Well, here we go again. As I have said again and again and again and again and again and again, our public policy makers persist in the mistaken belief that the solution to the online predator problem is more Internet regulation instead of stiff sentences for offenders.
The non-solution du jour is an proposal that has been introduced both in Congress and now my home state of Virginia which would require sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses or IM address with the government. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) introduced a bill (S. 4089) in Congress last week that contains this provision. And, according to today’s Washington Post Virginia Attorney General Robert McConnell will soon be introducing a similar e-mail registration bill. In theory, after the federal or state government officials got the predator’s e-mail or IM address, they would give social networking sites like MySpace.com access to the database to cross-reference it with their users. Again, in theory, this would allow social networking sites to weed out the bad guys.
Except, of course, that there is nothing stopping the bad guys from simply signing up for a different e-mail address somewhere else! I mean, come on, this proposal doesn’t even pass the laugh test! I don’t know about you, but I have multiple e-mail accounts and often switch providers and change my address to evade spammers. A determined predator is going to do the same thing once this law is passed. In fact, they probably already have multiple accounts today to throw people off their trail.
Again, when will our government do the right thing and put these scumbags who hurt children behind bars for a long, long time? Instead, our lawmakers now just give them a slap on the wrist and let them walk after just a few years of hard time, meaning they are out on the streets and behind keyboards again too soon. This 2003 Department of Justice study reported that the average sentence for child molesters was approximately seven years and, on average, they were released after serving just three of those seven years.
That is outrageous, and until we get serious about bringing bad guys to justice and locking them up for a long, long time, we’re never going to get this problem under control.
I’ve got a new article up at The American about the Teleflex case:
It’s a familiar story: productive companies are forced to spend millions of dollars in court to defend themselves against trumped up claims. Most of these frivolous lawsuits fail, but the successful ones net eye-popping payoffs, attracting more ambitious lawyers in pursuit of ever-larger jackpots.
Of course, that describes the campaigns in recent years against the manufacturers of vaccines and breast implants. But it also describes the more recent flood of frivolous patent lawsuits that have plagued the technology industry. Last month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of KSR v. Teleflex. The case presents the court with an opportunity to put a damper on abuse of the patent system, reducing a serious drag on one of our nation’s most productive industries.
One of the parallels between the tort reform and patent reform issues that I didn’t have space to discuss is the role of forum shopping. Just as certain southern states are known for administering “jackpot justice,” East Texas has become infamous as the go-to location for patent trolls.
Shopping is normally good for the economy, but not when the shoppers are net neutrality advocates looking for friendly deals on a regulatory forum. Policy makers in Michigan, their current target, should tell pro-regulatory activists to go home, with good reason.
Those who support net neutrality legislation frame themselves as proponents of the Net, but in reality their recommendations would have an anti-Internet effect. The worry is that network providers like AT&T or Comcast will start charging some Web sites more than others. It is true that network providers would like to charge high-traffic Web sites for their larger usage of the network, but it remains unclear why that would be wrong or unfair.
Voip.com, an Internet phone provider, is one of the corporations calling for government intervention. Without government oversight, it argues, “consumer-friendly applications like VoIP, online gaming, and streaming homegrown video would likely be squeezed out by the larger corporations that can afford to pay for unfettered service.”
It’s obvious that Voip.com is simply trying to avoid the risk of paying more for their network use, but the thing Voip.com’s executives have missed is that the Net is getting crowded. If network operators can’t recoup their costs for the higher bandwidth use, then the network will slow down for everyone and services like VoIP, online gaming, and streaming video won’t work so well anymore.
That’s the quickest summary of a paper the Cato Institute issued today, which I co-wrote with Jeff Jonas, distinguished engineer and chief scientist with IBM’s Entity Analytic Solutions Group.
Data mining is the effort to gain knowledge from patterns in data. A retailer can use data mining to sift through past customer interactions and learn more about potential new customers, but it can’t figure out which customers will actually come into a new store. Terrorism is so rare in society that there are no patterns to search for. Data mining has no capability to ferret out terrorists.
It appears that the Automated Targeting System, which made news last week (because of its previously unknown focus on American travelers), uses data mining. It sifts through information about border crossers to assign them a “risk score.”
In a National Journal article published last week, Secretary of Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff discussed ATS, revealing the need for government officials to get more clear about what they are doing, what works, and what doesn’t work. According to NJ, Chertoff called ATS “the process by which we collect that information and analyze it to see what are the patterns and the relationships that tell us, for example, that a particular telephone number is associated with a terrorist, or something of that sort.”
Comparing the number of a traveler to phone numbers of terrorists is data matching and it is not what ATS does – or at least not the interesting part of what ATS does. Data matching, link analysis, or “pulling strings” is a proven investigative method and, as we discuss in our paper, it’s what could have prevented the attacks of 9/11.
There should be forthright public discussion about whether a program like ATS, or any data mining program, can catch terrorists. Such a program might help turn up ordinary crime, about which there may be suitable patterns to discover. Whether the public would countenance mass surveillance for ordinary crime control is a different question than whether it would accept such methods to prevent terrorism.
The blogosphere was abuzz last week with discussion about Brink Lindsey’s essay about “liberaltarianism”–the idea of a fusionist alliance between libertarians and liberals, modeled after the conservative-libertarian alliance that brought you Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Julian has a good roundup here. And see Ezra Klein, Julian Sanchez, myself, Matt Yglesias, Ramesh Ponuru, Will Wilkinson, and Todd Zywicki.
It seems to me that this blog is in some ways a good example of the potential for left-libertarian solidarity. Much of what we talk about on this blog is at least as congenial to the left as it is to the right. We’ve got Adam attacking the FCC for bowing to the whims of the Parents’ Television Council and criticizing Congress for restricting online gambling. We’ve got Jim Harper attacking the national ID card and mocking elected officials for hysteria over terrorism. We’ve got me criticizing the NSA for its illegal surveillance programs (and blasting the GOP Congress for whitewashing it) and states for using insecure voting machines.
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. This week I look at a dispute between IBM and a company called PSI, which sells software to emulate the functionality of IBM’s mainframe computers. IBM filed a complaint requesting a declaratory judgment that, among other things, PSI’s software infringes several of IBM’s patents.
Here is the oldest of the bunch, “Program controlled rounding modes.” I’ll just quote from the patent itself:
In past architectures, rounding was provided either by means of a mode which controlled the rounding on all instructions, or by means of special rounding instructions. Each of these schemes has advantages and disadvantages. The mode has an advantage when a particular rounding mode is desired for an extended period of time. The special instructions have an advantage when a specific rounding is required for a single operation.
It would be advantageous, however, to have a machine which incorporates both a rounding mode and a rounding instruction.
If you release a new game console, this is the kind of press you want to get. Check out this warning statement:
Even while wearing the wrist strap, make sure you don’t let go of the Wii Remote during game play and do not use excessive motion. For example, in Wii Sports bowling, the proper way to let go of the ball while bowling is to release the “B” button on the Wii Remote–DO NOT LET GO OF THE Wii REMOTE ITSELF. If you are having so much fun that you start perspiring, take a moment to dry your hands. If you use excessive motion and let go of the Wii Remote, the wrist strap may break and you could lose control of the Wii Remote. This could injure people nearby or cause damage to other objects.
Here is a whole website with pictures of things people have broken with their Wiimotes.
No word yet on whether there will be Congressional hearings about the problem–this seems at least as important as steroids in baseball.
Nick Carr has joined the ranks of the DRM skeptics:
Digital music sales, after growing strongly for a couple of years, appear to be losing steam this year. That, more than the particular EMI experiment, is the big news here. As the Journal reports, “The MP3 releases are coming as digital-music sales have stalled for the first time since Apple launched its iTunes Store in 2003. Digital track sales held steady at 137 million songs in the second and third quarters of this year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That’s a slight drop from the 144 million sold in the first quarter.”
…Won’t selling songs as unprotected MP3s lead to rampant illegal copying? No. Because there’s already rampant illegal copying. Most unauthorized copying is done either through online file-sharing networks or by burning CDs for friends. DRM schemes have little effect on either of those. All new songs are immediately available on file-sharing networks, DRM or not. In fact, the Journal quotes one source as saying that the “pirate market … command[s] better than 90% of the online marketplace.” People buy through iTunes because they either don’t want to engage in illegal trading or can’t be bothered with the geeky aspects of illegal trading. It’s not because iTunes has removed the option of illegal trading. As for burning CDs to share, that remains easy even with DRM-protected songs.
No, DRM is about controlling the business model for selling online music. And if it looks like there won’t be much additional sales growth through iTunes, then music companies are going to start selling unprotected MP3s. In an iPod world, they have little choice.
Quite so. An interesting question is what the political implications will be if the labels start abandoning DRM en masse. The principal argument for the DMCA is that DRM is necessary to prevent rampant piracy. If the music industry tacitly admit that this is nonsense, will Hollywood soldier on, hoping that they can succeed where the recording industry failed? And if the RIAA stops using its lobbying muscle to block reform, will that make it easier to get legislation passed?
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.