Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Todd Hollenshead is the CEO of id, the developer of the DOOM and Quake series. He gave a talk at GDC about piracy. Unfortunately no transcript or video are available, but here is a summary of his talk (warning, this page’s color selection is hard on the eyes.)
I promise to talk about something different soon, but for now let me plug my op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today about first responder communications. You can read it here (no subscription required). The gist:
Offer Cyren Call, Frontline and others the opportunity to bid on spectrum already restricted to public safety use. That would allow firms to build national interoperable networks without affecting how much spectrum will be available for commercial use. At the very least, if spectrum now slated for commercial auction must be used, the government should identify an equal amount of existing public safety spectrum that can be auctioned commercially once the new public safety networks are built.
Whatever path we take, we should ensure that at least two competing networks are built. This works well for wireless services such as cell phones; subscribers to one service have no trouble speaking to subscribers on another while prices are kept low.
A private-sector national network for public safety first responders is not an untested idea. In the U.K., the national network that supports police, fire and over a hundred other public safety services is owned and operated by O2, a private firm. We can do even better, using competition to spur the innovations that monopoly rarely provides.
I’ve got a new story at Ars about the DOJ inspector general’s damning report on the FBI’s use of “national security letters” :
The defenders of the Patriot Act have been quick to emphasize that the report found no evidence of malice or intentional lawbreaking in the use of NSLs. This is true. By all accounts, the problems OIG found were the result of honest mistakes on the part of FBI officials. No examples were found of FBI agents using NSLs to spy on their ex-girlfriends or blackmail their enemies.
However, OIG teams only audited 293 letters out of tens of thousands that have been issued since the Patriot Act has become law. It’s quite possible that a complete audit of NSLs would uncover deliberate lawbreaking. And given the inadequate record-keeping procedures, it’s far from certain that even a comprehensive audit would uncover unlawful behavior.
A spokesman for the Smart Card Alliance says:
Privacy concerns are all perception and hype and no substance but carry considerable weight with state legislators because no one wants to be accused of being soft on privacy.
That’s Randy Vanderhoof, the Smart Card Alliance’s executive director, quoted in a Federal Computer Week article on the collapsing REAL ID Act/national ID plan. He was speaking of Congressman Tom Allen’s (D-ME) bill to restore the 9/11 Commission-inspired ID provisions of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.
Mr. Vanderhoof and the Smart Card Alliance couldn’t appear more dismissive, ignorant, and unserious about issues that are a core problem preventing uptake of its products.
The Boston Globe reports that some broadband customers are confused by their provider’s acceptable use policies, which sometimes place ambiguous limits on customers who are aggressive Net users. The problem that some cable operators are trying to deal with is that a very small handful of users who are heavy downloaders can sometimes impose significant delays on other network users because of the way cable high-speed networks work. According to the story, Comcast estimates that only .01 percent of its 11.5 million users fall into this category, but I’ve heard other estimates. Mike Lajoie, chief technology officer of Time Warner (TW), told the Wall Street Journal a year ago that fewer than 10 percent of TW subscribers consume more than 75 percent of the network bandwidth. And I’ve actually heard even more extreme numbers reported by other broadband providers (BSPs), with the ratio being more along the line of 5-10 percent of users eating up closer to 90 percent of bandwidth. To mitigate the problem, some network operators are apparently sending letters to those heavy users requesting that they scale back their downloading activities or else face the possibility of being kicked off the network for violating the firm’s acceptable use policies.
Regardless of what the exact number is, it is clear that a small handful customers really do impose more of a burden on the system and potentially degrade the broadband experience for other users. The question then becomes: How should BSP deal with these bandwidth hogs? As I wondered aloud in this old essay on network pricing issues, I think a metered pricing scheme might help solve this problem by fairly allocating costs to customers who use the most bandwidth. And yet, at least so far as I can tell, no BSP seems interested in taking that path. Why is that?
Here’s an interesting glimpse into the attitudes of career law enforcement bureaucrats towards civil liberties:
Since the Patriot Act, the FBI has dispersed the authority to sign national security letters to more than five dozen supervisors — the special agents in charge of field offices, the deputies in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, and a few senior headquarters officials. FBI rules established after the Patriot Act allow the letters to be issued long before a case is judged substantial enough for a “full field investigation.” Agents commonly use the letters now in “preliminary investigations” and in the “threat assessments” that precede a decision whether to launch an investigation.
“Congress has given us this tool to obtain basic telephone data, basic banking data, basic credit reports,” said Caproni, who is among the officials with signature authority. “The fact that a national security letter is a routine tool used, that doesn’t bother me.”
If agents had to wait for grounds to suspect a person of ill intent, said Joseph Billy Jr., the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, they would already know what they want to find out with a national security letter. “It’s all chicken and egg,” he said. “We’re trying to determine if someone warrants scrutiny or doesn’t.”
I have no doubt he’s right that being able to demand peoples’ personal information virtually on a whim makes investigations go a lot more easily. But as the saying goes, only in a police state is a policeman’s work easy.
Matt does a sensible post on the merit of more liberal immigration policies for high-skilled workers, and receives a barrage of criticism from his readers. Some of them are just economic illiterates who believe that importing too many brown people will destroy America’s middle class. But the really galling comments are those from self-serving engineers like “Dave” who can’t stomach the thought of having to compete on a level playing field with people swarthier than themselves:
Because if you can’t trust business to only use H-1B visas only when there are no other qualified workers and not as a weapon to drive down salaries who can you trust.
As an engineer, I can tell you that when many more visas started to be issued in the late 90’s, engineering salaries stagnated. Even as were told that there was a labor shortage for skilled workers, I knew many engineers who were laid off and could not find jobs. At the same time, the company I worked for more or less stopped hiring American engineers in favor of H-1B applicants.
I’m really tired of someone who has zero chance of losing his job in favor of a cheaper labor lecturing those who are on what a wonderful world it would then be.
Poor baby.
There was a blogosphere dust-up last week when the Washington Post reported on a law student who had been savaged in Internet chat rooms and subsequently not been hired by any of the many law firms she interviewed with. It’s a perfect story for the Post because Washington has so many lawyers and because the culture here lags in tech-savvy.
Reliable TechDirt debunked the story somewhat by pointing out that employers would be foolish to rely on such things in their hiring decisions.
Now, Volokh conspirator Ilya Somin points out that, given her credentials, the law student was probably left without major-law-firm work on the merits.
Like this person, when I interviewed for law firm summer associate jobs as a second year student at Yale, I had “graduated Phi Beta Kappa [from my undergrad institution], ha[d] published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in [my] field.” And, very similar to her, after interviewing at a dozen big DC firms, I ended up with two call backs and zero offers. Why did this happen? Frantic later investigation showed that the main culprits were precisely some of the credentials listed above. Because of them (particularly the publications), firms feared that I would go into academia and either never take a permanent job with the firm, or leave after just a year or two. A highly paid associate who quickly jumps ship for academia is far less profitable for a firm than one that stays for several years and can eventually bill hours as a senior associate.
Once again, “blame the Internet” fails to hold up. Law firms and other employers are unlikely in general to use salacious information that is anonymously posted, or long outdated, in their hiring decisions. Correlation is not causation.
TLF readers, I need your help. As most of you know, many federal and state lawmakers are suggesting that “social networking websites” need to be regulated in the name of keeping minors safe online. So far, regulatory proposals have come in two varieties: (1) an outright ban on such sites in publicly funded schools and libraries, or (2) mandatory age verification of users before they are allowed on the sites.
Setting aside the many potential pitfalls associated with either form of regulation, proponents of these mandates seem to be ignoring a very challenging threshold question: What exactly constitutes a “social networking website”? In my past and upcoming papers on this issue, I argue that lawmakers are opening up a huge Pandora’s Box of problems here in terms of unintended regulatory consequences. That’s because “social networking” defies easy definition since, in many ways, the Internet and most of the websites that make up the World Wide Web have been fundamentally tied up with the notion of social networking from their inception.
So, here’s how I need your help. Below the fold you will find the amorphous legislative definitions of “social networking websites” that lawmakers have proposed so far. Using those definitions as a guide, I am hoping that you can list for me a couple of your favorite websites that might be subject to federal or state regulation should lawmakers pass bans on social networking sites or demand age verification of them. This will help me construct a diverse list of websites that will be negatively impacted by regulation which we can then present to policy makers and the press in coming months as these debates unfold.
Here’s another installment in my series of blog posts analyzing the European Commission’s free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) report. In prior posts, I’ve discussed how the report is a call to action for Europe’s policymakers, that FLOSS’s popularity is growing, and that many FLOSS developers live in the EU. In short, the report contains ambitious policy proposals to transform Europe’s ICT sector through industrial policies — I’ve called it the new Airbus project for the European economy. As I get further into the report, however, I’m becoming more skeptical of the report’s overall claim that open source software can rescue Europe’s software industry.
Here’s why – the authors go to the extreme to show FLOSS in a good light, without giving much emphasis to how FLOSS has so far achieved its growing and respected status. Why do I care? Well, I haven’t read much critique on the report, and it’s often fun to be the dissenting voice. And I’m sick of hearing that open source software will rescue the planet from the evils of commercial software and the capitalist system that spawned it. I know that TLF readers are savvy enough to stay away from such absolute statements, but many others in the blogosphere aren’t.
Moreover, at the public policy level, there’s a lot of confusion I’m anxious to clear up between open source the license and the community development model that will often characterize open source software. Finally, I’m becoming more interested in free and open source software on a personal level, which can be technically challenging and at times overwhelming.
So…here I’ll analyze the report’s claim in Section 7 that “FLOSSers Work Faster”.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
