept from government eyes. This is most obvious in the amount of information voluntarily disclosed through social-networking Web sites, as well as the increased toleration of CCTV in public spaces. It is also implicit in the use of e-mail, credit cards, and other everyday transactions where significant amounts of personal information are passed on to corporations, the government or both.

Arguments over the appropriate balance between liberty and security have a long pedigree. During debates on the U.S.A. Patriot Act in 2001, one senator invoked a founding fathers: “As Ben Franklin once noted, ‘if we surrender our liberty in the name of security, we shall have neither.”’ In fact Franklin’s words were more nuanced: “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

More than two centuries later, the idea that we must choose between liberty and safety needs to be rethought. Instead of simply entrusting governments and other actors with personal data and relying on their good faith, the new arrangement can be thought of as a kind of social contract.

In its traditional formulation, people gave a government coercive powers to make organized society possible. What we are witnessing now is the emergence of a new social contract, in which individuals give the state (and, frequently, other actors) power over information in exchange for security and the conveniences of living in the modern world.

In a post-privacy world, the debate needs to move away from whether information should be collected and focus on how that information can and should be used. Reframing the question in the language of a social contract, mediated by a citizenry that is an active participant rather than passive target, offers a framework to defend freedom without sacrificing liberty.

The video is painful to watch. Amid screams of fear and pain, a Syrian girl at a school in Aleppo is forced to hold her classmate’s legs in the air. With a disconcertingly casual expression, their teacher hits the classmate’s feet repeatedly with a stick.

This video is at the center of a scandal in Syria. Although Facebook and YouTube are banned there, the video has gone viral and has gained over 4,000 fans on its page. After bloggers and the local news media took notice, the Syrian government investigated and recently announced the firing of the teachers involved.

Syrian activists have used connection technologies to encourage protest before. Last June, mobile phone users used blogs and social networking sites to coordinate a boycott of Syrian telecom providers over high prices.

However, the foot-beating incident is the first time activists have leveraged these technologies in a successful human-rights campaign. It illustrates that in repressive societies like Syria, where activists have to worry about getting caught, they increasingly operate Web sites rather than offices, gain followers rather than staff and use open-source platforms rather than relying on grants.

The technology that has allowed millions to share photos and information is fast becoming the latest tool in political activism.

The story is not always positive, of course, especially when the activists are unable to conceal their identity or, even worse, are infiltrated. Just weeks after the successful movement in Aleppo, the opposite happened in Damascus, where a 19-year old female Syrian blogger was arrested by authorities for “spying” — all too often the government label for dissent.

But the fact is that connection technologies will make the 21st century all about surprises. Indeed, new technologies and the desire for greater freedom are already changing politics in the most unlikely places. In 2008, Oscar Morales, an unemployed Colombian engineer, used popular social networking, video and Internet-based telephone services to orchestrate a massive demonstration against the FARC, Columbia’s Marxist insurgency.

In Iran last year, a small number of citizens used proxy and circumvention technologies to get information out of the country and onto YouTube, Twitter and other platforms. Although they only had a small role in organizing the protests in Iran, these tools were instrumental in seizing the world’s attention.

Inspiring as these stories are, connection technologies do not always empower citizens in positive ways. Connection technologies can benefit the human-rights activist and the terrorist alike. But whether these technologies will be used for good or ill is not the most important question. The most important question is how they will affect relationships between individuals and states. Not all governments will manage the turbulence of declining state authority the same way.

While much remains uncertain, it seems clear that those best suited to cope with this maelstrom will be free-market, democratic governments — and autocratic powerhouses such as China.

In the developing world, partially connected and still-connecting states will face a different set of opportunities and challenges. The stakes are high for states with weak central governments, underdeveloped economies and disproportionately young and unemployed populations. In these countries, connection technologies are breaking down the barriers of age, gender and socioeconomic status. While not removing the risks associated with activism, connection technologies are expanding the traditional realms of civil society, creating new spaces and new tools.

However, many governments in partially connected societies are wary. The sudden influx of connection technologies will threaten the status quo, leaving already fragile governments in potentially unstable positions. This is particularly true for those struggling to maintain political legitimacy. Anything that questions the status quo, the ruling party or the facade of stability poses a threat.

There are also the so-called failed states, which, while small in number, are globally significant. Chaotic and unable to act consistently, they are natural havens for criminal and terrorist networks that may have local grievances but harbor regional and global ambitions. Although connection technologies can be outlets for innovation in these countries, they also enable the exportation of criminal and terrorist behavior.

Around the globe, nonprofit groups and individual activists face new opportunities. Through technology, they will continue to shape government and corporate behavior by promoting freedom of expression and protecting citizens from threatening governments.

However, they will have to adjust to the new environment in which they operate. This means, among other things, they will have to ensure that efforts to expose wrongdoing do not strengthen governments apt to make nationalistic appeals; work behind the scenes when appropriate; and use technology in the private sector for their own ends.

Continuous innovation will pose difficult challenges for people and governments the world over. Even the best-informed and most active users of technology will find themselves caught in a blur of new devices and services. In an era when the power of the individual and the group grows daily, those governments that ride the technological wave will clearly be best positioned to assert their influence and bring others into their orbits. Those that do not will find themselves at odds with their citizens.

Un potente mito crece, sin darnos cuenta, ante nuestros ojos: la tecnología aparece cada vez más como sinónimo de inteligencia, de progreso y de panacea capaz de solucionar todos nuestros problemas. ¿En qué consiste ya esa “sociedad del conocimiento” salvo en equiparar a un niño que maneja un ordenador con un sabio y en establecer que un adulto que se mueve entre Facebook y Twitter pertenece a una clase social con oportunidades infinitas de prestigio y consideración mientras quien no acepta estas premisas es excluido del futuro colectivo?

Es obvio que ordenadores, móviles y toda la panoplia de instrumentos digitales que se utilizan en medicina, automovilismo y en las industrias imprescindibles para mejorar la vida humana son parte decisiva en el progreso humano. Quede claro. Quien esto escribe no está en contra de la tecnología per se porque sería una estupidez. Hay que aclararlo: parte del mito tecnológico se construye contra los diplodocus que se atreven a levantar la voz advirtiendo de los cambios sociales que toda innovación tecnológica conlleva.

Umberto Eco me dijo hace más de 10 años que “el exceso de información cambia nuestra cabeza”. La avalancha tecnológica ya se percibía entonces y Eco pronosticaba que se transformaría en “naturaleza”. Eso es lo que ha sucedido: la tecnología es ya nuestro hábitat hegemónico y el dulce dictador de lo socialmente correcto.

Datos recientes del Instituto Nacional de Estadística, publicados en EL PAÍS -2 de octubre de 2010-, aseguran que a los 10 años un 78% de los niños españoles navega por Internet y el 68% de los de 12 años tiene móvil. Nadie dice qué hacen esos niños con el móvil o Internet. Son nativos digitales, generaciones aptas para que el cibermito presuma de avance: cierto, para según qué manejos, como cambiar la melodía del móvil o controlar un DVD, los hijos enseñan a los padres. De lo cual, este mito de la maravilla digital, saca la conclusión -precipitada- de que las generaciones anteriores y una mayoría de adultos no pueden enseñar nada a sus hijos y hay que prescindir de sus reticencias ante el monopolio del progreso que exhibe lo tecnológico.

La tecnología requiere -nadie discute hoy su poder y atractivo- individuos entregados, gente que prefiera el ciberespacio a la vida real. Los 500 millones de usuarios que reivindica Facebook -cuyo propietario, de 27 años, uno de los hombres más ricos del mundo, da pie a una polémica película Millonarios por accidente, se jactó en Davos (2009) de que trabajaba en “la industria de la intimidad” y es, por sí mismo, parte del mito-, los millones de compradores de iPad, e-book y demás gadgets de “lo último de lo último” de la industria digital, son una realidad que confirma el poder de las Tics. No vamos a discutir eso a estas alturas: mucha gente, fascinada como todos, quiere jugar.

El programa Escuela 2.0, ahora en vigor en España con desigual aplicación, es una iniciativa del Gobierno de Zapatero dedicada a dotar con portátiles a 400.000 estudiantes, instruir a 20.000 profesores y digitalizar no menos de 14.400 aulas. Excelente idea, cuyo desarrollo precipitado e improvisación -¿nos encontramos ante un “profesorado envejecido” como asegura el responsable del máster de formación del profesorado de la Complutense de Madrid?, ¿a partir de qué se considera envejecido a un profesor?- no ha hecho sino fomentar el mito en su forma más brutal: niño + ordenador = sabio. ¿Serán estos pequeños monstruos digitales la crema de la sociedad del conocimiento del siglo XXI? ¿Excluirá esta cibercultura todo lo demás? ¿Serán estos sabios grandes ignorantes de lo que hasta ahora se ha entendido como patrimonio civilizatorio?

Siempre pongo un ejemplo ante este tipo de incógnitas: ¿quién sabe hoy coser, que era un saber común en las culturas anteriores y un patrimonio civilizador de importancia decisiva? Me temo que a pocos preocupa que estas habilidades desaparezcan: hoy cosen robots y la ropa es de usar y tirar. Eso sí, mucha más gente tiene acceso a un vestido digno, si no, no existiría un fenómeno como Inditex. Y ahí está la madre del cordero: el mito tecnológico, religión contemporánea con millones de seguidores, es más un fenómeno comercial que inteligente.

Estamos en la época del hombre centauro -mitad máquina, mitad persona- como dice Paolo Fabbri. Y la industria de las cibermáquinas tiene todas las de ganar, pone todas las condiciones -véase la devaluación de la propiedad intelectual- en cuanto a los contenidos que transmiten. Una de las condiciones imprescindibles es que la máquina entretenga. No se trata de aprender, sino de pasar el rato.

El mito permite el control de los individuos por métodos muy sofisticados -en Francia llevan tiempo trabajando sobre el “derecho al olvido digital”- y promueve la educación de un ciberindividuo de perfil estremecedor por su analfabetismo sobre la vida no virtual. Pero eso no se discute, simplemente se acata. Y se suele descalificar a quien pone objeciones: un estilo tiránico.

This week, hundreds of Internet activists, bloggers and officials from the public and private sectors will gather in Budapest to talk about the promise and peril of free expression on the Internet. People from Armenia to Kazakhstan to Zimbabwe will compare notes at a conference organized by Google and the Central European University about the state of play in what is an increasingly controversial and important arena.

Most of the debate will revolve around questions about human rights, technological innovation and — in the wake of the Wikileaks Afghanistan release — how to protect national security while increasing access to information online. There is another issue, a fundamental one about global trade and economic growth, that will also be discussed.

Simply put, evidence is fast accumulating that governments that block the free flow of information into, out of and within their nations are damaging their own prospects for economic growth. These obstacles are not just barriers to free expression, but barriers to free trade and, ultimately, a nation’s chances of achieving the kind of political stability that only economic growth can bring.

The good news is that there are opportunities for like-minded governments, supported by citizens and corporations, to design and put into use a set of 21st-century trade rules that can help people all over the world seize the opportunities of the new technology era.

Establishing a framework that takes into account the enormous impact of the Internet economy will help entrepreneurs create new businesses, businesses create new jobs and countries increase their exports.

In the ever-changing and uncertain online world, this much is clear: Information is the currency of the Internet. The Internet has transformed traditional commerce, created an astounding array of new economic opportunities, and expanded international trade.

The tremendous spread of the Internet — faster than the spread of any previous technology — has created new, rapidly expanding markets. Today, more than 5 billion people have access to cellphones, and 2 billion have access to the Internet. These are tools with unprecedented powers that help farmers in Kenya to get the best price for their crops and traders in Hong Kong to instantaneously invest huge sums. Little wonder that demand for information across national borders has grown exponentially.

While many governments have welcomed this trend, some have recoiled at the new openness — and are doing their best to make sure that the Internet is a restricted space.

Today about 40 governments around the world disrupt the free flow of online information — a tenfold increase from just a decade ago. Popular tactics include incorporating surveillance tools into Internet infrastructure; blocking online services; imposing new, secretive regulations; and requiring onerous licensing regimes.

In fact, direct government blockage of an Internet service is tantamount to a customs official stopping certain goods at the border. A small business that advertises on Bing, Google or Yahoo, for example, cannot reach certain markets when the platform is effectively blocked — or when access is slowed. Wildly successful enterprises like iTunes and eBay are locked out of seeking out new consumers. And multinational financial institutions cannot help but take steps to make sure they have access to their clients’ data while protecting it better than ever before.

To successfully export to or invest in a new market, a company needs to be able to understand the rules of the road and have some level of confidence that the government will not arbitrarily interfere with its business.

But when governments impose non-transparent and arbitrary regulation on online services — or use information regimes to favor their own national players — they make it difficult for businesses to make and execute commercial plans. Many governments do not even make publicly available their basic rules on restricting content.

Governments often are able to succeed in abusive regulation of Internet companies and information because they require that data be stored in-country, effectively requiring local investment. Requirements like this reduce the economic efficiency of the Internet, which otherwise allows a business in any one country to easily reach users and consumers around the world.

It is becoming harder for companies to compete in foreign markets where the government favors local firms. In China and elsewhere, companies in the information technology and other sectors are forced to compete on a playing field that is anything but level.

Given the stakes involved, policymakers must develop and implement an agenda that aligns Internet policy with the core principles of international trade. Governments should not treat the two as stand-alone silos, but should recognize that many Internet censorship-related actions are unfair trade barriers.

Governments should also use existing trade rules to challenge Internet censorship measures that are insufficiently transparent, unreasonably administered, or biased in favor of domestic players. Finally, governments should negotiate new trade disciplines — specifically, the Trans Pacific Partnership — that reflect the growing role of Internet-related trade in the global economy.

These issues present not only a tremendous challenge, but an opportunity — an opportunity for governments to align trade policy with the 21st century economy and to promote the many trade benefits that come from an open Internet.

The Internet’s power and ability to deliver benefits to the international trading system depends on the free flow of information across the entire global network. When data is blocked or disrupted, businesses and consumers who depend on the Internet as a tool of trade are affected.

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we’d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we’d bridle, then begin our next search.

We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights.

Much of the discussion of Mr. Schmidt’s interview centered on another comment: his suggestion that young people who catastrophically expose their private lives via social networking sites might need to be granted a name change and a fresh identity as adults. This, interestingly, is a matter of Google letting societal chips fall where they may, to be tidied by lawmakers and legislation as best they can, while the erection of new world architecture continues apace.

If Google were sufficiently concerned about this, perhaps the company should issue children with free “training wheels” identities at birth, terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to connect one’s adult identity to one’s childhood identity, or not. Childhoodlessness, being obviously suspect on a résumé, would give birth to an industry providing faux adolescences, expensively retro-inserted, the creation of which would gainfully employ a great many writers of fiction. So there would be a silver lining of sorts.

To be sure, I don’t find this a very realistic idea, however much the prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual witness protection programs, prisoners of their own youthful folly, appeals to my novelistic Kafka glands. Nor do I take much comfort in the thought that Google itself would have to be trusted never to link one’s sober adulthood to one’s wild youth, which surely the search engine, wielding as yet unimagined tools of transparency, eventually could and would do.

I imagine that those who are indiscreet on the Web will continue to have to make the best of it, while sharper cookies, pocketing nyms and proxy cascades (as sharper cookies already do), slouch toward an ever more Googleable future, one in which Google, to some even greater extent than it does now, helps us decide what we’ll do next.

We have spent much of the past year trying to resolve our differences over the thorny issue of “network neutrality.” This hasn’t been an easy process, and Google and Verizon are neither regulators nor legislators. But as leaders in our respective fields, we have searched for workable public policies that serve consumer interests and create a climate for investment and innovation. What has kept us at the table and moving toward compromise was our mutual interest in a robust Internet and our recognition that progress would occur only when players from across the Internet space work together.

The proposal we outlined Monday as a suggested policy framework for lawmakers translates these principles into a fully enforceable broadband Internet policy. In developing this framework, we were guided by two principles: our commitment to an open Internet, and the need for continued investment in broadband infrastructure, which is critical to U.S. global competitiveness.

First, our policy framework states that consumers should be able to choose any lawful content, services or applications they want; in other words, they can choose whatever Internet service they want, go to whatever legal Web sites they want, and use whatever software or applications they want. Our companies have long supported the FCC’s openness principles toward wireline broadband, and we also believe that blocking and degrading Internet traffic is antithetical to the principle of openness and to consumers’ expectations.

Consumers also should be able to access the Internet free from discrimination that is harmful to users or competition. Our proposed policy presumes that prioritization of Internet traffic — such as slowing down delivery of one video file so another’s arrives more quickly — is harmful. Further, we agree that transparency with users is key and that all broadband providers, including wireless providers, should be required to share with their customers in concise, plain language information that explains the kinds of Internet access services they are receiving and the provider’s traffic management practices. But Internet service providers should also have a fair amount of flexibility to manage their networks and the opportunity to provide additional services — such as telework applications, health monitoring services or optimized gaming — so long as these services do not affect consumers’ ability to simply access their favorite sites over the open Internet offerings that this framework would protect.

With respect to wireless broadband networks, we agree that the rapidly evolving wireless Internet is a different kind of network, with unique technical and operational challenges, demanding different consideration than wireline networks. Notably, the 4G network that Verizon also is building on the recently auctioned 700 megahertz spectrum is already subject to open Internet rules. This nascent marketplace for wireless broadband should be allowed to develop further before applying a new set of rules. That said, we believe that wireless providers should be fully transparent about their practices, and Congress should regularly evaluate the state of the wireless market to protect consumers’ interests.

Since the April court ruling that questioned the FCC’s right to penalize Comcast for slowing Internet traffic, the FCC’s authority over broadband service providers has been unclear. Our policy proposal spells out clear FCC authority for enforcement against bad actors. We propose a case-by-case adjudication model for determining harm to users or competition. The FCC should be authorized to stop bad practices, such as slowing Internet traffic or blocking legal applications or services, and to hit knowing violators with injunctions and substantial fines. At the same time — consistent with the Internet’s long history of self-governance — our framework would encourage parties in dispute to first consider using a nongovernmental resolution process to resolve their differences.

We believe this public policy framework empowers an informed consumer, ensures the robust growth of the open Internet and provides incentives to strengthen the networks that carry Internet traffic.

There are hundreds of millions of Internet users in the United States, and no two companies should be so presumptuous as to think they can solve this challenge alone. It is up to policymakers to establish broadband policy for the country. We are eager to work with Congress, the FCC and other interested parties to get this right. We hope that our proposal provides some concrete ideas to move this process forward.

Khaled Said is not the first Egyptian whom police allegedly beat to death. But his death has sparked a virtual revolution that is affecting Egypt’s tightly controlled society.

Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian businessman, was brutally beaten, his family and activists say, by two plainclothes police officers on June 6. An Interior Ministry autopsy claimed that Said suffocated after swallowing a bag of drugs he tried to hide from police. But a photograph of a shattered body that his family confirmed was his started circulating online. Teeth missing, lip torn, jaw broken and blood pouring from his head: It was difficult to square such trauma with suffocation. His family said he was targeted after he posted a video online allegedly showing police sharing profits of a drug bust.

If social media in the Arab world were merely outlets for venting or “stress relief” — as detractors claim — then Said’s fate would have ended with some angry comments on Facebook and a tweet or two railing at the Egyptian regime.

Instead, thanks to social media’s increasing popularity and ability to connect activists with ordinary people, Egyptians are protesting police brutality in unprecedented numbers. On July 27, the two police officers connected to his death stood trial on charges of illegal arrest and excessive use of force. If convicted, they face three to 15 years’ imprisonment.

While social media didn’t invent courage — activists have long protested the tactics of President Hosni Mubarak, a U.S. ally who has maintained a state of emergency in Egypt since assuming office in 1981 — the Internet has in recent months connected Egyptians and amplified their voices as never before. There’s an anti-torture Web site with a hotline to report incidents. The independent advocacy group El Nadim Centre for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence publishes an online diary that has documented 200 allegations of abuse since February. On another site Egyptians post pictures of abusive police officers.

This week, a woman in a full-length veil went on television to accuse two police officers of raping and robbing her. Her tearful segment has gone viral on YouTube.

Detractors say that social media sites are just the latest platforms from which “apathetic” Arabs now tilt at windmills. Facebook has not overthrown a single Arab dictator, and Twitter has yet to topple any regimes, the thinking goes.

But the better points to assess about social media have to do with their effect on young people in the Arab world — the bulk of the population — and the loosening of long-established controls.

An estimated 3.4 million Egyptians are on Facebook, according to Spot-On, a public relations firm, making Egypt the No. 1 user in the Arab world and 23rd globally. Nearly 2 million Egyptian Facebook users are younger than 25. As with Facebook users everywhere, Egyptians post embarrassing pictures, flirt with strangers and reunite with school friends. But to appreciate social media’s growing importance in challenging authority, consider the events between Said’s death and the trial of the two police officers.

After the photograph of Said’s corpse started circulating on Facebook and Twitter, a protest outside the Interior Ministry in Cairo was the largest in living memory against police brutality.

At least 1,000 people attended Said’s funeral, which became an impromptu protest. A new autopsy was ordered; it confirmed the Interior Ministry’s initial claim but acknowledged the presence of bruises on Said’s body.

Several Facebook pages and groups were launched in memory of Said, including “We Are All Khaled Said,” which sent out the call for silent protests in black and now has more than 220,000 fans.

Egyptian activists and everyday citizens, including families with children, turned up in unprecedented numbers. Reuters reported that as many as 8,000 people dressed in black took part in one protest along the promenade in Alexandria, Said’s home town.

The government tried to paint Said as a pothead and petty criminal who tried to evade national service. It suggested his brothers had converted to Judaism.

“They think the people are stupid,” a group of Egyptian rappers sang in response. Their video is available on YouTube and has been shared on Facebook and Twitter.

Egyptians who realize that any one of them could have been Khaled Said have the chance through social media to challenge the state and its once-absolute ownership of the narrative. There is a difference, of course, between the real world and the virtual world. Social media won’t overthrow regimes. But such sites have given a voice and platform to young people long marginalized by those regimes.

The story of WikiLeaks.org is the story of both the modern whistleblower and the structure of the modern media system. The site is now famous for embracing technology in order to protect sources behind material that might be damaging to institutions as varied as the Church of Scientology, Swiss banks and the US military. Yet despite shocking revelations and damaging material emerging from the site, very little has actually changed because of them. This ought to be troubling, but there is a way to explain it.

Julian Assange, the notoriously elusive Australian mastermind of WikiLeaks, has built the site like any good hacker would. WikiLeaks protects itself in a few cunningly simple ways. First, it receives information from sources via accredited journalists, thus protecting itself upfront behind various international press freedom laws. Then the information is routed through servers in Sweden, a nation with stringent whistleblower laws that assure the anonymity of sources in digital media. Finally, the information is also encrypted, and requires skilled volunteers to decode it before it appears online.

In a recent article in the New Yorker, Assange summed up the power of WikiLeaks. He told the magazine that “a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the internet itself.”

In effect, WikiLeaks has managed to carve out a place at the edge of the media-industrial complex. It has revealed exactly the point where the accepted dichotomy of good versus evil begins to break down. Like the whistleblowers before them, those who contribute to WikiLeaks are essentially asking us to question the accepted narrative, suggesting that our concept of individual freedom inherently accepts a degree of coercion from those in power.

Though many lauded WikiLeaks’ release of the Collateral Murder video depicting two US Army helicopters firing on a group of men in Baghdad that included two Reuters journalists, others weren’t so kind. After the video’s release there was speculation about WikiLeaks’ agenda, and whether both the editing of the video itself and the title given to it unfairly contextualised the content. But that was never really a concern for WikiLeaks. After all, it doesn’t aim to tell the entire truth, just some of the details of the greater meta-narrative. Its agenda is to poke holes in what it perceives as the veil of the accepted version of democratic liberty, which hides secret tyrannies.

This is also why the setup WikiLeaks has perfected is virtually bulletproof. Assange’s assertion that to destroy the site, one would have to dismantle the very medium through which it operates, also speaks to WikiLeaks’ agenda. The internet is predicated upon the very same ideas of personal freedom and expression that WikiLeaks suggests are partially fabricated by authority. To destroy the site would be the ultimate exposition of the accepted system as exactly what Assange suggests it is: reactionary, violent, controlling and – above all – interested only in its own preservation.

As such, WikiLeaks’ goals are clear: it seeks to damage that framework by achieving maximum impact for any piece of information it releases. Why hasn’t it been more successful?

WikiLeaks is reportedly preparing to release another video, this time of an air strike in Afghanistan against what the US government says were mostly insurgents. Afghan authorities claim that the majority of the victims were innocent civilians. No doubt it will attract the same kind of attention that “collateral murder” did. So it might be prudent to examine why, despite making massive media waves initially, that video altered neither the US government’s approach to Iraq, nor the view of the general public overall.

For all the freedom that the internet grants users, we still ask that the kind of information in “collateral murder” be interpreted for us. That interpretation and contextualisation of the footage took place on a more traditional medium: TV news and opinion programmes. There it fell victim in the very system it tried to undermine. It became part of a homogeneous message of The Way Things Are.

The “collateral murder” video has been viewed almost 7m times on YouTube – that’s 128 times fewer than the video for Miley Cyrus’s Party in the USA. That comparison might seem silly, but it hints at a bigger problem. That is, the “collateral murder” video, as it became a part of the usual TV structure of message-advertisement-message, was reduced to an equivalent of all other parts of the usual pattern of disarticulation and abstraction of signs. In essence, “collateral murder” was overshadowed by a Miley Cyrus video because, in the end, it became part of a structure inherently designed to nullify its message by promoting the status quo of the culture industry.

So, as much as WikiLeaks thrives in its online setting, its information still falls prey to the sameness of modern media. Even if someone were to see the video on YouTube, the same mechanisms prevail, with all information – including web advertisements and other videos – being presented as equal. Effectively, the only way one can view a WikiLeaks video without that influence is on the site itself, where it lives within certain confines, and with less influence.

The reason even major leaks coming from WikiLeaks haven’t had a more profound effect isn’t due to the site: it’s thanks to us. Even though WikiLeaks has done an impressive job of ensuring its existence and safety, our endless adherence to the influence of the culture industry prevents us from truly internalising and acting upon the information the site presents. If we’re not aware of that, we’ll continue to fall victim to exactly the kind of censorship that WikiLeaks aims to destroy.

When the first steam-powered vehicles arrived on the roads in Britain midway through the 19th century, parliament passed a law which stated that at least three people must be employed to drive them, one of whom should be walking in front carrying a red flag. It was not until 1896 that the Highways Act allowed vehicles to be driven without such restrictions.

Initial responses to new technology often have to be adapted as usage patterns become clearer. That was true on 19th-century British roads; it is true on the internet today. Media regulations to encourage the local production of content are becoming anachronistic with content available to all. Copyright laws are having to be updated to take account of today’s practices. Most relevant for Facebook, the right approach to privacy needs to take account of how consumers actually use social networks and what they want.

Although many internet companies have to deal with privacy issues, this is particularly challenging for social networking sites, whose very purpose is the sharing of information. Facebook has recently been criticised for being cavalier with users’ private data and for not being clear enough about how our privacy controls operate. We plead innocent to the first charge and guilty, up until now, to the second.

Privacy has always been a central focus for Facebook. From the time Mark Zuckerberg launched the service in his college dorm room through to today, privacy has been a core part of our offering. In the early days, Facebook consisted of static pages where people could share some basic information about themselves and a single picture. Over the past six years we have enhanced our service considerably. With these changes we offered increasingly complicated privacy controls, not because we were cavalier about privacy but the contrary – because we take privacy so seriously. The result was that, for many of our users, these controls became far too complex.

We heard this feedback and have made changes. Most importantly, we are putting in place one simple control that makes it easy to share on Facebook with friends, friends of friends or everyone – all with just one click. All new products or features we introduce to facilitate sharing will be controlled by this setting. For users who want more granular control, we still offer it; but for many, a simple master control may work better.

We have also significantly reduced the amount of information that must be visible to everyone. We require users to make public some limited information, like their name and photo (necessary for people to find their friends), but we no longer require that a user’s friends list or pages they like be public. We expect most people will want to make that information public – that is what social networking is about for many – but those who do not want to will not have to.

Lastly we’ve made it much easier to turn off the features which allow a more personalised service for Facebook users when visiting other websites. Many people benefit from the feature allowing websites to use information from Facebook pages about their likes and dislikes, but it’s not for everyone, and those who don’t want it will be able to turn it off easily.

Perhaps most importantly we don’t plan any other changes to our privacy policy. After a couple of hiccups we feel we have got things right and we won’t need to change things for a long while. We want our privacy controls to be simple and easy to operate, and to put users fully in control.

One thing that will not change is that Facebook never has and never will sell the private information of our users to anyone. We allow advertisers to target users by demographic; advertisers can, for example, target an advert for golf clubs at people who list golf as an interest in their profile. This makes advertising more targeted and more useful for people. But we do the targeting ourselves and pass no information about individuals to advertisers. Like a powered vehicle in a world used to horses, targeted advertising was once considered a terrible intrusion; it is now a dominant business model and widely accepted by consumers.

No doubt over a much longer time debates about privacy will change as technology evolves. Millions of users today benefit from making public what was once considered private. Finding the right balance between enabling people to share and express themselves and protecting people’s privacy will always pose challenging questions. No doubt decades from now we will look back on some of today’s norms as the equivalent of the man walking in front of the first vehicles waving a flag. Meanwhile, we are focused on today’s users. Our task is to ensure that the benefits of the new technology are available, but that users are equipped to make the choices that are right for them. We think these changes do that.

One of the greatest advances in space technology has been the military’s Global Positioning System satellites, which provide remarkably accurate navigation information for everything from smart phones and cars to pet collars.

But the navigational data is only one part of the program’s mission. The Nuclear Detonation Detection System, an array of sensors also on board the satellites, watches the world for nuclear explosions. In the process, it collects mounds of environmental data which, in the hands of climate scientists, could add greatly to our understanding of global warming.

Unlike the G.P.S. information, however, much of the detection system data is hidden behind bureaucratic walls by national security agencies, which treat it as classified, even though it isn’t, and even though there’s no compelling national security reason to do so.

The history of the G.P.S. system shows the impact satellite data can have on commercial and scientific progress. Since it was first made publicly available in the 1980s, G.P.S. has revolutionized industries from telecommunications to agriculture. Estimates place its economic value in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars each year. And that’s not counting its impact on everyday activities like hiking, boating and golf.

Then there’s the science: using the G.P.S. radio waves that travel through the earth’s atmosphere, researchers can better understand its temperature, density, water content and other properties, data that is critical to work on climate change and pollution.

Meanwhile, in the process of watching for a nuclear detonation, the detection system’s sensors — designed to observe visible light, high-frequency radio waves, X-rays, gamma rays and other data that might point to a nuclear explosion — stream an amazing array of data on powerful lightning strikes, space hazards like meteoroids and man-made debris and severe solar and space weather events.

It’s a daily trove of scientifically useful data that is not duplicated by any other sensor systems, military or civilian. True, other agencies collect similar data; sadly, it’s not nearly as comprehensive or global as the detection system’s information.

Unless a nuclear explosion takes place, the data has no immediate relevance to national security. Yet bureaucratic inertia has kept in place the presumption that because some of the data might be sensitive, all of it has to be protected; as a result, a thicket of paperwork and procedures deters all but the most resourceful and patient scientists from gaining access to it.

Making the data more available would be remarkably simple. The Departments of Energy and Defense, which operate the satellites’ detection functions, should apply the same standards used for G.P.S.: All but the most sensitive data is disseminated automatically, so that anyone in the world can tap into the flow of information beaming down from the satellites.

Opening this data would have many benefits. It could, for example, improve meteorologists’ ability to monitor destructive weather like “super” thunderstorms, hurricanes and solar storms, which can disable the electric power grid.

It would also allow scientists and engineers at national laboratories like Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore to greatly expand their research on climate change and other critical topics. While some scientists can already get access to the data, current restrictions mean they can’t easily share it. Making the data truly public would allow full peer review of their findings, leading to higher-quality research.

Much as America’s scientific leadership and policy of open inquiry did wonders for its prestige during the cold war, making most of the detection system data available to the global public would show friends, allies and adversaries that the United States is willing to use even its most advanced defense assets for the betterment of humanity.

American taxpayers support a truly remarkable monitoring system whose information could significantly improve our health, security and well-being. We should use this hidden treasure to make the world a better and safer place.