Mark Bauerlein has an article on the difficulty of slow reading online.

In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, Nielsen exclaimed, "’Reading’ is not even the right word." The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines, and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the "nut" and nothing else. A 2003 Nielsen warning asserted that a PDF file strikes users as a "content blob," and they won’t read it unless they print it out. A "booklike" page on screen, it seems, turns them off and sends them away.

In the July Atlantic’s cover story, Nick Carr has an interesting and provocative article about the effects of Google and other Internet technologies on our cognitive processes.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition…The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

In other words, don’t forget to read books!

A peek behind the scenes of RIAA’s anti-piracy efforts from the New Zealand Herald:

To root out illegal file-sharing activity, the RIAA works with Maryland-based MediaSentry, which has developed customized programs that also operate over the Gnutella network. MediaSentry has a list of recordings owned by RIAA-member companies and, like any P2P user, can search for a music file by song title.

MediaSentry then collects alphanumeric “hash” codes it discovers online that are associated with these recordings. LimeWire and similar programs will identify how many users are sharing the same file as identified by the hash code. The combination of song titles and hash codes listed in the ever-growing database are the foundation and starting point of all RIAA investigations.

What has the world come to?  Amazon is spitting out an error message currently, and it’s been going on for at least a few minutes now.  Some systems administrators over there are surely having a baad day right now. The error is Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.

In Congressional testimony on Wednesday, FBI Directory Robert Mueller said that FBI surveillance of the Internet should be done “whether it be .mil, .gov, .com–whichever network you’re talking about.” Two recent articles lay out the scope and nature of this proposed surveillance, which, as we live more of our lives in a networked online medium, has significant Fourth Amendment implications.

The FBI and other federal agencies have since 2001 been marching towards centralization, sharing information and resources to better coordinate efforts across agency lines.  No matter how well coordinated federal agencies become, however, criminal activities remain scattered across the Internet.  As Jon Stokes writes:

One of the FBI’s more recent efforts at centrally coordinating the fight against these “diffuse” activities is the Fusion Center, which I described in a recent article as “low-profile, highly secure sites where federal and state officials with top-secret clearance meet in order to collect, analyze, and redistribute information on ‘all hazards, all threats.’”

But while Fusion Centers centralize law enforcement efforts, they do not centralize the criminal activity. There are places, however, where such activity is centralized: the backbone hubs located in hosting facilities across the country. All of the Internet’s activity, legal and illegal, flows through these “choke points,” and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off data.

It is at these “choke points” or “backbone hubs” where the FBI would like to conduct its perpetual surveillance of all Internet activity, including legal activity.  This debate, while largely under the radar of the mainstream media, is important to air publicly.  Again, Jon Stokes:

I want to point out that this centralization of legal and illegal activity at network hubs will be a persistent part of all of our lives as we live more and more of them online. Thus the government’s desire to tap those hubs and filter them for criminal and hostile activity will never go away. The current debate over who gets to do what and how with network hubs is akin to the foundational debates over property and taxes with which we started America, so it’s important that we have it in the light of day and that we all participate.

It is a debate that requires public dialogue rather than back room deals.