My personal nerdosphere of interest (that’s the Berkman Center/Harvard Law School quadrant of the cyberlaw sector of the whole sort of general technology mish-mash) has been lit up the last few days, following the Daily Beast’s publication of an essay on Harvard’s Berkman Center and Prof. Jonathan Zittrain. A lot of the commentary, from people I know and people I don’t, has condemn the article and its author, one Emily Brill. The article relates to conflicts of interest, so I should admit mine up front: I just graduated from HLS, made a lot of connections with the Berkman Center, and (although we’re not close) did enough work with JZ to regard him as a brilliant professor and a great human being. In spite of all this, I thought there were enough potentially valid points in the essay to warrant mention, and I thought I’d take a minute away from bar review to do so here.

Don’t get me wrong: surrounding the good stuff is a morass of points that are petty, dumb, or wrong. I have no reason to agree with Brill’s innuendo that Prof. Zittrain or anyone else at the Berkman Center is in any way corrupt — far from it. And, well, when you’re writing an article that’s going to upset a small but tightly knit community, you owe it to your own reputation to avoid all the common mistakes that are going to make that community use the phrase “hack job.” Let’s start with the silly stuff: even a little bit of searching would reveal plenty of online record of Zittrain’s sudden, severe illness earlier this year. (I’d link it here, had he not publicly asked for a little privacy after news of his illness hit the web and offers of help poured in). So yes, his excuse for not returning Brill’s emails was a real one.

Looking at the bigger picture, Brill frames her story around a seminar offered by HLS in Palo Alto over this most recent winter term, which Zittrain led and she attended. Now, I’m only capable of an ethical appeal, but look: I don’t know how you spend three weeks in a class led by Zittrain without coming away thinking, at a minimum, that he believes in what he’s saying. If nothing else, I don’t know how you spend three weeks in class with JZ, see the man’s relationship with his iPhone, and come away thinking that he was a single-minded opponent of Steve Jobs… Just so we’re clear: I hold the people I’ve met at the Berkman Center in the highest regard, and I can’t honestly believe anyone involved with it is ready to auction his or her research conclusions to the highest bidder.

But apart from the salacious accusations, I was struck by one thing in the article.

No one has alleged that anyone at Harvard Law School has formulated opinions because he or she was paid to. But Berkman and Zittrain, due in no small part to the force of Harvard’s branding, have become increasingly important players in Internet policy and media circles. The appearance of conflicts matter; even if such conflicts are not the stuff of life and death, as they might be in medical research, they do impact legislation, stock prices, and consumer choices.

The Fortune article I linked above may have been right to classify this paragraph as an editorially mandated walk-back. But it makes a real point: the appearance of conflicts does matter. When I say “blah blah only capable of an ethical appeal,” you’re right to dismiss it as bullshit, because who the hell am I? But when the Berkman Center speaks, well, it’s somebody. To be sure, one of the things that makes Berkman projects so cool is that they don’t simply ask you to take their word that the Internet is like this or like that, they actually go out and show you. But as our society is learning, not all research is created equal. All the talent, methodology, and press releases in the world won’t save research that doesn’t look credible. Prof. Larry Lessig, another HLS affiliate quoted in the article, reminded us of money’s effect on trust in institutions only last fall.^[1]

Brill cites the Center’s “relaxed approach” to ethical guidelines. Though I was never in a position to discover it, I wouldn’t be surprised if that charge were accurate — the Berkman Center has a relaxed approach toward a lot of things, and that’s part of what makes it such a great organization. But as articles like this get written and questions like Brill’s get asked, that approach might inhibit some of the Center’s work, and actually work a net loss on its institutional capital. I hope it doesn’t, and I don’t think it should, but I think it’s a useful prospect to consider more directly.

Actually, that’s another thing that bothered me about the article’s reception. To pick on that Fortune article again, its author introduces Brill herself into the debate in his third paragraph, and uses her identity — well-connected socialite, recently passed over for a Berkman job herself — as a frame for his response. Now, I’m happy to admit that “reporting on reporters” is part of the blogger’s stock in trade. But another part of it is surely collecting the facts, right? And no matter who collects them, they’re worth considering, right?

I didn’t take last winter’s Difficult Problems in Cyberspace course with JZ, but I took a version of it earlier in 2009. Had I taken the second version in sunny California, I would have been very interested to learn that the funding came from Microsoft, but I didn’t learn that until reading Brill’s piece. It sounds like the students in the class didn’t, either. That’s investigative journalism. That’s the kind of fact-finding that, if my Difficult Problems class is to believed, is dying out and ought to be encouraged — even if the facts it turns up are a little uncomfortable.

Update: I just received an email from Larry Kramer, dean of Stanford Law School and the person responsible for organizing and funding the Difficult Problems class. He disputes Ms. Brill’s characterization of the Microsoft money, and I agreed to post his comment to the article:

To say that Professor Zittrain’s class at Stanford was funded by a “special grant” from Microsoft is highly misleading. The class was an experimental and unusual arrangement that involved bringing Harvard students to Stanford for a special three-week joint class. It was arranged long before the grant from Microsoft was even in the works. The grant, in turn, was secured with room for discretionary uses and with no mention of the Zittrain class. We subsequently decided that we could use some of these resources to fund Zittrain’s class, which was within its general terms. But while we did, as a courtesy, let Microsoft know later that we had used a portion of their grant for this purpose, we did not seek their permission. Nor did we inform either Professor Zittrain or the class of the source of funding, as it was irrelevant under the circumstances. Dinners for the three weeks were catered because to fit the course into this short time frame required meeting for many hours each evening, including through the dinner hours.

To my mind, Dean Kramer’s explanation is perfectly credible, and sounds a lot more like how I would imagine a one-off law school class would be funded. It may well be that the central “revelation” in the Daily Beast story is bunk, and there’s no story here at all. So, let me temper my already limited defense of Brill’s reporting — it’s hardly investigative journalism to just make stuff up. Still, maybe it’s an opportunity to remember how the appearance of bias problem works. Even when such an appearance is unfounded, it can interfere with an organization’s capacity to operate in the real world.

1. The main thing is to simply install this wonderful extension, “Click to Call.” Configuration is straightforward, but make sure that you set your “forwarding number” to your physical phone (with no spaces or punctuation), not your GC number. Now, you can click on any phone number in Firefox and get GrandCentral to call your phone! But how will you remember all your contacts’ phone numbers?
2. That’s where Address Book comes in. If your phone has Bluetooth, you should be able to sync your contacts to your Mac.
3. Then, have a look at the script published here. This will export your contacts into a well-formatted local web page. Put the whole “website” directory somewhere (maybe ~/Sites/?).
4. Open the web page in Firefox (should be something like “file:///Users/~/Desktop/HTMLize/website/index.html”), and bookmark it.

Viola — now you have a clickable address book, and you can talk to your entire phonebook for free. I’d still like to see a phone-based solution come down the pipe (I don’t spend all my time interacting with a lifeless machine!), but for now this is a nice way to take advantage of GrandCentral without the confusing two-number issue.

Problems

Let me walk through exactly what happened when my drive crashed. First, of course, was the freak-out. Let me point out that a dead hard drive will put you in a pretty sour mood in any situation, and all the more so if you’ve lost your primary computer at a crucial moment This isn’t relevant to Mozy, precisely, but it’s worth noting as context for the next step: the first restore.

I knew that I’d need my data fast (I had outlines partially completed, for one thing), and I knew that downloading several gigabytes from Mozy would take forever. So, I resolved right from the start to order DVDs. See, for restores, Mozy offers the option of burning your data onto optical media and expediting them to your doorstep. Unfortunately, there were two problems with this method:

1. It costs money. I paid $75.95 to have three DVDs overnighted to me by FedEx. This, on top of the $54.45/year I’d already paid to store an unlimited amount in the first place. Probably, had I been thinking rationally, I would have downloaded the documents I needed for my upcoming exams, and assessed the situation after they were out of the way to see whether I really needed to pay for my system files, preferences, and the rest. Of course, when your drive dies, you’re not thinking rationally — that’s how they getcha.
2. The online tool to select what files I wanted burned and mailed was broken. This led to my first experience with Mozy’s tech support.

I’d gone to a public computer to put my restore order in. When I realized it wasn’t working, I immediately called the first tech support number I saw. Unfortunately, after I read the rep my customer number, he told me that he couldn’t help — phone support is only for business customers. Fine. He directed me to their online chat system, for we $50/year plebes. I connected with another service rep, who quickly made clear that he or she was following a script and wasn’t interested in deviating. I described the problems I encountered with the file selection tool online (unresponsive script, ever-spinning progress indicator). The rep gave no sign he comprehended this at all; finally vanishing for at least five minutes. When he returned, his spelling had improved immensely, and he seemed to have forgotten everything I’d just told him. Anyway, halfway through explaining my plight to the new guy, the tool blinked and displayed my files (for future reference, I think it just hangs for 20 minutes or so on big backups). So, I continued.

I can’t fault Mozy for their communications after I put my DVD order in. Not only did I get a receipt, but they also sent a shipment notification with a tracking number, and an arrival message. Unfortunately, the shipping notification came a full day after I put my order in. I imagine there’s a queue for the still-laggardly DVD burners, but still — I’m paying $76 for overnight delivery.

By the time the DVDs had arrived, my dad had overnighted me his old Toshiba laptop (fortunately, his turnaround time is about an hour), and I eagerly pulled my law school stuff from them to work on. When my MacBook came back from the shop, though, copying my files back was a different story.

Now, let me say up front that part of my problem here was an unrealistic expectation about how Mac restores work. I know that all the user preferences live in ~/Library/, but I couldn’t help backing up all kinds of system folders as well. I thought that I had the same machine as before, so simply copying the old files over the new system-wide would bring me back up and running like my old drive had never died. It didn’t, of course, and an hour later I’d reinstalled Leopard and was ready to try again. This time, I checked the files as I was moving them onto my hard drive. Oddly, the permissions on every file had been reset to read-only. This might have been Mozy’s fault (apparently Mac backup software struggles with metadata) or it might have been mine (maybe reinstalling my OS changed my user account), but it was very annoying to have to piece everything back into place and then modify permissions by hand.

Mac users with more experience than I will note be surprised to learn that overwriting my system files still didn’t work. After another reinstall, I gave up, and started installing my programs by hand, then copying over user preferences with corrected permissions.

Moving on

A good backup experience is like a good plane landing: it’s any one you can walk away from. I walked away from this one with most of my data, but a much better idea of what to expect from Mozy and how I’d continue to use it in the future.

Mozy’s big draw is obviously twofold. First, it backs up your data offsite; second, it does this automatically and incrementally. On the other hand, it’s not a complete backup solution. First, I don’t care if they do offer an unlimited storage plan, you’re not going to have a good time backing up 40GB over the wire. Not only will it take forever to get there, but once they’ve got it, they can essentially ransom it to you (I didn’t even try to download my data en masse, but that’s in part because I’d heard that Mozy struggles with even smaller downloads). Apart from that, my experience should show that you can’t treat file-by-file backups as a drag-and-drop solution at the deep system level.

Instead, I plan to keep using Mozy by taking advantage of its strengths, and complementing its weaknesses. I’ve got some irreplaceable stuff on my hard drive, and a lot of it changes daily. Thus, I’m happy to back up my important data — documents, preferences, etc. — incrementally. For me, and probably for you too, the stuff that really does change frequently is small (individual documents, for instance), and the big stuff (photos, primarily) is just a one-time push.

At the same time I’ve discovered that irreplaceables alone don’t constitute a complete backup. Especially when deadlines loom, there’s a lot to be said for a bootable restore option, and Mozy ain’t it. I haven’t moved into my new place yet, but when I do, I intend to supplement Mozy’s online backups with a more conventional image dump to a hard drive sitting next to my desk. This will take a while, so I’ll probably only schedule it weekly, but it’ll also allow me to simply Ghost the image onto my new laptop drive and boot up as normal. If my documents are a few days out of date, Mozy can retrieve the most recent versions.

I’ve got several smaller complaints about Mozy as a piece of software (for instance, automatic updates still don’t work, plugging in an Ethernet cable terminates my uploads, and their tech support on both these issues still sucks), but when it works, the service it provides is just so useful that I can keep justifying the $50/year price tag. I hope it continues to improve, but right now Mozy will stay a part of my backup plan.

I love the Change Congress initiative. But as nearly as I can tell, it hasn’t really gotten off the ground (even change-congress.org has yet to launch). While jumping into the special election would have gained the nascent movement cheap publicity, it would come at the cost of credibility once Lessig lost. Forced to fundraise before he could ever publicize his anti-special interest message, that message might be dramatically undercut before the word ever got out. Even if he could win, the life of a freshman Congressman doesn’t admit much time for the kind of management that Prof. Lessig would need to do to grow his organization. Just like his earlier project, Creative Commons, I think he could be most effective as a professor, not a politician.

(While we’re on the subject of cheap publicity for the Change Congress movement, though, well, last week’s evidence indicates that a move back to Harvard would do the trick…)