Article on blogging in Iran. Mentions the Harvard Project, I believe this one.
August 2006
Related to last month’s series on platform monopolies, here’s an interesting article on Microsoft’s baby steps toward opening up the Xbox:
With the hobbyist release, the software giant is hoping to lay the groundwork for what one day will be a thriving network of enthusiasts developing for one another, something akin to a YouTube for games. The company, however, is pretty far from that goal.
In the first incarnation, games developed using the free tools will be available only to like-minded hobbyists, not the Xbox community as a whole. Those who want to develop games will have to pay a $99 fee to be part of a “Creators’ Club,” a name that is likely to change. Games developed using XNA Game Studio Express will be playable only by others who are part of the club.
Next spring, Microsoft hopes to have a broader set of tools that will allow for games to be created that can then be sold online through Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade. Microsoft will still control which games get published, and it’ll get a cut of the revenue.
Down the road, probably three to five years from now, Microsoft hopes to have an open approach, where anyone can publish games, and community response helps separate the hits from the flops.
Just so we’re clear, the obstacles to an open Xbox are legal and financial, not technical. If Microsoft’s goal were simply to make Xbox development tools more widely available, they could do that in a matter of months, just as the PC platform is open to development by anybody. What Microsoft wants to do is open up Xbox development to a wider audience of gamers without relinquishing their monopoly on access to the platform for developers. That way they can be sure to get a cut on each game released.
Bruce Schneier, who I’ve been informed actually invented the phrase “security theater,” has a brilliant op-ed on last week’s foiled terrorist plot:
It’s reasonable to assume that a few lone plotters, knowing their compatriots are in jail and fearing their own arrest, would try to finish the job on their own. The authorities are not being public with the details–much of the “explosive liquid” story doesn’t hang together–but the excessive security measures seem prudent.
But only temporarily. Banning box cutters since 9/11, or taking off our shoes since Richard Reid, has not made us any safer. And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-ons won’t make us safer, either. It’s not just that there are ways around the rules, it’s that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.
It’s easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it’s shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we’ve wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we’ve wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets–stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security–and too many ways to kill people.
Security measures that require us to guess correctly don’t work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It’s not security, it’s security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.
Dan Gillmor calls out libertarian exec TJ Rodgers for his “hypocrisy” in entering the solar power business, a business that’s heavily subsidized by the government. Supposedly it’s “phony libertarianism” to rail against big government while participating in an industry that benefits from government largess. That doesn’t seem right to me. As the article puts it:
The solar-cell industry is reliant upon government subsidies, to the consternation of Mr. Rodgers, an outspoken libertarian.
“The culture that got built is what I call a grant culture,” he said. “They’re all pitching to the U.S. government, looking for funding.”
Such criticism aside, the subsidies are in place, both in the United States and Europe, and Mr. Rodgers is ideally positioned to capitalize on the government support he has long railed against. “I can make a good profit for my shareholders,” he said, “and provide a lot of good eco-stuff to the world as well.”
The paradox is that Mr. Rodgers, 58, who has long been a free-market iconoclast, even by the tough-guy standards of the valley’s chip industry, may end up striking pay dirt by moving from the cutthroat world of computer processing power to the more sensitive realm of solar power.
It doesn’t mention whether his company is getting subsidies directly from the government, or whether the adoption of solar power is merely being driven by subsidies to his customers. If it’s the latter, I don’t really see how that’s hypocrisy. Solar power is a perfectly legitimate business, which would exist (albeit in somewhat smaller form) in the absence of government subsidies. As long as Rodgers isn’t himself actively pursuing government handouts, I don’t see why he should be expected to avoid the sector entirely merely because some of his customers are getting them.
More to the point, the long-run success of the solar power industry will be driven by the underlying economics of the energy market, not government handouts. If the cost of solar panels drop to the point where they become an economical alternative to the grid, (or the price of other energy sources continues to rise), there will suddenly be a huge market for solar panels. The government handouts obviously don’t hurt, but they won’t be what makes or breaks the effort. Libertarians have as much right to compete for that market as anyone else.
Ars reports that the RIAA has graciously moved to extend the deadline in its lawsuit against one Larry Scantlebury. Because, as the request puts it:
Plaintiffs do not believe it appropriate to discuss a resolution of the case with the family so close to Mr. Scantlebury’s passing. Plaintiffs therefore request a stay of 60 days to allow the family additional time to grieve.
In the event the parties do not reach a resolution with Mr. Scantlebury’s estate or the other family members involved, Plaintiffs anticipate amending the complaint following depositions of members of Mr. Scantlebury’s family.
Maybe they can hold the depositions in conjunction with the funeral to expedite the process.
Luis Villa just pointed me to this excellent review in the Wall Street Journal of Larry Lessig’s Free Culture:
Free Culture, in short, is an insightful, entertaining brief for changing our copyright policy. There is just one problem. Mr. Lessig aims most of his arguments at people like himselfstandard-issue Howard Dean liberals. Bad choice. He should be talking to conservatives. Viewed up close, copyright bears little resemblance to the kinds of property that conservatives value. Instead, it looks like a constantly expanding government program run for the benefit of a noisy, well-organized interest grouplike Superfund, say, or dairy subsidies, except that the benefits go not to endangered homeowners or hardworking farmers but to the likes of Barbra Streisand and Eminem.
It looks like Superfund in other ways, too. Copyright is a trial lawyer’s dreama regulatory program enforced by private lawsuits where the plaintiffs have all the advantages, from injury-free damages awards to liability doctrines that extract damages from anyone who was in the neighborhood when an infringement occurred.
Quite so. The advocates of constantly expanding the scope of copyright have managed to cloak their rent-seeking agenda in the mantle of free markets and private property. And unfortunately, most of their critics have made it easy by deploying left-wing rhetoric. The result is that most people on the right-hand side of the political spectrum–the side that’s in power in Washington right now–reflexively line up with the rent seekers, not because they’ve given the issue any real thought, but simply because they perceive them as being on “their side.”
But if “conservative” is understood in the Barry Goldwater/Ronald Reagan mold of limited government and free markets, there’s nothing conservative about the copyright cartel’s agenda. Advocates of sensible copyright laws desperately need to find ways to talk about their agenda that Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians find more appealing.
This post (and the previous one) is being posted from a 6-year-old iMac running the Ubuntu distribution of Linux.
The Ubuntu story is fascinating. It was created by Mark Shuttleworth, a 30-something South African entrepreneur who made his fortune in the 1990s, flew to space in 2002, and then decided to knock Microsoft off its perch as the world’s leading desktop OS. (AKA fixing bug #1) In just two years, Ubuntu has become widely recognized as the desktop version of Linux to beat.
Of course, a big part of its success is the $10 million a year he’s reportedly sinking into Ubuntu’s parent company, canonical. Still, there’s no way you could build a full-featured OS from scratch in two years with $20 million–to say nothing of a desktop OS with hundreds of applications and support for multiple architectures. Ubuntu is a very thin layer of commercially-developed (but free-as-in-speech) enhancements to off-the-shelf free software. Most importantly, Ubuntu is built atop Debian, a Linux distribution that focuses on stability and using exclusively free software.
Below the cut I’ll give some of my initial impressions of the OS, which necessarily will be a little bit more technical than the usual TLF fare. I’ll consider some of the economic implications of Ubuntu in a future post.
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. Mike Masnick suggested that I analyze this patent this week. It was granted to a company called Cordance, which is suing Amazon, claiming that their one-click ordering system infringes on it. The patent claims methods for automatically synchronizing contact information between client and server computers.
I wouldn’t want to disappoint Mike, so here we go: this patent is enormous. No, seriously, if the Guinness Book for World Records had an entry for “world’s largest patent,” I bet this patent would be in the running. The thing weighs in at about 85,000 words, about the length of a short novel. But that’s not all! Numerous other works, including “Kris Jamsa and Ken Cope, Internet Programming (1995),” “Marshall T. Rose, The Internet Message: Closing the Book with Electronic Mail (1993),” “John December and Neil Randall, The World Wide Web Unleashed (1996),” and assorted RFCs are also “incorporated herein by reference.” When you include all that supplementary information, this patent probably rivals the Bible for wordiness.
The patent is big in other ways too:
On Tuesday, government officials in India rejected an offer to participate in a much-hyped project to distribute laptops costing US$100 each to the world’s impoverished children. A closer look reveals this scheme to be little more than open source evangelism in the Third World.
The laptop project is part of the One Laptop per Child initiative, an ambitious nonprofit effort endorsed by the United Nations to “revolutionize” education by providing every child on the planet with access to a computer. OLPC backers assume there is a universal need for every child to have a laptop, which they view as the gateway to a rosy future.
Read more here.
Matt Yglesias offers some level-headed advice to the TSA:
Call me crazy, but I don’t see what kind of sense a ban on liquid travel on airplanes is. To be sure, letting people carry soda or shampoo onto an airplane could (apparently) allow them to conceal an explosive. And a bomb going off on an airplane would be a very bad thing. But by the same token, a bomb going off on a crowded Metro or Armtrak car would be quite bad. Hell, a bomb going off on a crowded airport security line snaking back and forth as everyone waits to have their bags searched for offending liquids woud be really point. At some point, common sense needs to kick in.
Banning firearms on airplanes is an inconvenience that is very effective at halting what could otherwise be a very easy method of hijacking airplanes since guns are pretty easy to obtain. It’s fairly clear, however, that permitting people to carry liquid aboard planes doesn’t necessarily lead to a rash of airplane-bombings. It is, however, a huge inconvenience for travelers.
Worst of all, it’s at best a minor inconvenience for terrorists. If you had a cell with some working liquid explosive devices ready to be set off, you could react to the ban by setting them off someplace other than an airplane. As outlined above, I would suggest a crowded rush hour Metro car.
This is what Jim Harper aptly calls security theater. We’ve given the TSA virtually unlimited powers and instructed them to accomplish an impossible task. As a result, they’ve taken to adopting erratic, reactionary, and comically ineffective anti-terrorism tactics. One terrorist tries to put explosives in his shoe? Make hundreds of millions of Americans take their shoes off when they go through security. Some terrorists try to smuggle liquid explosives on the plane? Ban Americans from carrying on liquids. And while you’re at it, require people to show you their IDs, close parking spaces close to the airport, subject people to random pat-down searches, ban tweezers and toenail clippers from carry-on luggage, etc, etc.
Life involves risks. Every form of transportation is dangerous. Even with the terrorist threat, airplanes remain among the safest of transportation modes. Yet thanks to the bizarre incentives of the political process, and the fact that terrorist attacks on airplanes make better news stories than car crashes, we remain obsessed with the miniscule dangers from terrorist attacks, while we think nothing of getting in our car and driving across country, an activity that, statistically speaking, is far more dangerous.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.