Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
WASHINGTON, May 24, 2007 – The National Association of Broadcasters has enlisted the recently re-minted lobbying firm of Bluewater Strategies in its quest to combat the proposed merger of XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio.
In a Wednesday filing at the Senate Office of Public Records, lobbyists Tim Kurth, Andrew Lundquist and George Nethercutt, former Republican representative from Washington, said they would represent the NAB on the merger and other issues.
Last week, Nancy Pelosi reportedly put the Fairness Doctrine in play in Congress — stating that the House leadership would aggressively pursue its restoration. At this point it’s unclear how serious she is about it — will there be a real effort to reimpose this relic of the 1940s, or is this just a bone for the Rupert-and-Rush-Need-to-Be-Stopped Left?
One thing is clear — serious or not, its a bad idea. I explain why is this just-released Heritage paper.
Mine is a simple – dumb, even – adaptation of Metcalfe’s Law.
“The security and privacy risks increase proportionally to the square of the number of users of the data.” – first quoted in this eWeek article about the electronic employment verification system included in the current immigration bill.
I actually suspect that Briscoe’s et al’s refinement of Metcalfe’s law is more accurate, but that’s just so complicated.
I’ve got a new article on e-voting up at the American. The basic argument will be familiar to regular TLF readers:
The fundamental problem with computerized voting machines is their lack of transparency. In order to ensure that elections are conducted fairly and accurately, it is important that election officials, candidates, and members of the general public be able to observe and verify every stage of the election process. Computerized voting machines make independent verification of election procedures extremely difficult because important steps of the election process, including recording, tallying, and reporting votes, occur unseen inside a computer chip.
That’s not the only reason e-voting is dangerous. One of the important safeguards in the traditional election process is that it is extremely labor-intensive. Thousands of people are involved in the process of collecting and counting votes. As a result, stealing an election almost always requires a large, organized conspiracy that would be hard to keep secret. In contrast, e-voting can allow a single, well-placed individual to tamper with the software of numerous voting machines at once, potentially altering the outcome of an election in an entire congressional district or state. Indeed, this is more than a hypothetical scenario. Last fall, Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten obtained a widely-used e-voting machine and created a virus that could be used to steal an election. The virus would spread from machine to machine through the memory cards that install software upgrades…
The safest course of action is to return to a tried and true technology: paper ballots. There are a variety of ways to mark and tally paper ballots, but probably the best choice is optical-scan machines. These have a proven track record, and many state election officials have decades of experience with them.
I go on to discuss the Holt bill, which is certainly less than ideal, but which in my judgment would be a big improvement over the status quo.
My buddy Julian is miffed that the Apple store told him his iPod was a glorified paper weight when, in fact, it took him all of half an hour to fix it:
Well, I was futzing around this evening and pulled it out of that drawer. And I figured: “What the hell, it’s bricked and out of warranty, I’ve got nothing to lose by tinkering with it.” So I grabbed a tiny screwdriver, pried it open, and started sniffing at the innards. It took all of a minute to notice that there was a tiny piece of ribbon circuitry at the base of the thing that had come unmoored from its connector, so I grabbed a tweezer and wedged it back in, then snapped the casing closed again. Voila, good as new!
Once I got over my pleasure at having a working iPod back with so little effort, though, I got a bit annoyed. It had been obvious when the problem first appeared (after I tried resets and other such things) that it was basically sound, but that there was some sort of hardware issue with the clickwheel. I almost just popped it open to check for loose connections back then, but I figured it was better to go ask the experts, on the off chance I could make it worse by poking about. And I suppose, like an ass, I assumed that it couldn’t possibly be that simple, because the experts were talking about sending it back to the plant for costly repairs. But now I find myself thinking: If these guys were remotely competent or informed about their gadgets, surely they must have known that there was a high probability this was a simple loose connection that could be solved with the five-minute surgery I just performed, and would have done for myself a while ago if I hadn’t deferred to the local Genius. So I want to register a minor WTF here: Have they decided that once it’s out of warranty, there’s no reason suggesting incredibly simple and obvious procedures that might fix an expensive piece of gadgetry if you look as though you might be willing to buy another, newer expensive piece of gadgetry?
This is obviously a borderline case, where the Genius probably could have done what Julian did and fixed the problem. But as a matter of general policy (remember that Apple runs dozens of stores and has to try to treat everyone equally), it’s not obvious that what Julian is suggesting is feasible. Labor is relatively expensive, and in the grand scheme of things, an iPod really isn’t.
Yglesias notes the heated battle in the 1960s over jukebox piracy. According to his commenters, Congress eventually closed the jukebox loophole so that music publishers would be fairly compensated.
Many in the press (NYT, AP) are commenting this morning about on how Google on Monday encouraged the Federal Communications Commission to design their forthcoming auction of radio-frequencies to take advantage of real-time airwaves auctions. It’s one more bit of news emerging from the 700 Megahertz (MHz) auction, which the FCC must begin before January 2008. In the words of telecom analyst Blair Levin, of Stifel Nicolaus, it is shaping up to be “a pivotal auction” that could provide “new blood for broadband… or [a] telco/cable sweep.”
But there was another noteworthy filing at the FCC on Monday. The White Spaces Coalition — whose members include Dell, EarthLink, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft and Philips Electronics — met with commission officials and provided them with a prototype device for operating in vacant television broadcast channels. Philips’ devices joins one previously submitted by Microsoft. (Look at page 3 for a picture of the “Microsoft TV White Spaces Development Platform.”)
Just as the 700 MHz band offers new hope for telecom and video competition, many technology companies are looking to the vacant TV bands. The reason is simple: television channels so scattered, principally because they were designed around the 1940s-era NTSC standard, named after the National Television Standard Committee. As a look at the broadcast band for the ZIP code 20006 demonstrates, using FCC metrics, no more than four of the 21 channels between 30 and 50 are occupied: 32, 45, 47 and 50. That leaves 17 available within the “white spaces” between the frequencies where those stations broadcast. The occupied channel numbers will vary from city to city, which is why advanced sensing capabilities are needed to even begin to complete utilizing the spectrum in the television zone for something other than broadcasting.
or
http://www.publicintegrity.org/telecom/telecomwatch.aspx?eid=2940
I recently posted on SSRN a draft paper, “Codifying Copyright’s Misuse Defense,” Codifying Copyright’s Misuse Defense, 2007 Utah L. Rev. __ (2007) (invited) (forthcoming). Herewith, the abstract:
(I had a major computer meltdown last week, so I’m a little late getting to this issue but..) The MPAA recently announced that it will take into account depictions of smoking in a movie when considering its rating. Apparently, it will now be more likely that a movie’s rating is more stringent if we see characters lighting up on screen.
Private ratings systems occasionally evolve to take into account changing societal norms, but this recent change to the MPAA system seems to be influenced more by politics. Excuse the pun, but there’s obviously a lot of groups out there today that make a stink about smoking. They are certainly welcome to pressure movie producers and other media providers to eliminate smoking from their art, but when they threaten government regulation as an alternative it’s an entirely different matter.
One wonders where the line will be drawn now that smoking has been deemed worthy of an “R” rating. Would a serious drama depicting drug or alcohol abuse that contained no other offending material also automatically qualify for a higher rating? If not, why not?
The best way to address this issue is with more education, not censorship. There has been no shortage of education campaigns and PSAs about the dangers of smoking over the past decades. Those efforts have made a difference. Smoking is less glamorous than ever before and the risks of smoking are widely understood. Critics should stick to those efforts instead of threatening artists with regulation if they don’t purge any depictions of smoking from their craft.
First eMusic, then Yahoo!, then Apple, and now Amazon have joined the anti-DRM camp. This adds momentum to the general perception that DRM-based business models are outdated and on their way out, at least in the music market. It’s only a matter of time before the labels cave.
It’s striking that this announcement is occurring less than a year after the unveiling of Amazon’s Unbox. As I said then, the use of DRM was a major reason the service sucked so much. Thanks to the much larger file sizes, the online movie market is a few years behind the online music market in its evolution. But I think recent developments in the music market presage similar developments in the movie market a few years from now. Ultimately, DRM is a bad business strategy because it doesn’t stop piracy but it does punish your own paying customers. The labels and online music vendors are realizing that now. Hollywood is still in denial, but they’ll figure it out eventually.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
