June 2006

Pirate Party Antics

by on June 5, 2006

Whatever you might think of the Pirate Bay from a legal or moral perspective, they’re proving to have undeniable entertainment value:

Swedish hackers are evidently not too pleased with the shutting down of Pirate Bay. This weekend they launched a DOS attack against the Swedish government’s website, as well as the Swedish police site. Both were offline for a couple of hours. The government’s website was functioning again at around 8am on Sunday, according to news site The Local. A group calling themselves World Wide Hackers claimed responsibility for the attacks in a phone call to the newspaper Aftonbladet.

On Saturday, hundreds of demonstrators with pirate flags gathered in downtown Stockholm. In G¶teborg, the country’s second largest city, another 200 protesters took the streets. They demanded that The Pirate Bay’s servers, which were seized on Wednesday, are given back and the investigation against the site’s operators closed.

Now, my ignorance of Swedish politics is as complete as my knowledge of Swedish law, but I have to say this doesn’t seem like a very effective PR strategy. Most of the intellectually serious defenders of services like Grokster focused on the potential of peer-to-peer technologies for distributing non-infringing content like open source software and public domain works. The pirate party seems to be taking the opposite approach, celebrating the role of peer-to-peer networks in copyright infringement, and generally providing the opponents with an easily-caricatured image.

On the other hand, one of the crucial differences between Swedish and American political systems is that the Swedish Riksdag has proportional representation. According to Wikipedia, that means they only need four percent of the vote to earn seats in parliament. In that kind of system, self-caricature might actually be an advantage. They don’t need to attract the median voter, they just have to attract the votes of the 4 percent of voters who support their cause. The exaggerated pirate antics may be an effective strategy for increasing their media coverage and attracting the requisite 4 percent of the vote.

Unfortunately, the party’s website has only a small amount of its content available in English, so it’s hard to judge how serious their ideas are. They say they want to abolish the patent system and replace it with something better, but the English summary doesn’t elaborate on what the “something better” would be. And for copyright law, they propose a broad exemption for personal copying, and a reduction of copyright terms to five years. That strikes me as fairly radical, although it does fall short of advocating a repeal of copyright outright. Their proposal to ban DRM and contract terms approximating DRM strike me as a bad idea.

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My Voting Machine Neanderthal Article

by on June 5, 2006 · 14 comments

In a new Brainwash column, I make the case against computerized voting machines:

Did George Bush steal the 2004 election?

Some left-wing activists are convinced he did. They point out that initial exit poll results in swing states predicted a Kerry victory. And they note that Walden O’Dell, the head of voting machine manufacturer Diebold, wrote in a 2003 fundraising letter that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

Personally, I don’t find their evidence very compelling. Exit polls can be wrong for a variety of reasons, and the O’Dell quote only proves that he was a partisan Republican, not that he did anything illegal.

What’s disturbing, however, is that our nation’s headlong rush to adopt computerized voting machines has given such conspiracy theories a certain air of plausibility. There’s little evidence of foul play in this case, but there are good reasons to be concerned. Last month, a consumer group released a report warning of serious security problems with Diebold voting machines. The report shows that it’s possible to install malicious software in minutes that could surreptitiously miscount votes.

I point to source code disclosure and paper voting records as stopgap measures to minimize these dangers, but conclude that ultimately, computerized voting may just be a bad idea. At the very least, we should hold off on installing additional computerized voting machines until we’ve had more time to study the existing ones and better understand their flaws.

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Media Deconsolidation, Part 12: Time Warner President Calls Synergy “Bull—t”

by on June 4, 2006 · 6 comments

I’ve been spending most of my time blogging about First Amendment-related issues in recent months and have failed to cover media marketplace / ownership developments. Specifically, I haven’t kept up with my ongoing “Media DE-consolidation series,” which has highlighted downsizing or spin-offs at several companies, including: Knight-Ridder, Viacom, Disney, Clear Channel, and many others.

As part of this series, I’ve previously written about Time Warner’s potential coming crack-up, but now it appears imminent. In an amazing front page story in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Time Warner President Jeff Bewkes declares the death of “synergy.” More poignantly, Bewkes goes so far as to call synergy “bull—t”!

And so it appears that the biggest media mega-merger of all-time–and a deal that had hoards of Chicken Little critics declaring it represented “Big Brother,” “the end of the independent press,” and a harbinger of a “new totalitarianism”–is set to unravel.

What are we to make of this?

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Adobe vs. Microsoft III: Open Standards Lose?

by on June 3, 2006

Following up on Sonia’s and Andrew’s recent posts on reports of the PDF spat between Adobe’s and Microsoft. What’s interesting in all of this is that Microsoft wants to implement PDF into its product offering. But what is it implementing? Is it a closed standard dressed up like it is an open one? Or is the version that Microsoft plans to offer (now via a free download, not as a part of Office or Vista) an open standard? When it comes to PDF, what’s the difference? The problem is that there are many different versions of PDF. Time for a little history lesson:

The PDF 1.4 specification is used in the AIIM created, and ISO approved ISO 19005-1 PDF/A and PDF/X standard. The PDF/A is generally considered the “archive” standard, PDF/X a focused subset of PDF designed specifically for reliable prepress data interchange. They are application standards, as well as a file format standard. In other words, it defines how applications creating and reading files should behave.

The PDF 1.5 specification was first a part of Adobe Acrobat 6.0, which was introduced in April 2003

PDF 1.6 was released in November 2004 and is supported by Adobe Acrobat 7.0, the current version. The AIIM committee has begun work on ISO 19005-2 based on PDF Reference 1.6.

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Open Source and Car Culture

by on June 3, 2006 · 2 comments

On a flight last night, I got to pore over the most recent issues of InformationWeek. It has the right mix of technology, business, policy, innovation, and gadgetry for a person with my mix of knowledge, interests, and time.

I came across a refreshing article on open source. I think I liked it so well because it was pretty much devoid of interpretation. Nothing about open source’s meaning or consequences – just neutral reporting about who’s doing open source and why. How businesses are using it, encouraging it, or shunning it.

The money quote for me came from a sidebar:

The reason [Chase Phillips] contributes code “boils down to a passion or belief that Mozilla provides freedom to people to control their own computers,” he says. “I believe in different layers of freedom, technological freedom.”

I’m not a coder, but the people featured in the article remind me of me when I was a gear-head in high school. There were Ford guys and Chevy guys – and a few Dodge guys (freaks). Maybe these analogize to the major operating systems. (The former car guy in me wants to beat me up right now.)

We spent our leisure time tricking out our cars and helping each other trick out cars. My car wasn’t all that great – I didn’t have enough money to do it right – and I haven’t even owned a car for 10 years, but I still enjoy the car culture in this country, from the lowriders in San Jose and SoCal to NASCAR’s roots in bootlegging.

It’s all a challenge to auto manufacturers who would just as happily stamp out identical cars and control the revenue stream from parts and repair. But they don’t, and we’re better off because people can still get under the hood.

(N.B., The distinction between cars and computers is collapsing. Hackers will decide whether car culture stays or goes.)

While I’m on InformationWeek, let me recommend the columns of Editor-in-Chief Rob Preston. Recent gems: Rob mentions John Locke in a piece on broadband regulation/”‘net neutrality.” And here’s Rob’s poke in the eye to CNN anti-progress blowhard Lou Dobbs.

That’s good times, people.

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Adobe vs. Microsoft II: Users Lose

by on June 2, 2006

Sonia’s pointed post earlier today spurred my thoughts on Adobe’s efforts to sic the European antitrust squad on Microsoft to keep PDF generation out of Office. But rather than argue over Microsoft’s position as a monopolist, I’m inclined to look towards the consumer surplus destroyed here by competition law.

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New Heritage Report: “Broadband Regulation: Will Congress Neuter the Net?”

by on June 2, 2006 · 2 comments

In case you haven’t had your fill of net neutrality yet, here is a new paper of mine, published today by The Heritage Foundation, surveying the issue. My conclusion:

Proposed network neutrality rules would impose comprehensive, unnecessary, and harm­ful mandates on broadband networks. Such unnecessary mandates–the most extensive regu­lation of the Internet ever considered by Con­gress–would stymie the efficient use of scarce Internet capacity, discourage investment, and even threaten the growth of competition among broadband networks.

Despite the grim scenarios painted by the sup­porters of regulation, there is little or no evidence of market abuse by network owners. This is for good reason: Today’s broadband market is compet­itive, and any network abusing its position would quickly lose customers. Moreover, if any abuse does occur, existing competition law is more than sufficient to address the problem.

Advocates of neutrality regulation argue that the future of the Internet is at issue in this debate. They are correct. This is why such regulation of the Inter­net should be rejected.

In other words, regulation would be a bad thing.

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Pew: Broadband Access Soars, Prices Drop

by on June 2, 2006

The Pew Internet Project came out with a fascinating report this week about broadband usage in America. According to their most recent survey, the number of Americans with broadband access at home has soared by 40 percent in the past year (growing from 60 million in March 2005 to 84 million in March of 2006). And the growth wasn’t just among the well-to-do: some of the biggest growth rates were among African-Americans and those with less thatn a high school education).

Much of this growth is no doubt due to dropping broadband prices. Pew found the average month broadband rate dropped from $39 in February 2004 to $36 last December. Interestingly, all of this decrease was from DSL, which decreased from $41 to $32, with cable modem prices holding steady.

These findings are especially interesting in light of the current debate in Congress over neutrality regulation. The case for regulation rests, in large part, on an assumption that their is no competition in broadband. Instead, the market is said to be “a cozy duopoly”. But, Economics 101 tells us monopolists (and duopolists) restrict supply and maximize prices. Pew’s numbers show things going in the opposite direction.

Of course none of this proves that competition is working. And Pew did note that some people don’t currently have a choice of broadband provider (although regulation would make it less–not more–likely they will ever get a choice). Moreover, the report didn’t compare what prices and access rates might have been under alternative industry structures.

Still, this has got to be bad news for those arguing that the broadband market needs regulation. And, if I were an aspiring duopolist, I’d be unhappy too–this industry doesn’t sound all that cozy.

As a consumer, though, I see Pew’s report as pretty good news. Now only if Congress doesn’t muck it up.

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Adobe Vs. Microsoft

by on June 2, 2006

Today, the WSJ reported that Adobe is threatening an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in Europe because Adobe doesn’t want Microsoft to use PDF in MS Office. So why is Adobe going to Europe?

They are both American companies, so it might seem pretty strange. That is, until you realize that the Europeans are much more sympathetic to such claims and seem to love to sick it to Microsoft and the Americans who run it. If Adobe really does complain in Europe, that will be a VERY obvious case of forum shopping. This is an unfortunate development for consumers and technology entrepreneurs.

Specifically, Adobe asked Microsoft to remove new PDF functions from Microsoft Office and to charge users for the service if it can be downloaded. Adobe gives the software away for free, and Apple and Open Office along with about 1800 companies, have already implemented the specs. So why can’t Microsoft do it? The argument that their bigness requires different rules just doesn’t hold. Microsoft is NOT a monopoly and is facing huge threats on a number of fronts such as from Google and Yahoo. Anyone who doesn’t realize that needs to wake up and smell the coffee.

Remember the last time MS faced antitrust charges here in the US? Charges of predatory pricing and tying were used and predictions that Internet Explorer (IE) would dominate forever abounded. Only a few short years later, IE has lost ground, being replaced by browsers like Mozilla, Safari, and Opera, and a bunch of others.

Government should not pick winners and losers in the marketplace and Adobe, who once welcomed Microsoft’s entry into the PDF space, would be better off spending its time innovating rather than litigating.

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Misquotes on Global Warming

by on June 2, 2006 · 16 comments

I’m doing some research to try to get a handle on Paul Krugman’s accusations against my former colleague Pat Michaels in the Ukia Daily Journal. (It was also in the New York Times, but it costs money there–methinks the paywall people at the Times need to talk to the syndication people) Michaels responds to the accusation on Cato’s blog.

I haven’t figured out what I think about the dispute yet, but I wanted to flag an inaccuracy I found in the course of my research. RealClimate.org is a prominent blog about “climate science by climate scientists.” They’ve done a number of blog posts criticizing Michaels for alleged inaccuracies, including the one featured in Krugman’s column. One of the unfortunate things about the climate debate is that it’s extremely vitriolic: the pro-Kyoto folks consider the “skeptics” to be pseudo scientists in the pay of private industry, while the “skeptics” accuse their opponents of trumping up the results to get more research funding. As a result, they often accuse each other of lying and misleading the public, and it’s often hard to tell for sure who’s telling the truth.

So here’s one example where Michaels’s critics wrongly accused him of misrepresenting his opponents. Gavin writes that Michaels misquoted climatologist James Hansen by removing the qualification “Given these constraints on climate forcing trends” from the sentence “we predict additional warming in the next 50 years of 3/4 +/- 1/4°C.”

“What are these constraints that Hansen mentions?” he asks, “Precisely the control of CO2, methane and black carbon emissions that Michaels insists are unnecessary!”

But that’s not quite right, as I’ll explain below the fold.

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