July 2006

Windows Genuine Nagging

by on July 5, 2006 · 4 comments

The BBC reports on Microsoft’s new anti-piracy “tool,” Windows Genuine Advantage, which is automatically installed on users’ computers when they download the latest software updates:

The tool is downloaded and installed voluntarily but Microsoft has said it could become mandatory in the future.

Blogs and forums have been hit with comments and queries about the tool.

The tool was downloaded as part of a wave of security updates Microsoft offered to users. If it is not installed Windows XP will periodically remind people to download and run the program.

According to a friend of mine who administers Windows-based computers for a living, this isn’t really true. If you decline to install WGA, Microsoft blocks you from receiving subsequent software updates. Given how often security vulnerabilities are found in Windows, that amounts to a death sentence, as unpatched Windows machines are usually hacked in a matter of days.

It’s also worth noting that this isn’t Microsoft’s first anti-piracy “tool” on Windows XP. When XP was released, it included product activation, which tied your copy of Windows to your hardware and refused to function if the same software was installed on different hardware (or if your hardware configuration changed too much). The problem was that pirates just modified cracked versions of Windows to omit the activation “feature.”

WGA may prove more effective than product activation did precisely because it’s based on controlling access to a service (Windows Update) rather than trying to prevent copying directly. This is how Red Hat makes a lot of its money, for example: give the software away, but charge for regular updates.

On the other hand, there’s a risk that a lot of users will just shrug and stop using Windows Update. Which would be stupid, but many users may not realize the dangers until their computers get hacked. In fact, they may not realize it even after their computers are hacked, as many hacked computers get used for botnets without the user’s knowledge. Discouraging the use of Windows Update may simply make a lot of peoples’ computers more vulnerable.

Update: Matt Cline comments that Windows users do still have access to “critical updates,” they’re just blocked from receiving other updates. So I stand corrected on the botnet issue. On the other hand, I do think characterizing the program as “voluntary” is a bit of a stretch when users will be cut off from non-critical bug fixes and enhancements if they decline to participate in the program.

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Monopolies in the 17th and 21st Centuries

by on July 4, 2006 · 6 comments

Pondering last month’s discussion of innovation and interoperability, it struck me that there are close parallels between that argument and the 19th-century debate over free trade. To explore this insight further, I sought the advice of my friend and budding trade scholar Dingel, who recommended that I read Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade. I thought this passage, on page 46 of the hardcover edition, was provocative:

The term “free trade” apparently originated at the end of the sixteenth century in parliamentary debates over foreign trade monopolies. In England, royal grants giving select merchants the exclusive privilege to engage in trade with a particluar region of the world dated back to the thirteenth century. Although well established in the vocabulary of those writing on economic issues by the dawn of the seventeenth century, the term free trade initially carried a different meaning than what we now attach to it. “A free trade” was a commercial activity in which entry was unrestricted, where the liberty of the merchant to participate in trade was unhindered by exclusionary guild regulations or government grants of monopoly rights and privileges. Calls for “a free trade”–or more preceisely, “freedom to trade”–arose in an antimonoopoly movement that opposed such government restraints on either domestic or foreign commerce…

Monopoly trading companies provoked such ill feeling that those defending them either denied that they were really monopolies or justified the exlucsive grants on other grounds. Misselden, for example, agreed that such grants reduced the liberty of subjects to engage in any trade they wished, but argued that the resulting security against competitors would increase traffic aboev what it otherwise would have been, and therefore concluded that “the utility that hereby arose to the commonwealth, did far exceed that restraint of the public liberty. A common defense of foreign trade monopolies was that long-distance trade required expenditures on certain public goods, such as navigational guides or defense establishments to protect person and property abroad, and government entry restrictions were required to prevent free riders from undermining the financing of such goods. An exclusive company, for example, could raise the requisite capital to pay for these required expenditures or use their trading profits to ensure the safety of cargo, whereas interlopers who did not contribute to the fund might reduce profits and could ultimately subvert the basis for all such trade.

The parallels to contemporary intellectual property debates are obvious. We often hear the argument for expanded intellectual property made in terms of creating incentives for the creation of quasi-public goods. Professor Picker, for example, implicitly portrays those who create and use unauthorized XBox software as free riders in a manner analogous to a competing shipper who benefits from a British East India company’s lighthouse In each case, one company expends capital creating infrastructure that subsequently makes it easier for competitors to enter the field, supposedly risking the financial viability of the whole effort.

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Marginalia

by on July 3, 2006 · 2 comments

Last week Paul Graham posted another great essay, this one on insiders and outsiders:

What are the genuine advantages of being an insider? The greatest is an audience. It often seems to outsiders that the great advantage of insiders is money– that they have the resources to do what they want. But so do people who inherit money, and that doesn’t seem to help, not as much as an audience. It’s good for morale to know people want to see what you’re making; it draws work out of you.

If I’m right that the defining advantage of insiders is an audience, then we live in exciting times, because just in the last ten years the Internet has made audiences a lot more liquid. Outsiders don’t have to content themselves anymore with a proxy audience of a few smart friends. Now, thanks to the Internet, they can start to grow themselves actual audiences. This is great news for the marginal, who retain the advantages of outsiders while increasingly being able to siphon off what had till recently been the prerogative of the elite.

Though the Web has been around for more than ten years, I think we’re just beginning to see its democratizing effects. Outsiders are still learning how to steal audiences. But more importantly, audiences are still learning how to be stolen– they’re still just beginning to realize how much deeper bloggers can dig than journalists, how much more interesting a democratic news site can be than a front page controlled by editors, and how much funnier a bunch of kids with webcams can be than mass-produced sitcoms.

The big media companies shouldn’t worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. They should worry that people will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that instead.

I suspect that the generation now growing up will think it positively perverse that in the 20th century, the average consumer had to content herself with 3 or 4 major TV networks, one or two local newspapers, a couple dozen radio stations, and handful of new movies each week for their news and entertainment. The line between amateur and professional is already starting to blur–the most successful bloggers already have larger audiences than a lot of professional pundits, for example. As technologies for distribution of music and video mature, there’s every reason to think the same will occur for those media.

Last week, Ed Felten had a good post on the same theme:

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A Series of Tubes?

by on July 3, 2006 · 4 comments

I believe there are two kinds of evil in this world.

The first and most common type was well described by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. This is the evil of the functionary or civil servant who abdicated moral responsibility for his actions and was “just following orders.” This is the evil that helps us understand many of the large-scale atrocities of modern civilization.

I also believe that there is enough evidence in this world to justify a belief in another kind of evil–something demonic, supernatural, and otherworldly. Until today, I believed Senator Ted Stevens was the embodiment of this kind of evil–a real-life Gozer the Gozerian walking the halls of the Hart Senate Office Building.

But now, after listening to this audio clip of Stevens talking about Net Neutrality, I’ve decided that he’s really just a sad and senile old man. Stevens is Captain Queeg and he’s missing his strawberries. The people of Alaska should be ashamed of themselves for continuing to reelect him, only to make a public spectacle of his declining mental state.

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Predicting the Future is Hard because it Hasn’t Happened Yet

by on July 3, 2006 · 2 comments

I’m back from vacation, where I got a bunch of reading done. So I’ll have several posts related to stuff I read last week in the next day or two. But first I want to note some interesting stuff on the Internet from last week. My friend Reihan Salam has an interesting article in Slate about Futurism:

The best futurists take present-day trends in technology and extrapolate from them based on a few fundamentals: that large-scale institutions will keep being slow-witted, that small groups of people are good at learning and adapting to new circumstances, and that death and taxes will always be with us. Reynolds partisans can sit back and wait for “the comfy chair revolution” to come. Meanwhile, I’ll be stockpiling enough ammunition, Cipro, and NewsRadio DVDs to last me through the coming robot wars.

However, I’m inclined to concur with Matt Yglesias’s critique:

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