For the last week, gossip web site Valleywag has been dressing down Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, about his previous essays and thoughts about — and let’s use the most ‘neutral’ term we can for this — “child sexuality.” The “Wag” links to his postings of yesteryear on his own web site and the tech/Internet discussion site Kuro5hin. The inventory of their headlines is vintage Valleywag:

• Erik Möller, No. 2 at Wikipedia, a defender of pedophilia
• Wikipedia leader Erik Möller: “Children are pornography”
• Wikipedia’s porn-loving No. 2 and his abiding concern for the children
• Wikipedia’s Erik Möller on the history of child sexual abuse: All Greek to him!

Among the sentences that has caused the most buzz is the one from Erik’s essay “Pleasure, Affection, Cause and Effect,” where he states:

“But if there was any doubt, yes, I am defending that children can have sex with each other. Not only adolescents, but also children of earlier ages — whenever they want to.”

One should read the whole thing in context to understand his larger argument through the prism of his libertarian stylings. Erik’s is an intellectual argument, in a style familiar to the user-created “diaries” of the nearly forgotten Kuro5hin tech community. (People today may know a site that was inspired by the same diary model and Scoop software — DailyKOS.)

Some Wikipedians have expressed deep concern about the nature of Erik’s writings and the lack of discussion about this in a normally open community. Others think that simply because the story broke in Valleywag, it should be discounted altogether.
My view? As they say in basketball, “Play the ball, not the man.” Nevermind your feelings about Valleywag’s style, if the links show it, deal with it.

To be fair, it is nearly impossible to publicly discuss the topic without quickly degenerating into a bitter emotional exchange. The mailing lists for Wikipedia have withered in terms of traffic and usefulness. And we’ve seen recently there has been a tendency to pull the “moderation” trigger on lists such as Foundation-L. Even with mandatory moderation lifted, the standing threat is still there, putting a lid on any dialogue that goes outside the mainstream. And we thought self-censorship was a only a problem in China.

Instead, the places it’s being discussed are personal blogs such as with Ben Yates, Danny Wool and Ben McIlwain (Cydeweys), and their comment threads. Yes, trollish banter from anonymous commenters are inevitable, but you will see there is also honest dialogue and true concern for the plight of Wikipedia.

These blogs are now being picked up upon by sites with more sway than Valleywag. Mashable, the influential tech blog covering Web 2.0, has now published about this and did not hold back:

So long as you’re desired profession is underwater basketweaving, fry cook at McDonald’s or tomato picker at country farm, I doubt your employers are going to do much of a reputation search to see what sort of objectionable positions you’ll go at great lengths to play devil’s advocate for on the web.

The only question that remains is how long Wikimedia will fail to go through and do these sorts of reputation background checks. For a company in the public eye, these things do matter (particularly when they have to do with your second in command). Given the predilictions for the directors at Wikimedia though, I get the impression that such background checks that look for shady behavior might be a case of pot, kettle and black.

This is going to be an ongoing PR problem for Wikipedia if it does not respond. It’s already under fire for hosting “pornographic” images, if you believe WorldNetDaily which you normally should take with great skepticism. This only makes the issue of public trust even more pressing.

So while Valleywag does bring up an issue worth reviewing, it also has its flaws.

Just today, it got a story all wrong about Erik’s past edits. In their juicy headline, “Wikipedia’s Erik Möller on the history of child sexual abuse: All Greek to him!” Valleywag claims that he was responsible for introducing text into the article [[Child sexual abuse]] that started with

Pederasty in ancient Greece took on mystical significance…

It went on to attribute this to Erik:

Since the practice was so widespread in ancient Greece, and there is no indication of any detractors at the time, many do not consider this an example of child sexual abuse (see moral relativism)

The problem is, it’s not Erik’s edit.

The link they provide [diff] shows nothing of the sort, and instead displays what changed between Erik’s edit in 2003 and today’s version. An analysis of the article’s edit history shows that the text in question was added by an anonymous IP user [1] on June 1 2002 and elaborated upon by User:Gretchen [2] two weeks later. This was one full year before Erik’s first edit to that article.

Valleywag needs to retract that post.

I’ve been watching the fallout of this story via Valleywag, blogs, personal mails, Twitter and IMs over the last week. Taste and preference notwithstanding, Erik’s comments butt up right against the line of generally accepted views in Western society regarding relations between minors and with adults. Does it cross the line? I can’t tell you, but I can help navigate the field of evidence and people’s views.

The community should have a say in what this means for projects that Erik has been involved with, such as WikiYouth or Wikimedia Youth Camp. It’s what’s demanded when volunteers make up the project. Ultimately, though, it’s the board and the executive director that have the final decision as to what implications this has. And it behooves them to be mindful of the sense of the community.

We will be discussing this issue in this week’s Wikipedia Weekly podcast in a fair, balanced, responsible manner that is fact-based and non-sensational.

It may be our toughest show to produce yet.

Kaiser Kuo has a good writeup on his Twitter conversion. For China-based users it’s been a particularly useful application the last few weeks:

Pick the right folks to follow and there’s real value: They link to interesting reads — this is to me probably the most useful thing about Twitter — and make trenchant, sometimes insightful comments. During the recent troubles in Western China, I was following Twitter feeds from people on the scene, providing first-hand perspective that was nearly impossible to find in the press.

This is a great example of the power of citizen blogging/microblogging being not just a frivolous act (ie. tweeting: “Sitting here watching paint dry”)

With the rising tensions over the Olympic torch relay in Europe, the boycott of Carrefour, the roughing up of an American English teacher by a mob in Hunan and the takedown of Web sites by pro-China hackers, Twitter has been ahead of the curve by assembling an ad hoc community of folks across different cities, pointing to blog posts, first hand accounts from the ground and  BBS postings reflecting local sentiment. It’s something that all China-oriented reporters should check out and experience first-hand.

I’ll be addressing the Hong Kong Journalists Association next week about China’s Internet and will absolutely talk about Twitter and its China-based counterparts.

ABC News is getting roundly criticized about the way it produced the Obama-Clinton debates yesterday. It’s was so bad, there are over 12,000 comments on the ABC News site related to the debate. A sample:

I am disgusted with ABC, Stephanopoulos and Gibson. The “Debate” was nothing more than tabloid journalism. It was a disgrace. There were two hours to ask questions that would showcase the candidates’ policies and approaches to some of “THE” toughest challenges this country has ever faced and you chose to spend most of the time on nonsense. From snipers to Jeremiah Wright to lapel pins. Do you think that’s what we care about? ABC, Stephanopoulos and Gibson you owe Americans a profound apology for this wasted opportunity and their sensationalism of non issues.

This appears to be more than typical “astroturfing.” These are folks who actually took the time to write angry grafs like the above, rather than simply pressing a “vote” button.
Perhaps more to the point was this from Will Bunch from the Philly Daily News:

With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters — you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

Touche.

I’ll be in NYC this week to be on “The Changing Media Landscape” panel of the Hearst New Media lectures at Columbia University. It’s a nice homecoming to the place where I helped start the entire new media modernization of the Journalism school in 1994.
I’m glad to see more international representation than in years past, as the panel will consist of:

• Josh Cohen, business product manager, Google News (coming from the
  Googleplex)
• Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan, an Iranian-born blogger,
  journalist, and Internet activist (coming from Toronto)
• Jonathan Dube, director of digital programming, CBC (coming from Toronto)
• Andrew Lih, author of a new book on Wikipedia and expert on Chinese media
  (coming from Beijing)
• Mindy McAdams, new media education pioneer and professor at University of
  Florida (coming from Gainesville)
• Michael Rogers, resident futurist of The New York Times (coming from
  midtown)

Hope to see some familiar faces in the crowd.

Financial Times is reporting that Yahoo! in the United States has finally admitted it was not forthcoming in the case of handing over information that got journalist Shi Tao jailed in China.

When Yahoo executive Michale Callahan testified in front of Congress, February 15, 2006, he said that “we” (Yahoo as a collective entity it seems) did not know the nature of the investigation:

The Shi Tao case raises profound and troubling questions about basic human rights. Nevertheless, it is important to lay out the facts. When Yahoo! China in Beijing was required to provide information about the user, who we later learned was Shi Tao, we had no information about the nature of the investigation. Indeed, we were unaware of the particular facts surrounding the case until the news story emerged. [link]

Now Callahan admits Yahoo “had additional information.”

A top Yahoo official who has come under fire for the company’s role in the 2004 imprisonment of a dissident in China apologised on Thursday for failing to tell US lawmakers that Yahoo knew more about the case than he initially acknowledged in testimony last year.

Michael Callahan, Yahoo’s executive vice president and general counsel, said in a statement ahead of a congressional hearing next week that he “realised” that Yahoo had additional information about the nature of the probe into one of its users, Shi Tao, a journalist now serving a 10-year prison sentence in China, months after he testified that Yahoo had “no information” about the investigation.

Apparently, they are putting the blame on a communication breakdown between the US office and China operations.

“Months after I testified before two House subcommittees on Yahoo’s approach to business in China, I realised Yahoo had additional information about a 2004 order issued by the Chinese government seeking information about a Yahoo China user,” Mr Callahan said in the statement. […]

“I neglected to directly alert the committee of this new information and that oversight led to a misunderstanding that I deeply regret and have apologised to the committee for creating,” Mr Callahan said.

He added that in consultations with committee staff they agreed that his 2006 testimony was “truthful”.

He is expected to testify that a lawyer for Yahoo in Asia failed to brief him on the order because the lawyer did not believe it was significant.

It’s good to see Yahoo finally acknowledge what was so painfully obvious after documents were released that proved their Congressional testimony was erroneous. But there are still questions going forward.

Yahoo could still be vulnerable to future human rights-related cases involving Yahoo China, since Alibaba’s boss, Jack Ma, made no secret of his willingness to co-operate closely with Beijing’s authorities and with any investigations into users.

For some of the best reporting and analysis of this, make sure to read Rebecca MacKinnon’s blog posts from earlier this year, and Roland Soong’s post about the Shi Tao case.

Ars Technica is reporting that a security specialist was able to grab a bunch of login/passwords after running Tor nodes to illustrate proper and improper use of the widely-used anonymity network. In this particular case, Dan Egerstad volunteered to be part of the Tor network by running “exit nodes,” and boy did he grab a bunch of sensitive logins and passwords.

Particularly embarrassing is the fact the list contained use by embassy staff of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Iran and India among others. There seems to be no other explanation other than the IT departments of these governments actually recommending Tor as standard operating procedure to access their accounts from abroad.

That’s not an appropriate use for Tor at all.

When this story broke in India, one of the news outlets tested the username/password to get into the account of a government official (which is of questionable journalistic ethics):

To check the authenticity, The Indian Express sent a test mail to the Indian Ambassador in China on her official email ID and, using the password posted online, was able to access it. The email account of the Indian Ambassador to China contained details of a visit by Rajya Sabha member Arjun Sengupta to Beijing earlier this month for an ILO conference. There was also a transcript of a meeting this evening which a senior Indian official had with the Chinese Foreign Minister.

Also on this list of shame were Hong Kong political parties and Legislative Council members. Being a former resident of HK, this is particularly bizarre since the HK government has prided itself on being IT savvy on the world stage, even bragging about being the first in the world to use E-certificates on the Smart-ID cards all Hong Kongers carry. It’s ironic the E-cert system is so secure, complex and unusable in HK, while politicians are using cleartext mail protocols and sending data through random untrusted computers.

Egerstad has taken special attention to HK (SCMP, Sep 9, 2007, subscription):

Swedish computer security consultant Dan Egerstad hopes to come to Hong Kong next month and visit some of the legislators and NGOs he exposed on his website as having weak internet security - but only if the police promise not to arrest him at the airport.

Mr Egerstad, 21, published the e-mail passwords of prominent legislators such as the Democratic Party’s Sin Chung-kai and Liberal Party vice-chairman Miriam Lau Kin-yee on the website dErangedsecurity.com. He also published the IP addresses of the e-mail servers.

Mr Egerstad trawled through the e-mails of the One Country Two Systems Research Institute of China and the Liaison Office of the Dalai Lama for Japan and East Asia, as well as the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor.

How Tor Works

A quick recap: the Tor system works by using a volunteer network of computers that offer to relay your Web traffic, encrypted and anonymously, through the Tor network. It relays your traffic through three Tor intermediary nodes, the idea being that each relay node knows which neighboring node packets are coming from and going to, but no one knows the entire path to the final destination address. There are some really smart people behind Tor like Roger Dingledine, and most experts agree that for anonymity, it does a very good job.

The problem is, people are using Tor without understanding exactly what it does and does not provide.

The weak link is when a user’s data finally emerges at the last computer (the exit node) which relays the request to the public Internet. Anyone operating a final exit node can see what you’re sending and receiving. So while Tor provides for end-user anonymity at the network/packet level (IP address), it does not provide for end-to-end data secrecy. The traffic coming off the the exit node on your behalf is exactly what protocol and data your application (Web browser, mail program, instant messenger, etc) sent out.

If it’s a cleartext data stream like HTTP or mail (IMAP or POP3) then anyone running a Tor exit node can see and capture it. And that’s what Egerstad did — he monitored his exit nodes for:

“gov, government, embassy, military, war, terrorism, passport, visa” as well as domains belonging to governments.

Tor uses the SOCKS proxy protocol to receive transactions for the Tor network. SOCKS has been around a long time and is a solid generic protocol. It handles HTTP (Web) requests as well as other data streams, so yes, it can support end-to-end encrypted sessions using HTTPS or secure sockets. So if you use Tor, combine it with a secure protocol if you need data secrecy! This is where people may get confused — data is encrypted within the Tor network, but it exits the Tor network exactly as your browser or application requested — most likely unencrypted. So use an end-to-end encryption solution in addition to Tor, if that’s what you need.

If you’re surfing CNN or ESPN to get the latest sports scores, no problem. If you’re logging into a system or sending/receiving e-mail, you better make sure it’s encrypted.

Tor has also been in the news related to a phishing/trojan scheme, where spam email asked folks to download Tor, but it really pointed to a trojan program instead.

It’s important to note in both instances, Tor is not the one at fault. The trojan problem is your typical phishing problem — never click on any hyperlink ever sent to you in email, and don’t trust any sites you didn’t find or search yourself.

Tor is a great program, but it’s not a cure-all. You need a wide spectrum of tools to do it right, or you can also do what many corporations do — require the use of a Virtual Private Network, and all your data packets are routed and encrypted back to a trusted corporate home base.

Egerstad had this final harsh warning on his blog:

These governments told their users to use ToR, a software that sends all your traffic through not one but three other servers that you know absolutely nothing about. Yes, two are getting encrypted traffic but that last exit node is not. There are hundreds of thousands ToR-users but finding these kinds of accounts was… hmm… chocking! The person who wrote the security policy on these accounts should reconsider changing profession, start cleaning toilets! These administrators are responsible for giving away their own countries secrets to foreigners. I can’t call it a mistake, this is pure stupidity and not forgivable!

ToR isn’t the problem, just use it for what it’s made for.

Tor is very good for anonymity, but does nothing for adding any data security. In fact, it’s likely more risky, because you are handing traffic over to a stranger (exit node) in cleartext.

I don’t use Tor much, as I don’t often need anonymity. It’s also a sluggish performer because of the three relays for traffic. But when I do use it, I make sure to use Firefox with a virgin clean profile — no cookies, no stored data, no caching, no browsing history. (You can configure Firefox to ask for what profile you want on startup.)

So the big headline? This is not a Tor insecurity. You wouldn’t complain to Home Depot that masking tape failed to seal your PVC pipes. You have to use the right tool for the right job, and the Uzbek government is learning this the hard way.

The NY Times reports that this is indeed the final call for Business 2.0, a fine magazine headed by my former teaching partner in NYC, Josh Quittner. It’s really too bad. As much as fine publications in the blogosphere have made monthly magazines a bit “old school,” there is still value in a thoughtful, monthly perspective on the industry.

I have the latest issue, which will be added to my box of former dot-com publications that I have toted around with me the last ten years. These include MacWeek, PC Week, Silicon Alley Reporter, Brill’s Content, The Industry Standard, Inside and Upside.

By now you might have seen the book The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture, the contrarian book by Andrew Keen telling us that we’re sewing the seeds of destruction with Web 2.0 by being driven by the “wisdom of crowds.”

Since I’m writing a book that exalts the crowd’s ability to create something like Wikipedia, many folks have asked me what I think about his thesis.

Well the problem is, I’m not sure there is a firm thesis to his book. While I’m quite sympathetic to the idea that MySpace and inane YouTube videos might indeed be a zombie plot to eat our brains through technology, on balance the Internet and Web 2.0 have done far more to engage a new generation in writing, conversation, content creation and inter-cultural dialogue than it has to corrupt us. What I find amusing is that the Internet has averted what everyone feared in the 1980’s — comatose teenage couch potatoes transfixed in front of the TV, passively absorbing mindless programming. Yet here is Keen villifying the Internet for its engagement and interactivity to reconnect humans.
So when asked to summarize Keen’s book, I usually tell folks it’s a “loveletter to mainstream media.”

He has an immense amount of faith in the conventional media to do an unrivaled job to nurture and filter the best sources and content for the general public. (I always found this argument quite odd to make in this day and age, with the spectacular failure of the “MSM” news media in reporting accurately on the march up to the “war” in Iraq, Curveball, and weapons of mass destruction.)

The problem with Keen’s book, and his associated lecture circuit, is that too often he comes back to simply saying, “I just don’t buy it.” Whether it’s on NPR (June 16, 2007) or authors@google (Google’s guest lecturer series), he seems to retreat to this same phrase, though his British accent (with a dash of Californian) helps put some gravitas behind it.

In the NPR interview specifically, he mentions how the Internet is cause of “death of the independent bookstore” while not acknowledging this was happening well before via the arrival of megastores like Barnes & Noble, Borders and even Costco.

Keen proclaims, “I prefer the wisdom of the professional. For people who are in doubt… look at Wikipedia and then look at Britannica.” This is quite a strange argument to make. Wikipedia is in the top 10 most visited web sites in the world, and even with is quality in flux, it’s hands down more relevant and useful to the average college student than Britannica’s narrow set of subjects behind a subscription firewall.
But so far the best analysis and rebuttal of Keen’s work comes from David Weinberger, who writes an extremely detailed and thoughful work in The Huffington Post. Weinberger was one of the first folks who first alerted ordinary folks to the massive impact the Internet would have in The Cluetrain Manifesto, and his insight is incredibly forward thinking. You would do well to review their new 95 Theses.

But more importantly read Weinberger’s entire response to The Cult of the Amateur. I would argue Weinberger does a better job of summarizing Keen’s views than Keen himself.

I’ve held back on mentioning anything about the deal so far because of my familiarity with the affected parties, but it seems to be done:

Rupert Murdoch has succeeded with his $5bn (£2.5bn) bid for Dow Jones, owners of the Wall Street Journal, according to a report in The Business.

Negotiations are finished and the board is confident the terms of the deal will be accepted by the Bancroft family, which controls a majority of voting shares in Dow Jones, the Business reported, citing people close to the Dow Jones board.

A formal annoucement of the deal is expected next week, The Business reported.

This is a big blow to the practice of quality journalism. Regardless of what you think about the right-wing and intellectually dishonest op-ed page, the WSJ was a stellar news organization.

That leaves only two entities in the United States that are even somewhat shielded from the pull of “market-driven journalism” and that’s the NY Times and the Washington Post.

We’ll look back on this era with fond memories. But now Bill O’Reilly, Neil Cavuto, Sean Hannity and Steve Doocy will be workmates with the fine journalists at Dow Jones.

I’m just glad my wife got a Pulitzer Prize distinction while the The Wall Street Journal was a respectable news organization.

It’s rare to see China reporting that provides insight to both newbies and old China hands. But Washington Post’s Ed Cody does an excellent job today describing how information communication technologies enabled the local masses to oppose the construction of a chemical plant in Xiamen, China. (story link)

By promoting the construction of a giant chemical factory among the suburban palm trees, the local government was “setting off an atomic bomb in all of Xiamen,” the massive message sprays charged, predicting that the plant would cause “leukemia and deformed babies” among the 2 million-plus residents of this city on China’s southern rim, just opposite Taiwan.

The environmental activists behind the messages might have exaggerated the danger with their florid language, experts said. But their passionate opposition to the chemical plant generated an explosion of public anger that forced a halt in construction, pending further environmental impact studies by authorities in Beijing, and produced large demonstrations June 1 and 2, drawing national publicity.

Ed had all the elements of a top notch China story — lucidly describing the Internet and telecom technology; identifying key bloggers and activists; relating Xiamen’s local green pride; capturing the national-provincial government dynamics; dissecting local media practices; and not going overboard with tired old China cliches. (To be fair, Wall Street Journal’s Shai Oster had it back in May).

Xiamen really is a unique place — it has been known as China’s Green City for years, with the city’s university sporting palm trees and rolling green lawns. Gulangyu Island, a short ferry ride from the city center, is like the Newport or Martha’s Vineyard of China, with the former mansions of colonial-era European businessmen while now playing home to a budding musical arts scene. Citizens rose up not for Western notions of democracy, liberty or personal freedoms, but simply to protect their basic right to a healthy life.

Even with the state-approved media outlets muzzled, people found ways to mobilize, get their message heard, and take to the streets to demand a modicum of social justice. Beijing’s leaders realized this, and had no choice but to relent in what was clearly an inept handling of issues by the provincial leaders.

Read the article in full, and then indulge me on my soap box.

It’s stories like these that make me want to print out a thousand copies for citizen journalism naysayers such as Nicholas Lemann and Andrew Keen. These pundits continue to feed a tired, first world, elitist snubbing of anything dealing with empowering individuals positioned at the point of contact with issues of the day. What they don’t realize is that outside their cozy privileged corners of the world, tech-enabled citizens are on the front lines countering state-run propaganda, corruption and social injustice.

The logical flaw is in their confused belief that “paid professionals” are the only ones with “professional standards.”

Wide swaths of Wikipedia are overseen and edited by unpaid professionals, but hold bachelors, masters and Ph.D.s in the fields they are editing. Slashdot commenters, often tops in their respective fields, quickly dissect so-called professional science journalism done my mainstream media and converge on the truth value of these news stories, often to the embarrassment of the authors. In areas devastated by war and strife, bloggers in Iraq and Afghanistan are the only ones providing any on-the-ground reality check while newspapers and TV news try to get individual foreign correspondents (if they’re lucky) some type of access to these stories.

As for the paid professionals? Fox News is a “professional news organization” filled with paid “professionals” severely lacking professional standards. And in between the Paris Hilton watch, the Anna Nicole Smith vigil, the Missing White Girl of the Week, waiting To Catch a Predator and the hourly shoutfests, sometimes television news will attempt something approaching serious journalism. But that’s only after 11pm or on Sunday.

The United States has the most free press environment in the world, yet it is puzzling why so many who purport to embody its values so enthusiastically throttle the practice of it. It seems folks like Lemann feel the job of journalism is too important to leave to ordinary people.

Myself? It’s too important NOT to have ordinary people do it.