Viewing Where the Internet Goes

When Edward J. Snowden, the disaffected National Security Agency contract employee, purloined tens of thousands of classified documents from computers around the world, his actions — and their still-reverberating consequences — heightened international pressure to control the network that has increasingly become the world’s stage. At issue is the technical principle that is the basis for the Internet, its “any-to-any” connectivity. That capability has defined the technology ever since Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn sequestered themselves in the conference room of a Palo Alto, Calif., hotel in 1973, with the task of interconnecting computer networks for an elite group of scientists, engineers and military personnel.

The two men wound up developing a simple and universal set of rules for exchanging digital information — the conventions of the modern Internet. Despite many technological changes, their work prevails.

But while the Internet’s global capability to connect anyone with anything has affected every nook and cranny of modern life — with politics, education, espionage, war, civil liberties, entertainment, sex, science, finance and manufacturing all transformed — its growth increasingly presents paradoxes.

It was, for example, the Internet’s global reach that made classified documents available to Mr. Snowden — and made it so easy for him to distribute them to news organizations.

Yet the Internet also made possible widespread surveillance, a practice that alarmed Mr. Snowden and triggered his plan to steal and publicly release the information.

With the Snowden affair starkly highlighting the issues, the new year is likely to see renewed calls to change the way the Internet is governed. In particular, governments that do not favor the free flow of information, especially if it’s through a system designed by Americans, would like to see the Internet regulated in a way that would “Balkanize” it by preventing access to certain websites.

The debate right now involves two international organizations, usually known by their acronyms, with different views: Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and the I.T.U., or International Telecommunication Union.

Icann, a nonprofit that oversees the Internet’s basic functions, like the assignment of names to websites, was established in 1998 by the United States government to create an international forum for “governing” the Internet. The United States continues to favor this group.

The I.T.U., created in 1865 as the International Telegraph Convention, is the United Nations telecommunications regulatory agency. Nations like Brazil, China and Russia have been pressing the United States to switch governance of the Internet to this organization.

Dr. Cerf, 70, and Dr. Kahn, 75, have taken slightly different positions on the matter. Dr. Cerf, who was chairman of Icann from 2000-7, has become known as an informal “Internet ambassador” and a strong proponent of an Internet that remains independent of state control. He has been one of the major supporters of the idea of “network neutrality” — the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications, regardless of the source.

Dr. Kahn has made a determined effort to stay out of the network neutrality debate. Nevertheless, he has been more willing to work with the I.T.U., particularly in attempting to build support for a system, known as Digital Object Architecture, for tracking and authenticating all content distributed through the Internet.

Both men agreed to sit down, in separate interviews, to talk about their views on the Internet’s future. The interviews were edited and condensed.

The Internet Ambassador

After serving as a program manager at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Vinton Cerf joined MCI Communications Corp., an early commercial Internet company that was purchased by Verizon in 2006, to lead the development of electronic mail systems for the Internet. In 2005, he became a vice president and “Internet evangelist” for Google. Last year he became the president of the Association for Computing Machinery, a leading international educational and scientific computing society.

Q. Edward Snowden’s actions have raised a new storm of controversy about the role of the Internet. Is it a significant new challenge to an open and global Internet?

A. The answer is no, I don’t think so. There are some similar analogues in history. The French historically copied every telex or every telegram that you sent, and they shared it with businesses in order to remain competitive. And when that finally became apparent, it didn’t shut down the telegraph system.

The Snowden revelations will increase interest in end-to-end cryptography for encrypting information both in transit and at rest. For many of us, including me, who believe that is an important capacity to have, this little crisis may be the trigger that induces people to spend time and energy learning how to use it.

You’ve drawn the analogy to a road or highway system. That brings to mind the idea of requiring a driver’s license to use the Internet, which raises questions about responsibility and anonymity.

I still believe that anonymity is an important capacity, that people should have the ability to speak anonymously. It’s argued that people will be encouraged to say untrue things, harmful things, especially if they believe they are anonymous.

There is a tension there, because in some environments the only way you will be able to behave safely is to have some anonymity.

Where Car Is King, Smartphones May Cut Traffic

But now licensed cabdrivers in this city where the car remains king are facing their greatest competition in half a century, from new ride-sharing programs that use smartphone apps to connect drivers and passengers.

At the end of a night of drinking recently, rather than hailing a cab, Trisha DiFazio tapped an app called Lyft on her phone to summon a ride. Minutes later, a graduate student moonlighting as a driver pulled up in a Toyota S.U.V. with Lyft’s signature pink mustache affixed to its grille.

“This is so much cheaper than a cab, and so much easier,” said Ms. DiFazio, 31. “I absolutely think my friends drink and drive less because of this.”

Transit experts say these new services, which appeal to younger riders, could play a crucial role in ending the reign of single-occupant cars (and unending traffic) in Los Angeles, and many young residents have embraced them as a cheaper, more reliable and, well, more fun way to get around the city. But some of the city’s licensed cabdrivers have another name for ride-sharing services: illegal bandit taxis.

Last month, city regulators sided with the cab companies and sent cease-and-desist orders to Lyft and two other companies offering ride-sharing services, Uber and Sidecar, ordering them to shut down immediately. “It’s the Wild West with these operators,” said Tom Drischler, the taxicab administrator for the city’s Department of Transportation. “You have folks driving private cars and picking up strangers. Public safety is our assignment, and I don’t think it’s safe for the public.”

All three companies have refused to leave town, asserting that agreements they made with state regulators allow them to operate anywhere in the state.

Smartphone-based ride-hailing services have faced opposition from taxi companies and city regulators almost everywhere they have appeared, from Las Vegas to Cambridge, Mass. But the fight here is complicated by longstanding efforts by city officials to alleviate traffic and reduce drunken driving.

Last week, on his first full day in office as the new mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti proudly proclaimed that Los Angeles was beginning to leave behind its culture of car ownership. And Juan Matute, director of the Local Climate Change Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that if more people used ride-sharing services — even just 3 percent of the population, he said — substantial reductions in driving in Los Angeles could result.

“It would be easier to share rides that are incidental to daily life,” he said.

Unlike the new companies, the taxi industry here, which pays about $4 million a year to the city in franchise fees and vehicle permits, is tightly regulated for safety.

In addition to franchise and inspection fees, regulated taxis have to serve far-flung and low-income parts of the city where Lyft drivers need not venture. The city also requires cab companies to offer disabled-accessible vehicles, which William Rouse, the general manager of Los Angeles Yellow Cab, said his company did at a loss. “If they’re going to skirt our entire cost structure,” he said, “then they’re going to be able to get away with charging less and still make a profit.”

Rather than a metered fare, Lyft has a suggested donation, typically about 20 percent cheaper than a cab. Riders can pay as much or as little as they like, although those who frequently shortchange drivers have a tough time getting rides.

Jano Youssefi, an Iranian immigrant who has driven cabs in Los Angeles for 15 years, said his income had dropped at least 20 percent in the six months since Lyft rolled into town. “We are not making money anymore,” Mr. Youssefi said.

Yet, even as the threat of arrest hangs over drivers — some Lyft drivers removed the pink mustaches from their grilles after the cease-and-desist order — interest in the new programs seems to be on the increase. Drivers for Lyft and Sidecar use their own cars, and typically keep about 80 percent of the payments passengers offer, while the company keeps the rest. Uber also offers a service that connects passengers with licensed, professional luxury car drivers, as well as people driving their own cars.

Justin Riley, who began driving for Lyft a month ago, said he enjoyed the flexible hours, which gave him time to work on getting his tech start-up company off the ground. “It’s allowed me to discover L.A.,” he said. “I’ve met so many diverse people, heard so many great stories.”

But Mr. Drischler, the city taxicab administrator, said the collegial environment was part of the problem. Before safety partitions were installed in cabs two decades ago, he said, one cabdriver was killed every 18 months in Los Angeles. “I’m honestly worried for the drivers of those companies,” he said. “I have two daughters in their 20s, and I would never let them drive for those companies.”

The California Public Utilities Commission is writing rules for smartphone ride-hailing services.

Opinion: Where Do Old Cellphones Go to Die?

In far-flung, mostly impoverished places like Agbogbloshie, Ghana; Delhi, India; and Guiyu, China, children pile e-waste into giant mountains and burn it so they can extract the metals — copper wires, gold and silver threads — inside, which they sell to recycling merchants for only a few dollars. In India, young boys smash computer batteries with mallets to recover cadmium, toxic flecks of which cover their hands and feet as they work. Women spend their days bent over baths of hot lead, “cooking” circuit boards so they can remove slivers of gold inside. Greenpeace, the Basel Action Network and others have posted YouTube videos of young children inhaling the smoke that rises from burned phone casings as they identify and separate different kinds of plastics for recyclers. It is hard to imagine that good health is a by-product of their unregulated industry.

Indeed, most scientists agree that exposure poses serious health risks, especially to pregnant women and children. The World Health Organization reports that even a low level of exposure to lead, cadmium and mercury (all of which can be found in old phones) can cause irreversible neurological damage and threaten the development of a child.

The growing toxic nightmare that is e-waste is not confined to third world outposts. It also poses health problems in the United States where, for several years, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has kept inmates busy processing e-waste. There are concrete steps the government, manufacturers and consumers could take to better dispose of electronic trash and to help prevent the pileup of more e-waste and the hazards e-waste processing poses.

The United States, for example, remains the only industrialized country that has not ratified the Basel Convention, an international treaty that makes it illegal to export or traffic in toxic e-waste. Fully implementing the treaty would be a step toward joining global efforts to contain toxic waste troubles.

The Responsible Electronics Recycling Act, introduced in Congress in 2011, would have made it illegal to export toxic waste from the United States to countries that don’t belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The aim was to stop dumping e-waste on the world’s poorest nations and thus to provide an incentive for safer waste management in our own country. The bill had bipartisan support but was never put to a vote.

The European Union provides a model for industrial regulation that would shift the burden of safe product disposal back to the manufacturers that produce electronic goods. Its Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive requires electronic sellers to accept, free of charge, any of their used products brought in by customers for recycling. The goal is to have properly recycled 85 percent of the European Union’s e-waste by 2019. Similarly, Japan requires its electronic manufacturers to establish their own recycling facilities or commission third parties to recycle a range of products, from computers and cellphones to TVs and air-conditioners.

Government or consumer pressure on manufacturers to design electronics with end-of-product-life issues in mind could be enormously helpful. Most cellphones, for example, are deliberately designed to make disassembly difficult. Changes in the way manufacturers glue, screw and solder components together would make it easier to dismantle discarded phones and thus reduce the risks posed by crude recycling techniques like those deployed by Ghanaian children.

THERE are alternative phone service business models that could be beneficial to producers, users and the rest of us. For example, manufacturers could sell products complete with prearranged recycling service or subscriptions that made it possible, for example, for phone user to exchange old units for new ones rather than throwing them away. Under a product service system model, companies recycle old units and repurpose core components. Xerox uses a similar model for its photocopiers, without impact on sales or profits.

In the absence of government regulation or industry initiative, consumers could play a role in determining what happens to products that have outlived their usefulness. Most phones and small electronics are designed with obsolescence in mind. But what if we held on to our gadgets longer and repaired, rather than replaced them? We could recycle the ones we no longer use through certified recycling services like e-Stewards, a nonprofit organization that runs certification programs for e-waste recyclers, ensuring that goods are not improperly exported.

As consumers we need to demand better end-of-life options for our high-tech trash; if manufacturers and government fall down on the job, we, the millions of Americans who own cellphones, should press for safe recycling.

Leyla Acaroglu is a sustainability strategist based in Melbourne, Australia.

Where Mail With Illegible Addresses Goes to Be Read

“Is that a 7 or a 9 in the address?” Ms. Stark said to no one in particular. Then she typed in a few numbers and a list of possible addresses popped up on her screen. “Looks like a 9,” she said before selecting an address, apparently in Jersey City. The letter disappears and another one appears on the screen.

“That means I got it right,” Ms. Stark said.

Ms. Stark is one of the Postal Service’s data conversion operators, a techie title for someone who deciphers unreadable addresses, and she is one of the last of a breed. In September, the post office will close one of its two remaining centers where workers try to read the scribble on envelopes and address labels that machines cannot. At one time, there were 55 plants around the country where addresses rejected by machines were guessed at by workers aided with special software to get the mail where it was intended.

But improved scanning technology now allows machines to “read” virtually all of the 160 billion pieces of mail that moved through the system last year. As machines have improved, workers have been let go, and after September, the facility here will be the post office’s only center for reading illegible mail.

“We understand that these remote encoding centers were planned as a temporary fix,” said Barbara Batin, the center’s operations manager, using the facilities’ formal name. “They were created and deployed with the knowledge that new technology would eventually put us out of work.”

But for now, this center operates 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. More than 700 workers stare at images of letters, packages, change-of-address cards and other mail, trying to figure out where they are supposed to go. It is not easy work. With software, a knowledge of geography and more than a little intuition, an operator has exactly 90 seconds to move each piece of mail.

When mail-sorting machines around the country encounter addresses they cannot read, an electronic image of the bad handwriting or faded address is transmitted to operators here who view them and try to fill in the missing information by typing in a letter or a number. Once corrected, the information is returned to the processing plant where the mail is sent on to a local post office, ultimately ending up where it is supposed to go.

“We get the worst of the worst,” Ms. Batin said. “It used to be that we’d get letters that were somewhat legible but the machines weren’t good enough to read them. Now we get letters and packages with the most awful handwriting you can imagine. Still, it’s our job to make sure it gets to where it’s supposed to go.”

Over the years, the Postal Service has become the world leader in optical character recognition — software capable of reading computer-generated lettering and handwriting — sinking millions of dollars into equipment that can read nearly 98 percent of all hand-addressed mail and 99.5 percent of machine-addressed pieces.

That was not always the case. In the beginning, people sorted mail. As the volume and variety increased, the post office turned to automation. But the machines could read only about 35 percent of the mail at first and had trouble with handwritten addresses. So the Postal Service set up the centers, using people to supplement the scanners. At the height of the program, in 1997, the centers processed 19 billion images annually, about 10 percent of all mail at the time, the post office said.

In the last year, this center, and the one in Wichita, Kan., that will close in September, deciphered just 2.4 billion images, or a mere 1.5 percent of the mail, the post office said.

Speed is important. Each worker in this nearly football-field-length room is expected to process about 1,200 images an hour, and they average three seconds an image.

Ubisoft’s Montreal Studio, Where Artists Are Superheroes

Mr. Measroch, a lively 36-year-old sound-effects artist, spends his days figuring out how to make noises he’s never heard — like that of an 18th-century musket being loaded or the thump of someone’s skull hitting the deck of a warship. A selection of wooden flooring samples also helps him create the sounds of each character’s footfalls, no matter in what location, or century, they appear. “A big part of the job is footsteps,” he explains.

The footsteps belong to characters like Jason Brody, the protagonist of Far Cry 3, a best-selling first-person shooter game created by Ubisoft. The company is the world’s fourth-largest game maker, ranked by sales, after Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts and Nintendo, according to Michael Pachter, an industry analyst at Wedbush Securities. But Ubisoft’s video game production studio in Montreal, where Mr. Measroch works, is one of the world’s largest, with a staff of 2,500. It is here where an overwhelmingly male staff of writers, producers, coders, directors, animators, artists and others come together to create the fantasy worlds of games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, into which millions of people escape.

When people play a Ubisoft game, Mr. Measroch’s ingenuity has wedded the on-screen action with the sounds that make it feel authentic. This may be technologically sophisticated entertainment, but when a clanking pirate falls on a ship’s deck, the sound is actually Mr. Measroch banging a leather handbag with metal rings against a slab of wood. When wind rustles through tall grass, he’s gently waving the hula skirt in front of his microphone. Leaves shaking in a breeze? That’s him shaking the camouflage net.

The company is perhaps most admired for its games’ attention to detail — the historical accuracy of a swordfight in Renaissance Italy, for example, or the emotional nuance in a villain’s sneer. In 2012, Ubisoft was named best video game publisher by six industry groups at E3, the annual industry conference, and won the award for best technology for Far Cry 3 at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March.

“When you play an E.A. game, it feels like the business people got the last word,” says Stephen Totilo, editor in chief of the video game Web site Kotaku (and an occasional game reviewer for The New York Times). “With Ubisoft, you can tell that the creative people did. It’s pretty clear they take far more creative risks, even in a sequel. They’re definitely putting art ahead of other companies.”

THE Montreal studio of Ubisoft fills a five-story red brick building, a former textile factory built in 1903 that covers a city block at the northern end of Boulevard St. Laurent.

The company is based in Rennes, France; it was founded by five brothers from Brittany in 1986. They opened the studio in Montreal in 1997, lured by generous tax credits. American competitors soon followed — Electronic Arts in 2004 and a Quebec division of Warner Brothers Games in 2008 — making Montreal a video game industry center.

The company takes pains to achieve authenticity — sending a staff member to sailing school, for example, so he could help create a detailed naval fight scene in Assassin’s Creed — but it does not put art ahead of money. It keeps costs down and hedges its bets. (There are nine installments in the less-costly-to-make Just Dance series.) For the first nine months of its current fiscal year, through Dec. 31, 2012, sales totaled 1.1 billion euros, or about $1.4 billion, up 20 percent from 900 million euros in the comparable year-earlier period.

Still, the lucrative business of making video games, which for major game makers like Ubisoft remains largely dependent on repeat success of blockbuster sequels, is now being challenged by the rising popularity of mobile technology like smartphones and tablets. Another Montreal studio, THQ, recently filed for bankruptcy, as did Atari, for years an industry leader.

“It’s a vulnerable industry,” says Nate Wooley, publisher of the Web site Game Industry News.

And the best way to stay strong, suggests Yannis Mallat, chief executive of Ubisoft’s Montreal studio, is to keep pushing the excitement of the experience. “A few years ago,” he says, “there was room in the marketplace for average games. Now, players are more demanding, and rightfully so.”

The games are tested in-house at every stage, with producers hoping their work produces “goose bumps,” says Luc Duchaine, a former game producer there who is now Ubisoft’s Montreal director of communications.

The company is particularly known for its extensive use of performance capture, in which a director works with hired actors. The actors’ gestures and facial expressions, translated into animation, make the characters more emotionally resonant, as in the case of Vaas Montenegro, the Far Cry 3 villain played by the actor Michael Mando.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the year that Ubisoft was founded. It was 1986, not 1996.

A Web Site Where Latvians’ Ideas Can Become Law

Janis Pipars for The New York TimesKristofs Blaus, 24, one of the founders of a Latvian Web site where citizens can start petitions.

CESIS, Latvia — Pulling up to a snow-covered front yard in this pretty little town last month, Alexander Grunte pointed to the chain-link fence, where a sad-eyed yellow mutt was tied up. “They’re so happy to get attention,” he said of the dog, which had jumped up and started barking. “Sometimes, it’s almost like they’re crying.”

The plight of local dogs left tied up alone outdoors has long bothered Mr. Grunte, a soft-spoken father of two and a translator of technical documents. So in January he went online and, usingManaBalss.lv, a Latvian Web site whose name translates to"My Voice,"created a parliamentary bill to make the practice illegal in Latvia. “I’ve never done anything political before,” he said. “But this was very easy.”

With the help of ManaBalss, he has a chance to see his proposal enacted into law by the Latvian Parliament. Thanks to a parliamentary rule passed shortly after the opening of the ManaBalss site in 2011, initiatives that gather 10,000 signatures from citizens 16 or older must be taken up by Parliament. Signatures can be gathered online, where they are verified using the same transaction codes that Latvians use for online banking.

With fewer than 2,000 signatures so far, Mr. Grunte’s proposal faces some headwinds, but he is still optimistic. “Even if it is declined by the Parliament, or even if it does not gain 10,000 signatures, it can already be considered as successful because of the wide publicity of the idea,” he said.

Latvia consistently has one of the lowest levels of political engagement and trust in government institutions in the European Union. Until recently, its national politics were largely controlled by a handful of business tycoons who amassed fortunes during the privatization of the 1990s and who are said to have chosen Latvia’s last president in a secret meeting in a zoo.

But ManaBalss now puts Latvia at the forefront of European efforts to shift some forms of political participation to the Internet. Last year, both Finland and the European Commission started official online platforms for citizens’ initiatives, and Iceland recently crowd-sourced some of the changes to a new constitution over the Internet.

At ManaBalss, anyone with an idea can suggest a change to the way things are done in Latvia, be it reducing the value-added tax on food or requiring that all employees of state institutions practice Bikram yoga. If the proposal meets several basic requirements — it must be legal, provide a solution and include a plan of action — volunteer experts offer advice on how to restate the suggestion as a more formal proposal. Then, if 100 people agree that the issue is important, and the site’s volunteer lawyers think it is feasible, the idea goes public.

According to ManaBalss, about 600,000 people, a number roughly equivalent to a fourth of the Latvian population, have visited the site, where 500 initiatives have been listed. So far, those initiatives have received a total of just over 174,000 signatures; seven have reached the 10,000 threshold.

Two popular ManaBalss ideas — that Parliament should be obliged to consider ManaBalss-type citizens’ initiatives supported by online signatures and that the state should know the names of the beneficiaries of offshore holdings — have been enacted into law by Parliament. Two more ManaBalss initiatives, one about traffic law and another about who should pay for hepatitis C treatment, are under consideration in Parliament.

Of course, some suggestions, like “I just want to lead a good life” and “Let’s sack the president,” never make it past ManaBalss’s initial hurdles. “Latvia should petition the U.S. to become the 51st state,” on the other hand, would probably meet the requirements to go public, according to Kristofs Blaus, one of the site’s founders. “Then we see what the people say,” he said, with a shrug.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 11, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the given name of the lawmaker who disagreed with a colleague, Boriss Cilevics, who had scoffed at ManaBalss. She is Lolita Cigane, not Lola.  

Bits Blog: A Place Where Old Computers Go to Live

An I.B.M. computer control panel at the museum was recently outfitted with L.E.D. lights.

SEATTLE — Paul Allen, Microsoft’s other founder, with Bill Gates, has a number of museums. There is the Jimi Hendrix Music Experience and his Flying Heritage Collection. The common theme is “hands on.” You can play a musical instrument and the planes fly.

That is no less true for the Living Computer Museum, a relatively new addition. Housed in a three-story warehouse south of downtown Seattle, its striking feature is that almost all the computers, even those manufactured in the 1960s, actually work.

The showcase machines are legends — like the Digital Equipment Corporation KL-10 introduced in 1974 and esoteric XKL TOAD-1, a clone of the DEC10. (The Digital Equipment meme runs throughout the museum, possibly because these are the computers Mr. Allen grew up programming.)

Opened rather quietly last fall, the museum hasn‘t attracted much publicity. That may be true in part because it appears that the collection has been intended for Mr. Allen and his more technical friends, as much as the general public. Indeed, the showcase computers, housed in a realistic “machine room,” are systems you probably have never heard of — unless you were a computer hacker in the 1960s or 1970s.

One sign that the museum may continue to cater to a rather elite clientele is the party that Mr. Allen held on Tuesday evening to introduce the museum to 150 industry pioneers and a handful of computer journalists — as least those who were writing about computers in the 1970s.

Attendees included pioneers from a number of computing eras: Mr. Gates, of course — the two men posed together, recreating an iconic picture from the 1980s; Bob Frankston and Dan Fylstra of Visicalc (the first spreadsheet); Chris Espinosa, who worked with Steve Jobs in the original garage; Larry Tesler, who came to Apple from Xerox PARC to help design the Lisa; Les Ernest, the assistant director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who could arguably be said to have invented the predecessors of both Facebook and Twitter; Lee Felsenstein, the designer of two early personal computers, the SOL and the Osborne 1; Nolan Bushnell of Atari; Esther Dyson, one of the first PC industry impresarios, and her brother George, the computer historian.

Then there was John Draper, known as “Captain Crunch” for discovering an inexpensive method for getting free phone calls by using the whistle from a cereal box. Mr. Draper, who said he is working on his memoirs and now living in Las Vegas, gently teased Mr. Gates, because it was Mr. Draper’s word processor, known as EZ Writer, that I.B.M. chose to offer with the first PC in 1981. Mr. Gates had not yet developed Word.

Mr. Gates said he remembered Mr. Draper, who was indirectly instrumental in creating Apple Computer, by teaching the company’s two founders how to make phone fraud devices known as Blue Boxes. (Mr. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak then sold the devices to raise money to start Apple.)

That Mr. Allen has managed to resurrect so many historic computers is remarkable. He has done it with a relatively small team of seven engineers and a handful of outside consultants. In some cases they have gone to extraordinary lengths to recreate machines where the original instruction manuals have long since vanished.

In other cases they have had to finesse the job, when original parts are no longer available or frequently fail. For example, Keith Perez, the lead restoration engineer for the museum, acknowledged that the beautiful display panel of flashing lights for a vintage IBM 360 now blinked with the aid of a number of LED lights. The originals burned out frequently, even at lower than normal power settings, he said.

At the end of the event, two buses took Mr. Allen’s guests to a downtown hotel for dinner, where engineers swapped tall tales from various computer eras. Before he left for the evening Mr. Allen told the group that when he and Mr. Gates worked for MITS, the maker of the first personal computer, in Albuquerque, he would handle telephone support calls after he finished his day job of writing software.

The computer maker had underpriced the machine at $439, and it was such a hot seller that to lower its costs the company had begun shipping the machine without any internal memory. People would then call to say they had assembled the computer and turned it on and it didn’t work, he recalled. Mr. Allen would then ask them if all the lights on the computer’s front panel were lit. If they were, that meant there was no DRAM (dynamic random access memory) in the computer, known as the Altair.

When he told the callers this, he said, they would invariably ask, “What’s memory?”

Bits: A Reddit Forum Prompts Questions of Where to Draw a Line

Jane Jacobs, an urban activist, made that observation in 1961 in her landmark book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Although she was describing cities built of bricks and mortar, her ideas about cultivating vibrancy feel relevant today, as some of the most important metropolises of the 21st century are being constructed online, where chaos is in no short supply.

The latest controversy surrounds Reddit, a community and social news site that lets members create and run their own forums on any topic, from movie news to local politics to the sharing of beautiful nature photographs. Reddit has come under fire for harboring a forum that encourages people to covertly photograph women on the street and upload the images to the site for others to ogle and comment on. The pictures, nicknamed “creepshots,” incited outrage and provoked other members of the site and some journalists to publicly out those distributing the suggestive images. These actions, in turn, prompted an outcry from those who felt that they should be able to retain their own anonymity while posting photographs of women without their consent.

The skirmish has set off a debate about privacy and free speech, ownership and community, digital rights and accountability, touching upon issues of privilege and the undercurrents of power that course through the Web. At its core, the fallout is about how we transport social order, morals and responsibility to the digital realm and whether the online infrastructure can find a weird wisdom in the way it is being erected that will allow all its inhabitants to flourish.

Reddit is just one Web site — and one that many people have never heard of, at that. But it wields a sizable chunk of influence online, playing an instrumental role in rallying the Web to halt the progression of antipiracy bills proposed by Congress earlier this year, as well as enticing President Obama into its virtual halls to answer questions submitted by its members. It also drives significant amounts of traffic around the Web each month.

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, described the site as “the secret backbone of the Internet,” which is why it is even more crucial that it be accountable for the environment it is fostering, she said.

“Reddit is not just a cog in the machine,” she said. “It may not be the most visible site, but is a powerful platform.”

Of course, Reddit isn’t the only Web site struggling with these issues. Such creepshots appear on other places around the Web, including Twitter. And sites from YouTube to Instagram, the photo-sharing app, are grappling with how to address provocative content, from images depicting self-harm to violent torture videos, and where to draw the line about what to publish and what to remove.

But the discussion around Reddit feels particularly pertinent because it is a site that deftly straddles the old Web and the new, managing to house the wondrous and the freewheeling, an antidote to the mainstream social networking sites where advertising and data-mining can seem more important than the conversations and community they contain.

As more of our life migrates online, the digital domains where we spend so much time may be as influential and important as the towns where we choose to go to school, find jobs and raise our families. The gap between who we are online and who we are offline is closing, said Katie Baker, a writer for Jezebel, who has been covering the skirmishes around Reddit. “It is increasingly clear-cut that we can no longer think that way,” she said.

Reddit, like Ms. Jacobs’s great cities, is a hub of interaction and civilization. And if one population feels marginalized within it, as many women and men who oppose those forums do, it detracts from the overall health of the community.

Those turned off by Reddit’s policies, which the company has no plans to amend despite the blowup, could always find a new place online to roost. But in Ms. Jacobs’ book, the cities that drive people away rather than deal with their unsavory bits begin to deteriorate and decay, and eventually wither.

In other words, averting our eyes and avoiding certain forums won’t solve the problem of how to deal with those forums when they tolerate and encourage attitudes of hostility and exploitation of women and underage girls.

Reddit is not an island. It is a site with 19 million users a month, according to Quantcast, one that is inexorably linked to the rest of the Web, and its community’s ideas, memes and images migrate from its front page to a larger online world. While it is owned by Advance Publications, which also owns Condé Nast, it is largely independent.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: How Chrome Knows Where You Are

Q. How does the Chrome browser know where I am geographically when I see my city listed on the side of the Google search page?

Google’s Chrome, like other browsers, uses network information from the computer to figure out your approximate location and then matches it up in a location database. This information can include the nearby Wi-Fi network routers (including the one you are using) and their signal strength, as well as your computer’s Internet Protocol (I.P.) address. (Google often used the cars that took picture for Street View maps to collect information on Wi-Fi’s. )

Some Web sites may also ask to use your location information for the purpose of showing you local listings and advertisements, but you can opt out. Google has an explanation of location sharing in the Chrome Help pages on its site.

Where Will Captain America 2 Shoot?

While Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 branched out to North Carolina and England (respectively), Captain America 2 will hang back and set up camp in Ohio where some of Marvel's The Avengers was shot.

According to Coming Soon (via the Greater Cleveland Film Commission), Joe and Anthony Russo's Captain America: The Winter Soldier will be shooting about 40 percent of its footage in Cleveland. That's the same city Joss Whedon used as a double for most of the New York final battle sequence in Avengers, which suggests that Cap 2 will likely also take place (at least partially) in NYC. Of course, the rest of production will probably relocate to Marvel's sound stages in California.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier stars Chris Evans, and is scheduled to begin filming in February.

Where God of War Draws the Line on Violence

Not counting a brief foray into mobile, God of War: Ascension will be the sixth game in the series’ short seven-year lifespan. In that time, Kratos has fought some of the most intense battles in videogames, while also taking gory disemboweling and delimbing to a new level of detail. At a press event in New York I spoke with David Hewitt, game design manager for Sony Santa Monica, about the game’s hallmark violence, the difficulty of making sequels, and whether game mechanics can be used primarily for emotional reasons.

IGN: There was a lot of criticism about violence in big games at E3 this year, and God of War: Ascension was frequently mentioned. Do you have any thoughts about that criticism?

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He was tricked into killing his wife and family. He’s literally covered in their ashes during every moment.

David Hewitt: The core of the God of War series is Greek mythology, and that’s blood and guts, vengeful gods, horrific things being enacted on mortals. What we’re doing is injecting a character into that and telling a story of revenge. Kratos has been through this before. He was tricked into killing his wife and family. He’s literally covered in their ashes during every moment. His motivation is violent, bloody revenge, and the milieu of mythology puts us in this distant, exaggerated world. We do revel in it somewhat but the violence is there to show Kratos dealing with his demons and enacting that revenge in a very physical, hands-on way.

IGN: I wonder if a part of it was that many of those games were using violence in an increasingly familiar way, and not necessarily that this year was so much more violent than any other year. People are becoming familiar with that level of gore and exaggeration and the unnerving effect of it has worn off.

David Hewitt:  I think that if all we had was the affect of showing violence in a game then we’d be in big trouble. It’s the mechanics of the game that matter. The presentation plays a big part in drawing people in initially. I think if the context is a wartime setting or something a little more modern than our game it has a different impact. Your reaction to that might be a bit more ambiguous. But we’re far removed from what your day-to-day experience is when we’re in this vastly different and weird mythological world.

The series has wanted to keep upping itself in presentation and making sure we have those moments where people kind of recoil a bit—genuinely uncomfortable moments that are part of the feel of this franchise. We’ve stuck by those, but the game’s not driven by those.

What we’re pushing for is mechanical innovation, making the combat rewarding, having every button press feel magnified with a lot of feedback. Some of that comes from these gory outcomes, but what we’re looking to do is provide that extra level of depth and complexity, to give the player more tools to use -- new weapons and sub-weapons, the new tether mechanics and so on.

IGN: Do you have an internal line of what kind of violence you won’t show in the game? Is there a line that you wouldn’t cross with Kratos?

David Hewitt: We do. In fact the team has a set of rules that define those sorts of things very clearly. Where it shows itself is how the combat designers and animators have designed Kratos’ moves. He’s always leaning forward, he’s always moving forward. He’s seeking revenge and he’s after his ultimate objective and he will tear through enemies -- rip them in half -- as quickly as he can. But there’s not a lot of flourishes, there’s not any kind of enjoying the moment. There’s nothing about this that he’s enjoying.

There are some things we’ve pulled back from. I think where this has been an issue is with violence against women -- the team’s pulled back from some of that and assessed that a little more carefully. There are certain things that carry has a different kind of resonance that we don’t want to get into. This isn’t about statement-making in that regard. It’s about fleshing out this character.

IGN: When I first heard Ascension would be a prequel to all the other God of War games I was excited that it might be a chance to rebuild the game around a totally new idea -- to have Kratos be a mortal and not supernaturally powerful and not be obsessed with revenge. Is it constraining to always have to go back to the same general set of mechanics and that revenge-driven tone?

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There are some things we’ve pulled back from. I think where this has been an issue is with violence against women...

David Hewitt: The game isn’t a reboot; it’s a continuation of the series. We’ve gone back to an earlier point of the story. There are a handful of things that are pillars of this franchise. They want to see ridiculous, epic, over-the-top moments, huge bosses, fluid combat, lots of options for combos, climbing, maneuvering around the environment, puzzle solving. Those are baseline expectations for the series that we need to build on regardless of whether we’re going back in the timeline.

Kratos is really struggling with his demons here, he’ll go through some seriously heavy events. He gets beaten up over the course of the story, he’s more vulnerable with some of the enemies than he was in the past. His movements have changed too. In the previous game he would just stab his blades into walls to climb around and in this one he’s more grabbing on with his hands and using footholds. That’s been a really nice refinement. In combat he’s got the ability to pick up other weapons, he can grab a sword or a spear -- or disarm weapons. So we’ve tried to expand on the toolset. We want to build on those things, but in a way that makes sense for a real human individual.