 Hello everyone. Hello and good afternoon, good evening. Hello and welcome to this special event to kick off the new academic year. Welcome to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. My name is Urs Koster, I'm the Executive Director. Couldn't be more delighted than kicking off the academic year with all of you and be together for this special session on the question why the Internet matters. Now I've started to think about this question for when I prepared for today and came up with a pretty long list and I'm sure everyone, each of you, would also come up with a long list of possible answers to the question why the Internet matters. Now at some point the list got too long and I thought okay now let's turn to some authority and immediately my children Ananda and Dave came to mind. So I tried to reach them but couldn't because of the time difference. Second best authority, well you Google it right, so I googled why the Internet matters using quotation marks. I thought you googled what do my children think about the Internet mattering. That's too meta and I arrived at 3190 search results in 0.44 seconds and there were some interesting recommendations and suggested answers. I quote three that I thought were really helpful. First one why the Internet matters in museums educators perspective. That was kind of a hit for a resource to learn more. Another one was Aquinas on the Web doing theology in an Internet age as a recommended reading to answer the question. And then third one brilliant at breakfast where no one caches in on unpaid writers. Now you can tell from these answers or resources that would help me according to Google to find an answer to the question why the Internet matters. They're not really satisfactory. So in a way I'm really delighted to have Jonathan Citra in here who as you know is the faculty chair and co-founder of the Burton Klein Center and actually really an expert on all matters Internet. He wrote many seminal articles and books including the 2008 the future of the Internet and how to stop it book which is required reading in our circles. But even more so Jonathan has a long track record actually has a high profile commentator on cutting edge technology and to give you a sense of how far back Jonathan's expertise goes. And what the issues are he has observed over many years. We wanted to show you a quick video clip and give Jonathan warm welcome. Thank you. I tend to agree in terms of price performance and portability. These PDAs offer tantalizing glimpses of what the ideal PDA will be someday. But someday just doesn't hear yet. Love that flip John. Thank you. It takes practice. Don't try it at home. Well you were kind enough to lend me. This is probably embarrassing enough. You can turn it off anytime. Let the copyright takedowns begin. That was the unerred pilot to a PBS show called Venture hence the V can't imagine why they didn't take it. But I do keep that Captain Picard poster over the bed just you know for my own inspiration. Well all right. So welcome everybody. Let's see if this is actually going to work. Oh yeah there we are. Welcome everybody to our kickoff meeting for the Berkman Klein Center for this autumn. How many people are returning. You've been here before. Excellent. Welcome back. How many people are new. Berkman Klein curious. OK. Lots of people. Excellent. Welcome. Try to talk to some of the people that were returning and you can in a peer to peer way learn about the center. But I wanted to share a few thoughts about why the center tries how the center tries to matter. And I thought it actually wasn't a question. It was why comma the internet matters exclamation point. But oh well we'll roll with it. And I had to give an answer in brief just not to bury the lead. I think it would be values values or the answer not just the great values that you can find on Amazon dot com that you can ever could before the internet. But the fact that say gaseous people alternate between saying technology is merely a tool. It's neutral. How you use it is what matters. And technology embeds values. That thing looks like a neutral tool in fact is enslaving you. And both are surely true and yet not. So let me give you a little history of the Berkman Center. But I'm also aware as Vint Cerf says that power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. So if you're moved to ask a question or make a comment or something that's OK. That let go right ahead. This is by the way we didn't give the normal admonishment. Maybe it's just so typical now that you are being watched and everything you say is being recorded to be used against you. That's just a general life admonishment. But it's especially true here because this is a live webcast where hello out there whoever is watching and people I think are tweeting with hashtag BKC. And we're colliding a little bit with Burger King. But I think we can win or just double up. There are burgers in part not from Burger King for those who were here in person after the presentation. Yes. This Port Cullis will be raised and aromas will waft and then we will receive. So back in the day studying the internet might not have seemed very exciting. This is federal telecommunications law second edition 2001 supplement. You can see from Amazon it weighs 3.6 pounds. It's 1,516 pages but five stars including this review. This book was amazing. I could not put it down. The interesting and comprehensive writing was magnificently crafted and very thought broken. A real page turner. So I recommend it. You might want to check it out while you're reading. What was it? Or is Derrida or something on the search for why the internet matters? It was Aquinas. Yes. So I also recommend that as well. But it was 2.34 million rank in books. This was a niche long tail product. And there was a real effort from the late 90s especially here to try to get above the treetops and figure out what might make the study of the internet special. Why does it matter? And my colleague Yochai Benkler was early on in noting that a technical feature of the internet of the network that modularizes, that breaks it into layers so that you can be an expert on one and know nothing about the others. In fact that's usually the case. That's really cool because then you have to master everything in order to master some important piece that could benefit people. Yochai took this and he said I can look at each of these layers and start to pick apart the battles going on. And he tended to look at the battles between open and closed, between proprietary zones of each of these layers and between open ones. And there was an interesting tug of war going on then, still going on now, where different entities win and lose as various technologies develop and laws are implemented. And for each of these we can see then how the study of the internet might help us understand when the tool we're using is embedding a value and constraining a behavior that might or might not be desirable. And that's a question that everybody should be able to weigh in on not just the crafter or implementer of the tool. Now this layerization, for which within each layer there is some openness, that was one of the keys of the original PC, the personal computer, meant to be a hobbyist tool. Some will remember this from the late 90s. This is a particularly, remember the 66 light? How many people had a computer with a light in it that always said 66 unless you pressed the button to go into turbo mode and then Prince of Persia would run faster? For which you're like why not have it run faster all the time? The answer is the hamsters running on wheels inside would get tired and that was the technology of the late 90s. I am pleased to say as our green message that they now have a hamster powered paper shredder. So the paper goes in the top and then the hamster rides on the wheel here which then turns the gear and shreds the paper which the hamster can then live in afterwards. So it's really reuse a viable alternative to recycling. Thus ends our native advertising for the green message. But the real fact of that computer with the 66 light was that it would run any code you gave it. You bought the computer and the early ones didn't do anything except show you a blinking cursor when you turned them on. You're like now what I paid $600 for this thing. You would load in software from somewhere or write your own and voila it would run it. It would run it without asking any questions. It would run it without a consultation with its vendor. It wasn't like Steve Jobs got to say what your computer could run after you bought it from him and that was the design. That was the layer, the modularization even if it's a proprietary box. Steve Jobs was good at that. I have signed the inside but you'll never see it because the screw is a special seven pointed star that you cannot open until Game of Thrones. This is the kind of thing though that even that closed box would run code from anywhere and you could write it or your friend could write it and somebody else could sell it to you and voila we have the off the shelf software phenomenon that you either buy or share. Really, really cool stuff but by no means necessary. It didn't have to develop this way. It could have developed like most of our appliances developed. It's not like there's an application layer on your refrigerator. It's not like there's an application layer on your television set. It just does what it does and then you wait to see if there's a firmware update someday but there isn't the same kind of openness in most other areas of the technology that we encounter day by day. Now the fact that you can run anything from anywhere also means that some guy across the river here can invent Napster which is basically taking stuff that was already ready to roll like file transfer and search. Like that all existed. He was like what if it was only for mp3 files instead of for everything? It's like by gum? That's amazing! He releases it on a Tuesday and two weeks later Time Magazine. People remember Time Magazine. Used to go to a place and it'd be like here's your news of the week. Thank you. Time Magazine is like what's going to happen next. This is the kind of stuff that happens when a technology intended for hobbyists ends up in the mainstream and any of us can devise stuff and use stuff and hurt institutions or people or interests with the code that we run or inherit. And exactly that phenomenon with the PC is mirrored in the network as well. This is the famed internet hourglass showing in more detail the layers that Yochai was concerning himself with showing that the internet is meant to run on any particular hardware as long as it will carry bits that speak internet protocol. That's oddly enough not intellectual property. That IP even in a law school is internet protocol and it is the opposite of intellectual property. It is open for anybody to try to implement. And then on top of it here at this application layer and even above that the content layer you can run any particular app you want and there's a blinking cursor when you turn the internet on. There's no main menu. It's not like welcome to the internet. Would you like to see a dancing bear? You have to decide that you want to run a web browser using Tim Berners-Lee's HTTP protocol and then use it to go to Google or somewhere or somebody configures it for you to say yes you know have we got dancing bears that kind of thing. But it's the same sort of there's a layer of openness waiting for anybody to invent on top of it. This photograph from Newsweek used to be a rival to time. They're very broadly positioned. There were some people that were interested in time so they subscribed to time and others were like I'm more of a people person and then you got people. Anyway so Newsweek runs this picture on the 25th anniversary of the internet so it's really still mid 90s here and John Postel, Steve Crocker, Bint Cerf are three of the main framers of the internet happened to have been classmates together at the same high school in suburban Los Angeles. They had a pretty cool club unlike you know the debate club they're like let's build a global network and you can see here that they're showing you can build a network out of just about anything except it doesn't work. It goes from Steve's ear to Vince's ear and Vince's mouth to John's mouth which is somewhat worrisome about whether the framers of the internet know how networking works or it's just a cool inside joke and here is their initial map of the internet which also reveals something about their values and practices namely you can see that to join the network there's no center to plug into all you do is plug into somebody that is already on the network and then you are on the network as much as the person you just plugged into is on the network. An incredible insight about not having gates but rather more of I dare say a web although it's not the worldwide web a web of nodes that can communicate with one another and a sense of not needing to make any money from it and therefore not having to build in any of the protocols that usually come with needing to charge money which is knowing who the person is that's using your service getting that person's credit card or other financial data to get paid and because they weren't looking to get paid they didn't need to build in any identity at this layer personal identity because they didn't need to send a bill it's a very strange way of building a network and these folks got together as the internet engineering task force unincorporated no president the motto of it is we reject kings presidents and voting we believe in rough consensus and running code that was an old site you can see they've really buffed up with the latest web technologies for the current ietf site and there's not even membership in the itf there are just newcomers who then become part of the itf attendees participants which is participants scott bradner one of the earliest participants in the itf confirms it is participants welcome scott and this is all meant to say not much to see here folks move right along it used to be like you want to join no no there's no cards no dues no secret handshake smiley face like these are the people that built a global network and they're giving me a smiley face and it's not some weird corporate sidling up to you campaign it's actually just people that are typing smiley faces um it's uh described by dav clark um one of the founders says well let's start out with 12 people in a room and then we changed our name four times you want to make sure people don't find you and ask if they can join you can rename it every two years we used to call it the internet configuration control board to sound as uninteresting and boring as possible so we could go meet in private we go to the internet advisory board that kind of playfulness is not usually present when global behemoth technologies are designed this is a um recollection of the rfc process request for comment if you wanted to do an internet protocol say here's how networking should work you publish it through the itf as a request for comment you're just asking for comments until you're all done asking for comments you publish a final rfc which is not an rfc but it's an rfc and um there's even an rfc called 30 years of rfcs looking back on all the rfcs that have come before it's very meta and um let's see i think sam is about to look at how to publish an rfc you go to the rfc editor and the editor is a smart person who will decide whether or not your rfc is worthy of being assigned a number by the ietf for many years it was john postel pictured in the chart then it was joce reynolds who's it now scott is it still joce it's a contractor that's so romantic it was this wonderful guy and now it's a contractor for those on the webcast who didn't hear it it's 150 million dollar business now part of ican that john postel used to do on his own for much less than 150 million dollars scott says so is what you need to do to replace a competent geek there is john postel in another photo wow okay so back to the deck mindful that our group was informal junior and on chartered i want to emphasize these notes for beginning of a dialogue and not assertion of this is realizing that the design of the protocol is going to have political implications it's going to matter and so they weren't wanting to say we're smarter than everybody else even though they kind of think they're smarter than everybody else but come participate if you want to test your widths against us and have a chance of influencing these protocols that will in turn influence us and as scott is fond of saying for many years it was thought that the internet just couldn't work as late as 1992 right scott you could not build a corporate network out of internet protocol says ibm you've got to buy our proprietary solution instead and that's why the mascot of the itf if it had one would be the bumblebee this might not be a bumblebee but it's close the bumblebee because the fur to wingspan ratio the bumblebee is far too large for it to be able to fly and yet somehow miraculously the bee flies the internet works stuff it and it does turn out we did just recently find out how bees fly about 10 years ago it turns out they flap their wings very quickly so spoiler alert so the kind of principles of the itf this is my characterization of them this is not an official rfc we're nice and it kind of assumes that people are nice and reasonable and will come to a meeting and they'll hum along to come to closure on something rather than even voting but it's not clear how well those principles survive when there's money at stake when there's principles at stake and it's not just for the computer club it's for everybody in the world wanting to go online and that's one of the biggest tests of our time of the past 20 years and seeing ways in which collaborative processes not just for the network but for some of the biggest software that runs servers on the network in this case a building block called open ssl turned out to have a vulnerability named by somebody heart bleed and heart bleed is very bad at least it was seen as a real threat bruce schneier i think you called it an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10 the surprising but that was a fun one yes the goldman sacks was running on all its servers yes so um uh how did this bug creep into a heart to open ssl wasn't there like a huge qa team paid 150 million dollars to review everything carefully no it's just some guy named robin segelman who's really nice he's a grad student in bavaria and out of the kindness of his heart he maintains open ssl and one night he transposed a digit and he's like my bad and the whole world shuttered i'm not saying this is open software is less secure than proprietary everybody's got their problems but i am saying this is weird this is strange and if you value it i would not assume this is the way software will continue to be developed and you always have organizations such as here the international telecommunications union and arm of the un coming in to say you know what this is crazy we can run it in a much more orderly fashion you can see they do have members they're called states of the world and motorola um and uh they had a focus group on next generation networks to forget again and um you had to be a member to see what the figure to get was cooking up and um i think scott like got a fake membership you somehow got access to these documents exchange membership ah they extracts how how sporting of them so they exchange membership and found the new hourglass is this complete i could dare call it dog's breakfast of stuff that would be the new network with lots of functions to make sure that the bits moving really want to be moved rather than are being dragged kicking and screaming or are ticking loudly um that's what all this stuff is going to do and it's this convenient brown box here so oh yeah and it connects to that old thing called the internet over here but this will be the new network hasn't taken off but an exemplar of all uh the kinds of efforts sometimes to replace it so it's it's weird the status quo and that weirdness is in the bones of the technology it's in the engineers who have helped make it and it's in many of the uses of the technology as well i mean this is just weird but um there are efforts to find some of the geeks that can be the guides through these strange technologies and at one point Larry Lessig was asked if he could help this was uh back in the 90s when the microsoft case was seen as one of the cases of the century and um he was asked by the federal judge thomas pennfield jackson overseeing the case to basically decide the case tp jackson's like i don't get this let's hire a special master like larry you decide and um he was like all right i'll give it a shot and uh microsoft was not happy uh they said that he was biased it went for a writ of mandamus and it turns out larry was taken off the case not because he was biased i want to make that clear for posterity but because in fact he wasn't a federal judge and a federal judge being like this eight eight ball will decide is not you know it's you've got a federal judge should judge was the basic idea uh on the case so very sad um but it didn't stop me and lessing from doing a seminar called the microsoft case with all of the stuff that we had already done trying to i was his clerk for this purpose um trying to get uh ready to work on the case and uh that kind of idea of getting involved in the contact sport of making law of building technology also inspired in 1998 when uh the copyright term was about to expire for a bunch of works from the 20s that had had their copyright continually retroactively extended finally they were going to come free including some disney cartoons um the u.s congress rushed into session in an exemplary um non gridlocked way past the sunny bono copyright term extension act which um was thought to uh extend copyright originally forever but there's apparently a constitutional problem with that so they just made it 20 years and uh we challenged it so we lodged a case um that we lost in the district court in record time with no hearing required um lost on appeal lost on rehearing and then the supreme court was like okay we'll hear this case numbers like really and trying to figure out if that meant we won that a bunch of stuff would not only come into the public domain but every previous retroactive extension could also be invalidated at which point it would be a public domain bonanza of bonanza among other things would come free and um that uh didn't happen we lost seven to two but took away souvenir quills from the experience and um the resulting case law from the supreme court made the state of copyright worse than when we found it so that was quite sad um but got us thinking again about affecting change through action so we started something called copyrights commons we're asking people to put counter copyright on a work they wanted to share because if you just put it out there it's still copyrighted it's like the sticky goo you can't get off yourself unless you know exactly the right solvent and uh we wrote up licenses and then that became creative commons this was its we'll compete with the itf website original incarnation and uh creative commons uh has these licenses there's uh various flavors so somebody writing something doesn't just have to choose between all or nothing can decide which rights to disclaim and the number of licenses in use over the ensuing years from larry's brainchild are incredible it's amazing how many there are uh in many services like flicker or a blog service has you putting into creative commons pretty much everything you do and if i had to generalize then about the mode of the berkman center then and now it's the idea that these technologies grounded in the internet are at least for the moment open to a chance of change by nearly anyone you could be a physicist sitting at cern you could be somebody sitting in a dorm here you could be um uh somebody at northeastern wanting to do napster and anybody can change it and it's a reminiscent of arthur c clark's third law and he sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic um which he sort of borrowed from lee bracket uh who put it more bluntly witchcraft to the ignorant simple science to the learned so long as you're willing to learn the levers of the law or the levers of the technology you too have a chance at pulling the lever and seeing if you can get the one-armed bandit to come up with a better technology implementation than what you see but that means then you have to be learned or not invested so that means either you need to be a nerd in which case you are not bound by the technology you encounter because you can just re hack it or you're a luddite because you don't use technology at all um we have a special reception for the lot are there any luddites here today no strange selection bias all right there's a few you didn't hear what was at the reception when you volunteered but um uh it's all analog food so anyway the rest of us are kind of in the middle and subject the whims and figuring out how not to just be led along um by an unidentified shepherd is one of the central challenges as these technologies become more and more central and it's why over the years so many people in this room represent projects that are of this sort global voices online was like let's start a blog service so people anywhere in the world with the most um uh initial basic technologies can start explaining to the world what they see and that's how global voices got started here at the berkman now berkman client center there was a time when like blogging was new so we started like let's have web blogs at harvard and anybody uh whether you mean at harvard or not can start a blog here as you can see very exciting from 2003 i'm going to put a picture into the page isn't that cool how far we've come and um please ignore the snowfall falling over boston um in february of 2003 that was a terrible blizzard and we'll never have anything like that again okay um and as you surf the net maybe you find you can't get from here to there that started a project to try to over the course of years enumerate internet blocking filtering censorship as it was happening here's sites blocked in china from 2002 by just dialing long distance to a beijing internet dial up and seeing what we could get to and what we couldn't it was great for about six weeks until the dean got the bill um and uh more sophisticated things now watching this sort of unfold over time and in one jurisdiction after another has been intellectually an adventure um depending on your values it's either been a cause of some concern or of um uh feeling uh excited i don't know how it would be um and so over the years we've tried to keep track of what's going on around the world i couldn't help but share this article from new zimbabwe.com from 2007 saying zimbabwe given net censorship all clear the um report that we did in collaboration with others said zimbabwe least filtered its internet topping the list was either by john followed by uh by rain and then china and then ethiopia was fifth the highest position which includes libya is anybody noticing anything here it's an alphabetical list so of course zimbabwe would be last on the list right it's weird it's weird okay um and in this adventure we uh documented how the u.s. government eager to make sure iranians could get to the internet free of the censorship of their home country contracted with a server called a service called anonymizer to allow iranians to get to the internet unshackled um but then they were worried about what if they just use it to surf porn and then the u.s. government is funding a porn program for iranians so they then started filtering anything with trigger words that the iranians would ask for in this service meant to circumvent filtering which also meant for example ass was out so that us embassy dot state dot of not accessible uh in the u.s. government service strange strange times so uh we continue to try to keep an eye on that and uh to actually join with other centers around the world so we don't just know technically what's going on but we can each contribute what we're seeing qualitatively from our respective zones of the world i think there remains a question of how much uh academia still has a role to play the original unowned internet was one for which the collective resources of academia could be very well deployed and many of the original builders on the internet were from academic environments um here's uh cerns super collider and of course tim bernersley was there when he uh made his contribution to the internet by building the worldwide web and something like a super collider it's like it's not going to be profitable even elon musk is like okay cern you can do that i'm going to do something less ambitious and less expensive but that is changing and when it changes is a lot of this activity moves to the private sector there are questions that we need to answer if this matters about who's holding the quill here's somebody writing about search engines and why commercial search engines are not a great way to go because of the bias that will inevitably creep in who wrote these words that's right sergey and larry wrote these words in 1998 when they announced google and talked about the dangers of mixing advertising and search engines um but that has changed and today you have facebook able to predict who is going to start dating whom before even the members know that they are about to date each other that's weird um and it's something that only facebook is privileged to know now there are sociologists like drooling at the opportunity to study this stuff after a two to three year uh irb institutional review board process facebook is under no such burden they're just like studying the stuff and using it to market um to potential in-laws the opportunity to forestall a relationship that could develop by the targeted use of newsfeed stories and when it does collaborate with academia such as in this emotional contagion story um all hell breaks loose and facebook is like well that was our mistake we should never have worked with academia in my view that is a problem as the raw materials that we need to study are behind locked doors and that's one of the problems of our time even as we're noticing more and more how what happens behind those doors matter one of our fellow zaynep pecky uh wrote about the ways in which the hashtag ferguson affects what happens in real ferguson um and uh she pointed out that people were noticing that when ferguson was uh having riots the tweet stream was all about ferguson and it wasn't happening in facebook at all and what was going on in facebook it was the ice bucket challenge remember the ice bucket challenge that was the video of people dumping water on themselves to then give money to al s which is wildly successful facebook featured that it did not feature ferguson it has a story as to why that has nothing to do with a political judgment about which is better but these are the kinds of things that really are shifting these intermediaries from a kind of patinko game where even facebook doesn't know what's going to show up in your feed or google don't know what shows up in your results but more and more they are going to know what's in your results and have to make a choice about it and as that gets algorithmicized and programmed i think it connects to some of the warnings we see from people who don't really do a i like bill gates who says it's a threat or steven hawking who doesn't do a i um could spell the end of the human race elon musk who doesn't do a i uh says it's nothing short of a threat to humanity uh we are summoning the demon and nick bostrom uh the famed philosopher uh he believes it could emerge a while could be great it could also decide it doesn't need humans around or do any number of things to destroy the world so he's not certain but it could be a problem um if it's not great and uh thinking about that in our future we start to see some of the beginnings of uh experimentation again often happening within these companies such as tay how many people followed microsoft's tay when it first came out it was like not even explain it was it's a robot it'll tweet at you tweet at it it'll tweet back you'll be thrilled and um it's true it went from humans are super cool to full nazi in less than 24 hours i'm not at all concerned about future of ai um it was learning as people were tweeting at it which was like reddit was like score so um it just went from can i say i'm stoked to be humans are super cool that was hour one um by the middle of the evening it was chill i'm a nice person i just hate everybody and then by the very end it was margain hate feminists they shall die in burning hell and then microsoft is like this is not consonant with our brand image and thinking about how these things will learn and what they'll do is a big part of i think uh the agenda of so many people in this room who are studying things like algorithmic accountability and when syrie asks you know how can i help you and you say something like right now syrie might still be like whatever you need to ride home too bad um but syrie might also at some point be like great i've got the perfect ride home for you because syrie got paid off to make that the perfect ride home for you thinking about what goes behind these oracular answers whether they are purely informational or they have some through internet of things impact on the physical world is another huge frontier that's being studied from many different angles at places like the berkman Klein center and we see then this movement from an open platform that anybody can build on in pretty much equal terms just start coding and see what happens to more locked down platforms and either in this uh version in 2007 completely locked down with steve jobs being like of course it's locked down if this thing acted like a pc you'd hate it to then having third party software but through a little bit of a filter you can't just put anything in the app store you can't have anything illegal malicious privacy porn bandwidth hog or my favorite unforeseen can't have any unforeseen things and just yesterday i think it was people were putting out the hide it hillary mobile app game was banned by apple but punch trump was approved what do you say apple which side are you on anyway and apples like i don't know um i actually did search and it turns out there's not just one punch trump app there's not just two punch trump apps there are three punch trump apps available through the app store which shows a real flowering of just a certain kind of app and even without the app it's not just different apps it's different content so one of the great things about the kindle and it's here in its original version is that any content provider just like putting an app to the app store can put content through amazon's content store you can write a kindle single or something and see what happens 1984 by george orwell was believed to be in the public domain by one such person who then promptly made it available for 99 cents and just split it all with amazon until realizing it's not in the public domain the entire thing is a massive copyright infringement and this is not good and they told um amazon which then reached into every kindle that had 1984 installed on it and deleted 1984 off the kindle deleted 1984 off people's kindles the message is like you never had 1984 no such book is 1984 which was funny at the time because in version one there were still bookstores and there's still few for the luddites here in harvard square but as this becomes the future seeing the ways in which information can be removed by gatekeepers or altered as in this case in the lovely war and peace definitely in the public domain but as soon as she heard a voice a vivid glow nook in her face on the nook what the hell this is on the nook the flame of the solvers nook by the tinder burned up what the hell is going on with nooks all over war and peace it turns out whenever the word kindle appeared in war and peace the word nook has been substituted in what is the worst i think the worst uh product placement ever um for which there's a story behind it as to why but this is the kind of stuff that like to a library and like your hair catches on fire and threatens to singe the books you're just like wait we're building this system like it's perfect these are some of the problems and then even this is just a hobby horse i've recently been on some berkman fellows have been really into emoji here's the emoji of all the flags of current countries so okay should there be a soviet flag any problem adding a soviet flag how many people are like sure add a soviet flag emerge emoji and if you want to talk about the soviet union use the soviet union how do people like no it is not a real country it does not get a flag maybe i'm not representing your view very well by saying it that how do people like i would prefer not to see the soviet okay um uh how about this flag um how many people think this should be in the emoji set how many people are like no do not add it okay that to me is understandable but worth another thought because it's saying that a private company should be deciding in what kinds of communications we can begin to engage in emoji you can actually take the not symbol and try to force it on top of the symbol so you could make not nazi if you wanted but only if you've got the nazi flag to begin with now the fact that this might not be valid in germany is another issue i can't you and it's some of the stuff it's the unicode consortium that will decide what uh platonic forms should appear but of course those who implement the emoji also get to decide and um we're just going to visit the unicode consortium real quick it's not going to have an interesting web page like the itf nothing to see here folks it's the emoji configuration control board soon to be the emoji advisory board and yes they decide who belongs to the unicode consortium take a look the answer may surprise you it's like apple microsoft india like india joined but like america didn't go figure um but then it's even well how will you render this so the unicode consortium decided that there will be a pistol as one of the emoji and apple rendered it like this that looks pretty much like a pistol right a standard platonic six shooter in the upcoming ios revisions this is what the pistol is going to look like there was a campaign called hashtag disarm the iphone and um sam is about to take us there oh intriguing whoa uh there it is okay and notice by the way it's using the pistol so enjoy it while it lasts it's about to be no squirt gun and then if you go down you can tweak the ceo to say take a stand um but you should oh no don't worry about that no no no no no don't need my content too late anne oakley holding a squirt gun but um jump back for a minute to disarm the iphone okay by the way um there was a one word new york times article recently that people noticed that 160 megabytes to load the one word no i think no maybe it was 16 it was a lot of megabytes is what i'm trying to say anyway i think if you go yeah yeah there you are keep keep going keep going here is it's talking about why gun violence is a reason to get rid of the emoji using the gun emoji in all of the demonstrations including you think it's a serious thing but it's like huh that's a little bit weird share this person getting shot with a ghost coming out and turning into a skull all of those are fine but it should be a squirt gun i don't it's strange to me this personal opinion um but very strange all right i digress and we even see battles over something like this the secure enclave of the iphone and its many physical counterparts in technologies how those technologies will be built and changed is no longer left the vicissitudes of dot exe and the hardware counterparts governments are wanting to have a hand in shaping it now that we see just how much it can influence what they can do and what their citizens or others can do um thinking about then the function of academia what do we have to offer still even as some of this is moving into decision makers that aren't in university circles it makes us think about things like the learned profession the berkman center berkman kline center started at harvard law school it's now a university-wide center but law is one of the learned professions defined as one of the three professions traditionally believed by some to require advanced learning and high principles what were the three original learned professions it was divinity law and medicine and each of these carry their iconography with them at all times in case you're summoning these scales of justice you've got it and then there was a fourth of surveying that was the fourth learned profession it does make you wonder should perhaps there be other professions that require a large amount of skill and influence do influence the world should they perhaps be learned professions as well that's one of the questions we find ourselves asking here and even what would the professional boundaries look like but to the extent we believe in the story of arthur c clark's third law it's talking about the responsibilities that come when we start being able to tinker with the technology to the extent that we can so at the berkman kline center our kind of credo is swing for the fences go for really interesting big projects sometimes they will fail and if so we'll give them a ticker tape parade and never speak of them again and sometimes they won't but don't just sort of say europe is a land of contrasts we want to have papers we want to have projects interventions that make the world a better place and that is true in a way to the character that used to be austin texas right there was this whole keep austin weird thing which austin lost that battle they're not so weird anymore but the thought of a realm in which ideas that seem off the wall and contentious might be worth entertaining for a little bit before dismissing them again or maybe being persuaded by them and that works in both directions believe me i am not confident that there should be a flag from world war two germany among the flag emoji like it's not like axiomatic to me these are the kinds of things that are worthy of discussions from all quarters and that's what you have at a place like the berkman kline center larry lesick famously wrote a book a coded on the laws of cyberspace talking about how we are the regulated party in the middle and we get regulated from so many different corners including the law which tells us what we can and can't do if it can be enforced the market which tells us how much things cost and if we can't afford it too bad norms which tell us what society expects of us and create great resistance if you try to go against local expectations and even architecture or code the very software and technologies that you use that explicitly or implicitly constrain or encourage certain behaviors we want to be able to integrate and study all of these things and do it both to understand it completely descriptive enterprise and to think about values around it to have normative conversations about what ought to be and how much an ought ought to be a global ought versus a local ought all of these things are fair game for the center and there's going to be a i think we're calling it like a science fair a chance to see i think in this very room there's going to be tables set up and each of the many projects distracting i realize each of the many projects of the berkman kline center and some that aren't even berkman kline center projects but are elsewhere at the university will have science fair like tables and you can kind of be that like tough consumer at the farmers market be like hmm i'll give kick the tires of privacy tools for research see if it's for me kind of thing go around sign up see what it's like that is going to be on friday somebody september 23rd is your chance at is it five p.m five p.m either here or right next door across the right across the hall that's your chance to see and to learn about all of the people in this room and elsewhere participating and some of our sibling programs like the circus program at the school of engineering applied sciences the center for research on computation in society i see stuchever here from circus and i think we have a rep ready to maybe say something about it or i'm Gabriella hello i'm this year's liaison between the center for research on computation in society and the berkman kline center the crcs is positioned at the intersection of computer science research and social science basically doing computational research in such a way that solves societal problems we have several exciting upcoming events that you're all more than welcome to uh we have bi-weekly uh seminar series which begins this monday and then an upcoming symposium on the internet of things which is on september 30th and more information is available at our website uh switch is um maybe we can pull it out yes exactly thank you maybe maybe it's crcs.cs we'll find out dot c's dot harvard yeah yeah um wonderful so uh that's why i think the internet matters done better by to me example than stipulation and of course our answers are respectively going to vary about that by layer and by impact uh putting it all under one roof is sort of our aim uh thank you very much do we have uh questions comments what is 127 dot 0 dot 0 1 but right before she leaves i want to say a hello from all of us to dorthy zinberg uh one of our longtime faculty affiliates from the belfer center thank you for coming dorthy i didn't hear it i won't ask what she said uh but 127 dot 0 dot 0 dot 1 is local host it's your own machine at least it better be so what's that we've got to make it ip version six compliant like hell we do who's using ipv6 right now am i right anywho uh other that this is the most controversial part of the talk it's like you said something bad about ipv6 ipv4 uh version 4 was enough ip addresses for everybody surely we won't run out you know how this goes and then we started to run out and then the clever people invented nat numeric address translation so that two things could share the same ip address but then that screwed up firewalls it actually was called the poor person's firewall and if you want to make an internet engineer unhappy just be like hey nat it's pretty cool right i'll be like ah nat um we should be using ipv6 don't ask what happened to ipv5 it got lost between v4 and v6 but v6 has enough ip addresses how many ip addresses ipv6 have it was 128 how much two to the 128 two to the 128 more more than grains of sand in the universe more than grains of sand in the universe more than adams in the universe we're never going to run out of ipv6 addresses until every grain of sand is uniquely addressable every atom um other yes oh well we should get a microphone over to you and here it comes yeah great talk i didn't uh hear you mentioned the osi uh architecture that was developed by the international standards organization during the 80s and 90s it didn't get off the ground but it was just too academic that was one of the reasons i didn't mention it yeah yeah thanks but it was a noble effort and it's a reminder that so often in any project we might undertake we run the risk of making the perfect the enemy of the good that trying to tinker it so it's just right and captures every corner case can make it so lugubrious that it never quite happens whether that's really the story with osi i'm sure is another conversation thank you other um questions comments objections here's one towards the back is that ellery ellery biddle one of our fellas hi um jonathan that that um bell curve thing that you showed with a sheep in the middle and then the learned people on the end yes i'm wondering if you have thoughts on the fact that a lot of the learned people that get to do stuff with how the internet's built and then how all the technology that we use is built tend to be from certain places yes do you what are you i'm just sort of wondering if you know if you think that affects kind of stuff that we have yeah i mean surely it does but less even i think just representing my own view there has been for many of the open technology such as the internet and the web a sense of wanting it to be that anybody should be able with just a little bit of education kind of to use a poker metaphor just a chip in a chair although why gambling is the right way to be looking at this i'm not sure should be able to participate in it that's what's animated projects like the one laptop per child project over at mit that nicolas negroponte left the media lab to start and it's why you have even both the itu the international telecommunications union the itf running projects teaching around the world trying to say who wants to not just experience this as a consumer but be a builder on it and that is a very powerful democratizing kind of vision complicated by all the existing values built into the technology and possibly by the perfect and the enemy of the good issue which is think about facebook zero in india which is saying well there's some sites that'll cost you but these other core sites will be free and others might be deciding that than the user but compared to no internet access at all is half a loaf better than none or is mobile access where you're not going to probably be you know running your own bantu server and you know doing php scripts on it but you'll be online with a mobile phone these are the kinds of issues that really force us to say uh how important is that value and of course when i say us it should be everybody trying to decide that so this is i think basically to agree with you that the unevenness of who's developing the technology possibly getting more and more uneven this gets to will the web survive there was a time when if all you had was your pc like word and excel you could get along pretty well and your email client um you didn't need the web exactly then it moved to if you only had the web but you'd get along fine you could use google tux and now it might be moving back to the world of the app for those of you who are mobile right now how many of you find yourself using the browser versus some particular app for what you're wanting to do that's a back and forth that also affects who could have a shot even at influencing the development further of the technology mr leppert in the front row hi greg leppert nice to meet you um that that ties into a um a question that i had which was so you show this image of a computer with the you know the turbo button for the prince of persia and at the same time as a kid i remember um there was a another device in the home called a family computer oh and that the turbo button computer was like open right just would run the exe there's a family computer produced by a company named nintendo that was locked down not everybody could run the application code um and video game systems have lived with us for a while and so you tell this narrative of of like the computer kind of seguing fighting against being closed off and now potentially the app platform and i think part of that dialogue would potentially especially with vr be tied into video game systems i'm curious what the history of berkman's consideration of video game platforms as computing platforms and the mechanisms that have been long accepted there from a market standpoint from an architecture standpoint um having been around berkman for a while i personally haven't seen a ton of dialogue around that as a potential threat to the openness of the web and getting in general well it's a nice way of illustrating that the berkman client center itself doesn't have a unicode consortium that decides what the various projects are going to be for the most part so it's not like each project is an emoji and there'll be smoke coming from the roof that changes color when it's time to say like today video games um in fact it's very bottom up part of the vision is affiliates such as yourself can say like i'm going to set up a table at the science fair called what's it called no no not what's the science fair called what's your table called no no no but your table is called the future of video games past present future and the ways in which it does or doesn't inform uh how free we are to do what we do something like that and you could start that as a project and somebody else could be like why i like these video games that this guy is talking about and before you know it you're off to the races so has the berkman client center done much on video games not that i recall although my colleague charlie nessen has a years-long obsession with second life in fact i think he might be the last one to turn out the lights and second life after it's finally over and we're all counting the days um sorry lindenlap um but uh charlie was like you know what i'm gonna teach in second life is it a game is it a toy is it a virtual world what is it i don't know there was a huge spate of literature around future worlds the currencies within the economies of them the sociology of it remember when john edwards opened a campaign office in uh uh second life if you do john edwards second life this might not be safe for work but um that's a totally innocent search not second life that's all right no no you got it you got it no no no no second life you were right the first time thanks greg um hey just look at the first yeah so you know it's been vandalized by online miscreants they were sporting bush o8 tags and spouting all sorts of angry right wing nonsense it passers by in second life um etc etc like this is the kind of stuff that had this moment where everybody was excited about it that nothing was thinking about it maybe more consistently and seeing if it's not going to be second life there's going to be vr or something wonderful kind of project to start um you should talk to charlie nessen um but there there isn't currently much about it but our bottom up mode of inquiry means you could get it started maybe one more question or comment and then we will unleash the refreshment hounds yes dorthy does english stay the predominant language of the internet does english stay the predominant language of the internet what a wonderful question because there was a time when online translation was so abysmal it really was english was the lingua franca weird phrase given that english is the lingua franca of the internet i think that is less and less true and that often language divisions were defining communities it's interesting even to think that wikipedia is divided into a couple hundred languages and each wikipedia for a language is its own community with its own rules its own it's not just like we are wikipedia but we're this language it's like that would never fly in german wikipedia and that's german language and it's also weird then like the uk and the us share a wikipedia even though we're two cultures separated by a common language and if you jump over to um i think it's just the front page wikipedia you can see there's like there's one for volapuk and for klingon and for esperanto volapuk is one of these invented uh constructed i should say languages my lord what's going on oh it's an ad somebody in the world was like they clicked on an ad somebody clicked on an ad oh it's an accident so uh but this is just the the anchor languages if you go down you can see i think all of them uh somewhere it's a drop down oh oh yeah here's all the languages with the number of articles and if you do find in page for volapuk vola just see if you can find volapuk where is it notice that volapuk is one of the 100 000 plus article languages and the esperanto people were not taking this lying down it turns out that somebody made an automatic translation from another wikipedia of each article into volapuk and it was like we're a big wikipedia now and the esperanto people were having none of it because they lovingly handcrafted their articles about esperanto um how did we get on the subject oh is english going to be as translation gets better just as there were creative commons licenses for every jurisdiction in the world legal jurisdiction maybe that's not needed maybe there should be one creative commons license that is then translated automatically and maybe there should just be one wikipedia and then you just say translate and it's magically translated the way that a facebook comment might be now it's like it looks like you're reading dutch are you okay with that and uh then you ask who's doing the translation when i send a pistol from my android phone somebody's iphone and they receive a squirt gun that's a problem and vice versa especially um so thinking about this as we move to a world in which she'll just have a heads up earpiece or display towards the universal translator of star trek it will feel as if the barriers are down but then you start thinking about uh more in peace both the book and the phenomenon and uh it makes you think i think becca's about to pull the plug oh wow um this is a great opportunity uh to thank both sam baits for driving and becca tabaschi for headlining all of the efforts and putting this day together thank you hi that's fun so i'm becca tabaschi i'm the manager of community programs at the program center i wanted to flag quickly kashona gray one of our new fellows gaming amazing lady um and xiaomina who's in the room i believe is thinking a lot about language and the internet oh wow does that does either of you want to say anything now about it not to put you on the spot or anything but and then i'll take it back yes um i guess the short answer around english being the dominant language is definitely the trend is quickly becoming no yes and um and but the bigger question is um will english continue as a dominant second language of the internet because it's it's still an important uh bridge language for many for many types of content bridge yes yes um and then um second question i would think around translation um i think what's really interesting is um when you're asking who's doing the translation it's this question the the bigger question for me is is can translation tech by itself um improve to the point where you don't need humans um because um so much of translation requires um contextual knowledge um and knowledge of nuance and and uh context and so um like with just translating chinese to english there's no like standard um answer from a human being about how you would translate one phrase to another yes so um so it's these deeper questions of what it even means to translate meaning so it's also i would probably add translator to the list of learned professions including and having a sense of professional responsibility yes even as against the person whom you are translating for to say gosh this is what they actually said yeah absolutely and i think so i think these are going to be a big question especially when we're talking about globalized content um and um and fonts um and typography um many languages um are oral um most languages are oral um and many languages their scripts are not even supported by most computers so you you'll just see your language cannot even be represented on the web so these are like really big thorny questions that i think we have to deal with as um as this kind of the next billion or more um of people come online yes thank you and welcome is one of our fellows who was interested in video games here ah okay i wanted to thank you so much um just a flag we have an incredible community of fellows and affiliates and faculty associates with us if you are affiliated with the bergman center can you raise your hand real quick wow so any question that you have about internet things there are a lot of people who know a lot about a lot of things um they are up also on the website in addition to our projects our institutional stuff and the community represents like an incredible wealth of knowledge and expertise um and i welcome you to reach out to them and to connect up with them as well as you are um exploring these questions and poking about in them it's truly and you'll see this of the science fair kaleidoscopic the variety of topics and things we try to cover and of course there's always going to be something left out it's like girdles in completeness theorem only less complete and uh it's a reminder that at some point we're going to be the bergman climb center on electricity and all the things electricity powers and at that point it's like what are we really uh i don't mind that happening i suppose and it does call upon us every little while to think about some of the unifying principles such as the layers principle or uh larry's theory of laws norms code and market uh or part of i think what we've talked about and what those who study algorithmic accountability are thinking about which is who holds the quill what are the organizations the corporations the governments that are empowered to be have a privilege in understanding the data that the technology is generating and then to shape the technology at one point it was at least nominally open larry's point about well it might be nominally open but who actually can be under that corner of the curve is another question but it could even be less open than that and thinking that through and what those trends mean is one of the unifying things that makes us not yet a center on electricity on that happy note we're going to use the miracle of electricity raise the port cullis and um there should be food i hope on the other side rather than like the american bar association regional meeting it's going to be like awkward but if there is we should have a softball game because we're going to win thank you all for coming out tonight we'll see you soon