Did you hear the one about the New York state lawmakers who forgot about the First Amendment in the name of combating cyberbullying and “baseless political attacks”? Proposed legislation in both chambers would require New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.” No votes on the measures have been taken. But unless the First Amendment is repealed, they stand no chance of surviving any constitutional scrutiny even if they were approved. Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte said the legislation would cut down on “mean-spirited and baseless political attacks” and “turns the spotlight on cyberbullies by forcing them to reveal their identity.”

It’s easy to make fun of the late Sen. Ted Stevens’ for his description of the internet as “a series of tubes,” or to get irritated with legislators who aren’t particularly tech-savvy. But this kind of inexperience has consequences: as ludicrous as this legislation is, and even if it would be struck down immediately, a bill like this eats up the energy of people who have to explain that it’s a bad idea, unimplementable, and ultimately unconstitutional.

But even beyond the bill itself, this is an interesting illustration of how inexplicable internet culture is to people who don’t actively participate it. I imagine it’s hard for Assemblyman Conte to imagine the incredibly dreadful things people are willing to say under their real names, and in forms that show up on their social networks. Maybe he doesn’t have things that he urgently needs to tell someone but that he can’t risk saying under his own name. And perhaps he’s never encountered a forum that he urgently feels the need to participate in, but doesn’t feel that he can join the conversation as himself, and by participating learned how self-policing works. There’s no lost age of internet civility that can be restored with legally unenforceable accountability requirements. There are just different kinds of intimacy that, if you haven’t experienced them, are hard to fathom and embrace.

The Pirate Party, which supports a platform of copyright reform and online privacy, picked up an electoral victory of four seats in the Saarland regional parliament in elections held at the end of March. The victory gives them twice as many seats as the once strong Green Party. The ultra pro-business Free Democrats won no seats.

Steve Ketteman, a former columnist for the newspaper Berliner Zeitung and the author of “One Day at Fenway,” opines in The New York Times:

This month they face their biggest challenge, with elections in two more states, including North Rhine-Westphalia, the country’s most populous. Should the results match recent poll numbers — as high as 13 percent, making the Pirates Germany’s third-most-popular party — they will serve notice that a new electoral force has arrived and offer a compelling political lesson for parties on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Pirate Party’s niche platform of stronger protection for file sharing, opposing censorship, and even supporting voting rights for teenagers has struck a chord for German voters. But while the party appears to have embraced a niche set of policy positions, the movement’s focus on the Internet as a medium for political organization and change has resonated with young Germans. Kellerman observes:

[T]heir real goal, and the root of their success, is more meta: using the Internet to create a new structure of politics that can solve the problem of how to energize citizens — not only for the excitement of a campaign but also the often dreary realities of actual governance.

Indeed, while a two party dominated system makes it unlikely for a similar start-up party to make such a splash in the U.S., the online activist-based pushback on SOPA and the growing power of the Internet as a political medium — and a political issue area — proves that the Internet-based influence is an emerging political force in legislative and electoral politics around the world.

As proposed by Arizona lawmakers, the bill amends a previous law to expand an already unconstitutional ban on telephone speech that might offend someone else to the Internet:

It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use a telephone ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person. It is also unlawful to otherwise disturb by repeated anonymous telephone calls ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS the peace, quiet or right of privacy of any person at the place where the telephone call or calls COMMUNICATIONS were received.

There should be no doubt that the law is unconstitutional, and that it builds upon an unconstitutional framework. The First Amendment does not permit the government to enact speech bans that rest on vague terms such as “lewd” or “annoy,” regardless of whether the speech takes place in person, on the phone, or on the Internet.

Moreover, there is something comical and cowardly about lawmakers fretting that, somewhere on the Internet, someone is annoyed by a dirty word. The U.S. Supreme Court protected free speech in Brandenburg v. Ohio for members of the Ku Klux Klan. In the recent decision of Snyder v. Phelps, they preserved the Westboro Baptist Church’s right to wave signs that say “God Hates Fags” at military funerals. If America can handle that kind of hateful speech, it can handle a few annoying words.

Obama initially listed some heartening interactions between Iranians and Americans — such as the best foreign language film Oscar for the Iranian movie A Separation. He continued that Iranians and Americans both use the same tools on the internet to communicate, but that Iran’s increasingly repressive government hinders the free flow of information:

OBAMA: Because of the actions of the Iranian regime, an ‘Electronic Curtain’ has fallen around Iran, a barrier that stops the free flow of information and ideas into the country, and denies the rest of the world the benefit of interacting with the iranian people who have so much to offer…

Even as we’ve imposed sanctions on the Iranian government, today my administration is issuing new guidelines to make it easier for American businesses to provide software and services into Iran that will make it easier for Iranian people to use the internet.

Watch the video:

Indeed, the Iranian government cracks down on satellite dishes (somewhat futilely) and jams signals by international broadcasters over U.N. objections.

Amid the increasingly severe internet restrictions of the Electronic Curtain, the Obama administration today released new Treasury Department guidelines removing some of the ambiguities that hindered American software producers from allowing their products to be used in Iran. In a blog post, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes expanded on the new guidelines and wrote:

Today we are taking another step, by making it easier for Iranian citizens to get the software and services they need to connect with the rest of the world through modern communications methods. The U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) today issued guidance that will facilitate the availability of software and services that Iranians have told us are essential in order to effectively use the Internet.

A Treasury release outlined some of the specific areas where allowances are now made to export software to Iran, including software for chatting and voice-over-internet-phonecalls and related mobile apps, data storage like Dropbox, web browsers, RSS readers, and more.

The benefits of the free flow of internet information to and from Iran was on full display last week when a Facebook page drew Iranians and Israelis — two peoples whose countries are seemingly approaching the brink of war — to share messages of mutual admiration, solidarity, and speak out against confrontation.

“In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT I.P. Act.

“There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved. Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs each year, with the movie industry alone supporting over 2.2 million jobs. We must take action to stop these illegal practices. We live in a country where people rightfully expect to be fairly compensated for a day’s work, whether that person is a miner in the high desert of Nevada, an independent band in New York City, or a union worker on the back lots of a California movie studio.

“I admire the work that Chairman Leahy has put into this bill. I encourage him to continue engaging with all stakeholders to forge a balance between protecting Americans’ intellectual property, and maintaining openness and innovation on the internet. We made good progress through the discussions we’ve held in recent days, and I am optimistic that we can reach a compromise in the coming weeks.”

PIPA had been losing momentum in recent days. Reid said earlier this week that he would not whip Democratic votes for the bill. At least 14 Republicans announced their opposition to the bill, and Sen. Mitch McConnell called for a postponement. At last night’s presidential debate, all four GOP candidates denounced the Protect IP Act.

Supporters argue the bill will provide much-needed protections for American intellectual property and curb “rogue websites operated and registered overseas.” Opponents warn that the measure as written would “censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business” and want to see significant changes to the draft before Congress considers it. Both sides have mobilized to lobby Washington on the bill.

Though many of the supporters and opponents of the bill are well known, a ThinkProgress examination of the companies and organizations lobbying on the bill yields some unexpected results.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the bill last May. In the two quarters that followed, at least 39 entities reported lobbying in favor of the bill. These included obvious business interests such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Comcast Corp., Disney, the Motion Picture Association of America, News Corp., Nintendo, and Sony Pictures, as well as a few less expected backers including Tiffany & Co., the American Apparel & Footware Association, and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

At least 19 companies and organizations lobbied against the bill and/or the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the House version of the bill. These included Internet companies including eBay, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, and Yahoo!, but also American Express and Visa.

While federal lobbying disclosure rules do not require filers to report how much they spend on each specific issue, the supporters total lobbying over the time they lobbied on this (including all other issues) amounted to at least $64 million, while opponents’ total lobbying on all issues totaled at least $12.8 million. (Note: we cannot determine from disclosure forms how much of the lobbying spending was devoted solely to PIPA.)

So whichever side wins, it won’t have come cheap. See our analysis of both the pro- and anti-PIPA lobbying activities below:

But there is a world of difference between the traditional notion of public participation in a newspaper or magazine and the cacophonous, sometimes libelous free-for-all that passes for it today. Whereas the old-fashioned letter to the editor involved crafting a letter, figuring out where to send it, springing for a stamp, and knowing that its publication-worthiness would be determined by an actual editor who might even call and suggest some actual edits, today’s readers are invited to “join the conversation” as if the work of professional reporters and columnists carries no more authority than small-talk at a cocktail party. And although some sites are making efforts to weed out the trolls by disabling anonymous posting, filtering comments through Facebook, or letting readers essentially monitor themselves by flagging or promoting comments at their own discretion, most are so desperate to catch eyeballs wherever and however possible that they’re loathe to turn down any form of free content.

Obviously it’s not easy to moderate comments and to foster a community where a health conversation can actually happen. It’s something that takes a lot of your writers’ time if, like me or Ta-Nehisi, you read and moderate comments yourself. And if you don’t want to do that, you have to hire a community manager or managers. But I certainly think there are examples out there of successful efforts. And I think it’s probably worth interrogating the idea that moderation kills traffic or commenting communities: I think it’s much more likely that people don’t moderate because they don’t make the effort. I’m unpersuaded that the people who occasionally show up here to decry liberals or inform me about the evils of Muslims are carrying more traffic with them than they drive away. It’s a much more fruitful pursuit to figure out how we can create civilized spaces than to lament some sort of collective loss of civility. I think we should be open to a whole gradient of walled gardens, from moderated comments sections, to places like Metafilter where you have to pay to join the conversation as a demonstration of seriousness.

The most interesting question Daum raises, I think, is whether commenting and the internet have changed the way we write. She says she never would have published an essay she wrote in the mid-nineties about sex and HIV if she had to publish it in the environment writers face today. But Emily Gould did write a long essay about her own self-absorption in the New York Times Magazine when she knew she’d likely get dismantled in the comments section. And if web publishing existed in the same form then that it does now, Daum might not have had to cut down her essay to the point of unrecognizability to get it published by a respectable outlet. The way she describes it makes it sound like a perfect fit for The Awl. But even if you lose some ability to be personally revelatory, the huge benefit of blogging in particular is the ability to try out ideas, to play with different parts of arguments, and to test-drive different pieces of evidence, and to refine your ideas into a final product. We might be able to be less personally vulnerable on the internet, but I think it’s probably worth it in exchange for being able to do intellectual growth in public and with the benefit of feedback and allies.

-For the distinguished meth or television connoisseur in your life, Walter White sneakers.

-The cultural exchange that made the Tintin story The Blue Lotus so good.

-Watchmen 2 is a thing. Everything is terrible.

-Sounds like Valentine Wiggin’s going to have true grit.

-Are we on our way to usage-based billing?

VAZ: Would you like to see better controls on the internet? On these social media sites like Facebook and Twitter?

KING: I do, now we have a First Amendment issue which does not really confront you or really pertain in Great Britain. So we’re trying to find ways, how can it be done without violating the First Amendment, involving freedom of speech or communication.

Watch it:

Explaining his prior statements in support of the then-terrorist Irish Republican Army (IRA), King said that he stands by these statements “in the context that they were said.”

When Conan O’Brien spoke at Harvard’s commencement in 2000, he joked about a number of predictions he’d made in a (presumably fake) high school graduation speech 15 years earlier:

I would like to make several predictions about what the future will hold: “I believe that one day a simple Governor from a small Southern state will rise to the highest office in the land. He will lack political skill, but will lead on the sheer strength of his moral authority. I believe that Justice will prevail and, one day, the Berlin Wall will crumble, uniting East and West Berlin forever under Communist rule. I believe that one day, a high speed network of interconnected computers will spring up world-wide, so enriching people that they will lose their interest in idle chit chat and pornography.

I start our discussion of William Gibson’s Neuromancer because it’s impossible to read this novel, published the year I was born, without thinking about what he thought the internet might look like and what it actually does—for most of us, anyway. I’m intrigued by the novel’s description of the internet as like”

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .

I think for some people, that’s true. But I think for most folks, the internet just makes their world a little bigger instead of a lot larger, it makes their world easier to handle rather than turning it surreal. On the other hand, most of us aren’t actually innovators, we’re not plugged in actively testing the limits of what our enabling technologies can do and what societal rules suggest we ought to want to do. Our personal geography is not like Ninsei, where, as Case tells us, “burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.” Reading a novel’s a form of tourism.

But there are things I recognize, and one of the things I’m liking most about the novel are the fragments of what remains from the world today, and what it means that Gibson thinks that those are the things that will survive. There’s the Azerbaijani who tells Molly that “You particularly, must take care. In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such modifications”—from exposed hair to exposed physical modifications like permanent glasses. There’s the sentimental attachment to extinct horses. A relic of John the Baptist’s hand gathering dust. And of course, cover-ups of the kind that turned William Corto into Armitage. The technology, the kinds of abysses we can bring people back from, may be different, but this is awfully familiar:

The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining. In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already underway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized, partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto. He’d need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said, but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing Corto’s shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet. Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he preferred to testify as he was. No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The trials needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely. Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto’s subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely the invention of a Congressional cabal with certain vested interests in saving particular portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. Corto gradually understood that the testimony he gave was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers directly responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of the emp installations at Kirensk. His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide explained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong people. Corto crushed the man’s larynx with the rigid fingers of his right hand. The Congressional aide strangled, his face in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Washington September.

We can perfect the world, we can perfect ourselves, but we probably can’t reform away nostalgia, or guilt, or shame. We’ll just have a bigger scope, and more powerful tools for them to play out on.

Hackers, which came out in 1995, is not exactly what you’d call a good movie. It’s got ridiculous animations that are meant to make the Internet seem comprehensible to the legions of Americans who were beginning to sign up for web access as the Internet went commercial. Jonny Lee Miller seems so gummed up by the complexities of pulling off an American accent that when Angelina Jolie asks his character, early in the film, “Do you speak English?” the correct answer is really “No, but he’s trying very hard.” The hacker glam is ridiculous in the extreme. But I got obsessed with the movie in high school, Hackers was the perfect aspirational movie for angry smart kids everywhere who spent a lot of time on the Internet, whether they were hacking corporations or spending lots of time talking to teenagers from other states who participated in the same dorkily intellectual after-school activities that they did. And even though I no longer sign into chat programs under my deeply embarrassing first handle, Hackers had some real sense of where the Internet was going — and where we were going with it.

PCWorld gives Hackers credit for having at least some sense of hacker canon:”Before the core crew of hackers allows Jonny Lee Miller’s Dade to enter their group, they challenge him to identify a series of technical manuals considered essential reading among real hackers in the early 1980s. Dade aces the test, which culminates with the Ugly Red Book That Won’t Fit on a Shelf.” But Hackers gets its longevity less from specific demonstrations of technical foresight—the hardware the characters drool over is laughably antiquated today — and more from its portrayal of what would become the dominant attitudes about the Internet and the way we live our lives on it.

I’ve written before about the social aspects of the Internet that the movie understands very well:

Dade is not as aggressive or articulate in person as he pretends to be online, though Kate, being a quite young Angelina Jolie, is hotter than her handle, Acid Burn. Their prickly competition gives way to romance, and a strong solidarity between their immediate group of friends and the wider hacking community, as people they’ve never met come to their aid…One of the messages of the movie is certainly that while hacking can be used for evil, the internet is where you find your tribe, if you’re too smart, or too maladjusted, for your surroundings. The net’s great promise is that even if you feel alone, you can find someone like you out there in the vastness of the web, and that those relationships will be no less real for being remote.

While some hackers may want to do things on the Internet, like stealing internal emails from Bank of America, that the rest of us may not be particularly interested in, in the years since Hackers came out, the values that a cop insists are “not cool. It’s Commie bullshit,” have become increasingly mainstream. We get annoyed when Google+ or any other social networking application wants us to use our own names. We want a lot of access to data, and we want it for free, particularly if it’s entertainment — and we want it to be easy. Instead of Dade hacking a television network at the beginning of a movie, we love Netflix and Spotify and Hulu, except when they start charging us more money and we get cranky (interestingly, the way Dade periodically flashes into a movie clip reminds me of the way the iPod made it possible for us all to live in our own movie soundtracks). And the people who shut us down are squares, like pre-HBO Wendell Pierce (Lorraine Bracco, pre-Sopranos, is there as an evil corporate honcho as well) as techphobic Secret Service Agent Richard Gill in the movie, who is given to saying things like “These people, they’re terrorists,” when he gets a chance to preen in front of local television cameras.

And though some critics think the characters in Hackers are ultimately sort of sellouts, in that they aid a major corporation rather than taking it down (though in the name of clearing one of their friends), that attitude is basically where the rest of us have landed. We like that the Internet opens up our world, we like that it gets us things for free, and in some cases, we even like it when it becomes a tool to topple regimes that we don’t like very much. But mostly we want the internet to broaden the social playing field, to make it quicker and cheaper to be consumers, and to help us find love — in other words, for the world to stay the same, except faster and easier. Hackers, for all of its faux-edgey aesthetics, is brilliant at capturing those compromises.

By Erica Newland

Last week, Alyssa wrote about Ghostwriter, a PBS children’s series about thoroughly normal kids from Brooklyn who solve neighborhood mysteries with the help of their eponymous ghost friend. Although it aired from 1992-1995, Ghostwriter works surprisingly well today: in many ways it is a thoroughly 21st century show, and not just because the title character is something of a search engine for the real world. In making computers a central part of the Ghostwriter characters’ lives, the show anticipated the role that the Internet would play in our lives and our television shows.

Television today is awash with Internet-themed episodes. Last season, Brick from The Middle developed an Internet addiction, Liz Lemon of 30 Rock was impugned on a Jezebel-like website, and Chief Webber discovered Twitter on Grey’s Anatomy. But even in these episodes, digital devices and the connectivity they enable are gimmicks that drive a storyline, not the third limbs and backup brains that they have become in the real world. With a couple exceptions, like The Big Bang Theory and iCarly, remarkably few characters on TV while away hours reading blogs, cement relationships over instant messager, make important life decisions via email, or Google a contested point in the middle of an argument.

It can be tough to turn scenes like these into good television—and it’s an open question whether we really want our on-screen doppelgangers as chained to their devices as we are. But the brains behind Ghostwriter deserve extra credit for figuring out a way to turn computer use into entertaining TV.

Computers figure into Ghostwriter’s plot just four minutes into the series’ first episode. Jamal Jenkins, the main character, is typing away on his PC when Ghostwriter appears for the first time. A boxy CRT monitor quickly emerges as the best medium for communicating with Ghostwriter, and something akin to instant messaging becomes the primary mode for talking to him. Throughout the series, Ghostwriter often feels like that close friend you chat with daily over IM but rarely see in real life. Over fifteen years later, it’s hard to find a TV series that so naturally incorporates a relationship that’s based mostly online.

Deaf and mute ghosts aside, the makers of Ghostwriter deftly integrate computers into the lives of the characters. Sure, the show has its share of analog moments (the team uses a card catalog to locate a book about how computers work, pen pals communicate through snail mail, and Jamal’s modem sings the dial-up song, but characters are also shown composing stories, letters, and high school application essays on the computer. The actors perfectly capture the frustration of sitting around a single computer, trying to write a document as a group, swapping the keyboard back and forth. They play computer games, print computer-generated images, spend time in computer class, and hang out in their middle school’s well-equipped computer lab.

Even Ghostwriter’s own token technology-themed case demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the new opportunities and challenges presented by the Internet (which only went commercial two months after the show’s finale). A hacker known as Max Mouse is attacking the computers at Zora Neale Hurston Middle School and as the team tries to track down the hacker, they connect to the Internet with Jamal’s new modem, log in to bulletin boards, and try to trace the locations of other users.

When Max Mouse’s actions nearly result in the death of a young child, the show grapples with the still-unresolved question of how to proportionately punish Internet crimes relative to their real-world counterparts. Yet Ghostwriter understands that the Internet offers more than just a playground for criminals. A hacker and student played by a pre-teen Julia Stiles goes so far as to offer members of the Ghostwriter team a Barlow-esque description of cyberspace: “It’s a world where you’re judged by what you say and think, not by what you look like. A world where curiosity and imagination equals power.” (Extra points to Ghostwriter for making the school’s two best hackers female):

Ghostwriter could hold its ground against any 21st century series, but it’s especially remarkable considering how slow other contemporary shows were to understand the importance of the internet. Seinfeld was cancelled in 1998, three years after Ghostwriter ended its run. But while successively more modern Macintosh computers sat in Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment, we only see Jerry using the computer during one of the show’s 180 episodes. Seinfeld may have been a show about nothing, but it missed that theme being writ large on the new medium growing up around it.

JR: I read this story, “Cloud computing could lead to billions in energy savings,” which cites multiple studies.  It intrigued me enough to ask for a response from Jon Koomey, Consulting Professor at Stanford and a leading expert on the energy impact of electronics and the internet.  Here’s his response (reposted from his blog).

– by Jon Koomey

There have been a few recent analyses showing that cloud computing has significant efficiency and cost advantages. The most recent one with which I am directly familiar was conducted by Jon Taylor’s team at WSP Environment & Energy for Salesforce.com, and it showed per-transaction emissions reductions averaging 95 percent for companies that shift to using the cloud.

I can think of four reasons why cloud computing is (with few exceptions) significantly more energy efficient than using in-house data centers:

1. Economies of scale. It’s cheaper for bigger cloud computing folks to make efficiency improvements because they can spread the costs over a larger server base and can afford to have more dedicated folks focused on efficiency improvements.

For example, there are usually significant fixed costs of implementing simple techniques to improve Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), like the costs of doing an equipment inventory and assessment of data center airflow (same for implementing institutional changes like charging users per kW instead of per square foot of floor area). Whenever there are costs that are substantially fixed (i.e. only weakly related to the size of the facility), bigger operations have an advantage because they can spread the costs over more transactions, equipment, or floor area.

There’s also a substantial advantage to having “in house” expertise devoted to efficiency, instead of having staff split between different jobs. Technology changes so rapidly that it’s hard for people not devoted to efficiency to keep up as well as those that are.

2. Diversity and aggregation. More users, more diverse users, and more users in different places means computing loads are spread over the day, allowing for increased equipment utilization. Typical in house data centers have server utilizations of 5-15 percent and sometimes much less, whereas cloud facilities for major vendors are more in the 30-40 percent range.

3. Flexibility. Cloud installations use virtualization and other techniques to separate the software from the characteristics of physical servers (some call this “abstraction of physical from virtual layers”).  This sounds like a great thing for software and total costs, but why is it an energy issue?

Using this technique means that you can redesign servers to optimize them and drop certain energy costly features. For example, if software can route around physical servers that die, you no longer need to have two power supplies in each server; the death of any one particular server doesn’t matter to the delivery of IT services.

In essence, this technique redefines the concept of reliability from one that is based on the reliability of a particular piece of hardware to one that is based on the reliability of the delivery of the IT services of interest, and this is a much more sensible approach.

4. Ability to sidestep organizational issues instead of having to address them head-on (which is hard and slow). While most company in-house IT operations face the problem of a disconnect between IT departments driving server purchases, and facilities departments paying the electric bill, that problem has largely been solved for the cloud providers. They generally have one data center budget and clear responsibilities assigned to one person with decision making authority.

Economies of scale are more powerful in the cloud scenario, because you’ve gotten rid of the impediments to taking action and can allow those economies to work their magic. Finally, it’s much easier and cheaper for people stuck with the in-house organizations to use a credit card to buy cloud services instead of waiting around for their internal IT organization to get its act together.

These four big energy advantages will over time translate into more and more pressure for companies to adopt cloud services, because the economic advantages (driven by the energy advantages) are so large.  And it’s not just energy costs, it’s the capital cost of all the supporting equipment, which in a standard in-house facility can be $25,000/kW and (together with the energy costs) add up to half or more of the total co

sts of the facility (for details see Koomey, Jonathan G., Christian Belady, Michael Patterson, Anthony Santos, and Klaus-Dieter Lange. 2009. Assessing trends over time in performance, costs, and energy use for servers. Oakland, CA: Analytics Press.  August 17.)

Of course, there are still issues to work out. For example, people haven’t really ironed out the complexities about liability for cloud outages.  And there will always be providers who will want to have their own in-house facilities for security reasons (like big financial institutions). But even in that case, the benefits of a virtualized cloud infrastructure can be brought to the in-house facilities.

You won’t get the same diversity, but the other benefits of cloud will still be powerful. I’ve also heard of companies creating “private clouds” for use by other companies that pay in to use them on a “members-only” basis, thus dealing with the diversity and security issues. So things are evolving rapidly, but the economic benefits are so large that we’ll see a whole lot more cloud computing in coming years.

– Jonathan Koomey is a researcher, author, lecturer, and entrepreneur whose work spans climate solutions, critical thinking skills, and the energy and environmental effects of information technology. He’s been a Consulting Professor at Stanford University since 2004, and recently held visiting professorships at Yale (Fall 2009) and Stanford (2003–4 and Fall 2008), and worked as a researcher and scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) for more than two decades.

Image courtesy of Pike Research, Grigorieff Photography, GigaOM Events

“Instead of attacking those raising concerns and attempting to block debate, the Saudi Arabian government should amend the draft law to ensure that it does not muzzle dissent and deny basic rights,” said Amnesty Middle East and North Africa director Stuart Malcolm in today’s release.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made Internet freedom a major plank in her foreign policy approach and has delivered two lengthy addresses on the issue. During the height of the Arab Spring, the U.S. heavily criticized countries that curtailed Internet use in order to prevent protesters from organizing online using social media sites. Indeed, just last week, a senior advisor to Clinton told Radio Free Europe that the U.S. will speak out against any country — including U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia — that prohibits internet freedom:

RFE/RL: The United States has been pushing for Internet freedom around the world. Do these efforts include U.S. allies; namely Saudi Arabia, which is considered an enemy of the Internet by rights groups.

ALEC ROSS: There are 195 countries on Planet Earth. The focus of the State Department is on 194 of them. Our Internet-freedom agenda is focused on 194 countries.

RFE/RL: So it applies to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain? Does the U.S. raise these issues with the leaders of those countries? [...]

ALEC ROSS: [Y]es, whenever any country significantly breaches what we believe to be longstanding universal rights, the United States speaks up.

Earlier this year, after pressure from activists and rights groups such as Amnesty, Clinton, a longtime advocate for women’s rights, praised the “brave” Saudi women who defied a ban on driving in a civil disobedience protest action.

So if the State Department’s “Internet freedom agenda” incudes Saudi Arabia, will the U.S. “speak up?”

At the blog of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which first reported the blockage, Ali Tayebi published screen captures from Iranian users who’d attempted to access Google Plus:

It appears Google is taking a cautious approach with Iran because of a U.S. sanctions regime against the Islamic Republic. (At press time, Google had not responded to an inquiry.) If that is the case, such a step almost definitely did not come at the behest of the U.S. government: in March 2010 the Treasury Department issued “general licenses authorizing the exportation of certain personal Internet-based communications services – such as instant messaging, chat and email, and social networking – to Iran.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made Internet freedom a major plank in her foreign policy approach, having delivered two lengthy addresses on the topic, first in January 2010 and again in February 2011 as social media helped to fuel the Arab Spirng protest movements that deposed two North African dictators and put several other Middle East autocracies on the brink of collapse.

In the past, before the Treasury general license, Google and other internet companies faced dilemmas about allowing access to Iranians and permitting software downloads — and most chose to deny services instead of even changing the prospect of censure by the U.S. It even took Google nearly nine months after the issuance of the general license for the California company to make downloads of Google Earth, Chrome, and Picasa available to users in Iran.

No doubt that, if the blockage came because of a fear of sanctions penalties, the breadth and severity of unilateral U.S. sanctions played a role in the decision. Iranians were at the forefront of using social media in protests when many of them tweeted their way through massive demonstration after the disputed June 2009 elections. Activists and others in Iran often prefer Google mail and other services because they are more secure. If Google is blocking access, it is, as NIAC says, “shameful.”

In the golden era, films went for the throat and then worked their way down. Part of the strategy was to tap into potent fears about random urban crime, war, the Manson killings, and the other topical concerns. We have our own phobias today, and if anything they’re even more deeply felt in an era when criminals and terrorists are only as far away as the nearest cable news channel, but the horror genre hasn’t caught up with the times. Why hasn’t a movie made us as petrified of the Internet as Jaws did of the ocean? Where is the great horror movie about Sept. 11? Is that in bad taste? Perhaps. But audiences don’t see horror movies for moral improvement. They go to be scared out of their wits.

I think some of that is true, though I’d be curious to see what Zinoman thinks of Drag Me to Hell, a horror movie rooted in the idea that it’s a poor idea to foreclose on a gypsy. But I think part of the problem is the juxtaposition between the common American fears of today and of the ’70s. Most of the things Zinoman listed that Americans were afraid of in the golden age of horror were things that suggested a dark side to the familiar: city streets and our own teenagers. Fears of terrorism, for example, have definitely spawned unfortunate suspicion of American Muslims, but if a group of al Qaeda-trained fighters successfully carried out an attack on an American city, nobody would be exceptionally shocked that such a thing had happened, or would have their preconditioned assumptions about al Qaeda challenged. Similarly, I don’t think anyone who uses the Internet thinks of it as an entirely benign institution, so it’s hard to think that anyone would profoundly upset if something bad happened as a result of people being online. What we need is something genuinely surprising: people who are attacked by the houses they took out adjustable-rate mortgages to purchase, or something that similarly upsets our assumptions about what’s safe and desirable.

The front page of the April 8 Wall Street Journal blared: “Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated by Spies.” The article reports that cyberspies from Russia, China, and other countries “have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system.”

The same day, I released a report on “Smart Grid, Smart Broadband, Smart Infrastructure: Melding Federal Stimulus Programs to Get More Bang for the Buck.” Among other points, I specifically discusses how better broadband deployment can improve the cybersecurity of the electricity grid.

Parts of the Recovery Act’s stimulus spending can be integrated to save money and improve our long-term infrastructure. One section of the act provides billions of federal dollars to fund a “smart grid” for electricity that connects a far more flexible and efficient grid for long-distance transmission to regional feeder lines and local hubs, and then to the “last mile” to residences and businesses. A different part of the act provides billions in funding to upgrade broadband networks for unserved and underserved areas around the country.

Construction of the electricity grid and the broadband network should go hand in hand. We should follow the principle of “dig once” — when bulldozers are in place to build electricity transmission lines, the crews should be laying fiber where possible and otherwise upgrading the communications network at the same time. This approach will speed the deployment of high-speed broadband to dispersed geographic areas, including to far-flung cell phone towers that are often near power transmission lines.

In addition to non-security goals (e.g., energy conservation), the upgrade and spending in the electric utility grid should include providing a sufficiently trustworthy network for control. The requirements are different enough for this sector that funding for cybersecurity research and implementation should be an integral part of the electricity grid stimulus spending.

Today’s electricity controls often “cannot accommodate current enterprise security solutions that soak up central processing unit (CPU) capacity and clog connectivity.” Nonetheless, a Wall Street Journal blog about the electricity story asked: “The big question is whether the move to a smart grid would increase the country’s vulnerability to such attacks, or serve as the best form of defense.” The main point of the WSJ blog post seems to be that we create new vulnerabilities by using the Internet for more parts of governance of the electricity grid and should therefore rely on dedicated communications lines to govern the electricity grid, the way we did in the pre-Internet era.

It would be a mistake, however, to dumb down the electric grid in the name of cybersecurity. The problems facing electric utilities are similar to those facing other sectors. As Professor Fred Cate observes, “increasingly critical information is both controlled by the private sector and carried via the commodity Internet (e.g., ATM transactions, financial data, health data).” The commodity Internet increasingly replaces the old dedicated lines due to enormous advantages in cost, functionality, and ability to upgrade. The path forward for electric utilities, as for banks and hospitals, is to learn how to act securely in this inter-connected world, not to try to use pre-Internet approaches.

Nor can electric utilities rely on the secrecy of their systems, what computer scientists call “security through obscurity.” On the Internet, as the Wall Street Journal story correctly explained, attackers can probe systems repeatedly and thereby discover vulnerabilities. As I have written previously, some aspects of the defense should stay secret, notably the ways that the system would respond to a novel, large-scale attack. But the downside of modern interconnectivity is that most security secrets on the Internet don’t stay secret in the face of the sorts of repeated probes that the WSJ describes.

In conclusion, one portion of cybersecurity for the electric grid should be to look for opportunities to use greater bandwidth to enable better defensive measures. Other upgrades should also be considered, such as improvements in central management and more effective use of virtual private networks to block attackers from access to remote devices. The main point of the smart grid/smart broadband report, however, remains compelling — we should look for opportunities to build the smart grid in tandem with broadband, to use the stimulus money better and also to achieve additional goals such as cybersecurity.

Note that this is precisely analogous to certain tired arguments over mass transit. It’s true that given the U.S.’s low average population density compared to the Netherlands, that it’s not realistic for us to have as much mass transit as they have. But this doesn’t do anything to explain why a fairly dense city like Los Angeles should have third-rate mass transit. LA doesn’t have modern streetcar lines because instead of upgrading the old ones to modern technology over time, they tore them up! Everyone understands why there’s no subway in Montana—that’s not the issue.