technology – Andy Sternberg

Legislating Sexting: Another Rant Against the State

Andy Sternberg — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 22:45:07 +0000

Self-portrait of the author pretending to sext.

Life in Southern California comes with various aspects you can depend on for better and worse: Abundant sunshine, salacious celeb gossip, consistent traffic and government over-legislation.

While we can leave the future of foreskin up to city government (thanks San Francisco and Santa Monica), it appears that what our children can and cannot do with their mobile devices while in class will be determined not on a case-by-case basis or by school principals but in Sacramento — by the California State Legislature.

Senators unanimously passed a bill that would make sexting an infraction for which school officials could expel students.

Senator Ted Lieu, the Torrance Democrat who introduced the bill, says that sexting is a growing problem in California schools, according to the AP. He cited a study saying that 20 percent of teens reported sending or posting nude or semi-nude pictures and videos of themselves.

Lieu’s bill – SB 919 – defines sexting as “the sending or receiving of sexually explicit pictures or video images by means of an electronic act.” If passed it would become an amendment to the Interagency School Safety Demonstration Act of 1985.

But there’s another problem in California schools, Senator Lieu. They’re broke and getting broker.

We elect state legislators to do things like balance the state budget, improve education and keep the governor in check. But as Governor Brown is set to cut billions of dollars from the state’s education budget and tens of thousands of teachers have already been laid off this year, our state senators are apparently reducing their priorities to babysitting duties.

Besides, the only way to find out what exactly a student is doing with their cellphone or mobile device is to confiscate it and go all Patriot Act on the contents within.

Undoubtedly coming soon: a proposition that would ban sexting while acting as a California State lawmaker.

Originally posted June 1, 2011 as “CA Senate Votes to Make Sexting Grounds for School Expulsion” at LAist.com

Interview: AOL’s Debbie Menin on Branded Content, Online Video and how Social Media Influences Marketing

Andy Sternberg — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:50:00 +0000

I spoke with AOL’s Entertainment Practice Head Debbie Menin at Digital Hollywood Spring 2011 last week at the Ritz in Marina del Rey. We discussed the different ways in which consumers are using social media to inform purchases and decisions and how that in turn is informing the advertising industry. Menin also gave me the lowdown on the latest trends on branded content and how and why consumers share content using social media (based on recent AOL – Nielsen research). Plus, if online video is “the future,” how does Heidi Klum play into AOL’s plans?

This post original appeared at LAist on Tuesday May 10. Please click on the link in the menu bar above to view more of my posts at LAist.com.

Video: Artist Cole Sternberg on His ‘The Content is Bleeding Through’ Installation

Andy Sternberg — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 16:22:04 +0000

I interviewed Cole Sternberg (no relation) last weekend at the unveiling of his new installation. I love the theme and concept of the work, however, i can’t possibly imagine taking the time to rewrite such asinine content all over someone’s walls, ceilings and floors. Cole did it over the course of seven months at a back house on the residence of Normandie Keith in the Hollywood Hills. The 24-hour newscycle, gossip media, and technology such as Twitter has brought the future into our laps and shirt-pockets. Cole calls this a “vision for this apocalyptic moment when media and technology have pushed us so far that all the content blurs together.”

Video and interview below as well as photos from the event.

Originally published at LAist.com.

TechCrunch Disrupt Photos and Notable Quotes

Andy Sternberg — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:21:07 +0000

The TechCrunch Disrupt conference is underway and I’ll be using this space to index notes and photos from the sessions, the demo floor, hallways, and parties as well as some of the best snippets and quotes from the event. Watch the event live at livestream.com/disrupt Monday – Wednesday May 24-26.

Click here for day two coverage.

QUOTES:

“I’m most amazed by, What I don’t know, What is my curiosity to know” – Charlie Rose (source)
“…the smaller the screen, the less time you have to watch” – entertainment panel, (a href=”http://twitter.com/Bill_Gross/status/14628067891″>source)
Funnyordie does $10M+ in ad revenues – (source)
“tv will be on the internet as long as the advertising is there to support it” – Andrew Steele of FunnyorDie.com (source)
“Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook are the four great horsemen of the Internet” – John Doerr source
on GQ – 250,000 sessions since iPad launched. 40% on iPhone and 60% on iPad. Vanity Fair has had 35,000 since launch, 90% iPad – source
Arrington welcomed Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz to the stage with a hearty, “How the fuck are you?” but Bartz got the last word in and then some. Search Arrington Bartz fuck off or just watch the instant classic below:
We’re going to Craigslist the AP…. a monopoly that’s ripe for destruction by web platform – @scottkarp @publish2
Judges responding to Publish2 with painful use of metaphors: “It’s sorta like selling new paint to the Titanic” – Phillip Kaplan; “It’s selling vitamins to the dinosaurs” – Jeffrey Bussgan (via nberg.us)

Keeping Track of What we Read in Class

Andy Sternberg — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:07:59 +0000

I was looking all over for the syllabus from a course I was fortunate to take in the fall of 2006 at USC, Set-Top Box: Hollywood’s Secret War on Your Living Room. As if it wasn’t enough to meet weekly with Cory Doctorow, the guests he brought in and the material we read were priceless and it has all stuck with me in many ways. Having tracked down the syllabus in an old socialtext wiki I thought I’d reprint it here so I no longer have to dig and dig and dig to refer back to some of the readings. The class blog and my class project are still online.

Syllabus

PUBD 510 Set-Top Cop:

Hollywood's Secret War on Your Living Room

COURSE DESCRIPTION

An examination of the public diplomacy at work in the international standards, legal and normative mechanisms by which technology is restricted in the name of protecting copyright and other exclusive rights over knowledge goods.

These systems, created at the behest of the American entertainment industry and subsequently exported to the rest of the world, have made great and invisible inroads to every corner of the technological realm. Every device that contains a DVD player is required to be locked down in ways that restrict owner-freedom beyond what copyright demands or even allows. Proposals abound to lock down innumerable general-purpose technologies, from the PC to the Internet, under similar regimes.

These systems have failed and will go on failing to enrich artists or prevent indiscriminate copying. However, they do distort the market, restrict innovation, and punish legitimate users and researchers. This is a vast exporting of the values of one corner of America's entertainment industry, and is directly contrary to the fortunes of foreign entertainment industries and tech industries domestic and abroad.

Set Top Cop will examine the technical failings with use-restriction systems and the legal frameworks for these. It will explore the diplomatic evolution of standards, lobbying, and industry negotiations that have yielded such a restrictive outcome.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Attendance and Participation (10%): Overall attendance and participation in class discussion will be accounted for in the final grade.

Research Project (30%): Students will choose an area from the seminar and conduct an exhaustive review of key literature, presenting a comprehensive overview of the key texts, debates, and issues of controversy. Topics will need to be approved by the course instructor and students will be encouraged to utilize new media and technologies to present their research in alternative formats and in a public forum.

Weekly Assignments (60%): Students will be responsible for a semester-long project which analyzes the history, use, and trajectory of a current Digital Rights Management technology. They will trace and contextualize that technology by completing weekly assignments which track its use and development.

COURSE READING SCHEDULE

WEEK 1: 8/22
Introduction:
An overview of the course's themes, objectives and assignments.

WEEK 2: 8/29
Security basics:
Lecture, discussions and readings on the basics of information security, from Augustus Caesar to Alan Turing; from the crypto wars to the DRM wars.

Bruce Schneier, Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, Wiley, 2004, 0471453803
Online copy for students (password required)

Peter Biddle et al, The Darknet and the Future of Content Protection
http://msl1.mit.edu/ESD10/docs/darknet5.pdf

Cory Doctorow, Microsoft DRM speech
http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

Cory Doctorow, HP DRM speech
http://craphound.com/hpdrm.txt

WEEK 3: 9/5
Reverse engineering:

Speaker: Jason Schulz, EFF Staff Attorney

The legitimate case for reverse engineering in the academy and industry from a UCSD engineering prof whose award-winning work focuses on the use of reverse engineering in pedagogy and as a tool of social analysis.

Bunnie Huang, Hacking the X-Box: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering
No Starch Press, 2003 (1593270291)
Readme.1st, Reverse Engineering Xbox Security, Caveat Hacker
Online copy for students (password required)

Ed Felten, Alex Halderman, Freedom to Tinker (blog)
http://freedom-to-tinker.com/

Feral Robotic Dogs (website)
http://xdesign.ucsd.edu/feralrobots/

Blizzard v BNETD: Legal case notes, EFF http://www.eff.org/IP/Emulation/Blizzard_v_bnetd/

WEEK 4: 9/12
Use restriction: Stories of DRM breaks, from DVD-Jon and the DeCSS break against DVD players to Microsoft's Palladium and Seth Schoen's Owner Override proposal to restore control of "trusted" PCs to their owners.

Mark Stefik, Trusted Systems (article) http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/forum/copyright/stefik1.htm(feel free to access w/ my Atlantic user/pass: revolute/usccpd – Andy)

Jane Ginsburg, From Having Copies to Experiencing Works (article) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=222493

Dean Marks and Bruce Turnbull, Technical Protection Measures: The Intersection of. Technology, Law and Commercial Licenses (article)
http://www.wipo.org/documents/en/meetings/1999/wct_wppt/pdf/imp99_3.pdf

Bruce Sterling, Hacker Crackdown

http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html

WEEK 5: 9/19
Present day DRMs:

Speakers: Michael Ayers, Toshiba DRM licensing attorney

HDCP, AACS, Blu-Ray, DVD-HD, CPRM, Fair Play and beyond.

Seth Schoen, Owner Override paper
http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/NewsBruiser-2.6.1/nb.cgi/view/vitanuova/2002/10/16/4

Seth Schoen, report from WinHeck
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003804.php
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003805.php
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003806.php
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003807.php

Halderman and Felten, Lessons from the Sony CD DRM Episode
http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/pub/sonydrm-ext.pdf

Project DReaM — An Architectural Overview
http://research.sun.com/spotlight/20050919_DReaM-Overview.html

WEEK 6: 9/26
Wrapup: Original research

Speaker: Bruce Schneier

Presentations of original research

WEEK 7: 10/3
History of copyright: The history of copyright and its industrial applications. Critical readings stress the dynamic tension between copyright and technology and the way that they have co-evolved. Class discussion will talk about the role of anti-Japanese sentiment during the VCR wars in setting Zaibatsu lobbying strategy in the US.

Speaker: Wendy Seltzer, Brooklyn Law

Tim Wu, Copyright's Communications Policy
http://ssrn.com/abstract=532882

Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture
Read chapters 1-5:http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/

Siva Vaidhyanathan, Anarchist in the Library
Basic Books, 2005, 0465089852
Read chapters 2, 4, 6 ,7 and 10
Online copy for students (password required)

Julie Cohen, A Right to Read Anonymously (article)
http://ssrn.com/abstract=17990

Pam Samuelson, Towards More Sensible Anti-Circumvention Regulations
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/fincrypt2.pdf

WEEK 7: 10/10
NO CLASS

WEEK 8: 10/17

Speaker: Steven Starr, Revver

Internet-era businesses sometimes thrive in the face of copying. Readings include works on effective Internet-era business-models.

John Buckman, Magnatunes Manifesto
http://magnatune.com/info/why

Neil Leyton, FadingWays manifesto
http://www.fadingwaysmusic.com/mission.html

Cory Doctorow, Introduction to electronic edition of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
http://craphound.com/someone/000363.html

Tim O'Reilly, Piracy is Progressive Taxation
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html

Debian social contract

http://www.debian.org/social_contract

Neil Stephenson, In the Beginning…Was the Command Line
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

Tim Wu, Copyright's Authorship Policy
Unpublished,
Online copy for students (password required)

Long Tail readings:

The Long Tail, Chris Anderson, Wired, Oct 2004
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

Long tail and copyright, Chris Anderson
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/02/long_tail_vs_le.html

Death of the Blockbuster
http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/02/death_of_the_bl.html

Life-Expectancy of Bestsellers

http://www.lulu.com/static/pr/05_19_06.php

WEEK 9: 10/24
Speaker: Jamie Love, Consumer Project on Technology

Wrapup: Original research

Presentations of original research

WEEK 10: 10/31
Standards and treaties: The actions of international consortia, treaty bodies, and standards groups have far-reaching effects on law, technology and commerce. Yet the action of these bodies is obscure and little-regarded. Recent activist participation in these bodies has shone the first light into their activities. This is public diplomacy for the rest of us, storming the gates of the UN.

Cory Doctorow, et al: DRM: A Failure in the Developed World, a Danger to the Developing world http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/drm_paper.php

Access to Knowledge treaty draft
http://www.cptech.org/a2k/consolidatedtext-may9.pdf

Geneva Declaration
http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/genevadeclaration.html

Declaration on the Development Agenda
http://www.wipo.org/documents/en/document/govbody/wo_gb_ga/pdf/wo_ga_31_11.pdf

Adelphi Charter
http://www.adelphicharter.org/

WEEK 11: 11/7
Laws: How copyright and related laws get made and passed.

Speaker: Fred von Lohmann, EFF Head IP Attorney

EFF's Annotations to the MPAA Broadcast Flag FAQ
http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/archives/000148.html

MPAA Content Protection Status Report
http://judiciary.senate.gov/special/content_protection.pdf
http://judiciary.senate.gov/special/mpaa_june.pdf
http://judiciary.senate.gov/special/mpaa110702.pdf

RIAA/CEA exchange on digital radio

http://cryptome.sabotage.org/RIAA-CEA.htm

DMCRA
http://www.house.gov/boucher/docs/dmcrahandout.htm

Jack Valenti 1982 Congressional testimony on Betamax
http://cryptome.org/hrcw-hear.htm

Lehman Report to the 1995 National Information Infrastructure commission
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/doc/ipnii/

Pam Samuelson, The Copyright Grab
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.01/white.paper_pr.html

WEEK 12: 11/14
Command and control dystopia: What it could mean to live in a world of ubiquitous command-and-control devices that respond to others' wishes instead of your own.

Speakers: Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow

Richard Stallman, The Right to Read
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Cory Doctorow, 0wnz0red
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/

Ed Felten, Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue (transcript)
http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~i312co/copyright/felten.html

Wendy Seltzer, The Broadcast Flag: It's Not Just About TV

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/uploads/510/06-TheBroadcastFlag.pdf

WEEK 13: 11/21
Speaker: Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, Xbox hacker, founder of Chumby
Wrapup: Original research

Presentations of original research

WEEK 14: 11/28

Modern copyright and technology: Technology restrictions in practice — Broadcast Flags, next-generation DVDs, Coral and other DRM consortia. Critical readings stress the unintended consequences of these laws for competition, innovation and freedom of expression.

Speaker: Seth Schoen, EFF Staff Technologist

Joint Report of the Chairs of the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group
http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/archives/000128.html#000128

EFF response to above
http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/archives/000116.html

CPCM Blue Book
http://www.dvb.org/technology/dvb-cpcm/a094.DVB-CPCM.pdf

Coral Alliance site
/coral-interop.org/

Fred von Lohmann, Unintended consequences
http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/unintended_consequences.php

Tom Giovanetti, IP Blog

http://www.ipblog.org/

WEEK 15: 12/5
Conclusion: New issues arising during the semester (Bluray v DVDHD final specs; new lawsuits over DRM)

Readings as appropriate

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY
The Annenberg School for Communication is committed to upholding the University's Academic Integrity Code as detailed in the campus guide. It is the policy of the School of Communication to report all violations of the code. Any serious violations of the Academic Integrity Code will result in the student's expulsion from the School of Communication.

DISABILITIES
Any student requesting academic accommodations based on a disability is required to register with Disability Services and Programs (DSP) each semester. A letter of verification for approved accommodations can be obtained from DSP. Please be sure the letter is delivered to the instructor as early in the semester as possible. DSP is located in STU 301 and is open 8:30 am – 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday. The phone number for DSP is (213) 740-0776.

Obama Connects at Google

Andy Sternberg — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:08:14 +0000

The full video of his “fireside chat” with CEO Eric Schmidt at the Googleplex this week is now up (posted below). In addition to unveiling his vision and presidential policy for the future of technology and the Internet, it seems he really won over the room… see the account of Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s Public Policy and Gov’t Affairs lead.