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I am currently at a conference hosted by the Berkman Center and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, at the USC Annenberg School of Communications. The point is to talk about how we can merge new and traditional media in ways that can improve society. It is also presented as an occasion for the the MacArthur foundation to think about how they should shape their media funding in the future.

Lots of interesting people here, and halfway through the day. I’m sitting in a session with nine (?!) of people on the panel, and it’s developing more or less as a conversation. Jeez Berkman, your panels have almost no women on them.

Michael Smolens from DotSub gave an introductory presentation, about how his project is trying to break down language barriers. He told me yesterday that they are launching an update to the website soon, and that you will now be able to view DotSub videos with subtitles in any language on iPhones. This is what they are working on right now: Pangea Day.

Caramba, Global Voices is getting mentioned on every single panel today. And I haven’t said a single word.

Smolens used a Global Voices post as a key example of how subtitles can become a powerful vehicle for distribution. He showed a post written by Chris Salzberg in Japan a couple of months ago, about a video of a Japanese nuclear reactor leak. Chris added English subtitles to the video. It was picked up by whistle-blower site, Wikileaks, and from there it was Slashdotted, jamming DotSub’s servers for several hours.

In his presentation, Mark Jones from Reuters, is frank about the difficulty of convincing “old media” colleagues about the ability to trust Global Voices (for instance) as “authenticators of content”, and says he often brings up Global Voices’ Harvard origins to help persuade them (we, in turn, tend to mention our Reuters friendship). His point is that part of the challenge of getting “old media” to interact with “new media” is developing new mechanisms of trust and authentication. Ivan Sigal, who is also on the panel, suggests this might be helped along by “old media” being more honest and open about their own methods and limitations.

My favorite thing about these conferences is learning about new projects and seeing the people behind them. One brand new project I hadn’t seen before, is Vocalo. An idea to allow people to upload audio reports via telephone to the web, and have them broadcast on local public radio in Northwest Indiana and Chicago. Neat.

And now, lunch.

My colleague, Ethan Zuckerman is doing an incredible job (as usual) of live-blogging what people are talking about. He’s a much faster typer and thought-digester than I am. Oh, and if you want to hear what he sounds like, Ethan and I were interviewed together on Radio Open Source recently.

(I am sure he is happy now that Radio Open Source has put a much, much nicer picture of him to accompany the story.)

My colleague Georgia thinks it wasn’t our fault, but I find it just a little conspicuous that the power went out in all of Southern Florida the moment 10 Global Voices bloggers all plugged their laptops into power sockets in the Miami house we rented for the week. See Georgia’s photos here.

With so many temptations on the internet, it’s no wonder the students at a training camp for Mormon missionaries are required to use a special monitored email service. This is just a minor detail of a longer article in GOOD Magazine about young people who are trained like soldiers by the church and sent out into the world to convert people.

As the little white Missionary Handbook reads, for email “use only MyLDSMail.net, the filtered service established by the Church.… While using computers, always stay next to your companion so that you can see each other’s monitors.”

I visited the link, and thought the website was kind of funny. I mean I know nothing is totally secret on the internet, but imagine choosing to open an email account specifically because you know you will be watched. Is there a business model there? Maybe Facebook should pretend they are spying on us for our own good.

Last night I got an email from an acquaintance saying Mac owners should no longer feel safe. It’s not a virus, but a different kind of malicious software called a trojan. Unlike a virus, is doesn’t self-replicate, but relies on a user to do something stupid, like click on something they shouldn’t on the internet. As I understand it, this then allows the bad guys to access your computer.

The sender of the email was an Israeli security expert called Gadi Evron (who I once interviewed at a Hacker’s convention in Berlin for Danish radio).

Here’s what he said:

For whoever didn’t hear, there is a Macintosh trojan in-the-wild being dropped, infecting mac users. Yes, it is being done by a regular online gang–itw–it is not yet another proof of concept. The same gang infects Windows machines as well, just that now they also target macs.

This means one thing: Apple’s day has finally come and Apple users are going to get hit hard. All those unpatched vulnerabilities from years past are going to bite them in the behind.

Gadi links to a post by Alex Eckelberry on Sunbelt Blog who seems somewhat satisfied that Mac users are now getting a taste of what it’s like for PC users to be under attack. Schadenfreude? Yeah, I think so. But Eckelberry provides a helpful description and a screenshot of the trojan. He says this is something really common on porn videos, and that people get reeled in when something comes up telling them a “reputable video” will only play if a piece of software is downloaded.

Like so:

Quicktime Player is unable to play movie file.
Please click here to download new version of codec.

I’m sure Slashdot must be bustling with comments on this, but before I could even look it up, I got an email from my cousin Christian, quoting Bojan Zdrnja at the SANS Internet Storm Center:

As I said, although the Trojan is really simple, it could have done much worst things (once the installer script has root privileges, it is game over anyway). This malware shows that we must not ignore Mac machines and that Mac users should not think they are invulnerable just by using a Mac and that they can click on absolutely everything.

Be careful out there.

Yesterday, I wrote a short post on Blogbyblog about the new online efforts of two Danish members of parliament, and was happy to see a direct response from one of them within 24 hours of writing the post. I guess it’s one of the benefits of coming from a small country – all I ever got from Hillary Clinton in the United States was a standard email written by someone else.

The commenting politician is Ellen Trane Nørby. She is the media spokesperson for the Danish liberal party (Venstre), and she is on Flickr, Skype, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube, and also has her own blog. Ellen says she agrees with me that using services like this will get more exciting when they are used to involve citizens actively in the political process rather than as tools for simple self promotion. Political comparisons aside, she’s no Segolene Royal. Yet.

The other politician I mentioned is social democrat Mogens Lykketoft. He has a new website, which he introduces with the following video. You don’t have to speak Danish to see that the level of ambition for what he expects citizen to do with his website is pretty limited. I don’t know why he writes down words like YouTube on cardboard cards while he says them. Cute? Or patronizing?

I don’t really mean to criticize the effort, but it would be nice for politicians to speak to citizens like thinking adults with useful views (Here’s one idea: better microphone). His next videos are much better, but only because he sticks with the politics.

See Dan Rather interview a young Karl Rove (the kid with the sideburns) in this piece on the Nixon campaign of 1972. The machine that automatically opens letters with campaign contributions is pretty nifty. I suppose today’s day equivalent would be online contributions. (Thanks to VSL)

I lose track, what’s the fashion comeback of the moment? The 80s? Today, I accidentally stumbled on a webpage that made me wonder if we’ll ever have a webdesign comeback of the 90s: Independent Payphone Association of New York (turn on sound).

I guess once that cell-phone fad caught on, they didn’t bother to update the website.

Check out what your favourite websites looked like in the old days. Waybackwhen Machine.

Just enter the name of a song or band you like, and press go. A database of 400,000 songs feeds you streaming music similar to the stuff you like.

It’s accurate because every song in the database has 200-400 attributes associated to it. And when it’s not accurate, you can give it the thumbs down to teach it never to do that again.

The FBI has found a sneaky way to remotely activate cell phone microphones to snoop on conversations even when the phone is switched off. If you have reason to believe you’re being listened to, the only safe thing to do is peel the battery out of the phone, says a security expert interviewed on CNET. And surprise, surprise it’s legal “because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect’s cell phone.”